Peavey Guitars: The Authorized American History

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Capone, the Cobbs, and Me

Golf king Tiger Woods and his father, Earl, recently whisked through Birmingham on April 20 and 21 to raise money for the Tiger Woods Foundation. Featured in the weekend festivities were the younger Woods’ phenomenal ability to charm golf balls and his dad’s uncanny mastery at charming his son’s legion of fans. Dwight Burgess of St. John’s AME Church had seen an article on the Tiger Woods Foundation, prompting him to make a 1999 call that resulted in the visit to Birmingham; one of only four cities on the Woods Foundation itinerary.

Reassuring smiles and words of encouragement from the golf legend greeted the awed stares of youngsters participating in the instructional clinic. Woods offered invaluable tips on adjusting stances, gripping clubs, and following through on swings. “There’s some serious talent out here,” observed Woods. “Kids today hit the ball farther than I did [at their age]. They’re younger, stronger, and more athletic.” Father Earl lounged nearby in a golf cart, posing for photos with lovely ladies and fielding occasional questions from bold reporters. After a few awkward seconds, the sometimes controversial Woods Sr. scoffed at suggestions that Tiger’s exposure to Buddhism (his mother is Buddhist) was responsible for his son’s unparalleled ability to concentrate under immense pressure. Instead, he said, the younger Woods learned self-hypnosis from a sports psychologist he saw for five years beginning at age 16.

Tiger and Earl Woods started the Tiger Woods Foundation four years ago to “make golf look more like America,” according to Tiger. Each year four cities are selected for the popular instructional and exhibition clinics. “We go to communities that haven’t been as enthusiastic about golf,” explained Tiger, emphasizing the importance of lingering in a city for a couple of days for greater impact on the community. “We don’t want to be a circus, where we just come in, do a clinic, and leave.” As for those kids battling nerves trying to hit a ball in his presence, he said, “I tell them no matter who’s watching, it’s just you and the ball. No one else can hit that shot for them.” Asked if he considered going back to finish his college degree at Stanford, Woods noted the difficulty in resuming studies. The former economics major hinted at a change in his field of study. “I’ll have to change majors. Maybe become a journalist,” Woods laughed to the throng of media gathered on the golf course between Highland and Clairmont Avenues. “Then I can just B.S. my way through.”

The afternoon before the clinic, Earl Woods, president of the Tiger Woods Foundation, addressed a two-thirds capacity audience at St. John’s AME Methodist Church in downtown Birmingham. Focusing on raising children and the importance of his son as a role model, Woods confessed, “I never raised him to be a golfer. I raised him to be a good person.” An engaging speaker, Woods sometimes wandered in melodramatic, even surreal, directions. He never failed to place Tiger on a monumental pedestal. “My son’s power dwarfs mine like a grain of sand in the Sahara Desert,” explained the elder Woods.

Back at the golf course, Tiger Woods made an entrance befitting that of a champion, motoring down the fairway from several hundred yards away to the strains of “Eye of the Tiger” as more than 3,000 shouting children and adults squinted for a glimpse of the world’s most famous athlete. Stepping from a golf cart, which had been flanked by two carts driven by bodyguards, Woods flashed his world-famous smile as he wowed starry-eyed patrons with his million-dollar golf swing. Putting on an impressive exhibition, he explained practice habits and the importance of becoming comfortable with gripping the club. Aiming for a 100-yard marker as he began hitting balls, Woods shook his head and questioned the marker’s distance. “That’s a long hundred. What did you do, measure it in meters?” He fielded questions from children, revealing that he wore red shirts during final rounds on Sundays because his mother told him his astrological charts said that red was his “power color.”

Woods ended the exhibition with a flourish. Bouncing the ball on his club just as he does in his now-famous Nike television commercial, Woods grabbed a second club and began performing the feat with two balls. Suddenly he tossed one iron aside and peered into the distance, still bouncing the ball as he apprehensively noted how narrow the fairway appeared. Woods promised to give the shot a try, regardless. And, of course, he whacked the ball in mid-air, it’s 200-yard flight a white blur that brought a collective sigh from the gallery. It was reality imitating television, with fine dramatic flair.

