THE LONESOME DEATH OF DANNY RAPP: THE FRONT MAN FOR DANNY & THE JUNIORS

THE LONESOME DEATH 

OF DANNY RAPP: 

THE FRONT MAN 

FOR DANNY & THE JUNIORS

Danny Rapp, the man who first sang “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay” and “At The Hop” stumbled and fell after stardom faded

 

July 24, 2018

 

by Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

 

The Juvenairs were four teenagers from southwest Philadelphia who got together in 1955 to make music. They’d meet on the corner of 54th and Pentridge streets and harmonize, singing doo-wop under the streetlight. Dave White Tricker, Joey Terranova and Frank Maffei were pals at John Bartram High. Danny Rapp, who sang lead, was still a student at Shaw Junior High.

 

A little guy from a big Irish-American family, Danny was smaller and younger, but he was the leader. He’s the one who made the guys practice, and came up with some choreography and routines that would turn them into an act. Thanks to Danny, they got good. The Juvenairs performed at school parties and sock hops and made a name for themselves around Philly — and that was a good place to make a name, because Philadelphia was a center of the rock & roll industry.

 

In 1957, a local producer named John Madera got involved. He and Dave White (Dave dropped the “Tricker”) wrote a song called “Do The Bop” and then he arranged for the group to record it.  The record got into the hands of Dick Clark, who was not only the city’s most powerful deejay, but hosted an afternoon dance show on television called Bandstand. Dick Clark liked what he heard. He suggested they change the song’s title to “At The Hop” and change the band’s name to Danny & The Juniors. They did.

 

Danny & The Juniors recorded “At The Hop” and it became a local hit. That same summer, Dick Clark’s television show was picked up by ABC and went national as American Bandstand.  After Clark invited Danny & The Juniors onto the show in December, “At The Hop” took off nationally and sold millions of copies.

 

Danny Rapp was all of 16 years old.

 

Well, you can swing it you can groove it


You can really start to move it at the hop


Where the jockey is the smoothest


And the music is the coolest at the hop


All the cats and chicks can get their kicks at the hop


Let’s go

 

Danny & The Juniors, with their white bucks and sweaters, looked like their audience.  They were approachable teen idols, and only got more popular after they released their follow-up single a few months later.  This song was a genuine teen anthem, a manifesto, a confident yet confused call to arms.  Before “My Generation,” “I’m Eighteen” or “Rockaway Beach” was “Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay.”

 

Rock ‘n roll is here to stay,


It will never die


It was meant to be that way,


Though I don’t know why


I don’t care what people say,


Rock ‘n roll is here to stay.

 

Of course, the boys didn’t see money from the records. Teenage stardom in 1958 meant television appearances, spots in a few exploitation flicks like the Julius LaRosa movie Let’s Rock, and life on the road. The Juniors hooked up with Alan Freed’s travelling rock ‘n’ roll show, riding a bus with fifteen other acts and getting out to play theatres, nightclubs and halls around the country. The headliner at each stop depended on whose record was where on the charts.

 

Danny & The Juniors recording 1958

 

Danny & The Juniors’ record company kept churning out the singles. They charted with a few, even hitched a ride on the Twist train, but never again reached the Top 20. In 1962, Dave White quit the group and moved west. He and John Madera wrote more hits for other people, like “You Don’t Own Me” for Lesley Gore and Len Barry’s “1-2-3.”

 

Danny & The Juniors soldiered on as a trio, and when the American teen idol rock & roll scene was destroyed by Beatlemania in 1964, went their separate ways for a while. They stayed close to Philadelphia. They took a shot at civilian life. Danny had a wife and kids. He got a job as assistant manager in a toy factory. For a while, he drove a cab.

 

Then, in 1969, in the middle of Vietnam War protests, drug culture and the Nixon administration, something called the “Oldies format” caught on at a radio station in New York City, and spread through the country. All of a sudden, the old groups from the Fifties were getting back together or reforming around whoever was still alive, and starring in rock & roll revival shows. Fifteen or more acts who’d had hits at least fifteen years earlier were trotted out the way they were on the old Alan Freed tours. Danny & The Juniors came along with their two hits. They hired Bill Carlucci to make it a foursome again, dusted off those stage moves and were back on the road.

