Category Archives: History

A Word on Words

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A Word on Words

 

In his latest book, author Roy Blount, Jr., puts the English language under the microscope.

 

November 13, 2008Despite frayed nerves and his fears that flawed voting machines would ruin another presidential contest, author Roy Blount, Jr., was his typical dry, comical self during an Election Day telephone conversation from his Massachusetts home. Having voted at 7:30 a.m., he confessed, “I can’t stand to listen to anybody talk about it anymore. I just want it to be over.” Blount talked about his latest book, Alphabet Juice, which offers amusing ruminations about the origins, meanings, and distinctive sounds of select words. Blount will discuss Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory on November 18, 6:30 p.m., at a charity event hosted by Alabama Booksmith at the Doubletree Hotel.

Black & White: As a Georgian, were you excited when Jimmy Carter was elected president?

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Author Roy Blount, Jr., will be signing his new book at a charity event benefitting WBHM. See below for details. (click for larger version)

 

 

Roy Blount: Yeah, I was sort of astonished and bemused. I just never expected anybody from Georgia to get elected president. I liked Mo Udall in the primaries. But when Carter got nominated, I was for him. I wrote a book called Crackers, which was largely inspired by my surprise that the leader of the free world was, all of a sudden, a white guy from Georgia. When we were watching the nominating convention, my brother-in-law Gerald, who is from east Texas, jumped up and hollered, “We ain’t trash no more!”

You once compared Democratic presidential candidate and philanderer Gary Hart to former Alabama governor Big Jim Folsom because of Folsom’s habit of kissing women on the campaign trail.

I never met Big Jim Folsom, but I heard a lot of good stories about him. Supposedly, he was at an air show with a bunch of French people. The Alabama National Guard had some kind of trick-flying formation. And all of a sudden a bunch of them ran into each other and exploded. There was an awkward pause and Folsom said, “Well, kiss my ass if that ain’t a show.”

Until I found it in Alphabet Juice, I was not familiar with the word “swive.” [Blount writes: "As early as the beginning of the fourteenth century, this was the most common slang term for 'to do it with someone.' It's a good one, too, smoother—might even say more suave—than the F-word."]

“Swive” is a good word, I think. It has a kind of nice force to it. It’s like “swing.” Most of the “sw” words, like “swing and swag and swagger,” are kind of groovy. A word that starts with “f” is often harsh.

You recount film critic Pauline Kael’s review of Reds, where she wrote that Warren Beatty’s character was “pussy-whipped,” and you told her that the New Yorker would never print such a word.

I suggested she change that to “uxorious,” and she just rolled her eyes. [Kael eventually described Beatty's character as "timid."]

Do you recall any particular arguments with editors regarding words you were defending?

I remember I went down to Mansfield, Louisiana, to interview the mother and the football coach of [Major League pitcher] Vida Blue because I was doing a story about him for Sports Illustrated. And I talked to his mother, and then I went and interviewed his old football coach. The coach said, “Well, Vida’s left-handed but if he got in a tight, he could throw with his right.” The editor wanted to change it to: “If he got in a tight ‘spot,’ he could throw with his right.” I said, “No, no, no! It’s got to rhyme!” I finally talked him into it, but he just didn’t see why. [The editor] thought that would be confusing: “Nobody’s going to understand. They would think that we inadvertently left out a word.”

You once wrote: “Rush Limbaugh is like Dom DeLuise trying to do George Wallace.” Have you ever met Limbaugh?

[Laughing] I’d forgotten that, but I’m glad I said it.

No . . . We don’t travel in the same circles. I haven’t listened to Rush in a long time. He reminds me of all these people of my ethnic background that I have, to some extent, justly scorned. In my formative years, I felt embarrassed by all the white Southern men who were holding forth in various mean-spirited and dismissive ways. I realized that I had some kind of connection to that heritage and I needed to just separate myself from it and explain it to some extent and all that. But suddenly, when people like Rush Limbaugh came along, basically saying the same thing—except a little less crudely, I suppose—that really pissed me off.

Do you think Al Franken would make a good senator?

Well, I haven’t been following his race. I know Franken a little bit. It’s strange for a comedian to aspire to be a senator, of course. But [former Republican House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay was an exterminator, wasn’t he? And, I hear, a good one. &

Admission is $35 and includes a signed copy of Alphabet Juice. The evening’s proceeds will benefit WBHM 90.3 radio. The Doubletree Hotel is located at 808 20th Street South; 933-9000.

Confessions of a Bicycle Thief

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Confessions of a Bicycle Thief

In springtime, a boy’s fancy turns to breaking the law.

April 06, 2006

Thirty years ago, a pair of college pals and I got the bright idea to ride our bicycles to Pensacola during Auburn University’s spring break. But only two of us owned bikes. In 1976, Biggin Hall on campus was home to the school of architecture; industrial design students were assigned to the building’s basement. Tim was the friend without a bicycle. However, he was studying industrial design, and thus experienced at operating the assorted machinery and power tools that were part of his curriculum. The three of us lived on the same floor at Magnolia Dormitory. Aware that a student residing a couple of floors above us who was going home to Nebraska for spring vacation never locked his blue Schwinn to any permanent structure in the stairwell, instead looping a heavy chain and lock around the rear wheel and bike frame so it could not be ridden away by a thief, we decided in desperation to borrow his bike for our trip.

Aware that a student residing a couple of floors above us was going home to Nebraska for spring vacation, we decided in desperation to borrow his bike for our trip.

We loaded the Schwinn into the trunk of my Chevelle and drove through a deserted campus to the industrial design lab. We scouted for a campus night watchman making his rounds as we crept down to the basement machine shop with the locked-up bicycle. Shortly, an unbearably loud bandsaw-type contraption disrupted the silence of the ghost town the Auburn campus became between quarters. It took 15 minutes to cut the chain loose from the bike. The basement lab had windows that could be seen from the street. Should we be spotted sawing a locked chain off of a bicycle, we doubted that the security guard or any campus cop driving by would believe that we were simply borrowing the bike. Before we could finish, a night watchman walked into the room. Luckily, it was the campus security guard whom Joey, the other friend in our trio of bandits, and I knew from nights spent working on oil paintings in a building nearby. He recognized us and, amazingly, bought our story that we were slicing off the chain because we could not remember the combination to the lock.

The next morning, we drove to my hometown of Selma in the Chevelle with one bike in the trunk and two strapped on top of the automobile (Selma to Pensacola was a much shorter trip than bicycling from Auburn.) At sunrise the following day, we pedaled off on our adventure down Highway 41, a two-lane that led us to a county road, which took us to Oak Hill at the end of day one of our trip, some 50 miles. After stopping at a small grocery late that afternoon to inquire if there were any churches where we could spend the night (due to a drizzling rain), we were instead offered a stable in the backyard of the proprietor’s home a few miles away. Settled into our sleeping bags, we suddenly heard the grocery owner’s wife shouting at her husband from the house: “There’s damn rattlesnakes out there in that damn stable! Let those damn boys sleep up here at the house!” The remainder of the evening was spent on the couple’s stately front porch.

None of us had proper bikes for a 300-mile journey, and our pathetic 10-speed bicycles made the unexpectedly hilly terrain of southwest Alabama a grueling workout. Forty miles farther south by lunch the next day, there wasn’t much fun being had. We were in no shape to pedal all the way to Florida. Finally resorting to flagging down pickup trucks, we lied to an elderly man who pulled over to help, claiming mechanical problems. Three rides later, we arrived at sunset on the outskirts of Pensacola.

We spent the days riding, swimming, and scouting for potential shelter should it rain come bedtime. Each evening we indulged in cheap draft beer and loud bands knocking off Led Zeppelin and Stones covers at beach-front lounges. After midnight, sleeping bags were drunkenly hauled as close to the water as the tides allowed. Few experiences are more hypnotic and peaceful than drifting off to sleep outdoors as waves crash against the shore a couple of hundred feet away. The steady drone of the surf, the stars, and breaking whitecaps were mesmerizing, and a cure for even the worst insomnia. After three days of carousing the bars of Pensacola and sleeping on the beach at night, we headed back north.

The first day we got as far as Atmore, Alabama, without bumming rides. It began to rain. Not wanting to spend the money or violate the spirit of true adventure by getting a motel room, we went to the police station to see if they could suggest a free place to stay. They did. We were given a cell for the night but were told not to close the jail door; the morning shift would never believe our story if we had to ask the jailers to let us out because we accidently locked ourselves up. Having secured sleeping quarters, we walked to a city diner that evening, then went to see the film Shampoo at the town’s lone movie theater. Later, back at the jail, we laughed ourselves to sleep at the spectacle of spending the night in a jail cell with an open door—with a stolen bicycle in our possession.

