Perhaps you’ve read elsewhere about the all-but-unknown Dallas band The Rain Kings, perhaps not. I was one of The Rain Kings (still am, I guess – once a Rain Kings always an idiot.) And here is our story…
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| The Rain Kings in December 1966 |
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High Hopes In Lo-Fi: The Rain Kings (1964 – 1968)
By Richard Parker
The specifics of our band are not the makings of great musical history. In fact the story itself is at best a footnote in the history of Dallas music, much less on a national scope. Except for one thing. The Rain Kings’ story mirrors ten thousand other bands’ stories around the country and around the world.
Our music may have been a bit different from the bands in Des Moines or Fresno or anywhere on Earth for that matter, but the story – at its core – is familiar to grungy mid-sixties pimple-faced rock-and-roll guys everywhere.
Here’s the story of – not just my band – but basically every band that never quite made it in the sixties:
The story starts in the mid-fifties when this truck driver named Elvis Presley made a bit of news with his Deep South combination of blues, country, pop and gospel. They called it rock and roll, but it was more than that, because that implies it was just music. It wasn’t. It was a social, cultural, political and entertainment revolution that continues to revolve madly into the 21st Century.
One (and only one tiny little) piece of the social puzzle that Elvis contributed was the basic line-up for a rock and roll band. Singer with rhythm guitar. Lead guitar. Bass. Drums. (No trumpets, no flute, no trombones, no frills.) You could add a sax or a keyboard, but get that clarinet player back to the marching band!
A couple of years later, Buddy Holly solidified it all in the hearts and minds of high school boys across the country. You didn’t have to look like Elvis to be in a rock and roll band. Buddy looked like the absolute anti-Elvis of all time. Skinny, with bad teeth and thick glasses, from someplace named Lubbock (somewhere in Texas, they said), he had nothing going for him but talent. And a band. Two electric guitars, bass and drums. We knew that was his band’s line-up because we saw him on The Ed Sullivan Show, and that was the same honor as if he had been knighted by the king. He played live, and all that music came from just those four guys. No orchestra hidden behind the curtain, just Buddy, Jerry, Nikki and Joe.
Gangly, jangly Buddy Holly from somewhere else, USA! If he could be in a band on The Ed Sullivan Show, then anyone could be in a band and at least appear at the high school gym or the National Guard Armory Dance. No matter what kind of rock and roll you dug, you could get three other guys and get on stage somewhere and do it. In the late fifties, in every city that had electricity, at least one band of pimple-faced pals plugged in and got loud.
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| Richard Parker, Steve Howard and Steve Lowry |
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In Texas by the early sixties, the trend was represented by The Nightcaps. In the Northwest it was Ron Holden and The Thunderbirds. In Florida it was The Blazers. In New York it was The Starlighters. In the Deep South it was Wayne Cochran and The CC Riders. Around the country sprung up r&b, rockabilly and blues-rock popsters with two guitars, a bass and a drum set. The Corals, The Exotics, The Embers, the list went on. Since most of them were in high school, they would play cheap, anywhere, for as long as you wanted them to. They had no rent to pay, no food to provide, and all their girlfriends cost them nothing, because after all, these guys were in a rock and roll band. (In those days, “Money for nothing and your chicks for free” was not exactly true. It was more like, “The money is nothing, but your chicks are free”.) So if you offered the band eight dollars and soft drinks, you had four hours of entertainment at your dance. (Four hours of a band playing usually offered about two hours of non-repeated entertainment, since the band only knew about 30 songs and would do each one twice.)
By 1960, there was still not exactly a band on every corner, but there were twice as many as there had been in 1955. The next five years changed everything. By 1965 there were two bands on every corner and at least one more in a car parked down the street.
There was not a high school anywhere in America that could not afford a live band for each dance of the school year. My old high school had two dances each week with live bands, plus one for every special occasion (Sweetheart’s Dance, Sadie Hawkins Day, Homecoming, National Potato Week, any excuse for a dance, since the school charged about 50 cents for admission and made a bundle off of soft drink sales). The St. Valentine’s Dance (which we always referred to as the St. Vitus Dance, based on the dancing prowess of our high school classmates), was a major event in most schools in most areas of the country. In 1965, my school started having before school dances too, five days a week, just to make sure the income didn’t dry up. I bet they considered canceling classes altogether and just charging for dances three times a day.