 

I was 16 when I saw Danny & The Juniors perform at one of those shows. It was Saturday night, January 20, 1973 at the New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum. They were squished in the middle of a bill that included Ben E. King and a version of The Drifters, The Five Satins, The Ronettes and Jay & The Americans. The emcee (and the reason I bought a ticket) was Don Imus, then the hottest thing in radio.

 

Danny & The Juniors did their two or three songs, opening strong with “Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay,” closing with “At The Hop.” To me, all of the acts except for Imus were from a different era. I was a toddler when Danny Rapp was in the Top 20. I was looking forward to Thursday, when Neil Young would be playing the Coliseum.

 

Danny Rapp at 31 had bigger things to look forward to. Somebody had the bright idea of filming some of the big oldies shows and turning it into a movie. Let The Good Times Roll was released in May 1973. Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino were the stars, but Danny & The Juniors were squished in the middle somewhere and that was good enough. The movie was a hit that summer, and in August came American Graffiti, George Lucas’s movie about teenagers, cruising and rock & roll in 1962, with a soundtrack filled with oldies.

 

American Graffiti was a boost but still a kick in the nuts to Danny Rapp and the Juniors. They didn’t make the soundtrack or the movie, but “At The Hop” made it to both. The song was performed in a sock hop scene by the retro rock 'n' roll band, Flash Cadillac & The Continental Kids. Kim Fowley produced the track, which was also released as a single. Flash Cadillac’s “At The Hop” didn’t intrude on the Billboard charts. Neither did Danny & The Juniors when they re-recorded the song that same year.

 

Nevertheless, the Seventies was the decade to cash in on rock & roll nostalgia. There was Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Grease the musical and then Grease the movie (on that soundtrack, “Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay” was performed by  Sha Na Na).  Danny & The Juniors stayed on the road, playing lounges, hotels — class joints. Only now they weren’t fresh-faced kids in sharp suits. They were men heading to middle age, with lacquered, sprayed comb-overs and matching polyester outfits with big collars. Danny Rapp didn’t dig it. His marriage busted up and it ate at him. His fear of flying got worse. After the shows, spent, he turned off the charm. He kept to himself, he and a bottle. He wasn’t fun to be around.

 

So what was the breaking point? The twentieth anniversary of singing the same two songs? Looking through the windshield at another endless highway and seeing only more of the same Holiday Inns, afternoons waking up hungover next to the same middle-aged female fans? Near the end of the decade, maybe it was Danny & The Juniors’ latest and strangest trip: another package tour, traveling by bus with another collection of acts. Only this time it wasn’t rock & roll.

 

It was vaudeville.

 

In 1978, Danny & The Juniors were booked into another version of Roy Radin’s Vaudeville Revue. Radin had hit on the vaudeville idea during the Summer of Love, back when he was a teenage publicist for the Clyde Beatty Circus. He saw how they raked in big bucks touring backwater towns with old clowns and tired elephants, so he copied the model. Radin assembled a troupe of jugglers, magicians, dancers and ventriloquists, convinced old comedian Georgie Jessel to headline, and sent them out in a bus. It worked.

 

Roy Radin’s Vaudeville Revue rolled through the Seventies, with tours featuring forgotten old stars like Cab Calloway, Gloria DeHaven and Milton Berle, comics like Jackie Vernon and Stanley Myron Handelman, and oldies groups like the Shirelles. On that 1978 tour, Danny & The Juniors would bound onto the stage following a knockout set by Tiny Tim. They’d perform “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay” and “My Prayer” and close with “At The Hop”. Emcee Frank Fontaine — Crazy Guggenheim from the old Jackie Gleason Show — would usher them off and introduce the star, “Mr. Show Business.” That was the cue for Donald O’Connor to come out and do a soft shoe to “Mr. Bojangles.”

 

With Donald O’Connor.

 

Around this time, twenty years after Danny & The Junior’s season at the top, Roy Radin was heavy into cocaine and intent on becoming a Hollywood movie producer. He and bigtime producer Robert Evans established a production company to make a film about the legendary Harlem venue The Cotton Club. On June 10, 1983, Radin was found dead in a ditch, shot up and blown up with dynamite by hitmen hired by the woman who’d arranged the Evans deal.

 

When the vaudeville tour ended, Danny & The Juniors blew up, as well. Like a couple of Philly mob bosses, Danny Rapp and Joe Terry had a sit down and divided up the group and the territories. Joe Terry and Frank Maffei got the East Coast. Danny Rapp took the South, Midwest and West. He hired a couple of other guys and called the group Danny & The Juniors.  Terry and Maffei hired Maffei’s brother Bobby. They called their group Danny & the Juniors.  The two Danny & The Juniors went their separate ways. They did all right. They played the classy clubs. The two outfits did not overlap or collide.

 

Danny Rapp- The last ad March 9, 1983

 

There was Danny Rapp, not yet forty, living on the road and dead tired of it, driving by car from town to town with his little band, playing nightclubs and hotel lounges. He’d made decent money all those years, but he never invested or saved any. He could not see an end to the grind.

 

Twenty-five years after his summer at the top of the charts, Danny Rapp was behind the wheel, on the road with his latest version of The Juniors: a four-piece band, a singer who called himself Bobby C, and another singer, a young woman. 

 

On March 7, 1983, the group opened a month-long engagement in the brand-new Pointe Tapatio Resort overlooking Phoenix, Arizona. The place was so new they were still finishing off the last of the five hundred rooms.  Danny and his band were following a successful four-week run by a version of The Platters (that contained no original members!) in the Silver Lining Lounge of the Different Pointe of View Restaurant. Danny & The Juniors were advertised as “light-hearted nostalgic entertainment,” two shows a night, excluding Sundays. Danny would pull down about a grand a week, with a free room and half-price food and drinks, but he was feeling anything but light-hearted and nostalgic.

 

You couldn’t tell when he was performing. Onstage, Danny was a pro. After twenty-five years, he could do it on his head. Offstage, he was all too often off his head, buying too many of those half-price drinks in an attempt to erase a mistake he made by hiring his latest girl singer a few months earlier. The mistake was having sex with her. Lonely Danny fell hard for her. It was a real romance for a while, but now she wanted to keep things businesslike. Danny would see her after the show, flirting with the yokels in the bar, and it made him crazy. He drank more and his mood got darker. A couple of times, when some hick made a move on her, Danny staggered over, all five-foot-five of him, and things got ugly. Hotel security had to step in to break it up.

 

Fighting with the hotel guests didn’t sit well with the owners of this classy joint. The last week of the engagement, the girl singer told them that Danny had threatened her. She said she was afraid of him. With three shows to go, she stuffed all her things in a suitcase and flew the coop.

 

The resort’s vice president scheduled a meeting with Danny at 4:30 the following afternoon, Friday, April 1st. Ken Nagel also had booking agent Charlie Johnston in his office when he read Danny the riot act.  Johnston wasn’t happy. He’d booked Danny & Juniors to play Pittsburgh the following week.

 

“We wanted to make sure we had a quiet ending of an engagement that wasn’t so quiet during the four weeks,” Johnston said.

 

Nagel recalled that although Danny had been drinking before the incidents in question, he seemed completely sober when he showed up in his office. Yet it wasn’t as if he was paying attention. “I had to repeat things three, four times. It was as if he never quite understood,” Nagel said.

 

“He was completely out of it,” Johnston said. “Ken was reading the security reports and Danny just said, ‘That wasn’t me.'”

 

“He kept saying he was not responsible,” Nagel said. “I said, ’Danny, if you’re not responsible for your behavior, who is?’”

 

Danny responded by changing the subject. He asked for a pay advance so he could get his truck fixed.  Nagel gave it to him. April Fools. Now it was Danny’s turn to fly the coop. He packed his bags and drove away. He did not return to the Silver Lining Lounge.

 

What was left of the band, four musicians and singer Bobby C, performed that night and the next, without their star. “The show is built around him,” Bobby C said. “We pulled it off, but it wasn’t the same show.”

 

On Saturday, April 2nd, Danny Rapp wound up in the middle of the desert, about 140 miles from Pointe Tapatio. In the tiny town of Quartzsite, Arizona, he checked into one of the mobile homes that make up the Yacht Club Motel. According to La Paz County sheriff Ray Evans, he bought a .25 caliber automatic weapon that day or the next. He was seen drinking heavily at The Jigsaw, one of the town’s two bars.

