Never Look at the Empty Seats

by Charlie Daniels

  We went back to our job, learning new material and rocking our way through four hours, six nights a week.

  One night when I came offstage I had a phone call, and when I picked up the phone, I heard the unmistakable gravelly voice of Bud Morris. He was sober, and he was in Richmond, Virginia. He had gotten us an audition on the Old Dominion Barn Dance, a show patterned after the Grand Ole Opry. It was performed live on Saturday nights from the stage of the Virginia Theater and broadcast over WRVA, a fifty-thousand-watt powerhouse of a radio station.

  He hadn’t asked; he’d just done it. But he was so persuasive that I agreed to come to Richmond on a Sunday soon and audition for the Old Dominion Barn Dance.

  So, after the last set on a given Saturday night, we packed up. Fortified with a fifth of bourbon and a case of beer, we set out for Richmond, Virginia, about three hundred miles away. Norman stayed sober and drove, and Tony wasn’t much of a drinker. But Billy Shepard and I put a serious dent into our stash of alcohol, and we arrived in Richmond at about daylight on Sunday morning totally sloshed. We got rooms at some fleabag hotel Bud was staying at and slept a few, a very few, hours.

  The audition was set for noon. When Bud woke us up to get ready, Billy and I were still walking loop-legged and hungover. After a shower and some coffee, we got dressed and went to the Virginia Theater, where Mr. Bert Repine, the manager of the Old Dominion Barn Dance, was waiting to hear us.

  We went in, set up, and played a couple of lackluster tunes. During about the third or fourth song, the music clicked in. The sweat started popping out, and we were rocking that empty theater like it was sold out.

  Mr. Repine was impressed and asked if we could come back and perform on a Saturday night in the not-too-distant future. He also asked if we’d be willing to play behind a girl singer he was managing named Janis Martin, who was signed to RCA Records and had already had a medium rock hit with a song called “Ooby Dooby.”

  Of course we were agreeable and set a date to return to Richmond. We said goodbye to Bud Morris and headed back to Jacksonville to explain to Smitty why we’d be needing a Saturday night off soon.

  A few weeks later we headed for Richmond, sans bourbon and beer, to let the world outside coastal Carolina hear The Rockets for the first time.

  In addition to playing the Old Dominion Barn Dance on Saturday night, Mr. Bert Repine had arranged an audition for us on Sunday up the road at Rose’s Casino in North Beach, Maryland. The club, with slot machine gambling on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay, was a weekend summer retreat for people from the Washington and Baltimore areas.

  The acts featured on the Barn Dance that Saturday night were the bluegrass group Don Reno and Red Smiley and Janis Martin and The Rockets. We had the only electric instruments on the whole show, and I don’t believe the Old Dominion Barn Dance had ever seen anything like us.

  When we hit the stage that night, the band was wearing loud plaid dinner jackets, and I was dressed in a fire-engine-red tuxedo. We did a couple of songs with Janis Martin and went into our own part of the show.

  I really got into the music that night. It was our first show in front of a crowd outside of North Carolina, and I guess you could say we were showing off. I jumped all over the stage, slinging the expensive, radio-quality microphone down and jerking it back up by the cord, which was giving the engineers anxiety attacks. We rocked that crowd’s socks off. I’m not bragging. I’m simply stating a fact. It was a stellar night.

  We finished the evening with congratulations all around and admonitions from the engineering department that if we ever came back to take it a little easier on their microphones.

  Flushed with the success of that appearance, we headed out to see what the good people of North Beach, Maryland, would think about The Rockets.

  Rose’s Casino was owned by Mr. Joe Rose, an astute businessman and an old-timer in the entertainment business. The club was on a choice corner across the street from a prime swimming area, and the streets were loaded as we took the stage. Soon it was the jumpingest joint on the beach.

  You have to remember that rock and roll was in its infancy and not that many bands had caught on, and our little four-piece rockabilly band smoked the place. It was such a thrill to have people react to our music the way they did that weekend at the Old Dominion Barn Dance and Rose’s Casino. We headed back to Jacksonville in a state of near euphoria.

