About this time my teenage brother Dennis Tieken joined the band on drums. He was pretty young at the time, but it took him about three hours after joining the band to grow up. Dennis grew to become a big influence on me and on the band over the years.

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. When I look back, I can't believe I lived to tell this and certainly wouldn't advise it to any readers.

Sometimes Jack would borrow his dad's single engine plane and he and I would fly to gigs together. I especially remember one time when we were playing a teen club in Burlington, Iowa. Although the thermometer read 0° when we took off, the flight to Burlington was uneventful. 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. So there we were out on the runway, spinning the prop by hand while shooting ether into the carburetor. It finally coughed a few times and started up so we jumped in the plane and took off. 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. The plane coughed and sputtered and almost stalled out a couple of times along the way, but we made it home. We just didn't think about how crazy it was then, but looking back it seems a miracle that we're alive.

Musicians that were a part of the Rockers at one time or another include Ron Shumake on bass. Ron left the group when he joined the army but returned to play with my brother's band a few years later. In the seventies, Ron moved to California and has since played with many famous artists including Willie Nelson, Roger Miller and Canned Heat.

Rick Ruggerio, a Culver Stockon College student from New York, joined the Rockers on guitar after we drove over to Canton, Missouri to hear him play. Other band members included Rod Hibbert (of Rod & the Satellites) on guitar, Gary Hendron on bass and Curt Wacholz on keyboards. Les Fonza played baritone sax and Ron Schaller played trumpet during the last years of the.Rockers.
 

For more than a decade, Freddie Tieken & the Rockers appeared at just about every nightclub, teen dance, coliseum, hall, gymnasium, ballroom, roller-skating rink, flatbed truck, frat party and prom in the central Midwest. We also covered the state and county fair circuit, playing with such groups as Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs and Tommy Rydell.

There were no musical pigeonholes in those days. No black music. No white music. No heavy metal. No alternative. It was all just rock'n'roll and you knew when The Rockers rolled into town there was going to be a party.

In 1999 a Freddie Tieken & the Rockers CD was released with cuts from
the Live and By Popular Demand albums along with some previously
unreleased recordings.

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.

Bix Clements came down from Detroit about that time and joined the band on bass. What a great guy Bix was and a major influence on the band as well. He had a big-city attitude and was a very funny guy. 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.

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. I hired a singer, Billy Wicks from Springfield, to add a different dimension to the group. Billy met an early death in a car wreck a few years.later.

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.

It was about this time that a good friend of mine, Mike Wendling, started booking the band. He got us a gig at Beavers in Chicago's Rush Street district where all the major groups played. 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. After our engagement, Buddy Miles followed us in.

Mike shared an apartment across the street from Beavers with another good friend, Denny Juette. Their rooftop was the place to be for partying and people watching. Rush Street really hasn't changed that much. There were young people everywhere. Their apartment was above a club called Lolly's and I remember that Dr. John was playing when we were there.

It was a great time musically, but we had a hard time fitting in. Rockers fans who came to our gigs expecting the old song list were disappointed. A lot of our new tunes were not exactly danceable material and that had been a large part of the Rockers' appeal in the day.

We were building a new fan base of mostly college students and counter-culture types but it was hard being on the road with eight mouths to feed. The horn section eventually left to pursue their respective educations and to get jobs where they could actually make some money.

Consequently, the vehicles that got us from gig to gig almost took on their own personalities. We spent so much time in them that they became like another band member after a while.

During much of the Freddie Tieken & the Rockers days, we traveled in a converted hearse. What didn't fit in the back of the hearse went in the casket box on top or in a trailer pulled behind us.

One New Years Eve we brought in the new year playing at The Barn in Quincy. As soon as that gig was over, we loaded up the equipment and headed off to play a breakfast dance at a black club in Hannibal, Mo. Well, I guess we took a highway curve too fast, because the hearse door came flying open and half the equipment (my sax included) went flying across the road. We threw everything back in the hearse and proceeded to the gig. I had to bend a few sax keys back into place, but we made it and played until 7:00 am.

And then there was the time we were rolling down the highway when the suicide door flew open and our vocalist Diana Rogan went flying out of the hearse. Luckily for Diana, the band's resident genius/songwriter Roger Wegehoft managed to grab her leg and hold on to her until we were able to come to a stop. That was quite a sight to see her half in and half out of the car at 70 miles per hour. Roger is also the one who dubbed the hearse "The Flying Magwheel Gas Chamber" due to the smell that often permeated the vehicle from its leaky exhaust system.

