One Hell of a Ride: A Memoir

By Chuck Kirkpatrick

Chuck Kirkpatrick is an American musician and recording engineer who gained notoriety from working with dozens of popular acts in addition to being behind the recording console as an engineer for some of the most iconic records made in the 60's, 70's and 80's. growing up in a sleepy little beach town in South Florida and then hi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: Feb 4, 2025
• ISBN: 9798822980877

Chuck Kirkpatrick

Chuck Kirkpatrick has played guitar and/or sung with revered artists such as Eric Clapton, The Bee Gees, Firefall, Peter Frampton, America, Brian Wilson, Meat Loaf, Dion, Coco Montoya, Harry Chapin, Eddie Money, Lulu, Henry Paul, John Parr, Jimmy Ruffin, Leslie West and Mountain, McGuinn, Clark and Hillman and more. He has also been an award-winning recording engineer on certified gold records by Aretha Franklin, Brook Benton, Derek and the Dominoes, America, The Allman Brothers, Wilson Pickett, The Rascals, Delaney & Bonnie, James Brown, Petula Clark, Frank Zappa and other notable acts. In 1978, Capitol Records signed him and released his first national recording under the pseudonym, Chuck Crane. He has toured extensively with Firefall sharing the stage with acts such as The Beach Boys, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Charlie Daniels, Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine and many others. He has appeared on Star Search, Nashville Now, Solid Gold, PM Magazine and other national television broadcasts. Finally, Chuck has created and performed the music and voice overs for hundreds of radio jingles that have played throughout the country.

Book preview

1

Philadelphia

April 19, 1946. My father, Hugh Houston Kirkpatrick, Jr. and mother, Patricia Crane Kirkpatrick celebrated the first birth of their three boys in the Boomer explosion after dad had returned from WW II just nine months earlier. What other name could be more appropriate than Hugh Houston Kirkpatrick III? It wouldn’t be long, however, when I was nicknamed Chuckie and, to this day, rarely has anyone ever referred to me as Hugh except the telemarketers who pronounce it Hug Huge or Hoog.

My earliest memory as a child is that of a dark, stormy morning in Drexel Hill, a suburb of Philadelphia, PA. I remember seeing and hearing the pouring rain through the screened front door of our tiny duplex on Eldon Avenue. I could not have been more than two years old, but I distinctly remember feeling the warmth and comfort of my head cradled in my mom’s lap as she read her book by lamplight.

My world was the tiny yard out front and the common driveway that ran behind the row of duplexes leading to everybody’s garage spaces. I used to wait at the kitchen window every night to see our neighbor, Jack, ride his huge Harley up the driveway. His bike had lights on the spokes of both wheels and seeing those two spinning circles of lights in the dark accompanied by the roar of that V-twin engine was the highlight of my day! I developed a passion for motorcycles later in life; even buying two at age 78.

That driveway also served as a perfect runway and racecourse for this adventurous three-year old and his American Flyer red wagon. There was enough of a slope in the driveway to be able to coast down in my wagon at a pretty good clip. Thinking I would impress the little girl next door with my driving skills, I invited her to climb aboard behind me for a thrill ride. Big mistake. Anyone remembering those wagons knows that they were steered by a long tiller-like handle that served both as a tow bar and steering arm when folded back towards the ‘driver’. Unfortunately, my passenger was forcing me to sit much further forward, and the steering arm was against my chest. Before I knew it, we were careening down the driveway completely out of control because I couldn’t steer properly. We hit the curb, the wagon stopped instantly, but my passenger and I went airborne over the front of the American Flyer, and I face-planted into a large rock. The next thing I remember was running screaming towards my mom and seeing the horrified look on her face. I’m glad I didn’t see the blood, but I sure tasted it and felt the gap with my tongue where a front tooth once was. To this day, I maintain a fear of facial injury and objects coming at me with any velocity: baseballs, footballs, etc. which explains my non-participation in most sports involving projectiles. Oddly enough, I did join in a neighborhood backyard baseball game a few years later, only to catch a line-drive square in the forehead at second base a wood telephone pole which I had my back to. Two inches lower, and I would have had a nose job. Ball hit head, back of head hit pole, and down I went, out cold the end of my baseball ‘career’!

