Coming into Kansas City, MO, after driving all night from a gig in Oklahoma the day before, I checked into a Motel, to get a couple hours sleep before I had to get ready for tonight’s show. As I was drifting off for my nap, I was looking forward to seeing some of my old friends and kin folk at the show, in a club where I had played several times before.
In the years of early country music, particularly in the 60’s and 70’s, working clubs, bars, lounges, supper clubs, dancehalls, honky-tonks, skull orchards or fancy joints, backwoods knock- down and drag- outs, or Uptown and slick, didn’t matter, if you wanted to eat, you worked wherever they paid you to come sing. And, I mean, it didn’t matter if you were a big act or medium size, club work was our bread and butter.
I was well familiar with the club I was working, this weekend in Kansas City, “Genova’s Chestnut Inn”. Mr. Genova kept a steady stream of Nashville talent coming in to play weekends, he had a top notch stage band that could back up anybody and did a good job of it. I had worked for Mr. Charlie Genova all through the 60’s and liked him a lot. He was an older man, white headed, rather portly, quiet spoken and respectful of his artists, and I never had seen him without his chewed up cigar. I don’t think he ever lit the darn things, he just kept if stuck in the side of his mouth and chewed on the end of it. If you were doing a movie, and wanted to cast the character of the “Godfather”, well, Charlie Genova was your man. I would sit back in his office, between shows, and talk to him and watch television with him, because that is where he stayed….back in his office.
What I didn’t know was…..the times they were a’changing….country music clubs all over were having to compete with a steady progression of competitive music venues, which would really get heavy by the mid 70’s with the explosion of Disco Clubs. The older, traditional country music clubs, in the bigger cities of America were trying all kinds of different promotions to get people to come out and support them. Yeah, some of them were trying really different promotions.
On this Friday night gig at Genova’s, I had called and invited several of my friends that I grew up with, from down in the Ozarks, that had moved to Kansas City in the intervening years. I also called my Uncle Clifford, my dad’s brother, who lived in Kansas City and shared a house with my widowed Grandmother. I guess I wanted to show all of them that what I did was respectable, and not just some gypsy bar-hopper wasting my life singing my country songs.
Since I had worked the Chestnut Inn several times in the past, and knew the band, and they all kept up with my music and could play it with their eyes shut…I didn’t see any reason to hurry to the club for rehearsal, so I rested up for tonight’s show.
I arrived at the club around 8 PM, giving myself a good hour before show time, pulled up in front and got my guitar case and travel bag to go inside, when I glanced up at the well lit marquee on the side of the building…”Appearing, Friday and Saturday-STAN HITCHCOCK and GIRLS-GIRLS-GIRLS!!!” Girls, Girls, Girls? What was that? A female music act? Oh, well, I reckon I’ll find out soon enough.
I stepped inside the Chestnut Inn, a rather old, and slightly worn club, sitting on the corner, facing Chestnut Street, and looking like thousands of other clubs around the country that used our hillbilly talent. It was clean, didn’t stink bad, except that combination odor they all had, cigarettes, spilled beer, sweaty working class folks that danced all night, public bathrooms with their automatic deodorizers that lent their odor to the mix, and hamburgers with lots of onions and French fries cooked in lots of grease, that folks woofed down like they hadn’t eat in a month. To the entertainers, like me, it was the smell of work.
I had just got inside the entrance good, when my old uncle Clifford and his girl friend came over to greet me. As he embraced me and turned to introduce me to his lady, he said, “Honey, this is my nephew that I been telling you about, we are all mighty proud of him.” Then, right behind them came my friends from down in the Ozarks coming up and glad handing me, back slappin’ and hand shakin’ and all talking at once. I got them all seated, right up front next to the stage, and went over to visit with the band musicians. I didn’t have long to talk cause show time was coming up and I still needed to get into my stage clothes and tune up.
I headed back to the big dressing room, a community affair that was just a room with some mirrors and places to hang your clothes, a couple of overstuffed chairs and a couch. I opened the door and stepped into……a room full of NAKED WOMEN! Or at least, various stages of undress and voluptuous body parts openly on display, as about five women, some in front of the mirrors adjusting little tassels on their body parts, others naked as jaybirds standing touching up makeup, swiveling their hips, doing body moves in front of the full length mirrors, as their fine faces turned and stared at me with no sense of embarassment or attempt to cover up the aforementioned body parts…tasseled, rouged, powdered, perfumed and glowing….body parts. Instinctively, I swung the clothes bag and guitar in front of myself, seeing as how no one else was covering up anything, I felt like someone had to do something! After a long, confused look, and a throat clearing cough….I said, “ ‘scuse me, ladies”, and backed out the dressing room door.
