Will Bellamy - The Century's
......The first paying gig"As soon as we learned about three and a half songs we accepted our first paying gig. It was a birthday party for one of the Hasslocher girls. The pay was phenomenal, a dozen free meals at Jim's Frontier Drive-in, on the coolest end of the main drag. We were content with instrumental tunes until some one pointed out that a vocalist could add a new dimension to the band and possibly make us even more attractive to the ladies. As I recall we gave Rex Foster a try at a job in the North East High School, now MacArthur, cafeteria. Rex , at that time, had developed a rather quirky Shakespearean delivery to many of the day's big hits by Little Richard, Chuck Berry and the omniscient Elvis Presley. One fan compared Rex's singing to a bowling alley, sorry Rex.
Next was Wink Kelso who had already made a claim to fame by covering "Hound Dog" in his fifth grade pre-pubescent voice. With voice now properly deepened he did present an amazing repertoire of material from Jerry Lee Lewis to a fairly convincing routine from the James Brown and his Famous Flames Revue, "Baby Please Don't Go". So Wink was in and became the center of attention, thusly attracting most of the female adoration, dammit."
_Will Bellamy, April 2002
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