The garage era: bands, radio studios, and records of their own

1965 — the 1970s

Cut at the radio station: Fort Wayne's rock-and-roll generation mostly did not get record contracts, and its surviving record is wonderfully concrete: singles cut in radio-station studios and pressed in small runs. The Shadows 5, a Fort Wayne band long misattributed to Oswego, New York, recorded their single — "Gathers No Moss" backed with "That Little Girl" — at radio station WOWO in Fort Wayne in 1966 and pressed five hundred copies in Chicago; the record came out on Tech Records that August. The Olivers, evolved from the Serfmen, cut the fuzz-garage 45 "Beeker Street" in 1966. The Male Men, North Side High School students, were picked in October 1965 as the house band of WPTA Channel 21's Saturday-afternoon teen show 21 A Go Go, showcasing other local bands weekly until February 1966, when the show ended amid union complaints that the musicians were non-union; in 1967 they made a demo at WGL Radio. The pattern is the entry's point: in a city whose national music institutions were a symphony and a German chorus, its teenagers' music ran through the broadcasters — WOWO's and WGL's studios were the local record industry. The scene's later, nationally documented acts — Ethos, Left Lane Cruiser, The Ready Set, and singer Addison Agen — are profiled as artists in the Artists record; what belongs here is the infrastructure they inherited: a city where making a record had always meant talking a radio engineer into studio time.

Sources:

1. Garage Hangover, Fort Wayne, Indiana (garagehangover.com/country/us/indiana/fort-wayne/) — the Shadows 5's WOWO recording session and 500-copy pressing (from the band's own account), the Olivers and the Serfmen line, and the Male Men/21 A Go Go account from singer Wallace Geller, including the February 1966 union-complaint ending and the 1967 WGL demo.
2. People–Artists section of this history — Ethos, Left Lane Cruiser, The Ready Set, and Addison Agen as profiled acts.