THE REGENTS
(1957–60)
I can’t remember why I went to Blue Ridge, a training camp for potential leaders in the Hi-Y, the YMCA/YWCA youth organization, late in the summer before I turned sixteen. I wasn’t a member, much less a potential leader. It happened fast. Suddenly, I was on my way.
The bus ride from Memphis to Black Mountain, North Carolina, was long. Some girls from East High caught my attention right away. Somebody brought an old Stella guitar but couldn’t play, so I played “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” and was a hit with the females before we left Tennessee.
Blue Ridge was held at Black Mountain College, where old Beatnik artists of the late forties and early fifties matriculated. It was almost too picturesque, remote and closed off like a hunting lodge, in North Carolina’s beautiful green hills. The “leadership” classes were boring and worthless. But every night there was a sock hop dance in the old gym. Friday night, the next to last night in camp, was a talent show.
Four guys from Memphis put together a vocal group and I played piano. My old man had sung on the radio with a quartet when he was military school. I figured, “What the hell?” We performed Johnny and Joe’s “Over the Mountain, Across the Sea” and Clyde McPhatter’s “Money Honey.” I played piano standing up, with my back to the audience. The place went nuts. We were a hit. The next night at the final sock hop farewell party, we were gods among men, the “Boys from Memphis.” I thought about it all the way home on the long bus ride. Something was taking form around me.
Every year White Station High School put on a talent show. Students from all grades were eligible for tryouts and almost everybody made it. After our triumph at Blue Ridge, I started to make plans. The year before, a group of seniors had performed as a four-piece band with a five-man vocal group, a sort of Dixieland band with trumpets, baritone sax, bass, piano, and drums. The drummer, Bill Roland, was a friend from the country club. The notorious and mysterious Al Stamps had transferred from East High and played piano. The band and singers (who performed in white tuxedo jackets, black shirts, and white ties) won the talent show, and were big in East Memphis. Later that year they won the Battle of the Bands at the Casino Youth Building on the Mid-South Fairgrounds.
A kid a year ahead of me, Rick Ireland, played guitar, and fixed the school’s P.A. system at the sock hops and other functions. He introduced me to another guitar player, Stanley Neil. My band’s nucleus was born.
We had a friend who sort of played drums, and signed up for the school talent show. We were going to play the instrumentals “Flip Flop and Bop” and “Rockin’ with Red,” and tried to work up our act at Ricky’s house. Rehearsal was the day before the talent show in the school cafeteria. Another band—two guitars, a girl piano player, and a drummer a year behind us in school—had signed up to play. A vocal group with Ronnie Stoots from my Sunday school class and pretty-boy Charles Heinz, who had a trained voice, performed “Ave Maria” in the show. A singer from my Blue Ridge group performed with them.
I was suspicious and with good reason: they did my arrangement of “Money Honey,” which featured the scream before every chorus. But the big problem was that our drummer could barely hold on to the drum sticks and their drummer kicked ass! Eddie Tauber, a short little Jewish kid from Vera’s homeroom, soon became the infamous “Steady Eddie.”
We did okay. They played my arrangement of “Money Honey” with Charles Heinz spraddle-legged, flipping his long greasy hair, and won the show. But by the end of the night I had enlisted the drummer and the pretty boy singers, and the other band had no future.
We called ourselves the Regents after the telephone exchange in West Memphis, but everybody called us the Jim Dickinson Combo. Charles and Ronnie sang ballads and I did the rough stuff. We started out playing house parties and worked our way up to the fraternity circuit. That summer we played the CYO (Catholic Youth Organization) at St. Louis Church in East Memphis. I was sixteen and had a ’48 Buick big enough for the whole rhythm section.
We never had a regular bass player. Once we played in the psycho ward at Kennedy Veterans’ Hospital. Inexplicably, they had an upright bass in their recreation room. We got Jimbo Hale, who played with Stanley in Roy Cash’s country trio, to do the gig with us. During that set a nurse asked us if a patient could sing a song. We were thrilled to back up a black singer. He sang something that was almost “Three O’clock in the Morning.” Afterward, the nurse thanked us, “Oh, that did Lester so much good. We can barely get him to talk.”
