Bill Quary and the Rollarena

It’s the summer of 1966. The seminal British Invasion band, the Yardbirds, just finished playing sold out show at the classic Avalon Ballroom on Catalina Island, the boat loaded up and ready to take everybody back to the mainland, but nobody can find guitarist Jeff Beck.  Pulling off this show was the result of months of careful planning for East Bay promoter, Bill Quarry.  He had to book the enormous concert hall, book the Yardbirds at the peak of their career, rent a steamship for the fans to take over from San Pedro and sell tickets (the whole package cost only $10 each!) for this concert that would not even be attempted today.  It all seemed to go off without a hitch until a local girl caught the eye of Jeff Beck after the show and if one of the biggest rockstars in the world holds up the boat, the boat waits.[i]The phrase “herding cats” comes to mind when looking over the career of Bill Quarry.

Men like Quarry were the glue that held rock and roll together.  While the Beatles were exploring their spiritual side, the Grateful Dead were exploring the limits of human LSD intake and all the teenage bands that were spawned by the 1960’s rock and roll boom were exploring their hairstyles and instruments, promoters like Bill Quarry had the thankless job of making sure the bands showed up to the right place on time, had an audience of adoring fans to play to and got paid at the end of the night.  While the notoriously hedonistic world of 60’s rock swirled around him, Quarry spent most of his twenties running his promotion business out of his house in Hayward, California.  He wake up early to be on East Coast time, make endless phone calls, create flyers and usually only leaving the house to drop off the homemade commercials to radio stations and attend his shows on the weekend.[ii]  Through his hard work though, Quarry’s presence dominated the East Bay music scene, with no name or band too big to pass through and play his Teens N Twenties concerts and dances.  While his counterpart across the bay in San Francisco, Bill Graham, thrived off the iconic hippie music scene of the Height District, Quarry presided over an area that was distinctly suburban and more blue collar.  All over the country in the mid and late 60’s there were promoters like Quarry, who had no training in the entertainment industry, but processed the right combination of brains, disposition and energy to make sure kids got their much needed rock and roll fix. 
  As the baby boomer generation has aged, the nostalgia for their salad days has produced a rich area for historians of rock and roll, but much of that has been from the perspective of the musicians, fans and critics, with little attention being paid to promoters, expect for the few famous ones like Graham.  Promoters that spent decades overseeing a music scene, as Quarry did in Alameda County, have an overarching perspective on the evolution of youth communities.  They managed not just the shows themselves, but also how the shows interacted with the community.  Bill Quarry’s story flushes out the history of rock and roll and tells a great deal of what life was like in the East Bay during the era.
  While still attending Hayward High School in the 1950’s (before the beautiful Greco building was closed down due to earthquake damage) Bill Quarry had the drive to organize events for his peers based around his interests.  He became something of a liaison officer between his classmates and the Hayward Area Recreational Department who put on weekly dances for teens, but this was short lived as H.A.R.D proved to have too many conservative rules and restrictions for teens who wanted to freely dance and intermingle while listening to early rock and roll.  With his friend, Gary Vanier, Quarry was able to procure the Moose Club in Castro Valley for private dances under the effectively simple name of Teens N Twenties Dances.  With the money they raised from the dances, along with lessons to middle school tweens on how dance like the high school kids, Bill and Gary pursued another of their interests and founded the Continental Car Club.[iii]  According to an article in the Hayward Daily Review in 1958 the car club was “not all tooling and talk.”  Their fundraisers were not just dances and performances from local musicians either, but the Continental Car Club’s main objective was to “provide members with a fuller knowledge of safe driving methods” by working closely with the California State Highway Patrol.[iv]  This might seem corny or worthy of skepticism in a 21st century context, but it is completely in fitting with Quarry’s personality who never aimed to simply entertain his young audience, but also to provide a service for them.  Often times he made little money putting on shows because his reluctance to raise ticket prices above two dollars, not wanting to exclude his teen audience.  Also, Quarry went out of his way to give local East Bay bands a chance to make a name for themselves by putting on “battle of the bands” concerts and allowing them to open for big name acts.[v]