By the mid-sixties not only were there thousands of local bands, but these bands were being recorded. Played on the radio. Filling dance halls. Written about in the paper. The Garage Bands had arrived and owned the damn place.
That’s what was happening. That’s how it started. But why did it have the opportunity to start in the first place?
How could these bands possibly compete with the established professional bands that had been working the circuit for years? The pro bands had all the things that a working band was supposed to have – matching stage outfits, professional equipment, a booking agent, business cards, equipment guys to set up the stage, portable lighting equipment. How could a bunch of kids in one Chevy with half a drum kit, two amps and one microphone steal away business?
Was it simply because they would play for peanuts, or free Pepsi or nothing at all? That was a part of it but just a small part. It was, is and will continue to be, about the music.
The fact is, the established bands were not playing the music that their audiences wanted to hear. The garage bands were.
Booking agents were mostly from a previous generation, learning their trade in the forties and fifties and merrily rolling on quite successfully until the mid-sixties. They had learned a valuable lesson in the late fifties when teens demanded true rock and rollers for their dances and the bookers and promoters were still offering “Lance Hargrave and His Syncopated Serenaders” or some such band. After a rocky few years the booking agents adapted and signed up the talent that the kids wanted to hear, but only after allowing the door to stay open long enough for a new breed of young, hungry rock and roll promoters to get in.
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| The Gretta Spoone Band, 1967 |
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But lessons may be learned, even though not remembered. Once all was well again, the young promoters blended into the establishment of seasoned promoters and all of them signed up groups with names like “The Kool Kats.” By the early ‘Louie Louie’ era, The Kool Kats had become The Old Guys, and the teens knew it. Fifties rock was still cool enough, and would continue to be the foundation for sixties rock, but things were changing fast.
Every generation of the century brought new sounds to the bandstands. Every ten years or so popular music was buried and a new popular music ascended the throne. By the late fifties this ten-year trend became an eight-year trend. Then it became a six-year musical turnover. By 1964, the musical-trend acceptability level of teens began to turn in about a five-year cycle. The trend-following promoters could not keep up with the trend-setting teens who were their bread and butter.
The introduction of hedonistic dance hits like ‘Louie Louie,’ ‘California Sun,’ ‘Surfin’ Bird’ and others came right before the mass musical turnover called The Beatles. Everything the promoters thought they knew about trends and trendsetters went out the window. The lessons they had so painfully learned in 1957 also flew out the window on the cool breeze from Britain.
The bookers continued to place the fifties and early-sixties rockers in nightclubs, of course. Without these clubs, which catered to the over-21 set, the established performers would have been waiting on tables of patrons instead of playing to them. But the teen dances were essential to music promoters, and they could not turn their backs on them. Most nightclubs paid less than a huge gig at the National Guard Armory or the “Teen Valentine Blast” at the VFW hall. In 1964 trying to place “Johnny Bop and The Twisters” into a high school dance was like trying to put toothpaste back into the tube. The musicians got the message first, and the youngest of them left the old bands and drifted together to form new groups with names like “The Demolitions” or “The Dark Screams.”
These semi-pro groups and the totally amateur high school combos that surrounded them had no management, no organization and virtually no chance to work, and yet somehow they were stealing all the gigs. Some of the “promotion” of these bands was purely word of mouth. Somebody knew the bass-player for The Demolitions because he was in the same English Lit class with him. So the band was booked in the school hallway in between classes and played the Groundhog Day Hop that Saturday night.
Some of the booking process was just luck of the draw and waiting your turn. If a high school kid had a band (and one out of five did), sooner or later he would get his chance to play in the gym or at a supermarket opening or a battle of the bands at the shopping center. Live bands were playing everywhere – schools, churches, gas stations, furniture stores and pool parties. Everyone’s turn came.
But established music-management tradition dies hard, even if the practitioners of the tradition began dying every five years. Soon a few teenage promoters became the “managers” of the better of the local bands. The most clever of these teen entrepreneurs made loads of money for their bands and themselves simply by working the telephones, printing up ten bucks worth of business cards and talking a good game.
