Johnny and I were best friends and lived just a few blocks away from each other, in a suburb of Orlando called Pine Hills. These recordings were done in 1968; Johnny was 12 and I had just turned 14 a few weeks prior.
We were friends for six years (I met him when I was 9 and he was 7), and as we developed over the course of the next few years, naturally our interests moved to music. Johnny started playing guitar when he was 10 and I started playing drums when I was 12.
A little side note is that Johnny's guitar teacher happened to also be his babysitter. She was the lead guitarist for a local all-female garage band called the Shang-a-langs. So Johnny early on had exposure to the hipper side of playing the guitar. (He wasn't playing "On Top of Old Smokey," he was learning Beatles songs from the Beatles Songbook, which he'd asked her to teach him—this is reflected in our recording a number of Beatles songs. I was the Doors/Cream fanatic, so that's why we did those songs from their songbooks.)
When we started, we were without any instruments except Johnny had a beat-up acoustic guitar and I played cardboard boxes with pencils, and eventually moved to beating real drumsticks on a chair. These were my first percussion instruments, until my father took pity on me and ordered a set of drums for me from a mail-order catalog. Johnny, being an obsessive Beatles fan, managed to find a violin-shaped guitar (Paul McCartney played a violin-shaped bass). We rehearsed in my bedroom almost daily after school. It was probably our favorite thing at the time. (Actually, playing music is still my favorite thing.)
My father engineered the recordings. He set up what I believe was a mono Telefunken machine; however, it may have been a stereo machine. I don't remember. Nonetheless, he managed to mix down three miked channels. One was on Johnny's vocals, another was on his guitar, and only one was overhead for my entire drum set.
Over the years, I've come to marvel at how well my father documented our music with such primitive means. It was an interesting session, because Johnny was in the utility room of my house with the door open so I could see him, and I had my drums set up in what was called the Florida room, which was adjacent to the utility room. So it's a garage recording, but more of a utility/Florida room recording than a garage recording, if you want to be precisely technical.
The reason that we did this recording session was because Johnny was moving away at the end of the month and we wanted to document what we had spent the past two years composing and working on. Unfortunately, after Johnny moved to California and eventually to Portland, Oregon over the course of the next five years or so, I lost touch with him and have been unable to reconnect since. This is something I will try again to do. However, if you have any resources through your connections and could help, that would be tremendous. The last place I know of Johnny living was in Portland. Unfortunately, he used two different last names when his parents divorced, and I'm not only unsure of which name he ultimately took, but also of the spelling. Here are the options: John Chadwick or John Pingrey/Pingry/Pingree (or some other spelling? I just don't know).
How met:
I was 10 years old and visiting a friend of mine (his name is Phil) and apparently he as friends with Johnny already and he introduced me to him. He was 8 years old and we became fast friends.
How started:
Johnny and I bonded initially over playing soldier and just playing as 8 and 10 year old boys—we were friends, we did a lot of imaginary role playing—we were very fond of war—Johnny’s dad was in the navy, mine was a seal—everyone was military. So we played war a lot either with toy guns or toy soldiers. We played monsters a lot. I didn’t like cowboy and Indians because I liked Indians. We did play civil war, player knights—all that kinda stuff most kids were doing at that age. We might have been more focused on these things than the average kids, because we didn’t play sports, we were into living a fantasy world, and we went to movies together and did all this stuff as best friends would do, made comic books together. I would basically do almost all of it because I drew, but I would include Johnny in the story writing and stuff, which led later to him being the main lyricist in our band.
The music that Johnny and I created was an outgrowth of our friendship, but also the environment that we grew up in. We both started doing music when the Beatles came to the United States. A little bit later, because of our age, but nonetheless, we started playing music mid-way through 1965. The Beatles had only been hitting for a little over a year.
