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 him a lie about who he had played with. Of course Ed knew it was a lie, but he humored him and liked him and after that Sydney and I sort of, we just hung out! 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,