Scott Finch - Finch (Part 1)
“The History Of The Palmettos and Finch”
June 23, 1950. Born in Milwaukee. My first memories are of Mom playing the piano after putting my brother and me to bed. By the time I was 3 1/2 both my brother, Tom, and I were taking piano lessons from Dorothy Kenngott. Tom quit after a couple years but I continued on and off until I was 10. Then at about 13 years old I started jazz/pop piano lessons with Tommy Sheridan. Around 1959, Tom and I also got started on guitar with our uncle, Bill Kretlow. He was a great jazz rhythm guitarist. He played briefly with Woody Herman right after WWII. He showed us basic chords and some fancy jazz chords. I played in school orchestras and high school musicals. Dan Dougherty played Birdie in John Marshall HS production of Bye - Bye Birdie and I played guitar in the pit orchestra. We were already playing in the Palmettos by then. I think “A Taste Of Honey”, Beatle version was our audition song. Dan didn’t do the Elvis impersonation thing like the original Birdie, but did a more John Lennon persona. I don’t recall ever seeing a live rock band before we started our first group. It was 1964, the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. We got pretty excited about that. But, a week or 2 later the Dave Clark 5 were on and seeing them play their simple songs live, Tom and I realized we can do this. We called up Dan and started the band. Dan lived about a block away.
The Palmettos first and only “professional” photo session circa: late 1964. (First two photos) - Tom, Dan and Scott waiting to sing harmonies and Scott tracking piano overdub on Molly Ann. (Second two photos)
He had almost no musical experience so he started out doing Dave Clark, singing lead and playing drums (cardboard boxes). Within a couple weeks at most, Dan had learned enough guitar to start writing songs. Soon we were good enough to learn Beatle songs and the rest is unwritten history. At first, only I had an electric guitar but no amp. We played through tape recorder pre-amps and speakers. A major equipment breakthrough was Dan buying a real bass guitar. A Kay bass! I remember thinking, wow, Dan must be really serious about this and he was never serious about anything. We found a big 12, or 15 in speaker from a TV and hooked it up to his Webcor tape recorder and to us at the time it was unbelievable how cool it sounded. We didn’t know what to call the band. It was the Dan Dougherty 5 for a couple days. My Mom said we should call it the Palmetto’s because we all lived on Palmetto Ave.
The Palmettos recording at Dave Kennedy's Studio circa: December 1967.
I remember thinking that was really corny, but I couldn’t come up with anything better. Our first couple drummers we picked because they had extra gear like mics and guitar amps. Because Dan and Tom used to go out and see bands, they knew more about what kind of gear the real bands were using. I didn’t tag along because I was just a little kid. They were 16 and 17 years old and I was only 14 and looked like I was 12. I had seen enough episodes of Leave It To Beaver to know why they didn’t want to be seen with the “little brother”. One day they came back from West Allis music with 2 huge, slightly used Fender Bandmasters amps. All we needed then was a real drummer and we found one. I think we put an ad in the Milwaukee Journal Want Ads. Tim Dessereau showed up. He was a real drummer. He actually played in time and told us if we didn’t. He didn’t like the Beatles quite as much as we did, but that turned out to be a good thing because we started playing more variety like James Brown and Young Rascals and Dan kept writing songs.
Finch "Polaroid" photo session after release of single 45 'Nothing in the Sun' circa: May 1968.
The first gigs were neighbor’s parties, junior HS dances. Those were back when we were playing out of homemade amps. One time we set up in our backyard and played to the whole neighborhood at once. We drew quite a crowd. No one complained or called the police. We normally practiced every Wednesday night in my basement. Kids in the area knew that the door was unlocked and they could come down and listen but no smoking or Mom would freak out and kick everyone out. That may have happened once. I ran into a guy in 2001 at a gig in Milwaukee who remembered being at some of those rehearsals and how cool it was. He said that was the first time he heard the Beatles song “I’m a Loser” and swore it was the best version he ever heard. Once we had our band equipped and rehearsed we could get any really good gigs without joining the Milwaukee Musicians Union. A club could get fined, or black listed for hiring a non-union band.
White Lie.
We had to audition in person. Normally they had auditions on Saturday afternoons in the union hall but we were in a hurry and auditioned acoustically in the president’s office. Dan played a wooden recorder, I played sitar, Tom played acoustic guitar and Tim, in a show of punky disrespect, played his sticks on the guys desk. That was one gutsy audition. We passed the audition and I became the only sitar player listed in the Milwaukee Musicians Union publication. I wish I had a copy of that. For all our annoyance with the red tape, we were now getting gigs directly from the union on top of being able to play any venue at union scale which was really good money. The unions power greatly diminished over the next few years and by 1968 we let our dues lapse. My mom and dad would drive us and our gear to the gigs in a station wagon they bought for that purpose. I looked so young that they had to come to bar gigs the first time in for legal reasons.
Gypsy.
I remember falling asleep on the way home and dad and the other guys would carry the gear downstairs without my help. One of those neighborhood kids that would listen to our underground rehearsal shows was Lee Schneider. His older brother, Joel Schneider and Nathan Sassover were a songwriting, producer duo looking for a band to record their songs. Young Schneider told them about the Palmetto’s. They told him “the band we’re looking for has to have great harmonies”. He told them he had heard us do Hollies, Turtles, and the Association-Never My Love. I guess that sold them on the idea and they came to us with a bunch of songs. We learned some of them, but the songs seemed exceptionally silly with us doing them and they realized that Dan’s songs were way better. They changed their strategy and became our managers/producers.
Bluehand circa: 1997.
Dakota Brown