“He was good,” I said. “What is he in here for?”
“Lester killed his family,” she replied.
That was one of the only shows with a bass. Jimbo played the Mid-South Fair with us, too. I was sick as a dog and pumped full of codeine cough syrup. I was more of less used to playing half drunk, but the cough syrup added a dreamlike, underwater quality. Some country girls down front swooned over Charles Heinz. That was something new. They followed us after the set, and mooned and giggled until they had to get on their school bus and return to Munford.
One Saturday, Ricky, Stanley, Eddie, and I went downtown to an old Quonset hut, Meteor Recording Studio, in the South Memphis ghetto. Les, the least of the Bihari Brothers, ran the record label and the crude and sparsely furnished studio. It was midwinter, and colder inside than outside. Les, middle-aged and dressed like a nondescript businessman, saw us looking around.
“Getting the heater fixed,” he said.
I couldn’t help notice the guy at the piano was wearing his overcoat and a pair of gloves with fingertips cut out. It looked like the cold was a permanent situation. But I loved it right away. The mics, the control room, the tape recorder! I forgot the cold. We played “Flying Saucers Rock ’n’ Roll.” Les was knocked out. Stanley hit him up for five dollars. I was down for whatever. I would have come back and tried to get the fingerless gloved piano player’s job, but Ricky had a better idea.
Another studio (in Brunswick, Tennessee, northeast of town) was in a big old barn behind a Dairy Queen Drive-In with a big flashing neon sign that looked like a space satellite. We had Charles and Ronnie with us, and had specially rehearsed our best rock ballads. I had a pretty good triplet feel for a white guy and Charles was really good.
That night I met someone who would be very important in my musical education. He was engineering in the studio and cooking burgers in the Dairy Queen. Packy Axton had a Robert Mitchum haircut and a slow, humorous style that made him appear almost retarded. He was one of the coolest people I ever met. His mother and uncle owned the studio.
We played, but mysteriously, the sound would not stick to the tape. It showed up on the meters and they could hear it going down, but it would not play back on the tape. Ricky was disgusted. “Hillbillies,” he complained.
Packy’s uncle, Jim Stewart, who was trying to start a record label, liked Heinz a lot. Charles ended up with a recording deal. I had taught him to play enough piano—octaves and triplets—to write his own songs. The result, “Prove Your Love,” was the second recording released on Satellite Records (soon to be Stax).
Charles “Prove Your Love” Heinz quit the Regents to tour behind the record. On the road, he had a car wreck somewhere in Missouri. Charles went through the windshield and broke all his newly capped teeth, putting an end to his budding career. Years later, Charles became a very successful minister of music.
THE MAN IN BLACK
Stanley Neil played rock ’n’ roll with sheer contempt; that’s what made it so good. He loved country music and played with Roy Cash and Jimbo Hale for the love of the art. Roy, Johnny Cash’s nephew, had a radio show on KWEM called the Roy Raymond Show. I don’t think Stanley made any money playing with Roy but it was his passion. They wore black and gold cowboy shirts and pants with gold lamé military stripes down each leg’s seam. Stanley insisted on wearing this outfit on our rock gigs, which delighted me but irked Ricky no end.
One night in 1957, Stanley took me to Johnny Cash’s home, a ranch house in East Memphis, off of Shady Grove Road. The mailbox was shaped like a guitar. Cash was warm and friendly, joking with us, showing us a home movie of Elvis in Vegas with a couple of showgirls. Elvis wore his famous gold Nudie suit, had a champagne bottle in each hand, a costumed showgirl under each arm, and a foot-long cigar in his mouth. He was obviously drunk. Cash laughed and laughed, and told us Elvis had tried to buy the film for big bucks. He didn’t want his mother to know he smoked. The second time Stanley took me to the House of Cash, my idol Jerry Lee Lewis was passed out on the couch. Cash said Jerry Lee’s wife had put him out.
