Manning. ‘The family had a vote and that was where we went. As soon as we got to Memphis I just went straight over to Stax records. I was quite young, had a guitar in my hand, knocked on the door and said, “I’m here.” They said, “What the heck do you think you’re doing?”’ And I said, “I’m going to engineer, I’m going to produce, I’m going to play. Anything you need!” And I did start working at Stax, but I was sweeping floors and putting tape copies together.
Once settled in Memphis and known at the local studios, Manning set about finding some new band-mates. He enrolled at Central High School and joined up with Bobby Lawson’s band, which was called Bobby and the Originals. Though Manning was more accomplished as a guitar player he played keyboards in the band. Like all the Memphis bands of the day, they wanted to get a slot on the Talent Party show so they recorded a demo, but they were rejected. Unbowed by the rejection they booked into the ‘granny’s sewing room’ version of Ardent to see if John Fry could work his magic with their tapes. At Ardent, Manning met Jim Dickinson for the first time. Dickinson gave the band a couple of songs he’d written to use on a single that Fry had agreed to issue on the Ardent label. The caveat was that they would have to change their band name.
‘We said, “We can’t change the name, everyone knows us, we’re famous,”’ recalls Manning. ‘We had won “battle of the bands” nineteen weeks in a row and had a local following, at least in one part of Memphis. However, we agreed and changed the name.’
The new name didn’t come easy and after weeks of discussion it was finally Manning’s father that gave the band their new moniker. ‘We’d been trying to think of a name but they all sounded stupid,’ admits Manning. ‘[My father] had heard some of the discussions and he said, almost facetiously, ‘Why don’t you be Lawson And Four More?’ I thought that was better than the other ideas so that’s what we became.’ The freshly revamped band, with the new single in their armoury, got a break when they were picked to play on the bill of Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars. Dick Clark, of American Bandstand fame, was one of the biggest names in American music at the time and would bring together well-known stars and bus them around with a local opening act at each venue they visited. Manning recalls: ‘So we opened for the Yardbirds and Gary Lewis and the Playboys and the Animals and groups like that.’
The first church in Memphis that Manning’s father had been assigned to was earmarked to be demolished to allow a new freeway to be built. The Manning family was then moved to another congregation across town in East Memphis, where they got a new house on Sequoia Avenue, opposite the Rhea family. The Rheas had two daughters and a son, Steve, who was a big fan of the Who14 and especially Keith Moon. Rhea had his own drum kit and it didn’t take long for him and Manning to become friends.
In 1967 Rhea, then in eleventh grade, transferred from White Station High to MUS. As well as jamming at home with Manning, Rhea was drummer in a band called the Strangers, where he’d wear his pride and joy, a ‘bulls-eye’ sweatshirt similar to the one Keith Moon had worn when the Who played on Shindig. All the other members of The Strangers attended MUS already and so he fitted right in. The Strangers were sometimes allowed to play shows at MUS and on one occasion they set up in the school’s foyer.
‘It was a huge lounge area,’ says Rhea. ‘When you cleared out the chairs it gave enough room for kids to dance. It wasn’t built for acoustics and was a real “live” room. They set us up on a stage about a foot and a half high. That was the only time I remember anyone playing in the foyer. All subsequent dances were in the dining hall which had better acoustics.’ As the show progressed, Rhea noticed a young kid hanging around the front of the stage, watching the musicians closely as they ran through their set of cover versions. At the end of the show the kid was still hanging around and Rhea approached him. It was the first time he met Chris Bell. Also being a fan of the Who, Bell must have noticed Rhea’s sweatshirt and the two then bonded further over their mutual love of the Beatles and Yardbirds.
In the autumn of 1968 the Strangers broke up and Rhea was asked if he wanted to join Bell in a band with a mutual friend, Vance Alexander. Alexander had come up with the name Christmas Future for the band and so he got the job of singer, Bell played guitar (a red Gibson Hollowbody) and Rhea would be the drummer. Rhea recruited Peter Schutt, from the Strangers, as bass player. ‘Vance was a Doors freak,’ recalls Rhea. ‘Jim Morrison was his main interest, but Chris and I didn’t share his passion for Californian music. We liked the Byrds and Chris said he was amazed that Buffalo Springfield had opened for the Box Tops but that was as far as it went.’ Things didn’t go smoothly and Rhea and Alexander didn’t get along. Sometimes fights would break out during practice. ‘I suppose I was pretty arrogant about my tastes in music,’ admits Rhea, ‘and he finally had enough. He didn’t stay in the band very long after that.’
The way things were shaping up, it was only a matter of time before Rhea introduced Bell to Manning and with Alexander leaving the group Manning soon joined the Christmas Future roster. Rhea drove Manning out to the Bell estate and they started rehearsing in the back house. As Manning, Bell and Carole Ruleman were into photography, they also set up a dark room in the building; David Bell also shared the group’s love of art. ‘I won’t say it was a bohemian hippy community,’ says Manning. ‘It was a bunch of guys into several art forms all at once. It was a one-storey house; a living room where we had band practice, a bathroom, a small dining area that was used as the dark room. It had several rooms, electricity to power the amps; we could play as loud as we wanted, no one could hear us. It was the countryside then but now it’s all built up around there.’ It was, in other words, the perfect hangout for a group of anglophile semi-hippies.
‘They were doing things like Hendrix and the Who,’ recalls David Bell. ‘The back house is where I probably did the most damage to my ears, sitting in front of amps blaring at impossible volume. He [Chris] just kept getting better and better and at this time began to get into the old Ardent and learn recording.’ Christmas Future spent many hours practising in the backhouse but also at MUS, where they were allowed to use the stage in the school’s chapel to set up their equipment. Schutt left not long after Alexander, and was replaced on bass by Bill Boyce.
While MUS, had college preparation as their goal for every student, Bell didn’t really fit in. ‘He wasn’t very happy at MUS because he was different,’ says his sister Sara. ‘Chris would go to MUS in the proper attire – there wasn’t a uniform but there was accepted attire – but when he got there he would change into his bell-bottoms and then they would call from the school and say, “He’s done it again”. Chris had shown an interest (and he wasn’t very sporting) in playing basketball at MUS, but he would have to cut his hair to do it and he wouldn’t do it.’
‘Chris and I were two of the relatively few bad boys at MUS,’ says Andy Hummel. ‘We both smoked so we got to know each other sneaking off to smoke between classes. I was moved to MUS because I think my parents were afraid I was going to get someone pregnant. Also, I had become a bit of a bad ass and quite uncontrollable. They really wanted to send me to the Christian Brothers school, which was known for its tight discipline. But I couldn’t get in so they settled for MUS.’
There were frequent dances after football games but until about 1967 most bands played soul music and the latest chart hits. By the time Christmas Future were playing gigs at the school, they wanted to give their audience a musical education. In a 1975 interview, Chris Bell explained that: ‘It was mostly soul music in high school so we decided to start a kind of underground movement in order to get a group together; a group that would just play English music. [The audience] hated most of it really. They would come and ask for “I Feel Good” by James Brown and we would play “I Feel Fine” by the Beatles.’
‘So we played this startlingly new music that many of them had never even heard before,’ adds Rhea. ‘We didn’t care if the audience liked us, which was probably our downfall. We were playing Who numbers at MUS. John Fry had worked up a cartridge tape player with sound effects and then we would play a Yardbirds song and when we got to the perfect moment Terry raced over to the cabinet and slammed his foot on a pedal to trigger this explosion sound on the cartridge. We were in heaven playing this stuff. At the end