I headed for Mr. Genova’s office and knocked on the door. He opened up and told me to come on in and I could change in here. Before I could ask, he volunteered, “Uh, Stan, some of my associates run Stripper Clubs in the Midwest, and we decided to try and see how they go over with the country music crowd. Tonight’s the first night so we’ll see how it goes. You go ahead and work the first show, then at the end of your show, bring the girls on and they’ll take it from there.
At the end of my first set, I did my last song…..cleared my throat and said, “Well, folks, we got something new tonight at the Chestnut Inn…yessir, something I don’t believe I have ever seen before…country music is all about the reality of life….now you are really gonna see reality…up close and personal!!” As I left the stage the dressing room door opened and the Ladies hit the stage…tassels flying….body parts swinging to the beat of the music..(how do they do that?) One of them could get body parts, on either side, moving in opposite directions…it was enough to make your eyes cross!
I suppose you are thinking of the scantly clothed ladies that dance in Vegas or The Rockettes, something like that? Huh, no, not even close. These women were doing things with their body parts that you do not see even in the privacy of your own home, they were double jointed, oiled up and ready to let it all hang out….except, it already was hanging out…out, and up, and down and sideways. Oh friends, it was a powerful display of female anatomy, the likes of which my poor old Uncle Clifford had never dreamed of in his entire life, even in the back tent at that Carnival that came through that time…those girly shows were tame in comparison. Uncle Clifford’s lady friend, who was a secretary to the Pastor of the Presbyterian Church, was pulling on Uncle’s sleeve to try to get his attention…..”Cliff, please take me home!” Oh, my, I’m ruined at the next family reunion, “And did you know, Stanley Edward is now fronting a bunch of Strippers in Kansas City?” “Yes! I don’t know for sure, he is probably traveling all over the country with them, and doing I don’t know what all….he’s just one step away from a Carnival girly show!” Actually I have had to skip family reunions now for 45 years because of it. Those old aunt’s don’t ever forget nothing!
Uncle Clifford finally took his Lady Friend home, walking backwards out the door to not miss the final tricks, shakes and round-abouts that the Ladies were performing on the dance floor. Thankfully, he never mentioned it to Grandmother, who later went to her reward, still thinking her grandson was a country music star….not a shill for a bunch of Strippers! Huh, I can just see me at a Carnival sideshow, “Step right up folks, see Big Bertha and Little Edie, doing the…….” Whatever it is that these particular ladies do….And I guess that Uncle Clifford’s Lady Friend, who I, mercifully never had to look in the eyes again, probably thought forever that that was what I did for a living. She had said, when we were introduced, “Oh, I’ve never been to a Country-Western music show before, however, I did go to an all night Gospel Sing one time, and actually got J. D. Sumner’s autograph” Oh, J.D., come and help me, son, I’m sinking here! Let me drop your name in the conversation and maybe she’ll forget the strippers.
What followed was the two longest nights of shows that I ever experienced. At the last night settle up, back in the office with Mr. Genova, he was counting out my money and said, “Stan, you do a really good job for us, I’ve talked to some of my associates and they would like to meet with you and maybe offer you a business deal. They are interested in putting some money into country music” I gathered my money up, put it in my briefcase and explained to Charlie Genova that I appreciated it, but I had another show and I had to leave right now. It scared me to think that some of his associates, probably the same ones that run these poor girls, and any number of other equally squalid ventures around the Midwest, wanted to talk to me.
I couldn’t get out of town quick enough and I never again worked the Chestnut Inn, which continued to go down hill after the strippers and stopped booking acts.
That had to be a hard life for the girls in that business. Traveling a circuit of clubs, taking off their clothes for men to gape at. Although, maybe we were not that different, the girls were selling their bodies for view, we entertainers were selling only our voices, but that weekend in Kansas City showed me that the difference was not that big a space.
The experiment of Strippers and Country Music was tried in some other clubs around the country, but finally the crooked nosed guys that ran the girls must have figured out that country folk might enjoy the female body, but in private, and not with country music as the soundtrack. stan
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