Morells – Many happy returns
It takes a certain mindset to go digging for gold in a mountain of 10,000 records, but Thompson has always had what it takes to persist. “Even if you’ve been through 150, if you find one that’s great, you get all excited,” he says.
Sometimes the songs are brought to him by the group’s devoted corps of fans, though they’re seldom sure where the material originated, when it was recorded, or who owns the rights. The song “Hot Rod Baby”, a rockabilly rave-up culled from a fan’s tape, sent the band on a particularly protracted search for the authors. It sounded to Thompson like “some really primitive record from the ’50s. It turns out it was cut by an ’80s band from Pittsburgh called Skinny Vincent. They did a great job of re-creating that raw sound.”
There are some new original tunes on the album as well, including a hilarious country-tinged monologue by Whitney, “Don’t Let Your Baby Buy A Car”, that follows the devolution of a relationship after a woman gets her wheels. “Lou used to have a big hat he’d put on to warn people we were going to do a country song, so they could go to the bathroom,” Thompson says with a laugh. “Tell you what,” Whitney admits, “I’d put that hat on, and off they’d go.”
Another original, Terry’s “Mom’s Got A Headache”, deals with domestic issues of another sort, in this case a mom who’s had enough out of her misbehaving child, but told from the child’s point of view. “It’s a kid’s song, or rather it was gonna be a kid’s song on a little record I was doing,” Terry says. “I brought it in because we’re not limited to doing anything in this band. We’ll do anything, even a kid’s song. As for writing it, I’ve got kids, and it’s pretty much what you hear. That’s how it is.”
The history of the Morells, now stretching across decades, seems almost ancient, but bears retelling even at this late date. It begins with Whitney, who grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, but didn’t gain much exposure to music until he visited his stepmother’s family in east Tennessee. They taught him to play “Wildwood Flower” on the guitar, but his deeper interest in playing and singing came later, when he was a student at East Tennessee State University in the mid-’60s. There he played in band that backed up singers such as Arthur Conley (“Sweet Soul Music”). For a short time, he joined a version of the Swingin’ Medallions, who had a hit (prior to Whitney’s involvement) with “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love)”.
The Medallions split into two bands, which both laid claim to the name, and Whitney joined the version that eventually morphed into the Pieces Of Eight. After college, he moved to Springfield to take a job selling real estate, but that didn’t last long. He kept his interest in music all the while, though. “I played music for three reasons. I wanted to make money, sleep late, and meet girls,” he says.
Thompson and Terry simultaneously take the bait. “So it hasn’t worked so well after all,” they say.
Whitney and Thompson met at a music store in 1972 and started playing the bar-band circuit in Southwestern Missouri. They did country tunes, Chuck Berry songs, and eventually, some original material and the sort of rock ‘n’ roll oddities that later became their specialty.
“When I started playing music, the two scariest words in the English language were ‘original song,'” Whitney says. “Like some band would say, ‘We’re gonna do a song that the bass player wrote now,’ and people would be leaving for the doors immediately. Now if you don’t do original material, you’re looked on with disdain, but back then you would only play songs that would get you hired. Every band in town would do the same songs, and the ones that would do them the best got hired. So you’d gravitate toward guys that could play better. I noticed right away that Donnie, he’s got that same sound that the records do. I figured we might find some work.”
Thompson occasionally manned the soundboard for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, then in their mid-’70s heyday, and played guitar for folk-rock duo Brewer & Shipley. In their spare time, Whitney and Thompson borrowed some equipment and recorded a few songs, one of which, a pounding version of the Ventures’ “Driving Guitars”, sold substantially as a single, particularly in England, and was written up in various publications.
In 1977, the pair founded the Symptoms, a band that included future Morells drummer Ron Gremp and keyboardist Maralie (who goes by her first name only). The band recorded a dynamite version of “Double Shot”, which charted in a few cities, as well as an excruciatingly hard-to-find LP, Don’t Blame The Symptoms (only 500 copies were minted), that featured a thrash-and-burn version of “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound Of Music. Really.
That band split, however, and the original version of the Skeletons followed, with Whitney, Thompson, drummer Bobby Lloyd Hicks and former Daredevil Randle Chowning (later replaced by Nick Sibley) on keys. Other singles followed, including “Gas Money”, recorded under the guise of Bobby Lloyd & the Windfall Prophets. During the gas crunch of the ’70s, it was the song that asked the musical question, “Wouldn’t it be neat/If we could run on surplus wheat?”
The group sundered prematurely after Whitney, Thompson and Hicks were hired to back Steve Forbert, who at the time was enjoying his moment as the latest in a long string of “new Dylans.” The cynical Whitney often clashed with his poetic-minded boss, who got the last word by drawing a rather cruel portrait of the bassist on the song “Laughter Lou (Who Needs You?)” on his album Little Stevie Orbit. “I don’t care,” Whitney cracked some years later. “After all, I haven’t had a song written about me since ‘You’re So Vain’.”