Gary James' Interview With Tom Austin Of
The Royal Teens



In March, 1958, a catchy song with the title, "Short Shorts" made its way all way up to #3 on the Billboard Top 100 chart. The group that recorded it found themselves on the cover of Life magazine, on Dick Clark's TV show, in a Columbia Pictures film and on tour with the likes of Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry, Jackie Wilson and Jerry Lee Lewis, to name just a few. The group we are referring to is The Royal Teens. Tom Austin, drummer and original member of The Royal Teens talked with us about the group.

Q - Tom, before we travel back to the past, let's talk about the present. How much work is there for The Royal Teens? Where have you performed?

A - I'm 80 years old now. So, about a year and a half ago (October, 2018) I decided to get some of the members I had played with before. I'm the only original one left in The Royal Teens, okay? But I put together a group. We have a website (TheRoyalTeens.com) and you can see a video of the group performing. We've had about five jobs in the last four or five months. The last one we did was the Lake Placid Film Festival. We were up there for a couple of days. For the Ft. Lee Film Commission we did a show down in Ft. Lee. We had two of them there. Then we had one in Hasbrouck Heights. It's called New Jersey Rock 'n' Roll, or something like that. They put shows on all the time and we did that one. The shows we've been doing, we're the only act on the show. So, we do about an hour, and hour and a half if we have to.

Q - How many shows would you say you do in a year's time?

A - Right now, with the new band, we're waiting to get more work. We just put our hat back in the ring as they say to get bookings. I just teamed up with a fellow named Eddie Rosenaco. Eddie played with The Royal Teens thirty or forty years ago. We played together. Recently, we had changed a couple of personnel in the band. So, Eddie and two of his guys are joining up with myself and three other people. We're going out as seven pieces now, a seven piece group.

Q - You understood something very early on that most musicians don't get, and that is people hear with their eyes. You entered this Battle Of The Bands at Father Donovan's Madonna CYO Hall in Ft. Lee.

A - Yes.

Q - You knew you were up against some pretty stiff competition.

A - Exactly.

Q - Older, experienced guys. So, what you guys did is you all went out and rented tuxedos to look sharp.

A - Right.

Q - You came out on stage and the girls screamed. Did you win that Battle Of The Bands?

A - We actually did. We had those white tuxedo jackets with plaid lapels that we rented. (laughs) It's like yesterday except it was sixty-four years ago.

Q - And the ultimate compliment of course is that one of your suits ends up in The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in Cleveland.

A - Yes.

Q - You knew all along what you were doing.

A - That's really funny. Any show I played on, I would have everybody autograph programs of everybody on the show. There would be Buddy Holly and Sam Cooke and Paul Anka and (Frankie) Avalon and Bill Haley And The Comets. Just for my own thing, and The Hall Of Fame took those too. I think I had two jackets in there and those programs in there for at least ten years on a display called The Early Years Of Rock And Roll.

Q - And then they gave it back to you?

A - Yes. They asked if they could keep it. I said, "No. Send it back to me," And they did.

Q - When you and Bob Gaudio formed The Royals, you guys wrote your own music. That was kind of unusual back in those days, wasn't it?

A - It actually was. For some reason, right from the beginning we were writing our own music. Bob Gaudio was extremely good at coming up with the melodies. I was pretty good with the lyrics. Words always meant a lot to me, even though "Shorts Shorts" has a limited amount of words, they were important words. That's the way our relationship went.

Q - Writing your own material came easy for both of you?

A - Yes. Where we met was another band, not The Royals. Prior to The Royals we played in a band out of Hackensack, New Jersey. It was Joe Durante's band. They were a lot older than us. Gaudio was probably 14 or 15 at the time. Very good piano player. I was the drummer of course. I was probably 16, maybe 17, and that's when we got together, through that band. We had similar interests, he and I.

Q - Leo Rogers, who owned the Power Record Co. (the label The Royal Teens signed with) pushed you to add Teens to the name.

A - Yes.

Q - You guys weren't crazy about that name. I'm thinking that's probably because you saw the band as having longevity and you knew you weren't going to be teenagers forever.

A - You're exactly right.

Q - The only other group that might have had a similar thought would have been The Beach Boys. But, with all their success they never did become The Beach Men.

