‘Son, can you play that guitar?’ ‘Yessir!’
I replied. He said, ‘Can you sing?’ I said,
‘Yessir’. He said, ‘Let me hear you’. So I sang
him a couple songs, and he said, ‘My name’s
Eddie Bond. I’m a deejay on a country radio
station here. I do jamborees! I’d like to get
you to open some of those shows!’ So I said,
‘Well, you’d have to talk to my mom and
daddy!’ They okayed me going to do the
shows. I started doing concerts with him
and I’d open for people like Carl Perkins,
Johnny Cash, the Burnette brothers, all the
people in Memphis...
“I didn’t own an electric guitar. I’d just
started playing electric guitar on shows
because Eddie would always go backstage
and he’d ask somebody there, ‘Anybody
in here got a guitar they’d let Little Travis
play?’ – they called me Little Travis back
then. One night, he asked that question,
Carl Perkins said, ‘He can play mine!’ I put
his electric guitar on and it hung down
around my kneecaps!
The strap was too
long. Carl said, ‘Here,
Eddie, hold that
thing up there where
it’s about right for
Travis!’ He reached
in his pocket, pulled
out a pocket knife
and cut a hole in
that guitar strap.
I played Carl Perkins’ guitar that night!”WAMMACK MADE HIS FIRST
RECORD IN 1957 for Slim Wallace’s
Fernwood label, pairing the self-penned
Rock & Roll Blues and I’m Leaving Today.
“Roland (Janes) once told me, ‘You sounded
like a young Brenda Lee back when you
started!’” laughs Wammack. “It had some
great players on it, at the time they weren’t
famous. The bass player was Stan Kesler,the Wooly Bully man.
I had Smokey Joe
Baugh, who was an
artist on Sun Records,
a piano player. Johnny
Bernero was the
drummer. My guitar
player – I played
rhythm and he played
lead – was Reggie
Young. Guess who the
engineer was... Scotty Moore! So I had
a pretty good rhythm section at age 11!”
Wammack wouldn’t see another 45
released until 1964, when his dazzling fret
speed impressed Janes, previously Jerry
Lee Lewis’ lead guitarist at Sun. Roland ran
his own Sonic Studio in Memphis by then.
“I went up to him and introduced myself,”
says Wammack. “I said, ‘I want to be your
session guitar player!’ And he said, ‘Well,
Travis, I saw you back in your younger days
when you played rhythm guitar. I’ve never
heard you play electric. Could I hear you
play something?’ I said, ‘Yeah’. So I went
and got my guitar and came in.”
Wammack’s amazing 1964 instrumental
Scratchy for Janes’ ARA label was a hit,
leading to a showcase slot on the road with
Peter and Gordon. “I was their tour band on
their first two tours, my trio,” he says. “I’d
do a 20-minute set before they came on.”
Although he earned a reputation as a
stunning instrumentalist thanks to his mid-
60s singles for ARA (including Distortion,
Part 1) and Atlantic (Night Train, It’s Karate
Time), Wammack’s 1970s hits for Fame and
Capricorn were all vocals. (Shu-Doo-Pa-
Poo-Poop) Love Being Your Fool was the
biggest seller. Travis continues to perform
around his Alabama home to this day, his
chops as dazzling as ever. 9SCRATCHING THAT ITCH
Not only was Travis Wammack
Memphis’ hottest young guitarist
in 1964, he was also an electronics
wizard who constructed his own
innovative distortion unit. He
says: “I overpowered an old tape
recorder that I had with my Fender
Super Reverb. I said, ‘Oh, wow!
This is the sound!’ So I took it over
to Roland Janes, and said, ‘Roland,
I’ve got a new sound!’”
Wammack pumped his 1960
Gibson Les Paul, outfitted witha Bigsby, through his new
invention when he cut his
mind-boggling instrumental
Scratchy and its similarly torrid
flip, Fire Fly, at Janes’ Sonic Studio.
Scratchy’s rapid-fire licks were
abetted during one break by tape
trickery when a vocal snippet was
daffily edited in backwards. “That
was credited with being the first
reverse tape, before The Beatles,”
says Travis. “It’s an English saying:
‘Blast this fog, anyway!’.We figured we’d use that English
saying, and then reverse it.”
Scratchy sat at Sonic for what
seemed like an eternity in search
of an interested label. “It was so
far ahead of its time, they didn’t
have a clue to what it was,” says
Wammack. A dub was shipped to
Chet Atkins at RCA Victor.
“He sent Roland a letter back
about Scratchy,” Travis recalls.
“He said, ‘This scares me. I pass!’”
Janes finally issued Scratchy on hisown ARA label and it broke into
the US pop charts near the end of
1964, putting Wammack on the
national map.Now based in Alabama,
Wammack continues to
perform live to this dayGET
TY^ IMAGESTravis served as Little Richard’s
go-to guitarist for 11 years