These new, young turk bands soon became the professionals, the equivalent of Johnny Bop and The Twisters from only four years previous. And these bands soon met the same fate as Johnny Bop and his boys. 1967 came rolling over these groups with a tidal wave of new styles, and overnight the ‘Louie Louie’ era garage bands seemed as quaint as a Dixieland jazz group.
Psychedelic music, hard rock, metal, country-rock and an early form of disco/funk took hold and the garage bands were history. The more talented of garage players drifted together to form bands with names like “Crystal Moves” or “The Orange Membrane” and continued on with the secure knowledge that this particular new wrinkle of rock and roll was here to stay.
Yeah, right.
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| The Gretta Spoone Band, 1968 |
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There’s A Market To Our Madness
In 1962, some rock and roll fans would have said that popular music really sucked. It was music and it was popular in that it sold a bunch of records and therefore people were buying it. But to a generation raised on Little Richard, Carl Perkins and Chuck Berry, it may not have seemed like real rock and roll.
Where was the rock attitude? Where was the grit-and-grunge sound that was the hallmark of teen rebellion? Where were the tunes that were indelibly stamped with street-smarts and sounds that your parents hated? They had all gone to the garage to rethink their strategies.
The powers-that-were had recaptured the rock mountain from the wild rebels who had taken it. Peace had been restored to the music world and nice young men in matching jackets were once again at the microphone and on the record charts.
A sampling of top ten hits in 1962: Folk songs like ‘If I Had A Hammer’ by Peter Paul and Mary. Teeny-pop like ‘Bobby’s Girl’ by Marcie Blane. Drippy love songs like ‘Johnny Angel’ by Shelly Fabares. Old fashioned pop vocals like ‘Ramblin’ Rose’ by Nat King Cole. The hit charts were filled with performers like Pat Boone, Connie Francis, Andy Williams, Jimmy Dean, Johnny Crawford, Bobby Vee, Bobby Vinton and The Lettermen. Even pure popsters of the past like Patti Page, Burl Ives, and Perry Como were regularly being heard on the “rock and roll” radio stations. Rock and Roll? Rex Allen, Walter Brennan, Tony Bennett and Hayley Mills? It may have been good music to some, but it sure as hell was not rock and roll.
Pretty people with pretty voices singing pretty songs. It was a pretty bad situation for a generation of teens hungry for raw, rambunctious rock and roll. (There were of course some rock and r&b hits in that pivotal year of ‘62: Ray Charles, The Isley Brothers, Gary U.S. Bonds and others provided relief from the stream of pop pap programmed on rock radio. But a huge amount of music on teen radio was from performers with traditional pop styles.)
So the stage was set for a revolution – a horde of hungry, ignored and disaffected fans looking for some relief. The recording industry powers had a firm grip on the output of music. Radio station executives had a firm grip on the past. Radio programmers and deejays had a firm grip on payola money from the big companies who had axes to grind and product to move.
Only five years before, unknown performers recording in basements and living rooms were enjoying top ten hits. Needless to say, in those early-rock days the record company honchos envied the local entrepreneurs and hated this trend of homegrown hits, mainly because the honchos were being left off the gravy train. By 1962 all was back to normal. It seemed impossible for a wild young band to walk into a studio, pay fifty bucks to record a raw rock song and get it released at all, much less see it become a hit.
And then that’s exactly what happened. The Kingsmen recorded ‘Louie Louie’ in one take using one microphone at a cost of about one buck and had one huge hit in 1963. Then rugged, twisted local scream-fests and frat-blasts like the above-mentioned ‘California Sun’ and ‘Surfin’ Bird’ came wailing out of the woodwork and the industry hotshots found themselves back at square one (or at the most, square two).
To compound the problem for the traditional money-changers, The Beatles hit in early 1964, and what was left of everything the industry thought it new about teen tastes disappeared overnight. Bad-ass sounding bands came attacking from overseas, fueled by the need of American teens for real rock and roll. Groups with names like The Animals, The Zombies and The Yardbirds scared hell out of mid-American parents, and electrified their kids. When the lead singer of Them appeared on the hit charts with vocals that sounded like his tongue was permanently swollen from some strange accident, the way singers sang and sounded was given a direct boot in the chops. Van Morrison made every local band singer want to sound like he had hot marbles in his mouth.