On our way to a gig in Burlington, Iowa I happened to look out the driver's side window and there was the trailer that was supposed to be behind us rolling along beside us. The next thing I knew there were wheels and metal flying every direction and our equipment bouncing all over the highway. We had a caravan of fans traveling with us in their cars but they didn't even notice the catastrophe and drove on by. Finally they realized we were nowhere in sight and came back to find us. We loaded everything we could in their cars and made it to the gig. That time my sax wasn't quite so lucky and I had to borrow one from a high school band student. Fortunately, our P.A. system and most of our amps were those Kustom Naugahyde quilted jobs and they didn't even get a scratch. It was as though they were made for bouncing down the highway end over end. The band should have done an endorsement for Naugahyde after that incident.

Around the time I changed the name of the band to Freddie Tieken's American Music Band, Charlie Parker joined the group on keyboards. Charlie had purchased his $14,000 Hammond organ with insurance money he received when he lost his leg in a motorcycle accident. One of the first nights he played with us, he stabbed himself in his wooden leg as the rest of the band looked on in amazement. I'll never forget the sight of Charlie standing there with a quivering knife handle protruding from his leg. Finally Charlie let out a maniacal laugh and we snapped back to reality. He was always doing crazy things like.that.

Once, we were returning from a gig in Colorado when we ran out of gas out in the middle of nowhere in Kansas. It was about ten degrees below zero and Russ Phillips, our trombone player, volunteered to hitch a ride to the nearest town and bring back some gasoline. His journey took several hours and by the time he returned we were in preparations to burn Charlie's wooden leg to keep.warm.

Upon returning from another long road trip in a freezing snowstorm, we parked the hearse and piled out as quickly as we could. As we were getting ready to leave for the next gig several days later, Ron Shumake announced that he hadn't been able to locate his electric bass. It wouldn't be hard to miss - it was all hippied up with dayglo peace signs. His bass was nowhere to be found, so he had to borrow one.

A couple of days later we were rolling in from another trip. It was a beautiful winter day and the sun had melted the snow. As we pulled in, there was Ron's bass proudly sticking out of the ground, just like the "Hard Rock Cafe?" sign. Ron ran over and chipped it out of the icy ground. He played it at the next gig and the amazing thing is it hadn't even gone out of tune.

Late one night as we were both returning from our separate gigs, I sat next to Tina Turner at the counter of Fern's Restaurant in Hannibal, Mo. eating bacon and eggs. What a thrill that was! After all, Ike & Tina Turner were my idols. As we were driving away from Fern's some redneck ran up and started stabbing our tires. The idiot was actually rolling on the ground, stabbing at our tires as we drove along. The hero of this incident was Terry Hawkins, my good friend and then roadie who volunteered to change out the tire for the spare in subzero
temperatures. What a night.

The Flying Magwheel Gas Chamber was always parked on the street in front of Little White when the band wasn't on the road and I liked to keep an eye on it. One morning I drove by and did a double take - the passenger side door was missing! I thought I was seeing things so I turned around and came back by. Sure enough, the door was gone. As the story unfolded, I learned that a couple of roadies had taken it out on the town the night before and somehow lost the door. I never got to the bottom of the missing door mystery, and that's when the Ilmo bus entered my life.

We eventually developed the lineup that would earn their name as The Ultimate Flash, featuring Dennis Tieken on drums, Micki Free on Guitar and vocals and Willie Dale III on bass and vocals. My rehearsal facilities and recording studio provided an ideal environment for the band to fine-tune their original material and work on their stage show.

At every show, Dennis' drum solo is a highlight. He has the fastest double bass drum I have ever heard and he would roll them like thunder as he used his drumsticks as motorcycle handlebars. I recorded his solo in my studio and we would play it behind him on stage so that he would play a duo with himself. It was an extreme wall of sound! Then he would leave his drum set and come to the front of the stage as the recorded version of his solo was playing. Dennis and Micki would play timbales together while the lights were flashing and smoke was filling the stage. The crowd would go crazy and it was a ton of fun.

Micki Free was fairly young when he joined Smokehouse. He had put together a band with some other local musicians and Gail was booking dates for them. After they played a few warm up gigs with Smokehouse we decided to give him a shot with the group. He was kind of like a diamond in the rough and we recognized a lot of talent there that hadn't been unleashed. He had God-given good looks and a natural sense of style. He had star written all over him and within a short time he became a good and then a great guitarist, developing his own unique sound with heavy power chords and melodic solos.

We had become friends with Willie Dale III from Champaign, Illinois when he was playing with the very popular Finchley Boys and Gail added the group to her agency's roster. When the Finchley Boys disbanded, we asked Willie to join Smokehouse. He knew how to pop those bass strings and he brought a funky but chic presence to the band.

