Deke Dickerson Writing Samples

Liner notes for Town Hall Party on Bear Family Records

By Deke Dickerson, October 2004

One of the rarest country music albums ever released on a major label, the Town Hall Party soundtrack LP was always rumored to exist but was rarely if ever seen outside collectors' circles. But here it is, for all to hear: a spotless reissue of the aforementioned rarity, now available in digital format!

A genuine barn-dance country-music show that was televised every Saturday night, Town Hall Party was Los Angeles's equivalent to Nashville's Grand Ole Opry. Many country and rockabilly fans believe that during the 1950s, Town Hall Party was actually better than the Opry. This album certainly makes a case for that argument.

Los Angeles might seem like a strange place for a hotbed of hillbilly and country music, but in the mid-century period there was a resounding demand for it, driven by the large numbers of transplanted Okies and other people of rural backgrounds who migrated west seeking work after World War II. Even stranger still, the south-central suburb of Compton, today known only for its rap artists and gang violence, used to be the central nervous system of hillbilly Los Angeles, and the home of Town Hall Party.

Town Hall Party started in 1951 when country music promoter William B. Wagnon Jr. decided that the West Coast needed a top-notch country music Opry-type show. He put together a cast of musicians and singers for a weekly Saturday night shindig that was originally broadcast on NBC radio, then live on KTTV television beginning around 1952. Los Angeles was home to quite a few country music programs, and Town Hall Party was not the only show of its kind. The Hometown Jamboree in El Monte, the County Barn Dance in Baldwin Park, and Cal's Corral in Long Beach were just a few of the other local Los Angeles country music television shows. However, Town Hall Party was always the biggest and the best, and the only one ever syndicated for national release (Western Ranch Party was the title of the syndicated version).

The Town Hall Band, who backed up all the guest artists, was a crack outfit led by superb multi-instrumentalist Joe Maphis. Maphis was a transplant from Maryland (via Richmond, Virginia, and Cincinnati, Ohio) who played guitar, fiddle, banjo, mandolin, and bass (among other instruments!), earning him the nickname "King of the Strings." He and his wife, Rose Lee, were also featured performers on the show and had their own contract with Columbia Records as a vocal duo, in addition to Joe's solo contract as an instrumentalist. The Town Hall Band also included Skeets McDonald on bass (he recorded for Capitol and Columbia as a vocalist -- see Bear Family's excellent Skeets boxed set), Dick Stubbs (later Marian Hall, and even later, Billy Mize) on steel guitar, blind pianist Jimmy Pruett, "Fiddlin'" Kate Warren on fiddle, and Marion "Pee Wee" Adams on drums. This group backed up many of the Town Hall artists on their various recordings, and they are playing on most of the tracks here.

Regularly featured artists on Town Hall Party included the Collins Kids (Larry and Lorrie, who also have a Bear Family boxed set), Freddie Hart, Tex Ritter, Johnny Bond, Tex Carmen, Les "Carrot Top" Anderson, Dortha Wright, and Bobby Charles. As it turns out, all of them but Ritter recorded for Columbia, which made a soundtrack LP like this possible.

Many country music legends appeared as guest artists on the show: Gene Autry, Tex Williams, Ernest Tubb, Johnny Cash, the Sons of the Pioneers, Ray Price, Jimmy Wakely, Ted Daffan, Tommy Duncan, Hank Snow, Hank Thompson, Doye O'Dell, Lefty Frizzell, Wanda Jackson, Patsy Cline, Webb Pierce, Ferlin Husky, and Carl Perkins, among others, plus dozens of lesser-known artists.

Most of the tracks on this album appear to have been recorded specifically for this project, but Columbia did draw from other sources as well. At least two of the tracks by Joe Maphis had already been released as Columbia singles. One song by Tex Ritter was licensed from Capitol Records. "Wait for the Light to Shine" features the entire cast in a group sing-a-long.

Note to collectors: Some of the tracks have not been reissued anywhere else. Freddie Hart's "Lonesome Love" was recorded specifically for this LP and doesn't appear on his recent Bear Family collection. Jinks "Tex" Carman's "Every Minute Seems a Million Years" appears to be the only track he ever recorded for Columbia, and if you're a Tex Carman completist, this track is not found on any of the three Bear Family compilation CDs. The tracks by Dortha Wright, Les "Carrot Top" Anderson, and Bobby Charles were also recorded specifically for this project and have not been reissued anywhere else. The version of "Oklahoma Waltz" by Johnny Bond is a re-cut of his 1947 Columbia hit recording, this time featuring the Town Hall band.

One of the most appealing aspects of the original soundtrack album was the stunning full-color cover showcasing the entire cast in their finest western duds. In addition to showing off the various vibrant Nathan Turk and Nudie outfits, it also featured the great Mosrite custom doubleneck guitars played by Joe Maphis and Larry Collins. One could certainly make the claim, from viewing this album cover, that the West Coast country music scene was every bit as colorful and exciting as the Nashville scene, if not more so! (Interestingly, Fiddlin' Kate Warren was incorrectly listed on the cover as Dortha Wright, who is not in the photograph.)

As great as this soundtrack album was, visually and musically, it sold poorly, probably because its target audience was largely limited to the Southern California region. Original copies are very rare and command collectors' prices, so thankfully we now have this great reissue CD for all to hear. We hope you enjoy it!

Liner notes for Davie Allan and the Arrows' Blues Theme on Sundazed Records

By Deke Dickerson, January 2005

Some of the most interesting records in the history of rock and roll were the ones that straddled the fence -- with one foot in a preceding era and one foot in a new, uncharted direction. Think about Bill Haley and the Comets making "rock and roll" records in 1953 with a steel guitar and accordion, or for that matter the Beatles' embryonic Liverpool and Hamburg days playing hits from the 1950s with a faster, louder beat that ushered in a new era.

In much the same way, Davie Allan and the Arrows' classic 1967 LP Blues Theme straddled the fence between the earlier surf and twang days of the Ventures on one side and the long-haired biker grunge rock of the late-1960s flower-power generation on the other. Frozen in a classic moment in time, when hippies were on the front page of the newspapers but the general public still wore buzz cuts and bouffants, the fuzz-drenched instrumental rock of Davie Allan and the Arrows must have seemed as dangerous as a gang of outlaw bikers coming over the hill.

"Blues Theme" was a monster hit in the spring of 1967, reaching the Top 5 all around the West Coast and #37 on Billboard. The song had been cut as a quickie for the movie The Wild Angels (Peter Fonda's biker flick that came shortly before Easy Rider) but soon found a life of its own as a hit single and title track for Davie's second long-player.

The history of Davie Allan and his producer/cohort Mike Curb has been well documented in the first installment of this reissue series by Stephen McParland, but we'll touch on the important facts again here. Davie and Mike Curb both attended Grant High School in Van Nuys, a suburb of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. They met in the school choir but discovered that they both had a love for rock and roll; Davie was a wunderkind on the electric guitar and Mike Curb was a piano player and entrepreneur of the highest order. Soon the two began collaborating, which led to a string of great but obscure surf instrumentals released under such names as the Heyburners, Mike Curb and the Curbstones, the Zanies, and many others.

Eventually Curb released "War Path" / "Beyond the Blue" under Davie Allan's name on the Cude label, but it wasn't until "Apache '65" b/w "Blue Guitar" was released in late 1964 on Curb's Sidewalk label that the famous nom de plume "The Arrows Featuring Davie Allan" appeared. Originally the band name was derived as a way to capitalize on the Indian motif of "Apache '65," but the name stuck and would serve Davie for the rest of his career.

The next few years would see Davie Allan and Mike Curb collaborating on a staggering number of records, film soundtracks, and side projects. There were so many sessions (and multiple uses for the same backing tracks, in many cases) that discographers are just now beginning to fully unravel the extent of this highly productive period of creativity.

Davie's first self-credited album (released as The Arrows Featuring Davie Allan) was Apache '65, released on the Tower label in 1965. It was a great collection of clean-sounding surf guitar instrumentals, concentrating heavily on the Indian theme. Some of its tracks ("Tee Pee," "Tomahawk," "Indian Giver") wouldn't pass the PC-censors today.

What followed in the next few years was a near-complete transformation of Davie's sound – and, for that matter, the music business in general. The Beatles hit the American record market like a hurricane, wiping out all surf instrumentals in their path. At the movie theaters, the Beach Party series starring Frankie and Annette was no longer in fashion, and a new breed of films emerged that documented (and exploited) the new juvenile-delinquent-hippie-biker-drug scene on the West Coast. Mike Curb and his crew at Sidewalk Productions were there with their fingers on the pulse of this emerging genre of films, and over the next five years they would produce over twenty soundtrack albums with Davie's musical involvement.

There were in fact eight soundtrack albums issued before Davie's second self-titled LP, Blues Theme, was issued in 1967 on Tower Records. Listening to the soundtrack albums, one can hear Davie and his crew transform from a squeaky-clean surf group into an angry bunch of outlaw malcontents over the course of only two years!

In retrospect, Davie Allan and the Arrows were the only group besides the Ventures to survive the British Invasion and the Hippie Movement and continue producing guitar instrumental music through the late 1960s. Both groups had to adapt to the changing times, and interestingly enough both groups learned to use and love a new electronic gizmo called a fuzztone.

Distorted guitar was nothing new, dating back to the '40s when blues and western swing guitar players had to turn their small amps up all the way to compete with horn sections and drummers. Link Wray is generally credited with being the first to intentionally make a fuzz effect by punching holes in his guitar amp's speakers, creating the overdriven effect heard on his landmark instrumental hit "Rumble." Similarly, Paul Burlison of Johnny Burnette's Rock 'n' Roll Trio had a wildly distorted sound on the influential rockabilly obscurity "Train Kept A-Rollin'," which was caused by an amp malfunctioning from a loose tube.

However, the first fuzztone as we know it today was created accidentally by Nashville engineer Glen Snoddy during a 1961 Marty Robbins session. As Robbins was cutting "Don't Worry," one of the preamps on the recording mixing console began to malfunction and create a unique, fuzzy, distorted tone. Guitarist Grady Martin saw its commercial potential and used the effect on the record, which became a hit. After that artists clamored for the special effect for use on their records until Snoddy built a stand-alone solid-state battery-powered pedal unit and marketed it to Gibson. This unit became the first commercially available fuzz, known as the Maestro Fuzz-Tone.

Soon "fuzz" was the order of the day, with companies like Vox and Fender making their own version of the effect. Perhaps the wildest fuzz of the era, however, was the infamous Mosrite FuzzRite pedal, which created a very compressed, psychedelic-sounding fuzz that was perfect for the new "freakout" music. Both the Ventures (who co-owned Mosrite and had a hugely successful line of Mosrite Ventures model guitars) and Davie Allan used the FuzzRite pedal, and that's the sound you hear all over these recordings.