I believe my performing career may have begun when I was only two years old. According to my mom, I would actually gather crowds in the department store where she shopped in downtown Philadelphia. Mom would leave me by myself in a safe corner of the store (nobody worried about kidnappings back then) while she looked at clothes. When she came to get me, she found me surrounded by people listening to me sing one of the popular songs of the day, Lavender Blue! Who would have thought that 70 plus years later, I’d still be up on a stage singing and performing the popular songs of the day? Uncanny.

My real passion as a child was trains and trolley cars of which Philadelphia had an abundance. I’m old enough to remember seeing real live steam locomotives pulling passenger trains out of Ocean City, New Jersey where we vacationed every summer. My little Lionel train set with a simple loop of track, two cars, and a locomotive was my other world, and I spent hours playing with it. Many years later I composed a song called Red Arrow Line which captured my passion for all things trains and trolleys. (can be found on my CD entitled HHK III 2016)

In 1950, we moved to a two-story house on James Drive in Havertown. With mom expecting, we were going to need a bigger home. Scott Crane Kirkpatrick came into this world on May 30 that year and I now had a baby brother! Dad recalled a priceless story in his memoirs about picking Scott up from the hospital. When he and I went to visit my mom, she was still in the hospital bed, and I was looking quizzically at her for a long period of time. When Dad asked what I was doing I replied that I was looking at her neck to see how they sewed it back on after her head was taken off to retrieve the baby!

My ‘world of trains’ further expanded when my dad built me a permanent layout in the basement of the new house. Also in that basement of the James Drive house was an upright player piano that my mom decided she wanted and bought. She had played piano and sung since she was in high school and decided to take it up again. I’ll never forget watching the two delivery guys struggling to get that monster piano down the steep basement stairs. I don’t know how they managed, but hours later mom and I were loading the paper rolls into the player mechanism and watching in amazement as the keys of the piano moved by themselves and played amazing arrangements of popular songs. I could change the tempo of the songs by how fast my little feet could pump the pedals below the keyboard. I could get 3-minute songs down to about a minute! When I wasn’t ‘playing’ the paper rolls, I was plunking out little made-up melodies of my own. Mom decided it was maybe time for me to get serious and found a piano teacher whose home I went to for lessons once a week. My favorite part of the lesson was not the lesson itself but eating all the candy out of a bowl the teacher had placed on a table in the waiting room! The lessons didn’t last very long simply because I would not practice those horrible little scales the teacher had written in my assignment book. My ‘music career’ had begun and ended by age five.

Two years after we settled in the James Drive house, Mom gave birth to a third son, John Archer Kirkpatrick. Now we were three!

2

Florida

In 1955, we took a family took a vacation to Fort Lauderdale, Florida and landed in a cozy little beach town called Lauderdale-By-The-Sea. Mom’s parents had moved to Ft. Lauderdale in 1952 so we started vacationing there in the winters. Needless to say, they were really enamored with the sun and the ocean. LBTS is located about thirty miles north of Miami Beach and still retains much of its small-town charm today. Dad had worked as a sales engineer for several years for S. S. Fretz, an air conditioning and heating company in Philadelphia. While in Florida, he saw the potential for the airconditioning business in what was a rapidly developing area. Tired of the snow and freezing winters, he made the decision to move us south.

We emptied the James Drive house into a moving van and followed it to Florida in our two family cars; Mom’s ‘49 Studebaker and Dad’s ‘52 Ford. The trip took two full days and nights as there were no Interstate Highways then... just Highways 301, 17, and US1.

Arriving in Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, we checked into a beachside motel on Bougainvillea Drive called The Lamb which became home for the next couple of months until we found a house several blocks away on Seagrape Drive. For my two brothers and I, it was a whole new world with the warm Atlantic Ocean less than one hundred yards away. We were in that ocean from sunrise to sunset all summer long and every day after school, rain or shine, floating in our inner tubes and riding the waves.

