www.jimnewsom.com/pfw-billdeal.html
This is funny. How Bill Deal came out of nowhere and all of a sudden was headlining. So these two VA guys met each other and put a little band together.
The Nags Head Casino even gets a mention.
"Deal, whose guitar-playing father owned Slim’s Restaurant near the shipyard in Portsmouth, had begun playing piano at the age of four. Tharp, whose dad was head of utilities at the Norfolk Naval Base, had started playing drums in the first grade while living in East Ocean View. "
"In the summer we’d come down here [to Virginia Beach] and work 6 or 7 nights a week,” Tharp remembers. “At the Top Hat, we’d play from 10:00 in the morning until 2:00 in the afternoon, then from 2:30 to 6:30, then from 8:00 to 12:00. We’d play three four-hour jobs in a day. Groups would come in like Fats Domino or Roy Orbison and we’d get to play with them.
“We made $12.00 a job, so we’d do those jobs for $36.00 back in those days, the early ‘60s. It was a lot of money.”"
"We kept getting requests for ‘May I’ at the Casino down in Nags Head,” Deal says. “We didn’t know what that music was. So we learned ‘May I,’ probably on a break or something, wrote down the words and worked out the parts, and did this ‘oompah-oompah’ thing to make it fun."
"They pressed a couple hundred copies of their “oompah-oompah, shoop-dooby-dooby” version of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ little known tune, sold out and pressed a couple hundred more, carrying it themselves from record store to record store and radio station to radio station. Then one day, WGH disc jockey Gene Loving called to say that a New York producer was interested in their record." So they pressed 10,000. Not enough.
Deal remembers the excitement of those days: “Our first trip to New York City, we could hear ‘May I’ all over the city. Our record was playing out of the speakers in the stores.”
“We played Madison Square Garden with Deep Purple, Neil Young & Crazy Horse, and Crazy Elephant,” Tharp adds. “And we were the headliners.”
In case you skipped over it THEY WERE THE HEADLINERS.
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