John Rainey Adkins & The Playground Rhythm Section
Clowning Back In The Day!Text of BEAVERTEETH press kit put together by Dothan's DEAN ATTRACTIONS:
If you took five top studio musicians from Georgia, Florida and Alabama, what would you have? A sound that's sharp as beaver teeth.And that's what they're called...Beaver TeethThis unique group was bred by years of studio work and show tours. They have worked with Bobby Goldsboro, Billy Joe Royal, Roy Orbison, The Classics IV and others.
The NOW sound of the group is reflected through blues and ballads of the past, heavy rock, commercial pop, as well as much original material.
The well known John Rainey Adkins was formerly lead guitarist for the very popular Candy Men, Roy Orbison back-up band. Since them, he has been doing studio work in Atlanta, Ga. and Valparaiso, Fla. Having been successful as writer also, John Rainey has to be one of the most skillful and devoted musicians around.
David Adkins, John Rainey's little brother, plays practically any instrument. David is featured as the drummer for the group. Also a studio musician at Playground Studios at Valparaiso. David's versatility is one of the main factors that contributes to the amazing sounds of Beaver Teeth.
The bass guitarist, Kenneth Griffith, comes to the group from a recording studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
The multi-talented Lamar Alley, began playing at the age of six. Lamar sings and helps with the guitar work.
Larry Shell plays rhythm guitar, piano and performs vocals for the group. With a voice and writing ability to compliment, Larry has had several records of his own, as well as years of studio work in Valparaiso, Fla.
Beaver Teeth, promoted exclusively by DEAN ATTRACTIONS, has the experience and versatility needed to perform all of today's music. Their sharp sound is guaranteed to satisfy!
for more information contact:
DEAN ATTRACTIONS
301 North Cherokee Avenue
Dothan, Alabama 36301
Phone 205/ 794-4719
Hey y'all:Lots uv exciting stuff happenin' in ZERO, NWFL!
Jimmy Dean has shared his reminiscences of John Rainey Adkins with us.
My old Young Junior Baby Criminal & Dusy Street buddy,Frank Tanton,
has sent us the link to his new myspace site where you can hear cuts from his new album he's put together with Richard Burke & Robbie Gay.
Make damn sho' you stop by Frank's myspace site to listen to his music and view his magnificent collection of vintage guitars & amps!
FRANK TANTON http://www.myspace.com/thebopcats
Jim Lancaster of Playground Recording Studio in VP
http://playgroundrecordingstudio.com/
http://www.myspace.com/playgroundrecordingstudiowas kind enough to lend us some images of John Rainey and Dothan's DEAN ATTRACTIONS press kit for BEAVERTEETH.
Ken Babbs
http://skypilotclub.com was nice enough to send us Paul Krassner's
http://www.paulkrassner.com/scathing review of the recent History Channel documentary
THE HIPPIES entitled
THE HIPPIES ON THE HITLER CHANNEL
& we get to make a special announcement concerning our favorite book & author, THE HEEEY BABY DAYS OF BEACH MUSIC by Waycross, Georgia's own Greg Haynes.
