There weren’t many places for kids to hang out when Jim Welton was growing up in Arlington Heights in the 1960s and garage bands were springing up everywhere. Welton was a senior at Arlington Heights High School in ’64 and was in one of those bands when a teen music club called the Blast opened in temporary quarters in the local VFW hall and changed things in a big way. A year or so later, when the club was attracting national acts like the Beau Brummels, making the northwest suburb a hot teen destination, Welton’s band was an opening act. By then the club was known as the Cellar.
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Welton and a classmate, Dan Baughman, had started out as a folksinging duo. But Baughman had a brother a few years older who “was always trying to convince him that folk music was not the way to go and we needed to have a rock ‘n’ roll band,” Welton says. “So around our junior year, we electrified. We had a bass, two guitars, a set of drums. We played at school dances. We weren’t very good.” Eventually they found a new bass player and drummer, developed a Byrds-like sound, and began calling themselves the Raevns. With this group a “really nervous” Welton auditioned for the club’s boss, Paul Sampson.
Cellar alumni say there were no real problems at the club, but the village was never comfortable with it. When it started attracting kids from Chicago and distant suburbs, things got tense. “I think the police got more and more concerned about the outside people that were starting to come in,” Welton says. A patron, Jeff Platt, recalls, “We were the scourge of Arlington Heights. There was the myth that all this evilness was going on. It was almost a constant battle. They had licensing problems and he [Sampson] did what he could. It probably would have lasted a lot longer if the town would have embraced it, realizing there was more good than harm.” The club closed in 1970.
