The Trenier twins, Claude and Clifford, were born in Mobile, Alabama, on July 14, 1919, the third and fourth childen brought into this vale of jive by Denny and Olivia Trenier, whose spawn eventually numbered ten. It was a musical family. Denny Trenier, in between ejaculations, played the baritone horn with the Excelsior Band, one of the legendary marching and funerary brass groups in the deep South; Olivia played piano; and their children took to the rhythm at a tender age.

In the fall of 1939, Claude and Clifford went north to Alabama State College, in Montgomery. Ostensibly, the twins were pursuing the study of education, preparing for careers in teaching.

“But, really, we weren’t studyin’ nothin’,” Claude told me, when I tracked him down in Atlantic City this past August. “We were there for the music. Our older brother Buddy had been doing some singing in little clubs around Mobile, and we saw that he had a lot of girls. It looked good to us.

“Alabama State at that time had some fine musicians. Erskine Collegians, in ’36. We hooked up with a few guys who were also studyin’ nothin’ at the time: Sonny Stitt, who went on to make quite a name for himself in jazz; Joe Newman, the trumpet player, who connected with Lionel Hampton and Wynonie Harris a few years later; ' Gene Gilbeaux, who played piano; and Don Hill, who’s been playin’ alto sax with us ever since.

“When they threw Cliff and me out of college in 1941, we took the band with us. But it wasn’t long before the World War II draft busted things up.”

In 1944 Jimmie Lunceford, whose music the Trenier twins had been listening to since their early teens, hired Claude as his vocalist; and on December 27 of that year, in New York, he cut his first record, singing “I’m Gonna See My Baby” and “That Someone Must Be You” with the Lunceford orchestra. Soon after the record was released, Lunceford also hired Cliff Trenier. On February 27, 1945, in New York, the twins sang together on record for the first time, on Lunceford’s Coral recording of “Buzz Buzz Buzz.”

Toward the end of 1945, Cliff returned to Mobile, and Claude, leaving the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, settled in Los Angeles, where in January 29, 1946, he recorded “Young Man’s Blues” (which Wynonie Harris had cut for Apollo the previous summer), accompanied by the Barney Bigard Quintet, for Lamplighter Records. Soon after this came another single, “Weird Nightmare,” with Charlie Mingus & His Orchestra, on the Excelsior label.

Claude found work singing for $25 a night with Joe Liggins and His Honeydrippers at the Casablanca, an after-hours joint on San Pedro Street. From there he moved across the street to Cafe Society, another after-hours club. When Wynonie Harris was fired from the Club Alabam for cussing out the audience, Claude took his place. Finally he got his first big booking, at the Melody Club, where he stayed for over a year, his pay rising to $1200 a week.

In 1947 Claude brought Cliff, Don Hill, and Gene Gilbeaux out to the coast. Picking up a drummer and a bass player, they hit the road, billed first as The Trenier Twins & The Gene Gilbert Quartet, then simply as The Trenier Twins. By the time that The Trenier Twins signed their first

recording deal, with Mercury, late in 1947, they had developed a unique sound—derived somewhat from Jimmie Lunceford’s 2/4 and Louis Jordan’s shuffle; more so from the sort of ineffable knowledge that can be had only by long years of studyin’ nothin’—and, just as important, a style of performance—involving everything from a cappella shrieking to acrobatics to football formations—the likes of which had not been known. (“When we used to jam at Billy Berg’s club in Hollywood,” Claude recalled, “all those bebop musicians would

shy away from us. They thought we weren’t cool because we jumped around and shouted and all that.”) It was the owner of a Chicago jazz club, The Blue Note, who first thought to bill them as “The Rockin’ Rollin’Treniers,” in the summer of 1949 (not long after their older brother Buddy had joined them).

The Trenier Twins stayed with Mercury until 1950, putting out five records in all. After one single for London (“Why Did You Get So High, Shorty?”), The Treniers, as they now called themselves, were signed to a long-term contract with Okeh by Danny Kessler, who had been put in charge of that reactivated label’s R&B product. By then their brother Milt, who had been singing in Oklahoma, had also become part of the group.

Their first Okeh release, cut on May 21, 1951, was “Go! Go! Go!,” one of the first real rock ’n’ roll records to come out of New York, and “Plenty Of Money,” a slow city blues sung by Claude in the voice that had prompted Jimmie Lunceford to call him the Sepia Sinatra.