By Ed Reynolds

At Southern clubs in the late ’70s, bands played three sets a night, four nights a week. Most were dishing out versions of The Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers, and The Eagles, among other dinosaur acts. Meanwhile, a Birmingham actor from Sweden named Mats (pronounced “Mots”) Roden was studying theater at New York University when he attended a show at Irving Plaza — a performance by a campy rock combo from Athens, Georgia, called The B-52s. “It was a really mind-blowing for me because I realized that you didn’t have to be from New York to play the city,” he recalls. “I had been working for the Wooster Group [an experimental theater company] in New York with Willem Dafoe and Spalding Gray, so I was really serious about the theater in those days. But I was always torn between music and acting. So I called Matt  [Kimbrell] a couple of days after The B-52s show, and we talked about me coming back to Birmingham to start a band called Jim Bob and the Leisure Suits.”

    Roden, Matt Kimbrell, and Leif Bondarenko had been friends since high school while attending the Alabama School of Fine Arts (where Roden was legendary for wearing his bathrobe to class). As teens, Kimbrell and Bondarenko were already working as professional drummers at various highbrow cocktail lounges in Birmingham, Alabama. By 1979, Roden had returned to Alabama to form the Leisure Suits, where they rehearsed at his parents’ house, much to the consternation of neighbors (“just keep on playing that white trash rock/you can hear us practicing for blocks,” Kimbrell sings in “White Trash Rock”). They recruited local attorney Craig Izard (rhymes with “lizard”) as second guitarist and third songwriter. Jim Bob & The Leisure Suits soon began playing the same clubs that were booking cover bands four nights a week, though they concentrated on original songs with rearrangements of tasty covers of Franki Valli & The Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man,” a Ramones-style version of The Eagles “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” and a scorching “Burning Love” (featuring front man Kimbrell as a sensual but vulgar Elvis Presley, shaking his hips and caressing his body as he sang).

    The band’s inaugural release was a five-song EP, 1980’s First Time, which reflected the Leisure Suits original vision: fast songs with a punk rock aesthetic, each clocking in at under three minutes. Though there was no college radio station in town to promote First Time, their unpredictable, energetic live shows created enough excitement to to earn them a following in Northern Alabama. The EP’s “White Trash Rock” best defined the Leisure Suits’ frustration seeking recognition outside of the South with the classic line: “They don’t make stars out of bar bands in Birmingham….” Eventually, the club scene in Birmingham evolved when venues such at The Nick and Old Town Music Hall began to focus on presenting a different act nightly. Birmingham groups such as The Mortals, The Invaders, and The Colas as well as The Rakes from nearby Auburn, began getting jobs playing original music. “What I think Jim Bob really did was tap into this underground scene,” says Mats Roden. “There was a wanting of new, original music in the scene. We were not going to do covers; Craig and I were totally opposed to doing covers, which Matt and Leif were not. So that caused a little friction in the band. I wanted it to be totally original.” In 1981, the Leisure Suits released a 45 rpm single, featuring “Panama City Bleach” and “This World Is Killing Me”. The single did not have the rapid- fire punk-rock ammo of First Time; rather the band’s sound had evolved into something slightly more sophisticated, especially the slow, introspective “This World Is Killing Me”.

    “What was cool about Jim Bob was that we had three strong singer/songwriters,” says Roden. The band decided to record a full-length album, 1982′s Jim Bob &the Leisure Suits. “The album turned out okay, but it did not reflect how crazy and good we were live. It was also out first time in a real studio.” One of the stellar tracks on the album is “Gangland Wars.” Roden recalls his naïveté about gang life at the time. “I wrote ‘Gangland Wars’ when I first heard about gangs coming to Birmingham — I’m sure they were always there — but that was my first introduction. This was like the early ’80s, and gangs started appearing all over metropolitan areas. And I kind of romanticized it. I thought it was a cool thing, like the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story.”

    Like the single and First Time that preceded Jim Bob & the Leisure Suits, all three records were released on the Leisure Suits’ own label, Polyester Records.

    One of Alabama’s legendary rock & roll bands when the Leisure Suits began was The Rakes out of Auburn. Rakes’ guitarist Bruce Yandle recollects playing shows on the same bill as the Leisure Suits. “I always thought Jim Bob was pretty good; I thought they were kind of better than we were”, Yandle notes. “They had that B-52s vibe to them a little bit. I remember being totally mesmerized by Leif Bondarenko’s playing. It was the first time I realized that drums are what it’s all about. I thought, ‘This guy is fantastic!’ Leif just drove that band.” Brad Quinn, a member of Birmingham’s celebrated cult favorites Carnival Season, who currently lives in Japan when not playing with pop-icon Tommy Keene, has fond memories of the Leisure Suits. “I was a little too young to get into bars in the early ‘80s, so the first time I ever saw them was at the grand opening of a Jack’s Hamburgers restaurant.” Quinn says, laughing. “They were pretty fantastic. They did Jerry Lee’s ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,’ of course, which as you might remember was Jacks’ theme song for its fried chicken.”

