The Passions

The appearance of an album entitled Texas Punk From the Sixties in record stores in 1985 would have presented a welter of confusion to any American who had lived through the 1960s and experienced its music first-hand. Music of that era had been largely defined by Top 40 radio. The songs played on the radio in Seattle were -- with a few regional exceptions -- the same songs played in the radio in Dallas, Miami, Cleveland, and Buffalo, forming a transcontinental tapestry of shared cultural experience and expectation in the minds of the young. Songs on local labels were, for the most part, not allowed to participate in this golden age, and were quite unwelcome when they began appearing out of nowhere in the 1980s and '90s. Their revival en masse gave notice to the Top 40 generation that what they had collectively experienced was actually a giant sham perpetrated on them by the music industry. The supposedly rebellious and questioning youth of the '60s had never questioned the logic of Top 40 radio, never questioned why or how major labels could dominate the market year after year. Rebellion had been packaged into a mass media consumer product, enriching the same corrupt, gray flannel suit establishment that the youth had imagined they were making irrelevant. Top 40 radio had actually prevented them from hearing most of the great songs of their generation.

So albums like Texas Punk From the Sixties were greeted with indifference or hostility by anyone who actually lived through the 1960s. The first problem with this particular offender was "Texas," a state known mostly for country music, not rock, though it was granted that a few people from the Top 40 canon had come from there (Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison). The second problem was "punk." Why punk? The term had never been used in a musical context in the '60s. It was an association that only came much later, and only among bands in places like London and New York City. It was inconceivable to the Top 40 mentality that anyone would invent a term for a musical genre and retroactively apply it to that era, nor were they aware that its application to certain songs of the sixties pre-dated (and influenced) the emergence of that later trend.

The third problem was the bands and songs actually featured on this album: there were no groups recognizable from the Top 40 era at all. Instead, it offered up groups like Kempy and the Guardians, Oedipus and the Mothers, and the Y'Alls. Surely bands with names like this did not actually exist in the 1960s, did they? Perhaps Texas Punk From the Sixties, which purported to originate in France, was an art school joke in which you collected songs nobody wanted, performed by groups no one had ever heard of, on an album no one could be expected to buy. At the very least, it was a product of the inscrutable European mind, like the eccentric Frenchmen who collected discarded, old neon signs in flea markets and displayed them in a Paris art gallery as if they were of great cultural import. More offensively, Texas Punk From the Sixties billed itself as "Volume Two" in a multi-volume series.

It's taken over 30 years to unravel all the mysteries and challenges that reissues like Texas Punk From the Sixties presented to the curious listener since they first stealthily appeared, unannounced, in the Various Artists sections of record stores across the USA as well as England and Europe. The young people encountering these albums had a completely different reaction than those who had inculcated a Top 40 mentality. These albums were instead perceived by them to contain lost treasures, rare sounds that had been unfairly resigned to a critical Sheol by the cruelties of time and fate. Their obscurity was perceived to be their greatest asset. These songs were never part of somebody's nostalgia trip; once liberated from their rare environments, they could live and pulsate on their own oxygen.

The Passions' "Lively One" was one such song liberated by Texas Punk From the Sixties. Raw, crude, sounding like an outtake from the first Rolling Stones album, "Lively One" oozed a certain quality that had been lost in the intervening 20 years. It was simple but somewhat dangerous sounding. The singer asks the listener in the first verse, "Don't I act crazy?" When he sings "dark-haired, dark-eyed," he pronounced "dark" in a way that no Texan has before or since. The point of the record was presumably to sound English, but they probably didn't fool many listeners.

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The most surprising thing about the Passions is that, unlike most garage bands of the era, they were not teenagers, but somewhat older men: lead singer and bassist Bill Galyon was 23 or 24 when he sang "Lively One," and the ages of the rest of the group at that time ranged from 20 to 25. They had been playing together as a band since around 1962, and it's likely that at least one member had played in '50s bands. The other members of the Passions were: Gordon Eatherly, Jr. (lead guitar), Bill Sheridan (rhythm guitar), Larry Jannasch (drums), and Jerry Mullins (harmonica). The group lived in the North Texas town of Sherman (population 24,988 in 1963), and played all over the area, as far away as Dallas (60 miles south of Sherman), and into Oklahoma. Photos of the group are known to exist, but none have surfaced. (High school yearbook photos of individual members will have to suffice.)

The Passions' first single, "Mercy, Little Baby" (Shayon 101) from 1964. Lead vocals by Bill Galyon, who also wrote the song. (This copy autographed by Galyon and lead guitarist Gordon Eatherly, Jr.)