A - Well, at the time the name got changed to Teens, The Royal Teens at the end, I think there were two or three other groups called The Royals. I think there were The Five Royals, and there was another group called The Royales. So, that's why.

Q - Who else was on Leo Rogers' label?

A - At the time he had Joe Villa And The Three Friends. They had a record called "Blanche", which was somewhat of a success. It was a local success, big success. Nationally it really wasn't. They had Diana Lee. Her name was Diana Costello. She was actually the girl in our group. She joined us. But, she was there in Leo's stable prior to us even getting there. Then there was Caroline Carpenter. She had a song called "Black Coffee", which I don't think did very much. Then there was another group called The Corvells. They had a hit record called "We Made A Vow". In fact, that was the first record The Royal Teens played backup on. It was the first time we were ever in a recording studio. When we hooked up with Leo, or he hooked up with us, let's put it that way, he had us playing the background music for everybody in his stable. So, we finally got our chance. We never thought we were singers at all. We were a band. It's funny, when we recorded "Short Shorts" we thought we were recording an instrumental. Leo said, "Where's the words?" We said, "Oh, we'll come up with some words." But, the reality is over the course of the following week, we saw these two girls in Bergenfield, New Jersey with cut-off jeans.

Q - You saw them coming out of a sweet shop?

A - Yeah, Luhman's.

Q - What is a sweet shop?

A - That was a candy store, like an ice cream parlor.

Q - Something was written that it should have been illegal what they were wearing.

A - Oh, they were cut so short. They were jeans and they cut 'em off as far up as they could cut 'em off. We were in my car at the time, driving up Washington Avenue. I said to Bobby, "Look at those short shorts..." I didn't know what they were called. I didn't know what the girls were doing. I found out later the girls were calling them cut-offs. That was the word. There was no such word as short shorts. That's the real truth of the matter. If you want, I'll explain what that word led us to.

Q - Go right ahead.

A - Here's what happened: The fashion industry went nuts over short shorts. It was a whole new product. I guess they saw these girls wearing these cut-offs too, but there was no word for it other than cut-offs. After the record came out we immediately got a contract with MacGregor Clothes and they asked us could we wear a new style of shorts that men would be wearing. They were called Bermuda shorts. Girls were wearing 'em. They said, "Can you guys wear those Bermuda shorts?" We said, "Never, never." "I'll tell you what. we'll pay you quite a bit of money if you do." So, we wore those shorts on Dick Clark's first nationally televised TV show. We were embarrassed to tears, but it caught on.

Q - Bermuda shorts come to your knee.

A - That's right.

Q - If they were shorter, guys just wouldn't look that good in them.

A - These were Bermuda shorts, to your knee. That's what I'm talking about. Except when the first Bermuda shorts came out, they were baggy. They weren't nicely fitting like they were as they developed. So, they were awful. Also, we had to wear the Bermuda shorts with high, black socks that almost went up to your knee.

Q - Black socks?

A - It was terrible. Terrible. We had these stupid shoes with crepe soles they had us wear. It was a total embarrassment, but we did it. We never wore them again. (laughs) We only wore them that one time and that was it. We went back to wearing fancy colored tux jackets.

Q - It was just fate then that you were cruising down the street and saw those two girls.

A - Yes.

Q - The title of that song might not have been "Short Shorts".

A - It probably would have been something else.

Q - And nobody knows if another song title would have caught on.

A - Nobody knows. They say when opportunity presents itself you have to be prepared. Gaudio studied very hard, learning his job on piano. I studied with teachers, learning my drums. We were ready. We were so ready. We were good. Hey, we had won that Battle Of The Bands. So, in our minds we couldn't be stopped. We thought any time you cut a record it's gonna be a hit. We had no concept that a million records get cut and get thrown in the garbage. We didn't think like that. We said, "Hey! We're gonna cut a record and man it's gotta be a hit!" But the funny part is we thought the other side, the B side... I'm drawing a blank right now. ("Planet Rock")

Q - Go back to the Battle Of The Bands. You thought you needed to be dressed up, and you did get dressed up. You're saying musically you were also on top of your game?

