![]() It was the good old days.”īig-name bands that played The Top Hat included Roy Orbison, The Shirelles and Gary “U.S.” Bonds. They would sit on the grass on the boardwalk side…. “Sometimes the audience outside was as great as the audience inside, especially when we had these national recording artists. “I was a young kid, and I knew all the kids, so it was a success,” Vakos says. Vakos had turned a 125-seat, Bob Sheppard-style jazz club into a hotspot where up to 600 people could dance to the hippest music in town. I said, ‘Get on the stage.’ They developed into one of the best bands on the beach.”Īt the time, The Top Hat, located on 30th Street and the boardwalk, was one of the best bars on the beach. “Some kids came in and said they wanted to play. John Vakos, who began running The Top Hat for his father when he came home from the military in 1954, remembers the first time he saw Bill Deal and the Rhondels. Then, in 1961, they took their first step up-to the Top Hat. “We were just at the right place at the right time.” They played the Community House every Saturday night for about a year. The Rhondels gave the students what they wanted. “I don’t think we cared too much, to tell you the truth, about who the band was,” she says. She became a lifelong music fan, ended up working for Cellar Door Entertainment and now runs her own band booking agency. Kathie Moore was one student who first heard the Rhondels at the Community House. “Most kids grow up in their own little neighborhood and know the kids they go to high school with, but because of the Community House we developed this relationship with these people, and still to this day I see a lot of people from those high schools.” “That’s where we developed a relationship with all the kids from these high schools,” says Tharp. There, the Rhondels developed a core following that would propel them to success at larger Beach clubs and around the country. Their first gigs were at the Knight’s Club Community House, a teen club where high school students would go to dance. We didn’t know what beach music was until 1975.” But we didn’t consider ourselves beach music. They said we were a beach music band because we played on the beach. “We were white guys playing soul music, that’s what changed us up from the other bands…. “From the get-go, it was two white guys that liked black music, which in 1959 was hard to find,” Tharp says. The two boys-Deal was 15 and Tharp was 17 years old-hit it off when they realized they both listened to the same soul radio station, WARP 850 AM. Tharp had been playing in a band called the Saints, at the Seaside Park Ballroom on 30th Street and Atlantic Avenue, but one night he met Deal, then with the Blazers, during a gig at Norfolk’s Admiralty Hotel. In 1959, there was one high school in Virginia Beach, one high school in Princess Anne County, and a few more in Norfolk and Portsmouth, remembers Ammon Tharp, a drummer and singer who formed the Rhondels with the late William Deal. And those who know the story best remember where it all started-at the Knight’s Club Community House on 18th Street and Arctic Avenue. But when people tell the story of Virginia Beach music in its heyday, they talk about Bill Deal and the Rhondels. There were many bands at plenty of clubs-places like The Mecca, The Golden Garter and Peabody’s attracted sunburned beachgoers with fabulously named acts like Pat the Cat and His Kittens. From The Top Hat to The Peppermint Beach Club to Rogues, the longest lines always formed wherever Bill Deal took the stage. Where the Rhondels went, crowds followed. The most important band in Virginia Beach was the local group that went national: Bill Deal and the Rhondels. Even bigger names like The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix came to the convention center known as the Dome. National acts such as Fats Domino, The Platters and The Police played Virginia Beach clubs. ![]() Crowds of Beach locals, Richmond regulars and tourists from Roanoke and beyond came to dance at the oceanfront. They remember the same crowded clubs, the same beautiful people and, most of all, the same music.įor two decades, Atlantic Avenue was alive with music. About the best.Įveryone seems to tell the same stories when they talk about Virginia Beach nightlife during the ’60s and ’70s.
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