Best of gaz 04 - Music Store, Inc



JULY 04

THE OLD BASS

Tahlequah, about 1970. Friendly Jim’s Pawn Shop had a bass guitar in the window. It looked like a Fender, but not like any Fender I’d ever seen. The body was not contoured; it was flat around the edge, and the headstock didn't have a point on it, so it looked like a Telecaster. It had no name on it and no serial number. It had two strings and was missing a knob and some screws. The price was $75. I asked Friendly Jim what it was and he said, “I got no idea. It’s probably a homemade attempt at copying a Fender.”

I inspected it and it was well made. It was a good job of copying Fender construction. The neck was smooth and the woodwork was well done. I was living out of my backpack and I sure didn’t have $75 or I would’ve bought it.

I thought of Blaine Trombold, my bassist friend who always seemed to have money, and told him about it. I knew Blaine since high school when he was in The Standells (Catoosa version) and he later played with Boiled Steam and Darkwood. He called me about a week later and said, “I bought that bass. I told the guy it’s guts were hanging out and I’d have to restring it and get it adjusted. I talked him down to fifty bucks.”

“You vicious cheapskate!” I blurted “The raw lumber is worth that much!”

He took it to Autrey Rutledge at The Guitar House to get it up and running. At that time, Fender had one of its three national warehouses here in Tulsa out by the Pepsi plant. Speedy West ran the place and all the guys there were old friends of Leo Fender. One of them stopped in the Guitar House and spotted Blaine’s bass on the bench and said “Holy cow, Autrey, where did you find that?”

“Some guy brought it in. Is it something?”

“That is a 1948 Broadcaster prototype bass that Leo built by hand in his garage!” Well, that explains why it had no decal and no serial number. They weren’t even close to production yet. I can’t tell you how many of these Leo might have made, but certainly not many.

Darkwood opened for The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band soon after he got it, at a festival in Stillwater. Their bass player offered him $1200 for it and Blaine just laughed. He would never sell it.

If that wasn’t enough, the bass sounded incredible. Through Blaine’s 4 X 12 Super Bassman Amp it felt like getting hit in the chest with a ball bat; solid, even tone. We recorded with Xebec in 1973 at Leon Russell’s Shelter Church Studio and Tom Russell, the engineer, said, “Man, I’ve never seen anything like this. That bass has perfect intonation. Every note he plays goes to the exact same spot on the VU meter. They’re all the same volume.”

Unfortunately, Blaine died in a car wreck in 1977. His widow Ann had the bass hanging on her wall for many years. It had been her husband’s prized possession.

This story appeared in Urban Tulsa in the early 1990s, and I ended it by wondering “How did that bass end up in a hock shop in Tahlequah?”

But there’s more. Ann had a daughter to support, and did it on her own. She still looked after Blaine’s mother. At one point, times got very tough. She was out of work and desperate. She took the old bass to a dealer in musical instruments.

“I’ve heard about this bass.” He said, giving it a superfluous glance. “But I can tell you it’s not what it’s purported to be. I’ll give you $150 for it.” It pains me to report that Ann was so needy, she sold it to him. He said she could by it back when she got on her feet, but he has never returned her calls.

I have serious doubts that this dealer was more knowledgeable about this instrument than the close friends of Leo Fender himself who originally identified it. It seems unlikely that an anonymous counterfeiter would make a bass that was as good or better than any Fender ever produced. It is also further questionable that a dealer who sells only expensive vintage American instruments would even pay $50 for a fake.

My Bible tells us to take special care of widows and orphans. One might surmise that there is a special place in Hell for those that take advantage of them.

I suspect it’s in a Japanese millionaire’s vault. Whether it’s worth anything or not, Ann would like to have her late husband’s bass back if nothing else but for the sentimental and musical value. Has anyone seen it?

J.J. Cale received a hero’s welcome from the full house at Cain’s. All the old hippies who could spare $30 were there. There were also some youthful hipsters. It’s reassuring that there will always be a cognoscenti, which you, as a Zig Gazette subscriber, are a part of.

