“Nebraska Sky.” I’d heard it was majestic, but I didn’t grasp its expanse until I journeyed to Omaha in the 
midst of 2002’s blazing summer. My purpose? A visit with L.A. Carnival guitarist Ron Cooley, a long-settled Nebraskan, who’d named his record label after the blanket the covered his home state. “See what I mean,” he beamed as we hurtled along the interstate in his minivan. “This is what I’m talking about – the ‘Nebraska Sky.’” Once you’ve driven the winding road that is Interstate 80, alongside the ubiquitous corn fields that abut freight lines – their empty stock yards witnessing the hustle and bustle of Omaha’s urban expansion – you understand why Ron smiles as those two words leave his lips. Above, that great, parched Midwestern sky opens in all directions. In the midst of summer, puffy clouds hold the prospect of rain. Blue radiates outward. It’s glorious.
But no matter how serene it appears to the impressionable traveler, Nebraska is like any other rough-hewn land of the frontier tradition. Prone to temperature extremes. Dry and, at times, brutal. Of checkered past and displaced natives. A land that might have afforded opportunity to some, but certainly marked the end of the road for others. Malcolm X’s opens his Autobiography by painting the jarring scene of Ku Klux Klansmen terrorizing his parents’ Omaha home shortly before his birth during the Great Depression. Arno Lucas, L.A. Carnival’s experienced singer who grew up in Omaha some thirty years later, and grew tired of the city long ago, now winces, “It was tough, man. Hostile, but not in your face hostile.” He continues, “If you turn your back, anything can happen hostile. That was Omaha, man.”
This is the dichotomy of the Midwestern city that birthed L.A. Carnival, arguably one of America’s best equipped, most unique funk ensembles. If the multi-cultural Mickey and The Soul Generation’s open, hopeful music was a product of their Southern Texas roots, if the Detroit Sex Machines’ raspy, biting vamps were the product of a bleak, harsh Motor City rearing, then LA Carnival would never have created the music they did without the uncharted hope that their frontier birthplace once exuded and the stark injustice of Omaha’s late 60s racial divide. Their solitary release – the woefully rare Pacific Avenue 45 “Blind Man” – treads the well known path of the jilted lover with an intensity that the subject matter wouldn’t normally call forth. The superlative B side “Color” hints at the reason why – “I am of one color/Payed the price to be around/I am of one color/Don’t put me down.” L.A. Carnival wasn’t floating in Nebraskan clouds, they were confronting issues in their troubled city with the same intensity that they recorded their music. But ultimately, their plain-labeled 45 proved to offer researchers more questions than answers. What lead to this record’s release? Why did they play so damn hard? There are three voices singing “Color’s” refrain, in sublime harmony. Surely they reverberate with pain and heartache, but they also resoundingly herald a brighter day. Who were they, from where did that hope spring?
The lead voice on the 45 issue of “Blind Man,” and the third part of “Color’s” tri-harmonic is that of Lester Abrams, L.A. Carnival’s leader, drummer, arranger, chief-songwriter, sometimes keyboardist, and, of course, namesake. Recently discovered living in the southern Californian coastal hamlet of Vista, his story begins to offer answers.
His maternal grandmother moved the Abrams family from the Southwest to Omaha in the early 1900s; Lester’s multi-racial father met his bi-racial mother there. Lester was born in 1945, and, as a child, had serious problems explaining his cultural background, which included ancestry from both Native and Black America, to ignorant school mates. “Between the ages of 8 and 10, I declined to admit I was black to my peers,” Lester, whose beguiling looks resist any categorization, reflects. “It was easier to do, so I said I was adopted.”
By the time he was in his early teens, his unique looks lead to torment. The parents of friends he once visited left him waiting at the front door when he knocked. Daily, he fought with his schoolmates. “It got to be that I had to fight black kids and white kids, I was too off center for (both of) them,” he states. “It was like straddling this fence, and being pissed on by both sides.” And the stress didn’t end at the threshold to his Lake Street home. His father, who balanced three jobs while riddled with arthritis of the neck and back, was prone to violent outbursts and Lester suffered “serious ass whippings” as a result. Not surprisingly, his sleep was interrupted by visions of fistfights and pursuit.
