The folks Bill Barnes and I were renting our room from moved across town and took over a bigger rooming house. We moved with them, getting a two-room apartment in the bargain. In that same apartment building lived a dark-eyed young Mexican lady named Sylvia Delores Socorro Ordonez. I felt an attraction to her, and she felt the same about me, so we started dating. We really enjoyed each other’s company, and it may have turned into something. But I was not in the frame of mind for any serious stuff.
One morning I was coming out of Juarez after a night of being up to no good and tripped on a streetcar track, hitting my mouth on a rail. I was so loaded at the time that I didn’t feel much pain until I woke up a few hours later to discover that I’d cracked my two front teeth beyond repair. I had to go back to Juarez, where a Mexican dentist dug the roots out. I went around with my two front teeth missing until I got the money to have another Mexican dentist make a partial for me.
For some reason I peroxided my hair, and it turned gray blonde. I had broken my regular glasses and wore thick prescription shades. With my two front teeth missing, I must have been a weird sight. I was living a wild, undisciplined life, living for the moment, with little thought for the consequences. I was out of control, burning the candle at both ends, and only the love of our merciful God kept me from disintegrating.
My mother and dad drove out to El Paso to visit me. When my mother first saw me, she started crying. I had changed so much since the last time she’d seen me that it really upset her. The first words she said to me were, “I’m taking you home with me.” Of course I didn’t leave with them. After staying a few days, they headed back to North Carolina, not feeling too good about their only son.
But I did start having second thoughts about the life I was living. I actually started staying home some nights after work, drinking less, and reevaluating my situation. I had to admit that although I thought I was having the time of my life in El Paso, I was actually slowly killing myself. I had put all my dreams of being somebody in the music business on hold, treading water, letting the world pass me by while I partied my life away on the Mexican border. After some honest soul searching, I came to the conclusion that if I stayed there, I would never accomplish any of the things I had set out to do.
I loved being in El Paso. I loved the band I was playing with. I had a girlfriend I really cared for and had forged some strong friendships. But something was missing in my life. I had had my fling. I had gotten out of a bad marriage and sown enough wild oats for any two people. I knew if I stayed there, it would be one beer joint and one party after another as the years rolled relentlessly by and the elusive bird of opportunity flew away.
I grew up a lot during that period of reflection. I made a hard decision. I was going to go back to the East Coast and get back in the race. I called my old booking agent Dick Obitts. He had gone into business with another agent named Bill Sizemore and was operating an agency called Capitol Talent out of an office in Baltimore. The icing on the cake was that they had a full-fledged recording studio. Dick wanted me to come back and write songs and produce records. Bingo!
It sounded like the ideal situation, or at least a good place to start. A few days before Christmas, I played my last gig in El Paso and said goodbye to Sylvia Delores Socorro Ordonez and all of my friends. I headed east, riding with Bill Barnes, who was driving back to the Washington area to spend Christmas with his family and would drop me off in Wilmington to spend Christmas with mine.
Then I was getting back into the game!
CHAPTER 13
JUST A STOP ALONG THE WAY
When I got to North Carolina, I called Bob Johnston, who was now a staff writer for Hill & Range music and living in Nashville. He said he’d pay my airfare to Nashville and on to Baltimore if I wanted to come through town and spend a couple of days writing songs with him. I enthusiastically took him up on it.
Bob’s wife is a beautiful and gracious lady named Joy. I really enjoyed the time I spent with them, but Bob believed in hard work. We spent endless hours putting words and music together, and one of the songs we wrote during those days in Nashville was to be the biggest thing to happen in the early days of my career.
I flew into Baltimore around noon on New Year’s Eve of 1962. I had just come from the land of mild winters and was dressed accordingly. There was snow on the ground, and when I set my guitar and suitcase down to put my ungloved hands in my pockets, a frigid wind came along and started blowing my luggage down the icy sidewalk. The thought What am I doing here? occurred to me as I picked up my stuff and headed on out to find the Capitol Talent offices.
One of the bands that the agency booked had a New Year’s Eve gig that night and was short a guitar player. So I worked on my first night in town and filled in with the band for a few weeks while they found a regular player.
Dick Obitts had arranged for me to share a small apartment with one of the local musicians, and I began a new phase of my life as a songwriter, record producer, and musician.
I wrote and cut quite a bit of music in Baltimore, and although I didn’t produce any hits, I gained a lot of practical studio savvy and learned a lot about making records. It gave me the opportunity to hone my songwriting skills, which was to become a bigger and bigger part of my life. But as much as I loved writing and the studio, I quickly discovered that my heart was really onstage, playing music and entertaining people.
For some reason I would deviate from this realization several times in my career but always end up back at the same place.
I needed to put together a band and go back on the road. A local drummer named Buddy Davis wanted to sign on, and a guitar player named Ward Darby had just come to town and was looking for a job. He called a sax player he knew in Pittsburgh named Bill Vickers, who was interested and flew to Baltimore to join up. I switched from guitar to bass, and we had a slick little four-piece band.
