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CHAPTER THREE

The Garage Bands

Rock ’n’ roll had been pioneered by the front man — the handsome singer — and the first wave of Birmingham rockers followed this pattern: Baker Knight and the Knightmares, Sammy Salvo, Pat Riley and the Rockets, Jimmy Wilson and the Flames, and so on. Elvis had been their inspiration and guiding star — southern boy done good. Henry Lovoy was five years old in 1953: “That’s when rock ’n’ roll was getting started and so was I. I was singing and dancing at dancing school and in various hospitals and army bases surrounding the Birmingham area and other cities in the Southeast. I was dubbed as Little Elvis and my mother painted on my side burns and I gave Elvis a run for his money at the age of six.” In the 1960s rock ’n’ roll became the music of youth; and youth was in the ascendant as the mighty baby-boom demographic reached puberty and its discretionary income rose. Musician Doug Lee of Dogwood: “Our generation changed it so much, back then pop music, rock music whatever you want to call it, was played by kids for kids … Back then it was all kid music.” The next wave of amateur rock ’n’ roll musicians were younger and less experienced than the first, and they did away with the handsome front man and formed guitar groups.

A powerful new technology was driving these changes. A pounding boogie-woogie piano or raucous saxophone had been the siren calls of rock ’n’ roll, but these were difficult instruments to master and quite expensive to buy. The electric guitar, on the other hand, was cheap and easy to play. As thousands of mass-produced Gibson Les Pauls and Fender Telecasters rolled off the assembly lines, more aspiring young musicians were tempted to buy into this technological revolution. Gradually the electric guitar became the voice of rock ’n’ roll, replacing pianos and saxophones for the leads, and cumbersome standup basses with new electric Fender Precision basses. Musical instrument shops stocked the new instruments, and even retail outlets like Sears and Montgomery Ward started to sell them. The Chicago Pawn Shop downtown provided many of the instruments for start-up bands. Entry into the world of professional musicians had always been guarded by the high value put on virtuosity. Rock ’n’ roll and cheap electric guitars changed all that. You could master the three or four chords that underlay rock music in a matter of months; energy and enthusiasm was more than a match for virtuosity in guitar bands. Guitarists like Buddy Holly provided the example for millions of young men: they copied his playing note by note as they craned over their portable record players or got closer to the television.

All over Birmingham in the waning years of the 1950s thousands of hours of grass cutting, errand running, and room cleaning were converted into the dollars that would finance a trip to Forbes Music or Nuncie’s Instruments. “I had to mow a lot of lawns to get that guitar!” remembered Terry Powers of the Bluedads and the Alabama Power group. His rock ’n’ roll upbringing took pretty much the same path as many other Birmingham musicians’: “When I was a baby my mother put a radio in my room to help me sleep at night. So I started off listening to all that old rock ’n’ roll … The first guitar I ever played was when my uncle moved to Clanton [Alabama]. He pulled it out and started to play all these hillbilly songs and I could not get over it. I was just infatuated; he was my hero. I started playing guitar when I was six. My first guitar idol was Chet Atkins and also Buddy Holly. Ahhh, the sound of Buddy Holly!” Electric guitars were easy to obtain; they were traded, mail-ordered, or picked up at pawn shops. Buying one was a high spot in many musicians’ memories of the 1960s — nobody ever forgot that first electric guitar, how much they paid for it, and how it looked. Keith Harrelson still remembers the wondrous day when his brother Mark came home from Nuncie’s with a brand-new Fender precision bass — the product of many months delivering papers. Keith was impressed with how the shiny new instrument looked with its pearly white pick guard and lustrous brown finish, sparkling like a jewel in a bed of crushed red velvet in its fitted case.

All over Birmingham, back rooms and garages were converted into practice areas as hundreds of excited young men embarked on the first steps of a journey that had no limits in their imagination. Being in a band got you some prestige in high school and was a great way to get some attention from the girls. Terry Powers: “When I went back to school after the Christmas vacation I was already singing and playing. I went down there and got on the auditorium at Lake View Elementary [School] and sang ‘Cotton Fields Back Home’ and that was the first time I ever played in front of anyone. Everybody just laughed and all the girls just screamed and they thought that was cool and all. So that was my first live performance … My first real electric guitar I got when I was fifteen. It was stolen and I got it for $150. It was a Mosrite made in California and it had a hollow body and the guy who sold it got it from David Crosby. So my first electric belonged to David Crosby … Then I started to play with some high school boys in their bands because I could play rhythm. I was then inspired to play lead from this guy in Homewood named Larry Benyon. He was unbelievable. He showed me how to do everything, and I practiced until my fingers were numb.”

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 barbershop harmony and they put on a minstrel show. It was a big group … So they started doing some doo-wop stuff. So we went from rock ’n’ roll to doo-wop when doo-wop became popular. We had a couple of girls that went to Banks High School that did songs like ‘In the Still of the Night.’” The Ramrods’ name was inspired by a record by Duane Eddy, the king of the guitar instrumentalists, which had become very popular —“the stuff came back in that featured a lot of instrumentals like Freddie King, the Ventures, and groups like that.” Guitar instrumentals were perfect for garage bands, requiring a minimum of musical expertise and doing away with the lead singer altogether — the group was now the thing. Duane Eddy’s “Rebel-Rouser” in 1958 started the trend, and it continued with a guitar band from Seattle called the Ventures. Their big hit “Walk Don’t Run” of 1960 encouraged numerous other guitar-based bands to emulate their twangy, echoing electrified sound.

Phillips High School produced the Epics. Rick Hester played lead guitar, Terry Ryan played guitar and bass, Ross Gagliano was on the drums, and Joe Ardivino was the vocalist. Rick was the lead guitarist for the band, and Joe was the lead vocalist. The Churchkeys started around 1962 with a group of students from Ramsey High School: Tommy Allison on drums, Mike Easter on bass, Rob Hackney on guitar, Bert McTyer on sax, and Tommy DeBuiys on piano. After Bert and Tommy left, Charles Feldman and Chuck Butterworth joined and the band was renamed the Bassmen. Again, their name came from their equipment, in this case the name of a Fender amplifier. Ramsey High School produced the Ramblers around 1961. This was formed around the guitar-playing talents of Tommy and Eddie Terrell, Van Veenschoten (on lead guitar), and Chip Sanders, with Johnny Robinson on drums. True to form, the Ramblers practiced in Robinson’s garage. The Romans had members from Ramsey and Shades Valley Schools — this group was managed by Buddy Buie, who was to have some influence on southern rock ’n’ roll. The Counts were formed around 1962 in Robert Alexander’s basement. Robert and Ned Bibb played guitars and teamed up with Bobby Marlin on drums.

As with many other Birmingham teenagers, Ned Bibb’s introduction to rock ’n’ roll came from the movies: “My inspiration was Chuck Berry from when I was thirteen years old [in 1958]. I had gone downtown on the bus on a Saturday. I decided to go see a movie. I went in to see a rock ’n’ roll movie that had Chuck Berry playing the guitar [probably Go, Johnny Go!]. This was the first time that I had seen how music was made. During that time there was no television that had rock ’n’ roll … I decided that I wanted to play the guitar, but I didn’t have any idea how to play one. I didn’t even know how to tune one. I think the insurance guy came by the house one day and tuned it for me. I would just play the record and learn the notes … The first live band I saw was the Road Runners … We were going to the movies and the band played after the movie was over … I just flipped out over their music. They played mostly Little Richard and Buddy Holly songs. I saw them play at the West End Theatre. They were a very big influence on me. I moved to West End in 1959. I met up with Rob and Bobby and them. I was in high school in West End and they all went to Ensley High. My cousin had a boyfriend named Jack Kelley, who turned out to be a musician was well. Robert [Alexander] invited me to come over to his basement one day to play. I was the only one who could play lead guitar. I was really shy the first day. They wanted me to play a song. I asked them if they knew anything from Buddy Holly. They didn’t. They wanted to know what key it was in. I didn’t know, I just told them to start on a certain fret. I started to play the lead part, and they had never seen anybody do that. They thought I was fantastic! Robert Alexander was the spark plug. He was the one who wanted to have a band. We got rid of Jack because he wanted to play country music and didn’t like me playing the lead. We recruited Bobby Marlin on drums. We played a little show. Our first little gig was at Calico Corner. We played at the Southern Steak House on Bessemer Highway. We were not of drinking age, but that wasn’t a problem. They were not nearly as strict back then. The fraternity parties were a lot of fun. At first we played for high school parties and sororities. A year later, as our band progressed, we played at Tuscaloosa [University of Alabama] and at Auburn [University]. It was a very important market. Those were the good paying gigs.”

The Counts later added Jim Larusa, on bass. They started playing Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley songs and recruited young Henry Lovoy as vocalist: “As I grew older my interest in music grew even higher to higher expectations and I knew that entertaining would be my life … When I was fourteen I played football at Ensley High School. If we won, I would sing Bo Diddley on the football bus. One day a fellow player knew some guys who were putting a band together and needed a lead singer … My first job in a nightclub was when I was fourteen years old. I became a lead singer in a rock ’n’ roll band. I could also play drums too when the drummer was not around. The first group was called the Counts, and my first break came when we played for Duke Rumore’s record hop at Duke’s in Ensley. That is when we got radio time, and that was important for local bands. I played in and out of clubs for about five years while going to high school.”

