Dallas

I was in Five of a Kind (1964-1967) in Dallas, Texas, I was the bass player.

The band members were:

Lead guitar and singer: Wayne Taylor (Rickenbacker 12 string and Vox 6 string)
Rhythm guitar and singer: Jimmy Reese (Vox)
Drums: Mike Magruder (Ludwig)
Sax: Jay Vestal
Bass: Phil Patterson (Fender Precision)

We went to Bryan Adams High School in Dallas along with Kenny and the Kasuals and others you have listed. Our first band, 'the Rhythm Kings' with Wayne Taylor, Jim Reese, and Phil Patterson along with our first drummer, James Parrish, before Mike Magruder joined us. The Rhythm Kings never recorded, but became '5 of a Kind' with the addition of Jay on sax and Mike on drums. James Parrish died in 1966 racing his Corvette at a local quarter mile track. He had left the band about two years before I believe.

The music we played was probably typical of the period. We played mainly the popular British Invasion music - Beatles, Stones, Yardbirds, Animals, Dave Clark 5, etc. as well as Young Rascals, Beach Boys, and we did a great version of Sonny and Chers' "I've Got You Babe" (sorta campy version really). Also some of the soul standards and rhythm and blues we needed to play depending on the crowd that night.

The Mystics beat us out for the record contract they received and I believe that would have been at Broadway Skateland in Mesquite, Texas. There were sixteen bands in that battle-of-the-bands. Ronnie Blocker was also a bass player for Ricky and the Royals who was the house band there, and his dad owned the place.

We also played at Louanns, the Sumpin' Else television dance show (with Ron Chapman as host) and Panther a Go Go television show in Ft. Worth where also on the bill that night were the Bill Black Combo, Peter and Gordon from England, and Johnny Green and the Green Men. We also played at La Maison in Houston and Gilley's as well, when they added rock type music. We also played at Dewey Groom's Long Horn Ballroom in Dallas when they added rock music to their usual country schedule.

We played at all the usual skating rinks in the area (Twilighters in Oak Cliff and Broadway in Mesquite come to mind); the Vaughn brothers would have played at Twilighters. Also high school sock hops and graduation dances. Small clubs and private parties all over the metroplex. Bill Ware's Pirates Nook, the Amber Room where Lady Wilde and the Warlocks also played (Frank Beard and Dusty Hill's older brother Rocky Hill); we played with the Marksmen (Boz Skaggs and Steve Miller at my uncle's airport in Garland with sponser KBOX and Scotty McKay I believe. Hate to call those guys a garage band but they probably were at one time. We played many times at White Rock Lakes' Winfrey Point for private parties, etc.

I remember the night we played La Maison in Houston and were playing the Rascals song "Good Lovin'" when we were surprised by the actual Rascals coming on stage and finishing the song and announcing they would be playing there the next night. That was a thrill for us.

Some nights were not so great such as the time we were booked into the NCO club at Ft. Hood. We were double booked with a soul band. The club manager said we could battle it out to see who played and would be paid for the gig and let the audience decide. We played to luke warm response and the soul band clinched it with some James Brown and the two sax players they had doing a front somersault off the stage. The crowd went wild and we packed up to head back to Dallas that night.

We played all the time and had a good local following. All the band members were good musicians but Wayne wrote the original songs. Wayne was a typical lead singer/guitarist with lots of ego going on, but I think you have to be that way. The girls all loved Jay's blonde surfer locks. I, as the bass player had a good music following because I played my Precision bass by finger picking and could play fast Yardbirds riffs. Then there were the groupies (thanks Sandy and Sherri and all the others), they were probably the real reason we all became musicians in the first place.

We released one 45 on the Vandan label (Tom Brown manager and recorded at Summit Studios). The 'A' side was called "Never Again" and the 'B' side was "I Don't Want to Find Another Girl" [both] written by Wayne Taylor.

We sold almost a thousand records at 10 cents per record going to the band. I remember one check for $16.00 for each of us. Wow...

At one time we had a booking manager who said his name was Andy Presley and was a cousin of Elvis. The guy had the pompadour and the look. We later found out he was a Mexican guy and may not have been Elvis' relative after all. We dropped him as he was also not booking many gigs for us.

I have not heard from Wayne, Mike or Jay since not long after the band broke up in '67. I do know that Mike Magruder became a sucessful local DJ in Denton, Texas. Jimmy Reese worked all his life at the JC Penney company and lives in San Antonio, now retired I believe.

I'm now practicing commercial real estate sales in Plano, and was formerly an owner of the San Francisco Rose restaurant (still open after 32 years) with Scott Fickling and Larry Smith.

Phil Patterson, December 2009

Thanks to Phil for sending me the history of his group, and for the photos and scan of the 45. Thanks to Jay Vestal for the two flyers and the photo at the bottom of the page. Transfer of "I Don't Want to Find Another Girl" courtesy of Jeff Lemlich.

Kenny Daniel (vocals and guitar)
Jerry Smith (lead guitar)
Tommy Nichols (harmonica)
Paul Roach (keyboards)
Lee Lightfoot (bass)
David Blackley (drums)

The top side is a hopped-up nugget of r&b, revving the Kinks song up a couple notches. With the early use of a fuzztone and Kenny's accented vocals, you could say they Stones-ify the song. Backing it is the Zombies tune "You Make Me Feel Good".

