45 release: |
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| artist: | DOUG SAHM |
| label: | NORTON 45-089 |
| title: | ROCK & ROLL |
| release: | April 4, 2000, USA, 7' 45rpm |
| A-side: | DOUG SAHM and the PHARAOHS Crazy Daisy (2:25) (Warner - Sahm) |
| B-side: | DOUG SAHM and the DELL KINGS Slow Down (2:35) (Larry Williams) |
| comment #1: | some copies were released on yellow/gold vinyl |
| comment #2: | From the Norton album San Antonio Rock: THE HARLEM RECORDINGS 1957-61 (NORTON 274) Licensed from Harlem Records. |
album release: |
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| artist: | DOUG SAHM |
| label: | NORTON RECORDS ED-274 |
| title: | SAN ANTONIO ROCK THE HARLEM RECORDINGS 1957-1961 |
| release: | April 4, 2000, USA, LP |
| A-side: |
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| B-side: |
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| comment #1: | the CD issue has two more songs (track 16 & 17) see below for the complete tracklist of the CD |
| comment #2: | extended liner notes by Andrew Brown |
CD release: |
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| artist: | DOUG SAHM |
| label: | NORTON RECORDS CED-274 |
| title: | SAN ANTONIO ROCK THE HARLEM RECORDINGS 1957-1961 |
| release: | April 4, 2000, USA, CD [18/46:30] |
| tracks: |
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| comment #1: | track 16 & 17 are NOT on the album version! |
| comment #2: | extended liner notes by Andrew Brown (same as on LP) (3 more pictures as on the album issue) |
The history of Doug's first recordings Doug's first recordings He was born Douglas Wayne Sahm on November 6, 1941. From an early age, his parents foisted musical instruments into his hands, encouraging the boy to not only play fiddle but mandolin, guitar, bass, and steel guitar as well. Most parents at the time gave their childern music lessons of some kind, but Doug's possibly weren't intended merely for recreation. In the late 1940s and early '50s, country music and western swing was virtually all that white, middle-class San Antonians listened and danced to, and with so many bands and radio stations playing these sounds, being a professional musician was considered a wise choise for a career as well. Doug took to all the instruments he picked up with such prodigious skill that it made him a child celebrity, earning him appearances on radio and television shows like the Red River Dave Show on WOAI-TV. By the time he was ten , "Little Doug," as he was then called, had already sat in as steel guitarist with the big western swing bands in town - Adolph Hofner and the Pearl Wranglers, Jimmie Revard and the Oklahoma Playboys, Smiley Whitley and the Texans - and would soon graduate to appearances with national stars like Hank Thompson and Faron Young. He would later tell people that seeing Lefty Frizell jump on stage and begin singing right after punching out a leering, drunken cowboy cemented his own dream of becoming a singer and performer. By the early to mid fifties, Sahm, as steel guitarist, had begun playing with various bands - Eddy Dugosh and the Ah-Ha Playboys and Rudy Grayzell and the Texas Kool Kats among them - comprise of younger musicians who, like him, were edging slowly toward a new sound, Grayzell in particular took Sahm under his wing. "Little Doug, he opened for me a lot," Rudy told writer Dan Davidson. "He was a natural musician. I took Doug on tour with me to Houston and he tore the house down. I used to pull up to Doug's school and tell 'em, 'I'm Doug's guardian and he's gotta come home right now.' They'd pull Doug out of class and I'd have my car out front with our guitars in the trunk. And I'd say, 'C'mon Doug, I got us a show!'" With Grayzell, Doug also appeared on the prestigious Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport. During this time, Doug was occasionally used for shows by booking agent Charlie Fitch from Luling, outside of San Antonio. "I heard him sing at the Barn," Fitch recalls, referring to one of the big C&W nightclubs in San Antonio. "He played five instruments. We used him on a show in San Marcos with the Maddox Brothers and Rose. He'd play a chorus with each instrument, see, that was part of his act." Recording debut Sahm made his recording debut on Sarg in January of 1955, when he re-recorded Rollin', Rollin' and A Real American Joe, two pleasant but pedestrian country tunes, with the musical support of another local western group, Larry Nolen and the Bandits. Disc jockeys were given a promotional flyer with the record that stated "Doug's ambition when grown is to be highly educated in school and music . . . watch for this bundle of dynamite to advance on the Sarg label as years go by." As it turned out, Doug made no further recordings for Sarg when sales of his release prove disappointing. Tiffany Lounge Amazingly, Doug was only fourteen or fifteen years old at the time he started sneaking out of the house to hang out at the Tiffany. By law, no one under the age of twenty-one was allowed in drinking establishments like the Tiffany, but such laws were fairly lax in the fifties. "The Tiffany was a small, little place," remembers Rickie Aguary's drummer, Roy McMeans. "I don't think the thing was 35 feet wide. It was real deep. Doug Sahm used to come in there, and - you know how Texas was in those times - you could just walk in a bar. They didn't care how old you were. Doug used to sit down at the end of the bandstand and just listen to us play." "Everybody played at the Tiffany Lounge," says Randy Garibay, a musician who worked closely with Sahm and many other San Antonio artists in the late fifties and early sixties. "I remember it was really dark in there. (The clientele) was a bunch of gangsters - well, they called themselves gangsters. I called 'em pain in the asses. These guys were part of the furniture there. But it was a great hangout for people who loved the night life. (Owner) Johnny Jowdy was very particular about the bands he brought in there. This was in the days when you played like six nights a week at eight bucks a night." Garibay adds that the club was regularly patrolled by cops - not because of the gangsters who hung there, but rather to intimidate the integrated bands. "Doug caused a minor stir at school in 1956 when he was doing a show and started a few Elvis-style gyrations," wrote Chet Flippo in his 1971 Rolling Stone article on Doug. "The principal promptly brought down the curtain and all the students rebelled and left school. They went over to Doug's house and his mother went over to a whip the principal." The Tiffany Lounge was downtown, but the premier night club for black music in San Antonio was within walking distance from Sahm's house. "Across a plowed field from my house was a place called the Eastwood Country Club," Doug once wrote. "On any given night, you had T-Bone Walker, Junior Parker, The Bobby 'Blue' Bland Review, Hank Ballard and James Brown." Doug added that he wasn't the only white kid in his neighborhood picking up on the R & B vibe: "At about twelve or thirteen years old, my neighbor Homer Callahan, a red-headed Irishman who loved to fight and listen to Howlin' Wolf, would bring over these great 45s with colorful labels like Excello, Atlantic, and Specialty, by dudes like Lonesome Sundown, Jimmy Reed, and Fats Domino. My mother, bless her soul, couldn't understand the profound effect these records had on her white son who was growing up fast in the predominately black section of San Antone." DOUG SAHM & THE KNIGHTS: Things began to happen for the Knights in late 1957 when Doug approached E.J. Henke, the owner of a local label, Warrior Records. Henke, a farmer's kid from the Karned City area, had sung with a country band and tried professional wrestling awhile before settling into the more stable world of radio advertising and record promotion by the mid-1950s. On the side, he ran Warrior, a small label that specialized in country music. The songs Doug auditioned for Henke, including a Little Richard-styled screamer called Crazy Daisy, were polar opposites from the country sounds that had been E.J.'s forte, but he was savvy enough to recognize Doug's talent and rock music's marketability. Besides, Henke, echoing Sam Phillips, knew that nothing was cheaper than tape - or studio time. "Every time I got fifty or a hundred dollars," he says, "I'd go record 'cause it was only fifteen dollars an hour (to rent a studio). And I could cut four songs in two hours." At the time, the Knights had come under the sponsorship of a local disc jockey, Charlie Van. An item in the San Antonio Light dated December 11, 1957, noted that "Charlie Van's Knights (are) waxing several sides for the Warrior label, to be released early next year." The waxing referred to is the raw, first version of Crazy Daisy, recorded late one night at the studios of KONO radio station along with a memorable take on Little Richard's Can't Believe You Wanna Leave. Doug handles tenor sax, Bobby Jett is possibly the baritone player, Johnny Neubauer pounds the piano, and the drummer is possibly Bobby Lynn. It's hard to fathom why