  We went back to our six-night-a-week gig at the S and M feeling pretty good about ourselves. Shortly after we got back, I got a call from Bud Morris, who had moved from Richmond, Virginia, to North Beach, Maryland. He was working as a bartender at Rose’s Casino and had an offer for The Rockets to come up and play there for two weeks.

  How could we turn down an offer like that? Our boss, Smitty, good fellow that he was, agreed to let us off for the two weeks.

  Taking a job as a bartender is a bad idea for an alcoholic. When we got to North Beach, Bud was on a bender, sloppy drunk, and looking terrible. Tiny Jenkins, who was in charge of the entertainment, literally ran him off the property. I felt so sorry for him, the pitiful look in his eyes. The heartbreak of alcoholism really came home to me. But I hadn’t heard the last of Mr. Bud Morris.

  Through the week, it was just The Rockets and a guitar player/singer single named Cowboy Doug. But on the weekends there were two bands at Rose’s, and we alternated sets. The other band was country. On Saturday and Sunday we started in the early afternoon and continued until closing time. It made for a long day, but we were breaking new ground and packing the place every weekend, which made up for any fatigue we might have felt.

  The venue had agreed to provide lodging, which was a two-story house across the street with some beds, no air conditioning, and a cold-water shower. But it was handy and right on the beach. It was pretty primitive, but our work and social calendars had got so full that we didn’t complain.

  We had done excellent business and made some new fans and had a fun two weeks. When I went in to get paid after our last night, I thanked Mr. Rose for having us and told him goodbye.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “We’re going home, Mr. Rose. Our two weeks are up.”

  “You can’t do that,” he said. “I’ve got a union contract with a two-week option, and I’m picking it up.”

  The musicians’ union provided contract forms that you just had to fill in the blanks and sign. I hadn’t been a member very long and didn’t understand about options and such. But here I was in the sweet dilemma of being such a smashing success on our first foray into the outside entertainment world that I had to call my employer and friend Jewel Smith in Jacksonville and tell him The Rockets would not be opening back at the S and M on Monday night.

  Besides that, I was so homesick that I was about ready to cry and needed to get back to Carolina and see my family. Being away from home for extended periods of time was a new experience for me. But I was soon to become very accustomed to it.

  I figured that if we were going to have to come back for two weeks, we may as well spend the summer, so I worked out a deal with Mr. Rose. We worked seven nights one week and five nights the next week. That way, we would get two nights off and go home every couple of weeks to charge our batteries.

  Besides being in charge of booking the entertainment for Rose’s Casino’s summer season, Tiny Jenkins was a booking agent who had a lot of contacts in the Washington area. He assured us we could get work in D.C. when the summer beach season was over.

  The band was starting to make a name for itself in the area, but we had one very serious problem. Our drummer, Tony Hinnant, still had one year of high school left, and the time for him to start the school year was fast approaching. Nobody, including him, wanted Tony to leave the band. I decided to talk to his father and see if he would give his permission for Tony to finish his senior year by taking correspondence courses. I was afraid I’d be disappointed with the result.

  Tony Senior was a drummer himself and, as it turned out, very symp
athetic to his son’s desire to be a full-time professional musician. He agreed on the condition that Tony would take correspondence courses and get his diploma. Even though our intentions were sincere and honorable at the time, it never happened.

  Tony was only eighteen years old, a good-looking kid, and a flashy drummer who quickly earned a reputation for turning the crowd on with his drum solos. Word was getting around. One day a long, tall, lanky character named Dave showed up at North Beach and said, “Where is this eighteen-year-old drummer who is going to make me break my drum sticks?”

  Dave was a drummer in the Washington, D.C., area, and as I said, the band was gaining a reputation. That night he sat on the side of the stage, and when Tony launched into one of his solos, Dave literally tried to break a pair of drumsticks over his leg.

