From The Beatles to The Blues: My Life in Music, 1965-????

From The Beatles to The Blues, Chapter 6: Dayton Sound Jr. (1971)

2008-05-11T02:08:00.000-07:00

6. Dayton Sound Jr. (1971)

I lasted, however, only one quarter at Ohio Northern. I had no academic problems, but I didn’t like living the dormitory life or being away from Bonnie, so I came back home at Christmas and transferred to Miami University in Oxford. After I returned to Hamilton, Hisey and I left our respective homes and moved into an apartment together. A few months later, he moved back home and I moved with our friend John Orme, Jimbo, and another friend, Lucian Muncie, into another hippie house, and then another. Eventually I ended up staying right back there in the Hiseys’ basement where we had practiced music so many times. Our psychedelic paint job was still intact on the basement walls where our young, innocent, and joyfully created bands had been born. Of course, we were not so good in those days. Were certainly were not the best young musicians in town. But those were the years when being in a band and playing music for people brought us the greatest pleasure and excitement. Those of us who have remained in the business would all probably testify that we never have and never will again experience the thrill we got simply from “being in a band” during our teenage years in the golden musical period from the mid-60s through the early 70s.

By this time, the Garage and the Dome had ceased operations. (It’s very hard for an entertainment venue to survive without the profit that comes from the sale of alcohol.) But a nightclub called Reflections had opened across the street from the site of the old Black Dome. Reflections featured the same local and national acts that the Dome and the Garage had. There we saw the Allman Brothers again. Other shows included a California white soul band called Cold Blood, Long John Baldry, Aerosmith, and even Genesis.

The big difference between Reflections and its predecessors was that the new place served liquor and thus was able to stay in business for a few years. The legal drinking age in Ohio then was 18 (for 3.2 beer), so Reflections, the new hangout for all the hippest Cincinnati characters 18 and older, became our new hangout for the next couple of years. The bands, the fans, the groupies, and the “wannabes” for all three categories could be found at Reflections, especially on Mondays, which were “quarter nights” (25 cents admission fee). Bonnie, of course, could not follow me into this new social stage of my life because she still lived with her parents and was held to very strict rules regarding her coming and going. Her father had bought her a car to drive back and forth to Miami in Oxford and to her part-time job in the evening, but she still did not have much freedom. Theoretically, I would drive to her house every weekday morning, then we would take turns driving up to Oxford for our classes. But I did not always make it.

So Bonnie was busy attending classes, studying, working, and planning for her future. (She eventually became an elementary school teacher and today is nearing the end of a 35-year career in one school.) Meanwhile, I was putting in token appearances at my own classes and hanging out at Reflections (I suppose I was a wannabe in the band category) many nights per week, carousing and philandering as most 19-year-old males would and still will if given the chance. And in 1971, there were a lot more such chances than there are today—certainly with the hip girls we came to know in Cincinnati in this era of free love, when blatant promiscuity was as trendy as “safe sex” is today.

If Hisey and I happened onto some kind of freaky party to go to late at night after Reflections closed, we had no curfew and were not likely to say no. The next day, however, I might be too exhausted—or maybe not even home in time--to go to classes with Bonnie in the morning. Thus I would have a lot of tricky explanations to make.

One Monday night, for example, I had spent some time at Reflections talking to a short, long-haired blond nursing student named Diane. She was always hanging around Reflections and going out with various musicians. After the place closed, she asked me to drop her off at a party somewhere because she had missed the nursing school dorm’s curfew and now had to stay out all night. Of course, I complied, but did not go to the party with her. This one night, at least, I made the responsible choice. I still had to drive back to Hamilton, where I would arrive in the wee hours, just in time to catch a few hours’ sleep before meeting Bonnie. Little did I know, however, that Diane’s path and mine would not only cross again, but actually run together for almost a decade in the future.

So, as a result of my new hip social life both in Clifton and at the apartment that Hisey and I shared (all our hippie friends who still lived with their parents had made our place their second home and crash pad), Bonnie and I began to have trouble. After more than three years together, we diverged and eventually broke up during this time. I also dropped out of Miami University and actually got a job. But it was a hip sort of job. I worked selling clothes at a freaky little boutique called New York Times in the Tri-County Mall. This gave me a discount on huge bell-bottoms and other clothes to help me look my coolest. Hisey also developed a more striking image at this time. He lost a good 15 pounds and grew his hair in a long shag and traded in his Buddy Holly glasses for some aviators like the ones Iggy’s guitar player Ron Ashton wore. We began to travel up I-75 to the Dayton Mall to buy stack-heeled, platform Rod Stewart shoes in white leather and purple suede, which we wore on our ventures to Reflections, where we rubbed elbows with Cincinnati musicians. We might not have been at their level musically, but we looked and dressed the part to the hilt.

Further inspired by hanging out with Cincinnati’s musical elite, Hisey and I vowed to get even more serious about our musical rebirth: Again we envisioned ourselves in a supercool four-man power band styled after Beck and Stewart, The Who, and The Stooges. Hisey had a job working with Warren doing lawn care and maintenance at a rest home, and he had come up with enough money to buy a genuine Marshall stack from Don Hacker, the bass player from northern Kentucky whom we had first seen in the band Rock, then later with Whalefeathers, and most recently at Reflections in a very cool band called Daphne, featuring lead singer West Davis, the taller, thinner, darker-haired Rod Stewart of Cincinnati, Ohio. Hacker was a born rock star. He was a good bass and guitar player, a natural entertainer who looked great on stage. Offstage, he drove around in a Corvette. (His girlfriend Joyce seemed to have good job with the phone company, as I recall.) We idolized him as one of the senior Cincinnati players and were honored to be invited to come and see the Marshall at the apartment he shared with Joyce over in Erlanger, Kentucky.

Jimbo Powell, our natural choice as drummer for our new band, was now living with a guy named Don Dickey and his wife Brenda. I think they had taken pity on Powell by reason of his homelife. (He was still required to watch his invalid grandfather and so, at 19 now, could never leave the house unless someone else was there to keep an eye on the old man, who was bedridden). Don and Brenda had a four-room apartment and let Jimbo stay there for a while. Don also happened to play bass. He had graduated from Garfield in 1969 gone to work at Fisherbody, so he had been able to buy some good equipment—a blue Mosrite bass like Bob Holland’s and a powerful Traynor amp, a perfect complement to Hisey’s Marshall. Jimbo had sold his blue sparkle drums to buy airplane tickets and run away to Florida with Don’s sister Sue, who had been married at the time. But they were back within a couple of weeks, and Jimbo had somehow come up with a gold sparkle Ludwig set he bought from Chuck Farkas, former drummer in Carmine Isgro’s band the Durations.

After more than three years of practicing in the Hiseys’ mother’s basement (thank you, Ruth; I don’t know how you stood it all that time!), we rented a rehearsal space above what had once been the Palace movie theater in uptown Hamilton. I think we paid about ten dollars a week. We learned to play the Who’s version of “Shaking All Over” and our own version of Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road, Jack” and Jefferson Airplane’s “Three-fifths of a Mile in Ten Seconds,” making creative arrangements that would de-emphasize the guitar solos. We also did our two original songs, “She Smiles” and “You Can’t Hide,” the latter of which required a fast and constant bass drum beat. Jimbo claimed that he just couldn’t keep it going throughout the song. It made his leg too tired, and his muscles threatened to cramp. I assured him that he could and would do it. If he slowed down, I stopped the song and we started over again. Eventually he did it just as it was supposed to be done.

We (probably I) decided that we once again needed a new name. I called Bob Smith, the former manager of the Dayton Sound, which was now disbanded. (Singer Danny Riley had joined the Rapscallion Circle.) I asked Bob if we might use the Sound’s old band name, since they were no longer together, and I had been such a fan. He said he didn’t see why not. So we called our new band The Dayton Sound. We had hardly ever been to Dayton, though it was just up the road, except on a few shopping trips. But I had always thought the name sounded very cool and wanted to keep it alive. Of course, this was presumptuous. The Dayton Sound had been a group with tremendous chemistry and stage presence. Everyone who heard and watched them was transfixed with a thrilling awe, not because their musicianship was so great. It was only adequate, but to see them play was always a great experience. We were not nearly as cool as they had been and didn’t last nearly as long

Our number-one goal was to move up into the ranks of the better Cincinnati bands. We knew that most of them were represented by AJaye Entertainment, an agency operated by “the two Stans,” Stan Silverman and Stan Hertzman. In Oxford, nearer to us, AJaye had some sort of affiliate office called L.P. Athens, and we got a guy from the Athens office to come and listen to our rehearsal, but I don’t think we sparked any interest. I remember playing almost no jobs while we practiced at the Palace.

One weekend afternoon, we heard there was some sort of jam session going on in a strip mall parking lot in Fairfield, and we went down there and played a Black Sabbath song (Ozzy and the boys had just appeared on the scene at that time) and something else—probably The Who’s version of “Shakin’ All Over.” That summer we also played one job at a Christian coffee house called “His Place,” which convened one evening per week at the new Fairfield YMCA. (Fairfield, which had really been only a semi-rural village in my youth, was now an up-and-coming small city, while Hamilton, the seat of Butler County, was beginning its long decline: the loss of business, flight of industry, and decrease in population that would make it what it is today, the self-styled “City of Sculpture” and not much more.)

The program at His Place was emceed by our friend Bill Williams. He was an athlete-turned-hippie-bass-player/singer who had recently become a Christian and was in the process of giving up his heathen ways to serve the Lord. This was before there was such a boom in contemporary Christian music, but Bill was one of the first in our area to have the idea of combining live music with a religious message, to make it more accessible to young people. (Bill would go on to write and record a gospel album and later to front his own band, The Reverend Billy Rose and the Soul Shakers.)

On the night Bill had asked us to play at His Place, the plan was that he would talk for a while about his life and experiences before his recent conversion. Then we would play a set of music. Then there would be some more preaching, then some more music to make things more palatable to the young people there and keep them around to hear Bill’s message. Now, we were not anything vaguely resembling a Christian band. If there were any such groups around, we didn’t know about them. We were a band that probably fit the His Place budget; in other words, we would play for little or no money, so Bill had brought us in to play. In terms of the religious aims of His Place, this turned out to be questionable idea. To explain why, I must digress at length.

Name bands from the Detroit/Ann Arbor, Michigan, area often came down the road to play in Cincinnati. Grand Funk Railroad had played (along with the James Gang from Cleveland) at the Eden Park amphitheatre and the Cincinnati Zoo. We had seen the MC5 at the Black Dome. This “Ann Arbor sound” appealed a lot to Hisey and me because these successful bands, like us, were not always the best musicians and singers. They succeeded with marginal talent and ability by playing good, energetic “power rock” songs and putting on a dynamic show. They were Ameican versions of what The Who had been a few years before. This was right up our alley. We could aspire to this level of performance, whereas we could not aspire to be like Cream or Hendrix, who were musically far beyond us.

Shortly before we were asked to play at His Place, we all (Bill Williams included) had gone to the Ludlow Garage to see the Ann Arbor band that would influence us the most: Iggy and the Stooges. The Stooges were the epitomy of what we hoped to be—three instruments and a front man—not particularly good musicians or singers (as Hisey and I, respectively, were not), but doing it all with good songs and lots of show—and so much more. The Stooges, in their black leather motorcycle jackets, spread their legs and pounded out the music while Iggy led us into his world of ultra-cool and unique lunacy. In his standard uniform of black high-heeled boots, tight blue-jean bell-bottoms, long brown shag haircut, and no shirt, he attacked the stage and the audience. His eyes popping wide enough to be seen at the back of the huge room, he commanded the attention of every person there as he growled and prowled the stage, often dropping to his knees and catching himself with the point of his triangular mike-stand base in his crotch. He dug drumsticks into his skin and sailed headfirst off the stage, diving into the audience and letting the fans down front deliver him back to the stage, from which he would dive again, landing in front of teenaged girls who sat paralyzed with awe and fear as he screamed “I Wanna Be Your Dog” right into their faces.

The following day, Hisey and I bought Iggy’s album, then went directly to Sears at the Tri-County mall, where we each purchased a black leather motorcycle jacket for $50. I kept mine for more than 25 years.

Sometime after his show at the Garage, Iggy had also played a big rock festival at Crosley Field. Other acts there included Alice Cooper, Mountain, Savoy Brown, and the MC5. But Iggy stole the show, climbing the PA stacks and smearing peanut butter all over his bare chest before diving into the audience.

So, when we went to play at His Place, we were reeling under the influence of our second dose of Iggy. We had had a volume-heavy four-piece group with a controversial stage show before we’d ever heard of Iggy. Now he had re-inspired us and given us permission to be as loud, aggressive, and bizarre as we could possibly be. To serve the volume gods, I had gotten hold of two complete blackface Fender Bassman amps—two heads and two 2x12 cabinets—to use as a PA system. The day of the His Place job, I went to Radio Shack and bought two big blue high-frequency audio horns, mounted them on squares of plywood, and put ¼” jacks on them so I could plug one into the extra speaker jack of each of my Bassman heads. Then I bought a “Y” cord to split the signal from my Electrovoice mike and send it to both heads to double my vocal volume. So the PA, for that time in that place, was monstrous. Whatever I sang or however I sang it, people were going to hear me. There was no doubt of that. Hisey, dressed like Ron Ashton in his black leather jacket, tight jeans, and aviator glasses, had his big Marshall, and Don Dickey had his big Traynor amp. So we wheeled a powerhouse of equipment into the Fairfield “Y” for our show at the Christian coffee house. I had on my high-heeled boots and tight green bell-bottoms that Bonnie had trimmed in some material that looked like a floral guitar strap. We set up our equipment, and Bill took the microphone to start off the evening with a little preaching. Then he introduced us, and we took the stage, intent on putting on the most Iggy-like show we could there in the Christian coffee house, which was full of impressionable young people. We actually had no idea of ridiculous irony of what we were doing: bringing music straight from hell into “His Place.”

We turned it up high and attacked the audience as Iggy had attacked us. We had learned some of his songs, like “TV Eye” and “Dirt,” and I had copied some of his stage antics into my show, which had already been on the borderline between dynamically scandalous and just in plain old bad taste. (Today, Bill Williams says were doing a tribute to the Stooges before anybody knew what a tribute band was.) Now I had certainly crossed over to the other side. I had carte blanche. No matter what I did onstage, there was someone doing something crazier, dirtier, and more unheard of than anything I might attempt: Iggy Pop.

Shocked by our incredible volume in a fairly small space, the audience sat, cross-legged on the floor, as I recall, open-mouthed and not at all sure what to make of us. Most of these young Fairfield Christians had probably been expecting a nice acoustic act—a couple of jangling guitars and the uplifting songs that would have been appropriate for a Christian event. They had not seen Iggy Pop and thus did not know whether we had lost our minds or simply taken large quantities of dangerous drugs.

I opened my eyes wide and cast my evil Iggy-like glare across the room as though I owned each body in it. At one point, I noticed a girl near the front who had her back turned to us and had the nerve to attempt to talk to her friends despite our fierce volume. Before seeing Iggy, I probably would have accepted her lack of interest as something beyond my control, but not now! Now I wasn’t having any of it. Like Iggy, I intended to make sure every eye in the house stayed on the band for the duration. So, between the end of one verse and the start of the next, I leapt from the stage, sailed through the air, and landed crouching right behind the girl in question. When she felt me there, she turned her head and found herself inches from my snarling mouth. One end of my microphone against my lips for maximum volume through the P.A., the other end all but touching her nose, I screamed the next lines of the song right into her face. In my true element, I had finally found a good use for all the evil, anger, venom, superiority, arrogance, and vanity that had characterized me almost since birth. That night, my fellow-band members were the poor man’s Stooges, and I was Butler County’s answer to Iggy Pop! The girl burst into tears, jumped up and ran out of the room. I stood up with a victorious smirk (a real smile would have been out of character), then I pranced through the cringing bodies writhing in fear on the floor, back to the stage to look for other potential victims, all of whom shrank back from us to the extent that space would allow.

On our break, while Bill was preaching again, one of the adult chaperones there, a pharmacist in whose drugstore I had been with my father, asked if we might turn our volume down from the unbearable to the simply ear-splitting for the next set. Dropping my Iggy-like stage persona and assuming my young intellectual tone (I was still a good student, in the Honor Society, and had a whole group of brainy friends at school), I explained that our particular type of music simply could not be played at a lower volume. The nature of the compositions required a certain level of amplitude in order to sound as they were intended to sound. So, no, unfortunately, we would not be able to turn it down for the next set. When the pharmacist pointed out that this level of noise (“noise”??!!) was potentially damaging to the hearing of all present, I think I shrugged to convey my complete indifference to the issue of the audience’s auditory health. I honestly couldn’t have cared less if they all walked out deaf. Oblivious to the fact that we were absolutely in the wrong venue for the type of show we were putting on, I felt very cool. We were playing on a stage in a room full of people, and we were “doing our thing,” which was unlike anyone’s else in Hamilton or Cincinnati or anyplace in Ohio at the time. We expected them to get into it, no matter how painfully inappropriate it was. So back we went to play an equally loud and obnoxious second set. At the end of the night, we collected our few dollars, packed up, and went home. Needless to say, we never graced the His Place stage again. But we were content with the musical strides we felt we had made that night.

I don’t think we played anywhere else with that band. Maybe southwestern Ohio just wasn’t ready to support a local tribute to Iggy and the Stooges. (I’m sure redneck Hamilton was not, anyway, and Cincinnati, though larger and more cosmopolitan, has always had a reputation for conservatism.) Don Dickey might have been switched to second shift at Fisherbody and thus been unable to practice. Jimbo might have lost his drums again. Somehow we gave up our Palace rehearsal space, and the band kind of fizzled out. But I had not given up my musical aspirations, and soon it happened that I, who had started out singing through the other channel of somebody’s guitar amp and had always had to borrow or piece together P.A. systems for every band job I ever had, was able to buy a P.A. worthy of Hisey’s Marshall.

During this time, while John Orme and I lived briefly together in a den of hippie lunacy, I let him borrow my car--a five-year-old red MGB I had recently purchased from a Cincinnati cop--one day when his was broken down. When John returned home with my car, he parked it at the end of our street, but forgot to put it in gear or to put on the emergency brake, so it rolled out into the cross street and down a steep hill into the back of somebody’s Ford Galaxie. The damage to my grill and bumper was estimated at $400, which John paid me in weekly installments from his salary at Nicolet, the asbestos factory where he worked second shift while attending Miami U. But I never got the car fixed. It still ran, with the partially crunched front end, and I had learned that the Lemon Pipers old P.A. system was for sale. It was a Sunn Coliseum PA, one of the absolutely top-of-the-line systems of the day. It had a powerful, 200-watt head with four mike channels, two tall, wheeled cabinets containing two 15-inch speakers each, and two “golden lens” sound horns mounted in cube cases to match the speaker cabinets upon which they sat. Its retail price was probably close to $1000 in the late 60s/early 70s. The Lemon Pipers had owned the system before signing with Buddah Records. They had then sold it to someone living just outside Oxford. This person now had it up for sale, and I had seen the sign in front of his house while driving up to Miami one day. The $400 John had paid me for my car was just enough to purchase that P.A. system third-hand. I bought it and somehow got it down to Hisey’s basement. (We either borrowed a van or enlisted Linda for the millionth time.) Now we had a Marshall amp and a Sunn Coliseum P.A. We had come a long way from our wall of Silvertones just a few years before when we’d been trying to grow our hair out in high school. Well-equipped, bone-skinny, and dressed to the teeth, we were now ready to rock the world! Ironically, though, Hisey and I never got the chance to put our impressive and powerful equipment to use onstage together. In fact, we never played another song together again.

