This Weeks Cover

It was 50 years ago today ... really, 50 years ago this week. The front page of Worcester’s Evening Gazette featured



Rock ’n’ roll is here to stay (from top): Eric Gulliksen, first of The Flares, then of Orpheus; The WTAG station wagon makes an appearance at a 1964 concert; and WORC’s “official request survey” from the third week in November, 1963 — when President Kennedy was assassinated.

news on the ongoing series of probes of suspected Communist sympathizers at Fort Devens and in Boston. James Lee’s May 1 entertainment column, “Backstage,” announced that famous Worcester songwriter Charlie Tobias (“composer of 1,000 hits”) had recently returned home to perform at a benefit concert.
The “Teen Topics” section of the Gazette reported on a trend among teen girls: wearing dog-collar anklets, particularly in pastel shades. Those wearing them on their left ankle were “going steady,” while those wearing them on their right were “ready to date.”
They may have worn those anklets to performances by three Commerce High School teens — accordionist Domenic DiPilato, guitarist Frank Mungo and bass fiddler Nicholas Perrone — who regularly played “hill-billy” instrumental music in 1953. “Waltzes are out,” the band declared in a May 20, 1953, “Teen Topics” column. “All the polkas and rhumbas we can play are called for.”
The Commerce High musicians were not the city’s first link to what would become rock ‘n’ roll. That honor, it would seem, belongs to the Mountain Aires, A/K/A the Ede brothers; Alan, Bobby and George. The latter would go on to play a pivotal role with The Phaetons, a local band well-remembered for its glory days in the first, true wave of Worcester rockers.
George Ede started playing music with his two brothers at the age of 10 in 1949 and the Mountain Aires stayed together through 1952. “Pretty much all we did was with the Armed Forces and the USO,” Ede says. “I was the hero of the neighborhood. The army would send a car to pick me up to go off to play. A couple of times they sent a carload of dancing girls — I really liked that a lot.”
As the summer of ’53 neared, a debate raged in the Gazette’s letters section over the appropriateness of wearing dungarees to school and places of worship. One person said wearing them in church was an insult to churchgoers; another wrote that they were all he could afford. One South High student wrote that some of her cohorts dressed to prepare for careers in business while those wearing dungarees were obviously getting ready to be farmers.
Some may have also become rock ‘n’ rollers.

As rock ’n’ roll began to dominate the popular music charts, big-name performers started visiting the area more frequently. Bill Haley and the Comets played the Whalom Park Ballroom on June 13, 1955. That same month, the White City Amusement Park brought in The Three Suns of “Twilight Time” fame, The Crew Cuts and Tony Bennett.
Meanwhile, George Ede and a few other local teens were ready to make their own contribution to the new sound. Ede had been playing island music since the Mountain Aires broke up, until he and vocalist Bernie Mangini formed The Phaetons. “I had a Hawaiian guitar, the singer had a Hawaiian guitar,” Ede explains. “We just got together to do stuff and eventually got rid of the Hawaiian guitars, got a real drum set, and we had a band.”

The Phaetons were first
Al Arsenault tells the story

Long before pianist/guitarist Al Arsenault became a fixture on the local blues scene, he was a teenage rocker who played with The Phaetons, one of the most storied acts to come out of the region. Norton Records, who reissued their 45, had this to say: “Over the years they’ve caught much lip service as one of the Crescent City’s coolest white-boy combos. The truth be known, these cats let mosta [sic] their good times roll within the city limits of their hometown of Worcester, Mass.”
Singer Jimmy Clanton helped get them signed after The Phaetons opened for him at White City in 1957. He was so impressed that he offered to pitch their demo to Ace records. Ace issued Frankie Ford’s “Sea Cruise’”alongside The Phaetons’ 45 and the label went full-tilt behind the rockin’ hit and “I Love My Baby” died on the vine. Still, the combo’s affiliation to a big-shot waxery helped The Phaetons maintain strong local status into the early ’60s.

The legend that is Al Arsenault, today (top) and back when he was a member of The Phaetons, occupying familiar territory at the keyboard.