Davie was still using his surf equipment, namely his Fender Jazzmaster guitar and Fender Concert amp, when he borrowed a Mosrite FuzzRite from a friend for "Blues Theme." After the wild new sound was committed to tape, there was no turning back, and even today Davie Allan carries the title King of the Fuzz Guitar. It's a totally unique sound, one that is instantly recognizable as Davie Allan and nobody else. (It should be noted here that even though Davie and the Arrows are pictured on the cover holding Mosrites -- including Davie's famous doubleneck -- the entire Blues Theme album was recorded with the Fender Jazzmaster and the FuzzRite pedal!!)

The song "Blues Theme" was recorded quickly, in mono only, to meet a production deadline for the movie The Wild Angels, where it was used in Peter Fonda's introductory scene. In fact, the motorcycle sound effects spliced onto the record are actually from Peter Fonda's Harley Davidson! Soon the hit potential of the song was realized, and it was released as a 45, and then as the title track for Davie's second album. Since it was recorded so quickly, however, a stereo version never existed.

The most important thing to remember when approaching the Blues Theme album (or any of Davie's other records from the '60s) is that none of them were planned as albums. They were made up of many sessions, some released as 45-rpm singles (the prevailing format of the day) and some as soundtrack recordings. To make things even more confusing, some tracks were used on soundtrack albums, then new guitar solos (and in some cases, vocals) were overdubbed to create "new" songs. In that light, the Blues Theme album is quite an interesting hodgepodge.

"Blues Theme" was released first as a Tower single, and then subsequently re-released on the album of the same name. "Theme from the Wild Angels" was also released as a single, but not before being used on the Wild Angels soundtrack LP. "King Fuzz" was an instrumental remake of a Harley Hatcher vocal originally called "The Twirl" (and subsequently reused as "Mario's World" on the Albert Peckingpaw's Revenge soundtrack LP). "Theme from the Unknown" was released several times previously under different names ("U.F.O.," "The Dark Alley") before making it to the Blues Theme LP under its original title. "Fuzz Theme" was retitled "The Young World" for the Teenage Rebellion soundtrack LP, then released under its original title on the Blues Theme LP. "Action on the Street" was originally called "Make Love Not War" on the Teenage Rebellion soundtrack LP, then overdubbed with a second solo and renamed for the Blues Theme LP. "William Tell '67" was recorded in 1965 and originally intended for the Apache '65 album, but it lay in the can for two years before being included on Blues Theme. The remainder of the tracks, "Ghost Riders in the Sky," "Theme from Thunderball," and "Sorry 'bout That" (the latter written around Don Adams's catchphrase on the Get Smart television show) were miscellaneous songs that had not been used before. Confused yet? If not, then please note that "Blues Theme" was released (misspelled) as "Blue's Theme" on the 45 credits, but listed as "Blues Theme" on the LP. Got it now? If not, don't worry... The Davie Allan, Mike Curb, and Harley Hatcher discography is a twisted tale that confuses even seasoned researchers of the genre.

The musicians that appeared on the Blues Theme album alongside Davie were Drew Bennett and Larry Brown, with Jared Hendler on keyboards. Wayne "Mickey Mouse" Allwine and Don Manning joined the group soon after when Larry Brown quit playing to concentrate on recording and producing.

One last interesting aspect of the sound and character of the Blues Theme album concerns the studio and recording engineer. All of the Davie Allan recordings were done at American Recording Studios with a young Richie Podolor behind the glass. Podolor was a hotshot producer and engineer who had started making rockabilly records in the late 1950s (under the name Dickie Podolor), then began recording such landmark hits as "Let There Be Drums" by Sandy Nelson. Under another assumed name (Ritchie Allen), Podolor released several dozen of the best surf instrumentals of the day on Imperial Records before finally giving up as an artist and concentrating on running his recording studio. As an engineer and producer he is responsible for many legendary recordings by the Standells, the Chocolate Watch Band, Steppenwolf, Iron Butterfly, Alice Cooper, Three Dog Night, and the heavy metal band Alcatrazz (yikes!)!

In short, everything that Podolor touched had a distinctive sound to it. With one of the first Ampex four-track machines in Los Angeles, he had overdubbing capabilities in the mid-1960s that were years out of reach for most other studios. His famous comment was: "Give me a Neumann U47 [microphone] and an Electro-Voice 666 [microphone] and I'll go make a hit!" Given his track record, it would be hard to deny that statement!

Listen to the Blues Theme album and you'll hear the transformation of instrumental music from one era to the next. From the pure Nokie Edwards-styled twangy guitar picking of "Theme from the Unknown" and "Ghost Riders in the Sky" to the far-out psychedelic sounds of "Action on the Street" and that career-defining track "Blues Theme," Davie Allan took the instrumental surf-guitar genre and carved his own niche. That much can never be denied him. Viva la FUZZ!

(With thanks to Davie Allan and Garrett Immel)

Liner notes for the Freddie Hart boxed set Juke Joint Boogie on Bear Family Records

By Deke Dickerson, April 2004

Freddie Hart will always be remembered in the annals of Country Music for his runaway 1971 number-one hit "Easy Loving." In fact, most biographies of Freddie begin with that song and detail the many accomplishments that came after that: the eleven number-one hits he penned, the numerous top-forty country hits that lasted until the late 1980s, the many Grand Ole Opry appearances.

But what most biographers fail to mention is that Freddie had one of the longest and most arduous climbs to the top of any country music star in history, having begun his recording career almost twenty years earlier. Dozens of fine and deserving hillbilly, rockabilly and stone country singles and albums were issued before Freddie would have a major hit, a fact that remains like an old bruise with Freddie to this day.

When told that the compilation I was interviewing him for was a collection of his early Capitol and Columbia sides from the 1950s and early 1960s, Freddie's comment was, "Son, I don't believe anybody remembers those records." It took quite a bit of explaining that there were indeed a lot of collectors and fans out there who really liked these recordings, but the pain on Freddie's face told of the struggle and disappointment that those early years must have held for him. Hopefully this compilation will dispel illusions that these records, simply because they were not huge hits, weren't some of the best hillbilly boogie and hard-core country discs to emerge from the West Coast in those formative years.

To understand the roots of Freddie Hart's music, it is imperative to understand the roots of the man himself. His personal story reads like a tale by Faulkner, from its grim Southern Gothic beginnings to its hard-earned chart-topping success story.

Freddie Hart was born Fred Segrest on December 21, 1926, in the small town of Loachapoka, Alabama. The town of Loachapoka is a short drive from Auburn, where wealthy, old-money southern kids go to earn college degrees and train for the good ol' boys' country club. But even though they are close geographically, in culture and class Loachapoka might as well have been on another planet. Loachapoka is an Indian name that means "the place where turtles are killed." The town's largest social event is the annual "Syrup Soppin' Day." To this day it remains a place where the only way to get by is through hard, manual labor.

Freddie grew up as poor as dirt, in a family of ten boys and five girls ("Our outhouse had three holes," he recalls), working in the fields mostly as sharecroppers, picking cotton and doing whatever other kinds of labor they could find to put food on the table. It was a hard life, but Freddie has many good early memories of the family singing and playing music together and listening to the Grand Ole Opry every week on their battery-powered radio. As with many southern families, music played a large role in easing the burdens of everyday life, and Freddie began playing the guitar at the tender age of five, at first using a guitar fashioned from a cigar box and wire from a Model T car.

Freddie admits he was the "black sheep" of the Segrest family, having run away from home at the age of seven. When he was twelve his parents enlisted him in the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps). This was a Roosevelt-sponsored program initiated in the Great Depression that took in idle young boys (read: juvenile delinquents whose parents could not control them) to help reforest the land and labor in civil rebuilding projects. Freddie went willingly because "at least in the CCC Camps I'd have enough to eat," something that wasn't guaranteed at home. It was a rough-and-tumble year for the youngster, living in faraway camps for months at a time. If he didn't know how to fight before he went in, he came out a man ready to take on the world.

When Freddie returned from his yearlong stint with the CCC, he found it hard to readjust to farm life. Having never owned a new item of clothing, and tired of threadbare hand-me-downs, Freddie recalls seeing an enlistment poster for the Marines and thinking that he wanted a sharp blue suit, just like the one on the officer in the picture. He was only fourteen years old, but his parents agreed to lie about their son's age in order to help him enlist, just in time for World War II. The great irony is Freddie spent his entire time in the service wearing green battle fatigues, never getting to see himself in the tailored blue suit that had prompted him to enlist.

Freddie shipped out to fight in the Pacific, and he spent three years and five months serving in Guam and Iwo Jima. Although he must have seen some bloody front-line action, Freddie doesn't like talking about it, and he has mostly fond memories of his experiences in the Armed Services. He recalls playing guitar and singing with his fellow enlisted men, playing in front of an audience for the first time, doing gigs at officers' clubs at night. He also used his time in the Pacific to learn martial arts, becoming a black belt in both jujitsu and judo.

Like many young men returning from the war, Freddie came back to Alabama in 1946 and found life there too boring to endure. The next few years found him drifting throughout the South doing every odd job known to man, all the while trying to find opportunities in the music world.

One particular incident appears to have offered Freddie the inner strength to keep his dream alive. In Ken Burke's book Country Music Changed My Life, Freddie relates a particularly gruesome story about being falsely accused of rape in Longview, Texas. At this time Freddie was stocking beers and Cokes and living in a small trailer behind a bar, where they would occasionally bring him in to sing a few songs. After a fourteen-year-old girl was brutally raped and beaten, Freddie was taken in by the local police and subjected to beatings and humiliation that would rival a scene from Cool Hand Luke. He was nearly beaten to death by the corrupt police chief until eventually his innocence was established and he was released.

When the judge released him from jail, Freddie promptly tracked down the police chief at home and beat the hell out of him. Amazingly, this was with the judge's approval! It was Texas in the late 1940s, after all. Flooded with relief after escaping this brush with death, Freddie was reborn with an inner strength that would sustain him through the tough times in his career. Oddly enough, several years later, in the early 1950s, he taught martial arts at the Los Angeles Police Academy, which must have felt like poetic justice.

Determined to make something of himself in country music, Freddie tried breaking into the Nashville establishment. He hitchhiked many times to Nashville, with little success at first. His attempts to find somebody interested in his talents met with complete indifference. But he did eventually encounter someone who would help his songwriting and professional outlook: Hank Williams.

As Freddie relates the story, Hank Williams imparted a secret of successful songwriting that Freddie now refers to as "setting people to music." Hank told him that people related to the common man, and stories of everyday life and living. Though the advice was simple, it was brutally honest, and Freddie took it to heart. He began writing original songs and trying to pitch them to anyone who would listen.

By this time, Freddie had married his second wife, who was from Newport, Arkansas. Through mutual acquaintance he was introduced to Wayne Raney, who lived nearby in Wolf Bayou.

Wayne Raney was a legendary figure throughout the rural South. He was most famous for his country harmonica playing, both on his own records and with the Delmore Brothers. One of the originators of the hillbilly boogie sound, he was at the height of his fame in the late 1940s, having scored big with his signature song "Why Don't You Haul Off and Love Me" in 1949.

Freddie managed to meet with Raney and audition some of his original songs. Raney liked Freddie's songwriting, and in fact he would later record Freddie's "Gone with the Wind This Mornin'" for King Records. At the time, Raney took some of Freddie's songs to Nashville, eventually pitching "Every Little Thing Rolled Into One" to George Morgan.

