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 acts while in college: “Arthur Alexander. I can remember him playing the song ‘Anna’ in Auburn, and this was about 1966, and if he played it once everybody wanted him to play it again. I think he played it about five times, to the point where the other members in the band were saying No! No! … I remember seeing Little Anthony and the Imperials in a packed house. We saw Dionne Warwick.” The embarrassment of rhythm and blues riches in Tuscaloosa had a powerful influence on young musicians in the area, for even if they were not enrolled in the university, there were still plenty of places you could hear outstanding African American performers play once they had earned their money at the fraternities. Future stars of southern rock Paul Hornsby, Chuck Leavell, and Eddie Hinton all started their lifelong infatuation with R&B while growing up in Tuscaloosa.
For lovers of rhythm and blues, the great public universities of Alabama offered wonderful opportunities to hear some good music. You could get an invitation to a fraternity party and spend the evening listening to Arthur Alexander or Wilson Pickett, or if you were really lucky you could find yourself playing behind Otis Redding at an Auburn fraternity party. When one of Redding’s backing band found himself unable to play, aspiring guitarist Bob Cahill got the chance of a lifetime: “This was in the fall of that year [1962], when Otis Redding was unheard-of. The band was sent from Georgia to perform at a fraternity party, and they sent the wrong band and the guitar player got pretty drunk there on the fraternity’s booze, and by the time the party started, he could not play. The guy that I had gone down to see and his brother were there, and he told his brother that I could play, and this singer and I figured out what songs we could play and we played for the rest of the night.” Redding had just cut his first record for Stax in Memphis, and a few months later Duke Rumore played “These Arms of Mine” on the radio. “Five or six months later this friend of mine called and said, ‘You have got to listen to Duke Rumore, he’s playing a song by this guy!’ So I said that that sure did sound like him. I don’t even think that we knew his name, but he had a real good voice. So when he came to Birmingham we went to see him, but when we saw him he did not remember us and I can understand that. It was, however, the same guy, and it was Otis Redding.”
Panama City Blues
Being underage, not having a license or a vehicle, working part-time jobs and homework restricted many teen bands to playing only around town at weekends, often relying on friends or parents to take them to their engagements. But those lucky to be in the nether zone between high school and college or full-time work grabbed at the opportunity to take their music outside Birmingham and onto the road, especially if that road led to the sun, sand, and girls on the Gulf Coast. Driving down to the beach became an important part of the garage bands’ experience as their members matured both as musicians and drivers. Touring was an adventure, part of the newness and excitement that characterized many memories of the 1960s, in which a generation of amateur musicians tasted the life once reserved for fearless bluesmen and hard-drinkin’ country acts. Terry Powers: “I used to play with Hot Light, and that was with Eddie Chandler, Wayne McNight, and myself. We were just a guitar trio and we did pretty well. Jerry Beetlesom and I played in my first band together when we were eighteen called Crystal Magic. We had the life of Riley on the road. It was fantastic.”
Financed by loans from parents and boosted by high expectations, Birmingham’s garage bands took to the road on worn-out tires and vintage automobiles. Many of the stories about touring in the 1960s have at their center vehicles made in the early 1950s or 1940s. The love affair between these young men and their vehicles led to songs and bands named after them: the former about the kind of beat-up cars they drove, the latter about the kind of prestige vehicles they yearned for. Rock songs about cars depict them as things of beauty and power, listing their attributes and making them the heroes of narratives of speed and conquest. For teenage musicians the automobile represented the American Dream at its most immediate and potent, and they crammed into old Dodges and Chevies for long-distance journeys that took them to the Gulf Coast. They pulled U-Haul trailers loaded with gear. They brought their instruments and band outfits but very little money: