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5

A Bad Guitar and a Simple Song

IT WAS NOT JUST the intense politics of the day that created a sense of heaviness during this time; there were other tensions in the Peterik household, and, at times, it felt like my only saving grace was my music. When my parents would fight—and that was often—I headed for the asylum of my tiny bedroom and lost myself in the four or five chords I knew on the ukulele. Years later, “In My Room” by the Beach Boys resounded with meaning for me.

Soon the four-string instrument gave way to the guitar. I knew Elvis Presley’s guitar had six strings; I cleverly counted them as they appeared on the cover of his iconic first album.

I started begging my parents for a guitar when I was about seven. For Christmas, I finally got my wish. My first guitar was made entirely out of plastic. It was horrible, and it had this device on the neck. You pressed down on one of the buttons of the contraption that was clamped onto the neck and it made chords.

I looked under the chord device to find out which strings had to be held down and on which fret. Then, I would attempt to substitute fingers in order to start making my own chords. I could see that this guitar was just like a ukulele, but with two extra strings. All I really had to do was figure out what to do with the extra two!

I would strum the C chord on the ukulele and play “Love Me Tender” and then play it on the guitar. So that’s basically how I learned to play the guitar. I based the guitar chords on the chords I had learned on the ukulele.

By next Christmas, my parents knew I had to move up. My first semi-cool guitar was a Harmony acoustic model with a tacky painted-on sunburst finish—but it was my Stradivarius. I would get up every morning at 6 a.m. and go over and over the basic eight-bar blues progression. I practiced that series of chords so relentlessly that it got to the point that my sister Alice Anne would scream from her slumber, “Shut up with that same progression!”

You forget, after you’ve been playing for so long, how hard it was at the beginning to hold down those strings when you’re first learning your instrument. It took me months to get enough strength to clamp down the strings to the frets and form a barre chord, which is the basis of practically all advanced chords on the instrument.

I was very influenced by a group in this pre-Beatles era, The Ventures, who played wicked instrumentals; kind of surf music meets spy music. They were like a human aurora borealis: they wore matching sharkskin suits and played Fender electric guitars finished in custom colors. When I finally purloined a Fender catalogue from Balkan Music in Berwyn I learned the correct name for these dazzling Duco finishes: Lake Placid Blue, Candy Apple Red, Foam Green, Fiesta Red, Salmon Pink, and, of course, Shoreline Gold.

I would pore over my Fender catalogue for hours on end to view the guitars played by my musical heroes. I can still feel the glossy pages of the book, as the corners brushed across my fingertips; pages filled with images of beautiful, smiling teenagers enjoying their instruments together, on the beach and on the bandstand.

I imagined how it would feel to cradle one of those contoured Stratocasters or Jazzmasters in my arms. I woke up thinking about these immaculate instruments, scheming ways to coerce my folks into buying me one.

I was mesmerized by the steely twang of Don Wilson and Bob Bogle’s Fender Stratocasters and Jazzmasters, their use of the vibrato arm to simulate Hawaiian steel guitar sounds, and how they would use the palms of their hands to create a muting effect that deadened the strings and made the sound pop. I also loved the sound of Mel Taylor’s snare drum, which he played in rim-shot style, thus combining the sound of the drumhead with the sound of the metal rim of the drum. It gave the backbeat a unique metallic gunshot sound that I could not get enough of. I had first heard that sound years before on “Jailhouse Rock.” The drum was played to sound like a gunshot ricocheting off the hard prison walls. Nokie Edwards played his sunburst Precision bass with a pick to give the bottom end a powerful snap.

I used to haunt The Balkans music store. It was located on Cermak Road and Clinton Avenue (one block from Karen Moulik’s family dwelling—the future Karen Peterik). Balkans was not only known for carrying a broad selection of ethnic sheet music, but it also carried a great array of electric guitars. There was a door that led to an actual recording studio. The big red light flashed “Recording” when a session was in progress. I didn’t dare ask the proprietor, Mr. Slavico Hlad, to enter those sacred confines. That was for music pros, not us little kids. One of the store’s highlights was a glass case that held the cream of the current guitar crop. I remember a red Gibson ES 355 that stayed there ’til the store closed its doors years later. I wish I’d been the one to finally buy it. Once when I ran in I was stopped in my tracks by an entire wall of Gretsch hollow body electrics. At first, I was riveted by a blood orange model until my eyes caught sight of one finished in a pale green with a darker green back and sides. That one became the focal point of my fantasies. Years later, in Minneapolis on tour with Survivor and REO Speedwagon, I bought a Gretsch just like that one. It was called the Anniversary model, from Pete of Pete’s Guitars, one of the several vintage guitar merchants who would meet groups backstage, tempting us with their wares.

