Eric and The Norsemen

The only single ever released by Eric & The Norsemen was a cover of Paul Revere & The Raiders' Get It On. Much like The Raiders, Eric & The Norsemen considered themselves a show band, and performed throughout nine states in the mid-to-late '60's. Although the single is the only official recording that the group released, they did record a solid frat rock LP that was never issued but has been circulating in the collector's market for years. As a result, the name 'Eric & The Norsemen' still is instantly recognizable in 2005 to many collectors of '60's garage band recordings.

An Interview With Roger "Eric" Johnson

60sgaragebands.com (60s): How did you first get interested in music?

Roger Johnson (RJ): Early Elvis Presley was my strongest influence. Most any Rock-a-Billy was good. I was quite big on Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Little Richard and others. I was nuts about Bo Diddley from the time I first saw him in the Lloyd Price Show of Stars of '59, in Wichita, Kansas.

60s: Was Eric & The Norsemen your first band?

RJ: My first band, The Shan-Dels, was formed at the end of my senior year of high school in Eureka, Kansas. We played infrequently through the summer of '63. When I came back home from school, we reformed with new members, and played over a very limited area through the summer of '64.

60s: Where was Eric & The Norsemen formed, what year, and by whom?

RJ: During the summer of '64, I saw The Flippers for the first time, when they played in my hometown, Eureka. Realizing that I had played in pick-up bands around Kansas University with two of them (Dennis Loewen and Dennis Fredericks) during the previous school year, I was inspired to put together a group at school.

Mike Willman (from Atchison, Kansas) was my roommate, and was learning to play the guitar. We spent countless hours listening to records, playing, and dreaming about forming a rock & roll band. Another one of our fraternity brothers listened to us rambling on with our dreams, and eventually asked, "Who is going to play bass?" We told him that we didn't know, and he said that he thought that he could learn to do it! Ken Kramer (Hugoton, Kansas) not only learned to play bass, but being an electrical engineer, and quite talented, he made his own instrument, to include wiring the pick-ups, tooling his own machine heads, and hand inlaying the frets! It was a fine instrument, and looked great, too!

We didn't have a drummer, and a girl I knew told me about a guy she knew who played drums, who was living in one of the scholarship halls. We hired Jim Kocher (Clay Center, Kansas), and we started rehearsing in the living room of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity house. This all happened thru the fall of 1964. We played our first gig at the Memorial Hall in Liberty, Missouri on Friday, Feb 5, 1965.

60s: Were there many personnel changes throughout the group's existence?

RJ: Roger 'Eric' Johnson - rhythm guitar, vocals, tenor sax, coronet (Feb '65 - Aug '68); Mike 'Rolph' Willman - lead guitar, vocals, kazoo (Feb '65 - Aug '68); Jim 'Thor' Kocher - drums (Feb '65 - Aug '68); Ken 'Garth' Kramer - bass guitar (Feb '65 - Jan '66); Forrest 'Tree' Cloud - bass guitar (Feb '66 -Jun '67); Frank Berrier - Bass Guitar, lead guitar, vocals (Feb '68 - Aug '68); and Mitch Bible - Hammond B3, Lead Guitar, vocals (Feb '68 - Aug '68).

60s: Why did you take the name "Eric" when fronting the band?

RJ: When we were trying to choose a name, we liked The Norsemen but there were so many bands with similar names, i.e. The Kingsmen, The Chesmann, The Classmen, The Coachmen, etc. We decided that adding a name would make it easier to remember, thus ‘Eric’ was born. For a short while we told people that, ‘…Eric was just a name, and we were all ‘Eric’, but that didn’t last long. People wanted ‘an Eric’! I had been the basic organizer of the band, and was the front man, so I was ‘it’. And, no one had ever heard of "Roger & The Norsemen?"

60s: Where did the band typically play (schools, parties, etc.)?

RJ: We played a lot of high school and college dances - and a lot of night clubs - but the bulk of our playing was doing one-nighters in armories, city auditoriums, and memorial halls, throughout the Midwest.

60s: Did you play any of the local teen clubs?

RJ: We played a number of teen clubs and dances. Ones I remember best were: Abilene, Marysville, Concordia Belleville, Clay Center, Manhattan, El Dorado, Eureka, Yates Center, Iola, Fredonia, Neodesha, Ft. Scott, Liberal, Greensburg, Hugoton, Sublette and Dighton, in Kansas; and Chillicothe, Trenton, Harrisonville, Nevada, El Dorado Springs, and Liberty, in Missouri.

