THE CASINO WITH SCOTTY AND BILL
(1960)
In the 1950s, Wink Martindale was a Memphis TV personality with a kids’ show on WHBQ—Mars Patrol, set inside a rocket ship with the audience facing a control panel. Each afternoon Wink and his crew of kids blasted off to a Flash Gordon serial adventure. He also co-hosted Dance Party, a Saturday afternoon teenage show featuring couples from local high schools and local musical guests. Anita Wood, Elvis Presley’s girlfriend, co-hosted. That’s where I first saw Jerry Lee Lewis playing with a trio (no guitar). At first the kids laughed at the long-haired piano player, but by the end of the first song they weren’t laughing.
Martindale did a live, show-stopping interview with Elvis early in ’56. Wink asked, “Elvis, when you got out of Humes High School, did you think all this was going to happen to you?”
“I didn’t think I was gonna get out of Humes High School,” Elvis snarled, leaning on a jukebox.
Wink moved to L.A. and the big time. WHBQ threw a farewell party concert at the old Casino Youth Pavilion on the fairgrounds. The lineup featured Thomas Wayne, starring behind his current hit “Tragedy,” and Warren Smith, the “Ubangi Stomper,” one of my favorite Sun artists. Scotty Moore and Bill Black had just quit Elvis, and were the backup band most of the evening. My band backed Kimball Coburn. We played two sets of four songs. Ronnie Stoots and I each sang one song a set. Kimball Coburn did two. Anita Wood, now Elvis’s ex-girlfriend, was backstage. Bill Black always liked me. He thought I was funny. Backstage he asked me, “Dickinson, you got a bass player yet?”
“No,” I answered.
“Well, by God, you got one tonight!” Bill had just gotten a Fender electric bass; it sounded great. We did our first set. I sang Little Richard’s “Send Me Some Lovin’.” It went over real well.
Second set, Ricky encouraged me to do “Hey Bo Diddley,” but I hadn’t brought my guitar. Bill said, “Why not use Scotty’s?” Ricky asked Scotty’s permission, since I was pretty drunk. I could tell he was reluctant, but nodded his approval. We did Stoots’s song. Kimball did “Cute,” his local hit. Bill looked over halfway through and asked me, “What’s the name of this song?”
I told him, “Cute.”
“Never heard it,” he said, without missing a note.
I strapped on Scotty Moore’s high-end Gibson guitar, and started to tune down to open D for “Hey Bo Diddley.” I saw Scotty off stage, freaking out. It was too late to stop. I was too far gone. The crowd went nuts. They hollered back, “Hey, Bo Diddley,” and hooted and hollered when it was done. I staggered off stage past Scotty frowning his disapproval, as Bill howled with laughter. Anita stood there, goggle-eyed. “That was fantastic,” she gushed. “Could I have your autograph?”
I signed her arm with a ballpoint pen. Warren Smith slapped me on the back. Scotty doesn’t trust me to this day.
After the Casino Wink Martindale Farewell Show, my band’s shape changed radically. Ronnie Stoots quit and joined the Royal Spades full time. What hurt worst was when Stanley Neil joined the army. He was a great musician, and put an edge on the band we never regained. However, this meant I now played guitar all night. Playing guitar drunk and playing piano drunk are different things. On piano all you have to do is avoid the cracks. Our gigs suffered. I would do one Jimmy Reed song after another, which was not yet popular with the crowd. “Hey Bo Diddley” turned into a medley that sometimes lasted twenty or thirty minutes, causing fights and trouble. We developed a bad reputation. “We’re not paying for a band. We’re paying to watch Dickinson get drunk,” one sorority complained. I could neither argue nor deny.
We still had no steady bass player; that made us a trio. I got a good friend of mine, Saul Belz, to sing background and play maracas. He was a good showman and had a better voice than mine. He came from a prominent, powerful Jewish family, big supporters of Israel. Somewhere I have a handbill in Hebrew for a bond rally that reads “The Regents—Guns for Israel.” Saul had a really cool older brother. He turned me onto a Big Bill Broonzy record that introduced me to country blues. Big Bill played solo acoustic guitar. The songs didn’t have the rigid twelve-bar structure of electric urban blues, like Jimmy Reed’s or Muddy Waters’s. It was black, primitive folk music, the motherlode where black music on radio came from. Saul’s brother knew the older musicians. One night when I went to pick up Saul for a gig, Jerry McGill and his bodyguard, Norwood Carter, were at his house. Norwood was sitting on the refrigerator.
“Norwood,” I asked, “How did you get up there?”
He flapped his arms and replied, “I’m an eagle. I flew up here.”
“I didn’t know you could fly, man,” I said.
“You can fly, too,” he said, holding out a black and red capsule in his hand. That was my first hit of speed. The gig that night was really hot, even if the tempos were a little quick. I didn’t sleep until Sunday night.
Ricky got word Brenda Lee was auditioning guitar players for her road band. We went over the river to Danny’s club in West Memphis for the tryout. The club was afternoon empty, and smelled like cigarette smoke, stale beer, and industrial-strength disinfectant. Amps were set up on the dance floor in front of the bandstand. A few local ringers had shown up, sheepishly sitting around the tables in front of the kitchen door. Ricky did okay. He was the only one who could read the chart. But the standout guitarist was a curly-blond-haired country boy a few years older than Ricky and me. Chips Moman talked fast and had a million-dollar grin. He took over, like he was in charge and ran the show. He had a conspicuous jailhouse homemade tattoo on his right forearm: a pair of dice showing snake eyes and the slogan, “Born to Lose.”
Gene “Be-Bop-A-Lula” Vincent was also there, in the same tour package as Brenda. He was crippled and dressed in black. In the road case for his Stratocaster I saw a snub-nosed .38 Special and a bag of what I assumed was marijuana. This is the big time, I thought.