From The Beatles to The Blues, Chapter 5: Erebus II (1969-70)

2008-05-10T01:48:00.000-07:00

5. Erebus II (1969-70)

In 1969, Steve Schmitt graduated from high school and went off with Bill Williams on some hippy adventures in Nashville or somewhere, and Bob Holland sort of fell out of the picture. 1969-70 was my senior year in high school and Hisey’s junior year. (It was hard to say what year it was for our drummer Jimbo; his academic status was always somewhat hazy.)

At this time, Hisey and I finally decided to adopt a four-man lineup—guitar, bass, drums, and a frontman. This was the personnel that comprised both Led Zeppelin and the new Jeff Beck Group. Beck, one of my favorite all-time guitar players, had left the Yardbirds and released the first Jeff Beck Group album with Rod Stewart on vocals, Ron Wood on bass, and Mick Waller on drums. Also that summer, before school started, we had seen at the Lake a local four-man band called Methusaleh, from a nearby town, and they were extremely cool.

Later in the year, the Ludlow Garage was opened by a guy named Jim Tarbell, who today is a Cincinnati city councilman. The Garage had been exactly that: a huge auto repair service located on Ludlow Avenue in Clifton. Tarbell had taken it over, opened it up into one huge room with steel beams and girders exposed, put a big stage at one end and the requisite Persian rugs on the floor, and started booking local and national acts. The Garage, like the Dome, had no liquor license, so teenagers and adults alike could go there. The sparse décor did feature a couple of specially made, oversized wooden rocking chairs that were probably six feet high and could hold three or four skinny hippies each. From one of these giant chairs, I watched B.B. King there at the Garage. We also saw the MC5, the Allman Brothers Band (touring on their first album), a Detroit band called Frost, Grand Funk, the James Gang, and many others.

We determined that the bands with the four-man lineup were the coolest, and that this was the direction in which we should go. Hisey, however, had always played rhythm guitar behind a lead player and did not consider himself much of a soloist. His hero was The Who’s Pete Townshend, who played few solos, but made his chords say so much. We figured out that we could tailor our song list toward material with minimal or simple guitar solos.

The first step toward our new identity was to trade in Hisey’s Kustom amp. It looked beautiful, but it was a solid-state (transistor) amp and just did not have the warm, tube sound necessary for lead guitar. We went down to Buddy Rogers Music in North College Hill, where Bob Monday of the Daybreakers worked selling and repairing instruments. He took Hisey’s Kustom in trade and sold us a used black-face Fender Vibrolux (probably made around ’65 or ‘66) and a Univox speaker cabinet with two 12-inch speakers to go with it. Hisey set the the Vibrolux on top of the Univox to make a little “stack.” I think he covered it with a big American flag, as we had seen the MC5 do at the Black Dome. The Vibrolux was a very heavy and powerful amp with two 10s. This gave Hisey plenty of volume and good tone for his new role as our only guitarist.

Jimbo remained on drums, and our fourth member was a guy from the West Side named Gary Sims, a very pleasant guy and a good bass player a year older than I. He had a Fender bass of some kind and a big Guild amp. We went to work rehearsing our four-piece act in Ruth’s basement. We were all old enough to drive now, but Linda was still with us at many of our jobs, running lights, collecting admission fees, or doing whatever we needed her to do. With Sims on bass, we played again at Open House, where Linda could not go. The band members were the only non-junior high people allowed in. My girlfriend Bonnie borrowed an Open House card from someone’s little sister so that she could sneak in and see us. (In a fetching, tight black knit skirt and sweater, she did not look like a junior-high-school girl to me, but she was able to get in and then positioned herself inconspicuously near the side of the stage.)

I had cut my hair, formerly all one length and almost to my shoulders, into a short shag style reminiscent of the the early Who. I had a tight, white ribbed shirt and bright purple corduroy bell-bottoms. With the rest of the band flamboyantly dressed, we took the stage upon which, with only four members, we had more room to move than we had had with our five-piece lineup. Because of the strictness of the director (the same one who had caught Marilyn and me kissing behind the building when we were Open House members), though, we knew we could not do our normally scandalous stage show here. She would have tossed us out on our ears—without our $20 payment. So we made it as flamboyant as we could without being too sexually suggestive. I strutted the lip of the stage like a caged lion and swung the mike as I always had, staring boldly at the crowd, but I did not grind my pelvis against the amps or stick my tongue out at the girls.

We went back up to the Eaton Armory with Sims, as well, and played wherever we could, but the most significant thing we did with this lineup was to record in a studio for the first time. In the winter or spring of 1970, Hisey wrote the music for two songs. He then showed them to me and asked if I could write lyrics to them. I did, and we added the two resulting original tunes to our repertoire. The first was an uptempo power rock song called “You Can’t Hide.” Its style was a combination of early Who and early Small Faces. The second was a slower song, maybe not exactly a ballad, but something like one, that we called “She Smiles.” Looking back at these two early songs, I find my lyrics sound like exactly what they were, something written by a juvenile (no kidding; I was 17), but I think Hisey’s music holds up pretty well. Both songs were musically well-structured, and “She Smiles” would actually turn out to be an “award-winning” song (in the most modest sense of the term) almost 15 years later.

That summer, shortly after I had graduated from high school, Buddy Rogers Music, which had many stores around Cincinnati, put on a big, city-wide “battle of the bands.” Established Cincinnati groups did not participate, but the minor, up-and-coming bands did. Somehow, through our acquaintance with Bob Monday of the Daybreakers, we became one of the contestant bands. We went first to a preliminary competition, which was held at the Westwood Town Hall in the Western Hills area of Cincinnati. There were several such preliminary shows in different parts of town. Each band was to play three songs, but only two of its own choosing. The third song had to be a combination of original music and pre-written lyrics promoting Buddy Rogers. We were given these lyrics and had to write our own music to go with them. The song we composed turned out to be one with a very simple jazz-like structure, primarily two chords, A and G, if I remember correctly. We had chosen this pattern because Hisey had found he could play a simple, jazzy kind of minor solo over this chord pattern better than he could play a rock lead superimposed on a blues-based pattern, as most rock players of the day did. He could not have competed well with the other guitarists there when it came to bending notes and screaming leads a la Clapton and Hendrix, but he was the only guitar player there playing in a jazz style. (To this point we had never played anything remotely like jazz and knew nothing more about it than that Hisey’s solo in the song sounded pretty good.) We placed that song in the middle, opened with our original “You Can’t Hide,” and closed with “Inside Lookin’ Out,” as always. We put on our best possible show, exploiting our four-man lineup to the maximum while Linda showed her movies on us in true psychedelic fashion. I think there were six or seven bands there, and we were one of two (the other was a band called the Odyssey) chosen to go to the final competition at the Cincinnati Zoo amphitheater, where local personalities like jazz drummer Dee Felice would be the judges.

We were shocked and overjoyed at our success and began to practice extra hard for the finals. That was the summer, however, when the cicadas made one of their every-17-year visits to Cincinnati. Of course the amphitheatre was outdoors, designed like a mini-Hollywood Bowl, with a little moat around the semicircular concrete stage to separate the audience from the entertainment. At the Zoo, there were many trees and much foliage, and the air was thick with these huge and disgusting red-eyed flying insects. I am extremely insect-phobic, anyway, and this was the first time in my life that I had seen cicadas. I was freaked out. I found it almost impossible to perform while dodging these dive-bombers attacking us onstage, and I was not the only one. They went up Hisey’s shirt sleeve while he was trying to play and down the neck of Jimbo’s shirt, so that he had to flail at his drums with one stick and try to dislodge the demon bug with the other. Obviously the insects were hugely distracting and interfered drastically with our performance. How could we possible put on a cool show under such circumstances? Of course, the other bands had to contend with the same problem. Who knows whether we would have fared better without the cicadas? As it turned out, we did not do so well with the judges at the zoo and were not chosen winners or even runners up. (I think the winners were the Odyssey, our co-finalists from Westwood, who played the Three Dog Night song “Eli’s Coming” as one of their selections.)

As a result of winning the Westwood preliminaries, though, we received two hours of recording time at the Lunar Studio, a modest recording facility in North College Hill, near the Buddy Rogers store where Bob Monday worked. Bob went with us to produce the recording. The studio (the first I had ever seen) was small and basic, probably used mostly for recording country acts or possibly radio commercials. Working with only two tracks—guitar and vocals on one, bass and drums on the other—Gary Hisey, Gary Sims, Jim Powell, and I made our first permanent musical record that day. We recorded our two original songs, “You Can’t Hide” and “She Smiles.” Since we had played them many times, we did them in just one or two takes. Then we dubbed in harmony vocals and some subtle guitar lead on “She Smiles.” I was not then and am not now a good harmony singer, but I was able to find harmony parts for the choruses of both songs and teach to Hisey. Bob Monday mixed the songs for us, and we were out in two hours with our little reel of tape in our hands.

We drove back to Hamilton, to Hisey’s girlfriend Judy Dowell’s house, where she, her sister Darlene, and my girlfriend Bonnie were waiting to hear the results of our efforts. They had a small reel-to-reel tape recorder, and we listened to the two songs, as loudly as the machine would allow, over and over again. I wasn’t completely happy with the sound of my voice. It sounded a little nasal and low and not as cool as I would have liked it to be, but it was better than my first effort-- “Satisfaction” on the Kogers’ home stereo—had been. And the music sounded pretty good, considering the time used and the simplicity of the studio. Looking back from a more experienced perspective today, I think our first studio session was a successful one resulting in two decent songs that were pretty well recorded. I don’t think we even talked about pressing the songs into a 45 rpm single, which seems like it would have been the next logical step. We didn’t even know how or where to do such a thing, and we figured a record company was necessary to the making of a record. Only a few of the good Cincinnati bands had made singles that received local airplay: the Lemon Pipers, the Us Too Group, the Heywoods, the Casinos, and maybe a couple of others. If Bob Monday’s band, the Daybreakers, didn’t even have a record, how could we hope to have one? (It didn’t cross my mind that they might have no original material to record.)

The Buddy Rogers contest and our recording took place late in mid-late summer 1970. I had been accepted by Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio (near Lima, a few hours north on I-75), where my classes would begin in the fall. So this meant the end of Erebus. We had achieved some modest success with our four-man lineup, and that was that. I was now thinking more about college than about music. In September, leaving my hometown, band, and girlfriend behind, I moved up to the ONU dormitory in Ada.

From The Beatles to The Blues, Chapter 4: Erebus (1968-69)

2008-05-08T02:39:00.000-07:00

4. Erebus (1968-69)

The next guitar player to join the Blues Inc. family was none other than my old friend Steve Schmitt, in whose basement I had played my first band job. He told me over the phone that he still had his old Kay guitar and a Magnatone amp. (Magnatone at the time was a respectable amplifier, though I haven’t seen or heard of one in years.) What he actually showed up with at our first practice, however, did not look like any Magnatone I had ever seen. He had some sort of small head or amp that might have been produced by some subsidiary of Magnatone, but his speakers were mounted in two tall, well-worn, rough plywood cabinets that looked distinctly homemade. They had neither upholstery nor grill cloth, and the exposed speakers were decorated with strips of adhesive tape where they had been ripped or torn during the course of long use. They sounded just about as they looked—all buzz and fuzz, but Steve had developed into a passable lead player and somehow we all jelled pretty well when we started playing together. He was able to play acceptable leads for the Cream and Hendrix songs we had learned with Hershner. Though he did not play the solos note-for-note, he knew his guitar well enough to improvise a blues-based solo when necessary and did not have to “review.” He also showed us a few songs—like Buffalo Springfield’s “Rock and Roll Woman”--that were good additions to our repertoire, so he became our lead guitar player. Linda soon drove us down to Midwest music in Cincinnati, where we were able to trade all of Steve’s old equipment for one second-hand, single pickup Epiphone guitar. Epiphone was a less expensive line made by Gibson and thus a decent enough guitar to play. (We had upgraded our equipment to the point where we didn’t really want to go onstage with a Kay guitar.) The neck of this “new” Epiphone might have needed adjustment, though, since it always seemed to present tuning problems. Of course, Steve now had no amp at all and no money to buy one. For the duration of the time he played with us, we borrowed amps for him to play through for every job.

But now we started to work a little more and to play outside Butler County. In Forest Park, a northern Cincinnati suburb, was a place called the Cellar. WSAI held dances there on Saturday nights, and all the good Cincinnati bands—the same ones we saw at Le Sourdsville Lake--played them. We were not in their league, but we went to the Cellar to see them on Saturday nights. There Steve and I got to know a couple of Forest Park girls who hung out at the Cellar regularly. They introduced to the guy who ran the place, and he hired us to play some dates on Friday nights, when there was a sort of teen dance for younger kids of junior high age. This was a step down from the Saturday night ‘SAI dances, but a step up, for us, from playing Open House in Hamilton (for $20) and the Millville Roller Rink (for $35). At the Cellar on a Friday night, we made $50, ten bucks each, which wasn’t too bad for a teenager in 1968-69. We played at the Cellar several times, and that is the first place I ever played any kind of blues repertoire. At the insistence of Steve Schmitt and Randy Blades, we added to our psychedelic list a simple blues song called “Last Night,” which had been recorded by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Randy had somehow discovered the blues, about which we knew very little, and was listening to Sonny Boy Williamson (the “second” one, Rice Miller) and starting to play harmonica. So, on “Last Night,” I played his bass and sang the song while he played harp. Hisey hated playing the blues because he found it boring. As the rhythm guitarist, he had to strum the same three chords over and over again, verse after verse, until he was literally falling asleep on his feet. We ignored his complaints and forced him to play “Last Night.”

Although we had added our first blues song to the list, I decided at this point that we must change the name of the band. “Blues Inc.” did not describe us, and I thought it was trite, uninteresting, and unhip. Bands we admired had names like Jefferson Airplane and the Strawberry Alarm Clock and Canned Heat and the Chocolate Watch Band, for heaven’s sake. We needed something freaky. So we went through a series of new names. I named us “Erebus,” which I had learned in Latin class was the name of the underworld in Roman mythology (reached by traveling on the river “Styx,” to mention at least one other band with a mythological name). We also toyed with “Electric Love,” then ended up sticking with “Erebus.”

Our next personnel change was again at the bass position. Randy Blades, a good bass player and probably the most serious musician among us, refused to turn his amp up high enough to match the volume at which the rest of us wanted to play. Bigger and louder equipment was being developed (the Marshall stack was the supreme amp of the time, though we could not yet dream of affording one), and bands were getting louder and louder. To play very loudly was to be that much hipper, from our musically immature point of view. Only Randy refused to go along with the program. “I’m not blowing my speakers for you guys,” he would say whenever the subject came up. “If you can’t hear me, you can turn down.” Of course, he was absolutely right. Today, I preach the value of playing as quietly as possible onstage in order to hear well and stay in control of the music. I have often fought with and even fired musicians—usually guitar players or drummers--for too much noise. But in those days, we saw Randy as hopelessly old fashioned in his viewpoint on volume. Then, to exacerbate our troubles with him, he did two things we felt he never should have done: cut off all his hair and break his leg.

An increasingly enthusiastic blues fan, Randy had begun to listen to Paul Butterfield, whose band then included not only Elvin Bishop on guitar, but also Mike Bloomfield. Bloomfield was a respected white blues player who would later make a record called Super Session ( with Steve Stills and Al Kooper). Bloomfield had what we called “electric hair,” a white man’s “afro,” if you will—black hair that was very, very curly and had been allowed to grow out to the proportions of a “’fro” like a miniature version of Jimi Hendrix’s “do.” Randy, whose hair was naturally brown and straight, wanted electric hair like Bloomfield’s, and he had a theory that if he cut it all off, he could somehow start from scratch and train his hair—by teasing or ratting or some other technique—to stand straight up and out like Bloomfield’s. So, in this age when to cut off one single lock was verboten to us, when a trip to the barber shop was worse than a trip to hell, Randy had actually gone voluntarily to a barber and gotten a “butch” or “burr” haircut like some of us (but not I!) had had in elementary school. Needless to say, we all were appalled and angry. The last thing we wanted was to appear onstage with a skinhead in the band.

Randy was also a gymnast. He worked out regularly and was on the high school gymnastics team. At one Saturday morning gymnastics session in the school gym, he fell and broke his leg, which had to be put into a cast from his foot to his hip. He was still able to sit on a chair and play his bass, which was good enough for practice, where our image did not matter. But, as luck would have it, while his cast was on and his hair was gone, we just happened to get THE job offer of our careers to that point.

In Fairfield, just south of Hamilton, a new VFW hall had been built, and WSAI was going to stage a dance there. The headline band would be the Rapscallion Circle from Middletown, north of Hamilton, but also in Butler County. Somehow, we got the job as the opening band. I don’t remember clearly now how we got it. I must have called the station. We must have been chosen because we were a Butler County band and theoretically likely to bring some local people in—our friends, families, and classmates. That’s the only rationale I can think of. Whatever the reason, we were ecstatic to hear our name being announced on the radio during the week before the show.

On the appointed night, the VFW was pretty much packed. The Taggart Brothers were there with their top-of-the-line Lawson P.A. system. WSAI deejay Roy Cooper was on hand to MC the show and introduce the bands: “To open up the show tonight, from Hamilton? [he paused as if to question our origins] Please give a big hand to [pause again] Erebus? [another question, as if to ask if he had gotten the name right].” Linda, ready at the back of the room, turned the psychedelic movie camera on us, and we began to play our opening song, “Fresh Garbage,” by Spirit. Of course we were dressed to the hilt and gave it everything we had. Jimbo was in heaven. Playing at a WSAI dance was the big time for him. Dressed in his red corduroy pants and leather aviator’s helmet, he flailed like madman. Hisey, in his polka-dot pants, spread his legs and wheeled his arm around with every chord like Pete Townshend junior. Steve had some houndstooth-checked Mick Jagger pants and dropped to his knees to play his guitar solos. I wore my Cuban-heeled suede boots from the House of Adam, my giant bell-bottoms and the button-and-chain-adorned army fatigue jacket that I had never returned to Warren. Our hair was washed and flying. On this, the biggest night of our short musical lives, we had made sure we were at our absolute hippest—all except for Randy. Perched on the edge of a metal folding chair at the end of the stage, his leg in it’s huge white cast stuck straight out in front of him, his burred head covered with the little beanie we had forced him to wear, he played along, the best musician among us. But he stuck out like a gigantic sore thumb and completely destroyed our visual presentation—which was vitally important to us, to the audience, and probably to WSAI (especially in these times when the audiences and most of the band members were still teenagers and not musically sophisticated enough to judge any group purely on its artistic merits). We played one set, then the Circle played one (the drummer dripped gasoline on his cymbals and set them on fire at one point; this was a feat we could not hope to match, since Jimbo couldn’t risk damaging or destroying the couple of beaten-up cymbals that he had), then we played another and the Circle finished the night. We seemed to go over well enough. We were paid, but I don’t remember how much, probably between $50 and $100. If we were expecting to now join the WSAI band rotation and play regularly at their events (truly our dream at this point), however, we were kidding ourselves. Was it just because we looked bad, or had we sounded bad too? We had no way of knowing, but nobody had booed our playing. We had been painfully embarrassed by Randy’s appearance.