The next surprising thing about the Passions is that they had another record besides "Lively One." Their first single, "Mercy, Little Baby" on the band's own Shayon label, is rare and has only recently been reissued. It can be accessed on You Tube (clip below). Recorded at Sellers Studio in Dallas, probably in early 1964, "Mercy, Little Baby" is a fine Chuck Berry-ish rocker with strong vocals by Bill and a guitar solo from Gordon. The only flaw is its brevity -- 1:31. It has been called "rockabilly," and if we were to agree with this designation, the Passions would perhaps be the only Texas group to record both a rockabilly and garage record (the appellation that replaced "punk"). The band themselves would have tagged their first record as rock and roll, and their second as rhythm and blues.

Bill Galyon, lead vocalist of the Passions. From the 1959 Sherman High year book. 

"(In the 1950s) Gordon Eatherly and I, as young boys, used to go to the Sherman Municipal Ballroom," Bill Galyon explained to me. "About once every couple of months, a promoter would rent that out and have a big name black artist in: Ike and Tina Turner, Jimmy Reed,  Ivory Joe Hunter, Gatemouth Brown…these guys. Gordon and I would go down there on our bikes and peek through the windows. Blacks from all over that part of the country would come. Johnny 'Guitar' Watson, Etta James … you name it." These shows were hugely inspirational and motivated the youngsters to gravitate toward being musicians themselves. 

Bill couldn't recall most of the places that the Passions had played. Too much time had passed, he said. "We played North Texas, a little bit in Oklahoma. We would venture up in Oklahoma … little towns, podunk places. We began to kind of cook ‘em in Dallas. We did a couple of concerts with Jon and Robin and the In Crowd and the Five Americans. We played the Bronco Bowl in Dallas, a lot of clubs I couldn’t tell you the names of. And a lot of high school hops and things, pretty much like everybody else did back in those days.

Gordon Eatherly, Jr. -- lead guitarist for the Passions c. 1964

"We had a great response, had a great following. We did some concerts with Bruce Chanel when he was hot. He would travel around and pick up musicians (as a backup band). We were on a stage show with Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. We did a couple of dances with Trini Lopez. The Everly Brothers, we did a backup for them once. It was great fun."

There were other Sherman groups, but according to Bill "we pretty much dominated the area there for the period of time that we were together."

Most bands that had formed in the early 1960s looked askance at the British Invasion trend that started in 1964, but not the Passions. While they were intrigued by the Beatles, they were blown away by the Rolling Stones and soon began emulating their sound, repertoire, and style. 

"We were big fans of the Rolling Stones," Bill said. "I liked them. I liked the Beatles’ music, but we liked the Stones because ... we liked their “outlaw” image. We liked the fact that they dressed differently. That was unprecedented. All the bands then had (matching) outfits, you know, like little red jackets, or what have you. And when the Stones came out, and just had anything thrown on, we thought that was the greatest thing in the world. So, we adopted that. We chucked the uniforms and began to wear whatever we wanted, and each one us would try to look more bizarre than the other one. That was fun. And we began to grow our hair longer, and the whole nine yards. All bands then were kind of feeding off that British influence.  It was great."

This was probably when they added Jerry Mullins as a standalone harmonica player: "Jerry was great. He added a whole new dimension to the band. He was in it toward the last, but we were really cooking at that time. We got into the Stones and started doing the harmonica stuff, because initially, they had some harmonica. We’d do a lot of blues, Jimmy Reed. Jerry was terrific on harp."

Bill says, "We saw Jimmy Reed on more than one occasion (at the Sherman Municipal Ballroom). One night, Jimmy Reed had to be helped out of the car, just so completely drunk. They took him in and set him up, got him set down in that chair, but the minute he started playing, it was incredible. It was like he was as straight as an arrow. His wife would sit next to him, or stand next to him, and whisper the lyrics. I’ve seen them do that on more than one occasion. That was an absolute fact." 

       Jerry Mullins, harmonica player of the Passions. From the 1962 Sherman High year book.

Prior to April, 1965, the Passions returned to Sellers Studio. A lot had changed in one year, and their new record would sound nothing like the first. They recorded four songs: one group original ("Lively One"), one song offered to them by local songwriter Donald Mask (the Bo Diddley-esque "You've Got Me Hurtin'"), and two standards ("Ooh Poo Pah Doo" and "You Really Got a Hold on Me"). Some acetates were cut and sent around to various Texas record men, including Huey P. Meaux in Pasadena (a suburb of Houston). Only Meaux expressed interest, and soon a contract was signed. The record was released on the Pic 1 label, one of the eight labels he operated, around June of 1965. The original label had no "A-Side" designation -- perhaps so the disc jockey could "pick one" of his own  -- but Bill confirmed that the band intended "Lively One" to be the A-Side. 

