For more than five decades, Freddie Tieken’s life has centered around music and design. He has been a musician and vocalist, songwriter and arranger, recording engineer and producer, artist manager, music publisher and concert promoter. He has owned and operated three recording studios. For 16 years, he fronted his own bands, playing over 3,500 live gigs and spending thousands of hours in recording sessions.

Freddie or Fred, as he is known today, was creative director at a leading Chicago design agency before starting his own design and marketing firm. He has received more than 200 national and international awards in the fields of design, illustration, art direction, marketing and advertising. He has been featured in Graphic Design: USA magazine as an International Top 50 Art Director and has appeared in Who’s Who of Outstanding Americans.

I Was Born in a (really) Small Town

I was born Frederick Earl Tieken in 1935 during the great depression. My birthplace was a one-room shack in the Mississippi river town of Meyer, Illinois, population 100. My father Dale Tieken worked as a welder, helping to build the Meyer-Canton dam for the WPA.

Freddie and sister Janet with Thunder around 1948.

Early Influences

I spent a couple of summers across the river in Canton, Missouri with my Grandma Lillie and Aunt Joy Caldwell. Grandma’s apartment was above the Canton Cinema and every Saturday night we would sit by the open window and look down on the lines of people gathering for the movies. On Saturday afternoon, Grandma would give me a quarter to go to the matinee double feature, usually featuring Hopalong Cassidy, Lash La Rue or Gene Autry. I could sit through those double features two or three times.

Next door to the theater was a honkytonk tavern and on weekends we would sit at our open window and listen to the sounds of hillbilly music and people having fun pouring out of the tavern while we ate our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The noise never got too loud or raucous for my Grandma.

What wonderful summers those were! It might as well have been Times Square. When I look back now I realize that this is where I developed my love of music, theaters, and the whole notion of people having a good time and being entertained.

At about that same time my parents managed to save twenty-five dollars to buy me a clarinet. I’ll never forget the first time I picked up that clarinet. By the end of the first day, I could play “Don’t Fence Me In” and “Twelfth Street Rag”. I didn’t know what sheet music was, I just listened to the radio and any old 78 RPM records I could get my hands on.

I also developed quite an interest in drawing, creating my own comic books, posters and ads for my make-believe orchestra and movie theater. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were very poor and I remember my parents having just enough money to buy me a dozen sheets of typing paper every Saturday at the corner store. Before the week was out, I’d have every square inch of that paper covered with my drawings and paintings. My mom Tina was always my biggest supporter and she saved a lot of my early artwork.

Some of my fondest memories as I approached my high school years are the Sunday afternoons we spent at Grandma and Grandpa Tieken’s sprawling old farmhouse. After a huge dinner, we would all gather in the parlor where Dad’s entire family would rock out on the piano, banjo and juice harp with lots of vocal harmony and yours truly on the clarinet. Another favorite activity on those Sunday afternoons was a ride on Duke or Barney, my Grandpa’s plow horses.

My mom always encouraged me to play my clarinet at school and church events. She would drive me to all the local dances and by age twelve I was “sitting in” with the likes of Bo Shipe, one of the area’s most popular bandleaders.

Eventually I was lucky enough to get my first saxophone. I was in love! It was so much more expressive than the clarinet. I also was fortunate to have a young high school music teacher, Otto Warner, who turned me on to Duke Ellington and Count Basie. I was hooked. I soon formed a little group with other high school musicians and called it Freddie Tieken’s Four Stars. We performed in the gymnasium during lunch hour and at pep rallies.

Freddie Tieken with his Four Stars, 1952. From left: Richard Spalding, Dick Austin, Don Neil, Freddie and Joe Conover.

Somehow I convinced Lafe Leckbee, a square dance bandleader, to let my group play during his intermissions every weekend at the Lorraine, Illinois town hall. Before long, Leaf was gone and we had the gig. At five dollars each per night, I guess you could say this was my first professional gig.

Every summer during my high school years I was expected to plow, plant and be a good dirt farmer. I hated every minute of it and my dad considered me very lazy, but every minute I wasn’t working in the fields, I was busy drawing and playing my saxophone.

Sometimes I would work for the neighbors, bailing hay for $5.00 a day. It always seemed like it was 100° from dawn to dark, seven days a week with so much chaff in the air you could hardly breathe. And all the while those giant Mississippi River bottom mosquitoes were trying to suck all the blood out of you. The good part was that one summer I saved enough money to buy a saddle for my horse Thunder.

The absolute worst job I ever had though was working at a gas station as an attendant/tire changer on the weekend graveyard shift. When truckers called in with flat tires, I would take the wrecker out to what seemed like the middle of nowhere and fix flats and change tires on the big rigs. It seemed like it was always in the middle of an ice storm too. But at $1.00 an hour, it was really good money back then. I guess these jobs were good for me because they really motivated me want to make a living from art and music.

Bebop Comes to Meyer

Meyer, Illinois sits on the Mississippi River directly across and a short ferry ride from Canton, Missouri, home of Culver Stockton College. Some really cool jazz cats from Chicago and New York were students at the college and on Sunday afternoons the Meyer Tavern – the only place of business in Meyer – was the place to be since Missouri was dry on Sunday. These guys would bring their instruments and play bebop all day long. The audience was mostly farmers, fishermen and hunters with a few hip college students thrown into the mix. As a teen I would come in from the farm to hear the music and it was like going to heaven. It was unbelievable!