Lester found solace sitting next to his grandmother at her piano, nestled away in the coal-room of their musty basement. He describes the scene vividly. “She would just light me up, man, I’d get this huge rush. I’d be sitting there crying these tears of joy, and I wouldn’t even know why. But really, it was like having a balloon in your chest, and someone’s blowing it up. And this joy just blurts itself out.” However, although his grandmother’s piano sessions were formative influences on – and, more than probably, cathartic releases for – Lester’s young soul, he only “tinkered around” the instrument. Like many an angst-riddled adolescent, Lester’s instrument of choice was the drums.
“I started off on the trash cans, turning them over and putting pillows on them before my dad bought me my first snare drum,” Lester recalls. “I then remember going to this pawn shop with my dad, and we bought this bass drum with a cymbal stuck to the side of it. It went on from there.” While Lester gigged happily in small ensembles such as his first band, the El Doradoes (with Mike Hatfield on rhythm guitar, Louie Walker on lead guitar, Danny Williams on tenor sax and Greg Williams on baritone sax), he had a large shadow looming over him. His uncle, the saxophonist Preston Love, was arguably the most famous musician in the city, leading various big bands in Omaha and traveling back and forth to Los Angeles, where he would session on records that young Lester would hear on the radio. Thus, the budding musician started his lifelong learning process, first by studying elementary drum rudiments on his own, then by impressing his junior high bandleader, Harold Smith, into allowing him to play with the high school dance band. By the time Lester arrived at Tech High School in 1960, he had been playing in the band for nearly two years.
“I’d been raised listening to Sarah Vaughn and Lavern Baker,” Lester states. “But the hard R&B was coming into my life with Little Richard and Junior Walker.” In the midst of discovering his musical calling, Lester discovered something about himself. “I realized that there was a depth to music that I wasn’t getting to play in the band,” Lester relates. “And there was much more to it than that. Everybody that touched my soul that I listened to, they were black. And I’d been paying all these dues (for being black).” Thus, Lester decided: “If I’m going to get subjected to this I might as well get all into it.” The year was 1963; Lester was 18 years old.
During his senior year, and upon graduating from high school, Lester honed his chops “playing a whole lot of gigs in the ghetto.” Spanning the area known then as the “near-Northside,” the largely black section of Omaha spanning from 15th to 30th Streets, between Lake and Cummings, Lester stomped around before briefly settling into The Peppermint Lounge’s house band. He hosted traveling luminaries such as Howling Wolf and Screaming Jay Hawkins alongside local legends King Richard, Big Iron and Hoshel Wright. “There wasn’t any, ‘No man, you’re not black enough’ with these guys,” Lester fondly recalls of his musical compatriots. “We just played.” He delved into soul jazz a la Grant Green and Jack McDuff via gigs with the Mike Lewis Trio. By 1967, when the funk rhythm syncopated the backbeat in American R&B, Lester was ready to add his own swing. “The more I built up my chops, the more I could fuse stuff together,” Lester recalls. “I would learn a lick that belonged in a jazz riff and put it in a funk rhythm ‘cause I had the chops to do it.”
There was no question about it – Lester Abrams was the cat to call if you were an Omaha musician in need of a funky drummer. A young drummer named Buddy Miles tried to steal a tip or two and even his hard-to-please uncle, though he would never invite him to play in his bands, had to admit he had a knack at pounding on the skins. When a chain-smoking woman offered him a gig instructing her son’s band, The Fabulous Impacts, Lester quoted an exorbitant fee – which he promptly received. He then fired the group’s drummer, Jack Schenegier, and took the band’s helm. This green bunch of blue-eyed rock n’ rollers – Joe Olivo on bass, Dave “Barney” Barnhart on guitar, Ed Finney on organ, Harry Roberts on trumpet and sax and ex-El Dorado Mike Hatfield on lead vocals – learned the hard way what having the top drummer in town in charge of group rehearsals meant. “I was brutal. I was like a drill sergeant when they got to rehearsal,” Lester laments. “I would give them homework. Licks to practice. Chords to learn. But after six months they actually started sounding like a band.” A soul band, at that. Lester’s funky drumming demanded that the Impacts embrace a different leaning. Hatfield, at the very least, was appreciative. “He could never get out of that funky, funky bag. He couldn’t play straight at all – he hated it!” Hatfield now exclaims. “I learned so much soul from Lester, I’ll never, ever forget him.”
