through the door.” Birmingham in the 1960s listened to sedate music in hotel lounges, supper clubs, and “rooms” named after their décor — the Cork Room in the Parliament House (featuring Denise Lumiere on piano) — or their fare — the Sirloin Room in Michael’s restaurant. When these venues put in a guitar band, it was as much a concession to the prevailing fashion in music as it was a novelty for their customers, for, as Tommy Charles remembered with some regret, “You didn’t sing rock, you didn’t get booked.”
Steve Lowry joined his first band around 1964: “The Echoes were a roving band. We played teen dances all over town: Misty Waters, the Cascade Plunge, and the Redmont Hotel were all weekenders. We did record hops. Neil Miller had us play for him at the National Guard Armory Shows. We used to play a lot for him out in Calera.” His second band was called the Tynsions, “named because at fifteen years old we were told that women go to bed with the ‘tensions.’ We were the house band at a club called the Starlight Lounge. It is now a parking lot across the street from the Federal Building downtown, next to the Patio Lounge, which was the first go-go bar in Birmingham.” There were plenty of problems for a group of underage teenagers breaking into the world of professional entertainment, including the lack of a Musicians Union card: “They never came around here and checked. We had a manager that got us in, and I think that he cut a deal with the local union, because we were underage … The story behind the Starlight Lounge is that a number of entertainers that played at Boutwell Auditorium would go for a nightcap after they had played their show. I became the bass player and the singer of the band in just one night. The whole thing. We were playing Wilson Pickett’s ‘Land of a Thousand Dances,’ when someone gets up out of the audience [he was snookered] and said: ‘Son, you don’t play that right.’ I was going ‘Excuse me?’ because I have a natural ear and I thought that I was a big stud playing it right. It turns out that guy is Tommy Cogbill, who was the original bass player for Wilson Pickett — he was one of the greatest bass players in the history of bass players … We were just kids, and this was where we got our musical education.”
Charles Smith and the Ram Chargers were jubilant to get a chance to play at the Southern Steakhouse on Bessemer Highway, a rowdy bar where you might have to deal with obnoxious drunks and dodge bottles from fights on weekend nights. They played from 8 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. Monday through Saturday, and each member made seven dollars a night. Fred Dalke started off in a band called the Coachmen and also played drums for the Ram Chargers: “Oh yeah, we played all the major clubs in Birmingham … some of the big clubs we played in were the Starlight Club, the Patio Club right next door, and that was where all the teenagers, people in their early twenties, would go … I take it back, you had to be at least twenty-one to get in. We were teenagers, but we got to go in because we played in the band … When I first played, see, I didn’t have my driver’s license. I played first at fifteen. My mom was real supportive, so she had to drive me.”
With the minimum wage hovering around $1.50 an hour, the rewards of playing rock music were impressively high for teenagers. A big armory show could bring in $250 for the band if the place was packed. The three members of the Ramblers split $9 among them for their first gig, but with a bit more experience and a self-produced record (“Stop That Twisting”) out there, they were soon pulling in from $75 to $100 a night. Steve Lowry: “When I got in the Tynsions, that was five nights a week from 8 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., and I would get up at 6:30 a.m. and go to school. I did that for two years and it almost killed me. I made decent money, which was $250–$265 a week and all that we could drink. We drank a lot, like fish.” With a popular record out in Birmingham, called “Goin’ Wild,” and enjoying lots of airplay on local radio, the Ram Chargers were on the way up: “Let’s see, I think the first night I played I got thirty bucks, that was a lot of money for a sixteen-year-old, that’s tax-free. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid for something I loved to do.” For fifteen-year-old Bunkie Anderson, the experience of playing in a band was priceless: “I loved it. I remember when they put six dollars in my hand and I said: You mean you paid me? There was the end of my life as I knew it. I went from being a church boy and a good student — my life was over. They gave me money. I would have done it for no money.”
As Fred Dalke points out, there were more than monetary rewards for playing in a rock band: “I think the moment I’ll never forget was when I was playing in a club on the West End called Misty Waters. It was a teenage nightclub, and they didn’t have any alcohol, or there wasn’t supposed to be any alcohol in there. And the local station, WSGN, was promoting us and playing the record, and when we got there that night it was a packed theater, you know just hundreds and hundreds of kids and they were just all going wild and having a great time. That was a special night. They made us feel like we were superstars or something.”
The Fraternities
The most sought-after gigs for Birmingham’s garage bands were the college sororities and fraternities. Auburn and Alabama were large public universities with a well-funded social life, and they became one of the most lucrative audiences for rock music in the state. The number of garage bands in Birmingham would have been much smaller if there had not been such a large market for rock ’n’ roll just an hour away. As band members got older and obtained the keys to a car, they were able to play these gigs. (In those days access to an automobile and the ability to drive were considered equal to musical ability when you were trying to get into a band.) These were valuable gigs. They could pay one hundred dollars a night for three or four forty-five-minute sets. Some bands played for the fun of it and for drinks, many drinks, sometimes all the beer they could drink: “The next time they hired us they said they’d rather just pay us a flat fee of four hundred dollars a night because they lost money on the beer payment deal.”1 Despite the contracts that stipulated the duration of the gig, college boys wanted to party late into the night, and this suited the musicians — young and eager and full of the relentless energy that was rock ’n’ roll: “We would play until the last man was standing,” said one. The fraternities of the University of Alabama had a well-deserved reputation for being, in the words of Johnny Sandlin, “animal houses … I will probably get shot for saying this … Fraternity parties down there during the period convinced me that I did not want to go there. That was the ’60s, you know, it was pretty crazy! Gosh, I had one too many beers spilled on my guitar.”
Tuscaloosa was Party Central in Alabama in the 1960s. The toga, jungle, and football parties were legendary, and the potent mix of testosterone, alcohol, and excitement placed a premium on loud music with a beat that you could dance to. It was quite a “culture shock” for a band that had only played the armories to work in the alcohol-fueled atmosphere of the fraternities, remembered Tommy Terrell and Johnny Robinson of the Ramblers. Entertaining “a bunch of drunks” took a lot more energy and a larger repertoire. In addition to rock songs, there was also a place for a few slower, more romantic numbers so that the young men could get closer to their dates. Rhythm and blues was the ideal soundtrack for a keg party, and in the fraternities it was R&B or nothing: “We had to play black music,” recalled Rick Hall of the Fairlanes, or be thrown out.2 When Bunkie Anderson’s band went to Tuscaloosa, “we wanted to play Beatles and Kinks and Yardbirds, but all they wanted to hear was black music: Temptations, Four Tops, J. J. Jackson’s ‘But It’s Alright.’” Henry Lovoy: “Everyone had to do the Beatles thing, because it was so popular. You had to go with the times … When we did the English stuff, we still had our soul sets. When we played the fraternity houses at Auburn and Alabama, we played the Beatles stuff with our soul stuff. They still wanted that doggone southern blues music. We were doing stuff like ‘Sweet Soul Music’ by Arthur Conley. At one fraternity house I must have had to play that song twelve times in a row, because that’s all they wanted to hear.”
Ironically, while Governor George Wallace famously stood at the door of the University of Alabama to deny African American students access; the frat houses had been employing some of the leading names in African American music for years. It was an Alabama tradition. The soul star Rufus Thomas said: “I must have played every fraternity house there was in the South … I’d rather play those audiences than any other.”3 Bob Cahill enjoyed many R&B
