Still Rockin’ in Raton

Fifty years and a few gray hairs can’t stop The Fireballs

When you go see The Fireballs play these days, don’t be fooled by those older gentlemen up on the stage, slapping strings and pounding skins. They’re really just teenagers who somehow got forced to grow up along the way.

“I guess you could say we’ve been teenagers for fifty years,” says bassist Stan Lark, who along with guitarist George Tomsco created The Fireballs in 1957. “It’s fun now. We get paid to be teenagers. Who else do you know who gets paid to be a teenager? Our bodies are getting old, but mentally we still think we’re teenagers.”

Are there other reasons these men get up on stage and play and sing and bask in the limelight to whatever degree it might shine on them?

“Poverty,” jokes Tomsco, then adds quickly, “It’s something you don’t give up. It’s not the kind of thing you just turn on and off. Once you get started, it just stays with you.”

The group’s current incarnation – Tomsco and Lark, with Ron Cardenas on keyboards and Danny Aguilar on drums – brought their sound to the Raton Country Club Sept. 18 as part of the Raton Museum’s 50th Anniversary Dinner. That the band still kicks butt is driven home with the first notes of its thumping rendition of “Great Balls of Fire,” a tune that, like many other rockers they play that evening, sees frontmen Tomsco and Lark break into synchronized guitar swings and leg kicks, just because they still can.

A hesitant older crowd, most dressed like youngsters in jeans, T-shirts, poodle skirts and saddle shoes, loses its reluctance and packs the dance floor when the band fires up with “Rockin’ in the Fifties,” a Fireballs original about life in the good old days, which, to watch them play it, makes it easy to believe are still upon us.

Then Elvis comes in. No, it’s not an “Elvis-sighting,” but rather a Noby Gomez-sighting. Gomez is a local Elvis-impersonator, northeast New Mexico’s next best thing to The King. Women old enough to know better yell out “Elvis! Elvis!” and Gomez says, “Thank you very much,” and all that.

Someone calls out a request for a two-step.

“You need a two-step so you can dance with Elvis?” says Lark, his tall frame draped in black, his Fender Precision bass hanging from his shoulders like a big hatchet. “Elvis ain’t no cowboy, honey.”

After a version of “That’ll Be the Day,” during which Tomsco’s amplifier cuts out for a minute but which still sounds better than the original by Buddy Holly (Tomsco can flat-out play), he tells the audience a story about the day the music came alive from his guitar.

It was in the late fifties, down in Clovis, where The Fireballs were recording. Tomsco had just bought a new amplifier and a Fender Stratocaster guitar, the same kind Holly played. Tomsco and Lark and the others took a break, were gone for about half an hour, and when they returned to the studio, Tomsco peeked in and noticed some joker fooling around with his brand new guitar.

Determined to put a stop to this nonsense, he went to the mixing booth to see studio head Norm Petty. “Who’s that playing my guitar?” Tomsco said. Petty said, “That? Oh, that’s Buddy Holly.”  Turns out Holly was recording there, too, and Tomsco, uncharacteristically, was rendered temporarily speechless.

Watching the guys on the stage, you get the feeling they’ve never really left it. Maybe just long enough to go do their other work and live their lives, but never long enough to forget what rock ‘n’ roll is all about. Another impression you get is that it hasn’t gone to their heads, that they’re having too much fun to take themselves that seriously.

I spot Lark’s beautiful wife, Dawn, near the back of the room. She’s back there selling Fireballs T-shirts and CDs. We go out to the patio, where I get her impressions of the continually resurging band.

“I don’t get tired of them, ever,” Dawn says. “My special honey’s up there on stage.”

I ask her if Stan is able to keep it all in perspective, if he manages to stay pretty level about the whole rock ‘n’ roll-band thing.

“Oh, he’s below level – no ego whatsoever,” she says. “He’s just a normal, wonderful guy. He works very hard. He’s a wonderful husband and a wonderful father.”

