CHAPTER 19 THE GIRL CAN’T HELP IT

By 1960, the touring R&B revues performing at the Evergreen Ballroom were attracting larger audiences and inspiring the young musicians in attendance. Those pro players were profoundly affecting their fans’ tastes in music, their sense of appropriately natty stage attire, and their sense of how an effective show ought to be paced throughout an evening.

Back then, R&B performances typically featured a dapper emcee who served as the ringmaster, joking, working the crowd, and introducing each of the revue talents. Among those might be a whole string of seasoned singers, a few comely dancers, a comedian, and any number of individual players who would be called up front to cut loose with spotlight solos—and then, finally, the grand entrance by the headlining star. And throughout all this activity, the backing band’s front line would all be doin’ synchronized steps. It also didn’t hurt matters that many of these entertainers were exceedingly kind and friendly to young local musicians.

“I remember one time Little Richard and the Upsetters were playing there,” Buck Ormsby recalled:

I was with the Wailers and this was like 1960–61—and they saw us white boys out there, and the sax player leaned over and said, “You guys play, don’t you?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “You want to come up and play?” So, he asked us to come up and play. Me, Rich Dangel, and Mike Burk. And I think he was, like, trying to see if we could really play.… But we got up there and he kind of left the stage, and we cooked and he came back up and grabbed his sax and started playing! I mean, we could do that sort of stuff. But the Black musicians of the time: they taught us stuff.… I think it helped us, the Wailers, a lot.

One of the knockout acts of the day was the one led by Ike Turner. Back in 1958, his Kings of Rhythm band had brought aboard Turner’s young wife, Tina, as lead vocalist; and then a girl group of omni-shimmering backing singers, the Ikettes, in 1960, reemerging as the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. It was their onstage energy and admirable stagecraft that made a deep impression on anyone who was ever lucky enough to have seen the show. And for the local musicians, they learned what it meant to pull out all the stops to entertain an audience.

“We were inspired,” Rich Dangel reflected, “by goin’ down to the Evergreen Ballroom and seeing these acts, like Ike and Tina Turner, come through. Or you went to see Bobby Bland and he’d have the band do a couple tunes, and then Al ‘TNT’ Braggs would do a sax tune—and it was real exciting. So we got inspired especially by the groups that would have, like, the girl singers in the background, you know? And so we found out about Gail Harris.”

Harris was a precocious Puyallup schoolgirl who already had years of experience singing country music with a bunch of old-timers on local radio and TV. At the age of nine, she became a regular on KING-TV’s Roy Gordon Show, then she appeared on the Jack Rivers Show, and from there she moved on to Buck Owens’s Bar K Jamboree on Tacoma’s KTNT-TV. But, by 1960, Harris was looking around for a teen band to join. She auditioned for a combo called the Aztecs before eventually crossing paths with the Wailers, who were aware of the kid’s country TV background but gave her an audition anyway.

Getting the chance to sing with Tacoma’s top rock band, she jumped right in. “I started singing with the Wailers,” Gail Harris fondly recalled, “when I had just turned thirteen. It was right at the time of ‘Tall Cool One,’ and John Greek was still there.… I used to listen to Etta James all the time, and I just tried to sing those kinds of songs. I sang pretty powerfully anyway and so kinda came up with my own style from that.”

After Harris cut loose with a couple of Ike and Tina songs, the Wailers knew that they’d found their very own Tina. Rich Dangel remembered, “She was this thirteen-year-old singer that we thought sang great and we got her to join the group. Robin was already with us, and then we had the girl singers—the Marshans—who came along. So we had a sort of revue happening where we’d go up and do our instrumentals set. Then Robin would come up and do some tunes, then Gail would come up and do some tunes and then we’d have the girls come up and back up Gail. You know: tryin’ to make it into a show.”

Now the Wailers’ ten-piece crew began developing what would be the most exciting teen-R&B stage act yet formed in the Northwest, and Harris would quickly become the most influential female singer on the local teen scene. Her spirited performances inspired untold numbers of girl singers across the region—including another, named Little Becky, who also gigged a bit with the Wailers. Musicians all across the Northwest—including Mike Mitchell, the guitarist from a new Portland-based combo called the Kingsmen—were quite impressed.

“The Wailers were the band,” Mitchell freely admitted. “The Frantics were great, but the Wailers were the band to copy. The Wailers had everything: they had a band, and then they had a lead singer, Rockin’ Robin, who would come out and do a few songs, and then Gail Harris would come out and do a few songs. And then she had backup singers that would come up and do a few songs, so they were a whole revue in themselves. So those were the guys we kinda emulated and followed. And so did Paul Revere and the Raiders.”