Cale opened the show alone, doing some new material with some of those jazz chords - “Naughty chords” as George Harrison called them. He sang about three songs and then went into “Memphis Blues”, as it is sometimes called. “Mama don’t allow no guitar playing ‘round here.” The second verse was “Mama don’t allow no bass playin’ ‘round here. Whereupon Bill walked out on stage at Cain’s to a huge round of applause, so he may be impossible to deal with for a while. Maybe we’ll have to set up a table where he can do ‘laying on of hands’ between sets. This will probably have to be for females only. Ok, so we don’t know zackley when Bill is going to be decompressing from the big tour, he may be back right now. It’s unlikely the tour was extended, as Cale would prefer to cut it short. In the event that they aren’t done by this weekend, then Mad Dog will be with us.

“Well, if you’re using him, I probably won’t have a job when I get back.” Bill commented. The two bass players admire each other’s playing. It’s only guitar players that routinely grumble about each other, which is completely understandable. That’s why we only have one. In some bands even one guitar is too much.

A Little Musicology

Awards shows and best lists always make us mad. Zappa said “Most people wouldn’t know good music if it bit them on the ass.” Louis Armstrong said there’s only two kinds of music; good and bad.

I just want to point out a few artists that never get their due.

I loved Les Paul’s records. His sound was so modern and huge and it was engineered to make a Wurlitzer Juke box get up and dance by itself. Hearing those records in a diner with a tile floor was like being at a big concert.

The year before The Beatles hit there were two outstanding bands, a rare thing since the demise of Buddy Holly. First was The Beach Boys. When I heard “Surfin’ USA” (which is Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little 16’ with new words) I had to go out and buy a bass guitar. I wanted that Buck Rogers Fender that Brian played, but I settled for a Silvertone. I formed my first band that year and we did some Beach Boys, and a lot of Ventures tunes. We were also covering John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed.

That summer came “Memphis” by Lonnie Mack, another Chuck Berry rewrite. That cleaned our young clocks! As if that wasn’t enough, the follow-up “Wham!” knocked us for a loop. I went to see Lonnie Mack at Melody Lane, which is now The Caravan, and my fate was sealed.

Lonnie played a Gibson Flying V with a Bigsby Vibrato through a Magnatone Amp. His bass player had the green prototype of the later Thunderbird bass. He ran it through two Fender Dual Showman amps and it turned my knees to water. The band also had an organ & a Leslie and two Saxes. Lonnie Mack was the best rock guitarist ever, until Hendrix came along. He could sing like Wilson Pickett, too.

I used to sleep with the radio on. I guess it was 1966 when I awoke one morning with a foggy memory of a strange new sound. Maybe it was a dream? Then in the next day or two, I heard it again and realized it was real. It was “Shapes Of Things” by the Yardbirds. Jeff Beck had a guitar rig that would sustain notes until you stopped them, and he was playing like Ravi Shankar. The Yardbirds played a dance at the Civic Center Exhibit Hall with Jimmy Page on bass, and Jeff Beck blew us up against the back wall.

One night I heard Jimmy Smith’s “Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?” on Johnny Martin’s KRMG jazz show, and I knew someday I would have a Hammond organ. I carried the 700-pound albatross for twenty years.

I have worn out two copies of “A Long Time Comin' by The Electric Flag. The same goes for “Electric Ladyland” and “The Nightfly” by Donald Fagen.

The best American Rock band of all time, in my opinion, is The Band. They never cut one throwaway song. Everything they did has that timeless, enduring quality that few bands ever even partly reach.

A close second is the original Little Feat with Lowell George, one of the best slide players ever. They were funky, soulful, jazzy, countrified and warped all at once. Go get “Waiting For Columbus” and then try to tell me you don’t love it.

An obscure band I liked in the seventies was Seatrain. They weren’t instrumentally great, except for fiddler Richard Green, but they had folksy soul and great vocals and material.

Some start out promising but don’t follow through: Boston, Fastball, Alicia Keys. The best is often that which defies categorization, such as Lyle Lovett or John Hiatt. The older you get, the less easily are you amused. After fifty years of listening to pop music, I see that a lot gets recycled and rarely is there anything fresh and new.