Soon after the WSAI dance, Steve Schmitt mentioned that he knew a guy on the West Side who looked good onstae and wasn’t afraid to turn his amp up loud. So we “fired” Randy at that point and “hired” Bob Holland to play bass.

The West Side of Hamilton was always considered a little more upscale than the East Side. The kids over there went to Taft High School, generally lived in nicer houses and had more expensive equipment than did the East-Siders at Garfield High. To this point (with the exception of original drummer Charlie Henry), we had been an East-Side band. Bob Holland was a guy our age who went to Taft and lived in a nice split level house in the Sanders subdivision, a good West-Side address in those days. He was a tall, slender, boisterous guy with good stage presence. He was not a genius, of course, and had not nearly so much talent as Randy had. No matter. He looked good onstage, he had long blond hair that flew through the air when he played his blue Mosrite (the guitars popularized by the Ventures) through his big black Fender Bassman amp with the large, 2x15 cabinet. He turned it up loud enough to distort the speakers and just let his fingers fly all over the neck, with little regard for the key of the song we were playing or what the drummer was doing. Holland more or less played a multi-keyed bass solo throughout every tune. But we could hear him; that was for sure. He had hair, and his leg wasn’t in a cast, so we were happy.

Playing at the Cellar one Friday night with our new bass player, we met a guy named Steve Bork (there seem to be a lot of Steves in this story), who said he wanted to be our manager. He was only a little older than we were, but looked like an adult—kind of conservative and geeky. He lived with his parents somewhere around Forest Park. He did not drive and sometimes actually walked to our practices in Hisey’s basement in Hamilton—a walk of at least an hour or more. We felt that having a manager made us pretty cool, but I think our association with Steve Bork was fairly short-lived, probably because of his location outside Hamilton and his lack of transportation. He did, however, put us in contact with a woman named Carol Ann Forbes (as I recall her name now, almost 40 years later). She worked for WUBE-AM, a top-40 radio station in competition with the better-known WSAI. WUBE also held dances around Cincinnati and hired local bands to play them. She came to see us at the Cellar and was interested enough to come along with Steve Bork to one of our practices in Hamilton. For this “audition,” I moved from my supervisory position at the far end of the basement, and we played facing her as we would have onstage. I had always been a shameless show off as a front man, and Ms. Forbes and I saw eye to eye. I liked her because she fed my ego by making me feel I was the most important person in the band, when the reality was that I was probably the least talented. She encouraged me to give it all I had and put on the best show I could. She also told me to keep my eyes open when singing, for better contact and communication with the audience, especially the girls. She told me to aim my show directly at them and not to be shy about it. Hold nothing back, she advised me. Be bold, blatant, even sexual!

She decided that she could use us as an opening band for some of the WUBE dances featuring the bigger Cincinnati groups. We had thought we’d blown our chance at the “big time” by failing to impress WSAI at the Fairfield VFW. Needless to say, we were so thrilled at the thought of playing more shows on the same stages with our local heroes that we hardly balked at all when she made it clear that these shows would be “freebies” to help us get exposure. There would be no money involved right now, but if we did well, after a few jobs we might work our way up to be headliners eventually.

The first show we opened featured the Daybreakers as the headline act. Linda hauled us down to a small VFW hall or American Legion in some part of Cincinnati with which we were totally unfamiliar. It took us a while to find the place, but eventually we did and put on our most enthusiastic and psychedelic show for what I remember as a small and quiet crowd. To our strobe and black light show, we had now added old movies. We got this idea from reading in magazines about the light shows at the Fillmore West in San Francisco and other hip places. At the back of the room, Linda would set up her 8-mm projector and show silent Keystone Kop and Charlie Chaplin movies directly on the stage as we played. She also took some footage of Hisey’s custom-made black-and-white polka-dot pants, moving the camera slowly up and down, left and right. So the jerkily running characters or slowly revolving white dots would move across our bodies and faces as we flailed away at the highest volume level our equipment could produce.

But we were no match for the Daybreakers, in either volume or quality. An excellent local band for the time, they were Hisey’s favorite group. The leader and guitar player was Bob Monday, a big guy with straight black shoulder length hair. He played a Gibson Les Paul through a Marshall stack. Wilgus Hicks, tall with a long blond shag, played a semi-hollow Gibson bass of some kind through not one, but two Sunn bass amps. We could feel each note he thumped vibrating the pits of our stomachs. The drummer was Davy Anslow, the keyboard player-frontman was Hank Mayberry. Under Monday’s direction, Hank had developed a unique and dynamic stage presence that made the Daybreakers a great band to watch. Hank was a good-looking guy with a long, dark shag haircut and goatee. He was well built in the very thin but slightly muscled way we cultivated then. He wore skin-tight hip-hugger bell-bottoms, Cuban-heeled boots and tightly tailored, long-sleeved shirts. On songs that other band members sang, he looked good just sitting behind his Hammond organ and playing, but when he sang (most of the songs), he stood up behind the organ and used it as part of his show. The keyboard hit him at about pelvis level, and he worked behind it as well as any front singer I have ever seen, grinding and pushing the organ in a very suggestive way, swinging the mike Roger Daltrey (of The Who) style. He was a natural and gifted frontman and gave a riveting performance every time I saw him.

The Daybreakers changed their lineup a little later, with Bob and Hank still the main players but with a different bass player (Don Hacker) and a drummer whose name I did not know. They were still good but did not have quite the chemistry of the original group. Then, later, in the early 70s, they gave up the Daybreakers lineup and formed a band called “Samson,” with Bob on guitar and Hank out front without his organ, backed by a new drummer, bassist, and keyboard player. I can’t remember if I ever saw Samson. I think they started doing some original songs, and I’m sure they were good, but the original Daybreakers were a special band that I will always remember as a great example of musicianship, presentation, song selection, and professionalism in that era. Bob Monday went on to own and operate a huge musical repair business called Secret Service in Cincinnati. And at some time later, I think he actually owned the Kustom amplifier brand name.

The next WUBE dance we played was in St. Bernard (a Cincinnati neighborhood), opening for the Heywoods (of brief “Billy, Don’t Be A Hero” fame a little later), featuring Bo Donaldson on lead vocals. This was a much bigger place. I recall it as a huge room inside a huge Catholic church, and we used the Heywoods amps, which were powerful enough to fill the room as ours could not. Following Ms. Forbes’ instructions, I put on the most dynamic show I could, prancing and posturing all around the stage like the very poor man’s Jagger, Daltrey, and Morrison rolled into one, and singing to, pointing to, staring boldly and even sticking my tongue out at every girl within 20 feet of the stage. I guess I went a little too far for some of these girls’ boyfriends, because after our set, Steve Schmitt came into the dressing room to report that he had walked through the crowd and heard some St. Bernard rednecks—of which I gathered there was no shortage—making plans to catch me outside after the show and beat my ass. To avoid this promised violence, I think we sneaked out some back door early, packed Linda’s Nova and high-tailed it back to Hamilton (where we also had a boatload of rednecks, but where we knew better how to recognize and avoid them).

The third job we played for WUBE was at a very unusual place called The House of the Rising Sun. It was not a theater or auditorium or VFW hall, but just a big old house that had been converted into a sort of psychedelic dream residence. I don’t know who owned it—the radio station or someone else. But the walls were painted much as we had painted the Hiseys’ basement—in free form psychedelic mosaic and peace symbols. The ceiling was a blue sky with clouds, and there was an ongoing light show—with black lights and strobes--in at least one room. One of two stairways had been replaced with a long curving slide, so that one could walk up to the second floor then slide down. The most unusual feature of The House of the Rising Sun was its stage, which occupied two rooms (probably the original living and dining rooms). A hole had been cut in the wall dividing these two rooms in order to extend this stage from one room into another, but the rest of that wall was left intact, so that half the stage was visible from one room and half from the other. I suppose the idea was that people could see the band from two different perspectives in the two rooms. We rather stupidly made use of the whole stage, putting, as I recall, Steve on guitar, Jimbo on drums, and me on vocals in the living room. Holland on bass and Hisey on rhythm guitar were in the dining room. We could see each other through the hole in the wall, but the amps were isolated in one room or the other, so we couldn’t hear each other very well. There was no sound man, and in those days we did not mike the instruments and send them back through the monitors as we do at bigger shows today. As anyone with any musical sense would have known, the set up at the House of the Rising Sun guaranteed terrible sound and a very unbalanced presentation, which is exactly what we delivered. We managed to play our normal list of songs, but God knows what they sounded like. My girlfriend Bonnie was there with us that day and kept her ear to the PA speaker in the living room (the other was in the dining room, of course) in order to hear every word I “sang.” This, maybe more than anything else, was a sign of her devotion to me. I still had learned nothing about vocal technique and had almost never heard myself on tape since my embarrassingly breathy rendition of “Satisfaction” a few years earlier. (I probably had told myself that the tape was inaccurate and that I really sounded as I did to myself in my own head.) I just choked it out with confidence until my voice got hoarse and compensated with an increasingly dynamic stage presence that began, with the encouragement of Ms. Forbes, to border on the scandalously suggestive--some might (and did) say obscene.

Ms. Forbes had also told us that we should mingle with the crowd on our breaks, not stand around in a huddle talking to each other--especially not to our girlfriends, since the reaction of the girls in the audience was crucial to our success. So I had to kind of ignore Bonnie that day in order to do my required P.R. work (still gratis, of course). I’m sure she would have like my attention when I wasn’t onstage, but she didn’t complain. She was always much too good for me.

I remember that the show took place in the afternoon and that we opened for the Stone Fox. More experienced than we were, they saw right away the downfall of the two-room stage, simply set up on the living room section, and played in one room. They sounded and looked great there on the stage in the psychedelic dream called the House of the Rising Sun, which still ranks today as one of the most unusual places I have ever played. Today, the house has probably been restored to normalcy, and a family probably lives there, completely unaware of the crazed hippie happenings that once took place right there in its little nest of happiness.

The fourth and most important job we had scheduled for WUBE was coming up. But the name of the venue now escapes me. I believe our agreement was that, after playing three free jobs, we would now get paid something for our next show. In the early afternoon of that day, we were rehearsing hard to be the best we could possibly be. We had discovered that we played our best if we ran practiced for little while early on the day of the show, then packed up, got dressed, loaded equipment, etc. So we were doing exactly that in Bob Holland’s basement, which was finished, with a bar, etc.

At one point we took a break and turned on the radio in hopes of hearing our name advertised for the show that night. WUBE was a station with the same format as WSAI—top 40 hits by the pop/rock artists of the day. Imagine our surprise when we tuned in WUBE and heard not the Beatles or the Stones or the Animals or the Doors, but instead George Jones, Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette, and other country artists, song after song after song. This was crazy. “You’ve got the wrong station, Holland!” we yelled. Steve got up and fiddled with the dial to get WUBE in properly. But it was still country. WUBE was playing country, and there was no mention of any dance or any band playing anywhere that night. We immediately got on the phone and started calling the station, but could get no answer. We also tried to reach Ms. Forbes, with no success. WUBE had changed formats—secretly, overnight without warning, as radio stations still do today so as not to tip off the competition. So there was no dance that night. We did not ever play our first paying job for the radio station. We never heard from WUBE or Carol Ann Forbes again. We had just been a free opening act for them to use at some of their last few dances before they switched over.

Undaunted, we continued to play around Butler County. There was one dance at Camden High School. (Camden was the boyhood home of author Sherwood Anderson and is generally considered to be the setting of his book Winesburg, Ohio.) It was a rural school, out in the country, and the country kids were always a good audience because they didn’t get as much live music as kids in the cities did. So we played the dance there in the gym. Holland had borrowed my suede Cuban-heeled boots for the show and somehow managed to lose just one of them. So I was left with one half of my favorite pair of stage shoes.

Another out-of-the-way place we started to play was in Eaton, Ohio, up in Preble County (maybe an hour’s drive from Hamilton,) at the Eaton National Guard Armory. Out the front lawn stood a huge old tank. Inside there was a big hall that we could rent for $20 per night. So on a Friday or Saturday, we would go up there and throw our own dance. Earlier in the week, we would make posters to advertise and Linda would drive us up to hang them around town. Then on the night of the show, we would put Linda at the door with a stamp (I think it was a peace symbol or cannabis leaf) and she would charge 50 cents a head for admission. If we got just 40 people through the door, that paid for the hall rental. The rest was profit. The kids in Eaton usually came out since they didn’t have many entertainment options. They were a good audience, and we played up there in Eaton a few times. We made friends with a couple of sisters who helped us by putting up signs in their high school. Then we would let them in free the night of the dance.

Still following the advice I had gotten from Ms. Forbes, I was making my stage show increasingly scandalous. If Hank Mayberry of the Daybreakers was mildly suggestive, I would be overly dirty. I would place the base of my microphone stand against my groin and thrust it like a long silver phallus toward the audience. I would mount and grind against speaker cabinets as though making love to the guitar solos issuing therefrom. I would stick my tongue out at the girls in the audience. This was a time when excess was cool. Jim Morrison had made big headlines by betting arrested in Miami for indecent exposure during a Doors concert. Some people were shocked and offended. That was fine, as far as I was concerned. The more shocking the better. And in Eaton, Ohio, there were no authorities to complain or tell us to stop. It was our show. We were young musician-entrepreneurs.

We did fun afoul of authority at least once during this time, though. Some club or organization from Talawanda High School up in Oxford was putting on a dance, and two girls from the committee in charge of getting the band came to hear us at a rehearsal at Holland’s house. They liked us well enough and gave us the job. Of course they had seen only a rehearsal, without the stage act.

The dance was held on the top floor of Oxford’s City Hall, which housed the police department and was right across High Street. from the Boar’s Head, where we had played our unnoticed Saturday afternoon “audition” a couple of years earlier. Now we were a different band. When we launched into our show for the Talawanda high-schoolers, many of them the children of Miami University’s faculty and staff, jaws dropped at my blatantly risqué shenanigans. On the break, the girls from the committee asked us to please stop the x-rated show. This is not what they saw when they auditioned us. I pointed out they had come to a musical rehearsal, not a show. If they had wanted to see a show, they should have come to a live performance. But the police downstairs were called to intervene. They said we were breaking public decency laws and that the show would be stopped if we continued in the same way. So I think I calmed it down and cleaned it up for the second half so we could get paid. (I’m sure the other band members wanted to kill me.) Needless to say, we were never asked to play at a Talawanda High School function again.

In the early summer of ’69 (sounds like a good name for a song!), Gary Hisey, original Blues Inc. bass player Danny Paul, and I would walk over to Gerry Sawyer’s House on the Knob in Hamilton to rehearse with him on summer afternoons before he went to work the second shift at GE, if I recall correctly. When we younger players had begun to learn, Gerry, a couple of years older than we were, was already playing at Junior High Open House in a band called The Crickets, which also featured my friend Mike McGuire on the organ. Gerry was a gifted singer with a fine, clear, true, wailing, soulful voice that made any song he sang a joy to hear. But at 19 or 20, he was already married and had children. We practiced with him and a drummer named Ronnie to play, again, one job at the Butler County Fair. From a vocal standpoint, it was silly for me to be there, especially then, when I knew next to nothing about singing, because Gerry could out-sing me on his worst day. I probably had horned my way into the project and nobody had the nerve to tell me to butt out. At the fair, we played a few cover songs, which I sang, and two of Gerry’s originals, which he sang. The titles were “How Many Times?” and “Am I Blue.”

After that job, Gerry took Danny and the drummer Ronnie and formed a trio that played around town for a while. Gerry was also a good, smooth guitar player who played a right-handed guitar left-handed, upside down in other words, so his hand looked very strange when he played, but his solos were liquid and soulful to match his voice. So with a bass player and drummer who were just adequate at the time, Gerry was able to carry the show with his singing and playing.

He continued in this trio format with his next group, the Maxx Band, which included Tommy “Boom-Boom” Ellis on bass and Gary Butler on drums. When a local music store held a battle-of-the-bands-style contest in the parking lot of a strip mall one Saturday morning, the Maxx band was the only group who showed up. Thus they won a P.A. system, which was the prize for being chosen the best band in the contest. With this P.A., the Maxx Band embarked on a 20-plus-year career as a local band around Hamilton and Butler County Ohio. They played early 70s classic rock and became very popular in the biker bars around the area, especially the Vagabond Lounge on the West Side of town and a place called P.J. Shooters (formerly Brenneman’s and owned by the father of Dee Brenneman) on the East Side. Over the years, Gerry’s personnel in the Maxx Band changed periodically, but his song list did not. Most people who saw them year after year will tell you that they played pretty much the same 30-40 songs for more than two decades. They eventually played also at the big yearly biker event in Sturgis (North or South?), Dakota. P.J. Shooters eventually came to be called Dakota’s, and Gerry tended bar there and ran a jam session on Friday nights. Around the age of 50 then, he would claim that the weekly session was enough music for him. After a lifetime of weekends playing in the barrooms, he had had about enough of that level of playing (which was understandable) and preferred to devote his free time to other activities.

Very sadly, Gerry Sawyers died just a few months ago, in late 2007. He was 57 years old. Though his career had been confined to a small area most of his life, Gerry always had more soul than any white man should. He was one of the best natural singers I’ve ever heard, and I envied his voice greatly. It is a shame that few people outside southwest Ohio ever heard him.

Another great white soul singer from my hometown is a guy named Larry Combs, who also has been working there for the past 40 years and more. Like Gerrry, Larry is a couple of years older than I am. I first saw him, too, at Junior High Open House, playing guitar in the Rockers, but he was not the lead singer. Wayne Perry was the frontman, and as I’ve already mentioned, had a ton of stage presence. A natural frontman, Wayne was, like me, a good showman without a great voice. His singing was rough and raunchy, limited in range, but he learned to use it to his advantage. (The years would show that his strength, like mine, lay in songwriting. After playing in many bands around our area, Wayne would move to Nashville, where he spent the last 15 years or so of his life as a successful country songwriter.)