We played over a nine-state area from Missouri to New Mexico and from Texas to South Dakota, including Arkansas and Colorado, but our primary territory was Kansas and Missouri. We played Wichita, Topeka and Oklahoma City, but on a very limited basis. We basically kept our venue in the small towns of the Midwest, primarily due to the nature of AM radio in the '60s. In those days, before FM was a factor, certain radio stations were licensed as ‘clear channel’ stations (not to be confused with today’s ‘Clear Channel’ stations) and at night they would boost their power to 50,000 watts, to give emergency news coverage to all parts of the country. Therefore, KOMA, being a clear-channel station, would boost its power, at night, and blanket in a large wedge, covering everything from the Rocky Mountains to roughly the Kansas / Missouri border, northward to Canada. In the larger cities, KOMA was not a factor, as their local stations did not shut down at night, and the kids didn’t listen to KOMA, but to the small towns, all of the KOMA bands became quite well known, and that is where we concentrated our efforts.

60s: What other local groups of the era do you especially recall?

RJ: Personally, I was very close friend with several of The Red Dogs and The Green River Ordinance. We were friends with The Flip(per)s, Spider & The Crabs, The Young Raiders, and knew The Bluethings, Mike Finnigan and many others. Each of these groups were unique, and quite good at what they did.

60s: Did Eric & The Norsemen participate in any Battle Of The Bands?

RJ: We never participated in a Battle of the Bands per se. The closest we came to doing so was one year we split the billing, and the stage, with The Kingsmen at the Montgomery County Fair, in Coffeyville, Kansas. We alternated sets, and we held our own, but it was not a 'battle'.

60s: Did Eric & The Norsemen have a manager?

RJ: We had no manager. We began by sending a form letter to all American Legions, VFWs, Lions Clubs, Kiwanis Clubs, Jaycees groups and Chambers of Commerce in a 150 mile radius of Lawrence, Kansas, offering to play for teen dances. After the first two weekends (only one gig each), we were booked solid Fridays and Saturdays for the rest of the school year. We put ourselves on the road for the summer of '65, and in one three week stretch we played 24 gigs in 21 days; literally every day and twice on Sunday! I personally did the booking (with periodic help from Jim Kocher) under the pseudonym of 'University Music Productions'. In the fall of 1965 John Brown offered us a contract with Mid-Continent Entertainment, but we declined. We did our own promotion.

60s: How popular locally were you able to become?

RJ: That's a difficult question to answer without personal bias. We always considered ourselves to be on a level with most of our friends and contemporaries. We were not a Mid-Continent band, nor were we a large 'show' band, as were most of the other bands with whom we associated, but wherever we played we usually developed a large, steady following of devoted fans. We considered ourselves to be a four-piece 'show band,' and worked very hard to give our crowds their money's worth, every night. None of us were career musicians. Our popularity at K-State in Manhattan, as well as in numerous smaller towns, primarily in Kansas and Missouri, was very gratifying. We signed autographs, had locks of our hair secretly ‘snipped’, and frequently had carloads of excited, waving girls, follow us out of town. The first night we played at the Red Dog Inn in Lawrence, for the school year of 1966-1967, the line at the box office stretched all the way around the corner and back to the alley! Someone was glad to see us!

60s: How would you describe the band's sound? What bands influenced you?

RJ: Someone (I have no idea who, but my memory wants to say it was John Brown of Mid-Continent Entertainment) dubbed us "the Wildest Show in the Midwest." We put it on our posters and in our ads, and did our best to live up to it. In our KOMA ads, the tag line was, "...Be there! ...when their ship hits the sand, near YOU!!" An obvious play on words that was maybe too subtle for some. One night, some kids were telling us that they heard our spots on KOMA 'all the time.' When we asked them to tell us how they ended, we were told that it was something about '...when the boat hits the beach!' So much for being clever.

When we started out, we were doing more Rolling Stones music than anyone, and were heavily influenced by The Astronauts (from Boulder, Colorado) and The Kingsmen. We were enormously influenced by The Beatles, but did very few of their songs because we didn’t feel that we were vocally strong enough to do them justice. We laughingly called ourselves a four-piece 'show band', and some people said that accurately described us. Probably the best description of us would be Paul Revere and The Raiders, as our names were similar and both on historical themes. We were doing the same shuffle-step that they used, long before we ever heard of them. We liked to clown around on stage, and thought of ourselves as a 'goodtime band'. Our lone single, Get It On came from a Paul Revere album.