Pedaling out of town the next morning, we discussed the plight of those locked up in the federal prison on the outskirts of Atmore as we cycled past the scary-looking penitentiary on the highway. The three of us wondered aloud what percentage of those locked up had bicycle theft on their rap sheets. Though taking a different route back to Selma, pedaling again became a strenuous bore, and we reverted to the same lies that had gotten us most of the way to Pensacola in the backs of trucks. By noon, we had reached Camden, about 20 miles south of Selma. While eating lunch at a local cafe, a woman in the next booth overheard us speculating about how long it would take to reach Selma. She was a photographer for the Auburn Plainsman, the school paper, and when she learned that we were Auburn students, she requested a photo with a caption detailing how three students spent their spring vacation. Forgetting we had a stolen bicycle from the Auburn campus, we failed to consider the consequences of having our picture splashed across the front page of the school paper.

One act of theft was enough to last me a lifetime. Tim had probably had his fill, too. Oddly, Joey soon began getting his kicks dressing in black from head to toe (including smearing black paint on his face), roaming the Auburn campus in the middle of the night to steal potted plants from outside stores and residences. He boasted of eluding the police on several occasions.

We got back to campus before the Nebraska kid returned to Auburn for spring quarter. The stolen Schwinn was returned to its proper place in the dormitory stairwell, as had been our plan all along. We even saved the butchered chain with accompanying lock, draping the chain across the frame and relishing the guy’s probable astonishment that his chain had been cut, yet his bicycle was still where he had left it a week earlier. &

 

Noah&’s Ark in Orbit

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Noah&’s Ark in Orbit

Chimpanzees and dogs were space travel’s first guinea pigs.

May 18, 2006
More than a decade before Soviet cosmonauts and American astronauts blasted into outer space aboard rockets, a squadron of chimpanzees, rhesus monkeys, mice, mongrel dogs, and French cats were sent into space to ensure that space travel was viable for humans. Their missions tested the effects of weightlessness on organisms, especially their behavior under the stress of blastoff and zero gravity. Leave it to the French to launch a feline. In 1963, French scientists sent a female named Felix into orbit on a Veronique AGI rocket. An abandoned street cat, Felix was one of 14 felines specially trained in centrifuges and compression chambers in preparation for space flight. Ten of the original 14 cats were eliminated from consideration due to their propensity for eating too much. Mercifully, the French arranged for Felix’s capsule to parachute onto land instead of in the ocean.

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Nicknamed “Muttnick” by the U.S. Press, canine cosmonaut Laika survived 10 days in space. (click for larger version)

Animals began flying on spaceships immediately after World War II. Four monkeys, each named Albert (I, II, III, and IV, respectively), were launched aboard captured German V-2 rockets during American post-war tests. Each monkey’s parachute failed to open. Mice, on the other hand, often survived high-speed impacts on their return to Earth. In 1959, four black mice were launched on a Thor Agena A rocket that carried a spy satellite. The mice perished when the Agena upper stage fired downward instead of skyward, sending the vehicle into the Pacific Ocean. Official speculation was that the mice would have survived had their crash occurred on land. Adding to the mystery of possible spy sabotage, the dead mice were a backup crew that had been assigned to the mission after an earlier tragedy. The original rodent crew was found dead of chemical overdose after eating the krylon that had been sprayed on their cages to cover rough edges.

Space Hounds

In the early 1950s, the Russians strapped dogs, instead of monkeys, into rockets because dogs were assumed to be less fidgety in flight. Females were chosen due to the relative ease of controlling bodily waste. Soviet R-1 series rockets carried a total of nine dogs in hermetically sealed containers. Each was ejected from the spacecraft and parachuted to recovery at the end of the mission. Two dogs were onboard because more scientific evaluation allowed for more accurate test results. Dezik and Tsygan (“Gypsy”) were the first dogs launched in August 1951. Both were successfully retrieved. A month later, Dezik went back up, this time with a dog named Lisa. The pair did not survive. Smelaya (“Bold”) and Malyshka (“Little One”) were later scheduled for spaceflight, but the day before launch, Smelaya ran away. Two days later the dog wandered back to the launchpad and the test flight was successful.

Laika (“Barker”) was the first animal to orbit the earth. No plans had been made to bring Laika back alive from her ride on Sputnik 2 in 1957. She was a small, three-year-old, stray mongrel (mostly Siberian husky) rescued from the streets of Moscow. The U.S. press nicknamed her “Muttnik.” Flight controllers monitored Laika’s heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing. It was determined that she barked repeatedly and ate her food during her 10 days alive on the flight before her oxygen ran out. Sputnik 2 eventually burned up in the outer atmosphere in April 1958. A statue honoring Laika and cosmonauts killed in flight was erected in 1997 at Star City outside Moscow. The dog can be seen peeping out from behind the cosmonauts.

 

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(click for larger version)

A year before Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space on Vostok I in 1961, the dogs Strelka (“Little Arrow”) and Belka (“Squirrel”) rode a Vostok prototype spacecraft into orbit. The dogs were the first animals to return alive after orbiting Earth. Strelka gave birth after returning to earth. One of the puppies was presented to Caroline Kennedy as a gift by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. The bodies of Strelka and Belka remain preserved at the Memorial Museum of Astronautics in Moscow. Belka is confined behind a glass case in the museum, while Strelka is part of a traveling exhibit that tours the world.

Among the last canines to ride in space were Veterok (“Breeze”) and Ugoyok (“Little Piece of Coal”) aboard Kosmos 110 in 1966. The purpose of the flight was to determine the prolonged effects of radiation during space travel. The dogs established a record for canines of 21 sustained days in space, a mark that humans finally surpassed in June 1974 with the Skylab 2 mission.

Space Apes

The United States sent monkeys into space instead of dogs to determine if the stress of space travel and weightlessness would affect basic motor skills or the ability to think clearly. In 1952, a pair of Philippine monkeys named Patricia and Mike were the first primates to survive spaceflight. Joining the monkeys were mice named Mildred and Albert. The monkeys were strapped into their seats but Mildred and Albert were allowed to float freely in zero-gravity. In 1959, Gordo, a squirrel monkey, flew 600 miles in a Jupiter rocket one year after the Soviets launched Laika. Gordo died on splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean when a flotation device failed. Nevertheless, Navy doctors determined from monitoring his respiration and heartbeat that humans could withstand a similar trip.

Sam and Miss Sam were a pair of rhesus monkeys named for the acronym for the U.S. Air Force School of Aviation Medicine. Housed in a cylindrical capsule, Sam was launched on December 4, 1959 in a Mercury spacecraft atop a Little Joe rocket. His mission was to specifically test the launch escape system. One minute into the flight at a speed of 3,685 miles-per-hour, the Mercury capsule aborted from the Little Joe launch vehicle. The spacecraft landed safely in the Atlantic Ocean, and Sam was recovered a few hours later. Miss Sam also tested the escape system a few weeks afterward. Upon being reunited, the two monkeys reportedly embraced.

 

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Ham was the first chimpanzee to fly in space. (click for larger version)

Riding a Mercury Redstone rocket, Ham was the first chimpanzee in space. Born in the French Camaroons, West Africa, Ham came to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico in 1959. His flight was the precursor to Alan Shepard’s 1961 suborbital journey that made Shepard the first American in space. After leaving NASA, the chimp was placed on exhibit at the Washington Zoo in 1963 and later at the North Carolina Zoological Park where he lived alone until he died in 1980.

The best animal spaceflight story of all concerns the mission accomplished by a chimpanzee named Enos. His flight was a full dress rehearsal for the Mercury launch on February 20, 1962, which would make Lt. Colonel John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth. Purchased from the Miami Rare Bird Farm in 1960, Enos completed more than 1,250 hours of training for his mission at the University of Kentucky and Holloman Air Force Base. His training regime was more intense than Ham’s because he would be exposed to weightlessness and high g-forces for longer periods of time. Three days before his November 1961 flight, Enos was chosen to fly on board a Mercury Atlas 5. The chimp was originally scheduled to complete three orbits but was brought back after the second because the spacecraft was not maintaining proper altitude. One of the stabilizing rockets on the Mercury capsule had malfunctioned, causing the ship to spin in circles as it orbited Earth.

Then another problem arose. Something went wrong with the wiring that controlled the shock and reward system. Enos had been trained through a reward-and-punishment, “electrical shock” system that included pulling designated levers as part of daily tasks. However, the system malfunctioned during the mission, and Enos received jolts of electricity when he should have received banana pellets. Scientists at mission control assumed that Enos would do whatever it took not to be shocked and therefore compromise the mission. Despite the 79 electrical shocks he received for doing his tasks correctly, the chimp performed his commands as he had been trained. After recovery from the Atlantic Ocean, Enos reportedly jumped for joy and ran around the deck of the aircraft carrier, gleefully shaking hands with his rescuers. &

First Lady of Stock Car Racing

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First Lady of Stock Car Racing

Sixty years ago Louise Smith discovered a new way to chase the boys.

May 04, 2006On Memorial Day weekend, the greatest automobile race in the world, the Indianapolis 500, runs for the 90th time. Danica Patrick, who became the first woman to lead an Indy 500 during her inaugural Indy race in 2005, will again be the focus. Patrick finished fourth and was roundly praised for her fearless skills at “mixing it up with the boys.” But half a century ago, a racing pioneer named Louise Smith had already pushed her way into the racing man’s world by winning 38 races on small dirt tracks from Alabama to Canada.

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Louise Smith died on April 15 at age 89 after a long bout with cancer. In 1999, she was the first woman inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in Talladega. Challenging men in the 1940s and ’50s was not easy for Smith. “It was hard on me,” she told the Associated Press in 1998. “Them men were not liking it to start with, and they wouldn’t give you an inch . . . If you won a race, you sometimes had to fight. I remember grabbing a tire iron one time to help Buck Baker.”

Louise was known for her Dale Earnhardt-style aggression and breathtaking crashes. One night her car became airborne coming out of the second turn during a race. It took more than half an hour to free her from the wreckage with an acetylene torch. At a Mobile speedway she crashed into driving star Fonty Flock and wound up sitting on top of her car in the middle of a lake. She had a reputation for taunting Greenville, South Carolina, police into high-speed runs staged for the thrill of the chase. She was uncatchable. She once drank a fifth of liquor before meeting with one of her early racing sponsors, backing into a telephone pole as she waved good-bye. “Louise was a pistol,” recalled racing historian Mike Bell, who knew Smith. “It was all a party in those days.”

 

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Smith was fond of fast cars, hard liquor, and fights at the racetrack. (click for larger version)

 

Louise Smith and her husband, Noah, owned a junk yard in Greenville. Former dirt track racer J.B. Day was an orphan unofficially adopted by the Smiths. The couple allowed Day to sleep in a 1936 Cadillac in their salvage yard. “Yeah, I stayed there for seven or eight years,” said the 72-year-old Day in an interview a week after Smith’s death. “My mother died when I was real small. [Louise and her husband] were good to me. They were like my mother and daddy.” Day remembered Smith’s fearlessness. “She’d run with the men . . . Louise was a ball of fire in her day.”

Smith began racing in 1946 when NASCAR founder Bill France was promoting a race at Greenville-Pickens Speedway in Greenville. It was not only Louise Smith’s first time to compete, but also the first race she’d ever witnessed. “They were trying to think of what they could do to spice up the show,” explained Bell. “And somebody said, ‘Get Louise Smith to drive. She’s crazy; she’ll drive anything.’” She raced a 1939 Ford modified coupe and finished third. “In those days 300 or 400 fans was a big crowd, and Bill France thought I could put more people in the stands,” Louise Smith once recounted. “[Before the race] they told me if I saw a red flag to stop,” Smith recalled. “They didn’t say anything about a checkered flag.” All the drivers except Smith came in at the end of the race after the checkered flag had been thrown. “I’m out there just flyin’ around the track. Finally somebody remembered they told me not to stop until I saw the red flag.”

In 1947, Smith drove her husband’s brand-new Ford coupe to Daytona to watch the races held on the beach. She couldn’t resist joining the fray. NASCAR officials gave Louise the number 13. Superstitious, she attempted to swap it for another. Smith recalled the story years ago to an interviewer. “I went all down the line trying to trade that ‘13’ off,” said Smith. “[Other drivers] said, ‘Aw, Lou, just follow us through that north turn.’ So I followed them, but when I got to the north turn seven cars were piled up. I hit the back of one of them, went up in the air, cut a flip, and landed on my top. Some police officers turned the car back over, and I finished 13th.” She left the wrecked Ford at an Augusta, Georgia, repair shop on the way back home to South Carolina. “Her husband said, ‘Where’s the car, Louise?’ And she said, ‘That ol’ trap broke down in Augusta.’ Her husband showed her the newspaper. The wrecked car was on the front page.”

 

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Smith poses inside her racecar after surviving another horrific crash. (click for larger version)

 

Bill France soon put Louise Smith on the modified touring circuit. She was paid up to $150 per race to pack grandstands from Alabama to Canada as a novel, but fearlessly competitive, barnstormer. Before meeting France, she had struggled financially. Smith once had to pawn her jewelry to bail out some fellow drivers who got into a fight—complete with flying chairs—at a restaurant after a race. “Money was nothing back then,” Louise Smith once reflected. “Sometimes it seemed like the more you drove, the less money you had. I remember one time Buck Baker and Lee Petty and I had to put our money together just to split a hot dog and a Coke.” She had no regrets: “Yeah, I won a lot, crashed a lot, and broke just about every bone in my body. But I gave it everything I had.” &

Dead Folks 2006

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Dead Folks 2006

A look back at the notable names and personalities who called it quits last year.

January 26, 2006The Icons

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Johnny Carson

 

Johnny Carson

Let’s concede that Johnny Carson had no competition when he took over the nation’s bedrooms back in the ’60s. Now that we’ve spent more than a decade with Letterman and Leno, there’s little doubt that Carson would still be our first choice from 300 channels of late-night diversions. “The Tonight Show” had been around long before his long hosting stint began, but Carson elevated the art of the celebrity interview. Carson represented millions of befuddled Americans as he steered his couch through the social upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s. He was relentlessly polite while constantly testing the shifting boundaries of double entendres—and his younger guests’ gullibility, as best illustrated when Carson tried to gently inform Susan Sarandon that her guru probably didn’t really live on oxygen, and likely occasionally snuck away to get something to eat.

The power of Carson’s nightly monologue has been exaggerated over the years, but he still famously created a panic when joking about a toilet-paper shortage. Still, none of his imitators could ever create memorable characters like movie host Art Fern and psychic Karnak the Magnificent. His floundering during the 1980s couldn’t be blamed on declining talent. Instead, he—along with network brass—made the fatal error of trying to phase out reliable older guests in favor of younger talents who were effectively nonentities. Carson didn’t seem like an antiquity because he was out of touch; he seemed like an antiquity because he was feigning interest in celebrities who were already damn boring while still in their 20s. At least Carson was spared talking with contestants from reality shows when he retired in 1992. America was still grateful that Carson got more than a decade of proper rest before his death at the beginning of 2005. —J.R. Taylor

Richard Pryor

There weren’t many great meetings of minds back in the ’60s. One of the most important occurred when famous folkie Phil Ochs went to a posh fundraiser in Beverly Hills. A young black man in a waiter’s uniform brushed past Ochs while muttering about how all the good guilty liberals could “at least pay the help.” Then the waiter went straight up to the podium and continued his complaints in the form of a vicious stand-up routine. Ochs would later commit suicide as he grew weary of addressing leftist hypocrisy. Richard Pryor was just getting started.

The holy trinity of controversial comics will always consist of Pryor, Lenny Bruce, and George Carlin. Of those three, only Pryor rates proper respect. He’d already scared enough Hollywood figures to be denied the lead role in Blazing Saddles after co-writing the screenplay back in 1974. (To be fair, Clifton Davis was probably the smarter choice as a comedic leading man.) Pryor would have to wait until 1976 before he finally broke through with Gene Wilder in Silver Streak, and only became a proper movie star when the pair returned for 1980′s Stir Crazy. In the meantime, his turns on “Saturday Night Live” and his own short-lived NBC series—along with 1979′s Live in Concert—were legendary comic encounters that, sadly, would be censored today as contrary to good leftist sensibilities.

Then things fell apart. Pryor quickly lost control of the weak grasp he had on reality and succumbed to a wide assortment of vices. By the release of 1981′s Bustin’ Loose, his confused state and resultant debts had already made him a willing pawn of the film studios. A series of lame comedies and indulgent projects squelched Pryor’s rising star—and nothing had changed when Pryor attempted a comeback in useless vehicles such as Critical Condition and Moving. In the end, Pryor’s legacy is that early stage work. The first few comedy albums are still out there, and Pryor remains untouchable as a truly original angry comic. —J.R.T.

 

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Richard Pryor (click for larger version)

 

Pope John Paul II

Nobody lets a Pope pass without plenty of attention. Still, let’s take the time to celebrate Pope John Paul II—born Karol Wojtyla—as the first Pope who spent his career as a pop-culture icon. Over the course of his 26-year reign, he would release CDs, have his early plays performed, and star in his very own comic book. He’d also be played by Albert Finney in 1984 and Jon Voight (in what would became a posthumous salute) last year. Don’t forget the accessories, either. John Paul’s bulletproof Popemobile became an iconic symbol after an assassination attempt, and his face adorned such fine Popeabilia as neckties and waterproof digital watches. He also appeared with Bruce Willis in 1998′s Armageddon. Pope Benedict XVI already has a hard act to follow. —J.R.T.

Rosa Parks

Fed up with being pushed around by white people, a weary 42-year-old Rosa Parks told a white man “no” when he demanded that she surrender her seat to him on a Montgomery bus in 1956. She was fined $10 for refusing. Within days, Parks’ simple but courageous stance launched a bus boycott in the city.

Her later years found a more litigious Parks. In 1999 she sued the band Outkast for using her name without her permission in the song “Rosa Parks.” After having the case initially thrown out, she later hired famed attorney Johnnie Cochran. The case was eventually settled with Outkast paying an undisclosed sum. The 2002 film Barbershop featured Cedric the Entertainer as a cranky barber who argues that Parks was not the first to refuse to give up her seat and had received the notoriety because she was an NAACP secretary. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton led a boycott of the movie until NAACP president Kweisi Mfume said he thought the controversy was blown out of proportion. An irate Parks skipped the 2003 NAACP Image Awards, hosted by Cedric the Entertainer. —Ed Reynolds

Dead Folks 2006 (Part 5)

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Dead Folks 2006 (Part 5)

A look back at the notable names and personalities who called it quits last year.

January 26, 2006

Film and TV

 

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Virginia Mayo

 

Virginia Mayo

Peaches-and-cream complexion, mega-watt blonde hair, and a five-star pair of legs made Mayo a second-tier pinup gal behind Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable. Often cast as a chorus girl or a can’t-bring-her-home-to-Mom date, Mayo probably typecast herself with an excellent performance in The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Playing the wife of a bomber pilot returning from the war, Mayo must have infuriated World War II-era viewers by registering, in no small way, her disappointment at finally seeing the flyboy out of uniform. She was not really dangerous, but never dependable, the type of gal who always stood by her man—until distracted by a diamond necklace, a shiny car, or a night on the town.

She also scored a knockout role opposite James Cagney in the insanely brutal crime thriller White Heat. She was Verna, the deceitful wife of homicidal thug Cody Jarrett. As an out-of-control hoodlum, Cagney was a blazing inferno, but audiences also noticed that the scheming blonde was no slouch at generating heat either. Did she really leap piggyback onto Cagney and ride him upstairs to the bedroom? Could you do that in 1949? —David Pelfrey

Sheree North

Bona-fide babe with a few miles on her—that’s probably the best way to describe the type of women North portrayed at the peak of her career in the late 1960s and early 1970s. North’s start in show business had something to do with her having a striking face and precisely the same “dimensions” as Marilyn Monroe. Fox studio bosses hired North as a threat to hold over an increasingly troublesome Monroe, so naturally the va-va-voom replacement got roles in such hubba-hubba foolishness as Living It Up; How to Be Very, Very Popular; and The Lieutenant Wore Skirts.

Her “look” during the 1950s was the Buxom Blonde Bombshell, but North actually looked better, and leaner, as she entered her thirties, probably because her features were better suited for the earthy, Ventura Highway, older-broad-next-door type (flowing mane, cutoff jeans, open blouse). She was in every medical, Western, and crime television drama you can name, but her best work is on the big screen in Charley Varrick, The Outfit, and other vulgar crime thrillers for which early ’70s Hollywood is notorious. That’s North, by the way, as Lou Grant’s girlfriend on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and as Kramer’s mom on Seinfeld. —D.P.

Paul Winchell

Winchell first gained notoriety as a ventriloquist behind dummies Jerry MaHoney and Knucklehead Smiff. A prolific inventor, he held 30 patents, including one for an artificial heart he designed in 1960. Winchell was also the voice of Tigger in the animated Winnie the Pooh. —Ed Reynolds

Mitch Hedberg

My friend was doing acid, and he said, “Man, the woods are really trippy, aren’t they?” And I said, “Maybe the woods aren’t trippy; it’s just our perception of them that’s trippy.” And then I realized I should have just said, “Yeah!”

That’s the quintessential Hedberg gag: drug reference, 1970s-era lingo, and stoner logic. The standup comic’s shoulder-length shag, blue-tinted shades, and platform shoes reinforced the ’70s vibe, but the soundness of his logic somehow made his jokes a lot funnier than they might be in a less elegant form. Elegance, after all, is any mathematician’s or philosopher’s goal when crafting a logic equation. Hedberg surprised audiences with the speed and concision with which he made his numerous, hilarious deductions, and because surprise is a key element of humor, Hedberg was always halfway home to cracking us up in the first place. Nonetheless, the crucial factor in Hedberg’s humor was that his logic, surprising or not, was unassailable.

Due to a confused, brink-of-disaster delivery, those loopy observations invariably sounded like pot-induced epiphanies, but in Hedberg’s case it’s as though he got so high that he bypassed stupid and came all the way back around to wickedly insightful.

 

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Mitch Hedberg

Sometimes my club intro is, “You may have seen this next comedian on ‘David Letterman.’ A better intro would be: “You may have seen this next comedian at the store.” The audience would go, “Why, hell yes I have! He likes kiwi fruit.”

To open one of his many Letterman gigs, Hedberg once briefly scanned a slip of paper and declared, “Okay, I’ve got 13 jokes, ready to go!” That got a big laugh. I asked him in a 2002 interview why such a straightforward statement was funny, and his response was even funnier: “Well, it is true that there were 13 jokes in that set. Maybe audiences just aren’t ready for the truth. They laughed because they were suddenly nervous. But that’s very strange, because they would not have known the absolute truth until I reached the 13th joke and then stopped.”

I also asked him why he laughed so much during his gigs. “That’s a good question, because the jokes are not cracking me up. As you may have surmised, I am already familiar with the material.”

Not enough people were familiar with Hedberg’s material, unfortunately, because apart from a few appearances on “That 70’s Show,” he was resolutely committed to the stand-up circuit, as opposed to the celebrity status that television specials and sitcoms bring comedians these days. Further hampering his rise as the Next Big Thing was his reputation as an unreliable abuser of substances. (In Hedberg’s mind, that would technically mean that he couldn’t be counted on to abuse drugs.)

That’s a shame, since he was the only genuinely innovative thinker in the comic realm of the past ten years. Jon Stewart, thanks to a team of writers, can mug for the camera and win points doing political satire. Ray Romano can be charming and amusing. Dave Chappelle is merely a one-man series of SNL skits, the punch lines of which are telegraphed far in advance. Lewis Black’s fury lasts only so long. Jimmy Kimmel is, well, he’s involved with a very hot Jewish gal who happens to be the funniest woman on earth. Chris Rock has simply updated Richard Pryor, as though both were some kind of hardcore software.

Mitch Hedberg, by way of strong contrast, stood on the stages of forlorn comedy clubs in Houston and San Diego and Birmingham, reeling off dozens of surreal, absurd, and inventive truths. There was one unassailable bit of logic that seems to have escaped Hedberg, or perhaps it was just that fourteenth joke he didn’t get around to telling until it was too late—that drug and alcohol abuse can destroy careers and kill people at a very young age. On the other hand, it could be that his jokes were not that funny, and perhaps his logic was not that sound. Maybe it was just our perception of his . . . never mind. Ponder these classics and decide.

I read that MTV’s Real World got 40,000 applications. That’s amazing, such an even number. You would have thought it would be 40,008.

I never joined the army because “at ease” was never that easy to me. It seemed rather uptight still. I don’t relax by parting my legs slightly and putting my hands behind my back. That does not equal “ease.” “At ease” was not being in the military.

This one commercial said, “Forget everything you know about slipcovers.” So I did, and it was a load off of my mind. Then the commercial tried to sell slipcovers, but I didn’t know what they were!

I got a belt on that’s holding up my pants, and the pants have belt loops that hold up the belt. What’s going on here? Who is the real hero?

A mini-bar is a machine that makes everything expensive. When I take something out of the mini-bar, I always plan to replace it before they check it off and charge me, but they make that stuff impossible to replace. I go to the store and ask, “Do you have coke in a glass harmonica? —D.P.

John Fiedler

As the voice of Piglet in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons, Feidler’s face is probably best recognized as the nervous, henpecked patient in group therapy on “The Bob Newhart Show.” Oddly, Feidler died the day after Paul Winchell, the voice of Tigger. —E.R.

 

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John Fiedler

Sidney Luft

There are really only two kinds of Hollywood legends: those whom everyone reveres, and those whom everyone ridicules. Sidney Luft, Judy Garland’s third husband, falls into the unhappy second category. His marriage to the movie icon led almost immediately to a series of funny, not to say cruel, one-liners, such as studio boss Jack L. Warner’s zinger that “Sid is one of those guys who promised his parents that he would never work a day in his life—and he made good on the promise.”

That’s not the meanest thing anybody ever said about Sid Luft, and it isn’t entirely fair, either. Throughout his hectic and financially troubled life, Luft could often be found busting his ass—only busting it in all the wrong ways. The tough (and volatile) amateur boxer was a test pilot for World War II aircraft, managed a fledgling custom automobile outfit in Beverly Hills, and, after dabbling in horse racing, he produced a couple of B-pictures. His big project was Judy Garland’s “comeback,” which involved, well, getting married to her. It also involved the rather savvy business of transforming the drug-addicted, emotionally unstable movie star into a world-class torch singer, which was a crucial move considering that MGM, who was responsible for Judy’s condition in the first place, had basically dumped her onto the side of the road. Luft also produced the 1954 remake of A Star is Born, Judy’s comeback picture that was art imitating life in all kinds of ways.

Touring major venues around the world and hosting television variety shows ought to have made the Garlands—er, the Lufts—a wealthy couple, but something about bad accounting, mishandled expenses, and lawsuits over contracts had the notorious pair living paycheck to paycheck. Complicating the contactual disputes was Judy’s tendency to go on a binge for a series of no-shows. Even worse, sometimes she did show up. In 1965, Garland divorced Luft and moved on to one Mark Herron, whom she divorced after learning that he was gay, unfaithful, and involved with song and dance man Peter Allen.

That tawdry fiasco isn’t actually a chapter in Luft’s story, but it does earn him the distinction, shared with composer David Rose, as one of Judy Garland’s heterosexual husbands. After all, before Luft came along, Judy was married to Vincente Minnelli (Liza’s dad), and it certainly wasn’t predicted that Minnelli would ever be anyone’s dad. The director of musicals and sensitive melodramas was, as they phrased it in those days, musical and sensitive. This leads to the wittiest thing anyone ever said about Sid Luft. Canadian writer Mark Steyn, in his disturbingly thorough obituary for the former Mr. Judy Garland, described him as “an all but unique figure: a rare friend of Judy who wasn’t a Friend of Dorothy.” —D.P.

Ismael Merchant

The BBC’s online obituary for Ismael Merchant was followed by letters from around the globe expressing sympathy, loss, and fond memories of the legendary producer. An Irishman living in Cape Town thanked Merchant for a recipe for “chicken dijon in clove sauce”; an Indian man in Sheffield recalled his interview with Merchant during which the visibly exhausted producer exhibited much patience in “the hot Calcutta sun.” Another Indian man in New York recalled Merchant’s warm praise for director Satyajit Ray at a retrospective in New York City. The tributes ran for some length. Based on that outpouring, one couldn’t help suspecting that, irrespective of the Merchant Ivory Productions’ contribution to cinema, we had lost a bona-fide gentlemen whose influence on those he met extended far past their appreciation of his work.

That may be because the aptly named Merchant—the money man on the Merchant Ivory team—was by all accounts a charmer when it came to the art of persuasion, as contrasted with the standard film industry hustler. His handsome face and ready smile (in early years, many acquaintances and contacts assumed the Bombay native was a Bollywood idol), along with a knack for conversation and considerable culinary skills, could turn a pre-production meeting into a very pleasant and memorable evening. On a more practical level, it took some time for Merchant to convey fully his daunting knowledge of production design, period costume, and his fondness for literary heavyweights such as E.M. Forster and Henry James. Having investors sit down for a five-star curry dinner that Merchant himself prepared was the producer’s version of what Donald Trump calls “the art of the deal.”

But apart from all that, Merchant loved the hands-on, collaborative process of making movies, and teaming up with director James Ivory and writer Ruth Prawa Jhabvala in 1961 for a decades-long filmmaking venture (the longest partnership in the industry) was his way of proving it. The early productions were often good-to-excellent films that had limited distribution and success, but by the time of The Europeans, Maurice, The Bostonians, and A Room With a View, the phrase “Merchant Ivory” entered the lexicon as a term that described a certain kind of film, rather than merely indicating who made it.

 

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Ismael Merchant

 

Dead Folks 2006 (Part 6)

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Dead Folks 2006 (Part 6)

A look back at the notable names and personalities who called it quits last year.

January 26, 2006 

Music  

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Jim Capaldi (2nd from left) with Traffic. (click for larger version)

 

Robert Moog

We could have a discussion about Attack-Decay-Sustain-Release envelopes, waveforms, voltage-controlled oscillators, and other stuff that fellows with PhDs in engineering physics like to talk about. After all, Robert Moog (rhymes with “vogue”), creator of the Moog Synthesizer, had several degrees in physics and electrical engineering, and he certainly knew his stuff. But let’s avoid getting bogged down in technical details and consider the larger story instead, which begins just after the Bolshevik Revolution.

In 1919, mad Russian physicist Lev Sergeivich Termen, aka Leon Theremin, created a musical instrument that generated between two antennas a radio signal, the frequency and amplitude of which a “player” could control by hand, sort of like playing a violin without touching it. An ever-deluded Vladimir Lenin sent Theremin on a global tour with this minor novelty, primarily to show off the amazing avant garde technology that the new worker’s paradise was ostensibly making available to greedy, behind-the-curve capitalists. One of those capitalist outfits was RCA, who purchased manufacturing licenses for the bizarre instrument in the late 1920s. Two decades later the Theremin’s spooky sound was de rigueur in radio and film scores for mysteries, crime dramas, and—most prominently—science fiction thrillers and horror movies (see: The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet.)

Enter Robert Moog, a teenager light years ahead of his schoolmates and neighborhood chums, who in the early 1950s began making and selling Theremin kits as a hobby. For about 50 bucks, Moog’s astonishingly elegant sets allowed anyone with rudimentary skills in electronics to construct their very own instrument. Moog and his father sold about 1,000 kits in 1960. Building a Theremin, however, was a snap compared to playing the thing. Moog was already looking down the road for something even more elegant.

Enter Raymond Scott, a wigged-out composer, swing-band leader, electronics wizard, and studio engineer who may have been from another planet (some of those wild scores heard in Warner Bros. cartoons and “The Ren & Stimpy Show” are Scott originals). Moog and his father popped into Scott’s mammoth “lab” one afternoon and observed, among other wonders, a Moog theremin set that had been reconfigured by Scott into a type of keyboard instrument he called the Clavivox. “I have seen the future,” mused Moog, “and it is the keyboard interface.”

What followed was the creation of the Moog Synthesizer in various forms, but at a fraction of the cost of the big non-interface synthesizers made by universities and electronics companies during the early 1960s. Integrated circuits changed all that, and pretty soon Mellotrons, Arps, and Rolands were competing with Moog’s devastatingly efficient Series 900.

Nonetheless, it was with one of the 900 Series modular systems that the world got switched on to electronic music. In 1968, pianist Walter Carlos (later Wendy Carlos, thanks to gender reassignment therapy) released an album of Bach compositions played on the Moog. Switched-On Bach, one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time, went platinum. Pretty soon everybody was switching on. The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and sundry other pop bands dabbled, but by 1970, artists such as Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, Stevie Wonder, and just about every member of Genesis were getting very serious. Then came the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange (another Walter/Wendy Carlos effort), and Tangerine Dream, and Kraftwerk, and so on to digital synthesizers and computer sequencers, which the Moog synthesizer definitely is not. To get that space age, bachelor-pad sound that Stereolab is known for, you must use an analog device. Just ask Brian Eno.

This makes Robert Moog essentially the father of electronic music as it is made, purchased, and listened to today, even if he was not a composer or player; “I just make tools for others,” he often stated. He’s wrong about that, but physicists do tend to be reductionists at heart. Moog was actually a major catalyst in a quantum shift in modern culture and science. The story in which he had a key role has a parallel narrative, such that the relationship of these cosmic counterparts matches in strangeness the interplay of subatomic particles. Just as Moog and Raymond Scott and other guys in lab coats and crew cuts tinkered with waves and oscillations, so earlier did Edward Teller, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and colleagues manipulate previously unknown/unseen objects and energies to render forth nuclear energy.

The men in both narratives had an affinity for the new and improved, fully understanding the inevitable evolutions of the Kitchen of Tomorrow and the Car of the Future. They listened to swing, but it was the electric, atomic-age swing of the Les Paul guitar. They were squares, nerds, and horn-rimmed geeks that the girls secretly dug (recall Marilyn Monroe’s fascination with Albert Einstein). Their relationship with the enemy had its own curious waveform. Had it not been for the Soviets, Theremin might not have brought electronic music to our side of the globe. But then, without the Soviets, atomic weapon research would not have continued at its frantic pace. Without so many tests in the desert, there might not have been so many giant creatures emanating from Hollywood, but the electronic music team supplied the soundtracks just the same. There might not have been a space “race” either, in which case the space-age sounds of lounge music masters, minus the urgency, may have developed at a slower, less vulgar pace.

Either way, the research teams in both narratives were all about electrons; Raymond Scott’s most famous and instantly recognizable composition is “Powerhouse.” The business of energy entails positive and negative charges, and the two stories are charged with comparable symmetries. These mid-century brainiac physicists instigated a fascination with two things, one that we think we can’t live without and another that we can’t live with: Hi-Fis and Hydrogen Bombs. The space-age bachelor pad becomes the Home of Tomorrow, with a Philco or RCA Victor Hi-Fi in the den and a fallout shelter just south of the patio. The makers of The Bomb worked on the Manhattan Project, the key instruments of which were Uranium 238 and various synthetic elements; Robert Moog and Raymond Scott started their projects in basements in Manhattan, the end result of which was a synthetic instrument.

Polarities evolve from those symmetries. The atom bomb was a fission device; the H-bomb is a fusion device. The bachelor pad becomes a home only after the owner finds his counterpart. Robert Moog’s invention, a thoroughly modern device built for the future, reached the world only after it was used to make a best-selling record of classical compositions from the distant past. The performer on that album was a man who later became a woman.

The H-bomb geniuses and the electronics wizards invented things with properties and behaviors that modern physicists now say might not be correctly understood, if they exist at all. But until we learn for certain, let’s relish the fact that the very first nuclear events in the universe can be observed today in the form of radio signals. The term “radioactivity,” as the synthesizer band Kraftwerk pointed out decades ago, is a cosmic bit of double entendre. –David Pelfrey

Johnnie Johnson

Chuck Berry has for decades performed with no interest in whoever’s backing him on live dates. Berry simply shows up with his guitar and plays with whatever junkies have been corralled by the promoter into being his backup band for the evening. In his defense, though, Berry’s probably aware that he’ll never replicate his luck in hooking up with Johnnie Johnson. Johnson didn’t need Berry when the guitarist joined up with his Sir John Trio in 1953, but the pianist immediately saw that Berry’s tunes were future hits. Johnson’s arrangements became a vital part of developing what became Berry’s biggest songs. Johnson’s own part in rock history was revived when he joined the all-star Berry band assembled for Taylor Hackford’s concert film Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. Johnson would go on to perform well into the ’90s. He put on much better shows than Berry, of course. —J.R.T.

Danny Sugerman

He was the manager of The Doors, but that was after Jim Morrison’s death. Still, Danny Sugerman built himself a nice career as the ultimate Doors fan. He began answering their mail when he was just 14 and would go on to chronicle the band’s exploits in plenty of books. His own autobiography, Wonderland Avenue, would turn out to be the most interesting. At least Sugerman lived long enough to see The Doors reunite—which, in the band’s current incarnation, has probably hastened the death of many Doors fans. He was survived by wife Fawn Hall, who enjoyed some ’80s notoriety for her role in shredding documents as Oliver North’s secretary during the days of the Iran-Contra scandal. –J.R. Taylor

 

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Johnnie Johnson (click for larger version)

 

R.L. Burnside

February 2 marks a decade since a capacity crowd crammed into The Nick during a snowstorm to see the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and 69-year-old opening act R.L. Burnside. Spencer obviously dug how Burnside, a Mississippi hill-country blues man and erstwhile sharecropper, was the real deal. The next morning, the Blues Explosion headed to Holly Springs, Mississippi, to back Burnside for what became the A Ass Pocket of Whiskey album (reportedly recorded in a mere four hours). Though it received mixed reviews, the album became the best selling of Burnside’s career and paid for a new roof on his home. He had been recording since the late ’60s, and it must have had him scratching his head to see young, indie-rocker types suddenly turning up at his shows. He recorded a few more albums on the Fat Possum label, including the 1998 album Come On In. His 2001 album Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down was aptly named for a man who preferred to remain seated onstage. He died in Memphis. —Paul Brantley

Harold Leventhal

Anyone interested in booking prominent folk music stars 40 years ago usually rang up Harold Leventhal. He was the man responsible for Bob Dylan’s first major concert appearance in 1963 at Town Hall in New York City. Leventhal handled folk stars such as Dylan, Joan Baez, the Weavers, Woody Guthrie, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, as well as pop and rock acts such as Harry Belafonte, Johnny Cash, the Mamas and Papas, and Neil Young. He also produced the Arlo Guthrie film Alice’s Restaurant. —Ed Reynolds

Jothan Callins

A student of Amos Gordon at Jackson Olin High School, Callins went on to a career as an educator when not playing trumpet and keyboards with Stevie Wonder, The Lionel Hampton Orchestra, B.B. King, Max Roach, and many other jazz greats, most notably Sun Ra, for whom he also served a stint as music director. In 1978, Mr. Callins became the first jazz Artist in Residence for the Birmingham Public School System and helped found the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame. (He was later inducted there, as well.) He led his own Sounds of Togetherness, with which he toured internationally, founded The Birmingham Youth Jazz Ensemble, and authored more than 500 compositions. Explaining jazz improvisation to schoolchildren, Callins once put it this way: “Everybody gets to play. It’s like being at church and having testimony time. We all get a chance to say our piece.” –Bart Grooms

Ibrahim Ferrer

As a member of The Buena Vista Social Club, Cuban-born Ferrer became an international star and was featured in Wim Wenders’ documentary of the same title. –B.G.

Jim Capaldi

Drummer and lyricist for Traffic; he co-wrote most of their songs with Steve Winwood. –B.G.

Jimmy Smith

He radically redefined jazz organ in the mid-’50s, making it a bona fide solo instrument and influencing every jazz and rock player who came after him. Eschewing the tremolo typical of the organ sound of his day, Smith used the newly introduced (1955) Hammond B-3 and played lines based on the ideas of his favorite sax players (Coleman Hawkins, Don Byas), not keyboard men. He made numerous recordings, especially for Blue Note. Miles Davis, on first hearing Smith: “Man, this cat is the eighth wonder of the world!” –B.G.

Vassar Clements

Fiddler extraordinaire who played with Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and Jim and Jesse McReynolds, then later sat in with the likes of Paul McCartney, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead, Hank Williams, Jr., even Woody Herman; he can be heard on more than 2,000 albums. He combined the bluegrass of his background with jazz and seemed to fit in anywhere, even alongside Jerry Garcia and David Grisman in the hippie bluegrass quintet Old and in the Way. ––B.G.

Shirley Horn

One of jazz’s most sensual vocalists, Horn was both a protegée of and an influence on Miles Davis. Horn was also an accomplished pianist whose playing and singing meshed elegantly on her trademark ultra-slow ballads. Close Enough for Love (1989) is a fine first place to hear the woman who influenced Diana Krall and many others. –B.G.

Spencer Dryden

You’d imagine that the members of Jefferson Airplane are doing well. Some of them are still along for the ride playing as members of Starship, while fringe figures such as Jorma Kaukonen remain respected guitar masters who run their own pleasant rural empires. Property values in San Francisco stayed on the rise, too. Yes, it’s good to be a former member of Jefferson Airplane—unless you were Spencer Dryden, the veteran Airplane drummer who was living in a miserable place that hardly counted as a shack.

Not privy to publishing rights or particularly adult decisions, Dryden was a classic hippie casualty whose induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame couldn’t even rate him a cup of coffee. To be fair, the band had originally lost interest in the guy after he began carrying around a gun in the aftermath of Altamont. Not too coincidentally, Dryden had joined the Airplane as a replacement for original drummer Skip Spence, who would go on to cultish fame as another legendary acid-rock nutcase. At least Dryden benefitted from a 2004 fundraiser that was meant to help him with hip-replacement surgeries and other medical problems. It was still a bizarre end to a weird life—which included an idyllic Hollywood childhood under the auspices of his uncle, Charlie Chaplin. Most telling quote regarding Dryden, courtesy of an ex-wife: “He was so quirky, and he never intentionally hurt anyone.” —J.R.T.

Willie Hutch

 

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Spencer Dryden (click for larger version)

He stepped in to finish up “I’ll Be There” for the Jackson Five, and that pretty much guaranteed Willie Hutch any number of production jobs during the ’70s heyday of Motown. He was a natural purveyor of chart hits, too, having already made the adjustment from backwoods Texas soul to writing songs for The Fifth Dimension. However, Hutch would really make his pop-culture breakthrough with his film scores for The Mack and Foxy Brown—both of which were grandly intrusive experiments in funk and soul. (In the tradition of Curtis Mayfield’s work on Superfly, “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” continues to matter far more than any scene from The Mack.) Hutch was always welcome in the studio during the ’80s and ’90s, as well, and was still releasing strong work right up until 2002. Hutch also stayed around long enough to hear his “I Choose You” backing up the action in this year’s critically acclaimed pimp epic Hustle & Flow. –J.R.T.

Hasil Adkins

Wearing wraparound sunglasses and beaming a toothless grin as he danced in the audience to his own opening act (Southern Culture on the Skids), Hasil Adkins was clearly enjoying himself as he waited to go on stage. Minutes later Adkins was on stage alone with an acoustic guitar, singing in a captivating yet disturbing tenor that occasionally broke into a bad, but hypnotic, falsetto. He broke a string and smashed his guitar against the wall behind him without even bothering to turn around, then calmly asked to borrow someone else’s instrument. After the show, a roadie acquaintance told me that Adkins’ lunch routine was a pint of vodka and five cans of chicken noodle soup eaten straight from the can. He also consumed two gallons of coffee daily.

