Til The Cows Come Home: Rock 'n' Roll Nebraska
By Bart Becker 1985
3. The Fabulous Flippers to The Hallucinations
I grew up in Schuyler, Nebraska, a Platte River Valley town with a population hovering a few hundred Czechs over 3,000. Even as a kid I always had an ear for the pop music of the day and as an adult I find I can sing lyrics from songs whose popularity dates from my pre memory days. My older sisters weren't exactly rock 'n' roll fanatics I remember they weren't even too crazy about Elvis. But they were '50s teenagers and I couldn't help but hear their records: "Short Fat Fanny" on the yellow, white and black label of Specialty Records, "Jim Dandy," "Western Movies."
From the sixth or seventh grade whenever it is that a kid starts having a little walking-around money of his own I spent my loose cash on records. This was nothing unusual in my crowd; our primary focus of interest rotated among music, basketball, girls and drinking. As the saying goes, we majored in agriculture and beer, not necessarily in that order. If one of our little gang of thieves had a birthday, we'd all kick in and buy him a Beach Boys' Surfer Girl LP or something. If we didn't have any spending cash we'd simply steal the records we wanted from the local Ben Franklin store. There were two preferred methods for these shopping sprees: buy an LP and slip a couple of 45s into the dust jacket, or drop the 45's right inside your shirt or jacket and bust ass out of the store. Crude but effective. I remember lifting the Fireballs' "Sugar Shack" so I'd be hip at the 7th Grade dance party. My biggest achievement a few years later was swiping the Byrd's "Mr. Tambourine Man," the Cyrkle's "Red Rubber Ball" and Ian Whitcomb's "You Turn Me On" on a summer day wearing only a T-shirt and cutoffs. If I remember it right, my buddy Flea boosted "Do the Clam" by Elvis on the same trip, though Lord only knows why. Anybody who hung around Don's Pool Hall wil forever associate the summer of '65 with the incessant repetition of the Yardbirds' "For Your Love" on the jukebox.
In my hometown and economic status "poor but happy" there was no such thing as summer-time weekday teenage recreation. Kids worked. Weekends, teens would get some young adult to buy beer and everybody would wade out onto a big sandbar in the Platte River, throw footballs, play whiffleball, swim a little, get sunburned and drunk. Nighttime recreation consisted mostly of keggers parties on little-traveled country roads featuring a keg of beer and carloads of minors with the radio blasting. As mentioned, my crowd of little hoodlums had a troika of interests: alcohol (sloe gin, creme de menthe, malt liquor, cherry brandy mixed thick with 7-Up and keg beer were the intoxicants of choice); basketball (state hoops champs in 1968); rock 'n' roll music (I flipped when I got my first look at a copy of Are You Experienced). The pursuit of happiness was inexplicably but inextricably meshed with our three more conscious pursuits. Some people find the key to the universe in a Chuck Berry riff and some don't.
Once a week of so there would be a teen hop at the local Oak Ballroom, a beautifully designed WPA project, presenting homegrown and area talent. Plains touring acts like the Rumbles and minor national acts such as Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids or Jimmy soul.
My older brother Peter used to go to teen hops at the Oak, this must have been around 1958 or so. He'd come home and tell me marvelous stories about the magic moment at the start of the hop when the hall would suddenly dim, blue stage lights would come up and the reverb-heavy guitars would bite into an instrumental "Rawhide" or "Raunchy" or whatever theme was being used. I couldn't wait until I could see it for myself, which finally came when I was about 11. (Or 12 I might be thinking I was 11 because at first I was supposed to be home by 11 'o clock instead of staying until the place closed at 1 a.m.) In any event, I am crystal clear about the first live rock 'n' roll band I saw the Fabulous Flippers. In this early incarnation they featured a big sign onstage with their name and they were a simple four-piece combo doing tunes like "Long Tall Texan." Personally, I couldn't imagine that anything, anywhere, ever, was going to top this. The next several times I saw the Flippers (probably a dozen or more performances altogether), they were the big brassy show band so fondly remembered on the Plains. That first time loud and galvanizing was a revelation to me. But not half as much as in 1963, when the Angels came to town touring behind their hit "My Boyfriend's Back." They sang the tune with choreography that included turning partly away from the crowd and delivering the sultry vocals while peeping back over their shoulders. This would make a cynic laugh, or weak in the stomach. Then or now, happily, it is the stuff that makes me weak in the knees. My curfew was forgotten; I could go home at 11 o'clock any night but the way my instincts figured it, seeing the Angeles was a once-in-a-lifetime deal. That, so far, has been the case.
