Lonestar amazed alternative version piano tv#
“So I borrowed $100 from someone and Jo Harvey and I went to Laguna Beach for the weekend, fully thinking that when we came back, I’d just be doing one TV show after another.” “I remember Brian Epstein was in the audience, and he was telling Jo Harvey, ‘This is great, this is great, bla bla,’ and we just decided, ‘well yeah, we’ll be rich next week!’” Allen says. The Beatles may not have been in the building, but their manager was. “How many times have you heard someone play the kazoo with girls screaming behind it?” Allen asks incredulously. All these years later, that part still tickles him. Click the link, and he springs to life, pounding the piano keys, stomping the foot pedal and singing loud, proud and Jagger-confident over a shrieking chorus of screaming girls:Ĭlose your eyes when he picks up the tempo to segue into “Freedom School” with a kazoo solo, and you’d swear - based on the rising pitch of teenaged frenzy - that John, Paul, George and Ringo all walked out onstage to join him. It’s the clip with the black-and-white thumbnail of a very Buddy Holly-looking Allen seated at an upright piano that looks yanked out of a old Western saloon. and jump right to Allen’s one-minute-and-44-second “Red Bird/Freedom School” medley via YouTube.
Lonestar amazed alternative version piano full#
You can find a DVD of the full episode with a little hunting online, or you can bypass the other performers - Marianne Faithfull, Billy Preston, the Dixie Cups, some dudes in kilts called the Great Scots, etc. “And they went, ‘OK, you made it,’ and gave me a date to be on it.”Īllen’s performance aired on Aug.
“So they set up an audition, and I went down to some place on Western Avenue, some little rat hole, and played about the only two songs I knew: ‘Red Bird,’ and this song called ‘Freedom School,’” Allen continues. A skinny dude from Lubbock with glasses, playing rock ’n’ roll? Stranger things had happened. Despite having never really given much thought to the idea of being a musician - let alone having ever played in public, outside of a somewhat controversial high school assembly - Allen was game for a shot of why-the-hell-not.
They had a piano in the living room, so I sat down and started playing, and one of the these guys came in and went, ‘Hey, you want to be on Shindig?’ And I went, ‘Yeah!’”Īs happens in such stories, the guy turned out to be one of the directors of the weekly ABC variety show, which from September of 1964 through the fall of ’65 showcased a who’s who of teen-centric popular music acts from both sides of the Atlantic. “And I went up there after school one afternoon to get my check, and they had about five of us waiting in line for our checks in the living room while they were writing them in the kitchen. “These two guys had this big house that they were building, adding on a couple of rooms to this mansion, and I was just doing labor,” recalls Allen, now 69. One of those odd jobs found Allen doing construction at that home in the Hollywood Hills. Perspective is everything.Īllen and his wife, high-school sweetheart Jo Harvey, had been living in the Los Angeles area for the better part of three years, two kids out of West Texas California dreaming on an odd-jobs budget while he worked on his degree at the Chouinard Art Institute. The take away, of course, is all in how you read it. and into rock ’n’ roll history.Įvery word of that is true. In the summer of 1965, a 22-year-old art student from Lubbock, Texas, named Terry Allen walked into a Hollywood mansion, sat down at a piano and played his way into homes across the U.S.A.