They were already playing when I joined. We never had a bass player. We had two guitars, piano and drums. It was a unique sound, totally different. The singer lived on Shrewsbury Street, Bernie Mangini. The guitar player is still around; his name is George Ede. The drummer died a few years ago, Dave Mulhammond, a Turkish kid. I was added to the band as the piano player. I was about 18 years old.
Bernie found the name. It was an old-car style, the phaeton. One year we won the Battle of the Bands at the Armory. We used to wear these sequin jackets. We played in Boston, all over the place. It was just a good rock ‘n’ roll band. We did Elvis Presley stuff. Jerry Lee Lewis. Stuff that had just come out. We played at Bronzo’s, the Valhalla. There was an American Legion Club on Main Street. In those days they ran dances.
We backed up all the names in White City Park outdoors, in summer. We opened for Jimmy Clanton, Jack Scott, Bobby Darin and Ray Peterson.
The record was recorded in Woburn. I can remember the night we went down there. We did two songs, “I Love My Baby” and “As You Know.” We never knew it was on a compilation CD on Norton records. My wife was on the Internet going through things and found it.
We had the No. 1 hit in New England at the time. That’s when Fabian came out. He had a strong Worcester following. We used to pack them in, every place we played. We had a shot to go on the Dick Clark Show, but the band broke up.
I left the band and they broke up right after me. I got married. That’s why I left the band. My wife at the time didn’t want me to play. Like a jerk, I listened to her. Six months later, I said, ‘I’m going back to playing,’ but the band broke up. We recorded those two songs and that was it.

Arsenault is still musically active. Catch him every other Friday at Café Amore on Shrewsbury Street and Saturdays at Christo’s, 97 Stafford Street. He also plays a Sunday brunch at the Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center.

While the teenage Phaetons wanted to rock out, thanks to pianist Al Arsenault, they also paid attention to their musical chops. As a result, they were able to get plenty of paying gigs — including a two-year stint at White City, where they opened up for many of the top recording artists of the day (see the Al Arsenault sidebar, page 13).
They started playing high school dances and proms, showers, and weddings. “As long as you played rock ‘n’ roll, you were going to be a popular thing,” Ede says.
When they weren’t playing, The Phaetons could be found checking out some of the city’s vocal groups. “There were a lot of local quartets — The Four This, The Four That,” Ede says. “We loved to watch these guys sing. Boy, those four-part harmonies were something.”

On May 3, 1958, at the Boston Arena’s Alan Freed Big Beat show featuring Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis, crowds went wild. Other cities on the Freed tour canceled their performances. A Gazette editorial titled “The end product of rock ’n’ roll” said, “Combine 6,000 excited kids, a group of hoodlums, and dark streets of a city, and you can expect trouble. Four days later, state Sen. William Fleming (D-Worcester) charged that narcotics were sold at the show and that “we have enough trouble keeping the good name of the Commonwealth without these New York people.”
A few days later, the paper reported that Shrewsbury had banned teen dances at Town Hall after considerable damage occurred at a Beal High School sorority-sponsored show. Three months earlier, the town had banned all record hops with DJs.
However, everyone was well-behaved at the Seventh Catholic Charities Stadium Festival, which was headlined by Danny and the Juniors. And the June 1, 1958 Gazette reported that 23,000 seats at Holy Cross Stadium were “well-filled” to see MC Dick Clark — Mr. “American Bandstand” — receive a silver tray as a gift from Bishop Wright.
Locally, columnist Lee reported that “Emil Haddad’s versatile band (The Note-ables) is beginning their fifth month at the 371 Club” and that “manager Toni Toscano says the boys are a fixture there until at least February 1959.” Not to be outdone, Bronzo’s, which still sits across from the former site of the park on the northern side of Route 9, began hosting a Sunday night talent contest presented by Dick Guicz. The June 15, 1958 lineup included rock ’n’ roll singer Paul Chaplain of Webster. He didn’t even advance to the next round. Chaplain, however, would have the last laugh, scoring a nationwide No. 1 single in the coming new decade.
The Phaetons made it the following week, when Bronzo’s winners included the instrumental quartet as well as vocal quintet The Lingcardos. However, only The Phaetons made it through to the talent finals on July 6, where they took on 10 other acts, including The Mello-Tones. “In a contest like that you didn’t know what you were up against,” said Ede. “You just hoped it wasn’t a cute 9-year-old girl or a cute animal.”

It was a GB world back then
Guitarist Steve Cancelli

Steve Cancelli has been playing guitar for more than half a century. Throughout the 1950s, he was one of the more in-demand players on the scene. Today he is a notable jazz player, who gigs regularly with pianist/bassist Joe Holovnia. He has recorded with Monica Hatch.

