Since 2005 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.
Long ago, an early fan of the Secret History of Chicago Music stopped me at a grocery store. Not only was I surprised that this gentleman had recognized me—I tend to think of myself as a faceless columnist—but I was also taken aback by his first question. “You do that garage-band column in the Chicago Reader, right?”
Even at that early stage in Secret History’s development, I’d covered jazz, blues, soul, and funk, so I didn’t want to be pigeonholed that way. But I have to admit, I’d already spotlighted loads of Windy City garage bands, and I’ve kept right on doing it. I love garage rock, and thanks to high-profile bands like the Shadows of Knight and the Buckinghams, Chicago is known for it.
Of course, in Secret History I don’t cover the bands most people have heard of—I’ve made it my unofficial mission to dig up every basement-dwelling group of teenagers who’d put out a single or two on a tiny local label in the 1960s and then disappeared. I’m a sucker for heartwarming stories of high school friends imitating their heroes in the British Invasion, and the DIY aesthetic these bands developed out of necessity is completely endearing to me. My subjects are often bemused, wondering how I could possibly care.
I thought I might finally have covered every such group, or at least the ones where I could dig up enough information to make a story. But last month the excellent and impressively prolific online magazine It’s Psychedelic Baby published an interview with Patrick Sassone, guitarist and songwriter of Society’s Children—a band I’d long wondered about.
The hook here is that the lead singer in Society’s Children was Sassone’s mother—an arrangement I’ve never encountered in another garage band. Their story even has something of a happy ending, in that a full-length compilation of their long-lost recordings finally came out in July.
Patrick Sassone was born in Blue Island and grew up in Lansing, Illinois, during the British Invasion and the rock ’n’ roll boom. “My early years were always filled with music. My parents always watched variety shows hosted by singers such as Dean Martin, Perry Como, and Andy Williams,” Sassone told It’s Psychedelic Baby. “Of course, 1950s rock and roll was also part of the mix. My mother would always sing around the house. . . . As I grew older, we also listened to folk music and rock groups coming out of England.”
Starting at age five, Sassone took accordion lessons from a traveling salesman. He eventually got wise to what was happening in the music scene around him, though, and at 13 he ditched the accordion and taught himself guitar.
“As a teenager, I began to notice many neighborhood rock bands,” he said. “Many of these were called garage bands because they often rehearsed in a garage. They would open the large garage door when the weather was warm and perform for the neighborhood.” Sassone’s first group got started just in time to take advantage of the skyrocketing popularity of teen dances and battles of the bands.
That young band, which Sassone formed with two cousins and a schoolmate, was called Patrick & the Shamrocks. They played high school dances, parties, and band battles, and in 1966 they released their lone single. The A side, “Yes, That’s What I’m Gonna Do” has a folk-punky Byrds-via-Dylan jangle, and the B side, “Wind Blowing Through the Trees,” is even more melodic, with an endearingly primitive 12-string shamble.
Though Sassone was only 14 at the time, he had precocious chops and songwriting skills—he was the main writer for both tunes on the Shamrocks 45. It appeared on Orlyn Records, a tiny vanity label whose small-run releases frequently command huge sums from modern-day garage collectors. Not a single copy of the Patrick & the Shamrocks single has ever been sold through the Discogs marketplace, which says something about its rarity and desirability—based on the prices of other Orlyn vinyl, it’d probably go for four figures. (Please send all copies to the Secret History of Chicago Music, care of the Chicago Reader.)
After a series of lineup changes, the Shamrocks split up, so Sassone recruited two brothers and a friend of theirs to start the first version of Society’s Children. His mother, Doreen, had suggested the name, and another group in Pennsylvania was using the same name at the same time—probably because teenage Janis Ian’s hit “Society’s Child,” about an interracial romance doomed by prejudice, was still climbing the charts in early 1967.
That first Society’s Children lineup fell apart quickly, and Sassone and his musical mother, who’d helped write one of the songs on the Shamrocks single, decided to form a new version of the band. Doreen took over on vocals and continued to pitch in with lyrics. I can’t think of a single other 60s garage band that included a parent and child—the bubblegummy Cowsills (who inspired The Partridge Family) don’t exactly count.
“The idea for my mother and I to form a new band was basically because of two things. First, I was so tired of trying to keep band members together long enough to make a name for ourselves, and second, my mother could really sing and wanted to perform,” Sassone told IPB. Bassist John Kolada (recruited via classified ad) and drummer Fred Sudlow completed the lineup that would record the only single the band released in its lifetime, “Mister Genie Man” b/w “Slippin’ Away.” (The four other tunes cut during those sessions remained in the can for decades—more on that later.)