After the Rockers broke up, Larry joined forces with a rival band called the Mods to form the What Four, in which he both played guitar and sang lead. To my knowledge, Larry’s career was pretty much confined to the Greater Cincinnati area, primarily Butler County, over the years. Most of the bands he was in would be called, simply, the Larry Combs Band. He sang and played guitar, but usually had another guitarist working with him, as well. Most of his bands did not last long, as far as I know, and I have heard people say that he was hard to work with, as are many talented artists. But there are people who will say the same of me—rather that I am hard to work for—not because I have much talent, but because I generally run the show with an iron hand. I have never been especially talented. But I know what must be done to put a band together and keep it running and working. I know what everybody should and should not be doing, onstage and offstage, to keep the program functional. I like to have the input of others, especially good musicians, but I make all final decisions, and anyone who interferes with my program or works against me will soon find him/herself fired. A bandleader is not in business to win a popularity contest among musicians. He must make hard decisions that will make people mad and sometimes even cost him friends. I have lost more than one good and respected friend as the result of decisions I had to make as a bandleader. So I cannot criticize Larry because I have never worked with him. I was always the singer/frontman in my bands, and he was a much better singer than I, so there was no reason for him to collaborate with me. The last and possibly most successful of Larry’s projects of which I am aware was a band called Jumbo Junior, which was together around 2000. They were managed by my good friend and favorite soundman in the world, Dave Scott of Middletown, Ohio, and made one CD featuring songs written mostly by Larry. It was a good record. The band was good and sounded a little like a soulful, modern-day Allman Brothers Band. Larry’s voice is just a little less gritty and more fluid and flowing than Gregg Allman’s, with beautiful range and heart. Whatever he sings—blues, R&B, rock, or country--it is beautifully done and drenched in soul. I am truly and deeply envious of his voice. It is a shame that the world does not know more about Larry Combs. Today, I am not aware of his doing too much in music, but I have been away from home for more than two years at the time of this writing. His son, Jamie, is a good drummer and, the last I knew, was playing for Sonny Moorman, who is probably the best and hardest working blues-rock guitar player in southwestern Ohio, northern Kentucky, and a few other places, too.

So there was always a lot of talent and a strong music “scene” in the Cincinnati-Dayton, Ohio, area where I grew up. I think this was true even before my time, but certainly from the mid-60s to the present, there have been many good bands to be found playing in venues all around the region. The best players who started out in the golden early days are getting up in years, but many are still kicking it out. It’s a very competitive place to play, with many good bands fighting for the available work, but the result is much good music to be heard. I think it was, during my youth, as good a place as any in the country for young musicians to develop and gain experience.

During my junior year in high school, 1968-69, my band-mates and I got driver’s licenses and at least occasional access to someone’s car. The first place we headed for was the Black Dome in Clifton, near the University of Cincinnati. I would sometimes borrow my father’s old Chevrolet, say we were all going to the drive-in movie, then fly down to the Black Dome, aka Hippie Heaven. The dome was in fact a round, domed building at the intersection of Vine and Calhoun Streets. One entered, pay his 50 cents, and got a day-glo hand stamp that showed up only under the black light at the door. The interior was neither very large nor very small. There were no chairs of any kind, only Persian rugs on the floor, and a high stage in the corner. No alcohol was served, thus patrons of all ages were welcome. In the back there were free bagels, as I recall. (Ah, the glorious late 60s, when it was cool to give, to love, to send out vibrations of peace and positive energy; who is giving away anything free today?)

At this time in history, WSAI, like other top-40 AM stations in the country had lost popularity among young listeners like us. In 1969, we were turning our attention to the FM “progressive rock” stations popping up all over the country to spread the wealth of music being created in those times. In Cincinnati, it was WEBN-FM and its “Jelly Pudding” show, featuring the warm and laid-lack voice of Michael Xanadu (aka Frank Wood, Jr., son of WEBN’s owner at the time), who treated us to Big Brother, Country Joe, the Dead, Cream, Hendrix, and the Doors doing “The End,” “When the Music’s Over,” and the long version of “Light My Fire,” each of which jammed on for a good 20 minutes. So the WSAI dances were becoming things of the past, but the best local acts, many of whom had graduated from the WSAI dance circuit, now played at the Dome: Balderdash (formerly the Us Too Group), The Glass Wall, Bitter Blood Street Theatre, the Sacred Mushroom, and a band called, simply, “Rock.” Rock featured Don Hacker on bass and a guy named Steve Belew on guitar. A few years later, Belew would have a trio called Adrian, with Ray Yancy on bass and Mike Hodges on drums. Then he, Belew, would change his first name and become Adrian Belew. Rumor around Cincinnati some 20 years ago had it that he had fallen into some collaboration with David Bowie and thus boosted his career up to an international level. He is now a minor guitar figure known at least by name to many musicians around the world.

Spurred on and inspired in our efforts during this magical musical time, we played through the rest of my junior year in high school with Steve Schmitt on lead guitar, Holland on bass, Hisey on rhythm, Jimbo on drums, and me out front. We returned to the Eaton National Guard Armory once or twice and went back to the Cellar. We were playing songs by Hendrix—“Fire” and “Foxy Lady,”—Pride of Man by Quicksilver, Cream, and a couple of songs by Spirit. Our big closer was always “Inside Lookin’ Out,” first done by the Animals (to my knowledge) and then covered by Grand Funk Railroad. We also did a tune or two by the Doors, I think. Jim Morrison was one of the few singers I could mimic well in those days, when doing a cover tune as much like the record as possible was our goal. Unlike Robert Plant and Steve Marriott, for example, whose stuff I really could not sing, Morrison had a voice that was low and full like mine, and I could sing in his range and copy his phrasing pretty easily. His version of “Back Door Man” was one of my favorites, though I didn’t even know at the time that it was an old Willie Dixon song.

Alhough Randy was gone, Steve Schmitt was becoming more of a blues aficionado. We didn’t know much about the black blues tradition in America, but a couple of bands, like Canned Heat and Big Brother with Janis Joplin, whom we saw at Music Hall, were blues-based groups that were part of the psychedelic scene. And The Paul Butterfield Blues Band was truly just that: a Chicago blues band that played all the big shows and venues that the big psychedelic acts played. When the first Led Zeppelin album came out in ’69, it featured “You Shook Me” and “I Can’t Quit You,” both blues covers. Steve was a huge fan of Jimmy Page and often said he really wanted to play in a band that was “strictly blues.” Hisey would roll his eyes in despair at such comments. He hated the blues because to him it meant sheer boredom for the rhythm guitar player.

When Cream released its version of the old blues tune “Spoonful” (written by Willie Dixon and recorded by Muddy Waters, unbeknownst to us), we immediately included it in our repertoire. This was the day of long songs, and Cream’s “Spoonful,” with verse after verse of Clapton’s blazing guitar, was at least 20 minutes long. Since the song consists of only two chords, G and E, repeated from beginning to end, playing it sent Hisey to a living musical hell. After about 15 minutes of G and E, he would rest his elbow on the head of his soft blue Kustom amp, roll his eyes behind his black, Buddy-Holly-style glasses, and try to stay awake until the end. Meanwhile, Steve would fall to his knees to deliver a screaming solo, Holland would play an equally busy, many-keyed bass solo against Steve’s, and I would use the instrumental breaks to grind my pelvis against the speaker cabinets in the bold psycho-erotic style that was becoming my trademark. Eventually, Hisey complained so much about his blues boredom that I think we let him sit out on “Spoonful.” He was happy take a break somewhere with a Mountain Dew and a Twinkie while we pounded away for an eternity on one two-chord song, there in our very poor man’s answer to the Fillmore West: the Eaton, Ohio, National Guard Armory with the big tank out front. Lord knows what the kids there thought of us, but they came out to listen, applaud, and dance every time we played.

During this time I wrote a song called “The Extraneous Blues,” a simple 12-bar anthem to male philandering, about which we as late adolescent musicians were just beginning to learn. I don’t think that was the first song I ever wrote, but it was one of them--and the first to be performed by the band.

Blues Inc. (1967-68)

2008-04-26T02:02:00.000-07:00

3. Blues Inc. (1967-68)

During my ninth-grade year at GW Junior High, I got together here and there with different people who were learning to play. Randy Blades was a classmate of mine who had a Gibson EB-3 bass, with the cherry SG-style body, and an old blond Fender Bassman amp—good equipment compared to our Harmony and Silvertone stuff. Randy was learning to play bass and piano with the help of his father, Emery Blades, who had been a local country singer in his youth and made a few singles. (One, I remember, was called “I Feel Like a Million.”) Another friend, Phil McKenzie, had a Gibson Firebird guitar and Fender amplifier. Up to this point, only some of the older bands who played at Open House had had such good instruments and amps. (Ron and the Sabras, from slightly more affluent Fairfield, were especially well equipped with Rickenbacker and Fender guitars and a wall of Magnatone amps), Randy and Phil were among the first kids I knew well, aspiring musicians of my age, to get quality epuipment. I, meanwhile, was still trying to sing and play guitar on my big acoustic Harmony with the attached pickup. A few of us would set up a Saturday practice session in somebody’s basement, get together, and play some songs. One person might know how play “Dirty Water,” by the Standells from Boston; another might know “Land of a Thousand Dances” by Cannibal and the Headhunters. We would teach each other the songs we had learned. Mike Mills had shown me how to play the Beatles’ “Daytripper” and “Money,” a classic Barret Strong tune recorded by both the Beatles and the Kingsmen. When “Dock of the Bay,” by Otis Redding, came out, Mike showed me how to play that, too. He had seen Redding do it on television, with Steve Cropper on guitar, and proudly told me he had picked up every lick that Cropper had played.

At one point, my friend Phil McKenzie and I got together in his garage with the former Inversions drummer, Bill Thomin. I remember playing and singing a song called “Little Black Egg” by the Nightcrawlers that day. But most of these sessions were one-time events that led nowhere in particular. Nothing seemed to gel. We were learning to play a little, trying to get better. We might form a band for a week or two. Soon it would change members or be abandoned. This pattern continued as we “graduated” from junior high school and went on to Garfield Senior High. Then, one Saturday afternoon during our sophomore year, Warren Wright took me to a rehearsal of his current band, Blues Inc.

I don’t know if they had intentionally copied the name of Alexis Korner’s British band, in which future household names like Eric Clapton honed their skills in London before achieving worldwide stardom. However Warren’s band had gotten the name, it was a misnomer because they played no blues of any kind. They played “Shout” by Joey Dee and “Knock on Wood” by Eddie Floyd and a Byrds instrumental called “Captain Soul” and a variety of pop rock hits of the time. They practiced at the home of the rhythm guitar player, Gary Hisey, at 3959 Hammond Blvd., in a part of Hamilton called Lindenwald. Hisey lived there with his mother and his sister, Linda, who was a few years older than we were.

Hisey had a Gibson SG and a Silvertone Twin-Twelve amp. Warren, who had fallen in love with Rickenbacker guitars, had come up with a Rick copy made by Crestwood and his own Twin-Twelve, as well. His guitar looked authentic, just like a Rick 330 with a “fireburst” finish, even though it was not of the same quality. The action and the sound could not compare to those of a real Rickenbacker, an American guitar of great integrity for the best part of a century now. But the Crestwood was a step up from Warren’s first guitar, a humble Kay, and his second, an old black Silvertone, which now became a backup. (We did not know then that Warren would one day have a basement full of real Rickenbackers.)

The Blues Inc. drummer was Charlie Henry, also our age, a sophomore at Taft High on the West Side. The bass player was Danny Paul, who had a red Gibson EB-0 to match Hisey’s SG. They were both still in the ninth grade at GW Junior High. At the time I met them, they had played at a GW dance and a horse show and a couple of other jobs, including one at Nichting’s Restaurant, a Hamilton institution for decades. Hisey’s stepfather, John Cook, even had a van he sometimes let them use, and they put “Blues Inc.” signs in the windows when they used it. (John would not let them actually paint the name on the side.)

Since Blues Inc. already had two guitar players, I was invited to practice with them as a singer only. This was my move from behind the guitar to center stage, out front, which is where I wanted to be. I still couldn’t sing much, but I had plenty of show, and I guess they thought it would be cool to have a showy singer out front. There weren’t so many bands who did back then. Among our local bands, the Rockers had Wayne Perry singing, and he was a very good front man. His size and coloring were not so far from those of Jagger, who set the standard for us, of course, and Wayne had all the moves and style you could ask for. I watched him with admiration at Open House, just as I watched Danny Riley of the Dayton Sound at LeSourdsville Lake. Always a self-centered, egotistical, vain child, I instinctively felt that I had the combination of image, physical coordination, presentation and shamelessness necessary to be a dynamic front man/lead singer. And, with precious little attention to developing and improving my voice (I sounded great in my own head), that is exactly what I became, starting with Blues, Inc.

At that first rehearsal, I sang only a little, though, and spent a lot of time demonstrating how to play a feedback lead, a la Pete Townshend, with Warren’s old Silvertone guitar. There in Ohio, we were only beginning to get a whiff of what was going on San Francisco and permeating the music world. “Psychedelic” music was just starting to reach us, and I was extremely hip to it. One feature of early psychedelia was the sound of feedback, the high-pitched squeal that results when open microphones are turned up too high and placed too close to speakers through with they are amplified. In general, feedback was to be avoided, but guitarists like Hendrix and Townshend of The Who had begun to incorporate it into their solos, turning their guitars up loud and facing their amps to create a feedback loop between the guitar’s pickups and the speakers. I instructed the members of Blues Inc. to play some continual riff in a certain key, then I turned up Warren’s guitar and amp, dropped to my knees and played feedback guitar in front of the speakers. This required knowing just a few notes in the scale because each note would sustain indefinitely and feedback would fill any silences or holes. Very long songs were a trademark of the psychedelic groups, and I played a good half-hour guitar solo (a terrible one, I’m sure, since I don’t consider myself a guitar soloist even today, 40 years later) while the band repeated two or three chords underneath me. Hisey, who was easily bored, almost fell asleep as he played the same chords again and again. Somehow, though, I become part of the band that day. After that, I played guitar only at home (thus my failure to really develop as a guitar player). At the age of 15, I was the lead singer/front man for Blues Inc., and we began to rehearse regularly there in the Hiseys’ basement.

Hisey’s older sister, Linda, who had just graduated from high school the year before, became very important in our development into teenage musicians. Linda did not do most of the things other girls her age did, as far as I could tell. With only a couple of girlfriends and no boyfriend, she did not seem to have much of a social life. She loved animals and always had at least one or two; she was a Beatles fanatic and made a trip to England with her cousin Judy Greathouse to see Liverpool, where it had all started; and she took a great interest in her little brother’s band. The relationship between the two siblings was often like a master-servant kind of arrangement, with Hisey in the master’s position, though he was the younger. If he called for a “dippied egg” at breakfast time, Linda would make it for him. (The recipe for this special dish was known only to the Hiseys). If he needed to go someplace and was too lazy to walk, Linda, who had a driver’s license and a car, would take him there. Occasionally, his selfish demands would make her angry, though, and the roles would reverse, with Linda spewing a big sister’s wrath at the spoiled little brother. One time, for example, she had taken us all in her car to the Acme Drive-In movie theater. We used to put one person in the trunk before we drove in, to save money on admission, then let him out after we had parked. So Hisey had volunteered or been elected to get into the trunk that night. He felt, though, that Linda, once inside, had been too slow about finding a parking spot and opening the trunk to let him out. He was a nervous child and had probably suffered an attack of panic and claustrophobia. When he finally climbed out of the trunk and into the front seat, he was angry and continued to verbally abuse his sister as the movie began. After apologizing and then listening silently for a while to his continuing tirade, Linda finally gave him what he was asking for. She turned and slapped him across the face so hard we thought his head would come off. “Now just shut up and watch the movie!” she said (or something to that effect). We were all shocked into silence. Hisey flushed scarlet, his mouth dropping open and tears jumping to his eyes, completely unable to believe Linda had hit him. He said no more, but watched the movie. Later, I’m sure she bought him some popcorn to make up.

Linda was like a sixth member of the band. In her brown ’66 Chevy Nova, she transported us everywhere. She would pick us all up in the early evening for band practice, and, when we had finished around 9:00 p.m., she would take us all home. On the way we would stop to eat at Miller’s Drive-In, a local 50s-style hotdog stand where the carhop brought the customer’s food on a tray that she attached to the car window. Warren always ordered the “Elephant Ear” sandwich, a jumbo hamburger of some kind. Others of us would have “foot longs” and chili dogs, fries and root beer. When we had finished eating, Linda would take us to King Kwik, a convenience store in the style of 7-11, for dessert: peanut M&Ms and Mountain Dew (then a new soft drink sold in green bottles with the monogram “bottled by Bessie and Earl” or “Jed and Henrietta”). Then she would drop us all off at our respective houses (#61, Dixie Trailer Park, in my case). How many times she did this I could never count. When we had our little band jobs, she would take us and our equipment in her car, run our “light show” or take money at the door or do whatever we needed her to do. Then she would take us out to eat at Jerry’s, another local drive-in, after the show. We usually made just enough money to pay for our late dinner. Without Linda, Blues Inc. probably would have been a short-lived affair, but thanks largely to her, we were able to continue playing (with different lineups and different names) more or less throughout our three years of high school.

Linda worked “uptown,” in the office of a furniture store called Lady Sylvia, and she sometimes had to go back there to do some work in the evenings, after dinner. If we were not rehearsing, she would often take Hisey, Warren, and me uptown with her and drop us off to wander around while she worked. We would look into the music store windows, then go over to the Post Office, the lobby of which was left open 24 hours a day at that time (hard to believe now, when it’s shut up tight at 4:00 p.m. to keep out the homeless and the crackheads). There we would sit on the stairs inside the building, eat peanut M&Ms, and talk about music and bands and instruments and amplifiers, etc.

Then we would sometimes wander over to the studios of WMOH-AM, where a DJ named Bob Zix would let us come up to visit him in the studio and give us promo singles he had lying around. We thought we were very cool, sitting up there in the radio station while Zix broadcast music to Butler County.

The first job that I played with the band was also thanks to Linda. It was the Lady Sylvia Christmas party of 1967. Since Linda worked there, she had gotten us the job. Her boss had rented the cafeteria of Taft High School, on the other side of town, for the occasion. There I remember playing a very long version of “Shout” and giving the Lady Sylvia employees all the show I could give as our blue and red light bulbs flashed slowly off and on.

Blues, Inc. also played at the Millville Roller Rink, which held dances on Saturday nights. The skating stopped at 10:00, and the music was supposed to begin at 10:00 and continue until 1:00. Of course this left no time for setting up equipment. We had to be there waiting near the side door of the rink a few minutes before 10:00. When all skaters had been cleared from the floor, the door would be opened, and we would rush in to set up our equipment on the rink floor as fast as we could. As soon as we got everything hooked up and plugged in, we began to play. (We had never heard of a “sound check” in those days.) Only the band was permitted to wear shoes on the rink floor. For the audience, it was a “sock-hop.”

