The Little Bits: How Four Pre-teens Achieved ’60s Punk Immortality

On “Girl Give Me Love” by the aptly named Little Bits, meaty basslines and Vox-organ vamps are the playground of four prepubescent rock’n’rollers howling romantic pleas more feral than flirtatious. Commanding love from pretty girls in go-go boots, the Little Bits ape the swaggering libertine of rock lore with a good deal of grind and a convincing amount of grit despite the obviously naive pitch of their too-young voices.

The tweenyboppers, as captured by Tiger Eye, a vanity label out of Jennings, Louisiana, are at once precious and impossibly cool, and surely rank up there with some of rock’n’roll’s most paint-peeling screamers: the Sonics, the Pleasure Seekers and the good Lord Sutch himself. The moment you recover from the band’s two-minute and twenty-second merry-go-round of candy-fueled hysterics, the mystery takes hold: Just who were these pint-sized punks?

That question has gone unanswered for the past fifty years, during which time the Little Bits’ 1967 release slowly wormed its way through record collecting circles, acquiring ever more value and mystique. As it traveled far from its swampy birthplace, the objet d’art lived in estrangement from its makers, who grew up, pursued careers, had kids of their own, and forgot, perhaps willfully, about their record and the eternally youthful voices trapped in its grooves.

Even as “Girl Give Me Love” made its way onto compilations like Louisiana Punk from the 60s and eventually to Youtube, Kim Roy, one of two living band members, had no idea that the song had a life beyond his distant recollections. Pulling at a thread of names left in the comment section of that Youtube video, I tracked Kim down at his ranch-style home in Lafayette, Louisiana, and listened to him tell the Little Bits story in full for the first time.

“My dad used to introduce me on stage as, ‘Pound-for-pound Louisiana’s best guitarist!” recalls Kim, who was 9 years old when the band formed and put out their lone single. Still years shy of lightweight status, the littlest Little Bit played the butt of the joke night after night. “People would always yell back that the guitar weighed more than I did!”

Joined by 12-year-old brother Keith Roy (drums) and neighborhood friends 11-year-old Marty Bonin (lead vocals) and 12-year-old Tommy Biessenberger (organ), Kim suited up in the latest mod fashions — ripped from the pages of Hit Parade magazine and custom-made by grandma — and took to the stage from 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. every Friday and Saturday. The foursome held court at local dances, drive-ins, pig roasts, hootenannies, and even a frat party in the nearby college town of Lafayette, where they played “Girl Give Me Love,” it’s B-side, a prismatic psych instrumental called “Spoofin,’” and top of the pops from the Rolling Stones, Ohio Express, and the like.

“If there were four people in the audience and we weren't what my dad called ‘putting on a show,’ he would walk in front of the stage and just give us that look. And we would have to start moving around like there were 10,000 people there to see us.”

Under the tutelage of J.D. Roy, the boys learned the art of stagecraft. “My dad made sure we kept our chops up and taught us to be real professional.” On cue, they danced and played hopped-up call-and-response numbers, and if that didn’t get the crowd going, the band deployed its secret weapon: Dressed in Edwardian ruffles and neon floral prints, Kim would answer audience taunts about his size by dropping to his knees and playing his pentagonal Domino Californian guitar while writhing around on the floor. And then like a maniacal Little Lord Fauntleroy, he bared his fangs, bit into the strings and picked out solos with his teeth.

“Yes, we were very groovy,” says Kim, now 60, with a far-off smile as he takes in the spectacle of his younger self.

He played the wild-child rock’n’roll evangelist like he was born for the part. He seemed a preternatural punk wunderkind. But his hammy act belied the stage fright he endured come weekend gigs. “In front of crowds that I did not know at all, it was not a problem. But if we would play our hometown, I would beg my friends not to come.” And his performance jitters reached a new pitch when girls tried to talk to him at the shows. “I would just shrink out of existence because I was really shy.”

He was just 9 years old, after all. And only through the eyes of a child would having to perform for one’s peers and interact with the opposite sex be perceived as more terrifying than the violent mobs that regularly attended their concerts.

Due to their age but even more so to their location, the Little Bits were total outliers. Bubbling up in a rural, French-speaking southwest Louisiana, the band was seen by older town folk and farmboy types as part of the encroaching hippie counter-culture. Down in Cajun country, no one dressed like them, no one sounded like them, and no one dared let their hair grow past their ears for risk of being called a fag. So a cutesy band of mop-topped kids mimicking new-breed rock stars and their flouting of gender conformity was an obvious target and easy prey for bullies of all ages.

Locally famous musician Happy Fats, who in 1966 sold 200,000 copies of "Dear Mr. President," a steel-guitar-driven lament against civil rights legislation, referred to the band as the Little Shits the one time they shared a bill. And the teenagers that packed the Little Bits shows hadn’t come to dance; they’d come to ogle and intimidate the longhairs, waving scissors in the air like pitchforks.

“In some cases it got out of control and violent and we were threatened. My dad would make us keep our mic stands on us and not load them into the trailer [until the last minute] in case we needed to use them to protect ourselves.”