I started to play in 1953. That’s when I had my first guitar instruction from Peter Clemente at Forchelli Studios on Front Street, the old Salem Square. A fellow upstairs was playing an electric guitar. It was more of an acoustic guitar with a pick up and an amplifier. I just loved the sound of it.
My first job was when I was 14. I was kind of big for my age. I think the first time I got paid it was $5, down at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church with a group led by a guy from North High School, George Perrone. We played a dance. Back then dances were playing pretty vanilla music. Rock hadn’t made inroads.
My first guitar cost $39. We had to make time payments on it. It was a Harmony Monterey, an arch-top guitar. My first amp I bought from Peter Clemente, a D’Armond pick-up and a little amplifier. It was the best amplifier I ever had. I used that for three or four years on gigs.
In the late ‘50s, if you could make $20 a night that was something else. I worked at the Valhalla, the Somerset, all the VFW halls in the area, the AOH halls, American Legion halls. The Plantation Club used to be the Queen Elena hall. The Knights of Columbus. Our Lady of Mount Carmel’s recreation hall. You had to be versatile in ethnic music. We played a lot of Jewish functions, as well as Italian, Polish and French. Irish. If you wanted to work St. Patrick’s Day, you needed to know my “My Wild Irish Rose.”
Whalberg & Auge was the big music store. They were starting to stock guitars. That where I bought my first Gibson in 1957. My father took me down and bought me a Gibson hollow body guitar. I thought that was heaven. My amp was a two-tone Gibson 20T, a little amp with a single 12-inch speaker. The next time I ever saw one was on “Happy Days.” There was no reverb then. Tremolo was the modern effect back then.
I would say the guitar was a second-class citizen then. If they knew you could play a solo, sometimes you did, but for the most part, you played rhythm. It was a big accordion town. Well, Pete Clemente was probably the only guitarist in Worcester who was playing on that level then. There was also Johnny Rines, who was working with Emil Haddad. John was a fine player. He was very deliberate. He studied John Van Epps. He knew his way around harmony like crazy.
Internationally, it was Johnny Smith, Tony Motola and Mundell Lowe, who I finally met just last year. Les Paul was the legend. I am told that he played in Worcester in 1953 to raise money for the tornado. You could walk down Front Street and hear Les Paul and Mary Ford. You’d hear “How High the Moon” or “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise.”
In the 1950s there was a lot of steady work. A lot of clubs were running three to five nights a week. The early rock was very tame compared to what you hear today. The rock jobs — that came with the Twist in the Chubby Checker era — those came later, in the early ‘60s. Most of the work would be playing dances. It wasn’t rock. It was music from the Big Band era or Nat “King” Cole. It was Latin rumbas, waltzes, fox trots and swing.

Yet at Bronzo’s, The Phaetons (“four boys — piano, drums, two guitars — Bernie Mangini doubling on vocals”) would defeat their amateur and semi-professional counterparts to take home first prize and receive one of the first thorough reviews ever of a local rock ’n’ roll act in the hometown Gazette.
“The beat is rock ’n’ roll and the quartet sounds more authentic than some of the pros,” reported May in his “Backstage” column. Second prize went to Linda Nigro, daughter of singer Yolanda Lee, while third place went to Supernor (“a cute trick who sings”) and singer Sandra Plourde. And while they didn’t place in the contest, Lee noted he was impressed with the vocal group The Bel-Aires — which featured Commerce High School all-star basketball player Jerry Price.
For a few amazing summers, The Phaetons backed many of the greatest performers in the recording industry at the White City Amusement Park. “We were the house band for the name act,” Ede says. “They didn’t travel with a band. We’d go in cold, meet the artist and do a quick practice run-through. It was quick, it was very simple.
Danny and the Juniors returned to the area to join Bobby Darin for the first of a series of 1958 record hops in front of 3,000 at White City. Performers were booked for the entire weekend, but on Friday night, WORC DJs Dick Smith and Bob Bryar spun the hits while the stars lip-synched their chart-toppers. The Elegants (“Little Stars”) and Connie & Lee (“Maybe You’ll Be Mine”) attracted more than 2,000, while The Royal Teens of “Short Shorts” fame drew 3,800 fans. Gazette columnist Lee wrote, “This backs up claims of record signers that White City dances are the best patronized of any in the country.”
While the dancing was getting hotter, so were Worcester’s streets. Judge Joseph Goldberg fined a city youth $75 after an altercation across the street from the popular Broadway ice cream parlor and soda fountain. Goldberg noted, “The gang hanging around the corners of Water Street is the worst and the freshest in the city. You take your life in your hands when you travel the street.” Even Tatnuck Square — where a 20-year-old was blasted with a gun shot through his knees — wasn’t spared from violence. “We were the city of seven hills and there was a gang on every hill,” says Ede.