  These early forays into to promoting mainly consisted of plastering diners, drive-in’s and other teen hotspots with flyers for upcoming shows.  Sometimes Quarry would tie a flaming trashcan to his the roof of his car and cover it in flyers to get attention as he drove back and forth on “The Strip”.  The Strip was about a two-mile stretch of East 14th Street between a drive-in theater on Hayward and a drive-in in San Leandro, that young people would cruise back and forth on Friday and Saturday nights in bumper-to-bumper traffic.  When asked how the local police felt about lighting a trashcan on fire atop a car in crowded area in an attempt to excite teenagers, Quarry laughed and said, “For some reason, it was [seen as] clean fun.”  He notes the lack of crime or violence surrounding weekend Strip activities and the general safety of the suburban cities.[vi]  This, as well, seems incredibly quaint by today’s standards, but it is telling of what teen culture was like in the late 50’s and early 60’s, that young people from miles around would come together in a single area to engage in principally innocent and benign activities.  It also might be that this is how the Strip was viewed from the eyes of Quarry (who was probably both popular and gentle) or how he remembers those days as an older person looking back on his youth.  David Glassberg notes that, “every person is his or her own historian, creating idiosyncratic version of the past that make sense given personal situations and experience.”[vii]  Most adults look back on the era of their teen years being as being wholly “simpler time” and then the world becoming more complex and sinister about the same time adult responsibilities overtake youthful blithe.  This phenomenon can be seen directly on this topic in nostalgic movies about teens cruising similar “Strips”, such as American Graffiti (which was made in the 70’s about the early 60’s) and Dazed and Confused (made in the 90’s about the mid-70’s).  Both movies are themed around a small town teen culture of innocence, just before the reality of adulthood is realized and the world is forever changed.  The truth is the world has always been as complex and sinister as ever, but the narrow margins through which we viewed the world as children and teens give our memories a sunnier color.
      For Bill Quarry the transition to adulthood would take two forms.  The first was meeting an Oakland promoter Manie Schwartz one day while pinning up flyers.  Schwartz raised Quarry to a more professional level and gave him access to nationally known acts like Fats Domino, Duane Eddy and Jerry Lee Lewis.  The second event almost ended Quarry’s career just as it was taking off, which was being drafted into the United States Army as a military policeman in 1959.  He would spend a year serving in San Francisco and then a year in Korea.  Upon returning home in 1962, Quarry would find the Strip just as he left it, but the music scene had effectively dried up.  All the excitement of live, loud and wild performances of 50’s rock and roll gave way to vacuous, safe and gooey pop in the early 60’s.  Elvis was in the army, Buddy Holly was dead, Jerry Lee Lewis was blacklisted, Little Richard was making gospel records, leaving behind the likes of sappy Frankie Avalon and novelty-based Chubby Checker.  Rock and roll was not dead, but it was in a certainly coma.  Along with the shortage of enthusiastic music, was a shortage of enthusiasm to see live music and Quarry came back to Hayward as, he puts it with a laugh, “a regular working citizen.”  His choice to join the carpenter’s union proved beneficial because it gave him access to the large Carpenter’s Hall in Hayward when the Beatles suddenly exploded onto America in 1964.[viii]  Four years later rock critic (thanks to the Beatles there was such a position) Nic Cohn wrote, “[The Beatles] changed everything.  They happened at a time when American pop was bossed by trash, by dance crazes and slop ballads, and they let all that bad air out…. They played harsh, unsickly, and they weren’t phoney…. They brought it home exactly how conformist American had really become, they woke people up, they crystallized all kids of vague discontents.”[ix]
  The impact of the Beatles was not at all vague for Bill Quarry.  Right away he noticed the interest kids had in music again, which was palpable in the dozens of local bands that sprang up in imitation of British Invasion rock and roll.  Bands like the Harbinger Complex, Peter Wheat & The Breadmen, The Spyders and Stanly and the Fendermen all came out of the area of Hayward, San Leandro and Fremont in the mid-60s.  There was a Batman themed band called Gotham City Crime Fighters that eventually dropped the capes and masks to become the renowned funk band, Tower of Power.[x]  All the bands were young (many still in high school) and inexperienced, but they were inspired that music was no longer the realm of polished elites with movie star smiles.  Guitarist and rock historian Lenny Kaye was the first to put out a completion of these bands, and similar ones from across the country, in 1972 called Nuggets- Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968.  In the liner notes he wrote these bands, “exemplified the berserk pleasure that comes from being on-stage outrageous, the relentless middle-finger drive and determination offered only by rock and roll at its finest... and as these kids, who more often than not, could’ve lived up the street, or at least in the same town, there was no question what even localized success could mean in terms of universal attraction.”[xi] Anybody could play rock and roll now; all they needed was a place to play. 