Freddie worked a string of odd jobs, doing everything from working in the oil fields to being a short-order cook, until fate took him westward. He set out for California but found himself at a Cottonseed oil mill in Phoenix, Arizona. He got laid off due to a strike and things weren't looking good for him, but when he saw that Lefty Frizzell (essential listening: Bear Family's Lefty Frizzell Life's Like Poetry boxed set) was going to be playing at the Riverside Ballroom, he thought it might be a good opportunity to pitch some songs. He knew his old buddy Wayne Raney was good friends with Lefty, having toured as Lefty's harmonica player, and he decided to introduce himself to the nation's top country singing star. (At the time of this show, Lefty had an unprecedented four songs in the top ten.)

Freddie found out that Lefty was staying at the Adams hotel in downtown Phoenix, and so he called up to Lefty's room and dropped Raney's name as a mutual acquaintance. Lefty replied that any friend of Raney's was a friend of his, and invited him up to the room. When Freddie got to the hotel, both Lefty and his booking agent Steve Stebbins were there.

Lefty remembered who Freddie was, informing Freddie that he had wanted to do "Every Little Thing Rolled Into One" but that George Morgan had gotten it first. Lefty asked him to sing a few tunes, and he was impressed with what he heard.

Later that night, after the show, Lefty asked Freddie if he would be interested in going on tour with him, more or less as a "roadie" even though that term hadn't been invented yet. Freddie leapt at the chance and immediately hit the road with Lefty's entourage. Soon Lefty and Freddie were inseparable buddies and Freddie was added to the show, acting as an M.C. but also singing his own songs as well as harmonies with Lefty.

Although Lefty was the top singing star in the nation, he was hell bent on a path of self-destruction, mostly due to his rampant alcoholism. As a result, there were many nights when Freddie was called upon to kill time while Lefty sat backstage drinking coffee and trying to sober up enough to do the show. It was a quick learning experience for Freddie to have to fill so many different roles, and he became a quick study on how to read and finesse an audience.

His experience with Lefty also gave him his first tangible break into the music industry. Lefty's booking agent Steve Stebbins signed Freddie to a five-year booking contract with his Americana company. Lefty took Freddie down to Nudie's and helped him get his first flashy western suit. And last but not least, when Lefty's group relocated to Los Angeles they hooked up with Cliffie Stone and his Hometown Jamboree television show. As a result, Lefty was able to get Freddie a recording contract of his very own with Capitol Records.

Back in those days, signing with a major label like Capitol did not mean what it does today. There were no million-dollar advances, no tour buses, no full-page ads in the trade papers. On June 8, 1953, Freddie was simply allowed to record at the tail end of a Hank Thompson session at the old Capitol studio on Melrose using Hank's band to back him up. Musicians included Billy Gray on guitar and "Pee Wee" Whitewing on steel guitar, both venerable members of the Brazos Valley Boys.

In the space of an hour, Freddie cut four songs, which became his first two singles on Capitol. It is interesting to note that for this first session, Freddie didn't do any of his original songs. The excellent Tommy Collins song "Whole Hog or None" is included here.

By this time, Freddie Segrest had found a new stage name. After going by several names, including Fred Waynard, his new agent Steve Stebbins suggested Freddie Hart, utilizing his grandmother-in-law's maiden name. The name instantly stuck, and his first Capitol record listed Freddie Hart as the artist. He would never have to use another stage name for the rest of his life -- it was a great pseudonym for a country singer.

It was a humble start, but Capitol producer and A&R man Ken Nelson had faith in the young singer. Sales of the first two singles were minimal, but Nelson brought him back in the studio six months later to cut four more songs, this time with Hollywood A-list session musicians and players from Hometown Jamboree.

This session yielded Freddie's next single, "Loose Talk." In addition, two excellent hillbilly boogie songs were recorded but not released at the time: "Juke Joint Boogie" and "Heart Trouble." These two songs appeared in fake stereo on budget cash-in LPs in the 1970s, but we can hear them here for the first time in pure, unadulterated mono, straight from the masters.

"Loose Talk," one of Freddie's compositions, became his first successful record, reaching the lower rungs of the country charts. Carl Smith covered it on Columbia Records and took it all the way to number one in 1955. Freddie's reputation as a hit-making songwriter was now cemented in place.

"Loose Talk" wound up having a life of its own, having been covered over fifty times. It even achieved the unlikely feat of being a top-ten hit twice, when Buck Owens and Rose Maddox covered it in 1961 and took it to number four.

The success of "Loose Talk" gave Freddie a reputation in the country music world that was very similar to the early career of Willie Nelson: It was said that he could write hit songs for other people but couldn't buy a hit with his own recordings. Freddie wrote songs for Porter Wagoner, George Jones, Patsy Cline, Billy Walker, and his old pal Lefty Frizzell among many others, but none of his own recordings made much chart impact. It was a stigma that would haunt Freddie for over a decade, but, as he recalls, it didn't bother him because the mailbox money was showing up every month and songwriters kept clamoring for his tunes.

Freddie did three more sessions for Capitol in 1954 and 1955, which yielded five more unsuccessful singles. Even though they were great West Coast country records ("From Canada to Tennessee" is an excellent example included here), all featuring cream-of-the-crop West Coast sidemen, none of them made the charts.

Ken Nelson, faced with a dilemma but having faith in Freddie, then decided to do what no A&R man has ever done before or since. He had a meeting with Freddie and told him that he just couldn't get a hit for him, as much as he had tried, and as a result he thought that a different approach was needed to get Freddie the hit he was seeking. Nelson then told Freddie that he was going to call up Don Law from Columbia Records and let him have his contract.

There's more! Download the entire liner notes as a Word document.

A technical appreciation for Gene Vincent's recordings, for the boxed set The Road Is Rocky on Bear Family Records

By Deke Dickerson, 2004

Fans have long admired the technical excellence of Gene Vincent's recordings, especially the Capitol albums from 1956 to 1962. But besides the fact that they are great-sounding records with amazing musicianship, the documentation and details of how these recordings came about have been somewhat shrouded in mystery, and what little has been written about them has been plagued with false facts and inaccurate modern views toward old-school techniques of making records. This addition to the Vincent boxed set is for those who yearn to know more about these recordings, and who thirst for more technical information about how these great rock and roll records were made.

The most important thing about understanding early rock and roll is knowing that all the recordings were done live in the studio, with no overdubs. This means the entire band was playing live in a room with Gene singing at the same time in the same room. Unlike today, where recordings are done one instrument at a time on multitrack recorders and mixed later on, these records were made on an extremely limited time schedule and then mixed on the spot to glorious mono by the producer. The first five Vincent albums were mono only; only the sixth LP, Crazy Times, was issued in both stereo and mono, and the last Capitol LP, Crazy Beat was a UK-only release available in mono only. Understanding this fact makes one realize just how incredibly talented the musicians and recording engineers were -- these are still some of the best-sounding records of all time!

"Mono" has often been understood to mean "low fidelity," and nothing could be farther from the truth. Mono simply means that there is only one channel representing the sound. A popular term in the 1950s was "high fidelity," which meant that the recording was of a high-standard, mono, source. When stereo came into use in the late 1950s it was intended to represent a binaural, three-dimensional, realistic picture of the sound spectrum, much like the human ears hear naturally. In reality, few understood true stereo then or now, but it was a great gimmick for the electronics stores to sell two amplifiers and two speakers with each turntable, thus doubling their profits (shades of today's "latest gimmick" mentality). The term stereo was soon hijacked, however, and a realistic binaural three-dimensional representation was abandoned by most recording engineers (save for a few jazz purists, like Rudy Van Gelder, who continued to record incredible stereo imaging on his LPs for Blue Note) in favor of goofy "ping-pong" stereo effects and gimmicky stereo panning: for example, guitar only in the left speaker, and vocals only in the right speaker. In this regard, many of the transitional records from 1958-66 actually sound much better in mono than they do with these artificial-sounding stereo mixes. Knowing these general facts, one should appreciate that the mono Gene Vincent records represent the very best in 1950s recording quality, and that the term mono in and of itself does not mean anything in terms of fidelity.

Gene's first two albums and his first batch of singles were recorded at the famed Owen Bradley studios in Nashville, Tennessee. The correct name for the studio located at 1804 16th Avenue South was Bradley Film and Recording Studios, not to be confused with Owen Bradley's later Quonset Hut (located in an actual Quonset hut set behind the original studio house) and Bradley's Barn (built in the early 1960s, outside the Nashville city limits, and the only studio of the three that still exists today), which have been incorrectly listed in other liner notes as the studios in which Gene cut his early recordings.

The original 16th Avenue studio was in a two-story house that Owen Bradley had converted into a recording studio by removing the floor from the first story, thus creating a sunken studio with a high ceiling in the basement. There was a long stairway leading down to the recording floor, and behind it were a bathroom and a utility room, the latter of which was converted into a small echo chamber.

1956 recording technology was primitive by today's standards, but much of the equipment that Owen Bradley used was state-of-the-art at the time. In fact, fifty years later, that type of gear is still highly sought out for use in today's digital studios, because those microphones, preamps, compressors, etc. are acknowledged to be some of the finest of their kind ever made.

Bradley used Ampex 300 and 350 tape recorders (a 300 for the master recorder and a 350 for tape echo) along with a custom-made mono mixing console. He didn't switch to his famous three-track recorder and three-buss mixing board until about 1958. The most obvious effect on the Gene Vincent recordings is the liberal amount of slap-back tape echo on Gene's voice and Cliff Gallup's guitar. Bradley and engineer Mort Thomasson's obvious affection for slap-back tape echo can be heard throughout, especially on tracks like "Catman," where the echo on the guitar is louder than the original signal, a great defining effect that has been imitated by rockabilly bands ever since. There is obviously compression and limiting on these tracks, but it is unknown whether or not Bradley had a compressor in his studio or if this was added during the mastering phase. The only other effect Bradley used was reverb, which came from the small echo chamber in the utility room by the stairs. This short, unusual reverb is the distinctive sound heard on Dickie Harrell's snare drum. Bradley used utilitarian RCA 77 and 44 ribbon microphones on the guitar amp and upright bass and rhythm guitar, but he used exotic (for the time -- Bradley was among the first to obtain them in the U.S.) German condenser microphones made by Schoeps and Neumann for the vocals and drums. (It's possible that at this time, Bradley was also using an Altec M-11 condenser microphone for the drums.) It should be noted that some of the promotional photos shot during the first session were set up by Capitol producer Ken Nelson, especially the one showing Gene singing three or four feet away from an RCA microphone with the Capitol logo on the front. Anyone who has ever used an RCA ribbon microphone knows that you wouldn't hear much from a vocal recorded that far away, and anyone with a technical ear can also plainly hear that Gene is singing into a condenser microphone. So beware of false impressions based on the Capitol promotional photos!

When Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps came into Bradley's studio in May of 1956, they were among the first rock and roll acts, but Owen Bradley had previously recorded several early rockabilly sessions for Roy Hall (September '55), Jimmy and Johnny (December '55), Buddy Holly (January '56), Johnny Horton (January '56), Bobby Helms (April '56), and Johnny Carroll (April '56). It was apparently Johnny Carroll's suggestion to Bradley that he use exaggerated amounts of slap-back tape echo, though there was already quite a bit of the slap-back echo in evidence on the January '56 Buddy Holly session (which yielded "Love Me" and "Blue Days, Black Nights"). Engineer Mort Thomasson devised the setup for the slap-back tape echo, which producer Bradley used with glee. He continued using slap-back echo on such rockabilly acts as the Johnny Burnette Trio and many others, helping define the rockabilly sound more than anybody else besides Sam Phillips.

An interesting footnote about the echo: The first session that Gene did at Bradley's was recorded dry (no echo), with tape echo added later to the entire mix (unlike today, they had no post-session mixing capabilities). The original dry tape surfaced recently and is included here, and it's very interesting to hear the difference! By the time Gene and the Blue Caps returned for their next session, Mort Thomasson had devised a more controlled method of utilizing slap-back echo only on certain instruments through the use of a second slap-back echo machine placed directly next to the master recorder (more on this below).

Unlike Sam Phillips, Owen Bradley almost always used his A-team of session musicians, a group of the best players in the world that included Grady Martin and Hank Garland on lead guitars, Harold Bradley (Owen's brother) on rhythm guitar, Bob Moore on bass, and Buddy Harman on drums (among others, but these five men represented the nucleus). They were called to the studio for the first Gene Vincent session, but after hearing the Blue Caps play (especially Cliff Gallup's lead guitar work), Owen Bradley and Capitol producer Ken Nelson agreed that this time, Gene's band should be on the session. It should be noted that not even Johnny Horton and the Johnny Burnette Trio were afforded this courtesy, and their recordings were augmented with studio musicians. In fact, to my knowledge, Owen Bradley never recorded any other rock and roll act without help from the session men.

Using Gene's band was not without problems, however. Harold Bradley recalls that young Dickie Harrell hit the drums so hard, it was the first time they ever needed to use baffles (room dividers) at the studio! In addition, Gene sang quietly, so in order to avoid leakage from the loud drums into Gene's vocal microphone, Bradley kept moving Gene further away from the drums until eventually he was singing behind the staircase, out of view of the rest of the musicians! This is also why on the first session, before they could sort out the baffles, Dickie Harrell used brushes instead of sticks to tone down the volume. It's funny to think about in the context of today's loud rock music, but this was the dawn of rock and roll recording and there was a lot of trial and error.

For many Gene Vincent fans, there are two distinct "sounds" of his recordings: the era with Cliff Gallup on lead guitar, and the era with Johnny Meeks on lead guitar. These two eras also fit neatly into the recording history, since Cliff Gallup recorded only at the Nashville Owen Bradley studio, and Johnny Meeks only recorded at the Hollywood Capitol Tower studio.

Cliff Gallup's sound was defined by several key elements. First and foremost, he was a musician of staggering technical proficiency. He obviously listened to a lot of Les Paul and George Barnes, and he stated in his only interview that he was a fan of Chet Atkins but had a style that was all his own. His jazzy runs complemented Gene's style, not only on the fast songs, but also on the ballads. It is safe to say that Cliff Gallup's lead guitar work has influenced every aspiring rockabilly guitar player since. However, if you've heard him playing live on the Alan Freed show recording, the tone of which was completely different, it is also obvious that the choices of the producers and engineers who recorded him also heavily influenced the sound of Gene's records.

Cliff played a Gretsch Duo-Jet guitar with DeArmond pickups. It was a cheaper imitation of the black Gibson Les Paul Custom Black Beauty, and Cliff bought the guitar to have an instrument similar to that of his idol, Les Paul. The DeArmond pickups in particular gave a distinctive, clear, ringing tone, and they figured heavily into his sound. Cliff later recalled that he played a Standel amp at Bradley's studio, but if studio pictures are to be believed, he was actually playing a Tweed Fender Pro amplifier, which had been modified with a JBL fifteen-inch speaker to replace the stock Jensen. It is possible that Chet Atkins's Standel amp was in Bradley's studio for one or more of the sessions, but the only picture we have of Cliff in the studio plainly shows the tweed Pro with an RCA microphone in front of it. Regardless, the two amps both had JBL fifteen-inch speakers, so at the low volumes involved in studio recording, they probably sounded very similar. Every bit of the tape echo heard on the guitar tracks came from Bradley's control room, utilizing the Ampex tape recorders. This was before the era of stand-alone guitar effects; with the exception of the 1955 Echo-Sonic amp, which had a built in tape echo, external tape echoes were not available until the release of the Ecco-Fonic in 1958. On these recordings, Cliff played dry, directly into the amp, and the echo was applied in the studio's control room.

In order to clear up a few misconceptions about how Bradley used slap-back tape echo, we have to step back into a different era of recording technology. Unlike today, the mixing boards back then did not have "echo sends" for each channel. Echo was achieved by placing a second, separate microphone on each source (in Gene's case, the vocal and the guitar amp) and running those not through the main mixing board, but instead straight into the second Ampex machine, which was set on playback monitoring mode during recording to achieve a slap-back echo effect. The slap-back echo was actually an accident of design; the Ampex machine had three recording heads (erase, record, and play) situated slightly apart from each other, and when monitoring off the playback head during recording (achieved by setting the monitor knob to playback), it was slightly delayed from the real-time signal that was being recorded on the record head. This slap-back effect from the second machine was then fed back into the main mixing board on a separate channel and mixed together with the dry signals from the vocals and guitar, then finally put down on the master tape recorder with a balance of the dry signal and the echo. The reverb on the drums was achieved the same way, with a separate microphone running into the echo chamber, folded back into the mixing board as a separate channel. It was a primitive yet effective way of achieving these effects, and one with unique tonal characteristics, since there were different types of microphones being used for the dry signal and the echo signal. Among the first things that Bradley built into his famous three-track mixing console were echo sends, but before that, all sessions (including the Gene Vincent sessions) were done in the earlier, more primitive way.

One last important factor in Gene's Nashville recordings was the presence of Capitol producer Ken Nelson. Many of the pioneering techniques used during the Gene Vincent sessions -- the choice of material, and ultimately the decision to use Gene's own band -- can be attributed to the enterprising spirit of Ken Nelson. He was truly a father figure for rock and roll and was directly responsible for much of Capitol Records' success in the new genre. The great sound of Gene Vincent's Nashville recordings can largely be attributed to the amazing chemistry between Ken Nelson, Owen Bradley, and engineer Mort Thomasson, not just any one of them.

The year 1957 brought about a complete revamping of Gene's band, and Ken Nelson decided to record them in the newly constructed Capitol Tower recording studios in Hollywood, California.

Previous to recording at the Capitol Tower, Capitol's West Coast acts had been recording at a small studio on Melrose Avenue. The Melrose studio produced great results for smaller jazz and country music bands, but the honchos at Capitol wanted a larger studio for recording big bands and orchestras, so the new facilities at the Tower were rather enormous, with a technical and engineering setup specifically geared toward recording large bands.

As a result, the Capitol Tower never really got a reputation as a great rock and roll studio. Lots of great material was recorded there, from Gene Vincent to Skeets McDonald to Tommy Sands, but the classical and big band approach to making records there never produced truly great rock and roll recordings. Most historians agree that the warm sound of the Capitol Melrose studio lent itself much better to country and rockabilly. For example, compare the sound of "Shotgun Boogie" by Tennessee Ernie Ford recorded at Capitol Melrose with Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant with the later version of the same song recorded at the Capitol Tower with big band accompaniment, and you'll have a rough idea. Wanda Jackson's classic Capitol recordings were done at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood, not the Tower. In fact, the Capitol Tower had such a stodgy reputation that by the 1960s, Capitol's top acts such as the Beach Boys were using other studios because they didn't like recording there.

That said, no classical or jazzbo engineer could hold back the youthful enthusiasm of Gene Vincent and his new group of young and rowdy Blue Caps. Thankfully, some of the wildest rock and roll of the era escaped intact. Tracks like "Lotta Lovin'" and "Dance to the Bop" positively sizzle, with Johnny Meeks's great guitar work taking no back seat to Cliff Gallup, but instead leading the group in a new, original direction.

Johnny Meeks was a country musician who had played in Country Earl's band with Paul Peek back in South Carolina. Like many other country musicians of the era, he made the crossover to rock and roll easily and brought along with him a memorable and unmistakable tone. What is interesting about Johnny Meeks's recordings with Gene Vincent is that he apparently used both a Gretsch 6120 Chet Atkins model guitar and a white Fender Stratocaster with little or no difference in the tone on the records! His trademark was a trebly, biting tone with lots of vibrato (whammy bar) crashes. Gene and the Blue Caps were sponsored by Fender Musical Instruments, and during this period they used Fender guitars and amps exclusively. There is one famous picture from the Capitol Tower that shows the entire band, two electric guitars and the electric bass, all plugged into one Fender Twin amplifier, but it's hard to imagine that they actually recorded in this manner!

The Capitol Tower sessions also used electric bass exclusively, and Gene would never use upright bass on record again.

Gene's sessions at the Capitol Tower were done the same way as the Bradley sessions, all recorded live at one time. Capitol used much of the same equipment as Bradley, including Ampex recorders and Neumann and RCA microphones, but the approach was completely different.

The Capitol Tower engineers barely used tape echo, which is the most notable difference between the Nashville and Los Angeles recordings. There were ample amounts of reverb, courtesy of Capitol's huge live echo chamber. However, the long reverberation time of the Capitol chambers did not lend itself well to rock and roll music, as they had been designed for classical and big band music. The Capitol Tower used a lot more compression than Owen Bradley, resulting in a "thick" sound, which sometimes bordered on the unnatural (most notably the saxophones, which ended up sounding like kazoos!). Nevertheless, Gene still recorded great music at the Capitol Tower.

The introduction of stereo recording and multitrack recorders around 1958 or 1959 didn't affect Gene's recording process too much. At most, we can only find evidence of background vocals being overdubbed later, as Gene still preferred to record with a live band and live vocals. Stereo mixes for "Crazy Times" were probably done live on the fly at the same time they were recording the mono mix, with little thought put into it. The sessions were not done on separated multitrack tapes, so it would have been impossible for them to make stereo masters after the fact.

The last phase of Gene's tenure with Capitol in the years 1960 and 1961 saw him recording both at the Capitol Tower and at Abbey Road Studios in England (known at the time as St. Johns Wood EMI Studios, Abbey Road, London), to capitalize on Gene's emerging stardom in Britain.

Great Britain in the early 1960s was a hotbed of musical activity. With their economy stunted in the immediate postwar years, they took a while to catch up to the United States as far as rock and roll was concerned. But when they did, they took off in leaps and bounds, culminating in the success of the Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion. Gene Vincent was in England during this time, enjoying huge popularity in the wake of his American slump.

Technology in Britain in the early 1960s was also experiencing significant advances, and Abbey Road was one of the best-equipped studios in the world when Gene recorded there in the early '60s. It was a huge facility with live echo chambers and state-of-the-art equipment; in many ways it was the British counterpart to Owen Bradley's Nashville studio.