Another band Harris auditioned with, the Statics, had also been influenced by the R&B revues appearing at the Evergreen. Learning their lessons well there, the band would go on to earn a region-wide reputation as an absolutely smokin’ teen-R&B combo—one appreciated as much for their sound as for their synchronized dance moves, perhaps the best of any of their peers.

The Statics had originated in Burien in 1958, and their eventual leader, Neil Rush (sax), had gotten into rock ’n’ roll after being inspired by the Frantics: “I saw the Frantics at a sock hop at Highline High School and I was about a sophomore so this would have been 1957. I was aware of Bill Haley and His Comets and all those people that really got the rockabilly thing started—but the Frantics were the first local band that I had actually seen that did it right.”

Just prior to the Statics, Rush had formed his Renton-based combo the Amazing Aztecs, who went into Joe Boles’s studio in January 1960. Their sole instrumental rock single, “Death Coach,” got a bit of airplay over at Wally Nelskog’s KQDE but then disappeared. The Amazing Aztecs eventually placed a “Looking for Female Vocalist for Recording Potential” classified ad, which attracted three respondents: Gail Harris, Nancy Claire, and Lynn Vrooman. The fifteen-year-old Vrooman didn’t have the country television background the other two did, but she had already recorded that single for Penguin Records, and she had been hired to appear—with the Playboys backing her—on Fabian’s November ’59 tour stops in Seattle, Spokane, and Portland. Vrooman should have been the leading contender.

“Lynn Vrooman brought along an accompanist with her,” Neil Rush snickered years later. “A girl named Merrilee Gunst. And Merrilee’s parents sat outside in front of my dad’s house waiting for the girls to audition. Anyway, to make a long story short: I fell in love at first sight. That’s what happened. She was a sixteen-year-old girl and I was an eighteen-year-old guy, and I said, ‘Can you do anything except play piano?’ And she said, ‘Well, yeah.’ And of course Lynn—being her friend—said, ‘Oh yeah, she sings real good!’”

Wrong answer. Merrilee was an effervescent North End kid with gorgeous dark eyes and long dark tresses who’d discovered rockin’ R&B music dancing to the Frantics, Little Bill and the Bluenotes, and the Wailers at various Seattle dances.

As a student at Shoreline High School, Merrilee’s performing experience was thus far limited to a few local USO shows with Vrooman. She’d been perfectly happy as the group’s pianist, never harboring any thoughts of being a lead singer. As it happened, though, Rush had made his decision: Merrilee was his choice for the Aztecs’ new singer. He had to admit, however, that “the Aztecs ground down to a halt in the summer of 1960. It broke up because of Merrilee. It actually split the band apart. The guys in the band didn’t really want to push a girl singer. They thought that I was putting far too much emphasis on Merrilee. And by the way, by that time I was madly in love with her, okay? So, I was.”

Merrilee agreed, remembering, “We basically had to form a new band because I was not well accepted by the guys in the band. Because it was a guy thing, you know? But, because Gail Harris was so strong with the Wailers, I really think that any female that they could bring in that they could feature was a real plus. But I wasn’t real good, so it was hard for them to accept that.”

As things turned out, it was Merrilee’s parents who found it hard to contemplate Rush’s true interest in their daughter. To create some space there, they hired Merrilee her own personal managers, which forced Rush to negotiate Merrilee’s involvement in his band through them. The result was the formation of an all-new combo that spotlighted her: Merrilee and Her Men. Over the next year and a half they gigged around on the circuit the Aztecs had already forged.

It was at about this point that the Statics—who had brought in a new guitarist, Dick Gerber—decided that they needed a singer and asked Tiny Tony (whose main group, the Gallahads, were only working sporadically) if he might want to pick up a few extra bucks with them. As it turned out, he had already been working casually with a few other combos, including the Dynamics and West Seattle’s El Caminos. But, in 1962, Tiny Tony opted to join the Statics because they had good connections and a big sound.

The only thing they seemed to lack was stage presence, and Tiny Tony was there to help. Having been the Gallahads’ choreographer, so to speak, he began tutoring the Statics on how to do synchronized dance steps while performing. Soon the Statics would be known for their wild stage show, which was soon to be copied by countless other local combos.