Central Florida at that time was a very good place for young people that were interested in playing rock and roll. It had a lot of venues and because it was the mid-60s, everyone was riding high on a strong economy. Where Johnny and I lived was a specialized community that was built for employees of the aerospace industry, which included military personnel from the surrounding area as well. Consequently, when I think of the Meadowbrook community and Pine Hills, which was built in 1958, we moved there in 1959, everyone that I knew—all the families were not from Florida. In fact, half of them weren’t even from the United States. Our family, for instance, was a second generation German-American family. But there were Germans living across the street, Norwegians, Czechs down the street, there was an Italian-American family at the end of the block—in other words, there were a lot of European families there because of the second world war. And most of these families were employed by either NASA or Martin Marietta. My mother worked for Martin. Initially, she was a Rosie Riveter on the Pershing missiles that were deployed in West Germany in the early ‘60s.
Johnny’s father was a corps man (doctor) in the Navy. There was an atmosphere amongst my peers that reminded me a lot of certain stories that were presented on Twilight Zone, for instance. We all embraced the space race, we were all fascinated with rocketry, and the idea of extraterrestrial life. I had fond memories of sitting in our backyard watching the various rockets as they were shot off, like the Mercuries and the Apollos. We could see them because it was only 35 miles away, without even binoculars. You could just watch them take off. (Though with binoculars, you could see them up close.)
That atmosphere I think gave Johnny and me something special, because our community wasn’t like even the communities that developed around it due to its initial founding. But that being said, there was a lot of young kids that had parents that due to what their vocations were, I think made them more liberal towards the idea of their kids playing rock and roll. I don’t know how to explain it otherwise, because we had a lot of rock bands in our community, and Florida in general, during the ‘60s, was one of the main hotbeds of garage rock. I suspect it had a lot to do with the warm climate because it has a commonality with Texas and California in that regard, and that’s where else there was a lot of garage activity, aside from Northern locations like Detroit or New York.
But as a 13-year-old kid, I had no understanding or knowledge of any of this. I just took it for granted that everyone loved rock and roll, and that as many people as could lay it, were playing it. I knew do many bands and so may peers that were paying rock when I Was growing up that I thought it was just an American thing to do. Of course, my favorite rock band at that time—and essentially sill is—the Beach Boys, which embodied in my young mind were a lot of things that were my kid reality. Brian Wilson expressed my kid reality. Granted, it’s a lot of fun in the sun with surf and hot rods, but I was in Florida, and people surfed, I knew surfers, I surfed a little bit, my brother had a hot rod, people had hot rods, it was all to me, normal. The rock was just an expression of all that.
Johnny and I, when we reached a certain age, which was for me around 12 and for him around 10, that we started being drawn towards music. Johnny was the first to want to play music and for him, he was so enamored with the Beatles that they were his initial inspiration to picking up the guitar. He was 10 years old and so he had a baby-sitter, this baby-sitter happened to be the lead guitarist of the local all-girl rock band, the Shang-a-langs, who were fucking amazing! So he ended up getting guitar lessons on a weekly basis by his baby-sitter. She obviously found it a lot more entertaining than doing her homework, so Johnny progressed rapidly as a guitarist.
I was in a different situation, being 12 years old, I had to convince my parents that I was serious about wanting to play drums, because they had invested in a clarinet and then a guitar in my older brother, who decided on not playing either instrument after a short amount of time. By the time it was my turn to learn an instrument, they were very suspicious of it. So for the first 6 months that Johnny and I were making music together, I was beating on a chair and boxes. (I bought some drumsticks.)
The boxes were first, and I played them with pencils. They were all little cardboard boxes; I would stretch material (usually construction paper, so I’d have to be careful, ‘cause I’d put holes in them very often—open top, but very fragile—taped construction paper—had three of them) over them for the heads. And Johnny played acoustic guitar.
When I got the sticks, I needed something more substantial to beat on. Then I graduated to the chair, which had multiple surfaces that I could beat on as different drumheads. Of course, this was a chair that my dad liked and I beat the stuffing out of it, and I think by my destroying his chair, he realized he was serious about paying the drums, because I got a set of drums within a couple months of bashing the hell out of his chair. It was an office chair that had a swivel head rest, so I could swivel that and bang it at a different angle like it was a cymbal; it had wooden appendages—part of the skeletal structure—and then the arm rests were padded, so I could beat on them, and the seat was padded. It also had metal rimming, so it had all sorts of surfaces I could beat the hell out of. It was a green chair.
