Welcome to Club Alibi, a website devoted to hard-driving rhythm n'blues and classic rock n'roll! We came online in the summer of 2002. My name is George Spink. I've loved this music since I first heard it in the mid-1950s.

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Remember how much time we spent listening to the radio back in the Forties and Fifties? Radios were everywhere. They were in our cars, in the kitchen, the living room, the dining room, the bedrooms, the den, the basement, the attic, the front porch, the back porch--even on the roof when we helped our fathers tack down the roofing, In the warm months, we often sat at the picnic table in the backyard of our old home in Berwyn, a Chicago suburb ten miles southwest of the Loop. Our neighbors and relatives joined us. The radio was always playing.

It was so great! Remember Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Amos n'Andy, Gangbusters, The Lone Ranger, Your Hit Parade?

Today, if you asked someone under 40 about Jack Benny, chances are they'll say, "Jack who?" Try it and see!

In the Fabulous Fifties, we discovered rhythm n'blues and classic rock n'roll. This was the music my generation. We also discovered and enjoyed many other great things in the Fabulous Fifties. How many do you remember?

Click here to listen to WHTR-FM ("Honky Tonk Radio") for different R&B sounds every day! You'll be glad you did! Guaranteed! It is your kind of station. It is my kind of station!

Watch this slide show of CDs and a few DVDs featuring music from the 1950s. When you see one you like, click on it to order from our friends at Amazon.com. You'll find the Hit Parade CDs for each year of the 1950s near the end of this slide show. So lean back, relax, and get ready to rock n'roll!

Everyone should have a Club Alibi in their life at some point. This was a bar in Cicero, Illinois that gave me a chance to play tenor sax in public when I was still attending nearby Morton High School. Even though I was a minor, the owner, John Katasanis, let me sit in with the trio on the little stage at the rear of the club.

The trio consisted of another tenor player, a drummer, and a bass player. I played with them during my junior and senior years of high school (1957-1958).

Three of my favorite rhythm n'blues saxophonists were tenor players Red Prysock and Sil Austin and alto player Earl Bostic. There were other musicians and singers I liked, too, including Bill Doggett, Louis Jordan, Louis Prima and Keely Smith with Sam Buttera and the Witnesses, and B.B. King. And I loved the new rock n'roll sound. My favorites were Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Bill Haley and the Comets, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, and a few others. Remember them? And think back to those days in the mid Fifties in Chicago listening to Daddy O'Dayley on WGES (my initials, to boot!). Daddy O always knew what to play!

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The rhythm n'blues and rock n'roll I enjoyed and played in the 1950s has entertained me for half a century now. Like anyone else who really enjoys music, my tastes are eclectic. I also like jazz and big band music, reggae, salsa, popular, and classical.

As Count Basie once told me, "If you like it, it's good!"

In other words, don't let jazz purists or anyone else razz you about your music. To quote a Bill Haley song, "Don't Knock The Rock"!

I will never forget the thrill of seeing Blackboard Jungle when it came out in 1955. My buddies and I took the train downtown to see it at one of the large theaters in the Loop (perhaps the Chicago, State-Lake, Oriental, or United Artists) on opening day. When the curtains opened and the movie began, all of a sudden we heard Bill Haley and the Comets playing "Rock Around the Clock"!

The audience went wild for the new music, which we were just beginning to hear on the radio and on jukeboxes. The film's story about teenagers in an inner city school mesmerized us. Our own high school had different problems, because it had 5,000 students, operated on shifts, and was in a suburb, not the inner city. We had good, dedicated teachers. And we respected them.

Juniors and seniors went to school in the mornings; freshmen and sophmores went in the afternoons. In my junior and senior years, my classes began at 7:45 AM and ended at 12:20 PM. I had a study period between 11:00 and 11:40, which I used for lunch, usually at Betsy Ross, a student hangout a block south of school on the southwest corner of 26th and Austin Boulevard. Great hamburgers, great fries, great juke box, and great looking girls!

Vic Morrow and Glenn Ford in Blackboard Jungle. Glenn Ford, who died Aug. 30,2006,is remembered fondly by his fans for his more than 100 films and his charismatic silver screen presence. Vic Morrow died in a helicopter accident on July 23, 1982 while shooting "Twilight Zone: The Movie." His daughter is the very talented actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.

As teenagers, we identified with the students depicted in Blackboard Jungle. It was the dawn of a new realism in motion pictures, ushered in by Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront in 1951.

Brando's The Wild One in 1953 was about alienated World War Two vets having trouble adjusting to civilian life after enduring the horrors of war. Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause in 1955 were about our generation, teenagers in the mid-1950s. These three movies were really cool! I love watching them whenever the are shown on cable TV, usually on Turner Classic Movies (TCM), my favorite movie channel.

After seeing Rebel Without a Cause, I wondered at first what James Dean's characterwas so upset about. Some of my classmates and I got into much more trouble than his character in the movie. We sometimes felt our parents didn't understand us, but we generally got along well with them. We knew other students who had problems at home and a few students whose elevators didn't always make it to the top floor. A few years later, I would discover that you can feel something is wrong, very wrong, yet not really know what is bothering you. I came to know what the French mean by ennui. I came to understand James Dean's character in Rebel. Anxiety would have a field day in the 1960s.

The music of the 1950s brought us together. It was fun music! We looked forward to dancing whevever we could, and I also looked forward to playing sax at Club Alibi. Considering I attended classes on weekday mornings, worked at Western Electric in the afternoons, played sax in a combo three nights a week at Club Alibi, dated sometimes, and studied other evenings and on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, I didn't have any time to brood. Funny how staying so busy can put you in such a good frame of mind.

Postscript: In September 2003, my uncle, Bob Miller, and I visited Cicero, Berwyn and the western suburbs. It was my first trip home since moving to California in 1986. What a great feeling, seeing old friends and old places after so long! At first, we thought that the building housing Club Alibi on 25th Street in Cicero was no more. But thanks to Pete Pawlowski, who visited this website in April 2005, I now know that the building still stands. My uncle and I were a block south, on 25th Place, the wrong street!

Pete was kind enough to take and send these two photos of the former Club Alibi, now the Unisex Beauty Salon:

The building that housed Club Alibi 50 years ago still stands at 5249 W. 25th Street in Cicero, Illinois. Today, it is the home of the Unisex Beauty Salon.

I knew that most of Western Electric had been torn down in the 1970s, but two buildings remain, including the Merchandise Building where I worked in high school!

For me, it's been a real joy to see yet another generation listen and dance to these great musicians, just as I have been thrilled to see them enjoy swing music and swing dancing on a scale I never thought I would see in my lifetime. Living in Los Angeles since 1990 has enabled me to witness so much of this revival.

When I visit clubs and see people of all ages dancing to swing, rhythm n'blues, and classic rock n'roll, it brings back so many good memories of my high school days.

Everyone is jumpin', swingin', rockin', and dancin' the night away! And if you play in one of todays great jump bands, such as the Royal Crown Revue or the Brian Setzer Orchestra, you are so lucky!

Thank you for visiting Club Alibi today! Please come back soon.

And tell your friends!

Spread the word, Thunderbird!

George Spink Los Angeles