The first audiences of Pawnee Bill’s wild west show must have been in awe at the trick shooters, trick riders, Native Americans, horses and battle reenactments they witnessed at the frontier spectacular. Such sights were rare in the eastern half of the country that had settled and turned toward industry and modernization. But Gordon William Lillie (Pawnee Bill’s real name) exploited a nostalgia for the disappearing past with sensation and bravado. Today, audiences are enthralled by the historic significance of the show itself, and the Pawnee Bill Ranch in Pawnee brings it all back with three shows featuring chuck wagons, chariots, quick shooters, stunt riders, powwow dancers and plenty of fun on the grounds at the ranch museum. Count on appearances from Pawnee Bill himself. Shows will be at the ranch in Pawnee on June 16, 23 and 30. www.okhistory.org
Curtain’s Up!
Cherokee playwright Diane Glancy has published a lot of plays. But seeing plays published and seeing them performed are two very different things. This summer she’s looking forward to the Oklahoma City Theatre Company’s production of her latest offering, Salvage. The company will perform the play at Oklahoma City’s City Space Theatre from June 1-10.
Every summer sees the Oklahoma City Theatre Company pour effort into the Native American New Play Festival, highlighting plays by the best Native American playwrights in the nation.
“I feel that investing our resources into the festival could someday bring national recognition to our theater company. There’s nothing like this, a yearly competition festival, in the state or in the region for Native Americans. As a theater company in Oklahoma, it’s really our duty to do something that brings things that are unique to Oklahoma to the forefront,” says artistic director Rachel Irick.
The company’s festival, a two-week celebration of Native American playwrights and their works, is in its third year. It began as a humble reading of plays by Native American authors and grew from there. Each year Irick and her team select one of the readings for a full presentation for the following year’s festival. Their choice isn’t just based on the best reading; it’s also a matter of finding a good fit for the company.
“Any festival that gives voice to a culture is important. It’s an educational process, it’s an awareness process and in this case it helps the Native American culture look at itself and work out some problems,” says Glancy.
Salvage tells two tales: The story of a car collision between two men and a story of the collision of Native American and European cultures. It’s also a tale of loss, revenge and family loyalty. The author, a University of Central Oklahoma graduate, confesses to pulling out all the stops for it. It’s the kind of work that’s garnered Glancy the American Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Five Civilized Tribes Playwriting Prize and the Oklahoma Book Award. From 1980 to 1986, Glancy served as the Artist-in-Residence for the State Arts Council of Oklahoma. The experience influenced several of her works, including Salvage.
Salvage has been produced before in Los Angeles and London. This is its first appearance in Oklahoma.
“I’m looking forward to seeing the play again. Every time you have a different director and actors that put their own interpretation on a play you see another dimension to it that you didn’t know was there. I’m looking forward to seeing it very much,” Glancy says.
A New Undertaking
If you were a “hepcat” teenager in the late 1960s who happened to live no more than a few dozen miles west of Tulsa, chances are good that you saw and heard the Undertakers, a five-man rock ‘n’ roll outfit that pretty well ruled that turf for a few golden years. Among the teen hotspots they regularly played was the Joker in Cleveland, Okla., where, in 1967, a friend of the band’s named Dick Culbertson set up a brand-new Sony reel-to-reel tape recorder and two mikes and recorded 60 minutes of the group’s SRO performance that night.
In those days, simply getting something down on tape for your own use was a big deal, and actually getting the music to the public was an even bigger deal. Home recording was far from ubiquitous then, and the process involved in putting out a record was far more costly and time-consuming than it is today, when a musician with reasonable technical proficiency can cut a CD, create the packaging and put it on sale without ever having to leave his computer. Sure, bands got picked up by record labels, but the distance between Mannford, Okla., where most of the Undertakers lived, and recording centers like L.A. and New York seemed as far away as another galaxy.
For those reasons, it’s unlikely that the young members of the group ever thought their recorded performance would go much further than the 1/4-inch tape on their friend’s machine.
As it turns out, they were wrong.
Forty-five years later, those 60 minutes are finally being released – on vinyl – as the premiere offering of In Person.Records, a new label based in Sand Springs. It’s the brainchild of 23-year-old Jake Shaeffer, son of Undertakers lead guitarist Larry Shaeffer, the concert promoter and booking agent who owned Tulsa’s Cain’s Ballroom for nearly two decades. To hear Jake tell it, he grew up at least as impressed by his dad’s record collection as he was by Larry Shaeffer’s role as one of Tulsa’s entertainment heavyweights.
“Years and years ago, I got into vinyl records, stuff like Buddy Holly, because that’s what dad had at home,” explains Jake. “I didn’t listen to it because I thought it was cool; it’s just what I had. If you were in eighth grade in Keystone Middle School, listening to Buddy Holly on vinyl was probably the most uncool thing you could do.”
