By Bland Simpson
In the late spring of 1974, our country-rock band, the Southern States Fidelity Choir of Chapel Hill, got an urgent call from The Attic, a well-known upstairs rock-and-roll beer hall in Greenville. Club founder and manager Tom Haines was saying, Please bring the Southern States down here, because we have word that 40,000 American Legionnaires are heading to Pitt County for Memorial Day weekend — they’ll pack in here at the Attic on Saturday night, and so-and-so has just canceled on us, and we need an act!
Our great friend and musical legend Don Dixon, of Arrogance, had gotten the same call earlier, and he had recommended us.
The Attic, on East Fifth Street, Greenville, was one of the most coveted showcase venues in Eastern North Carolina, with an official capacity of 400, though as many as 700 could pack in there when the fire marshal was not looking.
And our year-old band had never played the celebrated Attic before.
We had never played for masses of Legionnaires, either.
The deal was a low guarantee against a high percentage of the gross and, however odd the evening might turn out to be, we could not lose, so we took the date in a heartbeat.
The Southern States was a quintet: six- and 12-string guitars (Jim “Bud” Wann and John “Jackson” Foley), bass (Jan “Doctor D” Davidson), drums (Michael “Cap’n” Sheehan), and piano (myself). In great spirit, we drove east down U.S. 64 and 264 caravan-style in two cars on that Saturday afternoon. I felt like a king behind the wheel of my ’64 Ford Country Squire wagon, and our longtime friend Scott Bradley led the way in his hardtop, dull green and white International Harvester.
Upon our arrival we saw a fellow on a ladder switching out the second half of our name on the marquee to simply “Band.” A management decision: Apparently they thought “Choir” on a country-rock club marquee could be bad for business.
When showtime at the big black Attic hall rolled around, 9 o’clock that night, we were all wired and fired up, ready to crank it, to step it up and go. Ready to rock the joint.
So were the half-dozen audience members, the last few ECU students who were staying over in town that holiday weekend. Since they outnumbered us rather than the other way around, we laid into our first set and made music, eyeing each other and wondering: Where were all those free-spending Legionnaires who, we had been promised, were going to pack the place and give us the windfall paycheck of early summer?
On we played, the crowd growing to about a dozen as our first set went along.
At the set break, right as we left the stage, the Attic’s manager came from behind the bar and approached us, grim-faced. He had been phoning around, he said, investigating while we performed, and now he laid down the facts of the matter.
There were no 40,000 Legionnaires currently in Greenville.
Maybe there were 4,000, or possibly just 400, he said.
However many there were, they had all come to their celebration site in camper vans, and they were all at an RV park in a former cotton field a few miles outside of town. Apparently they were happily grilling and drinking beer in place, hunkered down on site, and they were most certainly not leaving their safe haven and heading into Greenville’s downtown, daring the state troopers to roadblock them, ready to give them DUIs coming or going, if not both.
The manager was sorry things had not worked out as well as he had so earnestly predicted when he first called us. He gave us our $150 cash guarantee and said we could go on and wind it up whenever we wanted to. But the dozen young folks, 10 men and a couple of women, really liked our songs and sound and were loosened up and wanted more, so we all said, what the hell?
And the band played on.
We played a hot second set, songs of the Colorado trail, dance-hall girls in Baltimore, and juke-joint nights in the South, as if 700 folks were there instead of a mere dozen — for, as Don Dixon has always counseled: “Them that comes gets the show, and them that don’t, don’t!”
Soon we were winding up with Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” and our modest crowd all bellowed Sha-la-la-la-la-la right along with us, and then, still Sha-la-la’ing, they helped us load out (which would have gone more quickly had they not), packing our two cars, and, as I recall, they all stood out in the middle of 5th Street joyfully waving and cheering us boisterously as we pulled away, heading west.
Coming into tobacco-town Wilson, slowing for a stop on U.S. 264 near the Purina Feed Mill, we saw a two-story house across a field ablaze with lights, all windows wide open, scores of people around it, loud strains of R&B reaching us through the country night.
Bass-player Jan swore the half a dozen male and female partiers he had seen wobbling along down the side of the highway were all naked from the waist up.
And guitarist Jim swore that the party house itself was visibly rocking from side to side.
On the edge of Raleigh, a city patrolman pulled our caravan over out of apparent boredom, and, after brief interviews with the drivers (it was now close to 2 a.m.), he wished us well and sent us on our way.
Only a few months later, all of us would be playing Off Broadway in New York City, selling out nightly with Diamond Studs, The Life of Jesse James, our first “musician’s theatre” show and a powerful hit, suddenly the toast of the town.
Yet on this particular desultory eastern Carolina Saturday night, in no way could any of us have foreseen that triumphant, almost-upon-us, life-changing time.
In the Memorial Day weekend moment, we six keenly discouraged 25-year-olds rolled the last few miles on back to Chapel Hill, never having seen even the first American Legionnaire on this outing. At least everyone had some new, ironic bragging rights about our really big show at Greenville’s Attic, and, after paying for round-trip gas, each of us had a whole $20 and change to show for our notes and our noise. EB
Bland Simpson is a Kenan Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a regular contributor to EastBound Magazine. He is also the longtime pianist for the string band The Red Clay Ramblers. His most recent book is Clover Garden: A Carolinian’s Piedmont Memoir.