A - We were as good for our age as we could have been. The other band had all of the local high school jobs around Bergen County, New Jersey. They were called The Stardusters. They were a terrific band. We were like freshmen in high school, that age group, maybe sophomores. The other guys probably had a couple of seniors in the band. Most of them were out of high school. They were older. So, we knew what we were up against because we heard those guys play a lot. We had Billy Crandall on saxophone. Billy Dalton on guitar. There were just the four of us. Actually we had Louie Weintraub on bass. Billy Crandall, after he left The Royal Teens, which I would say was immediately after we cut the record, he was only 14. His father wouldn't let him travel on the road. He was a very young 14, but he was an absolute genius on the tenor saxophone. Did you ever hear of a guy named Paul Whiteman?

Q - Sure.

A - He was a great band leader. He had a television show in the early '50s called Paul Whitemand's TV Teen Club. Billy had won fourteen weeks in a row when they gave him a Nash Rambler. Bob Gaudio knew him because he lived in Bergefield. He lived in Dumont. Bob lived in Bergenfield. I lived in Ft. Lee. Dumont and Bergenfield are very close to each other. Billy Crandall had a reputation as being an absolute savant when it came to playing on saxophone. He was a genius. Well, you could tell by the sax solo. One day we were in a rehearsal studio in Manhattan and a great saxophone player, King Curtis was in the same building. He was hearing through the door what Billy was playing on sax. He walked right into our rehearsal and said, "Who's playing that horn?" We pointed to Billy, who looked like he was ten years old. "He's not playing that horn." We were flattered that King Curtis noticed. When we cut "Short Shorts" at Bell Sound Studio in New York, it took us fifteen takes to get it. Fifteen times on the instrumental part.

Q - How long did it take you to write the lyrics to "Short Shorts"?

A - Oh, ten minutes.

Q - How long did it take Bob Gaudio to write the music?

A - All in the course of a week we had the whole thing down. We were struggling. See, the goal was to get a hit record and you had to have a new piece of material. We thought from the time we got together we wanted to get a hit record. We didn't want to play locally. We wanted to see how far we could go. He and I were hanging out every single day, even without the band, trying to come up with ideas. We did that for the whole Spring and Summer of 1957. His grandmother had a house up on a lake in Lake Baldwin in New York state. It was only a tiny lake. He and I would go up there and we'd continue to try and write music and songs. It did pay off when we finally got our opportunity.

Q - Did Diana Lee sing on the record "Short Shorts" with you?

A - Yes, she did. She sang the girl's part with another girl, but I don't remember the other girl's name. Diana, we knew her as Diane. She wasn't in our group. She was more like a back-up singer.

Q - What happened to her? Did she release records of her own?

A - She had some records. I don't think they were hits. But then she did a lot of things on her own with The Dick Clark Show. She had a whole career outside of The Royal Teens. But, for the first few tours we were on she was with us.

Q - Having her perform with The Royal Teens really added to your stage presentation, didn't it?

A - Oh, it really did. To this day I always use a female in the group for that reason.

Q - When you were onstage with Diana, you were all moving. Did you choreograph those moves with her or did someone show you how to do that?

A - That's a good question. It depends on what show we were doing. You've touched on a really good subject. Diana wasn't in the group at the time, but we would actually go to The Apollo Theatre in Harlem at about 10 o'clock in the morning and go down to the basement and take dancing lessons because there would be times when we would be on television where we didn't have the instruments to use as our props and we had to be there so we had to know how to move onstage. Now, if you saw the movie Dirty Dancing, the fella who did the choreography in there (Charles "Honi" Coles), he was the dance instructor in the basement of the Harlem Apollo Theatre. We were influenced a lot by what we saw onstage. We'd watch shows. At the Apollo they'd have shows at 10 o'clock in the morning. They'd run 'em all day. But when we were on our own instruments, we just moved the way we wanted to move.

Q - ABC Paramount bought the master tapes from Leo Rogers for $18,000. Did The Royal Teens see any royalties from ABC Paramont?

A - Yes, but not a lot.

Q - The Royal Teens were in a Columbia Pictures film?

A - Yes, Let's Rock!.

Q - Did you have any hits after "Short Shorts"?

A - After "Short Shorts", our next record was "Big Name Button". Do you know what they are?

Q - I do not.