I heard one of those pre-fab boys, from N Stync or something, making a ludicrous comparison, saying The Beatles were the first “Boy Band”. No, kid, that was the Monkees - THEY were manufactured like you. The Beatles were a real band that busted their asses playing their own instruments in filthy dumps, learning to deal with drunken mobsters and junky whores. They earned wisdom the hard way and it came out in their songs. You are a naive chump who passed an audition, and have been told what to do to sell product. Hanson will dance on your grave.

Probably the greatest collection of songs made in my lifetime was never intended for public consumption. It is almost secret, arcane and mythological in its stature. That would be The Basement Tapes recorded by Bob Dylan and The Band in 1967 on a two-track recorder. Musicologists will still be pondering those tapes in 100 years.

End of Rant.

JOHN HENRY’S PASSING Aug 2004

If you didn’t already know, Tulsa lost a great friend this past week. Johnny David “Rockin’ John” Henry died suddenly of a heart attack on August 11th, while visiting relatives. He was only sixty years old, though still a teenager in his heart. He was the greatest Disc Jockey since Wolfman Jack, and an inductee in the Oklahoma Jazz Hall Of Fame.

For those of you who are not in Tulsa, John was our best Disc Jockey for the last 25 years, the last of a kind. He was a DJ’s DJ, as KMOD’s Rob Hurt said.

He had worked in radio advertising and as a substitute DJ before he filled in one Saturday morning on KELi with a one-off special he dubbed Saturday Bandstand. The phones lit up and he was offered a job full time. The show was a great success, and continued all these years since 1980, even though it moved to KGTO, KAKC, KMOD and KQLL.

John would play obscure but important songs alongside the hits of the past, giving detailed history and annotations of what was known about the songs, the musicians, the songwriters, singers, players, and producers. He read about music voraciously, but a lot of his knowledge was directly from the many artists he met and interviewed on his shows.

For example, one morning he played “Train Kept A’Rollin” by Aerosmith. “Maybe some of you thought that was an Aerosmith song. But here’s where Aerosmith learned that song, from this version by Jeff Beck and The Yardbirds from 1966!” Then he played that version. “No, it’s not a Yardbirds song either. This is where The Yardbirds got it, and where their arrangement was inspired.” Then he played the 1959 version by Paul Burlison and The Rock And Roll Trio with the Burnett brothers. “However, that is not the original version either. Here is the original, by the Tiny Bradshaw Band, the jump-swing group, recorded in 1947!”

Obviously, John Henry knew his stuff. He was truly a walking encyclopedia of the history of Rock and Roll. He was also knowledgeable about just about all the popular music of his lifetime, including old time country and the blues. For a time, the first hour of his six-hour Saturday marathon was set aside for what he called “The Hadicol Hillbilly Hit Parade.” Hadicol was an old patent medicine with a high alcohol content sold for a variety of dubious ailments. He played unusual country songs, many of which were covered by pop and rock artists.

For a while, KQLL had him on weekdays, where he would spin actual records from his massive private library, but that show was sadly discontinued. The last time he counted his records, there were over fifty thousand of them. His collection was estimated to be several hundred thousand songs.

Seventeen years ago he began The Smokehouse Blues Show on KMOD Sunday nights from eight until midnight, where he played the best of blues past and present. The Smokehouse Blues Show also featured local bands live from the lobby of the radio station, jokingly referred to as “Studio B”. It also aired live broadcasts from Joey’s Home Of The Blues, which aired monthly for many years.

He foresaw the end of his era. A few years ago he told me about the increasing automation of radio. “In another five years, there won’t be any Disc Jockeys. They’ve already taken the turntables out. If I want to play a rare record, I have to burn a CD at home. Most of the songs are on a computer. A guy in LA can program all the music for a chain of stations, and his program tells the computer what songs to play and it inserts the station ID and the commercials automatically. One man can oversee the operation of several music stations. Oh, there will probably still be morning personalities like John Erling and Phil and Brent, but DJs as a rule will be a thing of the past.”

It’s a shame, really, that the commercial streamlining of radio is contributing to the soul being drained from popular music. Those of us who love music loved listening to someone like John Henry, who shared our passion and shared with us his vast knowledge of the art.

To know John was to love him. He was stoic, unflappable, and always there to cheer someone up, even strangers. No one ever saw him get mad or speak ill of his fellow man.

