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 about the Russian satellite Sputnik. The band consisted of Dale, Howard, Bo, and a drummer named Skeet, who played a new set of drums made by Premier. Dale and Howard re-formed the band as the Premiers in 1956. Their name came from the brand of Skeet’s drums — an indication of the importance of equipment in the mind-set of these youngsters. When Skeet left, the Premiers had to find a new drummer. Larry Graves bought his guitar from Sears after Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” inspired him and started a band called the Nomads. When Bo Reynolds asked him if he wanted to be in the Premiers, Larry brought his guitar for the audition, but ended up playing the drums. Pat Thornton had learned to play piano at Fairfield High and he also got an invitation to join the Premiers. The band practiced the garage below his house in Fairfield, and this explains where the term “garage band” originated: “We had a ball! There were only four or five bands when we started out, but everything was changing.”
The life of a garage band revolved around rehearsing. Record producer Ed Boutwell remembers this conversation with a concerned parent: “I am just so worried — they are spending so much time doing that, and I am afraid that they are going to go out and work at these nightclubs and all, and get in trouble. I said, ‘Pardon me, but where are they every afternoon?’ ‘In the garage out back playing that darned music.’ I said, ‘Yeah, every afternoon, seven days a week right?’ ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Where do they go then, once or twice a week? — they will go work a gig, right?’ ‘They are there for two or three hours and then come home and they will get right back out in the garage and start rehearsing again.’”
The Premiers were acknowledged as the leading rock band in Birmingham. Ned Bibb: “They were powerful for one thing. Dale Karrah was a powerful lead player for the times. I would go to Duke’s and just stand in front of him in awe. He played a Fender Duo Sonic. That was the kind I had to get, because that is what he played. My wife tells me that I started looking like him … They were all football players, and one time they came out on stage in their football sweats. They played really loud. They were older than us, so naturally they were all role models. They did mostly Bo Diddley songs — that was their big thing.” Henry Lovoy: “Dale was before his time. He was like Jimi Hendrix before Jimi Hendrix. He was doing all this whacking off the guitar and that stuff. He also had experimented with feedback, which nobody did. He was just wild.”
The Ramrods were formed by a bunch of students at Woodlawn High School in 1959: “We all went to Woodlawn together, the ones that started the band. We had Joe Lackey [vocals, guitar], myself [Larry Wooten, guitar], and we all went to Woodlawn. Jim McCulla [drums] that went to Banks [High School], Joe and I and Paul Newman here, and Harry Looney went to church together. That is really how we got started, and Joe bought a guitar and I sort of got interested in playing the guitar after watching a program at Woodlawn High School that featured a band that was already there. That is what motivated me to go out and buy a guitar. I couldn’t sing very well but I could play the piano. So I went out and bought a Silvertone [an electric guitar sold by Sears], a double-pickup Silvertone and an amplifier. Joe and I would practice in his living room: rock ’n’ roll songs. We were a rock ’n’ roll band. We played songs like ‘Suzie Q’ by Dale Hawkins, Chuck Berry stuff, but it was mainly rock ’n’ roll, and not much Elvis. Mainly Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry and folks like that, and some Little Richard rock ’n’ roll stuff.” High school garage bands were in a constant state of flux as trends in popular music changed: “Then we picked up some other folks. See Joe was in a choral group at Woodlawn, the Warblers, they sang