It’s common knowledge that, prior to joining The Shadows Of Knight, Joe Kelley played and recorded for The Vectors. Prior to The Vectors, however, Kelley played with Carl Anderson, Bo Calnen and Jimme Summers in The Exides. Although from Hinsdale, Illinois, The Exides played for two years in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin and recorded an unreleased demo that was rejected by Chess Studios. Anderson recalls the band as being incredibly talented, however, and like Calnen and Summers has many fond recollections of his time spent with the group.
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Carl Anderson Recalls The Exides
I remember when the first Elvis record (33-1/3 rpm) came out. I think it had a pink and black cover with his head on it. I was about ten years old (I was born in 1945). I was at a friend’s house in Clarendon Hills, Illinois, and we were in his basement. He cranked it up on his record player and it echoed on the concrete walls and floor of the basement. We just ran around chasing each other; it was such exciting music and much better than my older sister's "How Much Is That Doggie In the Window". I loved it. I was hooked on rock and roll. Chuck Berry soon followed, then Jerry Lee Lewis; I couldn't get enough.
The Exides was my first band. The first name put up was The Exides (music with a charge, like Exide batteries). Nobody liked that...so we spend about eight hours throwing out names and, in the end, we agreed it would be The Exides.
I think it was 1961 when we formed The Exides and the band lasted until Charlie, Joe and I graduated Hinsdale High School in Hinsdale, Illinois in 1963. The forming was weird. Joe Kelley (lead guitar), Bo (Bob) Calnen (bass), Jimmie Summers (vocals) and Donnie Moravec (saxophone) were in a band, The Vi Tones, with two other guys. They didn't want to fire their drummer and other player so they just quit The Vi-Tones and formed The Exides! I joined on rhythm guitar and Charlie Sparks joined on drums.
I was the worst player in The Exides...but had so much fun. Bo, Donnie, Charlie, Jimmie, and Joe were the true talent of the band. Every one of them was head and shoulders above anything else out there. Bo had a wall of his room filled with 33-1/3 rpm records. I mean hundreds. He was like 17! He had been playing guitar but switched to bass when we hooked up. He liked heavy jazz a lot and kept perfect time. Donnie played awesome sax. He was also our "muscle" on stage.
We were a Top 40 group. We did a lot of Ray Charles (we played a lot of Ray Charles stuff because Charlie dug him...and Donnie nailed it. Every midnight at the Taffy Twist we did "What’d I Say". It really did bring the house down). At the time The Beatles had one album out and we did about three to five songs off that. Buddy Holly was big with us because Jimmie was vocally a Buddy Holly clone. People used to stop dancing on the dance floor and just stare at him because it was so perfect. Meanwhile...Charlie was pounding out the drums on “Peggy Sue” and bitching and swearing about how much his arms hurt. People sitting in cocktail tables near him used to move because of his swearing. Nothing against Charlie; we all loved him...and still do. I think he really did it for humor. He is one of the funniest people you will ever meet. By the way, he was so talented it was unreal. He could play piano like he studied it his whole life. I watched him pick up guitars (having never played them) and figure out how to play guitar. One time in practice in Joe's basement he picked up Donnie's sax…left the basement...and then came back and played a Ray Charles thing. The guy was off the charts. He’s very successful now and owns a huge international retail store interior design company that deals with all the huge retail stores.
Unfortunately we never did our own stuff. We cut “Route 66” and “I Got My Mojo Workin’” as a demo in LaGrange and took it to Chess Studios. We just walked in. They guy didn't want to deal with us because we didn’t have a manager. They listened for about ten seconds...and said bye-bye. It was a low point for The Exides.
We played a lot of parties and teen clubs. I think "Stay" was one of our biggest songs. I remember a battle of the bands with The Travelers. We beat them out. They became The Cryan’ Shames in 1965. We toured to Downers Grove and LaGrange, except of course when we auditioned at the Taffy Twist in Lake Geneva. I think one of Jimmie's girlfriends turned us on to the audition.
We all piled into Jimmie's green and huge 1958 Mercury and headed to Lake Geneva. We went inside the Geneva Inn, the biggest hotel in Lake Geneva, and Jimmie met with the owner (I think his name was Bud). He set up an audition the following Sunday. We loaded up all our stuff...went up there...and played. The guy liked us and offered us a job. It paid $100 a man (six guys) a week - six nights a week from 9:00pm – 2:00am with a 15-minute break each hour. It was big money when gas cost $.25 a gallon. At the end of the try-out, this gal about age 25 approached us. We were the average age of 17 or so. She said, "Hi. I'm B.J. (Barbara Jack). I get to know all the bands real well." And she did. Rock and roll was then put into high gear for The Exides!