Funded by Olivo’s father and recorded at Sears Recording Studio by local label owner Eddie Haddad, the group crafted two 45s – the Abrams’ composed stormer “A Thousand Years” b/w “Cry Cry” (both featuring Lester on lead vocals) and Allen Toussaint’s proto-funk masterpiece “Get Out Of My Life Woman” b/w “Tell Me.” * The records’ hokey picture sleeves – prominently displaying Lester and the Impacts decked out in pirate suits sitting in a field (“Please man, she was paying me good money,” Lester retorts, a sentiment Hatfield shares) – couldn’t come close to hinting at the music those slips of paper contained. Not only could the Impacts keep up with their fiery leader, but they could sound damn good doing so. And Lester had documented the first examples of the off-kilter chord progressions that would come to characterize his songwriting, his polyrhythmic take on funk drumming and the rich timbre of his developing voice.
As Lester was developing the Fabulous Impacts and funking the blues, jazz and soul around town, he shone as a beacon to a teenager six years his junior whom he’d once baby-sat. Leslie Smith, a church-schooled singer who was then attending North High School, sang lead in a band called the Sights and Sounds with, amongst others, schoolmate Ron Cooley on guitar and a bass player from Central High, Rick Chudacoff. “Lester was the baddest drummer in town,” Leslie remembers. “And he was a hard, bad ass. A little guy, but when it came down to (a challenge), he wouldn’t back away.” Though not ready – or perhaps too intimidated – to call attention to his fledgling group at the time, Leslie worked through personnel and name changes to become the focal point of the Les Smith Soul Band, a developing blue-eyed soul revue. A chance meeting with a five piece singing group called The Creations heralded change. Soon, three members of The Creations were singing alongside Leslie in the Soul Band, in the manner of The Temptations and The Four Tops. When the company proved too great for the band’s meager paychecks, only gruff voiced Arno Lucas was asked to remain on – to complement Leslie’s soaring falsetto.
Leslie’s confidence grew. “We were good,” he remembers. “We had a thing. A vibe. An energy.” At some point, the young soul-man grew bold enough to invite Lester to a performance at a local high school to witness the Les Smith Soul Band in action. “He didn’t seem intimidated at all,” Lester remembers of the invitation. “I’m assuming he had enough intuition to know that there was something great happening between him and Arno.” Lester brought his pregnant wife to the performance and remembers telling her, in reference to Leslie and Arno, “See those two cats right there? They got it going on.” He now adds, “As an extra benefit, Ron and Rick took seriously what they were doing, and they would start to blossom.”
Leslie asked Lester to sit in at a Soul Band rehearsal, and he complied. In fact, Leslie remembers him saying “You guys are that close, all you need is a lift” and summarily joining the band. Unlike his experience with the rock n’ rolling Impacts, however, Lester didn’t have to fire drummer Lynn Overholser. Arno remembers, “Lester sat in on one tune and kicked the shit out of it. Lynn was standing beside him, looking sad. He knew.”
Leslie colors the situation. “He was listening (to Lester) and was like ‘You guys should use him.’ Lester and us was just magic, ‘cause Lynn was a rock drummer and Lester was absolute funk,” he argues. “In those days, the drum breakdown in (Dyke and The Blazers’) “Funky Broadway” was the most funky beat you’d ever heard in your life. Lynn, as sweet and wonderful as he was, couldn’t do it. It wasn’t in his vocabulary. Lester, of course, could do it. With him, we would be able to do more funky things and branch into things we just couldn’t do with Lynn.” Though he had a reputation for ruthless leadership and a tendency to fly off the handle at a moment’s notice, the members of the Les Smith Soul Band knew what having Lester Abrams as part of their ensemble would do for them. “We needed Lester in the band,” Ron reflects. “We needed someone there who knew things that we didn’t know.”
As was his wont, Lester immediately took over control of the band. This was acceptable to his young charges, for up to that point they were running the band as a relaxed democracy. “As soon as he joined the band, he was just the leader,” Rick remembers. “I mean, we looked at him like, ‘What are we gonna do next, Lester?’ ” The short answer? Play funk, and play it hard. “Lester was someone who listened and responded and drove you to do things,” Ron echoes. “He was a very powerful impact. We went from being a soul band to being a funk band right away because Lester played that way.” The Les Smith Soul Band’s rhythms expanded as Rick’s bass playing “exploded” alongside drum beats that “Lester could play like no one I’d ever heard.”