Mick Jagger of The Rolling Stones, Eric Burdon of The Animals and Paul Jones of Manfred Mann brought a guttural growl back to rock vocalizations. These bands, along with The Yardbirds, The Beatles and The Spencer Davis group reintroduced good old American r&b to American teens, who thought it was new and used it like a drug.
Thousands of U.S. teens (mostly pimply-faced boys like me) bought guitars, learned those three chords and began forming bands. They saved their paper route money, plus any cash they received from playing gigs at the high school hops or supermarket openings and invested wisely in one hour of recording studio time at a local facility which had previously made its living recording church choirs and school marching bands.
These recordings were released by the ton on local labels too naive to realize that it simply wasn’t done that way. The rewards for this naiveté were local hits, national hits and sometimes enduring fame. It couldn’t have happened and yet it did.
Most of these recordings went nowhere in a mad rush, only to be discovered twenty years later, labeled as “garage band classics” and reissued world-wide (and thank God for that). By the ‘80s, bands who couldn’t afford business cards in 1966 were gracing the covers of albums released in Paris, London and New York City! The bands still could not afford business cards, but at least they were enjoying a brief measure of fame denied them in their teens.
That’s how and why it happened. Home grown bad-attitude bands and records created indirectly by the industry that tried to prevent them.
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| The Gretta Spoone Band, 1968 |
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The Imposters
Our band – the aforementioned Rain Kings – were no exception to the evolution outlined above. We knew that we were at best, “raw” in the talent department and so we made a conscious decision to make that fact the focus of our act, what there was of it.
We decided to use humor and self-deprecation as a hook, to differentiate us from the other local bands. We billed ourselves at first as “The Imposters – The World’s Worst Combo.” There was some talent in the band, none yet developed into anything marketable. We had a guitarist and a bass player who could play. We ran through six different drummers in three years, all of whom could at least keep a beat. We had a lead singer who actually had a very nice voice. But once we decided on being a “comic rock band” we stuck with it. Often we intentionally sang and played much worse than we were capable of, just to keep the “world’s worst” idea alive.
In 1965 we changed our name to “The Rain Kings” after a Saul Bellow novel called Henderson The Rain King. Then came the period that made us so very, very like every other local band in every other locality. We played at school dances in the gym, school assemblies in the auditorium, parties at friends houses, local teen dances (including one called – no kidding – “Broadway Skateland and Sock Hop A-Go-Go.” We got paid, usually. It often came to three or four bucks per man, but still it was a paying gig.
Like most bands, there was always a better band down the street, and they were pulling in the big bucks. In our case, we attended a very large high school and there were a dozen working bands just out of that one school!
The stars were Kenny and The Kasuals, who were good friends of ours. (When The Kasuals weren’t playing and we had a gig, their organist Paul Roach would join us.) The other bands in our high school at the same time included Jimmy C. and The Chelsea 5 (‘Play With Fire’, Zero label), The Five of a Kind (on the Vandan label), and a large list of bands that never recorded: The Rafters, The Demolitions, The Madras Men and many more.
Other high school bands in the area in 1965–1966 included recorded bands like The Chessmen, The Briks, The Chaparrals, The Beefeaters, The Gentlemen, The Barons, The Cavemen, Kit and The Outlaws, The Warlocks, Just Us Five (Southwest FOB), The Galaxies, The Mystics and The Menerals. Plus a hundred more that never recorded. Plus the older, established, full-time groups like The Five Americans, Mouse and The Traps, The Floyd Dakil Combo and the number one Dallas band of the early ‘50s, still kicking hard in the mid-sixties, The Nightcaps (Vandan label).
Just too much competition for the average local band, especially ours.
And yet we continued on until 1968, after another name change to “Gretta Spoone and Her Magic Moustache Band” which was shortened by the Pompeii record company to simply The Gretta Spoone Band.
During the years ‘65–‘68 we recorded a surprisingly large list of songs – some as pure demos and some as released studio recordings.
