The Weasels: Underground Success of A Kansas Rock Group

The uses and gratifications perspective, developed by Elihu Katz and first described in 1959, propounds that the audience drives a bargain with the medium in terms of having their needs met and their beliefs affirmed, thus garnering their support of that medium. As Katz writes, "There is much, much more to mass communication than persuasion."⁴ This turned media research around by posing the question: What does the receiver do with the message from the source?

Katz put forth uses and gratification theory as "a bridge to the humanistic tradition of the study of popular culture which has had a continuing interest in mass media," though theorists in that field view media use as one of "escape...from political and societal reality."⁵

It is imperative that the medium know and play to their audience, serving them as presumably the musical artists serve themselves. Factors of audience response include affinity, story-telling, musicianship, and the nearly indefinable taste. Though, as in much social research, there is a possibility, as Dorothy Lee suggests when talking about basic needs, of "trying to assess a totality in terms of an aggregate,"⁶ still criteria can be established that will substantiate a position of rank regarding needs met. 

The following musicians were interviewed in the fall of 1992 by the author. All were over the telephone, except the Wichita musician (who asked that his name not be used), which was in person. His reminisces, while not altogether about the Weasels, help to show what life was like for a Wichitan who played with the musicians and socialized with the young people of El Dorado in the 1960s. 

The Unnamed 

"I played in a group with Elkshot. This was in Wichita in '68, after the Weasels had broken up the first time. Actually, I never got to hear them, but the guys I played with said they were good. If the Weasels had their respect, they certainly had mine.

"Elkshot lived with his aunt in El Dorado. One of our members was living in town at the time, going to school [then Butler County Junior College] to stay out of the draft. Wichita State had kicked him out for low grades, and in those days you might as well pack your bags when that happened, unless you could get into another school.

"So we spent a lot of time there. I remember being impressed with the quality of life in El Dorado. I mean, it was simple, but basically it had the whole love and peace trip. El Dorado State Lake had just been built and we cruised the expanding shore line. A good part of the town's kids turned on [used drugs] and it was kind of funny the way the factions sprang up.

"One story in particular stands out. It seems there was this girl who had left her redneck boy friend for one of the heads. The redneck took to following her around and one day was up in a tree in the park watching her when he heard a group of them planning to meet and smoke pot that night. He told the police and they raided the party. I don't recall if anyone was busted then.

"I heard that back in the days before pot was available, quite a few heads from El Dorado made do with Romilar [non-prescription cough medicine]. A bottle or two of that stuff would really put you under. I don't know if any of the Weasels did it.

"Elkshot's Aunt Martha had a beauty shop in her home. I don't know how she felt about all the longhairs hanging around there. Doug's hair was shoulder-length, making him look even more like an Indian. He was lean and tall and looked out at the world with an accommodating face that was always ready to crack a smile or hear a good story. One day he told me one.

"We were supposed to practice at my place in Wichita, an apartment that was the upstairs floor of an old house. You can imagine how the downstairs folks felt about that. Anyway, I'd just moved into the place and had celebrated with my friends the night before. There were beer cans all over the place. Aunt Martha dropped him off when I wasn't there. She walked up the stairs with Elkshot and, in country woman fashion, took a good look around. Later he told me that she asked who lived there.

"When he told her, she said 'Well he sure is a beer-drinkin' fool.'

"The band didn't last very long but we played a few parties, the Blackout [tavern], and had a regular gig at the Stagedoor Inn. We were all pretty wild and when you play at a club, one of the things they give you, to compensate for the ridiculous wages, is a free go at the draw beer. We all took advantage of that, as well as grass on the breaks, so by the end of the evening, we were testing our mettle against the mood of the audience and substances ingested. I don't know why we felt we had to play high. I guess it was a reward system, as well as a challenge. The music seemed to sound better to us. You could more easily lose yourself in the process of creation.

"So on one break, we all took off. One of the guys went behind the curtain and thought it a fitting gesture to take a leak. What he didn't know was that there was a live mike backstage right next to where he was having at it. You could hear it all through the club. I think the guitarist went back and stopped him.

"That winter we had the opportunity to play in the first rock concert in Wichita's new Century II convention center. This is a round, futuristic-looking place and is pretty far out for most of the city. Bucky Walters was the promoter and he had the misfortune of losing money on a bubble gum act, The Ohio Express.