Steady Eddie built his drum kit one piece at a time. He found his kick drum in a pawnshop, his snare in some music store, and painted them red. He had big black letters, ET, on his kick drumhead with silver glitter outlines. I told people it stood for Early Times. He didn’t have a floor tom-tom until my senior year and he never had a hi-hat. He had a 26” Zildjian ride that’s the reason I have high-frequency loss in my left ear to this day. Before Eddie got the 26” ride, we would break into the school band annex on Friday night and “borrow” a cymbal and bring it back Sunday afternoon or Monday morning. (We almost got caught a couple of times.) That 26” ride was a killer. Terry Johnson from the Royal Spades had one like it; they could peel paint off the bandstand. We got a reputation for being wild and loud. We played the Sun catalogue. Ricky was the first Memphis guitarist who could play a Chuck Berry solo. Microphones were hard to get. We started with a handheld tape recorder mic plugged into a guitar amp. A high school fraternity paid us with a professional mic they had probably stolen from a church. We lifted a mic stand from one of the party rooms we played, and put the tape recorder mic on the back of the piano.
Our reputation grew. We worked college fraternity parties at Memphis State and Ole Miss. The college parties got a little rougher—beer kegs, sorority girls dancing on the tables, and fights and drama over whether or not they were going to pay us. They liked Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters material better than the high school kids did. But they also liked to mess with the band. They would grab the mic, sing “Fuck, Suck,” jump on the stage, dance like Elvis, or do a drunken duck walk. Some nights as we loaded our meager equipment after the party, frat boys would pour beer on our heads from the upstairs windows of the frat house.
When a fraternity had a special party, it was cool to hire a black band. The Mad Lads and The Thomas Pinkston Trio (actually a quartet) specialized in these parties. Pinkston had been the child protégé violinist in the W. C. Handy Band. His business card read, “Thomas Pinkston World’s Greatest Negro Hawaiian Guitar Player.”
Many of these parties, some of the best I ever attended, were held on a sandbar on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River. Thomas was a great singer with a rough whiskey voice, like Rochester’s on the Jack Benny show. He had an ancient (to me) drummer, L. T. Lewis, who had played with Count Basie. I copied Pinkston when I sang, but paled by comparison.
During Cotton Carnival we played hotel ballrooms in downtown Memphis. I thought we had really arrived when we played the Peabody Hotel. Some of these parties were for adults, who usually acted worse than the kids.
We made good money. We were nonunion, but usually played for more than union scale. My father couldn’t understand why I didn’t want a summer job. The money I made playing with my band didn’t count. He wouldn’t see it. For all our similarities in mood and character, the big difference between us was he didn’t possess the artistic temperament that kept rearing its head in my life. He had a good voice, but it meant nothing to him. He had sung in a quartet when he was in military school. They performed on the radio in Chattanooga. He saw no possibility of a future or career in the arts.
In ’57, before guitar players were a dime a dozen and you could learn how to play like Chuck Berry at your local music store, there were three guitar teachers in town: old man Tanquerey, who taught only classical and Spanish (flamenco) guitar; Len Vernon who taught basic jazz and was very good; and Lieutenant Forrest O’Kelly, who taught at Berl Olswanger’s, but was a cop, which ruled him out even then.
So you taught yourself. I still maintain rock ’n’ roll should be self-taught. Guitar players usually fell into two categories: jazz players who could maybe read music and played arrangements, and hillbillies, cowboy players who could not read music and played instinctively.
Black musicians, relegated to play either white, roadhouse honky tonks like the Plantation Inn or their own establishments, also fell into two categories. Schooled musicians played big band holdover jazz standards at sit-down, reading gigs in the theatres on Beale Street, with more sophisticated music than what was played at any of the white clubs except the Peabody Rooftop. The second type played black juke joints in the heavy ’hood or out on the highway, with a mixture of aspiring locals and traveling acts left over from the medicine shows who played blues from town to town on the “Chitlin’ Circuit.”