Along with T-shirts and CDs, Dawn is also selling copies of  Route 66: The Neon Road in New Mexico, a documentary produced in September by KNME-TV in Albuquerque. It features six Fireballs instrumentals and was awarded a Rocky Mountain Emmy award for Best Cultural Documentary. Just another example that there’s still something about this band that turns people on.

Yet what fame The Fireballs have earned over the years might never have come, for Lark, anyway, had he listened to his father and gone to college like he was supposed to. Tomsco was already attending school in Socorro, and that September of 1958, Lark was headed to New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. The young men had created the fledgling Fireballs the previous year, and through several providential turns of events ended up at Norm Petty Studios in Clovis, and the Fireballs were off and running.

“Wouldn’t you rather be a recording star than go to college?” Lark asks with a look that says surely you know the answer, but I’m just asking to be neighborly. “The excitement of it . . . my God, we thought we were going to be the next Buddy Holly.”

Lark and Tomsco were boyhood pals in Raton. They used to ride their horses to each others houses.

“We were both into music at the time, but I didn’t think he realized I was, and I didn’t realize he was,” Lark says. “Our friendship didn’t start on a music-basis.”

They remained tight – “partners in crime,” Lark calls Tomsco and himself today – and when they sensed their moment had come, they entered the recording studio and got ready for the superstardom they were certain awaited them. A five-man group then, with vocalist Chuck Tharp, guitarist Danny Trammel, and drummer Eric Budd, they recorded several instrumentals, including their namesake, “Fireball.”

Imagine their surprise when they didn’t immediately rise to the top of the charts.

“We were shocked,” is all Lark can say.

But they stayed with it, shifting their lineup to include Jimmy Gilmer on lead vocals, and fame came in 1963 with the release of the single “Sugar Shack,” written by Keith McCormack, who went on to sing for the band from 1968 to 1972. The song was about – what else? – falling head-over-heels for a girl.

A little coffee house out beyond the tracks serves great coffee, Gilmer sings, but it’s not the coffee that’s drawing him back there.

“There’s this cute little girlie, she’s a workin’ there
A black leotard and her feet are bare
I’m gonna drink a lotta coffee, spend a little cash
Make that girl love me when I put on some trash
You can understand why I’ve got to get back
To that sugar shack, whoa baby . . .”

The band would spend years touring, reaching for a kind of fame perhaps none of the members could perfectly define. But they found at least some of it early on, when their biggest hit was named Song of the Year in 1964.

“How incredible is it to have a hit record in the first place?” says Lark. Not to mention, he adds, having it become Song of the Year, an honor Lark says has been bestowed on only about 30 bands in history.

While The Fireballs turned out no more Songs of the Year, they did keep plugging away. In all, the various members, which always included Tomsco and Lark at the helm, recorded 12 albums and released numerous singles.

Today they live simple lives but have no intention of stopping the music.

“There’s still a market for it,” Tomsco says. “And as long as there’s a market and people want to hear it, we’ll go out and continue to play it.”

He likens the resurgence of “oldies” music—now loosely defined as anything that came out of the fifties, sixties and early seventies—to an aging car.

“It’s like a car that’s twenty years old, and it’s not any good to anybody,” Tomsco says.  “But when it’s forty years old, it starts becoming valuable again.”

And now that it’s valuable again, Tomsco has some plans.

“I want to keep writing. There are times I have a run at writing, then we’ll do some recording. Right now, it looks like I have a possibility of getting involved with a recording studio, so maybe we’ll be doing some more recording soon.”

The band’s most recent recording session was about three years ago, when they brought in other artists to pay tribute to acts that recorded at Norm Petty Studios, where The Fireballs made their first records. The resulting CD, 7th Street Legends, includes some vocalists from the Buddy Holly era such as the Tolletts, the Roses, and “the” Peggy Sue, the girl for whom the Holly song was named.

“We might be doing that same kind of thing again,” Tomsco says, “digging some archives out, some of the stuff from the early Fireballs, or some of my demos, then enhancing that and releasing it as another CD.

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