Johnny got his electric guitar at the same time that I got my drums. My dad ordered the drums through mail order catalog, I think they were from Spiegel’s. They were a generic no-name set of drums, but they actually didn’t sound bad. The cymbals were horrible sounding, but I didn’t know any better, I didn’t know what I was doing. They were blue sparkle. They were for Christmas—we started about midway through ’65, so for Christmas for ’65, we both got our instruments. Our parents were in cahoots about that. Johnny got I forget the brand, but it was a violin-shaped sunburst guitar. Paul McCartney played a violin-shaped bass and Johnny wanted to have a guitar that looked like that, and somehow his mom found one. It was really quite cool-looking; I’ve never seen one since.
Johnny’s mom became a big fan of ours; she even made us Nehru jackets when we entered into our psychedelic phase. The material she used was wallpaper fabric material—strange material she used. They were cool jackets, and we were the only kids I knew who had psychedelic Nehru jackets. She could get these exotic Hindu-y patterns. They were a bunch of colors—earth tones, reds, browns, and greens. They were different material for each; we both selected different material. Mine had gold in it and browns and bronze; his was more the earth tones. (Of course, we never got any photos taken of any of this. Or, if we did, his mom might have them, but I don’t have any photographs of any of this.)
Lessons:
One of the big advantages that teenage bands have over older bands is that we don’t have to worry about jobs. So Johnny and I rehearsed 5x a week—it was our favorite thing to do. We’d come home from school, meet at my house, wherein my bedroom, the drums and his amplifier were, and we’d play music from 3:30 to about 5. Around 5 o’clock is when all the parents would come home—next door neighbors, my parents—between 5 and 6. That hour an da half before 5 o’clock was the golden hour, because no one was around to bother us—or be bothered by us. When I think about the fact that we wrote over 20 songs, it sounds like a lot, but we were playing music together 5 days a week for over 2 years. There’s only so many covers one’s gonna bother with learning. And just like a lot of musicians who are serious, we were interested in expressing ourselves through our own compositions.
In the beginning, during the box era, Johnny and I wrote a lot of songs. A lot of that material during the formative stage of our collaboration were very honest expressions of what we could only see from the outside, because we were so young, we had no understanding of dating even, much less the more deep aspects of emotional relationships. These things were all abstractions to us, we had never even dated. We were completely clueless, we were so young, we were just kids—still boys. So a lot of our early songs were to my mind, fantastic. A good example is “Hide,” which is possibly our first or second song, and I wrote the lyrics to it. I pretty much wrote the song, and my interest in music at the time was being informed by groups like the Animals and the Young Rascals—these were groups that were pretty aggressive, so the song is a fairly aggressive number, and it’s about what later I realize is basically stalking—but innocently at the time, it was just the idea of some guy trying to convince his girlfriend to stay with him because he’s obviously a jerk.
The second song or first was “Cloud 9.” Once again, these early songs are pretty much my doing, and this one was my influenced by the Stones and the Drifters. Obviously I didn’t know anything about genre bending at the time, whatever we liked, that was that, we didn’t care if it was country or rock or what; we didn’t know there were distinctions at the time.
Johnny quickly as his technical skill as a guitarist progressed, so did his compositional skills, whereas I would be basically singing the melodies and then he would interpret them on the guitar. His songs obviously didn’t have to go through that process. Some of his early songs, like “Who Says.” I remember when he first played it for me—this is a song written by an 11-year-old boy singing about working in the coalmines, under the control of the British royalty. So, you figure! I have no idea where this came from except from his mind one morning (that particular time was a Saturday morning).
Johnny always had the ability to imagine things, and I thought they were often surprising little songs. Another example of that would be “Where’s Uncle Harold,” which is a very entertaining little song to sing. Again, it’s about somebody losing their uncle at a fair or something—I don’t know, I’d have to look at the words. It reminds me of Hitchcock’s one day at the fair, but whatever.
Another little chestnut that he came up with that is very much in service to his complete devotion and love of John Lennon—“The Abstract Horse.” That was our nod to the Sergeant Pepper LP.