These worlds and groups did not mix musically or racially, except in the minds of Dewey Phillips and the generation of white boys who sought out blues, jazz, howling hillbillies on the Grand Ole Opry, and moaning bluesmen from Randy’s Record Mart. Amid the commercials for Hair Care (“for Kinky Hair”) and ads for an “autographed picture of the Lord Jesus Christ standing in the garden,” we heard Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf. We heard Smilin’ Eddie Hill and his Country Cowboys in the morning and Dewey Phillips in the afternoon, playing everything from Hank Snow to “the late, great Johnny Ace.” We soaked it up. When we met a brother follower of the new faith, we at least checked each other out.
Charlie Freeman came out of nowhere. Meeting Charlie was like meeting Packy Axton or Stanley Neal. At sixteen I could tell this guy was a pro. Somebody brought him and Steve Cropper over to my house because they played guitar. They both went to Messick in midtown Memphis, a social barrier between us, since everything in Memphis was a matter of race and where you went to high school.
We jammed in my basement that afternoon. I had bought a Silvertone Duo Jet from Steady Eddie. Cropper had a Telecaster. Charlie took lessons from Len Vernon and passed what he learned on to Cropper. Charlie leaned toward jazz but had a funky tone, a feel more like Lowman Pauling, who played with the Five Royales. We exchanged phone numbers. Charlie Freeman never met another musician without exchanging phone numbers, a ritual I watched over and over. Cropper kept getting shocked from stepping off the rubber mat that covered the concrete floor (he never did figure it out). Charlie never got shocked.
Charlie and Steve played with Packy Axton, Duck Dunn, Don Nix, Terry Johnson, and Wayne Jackson (who was from West Memphis and grew up listening to the music from the Plantation Inn). They called themselves the Royal Spades, named after a pinky ring with a diamond inside an Ace of Spades that singer Ronnie Stoots wore. Stoots sang with both my band and Charlie’s.
I played a couple of gigs with them at Neil’s Hideaway, a chicken wire joint on South Memphis’s outskirts. On my first gig there I naively asked Packy, “What’s the deal with the chicken wire?” It stretched around the front of the stage like a baseball backstop.
“Wait ’til eleven o’clock,” was all he offered.
The gig was pretty smooth. The piano was a piece of crap but that was par for the course. I liked playing with horns, Terry Johnson swinging like a rusty gate. Eleven o’clock came and the hillbillies hit the chicken wire with anything not nailed down. Ashtrays, beer bottles, hi-ball glasses, shoes, pocket books, everything. We kept on playing the “T-Bone Shuffle” like nothing was going on. Pieces of debris came at us through the chicken wire. Then it was over as quickly as it started. Packy looked over at me and rolled his half-shut eyes. I never questioned him again.
Charlie asked me to join the Spades, but I told him I had my own band. It seemed like a loyalty issue. Long ago Alec taught me the concept of gang loyalty, protecting your cohorts. I really enjoyed playing with the Royal Spades, but couldn’t walk away from the Regents.
In my high school art class was a girl from Colonial Acres. Carol Jensen was friends with Charles Heinz and from the same neck of the woods, the wrong side of the tracks from school and Poplar Avenue (a great dividing line that runs west to east through Memphis). Carol said her ambition was to marry Charlie Freeman. I wished her good luck.
The next year, when I was a junior, the talent show was a different story. We were stars. We had been gigging as backup for Kimball Coburn, a local Memphis-area celebrity of sorts. He had a regional hit called “Cute.” He was clean-cut with a mama’s boy haircut and a dark Italian suit. He would drop down and do a very embarrassing fruity little dance. But he had Portia Swain, a hot-looking blonde jazz dancer, as a side act. She danced while we played “Caravan.” We got Kimball to guest star for the talent show.