School was a whole new experience as well. Pompano Elementary was nothing more than a dozen portables in a sand lot. These square, wooden, un-air-airconditioned boxes up on concrete blocks were our classrooms and were unbearably hot most of the year. It was a far cry from the big stone building that was Manoa Elementary School in Havertown. I’d never heard the words sir or ma’am used before, but here in the south, they were required at the beginning and end of every sentence or phrase you spoke to a teacher!

The tropical climate and vibe heavenly influence Mom, and she began listening to and buying records by singers and bands from the Bahamas. This was a totally different kind of music called Goombay that had a very happy feel and, unbeknownst to me at the time, some ‘salty’ lyrics, sexual in nature but in a humorous way. Big Bamboo, Don’t Touch Me Tomato, and Naughty Little Flea were some of the popular songs by a fellow named George Symonette. There were also the classics like Brown Skin Girl, and Jamaica Farewell that mom was learning to play and sing on her newly acquired Martin 4 string tenor guitar.

As Mom’s interest in music grew, she also began going out to some local clubs that featured either jazz or Polynesian music. It was at the famous Mai-Kai Tiki Bar and Restaurant that she met a native Tahitian girl, Rita Gauss, who would become like a sister to her and a second mother to us kids. Rita had actually been married to the king of Tahiti when she was younger. She emigrated to the U.S. with her son and they both got jobs in the floor show at the Mai-Kai Restaurant in Ft. Lauderdale. Rita had a gorgeous voice and was a terrific dancer. I remember nights when mom would come home from the Mai-Kai accompanied by Rita and several other Polynesian musicians from the floor show. They would sit on our living room floor, singing and playing into the early hours of the morning, gracious for the hospitality shown to them by an American. Most of them could not speak a word of English. I only wish I could have had the appreciation then that I do now for all the wonderful music these people made.

In the summer of 1961, Mom took an extended vacation with her brother to Tahiti. Her brother, my Uncle Archer, had crewed many a sailing vessel across the Pacific from Southern California to Tahiti and had spent much time there. Off they went for over a month sailing the islands while dad and us three boys batched it at home. It wasn’t easy for dad to work five days a week with the boys at home during the summer. He was smart enough to find a catering service that would deliver hot meals to us every night. Even our housekeeper rallied and was there most days for us if we needed anything. My main responsibility was doing all the household laundry each week because we had no washing machine or dryer. I had to transport it all to the nearest laundromat which was miles away.

Soon after returning from her Tahitian island hopping, the Polynesian influences began to show up in the house décor. She tastefully decorated the living room with batik prints and island color schemes. Her Mai Kai friends obviously loved this, and the playing, singing and dancing continued for years. I remember one Halloween when she insisted the three boys get dressed in grass skirts with Hawaiian Koa nut necklaces as we canvassed the town for treats.

As mom’s playing ability improved, her tastes in music broadened to include music from Tahiti and the West Indies. Archer also played a guitar and sang, and he and mom would exchange tape recordings of themselves singing and playing Polynesian songs and telling one another jokes. Listening to these reel-to-reel tapes made over 60 years ago brings tears to my eyes. She had a great sense of rhythm and a beautiful voice. To top it off, she sang many of the songs in French.

3

Hello Guitar

Every chance I got, I would pick up Mom’s Martin 4-string baritone guitar and try to make some sounds of my own. I think the first thing I learned to play was Wake Up Little Susie by the Everly Brothers which I later sang with my brother, Scott. It wasn’t long before I was playing as well as Mom and then, even better. She decided it was time for me to have my own guitar which she bought for me; a big Gibson ES-125. Compared to her little Martin, it was a monster with two additional strings which were all steel, unlike the nylon ones which were much easier on the tips of my fingers.