A few years later, that all changed.
“My brother, James, was a big White Stripes fan, and they were putting out a lot of vinyl,” he says. “That was the first time I noticed kids buying new vinyl.”
As it turned out, kids like Jake were buying old vinyl, too, searching out hard-to-find rock ‘n’ roll and blues records, many of which had never been transferred to disc. He became a collector of LPs and obscure music. Given that passion, it was natural that his attention would soon fall on the tape of his dad’s band.
“I’d always heard about the Undertakers,” he says. “I knew the guys who were in the band, I’d seen the old pictures. And about 10 years ago, I finally heard a cassette tape of the show. I loved that I could finally put a sound to these old photos – and the music wasn’t bad at all. The vinyl collector in me thought it would be cool to do their first record.”
First, though, he had to convince his father.
“For a year or so, I’ve been pushing him into it,” Jake says. “He told me, ‘No one wants to hear us make our noise. No one would want to listen to it. No one would be interested. It’s not even a professional recording,’
“I told him, ‘That’s cool right now. People like to listen to the scratches and the pops. This is real music, flaws and all, and people like that old garage-rock sound.’”
“It was gentle persuasion,” adds Larry Shaeffer. “He finally just wore me down.”
Once Larry was on board, he and Jake turned to Undertakers bassist Terry Colberg – who, notes Larry, “has been the curator, the guy who hung onto the photos, the memories, and the original tape.”
“About a year ago,” says Colberg, “I ran it through a graphic equalizer and onto the computer. I digitized it because I wanted to make a disc for all the guys.”
Now, the music on the tape has been even further enhanced, and by one of the top mastering engineers in the business, Kevin Gray. Based in Los Angeles, he’s worked on recordings by such artists as the Who, the Doors, the Beach Boys, Jefferson Starship and Steely Dan.
“He remasters big acts to be put back on vinyl,” explains Larry. “He told us that the Undertakers reminded him of the garage band he was in. His band had even played some of the songs we played. And suddenly, an exorbitant price went down to something very reasonable.”
Following the remastering, the record goes to Chad Kassem in Salina, Kan., who is, says Jake, the largest vinyl distributor in America. “We’re doing 1,000 copies total, on 200 grams, the thickest vinyl we can get,” he adds. “Two-hundred-gram vinyl is more of an aesthetic thing. We want it to be as close to a record pressed in 1967 as it can be – weight, look, feel, smell, everything. The first 100 will be signed and numbered, with reproductions of five handbills for the band and a copy of the band’s business card.”
Unlike many bands, the Undertakers got along well until the end, when the military draft broke the group up. As guitarist John Claybrook remembers, “We just had fun and cared about playing good. There was no ego from anybody.”
That was true from the very beginning, according to lead vocalist Jimmy Allen, when the group had to cobble together whatever equipment it could. “I remember that our first microphone stand was homemade,” he says with a chuckle. “It had a Nash Rambler hubcap for a base. Our first gig was at a Mannford High School assembly, and all Mike had was a snare drum. We were raw. But we got better.”
Indeed, it wasn’t all that long before the group was drawing big crowds virtually every weekend in teen venues around the area.
“We put our songs in medleys, so we never stopped playing when we were on stage,” adds original drummer Mike Porter. “The guys had real good imaginations, and they did things that put our own mark on the songs.”
Often, those marks came about because the band members weren’t all that familiar with a number they were doing. “Sometimes we wouldn’t even practice a song,” remembers Jimmy Cunningham, who took over for Porter when the latter left for the Army. “Someone would hear a song on the radio and say, ‘Hey, have you heard this one?’ And we’d just jump in there and do it.”
That’s one of the things that make the project so attractive to Jake Shaeffer. “They didn’t write their own songs,” he says, “but what they did were a lot of the classic songs of the ‘60s. So this record is a way to document a little part of the ‘60s. And the fact that it’s my dad’s band makes me smile.”
At this writing, The Undertakers is set for a July 4 release. In addition to being offered on Facebook and other online sources, it’ll be available in Tulsa at Starship Records and Tapes.