Abbey Road used top-quality microphones like Coles STC and Neumann and custom-made mixing boards that were the world's most advanced at the time. The sessions were recorded onto BTR mono reel-to-reel recorders, which were enormous custom-built machines made for the BBC. They also utilized custom compressors and limiters, and like Bradley's studio the only effects they had were tape echo and reverb. It's worth noting that Abbey Road used much of the same equipment that famed British producer Joe Meek used in his Holloway Road studio.

Gene recorded at Abbey Road with large groups like the Norrie Paramor Orchestra and Sounds Unlimited, and with a small combo called the Beat Boys. Both sessions sound great (whether or not you like the songs is a matter of opinion, but the recording fidelity is impressive), demonstrating the expertise of the engineers at Abbey Road.

"Be Bop a Lula '62," with its flute solos, may have been a low point with which to end Gene's Capitol recording career. But Gene's reputation as a top-notch act was partially built on the truly world-class studios that he had the good fortune to record in, and it was also due to the great producers behind the glass. For the rest of his career he would have second-tier contracts with albums hastily recorded at studios such as Olympic in London and Challenge in Los Angeles. Thankfully, his Capitol records stand alone not only as some of the most sonically excellent and technically superior recordings of the era, but also as some of the best rock and roll recordings of all time.

Liner notes for the Glen Glenn collection Glen Rocks on Bear Family Records

By Deke Dickerson, September 2003

It seems to be etched in stone that rock and roll was invented in Memphis, Tennessee, one summer night in 1954 by a young truck driver named Elvis Presley. Many would have you believe that Memphis was the only city in America where such a convergence of white and black music could occur, and that young Mr. Presley was a genius of the highest order who created rock and roll single-handedly from his own design.

Of course, this notion is false. Just as there were dozens of people at the turn of the century working on the invention of the automobile, the real story behind the invention of rock and roll is a convoluted one, filled with more interesting twists and turns than the Mississippi River.

Our story concerns another very important city at a very important time -- Los Angeles, California, in the 1950s -- and two energetic young musicians who came of age during this exciting time period: Glenn Troutman, aka Glenn Trout, aka Glen Glenn, and his guitar-playing compatriot, Gary Lambert.

Perhaps nowhere in America was there such a diverse melting of cultures as Los Angeles at mid-century. Hillbillies from the South worked side by side with Mexican immigrants, African Americans came from the eastern United States for the multitude of factory jobs, and scores of other cultures converged in Southern California as well.

Along with this vast influx of immigrants came some of the finest music from across the country. Dust Bowl migrants such as the Maddox Brothers and Rose brought rowdy hillbilly and country music from their native Alabama to the West Coast; African American performers such as Louis Jordan, Pee Wee Crayton, and Slim Gaillard brought their rhythm and blues and jazz to Central Avenue in Los Angeles; Jewish music impresarios like Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller produced doo-wop and blues within the black community; and the sounds of Mexico wafted from almost every neighborhood from the San Fernando Valley to San Diego, wherever there were Mexican immigrants.

This was the atmosphere that bred Glenn and his music, and that inspired the guitar playing of Gary Lambert. A richer mixture of musical inspiration could hardly be imagined. While Elvis certainly was the important catalyst in the explosion of rock and roll, the fact is that the seeds had already been planted all across the country, and it was just a matter of time before this new music sprang to life.

Glenn's records rank as some of the finest of the era, and they have stood the test of time as perhaps the best examples of rockabilly to emerge from Los Angeles in the 1950s. Although all of Glenn's singles, demos, and live tracks have been reissued before, in a series of seven vinyl albums and compact discs, this is the first attempt at a comprehensive collection of everything together in one place.

This disc represents all of the original single recordings that Glenn made for ERA and Dore Records in the 1950s and early 1960s as well as several alternate takes, demos, and live recordings. The rest of the alternate takes, demos, and live recordings will be issued next year on a companion disc.

The story of Glen Glenn begins in Joplin, Missouri, where he was born Orin Glenn Troutman on October 24, 1934. Joplin was a small town tucked away in the Ozark Mountains, and country music figured heavily in its heritage (Grand Ole Opry member Porter Wagoner was also from the same area, and is in fact Glenn's cousin by marriage).

Orin was soon being called by his middle name, Glenn, to avoid confusion with his father Orin Orville Troutman, and the name stuck. His parents Louise and Orin had a love for country music and encouraged young Glenn in his musical pursuits from an early age. The family radio was often tuned to station KVOO in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Glenn first heard Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Once Glenn heard Wills he was hooked on country music. Eventually he began tuning in to the Grand Ole Opry and soaking up influences from Roy Acuff to Little Jimmy Dickens, Red Foley, Ernest Tubb, and many other country stars. From a very young age Glenn tried his own hand at singing, often imitating his country music idols.

Fate intervened in 1948 when the Troutman family loaded up the truck and moved westward to San Dimas, California, located about an hour east of Los Angeles. Like thousands of others from the South, Glenn's family came west for the promise of a better life. Little did they know the sorts of opportunities it would open up for the burgeoning musician in their family.

In addition to the country music he knew and loved, Glenn soon found himself listening late at night to a famed Los Angeles disc jockey, Dick "Huggy Boy" Hugg, on a local black radio station that played blues, R&B, and vocal groups. The music he heard would have a profound influence on him.

In 1950 or 1951 Glenn bought a Gibson guitar and then a Martin D-28, and he spent virtually every waking minute teaching himself all the songs he heard on the radio. Eventually he met a kindred spirit in Gary Lambert, a fellow high school student who played hot guitar and was looking for someone to play with.

Gary was from La Verne, a small community just down the road from San Dimas. He had quite a local reputation as a hot picker and impressed nearly everybody who heard him play. His style was half Merle Travis and Chet Atkins thumbpicking, and half Joe Maphis flatpicking, and it was well suited to the material Glenn was interested in at the time. Gary was in a comfortable enough position to afford some of the finest equipment (see sidebar below), and this too bolstered his reputation locally. Gary had a regular square-dance gig, and soon Glenn was joining him on rhythm guitar. After the two got together, they were soon rehearsing an act as a duo. All this excitement caught up with Glenn, and he dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade to pursue music full time.

Glenn and Gary began making the rounds as perpetual hangers-on. Even though they were too young to get into most shows, they would stand outside and listen to the music, soaking it all in. They would often go to the Riverside Rancho near Griffith Park, where the setup enabled them to stand directly outside the club and hear the music. One of their fondest memories involves guitar legend Joe Maphis, who played the Riverside Rancho every Sunday night. Glenn and Gary would go and listen to him from outside every week, and eventually Joe became so taken with the boys that he would come outside and smoke cigarettes during his break and talk to them, offering advice about how to break into the local country music business.

Joe Maphis, if you're unfamiliar with the name, was a hugely influential figure in Los Angeles country music history. He and his wife, Rose Lee, had a honky-tonk hit with Joe's composition "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (and Loud, Loud Music)," but it was his guitar playing that left the biggest mark. He was one of the fastest guitar players who ever lived, and he wore the crown "King of the Strings" for his prowess on any stringed instrument: guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, or bass. Starting in 1954 he was the leader of the house band on the popular Town Hall Party television show, where he was watched by everyone from Compton Okies to the Beverly Hills elite. (Be sure and check out Bear Family's collection of Joe's greatest instrumental recordings, Flying Fingers, for insight into this amazing musician.)

Joe told Glenn and Gary about an amateur contest being held on Sundays at the Rancho by a local disc jockey, the "Squeakin' Deacon" from country station KXLA in Pasadena. Every Sunday they would broadcast a live radio show from within the Riverside Rancho. It was a two-hour show, the first hour being the amateur contest, the second hour featuring big-name stars like Joe Maphis and Merle Travis.

Glenn and Gary went down one Sunday and entered the contest and, to their amazement, won the prize the first time out, singing a version of Joe and Rose Lee Maphis's "Dim Lights, Thick Smoke." The prize was a wristwatch, but the real reward was the encouragement it offered the two youngsters. Glenn recalls not being able to sleep for about a week afterwards, he was so excited.

Glenn and Gary, now billed as the Missouri Mountain Boys (even though Glenn was the only one actually from Missouri), made the rounds to all the Los Angeles-area country music shows. They made sure they were always seen, showing up like clockwork at the Town Hall Party in Compton and Cliffie Stone's Hometown Jamboree in El Monte. They knew how to sneak backstage at all these venues, and they befriended many of the artists, including Lefty Frizzell, Gene O'Quin, Merle Travis, the Collins Kids, Johnny Horton. The hundreds of backstage photographs that Glenn began taking at this time are evidence of the sheer number of musicians they were rubbing elbows with.

The pair auditioned for both the Town Hall Party and the Hometown Jamboree, but they didn't find a regular paying gig until they struck pay dirt with the County Barn Dance in Baldwin Park, just down the road from El Monte.

The County Barn Dance was another fixture on the crowded Saturday night roster of live televised country music shows in Los Angeles. It featured an impressive roster that included Les "Carrot Top" Anderson, Skeets McDonald, the White Brothers (Clarence and Roland White, in their pre-Kentucky Colonels and Byrds days), and Gary Lambert's future wife, Jean, who appeared with an act called the Three Country Girls, later renamed the Smith Sisters. The show also had many guest stars each week, and it was here that Glenn and Gary befriended aspiring guitarist Eddie Cochran, who was then half of the Cochran Brothers act. Glenn and Gary appeared regularly on the County Barn Dance throughout the years 1954 and 1955, and they became quite well known throughout the local country music community.

Their association with Eddie Cochran became quite close over the next couple of years. In addition to appearances on the County Barn Dance, Glenn and Gary did a show with the Cochran Brothers during a short stint living in Northern California in 1956 when the Cochran Brothers were doing the same thing. By all accounts Gary Lambert and Eddie Cochran bonded through their love for Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, and other hot pickers (both bought brand new Gretsch guitars around this time), and in fact Gary recorded quite a few home demos of the two of them playing together, which were collected on the Stomper Time CD Eddie Cochran and Gary Lambert. Eddie also loaned out his bass player, Connie "Guybo" Smith, to Glenn and Gary for live shows and recording over the years. Glenn recalls that when Eddie went solo and started having hits, he started hanging with the rock and roll crowd and they didn't see him around their country music shows any more.

It was during 1954 and 1955 that Glenn first began recording. Most of these recordings were primitive home demos done on Gary Lambert's portable recorder. Other early recordings that have survived are from live television and radio performances that were taped by their close friend Glenn Mueller on his reel-to-reel recorder (off the radio or TV).

Perhaps Glenn's most interesting performance from this time period is "That's All Right (Mama)," recorded live on radio station KXLA in January 1955. According to Glenn, he had not yet heard Elvis Presley's Sun Recording of this song, but he had heard country singer Gene O'Quin perform it on the Hometown Jamboree show. It was also around this time that Glenn started trying to incorporate more of the blues and R&B material that he heard on the "Huggy Boy" show into his country music act. Not long after recording "That's All Right (Mama)," Glenn heard Elvis Presley for the first time and soon was performing rock and roll every chance he could get.

