Byron Walls - Storyteller

The Three Spades

COLLEGE DAYS

When I was at Oregon State in the late 50s I was part of a vocal trio. We got the idea for our name from a famous group of the time called “The Four Aces.” We called ourselves, “The Three Spades.”

For two years we were the hit of the campus and no one ever had a problem with our name.

There was only one black person in the entire town of Corvallis (35,000 pop.) and he was a football player from Alabama named Sam Wesley. Sam was also a singer and we backed him up in the school talent show: SAM WESLEY AND THE THREE SPADES.

When I called an agent in Portland to try to get a booking in the big city, the conversation went like this:

What are you called?
The Three Spades.
Are you white?
Yes. Why do you ask?
If you come up to Portland with a name like that you will never get out of town alive.

We ended up having some new 8 x 10s made with “The Collegiates” printed at the bottom and worked a couple of one-nighters in Portland.

LOUIS ARMSTRONG

When I was at Oregon State I wrote a music and drama column for the school paper so when Louis Armstrong came to play, I got to interview him after the concert. You would have thought the way he welcomed me into his dressing room that I wrote for the New York Times. He was sitting against the wall in a white, terry cloth bathrobe with a white towel around his neck, his face bathed in sweat....like he had just gone 12 rounds. At his age, after singing and playing for over two hours, in a way he had. When he opened his mouth to speak, in a raspy whisper, his valet, Doc Pugh would bend down close with a spray bottle of water and spray his throat.

I had read somewhere that he had lost 100 lbs in a year so my first question was, “How did you lose so much weight?” Louis said, “Doc , give the young man a diet chart. “ Doc handed me a three page, typed diet chart along with a pack of Swiss Kriss laxative. Louis said, “Now here’s my secret. Eat whatever you want then take this Swiss Kriss and flush it right through ya. Heh, heh, heh!”

In high school I had read a book about the early days of jazz called, Really The Blues by Mezz Mezzrow. Mezz was a jive talking, hipster, ex-con, heroin addict, jewish clarinet player who used to play with Louis and talked a lot about him in the book. In reading a biography of Louis recently I learned that Louis loved to smoke pot and Mezz was his main source for years. In fact Louis made Mezz his manager for awhile mainly for that reason....so he’d never run out of good grass. All the musicians loved what they called his “mezzarolls.”

My second question was, “Whatever happened to Mezz Mezzrow.” Louis looked genuinely startled by the question. “How do you know Mezz?’ (how indeed would I, this baby-faced white boy from Corvallis who at 18 looked about 16 know about an ex-con dope pusher in New York)? I was proud I had done my research. I said, “Mezz wrote a book called, “Really The Blues” and he talked a lot about you in it. He said, “Oh yeah, I heard about that book. Haven’d read it yet. Mezz has a little club in Paris. He’s playing for all them cats and kitties in Paris.”

Other memorable quotes from that interview: “When I play high I think low. The important thing is not to think too much. Like when you play pool, you don’t want to think too much.”

When I asked him how he had enjoyed making the movie High Society, he said, “I saw that movie the other day for the first time. I wrote to Grace (Kelly). I told her I thought she acted better than Raymond Massey when he portrayed Lincoln, heh, heh, heh.”

The older I get the more I treasure this memory.

Louis Armstrong

Byron Walls - Storyteller

The Purple Onion

SAN FRANCISCO DAYS

San Francisco was a lively and happening place in the early 60s. While attending San Francisco State I gave guitar lessons out of my 2 room apartment at 1200 Haight Street.

One of my students was Marty Ballin. A year or so after that, when Marty was putting the Jefferson Airplane together he bought a small bar on Fillmore Street in the Marina, which he turned into a club called, “The Matrix.”

By then I was performing with my partner Howard Albertson at the Purple Onion.

Marty liked us and asked us to open for the Airplane on their opening night. .

The day before the opening night we were all at the club helping get the place ready...painting, scrubbing, mopping.

Signa Anderson’s* husband, Jerry told me he was going over to see his friend Ken Kesey. I told him I had his book “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” in my car and would he get it autographed for me?” He said sure...so I gave him the book.

He brought it back later with Ken’s signature and a tab of LSD taped to the inside cover.

