Stories and Tales

"Back in the day, the school had pay assemblies. For ten cents admission you could sit in the auditorium and enjoy some form of entertainment, usually music, to benefit worthy causes such as the spanish language club or the chess club.

The Centurys donned their tux jackets and set up behind the curtain on stage. Pat's brother had loaned us his Fender bassman amp and Pat had a Fender dual showman amp. Combined with the Ampeg and the Silvertone this set up was about as close to a Marshall stack as you could get those days.

The kids began filing in and there was something in the air, anticipation that some thing unusual was going to happen. Outside of a quiet murmur, all you could hear was the buzz of the amps and an occassional nervous tuning note or rimshot. The auditorium was dark and all you could see was the red lights of the fully powered up amplifiers. The Fabulous Centurys began to play their signature "Gandy Dancer" behind the curtain which slowly began to rise. I could feel the rush of heated air, as the kids started yelling, first hit my ankles, then knees and then wash over us in a tidal wave of rock and roll nirvana. We benefited greatly by the fact that due to country music dominance our kids had never heard the kind of hard driving rock that we had fallen into so, as they say, the crowd went wild.

One pay assembly we decided to do our James Brown review. While we would chant, "baby please don't go," Wink would grab the mike and fall on his knees screaming "please, please, please" and one of us would put a robe around him, console him, and get him back on his feet until we would repeat the whole thing progressively more manic. When Wink would hit his knees, screaming, the kids would rush the stage. Our assistant principal Floyd Crouch, fearing a riot, came on stage and patted Wink on the back to get him to quit. Wink, thinking it was one of us shrugged him off violently causing Mr. Crouch to stumble back and fall down. At that point like it or not we had total anarchy for which we spent several hours in the principal's office trying to explain why we shouldn't be expelled.

Subsequent assemblies featured such innovations as synchronized movement choreography with jumping and humping to tunes like "Good Golly Miss Molly", Pat playing guitar behind his neck or picking with his teeth and this was way before Hendrix. (Footnote: Once we went out to Eastwood Country Club and saw Jimi Hendrix as a young lead guitar player for Ike and Tina Turner, also remembering MissWiggles and Curly Mays.) The final curtain went down on pay assemblies when, as Whit Snell says because I didn't remember, our version of "Help Me Rhonda" caused the kids to get up and march around the auditorium and no one would stop. Time came for class and we kept going until they shut the power off to the entire building. It was banned from then on and to this day as legend has it."

_Will Bellamy, April 2002