60s: Where was Get It On (and the flip, Scotch & Soda) recorded?

RJ: Our single was recorded at Chrome Records in Kingman, Kansas during the spring of 1967. I remember that prior to our session, The Chosen Few from Topeka was recording Watch Out, and the while we were waiting, their lead singer (not Angel; I think his name was Lonnie) was going up and down the hall of building screaming - trying to get hoarse enough to have the 'soulful' sound he wanted.

60s: There's an apparently unreleased song by Eric & The Norsemen titled Norsemen's Theme that is circulating amongst collectors. Did Eric & The Norsemen write many original songs?

RJ: I have heard Norsemen's Theme mentioned a couple of times recently, and am wondering if that old recording may be lurking 'out there' somewhere? We actually did do a short recording of the music (for our KOMA bed) in Dodge City, in the spring of '65. We sent it to the radio station and I have never known of it surfacing since. None of us wrote it. It was an adaptation of the James Bond Theme from the movie, Dr. No. We didn't write many songs over the years we played, and we only played two or three of them onstage. I wrote I Know Why, Before, V-8, and Holiday for Love. Mike and I collaborated on She Don't Care, and Mike wrote the best one of all, a song called Chance.

60s: Was Norsemen's Theme a cut from the LP that The Norsemen recorded that was never released?

RJ: The Norsemens’ Theme that is on the soft cut LP is simply our background ‘vamp’ that we used to open our shows and introduce ourselves. Yes, it is the first cut on the album. The recording that I thought you were talking about is a short 60 second (or less) recording we made in Dodge City to be used by KOMA in Oklahoma City, for a bed while they announced our upcoming schedule in our radio ads. I don’t know of anyone who has a copy of that. I would love to find a copy of our KOMA basic, too, but alas, I don’t have it.

60s: Did the propsed LP contain any of original songs, or covers only?

RJ: The album had no originals - covers, only.

60s: Why was the album never officially released?

RJ: We recorded the album with the intention of dubbing in crowd noise, to be a live album showcasing our opening set. The only crowd noise that Larry at Audio House (Lawrence) found was recorded at Kansas Boys' State, the previous summer. He dubbed it in with no dynamics, and it was a solid two sides of continual screaming, not a very realistic crowd effect. Actually, it was most grating to hear. I had a few soft cuts made for the guys and my family, and didn't know that any clean cuts even existed until just recently.

60s: How did you find out about the clean cut?

RJ: I used to have a 7 1/2" reel of tape from Audio House in Lawrence, Kansas with the album on it, sans dubbed in screaming. That, along with some other tapes have disappeared from my possession over the last 20+ years of being a vagabond since my divorce in 1982. I thought that was the only clean copy in existence, other than any archival masters that Audio House might have, but I didn’t think that they had anything, because I thought the soft cuts of the album were all that there were. I guess I just wasn’t thinking. I knew that Jimmy had taken 8mm films of us through the years, but was not aware of the infamous video cassette that you have, until sometime last spring. I certainly didn’t know that he had used a clean version of our album as a soundtrack until I heard it myself. I was unaware that he had purchased a soft cut of the album that was ‘clean.’

60s: That 8mm footage is really cool to watch...

RJ: That film is totally the work and responsibility of Jim Kocher. He carried his 8mm movie camera around for years, and just took shots of us living the life of a band on the road in the Midwest in the '60s. There are lots of shots of motel rooms, swimming pools, and just plain goofiness. Jim had a clean soft cut of the album, edited down his footage, and put them together to make the video you have seen. I just found out about it myself, just last spring. As I remember, there were some other things in the films that didn't make it to the video, but they were personal shots, that didn't pertain to the band.

60s: Are there any surviving Eric & The Norsemen recordings other than the LP and the single?

RJ: The answer is yes. We did a session in ’66 at Audio House that included four originals, and one cover. The cover was a Rolling Stones version of Marvin Gaye’s Hitch Hike and the originals were I Know Why, Before, She Don’t Care, and Chance. Once again, I had a copy of the session, but it is now gone. Bill Lee (Kansas Hall Of Fame) has a copy of it and is putting together a CD with our single, the album, and the afore mentioned session all together. Another loss from my tapes is three complete shows, three plus hours of us live on each. One from (March, I think) 1965 – very early, and two from 1968. One (was recorded) at the Red Dog Inn in Lawrence and another from ’68 at the Ft. Scott, Kansas National Guard Armory. I know the ’68 tapes were good; I don’t know about the ’65 one, but, alas, right now anyway, they are gone. The tapes included great renditions of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, A Little Help From My Friends, and Jame Brown's Please Please Please.

