The Untouchable All Girl Band

Molly York

Who started the band? How did you all know each other?
I started the band with Dodie. We were in 8th grade together and became close friends. We were 13 years old.

Because of the Beatles who were very popular that year, 1964, I asked and received a guitar for Christmas. My older brother bought it at Princeton University Book store which had a small music department and it cost $50.

My parents also gave me a set of 4 guitar lessons. I remember asking my teacher during my fourth lesson if it mattered that I was left-handed? He seemed rather upset and spent my last lesson changing my strings and told me that I needed to relearn everything. I was on my own from then on.

Dodie, I believe, was already playing the Ukulele that year and formerly studied piano. She could read music and I was very impressed with her musical ability. In the spring of 8th grade we were playing folk songs together doing songs like 500 Miles, If I had a Hammer and Gypsy Rover.

In the spring of 1964 I began writing songs as I still have some of my original songs from back then.

I think shortly after we graduated from junior high school we began playing folk songs together on a weekly basis. We decided to become a rock band “like the Beatles” but all girls.

Our next step was to decide who was going to play what. We were absolutely in love with The Beatles and Dodie’s favorite was George Harrison so she wanted to be the lead guitarist. Back then, every female young teen had a favorite Beatle. Mine was Paul because he was left-handed. But I didn’t have a bass guitar and couldn’t afford one so I would play rhythm guitar.

We needed more band members and both agreed to ask our friend Sheri Oman because she was a good friend, very cool and pretty. She liked the idea and so she became our drummer. but she had no drums or knew how to play….small problem!
We were beginning to hang out in Greenwich Village that summer and one day I walked into The Cafe Wha? on Bleecker Street which was a very hip place at the time and seemed to always have live music. I approached the manager and told him about our all-girls rock group and asked if we could play and he told me to come back the next day with the band to play!

I was ecstatic, it was our first job! He said that we could use the amps and drum set already there.

I went back to Princeton and told Dodie and Sheri. Sheri learned how to play drums on the bus from Princeton to New York tapping on the metal rim of our bus seats as we sat in front of her playing “The Theme to Batman”, I believe three chords. We played and were HORRIBLE!! But for some crazy reason…we felt that the crowd still liked us! I guess they were amused and we looked cute and different.

We thought to ask one of Dodie’s neighbors and a close girlfriend of ours, Diana Mackie, if she wanted to join our band and be the bass player. Her parents were financially extremely comfortable and she said yes immediately. Diana and I then took the bus up to NYC to go to Manny’s Music shop on west 48th St. which was the most famous music store in Manhattan at the time and where ALL the newly famous bands shopped, including the Beatles. I helped her pick out a bass as she had no idea what to get (red Fender Precision). I secretly envied her for being able to just go out and buy a bass as I truly wanted to be the bass player)

What was your motivation to start the band? Any particular musicians/songwriters you looked up to?
We wanted to be like the Beatles. I looked up to mostly The Beatles and later on, The Byrds. I taught myself bass by listening to their records.

Tell me about the NJ music scene of the time, such as it was. Where were some of the places to play?
There was no music scene per se.

We played at Princeton University for private student parties, school clubs, dances and alumni events.

We also played at Lawrenceville School and The Hun School dances.

I remember very well when we played at The Hun School dances, the late Saudi Arabian King Faisal’s son was a student there (a prince!) and he was always so friendly and nice to us and never acted privileged.

I also remember playing for a dance at Princeton Day School and Christopher Reeve, who attended the school and was probably around 14 years old was there. I vaguely knew him and he was watching us with the biggest, cutest smile the whole time.

Did you play mostly covers? Which ones? What were some originals?
We played mostly covers but oddly enough, some of our originals were more popular. The song “I’m Sorry”, which I wrote was the one we played on TV most of the time and was the most requested at private parties at Princeton University. But some of our covers, like “Heatwave”, “Dancin’ In The Street” were fantastic.

What did your fellow classmates think?
I think our classmates really liked us and respected us except there were some guy groups who felt threatened by us, probably because we were better than them.

What was it like playing GOP-A-Go-Go? Any other strange/unusual gigs you remember?