 

On the afternoon of Monday, April 4, a maid at the Yacht Club Motel found Danny Rapp dead of a gunshot to the right side of his head. At least the cops were pretty sure it was Danny Rapp.  They couldn’t make a positive identification at first because the corpse’s face was blown off.  The sheriff said the shot was self-inflicted. He said bottles of booze and some money were found in the room, but no drugs. There was no suicide note, either, but there were notes on several calendars. The sheriff would not reveal the contents.

 

“It never dawned on me that he would kill himself,” Nagel said after Danny Rapp’s death was official. “He had been having quite a bit of trouble, personal problems, and we wanted to talk to him.  He just wasn’t acting like a mature adult.”

 

“It’s really too bad,” added Johnston, the booking agent. “To think he had reached the pinnacle of stardom in the 1950s and ends up in a little motel in Quartzsite, Arizona. He obviously was really despondent. I don’t know over what.”

 

Danny Rapp was 42.

 

They shipped his body the 2,300 miles back home to Philadelphia. About three dozen people showed up for his funeral at St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church. Danny Rapp was buried in New Saint Mary’s Cemetery in  Bellmawr, New Jersey, about ten miles from where he grew up.

 

When Joe Terry was asked about his former bandmate, he wasn’t very nostalgic. “Danny was an alcoholic,” he said. “He had some problems… He had trouble getting a grip.”

 

Thirty-five years after Danny Rapp shot himself in the head, sixty years since “At The Hop” went to Number One, Joe Terry and the Maffei brothers are still out there, performing as “Danny & The Juniors featuring Joe Terry.” They’re available for corporate and outdoor events, concerts, and shows in casinos and clubs. DannyndtheJuniors.com

 

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BURT KEARNS wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. JEFF ABRAHAM is a comedy historian and public relations executive who has represented comedians from George Carlin to Andrew Dice Clay. The two of them wrote a book about performers who died on stage. It will be published in 2019.

THE LATE GREAT JOHNNY ACE

THE LATE GREAT JOHNNY ACE

Burt Kearns

June 27, 2018

 

Johnny Ace died at 25, allegedly during a game of Russian Roulette. The legend of his death not only obscures his talent but is built upon a misreading of what really happened backstage that Christmas night in 1954

 

by Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

 

 

Johnny Ace. The name doesn’t get much more rock & roll than that, and neither does his story. Even those who aren’t familiar with his music — Memphis R&B from the early 1950s — have heard the name, and most likely the legend attached to it. Paul Simon referenced him in his 1983 song “The Late Great Johnny Ace” (a song in which John F. Kennedy and John Lennon were made honorary “Johnny Aces”). Dave Alvin offered a more straightforward recitation of his early exit in “Johnny Ace Is Dead.” Johnny Ace was one of those tragic legendary rock & roll figures who’s remembered less for the way he played than for the way he left the building.

As legend has it, Johnny Ace went out in a most romantic way on Christmas Day 1954 — romantic like the love scene between Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. Johnny Ace died at 25, playing Russian Roulette, the game in which you load a bullet into one chamber of a revolver, spin the cylinder, then pull the trigger while pointing the gun at your head. It’s said to be quite a rush if you only hear “click.”

 

There’s one small catch to the legend of the late great Johnny Ace: It wasn’t Russian Roulette, and it was only a matter of luck that it wasn’t a murder-suicide.

 

Johnny Ace was born in 1929 as John Marshall Alexander Jr., the son of Baptist preacher. He served time in the Navy and a bit more in a Mississippi prison before he washed up on Memphis’s Beale Street, the bubbling cauldron of southern urban blues, in 1949. He played and toured with Bobby “Blue” Bland and B.B. King in a band called the Beale Streeters before going solo and signing with Duke Records in 1952. There, he was christened Johnny Ace and out of the box went to #1 with “My Song.”

 

That was the first of eight chart hits in a row, and the beginning of a long slog of touring, much of it with Willie Mae Thornton (also known as “Big Mama” Thornton, enshrined in rock & roll history as the first to record Leiber & Stoller’s “Hound Dog”), a trajectory that blasted him into immortality on Christmas Day, 1954.

