Don & Dewey - Biography
By Jonny Whiteside
When Dewey Terry and Don "Sugarcane" Harris began recording for Specialty Records in 1957, rock & roll was reaching it's fever pitch, yet these two upstarts from Pasadena, friends from earliest childhood, slammed into it so hard that they made everything else sound tame. Extraordinarily, they were also a near fully self-contained force--writing, playing, producing, and performing each one of their songs with an incendiary, accelerated and unprecedented force. Starting with local doo wop act the Squires (recording “Cindy” on the Mambo label), the pair quickly split from the six-man vocal group, "We became Don & Dewey because there were too many people in the other band to make any money," Terry said. The twosome’s first record, “Miss Sue” and “My Heart Is Achin'' (1956 Spot) received crucial airplay on Hunter Hancock 's Hunting With Hunter show and Peter Potter's Platter Parade, leading to the deal with Specialty. The deal was formalized after label head, Art Rupe, caught their live-wire stage show at Hollywood Boulevard’s Royal Room.
Barely out of their teens--Harris was born June 19, 1938, Terry on July 17, 1937--they were billed as “The Two Little Richard,” a tag which only hinted at their volcanic power. Don & Dewey just flat-out rocked. They hollered, screamed and shouted in a weird, indecipherable tongue ("langga langga oli-oki changa-chang"). They warped language into strange new contours: doing the jungle hop with the beeb-a-lee bop, and heading out to mammer-jammer at the hootenanner. Moreover, Harris' highly stylized, haunting electric fiddle (created when he improvised a pick-up by jamming a 78rpm hi-fi needle into the instruments head) also placed the duo in a league entirely their own (get a load of “Justine”). Ably augmented at Specialty by first rate musicians like drummer Earl Palmer and saxist Plas Johnson, every session they did resulted in impeccably raunchy perfection.
Their ability to achieve such an extreme degree of untamed artistry was purely instinctive, as Dewey explained, “The real stomp-down, knockdown blues things, we'd been doin' that the whole time, but Rhythm & Blues were changin'. That's when we learned to rock it. R&B was too slow, too methodical --C'mon, baby, we don't want to hear that! Most people found what we did quite harsh. They said the music was too loud, always told us to cut our amplifiers down . . but I think that contributed to our success, because, well, the kids were doin' it anyway--rock & roll.” Although Don & Dewey's initial commercial impact scarcely registered, their influence was profound. The Righteous Brothers began their career as Don & Dewey imitators, down to the repertoire and stage moves; Chicano rockers the Premiers made "Farmer John" an East Los Angeles anthem (even siring an answer song). In 1974, after R&B act Dale & Grace, pop siblings Donny & Marie Osmond and country singer Freddy Fender all recorded Terry's ballad "Leaving It Up to You," BMI certified the tune as the year's most-played (Terry never saw any royalty money, and he famously picketed Specialty's Sunset Boulevard offices, alongside Little Richard, in the mid-80s).
The British Invasion sidelined Don & Dewey as a touring act somewhat. Though they did hit the road with Little Richard in 1964 for his "Bama-Lama Bama-Loo" comeback (doing so again during the early 70's nostalgia craze), and played a five year run at the Dunes in Las Vegas, but eventually drifted apart, doing solo dates and session work. In 1969, Harris was hired by John Mayall and then by Frank Zappa ("Weasels Ripped My Flesh," among many others), beginning a creative and chemical odyssey that would take its toll. By the time Harris began appearing with Joey Altruda's mid-80s art-rock outfit, Tupelo Chain Sex, it was clear that no small damage had been done--to the point that Terry often chose to gig with a replacement for Harris. But Terry never had a bad word to say about his partner, and they remained close to the end, with Harris' 1999 death preceding Terry's own passing in 2003 .