Down the Highway, page 5
The first band Bob was associated with was an a cappella group formed by his summer-camp buddies Larry Kegan and Howard Rutman, together with other friends in St. Paul. They called themselves The Jokers and played wherever they could find a piano, including high school dances. Girls gathered around as the boys harmonized pop songs of the day. Bob realized music gave him power to attract and charm people. It was a lesson his friend Kegan picked up on. ‘He taught me if you can sing, and / or play, you can get almost anything you need,’ says Kegan. ‘A meal, a place to stay, a ride, a girlfriend.’ Their mothers made sleeveless cardigans for the boys – in red and gray – with the name ‘Jokers’ stitched in the front. In this getup, the boys performed on a television talent show broadcast on Channel 9 in the Twin Cities. ‘We were hugely ambitious and we really wanted to do stuff,’ says Howard Rutman. In the summer of 1956 Bob, Rutman, and Kegan paid five dollars to cut a 78 rpm record. Bob played piano as he and his friends harmonized on a medley that included ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’ and ‘Earth Angel.’ It was the first record Bob ever made, but the sound of his voice was already distinctive.
Bob continued to sing with the Jokers until the spring of 1958. In March of that year Kegan went to Florida on vacation with his parents. He was playing with a friend, diving into waves rebounding off a sea wall and riding them out into the ocean, when he missed a wave and landed headfirst in shallow water. He sustained a spinal cord injury that rendered him quadriplegic and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He continued his singing, however, and his friendship with Bob survived into adult life. For Bob, the fact that a contemporary – a healthy boy who was as ambitious about music as Bob himself was – could have his life frozen by a freak accident remained a sobering lesson. Years later Bob wrote to Kegan that when he reflected on what had happened to his friend, ‘I become speechless unto myself.’
The music Bob made with Larry Kegan was limited to summer camp and weekend visits into the Twin Cities. His first Hibbing band began as something of a game with boys he had known since early childhood. Just as Bob’s parents had encouraged their sons to take up musical instruments, so had other parents. Bill Marinac learned string bass. Larry Fabbro was interested in the guitar, and another friend, Chuck Nara, played drums. With Bob on piano, they constituted The Shadow Blasters. Bob was the most passionate about music and was soon in charge of the group, getting the boys to play in the style of Little Richard and his new favorite, Gene Vincent. In 1957 there was a variety show in the high school auditorium. When The Shadow Blasters hit the stage, the boys were wearing pink shirts, dark glasses, and had their hair brushed so it stuck up in mounds. Bob stood at the piano as they made a travesty of two Little Richard numbers. Teachers shook their heads as students laughed. But there was enough spirit for Bob and the boys to be invited to repeat their performance at the Junior College’s ‘College Capers’ review shortly afterward. It was another ragamuffin performance, the end of The Shadow Blasters, but students began to look at Zimbo with new eyes.
As their passion for music grew, Bob and John Bucklen began spending time at a music store on 1st Avenue, run by a man of Finnish descent named Hautala, who, it seemed to the boys, always had the last three inches of a cigar in his mouth. Hautala, who could barely speak English, patiently showed the boys catalogs of guitars from which he could order. Bob, who had recently used his pocket money to buy a cheap electric guitar from Sears Roebuck, keeping the guitar secret from his parents until he made all the payments, became excited about a solid-body Supro electric with a gold sunburst. The guitars were $95 each, but Bob and John Bucklen made a deal to buy two for a reduced price. Late into the evening Bob would strum his new Supro, trying to work out chord changes he had heard on records. Then, after school, he and Bucklen would get together and play the new changes, both plugging into Bob’s amplifier. Bob started talking about wanting to become ‘a music star.’ This was something many of his friends dreamed about too. But Bob was serious. ‘He had it calculated all the way,’ says Bucklen. ‘Each step, how he was gonna do it, and how you get to be a star.’
It soon became apparent that Bob was willing to bend the truth if he thought this would help him become a star. An early example of this came one weekend when Bob and Bucklen visited the Twin Cities, taking turns driving Abe Zimmerman’s 1956 Buick. Traveling south, Bob told Bucklen he had black friends in St. Paul. This was strangely impressive to Bucklen, and he was not sure if he believed Bob. His friend was always trying to put him on. They had invented a mind game called Glissendorf whereby they would say crazy things to see how people reacted. ‘Say a word,’ Bob would say. Whatever answer Bucklen gave, Bob replied: ‘Wrong word. I won.’