Of course, I always had to go home to face my own el-cheapo guitar. Finally, as Christmas was closing in, my dad caved in to my incessant nagging and said, “I think it’s time we got you a decent electric guitar.”

The accordion player in my dad’s band, Al Tobias, did business with a store on the legendary music row down on south Wabash Street in downtown Chicago. That store imported not only fine ornate Italian-made accordions, but also began to import very bizarre-looking electric guitars, also from Italy.

I was beside myself with excitement the day my dad decided it was time to go downtown to the now-familiar district and check out some guitars. I raced up the narrow flight of stairs, ahead of my dad, which led to the music showroom, and found myself face-to-face with rows of shiny electric guitars. This was Mecca to me!

Dad whispered Al Tobias’s name to the proprietor of the shop, after which he proceeded to hand me an abstractly shaped, sparkly white Wandre. It said “Noble” on the headstock, but that was just the name of the importer. It was actually a Wandre designed by the eccentric Italian luthier, Antonio Pioli.

When I plugged this oddity into an amp, even with my limited experience, I realized it was a pretty lame instrument, even though I was only eleven. The strings were impossibly hard to hold down and the sound was kind of soft and wimpy. But then the owner handed me a Gibson, a higher priced brand. When I plugged this one in, the vibrant and piercing sound came shooting through the speaker. I was electrified!

We left the shop not knowing which guitar my dad would choose to put under the tree for me that Christmas, though I was hoping with all my heart that I would get the Gibson.

On Christmas morning, I was the first one to wake up, and, still in my pajamas, I spotted a red guitar case under the tree. Breathlessly, I opened it up to find, not the Sunburst Gibson of my dreams, but that modern, Danish coffee table of a guitar—the Wandre! My dad chose it not only for the sweet deal that was offered to move these beasts, but also for its warp-proof aluminum neck. Practicality like that spoke volumes to my father’s generation.

Christmas morning with the Wandre.

When my parents finally got up, I feigned excitement and posed happily for them. I cradled the guitar in my arms. I have that Wandre to this day. I love it—not only because I cut my guitar chops on it in those blissful, halcyon days, or because it has now become a valuable collector’s item, but because my dad bought it for me with his hard-earned money.

In addition, I realized that I had inherited my dad’s respect for a bargain. He shared my dream at that moment, and buying me that guitar made me love him even more.

From that moment on, that ugly first guitar and I became inseparable. I still didn’t have an amp, but Al Tobias came to the rescue and let me borrow his high-end Magnatone when the band wasn’t gigging. The amp had a dazzling vibrato effect built right in. You’d hit a chord and the sound went, wah wah woosh, as it swirled around the room. It made even a simple E chord sound profound!

At that time, I had just written my first song, which I had started to play in front of the grade-school kids. It was a derivative of a Chuck Berry tune. I called it “Hully Gully Bay.” The popular dances of the time were the Hully Gully and the Mashed Potato, so I decided to write a song about an imaginary place where you would go and dance and party (somewhere sunny and exotic) or maybe even a barely discovered archipelago. That extraordinary getaway was “Hully Gully Bay.”

“Come with me, my babe

Where the sea is choppy

and the tide is high

Come with me, my babe

Where the seagulls rock and the riverboats fly

Yeah, Yeah—hey hey

Come with me to Hully Gully Bay

Where the sea is choppy

And the waves are rocky

And the hully gully seagulls are winging our way

Come with me, my babe

to a place called the Hully Gully Bay”

Copyright Jim Peterik/Bicycle Music ASCAP

When I performed this original for my seventh-grade class, I suddenly became the hit of Piper Elementary. I had experienced once again the rush of performing. I liked the way it made me feel and I couldn’t wait to do it all again.