 

Johnny Ace’s last day began the day before. He played a Christmas Eve show in Port Arthur, Texas and drove to Houston for a show on December 25th. At 9 a.m. Christmas morning, he arrived at Olivia Gibbs’ apartment. Olivia was twenty-two years old. She’d attended the University of Wisconsin, but worked as a waitress at the Club Matinee, a blues showcase nicknamed “The Cotton Club of The South.” She was Johnny’s girlfriend. She considered herself his fiancée, and hoped to marry Johnny the following June — if his divorce from his wife and mother of his two kids came through by then.

 

Olivia later told a reporter that Johnny had invited his band to her place for Christmas dinner.  Johnny, she said, wasn’t a doper and he wasn’t a boozer and he wasn’t mean. He was a prankster, always acting foolish, and well, truth be told, he was something of a boozer, after all. Johnny was drinking on Christmas morning, guzzling vodka and playing with his gun. It was the little pistol he carried, a .32 caliber number he’d bought off another musician in Florida. He was always playing with his gun. He liked to shoot at road signs and show off, “just like a little boy,” Olivia said.

 

When Olivia told Johnny to knock it off and put the weapon away, he did. Then he showed everybody the gold and three-stone diamond ring she’d bought him for Christmas. When it was time for dinner, Johnny Ace used a big knife to carve the Christmas turkey.  He was in the Christmas spirit.

 

“I loved Johnny and he loved me,” Olivia said.

 

That evening, a crowd of 3,500 showed up for the “Negro Christmas Dance” at the City Auditorium. Johnny Ace was a featured act on a bill that included Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis and the headliner, B.B. King. Johnny capped off the first half of the show as usual, by inviting Big Mama onstage and then driving the crowd wild with a duet on his rollicking, rocking hit “Yes, Baby.”

 

Hey-ay-ay, tell me, baby!


Yay-hey, tell me, baby,


What is wrong with you?

 

Intermission began around 11 p.m. Johnny was still pranking around in the dressing room backstage at the City Auditorium, drinking vodka, but not in as fine spirits as he’d been earlier in the day. Now he was grousing about a toothache that was killing him.  Despite the fact that thousands of fans were in the auditorium waiting for the second half of the show, he said he didn’t think he could go on.

 

There were four other people in and out of the room. Olivia Gibbs was there, along with her friend Mary Carter. So was another singer named Joe Hammond and Big Mama Thornton. Olivia crawled up onto Johnny’s lap to try to make him feel better. All the while, Johnny Ace was playing with his little .32 caliber pistol, pointing it at people in the room and pulling the trigger. With no bullet in the firing chamber, every time he pulled the trigger, the gun made a snapping sound.  Snap! Snap! He was really getting on people’s nerves.

 

Willie Mae Thornton

 

Big Mama Thornton, all six feet of her, finally had enough. “Hey, man! What the heck you doin’ with that gun? Don’t you know it might go off?”

 

“It ain’t got but one bullet in it,”  Johnny replied.

 

“Hell, it don’t take but one bullet to kill you!” Big Mama snatched the pistol, turned the chamber and a bullet tumbled into her hand. She took a swig of 100 proof Old Granddad and headed out toward her second set.

 

“Gimme the gun!” Johnny demanded as she neared the door. She handed it over. 

 

“You ain’t gonna play with it no more, is you?”

 

“Where’s the bullet?” She threw it at him.

 

Snap! Now Johnny pointed the gun at Joe Hammond.

 

Snap! Snap!

 

Now he’d gotten on Joe Hammond’s last nerve. “Damn!” Joe spat. “You snapped it at everyone else! Try it on yourself!”

 

“Now watch me,” said the prankster. “Show you it won’t shoot.” Johnny Ace had his arm around Olivia. He placed the gun to his temple. He pulled the trigger once more.

 

‘Crack!’ Johnny Ace fell to the floor.

 

Big Mama stopped dead in her tracks. She swore that when the gun went off, “that kinky hair of his shot straight out.”

 

“I thought he was just up to his usual playing until I raised his head and saw the blood,” Olivia recalled.

 

Olivia Gibbs was lucky that Johnny Ace was playing with a small-caliber revolver and that the bullet didn’t pass all the way through his brain. When he pulled the trigger, he was hugging her close. Her head was pressed right up against his.

 

None of the thousands of dancers in the auditorium heard the gunshot, because Johnny Otis and his band were onstage, playing at the time. They were in the middle of a number when Big Mama came running onto the stage in tears and grabbed the microphone. “The concert is canceled! Johnny Ace has just been killed! There ain’t gonna be no music tonight! Johnny Ace has been killed!”