& last but not least a Miami cat from THE LIMESTONE LOUNGE
http://limestonerecords.comshares his memories of THE CANDYMEN & THE JAMES GANG:
"Jeff It's been a while since I looked up Limestone records. I've had a stroke and had to undergo a Quad Bypass but I'm doing well now. I couldn't help but notice the activity that's been going on about the Par Tee Lounge and the bands that played there in the 60's. Especially The James Gang and The Candy Men. Both great bands. In case you have forgotten, I was the lead guitarist in The Minute Men. We played the Par Tee three different times opposite the Blue Beatles ,The James Gang and The Bangs. Unfortunately at that time, we were having drummer problems and couldn't manage to find one who fit and shared the same musical goals as my brother Donnie and I. When The Bangs went back to college their drummer, Terry Sermons joined us. Terry was one of the best solid rock drummers I ever worked with. I think The Bangs may have been the link between Stu Kaufmann and Buddy Buie who handled both The James Gang and The Candy Men. What I find hard to understand is there is no mention of The Bangs and no longer a mention of The Minute men in any of the posted emails(?). The James Gang were pros and should have gone on to great things. Somewhere I have a copy of Georgia Pines which should have been a National chart topper. Johnnie,(I'm sorry I can't recall his last name), the lead guitarist was a prodigy on guitar. Very young at the time, as I recall just 17 or 18 and could play circles around any local Miami picker at that time. He played a double neck Moserite guitar, 12 and 6 string. Oh, by the way, unless I'm mistaken, the other club that is mentioned in some of the emails where the Blue Beatles played in south Miami was the Bird bowl Lounge,( a bowling alley). As you know, The Minute men had our share of local success and came very close to a hit record with "I Won't Lead You On" but also had enough disappointment and heart aches in the 8 or so years we played the South Florida night club circuit to last a lifetime! Still, I wouldn't change a minute of it. Nice to talk to you again. Remember "The Minute Men"! Terry Wetzel"Hope y'all are doing fine. Last night I attended my son Christopher's high school graduation in Coleman Coliseum. About 450 graduates with a crowd of about 10,000 & I walk into the hall as the processional is still in progress and the first person I got to see walk out onto the floor was my little boy Christopher. He was one happy man!
It wuz so kozmic!
My eyes followed him right to his seat so I was able to focus my attention upon him during the entire event.
Back in the spring of '72 the place was called Memorial Coliseum & I was manning the gate that led down to the front of the stage at a Jethro Tull concert. The floor was full so the gate was closed. Christopher's mother showed up and wanted me to let all her friends in [the friends happened to include Bob Weston & Bill Caldwell]
I said, "No!" & she shook those little play pretties at me & said,"PPPPPPPPPPPPPPlease!"
& as they say the rest is history!
The Good Lord works in mysterious ways,
his wonders to behold!Christopher showed his enthusiasm by pumping his fist in the air when his name was called and pumping it again when as walked off the stage with his diploma. For old Dad it was right up there with him receiving his Eagle Scout badge and his Vigil Honor.
Best,
RR
http://myspace.com/johnraineyadkinsI SUPPOSE WE WERE FRIENDS TO THE END:
Jimmy Dean's Reminiscences of John Rainey Adkins
John Rainey Adkins' group was first known and Spider and the Webs. I used to sit on his doorstep and listen to them rehearse and go next door and buy Picayune cigarettes for John Rainey. One of their first gigs was on a flat bed trailer at the bowling alley here in Dothan. "Spider" Griffin left for Texas, and after a while Bobby Goldsboro joined the group. Buddy Buie started booking shows, and one in Dothan starred Roy Orbison. As the Webs's manager, he put them on the show backing up Orbison. They got the job as Roy Orbison's road band after that show, which was I think in '60 or '61.
After a few years, Bobby struck out on his own and the group tried out several different singers for a while. In '63 or '64, John Rainey got into a squabble with Roy about something---he told me it was because he didn't like flying, which made little sense since Roy's tour bus stayed in John Rainey's driveway when they were off. Anyway, John Rainey came back to Dothan and restarted the Webs--the other group was no longer using the name--with new musicians except for Amos Tindall, the Webs' original bass player. Amos decided to quit music for the second time, and John Rainey started teaching me their songs (I was in school and had been playing bass in a local band).
The day I graduated from Dothan High School, I took over as bass player in that version of the Webs. But John Rainey had patched up his disagreement with Roy by then, and he left to go back on the road. Buddy Buie, the original Webs' manager, was also manager of our group. After a few months, he took our singer, Wilbur Walton, Jr., and me, and put us with three musicians from Birmingham, Alabama, and named our new group the James Gang. This was in October of 1964, before the other group with Joe Walsh was formed. We had several regional hits in the South, including Buddy and John Rainey's song, "Georgia Pines."
About this same time, the Orbison backup group, with John Rainey on guitar, Paul Garrison on drums, and Bill Gilmore on bass, hired a keyboardist we all called "Little Bobby" Peterson. After several attempts at finding a singer, they hired Rodney Justo of Tampa, Florida, singer of a Florida group called the Mystics. They became the Candymen. Robert Nix joined them in 1966 (I think) on drums. Little Bobby got drafted, and Dean Daughtry took over on keyboards.
