Rockin' With Conny and the Bellhops
by Bryce Martin

At Liberty Elementary in Galena, Kan., Gene Woods was a classmate. When the whole Elvis scene was just unfolding, Woods performed a pair of his songs at one of our school talent shows. He broke a string on his guitar right off with some savage picking but in what we were just beginning to recognize as true Elvis fashion he just kept on boppin'.

Long combed-back hair, shirt collar up, and sensous rock 'n' roll music, it all came from the devil's handbag of tricks. We were a little suprised the school allowed Woods to do Elvis.

Woods went on to play guitar for Conny and the Bellhops at the Hilltop Club in Pittsburg. That was the first real rock 'n' roll band in the region and that was the beer joint where the band made its name. In Kansas you only have to be 18 to legally consume alcohol, which means on any given night many 16-year-olds and younger are downing some suds in Kansas taverns.

Conny was the lead vocalist and a wonderful saxophone player. His name was Edgar M. Conrad III. He died in 1989.

Talking to Woods during a band break he once mentioned the group had just recorded a song he had written called "Bop Sticks" and it was out on a 45 rpm record. Since they were an instrumental group, I knew it was a rocked-up version of "Chopsticks," which as it turned out it was. They had a regional hit record with another one called "Shot Rod."

Gene Woods still lives in Pittsburg.

Another who guested at the Hilltop about the same time was Dick Feller. He went on, as they say, to write "Some Days Are Diamonds," a gem of a song for John Denver, and other hits and a few misses and lives in Nashville, actually in Hendersonville, Tenn. I lived in Hendersonville and I'd run into him at the post office and we'd chat. In my salad days, before the main entree of life, he was more or less a regular at the Land Inn in Fort Scott, Kan., another hangout of mine.

True pioneers of the musical sphere, Conny and the Bellhops was a surf rock band before the genre got its name.

I didn't know at the time I was drinking in so much history with the beer.

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