Here are some facts about me. I grew up in Hartford, Wisconsin, small town, population 5,000 give or take a few in 1960. As a kid I knew I would be a star for the Milwaukee Braves or the Green Bay Packers. I loved to sing and played the clarinet, but I would rather have palyed the trumpet. In High I got stuck on the bass clairnet.. That sucked.
I loved grade school, tolerated high school which got messed me up a bit as you see in a sentence or two. I never gave much thought of going to college until the summer I graduated from high school. I loved the outdoors and going out to visit my cousins and grandparents on the farm and in 1962 I was injured in a farming accident that nearly took my life. I spent a most of a summer in hospital or in bed, then 6 weeks in Rochester, MN getting put together again at the Mayo Clinic. I recovered and became a Rock Legend, in my own mind.
This “Rock Legend thing” started when I was recovering from the farming accident and subsequent surgeries. Actually, it started the day after Marylyn Monroe died and there is a vivid memory of the newspaper proclaiming Marilyn’s demise on my sick bed and a few minutes later I discovered my mother’s old Hawaiian guitar hidden away in a closet. I think I was 15.
In mom’s day, the 1930s-40, lots of young people were gravitating toward Hawaiian music, so the big catalogue houses of the day sold a lot of guitars and ukulele’s and mom’s Harmony arch top guitar became a my new horizon. Oddly, I never saw or heard my mother play it. She loved playing her piano instead. She characterized her guitar interest as a passing fantasy, and the guitar had been passed around the family and had come back to her and she stuck it in the closet forgetting about it. So I picked it up and started plucking the strings. Next, dad took me to the Hartford Music Center and bought some me new strings and a pick.
The first song I learned, from listening to WOKY and WRIT, the hit stations in Milwaukee, was a simple lead accompaniment and the rhythm chording to the Four Season’s hit, “Dawn” which was a smash across America in that era. I played along with that 45 until it was junk and then I bought the album played some
In 1964, with the British invasion and folk music, everybody was into Hootenannies or starting a band. I got together with a guy in my junior English class, Mark Giesheker and we performed at the first Hootenanny at our high school. It was fun and scary. We both played guitar (a little) and got up in front of a large gymnasium full of people and performed Marty Robbins’s El Paso then segwayed into a medley of “500 Miles” and “When I was a Little Baby-Cotton Fields”, both hit songs for a group called the Highwaymen. (The Beach Boy's also did a version of Cotton Fields.)
As we performed, nobody made a sound and I thought OH MY, we must be bad. We finished and the place erupted in applause and cheering. We walked off stage. I was stunned. One of the teacher’s backstage told us to go back on and take another bow and play and encore. Well, we took the bow but no encore. We didn’t know anything else.
Mom’s soon gave way to a $39.95 Sears Silvertone Sold Body Electric guitar and $29.95 Silvertone Amp. The guitar was a horrible color. I called it metallic Green Vomit. I sanded it down and repainted it in a metallic purple/white sunburst. That looked worse.
I was able to get together some cash and got a Gibson SG, beautiful cherry red color. If I only had that guitar today! Eric Clapton among others made the SG famous.
Somewhere in that time frame, I took a few guitar lessons and got together with a few guys and the first band was formed. We called ourselves the “Caminos” Jerry Jacklin, who has been my lifelong friend, was on drums and Ricky Zimmerman* (who was a hell raiser type and who drove a hot 57 Chevy) played lead guitar while I played rhythm guitar and sang. Ricky had the “boss guitar of the day, a Fender “Jaguar” and a Fender “Twin Reverb” amp.
We played at beer parties, and some school dances. I think the first paying job we got was $15 (split 3 ways) at an under age beer party in a party house that was illegally run like a speakeasy type place behind a tavern at Addison Center, Wisconsin. That is basically your average wide spot in the road and not found on a map in this day and age.
Ricky was perhaps the best guitar player I have ever played with but his love of cars, beer and wild times got in the way of his music. So the Caminos we very short lived.
By late 1965, Jerry and I had joinedJoe Strowig who had a Farfisa organ and then we met Joe Pieper who lived in the nearby small town city of Mayville. Joe had played lead guitar with the “Scrambells” which had recently disbanded. Joe and I had graduated from high school that year but Jerry and Joe S. were a couple years younger and that was a bit of problem as the pair was still in high school. To get into bars you need to be at least 18 to perform without your parents. Jerry’s parents were farm folks so that wasn’t going to happen. Milking cows came before chaperoning a kid in a bar. So we solved that and Jerry grew up in a hurry…Fake ID. If you’re from Wisconsin you’ll remember the “Wisconsin Beverage Identification Card” (Our next blog will be about that very subject!) With that card, the fun began.
We found a few others who wanted to be rocks stars so Rob, Roy and The Rest came into being. Some players came and went including Roy* and Joe S, so we morphed into Rob & The Rest.
Rob & The Rest
L-R:Joe Pieper, Jan Kaftanski, Rob Bowe, Jerry Jacklin, Larry Rosenthal 1967
Taken at "The Quarry" Manitowc, WI
Jerry, Joe and I and the Rest, who came and went, hoofed it out for a several years playing at taverns, 18 year old Beer bars, (You need to be a Wisconsin bred baby boomer to know what they were) High school dances, CYO dances, wedding dances and private parties. Our original bass player, Dick Bell, became our manager for while and we had some wild and crazy times. Then Uncle Sam was breathing down his neck and soon he joined the naval reserve to avoid going to Viet Nam, so Dick left. Joe and I took over booking and the world became our doorstep.
We bought more guitars and better equipment. We dreamed. We traveled a bit. We partied and we had fun, not to mention we did make a few dollars. Key word in that last sentence is few. We entered college to get student deferments and for a while I actually thought our dream of hitting it big might happen, but it never did.
In 1968, we went our separate ways, Jerry was in college at UW-Oshkosh and was looking at joining a well-established band there who needed a drummer. Joe was going to college in another town and I was attending college in Milwaukee and was offered a spot in a successful band there so it became apparent that with the distance and the fact we all needed to maintain grades to keep our student deferments and stay out of the draft, the end was at hand. Rob drifted this way, Jerry that way; Joe became a teacher and THE REST? They have disappeared.
Jerry went on to play in other bands, as did I. Jerry kept pounded the drums for a number of years while Joe and I both gave up rock bands for love. Joe is still playing trumpet in an Old time German band. We are all still friends and stay in touch. We talk about getting together again for shits and giggles, but distance is definitely a problem.
Were we rock legends? Well, in my mind we were. Reality, it was just another bunch of guys having fun chasing a dream. It was a great life experience and I still relieve some of the memories, over and over in my mind. We had “groupies”. We had fun. We were and I was fulfilling my senior high school prophecy that was printed for the senior class in the school newspaper by in 1965. I don’t know who wrote. The prophecy was I would be a “Rock Star.” AND I was…A rock legend in my own mind.
*This blog is dedicated to the memory of Roy Justmann and Ricky Zimmermann.
Roy Justmann was part of this memory. For a short while Roy was a part of the rock band I was in. He is the Roy in the original Rob, Roy and The Rest. Roy was a genuine nice guy with a great voice. He recently lost his battle with I believe cancer. He was great family man, and a County Supervisor in Washington Co. WI.
Ricky Zimmerman passed away over 15 years ago and we fondly remember some great times with him. He was a forerunner personality wise to great comedian Steve Martin in some ways… “A wild and crazy guy.”
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