Gene Summers

On the subject of all things Dallas, Gene Summers seems to be as important to the city's history of rock & roll as the grassy knoll is to assassination theorists. Speaking of big bands, some sort of implosion of creative forces occurred in the spring of 1961, when Summers left a combo called the Rebels in order to bolster the membership of another that had been known up until then as Tommy & the Tom Toms. Tommy -- as in Tommy Brown -- had decided to leave Texas for Florida, a drift so common that a Texas rock band from a later era would be inspired to write a song about it, "G...