Like their first two records, this one wouldn't make much headway on local charts, but their next two 45s, "Raindrops to Teardrops" and "Journey to Tyme" would change that.

"Help Me Find a Way" had hit potential from the strong vocal harmonies and upbeat production. The Charay 45 was picked up for national release by the Smash label, but didn't chart in any market.

Beginning in 1969, John Broberg and Neal St. John played in the group "Quest" along with Chants vocalist Darrel Howard and guitarist Michael St. Romain.

The Upper Class - Help Me Find a Way
The Upper Class - Can't Wait

Most of the photos below link to higher resolution versions, click if you want to see more detail. See the main entry on the Chessmen for the full story (so far) of this important Dallas band.

"From IRI recording studio in Dallas, taken from behind the matching tan Fender guitar amps. (Our manager wanted us to have the latest gear! so he bought it for us!)."

Thank you to Ron DiIulio for sharing his unique photo collection.

Rain Kings member Richard Parker gives all the details you could wish for, and more:

Richard Parker: Rebels Without Applause - The Rain Kings Story

The Rain Kings – a name that will live in anonymity. In 1964 our Dallas band began as The Imposters, a name that truly fit us, for our musical abilities were – at best – crude. We didn’t actually perform in person until 1965, after the name change to The Rain Kings, a name taken from a Saul Bellow novel – Henderson The Rain King.
 
We attended the same high school – Bryan Adams High – as Kenny and The Kasuals, Jimmy C and the Chelsea Five, members of The Chaparrals, Five of a Kind and many other pretty good bands that never recorded.
 
We simply weren’t as good as these bands so we made up for it by being stupid. (To be fair there was good talent in the group - guitarist Doug Dossett, bassist Steve Lowry, singer Steve Howard and our various drummers each were quite good and went on to other bands after The Rain Kings.) Our stage acts were notoriously stupid, our original songs were downright dumb and yet our ability to draw a crowd was very good. We played at the standard affairs – high school dances, local teen clubs, private parties and so on. We actually hold the all-time attendance record at the famous Studio Club in Dallas outdrawing such bands as Kenny and the Kasuals, The Briks, The Chessmen and even The Yardbirds! (It’s true although I can offer no logical explanation.)
   
In 1965 after recording some truly dreadful demos in my living room, we headed for the well-known Sellers Studio downtown where everyone from Gene Vincent to Kenny and the Kasuals had recorded. We booked one hour, recorded four songs and ultimately released them on an extended-play 45. The results were pretty bad, but since our reputation was one of stupidity-with-a-beat, it didn’t matter. 100 copies were pressed and we sold them all.
 
In 1968 after another name change (to The Gretta Spoone Band) we released another 45 this time on the Pompeii label (internationally on the London label.) The record went nowhere fast and our band days ended. The record shows up regularly on Ebay, although it seems no one wants to buy it. I can’t blame them – I’ve heard it.

Steve Howard – lead vocals, rhythm guitar
Richard Parker – harmonica, vocals, screechophone, piano, percussion
Steve Lowry – bass guitar, vocals
Doug Dossett – lead guitar, vocals
Vick Nuuttila – electric lead tambourine, electric klaghorn, electric vocals

Drummers included: Mike McIver, Johnny Smith, David Anderson and Barry Whistler.

Other members heard on these recordings are Bobby Bassett (vocal: I’m A Little Fat Boy), Connie Collins (organ: Blind Man), Dennis Keys (guitar: I Do Believe You’re Dreaming, Close Your Eyes), Danny Porter (pedal steel guitar on If You Really Want Me To and In My Life).

Sometimes the number in the group would be four or five and other times it would swell to ten or twelve. We never knew how many of the group would show up, or which ones of us would be among the present. If we were playing at a birthday party or gas station grand opening or some other gala event, and four guys showed up, it would sometimes be just the bass player, the harmonica blower, the tambourine rattler and the guy who carried the amplifiers. We’d play anyway, and no one in the audience seemed to notice the eerie silence where the guitar breaks should have been or where the drum solo was supposed to go.
 
Nevertheless, we were among the musical elite in the area, being hailed as the “best band north of Garland Road and west of Peavy Road yet southeast of Rustic Circle, bounded by Sylvania Drive to the east and Timmy’s house on the southwest.” Quite an honor.
 
Recording – Simply Uncalled For

Knowing in our hearts that we were about to make musical history, we wanted to make sure that this legacy would live throughout the ages. The only way to do this of course was to make a record. So in 1965 we booked one solid hour in an upstairs, downtown recording studio, which was famous for recording on two tracks! This was the big time.
 
The hour that we booked included the time it took us to unpack the cars, load our equipment up the stairs, set up and tune up (man, I wish we had recorded that tune-up, as it was one of our very best.) In the same hour we also had to tear down the equipment and get it the heck out of the studio to make way for whoever had booked the following fifteen minutes of studio time.
                                                                  
That left us with about seventeen minutes of actual recording time for our four songs. This turned out to be more than enough and we spent the last five minutes smoking cigarettes and planning our Grammy acceptance speeches. In the session, four lasting musical memories were perpetrated: Lydia, Everybody Out of the Pool, Lewis Lewis and the tune which would inevitably become our signature song, I Know What You’re Trying To Do But You Can’t Get Away With It.