Millville was semi-rural then, a village between Hamilton and Oxford, and the kids out there were a good audience. Always appreciative, enthusiastic and excited about the music, which was moving in a more psychedelic direction under my leadership. Our payment for the night was $35 for the whole band, so we made $7 each—enough to give Linda some money for gas, eat out, get some Mountain Dew and M&Ms afterward, and maybe have a dollar or two in our pockets when we went back to school on Monday. Much greater than the monetary reward was the thrill of having actually played music in front of people, of being in a band, standing on a stage (although neither the Taft cafeteria nor the Millville Rink had one) and creating music that the audience actually listened and danced to.

For better or worse, I have always been the leader of almost everything I have ever been involved in, and I quickly took control of the Blues Inc. repertoire and show, leading the band in a much hipper, freakier, somewhat psychedelic direction, much like that of my local heroes, The Dayton Sound. I cut out what I thought were uncool or burnt out old songs like “Shout” and put in songs by new hip bands like Cream, The Doors, The Animals, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Yardbirds, and the Chocolate Watch Band. I was determined to have the coolest possible band in town.

Linda took us to see Jimi Hendrix at the Xavier University Field House in Cincinnati in March 1968, as I recall. The admission fee was $3.50, and I’m sure Warren still has the poster advertising the show. The supporting act on the tour was the Soft Machine--a very progressive forerunner of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer-- and the show was opened by Cincinnati’s best and most popular “psychedelic era” band, The Sacred Mushroom, featuring Larry Goshorn on lead guitar and vocals. The Mushroom was a very cool band that opened most of the big shows in that time—Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service—and played their own shows at places like the Black Dome and the Ludlow Garage. They always sounded and looked great, had some good original songs, and lived together in the “Mushroom House” in Clifton near the University of Cincinnati, the hippest part of town in those days. The Mushroom made one album, Parallax View, while they were together. Then Larry Goshorn, along with his younger brother Tim and a guy named Craig Fuller, played in Pure Prairie League, a “country rock” band of the 70s that had a pretty big hit song called “Amy” and another called “Two-Lane Highway,” both of which I believe Larry Goshorn wrote or co-wrote. The Goshorn Brothers today are a very good blues-based band that still plays around the Cincinnati area, and I think Larry still sells the old Sacred Mushroom album on their website.

For us, junior freaks from a very uncool, redneck town, being at the Hendrix concert was like having front-row seats in heaven. The last thing we expected to see there was someone else from Hamilton, which did not have many hip music fans among its residents. But, lo and behold, we spotted Bonnie Farmer, who was a sophomore at Garfield High along with Warren and me. She and I had gone to elementary school together for a few years before I moved to the trailer park in a different school district, and we had “liked” each other in the fourth grade. At the concert with her sister, Bonnie had exchanged her “school clothes” for tight blue-jean bells, an army fatigue jacket and Indian moccasins. That night, we identified each other as fellow freaks in a redneck environment and soon rekindled our childhood romance. We had seen Hendrix together—a bond not to be taken lightly. She was my girlfriend all through high school.

Seeing Hendrix further strengthened my resolve to have the coolest, most psychedelic band possible. As anyone who has known me well throughout my life will testify, I am by nature a bossy, judgmental, impatient, intolerant, demanding and unforgiving person of the worst sort. A spoiled (not with money but in every other way) only child, I am self-centered, egotistical, and cynical. Today, I try to soften the rough edges of my personality with a certain amount of diplomacy, politeness, and positive energy, but as a teenager, I was without any of those three qualities. So I took over the band by sheer force of intimidation. At practice, I got a very long mike cord and sang from one end of the basement while the band played at the other, so I could hear and see everything the other members were doing. If I heard or saw something I didn’t like, I made them do it until it was right. I was harsh, critical, and mean and expected everyone to do exactly as I said, which they did. (Of course no one would dare criticize my singing, which probably needed the most work of all.)

Not only did I change our repertoire; I also went to work on our light show. Previously, we had had only some red and blue bulbs with flasher buttons that made the lights blink on and off slowly. First we added a “black light” that we bought from Marshall Electric. But that was not enough for me. I had seen The Dayton Sound playing under their real and expensive strobe light and insisted we should have one, which we made by ourselves with the help of Steve Sandor, a classmate of Hisey’s who was something of an electronic genius. He hung around our practices a lot and could fix any technical problem like shorted-out cords or dirty volume controls. He also played bass in his own little band called the Fiberglass Rowboat, which featured another friend, John Orme, on guitar and Mike Browning on drums. Mike was not permitted to take his drums out of the house, though. So all they could do was rehearse in the basement, with no hope of playing out.

Sandor helped us to make a strobe light from an old record player. We took everything out of the cabinet except the turntable. On it we mounted a circular piece of cardboard with a lightbulb-sized hole in it. We cut a similar hole in the cabinet itself, and installed a socket for the very brightest bulb we could find at Marshall Electric. When the hole in the cardboard wheel came around to line up with the hole in the cabinet, the bright light inside flashed through the two holes. Then Sandor added some device to control the speed of the turntable with a rheostat. We experimented with different speeds and finally found one that set the flash at the right frequency to create a strobe effect—one of moving in a dreamlike slow motion, for those who have never seen a strobe light. When we finally got it right, we turned out the lamps in the Hisey living room and jumped around in the beam of our new strobe. But we couldn’t leave it on too long because the bulb got so hot we feared it might burn or melt the old record player cabinet. We first used our new strobe at the Millville Roller Rink, and the country kids went crazy. They wanted to move their hands in and out of the beam to see the effect. The new light gave me even more confidence and enthusiasm, and our show improved significantly. So, although I was a teenaged tyrant of the first-degree, I maintain that our band became a lot cooler under my direction. We never were musically great, but we were not boring to watch, as some more talented bands were.

One of those more talented rival bands from our high school was called The Ladds, who also played sometimes at the Millville Rink. They were a good soul band, better musicians than we were, and very intolerant of hippies and freaks, which we were trying our best to be. We had begun to espouse peace and love, burn incense, and wear beads. But the members of the soul crowd were fledgling beer drinkers and ass-kickers, and “kicking some hippie ass” was one of their favorite pastimes. So some of the Ladds, in their standard soul garb (three-quarter length, black leather soul coats, high-waisted pants and “thick-n-thin” socks), might show up when we were playing at the rink, to stare at us menacingly and threaten to beat our asses outside after the dance. So we instructed Linda to pull the van up close to the doors when she came back at 1:00. (She was not allowed to say through the dance; admission was restricted to band members and teenaged patrons, only.) We hustled the equipment out, jumped into the van, and rushed to get out of Millville alive.

Another “job” we played was at the Boar’s Head, a college bar in Oxford, Ohio, home of Miami University (of Ohio), which was just a few miles up the road. The older brother of my junior-high-school girlfriend Marilynn had gone to Miami and hung out at the Boar’s Head, and from him we knew that some of the cool bands like the Lemon Pipers played there. We boldly called to ask about getting a job ourselves, and someone told us we could “audition” by playing on a Saturday afternoon. That was good enough for us. We packed up Linda’s Nova, and she drove us up to Oxford, where we crept tentatively into the Boar’s Head. Like most college bars, it was a primitive sort of place with a concrete floor and rough wooden tables and chairs. It did have a somewhat rustic atmosphere, and there was, as I recall, an actual boar’s head mounted on the wall. There was a two-level stage, which allowed us to place the drums higher than the rest of the band. We set up and played awhile for the handful students devoting their Saturday afternoon to drinking 3.2 beer. We got no particular response, one way or another, and no one who appeared to be in a management position spoke to us. After a couple of hours we went home. Our audition did not result in a job at the Boar’s Head, but I suppose that was my first barroom music job—though very, very far from my last.

Around this time, we had a personnel change. Drummer Charlie Henry got in trouble at home because of bad grades at school and was not allowed to play with us until he improved his marks. He had to pack up his pink-champagne sparkle Ludwig set and take it home. He was replaced by Warren’s former Pierce Elementary schoolmate and former OK’s drummer Jimbo Powell. As the others of us had fallen in love with guitars and given ourselves to music, Jimbo had given up everything to play drums. He had been a good baseball player as a kid and was the catcher on a team in the Champion Paper’s (where his dad, Mac, worked) youth baseball league—a sort of large but privately sponsored Little League. When he heard his calling to play drums, though, he lost interest in baseball, and his father never really forgave him for it.

He had started out with a red-sparkle Pearl drum set, then moved up to a blue Slingerland set. I don’t know how he ever managed it, because there were six kids in the family, his grandfather was now an invalid, and Mac spent any spare money the family had on fishing trips to Canada, but somehow Jimbo had gotten a pretty decent Slingerland drum set. He had no drum stool (or “throne,” as they say today), though, so he used his little brother’s high chair (with the eating tray removed, of course). If he broke a drum head, he might just have to tape it up, because he had no money to replace it. He played very hard and his drumsticks were always chewed up and ragged. At some point, some new metal drumsticks appeared on the market, and Jimbo, thinking them the answers to his prayers, scrounged up enough money to get a pair, but they were hollow metal (solid ones probably would have destroyed the heads), and were literally broken in half by the time he completed a couple of practices with them. So he went back to his chewed-up wooden sticks.

Jimbo was a decent drummer for his age and the time, powerful and energetic and definitely into the psychedelic scene. He was a huge fan of Hendrix and his drummer, Mitch Mitchell. Jimbo was a natural comedian, too. He regularly cracked us up with perfect impersonations of all our teachers. When he finally made it to Garfield High (after spending an extra year GW Junior High), he immediately began to mimic all the teachers there, as well. Often I would go into the restroom to find him surrounded by a circle of black guys (GHS had a significant black population and thus a lot of soul influence; we few psychedelic hippies were definitely the minority) who gave him cigarettes in return for entertainment. “Ol’ Powell, crazy dude!” the brothers would laugh as Jimbo adopted the persona of our principal Abe Hammons and ordered each one of them to the office for disciplinary procedures.

An occasional member of Powell’s restroom audience was Roger Troutman, who would graduated with me in 1970, but had some classes with underclassman Powell, as well. Roger was a well-known soul guitar player in Hamilton long before he ever reached high school. He had played guitar from the age of six, when his father would take him around to different venues, bars, dances, any place there was music, to let him play. People would give him tips, of course, and he had many of those coins laminated into the finish of his Fender Jazzmaster, which he played for the rest of his life. By the time he got to Roosevelt Junior High, he was fronting Little Roger and his Fabulous Vels, playing dances at the Booker T. Washington Community Center and at Open House and many other places, though he was just a kid. He traveled around the region some and recorded a few singles of cover tunes at an early age, as well. His band always included members of his family. His brother Lester and his cousin Ronnie both played drums at different times. He had a sister who sang, and another of our classmates, Ralph Shepherd, was his bass player for a while in high school. Roger’s older brother Larry was also usually involved somehow, playing percussion, singing backup, or something, though Roger, an advanced player for his age, was the real show. After high school, he began to shift his base to Dayton, an hour north of Hamilton, which was a town with more soul influence than Cincinnati to the south. Roger and the Human Body was what he called his band of the mid-70s. They made an album featuring a song called “Freedom” that got some local airplay. Then Roger went out to California and ultimately was signed to a contract by Warner Bros. I think he was around 30 and had been playing for almost 25 years at that time. The band was called Zapp and toured nationally as openers for bigger acts and as headliners in cities like Atlanta and Detroit. Some of their songs, like “Computer Love,” “More Bounce to the Ounce,” and Roger’s version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” are still played today. Most feature the electronically synthesized vocal sound that Roger developed—starting with a “talk-box,” but taking that style a step further than others had--and combined with his fine guitar playing to create his distinctive modern soul sound. Today Roger is credited with having had great influence on some of the 80s West Coast rappers. When I listen to early work by Prince, I think he, too, might have listened to some of Roger’s music in his formative years.

So Roger became successful enough to buy his parents a house in Dayton and build a big studio and offices for his music business, Troutman Enterprises, there. He continued to record and tour into the 90s. In 1999, at the age of 47, he was shot and killed by his older brother Larry, who had remained in Roger’s employ as a “manager” after he stopped actually “playing” with the band. The reason for the shooting, as it was told to me (I was out of the country when it happened), was some argument that had started in a recording session at the studio and continued out in the parking lot. After shooting Roger, Larry escaped in his car, then turned the gun on himself and committed suicide, writing a tragic end to Hamilton, Ohio’s biggest musical success story.

So back in high school, Roger, the established black soul guitar prodigy, and Powell, the much less experienced psychedelic/acid-rock drummer found common ground in Jimi Hendrix. Powell loved Hendrix because he was Hendrix, and Roger, who had neither love for nor interest in psychedelic music, was turned on to Hendrix because he was a good and increasingly famous black guitarist working successfully in what was then a very white music market. So the two students would spend the time in the psychology class they shared talking about Hendrix. Of course Powell knew every song by heart, down to each drum fill and guitar lick, which he could mimic just as he mimicked our teachers. Powell’s devotion to the black guitar hero delighted Roger. When his black friends tried to interrupt his baffling conversations with this crazy, long-haired white boy, Troutman wouldn’t respond and didn’t care what they thought. “Get on back with the rest of the niggers,” he would shout at the intruder. “Me and Powell jivin’ ‘bout Hendrix!” I’m sure Jimbo kept Roger entertained with a barrage of jokes and teacher impersonations, as well.

Always one to seize the moment of comedic opportunity, Powell could be counted on for entertainment in any situation. As we rode around town with Linda in her Nova, he might thrust his entire upper body out the back window, throw open his arms and scream a warm and friendly greeting—“Uncle Frank!”—at someone he had never seen before in his life. We would guffaw at the shock and confusion on Uncle Frank’s face as he squinted into the car to see if this lunatic yelling at him really was some long-lost nephew. Some of Jimbo’s shenanigans bordered on tastelessness, howoever. Once when riding back from Cincinnati, where Linda had taken us to visit some big music stores or hippie head shops that we did not have in Hamilton, we all heard her giggling and noticed she was flushing red for some unknown reason. After a moment of confusion, we all turned to Jimbo, who was suppressing a laugh himself. Sitting directly behind Linda, he had slid his foot under her seat and was pushing up into the springs with his toe to see if she could feel it. “Knock it off, Powell!” Hisey snapped at him.

Jimbo added a lot to our stage show. Whereas Charlie Henry had been kind of a heavy guy without much show or flash, Powell was a maniac. He would play without a shirt, peace symbols painted on his skin and a bright orange strip of highway reflector tape wrapped around his neck and glowing in the black light. He sometimes wore an old leather aviator’s helmet that Warren had in his collection of military artifacts. He painted his tennis shoes with many different shades of day-glo paint and did everything he could to be as hip and freaky as possible, which came pretty naturally to him. Like the rest of us, he was trying to grow his hair as long as he could and to dodge teachers who would send him to the school office for violation of the dress code. He had to dodge his father as well because, just as his hair reached a cool length, Mac was likely to get mad at him and march him down to the barber shop to get it all cut off, which would be a tragedy of the highest order.

Jimbo sometimes had trouble getting to practice, because he would be charged with watching his invalid grandfather while his parents and five siblings went out shopping, to Frisch’s Big Boy, to K-Mart, etc. If he left before they got back, he might suffer punishment by haircut. But he was a good addition to the band, and Charlie Henry never came back (though Warren and I would play with him again two decades later). Jimbo, though his timing probably was not perfect, added power and drive to the band. He attacked and flailed at his drums with the energy of The Who’s Keith Moon. Powell fit into my program also because he would do anything and everything I told him to. If I said play faster or slower or play your solo longer, he would do so. When he protested that he was playing a song as fast as he could, I told him he was not; he must play faster, and he did. Of course he would talk about me behind my back (and about everybody else’s behind theirs while kissing their asses in person), but at least he did what I said. He also spent a lot of time with me at the trailer where I lived so that he could get away from home, caretaker duties, and the wrath of Mac.

It was after Jimbo started playing with us that we finally got to play at Junior High Open House. It was a big thrill to pull up at the back door of the ‘Y’ in Linda’s Nova and haul our equipment down the stairs. Warren and Hisey both had their Twin-Twelve Amps, and Danny Paul had traded in his small Kalamazoo bass amp on a bigger Silvertone amp as well. Jimbo said it made him feel good to set up his drums behind a wall of “good” equipment. (It was far from the best, but two guitars were Gibsons, and Warren had his Crestwood Rick copy. Only another musician would have looked at the headstock and seen that it wasn’t really a Rickenbacker. Then again, only another musician would have cared what kind of guitar it was. Warren had by now covered his old black Silvertone guitar with round dots of orange reflector tape. He used it in our finale (The Animals’ “Inside Lookin’ Out”) and dropped in on the floor like the poor man’s Pete Townshend before he walked off stage.

At open house we were played the impressive sum of $20 for the whole band for the whole night—two one-hour sets with one break between. (On some nights, there were two bands that made $10 each.) On stage we could wear whatever we wanted, but when walking around on break, we had to have our shirts tucked in. Of course we were striving now to look as cool as we could onstage. One of Jimbo’s favorite outfits was a pair of tight scarlet corduroy pants with a black satin shirt and wide floral tie. Warren sometimes wore his old Inversions doughboy jacket, and he and I both proudly sported our suede “Dukes,” a rakish, streamlined shoe from Thom McAn. Mine were golden brown, and I think Warren’s were green. He had developed a hairstyle that allowed him to part his hair on one side during the week and remain in compliance with the school dress code. But on the weekends and for band jobs, he could part it on the opposite side and make it flow down over at least one ear in distinctive Beatle-esque fashion. Linda, meanwhile, in addition to her other duties, had started to make some stage clothes for Hisey. I can still see him standing beside me at Open House one night in a day-glo yellow and orange psychedelic print poncho and skin tight black bell bottoms festooned with bright white polka dots. (He wore no shoes, but only his socks, because his penny loafers would not have looked right with his outrageous new bells.) Linda had just gotten them sewn up in time for our Open House job and had not had time to install a zipper, button, snap or belt loops at the waist. So Hisey’s pants were held together precariously by a big safety pin that was hidden under his long poncho. At one point during the night, he dropped his guitar pick and asked me to pick it up for him between songs.

“Pick it up yourself,” I said.

“I can’t!” he hissed frantically. “My pants’ll rip open and fall down!” I guessed that we didn’t want that. So I condescended to retrieve his pick.

Danny Paul, our bass player, as I remember, remained somewhat normal in appearance—straight leg jeans, penny loafers, button-down-collar shirt, modest Beatle haircut—not too long. Always a ladies’ man, Danny probably wanted to avoid too much weirdness in order to appeal to the greatest possible number of nubile Open-Housettes.

I, of course, had no such reservations. Overkill has always been my forte. I had hippified my wardrobe by getting my mother to sew triangles of bright paisley material between the lower seams of my “flared” hopsack (pseudo-burlap) jeans to make them into bigger bell bottoms. (Eventually “elephant bells” would come into being, and I maintain that I started this fashion trend.) I also often wore an old army fatigue jacket I had borrowed from Warren. I decorated it with peace symbol buttons, and from one epaulet there dangled a long, thick chain of gold plate, tied together with a rawhide thong. Resplendent in my hip apparel, my hair and sideburns growing long despite the efforts of Garfield High to keep all its students looking clean cut, I trod the YWCA stage with more flash and confidence than ever, screaming out the lyrics and melodies to the songs I had chosen for us. Now we were doing a couple of songs by the Chocolate Watch Band, an obscure California band who had been in the movie Riot on Sunset Strip. We had discovered them by listening to The Dayton Sound. We also did the Yardbirds’ version of the old blues song “Smokestack Lightnin’” (still knowing next to nothing about the blues tradition in America, which was largely the source and inspiration for all the British music we tried to copy).