"The deal was that several local bands would open, each doing two or three tunes, for no pay naturally. As a prelude, three or four guys in our band dropped acid. This meant for a heady experience, on top of playing for a couple of thousand youngsters, when you are nineteen.

"The guitarist for the Ohio Express stopped by backstage and looked at an old acoustic I had rigged with a Jap pick-up. He was dressed in green velvet pants and a ruffled silk shirt, and was really flying, on amphetamines, I thought. He started to pluck the strings, almost compulsively. He acted like he couldn't believe anyone would play such a homemade outfit. When he started to go through his thing with the guitar, I just looked at him and said 'Speed kills.' He walked away.

"Later on after the show, he came up to me and said 'You were right, man.'

"The show didn't make any money and the headliner was kind of an insult to Wichita, but we had our fun. One drawback happened when Elkshot and the bass player were riding down the elevator and a great big pipe somehow slipped loose from the floor above. When the door opened, it beaned someone from another band as he left the elevator and knocked him out. They took him away in an ambulance. I wasn't there but I heard all about it. Pretty gruesome footage when you're on LSD." 

Jerry Wilson 

Jerry Wilson was one of the founding members of the Weasels. "I was just learning the guitar when we got together."

From the beginning, the band wanted to do original material, some of which was penned by Wilson. "Harold [Beal] does a lot of writing, too. I don't know how we got together with Elkshot. He was a few years younger than the rest of us. I guess we just ran into each other at his aunt's house, across from the high school."

The name was theirs from the band's inception, though they tried a different one after one of the concomitant personnel changes. "We called ourselves the Missing Linx for a while, then went back to the Weasels."

Wilson considers himself lucky concerning run-ins with the authorities. "We were playing at the Cage [a high school dance club in El Dorado] one time and I got a ticket for parking too far away from the curb. I remember the police also inspected my guitar case once."

The band found a measure of respect in the community, despite some of the antics of at least one member. "Elkshot was crazy. We used to go into Ball's Lunch late at night after we were through playing. Elkshot would jump up on the milk case and crow like a buzzard, trying to get the waitress to look up at him. She never did."

Although they competed in battles of the bands in Wichita, (winning the opening act position with the Turtles in one battle), the Weasels played few jobs outside El Dorado and surrounding towns, including Emporia and Manhattan. "We played the [Wichita] Seneca Lounge once. We had enough gigs in town." They left the state in 1970 to go to Houston, reported in greater detail below.

Resurrected in 1987 for a 20-year high school reunion, the Weasels are playing again. "We're still doing quite a bit of original material. My stuff is more country than rock. And I've written a few gospel songs."

Wilson, who works a full time job as does the rest of the group, sees some fulfillment in playing original music for his townspeople. He has accepted the vagaries of fortune so evident in popular music. "We were going strong there for a while." 

Harold Beal, Jr 

Harold Beal, Jr., bassist for the group, writes detective/comic fiction novels as well as songs. He joined the band on guitar as a summer replacement in '65. "They had another guitar player, Johnny Van Sickle, who got a job out of town for the summer."

He has been with the Weasels ever since. Beal has an explanation about the band's choice of epithets. "We were playing some gigs around town and the [El Dorado] Times wanted to do a story on us. But we didn't have a name."

One of the members would say "taking a weasel" for the act of relieving himself. "So we used the name."

The band had a certain standing in the community. "I don't think that we ever had that much trouble with police. We had a house down by the library, the Weasel house. We set up all our stuff and practiced down there."

Instrumentation was: two guitars, organ for a while, bass, and drums, as well as lead singer.

Beal, who considers himself a basic rock writer, played rhythm guitar in the '60s before he switched to bass in Houston. These days he trades off with Wilson on lead and bass. This member of the El Dorado band was in large part responsible for their emigration to Texas.

"My wife Dee and I subscribed to the L. A. Free Press. I saw an invitation for bands to send a tape to a new music company in Houston, Soundville Records. We recorded some stuff in the new El Dorado high school auditorium."

The Weasels' tape was one of six selected from 6000 entries. Their chance come, the band moved to Texas. "We recorded 25 or 30 songs. They released one single. One side was one of Jerry's songs and the other was one of mine. We came up to Wichita to a radio station and Little John, the D J, played the record or a tape and talked to us on the radio one night."