Here come The Five Aces, presented by radio station WAAB in the early 1960s.

“We had a manager — a hot-shot little guy,” Ede explains. “We weren’t even in the show but he got us to see Dick Clark and into the show. We got great publicity for that.”
The following June, the Jackson, Miss.-based Vin Records label released the The Phaetons’ first 45 single: “I Love My Baby” and “As You Know.” The following week, they personally presented a copy to the legendary “American Bandstand” host Dick Clark, who had returned to host the Eighth Annual Stadium Festival featuring 16-year-old teen singing sensation Fabian, Tommy Leonetti, Connie Francis and Leslie Uggams. As the show’s sponsor had the host escorted to Fitton Field in a police cruiser, The Phaetons rode to the show in Clark’s personal Cadillac.
The record never did make it on to “American Bandstand,” but it did get a four-star Billboard rating, signifying The Phaetons as a band to be watched. “And that was that,” Ede says. “We had great airplay in the Worcester area, but we didn’t have great distribution from our record company, so it didn’t get national airplay. It would have been a big stepping stone, but we never made the big step up. I went off to college. As for why we disbanded, I was thinking about that the other day. I couldn’t put a finger on it.”
Ede still performs each weekend as an on-call country music guitarist. “I’m always playing somewhere with someone,” he says. He’s also a full-time guitar teacher at Liberty Music in Framingham, which he owns.

Central Mass. gets a U.S. No. 1
In its final summer, the White City Amusement Park held Saturday night record hops featuring performances by The Crests and Dante and the Evergreens. It closed for good on Labor Day, 1960.
At the time, area rocker Paul Chaplain (and The Emeralds) was climbing to the top of the Billboard charts with “Shortnin’ Bread,” an African-American traditional song to which he added a twangin’ rockabilly beat. The hit was backed with “Nicotine,” which helped earn Chaplain the nickname “Mr. Nicotine.”
He may have topped the national charts, but having a hit record didn’t carry the same instant success it does today. That same year, Chaplain — by all accounts a pretty colorful character in his younger days — “performed” at Chandler Junior High School. “He came and stood on a table with an electric guitar, not plugged in, and lip-synched to his song,” says area musician Walter Crockett.
“Paul Chaplain and the Emeralds played Spree Day at Clark. They always had a lot of bands and a lot of beer,” recalls Tom Zagryn, a student at Worcester Tech who would make his own contribution to the area’s musical history. “There was a mysterious keg party in the woods some place; famous for having 50 kegs of beer and no one over 19. Paul Chaplain and the Emeralds were famous for playing those kinds of things. He always wore sunglasses — he was ahead of his time. He was a little older, unshaven, always smoking.”
Paul Chaplain and the Emeralds’ “Shortnin’ Bread” can be found on a wide number of rockabilly CD compilations. The Netherlands-based White Label released a compilation of Chaplain tracks, “Mr. Nicotine,” in 1987. Chaplain died on May 13, 1995, in his hometown of Webster.

The Legend of U.S.S. Titanic
Jaime Brockett

Jaime Brockett is one of the unsung heroes of local music. He is best known for his 1970 folk anthem, “Legend of the U.S.S. Titanic.” His early days were spent running the streets of Worcester. Writer Elijah Wald described a recent performance this way: “Brockett is still a hard-core, unregenerate folkie, in a day when the spirit of Woody Guthrie has all but disappeared, he brings it back with a vengeance.” These days Brockett is semi-retired. He lives on a farm in New Hampshire, where he deals in vintage guitars.

Let me set the scene for you, as far as early rock ’n’ roll in Worcester. Well, there was a guy named Tony Rand, a singer. He had a regional hit called, “Seven Come Eleven.” He sort of ended up being a fading star. White City Park used to be the place to go to see rock acts. I started going when I was around 12, from 1953 to 1957. God, I saw Link Wray there. The Bobbettes. They brought some fabulous people in there. My dad didn’t want me to go there because it was all “greaseballs.”