There was another guitar player at Piper whose name was Scott Sindelar. I heard that he played pretty well, and one day he invited me over to his apartment to show me his brand-new Gibson Les Paul Special, which was finished in what the Gibson catalogue called “TV Yellow.” The name was penned because of the hue’s resemblance to the blond finish on many television sets in the ’50s and ’60s. (Recently I purchased one in mint condition. I wonder if it was Scott’s?) We would jack into his brand-new Ampeg Reverb-a-Rocket amplifier, and before long we could play eight songs from the catalogue of our heroes, The Ventures.

I am quite certain that I chose the Fender Jazzmaster as my next dream guitar based on the fact that this was the model Don Wilson of The Ventures played. I found one for sale in the classified ads of the Chicago Tribune and begged my father to take me to Chicago’s exclusive northern suburb of Northbrook to try it out.

When we pulled up to the address, I noticed three brand-new Corvette Stingrays in the driveway. They belonged to the band members that had advertised the guitar. I was already impressed. For reasons unknown they were selling a near mint-condition Fender Jazzmaster finished in a vibrant three-tone sunburst: black to red to yellow. When I first gazed at it, the guitar was languishing in its blond Tolex (a DuPont registered leatherette) rectangular case with bright orange plush lining. When they saw this little eleven year old walk in, they started snickering amongst themselves. But when I sat down, plugged in, and started playing a note-perfect “Walk, Don’t Run,” their expressions changed to disbelief, and they suddenly got real quiet.

“Well, you might as well try the tone that made this guitar famous,” one of the band members said as he positioned the toggle switch to the center position, thus engaging both pickups at the same time. He was correct. There was the bell-like ring of the famous Fender sound!

“We’ll take it,” I exclaimed, as my dad peeled out the 150 big ones from his well-worn brown wallet. They’re probably still shaking their heads to this day.

The first time I heard the new Ventures song “The 2,000 Pound Bee,” in ’63, I was mesmerized by the sound of that searing lead guitar. It was like no sound I had ever heard—kind of a cross between a buzz saw and an electric guitar. It actually did replicate the sound that the title suggested—a bumblebee on steroids!

There was a revolutionary device that created that magical sound every time a guitar was patched into it; this $100 device, which was marketed by Gibson as the “Maestro Fuzz Tone,” literally changed the face of the electric guitar by adding a snarling sound that could sustain a note until the crowd left the building.

After I heard Keith Richards use this sound on the Rolling Stones ’65 smash “Satisfaction,” I ran out to The Balkans music store and made one mine. Suddenly, I was a complete horn section. I could also mimic the creamy tones of Eric Clapton (then a member of Cream).

I loved guitars. I felt like Aunt Bea on The Andy Griffith Show. Each time Aunt Bea would buy a new hat, she would become a new woman—until it was time for another one. Each new guitar was my new hat. Every time I acquired one, whether it was new or used, mint condition or rough around the edges, I felt that surge of energy coursing through my body.

Sometimes a new guitar would set me off on a twenty-four-hour writing binge. It added spring to my step, a light in my eyes, and a dream fulfilled. “Mother, this is the last guitar I’ll ever buy, I promise, oh, please, please!” In time my collection would grow to 172 specimens, each with a unique story, and each inspirational in its own way.

Do I play them all? Yes, I do. When preparing for a session, I will scan the racks in my home for the perfect one to create the sound I hear in my head for that particular song. For screaming, raunchy sounds, perhaps I’ll grab my Charvel (the small San Dimas, California, company that Eddie Van Halen put on the map. Just listen to “Eruption” from Van Halen’s first album for a piece of sweet ear candy.).

For a funky thing, I might choose my ’56 Fender Telecaster (perhaps the Swiss Army knife of guitars for me—it can do just about anything if coaxed properly). For a dreamy, Jimi Hendrix–inspired ballad, I may choose an early ’70s vintage Stratocaster, similar to the one he used.

It’s not only the sound of these vintage instruments that makes them special, it’s also the vibe they possess and the way they speak to you, and inspire you to play. When I play my ’54 Strat, I become Buddy Holly. When I strap on my original Gibson Flying V, I channel blues great Albert King. People tell me I have GAS—“guitar acquisition syndrome”! Who am I to argue?