We played two summers at the Taffy Twist Lounge. The second was cut short when the cops found out some of us were under 18. The union always wanted us out because we were not members of the union. I remember one time when a union guy came in, and Bud escorted him out with a gun. The Geneva Inn was actually a rather rough place. There were a lot of syndicate people that vacationed there. One time when The Exides were messing around at the pool - doing cannonballs, etc. - and this 300-pound Italian guy came up and "suggested" that we leave. His boss was in a lounge chair behind him. The Exides left.
At the Taffy Twist the crowd sometimes got out of hand. On the Fourth of July weekend tons of college kids came to Lake Geneva to party. They would close the streets down. The cops would bring German Shepherds onto the dance floor to quiet the people down. It was riot city. Sometimes drunks would get up on stage with us...but Donnie would take care of them. He was a football and wrestling state champ in Downers Grove High School. His neck looked like a beer barrel. Donnie would kindly ask them to leave. They did.
Jimmie was the best singer I have ever known. What can I say? Joe was awesome. Carl just tried to keep up. It was a great group.
Joe Kelley and I went to college at Western Illinois University. I think the day he got there he formed a band called The Vectors. They played a lot of college dances. Joe lasted about a semester at Western and eventually flunked out...and the next thing I knew he was in The Shadows of Knight. I used to go see them play...and they got very big.
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Bo Calnen Recalls The Exides
The Exides coexisted because we were friends! To this day, I’m certain that if we all got together again, it would only be minutes before the old Exides’ rapport would be rampant. Jimmie, Donnie, Carl, Joe, Charlie and I had an inner communication. I recall when we all got together at Joe’s place in Chi-Town after their high school 25th reunion, we played some of our best and didn't need to count or arrange anything. We all knew it.
I think one of our best attributes was that parapsychological communication we had. And it didn't limit itself to our music. It was everywhere. Anything we did for fun and laughs, we all knew the punch line before it came out. God, I never laughed so hard in my life at absolutely nothing. Seinfeld was nothing compared to some of our antics. Charlie’s rendition of "Grandma's Tool" was a Smithsonian artifact and we all had some great friends, mostly Hinsdale guys, who supported us through thick and thin.
We did some great covers of Ray Charles stuff: “What'd I Say,” “Unchain My Heart,” “I Gotta Woman” - You would have thought his big band was behind us. Our Holly stuff was superb. Carl mentioned how some would stop and marvel at Jimmie’s perfect Buddy renditions. To this day, I always thought they were marveling at the bass work behind him, but I guess I can understand how they always love the lead singer. We had a fantastic “In The Still Of The Night;” again, it was Jimmie’s phenomenal vocals and Donnie’s sax solo. I only wish we had done more doo-wop [even before it was known as that] but we ranged from rock-a-billy, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran to some doo-wop, Five Satins, and The Cleftones to blues, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley to Ray Charles (what a show! what a show!).
I can clearly recall a song we did that was the flip side of Ihe Pentagon's “To Be Loved” called “Down At The Beach”: "Look good in your short shorts (down at the beach); I really go for your ta-a-a-n (down at the beach), yeah, let's get lovey dovey (down at the beach)”, etc. Well, we replaced the “down at the beach” with “son of a bitch” and sang it that way unless “challenged” by anyone in the crowd, at which point, we'd return it to “down at the beach.” I remember one night a petite young thing came up to the bandstand and asked, "Could you guys play 'son-of-a-bitch'?” She may have even said “please.” It was great! That was and those were the memories of the Taffy Twist Lounge.
We learned how to live together, sleep, and cook together. We used lard to help us cook pork chops. Then, we poured it out into the sink. There has been an enormous water bead the size of a superdome in that sink ever since. We also had a great sink in the barn we lived in. Some folks even washed their faces and hands in it.
