Monocled Alchemist

`Stereopsis Of A Floret’ | Behind The Glasses

Those Guys | History And Songs | My grandmother played piano very well and I and my cousin, Jimmy Owens, also part of Those Guys, used to listen to her when we were very young. I discovered in elementary school that I had very good pitch recognition and as a youngster was totally captured by the sound of Buddy Holly. When The Beatles came along I was in high school and the excitement of all the attention led to getting more involved in pop music. My Sunday school teacher in high school was Ray Hildebrand, Paul of Paul and Paula (`Hey Paula’).

Those Guys was my first band though not in the exact form that had the most success. Jimmy Owens and I started the band after high school with some friends that we had gone to school with. We picked the name and went at it. That first collection played some ‘a-go-go’s and learned.

We had for a time a bass player named Teddy Neeley (not the famous one) who was the only member who had a real job and when he could not make a gig we had a favourite stand in, T-Bone Burnett (the famous one!) He had a violin-style bass and could really play the intro to ‘We Gotta Get Out Of This Place.’ We played a gig with B.J. Thomas once and he was the first to call our sound psychedelic.

In late 1966, after a stream of personnel changes, the real beginning to the good Those Guys band I guess started when Jimmy and I met Bob Dabbs. We all three were going to school at the University of Texas at Arlington. One day I saw a notice on a bulletin board that said, “Have drums will travel”.

I called the phone number and Bob came over to meet with us. When he first came over he had a very basic drum set and strong opinions about “superfluous per-cussion” being used by so many drummers. Boy! Could he play. He had the best drum rolls in the state.

By the time we were really cooking, Bob was playing with double bass drums with holes cut in the front heads and maybe five toms and both wood and chrome snares and cymbals everywhere. Dabbs, Jimmy and I practiced all the time. When The Elite broke up we got in touch with Eddie Deaton and Bob Barnes. Our catalogs were very different. We were big on Paul Revere and The Raiders with the dancing while playing and all that. They were big into The Beatles and Stones and standing very still.

Those Guys | History And Songs

Bob Dabbs and Bob Barnes hit it off right away. You know how much mutual appreciation there can be between drummers and bass players. We did what we both knew and merged the rest and before you knew it we were known as a psychedelic acid band.

We practiced more than anybody we knew of and often after we had done our basic practice we would go downtown to the legendary Cellar Club and listen to The Cellar Dwellers and frequently sit in there till who knows when in the early morning.

The Cellar was second floor, flat black and DayGlo paint, loud, dancing girls, big time performers and a very special environment.

I played lead guitar as well as keyboards. Eddie Deaton also played lead guitar and keyboards. We alternated as to what we felt would give us the best sound for the song at hand. Bob Barnes played the bass and harmonica. Jimmy Owens played rhythm guitar. Bob (“have drums will travel”) Dabbs was the drummer. We all did vocals.

The Fort Worth rock and roll scene was hot. Three radio stations in the mid sixties dominated the area: KFJZ and KXOL in Fort Worth, and KLIF in Dallas. Dallas and Fort Worth were home to legendary disc jockeys Ron Chapman and Mark E. Baby Stevens (both are in the hall of fame). Ron Chapman hosted the amazingly successful Sump’n Else show on WFAA Channel 8 in Dallas and Mark had the Mark E. Baby show on Channel 21 in Fort Worth. We appeared many times on both of the shows working with so many big acts: The Association, Roy Orbison, Dick Clark, Vickie Carr, Anita Bryant, Paul Revere and The Raiders and Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention (he called us weird, once!).

Other Dallas/Fort Worth local musicians—such as The Five Americans, Marc Beno, Leon Russell, Jimmie Vaughn, Bugs Henderson, and others on the way up in entertainment, such as Ralph Baker and Morgan Fairchild—also did the local TV scene. One group that we played gigs with called The American Blues evolved into ZZ Top.

Big name acts came into the Dallas/Fort Worth area all the time. Probably the peak of action was the KFJZ sponsored pop music festival in August of 1967. In one big party we had multiple stages with nearly constant music featuring as best as I can recall in no particular order: The McCoys, The Standells, Every Mother’s Son, The Seeds, The Grass Roots, The Doors, The Boxtops . . . and Those Guys.

We played at teen clubs, college parties, private parties, and as many public gatherings as we could. We played about all of the teen clubs that were around at the time: The Box, Teen A-Go-Go, Jolly Time A-Go-Go and The Bookstore and venues in Weatherford, Mineral Wells and other smaller towns around the area. We travelled to Weatherford and Mineral Wells to the west, to New Orleans to the east, and to San Antonio and Corpus Christi to the south.