There’s a famous Who video in which lead guitarist Pete Townshend violently smashes a vintage Telecaster into his towering amplifier—a Marshall stack. Through the years, Townshend has demolished hundreds of these irreplaceable works of art in the name of rock ’n’ roll. Though it’s hard for me to witness or reconcile this act of destruction, I understand the desire to thrill one’s audience.

One time when I was playing with The Ides in Joplin, Missouri, I threw my own guitar high in the air (as I often did at the end of “Vehicle”). Typically, I would catch it on the last drumbeat, but this time I missed.

My beloved 1968 Les Paul Goldtop went crashing to the floor, shattering its neck. I cried as I picked up the pathetic pieces and laid them lovingly back in the case. I’ve since had it reconstructed, but I learned a hard lesson that night about respecting your axe.

Flashback to my first public performance: I signed up to appear at the Talented Teen Search at the Cermak Plaza in my hometown of Berwyn. The parking lot was crowded with teens, adults, and “golden-agers” that had come to view the spectacle. When the emcee, Leonard Koenke (why do we remember that kind of stuff!) introduced me, I plugged my Wandre into my borrowed Magnatone amp and sang for all I was worth.

“Goin’ to Kansas City, Kansas City, here I come. They got some crazy little women there, and I’m a-gonna get me one.”

When I heard my eleven-year-old tenor amplified through the public address system, I basked in the vibrations that echoed across the parking lot. After I was done, and the people applauded, a cloud of happy dust circled around me, filling my every pore. While it’s true that I did not even place in that competition, my course had still been set. I knew I had to experience that feeling again and again. That performance even put all of my neurotic worries into remission.

From that moment on I needed to perform every week or so just to keep my demons at bay. The spotlight and the applause was the elixir that stopped the momentum of needless anxiety.

My night terrors also subsided. In the middle of many nights I’d had episodes that did not feel like nightmares. They were beyond that. It felt like I was helplessly ascending through space, never to land. It was terrifying and still is when I summon that feeling. Around these years I also experienced distortions of time and space, usually in the evening, when a sound as common as the ticking of a clock would suddenly be amplified, then intensified, then speed up…and up…and up. I never took acid but from what I’ve heard, these experiences were not too different. When music and performing finally came into my life all of this thankfully vanished.

Enter The Renegades, my debut into the rock ’n’ roll sweepstakes. I was in eighth grade by that time, and determined to go up against the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five—or at least to play the Berwyn Recreation Center, make a few bucks, and (maybe) even impress the girls.

I gathered up Scott Sindelar (the enviable owner of the yellow Les Paul Special), and Eddie Skopek on drums. Eddie was the younger brother of Corrine Skopek, who was in my grade at Piper Elementary. Corrine was the one that pursued me determinedly since second grade. Of course I had no interest in her whatsoever. Our band, which I christened The Renegades (I originally wanted to call the band The Masterbeats but my dad vetoed it vehemently for reasons I didn’t understand ’til years later), was pretty terrible. Eddie could barely keep a beat. We also boasted a bass player (whose name slips my mind) who did not know the importance of tuning his instrument.

I guess we were good enough, though, because we convinced my alma mater, Morton West High School, to hire us, pro bono, of course, to perform at the big Fourth of July show at the school’s football stadium. This was big! We were terrified, yet exhilarated, when we hit that stage.

As I prepared for the count-off for our first number, “I’ve Had It,” by the Crestones, I felt as if I was standing on the top floor of Chicago’s Prudential Building without a parachute, screwing up the courage to jump. But jump, I did. And we rocked! “One, two, three, four! Blast off!”

A schoolmate of mine named Larry Millas, unbeknownst to me, was sitting in those bleachers with soon-to-be bandmate Bob Bergland. Larry was a tall kid that I had known since third grade. You couldn’t miss him because he wore pink-tinted glasses. Fully present that day, he was mentally taking notes. I always wondered why he wore those pink-tinted glasses throughout grade school. I figured it was some correctional thing. About a year ago, I finally asked, “Larry, what was up with those pink glasses?”

He said, “I just thought they looked cool.”

Larry was way ahead of the curve with those specs. But, specs or no specs, he was always kind of a cool guy, and in eighth grade, during that performance with The Renegades, he was the one scanning the stage, like a nighthawk, for signs of life. He must have been thinking, That band is terrible, but that guitar guy plays and sings really well. Bob added, “Yeah, and he knows all the chords!”

About a week after that event, I heard a knock on the door. It was Larry Millas clutching a guitar case. I recognized him from grade school, but I didn’t let him in at the time. He talked to me as he stood outside on the front porch.

“I’ve got a band and, umm, I think you’d be great in this band,” he murmured.

“I’ve already got a band. Thanks, though. What’s the band’s name?” I asked.

“The Shy-Lads,” he replied. Huge negative.

A week later, I heard that persistent knock, knock, knock, and found Larry Millas, again, at the door. This guy just wouldn’t take no for an answer!

“I’ve got this band. We’re called the Shy-Lads.”

“I know, I know! That’s a terrible name,” I replied bluntly.

“Yeah, our drummer’s dad came up with it. But, really,” he said, “come over to Bob Erhart’s house. He plays drums and Bob Bergland plays bass.”

I already knew Bob Bergland. We had been in the same Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts troop. Our fathers were friends and we were both from close-knit, supportive families. In fact, Larry told me that Bob’s mom had recently cashed in her S & H Green Stamps (these were stamps you would receive for purchasing merchandise at various stores that you would paste into booklets and redeem for other merchandise) to buy her son a shiny, new, copper-finished six-string Danelectro bass. The “Dano” was an American brand distinctive for its use of Formica and composite board instead of wood for its body. The magnetic pickups were cased in what appeared to be lipstick cases. I found out later they actually were lipstick cases!

So, finally, I gave in to Larry’s persistence and agreed to come and play. A few days later I walked the four long blocks to current drummer Bob Erhart’s home, lugging my Wandre guitar and Al Tobias’s fifty-pound plus Magnatone amplifier. I would have to stop about every fourth bungalow to rest and shift hands.

In Erhart’s tiny attic space, the boys were working on the song “Tell Me Why,” a brand-new one from the Beatles (that places the date exactly in time: the summer of ’64). Fortunately, I knew this tune very well and joined right in.

I started strumming the chords on the guitar, mimicking John Lennon’s rhythm part (even then, Lennon was my favorite), while Larry sang the lead vocal. I noticed right away that when I sang harmony, the other guys did not switch to my part. That impressed me to no end!

The hallmark of a lousy band is when one of the singers is swayed to move up or down to another band member’s part. These guys stayed on their own parts! Actually, this was the main thing that convinced me to leave The Renegades behind and join The Shy-Lads. (I didn’t want to rock the boat that first day, but something had to be done about both the name and drummer Bob Erhart’s clunky-looking 1940s natural-wood drum kit—actually I now realize it was pretty cool!) Plus, Larry had a very good voice. Still, there was work to be done. I knew I had to give these guys a crash course in vocal phrasing.

Now, every Beatles fan knows that the verse in “Tell Me Why” goes, “Well, I gave you everything I had, but you left me standing all alone…”

“No offense, Lar, but your phrasing is all wrong,” I said, hoping that I wasn’t launching an attack. “The phrase ‘I gave you everything I had’ is sung bunched up quickly like this [I demonstrated], not sung slowly. Same thing with the words ‘but you left me standing on my own,’” I added. “The rest of the line follows from there.”

Larry looked at me. I guessed that he was not used to being challenged in this way, and then, after what seemed like an interminable, deadly silence, he replied, “Let me try it that way.”

Whew, now I knew I had to be in this band! How could I have known that this day would give way to a fifty-year journey that sees no chance of stopping? From this attic rehearsal, my career would be catapulted into motion.

The next day, I told the members of The Renegades that it was over—I was disbanding the group and joining The Shy-Lads. Though I braced myself for a meltdown, there were no tears. The anticlimactic sendoff made me realize just how uncommitted these guys were to making it big. Obviously, our time together had just been a lark to them!

The next time I got together with Larry and the guys, I sheepishly ventured, “We really should find a new name. The Shy-Lads is really bad. How about The Shondels?”

