After I separated from the Air Force, I moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where my wife’s sister, father and grandmother lived. It was a bold move on my part, because I had absolutely nothing going on there and had never been save one vacation when my oldest son was still a developing fetus.
After a few months there, my wife noticed that I needed to get out more often, so I started hitting the music stores with homemade business cards announcing that I was in town and looking for musical work.
My first work came months later when one Bill Bailey called and asked my wife if I would be willing to sit in with his band, The Midnight Special, for one job while he attended his sister’s wedding. I jumped at the chance. The job was at a bar called The Poopdeck underneath a Hawaiian restaurant . There weren’t many clients, but I got my first taste of playing in a real band since I had been a teenager.
These guys were good! They played all the top tunes of the day and even threw in some disco type music. I sat in for one night while Bill was there. I remember Richard asking if he had carried his guitar in on his motorcycle.
Bill was a big barrel-chested man. He stood at least six two and was pretty heavy. I learned later that he had gone to University of Texas at El Paso on an athletic scholarship for the shotput or hammer or cinder blocks or small cars or something like that.
I was very nervous and played horribly. At the end of the night, I thought that there was no way that anyone would ever want me to be in their band.
My thoughts proved to be pretty accurate. Six months later, I still was not playing in a band. Then providence stepped in.
I got a call from Richard the drummer to ask if I could sit in for two weeks at a club they were working. Bill had been in a motorcycle accident and seriously hurt and in the hospital. It did not look good. I jumped at the chance in hopes that I could just fit right into the band and take over for Bill while he was in the hospital. Since I had been gone, The Midnight Special had hired a pedal steel player, I think he went by the name "Bar," but he was, in hindsight, a horrible excuse for a steel player.
I did the two weeks and performed far better. It was at this point in my life that I truly felt I could play in a semiprofessional situation. Still, when the job was done, the band did not want to continue playing. Again, I was left out in the cold.
Several months later, I called to see how Bill Bailey was doing and was surprised to find that they were trying to remember my name so they could get hold of me to start a band. At last, at the ripe old age of 26, I was in a semiprofessional band!
Bill had been terribly hurt in his accident. He had no feeling in his legs and was wearing a body cast. He could only sit for a while when we started practicing because his cast cut into his legs when he sat up. We practiced a few times in a room at the hospital. We had to haul equipment in, set it up, practice, tear it down and haul it back out every time. Man, I really must have wanted to be in a band.
The band consisted of Bill, Richard, Jim Jarvis and myself. I was the only one in the band whose first and last name did not start with the same letter. Bill Bailey, Jim Jarvis and Richard Robinson. I guess I could have used my old high school nickname, Melton Malfunction, but how would that look on a card? Maybe I should have come up with one of those trendy one-word names like Cher, Sting, Slash, or Bono. I could have called myself "Sweat" or "Cheapo" or "Picker" or, since I played lap steel, "Bar." Bill played guitar and was the main singer, Richard played drums and sang a few tunes, Jim played bass and took everything too seriously, and I played guitar and lap steel and sang a few songs. Bill owned the sound system and a trailer to haul equipment.
At the time that I joined up with The Midnight Special, I had a small Fender Princeton Reverb amp. It was a fabulous amp, but at only 20 watts, not nearly enough power to actually handle a club situation. I traded the Princeton in on a later model Fender Super Reverb. It wasn’t the standard four 10-inch speaker Super Reverb, it had a different baffle board in it and a pair of 12-inch speakers. Still, at 40 watts, it just barely provided enough power and I often found myself needing more power for a cleaner sound. After we had been together for a few months, Bill came to the rescue. He had two Peavey Mace amps. These were tube-based, 240 watt amps that were at the top of the combo amp heap as far as I was concerned. He traded the Super Reverb for one of the Maces straight across. That Mace served me well for a number of years.
Once out of the hospital, we took to practicing at Richard’s brother’s house. We practiced in the basement and because Bill could not walk, we had to lower him down the stairs. At this time, he weighed about 250 pounds. It took everyone to get him down, and getting him back up the stairs was even harder. And we had to do everything with Bill still sitting in his wheelchair. Our first job was at a bar in Murray Utah. It had a small stage that was about 18 inches high. We had a very hard time lifting Bill and his wheel chair up onto the stage, so I went to work and built a ramp that became part of our band equipment. Once the equipment was set up, we would roll Bill up the ramp and get him in place for the set.
I got my first, but certainly not my last, insult at this club. I felt as if I was a pretty good lap steel player. I used a Magnatone six string model, but it was different from any other I have ever seen. Years later, Lynn Owlsley, the pedal steel player for Ernest Tubb and the Texas Troubadours, told me I could name my price and he would pay it. I declined, and still own this rare bird. It has a bender mechanism that has a three-position switch allowing a quick flip to a different tuning. I set it up so I could pull one string up a whole step with a flick of my right hand pinkie finger and got an okay steel sound.
I was sitting down playing at this club when someone passed a note on a napkin to me and then walked away. I opened it up when I had the chance and it read, and I remember it distinctly, "Why don’t you get a real steel?" That hurt my feelings a great deal and I carried that note with me in spirit for several months.