Gordon shows tremendous restraint on both sides, playing only a basic chord progression while allowing Mullins to take all the solos on harmonica. This is particularly striking since Bill remembered Gordon as "an exceptionally talented musician." Meaux faded both sides earlier than the band intended. "Lively One" has a second harmonica solo, and "You've Got Me Hurtin'" was not supposed to fade out. (The full 3:09 version of "Lively One" finally appeared in 2015.)

Unbeknownst to the band, Huey's signing them had an ulterior motive: he needed original material for his new hit group, the Sir Douglas Quintet, and he wanted to secure the publishing on "You've Got Me Hurtin'" so they could record their own version of the song. They did so on April 12, 1965, at Gold Star Studios in Houston during the session for "The Rains Came," their third single. Meaux ended up rejecting the Sir Douglas version, and it would not be released until 33 years later on Edsel's The Crazy Cajun Recordings of the Sir Douglas Quintet. Meaux probably had little taste for "Lively One," as bluesy harmonica is a rarity in his catalog. 

Donald Mask "had little to do with the band," Bill said. "We just kind of threw the (song) together. Donald wanted his name on the label, and he ponied up a few bucks for some outfits and instruments. We kind of went to the well with the guy. Kind of tapped him a little bit. And he was just enthralled that he could have his name on the label. Candidly speaking, we kind of used the guy. He was tickled shitless, so it was cool." Mask remained a dabbler in music. His composition "In the Alley" was recorded by area soul group the Fabulous Capris in 1971. 

"Lively One" received a good amount of airplay on local Sherman radio station KDSX (where Gordon also disc jockeyed), and was presumably sold at the local vinyl emporium, Atherton Music Company. Meaux would have sent the bulk of copies pressed to Big State Distributors in Dallas for sales in the area. The record's scarcity today probably reflects low sales. The record was too raw for most salesmen at the time, but not most teenagers, had they been able to hear it. 

It isn't known how long after the Pic 1 record that the Passions scattered to the winds, winding down after several years making music together. They were getting older and without a hit record, they were finding themselves overcome by eager, younger bands. Bill laments, "I got to feeling like there was no future in it, and I needed to pursue other things. Big mistake. I got interested in radio work. I went to school and got into radio and television. I disc jockeyed for many years, and that evolved into television work. I did some anchor work in Lubbock. But radio is very unstable. It’s a very transient life in small markets.

"We had the talent and capability to achieve greatness but, I don’t know, we didn’t have proper direction or guidance, and it all kind of fell apart. That’s a shame."

Sellers Company acetate of "Hurtin'," re-titled "You've Got Me Hurtin'". The acetate is longer than the released version, and doesn't fade. 

THE PASSIONS DISCOGRAPHY

1964. Sellers Recording Company, 2102 Jackson, Dallas, Tx. 
Bill Galyon (vocal, bass), Gordon Eatherly, Jr. (lead guitar), Bill Sheridan (rhythm guitar), Larry Jannasch (drums).

Mercy, Little Baby (Bill Galyon) Shayon 101 (SoN 7871)
I Want You (Bill Galyon)

Early 1965. Sellers Recording Company, 2102 Jackson, Dallas, Tx. 
Bill Galyon (vocal, bass), Gordon Eatherly, Jr. (lead guitar), Bill Sheridan (rhythm guitar), Larry Jannasch (drums), Jerry Mullins (harmonica).

Lively One (The Passions) Pic 1 117
You've Got Me Hurtin' (Donald R. Mask)
Ooh Poo Pah Doo (unissued)
You Really Got a Hold on Me (unissued)

Note: Both stock and disc jockey copies were released of Pic 1 117. At least two Sellers label acetate copies exist containing the full, longer versions of "Lively One" and "You've Got Me Hurtin'". The full 3:09 version of "Lively One" was reissued from the master tape on the 2015 CD release Don't Be Bad: '60s Punk Recorded in Texas (Big Beat 327). 

Thanks to: Bill Galyon and Doug Hanners. Pic 1 label scan by Mark Taylor. High school yearbook photos taken from Classmates.com. Shayon label scan from Popsike.com. 

"Mercy, Little Baby"


 "Lively One"



"You've Got Me Hurtin'"



The Sir Douglas Quintet version of "You've Got Me Hurtin'"