We didn’t have much rehearsal time because we started playing gigs right after Bill Vickers, who went by the name of Vic Catalano, got to town. But the audiences didn’t know it because we were able to improvise on songs we all knew and play them together without rehearsal.
You could tell if a musician had put a lot of time in with club bands because there was a nucleus of songs that every club musician had to know. They were what the people wanted to hear and dance to. Everybody knew “Honky Tonk” and “Johnny B. Goode,” the Elvis catalog, ballads like “In the Still of the Night,” and the time-tested, standard R&B dance tunes. So, basically, all we had to work on were the latest tunes.
Clint Butram, an old friend of mine who was an apartment mate from my wild, single days in D.C., got in touch with me. He was living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and said he thought the town was ripe for a good band and offered us a two-week booking at a club called the Fondalite. It sounded good to me, so we finished up the gigs we already had booked and headed west.
The Fondalite Club was situated at 11th and Denver and was already a popular night spot with the local bands it featured, and when The Jaguars hit town, we were like a breath of fresh air. Now that we were settled in one spot for a couple of weeks, we were able to catch up on rehearsals and learn the new popular tunes.
Some songs were so popular with the crowds that we had to play them three or four times a night. The Righteous Brothers’ song “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” was one of the most-requested songs we ever played.
Tulsa loved us, and we loved Tulsa and struck up a long and successful relationship with the Fondalite Club and Jerry Osborn, the owner. When we left town, it was with a promise to come back in the near future.
And return we did, on a regular basis from 1963 through 1966. We played there and at the Hi Ho Club in Wichita, Kansas, so often that we severed ties with the booking agency in Baltimore. Although we were living out of a suitcase, we considered Tulsa home.
I flew back to Nashville in 1963 to do some more writing with Bob Johnston. We knew that Elvis was recording at RCA studios, but what we didn’t know
was that he was recording a song called “It Hurts Me,” the song we had written together in 1962. When we found out the next morning, it was like living in a wonderful Technicolor dream. Elvis Presley was the biggest artist on the planet, and to have him do a song I had cowritten was almost past imagining. Colonel Parker took half of the writers’ royalties for Elvis when he hadn’t written a note of it. But that didn’t dampen my spirits at all; I was going to have my name on an Elvis Presley record!
I just couldn’t wait for “It Hurts Me” to be released. Later in the year it came out on the flipside of a movie song called “Kissin’ Cousins,” but both sides of Elvis songs were hits in those days. My euphoria was short-lived when I found out that my name was not on the label, which turned out to be a clerical error. The second run of records included a very relieved “C. Daniels” in the writers’ credits.
As great as it was being a cowriter on an Elvis Presley song, something much more wonderful was about to happen to me.
CHAPTER 14
TONIGHT I MET THE GIRL OF MY DREAMS, FOR REAL
One night during a break at the Fondalite Club, I stopped by a table to say hello to a girl my drummer Buddy was dating, and sitting at the table with her was a curvy little blonde. Her name was Hazel, and she was some kind of foxy. I was smitten and asked her to dance, which was probably the worst first impression I could have made on her since I’m just about the worst dancer in the Western world. But she didn’t seem to mind my two left feet, and we hit it off.
That night a new and wonderful chapter began in my life, and I soon fell into a kind of love I didn’t even know existed. The whole world seemed different; I wanted to be with her all the time. When I was away from Tulsa, I couldn’t wait to get back to her, and the most incredible thing about it was that she felt the same way about me.
I’ll never forget the day I told Hazel I loved her. It was on a beautiful Sunday afternoon on the top of a Ferris wheel at Mohawk Park in Tulsa that I told her how I felt about her. She said she felt the same, and when we got off that Ferris wheel, we knew we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together.
The only night I didn’t have to work was Sunday, and on September 20, 1964, we were married by a justice of the peace. Our honeymoon consisted of one night in my room at the Reeder Hotel because I had to be back to work at the Fondalite Club that Monday. It was to be long, arduous years before I was able to give her a real honeymoon. But, thank God, I’ve been blessed to take her places we could have only dreamed about on that Sunday morning in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Hazel has been the one stable thing in my life. No matter what else was going on, even if the world was falling in on me, she has always been there loving me, supporting me, and telling me that as long as we were together everything would be all right. She has given me the reason and encouragement to climb some very tall mountains and go through some very low valleys. She has stuck it out with me through cheap motels, cars that wouldn’t start, used furniture, repossessions, mountainous debt, too many bills and too little money, and my being away from home for long periods of time.
There is nothing I wouldn’t do for her, up to and including laying down my life. She is the glue that has held me together, the tether that has kept me from going off the deep end so many times and in so many ways. She is my anchor, my port in life’s storms, and there is absolutely no way I could have accomplished what I have without her by my side.
For the first time in my life, I was truly fulfilled. I was happily married and the band was drawing crowds.
Then, businesswise, things started falling apart.
CHAPTER 15
THE SHOW NOT ONLY MUST BUT WILL GO ON
We had a booking in Orlando, Florida, and when we got ready to leave town our drummer, Buddy Davis, informed me that he would not be going with us. No notice, no nothing. Buddy had gotten into a bad relationship that was just about to drive him crazy. He was confused and hurt, and I could sympathize with him. But that didn’t change the fact that the band was opening at the La Flame Club in Orlando and I was leaving town without a drummer and little idea of where to find one on such short notice.
