March 24, 1978 Gusto cover story: The Rebels

 

The twisted tale of Buffalo’s most celebrated one-hit wonders.

March 24, 1978 Gusto cover story

The Rebels 

          The Rebels were the hallway heroes of Lackawanna’s Baker Victory High School back in the days of “American Hot Wax,” the autumn of 1959. Starting out the previous year as members of a South Buffalo street fraternity, they’d turned their energies indoors and soon caught the ear of a wheeling, dealing young deejay named Tommy Shannon. Shannon asked them to be the featured band for his many weekly record hops, which traveled from school to school all over the Buffalo area.

          One of the songs Shannon asked the Rebels to learn was the theme song that he played every night to start off his show on WKBW. It was called “Wild Weekend.” Shannon liked it so much that he had them record it for him. Then Shannon and his manager put it out as a single. It became a fluke hit, selling 12,000 copies or more in Western New York that autumn, and the Rebels became a classic study in what happened to overnight teen sensations in the wild early days of rock ‘n roll.

         The Rebels didn’t shimmy like Elvis Presley or hiccup like Buddy Holly. Instead, they were members of then then-thriving genre of rock instrumental groups. They used no vocals at all. Nevertheless, there was no shortage of material – “Tequila” by the Champs, Bill Doggett’s “Honky Tonk,” all the stuff by the Ventures, Santo and Johnny, Johnny and the Hurricanes, even “The Green Mosquito,” a national hit in the summer of 1958 by another Buffalo rock instrumental group, the Tune Rockers.

          The Rebels’ idol was Duane Eddy. They faithfully reproduced his trademark, the Twanging Guitar, and his series of 1958-59 hits – “Rebel Rouser,” “Ramrod,” “Cannonball,” “The Lonely One,” “Yep” and “Forty Miles of Bad Road.” They called themselves the Rebels because that’s what Duane Eddy called his band. Some of the kids at the record hops thought the local Rebels were Duane Eddy’s band.

          The Rebels didn’t go out of their way to correct that impression. After all, the lineup was pretty much the same: Lead guitar (Jim Kipler), rhythm guitar (Paul Balon), saxophone (Jim’s twin brother Mickey) and drums (Tom Gorman). The Kiplers, Baker Victory sophomores in late 1958, met Balon, a junior, through guitar teacher John Gostomski at Park Ridge Music Store.

          “In those days,” Balon says, “there was no electric bass. It was all rhythm guitar. Jing-jing-jing-jing. Sometimes it used to get complicated. Jinga-jinga-jinga-jinga.”

          They played Baker Victory record hops at first, which is where Shannon, a guest record spinner one Saturday, heard them. With Shannon, they’d play a little to open the show, do a half hour or so in the middle, then run through a few more tunes to close the festivities. The group would get to divide $5 or $10 for their efforts. Since all of them were too young to drive, Shannon supplied their transportation.

          At the same time, the Rebels had ambitions. In those days, the Kiplers recall, popular local groups gathered together a few hundred dollars, recorded a tune and, with luck and a little airplay, could count on selling 5,000 singles at $1 apiece.

          The Rebels were working up an instrumental version of the hit “Short Shorts,” but Shannon wanted them to do his radio theme song instead. He took them to his manager’s studio at 291 Delaware Ave., where they taped “Wild Weekend” and the flip side, “Wild Weekend Cha Cha.”

          “There was a method to his madness,” Balon says. “He put the same thing on the flip side out of fear that the other radio stations would turn it over and wouldn’t play his theme song.”

          It was issued on Marlee Records. Marlee was a combination of the names of Shannon’s girlfriend and his manager’s girlfriend. Shannon’s manager was goateed Phil Todaro, a rock deejay himself. Todaro was Hernando, the Weird Beard, the Cool Fool.

          After watching “Wild Weekend” take Buffalo by storm, Shannon and Todaro went after Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Kids went wild over it there, too. Finally they sold it to Swan Records, which was owned by the wife of “American Bandstand’s” Dick Clark. That insured them a spot of Clark’s TV dance show.

          The relationship between radio stations and the record business in the late ‘50s was different from what it is today. There were no music directors screening incoming singles. There were no ironclad playlists. To the older generation, rock hits were an unfathomable mystic collaboration between the deejays and the kids.

          As a result, the deejays had pretty much of a free hand in selecting what went on the air. Record promoters went straight to the deejays with their wares. Then, as now, a hit had to have it in the grooves to become a hit, but hits were commonly helped along by plying the deejays with payola – cash, gifts and other considerations.

          It was a widespread practice, not exactly illegal, but not entirely scrupulous either. It became a scandal in 1959 and 1960. The Congressional investigation that toppled Alan Freed brought it pretty much to a stop.

          “American Bandstand’s” arrangement hadn’t been challenged yet when the Rebels appeared on the show in spring 1960. It was the high point of their instant stardom. They met all the Bandstand regulars. Annette Funicello autographed Paul Balon’s arm.

