Garagerocktopia talks with Sid Herring of the Gants Part 1

If you want to understand the Gants, skip "A" and start with "B". Two B’s to be exact: Blues and Beatles.

The Gants, for those who might not remember, were a rock and roll band that hailed from Greenwood Mississippi and who turned out a lot fine music from 1963 to 1967. Though lumped in with garage rock – and songs like “Smoke Rings” certainly had the appropriate grit -- Their best work, such as “I Wonder” and “My Baby Don’t Care” was a lot cleaner and more cohesive than most of what we regard to be "garage rock.". 

The band flirted with the big time, but ultimately, as with so many combos both before and after them, forces outside the music colluded, and not in the Gants' best interest. The band finally had to call it quits, but not before making a whole bunch of music that people are still digging to this day.

 

Guitarist Sid Herring still writes and performs music and is happy to talk about the Gants and his life in music. The friendly guitarist and songwriter chatted with Garagerocktopia for almost an hour, seemingly not annoyed to be answering questions he must have already answered umpteen gazillion times.

The band hailed from Mississippi, which, as most of you are well aware, is Ground Zero for the blues. Greenwood lies on the eastern edge of the legendary delta, the region that gave us B.B. King, Muddy Waters and the father of modern blues, Robert Johnson. Herring said that the blues, far from being exotic as they were to many in the '50s and '60s, were pretty much part of his family.

“I’m from Greenwood, MS, and I go by his (Robert Johnson’s) grave every time I go home,” said Herring, talking by telephone from his home outside the Nashville area. “I’m very proud of that area. As I was growing up, I listened to a lot of that kind of music, and my mother would sing ‘Come in My Kitchen.’ I remember how it made me feel. To me, that was everyday music. It stuck in my subconscious.”

The blues continued to have magic for Herring as they began to morph into rock and roll. If hearing Robert Johnson was the bedrock of Herring’s musical life early on, Bo Diddley would rattle that life to its core.

“I saw Bo Diddley when I was about 14 years old,” recalled Herring “and I went home and beat on that guitar all night. That was when I decided to become a musician and I give credit to Bo Diddley.

Herring would hook up with Johnny Freeman, and later, Vince Montgomery and Don Wood, and like so many young men their age all across the country, they had a rock and roll band.  At first, they called themselves the Kingsmen (and in fact had their own version of “Louie Louie”). To avoid confusion with the more well-known band from Seattle-by-way-of-Portland, they changed their name to the Gants, named after a popular brand of shirt. The band would go on to forge a strong local and regional following.

Much of the Gants early output were blues, r&b and rock covers, most notably Bo Diddley’s “Road Runner.” Then, things would take a giant turn for Herring and the Gants as they absorbed the same seismic musical blast that changed the rest of the world – the coming of the Beatles.  Like so many other rock and rollers, hearing the Fab Four had a huge impact on Herring.

“When the Beatles hit, they just knocked me out,” Herring recounted. “I kept a touch of that British accent in my music. It was a conscious effort – instead of fighting it, I went with it.”

The Beatles were not all Herring liked to listen to. He also mentioned the Rolling Stones as a big influence. Herring said he was careful, though, not to merely copy what the British bands were doing.

“A lot of writers don’t admit their influences,” Herring explained, “but if I think somebody’s good, I look up to them. I admired the Beatles and I did lean towards what they were doing. My music was a little like them, but it was my own. “My Baby Don’t Care” was based on the end of a Beatle song, but it came out in very different form. After I heard the Rolling Stones ‘Get Off My Cloud,” I picked up a guitar and ‘Smoke Rings’ is what came out.

Some other bands from the South performing at the time have said, as much as they loved the Beatles and other bands coming over, also felt something very personal about the British Invasion.

While some early rock was created north of the Mason-Dixon line, there’s little doubt that Rock and Roll was 100% born and bred in the South (as is most of the American music that anyone cares about). The Southern bands didn’t cotton to a bunch of people from England coming in and taking it over. Herring said such thinking never really occurred to him.

“I didn’t think that way,” said Herring. “What occurred to us was that we had all this great music right around us, right there in our neighborhood, and we (as a people) didn’t see it. But the Beatles did, they repackaged it and blew our minds. It took some of that brilliance of the British Invasion to make us see it, and I felt real proud.”

The Gants (r) with Eric Burdon and the Animals

You could make the case the the Gants are the first band of the genre that became known as Southern Rock. They had the blues foundation so integral to the genre, they were born in region, and perhaps most importantly of all, they recorded at Muscle Shoals, the famed studio that  helped the world get hip to Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and other immortals too numerous to name here. But years before anyone ever imagined Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers, the Gants were there.

Soon, the Gants would see success with original tunes that well echoed the melodies and harmonies of British bands, but with an underlying groove that was all American. The band attracted radio station attention and also found itself opening for bands like the Dave Clark Five and the Animals, all of which impacted their music even more. But events on the other side of the world in the 1960s would trickle back home and have an impact on the Gants.

You can check out the second half of the story of the Gants here. We’ll look further at their music, their breakup and why, five decades later, we still care very much about what they did – and care what Sid Herring is up to now.

The official website for The Gants: http://www.thegants.com

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