What We Had to Play On

Almost every “baby booming musician” you talk to has the same story. “I was watching the Ed Sullivan Show on February 9th, 1964 . . .” This happened to Roger (Jim) McGuinn of the Byrds, John Phillips of The Mamas and Papas and Billy Joel, to name a few. As well, I must not forget, it happened to me.

Even though I knew I would have been shot on site with a Beatle haircut I could always sing along with the music and pretend I had hair. They came out with Beatle wigs but they resembled dark Russian babushkas and lasted about as long on the scene as the K-Tel 8-Track Stacker. You have to realize that growing up in a small, mountain town in the early ’60′s wasn’t the bomb it is now.

My hometown of Kimberley, B.C., although now a premier all-season recreational area, was an isolated mining town back in those days which cut the winter doldrums with a Snow Fiesta in February and a senior men’s hockey team called “The Dynamiters.” I happened to have been very fond of “The Nitros,” as they were nicknamed, and played a very bush-league variety of the sport, myself. Skiing was becoming popular in that era but not the juggernaut industry it is now. But I digress.

Okay, we had one radio station, CKEK, in Cranbrook, which was about 15 miles away. They mostly played The Moms and Dads (not to be confused with Phillips, Doherty and Cass), Acker Bilk ( Although I do like Stranger on the Shore) and various versions of Mitch Miller singing Yellow Rose of Texas,I’m Looking over a Four Leaf Clover and I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair. Summer favorites included Nat King Cole singing Roll Out Those Lazy, Hazy Crazy Days of Summer and, if they really wanted to let their hair touch their ears, Perry Como singing Papa Loves Mambo. Not that there was anything wrong with this music but it was on from 6:00am until the national anthem at midnight . . or maybe that was 11:00pm.

However, from 4:00pm until 4:30 was an amazing time when there was time for four (4) tunes (count ‘em. . .four) for the Pepsi Generation-types and our older brothers and sisters. This is where we heard Herman’s Hermits and Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs amid the long commercials for Tak’s Furniture, Cranbrook Dodge and Lion’s Bingo. This is where we could hear the new tunes from those fabled places like London, New York and Los Angeles.

Our first band was called The Apaches and our drummer played on cardboard ice cream containers for the snare and toms. He had one real cymbal and his “kick,” or base drum, was just that. . .a four-foot high base drum from the defunct air cadet band with an old Slingerland beater that was held together with pieces of coathanger. On the front skin his sister had painted a character of some aboriginal figure that could have easily represented any of a thousand tribes.

I played bass (because I couldn’t play anything else) on a Kent bass guitar, a Japanese model that, forty years later, would be the only instrument from that era to have absolutely no antique value. Yes, in those days “Made In Japan” was not a very good thing.

For amplifiers I dragged along an RCA Victor phonograph in a heavy oak cabinet that took three minutes to heat up and always had the turntable running. Our guitar player used his mom’s reel-to-reel tape recorder and switched it to “Public Address.. His guitar consisted of a Harmony arch-top with a clamp-on pick-up.

The Mike? Yes we had a microphone that emitted blue sparks if your lips got too close and gave you a wallop after that. It sat on a broom stick which, in turn, was bolted to a piece of one-foot-by-one-foot plywood. It also plugged into the tape recorder.

Our signature songs were: I’m A Fool by Dino, Desi and Billy; Ticonderoga by the Ventures and Everybody Loves a Clown by Gary Lewis and the Playboys. . . .and three other songs of varying degrees of difficulty and dubious tonal quality.