He created a niche for himself that no one else was filling at the time and was a world class expert in his specialty. Few people in any field achieve an iconic status such as he attained. Our culture has lost something very special with the too early passing of John Henry. His family’s grief is shared by thousands upon thousands of music fans. He can not be replaced.

As he always said when he signed off, “Stay with Rock and Roll and you’ll always stay young.”

Sep 15 2004

The Leslie(

“What’s that spinning thing behind the keyboard player?” people often ask. We have some flippant answers: It’s our Doppler Radar, an air raid siren, or a whim-diddly. If the sound man asks, it’s a problem.

Doppler is only partly a lie. It is actually called a Leslie( Speaker, named after its inventor, Don Leslie(.

“What does it do?” is the next question. The short answer is that it creates vibrato by the Doppler effect, but this often prompts further questions such as “Huh?”

It does more than that, though. Don Leslie was a mechanical engineer and musician. He bought one of the first Hammond organs back in the 1940s. Leslie thought the Hammond sounded rather flat. Electronics were crude in those days and there was no way to create vibrato (pitch modulation) but the Hammond did have a crude scanning tremelo (volume modulation).

It occurred to Leslie that when you hear a pipe organ, the sound is coming from several directions, since ranks of pipes are scattered throughout the hall; a reed sound could be coming from the left and a flute sound from the right. He thought that some kind of moving speaker might simulate this effect of depth.

You can’t really move speakers around in a circle without tangling up the wires and breaking them in short order. What he came up with has similar innards as the Altec Voice Of The Theater( speaker cabinet; a horn driver and a fifteen inch woofer. In a Leslie, the horn driver is pointed up and that rotating double trumpet armature above it throws the high frequencies out in a circle. The woofer is pointed down and fires into a cylindrical rotating baffle with an angled deflector inside it. It has two speeds; a slow chorale and a fast vibrato. It’s quite an ingenious contraption and they have been in production for 60 years now.

You have heard these speakers for years but didn’t know what you were hearing, and on the standard Leslies you don’t see the revolving horn unless the cabinet is turned around and the back upper board is removed. Any time you see a big wooden louvered cabinet behind the organ, it’s a Leslie(.

With a little tinkering, you can play guitar through one, or even run vocals through it. The Beatles often did this. Clapton and Joe Walsh have played through them too.

Eddie Kramer said Hendrix loved the effect so much, they built tiny Leslies from oatmeal boxes and erector set motors and had them sitting on the console at Electric Lady, to run tracks through.

On Born To Be Wild, during the instrumental part, you can actually hear the rotation ramping up. Inertia is expressed musically, what a concept. If you listen to this in your Dodge Challenger, you will invariably accelerate.

When a train whizzes by, blowing it’s horn, the pitch drops as the sound waves are stretched. The same thing happens when the Leslie horn spins away from you. But high frequencies fade in and out and pan from left to right. Phase Shifters emulate this effect. Sound bounces back at you at different times from different surfaces in the room; so there is much more occuring than just vibrato. It’s truly 3D sound you can only experience if you’re in the room with it.

In an interview a few years ago, Leslie said he had experimented with electronic simulation, using synchronized automatic stereo panners, vibrato and phase shifters. “The only way to create the Leslie( sound is to spin a horn.” He concluded. Jim Downing uses Leslie( speakers exclusively.

Leslie also invented rotary electrical connectors using interlocking rings with mercury inside; much more reliable and durable than brushes.

What brought all this up? Don Leslie passed away September 8th. He was 93. Believe it or not, the very same day we also lost Ernie Ball, the inventor of the light gauge “Slinky” guitar strings everyone uses today.

In 1970 there was a musical train trip across Canada. On board were The Grateful Dead, The Band, Janis Joplin, Dealney & Bonnie, and Buddy Guy, among others.

This wild rolling party was filmed. But the film was never released. Instead it was chopped up and the pieces were given to the participants, or their managers. For thirty-four years these fragments have been scattered about. At last the film has been reassembled and released as “Festival Express”. It contains lots of drinking and jamming on the train. There is reportedly some excellent concert footage by Joplin as well as The Band.