We did our act and backed a girl group doing “Mediterranean Moon.” In that group was Mary Unobsky, little sister of the notorious Mark “Butch” Unobsky, and Donna Weiss, who would later co-author “Betty Davis Eyes.” After Kimball sang the ever-present “Cute,” I came back and encored with “Hey Bo Diddley,” with the audience singing the call and response.
The forbidden, fascinated youth culture was thriving. We went to West Memphis to see movies the infamous Lloyd T. Binford and the Memphis Censor Board banned in Memphis. We sought literature from Evergreen Review and City Lights. I got my copy of Howl from a friend of my mother who had a bookstore in Texas. After my mother discovered what it was, she only gave it to me after she had read it to me aloud. Due to my poor vision, my mother always read to me—the Bible, Pogo comics, Treasure Island. Howl was the last thing my mother read to me, an unforgettable experience for us both.
Paramount amongst the forbidden were records banned from radio. In the teenage underground copies circulated from big sister to younger sibling, like a secret traditional rite of passage. “Drunk,” “Sixty Minute Man,” and most significant of all, were Hank Ballard and the Midnighters’ songs, forbidden magic with a hypnotic shuffle rhythm patter impossible to forget. “Sexy Ways,” “Work with Me, Annie,” “Annie Had a Baby,” and the key to it all, “The Twist.” If a teenage band could play these songs, success was assured.
Jimmy Reed started a guitar pattern that became a recurrent theme throughout his entire repertoire. It’s played by two, sometimes three guitars, a lead and a rhythm. Chuck Berry takes the same three notes from a basic boogie-woogie bass line and makes them the rhythm guitar part that was the hard-drive of rock ’n’ roll (and led to the eighth-note frenzy of punk rock). This same riff, with yet another slightly different groove and back beat, is present over and over in Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, unquestionably one of the best group names in rock ’n’ roll history.
The Midnighters.
Dark and mysterious.
The wee wee hours.
The rising of the moon.
A time when all good people
were fast asleep.
Surely not dancing
to the forbidden
Negro Be Bop!
My band played them all. We had a killer “Twist” groove in ’59, at least two years before public acceptance and the fad. I still get that old feeling when I hear the three-chord turnaround and the shuffle of the eighth note pattern, the intro to “The Twist” itself. The pattern took on the name “Shifting” locally, as opposed to “Chuckabilly,” which was slightly different from the Jimmy Reed pattern (none of which are played correctly today). The Stones call it “grinding.”
The golden era was brief. Elvis went to Hollywood and then the army. Dewey Phillips was kicked off the air. Jerry Lee Lewis married his cousin. Chuck Berry went to prison. The bottom dropped out of the rock ’n’ roll dream.
I cut my ducktails and joined a high school fraternity, thinking it would help get jobs for my band. It did. There was also social pressure. “Why don’t you get a haircut? You look like a hood. Do you have to wear that motorcycle jacket? Sit up straight. Turn your collar down. I’m not going to be seen with a hoodlum.” Girls, parents, teachers, preachers! Everybody wanted me to change. I tried. I got an Ivy League haircut, and started to wear a suede jacket and penny loafers instead of my beloved motorcycle boots with silver studs and horseshoe taps.
I made good friends in the fraternity, T. J. Oden, Lewis Young, Tom Winston. Vera applauded my change. She had joined DBS, the best high school sorority, and was busy moving up the social ladder, eye on the prize. I enjoyed belonging to something. Fraternity meetings gave me a purposeful ritual for Sunday afternoon.
It wasn’t destined to last. I don’t believe people really change. Despite Ebenezer Scrooge’s transformation in A Christmas Carol, in real life you have to play the cards you are dealt. Cleaning up my image made it easier to think about college, and probably kept me out of juvenile court and reform school or worse. I created a Bruce Wayne alter ego as a disguise. But I missed my ducktails.