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 a job playing at the Redmont Hotel. It was a scene! This was the Red Room Lounge, and you never could tell who was going to come in. You never could tell when somebody with a gun was going to walk 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