We were kids that would hang out at Ed’s studio, this was in the old church … Had the whole congregation area set up as the recording area … Ed had built a plaster of Paris reverb chamber in a sort of a closet, and he had a microphone stuck in there, and it worked very well! I do remember one time in the old church, going and looking back behind where the choir was, and it was the first time that I had seen Jesus depicted as black … Shortly after that Sydney and I, we did a lot of session work over there. We played with the Rev. Parker on a lot of gospel albums, black gospel albums. We came in, and the reverend and the organist. We would ask them, What key do we play in, how does this song go? He would just say ‘Fall in and go for yourself!’ and he would start pumping away at that organ, and we just sort of fell in and he made albums that were put out. I felt the Spirit! I felt the Spirit because a lot of times we would do this recording on a Sunday afternoon in the summertime, the choirs were of course about fifty or sixty people crowded in there. I don’t believe we had air-conditioning, and it got really hot and the Spirit moved us. There were some ladies in the choirs that had outstanding voices, but they had some, either fainting spells from that, or the Spirit was moving them! It was exciting to play, I had grown up hearing that.”
The rise of rock ’n’ roll fostered a spirit of entrepreneurship as musicians began to form their own record companies. Inspired by the legend of Elvis and encouraged by larger crowds at their concerts, musicians like Larry Parker and managers like George Anselmo went into the record business themselves. After a producing a master recording at one of Birmingham’s studios, the budding producer could farm out the pressing of the disc to independent operations, like Rite Records in Cincinnati, or to the custom pressing departments of the major record companies — George Anselmo’s Mark V Records were pressed by RCA in Tennessee. Many rock ’n’ rollers remember the exciting trip to the bus station in downtown Birmingham to pick up boxes of their records (cash-on-delivery). Some of them had business plans for these discs, like Sammy Anselmo or Larry Parker; others had no more ambition than to show them off to friends and hand them to girls.
Birmingham garage bands recorded on a mass of small, homegrown labels: Jo-Jo, Vibrato, Vesta, Lemon, Gold Master, Modern Enterprises, Malone, Vaughn-LTD, Malcolm Z, Dirge, Chyme, Knight, Holly, Ara, and Tinker. The Tikis recorded for Finley Duncan, who ran a local jukebox operation and formed the Minaret label for them. Duncan had great plans for the Tikis and took the band to Nashville and Muscle Shoals to record in their prestigious studios. The Tikis went on to release records on the Dial, United Artists, and Atco labels. In 1963, the Ramrods went into the Baldwin Recording Studio in Woodlawn, Birmingham, and recorded two original songs. Larry Wooten: “We made a record that Joe wrote one side … and side A was ‘Fire Power’ by Paul Newman … It was on the Bright label, I don’t remember his first name, his last name was Bright, he saw us up in Blount County paying for a benefit or something and he liked our music and said that he would like to record us and put us on a record … So we went to either Florence or Sheffield to record ‘Night Ride,’ which was released on Rick Hall’s ‘R and H’ label.”
The Ramblers produced a record called “100 Miles Away” on the Brooke label. The song was written by an acquaintance of the band called Brooke Temple, who wrote the song about a girl he dated in Montgomery (a hundred miles from Birmingham) and asked the Ramblers to record it. His mother paid for the recording session and the disc pressing, so they used his name for the label. In 1967 they made their second record on their own Tommy Tucker label. As Johnny Robinson remembered: “The total for the packing slip was $123.10 for 510 records. That made them 24 cents each. The studio time was $300, as I remember. That made the total cost 83 cents each. Of course, we did not make the records to make money—we gave most of them away to try and book more jobs.”1
CHAPTER FOUR
On the Road
Drummer Bunkie Anderson remembered: “In like the early ’60s you played either of two places. You played the honky-tonks or the armories,” either squeaky-clean armories or raunchy road-houses. Rock ’n’ roll had grown up in Birmingham in adult venues like Pappy’s, which was out on Highway 78 West, stayed open very late, and always had good music. Pappy’s was owned by Jim and Margaret Wallace, who were known for their penchant for breaking up bands to get the right combination of musicians to play in their club. Many of the big names in Birmingham rock music played Pappy’s and remember it with affection. Jerry Woodard even recorded a song about it, called, appropriately, “I Got Loaded at Pappy’s.” Jerry Grammer remembered it being pretty decadent; there was a strip of motel rooms along the parking lot to cater for out-of-town bands and ladies of the night. Being a house band involved a lot of work, and it could get dangerous. Pappy’s attracted some tough characters, and even the formidable Bobby Ray, the chief bouncer, once got his ear bitten off.
There were also the bars and restaurants along Bessemer Highway. Ned Bibb recalled that these places were roadhouses rather than restaurants because they had stopped serving food years before and were “sleazy joints, serving only live bands and vulgarity. We didn’t get to play too many clubs because we were so young. We played the Southern Steakhouse because they were so lax about age. We played this crummy joint out on the highway once on New Year’s Eve. We played at a club on Bessemer Super Highway called the Colonial Inn … They’d have girl fights and ask you if you have a gun when you come in. If you don’t have one, they give you one. Ha ha!” Mac Rudd: “There were roadhouses out on the Bessemer Superhighway, the Twilight Club, the Bessemer Sportsman Steak House … in downtown Birmingham across from the Greyhound bus station we played at a club called the Shamrock.” Bunkie Anderson: “Back then they had the redneck kind of roadhouse bars up between here and Jasper. Jasper was a dry country and they had, I mean, rough, rough bars over there. There was only one rule back then: don’t stop playing. If you stop playing, everybody will know there’s a fight, and everybody will start fighting.” Johnny Carter played with Jerry and Bobby Mizzell: “You had to be drunk or crazy to play there … Warrior River rednecks were the worst — they would pull a knife on you if you danced with their girl.”
As rock ’n’ roll became the music of youth rather than drunken adults, new venues opened up for teenage musicians. Skating rinks provided safer and steadier work for guitar bands. Roller skating was an important teenage fad in the 1950s: there were rinks all over town, and it wasn’t too difficult to turn them into venues for live music. The Roebuck Skating Rink was booked by Richard Dingler, who later started the powerful Southeastern Attractions booking agency. Huffman Skating Rink was an especially good place to play, as it was reputed to be the spot to pick up girls. Rudy Johnson: “That was a hot spot.” Wayne Perkins: “That was a very hot spot!” There were also several bowling alleys that hired bands to play at weekends. The swimming clubs or playgrounds were an essential part of summer entertainment in the Deep South at a time when few public places were air-conditioned. These venues brought in live music to supplement their attractions of swimming and boating. The Cascade Plunge on Tuscaloosa Highway had local bands every weekend, such as one where the Counts performed on Saturday and the Cajuns on Sunday. Entrance was only a dollar, and the entertainment was described as “Rock ’n’ roll Band.” The Cloud Room in Eastwood had a bandstand and dance floor close to the outdoor swimming pool. There was also Holiday Beach, which had a pavilion for dancing in addition to the swimming pool. Henry Lovoy was a teenager at high school when he first moonlighted as a vocalist for the Counts. One of the band’s first major engagements was at the Holiday Beach resort. Henry fondly remembers the pay: five dollars and a hamburger!
As rock ’n’ roll became established in American popular culture, it infiltrated the adult bastions of dinner and dance clubs, such as the Pickwick Club or the Hollywood Country Club, as well as the ballrooms of the nice hotels that had once monopolized entertainment in Birmingham. Mac Rudd: “Sydney White and myself formed a group called T. H. E. Trolley. We got