Playing rock’n’roll in backwoods Louisiana during the sixties was indeed a bloodsport. The Bad Roads, the Louisiana frat band who released the knockout fuzz slab “Blue Girl” on JIN in 1966, had also learned to wield their gear like weapons. In preparation for the inevitable scuffle with hostile shitkickers, the Roads went to gigs armed with guitar cases full of axe handles. And a posse. "We didn’t have roadies," recalled drummer Danny Kimball in a 2004 interview. "We had goons. You needed goons."

J.D. Roy was the Little Bits’ one-man goon squad, and he made sure that not even a hair on the boys’ heads was harmed. In fact, the paterfamilias fought the school board for almost a decade over his kids’ right to wear their hair as they pleased. He entered the cultural fray, agitating on behalf of the long-hairs. But J.D. also had a good deal of Cajun roughneck left in him. His fuse was short and he liked to scrap (once, he even got into fisticuffs with his Jennings running buddy Doug “Ragin’ Cajun” Kershaw over a shared love interest). So when fights broke out at the Little Bits concerts, their parental guardian was usually the one landing blows. Audience members jeering and calling the band members girls, as was par for the course, provoked a response that was more muscular and meaner than the young boys’ rehearsed theatrics.

"I'm in the middle of a song and I see guys flying around the room,” recalls Kim. "My dad would be fighting someone because they were trying to disrupt our band. He was from Ville Platte [a very small Cajun town] and he couldn't control his temper. When someone would talk bad about his little boys, he would react!”

Happy Fats also learned a hard lesson about trash-talking kids within earshot of their irascible pops. The day after the “Little Shits” comment, the musician wound up on his morning TV show with an oversized shiner there for the whole town to see; and J.D. wound up in shackles in the county jail.

Yes, J.D. Roy was an intensely protective father, and the Little Bits was his baby through and through.

He was the one that taught Kim and Keith how to play, and then recruited Tommy and Marty (they were chosen because of their towheaded good looks, a requisite in J.D.’s scheme to form the next Beach Boys). He fed the boys fashion inspirations with teen-beat subscriptions and instructed their musical tastes by bringing home the latest rock platters. He purchased all of the band’s equipment and the trailer used to haul it. And he took the musical upstarts on a “field trip” to the New Orleans Pop Festival to see how real professionals like T-Rex and Iron Butterfly do it, giving the Bits front row seats to the budding flower-power revolution.

“I saw guys with super long hair and a guy and a girl crawling out of a sleeping bag together. And it was the first time I smelled marijuana,” Kim remembers.

And when J.D. was done working his 12-hour shift as a welder, he was either ferrying the boys to the next gig or building Velvet Ear Productions, the shag-carpeted home studio where he cut the Little Bits A and B sides, which he wrote for the group and put out on his Tiger Eye label, along with 8 or so other originals that were never released.

The ode to the girls in go-go boots, so it turns out, had sprung from the brain of a middle-aged, blue-collar guy doing everything he possibly could to instill in his young kids the unholy power of rock’n’roll.

Before his pursuits as a bubblegum impresario, James Donald Roy had attempted a musical career of his own. Under the name Jimmy/Jimmie James, J.D. released a couple of rockabilly singles for Crazy Cajun recordman Huey Meaux’s subsidiary labels.

“Huey Meaux sent my dad to Muscle Shoals in Alabama to record a few 45s with studio musicians. And it was good stuff. My dad was a good writer. But like thousands of other artists, it didn’t do anything.”

On “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More” (Capri, 1963) and “Sweet, Sweet Honey” (Princess, 1965), J.D. showcases his coiffed-up country mettle with warbles and hiccups folded into every word. Backed by a vocal group, the songs have the glossy, middle-of-the-road sound of Elvis’s RCA years with the Jordanaires. But underneath the chorale layers, J.D.’s hillbilly crooning glimmers faintly with the rock’n’roll spark that would later set fire to “Girl Give Me Love.”

Filling up notebook after notebook, J.D. scrawled lyrics for other songs he hoped to someday record. And if he didn’t cut it as a musician, maybe, he thought, he had a shot as a songwriter. He made daily collect calls to Huey Meaux to see how his records were selling; and he was crushed, in the end, when they didn’t. But J.D. kissed off his musical dreams with dignity and clowned his way through the heartache. He blamed Elvis for his failure to achieve stardom. He would’ve made it, he joked, if that good-looking bastard hadn’t up and stolen his act.

When the sun had finally set on his musical ambitions, J.D. channeled them into his kids and staked his time and money into their future success.

“He gave it a shot but he didn't really go anywhere. That's when he started investing and pouring out into us. Once we started getting better, he put down his instrument altogether. I think he was living his missed opportunities through us,” says Kim reflectively.