Adkins was the consummate hillbilly singer, the original madman who inspired The Cramps and other warped devotees of Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis to concoct a musical genre called “psychobilly.”

He claimed to have written more than 7,000 songs (with titles like “Boo Boo the Cat” and “Chocolate Milk Honeymoon”), and in 1970 he began mailing out thousands of tapes in an effort to secure a record deal. U.S. Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia gave one of Adkins’ tapes to President Nixon; the President responded to Adkins on White House stationery: “I am very pleased by your thoughtfulness in bringing these particular selections to my attention.” Adkins was found dead at his crudely constructed West Virginia shack at age 67 of as yet undetermined reasons. Foul play was ruled out. —E.R.

Baker Knight

Knight wrote hits for Ricky Nelson (“Lonesome Town”) and Elvis Presley (“The Wonder of You”) as well for Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Perry Como, among others. Knight was born in Birmingham, spending much of his 72-year life here. In 1956, he had a strong regional following with his band Baker Knight and the Knightmares. Ricky Nelson recorded 22 of Knight’s songs. —E.R.

Bobby Short

Singer/pianist whom The New Yorker called “one of the last examples (and indubitably the best) of the supper club singer or ‘troubadour;’” he worked at the Café Carlyle on Manhattan’s Upper East Side from 1968 to 2005. –B.G.

 

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Bobby Short (click for larger version)

 

Little Milton Campbell

Blues singer, guitarist and songwriter (“The Blues Is Alright,” “Your Wife Is Cheating on Us”). –B.G.

Paul Peña

Folk/blues singer; he wrote “Jet Airliner,” which was a hit for the Steve Miller Band, and was the central figure in the remarkable documentary Genghis Blues. –B.G.

Chet Helms

Chet Helms produced the first psychedelic light shows at the Fillmore West in San Francisco and staged free concerts in Golden Gate Park (when not fighting with promoter Bill Graham over whether to charge admission). “Chet was a hippie,” Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart said. “We were all hippies. He hated to charge for the music.” The story goes that he traveled to Austin, Texas, where he convinced Janis Joplin to hitchhike back to the West Coast with him. Helms was managing Big Brother and the Holding Company at the time and brought Joplin in to propel the band to stardom. Helms died at 63 of Hepatitis C complications. —E.R.

Jimmy Martin

A 1950s member of Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, Martin was an ornery man with a high, lonesome whine and a distinctive, fast-strumming rhythm guitar style. He’s probably best known for giving Mother Maybelle a run for her money as the show-stopper on the immortal 1970 album Will the Circle Be Unbroken?, a record that forced rednecks to forgive hippies for long hair and compelled hippies to forgive rednecks for not liking loud music. The two polar-opposite cultures admitted that they were really quite fond of each other, despite what Merle Haggard sang.

The Grand Ole Opry was too terrified of his reputation as an unpredictable drunk to invite Martin to join. He never got over the rejection; he often drove to the backstage of the Opry in a limo he owned (the license plate read KING JIM) on Saturday nights to drunkenly demand that he be allowed to perform. Martin died of bladder cancer and congestive heart failure at age 77. —E.R.

Dead Folks 2006 (Part 7)

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Dead Folks 2006 (Part 7)

A look back at the notable names and personalities who called it quits last year.

January 26, 2006 Authors/Illustrators

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Arthur Miller

 

 

Arthur Miller

What was the difference between the McCarthy hearings and the Salem witch trials? There weren’t any witches in Salem. Ignore that, though, and maybe you can find some meaning in “The Crucible” and the other writings of Arthur Miller. He hadn’t written a successful play since 1968, but Miller’s passing was still celebrated as an important event. This wasn’t because he was an important playwright. It’s because all of today’s good leftist playwrights have to celebrate Miller for bringing his absurd politics into high schools all over America. Fellow playwright Harold Pinter even tried to pretend that Miller was some kind of blacklisted figure.

Miller’s own leftist contemporaries, unsurprisingly, never considered him to be of much importance. “Death of a Salesman” wasn’t bad, but it still can’t compete with anything by Rod Serling or Paddy Chayefsky. At least Miller could proudly claim to have married Marilyn Monroe—but that achievement was pretty much ruined in the wake of “After the Fall,” a stage chronicling the marriage that was a pioneering masterpiece in midlife self-absorption. It helps to bear in mind that Bebe Buell once attributed her lust for Elvis Costello to “Arthur Miller Syndrome.” His final play would be yet another rehashing of having sex with Marilyn, so at least Miller had an understanding of his ultimate place in pop culture. –J.R. Taylor

Stan Berenstain

Plenty of parents and former children became very nostalgic when Stan Berenstain passed away. His wife Jan had been his partner in almost 40 years of Berenstain Bears books, as the clan’s illustrated adventures showed kids how to clean around the house and get ready for trips to the dentist—along with weirder stuff, as the Berenstains began to address issues such as drug abuse over the decades. The Berenstain Bears also made the inevitable transition to animated adventures and a bigger world of merchandising. However, all of this was pretty baffling to kids who’d first stumbled across the Berenstains’ hilarious early work as chroniclers of suburban angst. Racy paperback collections such as Baby Makes Four suggest that they could have been Erma Bombeck for those parents who’d just missed living by the Playboy Philosophy. —J.R.T.

Ed McBain

Fans of detective novels and mysteries are familiar with the 50-odd novels in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series. Fans of Hill Street Blues, Law & Order, Homicide, Police Story, and dozens of other television detective series are indirectly acquainted with McBain; his novels were the blueprints for a now well-established genre—the ensemble detective story. Ed McBain is a pseudonym, among others, for Evan Hunter, an amazingly successful mystery writer whose first novel was the controversial Blackboard Jungle. Based on Hunter’s experiences teaching at a vocational school in a rough urban environment, the book was adapted for a sensational motion picture starring Glenn Ford and Sidney Poitier. His screenplays for the “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” television series led to Hunter’s screenplay for Hitchcock’s The Birds. —David Pelfrey

Frank Kelly Freas

Anyone who so much as passed by a bookstore or newsstand in the last 50 years has seen an illustration by Kelly Freas. That’s his work on the covers of countless Ballantine, Avon, Signet, or DAW publications. From 1957 to 1962 Freas drew many of those hilarious, but amazingly realistic, fake ads for MAD Magazine, and provided Alfred E. Neumann’s moronic visage for their covers. Freas’ regular gig was creating otherworldly illustrations for works by such science-fiction legends as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke. The insanely prolific Freas earned 10 Hugo Awards for his work in the science fiction and fantasy field. He did real science, too; his illustrations for NASA missions hang in the Smithsonian. The cover illustration for the October, 1953, issue of Astounding Science Fiction (for whom Freas worked for 50 years) depicts a very troubled and puzzled giant robot holding a mortally wounded human in his hand. This legendary image became the album cover art for Queen’s News of the World. –D.P.

 

 

Inventors/Pioneers

Leo Sternbach

In the 1950s, pharmaceutical prospects for relieving anxiety were few: Barbiturates were highly addictive and easily overdosed on; “major tranquilizers” such as Thorazine had emptied mental hospitals but were instruments too blunt for everyday anxiety; and the only “minor tranquilizer,” Miltown, was weak in regular doses and toxic in high ones. What was needed was a drug that relieved anxiety safely and without overt sedation.

Austrian-born Jewish chemist Leo Sternbach, working with a couple of other chemists at Hoffman-La Roche Labs, serendipitously concocted just such a substance in the compound chlordiazepoxide, marketed under the name Librium in 1960. Librium was the first benzodiazepine, but its more potent successor, Valium, would change the face of American culture. It ultimately proved to be addictive, but Valium’s ability to take the edge off of daily stresses with surgical precision, plus its relative safety (you’d have a hard time killing yourself with Valium alone) made it the most-prescribed drug from 1969 to 1982. It was even immortalized in The Rolling Stones’ hit “Mother’s Little Helper.” Such a level of popularity can probably be explained in part by the fact that, for some, it was a readily concealable alternative to alcohol abuse. Sternbach also invented the drugs Dalmane, Mogadon, and Klonopin. –Paul Brantley

Robert Kearns

Robert Kearns invented intermittent windshield wipers, which allowed pauses between swipes during light rain. Ford and Chrysler implemented Kearns’ idea, and Kearns, often acting as his own attorney, successfully sued the automobile corporations in 1978 and 1982, respectively, for nearly $20 million. He had previously shopped the idea to automakers but could never reach a licensing deal. Lawsuits against General Motors and foreign automakers were dismissed. Kearns died of cancer at 77. —Ed Reynolds

Charlie Muse

Half a century ago, baseball players were real men who didn’t bother with helmets when batting. In 1952, a Pittsburgh Pirates executive named Charlie Muse forced his team to wear batting helmets despite taunts from opponents that the Pirates were “sissy.” Slowly, opposing teams began to adapt, and in 1954 the Braves’ Joe Adcock credited the helmet with saving his life after being knocked unconscious while batting against the Brooklyn Dodgers. The next day, the Dodgers began wearing helmets. —E.R.