In short order, ambitious trumpeter Harry Roberts quit and was replaced by Geno Devaughn, then attending the University of Omaha. Saxophonist Steve Fortner left the band to focus on clarinet studies at college and was replaced by a Les Smith pick – Percy Marion. And, after trumpeter John Kirsch joined the National Guard, Lester brought in a second saxophone player he “knew from playing those years in the ghetto” – Mike Patterson (“the smoothest cat you ever saw in your life,” remembers Leslie). Before Kirsch could return from his tour, Lester announced that Patterson would remain, and the group would have two saxes as opposed to two trumpets. As Ron remembers, Patterson was the most vocal opponent to this idea. “He said, “Oh, that ain’t right, it’s the cat’s gig!’” Ron recalls. “But Lester said, ‘No, that’s it. You’re in the band. John ain’t coming back.’” And he didn’t.
The Les Smith Soul Band (billed as “featuring Les Abrams on drums” on many a show poster) ended up being the raw talent that Lester had hoped the Fabulous Impacts would be. Under what Rick describes as Lester’s “somewhat dictatorial” rein, the band learned to perform with an intensity that matched the frenetic, at times chaotic, rhythms of their leader. Instead of crooning James Brown ballads, Arno and Leslie would belt out uptempo tunes by Dyke and The Blazers or Sly and The Family Stone at live shows. Rick’s bass playing walked around Lester’s stilted drumming, always bowing to drop outs and grounding hasty fills. Ron states, “He played hard, and it made us play harder. He would say (to me), “Man, turn that thing up! Crank that thing out!”
Though the band’s live shows consisted mostly of soul and funk covers, Lester’s ultimate desire was to create original music, much as he had done with done with the Impacts. In the same coal-basement where he had once sat with his grandmother, Lester would meet with Rick and flesh out his compositions. “I’d hear the drum part in my head, so I would play the bass part out on the piano,” Lester recalls. “Then I’d learn how to play chords over the bass part. Rick was a really intuitive and very smart guy. He had the ability to play whatever you wanted him to play.” At some point in 1969, the band cut three Abrams’ originals – all of which display a marked development from Lester’s Fabulous Impacts tunes. A Les Smith feature, with Lester on organ, the soulful “Blind Man,” the Arno Lucas lead “Bad Luck” (“My swan song,” Lester jokes) and an instrumental funk number, “Blues for LA,” perhaps a reference for Lester’s time spent on the west coast, were cut to acetate for the band members to enjoy. Sadly, the latter two songs from the session have yet to surface on reels and, as such, are only presented on this anthology as bonus tracks.
In 1969, Leslie was drafted into the army and stationed at a military hospital in Seoul. By that point Lester’s leadership of the band – and his undeniable on-stage presence – meant that he could change the band’s name to L.A. Carnival with little resistance. Lester was the focal point and the attitude which drove the ensemble. Vocal duties were laid mainly upon Arno, with Lester singing back ups from behind the drum kit. Off stage, Lester’s song writing became more radical – both in terms of musicality and subject matter. “Flying” overtly encourages the mind-expansion of psychedelic drugs. “The Klan,” a mournful dirge which Lester wrote for his enslaved ancestors, ends with the victim of Klan terror striking back and killing a man with his “bare hands/A member of the Klan.” “Seven Lonely Steps,” played largely in the awkward time signature of 7/4, but successfully funked by the Carnival, tells the hallucinatory tale of a man who, yearning for a lost girlfriend, finds solace at a local whorehouse. One day, going up the seven steps to the brothel’s door, he meets his ex – as she readies for work. “Black Man’s March” was a chance for Lester to funkify the cadences he would have played in Omaha’s solitary black marching band – had he been inducted. “I wasn’t black enough – literally,” Lester states. “I could play everything they needed me to play, but I didn’t fit in with the guys.”
Even “traditional” funk numbers such as “Pose A Question” and “We Need Peace” utilize off-kilter phrasing and chording that begs reference to jazz and leftward leaning psychedelia. Their lyrics philosophize of justice and racial equality in ways that some band members felt only Lester could truly comprehend – and voice. “It was hard to be around in the late 60s and not be politically conscious,” Ron, who was studying composition at the University of Omaha at the time, offers. “So I could understand what Lester was writing about, but I didn’t have the social consciousness to write songs about race relations or world peace. Lester had a lot he wanted to say.”
