Mingo Junction, Ohio...the hottest town on the Internet!

The Hop by Larry Smith

It was when I began to dream things making them happen by believing and working for them. Though I've eaten a houseful of humble pies since then, I still keep molding and making dreams.

We were two 1950's high school rock groups briefly and unevenly merged in a small industrial town in the Ohio Valley, Mingo Junction, just south of Steubenville. The Vibrations and the Fidels Cour names reflected the dream. Our group, the Vibrations, grew out of band camp that summer when we jammed in the men's barracks and performed for the majorettes around the bonfire. It was three of us pounding and picking on guitars, Joey beating on his new drum set very little melody and no real vocals, but we rocked. I had worked my way up from a cheap acoustic to a Sears Silvertone with a homemade amplifier. Rich played a strong acoustic, and Billy strummed on a fine Les Paul electric with a good amp, reason enough to include him. Though Billy was the only one who'd taken guitar lessons, he couldn't play well then, could barely keep up with the chord changes and so dragged the beat. One day Rich just handed him the acoustic, picked up the Les Paul, and stated, Hey, Billy, you do the chords on this one. I need this for the melody. We were a group, and Billy had made a sacrifice bunt for the betterment of the group.

By the end of a month of garage and basement practices we had a band that rocked on a total of four songs: covers of Buddy Holly's Peggy Sue, The Everly Brothers' Dream, Dream, Dream, Santo and Johnny's instrumental Sleepwalk, and a nearly original Girl with a Red Dress. And so one day we borrowed the marching band's reel-to-reel and recorded ourselves. I remember we sat around listening, afraid to look up. It was kind of a lame cross between The Kingston Trio of rock and Elvis with a cold. Finally, I said, Ah, that machine just doesn't do us justice. That same week Rich called his cousin from Richmond Township and it happened we had our first gig. We were to play the Richmond Grange Hall on a Sunday evening.

Banging and roaring with new earnest now, driving our intention into each beat, each chord change, we hardly noticed that our families had disappeared. We just kept playing those same four songs; until we felt we had them tight. That Sunday I got the family's old woody station wagon to drive the band to the gig. AM rock tunes filled the crowded car as we climbed the Ohio Valley hills and passed small farms. When we found the place, a white frame building at a country crossroads, we were set to rock. We carried in our equipment two amps, three guitars, and the trap set and tuned up the guitars. We were our own roadies, of course, and someday we knew we would have our own groupies. At seven o'clock, the kids started showing up and we soon discovered it was a junior high youth group with a chaperone who refused to lower the lights. We were so eager we ignored all distractions, propping ourselves up with attention to detail and buddy laughter, pumping our white shirts up with pride.

Our first song was shaky at best, and the kids just sort of stood around and stared at us, till we began to read their faces they were begging for something to dance to. In truth, we had never thought of things that way pleasing an audience. We were just playing our songs as we had 100 times for ourselves. Wasn't that enough? Obviously not, so we leveled off with the mellow Sleepwalk, and the kids began to two-step slide around the floor or to just lean against each other, giving the chaperone something to do. Others stood along the wall and watched as our music critics.

Fifteen minutes into it, we knew we were through we had played our entire repertoire, but there was no deejay or record player around, not even a radio we could turn to, no other music but us. They had booked a band for the night, and we were it. And so we stared at each other, played Sleepwalk again, and when some kid yelled, Ah, come on. Play something that rocks! Rich leaned over and gasped, Okay, guys. Follow me on this one use the C chords, and we were off. Rich called out, Okay, everybody, let's Twist and suddenly we were doing Chubby Checker's Let's Twist Again, and I mean we let go and just did it, playing beyond ourselves, and the instruments came alive in our hands. The kids loved it and began drilling their shoes into the old wooden floorboards. Twisting their hips as bright colored skirts went spinning about, and tight jeans kept working hard. That song lasted a whole 10 minutes till we all ran out of gas.

Laughing wildly, we took our break in the cool fall air slapping each other on the shoulders. On the steps outside, the kids giggled and whispered, sneaking glances at us older boys. A couple girls flirted with Rich who put his arms around both of them and joked, Hey, guys, we've got our first groupies!

We did our basic four again with more feeling and closed on the Twist. The applause was another kind of music. As we drove back over country roads, Rich opened the envelope and counted out ten one dollar bills--$2.50 each for an hour's performance. We were rich, not because we had earned twice the minimum wage of that time, but because we were actually paid for doing what we loved. The dream had survived our first performance by pulling something from each of us, teaching us how to make it happen for others as ourselves.

The Vibrations played three or four more gigs, one a feature during a sock hop in the old gymnasium deejayed by Stan Scott, the local radio disk jockey and mc of our "Teen Time" television dance party. At the break, he confided in us that our tunes were fair imitations, but our Girl in the Red Dress had real potential. We hung on those words for weeks and worked harder on our own material, but still we lacked the voices to carry it off no way to deliver the lyrics I was writing. I see now that my first urgings to write came from this need to express and the pressure to develop new songs to play kind of functional creativity. I was most inspired then by the romping tunes of Buddy Holly, and by the lyric blues of Lee Andrews and the Hearts: I sit in my room / looking out at the rain./ My tears are like rain drops/ falling down my window pane./ I'm lonely and I'm blue/ but I'll try to get long/ with you. I'd been ignoring my girlfriend during this time, hurting our relationship, and thereby leaning the blues and earning the plaintive tone of love's struggles.

While our group were pursuing our rock dreams, our high school friends had been working out their own in sports to bolster hopes for a scholarship from football and basketball in school work that could lead to college or nurse's training. Our entire school consisted of 250 students and a dozen teachers. In our little town the jobs in the steel mills and on the railroad were the chief life path, later it was the military during Vietnam. Only 10% went on to higher education, six out of sixty, yet I knew in my heart I'd be one who would. Belief and hard work would make it so.