 

The Associated Press story was carried in newspapers around the country the following day:  “A Memphis, Tenn. bandleader was shot to death playing Russian Roulette last night…

 

“According to the detectives, Alexander would spin the cylinder, put the gun to the head of one of his companions and pull the trigger. Each time, the bullet failed to come into the chamber. The last time Alexander tried it, however, he sat down and pulled the girl on his lap and put the gun to his head after spinning the cylinder, police said. When he pulled the trigger, the hammer clicked on the bullet, which went smashing into his head.”

 

The report was not accurate, but the story stuck.

 

Meanwhile, they carried Johnny Ace’s body back to Memphis. The Reverend Dwight “Gatemouth” Moore, a former blues singer himself, preached over the casket.

 

Duke Records, Johnny Ace’s label, didn’t waste time crying once word of the tragedy got back to Memphis. Johnny’s next single was released within days of his death, before the new year. “Pledging My Love” was produced by Johnny Otis and featured the Otis band. The opening lines were, “Forever my darling, my love will be true, always and forever, I’ll love just you.”  The record became Johnny Ace’s biggest hit, balanced at the top of the Billboard R&B charts for ten weeks beginning February 12, 1955.

 

The magazine stated that the death of Johnny Ace “created one of the biggest demands for a record that has occurred since the death of Hank Williams just over two years ago.”

 

Olivia Gibbs, the girlfriend who just missed joining Johnny Ace on his final journey, said the song had been dedicated to her. “I’ll miss those nightly phone calls,” she said. “He called me every night when he was on the road, as if he wanted to hear me for inspiration before he went on the stage.”

 

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BURT KEARNS wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. JEFF ABRAHAM is a comedy historian and public relations executive who has represented comedians from George Carlin to Andrew Dice Clay. The two of them wrote a book about performers who died on stage. It will be published in 2019.

THE TRUTH BEHIND THE BRAWL BETWEEN JOHN LENNON AND CHRIS MONTEZ IN 1963! EXCLUSIVE!

 THE TRUTH BEHIND THE BRAWL BETWEEN JOHN LENNON AND CHRIS MONTEZ IN 1963! EXCLUSIVE!

May 23, 2018

By Burt Kearns

 

Eyewitness accounts finally reveal what really happened in the brawl between John Lennon and Chris Montez, which has become one of the great urban legends of rock & roll!

 

It was March, 1963. Chris Montez’s rock & roll career had just reached its zenith, but was already on the slide. The Mexican-American singer who’d been promoted as the new Ritchie Valens; was slipping off the charts. Chris’s single, “Let’s Dance”, had peaked at #4 on the Billboard charts the previous November, and his follow-up, “Some Kinda Fun,” missed the Top 40 by that much in January.

 

The future was a bit rosier for Montez’s touring buddy, Tommy Roe. The 20-year-old from Atlanta who’d been touted as the new Buddy Holly ever since his Peggy Sue rip-off, “Sheila”, landed at #1 in September 1962. Then Tommy’s follow-up single cracked the Top 40, but just.

 

So in March 1963 the two guys were still hustling. Their careers were born thanks to The Day The Music Died in the wreckage of a chartered single-engine V-tailed Beechcraft 35 Bonanza, near Clear Lake, Iowa.

 

And they were getting as much mileage as they could from their one-hit-wonders.

 

Chris Montez and Tommy Roe

 

Now, following a tour through the segregated Jim Crow South, with a revue of acts that included Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter and Smokey Robinson, Chris and Tommy were heading to England. Both their follow-up singles had made it to Top 10 in the UK, and British audiences were always excited to see pop stars from the States, even those past their expiration date.

 

As Andrew Loog-Oldman, the future Rolling Stones producer who did publicity for the tour, said, “America was everything, in music and on the screen. It gave us our language. It gave us our hope, so to speak. It gave us our music.”

 

Chris and Tommy were given the month of March, a tour that pinballed around the UK, from Bristol to Bedford, East Ham to Exeter; twenty-one dates over twenty-three days. Joining them would be their opening act: an up-and-coming band from Liverpool.

 

Tommy Roe remembered: “The agent called me and said, ‘You’re going to England to do a tour with Chris Montez.’