The aforementioned “Color,” recorded two separate times at a point when Leslie returned to Omaha on leave from the military, would appear to epitomize the frustration – and the small, remaining glimmer of hope - that Lester had in his twenty-six-year old body. Leslie and Arno converse: “Say it loud, say it clear/Let your friends and neighbors hear/Say it loud and with no fear” before Lester joins them for the refrain – “I am of one color/Don’t put me down.” Over the rhythm section’s vicious vamp and alongside Ron’s biting guitar solo, those words don’t come across as dippy hippie musings – they come across as a mandate. As his revolutionary catalyst Malcolm X had shouted “By any means necessary,” Lester wrote, “But even though our hearts are strong/How much can one man take?” The song ends, however, on an optimistic note. “The secret is through unity/And loving one another/Don’t misunderstand a man/ ‘Cause his skins a different color.”
Perhaps because this song could respond to all of those who had downed him in his life, on both sides of the racial divide, Lester chose to release this song as the B-side of the Carnival’s one single. Skip Wilson’s Pacific Avenue, the studio that doubled as a record label for Omaha-hopefuls from all musical walks, released the record as part of its Universal Promotions program. “(The record’s release) was just a fluke,” Lester states matter-of-factly. “The only reason it got released is ‘cause we thought it would be nice to give something to our families.” Rick adds, “We didn’t have a clue! We were in Omaha! When we did the second version of “Blind Man” and “Color” we said, ‘We’re doing a single of this, and we’re going to put it out.’ But I can only remember a couple stores selling it.”
By the time their single was released, it was obvious that Lester’s band members didn’t take L.A. Carnival as seriously as he did. “I remember calling my near-uncle Johnny Otis in California and saying ‘I got this real killer band, man, they can really play.’ He said ‘Come on out,’” Lester states, in reference to the doors that an appearance on Otis’ well respected showwould have opened. “But I couldn’t get them to come out. Rick couldn’t leave college, Ron couldn’t either. Percy was in school as well.” By the time 1972 came around, Leslie had returned from the army and signed on for HAIR’s nationwide tour, Rick and Arno were readying to join funk-rock outfit “Crackin,’” and Ron had joined a rock band called Pilot. Lester had divorced his first wife and was ready to leave Omaha for good. L.A. Carnival, as Rick remembers, quietly faded away. “People wanted to move on to different things, so it just fell apart,” he states. “I don’t even remember the last gig. It was kind of like, ‘Ok, that’s it band. It was fun.’ Had we been on either coast, we would have had some success. But we were stuck in the middle of nowhere and we didn’t know what to do with ourselves.” “But we couldn’t go to the coast,” Ron states. “We had student deferments. Had we left school in Omaha, we would have been drafted and sent to Vietnam.”
“I could trip on it, man, but it is what it is,” Lester offers in reference to L.A. Carnival’s trajectory. “For whatever it’s worth, (that music) is absolutely real.” Indeed. The L.A. Carnival experience seems to have been a defining moment in the lives of all its participants. For some, it was their first experience with music on a professional level. Arno, for example, states “(Before L.A. Carnival) we weren’t thinking of doing music as a living. Now, thirty five years later and I’m still doing music full time. It’s amazing.” For others, it was a chance to stretch out into musical bags that would come to influence their lives later on. “That’s what was happening in music in the late 60s,” Ron says. “It was about taking these different styles of music, from different cultures, and exploring them.” And, for all, it was about exploring those different cultures that were right next door. “We got to be like a family,” Leslie reminisces. “So we had the unique experience of black guys seeing what it was like for white guys to be messed with by black folks and vice versa. We stuck up for one another in a time when it wasn’t necessarily cool to do that.”
Lester was there to put those experiences into words, into song – his band was there to translate the message through music with a power that would transcend the era in which it was created. “It was kind of insane to be me, thirty years ago,” Lester states. “It’s amazing I made it through it.” Thankfully he did, and he’s here now to see the music he lead that young bunch of wet-behind-the-ears Nebraskans to create shine – over thirty years later. One step closer to that vision he voiced. One step to proving that the hope he held, and which held him, wasn’t for naught.
