Teen Town (2)
The Beat gets Stronger
The Music And The Musicians
Youth Rock’nRoll music (with electric guitars, electric bass, drums, organ or piano and vocalists) was still a fairly new thing in the early 1960’s. Electric guitars had been here since the 1940’s but the rise in popularity of electric blues and rock’nroll music was a true cultural phenomenon. Radio airplay, and live performances were the fuel feeding the fire. Teen Town, as mentioned in the previous episode, provided a potent catalyst for supporting a vital local youth music culture.
Rhythmic Metamorphosis
Where the music of my father’s generation (not even 10 years in the past) was rooted in the rhythm of swing and bebop (think Bennie Goodman or Charlie Parker), my contemporaries were grafting a backbeat* onto the swinging 12/8 feel of the previous 20 years. From this change, a new rhythmic category described as funk was born. It was tailor made to enable a new generation to dance, and to… “let their freak flag fly..” as James Marshall Hendrix invited us to do.
Yours truly was 14-15 years old when I first knew someone in a band and after going with my friend George to his bands’ rehearsal, seeing kids my own age playing music from my—not my dad’s— generation I thought this was pretty cool.
Des Moines youth bands could play at THE PLACE (a VFW Hall still situated on Second Avenue a block north of Euclid) or THE KNOWWHERE in West Des Moines or THE CLIQUE located in a downtown Des Moines church. Bands like The Coachmen with guitarist and lead singer Jonathan Rowat, The Princemen led by guitarist Russ Morgan.
Guitarist Bernie Fogel and later Jack Dawson and Jay Alcorn were known as The Spartans. The Pete Klint Quintet from Marshalltown, Ia. had a regional hit record [Walkin’ Proud]. Des Moines’ Tommy Tucker and The Esquires and The Echos V were all good but my fav. was Jimmy Brown and the Rhythm Masters which also featured Fogel on guitar.
The Rhythm Masters (Brown, George T. Clinton, Fogel and bassist Wally Ackerson) were the first band I actually knew because of my friendship with George. Here’s a more extensive take on the significance of Clinton to the Teen Town era.
Even knowing someone who played in a band in those days bestowed upon you a certain degree of awesome-ness, so meeting Jimmy Brown was almost like encountering a Being come down from Mt. Olympus.
Music in the ‘hood
As destiny would have it, we were all practically neighbors. Russ Morgan who started the Princemen, lived on Maple Street a few blocks from my house.
Jimmy Brown (no relation) also lived on the East side a few blocks from our house at 1434 Walker Street. Jimmy came out of the Drum and Bugle Corp* tradition with a talent for creating beats which were way ahead of their time for here in Iowa. He was the first drummer I heard in person that could play what’s known as the backbeat.* Jimmy could play it as well as the original New Orleans drummer Earl Palmer or Clyde Stubblefield drummer with James Brown and his band The Famous Flames.
….From an upcoming interview with Jimmy Brown
Jimmy playing his black Rogers kit, locked-in with George T. Clinton’s driving Hammond B3, Bernie Fogel’s Fender Jaguar guitar (with dual Showmen amplifier no less) and Wally Ackerson’s Hofner bass represented the most sublime non-jazz music I’d ever heard.
Girls would crowd up to the front of the stage to see Jimmy smiling at the drums and GT being GT on the Hammond B3 using his Speck Redd-influenced musical knowledge combined with the Gospel roots he learned in the Corinthian Baptist Church. Dancing was definitely a thing and these guys could cause genuine frenzy bordering on delirium at Teen Town. When they got into songs like Phil Upchurch’s 1961 hit You Can’t Sit Down (Part 1) or You can’t Sit Down (Part 2) it was teen pandemonium.
I wasn’t playing music like this yet, (See YMCA Boys Chorus and Bellringers) but after listening to Dad (and neighborhood friend Ernest “Speck Redd) play Jazz, I knew that Jimmy, Wally, Bernie and George had a teen band as good as anyone I’d heard on television or radio.
Importantly, Jazz was a lot different than the Rhythm & Blues, Rock or Blues-Rock music of that period. Coming from a Jazz and Classical music-loving household I found that the basic chords and song structure of the Blues and R&B were not that hard to learn—but your rhythm and timing had better be spot on.
As a bass player (ha! one note at at time, I can do that!) I learned the blues and standard chord progressions discovering elements between jazz and rock that logically referred back to their common origins in African-American music.
I was hooked! Music was part of my culture, it was deeply an embedded part of my generation’s signature. Music uplifted and sustained the Civil Rights movement. You could achieve actual fame and (local) fortune if your band was good….and it was pretty obvious that girls liked musicians too.
This was 1963 into 1964, This was the post-Elvis but Pre-Beatles era. Yes, we’d heard of John, Paul, Ringo and George but we were more interested in Little Richard, James Brown, Junior Walker and the All-Stars and B.B. King—for another few months anyway.
Next Episode: I’ve had heartwarming conversations with Russ Morgan, Jimmy Brown and Bernie Fogel three guys who actually played at Teen Town 50 years ago. Theirs was a world comprised of new music, new sounds, new instruments, and new business opportunities. Russ Morgan, Jimmy Brown and Bernie Fogel, all band leaders at Teen Town take us back to the Post Elvis and Pre-Beatles era.
Stay Tuned…Don’t touch that dial.
Defintions and Expansions:
*Drum and Bugle Corp
*Almost every church in the black community or youth organization had some type of bugle or glockenspiel parade corps or standstill corps. Drum and bugle corps were a fabric of the African-American community back during the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Source
BackBeat
*backbeat. noun. back·beat -ˌbēt. : a steady pronounced rhythm stressing the second and fourth beats of a four-beat measure.
See Previous Episode (Part One) — Next Episode (Part Three)
Episode One Episode Two Episode Three Episode 4
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This is amazing! What a time and place. Thank you for taking us there.