As I turned around, I was face-to-face with a row of badges and shotguns. I walked out in the middle of all this to ask the mob to remain calm. I guess I didn’t realize how volatile the situation was. They followed us to the police station where they proceeded to overturn cars and to throw rocks and bottles at the police. As we were leaving the stage, the police walked up and hand cuffed the band member who had been found with the joints. We played that night to a very large and enthusiastic crowd of college students. They found two joints on one of the band members but said they would let him go since it was a bomb they were looking for. Under the pretext of a bomb threat, they searched the entire bus and its contents and even strip-searched everyone on board. On one occasion, we were stopped by the police as we approached the campus of Northeast Missouri State College where we were headlining a concert. The bus stood out way too much and we were always getting stopped by the police or assaulted by rednecks. After our engagement, Buddy Miles followed us in. It wasn’t unusual to look around and see Rod Stewart standing next to you and it seemed like the Allman Brothers were on the bill about every other week or so. He got us a gig at Beavers in Chicago’s Rush Street district where all the major groups played. It was about this time that a good friend of mine, Mike Wendling, started booking the band. We covered songs by groups such as Blood, Sweat & Tears and Electric Flag, but we were also experimenting a lot with original material that combined traditional soul and R&B sounds with our new instrumentation and musical influences. Billy met an early death in a car wreck a few years later. I hired a singer, Billy Wicks from Springfield, to add a different dimension to the group. Slink Rand, a young guitarist from Carthage, Illinois, joined the group and my brother Dennis Tieken, who was still too young to be playing nightclubs, played drums. ![]() Bix and I remained good friends for years after his stint in the band ended and we were all saddened by his untimely death in the early nineties. He had a big-city attitude and was a very funny guy. What a great guy Bix was and a major influence on the band as well. The 8-piece band featured an extremely tight horn section – Russ Phillips from Chicago on trombone, Ron Schaller on trumpet, Les Fonza on baritone sax and myself on tenor sax.īix Clements came down from Detroit about that time and joined the band on bass. In the seventies, Ron moved to California and has since played with many famous artists including Willie Nelson, Roger Miller and Canned Heat. Ron left the group when he joined the army but returned to play with my brother’s band a few years later. Musicians that were a part of the Rockers at one time or another include Ron Shumake on bass. We just didn’t think about how crazy it was then, but looking back it seems a miracle that we’re alive. The plane coughed and sputtered and almost stalled out a couple of times along the way, but we made it home. The plane had no navigation instruments and it was pitch black that night so it was a challenge to follow the Mississippi River back to Quincy. It finally coughed a few times and started up so we jumped in the plane and took off. So there we were out on the runway, spinning the prop by hand while shooting ether into the carburetor. By the time we were ready to fly back to Quincy at 2:00 am, the temperature had dropped to -10° and the plane’s gas line had frozen. Although the thermometer read 0° when we took off, the flight to Burlington was uneventful. I especially remember one time when we were playing a teen club in Burlington, Iowa. ![]() Sometimes Jack would borrow his dad’s single engine plane and he and I would fly to gigs together. When I look back, I can’t believe I lived to tell this and certainly wouldn’t advise it to any readers. Jack Inghram, Ron Lepper and I all had high-powered motorcycles and after many gigs we would head to the expressway and drag race anyone who was interested until the wee hours of the morning. Dennis grew to become a big influence on me and on the band over the years. He was pretty young at the time, but it took him about three hours after joining the band to grow up. About this time my teenage brother Dennis Tieken joined the band on drums.
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