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The Almost Greatest Band You’ve Rarely Ever Heard About: The Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band

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The Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band was one of the best, almost long-lost bands of the early 1970s. Six ace performers who spent their time busking on the streets of LA before winning over fans and followers across America. Yet, even with such success, the Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band never reached the heights of fame and success they so richly deserved.

Here’s their story as told by Lil’ Orphan Ollie, trumpeter, drummer, and original founder of the band.

Rule #1: Form a Band.

It started out this way: A bunch of guys outta UCLA blasting Christmas carols on the streets of LA. It was holiday season and they wanted money to buy presents for Santa and booze for his reindeer. Lil’ Orphan Ollie was trombone player and chief ring leader.

Lil’ Orphan Ollie: I thought I’d get three of my buddies and we’d go down and play some Christmas carols at the shopping center. People weren’t working too much. We were just out of college, and my recollection is it was December 1971,

I called up all my trombone buddies, we had a long association of playing together at UCLA, there’s no competition for this, but we were probably the best trombone players in the country.

When you get out of school and you’re a horn player the only opportunity you have for some steady work is to go on the road with various bands—Buddy Rich’s Band, Woody Herman, Count Basie and Duke Ellington—big bands like that. So some of us got some road work some of us didn’t. I’d just got back from playing My first trip on the road was with Louie Bellson Big Band—he was really a dynamic drummer

I said we should go and play some Christmas carols. We did that. My wife was pregnant with our daughter but there wasn’t enough work for me so we left town.

That’s my line: I started the band and then left town.
 
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Rule #2: Start playing.

While Lil’ Orphan Ollie and his family moved to northern California to find work, his buddies from college kept the Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band going. The line-up was: Sgt. Charts, Dr. Mabuse DOA, Off the Wallie, B-flat Baxter and Buffalo Steve. Sgt. Charts started organising the band into four trombones and four saxophones. The band covered “Flight of the Bumblebee,” Beethoven’s “Ninth,” and covers of tunes by artists like the Beatles. Wherever they played they brought happiness and joy and a hat full of dollars.

Lil’ Orphan Ollie: I left town and in the meantime I couldn’t keep the band from being contaminated with all these saxophone players and stuff. The trombone choir didn’t really exist for very long. They stated doing stuff on their own.

Sgt. Charts wrote and arranged music prolifically. He got the idea of doing a bunch of tunes like who’s going to write an abbreviated version of Beethoven’s Ninth for saxophone and trombones—that’s the kind of stuff Sgt. Charts would do.

They’d go up to the Observatory or Griffiths Park and play or let’s go over to the La Brea Tar Pits and put out a hat and play there.

I was up north with my family but it wasn’t working out up there and the band said, “Goddammit, you gotta come back and we’re going to do this thing.”
 
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Lil’ Orphan Ollie: I left town and came back. In the meantime they’d started to do some of this stuff and I thought they were nuts. Everyone kept saying, “Come on, you gotta come back.” And I was saying, “I can’t do all this stupid shit on the street. How are you gonna make any money? You gotta be out of your mind.” But I came back and did it anyway.

I was raised as a straight, legitimate horn player and I was real serious. A lot of my work was classical. The rest of it was all big band stuff. So, who was going to put on a bunch of costumes? But the fact of the matter was it came at the right time and the right place and it worked. Next thing we knew we were getting some media attention.
 

 
More from Lil’ Orphan Ollie and the Roto-Rooter Good Time Christmas Band, after the jump…
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.21.2020
06:19 am
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Eric Dolphy: Musical Centipede
06.20.2010
06:43 pm
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Let’s remember jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy, who would have turned 88 today. Over his 30 albums as a bandleader, Dolphy showed an amazing versatility and development, emerging from his be-bop roots into some wonderfully accessible avant garde creations, like his last, Out to Lunch, for Blue Note.

People celebrate that album as a classic of new jazz for good reason. It’s innovative and gritty instead of abstract and simply free for its own sake, as Dolphy seems to transfigure the idea of melody rather than rejecting it out of hand. It’s simply beautiful and compelling, and worth having in your library if you don’t yet.

Dolphy’s death at 36 from diabetes in 1964 in Berlin was especially tragic because it wasn’t from typically regarded circumstances—he was substance-free and didn’t even smoke.

“He was a musical centipede,” notes drummer Han Bennink in the documentary below. “I could hear that he could do everything.”
 

 

 

 
Get: Eric Dolphy - Out To Lunch (The Rudy Van Gelder Edition)

 

Posted by Ron Nachmann
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06.20.2010
06:43 pm
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