I used a $10 microphone that belonged to somebody else in the band, but we still had no P.A. system through which to sing. In those days, even for those who did have P.A.s, they were nothing like what we have today. Their development really lagged behind that of powerful guitar amplifiers. The standard P.A. for most of the open house bands was a small system made by Bell. It included a tiny 20-watt amplifier with a couple of inputs and two 8-inch speakers connected by long cords that unwound so they could be set upon the high sills of the basement windows in the ‘Y.’ The best P.A. in the Cincinnati area belonged to a couple of guys from Hamilton called the Taggart Brothers. They were twins—Merle and Gerald (Appalachian pronunciation: “Jerle,” to rhyme with Merle)—who had a Lawson system, maybe a 100-watt head and a couple of cabinets covered in beautiful gold grill cloth with a couple of 12- or 15-inch speakers and a green metal horn in each. They did sound for all the WSAI dances at LeSourdsville Lake and elsewhere, and they did even concerts like the Supremes and others who came to Cincinnati Gardens, the biggest venue in the area at that time. The Taggarts even had monitors, speakers that face back to the stage and allow the band to hear the vocals coming out of the front speakers. But we had none of the above. At first, like most other young bands of the time, we plugged the mike into the second channel of a two-channel amp. So while Hisey played rhythm, for example, through one channel of his Twin-Twelve, my vocals would come through the other channel. This meant we could not turn the mike up very loud because, with the speakers behind it, it would feed back easily. So, like most young vocalists of the time, I was forced to scream over the drums and guitars blasting behind my back. Without a good mike, PA, or monitors, I could never really hear myself, which I’m sure made it much worse for those who could.

Then we got the bright idea that my Silvertone single-12 amp—and another identical to it, which had been Hisey’s first amp before I knew him, could somehow be linked together to make a pseudo-P.A. We could place once small amp on either side of the stage. Steve Sandor probably figured out how to do this. We took him along with us whenever we could to solve any technical problems that might arise. When my mike cord shorted out at Open House (probably the result of swinging it around as I had seen Roger Daltrey of The Who do), Sandor could grab it, take it back to the dressing room, where he had a soldering iron, find the problem, and fix it, all while we played an instrumental song that required no vocals and thus no mikes. The mike shorted out once at Open House when we were trying to play “Dock of the Bay.” (This was before I replaced all popular soul tunes with more psychedelic material.) I insisted that the band just keep playing the song instrumentally until Sandor fixed the mike. Then I left the stage and ran with him to the dressing room, so I could get back onstage with the mike as soon as possible. Of course, this was kind of weird for the audience—a popular song to which everyone knew and expected to hear the lyrics became nothing but verse after verse of guitar chords, which must have gone on for at least 10 minutes before I got back to the stage to sing again. Afterward, Hisey was livid. He said he had been so embarrassed that he would never play the song again. So we dropped it from the list.

The next personnel change we had was at the bass position. Danny Paul decided to leave the band. He might have grown tired of my bossiness, he might have disliked our increasingly psychedelic repertoire, or band practice might simply have been interfering with his love life. Whatever the reason, we replaced him with Randy Blades, who was in the same class with Warren and me. Randy was a serious student of the bass and was also teaching himself to play piano and harmonica. His Gibson EB-3 was a step up from Danny’s EB-0, and his old Fender Bassman amp definitely spruced up our all-Silvertone backline. The Bassman had two twelve-inch speakers, and Randy and his father were building in their basement a second speaker cabinet with two fifteens, which would be upholstered to match the Fender. Then Randy would be able to stack one cabinet on top of the other, which would be super cool. We had seen Hendrix with his two Marshall stacks, each as tall as he was, and the larger and louder our equipment, the better, as far as we were concerned.

With this new lineup—Warren and Hisey on guitars, Randy on bass, Jimbo on drums, and me out front—we played our occasional jobs at Open House, the Millville Roller Rink, and possibly a few others I have now forgotten. We also started to decorate our rehearsal space to reflect our increasingly psychedelic orientation. Linda had covered one wall of the Hiseys’ basement with pictures of the Beatles, and we now got permission from her mother, Ruth, to paint the other basement walls as we liked. We had to stop practicing by about 9:00 to prevent the neighbors from calling the police on us, so when we stopped playing, we would all take brushes and day-glo paint and go to work on our growing psychedelic mosaic. It was totally free-form, each person painting his own thing, ankhs and peace symbols abounded of course, along with eyes and paisleys. Jimbo would draw crazy faces with funny captions. What had been a dull green basement slowly evolved into an underground hippie den where we listened to Hendrix and Cream and Canned Heat and Paul Butterfield (Randy was aware of and interested in the blues before any of the rest of us were) while we painted.

One weekend afternoon we wanted to rehearse but for some reason could not use the Hisey basement. So we transferred our practice to the basement of the Lutheran church that Warren’s family attended. There was a stage there upon which we could play, so Linda brought her movie camera to film us. And there was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, with which we recorded ourselves as we struggled to learn The Who’s new song, “I Can See for Miles.” The tape, as far as I know, no longer exists, but Linda still has the eight-millimeter film she shot that day 40 years ago, in 1968.

That summer, some rival musicians from the West Side asked me to play a one-time job with them at the Butler County Fair. One of them was Greg Wingfield, a guitar player who was the boyfriend of my girlfriend Bonnie’s niece. Greg went to Taft High and was in a band (possibly called the U.S. Male) with Bill Beasley on rhythm guitar, Jan Meyers on bass, and Jim Hipp on drums. Their singer, Ross Franciscus, was somehow out of the picture, the show had already been booked, and they asked me to do it with them. We learned some tunes, one of which was Vanilla Fudge’s slow, rocky cover of the Supremes’ “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.” I was flattered to be asked to sing. No one ever had any particular praise for my vocal efforts then, but I thought I could sing, and this invitation seemed to validate that notion. It was actually the result, I imagine, of their need for a replacement frontman (there weren’t so many around) and Greg’s recommendation because we were almost like “pseudo-brothers-in-law.” I said nothing to my Blues Inc. bandmates about the invitation. I rehearsed a few times and then played with the other band one evening during the fair, out on the horse track, facing the grandstand, where there were quite a few people. I was especially proud of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” and wailed it out with full force and plenty of show.

“Little Roger” Troutman was there, I learned later. He had probably played that day at the fair and hung around to watch the other acts. Or maybe he was going to play later. He was evidently not impressed with the Vanilla Fudge version of the Supremes’ song. A soul devotee, he probably felt the Fudge should have left the classic soul hit alone instead of trying to rock it up and “whiten” it up. For quite a while after the Fair, he showed his derision, whenever he saw me in the hall at school. Mockng me and the Fudge, he would sing in a deep, overdone parody of the Fudge version, “Set me freeeee, why don’t you baaabe?”

The other members of Blues Inc. eventually heard I had sung with another band at the Fair and reacted with a certain degree of jealousy, like a cheated-on spouse. Why was I playing with another band. Was I planning on quitting Blues, Inc.? Of course, I was not. The Fair job had been just a one-time thing, and after it, we carried on as before.

Shortly after this time, though, Warren decided that he wanted to leave the band. He too might have become dissatisfied with my leadership, though I think he and I were in general agreement about the material we should play, judging from our late-night phone conversations. We would talk on and on about Hendrix and Cream and other psychedelic-era bands we were discovering, like Big Brother, Country Joe and the Fish, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and Arthur Lee’s Love, until we actually fell asleep with the phones to our ears.

His real reason for leaving, unbeknownst to us, might actually have been a “love life” issue, since he and Linda began quietly to “date” around this time. Through her involvement with the band, they had gotten well acquainted and developed, it seemed, a certain mutual attraction. They now began a long and unique kind of courtship that went on for at least five years before they finally got married. As of this writing, they have been married for more than 30 years and live together in Hamilton with Linda’s ever-growing, ever-changing menagerie of cats, dogs, birds, and an occasional fish. Over the years, due to our history together, they have been the closest thing to some kind of “family” that I have had.

When Warren left the band, we advertised in our local newspaper for a new lead guitar player. One of the few respondents was a high-school junior from Fairfield (just south of Hamilton) named Steve Hershner. When he showed up at Hisey’s house to try out for the band, he didn’t really look like much of a musician. He was tall and lanky, with red hair and glasses that were always sliding down his nose. And he was wearing ankle weights, which were sort of small canvas belts, weighted with lead, that athletes wore around their ankles to strengthen their legs, build their speed, etc. “You going out for football or something?” we asked Hershner.

“No, just trying to build up my legs,” he answered, pushing his glasses up to the bridge of his nose.

We had him pegged for some kind of dork and didn’t hold out much hope that he would be our new lead player, but he did have good equipment: a real sunburst Fender Stratocaster and a blond Fender Tremolux Amp. This was a step down from a Bandmaster, which was more commonly seen then. The Bandmaster had two twelve-inch speakers, whereas Hershner’s Tremolux had only two tens, but it was a nice amp and would match Randy’s blond Bassman, giving us two name brand amps and only one Sears Silvertone—Hisey’s. So we thought we’d give Hershner a try.

Our mouths dropped open as he ripped into Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” “Fire,” and “Foxy Lady,” then Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Outside Woman Blues”—songs that we longed to play but could not because no one in the band could approach the guitar prowess of Hendrix or Clapton. Hershner played their guitar solos note for note—exactly as they were on the records. We couldn’t believe it. Bursting with excitement over how good we were going to be, we invited him to join the band that day.

He began to come to practice regularly, sometimes showing up with his ankle weights, sometimes wearing fisherman’s hip boots. Yes, he was a little weird, but so what? He could play everything we wanted to play exactly as the original artists played it. (We were not yet thinking of writing our own original music in those days.) We set about adding all these great new songs to our repertoire.

Hershner even bought a Vox fuzztone, which made his sound that much more sustained and psychedelic. Occasionally, he would stop us in the middle of a song, though, claiming he had to “review” a guitar part. He would go to the record player, put the needle on the guitar solo of the song in question and listen a little while, playing along quietly. Then we would start the song again, and he would play it note for note. We didn’t think too much about this until we got a last-minute job at the local American Legion post in Hamilton one night. We had actually been practicing, I think, when someone called to say there had been a cancellation that evening. Blues Inc. had played some event there before I was in the band, so the Legion had called us to see if we could be there to play within an hour or two. As I recall, Hisey didn’t want to play the job because he felt we weren’t ready. We had rehearsed with Hershner only a few times. I said we were taking the job. I was anxious to play our new songs with our great new guitar player—not in the basement, but in front of an audience. Hisey and I argued about it, I pushing everybody to pack the equipment into Linda’s Nova and get ready to go. With the stress of last-minute rushing and my arguing with Hisey over whether we should play, the atmosphere became pretty tense, and Hisey finally said that he was quitting the band. We would have to play without him. (Yes, players seemed to be dropping like flies under my leadership, but the band as a unit was moving forward; why couldn’t they all see that I was right?) I told him he could quit tomorrow. Tonight he was playing so he’d better get dressed and get ready to go right now. He did.

We rushed to the American Legion, where there was some sort of function for the members, who were adults, many of them middle-aged. They probably were not so interested in Cream and Jimi Hendrix and the Doors—but that’s what we played for them. We would not have thought of doing anything else. As we ripped into our new songs, we couldn’t wait for the solo verses, where Hershner could show off his blazing guitar ability and replicate Clapton’s and Jimi’s leads, note-for-note.

When it was time for a guitar solo, we would look expectantly at Hershner, but more than once, he balked—started to play the solo, then abruptly stopped looking confused and pathetically pushing his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. “What’s wrong?” I hissed at him venomously. “Play!”

“I forgot,” he mouthed. “I need to review.”

“You can’t review now! Just play!”

But he could not. He did not really know anything about scales and could not improvise a guitar solo that would be in key with the song. He played purely by rote memory, one note leading him to the next, and if he forgot just one of those notes, he didn’t know what to play next. He was paralyzed, and we were paralyzed with embarrassment, standing there playing rhythm for a lead solo that did not materialize because the lead guitarist stood frozen, needing to “review” before he could play one more note. I don’t know whether any of the people there knew we were having a problem. They just knew we were playing too loudly and kept asking us to turn down. Hershner, nervous before the audience, I suppose, kept forgetting his leads, and it turned out to be a disappointing night all around.

That was the only job we ever played with our great new guitar player, Steve Hershner—not because we fired him; we did not. We had seen in the basement what he could do with his guitar and thought that if we just kept rehearsing, he would be able to remember all his leads and play them correctly in public. Whether we were right we would never know. But we did continue to rehearse.

The next job we got was a dance at Wilson Junior High School on the West Side. We were rehearsed and ready to go when Hershner called at the last minute to say he couldn’t play. He had gotten his report card from school just a day or two before the job, and his father had grounded him for his bad grades. He wasn’t allowed out to play the job. Cursing his father and our bad luck, we pressed Warren back into service. We begged him to bale us out, and he agreed to play this one last job just save our butts. (I’m sure we had to bribe him with something or other; Warren is a born trader and negotiator.) Unable to perform our new psychedelic repertoire, we fell back on the old songs we had done with Warren, but the job came off well enough. The Wilson kids seemed to like us, but we couldn’t help wondering what their response would have been had we had our great new guitar player onstage with us.

Imagine our surprise then, when we saw, towering above the Wilson Junior High students in the audience, a tall red-headed guy with big black glasses! Yes, Steve Hershner, theoretically grounded and unable to bring his guitar out of the house to play the job, had somehow been allowed to come and see us play the job without him.

After he was “ungrounded,” Hershner came back to the basement to continue rehearsing with us. He also began to build, in his family’s garage, an extra speaker cabinet for his Tremolux amp, just as Randy Blades had for his Bassman. Steve, however, was shooting for the stars with his new creation. Whereas Randy had built a reasonably sized cabinet with two 15-inch speakers to supplement the two 12s in his original cabinet, Hershner was building a cabinet that would house not two but four 15-inch speakers—never mind the fact that his Tremolux head was probably not powerful enough to push all those speakers efficiently. His new cabinet would be eight feet tall, four feet wide, and two feet deep!

“How will we carry it?” we asked.

“Just strap it to the top of the car,” he answered.

We pointed out that it would surely crush the roof of Linda’s Nova, but Hershner would not be dissuaded. He continued to build like a madman. From the local Pontiac dealership he ordered a “Firebird” insignia, mounted it on the face of his creation, and christened his new amp the “Fender Firebird.”

One night he informed us that he was having an end-of-the-school-year party in his basement. He wanted to create a very hip theme. He had a black light to make things glow but wanted to use our homemade strobe light to further enhance the hip atmosphere. We were not invited to the party—it was only his Fairfield schoolmates and a few very hip girls from our school, Garfield. We said that we would bring the strobe only if we could come, too, at least for a limited period of time. So it was decided that we would attend the party and operate the strobe from 10:00 to 11:00 or 12:00, as I recall. Hisey and I dressed in our day-glo Nehru jackets from the House of Adam, and at 10, Linda drove us to Hershner’s house and waited outside while we spent an hour or two playing the roles of very hip strobe light operators. We hoped we had made a favorable impression upon Rhonda Smith, one of Garfield’s few hip girls, who had been invited by virtue of her extreme freakiness and reasonably good looks.

Near the end of that school year—1968, I believe—we got a job at Fairfield Junior High, playing outdoors on the steps of the school for a year-end event that was going on. Again, when he received his final report card of the year, Hershner was grounded for his bad grades. Rather than replace him for this job, we decided to play it four-piece. Hisey and I had become somewhat smitten with the idea of a four-man lineup like The Who’s and Led Zeppelin’s: guitar, bass, drums, and a frontman. The balance and symmetry seemed ideal for the flashy, showy kind of band he and I both wanted to have. He had by now traded in his Silvertone Twin-Twelve for a Kustom amp. These amps were upholstered in rolled and pleated sparkle material, like the interior of a customized car. Hisey’s was a beautiful royal blue sparkle and a real step up from his Sears amp. Since this was only a two-hour job to be played in a relatively small space, we rehearsed songs we could play with just one guitar and went with a four-piece line-up: Hisey on guitar, Randy Blades on bass, Jimbo on the drums, and me out front. Since Hisey had been to this point only a rhythm player and was not up to the Hendrix and Clapton solos, we adjusted our song list and play tunes that didn’t require much lead. We played, for example, The Who’s “Substitute,” which featured a bass solo that Randy could play easily. By now I had also gotten a harmonica and could play simple solos in the key of A, so that filled in some of the holes. Only a few kids showed up to watch us, but one of them (you guessed it, reader) was none other than Steve Hershneranyway, so the first set came off well enough. On our break, we walked to a nearby store to get something to drink, and as we were walking back, we heard the distinct strains of “Purple Haze” being played to perfection somewhere nearby! It took us only a dumbfounded moment to figure out what was going on. The supposedly grounded Steve Hershner had once again shown up to watch us play the job he was forbidden to play, and had, without even asking this time, just picked up Hisey’s guitar on the break and started playing for the kids there the songs that Hisey could not play, thus upstaging us insultingly. We ran the rest of the way back to the school steps and ordered Hershner off the “stage.” We decided that day that we had had enough of him and began to look for another lead guitar player.

We learned later that his Fender Firebird, when finally finished, was so big that he could not get it out of the one-car garage in which he had built it. He was forced to saw it in half and make two four-by-four Fender “mini-Firebirds,” which still did him no good since he had purchased not the 15-inch heavy-duty guitar speakers he needed, but 15-inch home stereo speakers, which were blown out by the first—and last—guitar chord he played through them.

I recently heard from an old mutual acquaintance—W.A. Williams, a longtime singer/songwriter and successful music photographer—that Steve Hershner is still playing music around the Butler County area and that he owns an entire houseful of equipment.

From The Beatles to The Blues, My Life in Music/Chapter 2: The Inversions

2008-04-12T01:01:00.000-07:00

2. The Inversions (1966)

While I was on my virgin musical voyage with the Morticians, my Industrial-Arts friend Warren Wright also formed his first little band, The OK’s, with Jim Gross Merle Lawson on guitars and Jim (Jimbo) Powell on drums. They too, I believe, played only one time in public, on the sidewalk outside Jimbo’s grandfather’s barbershop in downtown Hamilton during the annual “Fort Hamilton Days” celebration, circa 1965.