Let me tell a little about Bill Bailey. He, more than any other musician that I ever played with, influenced my playing and my showmanship. Bill seemed to be able to rip improvisations out while remaining true to a song better than anyone I knew. He could play amazingly fast and had an incredible sense of timing. He could also improvise the words of a song, something that was worth seeing The Midnight Special for in its own right. Some of his improvisations had us in stitches. I don't know if anyone in the crowd ever noticed, but we did on stage.
For instance, we did the Eric Clapton version of "Cocaine." Not the drug, the song. Anyone familiar with this song knows that is has stops in the song where the lead singer sings the word "cocaine" and then the music starts back up. After doing this song about 50 times, it becomes rather boring, something all practicing musicians must be able to deal with in their own way. Bill dealt with it by singing something else at the aforementioned breaks. The rest of the song was a serious interpretation, but the breaks got increasingly off track. Some of the words that I recall found their way into our versions included "propane," "no pain," "cellophane," "no brain," " freight train," "Solarcaine," the list goes on.
Despite playing in a wheelchair for most of our playing career together, Bill was often the most lighthearted musician I played with. There were many times when he would be in great pain while playing and he would get cramps in his legs that seemed unbearable, yet he never missed a job and rarely complained. I can't tell you the joy I felt the first time Bill stood up and played a song at the Moose Lodge in Bountiful, Utah. No, I didn't cry, but I can't think of a man I could have been happier to see making that kind of progress.
We played the American Legion club in West Jordan and it probably holds the record for the smallest club I've ever played in. It was a dining room with a "postage stamp" dance floor that normally held about three or four tables and accompanying chairs. Richard set his drums up on a table in the corner that the club had made a piece of wood to cover and I sat on a flower planter just inside the door to play my lap steel. Other places we played included a disco club, complete with lighted floors and mirror ball, in Provo, Utah, and what seemed to become a half-way home for us, the Bountiful Elks club, which turned out to be the club where I said my goodbyes to Midnight Special.
We were playing a club Heber City, Utah. It had a small stage and quite a few bikers seemed to stop in there. One fellow, a very big guy who used to come in on a bike so loud that we could hear it even when we were playing, would walk in the door, buy a six-pack and sit down in a booth and drink it. This happened nearly every night were there for several weeks. Just as regularly, about three times a night, he would yell out "Play ‘Born to be Wild’" loud enough for everyone in the club to hear. We ignored him for three weeks. On the fourth week, he went through the same routine. Bill chose to ignore him the first two times he yelled out. On the third time, he changed his request. "Play ‘Born to be Wild’ or I’ll kill one of you!" he barked out. We had no doubt that he would.
We immediately launched into the Steppenwolf classic. Always try to please the crowd.
I also first brought my pedal steel to this club.
I friend of mine who owned a music store told me that there was a finance company that had a pedal steel up for auction and that I should put in a bid. He told me to put in anything because sometimes you get these kinds of things for next to nothing. I had no clue how much a pedal steel was worth and even less of an idea what I was bidding on. But I put in a bid of $300. I discovered a couple of weeks later that I had won the steel. I drove down to pick it up and it was sitting in a room already assembled.
It was a beautiful Sho-Bud Pro 1 pedal steel. It had three pedals and three knee levers, a volume pedal and a very nice case. I had no idea how to take it apart, so I had to figure that out before I could leave with it. It was a fantastic investment. I still play the same pedal steel every Saturday night.
I gathered all the information I could in pedal steel and began to learn how to play it. It sat in my bedroom for six months and I would sit and figure out the tuning and string changers and listen to how they could be used. I wrote down notation of what happened with the pedals and translated it to the guitar. After six months, I figured I was ready.
I took the pedal steel to the club and set it up like I knew what I was doing. When we did something that I normally played lap steel on, I sat at the pedal steel and played it. I didn’t think I was doing too bad, but if I got in trouble, I would pick up the lap steel and take over with it. By the end of the first set, I was feeling okay about my pedal steel playing.
After the first set was over, Jim Jarvis leaned over to me and said, "If you ever bring that pedal steel again, you’re fired."
I left it at home for a few more months, Jarvis eventually left the band and I returned with my pedal steel.
Midnight Special is also the first band where I got to do music I really wanted to do. It's not secret that my favorite all-time band is The Lovin' Spoonful. We did a medley of Spoonful songs that included "Summer in the City," "You Didn't Have to be so Nice," and "Do You Believe in Magic." That medley is still a high watermark of my career. Bill had a medley of ZZ Top that he did. We had a lot of fun in this band and enjoyed working together.
I can't remember why Jim Jarvis and Richard Robinson
That is also the same time that I first met up with bassist John Crookston. And shortly thereafter, Richard left the band and I met up with drummer Gary Kopinsky. With stars in our eyes, Gary, John and I eventually ended up in one of the top bands in Salt Lake City at the time, Saddle Boogie. It was also a band that came with all the trappings of a bigger band—egos the size of the Great Salt Lake, drugs, alcohol and jealousy. I learned more about people and life than I did about music in Saddle Boogie.
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