Til The Cows Come Home: Rock 'n' Roll Nebraska
By Bart Becker 1985
4. The Others to the Eccentrics
Imagine my surprise then, when I grew up and started working for a newspaper, eventually started writing about entertainment and one leisurely day decided to browse through the paper's files for information on some of Nebraska's more famous groups only to find that there were hardly any files on local musicians at all! If nobody else was going to preserve my cultural heritage, I guessed I would do it myself.
It's probably evident that I've got a real strong naïve faith in rock 'n' roll. The chic music critics will probably dismiss the idea that rock 'n' roll can save the world. The line of thinking went out somewhere between the Altamont Speedway and the Watergate Hotel, right? I don't think so either, but you never know. I never caught on to the idea the rock 'n' roll was dead, never was able to in on too many of the fads or trends. It's not that I really expect rock 'n' roll will save the world, and I don't care whether it does (I hope something comes along pretty soon, though), I just believe in its power. It might be naïve, but the music speaks to me and for me lots of times.
Another thing, using the term "rock 'n' roll" even gets dangerous these days. If you just say "music" it will mean next to nothing. Even "rock 'n' roll doesn't mean much. Or more precisely, as Charlie Burton points out, it means something different to practically everybody. The music I care about and that I like to think cares about me now includes blues, jazz, RandB, reggae, folk, soul, bluegrass, rock, country and pop. At least. It seems to me that certain examples of all these kinds of music have something in common and what they have in common to me is that I like them all. Well that's not good enough. After all, boy, this is art now. Use the tools of literary criticism to analyze rock. Get with it. As Dave Robel says, I haven't figured out whether rock 'n' roll is serious fun or funny seriousness. And its corollary: rock 'n' roll's not a joke until it starts to get serious.
So I like James Brown, Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, Toots and the Maytals, Al Green, Fats Domino, Merle Haggard, Roland Kirk and all kinds of other things. County Basie. Jackie Wilson. Patsy Cline. The Clash.
It's not hard to listen to them, it's easy, even if you have to use a little different sensibility for each (and I'm not sure you do). I say they're all great and the reason they're great is just because they're great and I say so. If the only thing all these artists had in common was that I like them (it's not, but who's got time to analyze) that would be good enough reason to use them as examples of the wide range of idioms that rock 'n' roll can lead one to.
Popular music is always changing to meet the mood of the times thats what makes it popular. We can describe what has been or is popular now, but we can't even begin to guess what might be popular in the future. Popular music expresses the moral and psychological attitude of the day. Rock 'n' roll, it's been said, is supposed to be about not following rules. It is this unpredictability that makes it exciting to watch and study. The lachrymose ballads of the late 19th Century make no emotional sense to the popular music enthusiast of the 1980s; they exist only as artifacts. Rock 'n' roll really started with Elvis Presley. There had been some "rock 'n' roll" songs and some hit records and some stars, but there had not been anything like Elvis. The term "rock 'n' roll" is sometimes said to have begun as a racial slur, used to describe white youths' attempts to perform rhythm and blues music a style indigenous to black America.
As Mick Jagger so coyly put it, "It's only rock 'n' roll bu' ah lahk it" More directly, as a Nebraska religious fundamentalist said in 1980, while torching off a pile of vinyl, "rock and roll music has a hypnotic beat and the words are a coded spell." Exactly.
Given the karmic spectrum (remember karma? It'll be coming back one of these days), an argument can probably be made for the relative merits of supporting one's local musicians be they good, bad or indifferent.
Like any rock history, Nebraska's rock history gold rush days are in the dynamic period of feverish development 1963-69 or so. That was when it happened and it never happened so fast before or since. Some of the greatest music and some of the stupidest music played side by side. Some music was good because it was successful, some because it was honest, some because it was undiscovered, some because it was outrageous and some just because.
In February, 1964, Beatle-mania struck via the airwaves and the collective American teen rock 'n' roll ESP. "I Want to Hold Your Hand" came to America first, followed by "She Loves You," "Twist and Shout," "Can't Buy Me Love," Meet the Beatles, Introducing the Beatles, "Do You Want to Know a Secret," "Please Please Me," "Love Me Do," and The Beatles' Second Album. That was all before school let out for the summer. In June, 1964, The Dixie Cups' "Chapel of Love" was No. 1 while The Beatles charted "Love Me Do." July's top tune was an all-American endless summer "I Get Around" by The Beach Boys but the British invasion was in full stride, with the Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Peter and Gordon all in the Top 10. Other songs that rose to the top during the remaining months of 1964 included the Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go" (August), the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" (September), "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" by Manafred Mann (October), the Supremes' "Baby Love" (November). And get this: Bobby Vinton ended the year as he started it, in the No. 1 spot, this time with "Mr. Lonely."
Every town in Nebraska was sprouting bands, teen hops, ballrooms and clubs featuring live music. Nebraska kids, like kids worldwide, were drinking in the new was in music open-mouthed. When the Rolling Stones first North American tour hit Omaha on June 13, 1964, rock 'n' roll bad boy Keith Richard had an early sample of his lifelong close encounters with law officers. David Dalton dislodged a memoir from Keith for his introduction to the book "Rolling Stones."
