deejay’s support. “In order to get those gigs you had to have exposure. That is why Duke was such an important stepping stone. He had the armory shows in the late 1950s … At first it was called Duke’s in Dixieland and then just Duke’s. They had sock hops there: you would take your shoes off and dance in your socks. High school kids went there. That was the big time: if you could play Duke’s, the fraternities and sororities wanted you. Playing Duke’s for the first time was so important … Duke had a big influence on what bands learned. He controlled what people listened to. If Duke didn’t play it on the radio, nobody was interested in learning it. He had a show in the afternoon. It came on about 3 o’clock, when the kids were getting out of school. He played mostly black music and a lot of rhythm and blues. He played a lot of Jimmy Reed and Fats Domino. Birmingham was influenced a lot by New Orleans, Memphis, and other southern cities.”
Most of these electric guitarists were self-taught, but there were music education programs at Birmingham’s high schools that trained students in piano, saxophone, clarinet, and trumpet — instruments that could add a lot more to the standard lineup of lead, rhythm, and bass electric guitars along with drums. The Premiers, Bassmen, and Ramrods often used a piano rather than a guitar lead, and the Epics, Ramrods (after Ronnie Eades joined), and Bassmen employed a saxophone to supplement the lead guitar. The Torquays had a trumpet (Barry Bicknell) and a sax (Steve Salord) in addition to electric guitars and drums. The Epics were probably the first band to have a horn section, bringing in Jim Anderson on trumpet and Bob Sheehan on sax. Larry Wooten: “So doo-wop went out and then the Memphis sound came in with the horns. So we took on a saxophone player and then we took on two saxophone players. One of the saxophone players could play saxophone or trumpet. So we had that Memphis sound for a while, and then we got away from that because that went out and stuff came back in that featured a lot of instrumentals like Freddie King.”
The Garage Band Scene
The primary venue for bands made up of high school students was naturally the high school, whose extensive social events usually had live music. Doug Lee: “You knew you had a band when you got a paying gig. Yeah, once you got paid, you had a band, a real band … I can remember football games when I was a starter, a pretty good athlete, and immediately going back to the locker room, changing clothes and putting on my rock ’n’ roll duds and going to the gym and jumping on stage and my band was playing the dance after the football game!” The biggest draws were the lead-outs of the fraternities and sororities, and the shows staged at local armories. Each school had its home armory: high schoolers from West Birmingham went to the shows at Ensley Armory sponsored by Duke Rumore, those from East Birmingham went to Opporto Armory and Dave Roddy. Bunkie Anderson: “You go in, they drive the tanks out and they set the bands up, you would set up two little amps and you’d play, and it would take you fifteen minutes to break down and go home.” Frank Ranelli of the Things: “When I was a teenager and all, every weekend I wanted to go and hear some live music. It was just like the thing to do! The big deal was to go somewhere on a weekend and dance and hear music. Or go to the drive-ins and hang out. We used to go to the Oporto Armory. WSGN used to do it, and they had live music every Saturday, and it got for a while where they were doing it Friday and Saturday. That was a great place to go. You go out there to dance and meet girls or whatever. That is what we did. Of course we would try and play some music too.” The armory shows were squeaky-clean high school fun. Pat Thornton: “The kids picked up by parents at Duke’s, they always had four or five police at hand, so the fights ended quickly, no one could bring in booze there.” But someone else added: “You were drunk when you got there!”
Just like everything else in Birmingham, high school music was segregated by race, but it was also divided by school affiliation and geography. Birmingham’s teenagers kept in groups with high school friends. Bob Cahill: “They sold Cokes there, there was a big dance floor, and you just sort of milled around, you probably saw people from all the schools in the city, you would end up seeing people and they would say ‘I am from this school,’ and you would say, Well, do you know so and so?” Garage bands usually drew musicians and audiences from the same school. Record producers Courtney Haden and Mark Harrelson think this had a significant effect on retarding the music scene in Birmingham: “One of the reasons Birmingham never really penetrated back in the ’60s and maybe even today is that the kids were a lot more segmented by neighborhoods. You have kids in Birmingham: I was from Vestavia and Courtney is from Homewood. We had people who knew each other growing up, but it is still a city of neighborhoods. There were Vestavia bands and there were Homewood bands. In Tuscaloosa there were just bands.”
One famous armory show is remembered by many in Birmingham; as Ben Saxon said with a sly smile, “Oh, it was huge, everyone was there … In fact, I hardly know anyone who lived in Birmingham in the 1960s who says they were not there … The armory only held about five hundred people. I believe that there could have been eight hundred people inside and outside the building.” It was a Duke and Dixieland show at Ensley Armory. At the back of the room girls were standing on their boyfriends’ shoulders, and Ned Bibb estimated that there could have been nine hundred kids at the show and that they were stacked three high by the end of the night. The climax of the show was provided by the Premiers — acclaimed by many as the best band of the time and a favorite of Duke Rumore. As a tape recorder captured it for a record and posterity, the band sang one of their own compositions, “Are You Alright.” Ben Saxon: “It was a favorite because everyone always liked to say, ‘Hell yeah!’ They were all trying to be on the recording saying, ‘Hell yeah’ … It was kind of chaotic, there lots of fights … Duke kept saying ‘You’ll all be sure of saying, Well, yeah.’” Ned Bibb: “The only original music they did was ‘Hell Yeah.’ There was a national hit called ‘Flamingo Express.’ It was just saxophones. There were no words, but it was a real popular tune. I don’t know who put the words ‘Hell Yeah’ to it. I don’t know if Bo Reynolds did it or who did it. Somebody started to play those two chords back and forth and saying ‘Are you alright? Hell yeah!’ They repeated it over and over. It was such a big deal to go to a public place and shout at the top of your lungs ‘Hell yeah!’ This was a very rebellious thing for us. We weren’t allowed to do that in this town. We were not taught like that … We had fabulous times. We were innocent. Just to be able to say ‘Hell yeah!’ in public was mind-blowing. A girl once told me that the Premiers had so much control over those kids they could have marched them downtown if they had wanted to.”
As rock ’n’ roll became more popular with teenagers more venues opened up. Larry Wooten: “We played for high school parties, what they call lead-outs. High school sorority, fraternity lead-outs. We started to pay for church outings, we played social clubs and outings. It was good when you played, but it wasn’t real consistent … but we had fun! We played some [gigs] down on the Warrior River at a nightclub. We played a place out here, the Clover Club on Highway 31. It was pretty dilapidated when we played. I was a sacker at a local grocery store during the day, and I had to get off a little bit early to go play there one night, and I was already tired because I had worked a full shift, and they kept throwing so much in the kitty, I think we finally finished about three or four in the morning … We did radio … WVOK was a big station out here on the western end of Birmingham. We played there several times. These were live. Then we did some taped stuff for one of the local television channels, talent shows. We would tape on Thursday and they’d show them on like Saturday. We did fraternity parties. We did a fraternity party at Birmingham Southern [College]. I remember that. It was a good party! The theme of it, it was a commode party!”
Once the band was established and the first gigs completed, the players started to think about making a recording. The rise of the garage bands provided much more business for recording studios because the ambition of every band was to make their own record: “We wanted to make a record” was the mantra of numerous musicians as they recalled their days in a garage band. As incomes rose in the 1960s and rock ’n’ roll took hold on the mass audience, the record companies found a larger market for rock records. The recording studio now became a center for amateur musicians. Mac Rudd and Sydney White were in the Strangers. “Sydney had talked his way into Boutwell Studio at one time, and I believe told
