New site and old stories

\Greetings all

Just changed over to the blogger site from another seems to be a fair whack more user friendly.

Right on with the... whatever...

For those keeping pace with my old mans troublemaking back in the 50's and 60's I give you chapter 3 in the continuing saga:



Chapter 3-Dance a little bit to the Bop, to the Bop.


Saturday night was session time. Sports Clubs raised money by organizing dances where people danced to records played on a radiogram, a combination of radio and record player built into a cabinet with a speaker. These record players could play 78rpm shellac discs stacked onto a pin in the centre of the turntable or LP’s (long players-33 1/3rpm records only recently obsolete). Some could play EP’s (extended play records turning at 45rpm with two cuts per side) but the point was you came to jive, meet girls and pose with your mates.
People also organized Saturday night parties for invited friends and if you were brave, to took your own records to add to the music. The 78rpm shellac discs broke easily if they were dropped or mishandled. This didn’t stop people from bringing them though.
It was very important to make the proper entrance to these events. We’d arrive on five or six bikes and sit and rev the motors a few times before cutting the engines. This let everybody know that the bad guys had arrived, and we’d gather outside before walking through the door. Three paces through the door and you’d stop, check out the scene and comb your hair to show that you were the brekers who had come on the bikes. Once all the gang were through the door and had checked the hall for potential enemies from other towns, you’d have to find space on the chairs arranged around the room. The best scheme was to find some mates and move things about or intimidate some lesser unfortunates into moving.
Now came the interesting part. The unaccompanied guys sat on one side of the hall and the babes on the other. You’ scope them out, walk across to the chosen one and tune “Howzit, do you wanna dance?” With luck she’d say ”yes” and you were away.
Jiving had a little more contact than today’s popular dance styles with about five basic moves. Good dancers put their own variations into these moves and if a couple were dancing well, the other dancers would form a circle around them, clapping in time to the music and shouting encouragement.
By mid–evening some jollers would be smoking those strange cigarettes again and would be getting very restless and loud. Booze wasn’t allowed at these dos but some okies smuggled in their own dop in a half-jack bottle wrapped in brown paper. I never discovered what the brown paper was supposed to achieve, it was pretty obvious what they were up to, but I guess it made them feel terribly devious and bad. “Check me out, ous, I’m drinking this dop and nobody knows because it’s wrapped in brown paper”.
By about 11 o’clock the ous would be a bit gerook and would decide to go and soek some grief in town. Out to the bikes and five or six of us rumbling slowly through the streets, looking for trouble. Riding past the Plaza scopes, the Town Hall looking for anyone checking us skeef and on to other known session venues to find a party to crash.
The best jol was to ride to another town and pull up outside a session where a lot of bikes were parked. We’d sit on the bikes revving the motors and watching the entrance. The local jollers would burst through the entrance to answer the challenge and go for their bikes. Inter-town rivalry was intense and often led to some serious boxing in the streets as the manne sorted out their territorial conflicts.
We’d wait until they’d almost got started, drop the clutches and thunder off into the night. Hurtling down Main Reef Road at midnight sitting behind a half gerookde breker with no fear, pursued by ten irate Germiston ducktails is not the sort of thing you tell your mother about. Fortunately we never got caught and we’d rock up at the session with adrenalin pumping through the system. I never needed boom or dop, they only slow you down and, even better, adrenalin doesn’t give you a hangover.
Another great joll was going to the ‘scopes in Johies, especially to an Elvis movie. Jailhouse Rock brought all the manne out. Unless you rocked up three hours early and stood in a huge queue, you missed out. The street outside the cinema was packed with bikes, at least a hundred, parked at right angles to the pavement which was full of people. Even the press was there, taking photos for tomorrow’s papers. The atmosphere inside was charged with excitement. We were going to see our own boy Elvis. It’s amazing now that one person could stir up such a frenzy of emotion, but nothing like this had happened before. We’d had Frank Sinatra in America but he was an old man now and a crooner to boot, boring when compared to Rock and Roll.
Johnny “Cry Baby” Ray had girls fainting at his shows, but the Elvis phenomenon was our first taste of mass hysteria. When he came onto the screen for the first time, half the girls in the audience screamed with emotion and the guys cheered, such was his presence. He represented the non-conformist rebel we all felt we were. And what’s more, he looked the part, dark, brooding and a loner, misunderstood and dangerous. It was marketing at its most successful.
Coming out of the cinema into the bright street lights, being part of the noise and excitement of the bikes starting up together and roaring out into the city was an experience hard to top even in these much more sophisticated times. The traffic just had to wait while a hundred bikes started up and peeled out into the street. Gene Vincent said it all for us when he sang:
“Say Mamma, Can I go out tonight?
Say Mamma, will that be all right?
They’ve got a rockin’ party going down the street,
Say Mamma, can you hear that beat?
Woah woah woo woo woah woah woo woo woah.”