Those Guys | History And Songs

We also competed in quite a few battles of the bands. We lost the first one we were ever in versus The Rocks—featuring Bill Ham, quite possibly the world’s greatest guitarist. We never did lose another. We won all the rest of them that we were ever a live entry in.

We faced off with such groups as The Restless Set, The Crowd Plus One, Sundown Collection and Raving Mad. Other local groups at the time included The Five Americans, The Rocks, The Jades, Larry and The Blue Notes, The Chessmen, The Southwest FOB, and Kenny and The Kasuals.

We won the regional Vox Teen Beat competition and were beaten out (in second place) by a group called A Bit Much from somewhere in Kansas, I think. I never heard them and I am not sure how that contest went after the live part, which we did in Fort Worth at The Box.

We booked the homecoming at East Texas State University in 1967 with second billing to Them. I guess the posters and flyers sounded strange: Them and Those Guys. It was very Texan, I guess. We hired some kids to sit behind our Super Beatle cabinets during the show with some war surplus smoke grenades.

During our last song they set them off and the smoke rose up to the ceiling and then came down like some kind of a curtain. The concert set was nearly always the same: ‘I Should Have Known Better’ (Beatles), ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ (Van Morrison), ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ (Beatles), `A Little Help From My Friends’ (Beatles) and a medley, ‘Gloria’ (Them) and ‘Help, I’m A Rock’ (Mothers of Invention).

During the magical year of 1967 we were right at the top locally. We had a national fan club headed by Ms. Toni Pearce, a very successful model from Dallas. We were able to become very popular even though we did not have a manager. We probably should have but we did not trust anybody to make decisions for us. The closest we probably came was to accept as an advisor a deejay at KFJZ named Eddie Gayle. He was the station program director and very popular and became involved in our recording production.

Those Guys | History And Songs

We appeared at an autograph party at KVIL radio station with The Monkees. The two music groups were in the lobby of the station seated behind some folding tables with a stack of pictures and some pens. Kids were being let in a controlled few at a time and all was going well until a girl—maybe thirteen or so—jumped across a table and kissed Peter Tork on the cheek. She went running out into the parking lot screaming, “I kissed Peter Tork!” at the top of her lungs.

The next thing we knew there must have been a couple of hundred kids in that lobby and we were all pressed against the wall to our backs and really could hardly breathe. I was never so glad to see police in my life up to that point. They came in and began tossing kids outside, gave us some breathing space, and loaded us all into stretch limos for a trip to a big luxury hotel on the freeway.

We fronted for The Doors when ‘Light My Fire’ was the number one record in the world. We shared dressing rooms with Jim Morrison and The Doors on more than one occasion. Robby Krieger was the first guitar player that I recall having ever been around who had perfect pitch and I found it fascinating to see him tune up backstage with no device to help him. We also were able to hang out with the guys in The Boxtops when ‘The Letter’ was topping the charts.

Those Guys | History And Songs

`Stereopsis Of A Floret’ was the beginning of our psychedelic sound; it was our first recording together and everything just shot up from there. I still see it listed on playlists of stations around the country today! Next was `Lookin’ At You Behind The Glasses,’ and lastly came ‘The People Say.’ Everything that we recorded for release except `The People Say’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ was our original music. Bob Barnes and I wrote the songs. There were also some recordings that were not released. These include ‘Sad Smiling Faces,’ The Fix-It Man,’ Everything’s Gonna Be Alright,’ Sunshine Go Lightly,’ Wonderin‘and `Working Girl.’

When T-Bone Burnett owned the Sound City Studio we did a series of cover songs to use on the Sump’n Else TV show for lip-sync performances. These include Neil Diamond‘s ‘Kentucky Woman’, The Association‘s ‘Never My Love,’ and `Come Home’ and ‘When I’m Alone,’ both covers of Dave Clark 5 songs.

The fall of 1967 marked the end of Those Guys. Jim Morrison had told us that we were crazy to stay in Fort Worth doing local gigs. We wanted to get bigger but were too cautious and were all like, “Wow! Thank you man.” Bob Barnes heard the call to go after a bigger field to play in and took off with The Yellow Payges. We tried a few gigs with Jimmy moving to bass but it just was not the same.

Jimmy was later drafted for a couple of years in the army and after he got out he and I put together some demo recordings and got a deal with Atlantic Records and moved to Los Angeles for a time to work on that. I signed with a big west coast company and did some recording sessions there before coming back to Texas to go to school. In college we formed a group called Rock Bottom. We later changed the name to Plymouth Rock to try to get a deal like The Yellow Payges had with AT&T. (David Owens)