plate. There was no medium-rare or even well-done—they were all incinerated equally. I can still taste the bitter charcoal laden with salt against the sizzling fat. Now that’s eatin’!
Back in Lyons, Illinois, packed on opening night, our newly outfitted bodies and The Keynote Club generated quite a buzz. “The Shondels rock, man!” We had gone beyond the days of playing wimpy songs like “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter,” which Bob Bergland sang as Larry performed the palm-muted guitar part with a wadded up Kleenex underneath the strings! Now we were jammin’ The Rolling Stones (“The Last Time” and “Satisfaction”), and harmonizing the complex vocal arrangements of The Mamas and the Papas with “Monday, Monday,” and the West Coast’s Beau Brummels and The Byrds.
Sometimes, when we would come off a string of dates, sick as dogs with the flu, we’d line up as good old Doc Millas gave us each an injection of gamma globulin, apparently the very essence of life. I swear I saw microorganisms swimming around in that syringe! Presto, chango, instant health. We were tapping our toes, ready for the next gig! We called it “The Doc Millas Magic Bullet!” I found out each of these shots contained about $150 of this life-restoring elixir.
With our hot new band playing the sock hops after the basketball games, gradually the cheerleaders began chatting us up. We were invited to sit on “the stage” of the Morton West cafeteria at lunch where all the school’s glitterati (the jocks and pom-pom girls and cheerleaders) ate their sloppy joes and drank their chocolate milk.
The Shondels were my E-Ticket to hipness and acceptability. A nerd no more, I even traded in my broken, black, horn-rimmed glasses for a sharp pair of yellow-tinted aviator frames. I was in with the in-crowd and I swore I’d never be outside looking in again.
THE SHONDELS were making some real headway playing some high-profile venues like The Keynote Club and a fancy place in Berwyn called Frank Bond’s Supper Club. We had garnered a great deal of performance experience together and felt a surge of energy whenever we got on stage.
But we still played some hellish dives like The J and D lounge on Cermak Road, back in Berwyn, where drunken old men would slur phrases between numbers. “Play a lullaby, dammit!” or “Could you dedicate your next song to the woman who couldn’t dance tonight?” One old pervert actually grabbed my ass.
We entered every battle of the bands and talent competition we could find. One contest at the Red Feather Building in Cicero was especially noteworthy. We heard a rumor that there was to be a talent scout in attendance that night. We were breathless in anticipation as we ran through our spot-on cover of the Beau Brummels hit, “Just a Little.” As I started the faux horn riff intro on my fuzzed-out Jazzmaster on the Stones’ current smash “Satisfaction,” I spotted a person way in the back of the auditorium standing coolly in tight capris and dark glasses. The talent scout, no doubt. I motioned to Larry, Larry motioned to Mike. Mike signaled Bob, and we took it up several notches ’til our performance rivaled The Rolling Stones themselves. After the show we were handed the giant trophy. People came up to the stage one by one to congratulate us including the “talent scout.” That mysterious woman turned out to be my dear sister Janice who stopped by to support her little brother.
We started making a name for ourselves with our originals. We threw a few into every set: “It Makes Me Blue,” “Don’t Cry to Me,” and “Please Don’t Tell Me Lies.” We played Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ “Wooly Bully” in our parents’ ornate bathrobes, starting the song with our backs to the audience then abruptly turning around to reveal the ridiculous robes.
I knew that our future did not lie in our Sam the Sham act. It depended on solid, catchy originals. I have always been kind of like musical tofu—I was good at absorbing the flavors all around me. Somehow, though, my own style always shone through. One of The Ides’ favorite groups was The Kinks. It wasn’t just their cool Carnaby Street wardrobe that captured us; it was great punchy songs with sharp lyrical hooks and sharper-still guitar hooks. “You Really Got Me,” “Revenge,” and “All Day and All of the Night” still stand out as archetypal guitar riffs.
I wrote two songs just after “You Really Got Me” came out that were heavily influenced by The Kinks. The first was called “Like It or Lump It” and the second was “No Two Ways about It,” which was earmarked in my mind for the “A” side of our first single we were planning on recording soon. The guys flipped out when I played these tunes at rehearsal and added their unique guitar phrases, drum accents, vocal ideas, and arrangement touches, and in a week’s time the songs were a part of our regular set. In fact, when we played the sock hop at Morton West that Friday night and premiered these new songs, the crowd went crazy. That positive reaction made us feel that these new songs were already hits. (The crowd may have thought they were new ones by The Kinks!)
Finances were always a challenge. We decided to pool the proceeds from the next gigs until we had enough money to buy recording time at Midwest Broadcasting Service, better known as MBS on Wabash in downtown Chicago. We also needed extra funds to press up 300 copies of the 45 to sell after shows.
After jamming our gear into my dad’s 1957 Chrysler, and Mike Borch’s Ford station wagon, we excitedly set out for the recording studio early one crisp Saturday morning.
We were mesmerized as we walked into the quiet, professional confines of MBS. Expensive German microphones were gathered in the corner at the ready, and, man, were we ready! We cut those two tracks efficiently, and even talked my dad into providing the jangly tambourine part on “Like It or Lump It.” My dad was beaming as he rested his arm on the grand piano and played the tambourine part. This was his first time ever in a recording studio and he was lit from within.
As we packed our equipment back up, after what we considered a successful session, the engineer left the control room and sheepishly approached us with an ashen expression on his face. It looked like bad news. “Boys, I hate to tell you this, but we have to do your two songs all over again. We stretched the tape.”
At first, we didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. We kept playing those words over and over in our minds: “stretched the tape”! We set our gear back up so that we could try to recapture the magic all over again. Back in the day, apparently, it wasn’t uncommon to stretch the tape because it was much more elastic than the more durable modern tape that would be used years later.
When the discs finally arrived, we were giddy with excitement. We had even created our own record label, Epitome Records—of course everyone called it Epi-tome!—but we were so consumed with this new recording that the following fact didn’t really seem to upset us: Each and every one of our names was misspelled under the printed song titles! “Millias,” “Peter ik,” and “Broche” instead of “Millas,” “Peterik,” and “Borch.” (There must be some guy hired to mess up the lettering on every band’s first release.) Fortunately, though, these recordings, which were available after every sock hop, sold like hotcakes. In fact, it looked like we would have to reorder soon!
But the best was soon to come. One sunny Saturday morning, I got a call from Larry, whose voice trembled with excitement. He could barely get out the words.
“My mom got us an appointment at Mercury Records! They want to hear our forty-five!”
Anne Millas was an exotic-looking woman of northern Italian descent with a beehive hairdo and dark, flashing eyes. Today you’d call her a diva. She looked and held herself like a movie star complete with a confident air that could sell ice to the Eskimos. Because of Doc Millas’s thriving practice, Anne was always dressed to the nines—even at noon.