Whisky-A-Go-Go
By Stefene Russell
Photograph courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society's Photographs and Prints Collection
Here we are at Gaslight Square's Gilded Cage Discothèque in October of 1965, with that skinny tie and his hair slicked back with—from all appearances—boot-black. Straight from a late 1950s quiz show. But the dancers, cafefree in their sequined two-pieces and fur corsages, presage the summer of 1969, when college students would stomp around Woodstock, N.Y., many of them in nothing but feathers and body paint. Maybe there was some sharp at the bar in a serge suit, a crystal tumbler of Scotch in one hand and a turquoise Nat Sherman in the other, wistfully dreaming of his box full of Bix Biederbecke albums at home. The epiphany would have been unavoidable: His era, shaped by jazz and repression and detachable cuffs, was over. And here was the soundtrack to its passing, Farrell's Top 10 parade, the corny strains of "Wooly Bully" mingling with the unbridled hedonism of the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan's surly poetics and Jackie DeShannon, who earnestly belted out that all the world needed was love.