Henke or Sahm were unhappy with the results of this session; nonetheless, the tape was shelved for almost five years before E.J. Henke released these on his Satin label in the fall of 1962. Within a few weeks, two more unsuccessful versions of Crazy Daisy were attempted. They have since been lost. RED HILBURN: WARRIOR 507: Jimmy Dee While Jimmy Dee was fading out, Doug's popularity was on the rise. But changes were in store with his record company. With Crazy Daisy still moving, Henke sold his Warrior label to start a new imprint with R&B disc jockey Joe Anthony that was to be devoted to rhythm and blues and rock music. They called it Harlem Records, after Anthony's nightly KMAC radio show Harlem Serenade. (Doug's version of Allen Toussaint's Whirlaway was recorded as the theme song for this show.) Anthony was a hip, well-known character around San Antonio who, in addition to his DJ work, emceed teen hops and ran one the city's few (perhaps only) record shops devoted exclusively to rhythm and blues releases, the Jukebox Record Store on South New Braunfels Street. In 1959, with a mounting debt to a record distributor looming over him, Joe approached E.J. with a proposal: if Henke paid off his debt, Anthony would sign over half ownership of the record store to him. Intrigued, E.J. paid the debt, willing to take a gamble at the retailing end of the business. "When I started Harlem," Henke says, "I got in with Joe Anthony because of that record store. It looked like two outhouses put together. You could put it on a two-wheeled trailer and haul it off. Five, ten people, and you've got a full house. But we sold a lot of records." Harlem Records was the logical outgrowth of their partnership. (A third person, Charlie Woods, was associated with Harlem, though the extent of his involvement remains unclear.) Their first release was by a popular West Side vocal group, the Lyrics, whose debut record, Oh Please Love Me b/w The Girl I Love was issued as Harlem 101 in August of 1959. It marked the beginnings of what people would later call the West Side Sound, which Randy Garibay defines as, in essence, "Hispanic kids emulating Afro-American doo wop groups" as opposed to the conjunto or orquesta music of their elders. The sound had actually been brewing since 1955, but hadn't really found the support of a local record label until Harlem came along. Although nobody was making any real money, these were great days to be in the music business in San Antonio. Henke still fondly recalls his daily routine at the time, which involved running the store during the day before heading over to KMAC to hang out with Joe Anthony until he signed off at midnight. "Then we'd go someplace to eat . . . then at 1:30 a.m. we'd go to our bowling league as Joe, and the disc jockeys of KONO. We'd play against (bands) like the Royal Jesters, or the Lyrics. At 4:30 I'd get home. Then at 7:30 I'de get up and start all over again. Seven days a week." He adds, "I was broke, but I always had fun." Racially integrated bands were also something new in the late fifties. "San Antonio was the first city in Texas to have integrated bands," Randy Garibay says. "Not all the club owners liked it, but they learned to live with it because those integrated bands were the ones that made them money." The first fully integrated (white, black, and Hispanic) band in town anyone remembers was Little Sammy Jay and the Tiffanaires who, as their name suggests, were one of the regular groups in the Tiffany Lounge in 1957. A little later, Doug hooked up an integrated band led by a black blues guitarist named Jimmy Johnson. "Jimmy really showed me a lot," Doug would later claim. "He was a big influence, really showed me the ropes - chord structures and all. I was the only white cat in his band. It was two black cats, two Spanish cats, and myself. Boby Taylor was the singer." (Sadly, this group did not record.) From there, Doug graduated to joining Spot Barnett and his Orchestra, regarded as the rhythm and blues band in San Antonio. Though tenor saxophonist Barnett was only five years Doug's senior, the young guitarist viewed him as a mentor, letting Barnett know that it was an honor to play in his group. Doug had first seen him in action as early as 1957. "I went into the Ebony (Lounge) in '57 with a band with Bobby Jett and Bobby Lynn," Doug told Jim Beal, Jr., of the San Antonio Express-News, undoubtedly referring to the Knights. "We were pretty good. We played for the owner, Montay Johnson. When we got through, I asked him if we weren't better than his house