The movie was released to theaters a couple of weeks ago and opened at the Promenade 20 in Tulsa. The Tulsa World gave it four stars. We meant to go see it, but it wasn’t even on for a week. It was probably bumped off to make room for a Jessica Simpson movie or something. Now we have to wait for the DVD; oh well.

In case you’re too young to remember Delaney & Bonnie, let us clue you in. This group is definitely worth checking out and has a huge Tulsa connection. Delaney Bramlett was one of The Shindogs, the house band on ABC’s Shindig prime time rock show of the late sixties. The Shindogs included James Burton, Chuck Blackwell, Carl Radle and sometimes Billy Preston and Leon Russell. Bonnie (O’Farrell) was originally from Alton Illinois, near St. Louis and had worked with Albert King before she married Delaney. She was also the first white Ikette to back up Tina turner.

Delaney & Bonnie’s second album, “Accept No Substitue” featured one of their biggest hits, “When This Battle Is Over” –written by Dr. John. Musicians on this record included Radle, Russell, Jim Keltner (all Tulsans), Bobby Whitlock and Rita Coolidge. Many of the same people backed up Eric Clapton on his first solo album, after he toured as part of the Bramlett’s band. Part of that entourage went with Leon for the Mad Dogs & Englishmen extravaganza and four of them ended up being Derek & The Dominoes.

They also had hits with Dave Mason’s “Only You Know And I Know” and the atypical “Neverending Song Of Love”. Dave Mason also played on the first Dominoes tapes, as did George Harrison; see Clapton’s “Crossroads” collection

“Soul Shake” was another minor hit for them. Their live “Little Richard Medley” is definitely a barnburner. Bonnie also sang with Little Feat on the Dixie Chicken album. She’s the blackest sounding white girl you ever heard. She also had a bit part on the Roseanne show for a while.

So there you go. How’s that for a massive blast of trivia?

Novemeber 04

(((((

‘Twas last week that The Two Jims sat down with the unscrupulous John Wooley of the indecipherable Tulsa World. That’s all we did, we just sat. We looked at the ceiling some. Shuffled our chairs around. Cleared our throats. No, we did an interview; we interviewed Wooley for The Zig Gazette. He said, “Buy the album.” So we did, and now we’re in debt up to our thyroids. We need for you to buy some of them too. Wooley is a man of unquestionable taste. It’s bad taste, but it is taste. We jest. He thinks this album is at least as good as Werewolf Bikini Drag Strip.

No, John really likes the CD. His favorite is “1,000 Sunny Days” and he also likes “Cain’t No White Man Sing No Blues”. He asked us a lot of personal questions, which we refused to answer, like: “Have you ever seen a journalist naked?” What was that all about? We gave him a brief history of The Zigs and explained as best we could what we were trying to do, which is to try and figure out what we are doing. Of course, Zig babbled so much that probably only one tenth of what he said will end up in the finished article. Then afterwards he realized there were at least a dozen things he wanted to say which he forgot. So, The Gazette will print the entire text of the interview in an upcoming issue. You can print it out to line your birdcage. Our transcriptionist, Nadine Zig, is off doing community service right now, but when she gets back, we’ll have her type it up.

A photographer is coming out this weekend with a special shatterproof lens to take our picture for a big article to appear in said newspaper. It’ll be after Friday Night Football so we hope our article isn’t accidentally accompanied by a picture of The Bixby Spartans. Actually, they probably are a lot better looking than we are. We may not be handsome, but at least we wear shabby clothes. We may hit a lot of wrong notes, but at least we’re painfully loud. We may be rude and obnoxious, but at least we stink. This could go on and on..

Here’s what John Wooley said about our album:

“A new disk crammed full of original gutbucket barroom rock and roll and blues delivered with grit, humor, hard-earned insight and some moments of unexpected tenderness.”

You will never again see the words gutbucket and tenderness in the same sentence.

((((((

If you haven’t discovered it yet, John Wooley has a radio program, or as they say in England, programme. It is on KWGS 89.5, Saturday evenings at seven and is called Swing On This, because that is it’s name. He plays Western Swing Music, mostly from Tulsans or Okies and it’s one of the most enjoyable hours on Tulsa radio.

