clubs and church halls to more adult venues, including Air Force bases.
The Swinging Sensations wore matching light blue, short-sleeved Banlon shirts and played an array of R&B and soul covers. Fleming switched to trumpet and a saxophone player was added to give them a mini horn section and enable the Stax sound to be replicated. The summer after the ninth grade the band set off in a van down to Florida, playing shows all the way there and back for their one and only ‘tour’.
The following autumn Hummel changed schools yet again, this time to MUS, which Chris Bell was also attending. Bell had already met fourteen-year-old drummer Dewitt Shy. The two hit it off and immediately began talking about getting a band together. Bell was becoming quite proficient on the guitar and word was put out that they needed a bass player. Bill Cunningham auditioned and was accepted. He brought along two schoolmates from Elizabeth Messick Junior High School – David Hoback to play guitar and Mike Harris to share vocal duties.
‘Chris and I began talking about starting a band,’ says Shy. ‘We hadn’t seen each other play but had heard about each other’s interest in music. We practiced among ourselves until we knew we were compatible in our musical interests, then we went looking for other prospective members.’ In early 1965 the line-up was complete and Dewitt Shy came up with a band name.
‘The band called itself the Jynx,’ he says. ‘I pushed the name, being enamoured with, and basically cannibalising, the Kinks’ name. We practised regularly in the living room of my house at 4272 Chanwil. My mother knew with the band practices occurring at my house she could keep an eye on things. She always loved music, although before we started playing, her tastes were in the realm of Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. She did like the Beatles, though, and welcomed our band’s “new” music at the house. She bought me my first drum set, a Ludwig oyster marine pearl set with Zildjians and after each practice she had to walk around the house rearranging pictures and paintings hanging on the walls, which were askew as a result of the loud music.
‘Girls would show up for the practices which pleased us no end and we played covers of the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Moody Blues, Them, the Zombies, the Animals and the like. Chris was heavily influenced by the Beatles and was an excellent guitarist. We tried to get him to concentrate on playing just the lead guitar, but he liked to play both rhythm and lead and consequently was kept quite busy during our gigs.’
Chris’s love of all things English was enhanced by David Bell’s frequent trips to Europe, from which he’d return with the very latest singles that had yet to reach Memphis. ‘Of all of Chris’s bands, the Jynx are the group that I remember chauffeuring around to band practices and garage parties,’ says David Bell. ‘They were quite popular and rather competent. I think that a lot of their popularity had to do with their courage to be performing at such a young age.’
The summer of 1965 was a good time to be in a band in Memphis. Local act Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs had a worldwide smash with ‘Woolly Bully’ and bands like the Jokers, Ronnie and the Devilles and the Gentrys were pulling in crowds around town. ‘Our name got around the junior-high and high-school party scenes in Memphis,’ says Shy. ‘We played at private parties, at school venues and we competed in and did well in a number of local “battle of the bands” competitions. We played in some local Memphis teen clubs that were hot at the time, like the Tonga Club and the Go Go Club.’
By December 1965 the Jynx were being considered for a spot on Talent Party but they needed a demo tape to audition for a spot, which would let them appear on the show early the next year. ‘We bought some recording time at Sonic Studio,’ says Shy. ‘We recorded at least four songs and I remember that Alex Chilton was supposed to show up for the session to sing with Mike Harris but Alex did not show, so the original band did the session. We were nervous, or at least I was, but we got into it and it went smoothly. We liked to play loud, but we had to back the volume down for the session. Talent Party liked it and we went on that TV show in Memphis as a result. My recollection is a little fuzzy on this but I think Alex became involved because we wanted to experiment with having two lead singers sometimes singing together and sometimes one backing up the other. It proved not to work so well and Mike ultimately left the band.’
The four songs from the session were the Moody Blues’ ‘And My Baby’s Gone’, ‘I’ll Go Crazy’ by James Brown (which the Moody Blues had also covered), ‘Little Girl’ by Them and Paul Revere and the Raiders’ ‘Just Like Me’. ‘Little Girl’ is a confident-sounding take, with a tight rhythm section; ‘Just Like Me’ shows the band rocking out a little with some nice backing vocals and prominent guitar work from Bell. ‘And My Baby’s Gone’ could be an early Doors demo while ‘I’ll Go Crazy’ shows a different, soulful, side to the band.
The December 1965 session was the only one ever recorded by the Jynx and after Harris left the band tried out three different vocalists. Chilton, Ames Yates and Vance Alexander all filled in briefly and Jerry Powers had a short stint as keyboard player but the band disintegrated in 1966 when none of the stand-in vocalists would commit permanently. ‘Alex was very talented but was not always consistent in showing up on time for practices and some gigs,’ recalls Shy. ‘We were playing some original songs but also covers of well-known songs. I can remember telling my mother during the heyday of the band that “music is my life” but she poured cold water on any thoughts I had of not continuing my education. In the long run she was right.’
Chilton would soon go on to national fame with another band and Bill Cunningham would later link up with Chilton once again. On leaving the Jynx, Cunningham immediately hooked up with a band called the Jokers who had a limited edition album released. The line-up included a drummer by the name of Richard Rosebrough.
Rosebrough, born in Memphis on 16 September 1949, initially had different musical influences to his future band mates. ‘When I was three my mother bought us a seventy-eight rpm copy of “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”,’ he recalls. ‘It was on yellow vinyl and very scratchy. I was just fascinated with the melodies, counter melodies, mode changes and the imagery of all the different instruments and sounds. Then Elvis was on The Ed Sullivan Show. We watched it as a family event on a Sunday night. We had no idea that he would become the entertainer of the century. To us he was a local boy made good and we were proud. I somehow knew that things had changed that night but I was still too young to grasp it.
‘As a child I beat on pots and pans and had nervous legs [they bounced up and down a lot]. Both of my sisters got piano lessons because they were girls, but not me. I just banged aimlessly on the piano and worked out ‘Chopsticks’ until I was told to stop. It was considered proper for the young daughters to play the piano and to be cultured. They care little about music now, but it has always been my life.’ Rosebrough got his first drum in the seventh grade but, as his mother couldn’t afford a stand for it, he used two stacks of a classics book collection to set it on. ‘Tore ‘em up, sadly,’ he recalls. ‘It wasn’t that much fun playing just a marching drum, but learning the twenty-six rudiments proved to be the best training for the future.’
Rosebrough had originally started out in the Mariners, a group he put together with some high-school friends. ‘We formed in 1964 after the Beatles had been realized,’ he says. ‘We actually had success with parties, clubs, and “battle of the bands”. We even got paid. Then I got a call from the Jokers and I quit the Mariners.’ When Bill Cunningham also joined the band, the line-up of Rosebrough (drums), Cunningham (vocals and organ), Mark Cowan (vocals), Allan Stewart (guitar) and Dudley Brewer (bass) hit the Memphis live circuit for a couple of years between early 1966 and late 1967, covering everything from the Beatles to the Four Tops and most things in-between. During this time Cunningham brought Chris Bell to a practice and introduced him to Rosebrough for the first time.
It was a meeting that Rosebrough remembers well to this day. ‘Christopher came over to band practice in my mother’s living room one Saturday,’ he says. ‘He was dressed differently, perhaps more loudly, like purple patterned bell-bottom pants that were too short. He had bushy, curly reddish blonde hair that he cut himself or maybe his brother David cut it. He was shy and didn’t say a lot. He had a sheepish, devilish grin on his face, but gave little to go on. I sensed a far-away kid who was really into rock’n’roll,