Staying Fit
"He refused us," Lytle recalled, "We didn't see much of a future there because they were going to take most of the money and just let us do most of the work."
The three defected, and were replaced by four new Comets, including a permanent guitar player. "We gave him plenty of notice," Lytle said. "In fact we trained our replacements. They took those fellas on tour with us. They sat in the audience and they watched every move that we made."
Over the years, dozens of Comets came and went, with the band breaking up for good in 1962. Some of the later band members trademarked the Comets name in the 1980s and continue to tour as "Bill Haley's Comets."
Ambrose, Richards and Lytle formed their own group, the Jodimars (for Joey, Dick and Marshall). After that group split up four years later, Lytle started his own band, Tommy Page and the Page Boys. By 1967, he left show business to work as a real estate agent in California.
But in 1987, Richards called the other band members out of retirement to play at a tribute to Dick Clark in Philadelphia.
"We hadn't played together in about 25 years," Lytle recalled. "We went into this rehearsal hall and about an hour later, it all started to come back. And, boy, we started sounding like Bill Haley's old original band. We went on that show and did "Shake Rattle and Roll" and "Rock Around the Clock" and just knocked them out."
Two years later, with three other Comets, they began performing all over the world as the Original Comets, mixing in some of their own songs like "We Ain't Dead Yet" and "The Viagra Rock," which Lytle cowrote (and unsuccessfully tried to sell to Pfizer, the drug's manufacturer) with Warren Farren.