I had formed a group called The Freddie Tieken Combo and as my reputation began to grow, I was able to get the cream of the crop of area musicians for my band.

It’s hard to imagine now that I did all this while holding down a day gig. I guess that’s why I was eventually fired. I had started straight out of high school at Gardner Denver in Quincy, Illinois as an apprentice mechanical draftsman. My football coach Mr. Nelson, who was also my drafting teacher, got me the job. I learned to do perspective drawings and pen-and-ink exploded views and eventually became an illustrator and designer for the automation of assembly lines in the Detroit automotive industry. Among other things, I helped design the machine that put the big chrome strips on the sides of Ford Fairlanes as they rolled down the line.

My automotive design work meant frequent trips to Detroit where I enjoyed going downtown to Baker’s Keyboard Lounge to hear all the big names in jazz. Between the travel schedule and too many late nights with my band, I became extremely burnt out. That’s when I started neglecting my work and finally got the.axe.

I had been driving about 40 miles to Keokuk, Iowa every Wednesday night to play with a band, The Mood Notes, that my sister Janet had told me about. It paid twelve dollars a night and I liked the gig because they rocked. The band was about to break up and I asked the bass player, Mark Millspaugh, to join a band I was putting together. The year was 1955.

Freddy Tieken & the Rockers at The Barn nightclub, Quincy, Ill., 1956. From left: Mark Millspaugh, Freddie, Ron Davis, Wild Child Gipson and John Moorman.

If you came of age in the Midwest in the late 50s or early 60s, the chances are pretty good that you danced, strolled, bugalooed and, for the most part, partied the nights away with one of the popular rock’n’roll bands of that time period.

Let’s face it, in those days there wasn’t a rock band on every street corner, but there was a handful of bands out there making their place in Midwestern legend. One of those bands was Freddie Tieken & the Rockers and we earned our reputation by traveling through the cornfields and playing every gig we could. Night after night, we would pull up and the Rockers would roll out for another night of raucous, high intensity fun.

The original Freddie Tieken & the Rockers, (l to r): Mark Millspaugh, Wild Child Gipson, Ronnie Davis with Fred (seated).

Although our fans were color blind, others were not. I’m proud that we were one of the first integrated rock’n’roll bands but back then it made things difficult. Wild Child couldn’t even stay in the same hotels as us. There was an area in each town we went where he would know people to stay with. All the big stars like Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon that we did the TV shows with — we certainly looked different than them.

My only memories of Cicero, Illinois involve Wild Child holding off a bunch of rednecks with a gun while I went to get the car. I guess they didn’t care much for blacks in Cicero. It seems scarier than hell when I look back on it, but we just took things like that in stride and went on to the next gig.

Tales from the Road – Before I Forget

It seems like anything that could happen, happened to us in those days. I remember one night – it was our first night at a nightclub in Rock Island, Illinois. We were just getting ready to start our first set when the police came in, pulled our drummer off the stage and hauled him off to jail. He had apparently forgotten to pay his hotel bill in Quincy earlier that day. I guess the fact that he had left by the fire escape didn’t help his case.

And Wild Child, he was quite a ladies’ man. He seemed to have a different woman every night. He would sleep all day and play all night.

One night at Harold’s Club in Peoria, Illinois we were sitting around during intermission when a well dressed guy came up and introduced himself. We talked music and instruments and he invited us out for dinner at a nice restaurant. He didn’t have to ask us twice – a day off from road food sounded really good. The next day we piled into his very nice car and dined with non other than Leo Fender, founder of Fender guitars. What a great guy he was. He came back later and stayed all night listening to our group.

Speaking of Harold’s Club, we would play from 9 pm to 4 am every night and couldn’t wait for the next set. What a fun place that was. During intermission, this young comedian would do his standup routine. Years later I learned that the young comedian was Richard Pryor.

During this same time, Freddie Tieken & the Rockers released a single on Hit Records, “Sittin’ Here Cryin'” backed by “Uncle John,” both written by Wild Child. The single reached number 24 on the Billboard R&B chart. Recorded at Boulevard Studios in Chicago, John Moorman, a good friend of mine, played guitar and sponsored the session. The single was later re-released on both the Laurie and Astra labels.

Ad for Music Operators Convention, Chicago, Ill. Check out the artists appearing at the show.

One nice thing about doing TV shows in Chicago was that everywhere we went people knew who we were. There were only a couple of local TV stations in Chicago back then. Consequently, the doormen at all the big nightclubs would recognize us and let us in. I remember one night at the Blackstone Hotel Lounge, the room was very smoky and the stage was dimly lit but I could see the silhouettes of some very interesting looking musicians. I turned to Wild Child and said, “Who is that trumpet player with his back turned to the audience?” Well, Wild Child informed me that was Miles Davis on trumpet and John Coltrane on sax. I really didn’t have a clue how cool that was at the time. I was still a country boy just getting his feet wet in the ultracool world of jazz.

What great times those were. Wild Child Gipson was one of the best friends I’ve ever had. He was a true professional, a real talent and a tremendous person.