There was also a great after hours place on 5th Avenue called Mom's Kitchen. There we white boys could jam with some really good jazz/blues blowing black musicians. There was also a place located somewhere out in the woods of Alachua COunty called Cunninghams"s...or Cunningham's Country Club jokingly. It was a black juke joint and was also a great place to jam with black musicians. In those days Gainesville was still segregated. I have no idea where it was located. I was usually drunk when I went out there and it was always after a frat gig.
In the early 60's band wore matching "uniforms", Beatle style jackets, etc. I think The Maundy Quintet was the first band I ever saw that the guys all wore what ever they felt like. Bands copied the popular groups then. When I first started playing rock kids were still dancing jitter bug style. Then the twist came in and the later still The Beatles and the other british groups put the kobash on horn players...then I had to switch to keyboard.
One really good group you don't have was a Chicago/BST style band called The Brass Joint. WHen I got out of the Army I hung out with them for awhile. I only remember two of the musicians names. Jack Lewis on trombone and Bob Turner who played Lead Guitar. Bob worked at Liphams Music Company. Everyone was in debt to Liphams in those days.
After reading the stuff I wrote about "them olden days" I then remembered there was another after hours club that we used to jam at on 5th avenue, called Sarah's Place. During the days of segregation 5th avenue, between 13th street and 6ht street, was like the downtown for the black community. Regulars there referred to it as "The Set". I don't know if that reference was a musical one or a theater expression.
I remember there was this fantastic, older black jazz/blues drummer who jammed down there called Fat Poppa. He could do more things with one hand than most drummers could with two. He used to jam with a white organist (and UF student) named Bill Iernia (sp?). Bill played a Hammond B-3 and sounded just like jazz organist Jimmy Smith. A black tenor man named Rupert Simms, who was a school teacher down in Miami, used to drive up to G'ville just to play with these guys. These guys were way above the rest of us in talent and execution. It used to send a chill up my spine to hear tthem play blues/funk.
Anyway, Charlie wasn't much of a clarinet player and so a few years later, when I found out he was hanging out with some of the local R & B groups playing sax I was incredulous. However, Charlie, by through hard work and will-power kept at it until he got to be a pretty damn good sax man.
Charlie was not however, content to merely play with these black groups. Charlie wanted to be black as well. So he started wearing an afro wig, tanning himself up with makeup and began calling himself Charlie Blade. Eventually he became a booking agent for some of the local black groups and the last time I ever saw him he was standing on the back of a flat bed truck, jamming with a bunch of guys as part of a University of Florida homecoming parade. That was probably 35 years ago.
In the late 50's and early 60's most of the local bands who were getting regular fraternity gigs were the black groups. Otherwise the bands came from out of town. the local white music scene consisted of older guys in traditional combos playing the standards from the 40's and 50's or the country bands that seem to have always been around. When I went to Gainesville High School between 1957-61 I don't think the school hired a single rock group to play for a dance. I played in the school "jazz" band...you know, your standard 16 piece "big band", and we played for a lot of the school dances during that time. God how times have changed. Kids just a few years later would have raised holy hell against such adult control.
I auditioned for my first rock and roll band in the Fall of 1961, at a juke joint/grocery store on Hawthorne Road called Cason's Grocery. There was a beer bar on one side and a small mom and pop grocery store on the other. I was only 18 at the time but that didn't prevent me from drinking lots of 3.2 beer that night. In those days Alachua County was still "dry" and nothing stronger than that 3.2 beer was sold. You had to drive down 441 south to the county line to a liquor store and resturant called "Ruby's". Alachua County didn't vote to go "wet" until 1964. When that happened Gainesviile changed forever.