In addition to this incredible gift, Mom found a guitar teacher with whom I began taking lessons. Bobby Palk was a young, frustrated jazz musician who was living in Wilton Manors and trying to support a family any way he could. Bobby really didn’t have the patience to be a teacher and far less than needed to deal with a total beginner like me. I believe it may have been his attraction to my mother that he lasted as long as he did with me. I remember vaguely the casual conversations with her after my lessons that lasted nearly as long as the lessons themselves. Bobby’s patience got the best of him one night. After exploding at me for not having prepared the lesson properly, he said to Mom, I just can’t do this anymore. That was that. He recommended a guitarist named Royce Murrel, a mellow old guy who was teaching at a little music store out at the end of Davie Road in the west part of Ft. Lauderdale. I took lessons from Royce for about a year, most of which were just jam sessions and gabbing about music. After about 25 minutes of that, Royce would look at his watch and say, Oops, we’d better get to the lesson which would take up all the five remaining minutes.

From then on, it was me teaching myself. I didn’t really take learning anything on the guitar too seriously until the day Mom brought home an album called Hi-Fi in Focus by Chet Atkins. I put this record on the turntable and my guitar playing life was forever changed. Here was a guy playing one guitar and sounding like it was three guitar players simultaneously. He played bass, rhythm, and the solo lead melody all on one guitar! I was possessed. I threw myself into learning that amazing finger-style of playing. After about a year, I saw Chet playing on TV and was devastated to find that I had learned it all wrong! I literally had to start all over again, but after a few months and learning to use a thumb-pick, I had it down pretty good. Salty Dog Rag, Windy and Warm, Liza, and Yanked Doodle Dixie were about all I ever played for the next year or so.

During my learning of how to become a better guitar player, I also developed a huge interest in sound recording and engineering. Naturally, I wanted to be able to record the stuff I was learning to play on guitar. In addition, my fascination with Les Paul & Mary Ford records featuring amazing guitar orchestrations, further fueled my desire to learn about the recording process and techniques. Mom had recently purchased a Wollensak tape recorder so she could record herself and exchange tapes with her brother Archer in California. Whenever she wasn’t using it, I grabbed the Wollensak and took it to my room to record myself. What I really needed was another recorder so I could do the sound-on-sound technique used by Les Paul to create many layers of guitar tracks like he did. I found another inexpensive recorder, a very strange one-of-a-kind unit that used what looked like giant cassettes! The machine came with only one ‘cassette’ which I had to use over and over again because I could not find the tapes that were made for this particular unit anywhere. Anyway, it at least worked properly so I set about making my own Les Paul style recordings. I’d record a rhythm part on to the Wollensak and then I plugged the Wollensak into the second machine along with my guitar. I put the second machine in record mode, then pushed play on the Wollensak. While the Wollensak played my first recorded part into machine #2, I would play a second guitar part along with it. Now I had two guitar parts recorded which I would play back into the Wollensak again while recording a third part! I spent hours in my room making recordings with this newfound discovery. The only problem was the quality of the individual recordings would deteriorate with each new ‘pass’ to the point where the initial ‘track’ recording became almost inaudible.

Little did I know that years later I would become a full-fledged recording engineer at one of the premier recording studios in the country.

4

I’m In a Band!

My first couple of years as a ‘serious guitarist’ were spent mainly practicing and playing in my bedroom in the family home in Lauderdale-By-The-Sea. I had become obsessed with Chet Atkins and his finger-style which I was determined to master. Playing guitar was something I felt could give me some recognition. I didn’t do sports and wasn’t very active in any school-based extra-curricular activities. So, I would run home from the bus stop as fast as I could, head to my room, crank up my amp, open my bedroom window and start playing in the hope of being heard by the few kids passing my house on their way home.

While attending Sunrise Junior High in the late 1950’s, I met a fellow named Bob Naylor who was also a guitar player. Bob invited me to his house for an informal kind of jam session get-together. We hit it off well and Bob suggested we start a band. This introduced me to another world of music that I had pretty much ignored. Up until then, guitar instrumentals were all I knew or played. The only music I had listened to and learned up to that point was Chet Atkins and a band called The Ventures. I’d spent an entire summer vacation playing along with the Ventures’ Walk Don’t Run album at home with the stereo cranked up to the max. While my parents were at work, the living room became my private rehearsal studio and concert hall. Bob could actually sing and play, and he introduced me to the music of Richie Valens, Big Bopper, and Buddy Holly. Bob lived with his widowed father, his brother Dave, and a toothless old dog named Ginger. Our rehearsals were usually at Bob’s house and would officially end when his dad started yelling, Turn that shit down, dammit!"