Indeed, Paul Revere and the Raiders got schooled by the Statics one summer night when each band was booked to play different dances in Clarkston, Washington. As Neil Rush tells it, “At 10:30 that night, Revere was standing in front of us because we had a full house and they had nobody. I remember that later we—Tiny Tony and I—sat out there in front of a Chinese restaurant that night and basically taught them the basics of doing dance steps.”

Such synchronized dance steps would later become a visual trademark for the Raiders. The Statics’ moves were impressive—and funky enough to get Tiny Tony in hot water with the law on another night. “Tony got thrown in jail once down in Olympia out at the Evergreen Ballroom,” Rush recalled:

You know, we used to do some pretty graphic steps—we’d do the “bump and grind” kind of a thing. Well, one of the things Tony used to do: see, one of his girlfriends was a six-foot-tall Amazon-looking woman, very beautiful, and she was dancing out in the crowd right in front of Tony. And Tony was with her—only he was on the stage. And Tony would take his belt and he’d pull his belt out and stick it out like a dick. He used to wear three-piece suits and he would have his belt sticking out about seven or eight inches, and the cops came and hauled him away. They hauled his ass away for that one. We had to go down and get him out.

For her part, Merrilee was becoming a major attraction for the Statics, and they decided it was time to cut some singles. Among them were “Harlem Shuffle,” “Buster Brown,” and Little Richard’s “The Girl Can’t Help It”—records that sold reasonably well to their fans despite the fact that Pat O’Day rejected every one of them for airplay on KJR. And while the DJ forthrightly told Neil that they just weren’t hit quality, the band always believed the music was just too R&B-oriented for O’Day’s tastes.

It was a criticism leveled by other artists as well. Yet O’Day always defended KJR’s programming policies by stating that, at the time, airing any R&B that was rootsier than the slick “Motown sound” was a tough row to hoe on Seattle radio. If that were true, it spotlights an interesting dichotomy in the area’s culture. Here you had Seattle—the home base of a thriving, indigenous teen-R&B sound that fueled countless numbers of O’Day’s own weekly dances—yet the broadcasting of such local music (or the hard R&B that had initially inspired it) was risky business.

Meanwhile, the Wailers continued to evolve more toward an R&B sound. They announced auditions for their own version of the Ikettes, and a number of teenage girl singers showed up to try out at the Crescent Ballroom. In the end (and after working out parts backing Gail Harris on Ike and Tina’s hit “Tra-La-La”), three—Marilyn Lodge, Kay Rogers, and Penny Anderson—were hired and given a group name of the Marshans. Soon after, Etiquette Records issued Harris’s first single, “Be My Baby,” an attempt at a girl-group pop sound.

It was the golden era for girl groups, and in addition to the Marshans, the Northwest was also home to the Chandels, Cordenes, Marvelles, Shalimars, Shampaynes, and, most successful of all, a Black teen trio called the Chanteurs, whose single, “No Doubt about It”—featuring Mike Mandel on keyboards—got frequent airplay on KZAM and became a good seller for Bolo Records.

Meanwhile, Etiquette issued a few records by the Marshans: “I Remember,” “It’s Already Tomorrow,” “Don’t Worry about Me Baby (I Feel Just Fine),” and “You’re So Fine,” as sung by Marilyn Lodge under the name Mayalta Page. Lodge also had a thrilling experience one night down at the Evergreen Ballroom. The Ike and Tina Turner Revue was performing, and a girlfriend mentioned to one of the Ikettes that Marilyn was a talented singer: “The next thing I knew, I was in a back room auditioning for Ike and Tina. I guess I met with their approval because the next thing I knew I was being introduced on stage. I believe I sang the Mary Wells song ‘Bye Bye Baby.’ My knees were knocking for weeks.”

But there was another local female singer whose experience would top even that big night. Kathi McDonald, who noted her two greatest musical influences as Tina Turner and Gail Harris, sang with a few Bellingham bands including the Accents and the Unusuals, whose first single was issued by Jerry Dennon. In 1965, the band headed off to San Francisco and scored a deal with Mainstream Records—the same label that would soon release Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company’s debut discs—resulting in the single “Summer Is Over.” Then, while attending an Ike and Tina Turner Revue concert at the Carousel Ballroom, he noticed her singing along in the front row and signaled her to come and talk backstage. She auditioned and was hired as an Ikette, toured with their Revue, and appeared on their Come Together album. In short, Kathi McDonald’s early dreams came true. ⋆