  We spent the summer amid sunburns and slot machines, summer girlfriends, lessons learned, and the thrill of making a living playing our music. When the summer ended, Norman Tyson moved his family up from North Carolina. Tony, Billy, and I got an apartment together in D.C., and Tiny Jenkins booked The Rockets into the Famous Bar and Grill on New York Avenue in Washington, D.C.

  Washington had a lot of clubs, and once you broke into the circuit, there were plenty of places to work. We joined a nucleus of other bands that moved from club to club, playing six nights a week and staying for two weeks or longer. Once we stayed at the Dixie Pig in Bladensburg, Maryland, for a whole year.

  As I said, Norman Tyson was married, but Tony, Billy, and I were footloose and fancy-free. We rented apartments and all chipped in to pay the rent, which for some reason or another was always a few days late. We didn’t fit in too well at the apartment complexes. We didn’t get off work until 2:00 a.m., and we’d sleep the biggest part of the day. Our leisure time didn’t start until the wee small hours of the morning, when most apartment dwellers were fast asleep. The well-attended parties we threw were boisterous, to say the least. They would sometimes end up with a visit from the D.C. police, answering a call from a justifiably irate neighbor who lived over, under, or across from us.

  Needless to say, we had several addresses in those early years. We got together with a couple of other guys and rented a three-story house that turned into the party capital of the nation’s capital. When the rest of the town was fast asleep, things were just getting started at our place, until we defaulted on the rent and were asked to leave and moved on to be a thorn in another neighborhood’s side.

  We ran into a terrific eighteen-year-old sax player named Paul King. He joined the band, adding a new musical diversity to our sound and broadening the range of material we played.

  In those days we played a lot of Little Richard, Fats Domino, and Lloyd Price. Sax instrumentals like “Honky Tonk” and “Smokie Part Two” were hot dance pieces, so Paul’s tenor sax fit right in.

  We were staying anywhere from two to four weeks in the clubs on our circuit and had a solid following. We usually worked six nights a week with Monday night off and were just as apt to show up and jam with another band on our off nights.

  We rehearsed often and kept up with the new music that fit into our repertoire. We dressed in loud dinner jackets and tuxedo pants, a pretty on-the-ball little outfit, and had no problem staying steadily employed.

  But The Rockets’ horizons were getting ready to expand by about three thousand miles.

  CHAPTER 9

  BLAST FROM THE PAST

  In 1958 I got a call from the amazing Bud Morris. Remember, I told you how he kept popping up in my life. He had gotten married and was living in Riverside, California. He was flying to Washington to talk me into taking the band to California.

  I met Bud at National Airport. As soon as he hit the ground, he started his sales pitch about how we could have the state of California at our feet if we would only go out there and show those people how wonderful we were. He proposed booking us on a string of one-nighters and wanted us to be there shortly after the first of the year, which was only a couple of months away.

  I had never been west of the Mississippi River and was itching to see what the rest of the country looked like. “Hey, y’all, let’s go to the left coast!!!”

  Our trip would be in February and last about a month, so we just couldn’t leave all of our D.C. friends without a loud, rowdy farewell party. I’m sure the month we were gone was a relief to the people who lived in our apartment complex.

  I had traded in my Cadillac for a 1956 Ford station wagon. We painted the name of the band, The Rockets, on the side, loaded up, and headed for California. We had a luggage rack on top where most of the instruments and luggage rode. The rack piled high and with a tarp tied over it, we looked like fugitives from The Grapes of Wrath coming down the highway.

  In those days the interstate system was practically nonexistent. We took what was called the “Rebel Route” through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and New Mexico, finishing on Route 66 through Arizona to California.

  When we were playing in Jacksonville, I had made friends with a drummer named Bill Belcher, a US Marine stationed at Camp Lejeune. Bill was from Texas, and when his hitch was up, he had moved back. But he had stayed in touch. Since we were going through Fort Worth, we broke the trip up for a couple of days and stopped to see him, which turned out to be one of the best career moves I ever made.

  We traveled straight through, switching off drivers, and got to Fort Worth early in the morning. After a lot of effort, we found Bill Belcher’s house, said our hellos, met his wife, Nita, and his son, Kyle, and went and checked into a motel.

