It goes back to the spring-summer a 1964. I was attending San Fernando Valley State College in Northridge California, and I was in a fraternity called Sigma Phi Beta.
It was my third year a school and it was kind of boring. I was not really committed to higher education, college was just the place you went after high school.
Up until this time I had never really thought about any kind of show business or had any musical aspirations in my life. I had no musical background and none of my family or friends had anything remotely to do with the music business. And, then The Beatles came out!
The biggest thrill I use to have in those days was grabbing a broom and lip-syncing along with the bands that we would hire to play our fraternity parties. It occurred to me that you could actually play music without being terribly competent, as in having studied music for years and years. And it looked like fun. I was thinking about putting a band together but there was one catch I didn't know anyone that played anything, I didn't play anything. All these things came to a head when I was involved in a car accident and was eventually the winner in a $1,000 law suit. I had, at that time, more money that I had ever had in my life. I thought if I could find some people to play, I'd buy the instruments and we'd put together a band.
All I had in mind at the time was to form a band that would play our fraternity parties, like the bands we had been hiring. I thought we could do that so I spoke to two or three of my fraternity brothers. As I look back on it now, since no one played anything, my main interest was finding people who looked good and would look good on stage; there was very little else I had to go on. I didn't even know anvone who could sing. But, I did know who liked music the way I did, and that was a very large part of the beginning.
Robert Lee Reiner was just pledging our fraternity at the time. He and I use to go to local places and see bands and enjoy them, and he was the first person I spoke to. We made Jimmy Curran the drummer for no real reason except for the fact that he wanted to do it. Now we had the nucleus a the band.
Unfortunately we had to go outside the fraternity to find the fourth person because we realized, almost instantly, that there had to be someone in the band who could give us at least some tips on how to play. We found him in a surfer friend of Robert Lee's named Bill Rinehart.
He was attending Pierce College at the time, and had been playing for about six months. He wasn't so good that he refused to play with the three of us who didn't play at all, and he was just gond enough to give us some credibility as a band. He knew a few good songs and with some practice we were soon able to include in our repertoire such songs as TWIST AND SHOUT, and LOUIE LOUIE. We were lucky in that a lot of the songs popular in those days required only three chords.
We were looking for a safe place to play for the first lime so we went to our fraternity and told them we'd play the next party for free - which they gladlv let us do. So on
July 25th. 1964 we had our first job. It was like a rehearsal in front of a live audience. They gave us a lot of encouragement, and we kept at it. Next, we played another fraternity brother's wedding and we got paid for it!
Our play list was a cross section of surfing music like LETS GO TRIPPIN, MOONDOG, RUMBLE, MR. MOTO. and some oldies like WHAT I SAY, HONKY TONK, and LITTLE LATIN LOOP DE LOO. We had fun, and in those days people weren't expecting a lot from us so it was an easy little step from one
place to the next. We didn't have a name for the group, we were just the fraternity band. For the better part of the school season that Fall we were hired to play fraternity parties. By this time we were known as The Rockwells.
One of my favorite musical heroes prier to the British Invasion had been Jerry Lee Lewis. I pulled off what I thought was a great coup at the time. I had been given the post of social director of my fraternity, and it was my responsibility to arrange for fund raising events such as dances and the like. So, I hired Jerry Lee Lewis and booked us as the opening act. Not only would we play to the biggest audience we'd ever had, but we would actually get to meet Jet-n Lee Lewis! Bob Eubanks was the M.C. for the show, and he gave us quite a few words of encouragement. That show at Devonshire Downs was the best we'd ever done.
By now our band had been together about seven and a half months, and we began to realize that we weren't as good as we had wanted to be. We were looking for a fifth person, somebody to be out in front, sumebody to make us look good. Our aspirations had gone beyond fraternity parties - we wanted more. This was, mind you, when not everybody and his brother were putting bands together, not like today. There were very few people doing it, and we were thought of as being a little far out.
We were now playing a few jobs off campus. In fact, our first extended engagement was at a rather dismal place called the Mouse House On Reseda Blvd. in Northridge. just less than a mile from campus. We played a place called the Red Dog Tavern, and one called Chez Joey. As time went on it became more and more obvious to us that we needed a new member with really credible talent. We tried working with a guitar player named Bob Stamps, but unfortunately he was too good and didn't want to waste
his time with us. Then I met John Beck. He played saxophone, and I really liked the sound of it. I suggested that he play with our bband at a rehearsal - which he did.