It was a natural impulse, encoded by biology and fueled by artistic frustration. J.D. was contemporaries with several notorious manque-musicians-turned-band-dads. After Joe Jackson’s rhythm’n’blues group the Falcons disbanded, he escaped the drudgery of life as a steelworker by forging a kiddie popstar act that bore his surname. And then, of course, there’s Murray Wilson. Following marginal success as a songwriter when Lawrence Welk and hillbilly artists like Johnnie Lee Wills (brother of Bob Wills) and Bonnie Lou covered his tune “Two-Step Side Step,” Murray supported his family as a foreman at a tire factory. Until, that is, he saw a golden opportunity in his blond-haired, honey-voiced sons Brian, Dennis, and Carl. Meanwhile, a mill hand named Austin Wiggins had no discernible talent of his own. So he pursued his musical destiny, as foretold by a palm reader, by forming and managing his daughters’ inimitable pop group, The Shaggs.

But J.D. didn’t have the cruel streak of those patriarch-hustlers. The practices and shows were grueling, Kim admits, and he often fantasized about just being a normal kid running around outside with his friends. But his childhood was a happy one, he insists.

“We had a good upbringing, and I got to give it to my dad. He was a lot more hip than we thought at that time. He had a vision and he went with it.”

J.D. was an overly demanding dad, on occasion; but more than anything, he was a teenager who refused to grow up. He liked causing trouble. He wrote songs about chasing skirts. And he made rock’n’roll his life’s priority.

While he willfully defied authority figures and the conventions of adulthood, J.D. conscripted children to act out his teenage persona on stage. This fact is more irony than injustice. But one can’t help wonder how that affected the boys’ relationship to music. Did performing rock’n’roll at someone else’s bidding gut its rebellious spirit? Did being surrounded by it at such an early age sanitize it of all illicit pleasure? Were the boys robbed of the experience of feeling this music truly and deeply as their own?

At least when it comes to the Little Bits, the allure is totally lost on Kim. He cannot hear in “Girl Give Me Love” the je ne sais quoi that has attracted a cult fandom around the world. He was forced to do the bit, so naturally, the song’s punk appeal doesn’t ring true for him.

“This is a record I grew up with and pretty much forgot about. I just think it’s bizarre and I really do not get it,” Kim confesses. “The record recently sold for $639. I can’t imagine paying that much money for a single record. It just blows my mind.”

Even as a tyke, Kim didn’t think it was very cool to be in a group called the “Little Bits,” and the negative attention the band got from older school kids didn’t do much to persuade him otherwise. By the time he was in junior high, Kim had tired of the novelty act. When a classmate purchased one of the approximately 250 records that were pressed, he begged and pleaded for her not to play it.

“I was just embarrassed because we outgrew it. It was a kid's song.”

The Bits eventually traded in their old songs for ones they’d written themselves and re-formed under the more hippy-dippy, 70s-friendly name Featherstone. As the boys became more actively involved in the band, J.D. quietly handed over the reins.

After Featherstone, brothers Kim and Keith formed Kingdom, a heavy rock group inspired by Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. In a gesture towards autonomy, they moved rehearsals from their home studio to an old farmhouse outside of town, and practiced relentlessly. As the ’70s wore on, the Roy boys developed a taste for the complex musical stylings of progressive rock bands like Yes and Styx and absorbed them into their sound.

“I said, ‘You know what? I've been doing this my whole life, why not get good at it?’ So my dad came home one day... and I was "Learning Mood for a Day" by Steve Howe, which is a very challenging piece. I was learning it from the turntable, just sweating, and my dad was very impressed,” Kim barely makes out before his voice starts to break up. He is overcome with emotion thinking back on the pride he felt in laying his own claim to music and the bond shared between father and son in that moment.

“My dad just couldn't believe it, but then it clicked, ‘Wow, he is starting to take this serious.’"

After graduating high school, Kingdom hit the road and supported themselves as a touring band from 1974 to 1981. J.D. managed the band but, this time, in a more hands-off capacity. He helped pay for Kingdom’s studio recordings and released their lush power-prog singles on his Velvet Ear Productions. J.D. went to as many of the band’s shows as possible and even had the chance to discipline audience members that were getting out of hand. Consummate professionals, the members of Kingdom always played through while their manager tussled with concert attendees at the foot of the stage.

Despite his dad’s occasional rough and rowdy ways, Kim holds him up as his chief role model.

“J.D. was just a musician and he encouraged us to be, and he molded me into what I am now. My biggest regret is that he never knew how much attention this goofy little song he wrote would get.”

The rock’n’roll diehard passed away in 2007, long before Kim got wind of the collectability of “Girl Give Me Love” from garage-rock record sleuths. As did drummer Keith Roy, who died a year prior, and Marty Bonin, lead vocal shredder who died in 2016. Tommy Biessenberger, the organ player J.D. recruited for his good looks, retired from music after the Little Bits, making Kim the group’s only surviving musician.

When not attending to his office-cleaning business, Kim can be found practicing guitar, attending concerts or performing in a new lineup of Kingdom that includes his son, Treajure Roy, on bass.

When asked what their shows are like, Kim responds diplomatically.

“The market for this style of music is not really big in this area. But we are mostly just doing it for fun.”