The Treniers’ Okeh records contained some of the best rock ’n’ roll to be heard in the early ’50s: “Old Woman Blues” (1951), “Hadacol, That’s AU” (1952), “Rockin’ On Saturday Night” (1952), “Rockin’ Is Our Business” (1953), “Rockin-A-Beatin’ Boogie” (1954), “Get Out The Car” (1955), and more. (Nothing to write home about in terms of music, but of no mean interest to serious students of

nothin’ is “Say Hey,” which they made with Willie Mays in 1954, the summer Mays was voted National League MVP. In any case, it beats hell out of Mickey Mantle and Teresa Brewer.) The best record of them all was the two-sided affront to decorum that The Treniers cut in Chicago toward the end of 1952.

I don’t wanna eat and I don’t wanna sleep;

/ got a yen that I’m dyin ’ to please,

Till I get weak in the knees—

TURN TO PAGE 61

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 27

Gonna get me that poon-tang!

Poon-tang, poon-tang, poon-tang...

So went the plaintive “Poon-Tang!” The flip-side, “Hi-Yo, Silver,” all drums and saxophone and chanting, seemed to invoke not so much the Lone Ranger as it did that most exalted turbaned lord of high DoojiWooji.

Hi-yo, hi-yo, Silver, ride;

Hi-yo, hi-yo, Silver, ride.

Hi-yo, hi-yo, Silver, ride;

Hi-yo, hi-yo, Silver, ride.

Now, I’m the lone ranger from across the tracks;

I got a pocketful of money and a Cadillac.

Just sit in the saddle and hold on tight

’Cause, baby, we’re really gonna rock tonight.

The Treniers stayed with Okeh till 1955, when Columbia retired the label. Four singles followed on Epic, along with an album, The Treniers On TV, released in the summer of 1955. Although a few of their records had sold well—“Go! Go! Go!,” “Hadacol, That’s All,” “Get Out The Car”—none of them had been hits. The trouble, in Claude Trenier’s opinion, was that The Treniers were basically a live act. Entering a studio, much of the fire and madness died. On stage The Treniers could stop in the middle of “Hi-Yo, Silver” and go into a parody of the Julius La Rosa hit “Eh Cumpari,” transforming it into “Eh Cumpari, You Ain’t Nuthin’ But A Hound Dog,” then go back into “Hi-Yo, Silver”— as they often did in their 1953 performances. But this wasn’t the sort of thing that could be transferred well to recording.

In 1956 the group cut two singles for Vik; three for Brunswick in 1957. In 1958 there were a pair of lackluster singles and an album, The Treniers Souvenir Album, on Dot. (It was also in 1958 that The Treniers accompanied Jerry Lee Lewis to England as the opening act of that disastrous tour,) There was a single for the DOM label in 1959. Four years later there was an embarrassing “After Hours Bossa Nova” on Hermitage; then, in 1964, one last single, on Ronn.

But that wasn’t the end. Guys who really know the ins and outs of nothin’ are hard to keep down. The Treniers kept rocking the clubs, and they kept making money, mostly in Vegas, the Caribbean, and Atlantic City. In the mid-’70s they put out two albums on their own Mobile label, The Treniers Live And Wild At The Flamingo and The Fabulous Treniers, both of which hold up better than many records of that silly and unmissed decade.

The group today consists of Claude and Cliff, Buddy, and their nephew Skip (Milt left to open a club in Chicago), all of whom sing; Don Hill, the alto-sax man from way back when; Jack Holland on piano; Stan Richards on guitar; Chip Cole on bass; and Dave Akins on drums. When Don Hill sat down to do his income tax not too long ago, he discovered that The Treniers had played 355 nights in 1981. And the night before I spoke with Claude, The Treniers had had them packed six deep at the bar at Resorts International.

At the age of 63, Claude Trenier feels that he and his brothers will be rocking for another 10 years before they call-it quits. Looking back, he is aware that The Treniers were making rock ’n’ roll long before most people knew what to call it.

“I remember we were playin’ the Riptide in Wildwood, New Jersey, in the summer of 1950. Bill Haley had a cowboy band, The Saddlemen, that played right across the street from us. He used to come in and watch us. He asked us what we called the music we were playin’. And we told him. Hell, we told him.”

Nunc nihil amplius est quod dicam. W