We performed the Pyramids’ hit “Penetration” (with a few years under my belt, I wondered if that title went a lot deeper than just a reference to the piercing sound of the lead guitar). Unfortunately, we failed to penetrate. We came in at fifth place.
That first year represented our coming of age as a band. Our door-to-door peddling of our musical wares was paying off. We were playing almost every weekend at venues like Berwyn’s Red Feather Building, Morton West High School, and Tiger Hall in Lyons. The latter was a wild place where a senior named Val Godlewski would get raunchy and dirty dance with basketball star Skip Hack as we did our ten-minute rave-up rendition of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.”
The greasers from high school came dressed in their “workies” (short, gray work pants rolled up on the bottom), and at about 11 p.m., they decided that they were sweaty and horny enough to tie red bandanas around their heads. They proceeded to bump and grind to our version of “Land of 1,000 Dances.” (Our first swirl-finished, green business card read: “The Shondels—Band of 1,000 Dances.”)
The big moment came when a club that hadn’t even opened yet contacted us. It was to be called The Keynote Club in suburban Lyons, Illinois. Since Lyons was known for its strip clubs and houses of ill repute, the community felt that the addition of a teen club would serve as a breath of fresh air. This venue would lend an air of respectability to a then-sordid outpost.
Plus, the club owner offered us five hundred big ones for a two-day run. This was huge money to us. At our first show, just a few weeks earlier, we had only received $25; not apiece, but for the entire band!!
For this show we decided we had to retire the red sweaters. The Shondels rode the ‘L’ downtown to go to the fabled Smokey Joe’s for some groovy threads. “The man who knows goes to Smokey Joe’s” was their radio-blasted slogan. We listened to the train announcer through the megaphone-like sound system: “Jackson,” “Monroe,” and finally “Wabash,” where we tumbled out into the stifling humidity of Chicago summer to look for Smokey Joe’s.
Suddenly there it was in all its glory on South State Street. The store window burst with color: coats, shirts, and slacks of every shade—from shocking lime green to deep purple. We were by far the youngest and palest people in the store. After we bought our Beatles look-alike sport coats (tan corduroy with velvet lapels) we walked over to Tad’s $1.19 Steakhouse a few blocks north also on State Street. For just over a buck you got the juiciest, toughest, grizzliest steak known to man. There was literally a bonfire of flames as the grill master herded these babies from the bin to the grill and onto your baked-potato-laden plate. There was no medium-rare or even well-done—they were all incinerated equally. I can still taste the bitter charcoal laden with salt against the sizzling fat. Now that’s eatin’!
Back in Lyons, Illinois, packed on opening night, our newly outfitted bodies and The Keynote Club generated quite a buzz. “The Shondels rock, man!” We had gone beyond the days of playing wimpy songs like “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” which Bob Bergland sang as Larry performed the palm-muted guitar part with a wadded up Kleenex underneath the strings! Now we were jammin’ The Rolling Stones (“The Last Time” and “Satisfaction”), and harmonizing the complex vocal arrangements of The Mamas and the Papas with “Monday, Monday,” and the West Coast’s Beau Brummels and The Byrds.
Sometimes, when we would come off a string of dates, sick as dogs with the flu, we’d line up as good old Doc Millas gave us each an injection of gamma globulin, apparently the very essence of life. I swear I saw microorganisms swimming around in that syringe! Presto, chango, instant health. We were tapping our toes, ready for the next gig! We called it “The Doc Millas Magic Bullet!” I found out each of these shots contained about $150 of this life-restoring elixir.
With our hot new band playing the sock hops after the basketball games, gradually the cheerleaders began chatting us up. We were invited to sit on “the stage” of the Morton West cafeteria at lunch where all the school’s glitterati (the jocks and pom-pom girls and cheerleaders) ate their sloppy joes and drank their chocolate milk.
The Shondels were my E-Ticket to hipness and acceptability. A nerd no more, I even traded in my broken, black, horn-rimmed glasses for a sharp pair of yellow-tinted aviator frames. I was in with the in-crowd and I swore I’d never be outside looking in again.
THE SHONDELS were making some real headway playing some high-profile venues like The Keynote Club and a fancy place in Berwyn called Frank Bond’s Supper Club. We had garnered a great deal of performance experience together and felt a surge of energy whenever we got on stage.
But we still played some hellish dives like The J and D lounge on Cermak Road, back in Berwyn, where drunken old men would slur phrases between numbers. “Play a lullaby, dammit!” or “Could you dedicate your next song to the woman who couldn’t dance tonight?” One old pervert actually grabbed my ass.
We entered every battle of the bands and talent competition we could find. One contest at the Red Feather Building in Cicero was especially noteworthy. We heard a rumor that there was to be a talent scout in attendance that night. We were breathless in anticipation as we ran through our spot-on cover of the Beau Brummels hit, “Just a Little.” As I started the faux horn riff intro on my fuzzed-out Jazzmaster on the Stones’ current smash “Satisfaction,” I spotted a person way in the back of the auditorium standing coolly in tight capris and dark glasses. The talent scout, no doubt. I motioned to Larry, Larry motioned to Mike. Mike signaled Bob, and we took it up several notches ’til our performance rivaled The Rolling Stones themselves. After the show we were handed the giant trophy. People came up to the stage one by one to congratulate us including the “talent scout.” That mysterious woman turned out to be my dear sister Janice who stopped by to support her little brother.
We started making a name for ourselves with our originals. We threw a few into every set: “It Makes Me Blue,” “Don’t Cry to Me,” and “Please Don’t Tell Me Lies.” We played Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ “Wooly Bully” in our parents’ ornate bathrobes, starting the song with our backs to the audience then abruptly turning around to reveal the ridiculous robes.
I knew that our future did not lie in our Sam the Sham act. It depended on solid, catchy originals. I have always been kind of like musical tofu—I was good at absorbing the flavors all around me. Somehow, though, my own style always shone through. One of The Ides’ favorite groups was The Kinks. It wasn’t just their cool Carnaby Street wardrobe that captured us; it was great punchy songs with sharp lyrical hooks and sharper-still guitar hooks. “You Really Got Me,” “Revenge,” and “All Day and All of the Night” still stand out as archetypal guitar riffs.
I wrote two songs just after “You Really Got Me” came out that were heavily influenced by The Kinks. The first was called “Like It or Lump It” and the second was “No Two Ways about It,” which was earmarked in my mind for the “A” side of our first single we were planning on recording soon. The guys flipped out when I played these tunes at rehearsal and added their unique guitar phrases, drum accents, vocal ideas, and arrangement touches, and in a week’s time the songs were a part of our regular set. In fact, when we played the sock hop at Morton West that Friday night and premiered these new songs, the crowd went crazy. That positive reaction made us feel that these new songs were already hits. (The crowd may have thought they were new ones by The Kinks!)
Finances were always a challenge.