For instance, he played this real honkie tune a couple of weeks ago and you’d never guess who it was. It was “Oklahoma, Home Of The Good Old Boys.” The singer was David Teegarden, the band was Monk Bruce, and the composer was Bill Davis. Then he played some Hank Thompson recorded at Sunset West in 1981 featuring Jim Byfield and Debbie Campbell. It never ceases to amaze even us, how much musical history this town has. We don’t know how lucky we are, folks.

Local raconteur Pat Richardson gives us priceless advice in this quote from an old folk singer:

“There are three keys to success in the music business.

And nobody knows what they are.”

While we’re quoting people, it was that great philosopher Steve Martin who said “Before you criticize a man, you should walk a mile in his shoes. Because then you’re a mile away, and you have his shoes.”

Rodney Dangerfield: “When I first started out, the first place I played was so far out of town that my act was reviewed in Field And Stream!”

LONNIE MACK

The following is part of The Zigs Commnity Service. Just as we share our love of life through music, we share our love of music through the Gazette. There are no kickbacks involved and no animals were harmed.

Rock magazines are always publishing lists. Rolling Stone has been doing this all year, celebrating their 40th anniversary. We have seen the 100 greatest albums of all time, 500 greatest songs, 175 greatest guitar solos, album covers, ad nauseum. Guitar Player World had the 200 greatest guitarists, and so did Rolling Stone. They always leave out one very important artist.

If there is a Rodney Dangerfield of Rock and Roll, it is Lonnie Mack. He makes a small commercial blip in the history of rock, as he made little dent on the charts. But the same can be said of The Band and the original Little Feat. They never had any top ten hits, but their influence still spreads far and wide. Such is the case with Lonnie Mack. Most rock writers of today were not even alive in 1963 when Mack’s “Memphis” came out. They also know darn little about musicology or the development of different styles.

But most people don’t, nor do they care. To understand the music of that year, you had to be there and it helped to be a musician. Luckily, you have me to tell you about it.

In 1963, I was fifteen. I had been playing piano since 1954, two years before Elvis. I had studied Bach and Schuman and that ilk, but there were other ilks I heard as a child. I’d heard Les Paul, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Boogie-Woogie. In the mid-fifties I had found some R & B on the radio late at night. Later I dug Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. My first band, none of us had the guts to sing so we did lots of tunes by The Ventures, whose records were high quality.

It was hearing Surfin’ USA which prompted me to go out and buy a bass guitar. A Fender Bass recorded in Capitol studios and impressed on a 45 RPM record made a sound that grabbed you in your nether regions. The Beach Boys seem corny now but they were quite remarkable in 1963. The old Rockers were mostly off the scene and the radio was full of synthetic sanitized simulated Elvises like Frankie Billy Bobby Tommy Fabian. The only good Rockin’ at the time was coming from the girl groups like The Crystals, The Ronettes and The Shangri-Las. The Beach Boys were the first real rock band since The Crickets; they wrote, sang, and played their own songs. Well, they eventually did all the playing on their records. They weren’t great musicians, but neither were The Beatles.

But, before The Beatles, there weren’t many bands around. My mates and I had all been playing for a few years. In 1964, every boy on the block bought a guitar, but they couldn't catch up with us nerds who had already been picking since kindergarten.

Anyway, in the summer of 1963 there wasn’t much happening on the radio. When Lonnie Mack’s instrumental rearrangement of Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” hit our ears; we young musicians were asking each other, “Hey, what is this?” The flip side was a slow bluesy original called “Down In The Dumps” which featured Mack’s two Jewish sax players a little more, and had some high stinging guitar licks. It had a haunting quality of being ancient and new at the same time. As soon as “Memphis” slipped down the chart, the second single, “Wham!” knocked us for a loop. This is the first record that young Stevie Ray Vaughan bought, by the way. That should tell you something about the importance of it.

I was lucky to have Joe Henderson, program director of KELi 1430, Tulsa’s second Rock station, living right down the street from me. We talked about Rock and Roll from time to time, and he knew I had a little band going. He gave me a promo copy of Lonnie Mack’s first album “The Wham Of That Memphis Man”, which was on the Fraternity label out of Cincinnati. This album has been reissued twice that I know of, so it’s been on three different labels. I don’t know of any other album that can boast of that. We were surprised that Lonnie sings, and he’s a damn good soul singer, in fact. On the album, there were several instrumentals, and several vocal numbers. He took a country gospel tune, Martha Carson’s “Satisfied”, and created a sonic masterpiece using a New Orleans beat, a jiving horn section, and a trio of black female back-up singers. He covered Hank Ballard and did a scream on “Why?” that would give Janis goosebumps. Ace Moreland and Bill Davis have copied that rendition.

