When David Adkins called me in the spring and told me that he and John Rainey were putting together a new band that would also be the staff band for Playground Studio in Valparaiso, I was ready to come home. That band became the original Beaver Teeth. The lineup was David Adkins on drums and vocals, Lamar Alley on vocals and guitar, Larry Shell on vocals and guitar, John Rainey Adkins on guitar and vocals, and me playing my Hofner bass. Larry Shell was a great singer/songwriter who later went on to some success as a song publisher in Nashville. Beaver Teeth was named by John Rainey because of Larry's prominent buck teeth. That was a good band, and was to my thinking the most unique of the several Beaver Teeth incarnations, though later versions of the group may have been better. I recorded quite a few sessions at Playground Studios with Larry, David, and John Rainey. That was a great time for me, but it didn't last. Late that summer when I just turned 20, Larry and Lamar left the band. We had made a couple of trips up to Atlanta to see the new studio Buddy Buie was building in Doraville. Me being on the chubby side, several people thought it would be a good idea for me to see Dr. Rankin, whose office was in the building housing the Buie/Cochran offices and the old Mastersound studio, where the Classics IV and Candymen had recorded. Actually a lot of hits of the late 60's came out of that Mastersound Studio. (One aside about Playground Studios in Valparaiso, Findley Duncan operated that studio for years, and he had old tapes of the Allman brothers (just the brothers, not the band) when they'd recorded there.) On one trip to Atlanta, I remember cutting a couple of songs for Wilbur Walton when Studio One was new. David played drums, Paul Goddard, the great ARS bass player, played rhythm guitar, I played bass, and I think Dean Daughtry played piano. I bet Wilbur still has those tapes.



After Larry and Lamar left Beaver Teeth, David moved to guitar, Frank Tanton was added on keyboards, and Charlie Silva came in on drums and lead vocals. Charlie was a great drummer and singer, but his biggest talent was that he could do something called the "helicopter" with a certain part of his anatomy. This also made him quite popular with the ladies. That version of Beaver Teeth only lasted a couple of months, but we did record some sessions at Studio One, with Ronnie Hammond as the engineer. Frank and I then left the band. I was replaced by Jack Lane, who had to have been the best bass player in the world--he was phenomenal. Clark Craits took over the keyboard job. Jack Lane was the bass player for several months, and when he left Jimmie Dean, another really great bass player took over that job, keeping the bass chair for several years.



After I left Beaver Teeth, I played with almost every band in Dothan: Norman Andrews and the Concrete Bubble, Wilbur Walton, Jr. and Blackhawk (we played one summer at the Hang Out in PC), Strawdawg, MG and the Capers. In my mid-twenties I went off to school at Auburn to study agronomy and have never played professionally again, though I still play and try to keep up my chops.