The Rain King / Gretta Spoone Band Discography:
Farmer John, Lydia, Everybody Out of the Pool, Selection 4, I Saw You Walkin’ Up That Wall, Off The End of the World, Oo-Ah, Lewis Lewis, Land of 14 Dances (Demos, 1964-1965)
Lewis Lewis, Lydia, I Know What You’re Trying To Do But You Can’t Get Away With It, Everybody Out of the Pool (Sellers Studio, Dallas, 1965. Released on EP-45)
Bird Droppings, I’m A Little Fat Boy, Close Your Eyes, I Do Believe You’re Dreaming, Blind Man (Sellers Studio, Dallas, 1967)
I Do Believe You’re Dreaming, Close Your Eyes (IRI Studios, 1968. Pompeii Records)
All My Life, Tennis Shoes, Banker’s Daughter, Cuba (Demos, 1967–1968)
1992 Reunion Recording (Forest Edge Studio, Dallas) Re-recordings of many of the above plus Gorilla.
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| 'Lydia' / 'I Know What You're Trying To Do' |
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| 'Lewis Lewis' / ' Everybody Out Of The Pool' |
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| 'I Do Beleive You're Dreaming' |
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| 'Close Your Eyes' |
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| The Gretta Spoone Band |
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Back To The Garage
Like I said, we were only one of thousands of garage bands who tried to make it in the mid-sixties. What happened to those bands that stood in line to play at the local high school hop?
Only one garage band out of a thousand made any impact on the record charts, even locally. One band out of ten thousand had a certified national hit. Pretty lousy odds considering all the work that went into the creation and continuation of a rock band, then and now.
And even though each band (yes, even The Rain Kings) harbored a secret fantasy of having a hit, appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show and touring the country as the opening act for The Rolling Stones, it rarely happened. The real appeal of being in a band was simply in being in a band. Standing on stage, playing, screaming and basking in the admiration of the audience (although this admiration was in reality, mostly in the performers’ minds). After a year or two of limited fame within the neighborhood, the bands broke up. What happened to the members?
Well, there seems to have been some sort of cosmic mathematical formula for dealing with the weakest and slowest members of the band, perhaps tied in somehow with Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the survival of a species. If you had five members in your band in 1965, when you broke up, two of these members would move on to another band. This second band was composed of two members of your old band, two members of another broken band and one other guy who came from across town somewhere.
This means that natural selection has taken care of at least six of the smallest creatures, leaving them out of the biz, and leaving five standing. But then this new band broke up as well, because suddenly psychedelic music was the rage and most of the band simply couldn’t play it. So two members of this band left and formed “The Lemon Merry Go Loud” with two members of another failed garage band from way, way on the other side of town. (Note: Survivors had to begin looking further afield for other survivors, sometimes even looking in the next city over!)
Now all was well, even though if you look back on the family trees of this new band, you’ll see about fifteen abandoned souls for the four survivors. But The Lemon Merry Go Loud (now called simply Lemon Gong after merging with the band previously known as The Everpresent Gong of Truth) was the opening act at a new nightclub called Fogg City, even though the band members were all still under the age of 21. Fogg City lasted about two years, and Lemon Gong lasted a considerably shorter period of time. One member joined a white soul band led by an ex-jazz saxophonist and was happy for the work. Another member formed a band called The Cumberland Stargazers and began playing a mild form of country rock inspired by Poco and The Flying Burrito Brothers. The rest of the band went on to college, a year late.
By 1968, these two bands had disbanded and only one of the original players from the original twenty garage bands that had gone into creating them, was still in the music business. He was probably the nerdy bass player from The Meatloafs, who while in high school was voted the most likely to pick his nose on national television. (He is now a successful producer of music videos, lives in Malibu and is married to the cover girl of a recent Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.)
Everybody else in each of the untold number of garage bands that fed the everflowing stream of crushed dreams went to school, or work, or joined a commune or disappeared altogether. Most of them are now insurance salesmen, clerks, gardeners, corporate honchos and/or hopeless drunks. In other words they merged with mainstream American society.
The system works. Long live the system.
As for The Rain Kings, none of us still make our full-time living playing music, although a couple of guys (singer Steve Howard and one of our many drummers David Anderson) still perform regularly. The rest of us--Steve Lowry, Doug Dossett, Mike McIver, Vic Nuutilla (The Hun), Barry Whistler and me, Richard Parker--went on to various careers mostly in the arts.
I hope that in telling our story (and trying to include a bit of background on everybody’s story) I’ve shed a little light on the who, what and most importantly why of the ‘60’s garage band phenomena.
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