Shortly thereafter, Warren started playing with some guys from the West Side of town. That meant they went to Taft High School, not to Garfield High with us, but their families attended church with Warren’s family. The Inversions were doing on the West Side what we were doing on the East Side—trying to become a local version of a British Invasion band. Warren had started out playing guitar and had had at one point a big hollow-body National and a National amp, then a cheap Kay six-string, but he played bass in the Inversions. As I recall, he had come up with a Kay bass and some kind of bass amp. The lead guitar player was Keith Beyers, who had a Harmony Rocket and a fuzztone—a little black box that interrupted his guitar-to-amp cable. On his solos, Keith, a decent lead player for those times, could click the fuzztone on and get the fuzzy, sustained sound first associated with the Yardbirds, the British band that included, at one time or another, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, and Jimmie Page.

The Inversions drummer was Bill Thomin. There had been a fourth original member, a singer/rhythm guitar player who had left for some reason, and Warren convinced the band to try me out as a replacement on rhythm guitar and vocals. The only conditions were that 1) I had to purchase a tan “doughboy” jacket from Sears, since the Inversions had adopted it as their band uniform, and 2) my guitar had to be amplified. Keith had a Sears Silvertone Twin-Twelve, an amp that was becoming very popular with bands like ours because it was as close as we could get to the two-piece “piggyback” amps made by Fender: the Bandmaster, the Bassman, the Tremolux. None of these was within our price range, but a Twin-Twelve could be had for less than $200, as I recall. It was also a piggyback amp, with a separate “head” and speaker cabinet, and it was fairly large, with two twelve-inch speakers; hence the name Twin-Twelve. When I explained to my father that I had a chance to play in a better band, but needed an amplifier, he agreed to go to take me Sears and look. Of course, I wanted a Twin-Twelve, but it was too expensive. There was, however, a singe-twelve version, smaller, with one speaker, and that’s the one my father bought me. Then we went to the clothing department to get my “doughboy” jacket, a semi-military looking garment modeled after WWI uniforms, I believe, but in a rich tan wool blend. My problems were still not solved, though. I had an amp, but only an acoustic guitar, and my father had no intention of buying me an electric one at this point. The best we could do was go to Morris Loan and buy an attachable pickup. For those who don’t know, a pickup is essentially a microphone that lies beneath the strings of an electric guitar, picks up the sound of the strings, and sends the sound to the amplifier. It was possible to “electrify” my acoustic by purchasing this attachable pickup, mounting it on my guitar and running the cable to my new amp. Now, at last, I was ready to start practicing with the Inversions, with whom Warren had already played a job or two at church-related functions. We practiced together about three times. One of our big songs was the Yardbirds, “Mister, You’re a Better Man Than I,” featuring Keith’s fuzztone lead. We also did “The Last Train to Clarksville,” by the Monkees, “Gloria,” by Them and the Shadows of Knight, and some other tunes. At the third practice, the regular drummer, Bill Thomin was not present, and Warren brought along Jimbo Powell, who took his shoes off before sitting down to play. When we questioned him about playing barefooted, his response was: “Can you play guitar with gloves on?” I don’t know if the more uppity West Side musicians could not imagine playing with a barefoot drummer from the East Side, but somehow, that was the end of the Inversions. We never rehearsed again and never played a job together, but Warren and Jimbo and I would be in another band together sooner than we realized.

Meanwhile, when we weren’t practicing our music or trying to form bands, we fed our music obsession by going on Saturday nights to Junior High Open House, a hugely popular dance (though there was little dancing; we all just watched and listened to the bands) for 7^th- and 8^th-graders in the Hamilton Public Schools. It took place in the basement of the YWCA, uptown. We had to buy a green membership card at school, then pay a 35-cent admission fee at the door of the ‘Y.’ As we waited in line on the stairs, we could hear the bass guitar (a real one with a long neck and four oversized tuning keys) thumping up from the big room downstairs. There was a stage in the corner graced weekly by local groups a little older than we were. They were high-school aged guys who were ahead of us musically. We watched and listened to The Counts, the Rockers (whose lead singer, Wayne Perry, would eventually go on to be a successful country songwriter in Nashville,) the Mods, the What Four, Jerry and the Mustangs (who wore long-haired wigs until they were transformed to the Has-Bins; their guitar player, Doug Davis, was well known in the area as a fine musician and later moved to Nashville and made a career touring and recording with many different acts based there), the Out of Sights, Ron and the Sabras (Ron Danford also wore a long-haired wig while playing and later played organ in the Carp Brothers, a successful Cincinnati band; the other members of the Sabras evolved into Whalefeathers), and—for a special Christmas dance, I think--Beau Dollar and the Coins, a very good white soul band that had a regional hit in 1966 or 67 with their version of King Curtis’s “Soul Serenade.” Almost 40 years later, their guitar player, at the age of 60, would play for me in the Lowriders band in Cincinnati.

Dreaming of being “good enough” one day to play there, Warren and Jimbo and I and other aspiring players were at Open House every Saturday night. (There were a couple of weeks, however, when my girlfriend Marilynn and I were banned by the very strict lady who oversaw the dances because we had been seen kissing in the alley behind the Y while we waited for Marilynn’s mother to pick us up.)

In the summertime, when school was out, there was no Open House, but the local top-40 radio station, WSAI-AM, put on dance/concerts on Monday and Friday nights at LeSourdsville Lake, an amusement park out on Rt. 4, between Hamilton and Middletown. The park had been there for many years and included the Stardust Gardens, a large, covered wooden dance floor with a stage, where big bands of the 40s and popular singers of the 50s had performed in bygone summers. In the mid- to late 60s, the WSAI dances there featured “name” bands who were actually on the radio, coming through Ohio on their summer tours. At “the Lake,” I attended my first real concert. For a $1.00 admission fee, I saw the Byrds, who were touring on their first big hit, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” written by Bob Dylan, of course. The Byrds stayed at Eaton’s Hamilton Inn, a motel right next door to the Dixie Trailer Park! That day we rode our bikes around the parking lot, trying to get a glimpse of them. Finally we spotted the drummer, Mike Clarke, through an open door and worked up the nerve to go up to his room and ask for an autograph. As he signed his name for us, we admired the bikini-clad girl there in the room with him, and our desire to be musicians was even more firmly solidified! That night, as I watched the Byrds in the hot, packed atmosphere of Stardust Gardens, I was transported. I had seen them on “Where the Action Is,” and now they were somehow here in front of me. Jim McGuinn (later Roger Mcguinn) sang “Mr. Tambourine Man” in a thin, liquid voice while he played his Rickenbacker 12-string. His tiny square glasses sparked a fashion trend among those of us who had to wear corrective lenses. Many whose vision was 20/20 still bought non-prescription versions of the little square “granny” glasses anyway, just to be as cool as the Byrds. That night at the Lake was the first time I ever saw a live performance of a song I had heard on the radio or television, and of course it was magic. Besides the Byrds, other name acts we saw at the Lake were Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels (“Devil with the Blue Dress”), Gary Puckett and the Union Gap (“Lady, Willpower”), Every Mother’s Son (“Come on Down to My Boat, Baby”), Tommy James and the Shondells (“Hanky-Panky”), the Ohio Express (“Yummy, Yummy”), the Sir Douglas Quintet (“Mendocino”), the Music Explosion (“Little Bit o’ Soul”), the Syndicate of Sound (“Hey, Little Girl”), and the Knickerbockers (“Do You Wanna Dance?”), and one band of which I had never heard, Mouse and the Traps. They set up not on the stage but on the floor in a corner of the Gardens and encouraged us to gather round them and sit down cross-legged on the floor to listen to them. We were on the eve of the “hippie” era, and they were trying to establish an aura of equality and brother-sisterhood between band and audience. They were not there to encourage any dancing or other plastic, establishment activities.

The national acts were supported by good local Cincinnati groups who opened for them at the Lake. These bands from the big city 25 miles south of Hamilton were a cut above even our senior local bands, and we idolized them, too. There were the Lemon Pipers, the Us Too Group (later Balderdash), the Glass Wall, the Daybreakers, the Heywoods, the Dingos (whose trademark was blue-sparkle rolled and pleated Kustom amplifiers), Salvation and his Army, the Rapscallion Circle, Whalefeathers (who had evolved from Hamilton’s Ron and the Sabres), the Haymarket Riot, the New Lime, Ivan and the Sabers, the East-Orange Express, the Casinos, and many others. My very favorite, whom I watched with full attention from the foot of the stage, was the Dayton Sound, a band actually from Franklin, Ohio, though Dayton was nearby. The Dayton Sound modeled themselves after The Who. They had the first strobe light I had ever seen and, during “My Generation”—their finale--smashed their equipment up a little bit (to the minor extent they could afford) as The Who did on a grander scale. The Dayton Sound’s lead singer, Danny Riley, was a tremendous front man whom I admired and copied shamelessly. My girlfriend Marilynn and I would follow them around when they played at other WSAI dances in the Cincinnati area, taking photos of them and becoming huge fans.

A few of those local bands went on to a national level, however briefly. The Heywoods later had a very commercial hit called “Billy, Don’t He A Hero.” The Casinos, featuring singer Gene Hughes, had a hit with a song called “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye.” The McCoys, from a nearby town in Ohio had a national hit with “Hang On Sloopy.” Their guitar player, Rick Derringer, then went on to some notoriety, working with Johnny Winter in later years and writing “Rock and Roll, Hootchie-Koo,” recorded by both Winter and Derringer. The Lemon Pipers, from Oxford, Ohio, were a very good progressive rock band who got a deal on Buddah Records and recorded “Green Tambourine,” which became a national hit. Buddah was essentially a “bubble gum” label, though, and tried to push the Lemon Pipers in the same direction as the label’s most successful act, the “Ohio Express” (“Yummy, Yummy, Yummy, I’ve got love in my tummy”!). So the Pipers’ association with Buddah was short lived and finished badly, essentially putting an end to a really good band of the late 60s.

These were the groups we idolized as we struggled to make music in those years. We modeled ourselves after them, wearing suede, Cuban-heeled boots, tight corduroy pants, “Nehru” jackets, beads, and Indian moccasins, and, most importantly, growing our hair as long as we possibly could. Of course we ran afoul of the Hamilton Public Schools’ dress code and paid a price, but we would not be dissuaded from the most important thing in our lives: to be in a really cool band—and look like it. The next one that I joined, again through my friend Warren Wright, was called Blues, Inc.

From The Beatles to The Blues, My Life in Music

2007-09-29T06:58:00.000-07:00

From The Beatles to The Blues:

My Life in Music, 1965-????

By Billy Hamilton

Dear Reader--What you are about to read is a serialized memoir. That means the research upon which it is based was done, primarily, inside my head. While my memories of the last 40 years are reasonably clear, it is certainly possible that I have misspelled someone’s name, written the wrong date, or committed other such minor errors here. I have asked for input and correction from friends and fellow-musicians who shared these times with me, and some have provided helpful information. Many who have lived to tell about the times during which these events took place, however, claim to have little or no recollection of those years. They are walking exemplars of the old saying: “If you can remember the 60s, then you were not really there.” So I welcome feedback from anyone who WAS there, remembers, and finds historical inaccuracy herein. Despite any such flaws, I hope that what you find below might enable you to share a little bit of my musical past--the times, the people, the places, and the songs—for better or for worse. BH

Chapter One: The Morticians

In 1964, there were no such things as “air guitars,” but they were the first instruments that we played as we stood in the Bell family’s driveway, across the street from my trailer park in Hamilton, Ohio. Lip-syncing to “I Saw Her Standing There” and “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” we tried to pose like John, Paul, or George and held our imaginary instruments just as the Beatles held their Rickenbacker, Hofner, and Gretsch guitars. Ralph Bell was also especially good at playing “air drums” and lifting the corner of his upper lip to imitate Ringo’s pleasant smirk.

Eventually, some of us got more serious and started hounding our parents to buy us real instruments. In the summer of 1965, at the age of 13, I managed to persuade my dad, though he probably couldn’t afford it, to get me a big Harmony acoustic guitar at Rink’s Bargain City. It was black with a red sunburst and a half-inch of space between the strings and the neck. With it, I started trying to teach myself to play. Like so many kids of the time, I had a Mel Bay book of songs with chords and finger charts, and I sat in the living room of our mobile home in the Dixie Trailer Park, my fingers nearly bleeding as I struggled to replicate the songs of the Beatles and other British Invasion groups on the airwaves that summer. At 2:00 every afternoon, I would take a break to watch Dick Clarks’s new TV show, “Where the Action Is.” (I can still hear the theme song, which was sung, I believe, by Freddy Cannon of “Palisades Park” fame: “Oh, baby come on, let me take you where the action is . . ..” The “house band” on the show was Paul Revere and the Raiders, who went on to have a huge string of hits, and every day there were different bands from the exploding music scene of the time. Sonny and Cher made their debut on “Where the Action Is.” They wore their matching fur vests and sang “I Got You, Babe” and other songs written by Sonny Bono, who was a good pop songwriter.

I never took any guitar lessons. (“Yes, we can tell!” some listeners might concur, even today.) I don’t think my father could afford them. Maybe he wanted to see if I was serious before throwing away any money on my early interest in music. Also, reading musical notes off paper just didn’t seem all that cool to me. I couldn’t imagine the Beatles or the Stones doing that. So my fellow musicians-to-be and I learned to play “by ear,” though I always thought “by memory” was a more accurate phrase. We taught and learned from each other and from records. At George Washington Junior High School, my friend Warren Wright and I spent our time in eighth-grade Industrial Arts class hiding from our teacher, Herman Smith, so that we could draw guitar necks on paper to show each other chords and songs while normal students made bowling-pin lamps for their mothers. After school, Warren and I and others like us would visit each other’s houses and start trying to play together in one another’s basements, forming our first fledgling bands, much to the distress of parents who had come home from work anticipating an evening of peace and quiet.

We all had cheap instruments then. Most parents would not or could not buy the expensive and beautiful guitars at which we gazed through the windows of Weaver’s and Imfeld’s music stores. The guitars themselves cast a spell over us with their special beauty—the symmetrically curved and cherry-stained Gibson SGs, the flat, cutaway bodies and beautiful sunbursts of the Fender Stratocasters. The reverse design of the Gibson Firebird guitars and Thunderbird basses, the space-age shapes of the Vox guitars—teardrops and hexagons--would hypnotize us. Usually, the salesmen in the stores would let us come in to hold these precious wooden sculptures that spoke music. Upon them we played the paltry chords we knew, which seemed unworthy of such guitars. To own one was beyond our reach. We could not afford even the modest, second-hand instruments at Morris Loan down the street, where there were Harmony Rockets, for example: red semi-hollow bodies that were halfway respectable but less expensive than the Gibsons and Fenders. We did buy picks and strings there, and I think my first harmonica—a Hohner Marine Band in D—came from the gruff but kind old owner of Morris Loan, who put up with our coming in to waste his time on Saturday mornings, browsing and touching and asking questions about the instruments we dreamed of owning.

Carmine Isgro, who lived across the street, next to the Bells, was the first kid in the neighborhood to get a new, real electric guitar. It, too, was a Harmony, a solid body with a tortoise-shell pick guard and silver, easy-to-play, flat-wound strings. He would sit outside on the porch-swing with it, effortlessly strumming Herman’s Hermits’ “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.” He also had a small Harmony amp, which he personalized by putting his first name, in black letters, diagonally across the grill cloth. The rest of us did not dare to ask if we could play his guitar. We knew he would say no. Carmine eventually switched to bass and became a good bass player in a local band called the Durations, with drummer Chuck Farkas, rhythm guitarist Steve Crank, and Dean Arno, an excellent musician, playing lead. Later on, Carmine joined the Air Force, as I recall, and made a career of the military, an unusual choice for a musician in those days, but ultimately a wiser one than the choices many of our fellow guitar-strummers made.

The feeling we all shared about playing music, the magical thrill that spurred our first and ever-so-humble efforts, is very hard to convey. It was a chillingly beautiful obsession that claimed our hearts, minds, and souls. When we watched the long-haired British invasion bands on Ed Sullivan—or new American acts like the Righteous Brothers or the Shindogs (featuring Rick Nelson’s guitar player James Burton and Delaney Bramlett of Delaney and Bonnie) on “Shindig” or “Hullabaloo” (music TV shows of the mid-60s), we were positively overcome with an excruciatingly painful excitement. Girls screamed and cried and fainted. We gladly would have died to be the boys who made them scream and cry and faint, but it wasn’t just that—wanting to impress the opposite sex. The amazing coolness of those slim, long-haired young British guys (we had never seen or heard any English band before), the chemistry that poured from the TV screen and out of the speakers of our tiny transistor radios when they played and sang (in American accents because of the 50s rock and roll from which they had learned), became a very important part of our existence. To be like them was to be supremely cool.

Of course, young people today are awed by and obsessed with their own musical heroes, from Eminem to Britney Spears to 50 Cent, but can their excitement now possibly compare to ours then? I’m sure they would say yes, it can. But we had the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Animals, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Hollies, the Kinks, the Dave Clark Five, Them (featuring Van Morrison), and many others, plus a growing contingent of American artists—The the Young Rascals, the Byrds, the Doors, Mitch Ryder, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Kingsmen,--that sprang up to reflect the guitar-group lineups coming to us from England. Ironically, these British groups had, in turn, been influenced by American blues music that they had reconstituted and were feeding back to us, unbeknownst to most Americans. Also, during these years, the air-waves were drenched in 60s soul music from Stax and Motown and King Records (in Cincinnati): James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, the Temptations, the Supremes, Stevie Wonder, Smoky Robinson, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, Lou Rawls, Solomon Burke, and so many others, like Ray Charles, who was really in a class of his own. Although there developed a certain rift at that time between the soul fans and the rock disciples in my hometown, today I revere the 60s soul music and still play some soul covers of that time in my shows.

So, at the risk of offending today’s young music fans and sounding like an “older person,” I have to say there is no comparison--in terms of the songwriting and the “realness” of the recordings and performances--between most popular music of today and that of the mid- to late 60s and early 70s.

I cannot fail to add that 50s rock and roll and doo-wop, by which I was bewitched during my pre-teen, elementary school years, had been equally full of good singing and songwriting, just a step away from the blues and black gospel music. Elvis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Rick Nelson, Gene Vincent, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the Drifters, the Coasters, The Isley Brothers, and many others made great pop music, though it was recorded on only one or two tracks, essentially live, in the most basic and primitive way. Thus, it was very real, and that realness, along with the singing and songwriting values, is what made it so good. It was not just pleasing to the ear and not just something to dance to; it reached inside and grabbed the listener by the heart. Once music takes hold of one’s heart in that way, it never really lets go. At least that has been my experience.

