“Full Cyrkle!” Spotlight on The Cyrkle’s Don Dannemann
By: Spotlight Central
Tags: 60s, Music, 60s Music, Rock, 60s Rock

By Spotlight Central. Photos by Love Imagery

The Cyrkle is a 60s-era rock band which is well-known for their hits, “Red Rubber Ball” and “Turn Down Day.” Founded by lead singer/guitarist Don Dannemann, the band toured with The Beatles, opening for them at the Fab Four’s final show at Candlestick Park in 1966. After breaking up, The Cyrkle reunited nearly a half-century later with Dannemann at the helm, performing concerts around the country, including their first revival show at The Strand Theater in Lakewood, NJ.

Spotlight Central recently caught up with Dannemann to ask him about his early musical memories, his rise to fame with The Cyrkle, his recollections of touring with The Beatles, and what he’s been up to lately.

Spotlight Central: We understand you were born in Brooklyn to a mom who played the piano. Is it true that your mom said you were already humming songs when you were only 10 months old?

Don Dannemann: Yes, that’s actually true. My mom told me that when I was only 10 months old, she was diapering me and she was humming the song, “Little Brown Jug,” and I hummed it back to her. Now, I don’t remember that, obviously, but that’s what she told me.

Spotlight Central: You’ve said that in fifth grade, you can recall listening to Alan Freed’s 1010 WINS show on your transistor radio. What kind of music were you interested in at the time?

Don Dannemann: As a family, I remember when we would travel in the car, we would listen to Martin Block’s Make Believe Ballroom, and I was always interested in the music he played. But around 1955, for my birthday, I got a transistor radio, and I was sitting on the front porch of our home in Brooklyn when I came upon Alan Freed’s rock and roll show on WINS in New York and I was transfixed. The first song I heard was a song called “Story Untold” by The Nutmegs and it just caught me. I remember listening and listening — to the point where I even missed my favorite TV shows — and thinking “I want to do that! This is great!”

Spotlight Central: After taking piano lessons, influenced by Elvis, you started taking guitar lessons. Tell us about how, as a youngster, you began your recording career with a tape recorder you received as a gift.

Don Dannemann: It’s interesting you mention that. This would have been, probably, around eighth grade or so. I had gotten a tape recorder as a present, and not long after, I was given a second tape recorder. As soon as I got the second tape recorder, the first thing I did was put the two tape recorders next to each other to record myself performing the song, “In the Still of the Night.” I recorded the first part [sings] Sh-doo, shoo-be-doo/Sh-doo, shoo-be-doo” into the first tape recorder. Then I put my head next to the speaker of the first tape recorder and I took the mike of the second tape recorder and I put it in front and sang the second part, the harmony. Then I went back and forth a few times with that between the two recorders, and finally sang the lead. It was an awful recording — it was hissy and there was room noise and all that — but it was correct. It was the way overdubs were done later on and even now — where you can sing along with yourself — and I did exactly that with my two tape recorders, so I guess you could say I got started with multi-track recording pretty early on.

Spotlight Central: As a high school student, you played in different groups and then, at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, you founded a band called The Rhondells. What kind of music did you play and where did you perform?

Don Dannemann: The Rhondells got started at a freshman mixer at Lafayette College during my freshman year. A couple of guys started playing when the hired band took a break and a friend of mine said, “Hey, Don, you should go play with them.” I got my guitar and went down and started playing with them, and it was one of those magic moments where we all went, “Wow, we can play the same stuff!” It was basically rock of the time — Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, and some doo-wop stuff. Soon after, we started rehearsing and a major thing happened at Christmas when my high school girlfriend broke up with me. It really made me very sad, but it freed me up to say, “All right, my girlfriend’s gone. I don’t care about seeing girls on party weekends, so if you guys want to get some jobs for the band, let’s do it.”

My bandmate, Jim Maiella, who was our first drummer at college — Marty Fried, the original Cyrkle drummer, came about two years later — got us a job playing a fraternity party at Lehigh University, which was just down the road a bit from our college. So we started playing fraternity parties doing the rock and roll music of the time and, over the course of our stay at Lafayette, we became the band to get for fraternity parties.