Tom Salles is the Merced Fair's Music Man
By Diane Booth Conway
 

   The first time Tom Salles performed at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore Theater, he walked out on the stage before the concert began, and just stood there, soaking up the scene.
   Basking in the spectacular lighting and sound as the stage technicians worked their magic and the musicians warmed up, Salles was in heaven. "I remember looking at one of my friends and saying, ‘This is makin’ it.’ "
   The year was 1967. Salles was just 17.
   Fast forward to Fall 2002, this time Salles is the director of the Dos Palos Middle School’s Marching Band. It’s the Merced Band Review, the musicians line up in precision order, the drum major blows the whistle and the band starts marching with Salles leading them down the street.
   "People were cheering and clapping for the kids as they marched down the street playing a strong introduction to their song. Marching bands are very powerful and their movements are precise, it’s a very powerful thing," Salles said. "To watch the kids clap and cheer for themselves after they marched was really a thrill."
   It gives him a lot of satisfaction to be able to help his students feel the exhilaration of such a performance and to receive such a great reception in junior high school. "They get a chance to really shine and show their stuff," he said.

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"It gives him a lot of satisfaction to be able to help his students feel the exhilaration of such a performance"

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   Salles once teetered on the brink of stardom as he and his band played some of the renowned venues of the Sixties. He’s a music teacher now, but that doesn’t mean the thrill is gone. "I write music every day and do my own arrangements. Watching the kids at school, I get the same feeling I got out on stage at the Fillmore.
   "It’s the same thing going down the street with the band," he added. "You can tell if you’ve met the approval of the crowd with the whoops and hollers."
   Salles’ lifelong love of music began at the Merced County Fair when he first heard "The Merced Bluenotes" perform. Over the years he played with a number of bands. "Every version of every band I was in played at the Fair," he said. Since 1995, he’s worked for the Merced County Fair, where his title could be "Music Man."
   His job description in entertainment/promotions at the Fair now includes handling radio advertising contracts, negotiating and booking small stage acts’ entertainment contracts and arranging promotions. "If it’s about the fair and it’s on the radio I did it," Salles said. His duties have expanded every year and include obtaining instruments signed by artists during the Fair and coordinating meet-and-greet events with artists and contest winners.
   For example, members of the Bay Area rhythm-and-blues band, Tower of Power, signed a trumpet that was played on stage during a fair performance and Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo signed a guitar donated by a local music store. Both instruments were awarded as prizes in radio station contests.
   He grew up on a Merced County area dairy and was in 4-H and FFA. "I was always showing swine and lambs at the fair. Even though my father was a dairyman, he didn’t want me to show cows." The younger Salles had aspirations to be a farmer but his father, Manuel Salles, had other ideas. "I was really into agriculture but my father was a dairyman and farmer and he wanted out of it."
   Tom Salles always remembers the day he discovered music. He was a sixth grader hanging out at the Merced County Fair. "I was cruising around being a kid at the carnival when I heard this subsonic sound – it was a bass guitar player for The Merced Bluenotes."
   Life was never the same. "That made a major impact on my interest in music. I was really taken with the music," Salles said. Years later he got the chance to play with some of the band’s members. "To me that was a big thing because those guys were my heroes."
   Salles started in music playing drums in the Weaver Junior High School Marching Band. "I wanted to play the drums badly, but my Dad didn’t like drums. He bought me a guitar for Christmas instead of the drum set I wanted."
   His first guitar was a "standard flat top acoustic guitar with the strings so far off the front board that you’d make your fingers bloody playing it. With a guitar like that you really had to want to play."
   And play he did. "I would fall asleep with that guitar in my arms. I fell in love with it." Salles said.
   His father learned to play the guitar while serving in the Army and taught his son how to play. "We would jam playing old cowboy songs and Jimmie Rodgers songs. He was kind of my teacher for awhile," Tom Salles said. "The guy can still pick up a guitar after all these years and he still remembers how to play those songs."
   But Tom Salles didn’t always have to have an instrument to make music. When he was in junior high school, he recalls teaming up with some of the Bluenotes band members’ younger siblings to make music on the school bus ride home. "We had a percussion thing going on. We would beat our school books and lunch boxes and make music. We were doing Carlos Santana R&B before Carlos Santana was around," he said.
   He played in a few bands and then he and some friends put together the first commercial band he played with, "The Morelochs." Salles was a freshman in 1964 and the other band members were all seniors at Merced High School. "They were all folk singers coming out of the "hootenanny" days looking to switch over to rock music. I was just a country kid who lived on a dairy." But the band needed a lead guitar and he could play.
   Performing on guitar, Salles and the group played at parties in Fresno. "We would catch the Greyhound bus to get there. We were doing terrible versions of Merced Bluenotes’ songs. We weren’t very good, but at least nobody threw stuff at us."
   In the late 1960s The Morelochs performed at the Fairground’s Old Bandshell, now the site of the Outdoor Theater. "Every version of every band I was in played at the Fair," he said.
   His ties to the Fair go way back. "When you come here (to the fair) it’s like coming back to school – it’s like a family," he said. For years, his late mother, Alice, worked as a cashier at the Fairgrounds’ gates during the annual event.

