The Lost Heroes of Rock 'n Roll

The first Rock ‘n Roll band I ever played in was called The Vampires.  We used to rehearse in a school assembly hall on Vine Street, back home in Coventry, England.  It was the 1950’s and I was still a schoolboy. At the time I had one overriding passion in my life, besides soccer; it was music.  Rock ‘n Roll was just starting to happen; and, along with the pubescent testosterone coursing through my veins, also was the pulsating beat of my generation’s music.

The highlight of my week was Tuesday night.  After school I would discard my navy blue and gray school uniform and don my Rock ‘n Roll attire.  Once I had transformed myself, with the aid of tight, black, ‘drainpipe’ jeans, a red shirt, and a short gray imitation suede jacket, I was ready.  It was time for me to take the bus into the city; it was my only escape, my only small piece of personal freedom, a few hours of release into the fantasy world of Rock ‘n Roll.

I sang three songs with the Vampires, Chuck Berry’s, “Johnny Be Good”, Gene Vincent’s, “Be-Bop-A-Lula”, and Eddie Cochran’s, “Twenty Flight Rock”.  In the late 1950’s, and until his tragic death in 1960, Eddie Cochran was a big star in England.  Eddie, with his signature Gretsch Country-Gentleman guitar and his Rockabilly gyrations, became one of the first, new Rock ‘n Roll idols of the British kids. 

His songs, “Something Else”, “C’mon Every Body”, “20 Flight Rock”, “Summer Time Blues”, and “Three Steps To Heaven” were all smash hits in England.

When a car crash took the life of Eddie Cochran, just outside of London on April 17, 1960, his fans all over the world felt the great loss.  Eddie only spent a few short years in the music business, and although his time with us was brief, he accomplished much.  Not only a writer and producer, Eddie was a good singer and a great guitar player.  He was a respected session guitarist on the West Coast music scene when he was just in his teens. He was an innovator of multi-track recording; he played and sang all the parts on his hit records “Summer Time Blues” and “Twenty Flight Rock.”  Eddie Cochran was the prototype of the ‘studio genius producer’ that would emerge in the Rock ‘n Roll world long after he was gone.  Along with Buddy Holly and Phil Spector, Cochran, in his time, was a pioneer of innovative studio techniques.  When Eddie Cochran died, he was only twenty-one years old.  This is his story.

In the year 1934, thousands of families left the state of Oklahoma, after a drought so prolonged and vicious, that it scorched the rich ground and turned the state into an arid wasteland.  This beautiful and bountiful country, once so fruitful, now became a vast abandoned desert.   When the heat of the relentless sun had baked the last vestige of moisture from the blackened earth, then came a wind, so cruel and hot that it literally blew away all the remaining topsoil and turned the once beautiful green state of Oklahoma into the infamous dust bowl.

The same searing, furnace-driven wind that took the rich land of Oklahoma and turned it into dust also blew away the hopes and dreams of countless working families.   One of the families that fell victim to the dust bowl was the Cochran family of Oklahoma City.

As the great depression took hold of the country, Frank and Alice Cochran decided to move their family ‘up north’.   Frank and Alice and their four children, Gloria, Bill, Bob, and Patty, packed up and moved ‘lock, stock and barrel’ to the ‘Land Of A Thousand Lakes’, Minnesota.  The Cochrans settled in the small rural farming town of Albert Lea.  The large meat packing plant in Albert Lea was hiring, and, as Frank Cochran was fond of saying, “If there is no work where you’re at, go where there is some work,” simple, straight to the point and true!