The revolution began in the middle of the 1950s, when the musical stew of rhythm and blues, swing, and hilbilly music transformed into something entirely new; powered by the current of amplifiers' glowing vaccuum tubes and the pulsing thump of the kick drum. Rock and roll was born. This new sound took the youth of America by storm and in the 1950s, rock and roll bands popped up all over, exciting teens and perplexing parents of the age.

Author Will Anderson was one of those teens and he has re-visited the era in Maine in his latest book, When Rock 'n Roll Rocked Maine. Anderson looks at the local bands and hotspots as well as the national acts that dropped by in Maine. He talks to the people who remember, and remembers the ones who are gone. We spoke with him by phone from his home in Bath.

What prompted you to tackle this subject?

As you know I’ve written quite a few other books and always on a topic with which I feel a strong passion, baseball, beer and brewiana, basketball, roadside architecture. There was one that was really meaningful in my life from high school on, and that’s rock and roll, I mean real rock and roll, I don’t mean this powdered down crap now. I mean the real thing, you know, Larry Williams and Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Fats Domino, that kind of thing, a little raw around the edges. I thought that I could do a book and capture the flavor of it, and the spirit of it and indeed I think I have. I’m very proud of the book.

You had the chance to track down all these folks from all these bands. That must have been fun.

It was fun…well of course some of them have passed away, that wasn’t fun. But talking with the guys who are still around, yeah they get a twinkle in their eyes when we talk about rock and roll.

The Ramblers from Rockland - Photo circa 1957. The Fender Stratocaster guitar in guitarist Fred "Tommy" Thompson's hands would be worth tens of thousands of dollars today, depending on condition - Photo from When Rock 'n Roll Rocked Maine

Do they still have the guitars in the closet? Because I was looking at the guitars in the pictures and some of them would go for major bucks these days.

Oh they know that. They know they’re worth a bloody fortune. They’re not just in the closet; a lot of these guys are still playing. They’ll get together for a little sessions Thursday night up in Westbrook, some of them actually do paying jobs.

Do you think the advent of electric guitars and amplification was important to the birth of rock and roll? Suddenly you didn’t need to have a big band to make a big noise.

The guitar certainly had much to do with shaping rock and roll and the changing of popular music in America, but there was rhythm and blues long before there was an electric guitar, it was the piano and the saxophone. Those were the key ingredients all through the thirties and forties and into the fifties. Guys like Fats Domino or Smiley Lewis would pound the piano…there’d be a sax break in the record and then go back to the piano again. They did not need a guitar at all. What good was a guitar when you had everything you already needed? But the guitar did let it be easier to suddenly start playing rock and roll. It didn’t take much intelligence or knowledge of music.

Maine rock fans particularly in more rural areas will remember getting their rock and roll over the air on powerful distant AM radio stations at night.

That was exciting. That was such an exciting thing to be out on the road at night, you could pick up Philadelphia, you could pick up WOWO (Fort Wayne, Indiana). WKBW Buffalo, the whole eastern part of America listened to that -- and rocked and rolled to it, I might add.

You talked to some of the people who were on the radio and some who sold records in those days.

There was a guy who used to make records, Al Hawkes over in Westbrook. That was pretty exciting. I mean you could just make a record right here in your home state. And I got (Arnold) “Woo Woo” Ginsberg who is in his early 80’s and lives in Ogunquit. I chatted with Don Brown, who is still on the airwaves. These guys they had some good memories.

Was it largely an urban thing in Maine or was it more widespread.

Well there isn’t that much urban in Maine, I think it was more widespread. I was surprised that there was a rock and roll band up in Caribou, for example, which I tracked down, that really surprised me. It seemed to be spread pretty evenly throughout the state. Lewiston had the big advantage, because they had a very liberal licensing to play live music, and if you didn’t have a license for live music then you couldn’t very well play rock and roll in those days. And so that was more a center, a hub for rock and roll activity, more so than in Portland and more so than any other place in the state obviously.

Where I thought there would be a real magnitude of rock and roll was Old Orchard Beach, and there was, of course it was seasonal. Many of your early developments took place in the winter when OOB slept, so to speak, and the rest of the state was gaining ground in terms of live rock and roll music being played.

To be honest I grew up in downstate New York and then moved to Maine, so was writing a book about Main,e but pretty much from a downstate New York perspective. So I felt I had to work harder by interviewing more people, I read more newspapers. New York was a little bit “ahead” in terms of rock and roll. It had more population, number one, a more savant population number two and equally important-- more black population -- because they were the guys who spearheaded the whole thing, for which we can be thankful. Maine. as you know. is pretty white, so you didn’t really have that cutting edge up here, but it was more than I would have thought, more doo-wop groups, more bands than I ever would have thought actually. There was some pretty good stuff, too.

December 23, 2007
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