band. He said, 'Now, you're all right for a bunch of white boys, but you come see the band I got.' We went back to hear Spot. The guitar player was Joel (pronounced 'Jewel') Simmons. Man, that cat could play. We'd come in and learn something and keep our mouths shut. We knew we were lucky." Sahm couldn't have realized at the time that he'd be Simmons' replacement when the latter left Spot's band a couple of years later. "For a white boy to be accepted at the Ebony Lounge was like being signed to the New York Yankees," he later said. (Although Barnett remembers the Ebony's crowds being integrated, bassist Wayne Reed, who also worked with Spot's band there, says he and Doug were "the only white guys in the whole joint.") "Doug was in the group right after Joel Simmons left," Barnett says. "I recognized a talent right off the bat. He played bass and guitar, a little fiddle. He was my guitarist / vocalist a couple of years, off and on. I'd go pick him up at his house. I'd say, 'Mrs. Sahm, can Doug play with me tonight?' She'd say, 'Have him back home by 12:30.' Doug was an instant phenomenon." When Barnett landed a steady gig at the renowned Eastwood Country Club (as mentioned, a stone's throw from Doug's house on the East Side) Sahm was there with him, despite the fact that, like most of the places he played, he was still technically underage. A stop on the so-called "chitlin' circuit", the Eastwood would hold up to a thousand people, and nightly featured the top black recording artists of the day. To be sure, some of them looked at Doug with skepticism, thinking it must be a joke for a white teenager to be playing on the stage with an older, experienced R & B band. Spot would always set them straight. Doug never forgot the time Chess Records' Lowell Fulson took the stage at the Eastwood one night. "Lowell looked over at Spot and said, 'Hey, man, you sure this white boy can play my record?' And Spot told him, 'Just shut up and do your song and don't worry about it, man. He can take care of it.'" More encouraging was T-Bone Walker, one of Sahm's idols. "At that time I was playing some pretty heavy blues. T-Bone told some people to come dig me, we'll dig this little white cat that plays blues, man. That wigged me out." Sweetmeats, a mellow instrumental and one of the few recordings Doug (playing bass) made with Spot, is included with this set as a bonus track. It isn't clear when Doug began playing with Barnett, but sometime before then, he and Randy Garibay had worked in a band called the Twisters (prior to local pianist Sonny Ace using that name). "The Knights changed to the Twisters," Randy says. "Bobby Jett was on sax, Jesse Garza was on bass, Loud Eddie Valdez played drums. Doug, he could play every instrument up there, y'know. The only reason he had me playing guitar (was that) he was never comfortable playing guitar and singing. He wanted to hold on to that mike, or he wanted to come off the piano. He used to practice jumping off the piano and landing on a split with a microphone in his hand. He always had that 'teenage idol' attitude. He was an incredible frontman." Garibay is sure that the first version of Sapphire, which went unreleased at the time, features the Twisters. Randy remembers that Doug actually devoted more time to baseball than music. "He was a baseball nut," Garibay says. "We used to go sit and watch baseball games all day long at Comanche Park. If you can imagine watching eight baseball games . . . we'd drink a couple of cases of beer, just me and him, sittin' in his old '52 Chevy. Then we'd go over to his house and he'd show me all these chords that I'd never seen before. He's the one that taught me the legendary 'shootin' finger' ninth chord. That's what Doug called it. A C9th, it looks like somebody's shooting the finger at you. He taught me a lot of chords. Never stopped talking." He adds that Doug "knew how to put a band together, much like a manager would put a baseball team together." Sahm would have loved the analogy. HARLEM 107 HARLEM 108 HARLEM 113 COBRA 116 / HARLEM 116: Doug moved on sometime in 1961, joining the rosterof Henke's rival Jesse Schneider and his Renner label. A further six releases on Renner, some leased to still other labels, would carry Doug into 1964. National stardom, something that had eluded him up this point, finally came the Spring of 1965 with his "English" group the Sir Douglas Quintet and their Top 20 hit, She's About A Mover. His subsequent recordings and activities are well documented. |
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