Our group, the James Gang, burned out in 1970, and by that time John Rainey was back in Dothan playing with a group he had formed with his younger brother David, working in clubs and as studio musicians at Playground Studio in the Florida panhandle. In May of 1972, he hired me as bass player. The group was called Beaverteeth.
Dean and Robert Nix were in Atlanta working as studio musicians at Buddy's new studio with Barry Bailey, J. R. Cobb, and Paul Goddard. Rodney Justo joined them and they became The Atlanta Rhythm Section. Rodney didn't stay with them for long. The next thing we heard was that he was working for B. J. Thomas. In the spring of 1973, he called John Rainey and said B. J. needed a backup band, so that is how we got that job. B. J. came to Dothan and we rehearsed a couple of weeks at my father's warehouse, and we hit the road right after that.
We worked with B. J. until the summer of 1975, when he hired new management with whom we didn't get along. We came back to Dothan, and our singer, Charlie Silva, was found to have cancer and had to quit. John Rainey called Rodney, and he came up from Tampa and became our lead singer. We played clubs until the end of the year, but at this time disco music was replacing the Southern rock I had enjoyed so much, so I quit music for good in February of 1976. They hired another bass player and carried on for a couple more years, even putting out one or two albums, but it didn't work and Beaverteeth folded.
John Rainey and David joined a country band that played around for several years, then John Rainey went to work at a music store in Dothan. Charlie Silva lost his battle with cancer, Rodney Justo went back to Tampa, and I went into the advertising business as a commercial artist, also in Dothan. John Rainey and I stayed in touch---I freelanced as a political cartoonist, and he liked to do cartoons too, so often he would call me at midnight to talk about my latest cartoon. He is the one who called me and told me Roy was dead. A year or so later, somebody else called me and told me John Rainey was dead.
I was a pallbearer at his funeral, so I suppose we were friends to the end.
James L. (Jimmy) Dean
Dothan, Alabama, USAHippies on the Hitler Channelby Paul Krassner
The History Channel recently presented a two-hour documentary
titled Hippies. It was a blatant slur on countercultural history. I
had been interviewed for a few hours and was dismayed to see that the
one quote they used--beginning "It was fun"--immediately followed a
scene of police indiscriminately beating young demonstrators at an
antiwar rally. You'd think you were watching the evening news. The
program was partially sponsored by AARP--a crude attempt by that
front for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries to reach the
aging baby-boomer market.
I asked a couple of fellow participants for their reactions.
BABBS & KESEYimages courtesy of
http://key-z.comKen Babbs, sidekick of Ken Kesey in the roving band of Merry
Pranksters:
"The show sucked. Zane [Kesey's son] said he wasashamed to have had anything to do with it. Disinformation--thatpicture of a bus, calling it the Ken Kesey prankster bus--I supposeit doesn't do any good to point out that it is not Further butsomeone else's bus, for as time goes on, whatever anyone portrays asreality works just fine, for anyone who was there is probably dead bynow."
MOUNTAIN GIRL
And Carolyn Garcia aka Mountain Girl, former wife of the
Grateful Dead's
Jerry Garcia:
"Peter Coyote deserves to get stoned inpublic for participating [as narrator] in this bash-fest. He wasobviously forced at gunpoint to read the script. Could more negativeterms be found? I must have turned it off five times. If I hadknown the bias of the piece I would have abstained. I hate beingblamed for Manson and riots and people bleeding. What a nasty raftof crap."
LANCE MICCIO
"What can I say?" asks free-lance video-maker Lance Miccio.