Another line might be: ‘Is it raining out?’
‘No.’
‘Well, okay then.’
That was Glissendorf. It left the other person wondering if they had missed something. Some people became quite angry about it. The more riled up they became, the funnier the two friends thought it was.
However, this was not a Glissendorf. Bob did know black people in St. Paul. They were the boys in Larry Kegan’s doo-wop group. Before introducing Bucklen to this part of his life, Bob said a curious thing that illustrated his willingness to manipulate people and facts to suit his ends. ‘When we meet anybody down there,’ he said, ‘tell them that we’re gonna cut a record, and you’re my bass player.’
Although a very quiet boy in many ways, there was a definite element of Bob showing off by telling people John Bucklen was his bass player. This flashy, one might say fearless, side to his character – a little of which he inherited from his sociable and extroverted mother – became more pronounced as he moved into his later teenage years. After his sixteenth birthday in 1957 Bob convinced his quiet, conservative father to let him get an ostentatious pink Ford convertible. Now Bob could cruise Howard Street on Saturday nights with the other teenagers. Shortly after he acquired the car, Abe, after much persuading by Bob, also helped his son buy a Harley Davidson motorcycle.
Unfortunately, Bob was impetuous and nervous by disposition, and it was not long before he had an accident with the motorcycle. He collided with a boy who had run out into the road. The child had to go by ambulance to the hospital but, luckily, he recovered. Another time Bob was riding his Harley with LeRoy Hoikkala and other friends when they came to the railroad crossing that separated Hibbing from the adjacent district of Brooklyn. A freight train was going by and they had to wait. Bob sat with his engine running, anxious to be moving. ‘He didn’t like to wait for anything, or anybody,’ says Hoikkala. The minute the caboose passed, Bob shot across the track. He was half way when he saw a second train bearing down on a parallel track. Bob dumped his bike on the strip of ground between the tracks, and lay there as the train rumbled by. ‘He almost got killed.’ Bob was too proud and aware of his image to show that he was scared by what had happened. ‘When the train was gone, he picked the bike up and didn’t say a word. He got on and took off.’
LeRoy Hoikkala, John Bucklen, and Bob considered themselves outsiders in Hibbing. They were not very articulate or sporty, and felt disconnected from the mainstream teenage social scene, which revolved around basketball games. ‘If you said any of us had a best friend, we kind of did, but we still were loners,’ says Hoikkala. ‘We did our own thing.’
Echo Star Helstrom, Bob’s first serious girlfriend, was another Hibbing teen who did not quite fit in. She was the youngest daughter of Matt and Martha Helstrom, whose respective parents were all from Finland. This made the Helstroms ‘Finlanders’ in the local argot. They lived in the woods at Maple Hill. Echo Star got her poetic name because she was born so long after her nearest sibling – ‘my mother said I was like a little echo’ – and because frost made a star pattern on the hospital window the day she was born. She was a strikingly attractive girl with white-blond hair, cast in the role of an outsider from an early age partly because the Helstroms lived in the woods. It was only three miles from town, a pleasant walk in summer, but far enough for Echo to think herself a country person and the girls in Hibbing as ‘city girls.’ She affected the look of a rebel, wearing a leather jacket and jeans, when most young girls were wearing poodle skirts. As Bob’s friend Luke Davich says, ‘She just had a wild look about her.’ Echo may have looked wild, but she was a warmhearted, sensitive, and upbeat person who did not share the popular enthusiasm for Rebel Without a Cause because it was ‘depressing’ and there was no need to go through life ‘being that angry.’
On weekends, Echo would often catch a ride into town with her friend Dee Dee Lockhart. One snowy night in 1957, as Echo and Dee Dee were crossing Howard Street on their way to the L&B Cafe, they saw Bob standing on the corner playing his guitar and singing. Echo thought Bob, whom she vaguely remembered talking to once before, was a ‘weirdo.’ Bob did not appear to be playing for money as there was no cup for coins and nobody stopped to hear him. For sheer joy, he was singing to himself in the snow. Echo thought it totally bizarre.