I had been keeping this name in my back pocket for a while now. I had first seen it in the back pages of a Melody Maker newspaper (I treasured these publications because they represented the whole allure of the British rock culture), which Alice Anne had brought back to me after visiting England and Scotland with her Scottish fiancé and future husband, Jim McCabe.

My culture-crazed sister had also carried back these other amazing recordings: The Shadows’ Greatest Hits, smashes by Freddie and the Dreamers (this was before their dance, “the Freddie,” became popular; it resembled a Kingfisher penguin flapping its appendages mindlessly against its thighs), and the debut LP by a new English group called The Rolling Stones! “England’s newest hit makers!”

But it was the adverts, in the back of that newspaper, that intrigued me most. It was like being in the London Underground gazing at emerging bands with strange and fascinating names: The Steampacket, The Underbeats, Shane Fenton and the Fentones, and The Graham Bond Organisation (note British spelling!). They were performing in clubs such as the Cavern, the Marquee, and the Rainbow. It was in these back pages I noticed a performance by an obscure group called The Shondels.

They were a small-time British band playing tiny clubs in London. I figured (correctly) that they’d never make it, and history proved me right. But, I also liked the name because it was the last name of one of my favorite artists, Troy Shondel. His hit “This Time” was currently in high rotation on my turntable.

Larry, in his unvarnished honesty, asked, “What’s a Shondel?”

I told him that I had absolutely no idea, but added, “It sounds cool, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Larry said. “It sounds cool!” Everyone else agreed. That day we officially became The Shondels.

That agreement marked the beginning of forever. We rehearsed tirelessly and went from teen club to teen club, from church event to recreation center, offering our services. The routine was exhausting, but it paid off. We soon begged our parents to buy us matching Sears Roebuck Silvertone amps. These were “piggyback” models where the amplifier section was separate from the speaker cabinet and perched on top. It made for easier cartage and more flexibility.

We made our grand debut.

When we hit the Berwyn Recreation Center (known as “The Rec”), we gave our hard sell to the director, Fritz Ploegman.

“Well boys, I’d like to have you play our Saturday night dance, but of course, you’d have to ‘donate your services.’” That’s not the last time we would hear that phrase from countless teen center managers and club owners.

These performances went really well. I remember the kids dancing, frugging, ponying, and twisting to our repertoire, which included hits by the Beatles and The Ventures. We also covered “Bad Motorcycle” and “I’ve Had It” by the Crestones.

Then there was our selection of Beach Boys songs, which offered us a good excuse to show off our emerging harmonies. We did “Fun, Fun, Fun,” “409,” and “Surfin’ Safari.” Then we’d cut loose with “Carhop,” by the Exports, “Land of 1,000 Dances,” by Cannibal and the Headhunters, and even a cover of the Chiffons’ hit “He’s So Fine” (changed to “She’s So Fine”—we loved singing that “doo lang, doo lang, doo lang” hook in three-part harmony!).

We even started sneaking some of our originals into the set: The Ventures-inspired “Corruption” and “Torque Out” (“I’ll get the car, you buy the gas, I’ll bring the girls…Torque Out!”).

After starting out with a wicked snare drum rim shot, I intoned the first song’s ominous hook, “Corruption.” Then Bob Bergland took over with the “Peter Gunn”–inspired bass line. I continued our Ventures homage by adding the twangy lead on my sunburst Jazzmaster.

Time flew by. I became a freshman, and the other guys became sophomores. After being Boy of the Year in eighth grade I was now demoted to nerd boy of the year—at the bottom of the food chain at Morton West High School. When I couldn’t find my algebra class on the very first day of school, I slid into the class on my ass, ten minutes late. I had my slick new leather-soled shoes and the floors had just been waxed. “Nice entrance, Mr. Peterik,” intoned the old Mrs. Buddeke. “Now find your way down to the dean’s office for a detention!”

That same day as I stood saying my name in the gym class lineup, Coach Regan silently came over to me and handed me a pink slip of paper. “Should be in girls PE. Take it down to the dean’s office for a detention!” he bellowed. My hair was only slightly longer than the guys around me, but too long for the coach. I was batting two for two on my first day of high school.

Fortunately The Shondels started playing the sock hops after the basketball games at Morton West. In fact, we proudly became the official sock hop band. It was called a “sock hop” because the kids were asked to remove their shoes so they wouldn’t scuff up the gymnasium floor.

