THE ANSWER
Coming of age in the liberal/bohemian atmosphere of Berkeley, Calif. —ground zero for student demonstrations at the nearby University Of California—it was only natural that the kids of Berkeley High School would be deeply affected by the rebellious new music of the mid-'60s. Berkeley high students Todd Anderson, Michael Friedman and Bob Shumaker had been heavily into modern jazz until that fateful summer of '64 when the British Invasion rolled like a tsunami over the American landscape. It had suddenly become very hip to assemble a longhaired, Rolling Stones-inspired rock 'n' roll band, and by 1965 the trio—Anderson on keyboards and vocals, Friedman on bass and Shumaker on drums—added guitarists Chip Wright and Mike Simpson and formed the Answer. A miraculous bit of luck found the boys palling around with the Turtles after their gig at a local race track. Through the Turtles connection the Answer cut a single for White Whale, the rawboned "I'll Be In" backed by the folk-rocking "Why You Smile." When the record stiffed, the band evaporated into the mists of time. I tracked down Anderson, a jazz musician now living in New York, and Shumaker, a well respected Bay Area recording engineer, to fill in the blanks left by this fabled Bay Area teen combo.

BOB SHUMAKER interview:
You guys were into jazz—Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane—before the rock 'n' roll bug bit?
Right, Todd and Michael and I had all played jazz. That was always our goal since junior high school: forming a variety of bands trying to play jazz. But I went to japan in mid '64 and when I came back and lived in Michael Friedman's—my family was still in Japan—I was appalled to find he had an electric bass. Everybody had slid into rock 'n' roll. The Stones had been the impetus now that you could play interesting rock 'n' roll. I wasn't supposed to be in the band, but the original drummer went off to school. They were rehearsing at Mike's house and I was around.I don't think anybody's interviewed the band's lead singer, Todd Anderson.

Tell me something about him.
Todd was the brains of the outfit, he did the vast majority of the songwriting and was, by far, the best musician in the group—and Chip was the soul of the band. Todd was a reed player at heart but he played keyboards reasonably well too, so he became the singer and the band's songwriter.

You told me once about a near-riot you guys caused at a noontime show at Berkeley High School.
It was a daytime rally for the school and we got three thousand kids out there. We get out onstage with no soundcheck and got set up in front of audience as fast as we could. The amps were in front of me and I couldn't hear a note. The term stage monitor didn't exist back then. Everything I heard was coming off the back wall of the audience, about two seconds later. It was one of worst days of my life. I had no idea what anybody else was playing. When I got the beat turned around at one point, I could see the guy who wound up playing in the next band cringing in his seat. Finally I got Michael Friedman to pull his amp around so I could hear something. But the audience was going wild, jumping out of their seats and dancing. Four tunes into our set it was so loud this old guy who was the stage manager just turned the power off. It was a huge controversy at the school for about a week, with free speech editorials in the school paper.

What was the story with meeting the Turtles after they played at the local race track?
We'd heard that the Turtles, in their scruffy, folk-rock period, were going to be playing at Golden Gate Fields race track and by chance we got to meet 'em. We went over to their hotel after the gig and smoked a little pot. They said they'd never done it before, which I find hard to believe. But we knew how to hook 'em up in the Bay Area. There was reefer to be had. They came to one of our rehearsals and got the White Whale people interested in us. In classic Hollywood tradition, as we were cutting demos at Coast Recorders, one of the owners of White Whale held up the phone to his partner. And they signed us. It was totally cool.

How did you cut the "I'll Be In" single for White Whale? I know the White Whale guys brought you down to L.A. to record with the Turtles' engineer, Bones Howe.
"I'll Be In" was the demo we'd cut at Coast, with some additions put on it—Mike Simpson doubling the guitar lick and a bunch of handclaps—rather than the one we cut with Bones Howe in L.A. Watching Bones work was amazing. Then there was the time that Chip shows up late for our audition with Bill Graham. He had no clue about that stuff. The single never really got played, even in this area. We called KYA over and over to get them to play it, but that was a very tight play list.

When the single sank without a trace was that pretty much the end of the band?
Pretty much. Todd was getting frustrated and I wasn't a particularly good drummer. He was forcing me to get better or move on. That was the wrong approach for "I'll Be In." Bones was making a Lou Adler kind of layered sound, all this overdubbing. I remember he wanted Chip to overdub chords on every backbeat, Chip had no idea what I was playing. He had no clue what anybody was playing. The Bones Howe version rounded off all the edges, and that was all we had going for us. The B-side was more a folk-rock kind of thing and we kept the Bone Howe version of that one. The band only lasted about six months from the summer of '65. By January of '66 it was just about gone.

TODD ANDERSON interview:
Bob says you guys were into jazz before you began playing rock 'n' roll.
I was always a jazz musician. I got a Downbeat scholarship to Berklee. But when that rock 'n' roll revolution happened we said, "Wow, this is pretty hip." I wasn't really a singer—I played piano and tenor sax—but that's what I became. So I put that whole jazz thing on hold for about two years and we formed the Answer.