There was nothing else to do but pack up and head for Florida. I made phone calls to everybody I could think of, but nobody I wanted was available. By the time we got to Orlando, we were desperate and frantically put out the word that we needed a drummer right away, and a guy named Salty Loveland showed up. We quickly rehearsed enough tunes to get us through a couple of sets and went to work.
We had no sooner gotten the drummer replaced when Ward Darby, the guitar player, left the band. One night he was there, the next night he wasn’t. I was stuck again.
I would like to interject something here, a little advice for all you aspiring band leaders, from a lesson I learned the hard way.
Both Buddy Davis and Ward Darby had threatened to leave the band before, and I had talked them out of it. That was a big mistake. If a musician threatens to quit, he is going to quit at some time in the future and possibly leave you in a lurch. I’ve developed a policy over the years. When an employee says anything about leaving my organization, if the word “quit” comes out of his mouth, he has given notice. He is gone, and I will replace him the next day if possible. I’ll give him severance pay if he gives me notice, but I want him out of my outfit as soon as possible.
There is nothing to be gained by having a disillusioned employee hanging around. It causes dissension and affects the other band members. No matter how good a musician plays, he’s not worth the hassle. And there’s not a musician in the world who can’t be replaced.
So don’t bring your personal troubles to work with you one night and tell me you’re going to quit because you’ll wake up the next morning unemployed, and I’m not going to change my mind: you’re out of here. There is no one in my band that can’t be replaced except me.
I switched back from bass to guitar. That solved one problem but left me short on the bottom end of the band. I now needed a bass player.
There was another musician staying in the same motel as we were. He was an organ player who not only played the organ keyboard with his hands but played the bass pedals with his feet, and on top of that, he could sing. I’d see him from time to time around the motel, and he didn’t seem to be working a lot. I asked him to come by and talk to me.
He was fresh out of Massachusetts and spoke with the “pahked the cah at the bah” New England accent. His name was William Joel DiGregorio, known professionally as Little Joe Roman, and in years to come, he would acquire the permanent nickname of Taz.
He had a great singing voice and did the James Brown, Wilson Pickett–type songs that were so popular with the dance crowd in the 1960s. And a new voice and an organ would give us a sound we’d never had.
I hired him on the spot and went into intense rehearsals to catch our new players up with the existing repertoire.
Some months before coming to Florida I had bought an old used school bus, pulled the seats out of it, and put in a couple of bunks and a couch. There was plenty of room for the instruments, and it was a great way to travel when it didn’t break down, which it did frequently.
I hate old vehicles. I’ve driven so many pieces of junk, breaking down, not starting, blowing tires and engines, and keeping me broke trying to keep them running. I wanted a new vehicle. I’ve had enough worn-out, worrisome automotive garbage. I wanted a speedometer with zeros on it. But, there again, it would take me many years to learn that lesson and many more to acquire the resources to do anything about it.
CHAPTER 16
HAPPINESS COMES IN SWADDLING CLOTHES
One of the very greatest blessings of my life occurred at Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on April 28, 1965, when our one and only son was born. We had planned on naming him Charles Edward after me, but since Hazel’s dad and my dad both had a William in their names, we decided to make everybody happy and name him Charles William.
I needed to do something nice for Hazel’s
family. An itinerant musician of meager means and questionable stability had taken away their baby daughter, and they didn’t really understand what I did for a living and why I had to leave their daughter alone so much.
Her parents, Dessie and R. D., had taken me right into the family, but I’m sure they still had some serious doubts about their youngest daughter’s future. The arrival of Charles William Daniels smoothed out any rough edges and gave them a whole different opinion of their wandering son-in-law.
A few weeks after he was born, Hazel flew to Wilmington to let my parents meet their only grandchild, and we had two sets of proud grandparents.
By far the hardest thing about being a professional road musician is being away from your family. It was hard enough before, but when my son was born it became doubly hard. When Little Charlie was about six months old, I was gone from home for sixteen weeks, and when I finally walked through the door and picked him up, he started crying. He didn’t know who I was, and that hurt.
I have wept bitter tears because I missed my family so much. And it’s no easier on the family. I missed my son’s first steps, his first words, grammar school plays, and high school football games.
There is a price to be paid for following the path I chose. When I hear people nowadays say that I’ve had it easy because I’ve been able to chase my dreams, I think, You don’t have any idea. I would advise anybody considering a career as a traveling musician to stop and weigh the cost before you take the leap, especially if you have a family.
In my case I was driven by something that I can’t even put a name on. It just seemed there was something inside me that had to find a way to get out, something better, something higher, something unique and special, and something that I had to pursue. I felt that I had not touched my potential, that there were songs I hadn’t written, musical heights I hadn’t explored, and dreams I hadn’t even dreamed yet. I knew that until I had exhausted every avenue open to me to accomplish whatever it was I was looking for, I would never be complete.
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