   Crystal Syphon became the house band at a nightclub across from the street from California State University, Stanislaus in Turlock, for a couple years. "We were the thing," he said. "We caught fire with the college crowd." Looking back on the Summer of 1972, he said, "That was the best summer of my life."
   One of the other bands he played with was "Boogeyman." The name came from a popular line at the time, "Let’s Boogie." The band played at the Merced Theater downtown. "We were up on the marquee," he recalls, adding, "Buses full of fans showed up for our shows."
   Large venue concerts nicknamed "coliseum gigs" became popular. "You didn’t get a "coliseum gig" unless you were international," he said of the band. "That put me into the nightclub scene."
   From "Boogeyman" he moved on to play with other bands including, "Voyage," a group that played mostly rock ‘n’ roll cover tunes. He was living in Fresno at the time but on the road with the band a lot. One of the big names in music that "Voyage" opened for was Eddie Money, when he performed at the Women’s Club House in Merced.
   Years later when Money performed at The Merced County Fair, Tom Salles ended up giving the singer a ride to the Fairgrounds before the concert. When he told Money who he was, the two musicians started reminiscing. "He said he remembered me and we had a great time talking, He gave me a bunch of signed CDs and invited me on the bus to hang out."
   When the "disco" fad hit in the ’70s, Salles said, "Every club in Fresno was turning into a discotheque. There was no place to work and I was used to working all the time." Looking at the music scene, he realized it was the country bands that were getting all the work. That’s when Salles started a country rock band called, "Wildfire."
   In 1979, "Wildfire" competed for a national recording contract at the "Wrangler Dodge Country Showdown," a talent search held at the Merced Fairgrounds. Bands from all over The Valley competed in the event and "Wildfire" came in first place performing at the old Bandshell.
   The band recorded two songs, but they weren’t able to cut through the red tape to get it distributed nationally, Salles said. The band quit working for awhile. "All I ever wanted to do was have a recording contract," he said. "I was always the youngest member of every band I was in until Wildfire. Wildfire became my band."
   That winter, "Wildfire" was hired for a "steady gig" in Yosemite National Park at the Yosemite Lodge. The deal included six weeks of food, room, pay and ski passes. Some of the performers he worked with at that time were Lacy J. Dalton and the late Johnny Paycheck.
   Working at the Fair has helped Salles stay connected with the world of music.