Name:
As I mentioned, Johnny and I got together in mid-’65. We felt the need for having a third member, wanted to have a bass player. I had a friend who played bass and kept saying he would come over and work with us, but never did. And so we sort of ended up being a duo just because we didn’t bother with looking for a bass player, even though we wanted to have one. I guess in some ways, it’s almost like a brother band, where you feel a certain insularity in your collaboration.
We had tossed around a couple names for the band—we had thought of “The Abstract Horse” later; early on, we thought of “Two of Us”—it wasn’t until probably our last year together that we thought of using “The Abstract Horse.” We never really came to a decision on that, but those were the two names that we had considered. Later, because there already was a “Two of Us,” I rethought the name and decided upon “Two Much.”
As I mentioned, there were a lot of bands in the area—my next door neighbor dated the organist from a band I saw a few times. I knew personally at least 6 bands; only 1 of them ever put out any records.
There was a local label called Pine Hills Records, from our community. They put out a few records on that label. About 5 miles from my house was a recording studio that also had its own in-hose record label, and that’s where We the People recorded their first records, as did countless Florida bands. The studio was BJ and put out these samplers that are now highly regarded by collectors. They also put out a number of singles on their own in-house record label. A lot of these bands were older than Johnny and I, and so we didn’t know them personally, but my dad had bought me the BJ sampler, so I knew what a lot of the bands sounded like, plus a number of them played at our local high school. I saw Plant Life there, for instance.
As the scene evolved, a number of the bands in Florida were getting singles out, and Johnny and I, in the summer of 1968 (it amazes me that we’re talking 50 years ago), his father had gotten reassigned to the West Coast. So before he moved, we decided to record all of the material that we had written. This always amazes me that my father not only had the equipment to record us, but had the know-how—which, if you knew my father was something you wouldn’t expect. Nonetheless, he had a Telefunken system, I don’t know what kind of mics, they may have also been Telefunken. I know that Johnny also had a Telefunken system at his house. So we had German gear all over the place.
We recorded this album in one afternoon with very few retakes—only a handful. We had no idea what we were doing; my father probably had a better sense, because he was recording it. The recording situation was such that I set up in the Florida room—this is obviously that is special to the state of Florida, but it’s very similar to having a porch be part of your house—it’s not screened it, it’s an extra room that’s sort of porch like. I had my drums set up in it—it connected to the utility room, which is where Johnny set up his amp and his microphone for singing. My father was in his room, which adjoined the utility room, and he had his recording set up there, which was I assume a two-track system, but I’m not sure because the recordings are with three microphones. I don’t know if this system had multiple inputs for mics or if my dad had a small mixer or some sort. I really don’t know how he did this recording; it always amazed me that he got such clarity on the guitar and vocals with just one mic on each, plus another mic—just one mic—hung over my drums, so that all of the drum sounds are from this one overhead, ambient mic. Nonetheless, it’s a fairly decent recording of that, given those restrictions.
I mentioned that the bands were all older than us, being that Johnny and I were just kids, we couldn’t play out. The only people that heard us were our neighbors or friends that sat in while we played in my bedroom. I did know, like I said, guys that were older than me that were playing in bands in the clubs. One of them became a very good friend of mine after Johnny moved away—John Massatone.
What peers were up to at the same time:
My peers at the time were…in terms of my close friends, they didn’t really get involved with playing rock until their teens, so Johnny and I started playing, we were still in elementary school, and none of our friends were paying music—they were playing sports or just playing; they were just kids. It wasn’t until I was in the 8th grade that I then knew other people my age that were involved in other rock bands.
Most of my peers didn’t know that I was making music. Johnny and I had been doing this for a couple years—it was part of our friendship and just part of our way of being. I didn’t see it as something unusual, so the only people that really knew about us playing music were friends that happened to either be around when we were playing music. We didn’t have any recordings, because we didn’t do a recording until the very end of the band. And I didn’t think anyone else cared, and I think Johnny felt the same way. So for us, we were doing this music for ourselves.
