In 1965, the notorious future serial killer John Wayne Gacy and so-called "Killer Clown" was working as a salesman at the Nunn-Bush Shoe Company in Springfield, Illinois.
An ambitious man, Gacy had joined the local branch of the United States Junior Chapter – known as The Jaycees – a not-for-profit organisation aiming to develop personal and leadership skills in young men by giving them responsibilities in the community. He'd quickly become popular, being voted Outstanding First Year Member in 1964 and Man Of The Year in 1965.
As part of this role, Gacy promoted live events to benefit the Jaycees Scholarship Fund. Which is how, on June 23, 1965, The Kinks came to be booked for a show at the Illinois State Armory in Springfield.
It had been an interesting few days for Ray Davies & Co. Three days earlier, preparing to play at the Exposition Gardens in Peoria, IL, the band had been given a local driver for the day, a gun-wielding redneck who terrified Daives so memorably that the incident was recounted in his' book X-Ray: The Unauthorized Autobiography and in the lyrics to the unreleased song, Americana (Hey Big Fat Cowboy).
Back to Springfield. 1200 fans showed up at the Armory, and the local paper, the State Journal-Register, reported that The Kinks "brought the crowd to a near-frenzy as it screamed its approval" while "policemen stood by, scratching their heads in amazement."
Despite the show's success, it was presumed for years that the band had had little or no direct with promotor Gacy on the night. But in an interview with Mojo magazine in September 2000, bassist Pete Quaife told a different story.
"The local promoter that was looking after us turned out to be a real greaseball," said Quaife. "He was polite enough, but a greaseball nonetheless. After the gig, he invites us back to his house. Says he's got some people coming round and he's got some booze, so we say, ok.
"We get there, and the place has an awful, sickly smell about it. But he's our promoter, so we stay there, drinking, 'til about 3 am. When we decide to go he gets upset, says can't a couple of us stay? By now we were beginning to get a bit antsy about this guy, so we took off to the hotel and that was the last we saw of him."
"We could have ended up as mementoes, bricked up in his walls," Quaife added.
It's not known if Quaife's description of Gacy's home as having an "awful, sickly smell" is genuine or was added for dramatic effect (the bassist died in 2010, while Gacy's first-known crime came two years after the Armory show, when he'd moved to Waterloo, IL, to manage a KFC store). But, in a 2014 interview with Classic Rock, Ray Davies appeared to confirm that the encounter, at least, was real.
"I didn’t stick around, but I think Pete Quaife hung out there," Davies said. "I don’t know what the guy claimed to be at that time. You’d meet a lot of people like that, hanging out with promoters. That could have been a potentially scary time. I’ve worked with a lot of dodgy people in my time, without knowing their connections."
Did the meeting really happen as Quaife described? We'll probably never know, but, like the famous story of Debbie Harry's encounter with the serial killer Ted Bundy, it'll forever remain part of rock'n'roll lore.
