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CHAPTER FOUR

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 I was getting paid for something I loved to do.” For fifteen-year-old Bunkie Anderson, the experience of playing in a band was priceless: “I loved it. I remember when they put six dollars in my hand and I said: You mean you paid me? There was the end of my life as I knew it. I went from being a church boy and a good student — my life was over. They gave me money. I would have done it for no money.”

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: Larry and the Loafers fell out in Panama City with only $2.65 between the five of them, and the Ramblers pawned some of their PA system for $5 worth of gas to get home. Driving long distances at night on narrow country roads was scary enough to persuade some of them to retire from touring. All shared the same trials and tribulations. Country musician Bill Morrison: “The good, the bad, and the ugly of traveling in passenger cars pulling those darned trailers, with the drummer’s stinky feet resting on your lap while you tried to get a little sleep” during the long rides, guitars between your legs in the cramped interiors, and the inevitable breakdowns. Engines blew up, transmissions failed, tires burst, and trailers became disengaged and took their own way home. None of these hurdles seem to discourage the bands. This was an adventure. It made memories that lasted through adulthood and were fondly recalled in middle age.

The garage bands went on the road with varied goals. Some of them were playing to pick up a few hundred dollars to help get through school. Some played to pay their bar bills. Others had their sights set a little higher and dreamed of a recording session in Muscle Shoals or Nashville. Playing in a band could make an important contribution to a high school student’s budget; a wad of bills for a few hours of fun seemed like a big deal at the time. Bandleaders were in constant negotiation with venue owners for increases in pay or beer. The meeting of band and venue owner usually went as follows, as related by Dale Aston of the Torquays: “A tubby middle-aged man greeted us and gave us the standard band greeting: no drinking on stage — no girls in the room — no smoking on stage — don’t play too loud, etc., etc.” But all the rules were there to be broken and the party that started on the bandstand often ended up in the sensuous confines of a motel room. Playing rock ’n’ roll in Alabama was not without its peculiar dangers, especially where booze and girls were involved. And booze and girls were usually involved. Vodka and underage girls ruined one trip that the Distortions took to Demopolis. The gig at the party went well —“Man, we had a ball!”— and the band’s celebration in the motel after the party went even better until the police arrived. Disaster! The story ended with the band spending the night in jail for underage drinking. The next morning the judge, who had earlier been at the party, fined the band all the money they had made at the gig.⁴

The thrills of the road went hand in hand with the maturation of the garage bands as musicians. Playing for money, and learning how to entertain a crowd, pushed amateurs to a level of professionalism. There was always that moment of epiphany when you realized that the band was really playing together and you had finally made it. It might come at the end of a set when the crowd cheered or when a promoter asked you what you were doing for the rest of the summer. Some bands enjoyed a special moment of triumph. Dale Aston remembers when the Torquays played Panama City: “Our first night to perform at the Old Dutch was fun. We had a chance to meet our fellow performers, Mark Dinning [known for his songs on Teen Time in Birmingham] and the exotic dancer, White Storm. We began an upbeat instrumental and brought her onstage to raucous applause from around seventy-five well-lit people ready for the show. Remember, she was only a few feet in front of us on the stage as she danced about … All of a sudden White Fury turned her back to the audience, faced the band, and tore her top off, revealing two bounding breasts with tasseled pasties at the end. The drummer lost a stick, and the band lost it for a moment before recovering. I don’t think the audience even noticed the sour chord. After the first night the strip act became routine for us and we hardly noticed when the clothes came off. I guess we had finally become true professional musicians.”

The college fraternity circuit was easily the best place for a garage band to play, but it only operated during the school year, during football season in the fall and coming to a climax with graduation in the spring. The long, dreary months of summer tended to drag on with little musical entertainment and employment opportunities for amateur musicians. Driving down to Panama City, Florida, for the summer vacation became popular in the 1950s as this sleepy seaside town developed into a major tourist destination for folks from Alabama and Georgia. By 1960 it was welcoming a million visitors a year, and the “Miracle Strip” became an icon of southern culture that also supported a lot of live music. It became a summertime tradition to go down Panama City Beach. The route which went along the two-lane highways to Florida became an indelible part of the memories of summer for many in Birmingham. In the 1940s and 1950s the annual trip to Panama City was a family affair, with several generations crammed into an automobile heading for a wooden cottage a few steps from the beach.

J. D. Weeks’s love affair with Panama City began in 1949. “I knew the routine. Take Highway 31 out of Birmingham, turn right on Highway 331 in Montgomery and go as far as you could, which was Highway 98 in Florida, and turn left.” Some years later he would hitchhike with some of his fraternity brothers: “We were picked up about 2 a.m. by an already full car that included Dinky Harris another Viking fraternity brother. We did finally arrive and got right out near the Hang Out. After a lot of searching we found a lady that would let us sleep on the floor of her living room. Her cottages were all full and she felt sorry for us.” Bad Betty: “Boy, back in the 1950s Panama City Beach was the New York of all high school kids. On Fridays we would load up and take off, heading to the beach. All the guys were wound up and would stay wound up the whole time they were there. Running along the beach, trying to make out with the girls, drinking a beer, going to the Hang Out and just having a blast. The sororities were all there trying to outdo each other. Dixie Debs were always around and flirting with everyone’s guys … The music was great, laughing and talking and meeting new folks. Sitting on the beach listening to the music.”⁵

Music and dancing were central to the Panama City vacation. You listened to it on the radio as you drove down. Sarah Bradford Wear: “Seems we kept it on Duke Rumore until we got close to Montgomery, then the dial on the radio would get a workout … looking for our finger-snapping, hand-clapping, and singalong favorites until we could get our luggage to the motel door.” The Newspaper Boy: “We listened to WSGN for as long as we could, switching to WVOK and its 50,000 watts until it signed off at sunset … We went through all of the small towns and tried hard to find a radio station playing good music. South of Montgomery we picked up a Tennessee station with a black deejay playing ‘So Tough’ by the Original Casuals.” And when you got there, rock music was everywhere: from live bands at the Old Hickory restaurant and the Old Dutch Tavern, and from numerous jukeboxes at the popular Hang Out or at Aultman’s or at Little Birmingham, a liquor store and gift shop: “The music was great, laughing and talking and meeting new folks. Sitting on the beach and listening to the music.” But most important, the music was there to dance to, and the place to dance or just be seen was the Hang Out, a large, open pavilion right on the beach, with music blasting from several jukeboxes. Here you did the Bop or just watched from behind the wooden railing that enclosed the concrete dance floor. Don Campbell: “The Hang Out was the place to see and be seen on the beach, usually all night and all of the day. Some didn’t have to get out of bed; they slept on the beach. The dancing started early at the Hang Out, with the jukebox playing the newest 45s continuously [six plays for twenty-five cents]. The music had to be loud to drown out the scratching of the sand between the dancer’s shoes and the dance floor … The guys would spot who the best dancers were and who looked best in a bathing suit or a pair of white short-shorts with a golden tan. Many of the girls danced with a set of large curlers in their hair so they would look good that night.” The Newspaper Boy: “The records on the Hang Out jukeboxes included songs we would always associate with PC [Panama City] and the Hang Out: ‘Hully Gully’ by the Olympics, ‘You’re So Fine’ by the Falcons were great 1959 dance songs, and ‘Searchin’/Youngblood’ by the Coasters, ‘Honky Tonk’ by Bill Doggett, ‘The Stroll’ by the Diamonds, and ‘That’ll Be the Day” by Buddy Holly and the Crickets. We didn’t spend much time on the beach because the music from the Hang Out drew us to it. The Hang Out was a concrete-floored open-air pavilion with a high gabled roof and a wooden railing around it with four jukeboxes.” Henry Lovoy: “I was ten years old when I learned to Panama City bop, which was the dance. If you knew how to bop you could dance with the older women [sixteen and older] … I went to the Hang Out every night and bopped to the great rock ’n’ roll music … At the Hang Out, at eleven o’clock, the big cop [Tom] would lock up the jukebox. Then we would go to a little place to dance called Aultman’s, but then for only an hour, since it was late by then.” Sarah Bradford Wear: “Of course we’d have to comb our hair again for the umpteenth time, freshen our drugstore lipstick and … carry our shoes to the concrete dance floor at the Hang Out that was still open and going strong. I was a good dancer too, one of the best … at least I thought. I’ll bet everybody thought the same thing about their own smooth moving. I’d rather bop than eat, and I did, lots of times … We seemed to draw approval from the crowds gathered around us just about every time I’d get on the dance floor. 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).