Magic City Nights. Andre Millard

That made it official: I had to perform my own ‘stuff’ … I guess I could say that Panama City is not where I was born, but it’s where I started living.”⁶

      Teenagers maintained their Birmingham high school affiliations on Panama City Beach. Walter Norris went down with a group from Ensley High School: “We did run into some luck that first night there. We met a group of girls from Shades Valley High School who paid for a full week in a cottage … but to a person they were so sunburned that they were going home after four days … I made friends with a girl who was with a group from Woodlawn High School … soon her friends had met the other boys in our group and we were all just having a ball enjoying the beach … The girls from Woodlawn outnumbered us guys eight to four, so we were in teenagers’ heaven!”

      For Birmingham’s garage bands, playing at Panama City was the closest thing to heaven. It was that potent combination of the music, the sand, the beer (ninety-nine cents for a six-pack of Old Milwaukee), and the girls (“we had a one-track mind … girls, girls, girls”). There was also money to be made, and also valuable publicity for the band. John Wyker of the Rubber Band: “Back in those days, and probably even today, the best place for a band to be seen was at a club at the beach. Every summer, kids would come to Panama City where they would be exposed to bands that they usually fell in love with. This would lead to wintertime gigs all over the South. I did my best sellin’ jobs to my fellow band members, painting a picture of all the fun we’d have and all the girls we’d get, but mainly all the money we could make that next winter by bookin’ parties and lead-outs for top dollar.”⁷

      In the 1950s most of the music in Panama City was provided by a jukebox, but as the garage band movement took over high school entertainment, the beach clubs and bars began to adopt live music and hire guitar bands. Some bands like the Swinging Medallions, the Rubber Band, and King David and the Slaves established their reputations at Panama City Beach. “Back then [1960] the Old Dutch was a jumping place. Always crowded with a large supply of pretty girls. We got in line to get inside. I happened to know the guard at the door, as I remembered him from the summer before. He was an ex-marine, well built, and his face looked like it had caught fire and someone tried to put it out with a track shoe … Back in those days no one checked your age. If the door bouncer thought you were old enough, you got in. If not, he told you to hit the road … The place was jammed … A band was playing and the noise was unbelievable. We could hardly hear our own voice … We were in hog heaven” (“KB” from Samson, Alabama).