The performing was great, but, gradually, tensions were brewing during rehearsal. Bob Erhart’s father was becoming a major pain in the ass. There were never enough drums in the mix for Mr. Erhart and his beloved son.

“You’re drowning him out with bass and guitars!” he bitterly complained.

After every set, right on cue, he would chide, “Too much bass! Too much bass! I can’t hear the vocals, can’t hear the drums!”

Our resident Achilles heel would go on and on, night after night. He went from being an irritating paper cut to becoming an oozing incision. But beyond that, we started to notice something else—Bob Erhart was not really getting the new beat of the modern day songs. To him, the bass drum was four on the floor, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Mr. Erhart’s coddled son just didn’t get the whole boom-boom boom thing, at all. After putting all the negatives together, Bob Bergland, Larry Millas, and I converged at Larry’s house one afternoon to scan the phone book for the number of a drummer in Mr. Boker’s grade school band, of which we were all a part (I played sax, Larry played percussion, and Bob played clarinet). This Mike Borch guy, whom we had all noticed, was really on the ball and knew how to smack that snare drum in band practice.

We scanned the pages, “Borchard,” “Borchart,” “Borch!” We struck gold. He answered right away. After we convinced him to audition, we gave him the directions to what Larry called his “big ritzy house.” It was a magnificent place built in the early ’50s on a double-wide lot. It was located on the upscale Riverside Drive in Berwyn. We even put up a sign in front boasting, “Big Ritzy House” so Mike couldn’t miss it!

When the day came, Mike’s audition song was “Game of Love” by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. We had recently tried out this song with Bob Erhart, and it had been a total disaster. But on this day, I counted it off and Mike proceeded to play it exactly like the record. Boom, crack, boom-boom. Heaven! Smiles were exchanged around the room and we welcomed Mike Borch into The Shondels.

The Shondels and I used to frequent Chicago’s music row, taking the ‘L’ train downtown from Cicero, and then getting off at Wabash. We would bug all the music store proprietors by asking questions, and then we would beg permission to plug their guitars into amplifiers. These outings also allowed us to observe the burgeoning Chicago music scene as other real musicians plugged in and jammed in the music rooms of Lyon & Healy Music, The Guitar Gallery, or Kagan & Gaines.

We rehearsed every chance we got. We bought sharp, matching red sweaters for our upcoming shows. We rehearsed in Larry’s basement. At breaks, we’d shoot pool on Larry’s dad’s professional table. Dr. Millas was the beloved town physician. He was known for bartering loaves of bread and bushels of tomatoes and unsold shirts for delivering a baby or setting an arm if the family didn’t have the means. Everyone in Berwyn and Cicero knew and loved the kindly Dr. Millas.

Early on, we played a variety show at Piper Elementary, our alma mater. We were the only musical act among dancers, comics, and jugglers. We wowed the audience in those red cardigans.

Flush with victory, we walked back to Larry’s house a few blocks away. Unfortunately, we got so distracted goofing off and playing pool that we forgot to go back and take the final curtain call with all of the other acts. We learned a lot about becoming professionals that day, and about avoiding fancy distractions—like shooting pool.

Fortunately, we exercised a little more discipline the next time around. On our first professional gig we opened for a fashion show at Morton East High School. Again, we all wore our signature red sweaters and collectively sweated under the spotlights as the houselights dimmed. Soon, the spot zeroed in on me. I sang:

“When I was just a little boy / I asked my mother, ‘what shall I be?’

‘Will I be handsome, will I be rich?’ Here’s what she said to me.”

My folksy rendition of “Que Sera, Sera” was then rudely interrupted by the sharp crack of the snare drum.

“You ain’t nothing but a hound dog!

Crockin’ all the time!”

I sang it “crockin’” because that’s what it sounded like when Elvis sang the song. Years later I found out he was saying “cryin.’”

The audience roared their approval! That was a defining moment for me. I heard my voice echo through the wonderful acoustics of the Chodl Auditorium. The Shondels were bringing down the house! We were on our way.

