Susan Kepecs' article, Free-Jazz missionaries: Madison's Imitations were the sound of 60's radicalism, in this week's Isthmus is important in understanding the connection between the evolution of modern music and and politics. Hart McNee was right.
"The frats paid pretty good, but they were the enemy," recalls McNee. "Everybody in the band was basically left of socialist. We were playing 90% black music. We were playing for snotty rich kids and conservative football fans, but we were for civil rights and against the war."
When I got to Madison in 1962, one of the first things I did was look up Ben Sidran. Our families were friends back in Chicago and there was no problem finding him at Discount Records on State Street. Mike Moss was easy to find as well, since we had graduated from high school together.
The tough part was sneaking into the fraternity houses to hear the Imitations play. They were not pleased that friends of the band would wander in around 11:30 pm, but we stayed in the shadows and were generally left alone. Thank you, Chi Phi.
It was either 1964 or 1965 that someone at the Memorial Union got the bright idea to book the Imitations into Great Hall on Saturday nights. Tracy Nelson modestly recalled in the article:
...I hung around for a while, and they let me join...It was the first time I sang with an electric band. I felt lame and white singing with Irma and Chuck. There was nothing they couldn't hit. But the tunes, the big horn section — people loved us.
Tracy need not make any apologies. She could belt them out and hold her own with Irma Routen and Chuck Matthews. Ten years later, Chuck worked for Dane County, I think with kids, and died at a young age. Heart attack.
Ben did fundraisers for my various mayoral elections from 1973 into the 21st century. Dick Drake, "Fat Richard," did a number of them as well, either with Ben or with his own band, was Ben was booked doing real work. Many were at the Nitty Gritty.
I last saw Tracy when she played Madison about eight or nine years ago with Irma Thomas and Marcia Ball doing their "Sing It!," still one of my favorite CDs. In 1965, Tracy lived around the corner from us, in an apartment on Broom Street. We were are 515 W. Dayton and there was occasional traffic back and forth.
As I reread this, I am wondering if this is important to anyone else.
Susan Kepecs makes the point:
...Not everyone who lived on the front lines of the '60s sold out. The Imitations are a case in point. They broke down racial barriers with their bare hands and pitted their collective voice against the war in Vietnam. Some of them are dead now — Matthews, Drake and others who came and went. A few just disappeared. But the rest keep on keepin' on. ..
As I noted in a post a few weeks ago, "We are not done."