Jaime Brockett still sports his trademark moustache.

Of course, this is where all the rumbles started, because the kids would come from Grafton and then there’d be the gang from Shrewsbury Street. Then there would be the Bell Hill boys. It was rumble in the streets back then. We were all greaseballs with big Elvis haircuts. We had big belts, sharpened. Speedy’s [Burger’s on Shrewsbury Street] was the place when I was a kid. Of course, I didn’t have a license, but we used to go to Speedy’s and watch them peel out. It was big-time.
In 1955, ’56, ’57, I used to hang around WORC all the time. They were located right across from the Common and City Hall, right near the T&G. There was Milt Cray, Ken Ducette and Dick Smith. I was a gofer for these guys when I was like 11, 12 years old. Christ, I met everybody. The Moonglows. I went and had coffee with Bobby Darin. I didn’t drink coffee, but I was drinking coffee with Bobby Darin.
Everything else that was happening music-wise, was coming out of the art school at the Worcester Art Museum. As far as I’m concerned, that’s where local music really started pushing out. There were people there with guitars and banjos; more a folkie thing.
I saw The Phaetons once or twice. I saw the guy who did “Shortnin’ Bread.” We used to go to dance at the Armory. The big highlight of the whole thing was the big rock ‘n’ roll contest. I remember The Moors. I remember seeing the Orchids at AOH Hall, which would have been down where the old bus station used to be. There was a big hall upstairs and a bowling alley on the other side.
The electric guitar was a new animal. I never really saw the electric guitar played the way it should have been played until I saw Link Wray at White City.

As “Shortnin’ Bread” was breaking nationally, Eric Gulliksen and Tom Zagryn were enrolling at Worcester Tech (now known as WPI). They soon teamed up with other classmates to form The Flares, playing instrumental rock and roll, mainly for the local fraternity brothers. They were sometimes joined by The Scarlets from Clark University, who played, according to Gulliksen, “straight-out rock ’n’ roll.”
When The Flares burned out, Gulliksen joined Jack McKenes (who would later be a member of Orpheus, a Worcester-based band who would have a huge national hit with “Can’t Find the Time”) and Dave Beaber in the folkish Wanderers; however, his heart wanted to be playing rock ‘n’ roll.
In searching out kindred souls, Gulliksen and Zagryn played in a pick-up group at the Golden Nugget on Summer Street. “It was a wild place,” Gulliksen remembers. “We played whatever we had. That was where I met Tom Collins, who was in a group called The Corvettes that had popularity in the Main South area. We played with a lot of drummers, but none of them could play this shake music coming out of New York.”
It was the beginning of The Blue Echoes. Their style was captured on “Tiger Talk,” the B-side of the first Blue Echoes 45, which was released on their own Bristol Records label. The A-side, “Blue Bell Bounce,” went on to be a huge local No. 1 hit. “We had been confined mostly to colleges and fraternities,” Zagryn says, “and when the record broke, we got booked into churches and clubs.”
Zagryn remembers playing some big gigs at the Leicester Airport and backing The Chiffons of “She’s So Fine” fame a number of times. And another venue: “Mechanics Hall ran a lot of dances,” Zagryn says. “It was a cheap rental — you could have it for $50 and cleaning up the gum after the shows. We had some pretty good crowds there.”
The biggest rivals to The Blue Echoes were The Orchids (sometimes known as Tweety and the Orchids) who, thanks to WAAB DJ Bill Garcia (who released two 45s of his own), had a big local hit with their version of “Hello, Josephine.” The Orchids were also infamous for their version of “Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box,” a pretty hot, risque hit. “They just lifted it and played it at parties,” Zagryn says.
While “Blue Bell Bounce” was rocking Worcester radio, WORC ’s Dick “The Derby” Smith, the first American DJ to play the Beatles, put the group in contact with the local rep for Swan Records. Swan had released the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” although it was the flip side, “I’ll Get You,” which wowed Worcester audiences. “We were in the middle of playing a show at Becker College when we got a frantic call from Dick Smith — I’ve got no idea how he traced us down — to tell us Swan Records wanted to purchase our master,” Zagryn says.

Layers of time: The front of the former Ethan Allen furniture store on Front Street gave way to a popular sentiment in the 1970s.

