In the garage band days of the ‘60s, it was practically unheard of to have an all-girl rock group of high school girls. Then came the Daughters of Eve.
Promoter/agent Carl Bonafede was already having success with the Buckinghams in the mid-‘60s when he decided he wanted to put together an all-girl group. Unheard of at the time, he set up auditions at Taft High School on Chicago’s North Side. Soon, 16-year-old Marsha Tomal (organ, guitar, vocals), 15-year-old Judy Johnson (lead guitar, vocals), 15-year-old Debi Pomeroy (drums) and 14-year-old Andee Levin (bass) became the Daughters of Eve.
Pomeroy remembers in an interview in Drum magazine, “I was playing lead guitar in an all-boy surf band at age 14 when I first sat on the drum stool of the drummer’s kit and played a simple tom tom beat. I really liked how it felt when I played them. The drummer left his drums in my parents’ basement where we used to practice one summer while he was away. Six months later I had the good fortune when a boy who was a drummer heard me jamming with my guitar-slinging brother,” who was in another local band the Dirty Wurds, “and got me an audition.”
At the time, Bonafede was working for the Willard Alexander booking agency, so he had plenty of places he could schedule the band to play. And with the success of his Buckinghams, he could add them to their shows and gain the exposure the Daughters of Eve needed.
Their first major appearance was in February, 1966, at the annual McCormick Place Auto Show. It was a great “coming out” event that garnered great press and instant notoriety. “The girls were great entertainers and musicians,” Bonafede remembers. “Marsha was the ‘Paul McCartney’ of the band with a magnetic personality.” He also called Marsha and Judy “the female Everly Brothers.” With the emergence of teen clubs at that time, it was no problem finding them places to play.
When it finally came time to record, the girls had played enough live shows that they had the songs down and went into the studio recreating what they had already done. “The records sounded exactly like their performances,” Bonafede said. But that was a good and a bad thing. “From a production perspective, this was good. From an originality standpoint, it wouldn’t get them national recognition.” Bonafede was working with the local U.S.A. label and started looking for songs that would satisfy the market. Their first single was covers of the popular songs “Hey Lover” https://youtu.be/CwyzBdBJAH0 and “Stand By Me.” With that, they became the sweethearts of Chicago.
Of course the girls had to juggle time between the band, the boyfriends and school. Bonafede seemed to handle that well. Even when they went out on the road he acted as manager, paternal caretaker, and babysitter. One of the girls’ mothers would often come on road trips to act as a chaperone. “The moms eventually saw me as a protective big brother and became more comfortable leaving their daughters in my care,” he said.
Bonafede kept the Daughters of Eve busy from the early part of 1966 through to the summer of 1968. Yet as much as the band members were appreciating Bonafede’s work and guidance, he was apparently at odds often with some of the parents over his managerial expertise. It seemed they felt the girls should be taking home more money from performances and record sales while Bonafede attempted to detail the costs of travel, production, studio time and record company expenses. The fissure between Bonafede and Andee Levin’s parents cracked open wide enough that they pulled her from the band. The Daughters of Eve would go through a number of replacements until Lori Wax settled in the slot.
1967 saw a second single with “Symphony of My Soul” paired with and a take-off of the Animals’ hit “Help Me Boy.” It was also a time when another crack started splitting open. Bonafede was in the process of losing his star band the Buckinghams, who had just scored a national hit with “Kind of a Drag.”
“The girls were creating fun and excitement for their audience. Unfortunately the girls were experiencing far less of that themselves.” With hindsight, Bonafede looks back on the strain he probably caused the girls and their parents. At first, they were playing liquor establishment venues so they had to play early, stay backstage and have no interaction with their audience. Once teen clubs started popping up, that freed them up. Yet the travel took its toll. “Day after day we piled into our brown van,” he recalls heading to Kentucky, or Kansas or Iowa. Every weekend was booked. Bonafede even scheduled a six-week tour supporting U.S. military troops at various bases’ NCO Clubs and National Guard Armories in May and June of 1968.
The Daughters of Eve released one more single with “A Thousand Stars” and “Social Tragedy” https://youtu.be/quYtB04vZUU?list=TLPQMDMwMzIwMjKz_U8NdVjvIA. Ironically, the last song spelled an end to the Daughters of Eve. “There’s a line in the song about not letting ‘it’ slip away,” says Bonafede. “Sometime, we are forced to helplessly watch while it happens.”
By that time Marsha and Judy were planning their weddings. It was time for the girls to grow up.
Looking back, Marsha Tomal recalls, “We did amazing things, made good money, and traveled around as 16, 17, 18-year-olds.” At the same time, “We attempted to have a normal life with school and boyfriends.”
Even though she had left the band, Andee Levin recalls, “To have the experience of bonding and making music with these talented girls, recording at the renowned Chess Studios, and of course, to have the experience of my grandchildren’s smiles and wide eyes as they listen to the songs that I played. Very few women my age can say they had these events in their history.”
Debi Pomeroy was 18 when the Daughters of Eve broke up. “I played with a local female country band until I left Chicago for Los Angeles the following year,” she says. There she picked up work regularly, did radio commercials, and joined a band that recorded demos for Criterion Publishing that included the Doobie Brothers’ Michael McDonald. She would go on to join the all-girl band Sugar when they were regulars at the Pagoda and Outrigger Hotels in Hawaii in the mid-‘70s. Her career spanned some five decades before she stopped touring in 2006 and slipped into retirement. Sadly, Lori Wax (Haddon) passed away in 2017.
What’s truly amazing is the interest there still is in the music of the Daughters of Eve. According to Spotify https://open.spotify.com/artist/4Fgj7fAOMYS3rMV4cUN2On?fbclid=IwAR0tUd-dBaf6KaLWEjRDiBNXKvui1HA2u6EV47JyjgkKXdf3Cdz-MS0aiuo their page has well over one million listeners!
For more on the Daughters of Eve, their history has been documented in the book The Screaming Wildman: Vibrations from the Dawn of Chicago Rock (Chi-Town Music History) by Carl Bonafede himself. And you can enjoy more memories on their Facebook page www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100040742508136
Discography
1966 Hey Lover b/w Stand By Me (USA TM1779/1780)
1967 Symphony of My Soul b/w Help Me Boy (USA 891)
1967 He Cried b/w Don’t Waste My Time (Spectra Sound AB 920)
1968 Social Tragedy b/w A Thousand Stars (Cadet 5600)