A few weeks later Joe Henderson gave me a free ticket to see Lonnie Mack. KELi was bringing him to the Melody Lane Ballroom. This ballroom is still standing and is now called The Caravan.

There was no warm up act. The ballroom had a low stage on the north wall in the center of the big room. The instruments were all set up. There were several Saxes on stands on the right side of the stage. Behind them was a Hammond B3 and a Leslie. On the left side of the stage was a pair of Fender Dual Showman amplifiers. These were powerful piggyback amps that had two JBL 15” speakers in each cabinet. Sitting in front of these amps was a bass like no one had ever seen before; it has a story of it’s own, but it was the prototype of the Thunderbird Gibson series. Its shape was more exaggerated than the production models and it was green and the headstock angled off to the right. To the right of the bass rig were two Magnatone guitar amps with two twelves in each one. Leaning up against them was Mack’s Gibson Flying V guitar with a custom fitted Bigsby vibrato bar. The Flying V was a fairly new model then and was the first guitar with a two octave fretboard. There was also a Fender Bandmaster amp and another guitar to the right of Mack’s setup.

Some bands come on stage rather casually and noodle around a bit and chatter before starting. Mack’s group filed silently onto the stage from the back and strapped into their axes without a word or a note. Mack bobbed his head three times and stomped his left foot on “four” and suddenly they were playing “Wham” at full volume! My knees almost folded under me; it was like being caught in a sonic avalanche. The bass alone was devastating. The musicians were all fantastic. One of the sax players played rhythm guitar on “Baby what’s Wrong?” and a few other songs. Mack knew the guitar inside out; he never even looked at his hands.

I believe my fate was sealed that night. I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a part of a group that made sounds like that, that banged out the Big Beat and made people dance as if they couldn’t stop themselves. My buddy Glenn Townsend was there that night and he was immediately afflicted with a Lonnie Mack fixation that lasted years.

Lonnie Mack did just the one album on Fraternity, and a few singles after that. Few singers are as good as Lonnie Mack, and no guitar player of the day could touch him. In fact, no one really surpassed him until Hendrix showed up. He did a killer version of “Further On Up The Road”. One single that I have is entitled “Lonnie On The Move” which is sort of like an instrumental “Turn On Your Love Light”. Ask any drummer who has heard it and you will get a wide-eyed look. His remake of the Bell Notes’ “I’ve Had It” may be the first power trio recording of just guitar, bass and drums. The hand is quicker than the ear; on “Chicken Pickin” you have to play the 45 at 33 to hear all the notes. Some of the singles were added to the album on the reissues on Elektra and Alligator. I’d love to find a CD box set of the complete Fraternity recordings.

Of course, just a few months into his pop career, a whole bunch of cute British groups turned the record business upside down and searing guitar licks and the real beginnings of Southern Rock that Lonnie Mack’s band exemplified were lost in the shuffle. He was ahead of his time.

He surfaced on Elektra around 1967, and did four albums that blended rock and country, “Glad I’m In The Band”, “Whatever’s Right”, “Hills Of Indiana” and “Pismo”. He recorded these at Elektra studios in Hollywood where he happened to be one day when Robbie Krieger asked him to play bass on The Doors' “Roadhouse Blues". Then he retired to the country again.

In the late eighties he came out again on Alligator with “Strike Like Lightning” which was produced by SRV. They played a showdown on “Wham!” and I hate to tell you, but Lonnie wins. There were a few other albums on Alligator, “Second Sight”, “Road Houses And Dance Halls” and the great live “Attack Of The Killer V”

The best music is almost never the most popular. Musicians who know their roots consider Lonnie Mack an awesome innovator, even an avatar of Southern Rock. If you love good honest Rock And Roll, you owe it to yourself to have some of Mack’s work in your collection.

