On a verdant stretch of land a few miles outside of Tahlequah, a literal stone’s-throw from the Illinois River, sit the trim little cabins of the Riverside Resort. A popular vacation spot for many decades, it was purchased by Gary Gilmore and his wife 11 years ago.
“It’s a beautiful spot, and it’s a fun business,” Gilmore says. “We’re all involved. My wife and I work it, and we’ve got two boys who work it. It’s been a great experience.”
Gary Gilmore is a man who should know something about great experiences. In fact, he’s had so many of them, especially relating to music and musicians, that it’s going to take another column just to tell you about some of the more prominent ones.
It’s likely that few of the folks who’ve checked into the Riverside Resort over the last decade-plus know that the soft-spoken, friendly man who’s always ready to help them is one of Tulsa’s great rock ‘n’ rollers of the ’60s and ’70s, a bassist who was an integral part of the touring and recording bands of both bluesman Taj Mahal and Tulsa icon JJ Cale – a top-notch, first-call player whose musical adventures including a house-band stint at California’s famed Whisky a Go Go club and an appearance on the international television special The Rolling Stones’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus. He’s even got a gold record for his work on the 2007 Cale and Eric Clapton disc, The Road to Escondido, which also won a Grammy.
“That was the last time I played with JJ Cale,” he recalls. “Back in 2005, he called me and said, ‘I’m going to make an album with Eric Clapton. You want to come out to California and play on it? Walt Richmond and David Teegarden and a bunch of other guys from Tulsa, they’re all coming out.’
“He said, ‘Eric wants to make an album that sounds like Tulsa – like my records. I wrote ten songs for it, and we’ll go out and just run through the stuff at my house in Escondido for about a week before we go into the studio in Hollywood and record it.’ So that was a great thrill, and I think it’s really a good record.”
The Cale-Gilmore musical connection goes back to 1963, when Gilmore, still a teenager, started playing club dates in Tulsa. He’d begun as a guitarist, not a bassist, about three years earlier, after his next-door neighbor and best friend, Tommy Tripplehorn, came home one day with a guitar. Tripplehorn, of course, would go on to become one of Tulsa’s stellar rock ‘n’ roll names (as well as noted actress Jeanne Tripplehorn’s father), playing lead guitar with, among other acts, the ’60s hitmakers Gary Lewis and the Playboys.
“He just seemed like he was having so much fun with it that I had to do the same thing,” remembers Gilmore. “So I went and got a guitar, and we actually took lessons from a guy for a couple of weeks. But Tommy had such a good ear for music that he’d listen to the 45 [rpm] records we’d buy and then pick ‘em out, note for note. We liked Jimmy Reed records, and Chuck Berry records – Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, stuff like that. And Ray Charles was really our top-end guy. Those were the records we wanted to learn.
“So we quit taking lessons. We just played together. Since he lived next door, we’d practice at my house all the time, in my bedroom, until my mom would come in and say, ‘Don’t you guys know any other songs but that one?’” He laughs. “We’d play a song for two or three hours straight.”
When they decided they were good enough to try to put together a band, he adds, “It was natural for me to switch to bass, because Tommy had the guitar covered.” Joining up with brothers Bob (piano) and David (drums) Boaz, they eventually added still another future Tulsa rock ‘n’ roll legend, singer-keyboardist Larry Bell, on vocals.
“We had a really good band called Larry Bell and the Teardrops,” says Gilmore. “We played high school dances and had a great time. We actually went on the road once, between my sophomore and junior year, and played at a club up in Joplin, Missouri. That was my first taste of the road.”
It would be far from his last. Later on, in the summer between his junior and senior year at Tulsa’s Central High, he and Tripplehorn were working with still another Tulsa great, vocalist Jimmy Markham, playing six nights a week at a club in Lawton that catered to Fort Sill personnel.
“We were really having fun, and we were making probably the best money we’d ever made, playing for the soldiers down there, staying in a motel, swimming in the pool in the daytime. It was getting close for me to start my senior year at Central, and I wanted to just keep on playing, you know. So I called my mom and said, ‘I think I’d like to stay here and play and make this money.’”
His mother was an English teacher, so you can imagine how that idea hit her.
“She said, ‘Would you please do one thing for me? Come home, finish high school, and graduate?’
“Well, what could I say to that?,” he asks rhetorically. “When I got home, school was getting ready to start, and I didn’t really have a gig. Then I got a call from Bill Raffensperger, Cale’s bass player, and he asked me, “Would you like to play a gig with Cale? I’ve got a chance to do a better-paying job at a supper club with Duane Collins [Cale’s piano player at the time]. It’s just a little trio, and it’s easy. Three hours a night.’
“And I said, ‘Yeah, I’d love to play with John.’”
At that early date in Tulsa’s rock’n’ roll history, Gilmore explains, he and his musical friends dubbed John Cale “the Count of Rock ‘n’ Roll.”
“When we first started playing, we’d go out to listen to him whenever we could. Sometimes we couldn’t get into the nightclubs, but if he did a shopping-mall opening or anything like that, we’d be there. He had some records out that the local radio station, KAKC, was playing. He had a band, and it sounded good. He was the man. I’d met him. I knew him. But I’d never been in a band with him.”
The job was at Tulsa’s Capri Club, one of those allegedly “private” clubs where members and guests could drink liquor more or less with impunity, even though it was illegal, without getting in much trouble with the law. The authorities didn’t pay much attention to anything else in those clubs, either – like underage musicians. Gilmore was far from the only high schooler working a private-club stage in Tulsa.
He played with Cale four nights a week, Wednesdays through Saturdays, while going through his senior year at Central, and, he remembers, “we never rehearsed. A lot of nights he’d just start something off and I’d have to look over and see what key he was in, and then just start playing. He would never tell me exactly what to play. He’d just let me find my own way. You might say the way John played back then was sort of like jazz. It wasn’t very structured. He wouldn’t kick a song off the same way every time. And I could tell by looking at him if I was playing what he wanted.”
After about six months, Cale got a call from his friend Leon Russell, who’d come up through the same Tulsa clubs. Russell had been in L.A. for a while and was doing so well as a studio musician that he was buying a house in the Hollywood Hills. And he made an invitation that not only changed Cale’s life, but also Gilmore’s – as we’ll see next month.
