![]() John Rohde was one of my buddies whose dad was in the Air Force. As fate would have it, when I was a Junior or senior in high school, several of my friends had guitars, acoustics and electrics. That was my first recollection of wanting to play in a rock band, but at that time I only knew how to play Clarinet and that wasn’t an instrument any rock band seemed to use. Fire Chief George Coolures lived a couple of blocks away from our house and we local kids would head over on our bikes and hang out and listen to them. The Merced Blue Notes were the first local and somewhat famous bands I heard in my early teens. If memory serves me correctly, Jerry Lee Lewis was one of those early Rocker’s that played Merced but I don’t remember seeing him. These tours were mostly held at the American Legion Hall in Merced or at the Fairgrounds. We were on the Highway 99 corridor and had many of the original rock and roll and R&B groups come through on their way between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Unlike major cities, Merced had a limited “scene”. Jim Sanders: In the early 1960’s, Merced had a population of about 15,000. ![]() ![]() Originally a Beatles/Byrds-influenced unit called the Morlochs, they soon shed their original moniker and moved in a more psychedelic direction, becoming a fixture on the ballroom circuit from 1966-1970. Crystal Syphon | Interview Crystal Syphon, one of the greatest “lost” groups of the West Coast psych scene, came together in Merced, California in 1965.
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