Others from our hometown had fostered their dreams through music. Joey Farr and the Mingo Men recorded a hit with the upbeat Moving on Down and the sweet ballad Jeanette; George Otis with the Stereos had recorded the doo-wop single Sweet Pea's in Love and the street corner a cappella I Really Love You. Woody Yingst had been part of a rollicking Pittsburgh group Buddy Sharpe and the Shakers that recorded Linda Lee. Right ahead of us were the Savoys (Danny, Bobby, Bill, and Ron) who crooned and rocked at local dances and high school events. A decade after us, Rob Parissi and Wild Cherry would record their national hit, Play that Funky Music. So, we knew the dream was possible.

I remember how this recording idea first drew us. After our second gig, we pooled our pay into the purchase of a small recording device a $20 mail-order attachment that you connected to your own record player to cut a groove into the disks they sent. Out of the corners of our eyes we watched the little shavings peeling off our hopes. If you've ever done a Record Your Own Voice at amusement parks of decades ago, you have an idea of the poor quality of the results. We listened, looked at each other, then did our best demo, and one for each of us to show our friends. It was a weak moment in a brief career, but, anyway, it looked like a record. We went back to reel-to-reel, and we were definitely improving.

Meanwhile, a group of our school buddies, the Fidels, had been crooning doo-wop in lockeroom showers, gloss tiled restrooms, and family basements developing a sound to nearly capture the harmonies of the Crests, Flamingos, Del Vikings, and the Skyliners. I remember the Vibrations went to hear them at "The Wigwam," Mingo's Community Center, and, well they were good at a cappella, strong on harmonies and ethereal on falsettos, but their instruments couldn't match their singing. And so, on the steps outside of the dance, amidst glowing cigarettes and boyhood banter, a brainstorm came to combine the two groups. Noony, Donny, Nick, Guy and Pete would join us for a few gigs. We also inherited a practice place at Tony's barbershop after hours. It could hold a group of nine as our wall of sound echoed off his plastered walls. With nine persons to pay, any gigs would yield slim pickins for any of us. But that didn't matter. It just didn't. There was nothing like being in the middle of a song, riding the sound of yourself and others, and feeling the wave of it going through you and out into the crowd. Sure we dug the small town glory of it, but more important, we were feeding a dream, ours and others.

After several rehearsals turning down the amps and smoothing out the transitions we began building a block of cover songs and a group of originals. We were ready for a gig, and excited enough to buy matching shirts. And so we hit our savings, worked a few extra hours as paperboys and ushers, or borrowed the $10 from our folks for our career.

On a Saturday before noon we met downtown at Weisenberger's Clothing to pick out the shirts. The clerk couldn't believe it Nine shirts maroon long sleeves…all the same kind are you guys putting me on? We smiled, and he told us they'd have to be ordered in. But we did it and kept the business local, as we promised we would when we became famous. The idea of anagrammed names was defeated by the extra cost--and maybe a little by the doubt that a group this large would survive. The Fidels had already been through one break-up when they decided to drop their leader for his inability to sing on key. Like a high school romance, they broke up, disbanded, then reformed a week later without him, though he soon got wise and began calling them the "In-Fidels."

I have to tell you here that I met my future wife at one of our practices Pete's cousin Ann. She was wearing these plaid pants that hugged her curves and a soft tight sweater as she greeted us with her smiling eyes. As she let us into her Grandma's Ferroni's place, I brushed by her, swallowing hard, feeling her closeness and the distance growing between me and my girlfriend. I knew a song would come from this, but it would be years later before we would emerge as a couple, and yet her image had burned inside me until that dream could be made real.

Our first gig as a band was back at the Mingo Community Center sock hop where we arrived early to set up equipment three amps now, two microphones, three guitars, and the drums. We had worked out the numbers in rehearsal all week. And so we did a sound check then went out into the alley to smoke a last cigarette. The police cruisers were shining in the parking lot. Kids were playing under street lights a block away. As the mill roared, the Bessemer furnace glowed an orange-pink light over the valley and the night.

At ten after the hour, the center director introduced us, and we strolled out from the back room in our new shirts, black slacks, and a shower of hometown applause. Friends and enemies gathered to measure our sound. And we had it we played and sang from somewhere deep inside without really trying too hard, in that effortless effort of riding a wave. It echoed off the walls and sunk into the bodies on the dance floor. Doo-wop and rock n roll, rockabilly and rhythm and blues, it rocked and it rolled out of us. We could see ourselves as part of it. It was a great night, and though we never made that big record, never played beyond our hometown, we had shown others and ourselves that it could be done a dream had been fed and grown. After graduation, we each went off to college or jobs, some married and had kids, a few went off to Vietnam; only Rich stayed on to rock and roll for decades with Big Boy Pete and the Kaddies playing reunions and small clubs. The rest of the group saw less and less of each other, and eventually most of us moved away. That dream may have faded, but for a time we'd made it real and somehow we'd learned how to keep the dreaming alive.

Notes: The Vibrations: Richard Grimm, Joe West, Billy Johns, Larry Smith; The Fidels: Guy Mason, Donny Yingst, Ralph (Noony) Chappano, Nick Drzayick, Pete Boyuk, (John Dagon when group was the Del Tones); The Savoys: Dan Pizzerferatto, Bill Mitchell, Ron Morris, Bob Cutri. Larry Smith graduated from Mingo Central High School in 1961, and is the author of MILLDUST AND ROSES: MEMOIRS, Ridgeway Press, 2002 (at http://members.aol.com/lsmithdog/bottomdog). Thanks to Guy Mason and Rich Grimm for help with the details. }