"Hippies by the Hitler Channel. It was not what I had hoped for. I
feel like the guy in Pulp Fiction who said it best: 'We went into
this with the best of intentions.' Then Samuel Jackson shoots him in
the knee. I am sorry to all of you who allowed me into your life so
the History Channel could present you in such a slanted,
misunderstood view. My deepest apologies to all."How did it happen that his footage was morphed into such a
hodge-podge of prejudicial propaganda? Executive producer Scott Reda
saved money by not having a director, and his editor who had to tell
the tale was not qualified to. Reda fired anyone who objected to his
cost-effective vision of what the hippies were about. He was
supplied with an overabundance of first-hand information from those
who were there, yet he chose to ignore or manipulate it into a
stereotypical hatchet job about those filthy hippies.
"Although Scott was alive in the 60s," a member of the crew
told me,
"I think he did two '50s and went right into the '70s."According to Scott Reda, "At first the film was going to
mimic the book Hippie--very light, from 1965 to 1970 or '71--but the
network kept saying, 'We know about that, we know about that, we know
about that.' Literally at our 15th draft, they said, 'Tell us
something we don't know.' "
In his hometown Pennsylvania paper, the Express-Times,
feature writer Tony Nauroth says, "Through intense below-the-skin
research, Reda emerged with the film's dark direction--fewer flowers
and more drugs; lost children fumbling their way around the predatory
jungle that the Mecca of hippie life, Haight-Ashbury, had become."
A reporter sent me this e-mail: "My real concern is the
rewriting of the history of the '60s. Young people taking to the
streets and demanding an end to the war. The pursuit of social
justice and equality--for blacks, Hispanics, women, gays. A
profound rejection of puritanism in all its forms. The invention of
a new and freer journalism. A flowering of the arts. Yet the
prevailing narrative is that the era was at least misguided, if not
downright disastrous. Those of us who were briefly in fashion back
then are now portrayed as dangerously naive dupes."
But we can be grateful to other voices for presenting the
positive side of this story, such as
San Francisco Chroniclecolumnist Mark Morford:
"The hippies had it right all along. All this hot enthusiasm
for healing the planet and eating
whole foods and avoiding chemicals
and working with nature and developing the self? Came from the
hippies. Alternative health? Hippies. Green cotton? Hippies.
Reclaimed wood? Recycling? Humane treatment of animals? Medical
pot? Alternative energy? Natural childbirth? Non-GMA seeds? It
came from the granola types (who, of course, absorbed much of it from
ancient cultures), from the alternative worldviews, from the
underground and the sidelines and from far off the goddamn grid and
it's about time the media, the politicians, the culture as a whole
sent out a big, wet, hemp-covered apology."
As Stephen Gaskin writes in an introduction to a revised
version of his 1970 book,
Monday Night Class:
"I consider myself to be an ethnic hippie. By that I mean
that the ethnicity I grew up with was such a white bread, skim milk,
gringo experience that it wasn't satisfying for me. It had no moxie.
Now, being a hippie, that's another thing. I feel like the Sioux
feel about being from the Lakota Nation. I feel like Mario Cuomo
feels about being Italian. It makes me feel close with Jews and
Rastafarians. I have a tribe, too. I know that the hippies were
preceded by the beatniks, the bohemians, the free-thinkers,
Voltaireand so on, back to Socrates and Buddha, but the wave of revolution
that spoke to me was the hippies. And rock'n roll lights my soul and
gives a beat to the revolution."
The spirit of that revolution continues to flourish,
celebrated in such annual events as the Rainbow Gathering, Burning
Man, and Earthdance.
We are still agents of change.--
Paul Krassner's essay
http://paulkrassner.comwas brought to you courtesy of old padnuh, BABBS @
http://www.skypilotclub.comTo have seen a spectre isn't everything. And there are death masks
piled high, one atop the other, clear to heaven. Commoner still are
the wan visages of those returning from the shadowy valley. This
means little to those who have not lifted the veil.
-- Neal Cassady
Congratulations go out to Greg Haynes for his book
,THE HEEEY BABY DAYS OF BEACH MUSIC http://heybabydays.com
being awarded the Bronze Medal for
Popular Culture in the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards!
Ironically,
Greg shares the Bronze Medal with Hunter S. Thompson who received
the award posthumously for his book GONZO.
http://www.independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=1157&urltitle=Announcing%202007%20Independent%20Publisher%20
Book%20Awards%20Results