Things appeared to be coming together for the El Doradans. But the music business was as full of dips and twists as it is today.

"We never sold any records because the record company didn't have distribution. We were too naive, really. We thought we'd go down there, record and be big rock stars. We heard later the Mafia bought them out."

The years of playing and recording in Texas were not without benefit. "I've got the cassette tapes."

During the intervening years between Texas and the high school reunion, the Weasels scattered with the winds. "My wife and I were living up north of Topeka. We had a used and rare book business. I came back and played for the reunion. Then we played for Jim Lytton's [Wichita] Halloween party. We thought maybe we could do this again. We finally made arrangements, sold our place up there, moved back down here and started playing again. We still do a couple of the old songs. We usually close with 'Lonesome Good-by Blues.'" 

Linsey Cutsinger 

Linsey Cutsinger took over drumming responsibilities when the band reformed in 1969. Elkshot, after performing with other groups, had by then left music to pursue a rodeo career.

"The Weasels were going good until Jerry got drafted." When he returned from Viet Nam, the band put together Cutsinger, Wilson, Beal, Dave Ellis (vocalist), and Jim Cox (bassist) to continue playing original music.

"We'd play every weekend, playing our own music for 200 to 250 people in the Gable [El Dorado club]. That went on for a year."

Cutsinger did not recall any problems with the police. Then, in 1970, they were in Houston in Soundville's brand new studios.

"One of them was 24 track, one of three in the country at that time."

After the band moved to Houston, "We played all over Texas in '70-'71 and did a lot of session work."

When it finally came to light that the company wasn't going to have a distribution set-up, the band members left Texas one at a time, returning to El Dorado to play in different bands and to pursue other careers.

Cutsinger, who has studied music at Kansas University and is working on his M.B.A., feels that the band is contributing to the community, in a contemporary as well as historical context.

"We practice in our living room. Last year the police came over and asked us to turn down. They were a couple of young guys. They said 'We'd like for you to turn it up.'"

The Weasels now play private parties for the majority of their performances. "We don't play beer joints any more. Gigs are hard to schedule with everyone working."

Current lineup, besides Wilson, Beal, and Cutsinger, is: Lefty Gonzales, bass, Dean Hopkins, saxophone, keyboards, and guitar, and Dave Ellis, lead singer.

Of its repertory, the band does a third to half original tunes. "Our songs are blues-hard rock/ country/ and classical influenced. We never went over that well in Wichita, possibly because we played our music. They wanted to hear what they'd heard before." 

Dave Ellis 

Dave Ellis currently works with another band, Phenix, as well as with the Weasels. "I started playing in a little band in 1963, The Gentlemen Four. We bought some gray suits that all looked the same and played sock hops. At the time I was playing drums."

Ellis started with the Weasels on drums. When Elkshot joined, he became lead singer. He went with the group to Texas.

"We got a house in the northeast part of Houston, all the band members and wives and one kid. We bought egg cartons and nailed them to the walls to sound-proof the garage." This enabled them to rehearse. Later the group moved to separate quarters but several of the band members lived together in another house.

Aside from managing their recording work, Soundville put the band on the road. But the management fell short.

"We toured New Mexico for ten days and came out with $1.50 apiece. Soundville didn't demand enough pay. We had to furnish all our own equipment. We had a really bad P.A. You were kind of just out there on your own. We did the best we could with what we had to work with."

The band experienced some down-and-out times, but the hope of the album release buoyed them along. "There was a point when Sceptre Records offered to buy us but Soundville wouldn't sell." Had the transfer happened, the Weasels would have had a better chance at having their material released. The band also had casual contact with some of the well-known in the rock trade.

"I met John Mayall down in Houston. He was in the stratosphere, gone, gone, gone. Jimi Hendryx' manager, and Johnny Winter came down to the studio to see if they wanted to record down there. We were recording at the time and went to the reception for John Mayall."

When it became clear that the album was not going to go into production, the inevitable migration back to Kansas began.

"When Linsey and I got back, he got a job right away with the Illusions, and I came in later. The Illusions were always a standby band you get a job with when your band broke up. They were real commercial and money oriented. Everybody hated to play with them. But they paid a salary, and always seemed to be playing."

These days, Ellis manages playing in two groups with a professional's aplomb. "The Weasels don't play that much. When something comes up like a reunion or a party, we rehearse and go over the old tunes."

He recalls some of the rougher aspects of life in El Dorado in the '60s. "It was like little Chicago. There was a group in town more into getting drunk and fighting. They didn't use LSD. There was something called [Romilar's] March Across Butler County." 

Jim Cox 

Jim Cox was the original Weasels' bassist, with the group from '64 until '71. "I wasn't with them in Houston. My wife just had a baby. That's when I put my bass guitar in the box and never opened it until the reunion [1987]."

"Playing these reunions, that's where I have the most fun. I get up on stage and say: hey, this isn't going to last very long."

Through this chronometric envisioning, Cox effectively brings the oldsters to their feet. "We got the place going like the old days. The women were dancing on the tables."

The spontaneous composition of the youthful El Doradans was a factor that inhabited the Weasels performances. Cox viewed it as an important difference when assessing audiences and explaining the band's lack of popularity in Wichita.

"I think the people were more laid back in Wichita. We were used to driving the people crazy."

It seems Cox had heard of [Romilar's] March Across Butler County. "Doug was a great story teller. You know he was part Indian. He'd get us together around a camp fire and tell us wonderful stories."

The March came about this way: "It was a hot summer Sunday afternoon. The toughs of El Dorado were an odd collection of people. Nobody had a job. They kind of hung with the old Weasels.

"Anyway, they had a bunch of hot beer, and about eight of them in an old pick-up were driving around all these roads raising hell. They came to an old cable swinging bridge that ran across part of the old El Dorado lake. They found a guy on the bridge they didn't like too well. He was fishing. They jumped on it and started it swinging, terrorizing him and anybody else who was on it. His fishing rod and tackle box fell into the lake."

They got back in the pick-up and resumed their journey.

"One of them took off all his clothes and was hanging on the side of the truck when a carload of Mennonite women drove by.

"Then they headed toward Cassody when they saw one guy in a filling station. They stopped and three or four went inside. They kept the guy busy watching them while [Romilar] filled up the tank. The guy couldn't see how much gas they bought. They paid for two dollars worth and left.

"Five or six miles from Rosalia, they saw a rat run across the road and go into an old barn."

Taking this as a sign, the toughs stopped the truck and followed the rodent. "They couldn't find anything so they set the barn on fire. They drove along and then got out to take a leak and looked back to see a black plume of smoke. They were getting really hungry by then so they broke into a farmer's barn and got some implements--hammers, rakes, and stuff. Then they drove on into the Flint hills and figured they would wrangle a steer."

The toughs located a herd. "They drove into a field and picked out a steer. [Romilar] ran into it and knocked it down. They all jumped on the cow and managed to kill it. It was much too heavy to put into the truck, so they put a chain around its head and tied it to the rear bumper."

They continued their march, dragging the steer. "They were going forty or fifty miles an hour across the field. One of them decided he wanted to ride it. They found a paved road and he road it.

"Toward the evening they started to realize what they'd done: terrorized people, robbed a filling station, broke into sheds, burned a barn, and killed a steer. They figured they'd better ditch the steer and get back to town. The carcass was in bad shape. They unchained it and then went into town by the back roads. They came over to Elkshot's aunt's house on Central and waited on the porch. Nothing ever happened." 

Group communication is more likely in small venue rock performances. Feedback to the source is readily evident in such things as audience members dancing and requests for specific tunes. Hence the performances of the Weasels in their primary location of El Dorado led to a building of competence in musicianship and confidence in song-writing abilities.

One of the functions of the medium of rock is cultural transmission. Goodall writes of rock and roll as an "expression of important cultural values."⁷ In the case of the Weasels, this would have been subcultural, for they were the disinherited (by choice) young, who had turned their backs on the mainstream goals of respectability, wealth and position, instead choosing the mercurial milieu of underground rock.

George H. Lewis has aptly explained the needs and applications of taste cultures, sets within the general population who champion a particular artist or art.

"Taste cultures consist of values and choices of cultural content [and] function both to entertain, inform and beautify life and to express values and standards of tastes and aesthetics."⁸

In line with this, while it is generally accepted that mass media cannot substantially change peoples' minds on the issues of the day, it can give them an indication if their view (or in this case, taste in rock music) is of the majority or minority. Regrettably, the Weasels failed to have their music placed before the public by the mass media of recordings and radio. Thus their interpretation of punctuated balladry--which is essentially the concept of rock and roll--failed to be tested in other than a regional setting. This is not to detract from the worth of the music. Perhaps their local productions were more meaningful and truer to the creative spirit when perceived in a group communication mode.

The early Weasel audiences in El Dorado had their needs met and were gratified by the band's performances, fostering a Kansas quality in the musicians. This quality included such isolated locale-induced attributes as deep commitment to friendship, ineffable feeling for the sweep of the prairie, and altruistic impulses of honor among their underground as well as a sustained hope that their style of life would be accepted by American culture. Later the native worth of their performance and originality was borne out when Soundville Records offered them a contract from a field of 6000 applicants.

In Texas, removed from their accustomed feedback, which was warm, lively, and supporting, and discouraged with the failed promises of the music company, the Weasels eventually lost the idea of creating music as the band entity. Szatmary observed that the "psychedelic generation [to which the Weasels assuredly belonged] persisted in a cult of tribalism."⁹ The fact that the Weasels lived together in the houses in Houston serves to solidify that application.

Distanced from one form of receiver, the Weasels had expected their message to achieve a larger receivership, that of a national audience through record sales, to sustain their creativity. Rock writer Ellen Willis maintained "The hippie rock stars were...apostles of a cultural revolution."¹⁰ This, then was very likely one of the band's unspecified goals.

Hirsch has delineated two groups of "cultural gatekeepers," producer organizations and distributor organizations.¹¹ He writes: "Quite simply, the role of producer organizations and media is to create new cultural forms, ideas, patterns and products, whereas distributor media select from these to present standardized and watered-down versions to the mass public."¹²

One of the results of the tension between the two organizations is rock music available to the masses. The Weasels (production medium) and Soundville (distribution medium) fell together through underground solicitation, the ad in the L.A. Free Press. Perhaps the high aspirations of both should have been enough to give the El Dorado band a national hearing. But lack of practical grounding (in both organizations) hampered this. In effect, the incompetence of Soundville allows only limited application of uses and gratification theory.

There was never an opportunity for the Weasels' message to reach a national receiver. The isolated characteristics of Kansas small towns left the band limited recording opportunities. When this chance for national exposure did not find fruition, the natural forces of chaos and decay, inherent in the creative process of rock, took their toll. In addition, the increasing pressures of family life in at least one instance also had an influence.

The current resurrection of the Weasels can be taken as respect for the past, adaptive reuse of talents long since put aside in at least two individuals, and continuing creativity in the others. The fact that the band still has an audience (as yet primarily composed of retrospective listeners perhaps) is factor and progeny of the combining forces of affinity and desire to communicate through the medium of rock. New fans would serve to validate the band's current existence in the community, beyond the call of the wild '60s. 

                              Notes 

¹ Jeffres, Leo W., Mass Media Processes and Effects, (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, Inc., 1986), 1.

² Johnstone, John W. C., "Social Context And Mass Media Perception", Studies In Public Communication 2: 28.

³ Johnstone, 28.

⁴ Katz, Elihu, "Mass Communication Research and the Study of Popular Culture: An Editorial Note On a Possible Future For This Journal", Studies In Public Communication 2: 2.

⁵ Katz, 3-4.

⁶ Lee, Dorothy, "Freedom and Culture."  Youth and Culture. Comp. Hazel V. Kraemer. Monterey, Cal.: Brooks/Cole, 1974. 127.

⁷ Goodall, H. L. Jr. Living In The Rock And Roll Mystery, (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 5.

⁸ Lewis, George H., "Taste Cultures And Their Composition: Towards a New Theoretical Perspective", Mass Media and Social Change. Eds. Elihu Katz and Tamas Szecsko. London: SAGE Publications, 1981. 205.

⁹ Szatmary, David P. Rockin' In Time, A Social History Of Rock And Roll, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1987), 113.

¹⁰ Willis, Ellen, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History Of Rock & Roll. Ed. Jim Miller. (New York: Random House, 1980. 275.

¹¹Hirsch, Paul M., "Institutional Functions Of Elite And Mass Media", Mass Media and Social Change, 187.

¹²Hirsch, 189.