 

“And I said, ‘Oh, great. We’re old buddies, so that should be fun.’

 

“So we get to England, and on the bill with us is this group called the Beatles. Nobody in the States had ever heard of the Beatles. We didn’t know who the Beatles were.”

 

 

The two young Americans found out pretty quickly, once they stepped out of the rickety bus and were crushed by Beatlemania. The Beatles second single, the handjob-begging, blue balls anthem, “Please Please Me,” just happened to be at the top of the UK charts that week. And Parlophone was in the process of rush-releasing their first album, while masses of fans swarmed through every door and window at every stop along the way.

 

Chris Montez said, “Once we got rolling, we couldn’t go anywhere, Tommy Roe and myself and the Beatles. You never know how shocking it is until people rush at you and start tearing at your clothes and screaming. And you’re thinking, ‘Wow, yesterday I was doing nothing, today people are screaming in my face!’ It was kind of exciting.”

 

Tommy Roe remembered, “We started the tour and these guys have a huge following. They’re just kicking off their career, but their fans are everywhere. They’re chasing them around the theaters and it was really pandemonium. The only time I’d ever seen anything like this was with Elvis.”

 

The four young Beatles had a busier time than Chris and Tommy, breaking away from the tour, and driving to London to appear on the BBC, or to EMI Studios on Abbey Road for final touches on their debut album. And, for several nights early on, John Lennon was knocked out by a cold, so the Beatles performed as a trio.

 

Chris remembered the tour this way: “We got along good together. They seemed like regular guys, just rockers. And they loved music. I don’t think the Beatles were aware what was going to happen in their career. Paul was real humble and real nice. Ringo and George were real cards. You know, I had a lot of respect for Lennon, and even more now. But he was who he was. Lennon was, I guess, kind of rambunctious.”

 

Tommy said, “They were very nice. They were very inquisitive about America. I mean, they asked tons of questions about America. And John, he had a Gibson guitar, and first thing he did on the bus, was say, ‘You know, we did your song ‘Sheila’ at the Star Club in Hamburg and people loved it.’

 

And he said, ‘But I don’t think I’m playing the chords right….’

And he played it, and sure enough, he was playing a D before the E.

I said, ‘Nah, it goes like, A, E, D, A, like so…’

And he said, ‘Ah, that’s it!  I knew I was doing something wrong.’

And then John let me use his guitar on the bus, to write songs.”

 

The Beatles were driven off on the morning of March 14 for business in London. When they arrived back at the hotel, it was time for the show in Wolverhampton. Chris was holed up with a beer, in a private den set aside for the musicians, safe from the packs of screaming girls outside.

 

Chris remembered what happened next. “I said, ‘Hey, where were you guys?’

 

“They said, ‘Oh, we were finishing our album.’

 

“I said, ‘Really?’

 

“And they said, ‘You want to hear it?’

 

“And I said, ‘Yeah,” and they put the record on. The first cut. When they put the needle down, it just knocked me out. I said, ‘What a rocker!’

 

“And they played me the rest of the album and I said, ‘Paul, play that one again for me. I love that one. That’s my favorite.’

 

“He said, ‘You like that one?’ 

 

“I said, ‘Yeah!”

 

That first cut on the Beatles’ first album was “I Saw Her Standing There,” the one that began with the count-in: “One, two, three, FUCK!”

Chris Montez would turn out to be the last pop star the Beatles would open for. He was also the first to hear The Beatles’ debut album. And, by the final week of the tour, Chris would be the one standing right in the middle of the road, the first victim of Beatlemania, run over by the locomotive of sex, adolescence and rock & roll, stoked by those four words. One. Two. Three. FUCK!

 

As Andrew Loog Oldman remembered, “Chris came in just as the curtain was coming down and he watched. He had a wonderful experience, as we all did, but there was just now no denying what was happening with this incredible phenomenon, the Beatles. By April, they were it.”

 

The tour moved along. Everyone got along on the bus. The Beatles did their half dozen numbers and made way for the American headliners. Chris learned to perform with the Beatle fans stragglers rushing the stage.

 

The album Please Please Me was released on Friday, March 22. On Saturday night, way up in the northeast, in Newscastle-Upon-Tyne, there was a celebration after the show, and the dispute that until now has been the most disputed moment in rock & roll history.