It was also about the 6th or 7th grade that my own first combo appeared. Now we are getting to the real history. No name, but it was a trio of me and Kenny Lee on guitars with David Cook on drums. Lee's brother, Carroll, was a good country musician and a Travis-style guitar picker. He gave us rudimentary business advice that is still sound: make sure our pay for a job will cover enough gas and beer to get you home. He also taught us our first tune, Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman." We figured out our second one, "Gloria," on our own. If I remember it right, we debuted at a birthday party. God only knows what sort of equipment we had I recall a microphone perched on a makeshift, broomstick stand. Some combos were well subsidized by their parents to buy lots of rolled and pleated equipment but we were not that kind. We usually had to make do with second-hand, borrowed, cheap or homemade goods. A few years later we had advanced musically but we were pretty much in the same boat equipment wise when the front panel of one of homemade PA columns having undergone emergency repairs minutes before the curtain went up on a performance shook loose from its cabinet during "Good Lovin'" and toppled off the stage to the amusement and amazement of dancers at the Sweetheart Ball or Sno-Ball of some otherwise unmemorable event.
Prior to the early '60s, playing in a combo was considered a somewhat low-life extracurricular activity, not too far removed from car-clubbing (for the musicians, not the audience). The combo I played with, the Hallucinations (same name as a band Peter Wolf and J. Geils were running in Boston at the same time, although I only learned this a few years ago), began appearing in the fall of 1966. By October we had been playing parties and rehearsing for eight months. The Hallucinations (Bart Becker, bass and vocals; Kenny Lee, lead guitar and vocals; Jim Finley, rhythm guitar and vocals; David Cook, drums and vocals; and, later, Paul Ehernberger, organ) wore only the finest in suede Beatle boots (ankle-high fence climbers with Italian heels, an elastic insert in the upper, and accented by a zipper guaranteed to break on about the fifth zip), white jeans, polka dot shirts with white collar and cuffs. A hot outfit, doing cover versions of tunes like "Play With Fire," "Blue's Theme From the Wild Angels," "Born to Be Wild" and "Latin Lupe Lu." Styles change, of course, and by the 10th grade I was more likely to be spotted wearing a Nehru shirt and medallion but still with the white pants. In a word, groovy.
I offer up this little history of my adolescent entanglement with music not because I like writing about myself so much (I'd write a whole book, "Adventures of a Farm Boy" or something, if that was all it took) but because I figure it will be not too different from what lots of other people have experienced. Rock 'n' roll is the most powerful force of this generation. TV is more pervasive, perhaps, but it is passive and it crosses generations and besides that, most of it sucks, if you'll excuse the euphemism. The same with most radio since the early '70s, but that's because of programming and marketing, not because there isn't good music to play. Aural wallpaper. Lots of people, as they get to be adults, have figured that rock 'n' roll is for kids. For my generation it's understandable. Since 1970 you can listen to most radio stations all day long without hearing anything you really care about. You could easily believe the music died. But as any number of people have pointed out, rock 'n' roll never forgets, it will never die, it can deliver you from the days of old, and, most importantly, there's only one thing can make you act like that, and it's rock 'n' roll behavior.
All through high school and college, music was one of the main forces in the day-to-day life of me and just about everybody I hung out with. I just assumed that rock 'n' roll was one of the handfuls of essential concerns for everybody. It's certainly under the skin of millions of people.