What shows went to:
Because of our age, we never went to any live shows except for the Beach Boys Wild Honey tour, which had as an opener, both the Strawberry Alarm Clock, and more importantly, the last tour of Buffalo Springfield. Somehow my mom had managed to procure front-row tickets for me and Johnny, so when the Beach Boys were on stage, there was no way they didn’t know that we were out there because we wouldn’t shut up. We were yelling song titles and all sorts of stuff all through the show, just like the raving kids on those early live Beach Boys albums. We were just another one of those screamers. It was funny because I remembered that we were the only kids there—everyone else was either a teenager or young adult, and most of these folks weren’t yelling, so we were pretty obvious. (This was after Pet Sounds, so long after the yelling kids are going to be around. We were a throwback to their earlier days.) I remember this girl requesting us to yell “Surfer Girl” at the Beach Boys to get them to play it because she was too shy to do it herself, but she knew we would yell anything regarding the Beach Boys.
And so we did. The funny thing is that the Beach Boys play that song every. single. show. I know this because I’ve seen the Beach Boys many times since. As a kid, we had no idea that even the concept of a setlist was beyond our understanding. We had no idea about how they chose a song, so we just yelled songs we wanted to hear, because we were afraid they weren’t going to play them.
I think Carl Wilson in particular realized that about us, because after the show was over, we—rather than leaving the venue—we dived underneath the stage’s support system, which had opening areas that we could climb through as little boys (we were 10 and 12). So we basically snuck backstage by climbing underneath the stage. When we emerged on the other side of the stage, we stood up right in front of Carl Wilson, who without missing a beat said, “Hey guys, how you doing?” As if he was one of our buds. It was obvious that he recognized us for being the loudmouths in the front row. It completely put us at ease, because first of all, he was only like 6 years older than us—I think he was maybe 18—and he seemed just like an older brother or something. He was very natural and as I said, put us completely at ease. I got his autograph, we talked about I don’t remember now, but we talked to him for about 10 minutes, until one of his handlers came and got him.
One of the things I wanted to say about the show that had nothing to do with me and Johnny—but had to do with Dennis Wilson—is that he performed the entire show wearing army boots and a skin diver’s wet suit. Just wanted to mention that.
What songs covered:
The covers that we chose to do reflected our interest. Consequently, we did a bunch of Beatles songs—in fact, the first song I learned to play on the drums was “Money” (yes, I know it’s not really a Beatles song, but we didn’t know any better at the time. To us, it was a Beatles song, just like “Twist and Shout” was a Beatles song).
I had an interest in the Beach Boys, but not in terms of trying to play their music. The bands that I chose for us to learn were the Doors and Cream. The first song that I approached as a reflection of my compositional skills as a drummer was “Break On Through.” I never tried to play the drums like any of the drummers in any of these bands that we were covering—could you imagine me trying to play Ginger Baker? So when you hear the covers, I’m just smashing my way through these songs because I was a pretty caveman-style drummer. All the other songs were Johnnny’s doing—I had no interest in doing the Tremeloes or Lovin’ Spoonful—but it was fun, got to play a cowbell on the Tremeloes song—can always use more cowbell.
What happened after Johnny moved:
Johnny moved first to San Francisco, and we exchanged cassette letters, where we talked about stuff an also presented new songs that we had composed since he moved. Johnny had hooked up with another drummer on the West Coast and they were doing stuff that was more garage-y, and I had always complained that I wanted to hear him doing some feedback, so he sent me some recordings of him messing around with feedback. I was getting involved with blues and playing harmonica, so I sent him recordings of me playing songs like Shake Your Moneymaker.
After San Francisco, the next time I heard from him was a few years later and his family had moved to Portland, Oregon. I was in art school at the time—this was ’72—and I was able to contact him through the Portland yellow pages and I had a conversation with him. He told me he had just graduated from high school and he was talking about how he wasn’t happy with any girls he was dating, and I told him a little bit about my life in art school. We’ve never spoken since.
I have no idea where he is, I’ve tried to find him using various digital means, and have bee unsuccessful in locating him, which I find perplexing. Given how talented he was at such an early age, I can’t understand how he wouldn’t have gone into music on a professional level. You can find me by Googling my name without any effort, due to my career as a musician. I would think it should be the same for John Chadwick, but sadly that’s not been the case.