Society’s Children recorded “Mister Genie Man” at Columbia Records Studios in Chicago on December 13, 1968. It’s now considered a “punkadelic” masterpiece: sounding like Grace Slick, Doreen wails doomy lyrics (Patrick described the tune as “basically about someone having a terrible nightmare”) while blasts of fuzz guitar and propulsive Farfisa organ double down hard.
Tiny local imprint Cha Cha Records, which had distribution through Chess, released the 45 before the end of the year. Cha Cha had its own small recording studio on West Randolph in the Loop, but Society’s Children never used it. The single didn’t take off, but if everything Sassone says about Cha Cha owner Donald DeLucia is true, that’s no surprise.
“We had been advertising for a manager and received a call from Mr. DeLucia. My mother, Doreen, handled the call and set up an audition,” Sassone said. “He called us a couple of days later and said he wanted to promote our work, but we had to pay for the studio costs. Being young, we did it. The record played on numerous independent radio stations in the Midwest, and that was it.”
DeLucia may have helped Society’s Children get regional airplay, but then he seems to have pulled a disappearing act. “We could never contact him again at the phone number we had, we had no idea where he lived, we never received any promised royalty payments for record sales, and we never heard from him again,” said Sassone. “This was very commonplace back then for young groups like ours. Luckily for us, my mother and I paid the studio fees and insisted on ownership and control of the studio four-track tapes and the master.”
Sudlow soon left to join the military, and the drummer’s spot in Society’s Children became something of a revolving-door situation. Fortunately, Kolada stayed for many years. The group continued to gig steadily, playing at nightclubs, bars, hotel lounges, private parties, dances, and weddings. Sassone told It’s Psychedelic Baby the story of a strange show at an air force base in downstate Illinois.
“Shortly into our second set, two girls approached the stage and started dancing with one on each side. . . . After a couple of minutes, we saw that they were actually stripping, so I quickly told everyone that after the current song, stop and head toward the front entrance,” Sassone recalled. Elsewhere in the interview, he firmly declared that nobody in the band had ever experimented with psychedelics—having your mom as lead singer probably changes things!
“As we got to the front entrance, the Officer in charge approached us, and I immediately told him this was not what we had agreed to play for and that it was embarrassing to my mother, as well as the rest of the band. He quickly apologized,” Sassone continued. “I told him that it was either the strippers or us. He said the girls would be removed because the trainees wanted us to stay. So, we went back on stage. . . . we had a great third set that ended with a standing ovation.”
In 1974 Society’s Children recorded what was supposed to be their second single, “Listen” b/w “I Don’t Wanna See Tomorrow,” at the studio operated by Palos Records (which released mostly blues artists such as Lonnie Brooks, Bobby Rush, and Eddie Boyd). The interview at It’s Psychedelic Baby includes a photo of hub labels apparently from this single, but I have to assume they’re from a test pressing—the record never came out.
The band would keep recording in a home studio with various rhythm players, but in 1976 Sassone and his family (including Doreeen) moved to California. “That was the year that the Chicago version of the band ended,” he said. “After arriving in California, we put together another band, which lasted only a few months. We soon moved to Arizona and tried again, but we had trouble keeping musicians. In 1977 the band ended for good. We lost touch with the other members, and I have no idea what they are doing today.”
Patrick Sassone never stopped making music, and he’s been putting out solo material since 2010. Sadly, Doreen passed away in 2017.
“Since 2021 I have self-released three solo rock albums, am currently preparing two more, and enjoying writing again,” Sassone said. “During my early days, music was always my best friend, and through my darker days, when I tried to stop, it would never let me.”
Mister Genie Man includes both sides of the lone Society’s Children single and 13 previously unreleased songs.
The story of Society’s Children also continues to unfold. Because Sassone held onto the band’s unreleased recordings (including a “gospel rock” album from the early 70s), he could help assemble a new archival release, Mister Genie Man, that compiles the Cha Cha single with never-before-heard tracks from between 1968 and 1974.
German label World in Sound released the collection last month, and the translated English version of the label’s online record store, Tasty Odds, hypes it thusly: “13 original compositions with a spectacular fuzz tone of Sassone’s ‘Gibson Firebird’ electric 12 String guitar; and the highly intense, remarkable female vocals make this album a milestone for end-Sixties psychedelia, several tunes have an all-time hit-potential!”
The whole compilation is streamable on Bandcamp, and I recommend you give it a spin—exclamation point aside, this isn’t just hyperbole. “Can It Be” and “Darkness” are scuzzy but tuneful screamers, and “Light of My Garden” and “I Am a Minstrel” are subdued slow rambles that almost sound like the Velvet Underground crossed with the Shangri-Las. The rest of the songs are top-notch examples of unpolished, earnest garage rock—and as far as Secret History is concerned, it’s all gold!
The radio version of the Secret History of Chicago Music airs on Outside the Loop on WGN Radio 720 AM, Saturdays at 5 AM with host Mike Stephen. Past shows are archived here.