A - Okay. I'd say they're about four inches around. The first third of the button would be red. The middle of the button from side to side of this round button would be white with your name in red on it. The bottom third would be red. If you can picture that divided in three parts, you've seen it, but you probably didn't know the name. But back then that was the hottest thing in the world. Every kid was walking around with that button on them. Young kids, you know. So, when we were doing Dick Clark's first nationally televised program from The Little Theatre in New York... Now, The Little Theatre probably only had three or four rows of seats. (laughs) I guess that's why they called it The Little Theatre. His sponsor was Beechnut Gum. Beechnut Gum's slogan was "It's Flavorific." So, we did Ific button instead of "Big Name Button", which is totally stupid.

Q - How well did "Big Name Button" do?

A - Well, it was on the charts. I don't know how high it went. It was Pick Of The Week on Cashbox, (#60 on Cashbox on June 7th, 1958) but it was nothing compared to "Short Shorts".

Q - You would go out on the road for ninety days at a time. Was that with the Dick Clark tours?

A - No. We never did a Dick Clark tour. We on Dick Clark's show maybe thirteen times or something like that. But for some reason we never did a Dick Clark tour. We would go to Philadelphia to do his daytime show. Then we would do the show at The Little Theatre in New York. I think we did that two or three times. We did that without our instruments when we had the hit record "Believe Me" (Billboard #29 in November, 1959), which would have been nationally televised.

Q - But, you did go out for ninety days?

A - Yes. We always say ninety days. That would be three months worth. We'd be all over. It might not have been one tour for ninety days. We'd finish one and get on another thing and off we'd go again without any breaks. So, when we say ninety days, that's what we were doing. When we did the Biggest Show Of Stars for 1958, I think we did about close to ninety days. I know we probably did ninety to a hundred shows with them.

Q - You toured with Buddy Holly.

A - Yes. Buddy Holly.

Q - Jackie Wilson. Sam Cooke.

A - Jerry Lee Lewis. The Everly Brothers.

Q - Did you get to talk to Buddy Holly?

A - We went from playing CYO halls to opening at the Municipal Auditorium in Miami with Buddy Holly. How we met Buddy Holly was: I'm fortunate. I have almost total recall. I can write stories about what I did when I was ten years old. Everything is in my head. I don't know why, but it is. People comment on that all the time. I'd love to forget some of this stuff in my life, (laughs) but I can't. Okay, so we fly down to Florida. It's the winter. It's probably February or maybe it was March. I'm not sure. But it was winter with snow on the ground up here. I had never been in Florida. None of the group had ever been in Florida. Now, I just want to put something in so you understand. Remember when I said Billy Crandall, the sax player, left immediately?

Q - Yes.

A - We replaced him with a sax player, Larry Qualiano. Larry came out of the Manhattan School Of Music. He was so handsome that girls would be as crazy for him as they were for Frankie Avalon. He was that good looking. He added a lot to the group. Anyway, with Larry aboard we go down to Miami and we're gonna tour all through Florida. Maybe it was around the Spring break time. I don't know. This was our first time on an airplane. We had never flown anywhere. It was our first tour. We went from playing CYO Halls to flying down to Florida to play with Buddy Holly. It was like, "What?" Huh? How did this happen?" I think you can feel the way we felt. It was proof that, "You mean people of that caliber want us with them?" When I met Buddy Holly the first time, we were in a baseball stadium. We're gonna play at night. So, we go down there in the afternoon for the rehearsal and we go into the locker room, some locker room. I guess the baseball team's locker room and there's Buddy Holly, fully dressed, laying on the training table. Just laying there, okay? Not talking. Laying there. What was so obvious to us was the way he was dressed. He was dressed in British clothes, these tight fitting clothes that didn't even become popular until the 1960s here in this country. He had these short boots on. We didn't know, should we talk to him or shouldn't we talk to him. The Everly Brothers were there and they were goofing around. We met them first and of course Bill Haley And The Comets were much older than us, much older than everybody. They had been around the block a hundred times before this tour showed up. They had been going strong probably since 1955 or '54. Now, keep in mind this is 1958. So, they had a lot of miles under their belt. That night we didn't talk to Buddy Holly. We just saw him. We're in the same room with him and it wasn't that big of a room. See, that night we played, we were really kind of scared to death. I think we opened the show. The following day, Bill Haley and Ralph Jones, the drummer for Bill Haley And The Comets, came over to us and said, "You guys are too good to be standing there like a bunch of stiffs. Now, here's what you gotta do when you go onstage," and they just showed us a couple of basic moves, gave us some confidence and told us some stuff. The next night we performed we were tearing the house down just by doing what they told us. So, it was like a quick learning curve. We had to do what everybody else was doing, put on a show. We were no longer a CYO dance band.