The girls settled in a booth and Echo ordered one of her special coke drinks – a mixture of chocolate and orange, or chocolate and cherry flavor, ‘just for variety.’ Bob came in with John Bucklen. Despite Echo’s opinion that Bob was weird, they all started talking and it turned out that Echo was another fan of the late-night radio show No-Name Jive and she loved the blues. Sometimes she listened to the radio all night, especially in summer when the signal was stronger and the reception clearer. Echo’s love for the blues immediately bound her to the boys. ‘My friends didn’t understand the intensity of the way we felt about the kind of music we liked,’ she says. Bob wanted to play piano, so they went next door to the Moose Lodge. Echo jimmied the lock with her penknife and Bob played boogie-woogie for her. ‘He was good!’ says Echo. ‘He could play the piano like an old blues guy.’ They exchanged telephone numbers and agreed to meet the next day. Bob wanted her to come to his house and hear his records.
For a month Echo, Bob, and John Bucklen buddied around together. Echo was used to having boys as friends and assumed Bob and Bucklen were now her music friends. Then one night, when they were at Bucklen’s house talking about movies, Bob shocked Echo by kissing her. ‘I was totally flabbergasted. Because I thought we were just buddies. I had no idea he was interested in me as a girlfriend.’ John Bucklen was obliged to make himself scarce while Bob and Echo spent the rest of the evening making out. Bucklen was often bemused by Bob’s success with girls. There was Judy Rubin from summer camp, whom Bob saw when he went to St Paul; he had dated fellow student Barb Hewitt for a while; and now he was with Echo, one of the best-looking girls in school. ‘I can remember not understanding it. I mean, he was sometimes very successful with girls. He was this little pudgy-faced kid, you know.’ Bucklen wanted a woman’s point of view, so he asked his sister. ‘What do you think that guy has?’
‘Well, he’s got the prettiest blue eyes,’ Ruth Bucklen replied.
It was also true that Bob was exciting company. ‘Nothing is boring when you are with Bob,’ says Bucklen. When they were not playing music, Bob’s legs jerked up and down with nervous energy and he tap-tap-tapped his cigarette in the ashtray. Bob made up fantastic stories and then told them as if they were gospel truth. Once he told Echo about how, when he was walking home from her house, he came upon a snake wrapped around a tree. He told the story with such conviction, making the snake in the tree so vivid, that she believed him for a while. ‘[Then] I thought, God, he made that up. There’s no snakes in trees in Minnesota.’ It was one of many examples of tall tales Bob would tell. Echo thought they were silly and unnecessary, but she later reflected that there was no harm in them. Bob was a fantasist, but not in a malicious way, and this was part of his charm.
Bob spent a lot of time with Echo at her home, and he enjoyed playing with her young nephew. Indeed, throughout his life Bob would show an interest in children and a natural ability to get along with them. But Echo noticed, as John Bucklen had, that Bob was less keen on spending time with his younger brother David. As Hibbing High was just two blocks from where Bob lived, Echo often went back there for lunch and she got the impression Bob resented sharing a bedroom with David. ‘Sometimes David would come around and want to talk to Bob, and Bob was like, No not now. He was irritated ’cause they lived in the same room and I suppose if you spend all your time with somebody you want to get away from them once in a while.’
Before she went to her part-time job at Feldman’s, Beatty Zimmerman would leave a lunch for Echo and Bob. After they ate, Bob played boogie-woogie for Echo on the baby grand piano. Bob’s grandmother was living with them – sleeping in the third bedroom – and one time she came home unexpectedly. ‘Quick, up the stairs!’ said Bob. He shut Echo in his bedroom. ‘In five minutes I want you to go out on the sun-deck porch,’ he said. ‘I’m going to tell my grandmother I’m going to the library.’ Bob made a great show of leaving the house. ‘I’m going to the library now!’ he called out. Then he ran around the back to catch Echo, who climbed out of his bedroom window and jumped off the sun-deck roof of the garage into his arms. ‘That was really silly,’ says Echo. Bob’s parents knew full well she came to the house for lunch, and Grandma Stone must have known, too. ‘It was totally unnecessary for him to do what he did. It was a game. It was always a game. He likes to play games and make a mystery out of things that don’t need to be done.’