I remember his first job with us, a sonoritv party from San Fernando State. I really liked his image, his appearance in front. Hes gave us wat I thought at the time to be a Rolling Stones type of look. Since, our music was pretty raw-edged, more like the Stones than the Beatles. John was officially adopted as our front man. He soon went On to learn to play the harmonica. And we continued on with the five - man ensemble doing school related functions. We even did a school function with Captain Beefheart.
By now our musical repertoire was extended a little past the three chord stuff. And we started te become aware of the fact that we needed a more basic, driving drum beat.
As much as we liked Jimmy Curran, we felt he was loosing interest in the group, and we decided to let him go. Bill Rinehart found Tom Ray, who said that he played the drums. He brought a set of drums to rehearsal one day and he was great. He really gave us a spark we didn't have. Tom Ray was our drummer from that point on. (It wasn't until later on that we found out that Tom Ray had never played the drums before, and actually had rented a set to bring to rehearsal.)
The band now consisted of Robert Lee Reiner on rhythm guitar, Bill Rinehart on lead guitar, myself on bass guitar, ,John Beck in front on tamborine, harmonica and
occasional saxophone, and Tom Ray playing the drums. This was the incarnation of the unit that became known as THE LEAVES.
Up to this point we had been managed by two of our fraternity brothers, and we had developed quite a following in local clubs. One young lady named Marisa, a local fan, knew the owner of a club called the Yum Yum Tree and managed to get us an audition there and we got the job! It was while we were working at the Yum Yum Tree that we started thinking seriously about pursuing music as a total career instead of a hobby. Those were great days. We would play the Yum Yum Tree in the early part of the evening and then go over the hill into Hollywood later on to see people like the Byrds playing at Ciro's. There were very few bands in those days and we were at a point where we could go over the hill, as it were, into this scene where serious musicians were playing for the sophisticated audience. Through the help of Marisa we acquired a manager who was powerful enough to arrange an audition for us at Ciro's on Sunset Strip. We had just changed our name to THE LEAVES. After the audition I went to San Diego for a week to visit my folks and received a call saying we got the job. That was the single most dramatic change from fraternity band to professional band, and it was the turning point of my life from part time student to full time musician. It's hard to explain the feelings we had in those days - it was so heavy and so exciting that I can't put it into words.
As unlikely as it may seem the man who helped us along on the next step of our career was Pat Boone. He came in to see us and signed us to a contract with his production company called Penthouse Productions.
He got us a recording contract with a local company called Mira Records.
Our first song was a song that Bill Rinehart and I wrote called TOO MANY PEOPLE, which was recorded at Harmony Records and was a minor hit in Los Angeles. It got to be number eleven and led to appearances on such T.V. shows as The Lloyd Thaxton Show, Night Street West, Sha - Bang, Where The Action Is, and Shiverree. We were playing with groups that months before were so far removed from us - groups like The Beach Boys, The Byrds, Paul Revere and The Raiders: we did a show at the Hollywood Bowl with Chad and Jeremy, and Perey Sledge.
Bill Rinehart and I were writing a lot of songs and were looking for a record to follow TOO MANY PEOPLE. We recorded a song called BE WITH YOU and another called THAT'S A DIFFERENT STORY but they were never released. There was a song being done locally by a lot of bands on the strip called HEY JOE, which we added to our play list and went in and recorded. It didn't come out good and that wasn't released either. During this time we were accepting extended bookings in various cities on the west coast; as far north as Oakland and as far south as San Diego. It was in a town called Hayward in the Bay Area, that we had to make the next major decision about membership in the band. A tremendous personality conflict had developed beetween Bill Rinehart and the other members of the group, and we decided at the end of that gig that we would come back to L.A. and find ourselves another guitar player. We found Bobby Arlin playing in a snappy rhythm and blues combo, he was kind of "Vegas" looking, maybe a little too slick for us. He was not doing the type of music that we were doing at all, but he sure could play. He joined our band and his ability to play was vastly superior to ours.
He opened up a lot of areas of music that we hadn't explored before.
With each new change we became a better band. At this time we still believed in the song called HEY JOE, and we went back in the studio with Bobby and recorded it again. When the record was released it was recalled because it still wasn't right. We went back in and recorded it again and we nailed it. We had the hit, the big hit! It was the
number one record in most of California and in the top ten in most of the western United States. It got to be a top forty record on the national charts, and we were off.
We had started off less than two years earlier as a fraternity band with a big pipe dream, now here we are a professional Rock and Roll Band.
JIM PONS