THE HEART BEATS
The Heart Beats were an all-female garage rock band, based in Lubbock, Texas, and founded around 1966. They were led by drummer and lead vocalist Linda Sanders, along with younger sister Debbie Sanders (guitar), Debbie McMellan (bass guitar), and Jeannie Foster (guitar and keyboards). The Sanders sisters met McMellan and Foster in a music class when Debbie Sanders was about ten years old and the other girls were about 12 or 13. The Sanders’ mother Jeanne Sanders became the band’s manager, supervising them closely to “maintain in appearance and reality a group of decent, wholesome girls”. (More from Wikipedia)
One garage rock compilation album that I picked up by mailorder sometime along the line is We Had the Beat / The Heart Beats & Other Texas Girls of the 60’s. The Heart Beats were a good enough band, as were the other featured bands; mostly they recorded serviceable covers of songs like “Little Latin Lupe Lu”, “Poor Side of Town” and the Nancy Sinatra hit “How Does that Grab You, Darlin’?”.
I have also been reading about another CD that came out more recently which featured a lot of the same music, called It’s a Happening! Texas Girls of the 60’s. Because the CD features the Heart Beats and Linda Pierre King, I assumed that it was basically a reissue of the earlier CD that I had. Actually, the 26-track album mostly features other bands; but more importantly from my standpoint, there are four songs by King that did not appear on the We Had the Beat / The Heart Beats & Other Texas Girls of the 60’s.CD. I guess I’m going to need to track down that CD also!
(April 2012)