How did you meet up with the Turtles and get signed to White Whale?
Mike Friedman and I had this little place in Oakland behind these people's house and they let us rehearse. We got wind of the Turtles being at Golden Gate Fields and a couple of them, Howard and Mark, agreed to come by and listen to us. They came out to Oakland and heard us and they got word back to White Whale. Pretty soon Mike and I made a trip to L.A. to see those White Whale people, Lee and Ted. They were hot with the Turtles. It was kind of a disastrous trip because we didn't have any money, so they gave us money so we could fly back home. We'd made tapes at Coast Recorders. When we made a version of "I'll Be In" with Bones Howe it came out too slick, so we ended up using the demo. They called back and said it didn't sound raw enough.

What do you remember about the high school assembly at Berkeley Community Theater?
We'd gotten all these Fender amps with super reverbs and Berkeley Community Theater is designed for acoustic music. But we didn't know any better. People in the back of the audience were holding their ears. It was a disaster. We only got through maybe three songs. Then the school paper came out and it said we were "The Wrong Answer."

Were you pretty jazzed when your single came out on White Whale?
Because of their newfound notoriety, Lee and Ted got that record rated Pick Of The Week in LA, and we were just sitting back waiting to become the next Rolling Stones. But it didn't do anything. After that I disbanded the band. A number of the players were pretty amateur. Bob wasn't really a serious drummer and Chip was basically a folk guitar player and Mike was learning from him. The truth is I'd chosen these guys, trying to make it, just because they looked right. The problem with the recording we did with Bones Howe was that the players weren't up to it. I began to get frustrated. So I formed the Drongos with Mike. White Whale financed a five-tune demo, and it was a much better band. But some guy who said he was a promoter came by and I gave him the demo. Now I don't have any of those songs.

THE PREACHERS
In those brief and breathless days just before the Byrds, Love, the Seeds and the Leaves were anointed top dogs of Los Angeles' teeming Sunset Strip music explosion, the Preachers may have been kings of the hill. A wild 'n' woolly outfit with enough teen appeal to pack your club with frugging kids and Hollywood scenesters, they featured wailing vocalist Richard Fortunato, guitarist Hal Tenant, keyboard ace Rudy Garza, bassman Zeke Camarillo and drummer Steve Lagana. The Preachers cut a handful of singles, including "Who Do You Love" with searing Fortunato vocals as well as a follow-up disc, "Stay Out Of My World," that spotlighted the more sensitive pipes of new recruit Johnny English. Still living in Los Angeles, Garza was ready, willing and able to relive those thrilling days of yesteryear when the Preachers ruled the roost in Tinseltown.

RUDY GARZA interview:
Where did you guys first meet, Rudy?
We're all from the San Fernando Valley: North Hollywood, Mission Hills, San Fernando. Hal and I had both graduated from college. I went to Cal State Northridge with a degree in physics, Hal got a degree in animal husbandry from a college back in Enid, Oklahoma. We had a mutual friend named Dick Monda, later to be known as Daddy Dewdrop ("Chick-A-Boom"). I met him my first day at community college in late '64. He said he knew a singer who was putting together a band. I met all these guys at the singer's house. After a while we didn't see the point of having a guy who didn't play an instrument, so we fired him and went out on our own. We called it the Preachers because Hal had been in a band called the Preachers back in Oklahoma, so we just kept the name.

There was some obvious Rolling Stones worship going on.
Sure, we wanted to sound like the Stones. Hard-driving blues was what we were trying to play. We were a pretty hot band in Hollywood at that time in Sunset Strip clubs like It's Boss, Gazzarri's and the Red Velvet. People loved us. We were pretty commercial actually because we needed to make a living. So we played a lot of top 40 stuff with our own flair. And the clubs were always packed when we played. We didn't write a lot of our own tunes. People like the Seeds and the Byrds would come by and watch us play because they didn't work much while they were developing their own sound. I'd tell them, "You don't work because you only do your own music." We had our own sound but we didn't have our own tunes. We were looking for tunes to record and Hal brought us the version of "Who Do Love" by Screamin' Jay Hawkins. Never heard the Bo Diddley version. That's why we ended up screaming in harmony. That's the way Richard sang, pretty hard-driving for Top 40.

"Stay Out Of My World" had more of a folk-rock sound to it.
We realized we weren't commercial enough when folk-rock appeared. We didn't have a guy who could sing pretty like folk-rock required. We fired Richard and destroyed the way the band sounded and hired a guy who could sing pretty—Burke Reynolds. And we put out a real commercial song that didn't do anything. It was contrived. We decided to go back to our roots, but Richard was already working with the Vejtables, so we found a guy named Johnny English. He had the lyrics but no music, so I put music to it. We could keep busy just playing in L.A. although before we broke up we did work for a while in Tucson.

What was it like in the heyday of the Sunset Strip?
It was like a zoo, the way everyone was dressed: guys with weird blond hair and very strange girls. Jim Pons and his buddies used to hang out at this club we played called the Casbah, out in Reseda. He and his friends decided to put a band together and that's when they came up with "Hey Joe" and formed the Leaves. Everybody in that scene knew everybody else. But after working the clubs for six nights a week I didn't want to go out on the seventh night and listen to music.

>The ANSWER and The PREACHERS can be heard on: SC 11141 GARAGE BEAT Vol. 3—Feeling Zero