Q - Not every band could do that, but you guys were obviously fast learners.

A - Absolutely. You're drawing a lot out of me! (laughs) Keep in mind we only had one hit at the time, "Short Shorts". So, we opened our little act with the song "Tequila" because it was an instrumental.

Q - The Champs.

A - Yeah, but we were very comfortable playing instrumentals. So, that was easy for us. We did that song and "Short Shorts" and probably two more which I don't recall, but we got through it. By the time the tour ended we knew what we were doing. I think that tour lasted about a week or something like that. It was short.

Q - But, you did get to talk to Buddy Holly, didn't you?

A - Oh, yes. Absolutely, 'cause we'd be on the bus with him. After the shows we'd all be together. After that first introduction where he didn't say anything and we didn't say anything, we were all in awe of Buddy Holly. Of course after that everything started to get relaxed and then we'd talk to everybody. We became really close friends with The Everly Brothers. Jerry Lee Lewis wasn't easy to get along with or talk to. He was a different kind of a soul, but The Everly Brothers we hit it off with.

Q - Why didn't The Royal Teens ever record an album, or did you?

A - You know, that's a good question. We always had problems with getting paid a fair amount of money, like every other group in that era. We came from blue collar parents. They didn't have the money to hire a lawyer for us or anything like that and we weren't getting that much money. We were playing the Princeton Prom about a year later, maybe a couple of years later. The Princeton Prom was held in the gymnasium. On one end of the gymnasium was the Les Brown Band. Another big band was on the other end of the gymnasium like full court, up and down, but on each half court side there was a group. We were one of 'em. Chuck Berry was another one. This was big stuff, you know? They had money to burn, these guys. Our manager came down with us, Leo Rogers and he said, "I'm going to get tea." He always liked to drink tea. What he did to us from the beginning was always tell us we stunk. "You guys are a bunch of bums. You're lucky I come with you," that kind of talk. We were only teenagers. We were so happy to be playing and he was belittling us, insulting us, telling us we had no talent.

Q - You had a hit record and he's telling you that?

A - Yeah, he was.

Q - I wouldn't have a manager like that.

A - Well, we were overwhelmed, okay? That night we're getting ready to go on our little half court piece, and he goes out and gets tea. We finished what we were doing in fifteen minutes because there were so many acts in the room. Everybody was taking their turn playing, right? So, instead of being there four hours we were lucky we played for twenty minutes. One of the students who was helping run the affair comes up to me and says, "Can we settle up now with what we owe you?" I said, "Well, our manager just went out." He said, "I'll pay you guys." Now, Leo told us we were getting maybe $300 or $400 for that gig to split between us. The kid comes up to us and says, "Here, we owe you the $2,500." We said, "$2,500? We're supposed to get $300." "No. Here, look, here's your contract your manager signed." As far as I was concerned we were ready to break his neck.

Q - And if he did that, that night...

A - What did he do before that? Well, he's dead now. Both managers are dead.

Q - Tom, you have no idea how many stories I've heard like yours over the years.

A - That's what they did. We just recaptured our publishing rights. You're allowed to do that every thirty-five years. It's a congressional thing we've been working on for three years. So, we're in the middle of that now. So, we didn't make the money. Alan Freed's guy in the music business was the biggest crook publisher. If you wanted to get anything played, you had to give the publishing to him. He got the publishing. So, it was Alan Freed's guy who got part of the publishing on it. Otherwise Allan Freed wouldn't play your records. And it was that way with Dick Clark too as a matter of fact. Dick Clark would pay you by check for his day show and the he'd have you sign his check, endorse your check and then hand it back to them. That was for your promotion on his show. So, you can look at that a lot of ways too.

Q - The Royal Teens were on both RCA and Capitol Records. Did you ever meet Elvis and/or The Beatles?

A - No. We were on ABC Paramount. They were selling us all over the place. So many record labels. But it was basically ABC Paramount.