We knew we needed a drummer to be a real band and so came along Fred Reed. Fred was a bit older, probably 18 or 19, but he wanted to play and, he owned a full set of Leedy drums! When Fred wasn’t drunk on beer, he was a pretty decent drummer. We rehearsed the entire summer for our very first booking at the end of August 1959, a teen dance at the Beach Club hotel. At some point during the summer, we acquired a third guitarist who would help with the singing. As the gig date neared, we knew we needed amplification for the three electric guitars, so we rented one small 25-watt amplifier which all three of us plugged into and played! We all wore suits and ties and played for maybe an hour at the most because we only knew 8 songs!

The third guitarist left the band after that one gig, and we were a trio again, still regularly rehearsing and hoping to get hired somewhere, anywhere.

The War Memorial Auditorium had become the place to be on Friday and Saturday nights. This was a 3,400 seat multi-purpose arena and convention center that hosted the largest events in Ft. Lauderdale including championship wrestling from as early as 1951 on. Local promoter, Steve Palmer - South Florida’s own version of Bill Graham - ran some very successful teen dances there that drew hundreds of kids from three counties. For these dances the seats were removed, which gave way to a cavernous dance floor. It was considered the most prestigious of all places a band could play, and the local talent Palmer hired was tremendous. I spent many Friday and Saturday nights pressed against the iron railing across the front of the stage gawking at great bands like the Twi-Lites, the Catalinas, and the Ardells. Somehow Bob was able to talk Palmer into giving us a shot at the opening spot on the bill. We would be the first band on stage as the doors to the place were opened. Palmer always wanted the bands to be playing when the first kids entered the auditorium. I’ll never forget the three of us standing on that huge stage while waiting to hear Palmer yell his customary LET’S GO! We began playing as a rush of kids came through the huge doors and on to the giant dance floor. I think we played maybe two songs before Palmer gave us the cut-off sign and motioned for us to clear off the stage. That was it…our first big night. I don’t think Palmer thought too much of us. We really weren’t even close to being as good as his usual line-up of bands but he did give us a chance to play a major venue so we’ll always be thankful for that.

We may have played ‘the War’ maybe one more time and a few private parties after that, but Bobby Naylor and The Saints would soon be no more. The change in zoning for schools put me back up in Pompano Beach High again where I’d gone for grades 4 through 7. With the separation, no prospects for future gigs, and Fred disappearing, that was pretty much the end of Bobby Naylor and the Saints.

My memory fails me now as to who I first connected with, but I joined my second band, the Eldoradoes somewhere around 1961. The leader was a fellow named Alan Mason who was the drummer and who mandated our stage uniforms, very bright green sparkly vests. I don’t think we played more than maybe three or four gigs together, mostly little teen dances on Friday or Saturday nights. I don’t remember us as being very good musically and I really didn’t know anyone in the band very well except the bass player Dennis Regan. I was the rhythm guitar player, and Henry Tarquin played lead guitar.

Band number three was The Impalas. Tommy Strickland was a hot young guitar player from Oakland Park who was looking to put a band together, and in 1963, Dennis Regan and I decided to join forces with Tommy after The Eldoradoes broke up. Tommy knew a drummer named Jim McCutcheon who happened to be going to the same high school as me who also joined us. Very shortly thereafter, Dennis left and was replaced by a fellow named Paul St. Pierre. Paul was a terrific bass player and, after a few rehearsals, The Impalas were gig-ready.

We played the usual teen dances around the area and the Oakland Manor Skating Arena on Friday nights during sock-hop. Defined by when the kids were turning in their skates they’d come back to dance on the wooden rink floor sans shoes. For that 30-minute set we got paid a whopping $5 per man! For a short while we had a keyboard player named Ed Palkovic, who really expanded the sound of the band.

The next personnel change would come after an ugly scene one night at a gig. Drummer Jim somehow had left his drum stool in my car from a previous rehearsal or gig. When I showed up at the following