George Mikan

The first “big man” to dominate the game of basketball, the 6-foot, 10-inch Mikan would simply stand beneath the basketball goal of opponents and swat their shots out of the rim. Mikan’s advantage forced the sport to outlaw “goaltending,” where a ball is deflected away once it begins its downward trajectory to the basketball goal. —E.R.

John Ebstein

 

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George Mikan (click for larger version)

In 1962 John Ebstein created the first airbrushed rendering of Studebaker’s ridiculous-looking Avanti, the ugliest sports car ever. With its extended underbite front end, the Avanti appeared to have lost the futuristic design war that the Corvette Sting Ray had easily won. Hideous though it may have appeared, the Avanti nevertheless turned heads just as the DeLorean once did. Ebstein also designed the Lucky Strike cigarette package and Greyhound buses. —E.R.

George Atkinson

A former Hollywood stuntman and occasional actor, George Atkinson didn’t need Grauman’s Chinese Theater to leave his imprint on the film history. Atkinson pioneered the home video rental industry. In 1979 he turned a 600-square-foot store into a goldmine called Video Station by charging $50 for a membership card and a $10-per-day rental fee for any of 50 available titles. Scoffing at earlier entrepreneurial notions that people would buy movies, Atkinson summed up his business philosophy: “You listen to Beethoven or The Beatles over and over again. You don’t watch Burt Reynolds over and over.” Currently there are more than 24,000 video stores around the nation. Atkinson died at 69 of emphysema. —E.R.

Joseph Owades

Weight-conscious beer drinkers can thank Joseph L. Owades for inventing the first low-calorie beer. Miller Brewing Co. acquired the rights to the process Owades invented and launched Miller Lite in 1975, spawning the phrase “you might as well drink horse piss,” which was almost as popular a slogan as “tastes great, less filling.” —E.R.

Alabama Royalty

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Alabama Royalty

September 22, 2005

There’s a touch of royalty nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in northeast Alabama. Surrounded by Lookout Mountain, Desoto State Park, the Little River Canyon Natural Preserve, and gorgeous Lake Guntersville, an imposing stone (and brick) castle in Fort Payne is currently on the market for a cool $4.9 million. Built and presently owned by Jeff Cook, guitarist for the band Alabama, the eight-bedroom, seven-and-a-half-bathroom palace is an eye-catcher set on 40 lush acres with a pond. The main foyer includes granite tile floors, a coffered ceiling, crystal chandelier, and a pair of curved hardwood staircases. The grand room features an immense stone fireplace that stretches more than two stories tall with balconies that overlook the immense chamber. A couple of kitchens and a formal banquet room with picture windows offering views of the grounds are sufficient to entertain a few hundred guests.

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(click for larger version)

The owner’s suite offers “his” and “hers” bathrooms. A sunken garden tub and a hot tub are the main attractions in the lady’s bath; the gentleman will have to make do with a simple yet immaculate tile shower. The guest suite features an amenity ideal for any overnight company—a heart-shaped garden tub. There’s a game room with a billiard table, an exercise room, and even more bedrooms in case the summer soirées get out of control.

The Fort Payne castle does boast two amenities not usually found in palatial estates south of Nashville: a recording studio and a guitar-shaped swimming pool complete with a two-tier waterfall. Private balconies extend around the courtyard surrounding the pool area. Appointments for those with serious inquiries can be made by calling 205-401-7045. And for God’s sake, if you do qualify for a showing, don’t refer to the pool as a “cement pond.” Fort Payne folks have grown weary of that joke.

Dr. Lawson Has Left the Building

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Dr. Lawson Has Left the Building

His office never had a computer, and his patients were treated in chairs placed in the upright position. After 52 years as a dentist on Southside, Dr. William Lawson retires.

July 14, 2005Fifteen years ago I made my initial visit to the dentist office of Dr. William Lawson. I recall the very first words he spoke to me (while he tugged at a root stubbornly lodged in my novocaine-numbed mouth), “You ever tried to pull a nail out of a 2 x 4 with a pair of pliers, and it just won’t come out?” After practicing dentistry on Birmingham’s Southside, Dr. Lawson has decided it’s time to put away the dental tools he deftly wielded, with deadpan humor, for 52 years.

Dr. Lawson sported a red clown nose when he greeted me on a recent morning as he cleaned out his office. He pointed to a painting of Robert E. Lee on one wall, one of several depictions of Confederate generals that adorn the waiting room. (One has a cut-out photograph of Lawson’s head superimposed alongside the officers.) “That’s not a good picture of Lee, too stylized,” he said. “Lee wasn’t a Joan of Arc character, and that’s how they’ve got him portrayed.”

Despite being on the ethics board of the American Dental Association for two decades and past president of the Alabama Dental Association, Dr. Lawson was an anachronism, a throwback to an era when relations between a dentist and his clients were closer. “A successful practice is knowing the people and having a successful relationship with the patient,” Lawson explained. He’s perhaps proudest of the third generation of patients that stayed with him as they entered adulthood. His office never had a computer, and he worked on patients in chairs in the upright position, as opposed to the modern procedure in which patients recline.

He reflected on changes in the dental world during his half-century of practice. “Back in the late ’50s, early ’60s, there was no dental insurance. A dentist competed with television payments,” he recalled. “People’s teeth are in much better condition now with insurance. There are fewer and fewer people over 65 wearing dentures.” The intimidating drills used to bore out cavities are now high-tech, air-turbo devices with diamond drill bits that whirl at 100,000 rpms as opposed to the earlier contraptions operated by pulley systems attached to a motor that peaked at 4,500 rpms. “Those old drills got hot pretty quick,” he laughed. The drill upgrade took away a favorite trick Lawson employed to distract children as he worked. The dentist would attach a piece of red cotton behind a piece of white cotton to the drill’s pulley cable. He instructed the kids to “watch the fox chase the rabbit,” as the cotton pieces chased each other along the cable.

Dr. Lawson also used other methods to put patients at ease. The walls of the examination rooms were lined with huge murals of soothing Caribbean beach scenes or mammoth photos of the earth taken by an astronaut during a moon landing. He and daughter Barbara, who worked for him for 25 years, recalled a routine the two developed when taking X-rays. Dr. Lawson would take the wooden block that held the film from a patient’s mouth and, without turning away from the patient, toss it over his shoulder to Barbara, who was standing in the hall to catch it.

Sometimes his entertainment was unintended. He used to perform magic tricks while working, pretending to pull coins from children’s ears, then doing the same trick with the tooth he’d just extracted before the child realized the tooth had been pulled. “One time this lady was in the dental chair—she knew about his magic tricks and stuff,” his daughter Becky remembered. “Dad felt a little weight in the sleeve of his lab coat, and the next thing you know, he’s pulling a bra from his sleeve that had gotten stuck inside his coat from static electricity when my mom had done laundry.” The woman in the exam chair grabbed her chest and said, ‘My you’re good!’”

A baby blue jay that Dr. Lawson found outside the office was adopted by the Lawson family. “Melvin” stayed at the dental office during the day. “We kept him in the lab,” laughed daughter Betty. “If little kids came in, Dad would bring Melvin in for the kids to see. Melvin was really attached to Dad. The door to the lab was occasionally left open, and Melvin would fly into the room where Dad was working on a patient, and Melvin would land on his hand just as he was about to stick it in a patient’s mouth.”

His children told of his wicked sense of humor. “He’d be working on us on weekends when it didn’t interfere with his making a living,” Lawson’s son, local radio personality Dollar Bill Lawson, remembered. “He’d put us in the chair and chant, ‘I’m gonna get me a bucket of blood, I’m gonna get me a bucket of blood.’” The younger Lawson also recalled the acrylic imitation pink gum with tiny red fake capillaries used with dentures. “My dad would fix everything with that pink plastic. He’d fix the refrigerator door, anything. Even fixed my glasses. I’d have to go to school with this fake pink, human gum-looking stuff holding my glasses together.”

Friends would bring fish they had caught to the office and ask the dentist to install human teeth, complete with gums. He once fitted a bass with tiger fangs, which was proudly displayed at the famous Ollie’s Bar-B-Q restaurant located on Greensprings Highway.

Dr. Lawson even worked on himself on one occasion. He was due to leave town for a convention when a filling came out the night before. His daughter Barbara held one mirror, while he held the other. Injecting himself with novocaine, he drilled on the tooth and installed a plastic filling. “It’s very difficult to do,” he admitted.

“I think he really just wanted to see if it was possible,” said Barbara. “He doesn’t really like dentists in his mouth, anyway.” &