One of the moments that stamped itself in my brain and instilled in me the desire to play music in front of people occurred on a summer evening, sometime in the late 50s or very early 60s. I had been sitting outside on the porch with my parents at 615 South 5^th Street, where we lived in a two-room apartment until I was ten. I went into the house for some reason, and the television was on, showing some kind of variety show, maybe “Ed Sullivan” or something similar. When I walked in, a band called Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks was playing “Mary Lou,” a song later covered by Bob Seger (“Mary Lou, she took my diamond ring . . .”). That was the first and last time I saw Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, but I remember them as a five-piece band in sharkskin suits, with greasy pompadours—a sort of hybrid of--or link between--the 50s doo-wop groups and 60s guitar bands, with the players right there around the singer, not hidden in the background or off camera. They were so unbelievably cool, and the song so perfect for them, that they riveted me to the floor. I watched them play that one song, “Mary Lou,” and knew, without ever putting my knowledge into words, that I would never be content if could not do what they had just done, more or less as they had done it, with perfect style. I wanted to crawl into the TV screen and become Ronnie Hawkins. That doesn’t mean that playing music has made me happy. It does not mean that it offers satisfaction or security or much of anything else. It doesn’t mean that I had ever displayed any particular musical talent to that point. It does not mean that music is a good business to get into. In fact, for anyone with any sense it is probably not a good business to get into. It just means that I had no choice but to try. It means that playing music, especially being a bandleader, which I have always been since the age of 15, will make one miserable a good part of the time, probably most of the time. But if such a person is not involved in music, he or she will be even more miserable all of the time. So one must play, even if it’s just to be a little bit less miserable than he/she would be if not playing—to keep “the glass” half-empty instead of completely empty. Anyway, when the Ronnie Hawkins segment was over that night and the show cut to a commercial, I knew every word to “Mary Lou,” and I still do, though I have never played or sung it in public, strangely.

Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks were not well known in America, and I heard nothing more of them until 30 years later, when I learned that Ronnie Hawkins was Canadian and that his band, the Hawks, had later evolved into The Band (Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, et. al.), who played with Bob Dylan, after he went electric, and then went on to make excellent records of their own. So the mid-50s through the early 70s, I think, were very good years to grow up and absorb the popular music being played in North America. The music of that time changed music history, and I was fortunate—or unfortunate--enough to grow up right in the middle of it.

Of course there are good young and talented musicians and songwriters today. I have worked with good young players in my Lowriders band in Cincinnati in recent years. Interestingly enough, most of them are pretty well-versed in the music of my generation and not too interested in the artists with mass appeal for their own. But certainly there are fewer talented young musical artists today than there were 30 to 35 years ago (by percentage of people and maybe by actual numbers). This is due in part to the fact that fewer young people learn to play instruments as we did. Their heroes now are performers who sing or rap in the studio over a background of computer-created sound that resembles music. (I find it interesting that so many of these artists catch the ear of the listener by “sampling” the songs of my generation instead of writing something original.) Many of the singers who appear on “American Idol” and similar TV shows to display their vocal talents have sung only in karaoke bars, never in front of a live band. Our idols were real bands that sang and played real instruments--guitars, drums, keyboards, and the occasional saxophone--so that’s what we learned to do. That is why in America today, at the local music level, the musicians working regularly in bars and clubs featuring live music—even places with a younger clientele—are often players in their 40s and 50s or even older. They are the best ones around now by virtue of their long experience, and they do not have so much competition from many younger players.

When we do find good and talented young artists today, they are likely to be more obscure than ever. This has always been true to a certain extent in any art form. The common taste is generally low, and the artistic cream usually does not rise to the top except for a handful of artists who manage to be commercially appealing and artistically respectable (and sensible and persistent and focused and lucky and in the right place at the right time). But today that common taste (with strong encouragement from industry professionals who feed us the worst of the worst, rather than take chances on the best of the best) is lower than ever, in my opinion. Some of the mindless, computer-made “dance music” I now hear, for example, seems to me not to be music at all. Of course, our parents said the same of our music; but much of it has stood the test of time. Yes, the Beatles, Stones, and other pop-rock or “beat” groups started out with somewhat lightweight, formulaic songs of love, catchy rhymes and predictable lyrics and chord structures, but they quickly developed into more serious and progressive artists as they moved into the late 60s and early 70s. Those who remained “lightweight” we dismissed and ridiculed as “plastic” or “bubble gum” bands. But even the most commercial acts of that time brought more to the table in terms of songwriting and real singing and playing than do many of the most popular teen idols of today. If I were forced to choose between The 1910 Fruitgum Company’s “1-2-3 Red Light”—a truly vapid “bubble gum” song of my time, which we young “musicians” turned off every time it polluted the airwaves—and the stuff I hear pouring out of the headphones of my students’ I-pods today, I’m afraid I would have to choose “1-2-3 Red Light” every time. It was bad—silly and trite and blatantly commercial--but at least it resembled real music in some way.

Technology was much less sophisticated back then, thank G/god. What was played in the studio was more or less honestly reproduced on vinyl. There were studio effects like echo and reverb to beef up the sound a little, but there were no computer programs to make someone who could not sing or play at all sound as though he or she could--not that all of our heroes were great musicians. They were not. In the case of the Beatles, though their vocals and songwriting were good, their playing was adequate for their material and no more. And nobody ever claimed that Jagger had a beautiful voice, but it was unique, his alone, boldly expressive, shamelessly angry and proud—like nothing we had heard before—largely because we were ignorant of our own blues tradition. We knew Elvis and 50s rock and roll, but we did not then know anything about the American blues that had spawned it. Most importantly, the songwriting of the 50s and the mid- to late-60s was just so good. Yes, it was only popular music, not Beethoven, but so many of those songs were popular classics in the making, work that is still listened to today, almost a half-century later. Though it was simple and simply recorded (by today’s standards), it was, I think, far better than most (sophisticatedly recorded) pop music of today, and we watched the artists grow before us as we followed them. The Beatles went from “She Loves You” to “A Day in the Life,” for example, in just a few years, before our very eyes. The Who went from “My Generation” to the rock opera “Tommy” in the same time-period. The Stones went from “Satisfaction” and “Under My Thumb” to “As Tears Go By,” “Angie,” and “Ruby Tuesday” and went on to create a huge body of work, to which they are still adding today. Even as I write, they are out on their “A Bigger Bang” tour, with original members Jagger, Richards, and Watts still in place and Ron Wood still in the second guitar position formerly held by Brian Jones and then Mick Taylor. Bassist Bill Wyman, sadly for long-time fans, seems to be a Stone no more, so now there are only four Rolling Stones, which feels strange. But not replacing Wyman with a new fifth member (hiring, instead, a bass player for their recording and tours) showed very good taste on the part of Jagger, et. al., in my opinion.

So, though I’m sure today’s young music fans are as excited as they think they can be by their musical heroes, I would like to drop them into 1964-65 and let them hear the Beatle’s first sing “Please Please Me” or the Stones first do “The Last Time” or “Heart of Stone” over a pocket transistor radio. Then, I think, they would know what true musical excitement is. Will Hilary Duff or Justin Timberlake or 50 Cent or Britney Spears display impressive musical development and staying power over the next few decades? Will their songs still be listened to by new generations and performed and recorded by the musical artists of 2060? Will these artists, themselves, still be writing, singing, recording, and touring in their 60s as the Stones are today? Well, time, at least, is on their side; time will tell.

While most kids of our time were audience members content to watch and listen, for some of us—blessed or cursed—consumption was not enough. We wanted to be those musicians up on the stage and screen. Talent? Most of us—certainly I—had very little, but of confidence and the egotism necessary to take center stage and command it, I had plenty. When I first saw the Rolling Stones on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” I was thunderstruck. They were described as rebellious, rawly sexual in their image and delivery. Some critics of the day called them “dirty” (compared to the clean-cut, pompadoured heroes like Rick Nelson and Frankie Avalon--and even compared to the Beatles). To me, the Stones were so far beyond cool that it could not be described. Every sound they emitted and every move they made spoke to me directly. I immediately set about becoming the Mick Jagger of Hamilton, Ohio.

The seeds of musical aspiration had probably lain dormant in me for a few years already, anyway. As a pre-teen, I had fancied myself a local combination of Elvis, Rick Nelson, Fabian, and the Everly Brothers, whose music thrilled me in the 50s and very early 60s. Even then, I was not content just to be the audience. I wanted to do what the performers did and was not shy about it. I remember getting up in front of my 4^th-grade class at Jefferson Elementary School to sing a local hit song called “The Eggbeater,” recorded by Dale Wright and the Right Guys of Middletown, Ohio, just up the road from my hometown of Hamilton. Later, in the 6^th grade, I could easily be persuaded to stand up and give the class my a capella rendition of Elvis’s “I Gotta Know.” (Though I have not thought of this song for more than 40 years, I find that I still know most of the lyrics.) Why in the world my teachers allowed me to make such a fool of myself is completely beyond me. As a teacher myself today (my “day job”) I absolutely forbid singing of any kind in the classroom.

In my first band, the Morticians, a trio consisting of two brothers, Tim and Kenny Koger, and me, I was not the singer/frontman, however. I was, very laughably, the lead guitar player. At that time, I could strum a few open chords-C,D,E,A,Am, and G—but F was difficult, and I certainly had not mastered B, nor had I learned yet to play bar chords, the rock/pop guitarist’s stock in trade. Any kind of solo was far beyond my abilities. A couple of choruses of the Ventures’ “Walk Don’t Run” or “Wipeout” respresented the peak of my abilities. I was the lead player only because I had an acoustic guitar. Tim Koger had come up with a second-hand Kay electric and a small Kay ampflier. By setting all his tone controls at the bass levels and playing notes, not chords, only on his lower strings, he could mimic a poor-man’s version of a real 4-string bass guitar, which we did not have. His brother Kenny had a three-piece red-sparkle drum set of some kind, and together we banged away at songs like “Louie Louie,” by the Kingsmen; “This Diamond Ring,” by Gary Lewis and the Playboys; “Pipeline,” by the Chantays; and a few others we had learned from books or from older, better musicians or figured out—often wrongly--for ourselves. On Saturday mornings, when the Kogers’ parents were gone shopping and running family errands with most of Tim and Kenny’s siblings, we would meet early and set up our meager equipment in front of the big picture window in the Kogers’ family room to flail away at our humble repertoire. Of course, we hoped people might see us through the window and know that we were “in a band.”

In this family room, the Kogers had a wooden console stereo hi-fi, which included a turntable, a radio, and a small reel-to-reel tape recorder. So it was there on a Saturday morning in the Koger family room that we recorded our first music. We played our instrumental versions of Henry Mancini’s “Peter Gunn” theme, the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun,” and the Stones’ first big hit, “Satisfaction.” Since my guitar was un-amplified, I stood closest to the tape recorder’s little microphone. We placed Tim’s louder, amplified pseudo-bass a few feet away and Kenny’s drums, the loudest instrument of all, in the next room, where we could see him through the doorway. In this way, we tried to achieve a balance of volume levels. Then we turned on the tape and played. To this point, we had been only an instrumental band, since we had no microphones or PA system and could not be heard singing over the drums. But I knew all the words to “Satisfaction,” and now I hit upon the bright notion that I could sing directly into the tape recorder mike and be heard over the music behind me. Anyone who hears his voice recorded and played back for the first time is usually shocked to find that he does not sound on tape as he does in his own head. Certainly this was the case for me. Sounding to myself just like Jagger as I poured my emotion into the microphone, I produced a very breathy and overly dramatic version of “Satisfaction” that made my band-mates laugh. I was embarrassed by the way I sounded, but not quite embarrassed enough to give up singing on the spot. Fortunately, that tape was probably erased and recorded over by the Koger kids long ago. It might be interesting to hear now, but it’s probably a blessing that it no longer exists.

The Morticians continued to rehearse whenever we could get away with it, but I lived in a housetrailer, so there was no room, and the Kogers’ parents didn’t want to hear the noise when they were home. Thus our practice sessions were sporadic, but we were in love with music, and love will always find a way. Sometimes, when my girlfriend Marilynn’s father was working second shift at Fisherbody, her mother would allow us to come over after school and rehearse in her living room. Recalling this from an adult point of view today, I am amazed. Would I ever allow a bunch of very bad aspiring teenaged musicians to drag drums and amplifiers into my house and bang away loudly at something that must have sounded like G/god knows what? Never. And we probably did not even thank Marilynn’s mother properly. I am retrospectively grateful today, though, because there was no thrill better, then, than making music. Hearing something even remotely similar to what we had heard on radio and records actually being reproduced by us was amazing. That’s what made us continue playing, as bad as we were. Like most things in life, playing music gave us the biggest thrill when we were new to it—and thus very bad at it. After 42 years of experience, I hope I am a little better at it today than I was then, but I don’t think I will ever experience the pure joy of just playing for its own sake—for no money and no audience--as I did in 1965.

Sometimes Tim and Kenny would get into trouble, and their dad would threaten to sell the drums and guitar, which officially belonged to all the kids in the family. Once, I think, he actually did sell them, to a guy named Bill Sams who lived nearby and fancied himself a singer/musician just as we did. Then, somehow, they were gotten back and we were able to continue practicing.

The Morticians played only one job—a party in the basement of my friend Steve Schmitt, who had a rival fledgling band in a different part of town. He was a graduate of St. Veronica’s elementary school, in his freshman year at Hamilton Catholic High, and had players from his school and neighborhood. So his band did the few songs they knew, the Beatles’ “Boys” and a couple of others, then took a break to make out with their girlfriends in dark corners of the basement while we played our big three tunes—instrumental again of course, since we still had no mikes and no P.A. system. The kids from Hamilton Catholic, Notre Dame High (the girls’ Catholic school), and St. Veronica were thus spared my early vocal efforts--not that they would have noticed, since they were busy fondling one another passionately in the dark. We were innocently girl-less at the party, but developed an interest in the St. Veronica’s girls, who seemed a little racier than their public school equivalents--probably the result of all that repression by the nuns in those days. When the public schools had a day off and St. V’s was still in session, we would wander over to the Catholic school grounds around lunch or recess time. I would comb my hair down from its 50s pompadour into a Beatle-like style. Thus I won the attention of a St. V’s eighth-grader named Juanita. I began to walk the long distance from my house to hers on weekend afternoons. Together, chaperoned by her family, we would watch music shows on TV, but managed a fairly passionate good-bye kiss or two out on the porch most evenings when I left. One day, a British band called The Pretty Things, the first to have hair all the way down to their shoulders, was on television. Juanita liked the Beatles’ hair, but she and I agreed that shoulder-length tresses on guys were a little too much and that I would never let my hair get that long. I’m sorry, Juanita, but in later years, I’m afraid, I did breach our agreement. I hope you can forgive me.

Hanging around St. Veronica also led me to meet Mike Mills, who turned out to be the best guitar player of our age that we knew. Mike’s older brother Jim was the lead player in a local band called the Out of Sights, so Mike had learned from Jim and had plenty of natural talent all his own. Their father, Don, had been a trumpet player in his youth, and musical families often produce good musicians, obviously. When Jim wasn’t around, Mike was allowed to play his brother’s Fender Stratocaster through his Gibson amp. Then one day, Jim switched to bass and joined the Has-Bins (formerly Jerry and the Mustangs) and more or less gave Mike that guitar and amp. Many evenings we sat up in his room in his parents’ house on Harmon Avenue, where Mike taught me most of what I know about playing guitar. Of course, I never approached his ability. I have never been more than a rhythm player, but learning to play in that basic way has enabled me to write songs over the years, so to Mike I am thankful.

I don’t think he and I ever really played together in a band. With him playing lead, I could hope to play only rhythm, and didn’t I even have an electric guitar. Another friend of ours, Dee Brenneman, usually seemed to be his rhythm player. Of course I wanted to sing out front, but was not considered that good a singer, so that job went to a guy named Juan Boggs. I recall coming over to Mike’s one day to find this lineup rehearsing in his basement, which made me feel rather left out. But Mike and I remained friends, and he continued to teach me.

Mike transferred to Garfield, the public high school where I went, in his—and my--sophomore year. Though we were now in the same school building, we diverged musically at this time. Whereas I migrated to the rock/psychedelic end of the music spectrum, he went the soul path that was more popular at Garfield, perfecting a subtle style like Steve Cropper’s. While we flailed away at Jimi Hendrix for the Open House crowd, Mike would play James Brown and Otis Redding and Sam and Dave at the Halfway or the Walnut Inn. Today, he plays only in church, like many musicians who have found that working in bars every night can lead to heavy drinking every night. Mike is not the only talented player I know who more or less had to get out of the barroom music business to save himself from bad habits. The secular music world is poorer without his tasteful soul guitar, but of course he made the right decision. Many others have fallen victim to the temptations of the nightlife and have come to much worse ends than playing on Sunday mornings at the Solid Rock Church in Lebanon, Ohio, which is reputed to have one of the finest church bands around because of the number of born-again former barroom musicians who play there. As you might have heard B.B. King sing, “The nightlife ain’t no good life, but it’s my life.” Actually, it’s not my life so much anymore. My last band in the U.S. played from 2001 through 2005, and when I was not working in a bar during that time, I rarely went out to one. Here in Europe, I am fortunate enough to play most of the time in small concert settings rather than as a barroom musician, and shows in Europe start and finish much earlier than they do in the States. But there’s no doubt that I have spent more than my share of late nights in the bars and nightclubs, sometimes as an entertainer, sometimes as an employee, and many times as a customer.

None of the Morticians knew anything about “the nightlife” in 1965. We were still interested in sports and all went out for the George Washington Junior High School football team that fall when school started. Football practice interfered with our band practice schedule, however, and we had to choose one or the other. You guessed it, reader, we turned in our cleats and left football behind in order to be musicians. I had begged my father to buy me new cleats for that football season. They cost $10.00, which was much more money to him in ’65 than it is to us now, so he was very disappointed when I quit the team. It also hurt because he and I had always watched football together on Sundays (the Cleveland Browns, when Paul Brown was the coach and running back Jim Brown was in his glory days), passed the football out in the street, and bonded through sports as many fathers and sons did and do. But he did not discourage me from playing music, although he would have preferred (very reasonably) that I focus on school and sports. My decision to play music rather than football was truly a Robert Frost-like, “two-roads-converged-in-a-wood” type of choice. It did make “all the difference” because it led to the nurturing and development of my artistic (not necessarily talented, but artistic) nature and to all the rebellious and outside-the-mainstream-behavior I have cultivated since then. I was a pretty good potential athlete in terms of my physical skills, coordination, love of the game, and desire to win (though I did not develop much mental toughness, growing up as I did: a maternally spoiled only child). I was also usually a good student at school and probably would have been more materially successful in life had I stuck to sports and academics, worked for a college scholarship, and left music alone. But I had even less sense back then than I do now. So we all quit the football team to devote ourselves to our band. We even had my friend Dan Sweet, a good artist, design a bass drum head with our name on it (I remember a musical death’s head, wearing a top hat and black cape and holding a guitar), just as the Beatles had. Before Sweet could ever paint it on the drums, though (Kenny had to ask his parents’ permission), the Morticians disbanded. I don’t remember how it came about. Maybe the Kogers got into trouble again and their dad sold their stuff for good. I do remember that just before we broke up, Tim Koger came up with a Danelectro bass just like the one the Shindogs’ bass player used, white and gold in a super-cool outlandish fork shape. I never saw Tim play it outside his house, though. My next musical endeavors took place with my junior high school friend Warren Wright and his band, The Inversions.

--To be continued. Please check back regularly for further installments of

From The Beatles to The Blues: My Life in Music, 1965-????

by Billy Hamilton