Keith: "First time in Omaha in '64. Drinkin' whiskey and Coke out of cups, paper cups, just waiting to go on Cops walked in. "What's that? 'Whiskey.' 'You can't drink whiskey in a public place.' I happened to be drinking just Coke actually. 'No, man, I've just got Coca Cola."
In December, 1964, another top British group, the Dave Clark Five, played Lincoln and police officers had the task of controlling thousands of teens, mostly girls, in the throes of Anglomania. By 1966 parental concerns over the new rage were evidently being expressed since a July concert in Lincoln featuring Herman's Hermits and the Animals felt obliged to describe the latter group as "clean and tidy."
'Twas ever thus, at least since a decade earlier. When Elvis Presley played the University of Nebraska Coliseum in May, 1956, a ticket to see what was billed as the "Nation's only atomic powered singer" was going for $2. Three thousand local teens shelled out the deuce for the privilege of yelling their throats raw. A newspaper reporter saw it this say: "Presley, garbed in yellow sports coat with black strips, a blue iridescent shirt with a kimono collar, black pegged trousers and hair coiffured in 'ducktails' and sideburns, had the young Lincolnites in such a frenzied pitch they tried to grab him off the stage. One girl knocked down all of the stage foot lights while trying to grab the singer. Another grabbed a cord which disconnected the entire loudspeaker system."
Nebraska lagged behind the coasts but national and international trends were quickly reflected at the local level, proving, I guess, that the teenage grapevine was, and is, the most efficient and fastest form of communication. Omaha, of course, had most of the bands and consequently most of the best ones. Drummer Dell Darling of Oakland whose own combos such as the Others played "a fall-spring thing heavy, the high school dances. A lot of Homecomings in the fall, then nothing in the winter, then proms in the spring" remembers the Omaha groups as generally "more sophisticated."
Band personnel changed rapidly; the music business is pretty volatile at any level. The usual triumvirate of reasons is given for band breakups: professional differences, personality conflicts (somebody is screwing up, onstage or off) and money. Some groups have to regroup when the star leaps up to the next rung of the show biz ladder. Other bands crumble. Still others seem to dry up and dust away, leaving no prints. The national movements epitomized by the Beach Boys, the Beatles, soul and show bands, had their Nebraska counterparts in the Eccentrics, the Coachmen, the Rumbles, the Flippers and the Afro Brass.
By the mid-60s it was happening everywhere. It could happen to you.
Boys in "wheat" jeans and madras shirts cluster together, their hair pressed down into awkward nubbins of bangs in front and razored into high sidewalls above the ears. The air around any one of them contains more parts-per-million of Jade East than anyplace outside the cologne manufacturing plant. The densest agglomeration by far stands pressed near the bandstand.
Across the dance floor, girls are giving the once-over to their Barbra Streisand hairdos, Cutex Peppermint Pink lipstick and nail polish, and Bobbie Brooks mix 'em match 'em outfits.
A combo strolls onstage. A guitar chord rings out and the crowd, which is, to be sure, not too sophisticated about these things, is transfixed.
Nebraska supported an active dance band and jazz scene in the '30s and '40s. In the '50s a few early rock 'n' roll records were cut by such Nebraska artists as Carl Cherry and Sparkle Moore.
By the mid-60s, the state was a microcosm of the international rock scene and every town with a hall would hold teen hops. It was a time when a band could be immensely popular without benefit of a national hit and a disk jockey might play a record just because he liked it. Some Nebraska groups even broke out with tunes that made the national charts: the Coachmen, the Smoke Ring and, of course, Zager and Evans.
The Cornhusker State is not so far from civilization as to never pick up what was going on, but it was isolated enough to keep out of the drafts set up by the whiling of fads on the Coasts. As the social observer and author Tom Wolfe wrote: " . . . One week in October, 1961, a few socialites, riding hard under the crop of a couple of New York columnists, discovered the Peppermint Lounge and by the next week all of Jet Set New York was discovering the Twist, after the manner of the first 900 decorators who ever laid hands on an African mask. . . "
In 1962 Lincoln only had two clubs that featured rock music, the original Royal Grove and Robbie's Happy Corner in West Lincoln. The Saber Club, a teen dance spot upstairs at 12th and P came later. The Bygones, the Thunderbirds and the Eccentrics were the ruling local bands. High school combos played teen gatherings such as Woods Park pool parties, Nine High and Keen Time.
Besides the musical and sexual aspects of teen dances, they also served another time-honored ritual: fighting. This was generally innocent enough. I, myself, learned how to put up my dukes and also how to lose a fight quickly once it became apparent that victory was not the better part of valor. Sometimes, though, the violence had a more insidious cast, as when racial melees broke out at summer, 1968, Keen Time dances in Lincoln. According to newspaper reports, the initial fracas started this way: "Tension was created at the beginning of the dance by a fight between two Caucasian youths. After the dance a fight started between a Negro youth and a group of whites. The Negro fled an was pursued by a Lincoln park policeman. In the confusion that followed an innocent 16-year-old Negro girl was sprayed in the face with Mace by a park policeman. As the officer gave chase to the Negro youth, he was pursued by 50 or 60 other Negroes." The Mace, incidentally, was sprayed into the wind and blew back into the eyes of the officer who sprayed it. Subsequently, a couple of Keen Time dances were cancelled but a parks official said, "If we closed ever dance because of rumors of trouble, we wouldn't have any dances.")