Ned Bibb underlined the importance of gaining this powerful deejay’s support. “In order to get those gigs you had to have exposure. That is why Duke was such an important stepping stone. He had the armory shows in the late 1950s … At first it was called Duke’s in Dixieland and then just Duke’s. They had sock hops there: you would take your shoes off and dance in your socks. High school kids went there. That was the big time: if you could play Duke’s, the fraternities and sororities wanted you. Playing Duke’s for the first time was so important … Duke had a big influence on what bands learned. He controlled what people listened to. If Duke didn’t play it on the radio, nobody was interested in learning it. He had a show in the afternoon. It came on about 3 o’clock, when the kids were getting out of school. He played mostly black music and a lot of rhythm and blues. He played a lot of Jimmy Reed and Fats Domino. Birmingham was influenced a lot by New Orleans, Memphis, and other southern cities.”

Most of these electric guitarists were self-taught, but there were music education programs at Birmingham’s high schools that trained students in piano, saxophone, clarinet, and trumpet — instruments that could add a lot more to the standard lineup of lead, rhythm, and bass electric guitars along with drums. The Premiers, Bassmen, and Ramrods often used a piano rather than a guitar lead, and the Epics, Ramrods (after Ronnie Eades joined), and Bassmen employed a saxophone to supplement the lead guitar. The Torquays had a trumpet (Barry Bicknell) and a sax (Steve Salord) in addition to electric guitars and drums. The Epics were probably the first band to have a horn section, bringing in Jim Anderson on trumpet and Bob Sheehan on sax. Larry Wooten: “So doo-wop went out and then the Memphis sound came in with the horns. So we took on a saxophone player and then we took on two saxophone players. One of the saxophone players could play saxophone or trumpet. So we had that Memphis sound for a while, and then we got away from that because that went out and stuff came back in that featured a lot of instrumentals like Freddie King.”

The Garage Band Scene

The primary venue for bands made up of high school students was naturally the high school, whose extensive social events usually had live music. Doug Lee: “You knew you had a band when you got a paying gig. Yeah, once you got paid, you had a band, a real band … I can remember football games when I was a starter, a pretty good athlete, and immediately going back to the locker room, changing clothes and putting on my rock ’n’ roll duds and going to the gym and jumping on stage and my band was playing the dance after the football game!” The biggest draws were the lead-outs of the fraternities and sororities, and the shows staged at local armories. Each school had its home armory: high schoolers from West Birmingham went to the shows at Ensley Armory sponsored by Duke Rumore, those from East Birmingham went to Opporto Armory and Dave Roddy. Bunkie Anderson: “You go in, they drive the tanks out and they set the bands up, you would set up two little amps and you’d play, and it would take you fifteen minutes to break down and go home.” Frank Ranelli of the Things: “When I was a teenager and all, every weekend I wanted to go and hear some live music. It was just like the thing to do! The big deal was to go somewhere on a weekend and dance and hear music. Or go to the drive-ins and hang out. We used to go to the Oporto Armory. WSGN used to do it, and they had live music every Saturday, and it got for a while where they were doing it Friday and Saturday. That was a great place to go. You go out there to dance and meet girls or whatever. That is what we did. Of course we would try and play some music too.” The armory shows were squeaky-clean high school fun. Pat Thornton: “The kids picked up by parents at Duke’s, they always had four or five police at hand, so the fights ended quickly, no one could bring in booze there.” But someone else added: “You were drunk when you got there!”

Just like everything else in Birmingham, high school music was segregated by race, but it was also divided by school affiliation and geography. Birmingham’s teenagers kept in groups with high school friends. Bob Cahill: “They sold Cokes there, there was a big dance floor, and you just sort of milled around, you probably saw people from all the schools in the city, you would end up seeing people and they would say ‘I am from this school,’ and you would say, Well, do you know so and so?” Garage bands usually drew musicians and audiences from the same school. Record producers Courtney Haden and Mark Harrelson think this had a significant effect on retarding the music scene in Birmingham: “One of the reasons Birmingham never really penetrated back in the ’60s and maybe even today is that the kids were a lot more segmented by neighborhoods. You have kids in Birmingham: I was from Vestavia and Courtney is from Homewood. We had people who knew each other growing up, but it is still a city of neighborhoods. There were Vestavia bands and there were Homewood bands. In Tuscaloosa there were just bands.”

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, we did not make the records to make money—we gave most of them away to try and book more jobs.”¹