Incidentally

Part of what made his guitar sound unique was the Magnatone amplifiers he used. These were made by the Estey Organ Company. The Estey name can be found on old Melodeons, or pump organs, from the early 1900s. Someone in the company patented a tube circuit that created true vibrato, or pitch shift. This circuit was first put into powered organ speaker cabinets in the 1950s, then into guitar amplifiers.

The first recording I know of with this sound was “I Found A Love” by The Falcons which was recorded in the same Cincinnati studio where Mack recorded. In fact, it might be Lonnie playing on that record, or it might be where he first found the Magnatone sound. The Falcons, by the way, included Wilson Pickett, Eddie Schoffield, Joe Stubbs (brother of Levi), Eddie Floyd (“Knock On Wood”), and Bonnie Rice (“Mustang Sally”).

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Our little diatribe about Lonnie Mack drew many responses.

Ignatz The Bartian asks: “Is Lonnie in the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame? If not, there must be serious petitioning forthwith. Mack was an icon in Bartlesville and responsible for the sale of many Magnatone amps there. Whammy bars forever!”

Of course he’s not in the hall of fame, even though he made his mark in Ohio. When Mack came to town he drove horses off cliffs, launched cattle with trebuchets. Yes, Ignatz does speak like that.

Steve The K, our Yankee guitar historian up in lower Michigan, says it was Robert Ward who played the guitar on “I Found A Love”. Ward and Lonnie were friends and both used Maganatone amps. The K also told us a while back that it was Kenny Paulson who played that Telecaster solo on “Tallahasee Lassie”. Even Freddie Cannon didn’t know that. The K was also impressed with all the guitar players who sat in on Jukin’ At Joe’s, and he’s no slouch himself.

Our European correspondent, Wynton Bluitt, writes:

“I learned to play drums playing along with Lonnie Mack and Bobby Bland albums. My band The Carpetbaggers was based in Lawton for a while and we spent a month opening for Lonnie at The Oriental Club. He was down to a four-piece band then with Hammond, bass and drums. They were all great players. The strings on that guitar were so high I couldn’t push them down.” Wynton also wants to know if anyone knows where his old organ player Larry Hall is.

Mack has his own website, . That first album has been reissued a couple more times. There were enough Fraternity tracks for about three albums. The label went out of business and that’s partly why Mack’s career stalled. He has his own label now and there are other old rarities that he has put out. According to , there were a couple of albums on Capitol as well, and another obscure label.

Lonnie bought his Flying V the first year they came out, in 1958. It is serial number 7.

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GORDON SHRYOCK

“Mister Guitar man, tell me what your secret am.”

We’ll get the bad news out of the way first. The Tulsa music community lost one of our most enduring citizens last week when Gordon Shryock shuffled off.

Some of us recall Gordon from back in the mid sixties when he played guitar with a local group called The Band. The other members of The Band were the Quick twins, Don and Paul on bass and drums, and none other than Jim’s piano teacher, Reverend L.Larry Bell on Wurlitzer electric piano. The bass and drums have to work together. What could be better than having identical twins in those chairs? This group also sometimes backed up a black male vocal group named The Duprees.

Of course, a few years later The Hawks changed their name to The Band. (They probably got the idea when they played the Continental Skating Rink at 11th & Frankfort.) Then in a later eighties incarnation they had the nerve to try and pass the Cate brothers off as the Quick twins; of all the nerve.

Anyhow, Gordon, Larry & the Quicks had an actual hit record on the radio here in Tulsa back in the days when radio stations would actually play local music more than one hour a week. It was called “Mister Guitar Man” and Larry sang it. It was actually a pretty good tune and a good recording to boot. That was Gordon playing guitar on that, wasn’t it, Larry?

Anyway, Gordon played around Tulsa for many years. In the late sixties he had a big weird band called Mundane Willis which included one of the Cowsills and sometimes Garry Lewis. They played one of the big free concerts out at Mohawk Park. He went on to be an engineer of renown and even had a couple of Grammy( awards for some gospel recording. Many of us have been on projects recorded by Gordon over the years. Gordon also worked for KWGS as an engineer. He was a solid, reliable guy with a great pair of ears, and will be missed.

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