 

"John comes in, all the Beatles come in, and John’s 

got a beer in his hand and he’s really whacked,

 you know, just drunk out of his head and…”

 

Late Saturday night, March 23, 1963, or possibly in the early morning hours of March 24th, John Lennon and Chris Montez got into it.

 

As Tommy remembered it, “Somebody in the business threw them a party. It was in a beautiful house, kind of a country house out in the forest. Everybody was drinking beer and having a good time. And Chris had left the party and was on the bus asleep in his seat. And we all come piling back on. I come on, I sit down next to Chris. And John comes in….”

 

One would think that this would be one triumphant night on which Lennon would have held his fire, except for the fact that he never could hold his liquor. Remember March 14, 1974?

 

The Troubadour, West Hollywood?

 

You know, the waitress who responded to his, “Do you know who I am?” with, “Yeah, you’re some asshole with a Kotex on his forehead.”

 

Tommy Roe and Chris Montez. 1963.

 

Tommy continues, “I sit down next to Chris, and John comes in, all the Beatles come in, and John’s got a beer in his hand and he’s really whacked, you know, just drunk out of his head and…”

 

Chris interrupts, “Lennon poured beer on my head!”

 

Tommy continues, “He pours the beer on Chris’s head, sitting in his seat, and Chris wakes up, he’s wet with beer, and he goes, ‘Oh man, what’s that?’ He was pissed!”

 

Chris interjects, “And John says, ‘You son of a so and so.’ I was shocked. I was perturbed, I got real pissed, and I got up and I said, ‘Hey, you! What the hell you think you’re doing? You want some?’ and started rushing at him.

 

“Because I didn’t take any of that crap, you know?

 

“We started throwing punches and we got tied up together.”

 

Tommy picks it up, “And the big scuffle starts, and we start fighting in the aisles and scuffling and, you know, it was kind of ugly.”

 

Chris said, “Actually, Tommy Roe stepped in and broke it up.”

 

Tommy again, “I got between them, everybody was scuffling, and we kind of scuffled down in the floor, got between the seats and stuff.”

 

Chris recalled, “Tommy said, ‘If you want anything with him, you want something with me, too!'”

 

Tommy said, “Well, it was only against a dozen, man. We were the only American acts. Chris was getting ready to hit him, and it’s like, we don’t want to go there. We’d already had a fight on that tour between the road manager and one of the guys in the band.  And the road manager butted this guy, and his face just opened up. It was like a really a rowdy group, from what we were used to.”

 

“And that’s how it ended. There was no winner.”

 

Everyone settled down in their seats. Paul McCartney tried to make peace with Chris.

 

Chris said, “Paul sat by me and said, ‘Come on, Chris, let’s be friends….’

 

“I said, ‘Paul, just get away from me, I don’t want nothing to do with you guys. You know, you pissed me off!”

 

As for Lennon, Chris recalled, “John? I guess he was a wise guy. But I got the sense that, I shouldn’t say this, that he was jealous of who I was or what I did. I don’t know what his problem was, but I didn’t like it too much.”

 

The next day, the show rolled into Liverpool. It was a homecoming for the Beatles, and a chance for Chris Montez to show he didn’t harbor any hard feelings.

 

Chris remembered it this way, “When we arrived in Liverpool, I told my manager, ‘This is their town. Let them close the show.’

 

“He said, ‘You sure?’

 

“I said, ‘Yeah, It’s no big thing.’

 

“And that’s the way it was with me.”

 

The Beatles closed the show in Liverpool and they wound up headlining the remaining six nights of the tour. Chris Montez had no problem with that, either, although it turned out that one performer did hold a grudge that final week on the bus. Turned out, John was just a jealous guy.

 

Tommy said, “Before the fight, John was letting me use his Gibson guitar on the bus to write songs. The next day he said, ‘You can’t use my guitar anymore!  That’s it. That’s it! No more. Leave my guitar alone.’ It just got cold after that. And by this time, they had the tour locked up. It was really a Beatles tour by this time.”

 

It really was.

 

###

 

[Chris Montez and Tommy Roe would rebound with phenomenal reinventions and success a few years later. Chris Montez as a MOR crooner in Herb Alpert’s A&M stable, and Tommy Roe with bubblegum hits like “Sweet Pea” and “Dizzy.”]