Back to the music...we all loved the sounds of the day and after The Beatles (or whatever that band Paul McCartney was in before Wings was called) came around we adapted to that sound. We never quite got to write much, but did do some of our own renditions of some blues, group harmony, pop, rockabilly, and big band stuff. We never did any of it, but I recall we wore out an LP of Kenny Burrell's Midnight Blue. Then Charlie brought up copies of Mose Allison's Seventh Son and Parchman Farm. Just like Peter Townshend's revelation, none of us could imagine him as white. We loved the sound and the spirit of the music so much that Chess and Vee Jay were our labels of choice, though nothing happened. But we lived it, we loved it and we had an enormous friendship. When we've gotten together in recent years, the stories and memories are embedded and reliving the moments is precious. And I've missed so much in this…
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Jimme Summers Recalls The Exides
I took the name Exides from a battery and immediately regretted suggesting it; I never liked the name but it seemed to stick - there is no other explanation. Carl’s recollections are off by one year; we actually met in 1962 when a young acquaintance who was attending the same high school as Bo and Don suggested I audition for their band (they were called The Vi-Tones). He knew me because I had moved with his family to the Chicago area from Arkansas. I came here to earn money to go to college. After the audition, they asked me to join. We played several gigs but it quickly became obvious that we weren't really going to go anywhere because two of the musicians were not "naturals"; that is, the bassist had to learn each individual song by memorizing individual notes whereas the drummer couldn't keep the beat and kept slowing down. Rather than fire them, we took the easy way out: we disbanded and reformed as The Exides by taking Joe's two friends - Carl Anderson on rhythm and Charlie Sparks on drums - as new members.
Carl, Joe and Bo bought new Fender equipment on Maxwell Street and we were off and running. Bo placed an ad in the newspaper to sell his old Silvertone amp and bass at $80. Bo told the only person who answered the ad that he would take no less than $80 for the equipment. When the guy responded, "I will give you $50," Bo quickly responded, "I'll take it!"
We did play lots of gigs, mostly parties, and there are lots of stories but the core of our experience was playing at the Taffy Twist Lounge in Lake Geneva. The idea was hatched by Bo and me; we saw an old fifties movie about friends who happened to have an amateur band, who auditioned for a gig to play at a resort "up at the lake" and actually landed the job. We did one of those "wouldn't it be great" things and we began to fantasize that we, too, could pull this off. I knew there was a nightclub in Lake Geneva because I had been going up there a lot: my girlfriend's family had a summer home there. I knew there was a band playing there so, we decided to call and see if we could audition. The managing partner, Bud Parker, said sure, come on up and named a Sunday when we could play for a private party he was having for employees and guests. We played for about an hour (for free) and at the end of the session, he called me over and offered us the job; full-time, five nights a week plus Sunday afternoons for $600, in cash.
Bo and I quit our jobs and started living up there in May 1963 (we actually started playing on weekends in May) and the rest of the group came up after graduation in June. It sounds glamorous but it was actually hard work and we did not get as continuously laid (except for Charlie) as we thought we might. We lost the gig when Don was pulled in for curfew violation one week before the Fourth of July weekend (he was not 18). When he explained that he was on his way home from work (at 2:30am) the cops informed him he had to have a work permit. When we explained this to Bud, he was understandably "concerned" and suggested we try to save our job by going up to Madison, Wisconsin to appeal directly to the Secretary of State (or else). We got dressed up in suits and ties, drove 100 miles over to Madison, walked into the office and met briefly (22 seconds) with the Secretary's assistant; when she had heard our explanation she simply said no. We returned to our car and drove back to Lake Geneva and met with Bud. He said OK, finish on July 4th and we’ll see about next year.
We spent the rest of that summer playing parties and in August recorded the two-sided demo "Route 66" and "I've Got My Mojo Workin’". These were probably our two best songs anyway. We did take the demo to Chess and they were not interested but I don't remember the reason.
The following year, 1964, we played weekends only at the Taffy Twist and then our two last official gigs were a party in December at North Central College where Bo and later Don were students and at Kendall College in Evanston where I was a student.
We broke up because of conflicting interests and educational pursuits. Joe went with The Vectors and then The Shadows of Knight; Charlie transferred to the Art Institute to finish his BFA (Charlie played in a band I formed at Kendall called Points East); Bo moved to Connecticut to rejoin his parents who had relocated to Hartford and transferred to UConn; Carl continued at Western Illinois University, I transferred to the University of Illinois Chicago and Don was seriously playing football at North Central. We all finished school except Joe. Bo went to the Air Force and Carl actually got his Master's degree.
Bo has it right - we were all friends first and some of us still try to hang on. We are contemplating a reunion but can't quite figure out how to go about it. I am retired though I still do human resource consulting part-time and Don is a retired high school dean of students although he does work for his wife's company (she owns it, I mean).
It seems incredible to me that our musical relationship only lasted two full years; it seemed so much longer. There is a lot more but I don't want to bore you. Maybe I will write my memoirs.
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