          But the show didn’t go exactly as they’d hoped. For one thing, they couldn’t hear the record they were pantomiming, so the steps they’d made up for it were out of syncopation. And then there was Dick Clark’s little interview with Balon. The Kiplers had been spokesmen for the last four TV shows the group did, but for some reason the manager tapped Balon as spokesman that day in the car en route to the studio.

          “I was so scared my bottom lip was quivering,” Balon recalls. “I went blank. Dick Clark asked me: ‘Why do you call yourselves the Rebels when you’re from so far up north?’ I blurted out, ‘Duane Eddy’s our idol. We copy everything he does.’ Because of that, we had to change our name to the Buffalo Rebels. Encroachment, they called it.”

          “Wild Weekend” went on to sell between 1.2 million and 1.4 million copies worldwide. It was number four in Japan. Shannon got a gold record from Swan, but the Rebels didn’t. They didn’t get any royalties either. They only earned money from personal appearances – those $5 and $10 record hops plus standard artist scale for TV. Todaro took their check from “American Bandstand” and used it to pay for their hotel in Philadelphia. And though the Rebels once got to kiss a lineup of more than 100 girls at a Niagara Falls hop, there were never any groupies.

          “They watched us,” the Kiplers relate, “or else they put us in some obscure motel on the outskirts of town. We’d watch TV all night or play miniature golf or go swimming. We met a few girls, but we always had to go. We’d be doing two or three hops in one evening. Sometimes, it would be 25 minute to unpack, play, pack and get back in the car.”

          Their fame did not endear them to the Baker Victory High School administration. They missed a lot of school. Four times the Kiplers were threatened with expulsion. They would up taking their senior year at Lackawanna High School.

          While they were missing classes, they were making TV bandstand shows all over the Northeast. They also did part of a tour with Bobby Vee and Roy Orbison in the summer of 1960. But the lack of royalties from their hit began to anger them. Balon was the first to quit.

          “Our parents didn’t realize what we had,” he says. “We were unaware of contracts and things like that. Our parents signed for us like they were signing a permission slip for the football team.”

          When attorneys were called in, they found that Todaro and Shannon had formed corporations on top of corporations. They also learned that all the corporations had filed for bankruptcy.

          Todaro went to New York City, where he allegedly became involved in the pornographic film business. Balon says that “Wild Weekend” has turned up in the soundtrack of at least one X-rated movie, along with “Buffalo Blues” and “Donkey Walk,” two other Rebels records.

          Shannon, now a morning deejay on CKLW in Windsor, Ont., had the Rebels’ name copyrighted. When the record resurfaced again in 1961, he asked the Kiplers to go out and tour. When they refused, he rounded up another quartet and called them the Rockin’ Rebels. Historians credit the second group with the hit.

          “You guys were shafted,” says Kenny Vaughn, a trumpeter and business agent for the Buffalo Musicians Local. He was a driver for Shannon in the early days. He met the Kiplers in the mid ‘60s and played with them.

          Some their management’s trickery didn’t have an effect immediately. The group discovered in 1961 that their union dues and penalties hadn’t been paid as promised. It took each of them several hundred dollars to straighten that out and avoid union sanctions.

          Balon went on to study music at UB, learning the upright bass. He now teaches fifth grade in West Seneca and is a freelance bassist working weekend dates on call. The Kiplers began studying jazz in 1964. A couple years later, they reunited with Balon to play jazz – John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery, things like that.

          Later on, the Kiplers joined a long-standing local commercial band, the Coincidentals, and began to sing. Since last year, they’ve worked with singer Al Vino, a regular performer at the Charter House Restaurant on Transit Road.

          As for Tom Gorman, the drummer, the Kiplers and Balon have lost touch with him. Gorman was parentless and was raised at Our Lady of Victory orphanage. He was the one who wanted to call the band the Rebels. The last time Jim Kipler saw him was during a gig at a Hamburg club in 1974. Gorman came to the stage, borrowed $20 and disappeared.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: The Rebels in 1960. From left, Tom Gorman, Paul Balon, Mickey Kipler and, seated, Jim Kipler.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: The Kipler brothers continued playing weddings, parties and clubs locally for many years. Jim’s LinkedIn page tells us that he became business agent for Buffalo Local 92 of the American Federation of Musicians in 2013. He also still plays and teaches guitar. He and Mickey can be seen on YouTube in a nine-minute version of “Wild Weekend” recorded in 2019, but without Paul Balon. He died in 2003, the year after the Rebels, a/k/a the Buffalo Rebels, were inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame.

          Tom Shannon, who became a Buffalo Music Hall of Famer in 2004, eventually came back to his home turf in the 1980s and had a 50-year career on the air, finally retiring from playing oldies on WHTT-FM in 2006. I noted in his obituary in 2021 that the theme song for his radio show was so familiar to Western New Yorkers of a certain age that they can fill in the lyrics whenever they hear it: “Top tunes … news and weather. … So glad we could … get together … on the Tom Shannon show.”