    Izard tells of the two nights the Leisure Suits got to open for The Ramones at Brothers Music Hall. “We got there for soundcheck and they played a couple of songs and Johnny [Ramone] said into the mic, “What state are we in?’ And I’ve never smelled as much pot backstage as I did from the Ramones’ dressing room. You normally wouldn’t think of the Ramones as a bunch of potheads.” Roden’s funniest memory of a Jim Bob gig was the night they opened for Bow Wow Wow at a five-thousand-seat Birmingham auditorium. The Leisure Suits has to leave immediately after their set for a second job that night. “The guys in Bow Wow Wow were really cool, but Annabella [Bow Wow Wow lead singer] was kind of a snob, and I mean, who can blame her? She was sixteen and being managed by that fucking Malcolm McLaren [former Sex Pistols and New York Dolls manager]. Then we had to pack up our gear and go play a Bar Mitzvah at some cheesy Holiday Inn that same night.”

    Craig Izard left Jim Bob & The Leisure Suits soon after the album was released. Guitarist Charles Muse was hired to take his place when the band moved to New York City for a couple of months to peddle Jim Bob & the Leisure Suits. No one showed any interest in releasing the record, and the band never put out another. The last night of a brief tour of the Midwest was the final disappointment; when they arrived at their scheduled Oklahoma City show, they learned from the club marquee that they had been replaced that evening by an unknown band called The Bangles. In 1983, The Leisure Suits called it quits. “By that time it was for all intents and purposes Matt’s band, and we weren’t collaborating anymore,” says Roden.

    RODEN and Bondardenko then formed the Primitons, which, along with local power-pop sensation Carnival Season, became one of the top acts in Birmingham. “Initially, The Primitons were more focused than Jim Bob because we only had one central songwriting point of view and only one lead singer at the time. We did the demos at Mitch Easter’s Drive-In studio in North Carolina,” says Roden. “The studio is like in his mother’s den.” Arena Rock Recording Company, which recently released Misguided Promise: Carnival Season Complete (1984-1989), will soon release a Primitons compilation.

    Kimbrell went on to front a pair of trios, The Ho-Ho Men and The Mambo Combo, both reflecting the tongue-in-cheek approach to performing that the Leisure Suits had pulled off so well. Drummer Leif Bondarenko came to regret having turned down an opportunity to audition for Iggy Pop in 1982. He currently plays drums in American Idol winner Taylor Hicks’ band. Craig Izard is an attorney and musician who fronts The Cosmic Snakehandlers. Despite suffering a stroke a decade ago, forcing him to play keyboard with one hand, Roden contacted the other original members about a Jim Bob & The Leisure Suits reunion that never materialized. When The Oxford American approached the Leisure Suits in October of this year about being featured in magazine’s Music Issue, the band was shocked that anyone was interested after thirty years. “Matt was so excited,” says Roden. “He felt vindicated after having put up with naysayers for three decades.” A week later, Matt Kimbrell died at age fifty-one of a heart attack, following a decade from suffering from a heart condition.

    “Jim Bob set out to make a statement about being anti-status-quo-rock,” Roden notes. “We’ll always be remembered as the first punk/new wave band in Birmingham.” He wasn’t always so proud of that notoriety, however.  “As far as Jim Bob, I thought, I thought of it as a negative thing for a long time. I really was kind of embarrassed by the band as a gimmick. But Blondie, The Ramones, Television, all that music changed my life. So I’m not embarrassed by Jim Bob anymore because I am proud of what we did,” he admits. “We totally changed the scene. If it hadn’t been for us, the new-wave sound would’ve hit a lot slower in Alabama.”

Originally published in the Oxford American Twelfth Annual Music Issue 2010, pgs. 62-64.