 

Quarry convinced the carpenter’s union for use of the hall every Friday night and went back to promoting on the Strip the way he used to: flyers, flaming trash cans and all.  He also brought back the name Teens N Twenties to advertise, but this time he came at the venture with the professionalism and ambition of adulthood.  The shows quickly outgrew the small Carpenter’s Hall and he was able to lease the roller skating rink located right in the middle of the Strip called the Rollarena in San Leandro.  Here he would put the local bands on stage with their heroes, bands like the Yardbirds, Van Morrison’s band Them, the Byrds, the Everly Brothers, The Standells, and Paul Revere and the Raiders.  Quarry even personally picked up Neil Diamond from the airport when “Solitary Man” was the number one song in the country, brought him to play at the Rollarena and paid him $1000 in cash at the end of the night.[xii] 
  Though, San Francisco was only about twenty miles away and enjoying its legendary renaissance of heavy, blues-based jam sound that defined hippiedom, the East Bay scene remained remarkably untouched by the San Francisco rock revolution.  Local bands did cross over to some degree, but as San Francisco Chronicle music critic, Joel Selvin, put it, “the teens at the Rollarena hadn’t all washed the Brylcreem out of their hair.”[xiii]  The suburban, working class teens were skeptical of the social and political mutiny that came with music from the Height and in that way were more representative of other suburban teens from across the country who wanted to play and hear rock and roll, but not necessarily “turn on, tune in, drop out.”[xiv]  It is likely that the San Francisco scene was in such the midst of counterculture that acts that tended to be more pop like Neil Diamond and Paul Revere and the Raiders found more receptive audiences in the East Bay.
  Bill Quarry admits that he regrets not making inroads into to San Francisco when he had the chance, but as his reputation grew he was able to book larger shows at venues like the Oakland Coliseum, Frenchy’s in Hayward and the Alameda County Fairgrounds.  Quarry was involved in the concert that is often considered the epitome of the changing time: the infamous Altamont Speedway Festival with the Rolling Stones in the December of 1969.  Charged with the impossible task of managing concession stands for the show, Quarry found himself in the logistical nightmare of running a single concession both for all 200,000 concert goers and with no one to control the crowd but a group of hired bikers.  He was glad to have any security though as he recalls a optimistic entrepreneur who showed up with a truck full of oranges to sell and within twenty minutes the man was overrun, every single orange gone and not a single one paid for.[xv]  As can be witnessed in the documentary Gimme Shelter the hired Hells Angles security got violent and abused the crowd more than it protected them and a fan was stabbed to death right in front of the stage during song “Sympathy for the Devil.”[xvi]  The roads were so jammed for days that Quarry found himself having to sleep in a trailer for two days before he could make it out of the concert area.[xvii]
  The nature of rock and roll had had evolved again at the end of the 1960’s, as the garage bands who played small shows faded away for a time, leaving a music industry centered around massive concerts, concept albums and musical one-upmanship.  Quarry continued to promote shows into the early 80’s, but the were all large concerts, put on only a few times a year and ran much more professionally.  Gone were the days of the Rollarena $2 shows every weekend that would put Peter Wheat & The Breadmen on stage with the Byrds.  Most of the local bands disappeared as members went off to college or were drafted into the army and the big name bands went on to playing arena concerts that encouraged fans to sit in reverence rather than dance.  The baby boomers had grown up and found the world was, in fact, a complicated and sinister place.
  A music scene is by its nature an ephemeral community of people at a certain phase of their life.  Historians David Kyvig and Myron Marty would define this as an “intentional community” that organizes around a charismatic figure, or in this case, the multiple figures of the bands.[xviii]  The scene and fandom were used as a social identifier, but it is connected to a particular time and place that the participants of will inevitably out grow or physically leave.  In this way it is a unique community to historically study.  Aside from the records made, the only way to view the scene is through the memories of people who inevitably look back with the romantic notions of youth.  One of the reasons the mid-1960s is exceptional is the fact there were so many prolific scenes like the East Bay across the country, as appose to later bubbles of musical flourishing like New York City’s punk scene in the late 70’s or Seattle’s grunge scene in the early 90’s.  San Francisco was a stand-out in a sea of scenes, but really more because of the flamboyant counterculture than anything musically extraordinary.  The East Bay scene was not a stand-out, but Quarry’s experiences are informative of the time, place and youth culture.  Rock and roll played a central role in the community and in looking at that we are informed of the larger story of what rock and roll was like in the mid to late 60’s.  From a trash can on fire on the Strip to the fatal stabbing of fan at Altamont, rock and roll and youth culture went through a dramatic transformation in the span of a few short years.