60: Did the band make any local TV appearances?

RJ: No, not that I remember.

60s: What year and why did the band break up?

RJ: We broke up at the end on our summer tour in 1968, and I don't know that I could give you a specific reason. I think it was a variety of things, from we were all either graduating from college, or approaching that event, and we knew that our futures would not be tied to music, and, after-all, someday we were going to have to grow up. Another factor was the societal changes of the year 1968. When we began, in 1965, kids would throng to the armories, etc., to dance, pick up girls, and drink beer, out in their cars. By '68, the music had changed from what we primarily played (good time rock & roll) to Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Vanilla Fudge, etc., which was all great music, but not great ‘dance’ music and, there was a drastic change in gate receipts. Kids began just coming to the armories, staying out in their cars, listening to their stereos and getting stoned. They didn't want to pay to come inside. Add to this, the growing connections of the drug culture with the music industry, and I didn't like the association. Sometime in July, I think, we had a minor squabble, and I announced that I was through. I don't even remember what it was about, but being young and stubborn, I never recalled what I had said, and the guys never asked me to do so. Toward the end of August, we played a Sunday night, private birthday party gig in Abilene, and after the gig we packed up our equipment. Jimmy was feeling sick and having strange symptoms. We didn't have any solid bookings for September, other than a potential one at the Stage Door Inn, in Wichita, and each of us simply went our separate ways, and it was over! There were no hard feelings, and we are all good friends to this day.

Jimmy has been an attorney in Eugene, Oregon for more than 30 years, Mike has been the Advertising Director for KCP&L for about the same length of time and lives in Lone Jack, Missouri, where he raises horses and deejays on the side as a hobby. Tree is retired Chairman of the Board of Industrial Bearing & Transmission in Kansas City, and spends his time traveling cross country on his Harley when he's not in Hawaii. I have no idea as to the whereabouts of Kenny, Mitch, or Frank, as I have not heard anything from any of them since the '60s.

Personally, I have done many different things, from radio sales, programming, and management, to 20+ years of living history, reenacting the Civil War, all across the country. I returned to music and played a solo gig for a few years, basing out of Dallas, Texas. I have settled in Carrollton, Texas, where I now work for FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Association).

60s: How do you best summarize your experences with Eric & The Norsemen?

RJ: My experiences with The Norsemen were real life fairy tales. We happened at a magical time, and we just happened to be in the 'right' place. We weren't 'gifted' musicians, but when we got together we 'clicked,' and it worked. With the British Invasion in bloom, and the Midwest ripe for teenage music, KOMA was a perfect venue for us. To this day, we all still run into people in varios parts of the country that say, "I remember Eric & The Norsemen! I saw you guys at...." Like we have often mused, "…we did make a lot of people happy!" It was quite a trip, while it lasted. Forrest "Tree" Cloud Recalls Eric & The Norsemen

I started playing bass in high school for the fun and a few extra bucks. I did play in a group that featured Charley Shoemaker (he later joined Spider and The Crabs) and a group from Turner, Kansas called The Rebels. Our lead guitar player was Terry Gerkovich. After filling in with a few groups from Kansas University, I was asked to join The Norsemen.

I was with them for two years. We were more like brothers than just band members (in fact, Roger, Mike and I were fraternity brothers). Jimmy Kocher was, in my opinion, the best drummer in the area. The main thing I remember about The Norsemen was the chemistry was shared on stage. We didn't consider ourselves to be great musicians, but we made sure our audiences got their money's worth. We worked hard on stage and just enjoyed performing together. I had to leave the band in the summer of '68 because I had just graduated and joined the Navy.

We still stay in contact today (I had lunch with Jimmy this summer in Eugene, Oregon) and Mike still lives in Kansas City so we try and lunch together a few times a year. Roger and I talk on the phone and email. We did get to see each other this summer when Roger declared that Mike and I were Honorary Graduates of Eureka High (class of '63), and we attended their high school reunion in Eureka. I am now retired from a Kansas City-based company and my wife and I enjoy touring the country on our Harley during the summer and living on Kauai for six months during the winter.