By Ed Reynolds

Dr. Frank “Doc” Adams, the last of the old guard of local jazz musicians who played with legends Duke Ellington, Sun Ra, and Erskine Hawkins, among others, has written a captivating memoir with writer Burgin Mathews entitled Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man, by the University of Alabama Press. Adams is a brilliant story-teller, recounting life as a professional musician and musical instructor in segregated Alabama beginning in the 1950s. One of the first inductees into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, the 83-year-old musician will perform a free concert with the Birmingham Heritage Band on October 25 at 7 p.m. at the Bama Theatre in Tuscaloosa.

Adams was trained at Industrial High School [now known as Parker High School] under the tutelage of John T. “Fess” Whatley, whose discipline and devotion to musical professionalism made an early impression. The young Adams turned down an invitation in the early 1950s to tour with Count Basie’s orchestra, instead remaining in Birmingham to teach music at Lincoln Elementary. Adams’ family [his brother Oscar was the first black attorney to join the Birmingham Bar Association, as well the first black Alabama Supreme Court Justice] was somewhat prominent. His father published a newspaper, the Birmingham Reporter, in the early 1900s, and also wrote a column for more than 20 years for the Birmingham News entitled “What Negroes Are Doing.”

Black & White chatted with Dr. Adams in his office at the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame on a recent October afternoon.

“I got a chance to [travel] around with my Dad. He was one of those dads that said, ‘Come on. Go with me, boy!’ And I’d go with him,” Adams recalled. “And I found out a lot of things about people. One was that people are more alike than they are different.”

Reflecting on the evolution of musical styles he’s played during his lifetime, Adams grabbed a sax next to his desk to demonstrate different variations on the melody “Tea for Two” during our interview. “The big bands were evolving. First, we had Dixieland,” he explained. “You had a trumpet, maybe a clarinet, maybe a bass and a guitar or mandolin or whatever you had. It was everybody for himself. The clarinet going one way, the bass going one way, the
trumpet going one way. That’s Dixieland. But when you start adding two or three saxophones, you had to have harmony. You had to read music. Everybody couldn’t play what
they wanted to play.”

As a young teen, Adams played sax with Alabama’s Sun Ra. “Sun Ra
was a known character in Birmingham. To some people he’d be frightening because nobody knew where he came from and nobody knew his parents,” said Adams, who
writes in his book that Sun Ra would warn Bull Connor’s henchmen that they would be “paralyzed” if they tried to harm him when the jazz maestro wore his colorful robes on
the street. “Sun Ra lived over by Terminal Station in a raggedy house. He was ‘flower power’ before ‘flower power.’ He was before Dr. King. He was defiant back in the 1930s when
nobody was thinking about civil rights. And he had this thing about where he was from—the Sun or the Moon. And his bands were terrific. He picked up people [to play] that were just unusual folk. They didn’t have the discipline [musically] . . . They never played a place like the Birmingham Country Club. They played little dives and stuff.”

Sun Ra asked Adams’ mother if her son could join his band. “One day he called my Mom, he wanted me to play in his Intergalactic Arkestra. My Mom just said, ‘OK.’ What it was about him was this mystique; He would look at you and say, ‘Well, do this.’ And you might say, ‘I can’t.’ And he would say, ‘You’ve already done it. It’s in your mind.’ Those weird things, you know? He would wear these clothes down on Fourth Avenue and everything. And people admired him for his band. He was just a weird guy. He could play Count Basie but he also had this other weird stuff he was playing. And he talked more than he would really practice.” &

Originally published in Black & White, Oct 18, 2012

The portrait of Eudora Welty beside her casket in the rotunda of Mississippi’s Old Capitol building offered quiet reassurement to the thousand or so mourners paying homage to the acclaimed writer. Welty’s inquisitive eyes—blue and round as the moon-—gazed thoughtfully at all who filed past her white-draped coffin on a rainy afternoon in Jackson. A modest but pretty arrangement of orange Montbretia from Welty’s garden offered an unpretentious symbol of her simple yet uncommon life. On the floor beside the coffin lay a single long-stem rose. High above, the walls of the rotunda balcony were adorned with samples of quilt patterns from 1850 to 1946, a fitting display that paralleled Welty’s embrace of everyday people in their attempts to extract meaning from mundane lives. Pattern names sounded not unlike metaphors from a Welty tale: “Drunkard’s Path,” “Russian Sunflowers,” and “Gentleman’s Bow Tie.” She was only the fourth person to lie in state at the Old Capitol.