In an unforeseeable act of bad timing, Swan Records re-released “Blue Bell Bounce” on Lawn Records, its subsidiary label, on Nov. 22, 1963. By the time the nation had recovered from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the record would be lost among year-end surveys and the British Invasion.
“This is strange,” remembers Dick “The Derby” Smith. “I know the president of Swan was having lunch with me at Putnam and Thurston’s the day Kennedy was shot. He came to Worcester because of the Beatles and other things. He wanted to get back and start promoting it. ‘Blue Bell Bounce’ was on our charts, too. And I indicated it was a good sound that was getting a good response. “If anyone local came to us with a record that was halfway decent, we were willing to give it a shot. Some got a response, like The Phaetons, and others died a noble death.”
There was a good side to Beatlemania, and The Blue Echoes took advantage of it. “Eric’s family took him on a summer vacation to Europe, where he picked up some records on the Parlaphone Records label by the Beatles,” says Zagryn.. “When we came back to school, we rehearsed a heck of a lot of Beatles songs and initially nobody noticed. But when they hit, we were about the only band on the East Coast playing those songs.”

“We knew it was going to hit sooner or later, because we subscribed to Billboard and they were huge all over Europe,” adds Gulliksen, who played the electric, 12-string guitar that gave the pre-Byrds Blue Echoes a unique sound.
Of course, even the biggest hits eventually fall from the charts. “We had a pretty good run on ‘Rate the Record’ — six of my fraternity brothers would work the phones,” Zagryn laughs, “but my heart was broken when ‘Blue Belle Bounce’ was knocked off by ‘The Crusher’ by the Novas.”
The Blue Echoes disbanded in 1966 after releasing a third 45 on their own BEP — Blue Echo Productions — label. Gullicksen, who would go on to play with Orpheus, keeps connected with the music business by doing disc jockey work. At WPI reunions, he always gets requests “to play stuff by The Echoes.”

The Derby remembers

Dick “The Derby” Smith is probably the most fondly remembered radio personality in Worcester, having programmed WORC when it was a Top 40 giant with a national reputation. His WORC was where most teenagers of the first rock generation, transistor radios glued to their ears, connected to the new music with the dynamite beat — the first music they could truly call their own.

Dick “The Derby” Smith, with his golden gift from The Beatles.

In the early ’50s, WNEB was the dominant radio station in Worcester as far as music went. But that station and others resisted playing music with a rock beat, figuring it wouldn’t last. At WORC, we were a little more adventuresome. We stood alone. I don’t think the other stations would play even a Johnny Ray song.
Then, when Elvis Presley and other artists came on the scene and it became the mainstream, some of the other stations relented a bit and started to mix in a little rock and roll. WAAB, which was the fourth radio station in the city, started to play the music and tried to challenge WORC for a while. And of course, some of the Boston stations — even WBZ — were playing some of the Top 40 music. But we were the pioneers.
We let the listeners pick the music. Probably five or six times a day, we would introduce a new record. If we put on a song by The Drifters and they liked it, we would stay with it. There was no question that WORC was a national trendsetter. We — the songs we played — were listed in the trades, Billboard and Cashbox, each week, plus some of the radio industry tip sheets like The Bill Gavin Report. We became quite prominent.
Seventy-five percent of the artists who were on the charts came to town for personal appearances. We ran Friday night dances at White City every summer for a few years. Imagine today, bringing together two prominent artists like Bobby Darin and Danny and the Juniors for an evening, for maybe 75 cents to get in. Plus, of course, we had the many touring shows, like the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars. I had the honor of emceeing most of those shows when they came in.
At the Poli, we sold out two shows with Herman’s Hermits. We had The Beach Boys on three occasions in Worcester. The Memorial Auditorium never erupted more than it did then. I was one of four people who brought The Rolling Stones in, in 1965. It cost us $3,500. The next year, they wanted $35,000!
I still have the gold record I got for the Beatles’ “She Loves You,” which is inscribed, “To Dick Smith, America’s first believer.” But the only Beatle I got to meet was George Harrison, after they broke up.
I don’t think I could fit into today’s radio. No. 1, I would have to get acclimated to today’s music. Some of the hip-hop music is very good — I appreciate it, but I don’t know it that well. Second, there are very few radio stations now that hire local DJs. Everything seems to be syndicated. There’s hardly a person at the station, so it loses a lot of its human element. To me, our days were the fun time, when we met the acts and when the local personalities were stars.