While a member of The Living End, a young band in Grand Ledge, Michigan, Jim Hall was asked to provide a horn on the new 45 by local heroes Tonto & The Renegades. Although The Living End did not record, Hall has very fond recollections of being an integral part in a great recording by a truly legendary '60s combo...
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I started playing coronet in 5th grade in the school band. By the time I got in 7th grade I moved on to french horn. Then, while in junior high, The Beatles hit the Ed Sullivan Show and it was a done deal; I had to play more than school band music. I drove my folks crazy and they finally let me buy some drums. At first, all I did was practice to the radio and record player. I then got together with a couple of band mates (both horn players) and a classmate whom wasn't in a band but he was already playing some guitar. One of them came up with a bass...another one had a couple electric guitars, and then we added a organ. We all had a few years of school band background, and we soon became a pretty good little local band.
We called ourselves The Living End (Steve Pinckney, Jim Hall, Gary Bilow and Ernie Morrow). We played a lot of parties, school dances, and a number of other local events. We did a few Lansing battle of the bands. We only won once but that was due to our horns. A couple of The Plain Brown Wrapper members came over to my house during one of our practices and with their MSU jazzband background they helped us put together a killer version of a Stones tune, 'As Tears Go By,' with alot of cool horn parts and I'm sure that the arrangment won us our only battle!
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Being a Grand Ledge band at that time wasn't easy. Not only did the Lansing area have quite a few great bands but Grand Ledge had a couple of the very best. Tonto and The Renegades and The Beaux Jens were were both Grand Ledge bands and had huge amounts of fans. They were both a year or two ahead of us in school so we looked up to them and I was honored to have The Renegades ask me and one of my other bandmates, Ernie Morrow, to record with them. That was like, "Wow. I get to perform and record with some of my heros!"
Then it just got better and better: To think that we would be doing a couple of songs both written and produced by Dick Wagner! I will never forget how Dick asked us what key our horns were in. We told him Bb and he rattled off what he wanted us to play--transposing it all in his head!! We were blown away, not only to be in the studio with one of the very best bands of the sixties--Tonto and The Renegades--but to have Dick Wagner and Don Hartman (unbelievable harmonica) working with us to produce what I still feel is one of the very best '60s 45s ever.
I don't play horn anymore, but I play drums a little. Since I got out of the bands it hasn't been fun singing to my drums alone so for the past 30+ years. I've been singin' and doing some acoustic guitar stuff. I'm still lovin' my music every single day!
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