Lydia had lyrics that were so bad that even The Rain Kings were embarrassed by them (including the immortal line “If you should leave, my name is Steve.”)
 
We decided to go for broke and pressed one hundred copies of our record, and in six short months we had sold almost one-third of them for a clear profit of sixteen cents. 
 
In Concert

The Rain Kings may have been the first “anti-band”. We set out to be weird and succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. Often our audiences didn’t have a clue as to what we were doing. Often we didn’t either. This sometimes ended up antagonizing rather than entertaining the audience. In The Rain Kings’ performances, we not only began to enjoy this audience confusion and sometimes anger, we courted it. After all, the only reputation we had was one of weirdness interrupted by occasional music, so we decided to maximize our public image and go for it all. We set our goal on “Stupid”. Our reasoning was that merely being bad was not enough to bring in the patrons, and being bad and weird was somehow even worse. But being “stupid”…now that had possibilities.
 
There’s logic in there somewhere. People will gather to watch the clean-up of a car wreck. They will stop at an empty field and say “Look, here’s where old Henderson’s barn used to be.” They will watch mimes perform. Therefore, if it is presented right, people will watch anything.
 
Crowds of curious and disappointed fans flocked in the high single digits to our Stupid Show. We played one song while laying on our backs. We sang a rock version of a radio commercial for pies. We sang a hillbilly ballad from the 1930s accompanied only by the sound of tire tools pounding on wooden objects. We sang our “hit” records, of course, since they were incredibly stupid even before we planned to be that way.

One touch that seemed to affect every song performed was “the standard Rain King ending”, which usually meant that the song went on way too long or crashed to a finale in a musical wreck of non-stop non-stopping.

The band often played songs with their backs to the audience or while laying down on the stage.

At one time the band included a performer whose entire function was to shake a pair of small deer antlers, which made no sound at all. We often – intentionally – sang in a key different from the musical instruments. We referred to this as “singing in the key of ‘R’”.
 
We planned to be stupid, even billing ourselves as the world’s worst band. And the people accepted us as just that. Success at last.

It would be great to say that the band was the vanguard of a new musical direction that grabbed the sensibilities of the world. But to say that would be an outright lie. The Rain Kings were a musical aberration, a misprinted footnote in the history of music. So be it. 

The Rain Kings were never heard from again, and thank God for that!

Our main lead singer - Steve Howard - continued in music and as John Steven Howard released a CD last year. He lives in Red River New Mexico and for a while in the 70s - 80s took Ray Wylie Hubbard's place in a folk group called Three Faces West. They recorded an album in the late 70s.

David Anderson - one of our drummers though not heard on the recordings - owns Zoo Music Stores in Texas selling instruments (mostly guitars). Paul Roach our occasional organist still performs with his "real band" Kenny and the Kasuals. Paul was also "Gator Shades" of The Gator Shades Blues Band (Train Kept a Rollin'). Another of our drummers, Barry Whistler, owns a respected art gallery in Dallas. The rest of us were hounded out of the business by music lovers.

The 1992 reunion featured the original five Rain Kings. The reunion was recorded and contains some really crappy wonderful moments including the only time we recorded "Gorilla". We also re-recorded the original Imposters Living Room Tapes and after 27 years we still sounded like a train wreck.

The Rain Kings - Lewis, Lewis
The Rain Kings - Everybody Out of the Pool
The Rain Kings - Lydia
The Rain Kings - I Know What You're Trying to Do (But You Can't Get Away with It)
The Rain Kings - I'm a Little Fat Boy (unreleased)

The Gretta Spoone Band - I Do Believe You're Dreaming
The Gretta Spoone Band - Close Your Eyes

Thank you to Richard Parker for sharing his recordings, photos and history of the band.

Cecil was lead singer of the Briks, one of the great bands to come out of Dallas in the 1960s. He composed the lyrics for many of their songs, including Foolish Baby, It's Your Choice, and Can You See Me. His singing on It's Your Choice shows a maturity that no other vocal from the era matches, and he was only about 20 years old at the time.

When the Briks broke up, Cecil played for a short time in the group 'Texas' with three members of the Chessmen: Jimmie Vaughn, Tommy Carter and Billy Etheridge, plus Sammy Piazza on drums. They were managed by Jimmy Rabbit and recorded some songs at Robin Hood Brians studio in Tyler which have never been released.

In 1969 he moved to San Francisco and started 'Benny, Cecil & the Snakes' with Benny Roe, Keith Ferguson, Steve Karnavas and Steve Davis. The Snakes played house parties for the publishers of Zap Comix, the Rip Off Press.

In recent years Cecil and former Briks bandmate Mike Neal recorded a CD of blues-inspired songs as The Pickin' Cotten Band.

It's one of my great regrets that I never met Cecil, and his music will always mean a great deal to me.