*(Signa was the original girl in the group)

SHELLEY BERMAN

The Purple Onion and Hungry i nightclubs were the coolest clubs in town in the late 50s, early 60s and it was quite an honor to be invited to perform there. The Purple Onion would book you for two weeks, and then hold you over for another two weeks if they liked you. My group, The Travellers ended up staying there, opening for Phyllis Diller, for three months. What a thrill. The night we opened, Billie Holliday opened two blocks away at the Jazz Workshop and...I barely knew who she was.

We worked six nights a week doing two shows a night, three on weekends. In between shows we would run across the street to the Hungry i, sit in the back, and watch their show. Acts who appeared there regularly were Mort Saul, Lenny Bruce, Prof. Irwin Corey, Nichols and May, Maya Angelou, Bob Newhart, Woody Allen, The Limeliters, The Kingston Trio, Jonathan Winters, Bill Cosby, to name a few.

Shelley Berman was a regular there and he took a liking to us. Sometimes he would come across the street and introduce us...to the delight of our audience and us.

A popular place to go for breakfast at two in the morning when the clubs closed was the Papagia Room in the Fairmont Hotel and we would often go there with Shelley. The place was usually packed with SF musicians and entertainers unwinding after work.

During the day I was attending San Jose State majoring in Drama. I knew of Shelley’s background as a Shakespearian actor at the Chicago Art Theater. He told me he used to play the villains....Shylock, Brutus, Iago. For a class assignment I had memorized a scene from Julius Caesar between Cassius and Brutus so one morning sitting with Shelley eating breakfast, for some reason I recited one of Cassius lines,

“That you have wronged me doth appear in this, you have condemned and noted Lucious Pella for taking bribes of the Sardians wherein my letters, praying on his side because I knew the man, were slighted off.”

Without missing a beat Shelley, in the voice of Brutus said, “You wronged yourself to write in such a case.”

I responded in turn with Cassius’ next line and before you know it, we were both standing up, doing the entire 3 minute scene, gesturing dramatically at a volume loud enough for the whole room to hear. Everybody applauded. I was so thrilled. Couldn’t wait to get back to school and tell my drama teacher about it.

The Hungry I

Howard Albertson & Byron Walls

BYRON AND HOWARD AT SAN QUENTIN

Truly the hardest audience I ever played to was the one at San Quentin prison on New Years day of 1968 with my partner Howard Albertson. It was a tradition there that every year on that day nightclub acts from San Francisco would do an all day benefit show for the prisoners...backed by a 12 piece union orchestra. The headliner that year was jazz singer Carmen McCrae.

We were told that those in attendance (about 200) had earned the right through good behavior to attend, and that for many of them...those who didn’t get female visitors, this was the only chance all year for them to actually be in the same room with a woman. So guess who they were there to see...clearly not us. So we knew we would have to be good.

Our first number was a fast paced opener where, every 12 bars or so, the band would stop, we’d tell a quick corny joke, and then we, with the band would pick up again. Now this is an unusual song where the band stops playing every 12 bars. The stops were indicated on their music charts but were easy to miss ...which is exactly what they did. We stopped but the band kept playing. This created two problems for Byron and Howard. 1. When we stopped and told the joke, no one could hear the joke because the band was playing, and 2. After we told the joke and tried to continue the song, the train...i.e. the band, was a mile down the track and we couldn’t get back on. So we just stood there looking lost while the band continued playing to the end of the chart.

In the second number the band sat out and we accompanied ourselves...me on electric guitar, Howard on standup bass. Halfway through the song, the power to my amplifier and the microphone cut off. That was when the crowd started to boo, stamp their feet and holler, “Get off the stage. Bring on the broads. Get off the stage.” We were about six minutes into our allotted 15. I said come on Howard, let’s go. He said, “ No, we can save it.” I said, “No we can’t. Let’s go.” I grabbed his arm and we ran off the stage.

It was just awful. And sort of scary. The worst part was we didn’t get to conclude with the sing-along on "I Shot the Sheriff." Our plan was to have the burglars do the first verse, the rapists the second, the child molesters the third and then all chime in on the chorus. Oh well, maybe next time.

BANGKOK TO LAS VEGAS

Besides that show, the low point for our act was performing at the Sani Chateau nightclub in Bangkok for a bunch of very drunk Chinese and East-Indian businessmen who didn’t speak English. I knew we were in trouble when we checked into the hotel and a sign behind the desk said, CHECK YOUR VALUES HERE.