  After sleeping for a while, we went back to Bill’s house, where his wife had made a humongous pot of the best chili I ever tasted. Needless to say, we acquitted ourselves admirably at the table.

  That night Bill showed us around town and told us about a friend of his who was in the music business. He said he’d like to bring him by the motel and introduce us to him the next day.

  I happened to look out of my motel room window the next morning and saw Bill Belcher with some guy in tow, headed our way. I had a blank pistol with me, and when they got close to the room I stepped out, leveled the pistol at them, and started firing blanks. Both of them almost jumped off the second floor walkway before Bill recognized me.

  Don Johnston was a struggling songwriter and record producer. And, much like I had been a couple of years before, he was doing everything he could to cut the apron strings of his day job and make it full-time in the music business. His ambition and work ethic knew no bounds, and he was determined that Fort Worth, Texas, wasn’t going to hold him for long.

  He was aggressive and confident. After a night on the town, he asked me if I’d like to take the band into the recording studio and cut something. I jumped at the opportunity.

  The only problem was that we didn’t have anything to record, which was not a deterrent to Don at all. He said, “We’ll just write something.” We moved all the band instruments into Don’s mother’s house and set to work.

  Don’s mother, Diane, was a songwriter signed to Mellin Music Publishers in New York. She had written quite a few songs herself, including a Western favorite called “Miles and Miles of Texas,” which was recorded by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys and in later years by Asleep at the Wheel. She welcomed us with open arms, made sandwiches for us, and was a great encouragement and a pleasure to be around. It started a friendship, and I stayed in touch with her until she passed away a few years ago.

  We started kicking around ideas, and after many hours and a lot of hard work, we came up with a slick little sax and guitar instrumental. The next night we moved the instruments into a recording studio, where the five of us, with Bill Belcher adding an extra snare drum, started a process that would last until daylight the next morning. When we finally got it finished and listened to the playback, we all agreed that “Jaguar” sounded like something that would play on the radio along with the Duane Eddie and Johnny and the Hurricanes instrumentals
that were so popular at the time.

  Don would send the tape to New York to Mellin Music, who would shop it to the record labels, a common practice in those days. Independent producers would make records and sell or lease them to the record labels. Some of the big hits of the 1950s and 1960s had happened that way.

  Well, this was all very exciting, but we had gigs to play one thousand five hundred miles away in California. Don promised to call when he got word of the record companies’ reactions to “Jaguar.” We said our goodbyes and headed across the west Texas plains, still zinging in the glow of our very first real recording session.

  Seeing the western United States for the very first time was a moving experience for a bunch of kids who had never been very far west of Charlotte, North Carolina. We watched the prairies turn into high desert and then to a barren landscape of sand and sagebrush as we drove straight to California. We got to Riverside on a late Saturday afternoon.

  Bud Morris had been sober for quite a while and married a really nice lady. He was at the top of his game and as good as his word, and we went to work Sunday night. We played one-nighters in Barstow, Victorville, Pasadena, and all around southern California. We’d never seen highways with so many lanes and so many people driving so fast.

  On one of our nights off, Bud took us to Las Vegas. We spent the biggest part of the night in the lounge in the Sahara Hotel listening to Louis Prima and Keely Smith with Sam Butera and the Witnesses, who were one of our very favorite bands. We even got to meet Louis Prima. What a night!

  Louis Prima and Keely Smith were the hottest lounge act in Las Vegas. Their show was fast paced and entertaining and made a profound impression on our whole band. We added quite a few of their numbers to our repertoire.

  Bud also took us to Tijuana, Mexico, on one of our nights off. It was my very first trip into a foreign country. All we had to do was cross the border to realize just how blessed we were to live in the United States.

  One Sunday afternoon we were playing at a club in Mojave. The dance floor was jammed and the band was cooking when two California ABC officers walked in and spotted Tony and Paul, who were both under the age to be in a bar in California. They wrote them up and took them to city hall to book them.