Bob told Echo she was his ‘first love’ and gave her his identity bracelet to prove they were going steady. ‘We were in love,’ says Echo. ‘You can be sixteen, seventeen, and still be in love. Not just puppy love.’ They were also lovers, which was relatively unusual for teenagers of the time, years before the advent of the contraceptive pill. But, as with most people in Bob’s life, Echo did not know the whole story. Twenty years later Bob told her that, although she had been his first love, she had not been his first lover. He said he lost his virginity to one of her friends. ‘He was a very naughty boy,’ says Echo, wistfully. ‘But he was so sweet. He wasn’t the football-player, hunky kind of guy. He didn’t have a great physique. But to me he was very cute, and I liked his personality. [He was] very magnetic …even then.’ It seemed to Echo that there was an air of magic about their lives.
As Bob and Echo were falling in love with each other, Bob also pursued his ambitions to be in a real band. His biker friend LeRoy Hoikkala was learning to play drums in the jazz style at the time and another friend, Monte Edwardson, was becoming a good guitar player. Bob suggested they jam together and the trio was soon banging about in the garage behind Bob’s house. This was the beginning of Bob’s most significant high school band, The Golden Chords. Although Edwardson was the most accomplished musician, Bob decided what songs to play, and how they should play them, even suggesting drum parts. He managed to be in charge without being obnoxious. ‘He knew exactly what he wanted,’ says Hoikkala. ‘He had a lot of confidence.’ As Hoikkala says, Bob was always himself; he developed a look of his own, a sound of his own, and adopted phrases – like ‘Hey, catch ya later’ – that other people might not use. The boys were also impressed with the way Bob could improvise chords on the guitar and piano. It was partly because of his chording that they got the band’s name. The ‘Golden’ part was inspired by LeRoy’s gold-colored drum kit; ‘Chords’ was due to Bob’s playing. As he said, ‘Hey, I’m a chordy kinda guy.’
Staff at Hibbing High regularly organized what Principal Kenneth Pederson called ‘convocations,’ a fancy word for having kids put on a show. On February 6, 1958, the auditorium was full for the coronation of the homecoming queen, and a celebration of the school’s sporting triumphs. This was the annual Jacket Jamboree. There was a program of entertainment including a magic show, some singing, and a performance by The Golden Chords. Hoikkala rapped out a beat on his sparkling golden drums. Monte Edwardson’s electric guitar screamed through his amplifier and, in the middle, bouncing up and down at the piano, Little Richard-style, was Bobby Zimmerman, hair up, feet apart, singing ‘Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay’ as loud as he could. When Bob broke a pedal off the piano the students howled with laughter. Principal Pederson was appalled. ‘He and the others were carrying on in a terrible way, right on the stage, and it got out of hand,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t tolerate it.’ He cut Bob’s microphone and, when Bob persisted in hollering, he pulled the curtain. It was not so much the noise, it was the way Bob was behaving. ‘He got so crazy.’
That evening Bob got up on stage again, this time without the band. Echo was in the audience. When she saw Bob, she squirmed down into her seat with embarrassment. It was too terrible to watch him making a fool of himself. Her friend Dee Dee insisted she sit up and listen. To a Little Richard tune, Bob was yelling that he gotta girl and her name was Echo. ‘Oh my God, he’s singing about me!’ Again they cut the mike. But Bob was elated. ‘What did ya think?’ he asked Echo when he met her outside. ‘What did ya think?’ She thought it was romantic.
A few weeks later The Golden Chords competed in a talent contest that was part of the Chamber of Commerce’s Winter Frolics. The show was held at the Memorial Building, an all-purpose civic arena shaped like an aircraft hangar. The Golden Chords came on after a succession of dreary performances including a tap-dancing display. ‘The kids were just screaming and hollering. They loved it,’ says Hoikkala. ‘We got up there and [gave them] some music with feeling. It was something different, something the kids very shortly after that really got into.’ The band felt cheated when first prize went to a pantomime artist.