I guess the high point for us was two weeks at the Tropicana in Las Vegas opening for the great Rosemary Clooney. And that has it’s own story.

To prepare for that job we had spent $2000 on music charts for the 16 piece orchestra that would be backing us. We hired a piano player in San Francisco to do the arrangements and to be our conductor. We were to open on Friday night. Our rehearsal with the band was scheduled for 1:00 that afternoon.

Jeff, our bearded, hippy piano player and arranger arrived on the Vegas strip in his VW van with the peace symbols on the side at about 10:00 that morning. The peace symbols and beard alone were enough to get him stopped and sure enough, he was.

When the police found pot (or traces of it) they took him to the Clark County jail. He used his one phone call to call his wife in SF. She called us at our hotel. We rushed down to the jail. It is now about 11:30 and the rehearsal is at one. They have quarantined his van containing our charts in the police lot a couple miles away.

We are pleading with the desk sergeant to release the music. Jeff who is out of sight in a holding cell within range of our voices yells “to hell with the music, get me out of here” or something to that effect. We yell back that we’ll deal with him later, that we have a rehearsal to get to. The deputies finally agree to release our music, drive us to the van and watch carefully while we remove the charts.

We made it to the rehearsal OK and the regular hotel band director agreed to conduct for us during the course of the engagement.

I am kind of embarrassed to admit that I honestly don’t remember what happened to Jeff or how his case was eventually settled. I do know in the short term he got out on bail and returned to San Francisco. It was made clear to us that even if we had managed to spring him that morning he would not have been allowed to work in Nevada until his case was tried and settled.

A footnote to this story is that for the entire two weeks I was sick as a dog with a 102 temperature, barely able to sing. Accept for the couple of hours every night we were on stage, I spent the whole two weeks in bed. Probably the result of the stressful start.

Bangkok, Thailand

Tropicana - Las Vegas, Nevada

Ryman Auditorium, Nashville, Tennessee

NASHVILLE

From 1977 to 1985 I lived in Nashville. It is sort of curious to note that I wrote some of my best jazz songs while living there. And I wrote some of my best country songs in LA. Also, during my years in LA (1970 to 1977) I did no acting. While in Nashville I earned my SAG card by being in two fairly major movies. Go figure.

Johnny Cash was the “man in black.” When Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings put out “Wanted, Dead or Alive,” they took on the outlaw image. That image opened them up to a new audience of rockers and bikers and the result was the first million selling country album. That “something extra” attached to these artists is called a “vehicle.” From Dolly Parton's chest to Mel Tillis’s stutter, these things help to set them apart in our minds. It’s good for business.

A story: The late Jimmy Darrell was a friend of mine. He worked for Mel Tillis, running his publishing company. I was in Jimmy’s office one day when Mel rushed in all excited and animated, “I was just t-t-t-talking to Oral R-R-Roberts on the phone. He w-w-ants me to g-g-go down to Oklahoma and b-b-b-be on his TV show. I’m not g-g-g-getting near that man. He might heal me!”

Another story: I have always loved Ronnie Milsap’s singing, and am proud to say he once recorded a song of mine. As you know, Ronnie is blind. One time during a recording session, Pig Robbins, the legendary Nashville session player came up behind Ronnie, cupped his hands over his ears and said, “Guess Who?”

MY LAST STORY: I really adore this one.

One day in 1992 when I was living in Brush Prairie, Washington (suburb of Vancouver, across the river from Portland) our furnace wasn’t working right so I called a furnace company to send a repairman over.

As we passed through the den to get to the furnace the guy noticed my guitars lying around and said, “I see you are a musician.”

I said, “Ya, I played music in LA and Nashville...” He said, “No kidding. I played music in LA too.” Now I’m thinking that is interesting, maybe we know some of the same people, so I ask him, “When were you there?” He said, “1964, New Years Day, Rose Bowl Parade, Brush Prairie Marching Band, I played first clarinet.” I said, “You DID play music in LA.” Good for you! He said, “It was great. We went to Disneyland and everywhere. Had a great time. “

"A charming, witty performer that everyone
would cherish experiencing."

MARK VICTOR HANSEN
Author (Chicken Soup For The Soul)