Avenue Q
On Avenue Q, residents pass the days in relative peace and privacy. The difference between their neighborhood and yours is that your neighbors probably do not look like descendents of Jim Hensen’s Creature Shop. Call it Sesame Street for those Gen X-ers – now grown and in touch with the more sardonic aspects of life – who learned to count with music, monsters and giant birds on TV. Just don’t make the mistake that Avenue Q — 2004’s big Tony Award winner – strives to be a haven for tender minds. Satire makes the story of a young college grad and the folks he meets in his shabby apartment building ripe for songs titled “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” and “The Internet is for Porn.” That the play is produced this time by LOOK Musical Theatre makes it enticing, considering the company was born from Gilbert and Sullivan shenanigans. Avenue Q plays the Tulsa Performing Arts Center June 16, 17, 22, 30 and July 3. Also see LOOK’s entire summer season at www.looktheatre.org
Ozarka Oklahoma City Nationals
When you’re a fan of speed, it doesn’t matter if the action takes place on the pavement or in the water. Head off-road to the Ozarka Oklahoma City Nationals for one of the country’s biggest boat dragging spectaculars set for June 8-10 in downtown Oklahoma City on the Oklahoma River. In its fourth year, the event is sanctioned by the Southern Drag Boat Association and features a variety of watercraft, some racing on speeds of up to 250 miles per hour. Top fuel hydro, top alcohol hydro, pro mod, pro eliminator, river racer – whether you recognize these as a class eligible for drag racing or not, the sight of boat and driver virtually skipping the waves like a stone ripping the surface at 175 miles per hour just may fascinate you. www.okcmotorsports.com
In Like A Lamb
There’s a famous scene in the movie Rounders in which Mike McD (played by Matt Damon) walks in on a game of Texas Hold ‘Em and proceeds, through a combination of superior skill and Hollywood magic, to accurately name the hand each player at the table holds. It’s the kind of moment that movies love to feed to audiences: a baby-faced prodigy astounding seasoned veterans with his abilities in a contest of skill. By the end of the movie, Mike is heading off into the sunset toward Las Vegas where he plans to test his skills against the world’s best poker players in the World Series of Poker. This is the point when, if the movie world crashed with present-day reality, we would see reigning World Series of Poker Card Player of the Year Ben Lamb destroy all of Mike McD’s dreams.
Of course, Rounders was released in 1998, when Ben Lamb was a 12-year-old living in Tulsa, and long before he became one of the top poker players in the world, with more than $7.4 million in career winnings. Lamb’s gambling experiences up to that point were limited to high stakes games of Monopoly, some intensely competitive pool and Pog.
“When you’re a kid you tend to want the things your friends have,” Lamb says and laughs, “whether it’s a video game or a 10-cent Pog.”
It might seem silly now, but those Pogs were instrumental in shaping the competitive nature that would lead him to become one of the top poker players in the world. But first he would have to actually take up the game.
“I played a lot of pool in high school, betting on games,” Lamb says, “but I didn’t really play a lot of poker until I was 18 or 19.”
Although 18 might not sound particularly old, it is a bit late for mastering the skills needed to excel at poker, especially when you consider that 2009 World Series of Poker champion Joe Cada was the youngest winner ever at 21. But Lamb turned out to be a quick study and began playing in money games online and in college at Trinity University in San Antonio.
It was the online poker games where Lamb received his real poker education. Back then, before online gambling laws forced the two largest poker sites in the world to shut off access to money games in the U.S., a young guy like Lamb could shorten the learning curve by playing hundreds of hands a day. In fact, he became so good so fast that he quickly made the decision to drop out of college and pursue poker as a career.
“It seems stupid now,” he says of leaving college. “It probably was stupid. But I guess it turned out okay.”
After moving back to Oklahoma, Lamb took a job as a dealer at the Cherokee (now Hard Rock) Casino in Catoosa, where he continued learning by watching the players and playing in tournaments, often finding himself playing against older and much more experienced competition.
“I think (my age) was an advantage sometimes,” says the baby-faced Lamb. “I was underestimated a lot. Back then there weren’t a lot of young players.”
Soon he was winning enough to travel to Atlantic City and Las Vegas for tournaments. In 2008 Lamb went to Las Vegas and stayed.
“I had been making money for a while by then,” he explains. “It was sort of the natural progression.”
One might say the rest is history, but for Lamb, history is still waiting to be written. The natural progression he speaks of has been a steep and steady slope that he has climbed at unusually high speeds. In 2011 alone, Lamb totaled more than $5 million in winnings and finished number three in the main event at the World Series of Poker.
“I’ve succeeded beyond my wildest dreams,” he says, “but I always want to improve as a card player.”
For the most part, that improvement comes from simply playing cards. Lamb plays anywhere from twice a week during slow periods to every day when he’s preparing for tournaments. But he also never hesitates to ask his peers questions or seek their input in trying to learn more about the game. For Lamb, the ultimate goal in poker is learning to always play to his utmost ability.
“A lot of my friends who play will maybe have their B or C game a lot of the time,” he says. “I want to get to the point where I bring my A game every time.”
One would be wise to expect that Lamb will get to that point sometime, probably sooner rather than later. Any good gambler will tell you that it’s a safe bet that he will make it back to the final table at the World Series of Poker Main Event. A safer bet would be that the next time he makes it there, Lamb will be the last man standing. And if and when he does, maybe he’ll stop being so hard on himself for dropping out of college.