I don’t remember playing here but I remember playing at Cheetah night club/discotheque in New York City which was a huge deal.

The most unusual place for me to play was Fort Dix, playing for the wounded troops in the large room in the hospital. It was around 1966.

They had just returned from the Vietnam War. That night we were the first women that they saw outside of Vietnam, other than medical personnel. So many soldiers were amputees and in wheel chairs and they were so young, many just a few years older than us! It was very sobering and completely influenced my views of the war after that.

Another fun memory was playing for a private party in the summer of 1966 in Manhattan. Geri and I were invited to a Junior and Senior Prom at St. George’s boarding school in Newport, RI. It was an all-male school back then. I had met and became quite friendly with a nice girl from New York City who also attended that weekend. We exchanged phone numbers and the following week she called me to say that her parents were giving a party and would we come to New York to play and we would get paid. Her father, it turned out was the editor of TIME magazine! They lived in a gorgeous brownstone on the upper east side in the 70’s of Madison avenue and we played out on their private terrace which could not be seen from the street. Everyone was really enjoying themselves but then we found ourselves being hit with rocks that were flying over their fences with notes of paper attached to them asking who we were, wanting our phone numbers and photo, requesting songs to sing. It was very funny!

At what point did you start making inroads into Philadelphia and NYC? What were your favorite venues to play? Did you have a manager (Geri, I seem to recall reading about your brother managing the band for awhile)?
We basically managed ourselves and then Geri’s brother Tom became our manager and he was the one who got us the jobs in Philadelphia, Steel Pier, Philadelphia television shows, etc.

I don’t believe he got us the New York jobs, I think we did this.

Any touring outside of the tristate area?
NO

How did you end up playing for the Helena Rubinstein foundation?
I don’t remember exactly, but besides her kick-off press party for “Lightworks”, we performed in Bryant Park for some fashion show for her and were on the New York News that night as it was hyped as a “be-in” event. We also played at The Palace Theater on Broadway.

How and when did you come to sign with Koppelman & Rubin? How did that change things for the band?
I was not in the band at this time. I had left the band in the spring of 1967. My parents made me quit the band the summer before my senior year in high school because my grades had become terrible. I was devastated.

What was it like performing on Disc-O-Teen? Any other TV appearances?

I loved being on TV. I remember that I became really good at following the little red light on the cameras showing which cameras were filming us and looking into that camera. I remember that after the TV appearances there was usually a small crowd of teenagers waiting outside of the studios wanting our autographs which was always fun.

In New York City, we played on Zacherley’s Disc-O-Teen several times and in Philadelphia some TV show called “Aqua-rama” which was in some aquarium and very much like American Bandstand. Also in Atlantic City for Ed Hurst’s Steel Pier.

What were your favorite bands to play with, either locally or nationally?
I did not have a favorite band to play with really and we were most of the time the only act.

At what point did you record “Creeque Alley” and “Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore?” (BTW, I looked up Hagens Recording Studio - it’s still there.)
I had left the group by then.

Tell me about the recording for “Tollbooth.” Any other recordings or demos from the Koppelman/Rubin era?
Though I wasn’t part of the band when they recorded the song I do remember the song itself.
The group had all been in NYC for some reason and we were in a car leaving the city and had just come out of the Lincoln tunnel in traffic to get on New Jersey Turnpike. The traffic was backed up at the toll booth. We came up with the idea that we should write a song about the tollbooth. We thought that it would be cool for each of us to write our own section of the song and to try to put it all together and it sounded good. I remember writing the section:

“Psychedelic music coming out of the mufflers, cars backing up at the height of the rush hour, someone doesn’t pay, the alarm goes off to say, the fuzz are on their way”
(We called the police “Fuzz” back then.)

At what point did the band break up?
I wasn’t in the band when it officially broke up. (After my daughter Aimee was born, for a brief while I got back with the band.)

Did any of the band stay in the business or do other creative things?
I stayed in the business for several years in my early twenties playing acoustic 12-string guitar, composing and performing in coffee houses and restaurants like the Rusty Scupper in Princeton, but it was just for fun. I still play guitar every day and write music and have been studying formally Hawaiian slack key guitar for past 15 years.