Other early performances included on this disc are rollicking live versions of "Jack and Jill Boogie" and "John Henry," both recorded on KXLA in May 1955. These recordings really demonstrate the concept of hillbillies latching on to boogie woogie and rhythm and blues and forging ahead with this new music known as rock and roll. By the time Glenn made his next recording in January 1956, he was moving even more into the rock and roll camp, cutting his own versions of "Baby, Let's Play House" and "Be-Bop-a-Lula," both included here.

Later in 1956 Glenn had an opportunity to go back to Missouri and tour with his cousin Porter Wagoner. Glenn leapt at the chance and soon was making regular appearances on the popular Ozark Jubilee show broadcast out of Springfield, Missouri. Porter was supportive of Glenn's forays into rock and roll, and in fact a great version of Glenn singing "Shake, Rattle and Roll" was recorded live at the Ozark Jubilee in July of 1956 with Porter's band backing him up (they also did a great version of "There She Goes" for the country listeners).

Glenn toured with Porter to the East Coast and throughout the Midwest, logging lots of great road stories and rubbing elbows with just about everybody in the business. Porter was also trying to get Glenn his own recording contract with UA Records, but he couldn't get a deal because the label thought Glenn was stuck between the country and rock and roll markets. This was undoubtedly true, and in fact Glenn has said himself that he was really a country performer doing rock and roll material. Although Glenn had some great experiences with Porter on the road, California was home, and Glenn got homesick for his family and moved back to San Dimas after only a month or so with Porter's group.

In September 1956, Glenn had his first professional recording session at the Garrison Studio in Long Beach, California. This was a four-song demo of excellent country material that Glenn paid for himself and intended to shop around for a record deal. Although the material was excellent and featured top-notch talent such as Ralph Mooney on steel guitar, Glenn failed to get a recording contract with any of the labels he played the demos for. This disc features one of the tunes from this session, "It Rains Rain," a great Pete Stamper composition.

Rejoining the County Barn Dance and reuniting with Gary Lambert, the next major figures to emerge in Glenn's career were the Maddox Brothers and Rose, who were to play a large part in the crucial next phase of his career.

The County Barn Dance had big guest stars every week, from Ray Price to Faron Young, and the Maddox Brothers and Rose were regulars on the show. During this time period, they were perhaps the most popular act on the West Coast, with their wild stage antics and novelty tunes. Fred Maddox (the de facto leader of the group) was particularly smitten with rock and roll music, and he took an instant liking to Glenn and Gary and their brand of rockabilly.

Fred Maddox suggested to Glenn and Gary that they go check out Elvis Presley when he played in San Diego. The show galvanized the two youngsters and reinforced their opinion that they needed to be playing rock and roll instead of country. When they saw all the hundreds of screaming girls, the choice was obvious which direction they'd be taking. Fred took the boys backstage and they struck up a friendship with Elvis, Scotty, Bill, and D.J. They would visit Elvis once more when he came back to the West Coast and stayed at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. In fact, Bill Black would later even play on one of Glenn's demos while visiting with Fred Maddox.

There's more! Download the entire liner notes as a Word document.

A Brief History of Hallmark Guitars, for Hallmark.com

By Deke Dickerson

The story of Hallmark guitars and its namesake Joe Hall is an interesting, if obscure, tale in the history of the electric guitar.

The story begins in Bakersfield, California, in the late 1950s. Semie Moseley of Mosrite guitars had just moved his operations to Bakersfield after years of struggling in Los Angeles, including stints with Rickenbacker and Bigsby as well as many years on his own building custom-order guitars. Los Angeles hadn't worked out for him, and numerous attempts to turn Mosrite from a custom-order luthier to a full-scale mass-production factory had failed, although he did receive some notoriety from Joe Maphis and Larry Collins (of the Collins Kids) playing his flashy doubleneck guitars on the Town Hall Party television show.

The year 1959 found Semie Moseley and his brother Andy living and working in a tin shed in Oildale, just outside Bakersfield. The guitars that Semie made were different, and original. They weren't copies of Fenders or Gibsons -- Mosrite guitars had many unique features including ultra-slim necks, zero frets, high-output handmade pickups, custom-built aluminum hardware, and body shapes that were a combination of hillbilly flash and the Jetsons.

As Semie struggled to survive, word of this strange guitar maker from Los Angeles began to filter out to the countryside surrounding Bakersfield. Soon kindred spirits made their way out to the tin shed in Oildale, including a young guitar maker named Bill Gruggett and a gospel musician by the name of Joe Hall who wanted a custom guitar. Joe saw one of Semie's custom creations and just about fell over! He had to have one of Semie's guitars.

Joe Hall ordered a guitar from Semie. He traded in his Gibson ES147 and paid $400 in advance for the custom order, a LOT of money in those days. Soon Hall found out a thing or two about Semie Moseley's business practices. Although Semie was nothing short of brilliant when it came to making guitars, when it came to the business end he was an absolute nightmare. Joe waited and waited for the new guitar to be made, and he was losing money from all the gospel gigs he had to pass up.

Joe finally confronted Semie about the lack of a guitar, and, in his persuasive way, soon Semie had Joe working in the Mosrite shop just to speed up the production of his guitar! This led to an association that lasted three or four years. Although Joe says that he didn't receive anything in compensation except the knowledge of how to build a guitar, he has no hard feelings because he feels that he got to study at the side of a master.

In those wild and wooly days of the A-Go-Go 1960s, the guitar-making world was a dangerous field where fortunes could be won or lost on a handshake deal. Joe Hall saw this with his own eyes many times. Joe watched Semie make an agreement with Bob Crooks to make guitars for Standel, a deal that folded after ten units made for the NAMM show (these are the early, primitive models with a single cutaway and a vaguely Telecaster-like shape). Soon thereafter, a chance meeting with Nokie Edwards from the Ventures brought hundreds of thousands of dollars to Semie Moseley, as the Ventures-model Mosrite became a runaway hit. He also witnessed Semie pass at the chance to have had Sears and Roebuck purchase Mosrite for well over a million dollars. Semie told Joe that because his name was on the guitars, he just couldn't sell the brand name away.

Much in the same way that Memphis became a home to aspiring rockers after Elvis's great success, Bakersfield became the home of several guitar makers, all of them chasing after Semie's newfound prosperity. Joe Hall was one of the hopeful, and he pursued several different business deals, which resulted in some interesting off-the-wall guitars.

One of the most notable of these resulted from Joe's association with Bob Crooks and his Standel brand. Bob had been trying unsuccessfully to market a Standel guitar to sell with his Standel amps since Semie Moseley's earlier, failed association. Joe and Bob Crooks collaborated and made a run of Mosrite-inspired double cutaway guitars featuring an aluminum casting that housed the pickups, bridge, and tailpiece. These guitars were advertised in Downbeat magazine in 1965 but were never produced beyond this small run. (At least one of them turned up last year on eBay.) A few of these unfinished Standels wound up being branded as Hallmarks later on, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

The Standel deal ended when one of Joe's employees broke into his shop and stole the prototypes and all the tooling. Although Joe tried to get Bob Crooks on his side regarding this incident, Bob continued to work with the ex-employee, who unfortunately knew little about guitar making, resulting in another failed launch of the Standel guitar line.

Joe continued to make custom-order guitars during this time, some under the name Sterling, but he was already envisioning the Hallmark brand name and was looking for new and different ideas to launch his Hallmark guitar company. Joe even managed to pull Bill Gruggett away from Mosrite to work for Hallmark. Bill had continued working for Semie Moseley through the glory years, but after Mosrite acquired Dobro in 1966 Gruggett found himself working side-by-side with one of the ex-Dobro managers. Bill did not care for the man's floor expertise and sometimes rude conduct with Mosrite employees, and so when Joe Hall offered him more money, he left to try his luck there.

Gruggett was working on some new ideas of his own, including the new Gruggett Stradette, and Joe hired him to work for the new Hallmark company with the understanding that Gruggett could make his own guitars on his own time. It was while he was at Hallmark that he built the first Gruggett Stradette six-string guitar, which is now on display at the Kern County Museum in Bakersfield (along with several other historical instruments, such as Joe Maphis's second Mosrite doubleneck).

Bob Bogle, bassist for the Ventures, approached Joe with a new guitar design he had come up with after surveying guitar players in Los Angeles to find out what new body shape they wanted. He showed Joe a crude sketch of what would become the Swept-Wing design. The popularity at that time of the Batman TV show has been offered as a theory for the Swept-Wing body shape, but where it came from is really anybody's guess. The Ventures were caught in a bad business deal at that point with their failed Mosrite amplifier line, and Bob Bogle was looking to invest in a new, upstart company. Bogle wanted to call the new company Ovation (!) and would retain fifty percent of the profits in return for his initial investment. Because of his involvement with Mosrite, Bogle was a silent partner, and not even Bill Gruggett knew that Bogle was involved with the company! After the deal with Mosrite turned sour, Bogle relinquished his share and told Joe he didn't want compensation for the original investment. This was really the birth of the Hallmark brand guitar, as Joe took this and ran with it! Bogle had paid for the construction of the first ten Hallmark Swept-Wings, which were to be displayed at the 1967 NAMM show.

Joe took Bogle's crude sketch, streamlined it, and the famous body shape of the Hallmark Swept-Wing was born. Hall, Gruggett, and Don Stanley made a batch of Swept-Wings, as well as a prototype Hallmark model called the Eldorado, which was like a Gibson ES-335 in a very Bakersfield sort of way.

Hallmark had a decent chance at making it. They rented a legit factory space on Derby Street in Arvin (another town near Bakersfield), they got the merchants and folks in the city of Arvin to buy shares in the Hallmark company at $500 per share, they took out full-page ads in the newly created Guitar Player magazine, and they had a batch of nice-looking guitars to take to NAMM in Chicago.

When Joe and Bill Gruggett got to Chicago, they had so little money between them that they slept on top of their display tables because they couldn't afford a hotel room! The pair was convinced that their new, unique designs would take the guitar world by storm, and their financial futures would be secure.

There was only one problem: The NAMM trip was a total failure -- a prelude of things to come. There were several reasons for this. First of all, many young men went to southeast Asia in the late 1960s for the Vietnam conflict, and as a result the used-guitar market was flooded with cheap guitars, making new ones harder and harder to sell. Secondly, the market for unique guitars was overcrowded. A casual look at a 1967 Guitar Player magazine shows not only the Hallmark Swept-Wing, but also many other bizarrely shaped brands and models trying to capture people's attention.

Although Joe Hall says that Hallmark built less than a thousand units, a more realistic figure comes from Bill Gruggett, who seems to think there were maybe thirty or forty Hallmark guitars produced before the whole empire crumbled less than a year after it started. These included hollowbody Swept-Wings, solidbody Swept-Wings, at least one solidbody Swept-Wing bass, and at least one solidbody Swept-Wing doubleneck.

During Hallmark's brief existence, they gave guitars to the Doors, the Grateful Dead, the Mamas and the Papas, the Baja Marimba Band, Jefferson Airplane, and the Association, among others. Before closing they also contributed to the short-lived Epcor brand of guitars.