Q - I consulted Brown And Friedrich's Encyclopedia Of Rock And Roll on The Royal Teens. Here's what they wrote about the group: "One of the freaky hits that sprang out of New York in the late '50s and helped carve out a bad name for Rock And Roll was The Royal Teens. "(Who Wears) Short Shorts"...

A - How about that.

Q - "It's inane lyrics consisted of little more than the title repeated in unison by this unusual group. It had a beat and bandstand shows used it to get the kids all dancing. The exposure did the trick and for a little while The Royal Teens were atop the best seller lists with another song about the fashions of the day. Short shorts had taken its place next to blue suede shoes, black denim trousers and motorcycle boots and brrrrrr black slacks." Sounds to me, Tom like you're in good company there. What I don't understand is, you helped carve out a bad name for Rock And Roll?

A - Well, they probably were Doo-Wop purists, but there was no such thing as Doo-Wop back then. There were the early '50s groups who sang a capella, harmony, and they were mostly Black groups. But we were different. We definitely were different. We didn't have much respect for "Short Shorts", our song, but ironically it became a monster hit.

Q - When you'd tour, did you have any girls waiting for you backstage wearing short shorts?

A - All the time! When we went to Florida on that first Buddy Holly tour we got off the airplane and we went to a hotel that our manager had picked out for us. In the hotel were tons of girls in the lobby. We walked in and said, "Wow! Loot at all these girls in short shorts." We said to the manager, "Why are they here?" And he said, "What?" (laughs) Isn't that amazing?

Q - Did they recognize the band when you walked in?

A - Oh, they went crazy. Another time we were in Kansas City. We were staying at the Aladdin Hotel. This would probably be '58, '59 maybe. Gaudio and I always roomed together. We were playing at the Municipal Auditorium in Kansas City. There was something going on with college girls and so they were there. Gaudio and I were in our room, watching TV or whatever we were doing. There's a knock on the hotel door. I open the door and the door gets pushed open. It's all these girls and they grab us. They're dragging us out of the room. We're fighting them off. But, that was scary. They were just grabbing us. We pulled ourselves back into the room and slammed the door.

Q - What did they want? A piece of your clothing? A lock of your hair?

A - I don't know what the hell the wanted. But it was like a frenzy, to tear your clothing, grab you, pinching. It was a mob scene of women, young women. Over the years "Short Shorts" has retained its popularity, the song. Why? Because in the year 2020 you can look at the girls walking down the street in their short shorts and they're exactly the same image to boys and other girls as it was in 1958. "Short Shorts" has never gone out of style. That's why it retains its popularity.

Q - The Royal Teens broke up in 1965. Was that because of The British Invasion was in full swing?

A - Joe Villa of The Three Friends, who had that record "Blanch", he had joined the group before 1965. He had been with us for a couple of years. So, we went from a group of four guys to five guys when we added Joe. The girl left and Joe took her place. We always had four and the girl, but then the girl left and we took Joe on. Now, what happened was when you became 18 years old back in those days you automatically got drafted into the Service. If you weren't in college you were going to get drafted. It was a simple as that. So, I turned 18 and I got my draft notice. I had to go into Fort Dix. I was on active duty for six months and I had to be six years in Reserve and go to these meetings. I'll tell you who we had in our group; Al Kooper. Do you know who Al Kooper is?

Q - I do. I interviewed him. He was the guy behind Blood, Sweat And Tears and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

A - Exactly. Did Al tell you he started in The Royal Teens?

Q - That, I don't remember.

A - Al started in The Royal Teens. So, he was with us. He didn't have his success that came in the '60s when he was with us. He was just starting out playing guitar with us, lead guitar. He was good. He was young. I was 18. Maybe Al was 15, 16. So, we were becoming the big kids. Gaudio, Al and I came on after that. Of course Billy Crandall, the sax player went on to start The Knickerbockers. They had the big hit, "Lies". If you look at the ingredients of The Royal Teens you had Gaudio and Billy Crandall, Al Kooper, Joe Villa and myself.

Q - The Royal Teens' spin-offs enjoyed a lot of success in the record business!

A - Really, yes.

Official Websites: TheRoyalTeens.com
and
TomAustinGallery.com

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