Emboldened by the crowd response and our raging teenage hormones, we entered the Talented Teen Search, being held the very next day at the Cermak Plaza. This was the contest I cut my teeth on the year before with my solo rendition of Wilbert Harris’s gem, “Kansas City.”

We performed the Pyramids’ hit “Penetration” (with a few years under my belt, I wondered if that title went a lot deeper than just a reference to the piercing sound of the lead guitar). Unfortunately, we failed to penetrate. We came in at fifth place.

That first year represented our coming of age as a band. Our door-to-door peddling of our musical wares was paying off. We were playing almost every weekend at venues like Berwyn’s Red Feather Building, Morton West High School, and Tiger Hall in Lyons. The latter was a wild place where a senior named Val Godlewski would get raunchy and dirty dance with basketball star Skip Hack as we did our ten-minute rave-up rendition of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.”

The greasers from high school came dressed in their “workies” (short, gray work pants rolled up on the bottom), and at about 11 p.m., they decided that they were sweaty and horny enough to tie red bandanas around their heads. They proceeded to bump and grind to our version of “Land of 1,000 Dances.” (Our first swirl-finished, green business card read: “The Shondels—Band of 1,000 Dances.”)

The big moment came when a club that hadn’t even opened yet contacted us. It was to be called The Keynote Club in suburban Lyons, Illinois. Since Lyons was known for its strip clubs and houses of ill repute, the community felt that the addition of a teen club would serve as a breath of fresh air. This venue would lend an air of respectability to a then-sordid outpost.

Plus, the club owner offered us five hundred big ones for a two-day run. This was huge money to us. At our first show, just a few weeks earlier, we had only received $25; not apiece, but for the entire band!!

For this show we decided we had to retire the red sweaters. The Shondels rode the ‘L’ downtown to go to the fabled Smokey Joe’s for some groovy threads. “The man who knows goes to Smokey Joe’s” was their radio-blasted slogan. We listened to the train announcer through the megaphone-like sound system: “Jackson,” “Monroe,” and finally “Wabash,” where we tumbled out into the stifling humidity of Chicago summer to look for Smokey Joe’s.

Suddenly there it was in all its glory on South State Street. The store window burst with color: coats, shirts, and slacks of every shade—from shocking lime green to deep purple. We were by far the youngest and palest people in the store. After we bought our Beatles look-alike sport coats (tan corduroy with velvet lapels) we walked over to Tad’s $1.19 Steakhouse a few blocks north also on State Street. For just over a buck you got the juiciest, toughest, grizzliest steak known to man. There was literally a bonfire of flames as the grill master herded these babies from the bin to the grill and onto your baked-potato-laden plate. There was no medium-rare or even well-done—they were all incinerated equally. I can still taste the bitter charcoal laden with salt against the sizzling fat. Now that’s eatin’!

Back in Lyons, Illinois, packed on opening night, our newly outfitted bodies and The Keynote Club generated quite a buzz. “The Shondels rock, man!” We had gone beyond the days of playing wimpy songs like “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” which Bob Bergland sang as Larry performed the palm-muted guitar part with a wadded up Kleenex underneath the strings! Now we were jammin’ The Rolling Stones (“The Last Time” and “Satisfaction”), and harmonizing the complex vocal arrangements of The Mamas and the Papas with “Monday, Monday,” and the West Coast’s Beau Brummels and The Byrds.

Sometimes, when we would come off a string of dates, sick as dogs with the flu, we’d line up as good old Doc Millas gave us each an injection of gamma globulin, apparently the very essence of life. I swear I saw microorganisms swimming around in that syringe! Presto, chango, instant health. We were tapping our toes, ready for the next gig! We called it “The Doc Millas Magic Bullet!” I found out each of these shots contained about $150 of this life-restoring elixir.

With our hot new band playing the sock hops after the basketball games, gradually the cheerleaders began chatting us up. We were invited to sit on “the stage” of the Morton West cafeteria at lunch where all the school’s glitterati (the jocks and pom-pom girls and cheerleaders) ate their sloppy joes and drank their chocolate milk.

The Shondels were my E-Ticket to hipness and acceptability. A nerd no more, I even traded in my broken, black, horn-rimmed glasses for a sharp pair of yellow-tinted aviator frames. I was in with the in-crowd and I swore I’d never be outside looking in again.