   Not long after he started working for The Fair, he suggested to former Fair Manager Tony Leo, to let him provide the sound equipment for the small act stages. "The bands sounded pretty crummy but the quality of the music improved when we got consistent sound systems." He also introduced karaoke to the Fair and it’s still big with fairgoers.
   Salles enjoys rubbing elbows with the Fair’s Outdoor Theater entertainment. "I just like being around them. It connects me with music and the performance end of things. I’m not really star-struck by the artists. I talk to them and eat with them, but they are just people to me.
   "I like seeing the artists who are going to be around a few years from now and the ones that act like prima donnas who won’t be around long," he said.
   In talking with the performers, he often finds they have mutual friends in the business. "Sometimes I know people they are talking about," he said. When WAR performed at the 2002 Fair, one of the members mentioned a friend in the business that lives in the Merced area and Salles tracked him down to talk to the artist.
   Today, Salles lives on the ranch where he grew up in rural Merced County, and his widowed father, Manuel lives there, too. Tom Salles has been married to Leslee since 1976. She is the Assistant Manager at Gottschalks’ Century Center store in Modesto. Together the Salles raised their blended family of three kids who are now grown. The couple has four grandchildren.
   A few years ago, Salles tired of all the traveling and bookkeeping of playing in bands and decided to pursue another career. "I decided to get my teaching credential." He started out in a part-time job at McSwain School but in addition to teaching music he also was teaching math and literature.
   After two years he went to work as the music director for Dos Palos High School and Bryant Middle School in Dos Palos. After a year he ended up teaching orchestra and marching band at just the middle school. Awhile back the school had a strong music program but after years of decline he said, "It’s a program that’s building again."
   The marching band competed in Merced’s 2002 Central California Band Review for the first time in years and took first place in the smaller school category consisting of six schools, he said. They also received several other honors in the annual competition including first place drum major for all junior highs. "The band did well overall," he said with enormous pride.
   At the Merced Band Review, Salles’ daughter was standing in the crowd and overheard two men her father’s age remark that he was leading the marching band. "She said they were excited because they always wondered what happened to me after my band days. She said they were just blown away – they were apparently very moved and jazzed that I was leading those kids."
   Salles is grateful for what he calls "the markers of success," to be listed on a Merced Fair poster, to get countless standing ovations during years of performances, to have your band’s name mentioned in the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper and to have his band’s concert date on a Fillmore poster.

   But he’s also happy with the direction his love of music has taken him. "I look forward to school and I look forward to doing the Fair every summer. It’s very fulfilling."
   A lot of his students are inspired to play an instrument, but there are 170 students signed up for the music program and there’s a shortage of instruments. "I can only supply instruments to about 10 percent of them," he said. Salles asks that if anyone in the community has an instrument they no longer want, from a keyboard to a violin, guitar or flute, his students can use it.
   "There’s a lot of kids who want to be involved but can’t because I can’t get them an instrument," he said, adding that even computers are welcome because he wants to teach students about computerized music.
   "I’m researching ways to bring more music into the classroom," he said. He bought some karaoke machines and encourages teachers to use them. "The kids get to read and sing at the same time. The teacher doesn’t have to be intimidated if they don’t sing well and the kids love it.
   "In a few years I will get kids in class who won’t be afraid to sing anymore. Teachers can find 30 minutes a week to plug in the karaoke machine and the district likes it cause the kids are reading the words at the same time."
   His goal is to make music a part of the curriculum like teaching songs about the Gold Rush to accompany history lessons. "I’m trying to make music an accompaniment to other disciplines. Music is the background of life. I want to work to find a way for music to fit in, and still recognize the importance of other disciplines."
   The school district is more than happy about the work Salles is doing with music students. In July 2002, the district gave him a "Certificate of Appreciation" and made him the district’s Music Facilitator for three elementary schools and two middle schools and he continues to serve as Band Director.
   "Music has been a tradition in Dos Palos – it’s football and the bands. And the bands support football, he said. The music program is making a big comeback and everybody in town is happy about that, he said. "Everybody wants to bring it back."
   The fairgrounds office is located at 900 Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Merced. For information, call the fair office at 722-1507 or email to Info@MercedCountyFair.com or fax at 722-3773.
 

Press Archive: 3/28/2003
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