I slid into the class on my ass, ten minutes late. I had my slick new leather-soled shoes and the floors had just been waxed. “Nice entrance, Mr. Peterik,” intoned the old Mrs. Buddeke. “Now find your way down to the dean’s office for a detention!”
That same day as I stood saying my name in the gym class lineup, Coach Regan silently came over to me and handed me a pink slip of paper. “Should be in girls PE. Take it down to the dean’s office for a detention!” he bellowed. My hair was only slightly longer than the guys around me, but too long for the coach. I was batting two for two on my first day of high school.
Fortunately The Shondels started playing the sock hops after the basketball games at Morton West. In fact, we proudly became the official sock hop band. It was called a “sock hop” because the kids were asked to remove their shoes so they wouldn’t scuff up the gymnasium floor.
The performing was great, but, gradually, tensions were brewing during rehearsal. Bob Erhart’s father was becoming a major pain in the ass. There were never enough drums in the mix for Mr. Erhart and his beloved son.
“You’re drowning him out with bass and guitars!” he bitterly complained.
After every set, right on cue, he would chide, “Too much bass! Too much bass! I can’t hear the vocals, can’t hear the drums!”
Our resident Achilles heel would go on and on, night after night. He went from being an irritating paper cut to becoming an oozing incision. But beyond that, we started to notice something else—Bob Erhart was not really getting the new beat of the modern day songs. To him, the bass drum was four on the floor, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Mr. Erhart’s coddled son just didn’t get the whole boom-boom boom thing, at all. After putting all the negatives together, Bob Bergland, Larry Millas, and I converged at Larry’s house one afternoon to scan the phone book for the number of a drummer in Mr. Boker’s grade school band, of which we were all a part (I played sax, Larry played percussion, and Bob played clarinet). This Mike Borch guy, whom we had all noticed, was really on the ball and knew how to smack that snare drum in band practice.
We scanned the pages, “Borchard,” “Borchart,” “Borch!” We struck gold. He answered right away. After we convinced him to audition, we gave him the directions to what Larry called his “big ritzy house.” It was a magnificent place built in the early ’50s on a double-wide lot. It was located on the upscale Riverside Drive in Berwyn. We even put up a sign in front boasting, “Big Ritzy House” so Mike couldn’t miss it!
When the day came, Mike’s audition song was “Game of Love” by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. We had recently tried out this song with Bob Erhart, and it had been a total disaster. But on this day, I counted it off and Mike proceeded to play it exactly like the record. Boom, crack, boom-boom. Heaven! Smiles were exchanged around the room and we welcomed Mike Borch into The Shondels.
The Shondels and I used to frequent Chicago’s music row, taking the ‘L’ train downtown from Cicero, and then getting off at Wabash. We would bug all the music store proprietors by asking questions, and then we would beg permission to plug their guitars into amplifiers. These outings also allowed us to observe the burgeoning Chicago music scene as other real musicians plugged in and jammed in the music rooms of Lyon & Healy Music, The Guitar Gallery, or Kagan & Gaines.
We rehearsed every chance we got. We bought sharp, matching red sweaters for our upcoming shows. We rehearsed in Larry’s basement. At breaks, we’d shoot pool on Larry’s dad’s professional table. Dr. Millas was the beloved town physician. He was known for bartering loaves of bread and bushels of tomatoes and unsold shirts for delivering a baby or setting an arm if the family didn’t have the means. Everyone in Berwyn and Cicero knew and loved the kindly Dr. Millas.
Early on, we played a variety show at Piper Elementary, our alma mater. We were the only musical act among dancers, comics, and jugglers. We wowed the audience in those red cardigans.
Flush with victory, we walked back to Larry’s house a few blocks away. Unfortunately, we got so distracted goofing off and playing pool that we forgot to go back and take the final curtain call with all of the other acts. We learned a lot about becoming professionals that day, and about avoiding fancy distractions—like shooting pool.
Fortunately, we exercised a little more discipline the next time around. On our first professional gig we opened for a fashion show at Morton East High School. Again, we all wore our signature red sweaters and collectively sweated under the spotlights as the houselights dimmed. Soon, the spot zeroed in on me. I sang:
“When I was just a little boy / I asked my mother, ‘what shall I be?’
‘Will I be handsome, will I be rich?’ Here’s what she said to me.”
My folksy rendition of “Que Sera, Sera” was then rudely interrupted by the sharp crack of the snare drum.
“You ain’t nothing but a hound dog!
Crockin’ all the time!”
I sang it “crockin’” because that’s what it sounded like when Elvis sang the song. Years later I found out he was saying “cryin.’”
The audience roared their approval! That was a defining moment for me. I heard my voice echo through the wonderful acoustics of the Chodl Auditorium. The Shondels were bringing down the house! We were on our way.
Emboldened by the crowd response and our raging teenage hormones, we entered the Talented Teen Search, being held the very next day at the Cermak Plaza. This was the contest I cut my teeth on the year before with my solo rendition of Wilbert Harris’s gem, “Kansas City.”
We performed the Pyramids’ hit “Penetration” (with a few years under my belt, I wondered if that title went a lot deeper than just a reference to the piercing sound of the lead guitar). Unfortunately, we failed to penetrate. We came in at fifth place.
That first year represented our coming of age as a band. Our door-to-door peddling of our musical wares was paying off. We were playing almost every weekend at venues like Berwyn’s Red Feather Building, Morton West High School, and Tiger Hall in Lyons. The latter was a wild place where a senior named Val Godlewski would get raunchy and dirty dance with basketball star Skip Hack as we did our ten-minute rave-up rendition of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.”
The greasers from high school came dressed in their “workies” (short, gray work pants rolled up on the bottom), and at about 11 p.m., they decided that they were sweaty and horny enough to tie red bandanas around their heads. They proceeded to bump and grind to our version of “Land of 1,000 Dances.” (Our first swirl-finished, green business card read: “The Shondels—Band of 1,000 Dances.”)
The big moment came when a club that hadn’t even opened yet contacted us. It was to be called The Keynote Club in suburban Lyons, Illinois. Since Lyons was known for its strip clubs and houses of ill repute, the community felt that the addition of a teen club would serve as a breath of fresh air. This venue would lend an air of respectability to a then-sordid outpost.
Plus, the club owner offered us five hundred big ones for a two-day run. This was huge money to us. At our first show, just a few weeks earlier, we had only received $25; not apiece, but for the entire band!!
For this show we decided we had to retire the red sweaters. The Shondels rode the ‘L’ downtown to go to the fabled Smokey Joe’s for some groovy threads. “The man who knows goes to Smokey Joe’s” was their radio-blasted slogan. We listened to the train announcer through the megaphone-like sound system: “Jackson,” “Monroe,” and finally “Wabash,” where we tumbled out into the stifling humidity of Chicago summer to look for Smokey Joe’s.
Suddenly there it was in all its glory on South State Street. The store window burst with color: coats, shirts, and slacks of every shade—from shocking lime green to deep purple. We were by far the youngest and palest people in the store. After we bought our Beatles look-alike sport coats (tan corduroy with velvet lapels) we walked over to Tad’s $1.19 Steakhouse a few blocks north also on State Street. For just