Screw the Beach Boys. Chuck Berry ripoff kings that they were. The surf music song I liked as a kid was “Surfin’ Bird” by the Trashmen. I never really thought much about it, but songs about cars quickly became more interesting. Jan and Dean had that covered. Their amazingly creative “Bucket T” got covered by The Who with a fabulous John Entwistle horn chart. Then there was “Little G.T.O.” by Ronny and the Daytonas. “Little G.T.O,” that was the shit! “Wah wah…. wah wah wah wah wah wah” over and over again, now you’re talking rock and roll.

B.B. Cunningham Jr. wasn’t in the original Daytonas, which cut “Little G.T.O.” (and their own version of “Bucket T”) on a great lost album from the 1960s. Cunningham would join the band later, but he was always the real deal — a 14-year-old Memphis studio rat who cut his teeth at Sun and became the youngest person ever inducted into its musicians union. Just around the time Jimi Hendrix was predicting “You’ll never hear surf music again” in “Third Stone From the Sun,” Cunningham was playing the taco circuit with the Daytonas, which were finding audiences less interested in the songs about cars and girls that were being pulled out to sea in the psychedelic undertow. Cunningham had the solution: They changed their name to the Hombres and… Presto, the same guys who had been retreads last week were suddenly cutting-edge rockers of the new age!

The anthem? “Let It Out (Let It All Hang Out),” nonsense garage rock with a message, to wit:

“A preachment, dear friend
You are about to receive on John Barleycorn
Nicotine and the temptations of Eve”

After this ominous spoken-word intro, a jangling, fuzzed-out guitar line right out of “Gloria” and Cunningham’s droning, lo-fi Vox organ accompanied the sing-along that followed:

The Hombres also included B.B.’s brother, Bill Cunningham, a founding member of the Box Tops. In the ensuing years B.B. took on a lot of production work while still leading his own band. He also became the keyboardist and backup singer for Jerry Lee Lewis in a band that really could deliver the mail.

Cunningham played New Orleans a while back on a show produced by the Ponderosa Stomp Foundation at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Local rockers the Lonely Lonely Knights, who regularly perform “Let It All Hang Out” (but not as far as I know “Little G.T.O.”) provided the backup band.

Cunningham died over the weekend in Memphis. He had been working as a security guard in an apartment complex. According to the Commercial Appeal, early Sunday morning (October 14) around 2:00 a.m., Cunningham heard a gunshot at the neighboring Cherry Crest apartments and went to investigate.

When officers arrived later, a 16-year-old boy and the 70-year-old Cunningham lay dead from gunshot wounds.

 

Cunningham left his mark on American culture, and he leaves a bit of his legacy in New Orleans, where you can hear the Lonely Lonely Knights pay homage to him Tuesday night (October 16) at the Saturn Bar.

“We will definitely pay tribute to him,” said Lefty Parker, who first heard “Let It All Hang Out” on a compilation album when he was 12 years old. “I didn’t understand it, but I kept playing it over and over because it was hilarious.”

Parker got a chance to ask Cunningham himself what it meant when they played together. “They were on tour a lot back then and he told me he was driving down the highway and just started writing lines about every billboard he saw.”

VH1 might call them one hit wonders but the Hombres were special.

“The Hombres,” Parker concluded, “were underappreciated as an American garage icon. There weren’t a lot of Southern garage bands back then.”

Enjoy this 2009 clip of Cunningham letting it all hang out in his home town: