The year was 1966. The Beatles were just hitting their stardom,
the Vietnam War was underway, Martin Luther King Jr. was still
alive before anyone had heard of an iPhone, uploaded a photo to
Facebook or Googled something.
The year was 1966. The Beatles were just hitting their stardom, the Vietnam War was underway, Martin Luther King Jr. was still alive before anyone had heard of an iPhone, uploaded a photo to Facebook or Googled something.
In the town of Morgan Hill inside a high school auditorium stood four young teenage boys, guitars in hand, drumsticks ready, opening their first number after just two weeks of rehearsal. As the first few notes of The Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul” came out, to their surprise, the crowd loved it.
That was the beginning of the GoldWatch Blues Band.
Skip Bailey, the drummer, was 17 at the time. Fellow band mates Kevin Tozer, on rhythm guitar was 17, Joe Millwood, lead guitar and vocalist, was 16 while his younger brother the bass player, Mike Millwood was a mature 11 years old.
These young men held stardom in the South County with adoring fans, ‘roadies’ and gig after gig for a solid six months. Although they never recorded, they performed cover tunes of the first wave of English rock ‘n’ roll-The Yardbirds, Kinks, Beatles and Rolling Stones.
Joe Millwood kept their band ledger with lists of every performance: Live Oak High School Homecoming Dance in November, a Teen Club Dance at Gilroy’s St. Mary’s Hall in January, or a dance at the Gavilan College Gym in Hollister all neatly written in black ink on graph paper. The prices they charged ranged from $10 to $100 per performance.
GoldWatch Blues also performed at the Uvas Meadows in Morgan Hill on weekends, nearly 60 songs in one show in front of hundreds of people, remembers Mike Millwood.
Now more than four decades later Bailey, now 62, reconnected with his other three band mates in June to celebrate their 45-year anniversary of their first rehearsal. He had not seen Mike or Joe for 25 years.
“It felt like we hadn’t been apart for a day,” said Bailey.
Bailey presented each band member with a DVD of video footage that was shot with an 8-millimeter camera without sound in Nov. 5, 1966 at the Live Oak High School Homecoming Dance.
“I loved it,” said Joe. “I got a huge kick out of it and it brought back all those warm feelings.”
Bailey met them each in different cities: San Juan Bautista where Joe, 61 now lives, Santa Cruz where Mike, 56, resides and Tozer, 62, in his current home of Watsonville. Joe and Mike had lived in Morgan Hill before their family moved to Gilroy after Joe’s freshman year of high school. Joe, Tozer and Bailey attended Live Oak High School.
Mike said he remembers Tozer coming over to their house in Gilroy to listen to records after school. When the Beatles became popular, they soon got guitars and decided they needed to form a band. Tozer knew Bailey from school and soon the GoldWatch Blues Band was formed.
They all began playing guitar, Mike and Joe had gone to a couple of lessons. They needed someone to play bass, and Mike “just kind of got stuck with it.” Bailey learned to play the drums on his great aunt’s old 1920s drum kit and later purchased a newer set, which he still owns today.
Mike continued in the music business after GoldWatch Blues, playing for such musicians as John Lee Hooker and Pat Simmons of the Doobie Brothers. He now teaches music in Santa Cruz and has counted that he’s played in more than 10,000 performances since his GoldWatch Blues days.
He recalls how music was not only different back then, but served as a positive perspective in crazier times.
“In the ’60s, music for us was a relief,” Mike said. “With the civil rights movement, assassination of (John F.) Kennedy, the Cuban missile crisis … there was tension in the nation. Music showed us that there was more to life than just war.”
Bailey, now a retiree living with his wife in Tucson, Arizona said he tried to keep his hair long during his band days, much to the dismay of his Live Oak High School principal; Long hair was against school policy back then.
“In that era if you had long hair, you were a musician,” he said, and claims GoldWatch Blues band members were some of “the first long-hairs in South County.”
Joe too had some run-ins with rule breaking as a “shaggy haired, Beatle-loving dude.”
“It’s really funny to think about it now, because I kept it short by today’s standards,” said Joe. “I still have a letter from the vice principal at Gilroy High School from 1965 addressing my parents that I was suspended from school until I cut my hair.”
Bailey recalls what some rehearsals were like at Joe and Mike’s parents home on 5th Street in Gilroy.
“Some of the girls would come walking by. Someone would shout “girls!” and we would start playing our best songs,” said Bailey.
Joe too, remembers the fans that would line up outside to listen to their music and peer inside windows.
“Back then, it was much more rare to be in a band. There weren’t a lot of players out there in the public. So we picked up quite a following,” he said. “I like to think it was partly because we were pretty good.”
Some of Joe’s favorite songs to perform were “Evil Hearted You” by the Yardbirds and “I Need You” by the Beatles which “the girls really liked a lot,” said Joe.
For Bailey, one of his favorites was “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones because “it shows me banging on the drums.”
After June’s get-together, the band is now talking reunion gig in the South County area.
“We all agreed we wanted to (do a reunion) and play songs from our old song list,” said Bailey.
Figuring out those logistics 45 years after they first played has been a slight challenge: the men now in their early 60s and late 50s have some minor health problems holding them back and all live in different cities. They will all be rehearsing on their own, with the idea to set up a performance in the near future.
“Well, we aren’t getting any younger,” said Joe.