Joe Hall left the guitar business, went overseas to learn the oil business, and returned to the U.S. to work as a consultant for a petroleum company, which he did until retirement.

Bill Gruggett continued to make guitars on a custom basis in Bakersfield. He made the Stradette model throughout the 1970s and even got back together with Semie Moseley for a brief reunion that resulted in the Mosrite Brass Rail model. He still makes a very limited number of custom guitars, including a beautiful new Pearl White Stradette and a Pearl Black Stradette that were recently sold through the new Hallmark company! Bill also made a Red, White, and Blue Gruggett that was commissioned by Buck Owens's band and presented to Buck as a birthday present this year. It is now the only guitar Buck is seen playing.

The Hallmark Swept-Wing became something of a joke around Bakersfield. Just like their cross-town rival Mosrite, Hallmark declared bankruptcy in 1968 (keep in mind that in 1968, even Fender and Gibson were going through rough times). Unsold Swept-Wings littered the pawnshops on 18th Street and were treated with little or no respect.

Of course, what might be a joke in Bakersfield may be considered high art in Berkeley, and that's exactly what happened. When a Berkeley vintage guitar dealer sold collector Teisco Del Rey a Hallmark Swept-Wing, and when Teisco then featured the guitar on a pullout "Collector's Choice" poster in Guitar World magazine, the modern legend of the Swept-Wing was born.

After being featured in Guitar World, everybody knew what a Hallmark Swept-Wing was, but nobody had ever seen one in person! The legend grew. Coffee-table books talked about the Hallmark Swept-Wing but often got the facts wrong, and the problem was, there just weren't any guitars around! Not only that, but Joe Hall had vanished.

One of the distorted facts involves the "double-branded" Standel/Hallmark guitar, which was prominently featured in Vintage Guitar Classics magazine. Joe Hall denies having anything to do with these guitars and theorizes that the same ex-employee who stole the prototypes may have finished these guitars with the Hallmark name on the headstock, even though they began life as Standel prototypes.

The story might have ended there except for the tireless efforts of Bob Shade from Greenbelt, Maryland. Nobody I can think of would be as well suited to restart Hallmark as Bob, a skilled luthier who had managed to track down four original Swept-Wings. He had studied the Mosrite story and collected rare Mosrites for years. Bob was and still is one of the only people besides Bill Gruggett who you can send your Mosrite to for expert restoration or service. As Bill is building regularly for Hallmark again, he is now referring people to Bob for Mosrite restoration. Bob felt the Swept-Wing was truly a wonderful guitar that had never had a chance, and he threatened to his friends that he was going to bring them back as a modern reissue.

Somehow, Bob tracked down Joe Hall and learned the true story of the Hallmark legend. Bob secured the rights to use the Hallmark name, and Joe gave his blessing for the reissues.

Since last year the new Hallmark company has emerged as a genuine threat to the modern guitar market. The old saying holds true that what goes around comes around, and the once-ridiculed Swept-Wing body shape is now hip again!

Bob Shade has made his business plan a dual one, with custom-order Hallmark guitars made in his Maryland shop and mass-produced Hallmark Swept-Wings (made overseas) available for an incredibly reasonable price. They are all great guitars and have received rave reviews from everybody who has tried one!

The Swept-Wings come in a vintage reissue style, very exact to the original specifications of the legendary Arvin guitars, with vintage Hallmark hardware and Hallmark Hi-Fi pickups to get that Ventures-meets-Maphis Bakersfield sound. There is also a new custom style, with exciting modern finishes and hardware.

A strange saga in the history of the electric guitar, to be sure, but a classic design can't be denied, and the Hallmark Swept-Wing may have finally found its audience almost forty years after the fact!

Liner notes for the Roy Orbison collection Roy Rocks on Bear Family Records

By Deke Dickerson, February 2006

Historians love to write about how Roy Orbison got started in the music business on the wrong foot, being forced to cut rock and roll until he found his niche with the sort of orchestrated ballads that would cement his place in the hall of fame. While it is true that Orbison himself preferred the softer songs and the pop ballads, and certainly that is where he found his greatest chart success, Roy Orbison's veins pulsed with the blood of a rocker. Although he always denied it, he was great at rocking and left behind some of the best-loved rockabilly tracks of all time. This collection is perhaps the first of its kind, the first to collect all of Orbison's best rockin' material, from the early days at Sun Records and the Norman Petty studios to his short-lived days as an RCA artist in the late 1950s and the few but fertile rockers he cut in his golden days for Monument Records in the early 1960s.

When an artist finds such massive success with a radically different style, as Orbison did with his pop hits in the 1960s, it is easy to write off early efforts with a dismissive wave of the hand. In doing the research for these liner notes I was shocked at how nearly every book or article about Roy Orbison regurgitated the same details about his early rocking period, usually in a few short paragraphs. Had he not gone on to record those massive pop hits, critics would have paid the same attention to his rockabilly sides as they did to the records by Carl Perkins, Billy Lee Riley, Sonny Burgess, Warren Smith, and other Sun Records greats, who have had every minute detail of their 1950s activities researched and obsessed over. The fact of the matter is that Orbison was another teenager in the mid-1950s who traveled to see Elvis Presley play and got swept up in the fury ofwomen, fame, and attention. Orbison admits that his only goal at that time was "a Cadillac and a diamond ring by the age of twenty-one." Whether or not he was teen-idol material mattered not, for deep in his soul Orbison felt the calling of wild bop music known as rock and roll.

Much has also been written about how unlikely a star Roy Orbison was. True, back in the 1950s, as today, looks mattered over talent in the pop business, and Orbison was not exactly an attractive man. Born an albino, he suffered from the eyesight problems of albinism, and in fact in the early days (before he wore glasses on stage) many thought he was blind because he had to be led up to the microphone. But he dyed his hair a deep jet black, bought himself the finest hepcat clothes, equipped himself with top-of-the-line equipment. As a teenager he had a Les Paul Black Beauty guitar, the most expensive solidbody Gibson made, and a Ray Butts Echosonic Amp like Scotty Moore, also the most expensive custom-ordered amplifier one could own at the time. He made up his mind that he was going to be a rock and roll star, looks be damned.

In the music business there has always been a great divide between the gifted and the determined, and Orbison was a gifted vocalist and guitarist determined to overcome the handicap of his looks. His determination paid off, and in fact the stubborn Orbison stuck at it through high and low times in his forty-year stint in the music business. How many artists can say they started off with a hit on their first record, then sank so low as to eat rolled-up balls of cornmeal and water (as Orbison did between his Sun days and the pop hits), found top-forty success and made a million dollars, lost their wife to a motorcycle accident and two sons to a house fire, then wound up getting inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and having a top-ten hit just as they died? The story of Roy Orbison is a story of perseverance and dogged determination more than anything else.

West Texas is precisely the sort of place to breed a determined young man. Hot, dusty, and flat--these are the only good things that can be said about a place like Wink, Texas, where Orbison was raised. Born in 1936 to hardworking parents (his dad, Orbie Lee, was a rigger in the oilfields), he was the classic outcast, a subject that later permeated his hits like "Only the Lonely" and "In Dreams." He had a good head on his shoulders, though, and quickly found that while he wasn't good at football and hard, menial labor, he excelled at drawing and singing. Perhaps the most telling picture of his early years shows him posed in front of a very large blackboard mural. He had created an elaborate Christmas drawing, which apparently was so well received that the entire school was taken to view his creation. The huge mural dwarfs the diminutive Roy, who stands beaming from ear to ear, his eyes barely visible through his thick coke-bottle glasses. He had found that he could use his talents to gain acceptance and praise, even if he didn't fit in with the football players and oil riggers.

Orbison's musical talents surfaced early on as well, and by his teens he was leading a local aggregation called the Wink Westerners, a group that eventually turned into the Teen Kings. The group began by playing all the country and western hits of the day, with Orbison being particularly knocked out by Lefty Frizzell's voice. As was the norm of the day, the group also played pop standards such as "Moonlight Serenade" and "Stardust."

All that would change the day that Elvis Presley blew through West Texas like a hurricane, changing everything in his path. The details of exactly where and when Orbison saw Elvis for the first time are murky, but it's generally accepted that he had heard about the noise Elvis was making in the music world, and in fact his father had told him about seeing a "terrible" Presley show. Orbison made up his mind to see what the fuss was all about and went to see Elvis play, either at the Big D Jamboree in Dallas or at one of the many shows Elvis played across West Texas in 1954 and 1955. It's hard now to imagine a time when such things were so shocking or life changing, but when Orbison recounted seeing Elvis for the first time, he remembered Elvis spitting out his chewing gum on stage, breaking guitar strings, talking "with the coarse diction of a truck driver," rolling around on the stage while singing, and causing a near riot in the crowd by turning the ladies on and ticking the men off. Elvis's music, looks, and attitude represented something that teenagers all over the country could latch onto and call their own.

In no time at all the Wink Westerners were doing their own interpretation of hillbilly bop and looking at getting a piece of the Presley pie. The group made some lineup changes, most notably adding rhythm guitarist Johnny "Peanuts" Wilson, who brought with him a healthy love for the new rock and roll music (and later would cut the classic single "Cast Iron Arm.") After a spell during which Orbison and drummer Billy Pat Ellis went to North Texas State College in Denton, the whole group moved to Odessa, where they all attended junior college together and changed the band's name from the Wink Westerners to the Teen Kings.

It wasn't long before they made their first recording, an acetate demo of a song that Orbison had learned from two students at North Texas State named Wade Moore and Dick Penner. The song was "Ooby Dooby," and although it was a simple song with nonsense lyrics, Orbison had seen Moore and Penner make crowds go crazy with it. The demo session was intended as an audition for Columbia Records. Columbia saw no future with the band, but A&R man Don Law did give "Ooby Dooby" to Sid King and the Five Strings, who released it on Columbia to little fanfare (the early Orbison demos of "Ooby Dooby" and "Hey Miss Fannie" can be found on the Roy Orbison box set on Bear Family, BCD 16423).

Around this time, Roy and the Teen Kings caught the eye of local impresario Weldon Rogers, who agreed to put out a Teen Kings single as soon as they had something recorded. The group then traveled to the other notable studio in the region, Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico, where they recut "Ooby Dooby" and a new flip side, "Tryin' to Get to You," which they had learned from Elvis's live shows (one report has Orbison owning a prerelease acetate of Elvis's version). The two numbers were released on the tiny Je-Wel record label (the name was an acronym that combined the financial backer's daughter's name, Jean, and that of Weldon Rogers, who handled the music and promotional side of the label).

The Je-Wel record took off locally, selling hundreds of copies and catapulting the Teen Kings to regional fame. It made so much noise that another local impresario, Cecil Holifield, notified Sam Phillips of Sun Records that the Je-Wel contract was not legally binding, since Orbison and the other boys were under the age of twenty-one. When Holifield and Sam Phillips threatened legal action against Je-Wel Records, the Teen Kings were released from their contract and given instructions to go immediately to Memphis to record for Sun. In the rapidly moving waters of the day, songs could break overnight and just as easily be forgotten. Phillips knew this and brought the group to Memphis as fast as possible to recut "Ooby Dooby" yet again, capturing the momentum that the Je-Wel record had promised.

When the group arrived, Phillips rushed them into the studio and explored their potential as new rockabilly hitmakers. The group rerecorded "Ooby Dooby" a total of four times, but Phillips felt they hadn't gotten a good version and in fact wound up calling Weldon Rogers seeking to lease the Je-Wel master (after threatening legal action against him only a month earlier!). Weldon offered to sell the Je-Wel master for $1100, but Sam decided to go with the first take the boys had laid down at the Sun Studio instead. For a flip side, the band came up with a new rocker, "Go Go Go," a scorching rockabilly mover that has become a standard in the rockabilly repertoire, though it is usually called "Down the Line," the title that Jerry Lee Lewis gave it when he cut it a year later for the flip side of "Breathless."

One thing that should be pointed out regarding all of the early rockabilly sides by Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings is that Orbison played all the lead guitar parts himself. He was one of the great rockabilly axemen, cutting solos that were as tough sounding and biting as any of his contemporaries. Few realize when they hear that classic intro to "Go Go Go" that it's Roy himself tearing it up on the guitar!

The band also recorded another couple of takes of "Tryin' to Get to You" at that first Sun session, but Sam Phillips chose the two rockers (and picked "Go Go Go" as the flip to ensure his own publishing interests) and rushed "Ooby Dooby" out as Sun 242 as quickly as possible. The single did very well, selling up to two hundred thousand copies by some reports, and Roy Orbison became a star for the first time.

Orbison's tenure at Sun has been rehashed in biographies many times over. According to the artist, he kept trying to get Sam Phillips and his in-house producer "Cowboy" Jack Clement to listen to his ballads, which he felt were his forte. If you believe everything you read, Phillips and Clement forced Orbison to record rock and roll material against his will, while he tried in vain to convince them that he was a ballad singer. According to lore, Orbison eventually gave them a giant "I told you so" by scoring numerous top-ten ballad hits in the early 1960s. Like a lot of music history, it makes for a nice story. But human accounts differ from the recorded material--and also the photographs--from his time at Sun. For one thing, Sam Phillips and Jack Clement were interested in selling records. If ballads were selling in 1956, they would have been pushing Orbison in that direction. But in 1956, rockers were the hot ticket, and all they really cared about was getting another hit record. The "I told you so" part of the story doesn't really jibe, as pop rockers and ballads were much more marketable in the early 1960s, when Orbison had a string of hits with such material. Had he recorded "Oh Pretty Woman" or "Only the Lonely" in 1956, they would undoubtedly have been flops.

Secondly, Orbison's account that he wasn't allowed to record ballad material at Sun simply isn't true. Out of the twenty-eight song titles he recorded at Sun, almost a dozen are ballads. While only two of them were released at the time ("Sweet and Easy to Love" b/w "Devil Doll," Sun 265), the fact is that Phillips and Clement suffered from pill-popping attention deficit disorder, and Orbison simply wouldn't have been allowed the time to record a dozen ballads if they didn't see some promise in them.

Lastly, the biggest flaw in this whole written history is that Orbison and the Teen Kings were simply brilliant at rockabilly material. While Orbison was quick to discount it later in life, all one has to do is study the photographs from 1956 and 1957 to see that these boys were having the time of their lives. Dressed to the nines in hepcat finery, jumping all over the stage "like a bunch of idiots" (quoting Orbison), and touring with their fellow Sun luminaries Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others, these teenagers were living the rock and roll dream and enjoying every minute of it.

Perhaps these excuses and explanations were to cover up the pain of the failed releases that followed the success of "Ooby Dooby." All three follow-ups were undeserved commercial flops. "Rockhouse" b/w "You're My Baby" was released as Sun 251 in the summer of 1956 and sank without a trace. The only logical explanation is that Sun's promotional team was focusing their energies on other artists, as this is one of the great two-sided rockabilly 45s of all time. The top side, "Rockhouse," was a great call-to-arms number that Orbison cowrote with Harold Jenkins (later to become Conway Twitty), and the flip, "You're My Baby," was written by Johnny Cash and originally titled "Little Woolly Booger" (Cash called it the worst thing he'd ever written). They are two of the most savage, flat-out rockabilly sides ever waxed. From Orbison's frantic guitar to the wild drumming, this is a perfect rockabilly record and not deserving of the derision it has suffered from Orbison, Cash, and other historians.

Orbison's third release on Sun also seems to contradict his assertion that he was never allowed to do ballad material there. "Sweet and Easy to Love" b/w "Devil Doll" were released as Sun 265 in late 1956 and both were balladesque. "Sweet and Easy to Love" is a classic rock-a-ballad, with Orbison's sweet vocals riding over a thumping rockabilly backing. "Devil Doll" is as syrupy as anything ever got at Sun, and its commercial failure led producer Jack Clement to push Orbison back in the rock and roll direction for his next record.

The last Orbison Sun release, "Chicken Hearted" b/w "I Like Love," released as Sun 284 in fall 1957, has been characterized even in the Bear Family box set booklet as "a ghastly record." Orbison hated it because he was forced to record songs that other people had written. But why it gets such a bad rap baffles this author, because even though the lyrics are somewhat cornball, the rocking feel on both sides is superb. Recording with the Sun house band (he had gotten into a dispute with the Teen Kings by this time over label billing and money issues), which included both Roland Janes on guitar and Stan Kesler on bass, this session produced a host of great rockers, including the stunning, unissued tracks "Mean Little Mama" and "Problem Child."

After Roy left Sun, he had few good things to say about his experience there. But what cannot be denied is that the rockabilly tracks were some of the best ever cut within the confines of 706 Union. Part of what has marred public opinion of these tracks was the dreadful album release Roy Orbison at the Rockhouse, which Sun hastily released in 1961 after Orbison started having hits on Monument Records. Some of the fantastic unissued tracks from his Sun sessions appeared there for the first time, but they were covered in overdubs of piano and saxophone. It wasn't until the original, undubbed tracks came out in the 1980s that the true power of his rockin' voice and his raw guitar style were revealed.

An interesting side story to the Sun tracks came to light only recently, when it was learned that Orbison had done a session with the Teen Kings at Norman Petty's studio some time in 1957, when he was still contractually obligated to Sun. Two tracks were cut: "An Empty Cup (a Broken Date)," which was pitched as a demo to Buddy Holly, who cut it shortly thereafter, and possibly the most savage rocker that Orbison ever performed, "Cat Called Domino," which he had recorded for Sun a few months earlier with no success in securing a release. Whether or not Orbison recut the song with Norman Petty to pitch to Buddy Holly or someone else is unknown, but what we do know, and are grateful for, is that the original recording survived. This blistering version of "Domino" is the lead-off track on this compilation, with good reason--it's the hardest Orbison ever rocked in his life.

The next phase of Orbison's career was probably the hardest for him to suffer through. Barely a year after having a hit record with "Ooby Dooby," he found himself back in West Texas with virtually no career. The Teen Kings had dissolved and he was stuck at home with a new wife (Claudette) and baby and no way to feed them, much less make the Cadillac payment. If it weren't for his songwriting skills, that might have been the last anyone ever heard of Roy Orbison. Luckily, he placed "Claudette," an ode to his young wife, with the Everly Brothers, who released it as the flip side to "All I Have to Do Is Dream," which became a huge hit.

The association that Orbison had with song publisher Wesley Rose (of the huge publishing empire Acuff-Rose) led him to his next contract, with RCA Records in Nashville. Undoubtedly Orbison hoped that his career would take the same path as Elvis Presley's, jumping from Sun to RCA to world stardom, but it wasn't to be. The RCA sides are a curious footnote in his career--a step in the direction that he would eventually hit with, but not yet fully realized. His RCA ballads are unmemorable and sanitized, and the two singles he recorded for RCA sank even faster than his last few Sun singles. The only redeeming memory of the RCA sessions were the three rockers, which were decent in a late-'50s style with backing from the Nashville A-team studio musicians. We've included all three of them here, from the rockabillyish "Almost Eighteen" to the pop rockers "With the Bug" and "Double Date."

With his publishing mentor Wesley Rose's help, Orbison was then transferred to a new start-up label called Monument, the brainchild of Baltimore record hustler Fred Foster and Nashville A-team bassist Bob Moore. Monument was an upstart new label and dedicated to promoting Orbison, whereas at RCA he had been lost in the shuffle. The new union between Orbison and Monument turned was well timed on several fronts. First, Monument quickly gained strong momentum as their first two releases became moderate hits ("Gotta Travel On" by Billy Grammer and "The Shag (Is Totally Cool)" by Billy Graves). Second, Orbison had recently found a new songwriting partner in Joe Melson, who helped bring about some of the best writing of Roy's career.

The story that ensues could fill an entire book, and in fact there are already several biographies that detail this period in depth. Orbison began having huge top-ten hits with such classics as "Only the Lonely," "Crying," "Running Scared," and "In Dreams." He had finally found the winning combination that would secure his legend. What most accounts conveniently leave out is that while he always talked about leaving the rockers behind and finding success with the ballads, he was actually still recording great rockers well into the mid-1960s. The backing became more "beat" music and less rockabilly, but Orbison could rock with the best acts of the early 1960s, and in fact he toured with and befriended many of the early British beat bands, including the Beatles.

Included on this collection are some of the finest and most pounding uptempo numbers he recorded for Monument: "Uptown," "Dance," "Mean Woman Blues," "What'd I Say," and of course the biggest hit of his career, "Oh Pretty Woman." Shortly after the megasuccess of "Oh Pretty Woman," Roy signed a long-term contract with MGM Records, which seemed like a good career move at the time. He quickly found himself alone and lost in the forest, however, surrounded by hippies, psychedelia, and hard rock music, and was viewed as a curious relic of an earlier era. Misguided releases such as "Southbound Jericho Parkway" that tried to bring his image into the Charles Manson era were flat-out embarrassing. The hits stopped, and he hit the oldies circuit for the better part of the next twenty years.

After the death of his wife Claudette in a motorcycle accident followed by the death of his two eldest sons in a house fire, it is a miracle that Orbison came out on the other side intact, but that is exactly what happened. As with all things iconic, his image and inimitable sound were bound to make a comeback, and indeed after David Lynch used "In Dreams" to surrealistic effect in the 1986 movie Blue Velvet, Orbison found himself in demand once again. He was invited to join two rock supergroups, the Traveling Wilburys (with George Harrison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne) and the Class of '55 (with Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins). There was an all-star concert tribute on national television. And most unpredictably of all, Orbison even had one last top-ten hit with "You Got It," which was shipping from the pressing plant just as he suffered a fatal heart attack on December 6, 1988.

In all aspects of his life and career, Roy Orbison was something of an enigma. Though he hailed from an unlikely place with an even more unlikely image, he ultimately became a rock star and legend. Through personal and professional triumphs and tragedies, he nevertheless went out on top. Though he himself would never acknowledge it, Roy Orbison was a great rock and roller.