Gail kept Smokehouse solidly booked, playing an average of three to four times a week. They were always on the road, mostly playing one-nighters to sell-out crowds. They were an extremely sexy band, attracting more than their share of attractive young women and anyone who enjoyed a party. Because that's
what you got every night with Smokehouse--a party!

I was working in my recording studio one day when Gail announced that I had a call from John Cougar. This was after he had broken with David Bowie's management and long before he changed his name back to John Mellencamp. Anyway, John said he had heard of Smokehouse and would they be interested in being his band. You have to remember that at this time things were really cooking for Smokehouse and I thought his offer was ridiculous. I told him we might be interested but no way would we change the name to John Cougar & Smokehouse. End of conversation.

I designed and constructed a lighting system for Smokehouse that worked so well, other bands asked me to make systems for them. I used paint cans and gels and the effects were quite professional. The lights became so popular I ended up with a separate line of business, Lighting by Libra.

It's hard to believe now, but in those days you could walk into any gun store and buy a keg of gunpowder. I would buy the stuff to use in the flash pots I had made for Smokehouse. We were really naive about the dangers involved and I don't know what kept us from getting blown to bits.

One night a promoter friend of ours, Len Trumper, invited us to a Kiss concert at the Springfield, Illinois armory. It was Kiss' first tour and it was one of my most memorable music experiences. We were right in front of the stage. They were so high energy and exciting and their pyrotechnics were amazing. The minute their gigantic flashpots went off, we saw all these guys from the armory milling around the stage. They looked extremely worried but we assumed they were just surprised by the show. We later were told that there was ammunition stored beneath the stage and the armory staff expected to see the entire armory blow at any minute.

Another time at a large nightclub in Carbondale, Illinois the Smokehouse roadcrew had my homemade flashpots set up on the front of the stage as usual. They were poised and ready to fire at the appropriate time during the show. The dance floor was packed that night and one guy had set his sport coat on top of one of the flash pots. No one noticed the coat so when the flash pots went off his coat shot about 15' in the air. When it came back to earth it was flaming. Without a blink, this guy picked up his coat, brushed out the flames and strolled off with his coat over his arm as though it had all been part of the show. It was crazy. Things like that were always happening with Smokehouse.
 

One thing I remember about Willie Dale is that he loved to drive. Sometimes he would drive the equipment truck but most of the time he drove the band's stretched limousine. It was so much fun riding to gigs with Dennis, Micki and Willie. They were as high energy off-stage as they were on-stage and there was never a dull moment. When we stopped at a large truckstop, Willie would head immediately to the truck drivers' reserved section. He would use the private lounge area and even avail himself of the showers while there. I can't even imagine what must have been going through the other drivers' minds.

I should also mention someone here who was virtually the fourth member of Smokehouse, Micki Free's brother, Roger Davis. As head of the Smokehouse road crew, Roger would drive the truck to the gig, supervise the road crew during setup, run the sound and lights and all the pyrotechnic special effects as well, and then tear down and drive to the next gig. What a trooper.
 

Another integral part of the Smokehouse road crew was Rick Chapman. He was really dedicated to the group and worked so hard for those guys. He always brought a great rock'n'roll attitude with him.

So here they were-- a stylish, pretty, heavy, funky power trio from a small Illinois river town. Smokehouse could wow them in Chicago and in the middle of the corn fields. With Gail and I providing management, booking and public relations, they were making quite a name for themselves.

Even though it was now the mid 70s in America, we were still faced with racial and social prejudice on many occasions while on the road. Once we sat at a Denny's in Des Moines, Iowa for about a half an hour before Gail finally asked a server to take our order. She was told that they would not be taking our order and we were getting pretty hungry so we left and found a place that would serve us. On another occasion, we were told that we couldn't stay at a Ramada Inn in St. Louis, Missouri because of our long hair. It is ironic to note that the Ramada Inn logo at the time featured a long-haired guy carrying a lantern and wearing a funny outfit.

Every minute they weren't touring, we were in the studio working on demo tapes to send to producers and record companies. With all the press we were getting, I was able to generate a lot of awareness of the group within the industry and we started getting some interest from the demos.

Vernon Gibbs who was head of A&R for Mercury Polygram records came to see Smokehouse when they played the Springfield, Illinois Coliseum with Rush. He was really interested in signing the group to his label, but felt we needed to tweak the demos before presenting them to the company. He came to Quincy, stayed at our house and worked with me and the band in my studio.