as Little Elvis and my mother painted on my side burns and I gave Elvis a run for his money at the age of six.” In the 1960s rock ’n’ roll became the music of youth; and youth was in the ascendant as the mighty baby-boom demographic reached puberty and its discretionary income rose. Musician Doug Lee of Dogwood: “Our generation changed it so much, back then pop music, rock music whatever you want to call it, was played by kids for kids … Back then it was all kid music.” The next wave of amateur rock ’n’ roll musicians were younger and less experienced than the first, and they did away with the handsome front man and formed guitar groups.
A powerful new technology was driving these changes. A pounding boogie-woogie piano or raucous saxophone had been the siren calls of rock ’n’ roll, but these were difficult instruments to master and quite expensive to buy. The electric guitar, on the other hand, was cheap and easy to play. As thousands of mass-produced Gibson Les Pauls and Fender Telecasters rolled off the assembly lines, more aspiring young musicians were tempted to buy into this technological revolution. Gradually the electric guitar became the voice of rock ’n’ roll, replacing pianos and saxophones for the leads, and cumbersome standup basses with new electric Fender Precision basses. Musical instrument shops stocked the new instruments, and even retail outlets like Sears and Montgomery Ward started to sell them. The Chicago Pawn Shop downtown provided many of the instruments for start-up bands. Entry into the world of professional musicians had always been guarded by the high value put on virtuosity. Rock ’n’ roll and cheap electric guitars changed all that. You could master the three or four chords that underlay rock music in a matter of months; energy and enthusiasm was more than a match for virtuosity in guitar bands. Guitarists like Buddy Holly provided the example for millions of young men: they copied his playing note by note as they craned over their portable record players or got closer to the television.
All over Birmingham in the waning years of the 1950s thousands of hours of grass cutting, errand running, and room cleaning were converted into the dollars that would finance a trip to Forbes Music or Nuncie’s Instruments. “I had to mow a lot of lawns to get that guitar!” remembered Terry Powers of the Bluedads and the Alabama Power group. His rock ’n’ roll upbringing took pretty much the same path as many other Birmingham musicians’: “When I was a baby my mother put a radio in my room to help me sleep at night. So I started off listening to all that old rock ’n’ roll … The first guitar I ever played was when my uncle moved to Clanton [Alabama]. He pulled it out and started to play all these hillbilly songs and I could not get over it. I was just infatuated; he was my hero. I started playing guitar when I was six. My first guitar idol was Chet Atkins and also Buddy Holly. Ahhh, the sound of Buddy Holly!” Electric guitars were easy to obtain; they were traded, mail-ordered, or picked up at pawn shops. Buying one was a high spot in many musicians’ memories of the 1960s — nobody ever forgot that first electric guitar, how much they paid for it, and how it looked. Keith Harrelson still remembers the wondrous day when his brother Mark came home from Nuncie’s with a brand-new Fender precision bass — the product of many months delivering papers. Keith was impressed with how the shiny new instrument looked with its pearly white pick guard and lustrous brown finish, sparkling like a jewel in a bed of crushed red velvet in its fitted case.
All over Birmingham, back rooms and garages were converted into practice areas as hundreds of excited young men embarked on the first steps of a journey that had no limits in their imagination. Being in a band got you some prestige in high school and was a great way to get some attention from the girls. Terry Powers: “When I went back to school after the Christmas vacation I was already singing and playing. I went down there and got on the auditorium at Lake View Elementary [School] and sang ‘Cotton Fields Back Home’ and that was the first time I ever played in front of anyone. Everybody just laughed and all the girls just screamed and they thought that was cool and all. So that was my first live performance … My first real electric guitar I got when I was fifteen. It was stolen and I got it for $150. It was a Mosrite made in California and it had a hollow body and the guy who sold it got it from David Crosby. So my first electric belonged to David Crosby … Then I started to play with some high school boys in their bands because I could play rhythm. I was then inspired to play lead from this guy in Homewood named Larry Benyon. He was unbelievable. He showed me how to do everything, and I practiced until my fingers were numb.”
The ease of learning a few chords on an electric guitar created a more egalitarian standard for amateur musicians, and forming an instrumental band of guitars and drums gave a measure of anonymity to players who were not too confident in their solo skills. Bands were being formed in high schools wherever there were music-loving teenagers. Larry Parker started his musical career in high school in 1957: “I got to Woodlawn High School and took music instead of art. I had been taking art for all those years and had no talent. Music was something that I could get recognition in. That is what I was looking for. I put a vocal group together called the Veltones. Woodlawn had fraternities and sororities for social clubs. They were the Top Hatters, the Suitors, the Esquires, and the Tri Ws. The clubs would have lead-outs every year. They would always bring in the black groups. They would bring in the Coasters or the Drifters or Hank Ballard and the Midnighters. They were big groups. We would come up with the money. The guys would spend the better part of the year raising money. It was very elaborate, the lead-out. The guys were in tuxedos, the girls in evening gowns, and we had bands all night … When the school teacher in the eighth grade told me that I should consider music as my career, that summer I made a real effort to try it. I went down and auditioned for Teen Time Talent Hunt, which was by Jim Lucas at the Alabama Theatre. He was a deejay at WSGN radio. He had a great voice and had this show live every Saturday at the Alabama Theatre. I went down for the audition on an early Saturday morning. I did a lip-sync on the Four Coins’ ‘Shangri La’ [a hit record in 1957]. Jim took me off the stage and we sat on the steps and he said, ‘Larry, you have a good voice and you don’t seem to have any fear on stage, but groups are what’s happening. You should put a group together, instead of trying to do it solo.’ This is in 1958. Jim told me to get a group together, and that is where the Veltones came together. We began performing as a regular on Teen Time … We put the group together and we didn’t like the name. We only kept that name for about a month. We were a doo-wop band. It was a four-part harmony group. This was Top Ten at the time … Jim Lucas was very encouraging to me. We performed at the Alabama Theatre as the Swinging Teens … Then we were invited to do a television program on Channel 6 every week. They wanted us to come up and play there … About that time I decided that we needed a band. All I could handle was the group. I decided to put my own band together. I found a guy named Jack Pyle. He found the rest of the guys, including Bill Campbell, and they formed a band called the Nomads. They backed the Swinging Teens … The following summer I met a guy named Hal Painter. We found another guitar player and a drummer and we put together Larry and the Loafers. That was in 1960 … My father was the one who named the group. One night he asked where I was going. I told him that I was going out to spend some time with the guys and go play. He said: ‘When are you going to stop hanging around those loafers?’ When I saw them, I told them that they were now the Loafers.”
Forming a guitar band was something that you did at high school in the 1950s, like playing football or writing for the yearbook. In Birmingham the first wave of garage bands emerged from local high schools in the late 1950s: the Counts, the Premiers, the Epics, the Ramblers, the Ramrods, the Gents, Rooster and the Townsmen, Charles Smith and the Ram Chargers, the Nomads, and the Roulettes were the best known, but there were more. Larry Parker: “Bands started to pop up everywhere. Anybody that wasn’t participating in my group started their own group in order not to feel slighted. Anyone could do it. There wasn’t any competition; we even tried to help each other.” Although they were not musically accomplished, the enthusiasm of the garage bands spread rock ’n’ roll throughout teenage America. These amateur guitar bands were to transform the musical landscape of Birmingham in the 1960s and create a new paradigm for professional entertainment that would last for the rest of the twentieth century.
Dale Karrah gave Fairfield High School friend Howard Tennyson a bass guitar and said, “Here! Learn to play this!” Bringing in another friend, Bo Reynolds, led to the start of a band called the Satellites — named for the current headlines
