My First Live Music Shows

For some reason I was recently reminded of one of the earliest live music performances I had ever attended while in high school, which then triggered memories of a show I saw previously in junior high.  Thanks to the internet I was able to track down some information on the performers, much of which I was unaware of at the time.  Armed with this additional information, I figured I should do this write-up while I still remembered some portion of these events.

I attended Mount Vernon Junior High School is Los Angeles from 1959 to 1962.  (The school has since been renamed Johnnie Cochran Middle School.)  I remember one school assembly where there was a special outside performer.  Mind you this was the early 1960s when rock n’roll was changing the face of music.  Nevertheless all of us as this predominantly minority school were thrilled by the appearance of Eugene List, famous classical pianist, and Mount Vernon alumnus.  They probably told us that List gained fame playing for President Truman, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin at Potsdam, but I had forgotten that.  Later he also appeared in the movies and on the Ed Sullivan Show.

I moved on to Dorsey High School in 1962, probably the most diverse high school campus of its day with a population almost evenly split between Asians, blacks and whites.  Indeed, Indonesian strongman President Sukarno was taken to Dorsey on his US tour to see its diversity.  This is where on a Saturday evening my pal Gary Fugita came to my house and we walked the three blocks to Dorsey to see my first show with big name entertainers, the Lennon Sisters.  Yes, the rock era was well under way but it was still a big deal that the featured act of Lawrence Welk’s weekly TV show were making an appearance at our school.  Strangely over the years I had forgotten that the Lennon Sisters were at that performance and associated that evening with the appearance of a band fronted by Marshall Cram, whom I had never heard of.  Now you’d think that a band playing at a high school well into the rock era would play rock music.  But actually as I just discovered Marshall Cram was a late swing era session musician, which explained his music which I would describe as big band music with a bit of a rock beat.  And as I also discovered, though Cram was fairly young he died a year or two after he performed at Dorsey High School.  

Back then live music concerts as we know them today were unheard of, so it's interesting to look back at those early shows at school.