The Courier-Journal from Louisville, Kentucky • Page 15

4 '7 4 The now-defunct Spanky Lee, above, got WLRS to play (jS tftvl I Its 1990 CD, but only after years of talking with the vf station's DJs. The CD by the Hammerheads, left, got S. lj 7 aP'y other cities but not In the band's hometown. In Local bands are missing from most of Louisville radio, but it wasn't always that way By RICK UATTINSLY, Special Writer record companies that you had something. We worked hard at promoting our THE TUESDAY before Thanksgiving, WQMF radio extent that the Sultans.

Monarchs and disc jockey Duke Meyer played la block of songs from the 1960s to promote the station's "AU-W Saturday. He played 'the Doors, followed by the Beatles. Then he announced that the next song had been thing, so that's when we decided to start SAMBO." The A and in the new company's name stood for Allen and Martin. The BO stood for "booking office." The came from Jack Sanders, a disc jockey at a new radio station in town. The WAKY era Certain events will always be remembered In Louisville.

The 1937 flood. The 1974 tornado. The day in 1959 that WAKY radio burst upon the Louisville airwaves by playing "Purple People Eater" non-stop for 24 hours. "That was the beginning of an era," Martin says. "The Carnations were just getting started, and we immediately went down there and promoted ourselves.

The station would sponsor dances that we played at, and we devel- CarnationsTren-dells all had songs in the top 20 almost continuously." Several of the songs did attract national attention. The Tren-dells' "Nite Owl" was picked up by Capitol Records, while the Monarchs' "Look Homeward Angel" was sold to Monument. But that's not to say that the national labels came running once a group hit the charts in Louisville. "Ray and I continuously met with these people," Martin says. "You can't just take them something one time.

You have to call on them repeatedly, take them to lunch, talk with them, establish a relationship and develop friendships. It wasn't magic that all this happened; it to the nromotmg our an. compact discs at several record shops in town. Black Diamond Network, a distribution group representing local music, offered recordings by 28 local bands at its booth at last summer's Kentucky State Fair. The band Spanky Lee heard its record on Louisville airwaves a couple of years ago, and there are some local radio shows, most notably those on WFPL-FM, that occasionally feature local groups.

But for the most part, the heyday of hometown radio playing local bands has past. How did that happen, especially in a town with as rich a local music heritage as Louisville? The early years In 1954, a pair of high school students named Floyd Lewellyn and Hardy Martin were in a band called Floyd, Sam the Black Mountain Boys. They cut a record called "Big Bad Moon," which was issued on 78-rpm and received local airplay. "Pee Wee King helped us," Martin recalls. "He told us how to deal with the radio stations, and we were able to get airplay on several country stations in the area.

We were just high school kids. In fact, one morning they played our record over the intercom at Southern High School. I was sort of embarrassed." In 1957, Martin and Lewellyn, who had changed his name to Ray Allen, started a rock 'n' roll band called the Carnations. A few months later they joined forces with a vocal group called the Tren-dells and a singer named Paul Penny. Soon they were making records and getting airplay.

Other groups in town started coming to Allen and Martin, asking for help. "We were promoting and booking ourselves," Martin says, "and getting our records played. The Monarchs and Sultans said they Wanted to do the same oute worked naru r- that tne No. 1 in Louisville in 1968 and that he would give a $25 gift certificate to the first caller who could identify the group. "In a heartbeat, the phone was ringing," says Gary Guthrie, the WQMF program director who was responsible for inserting the song into the station's play list.

"Everyone knew who the band was." The song was "I Belong to Nobody'! by a Louisville band called Soul Inc. Guthrie, an architect of the "classic rock" format, which WQMF recently switched to, thought it was important to include such a record. Local bands, he reasoned, were a major part of Louisville radio during the 1960s. i WRKA, the "oldies" station that plays more pop-oriented tunes from the 1950s! to 70s, also plays songs by such local bands as the Monarchs, whose "Look Homeward Angel" is a regular part ot the station's repertoire. The station haaj devoted entire weekends to "Louisville's Own" programming.

i "That music is great," says Andy Bar-i ber, RKA's program director. "Some of hose songs by the Sultans, Cosmo the Counts, the Mystics and the Epics ara great and still hold up today." But switch to a Louisville radio station that plays contemporary music and you'll seldom hear a local act. I It's not because the bands aren't rej cording. You can find their tapes and fe4lfhe'6obViey-iJournal-SCENE''Jan. 2, 1993 oped close relationships with Jack Sanders and the other disc jockeys." The first group that SAMBO signed was the Sultans, whose lead singer was Tommy "Cosmo" Cosdon.

The Monarchs soon followed. Martin and Allen immediately took their new bands into recording studios. "There was no place to cut a record in Louisville, so we went to Cincinnati and Nashville," Martin says. "We paid for the records ourselves and issued them on our own label. "It was hard to sell something to a national label by a group that didn't have a big name, so you hf to generate first to Show the took a lot of hard work." 1 At first SAMBO operated from a rented office on Bardstown Road.

A couple of years later, it bought a white frame house on Taylorsville Road in Jefferson-town and moved the booking office there. "The house had a large living room," Martin remembers, "so we bought a couple of tape recorders and some microphones, put up some insulation to deaden it, and started using it for practice recording. We liked doing that so much that we added on to the building and made an actual recording studio." The' boklrtg, bffic'e' became Triangle Talent and the shidio operated urider the.