Iowa Garage Bands of the 1960s and 1970s

Des Moines in the mid-60s was supposed to be quiet. Flat. Corn-fed. God-fearing. That illusion died the first time a kid turned a cheap Silvertone amp all the way up in a basement and realized the walls could shake like a riot. The Midwest learned how to sweat that night. The garage bands came crawling out of rec rooms, Legion halls, gymnasiums, and half-finished basements all across Iowa like insects drawn to voltage.

The air smelled like beer, Brylcreem, overheated transformers, and teenage panic. Nobody knew they were building a scene. Scenes were for cities with music writers and better lies. These kids just knew the songs had to be fast, loud, and lethal. The parents were upstairs. The cops were somewhere else. The floor shook anyway.

Iowa didn’t have Sunset Strip clubs or Detroit ballrooms. It had VFW halls with bad carpet. Catholic school gyms with folding chairs. Roller rinks that smelled like rubber, popcorn, and spilled Coca-Cola. Stages made from plywood and rusty nails. The sound systems were a crime. The volume was the point.

Des Moines High School Music Train 1927

On May 5, 1927, over 250 high school musicians climbed aboard a special train in Des Moines, their instruments packed tight and their nerves running high. They were headed for Iowa City on a rare out-of-town adventure that promised music, competition, and the excitement only a long train ride with friends can bring.

The group was a lively mix—the North High band and orchestra, the East High boys’ glee club, and the Valley Junction Orchestra, among others—all gathered together for the big trip. For many of them, it was their first time traveling with a full musical ensemble, and the train cars buzzed with rehearsed melodies, last-minute tuning, and the hope that their performance might just be the one people remembered.

Picture: Des Moines Tribune. May 6, 1927.

The Cherry Sisters The Best, Or The Worst Iowa Act--Ever

A colorized image of The Cherry Sisters

The Cherry Sisters didn’t arrive on the American stage—so much as detonate on it, like some godforsaken cyclone stuffed with tin pans, bad hymns, and the righteous confidence you normally only see in evangelists or heavily medicated congressmen. Five of them—Effie, Addie, Ella, Lizzie, Jessie—marching into the 1890s like a militia of homemade virtue, certain the world was ready for their greatness.

The world, of course, had other ideas.

 

Their traveling revue, a fever dream called “Something Good, Something Sad,” wasn’t a show so much as a moral crusade welded to accidental slapstick. They sang with the reckless abandon of people who did not know what singing required. They recited poetry like hostile witnesses in their own trial. They dispensed moral lectures with the zeal of frontier prosecutors. And they performed dramatic sketches stitched together like ransom notes.

 

Orchestra Leader Glenn Miller

Born in Clarinda, Iowa, in 1904, Glenn Miller came into the world wired tight and slightly out of tune—a man already chasing the rhythm no one else could hear. He wasn’t some dreamy jazz poet. He was an engineer in a suit, obsessed with sound the way gamblers obsess over dice. “A band ought to have a sound all its own,” he said. “It ought to have a personality.”

By the late 1930s, Miller had wrung that sound out of America’s nervous system. It wasn’t raw jazz—it was something slicker, faster, built for motion. You could hear it bouncing off jukeboxes in hotel lobbies and bus depots from Chicago to New Orleans. “In the Mood” didn’t ask you to dance—it commanded it. “Moonlight Serenade” wasn’t a love song; it was anesthesia. A New York critic said his music was “too perfect, too polite, too damn smooth.” Another said, “You can’t fight it. It gets in your bloodstream and stays there.”

Miller didn’t conduct—he controlled. Every arrangement was dissected, cleaned, and polished until not a single breath was out of place. “You’re sharp by a hair,” he told a trombonist. “Shave it off.” His musicians swore he could hear a wrong note through a hurricane. They feared him, respected him, maybe even loved him, though no one dared say it out loud.

The Day the Music Died February 3, 1959

Buddy Holly

February 3, 1959. Clear Lake, Iowa. The air felt like glass. You could see your breath in the headlights. Inside the Surf Ballroom, it was — sweat, perfume, and static.

 Buddy Holly hit the stage in a gray suit and black-rimmed glasses. He opened with “Gotta Travel On.” The crowd roared. Ritchie Valens followed with “Donna,” smiling through the flu. The Big Bopper — J.P. Richardson — lumbered across the stage, wiping his brow, booming out “Chantilly Lace.”

 

Carroll Anderson, the ballroom manager, said, “They were in good spirits. Buddy was joking; Ritchie was nervous but happy. Nobody was thinking about the weather.”

 

Outside, the temperature was ten below. Snow whipped across the lot. The tour bus was parked near the back, with a dead heater, iced windows, smelling like old socks and diesel.

Lillian Russell The Iowa Girl Who Took the World By Storm

Lillian Russell was born Helen Louise Leonard in Clinton, Iowa, in the early 1860s . Her father ran a newspaper, her mother scared the local men by speaking her mind, and the baby came out howling like she already had headlines to make.

 She grew up in Chicago, where sin had a better rhythm. Helen sang too loudly, laughed too big, and drove her mother half mad. She got kicked out of a church choir for “indecorous behavior,” which is Victorian code for being interesting. Someone told her nice girls didn’t go onstage. Helen said, “Then I guess I’m not nice.”

 

She was eighteen when she ran away to New York — the filthy, electric carnival of the Gilded Age. Tony Pastor looked her over, saw the cheekbones, the mouth, the trouble. He said, “Helen Leonard sounds like someone who does laundry. You’ll be Lillian Russell.” It was a name made for scandal and silk sheets.

 

By 1881 she was onstage in The Pirates of Penzance, and America lost its collective mind. The New York World called her “the prettiest girl in America.” Another paper called her “a soprano who makes an entrance like a cavalry charge.” A Boston critic said she was “more bosom than brilliance.” She framed that one, saying, “At least he noticed.”

Bix Beiderbecke An Iowa Original

Bix Beiderbecke

Bix Beiderbecke grew up in Davenport, Iowa, a river town that smelled of corn and coal smoke. He listened to the steamboats at night, and played piano by ear when he was five. His parents wanted him to stop. He didn’t. Ragtime was dying. Jazz was being born. He was there at the baptism.

The local papers called him the Davenport wonder. They liked him because he was theirs. They didn’t understand him. One early review said his tone “seems to drift from another world.” It did. Eddie Condon said, “He put the cornet to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying yes.”

He joined the Wolverines when he was nineteen. They drove from town to town in a beat-up car, sleeping in barns, playing dance halls. Bandmate Jimmy Hartwell, said, “We didn’t make much money, but when Bix played, it felt like we were rich.” Another remembered him sitting up all night, rewriting a tune until it sounded like water.

By 1924 he was recording. “Fidgety Feet.” “Jazz Me Blues.” His solos were short and sharp, like postcards from a different planet. Then came “Singin’ the Blues.” That one stuck. “Beiderbecke doesn’t play—he converses,” wrote a Chicago critic. Melody Maker called it “the loveliest tone ever captured on record.” Louis Armstrong listened and said, “A lot of cats tried to play like Bix. Ain’t none of them play like him yet.”