My all-time favorite headline from The Onion is “Fun Toy Banned Because of Three Stupid Dead Kids.” Not only is it hilariously blunt, but, like all great humor having to do with childhood, it’s also mean. And it speaks volumes about what it was like to be a kid in the 1970s.

I can’t say that parents in the 70s didn’t give a shit, as many people now maintain. That’s way overstated. Mine certainly cared about me and my siblings. When I got injured in some way and came in the house crying with snot guttering along my upper lip, Mom would always display obvious compassion and start cleaning me up and bandaging me.

My dad, on the other hand, would keep his eyes glued to the college football game on TV and simply ask, “What happened?” Then, when he got the answer, he’d go on watching the game. Maybe he’d eat a potato chip.

But that doesn’t mean he didn’t care.

Dad was born in 1930, so he’d been through a wringer, and I don’t mean his thumbs got sore from too much texting.

When I was 57 and thinking that the Covid lockdown was one of the worst experiences of my life, I realized that, by the time he was legally able to drink a beer, Dad had been raised during the Great Depression by priests and ruler-swinging nuns in a home for abandoned children; experienced the existential anxieties and food rationing of World War II; and, at the ripe old age of 21, was cordially invited by the United States government to get shot at for a couple of years in picturesque Korea.

He liked to tell the story of how he once skittered so fast across a frozen pond to escape a plane that was strafing his platoon, he couldn’t get back after the attack because the ice kept breaking when he tried to step on it again. They had to send a raft out to retrieve him.

That’s hauling ass.

Once, when I was in the third grade, sulfuric acid overflowed out of a four-thousand gallon tank that he happened to be strolling past in the chemical factory where he worked. The acid splashed all over one of his ankles...which had to have generated a rather unpleasant sensation, to say the least.

I would have been screaming like there was sulfuric acid all over my ankle, but here’s how Dad handled it. He “sprayed the affected area”, which now looked like an uncured ham, with an emergency water hose, then rubber-banded a plastic bag over the burn (“Because it was dripping something,” he once told me) and DROVE HIMSELF TO THE HOSPITAL!!

This is sulfuric acid we’re talking about here! He had to get skin grafts!

He also dislocated his shoulder on eight different occasions—that’s not a typo—before finally having surgery to insert a steel pin so it would stay put. That must have gotten awful old by the sixth or seventh time his arm was hanging down below his knee.

Regardless of what happened, Dad just dealt with it. He wasn’t happy about it, but he also wasn’t big on complaining.

Consequently, when one of his kids would whine about some little nuisance or stagger in with a wound that would convert into nothing but a scab in two or three days, it was hard for him to get all emotional about it.

He’d been fortified by past traumas, you see, and he was hardly alone in that regard. Surely, this explained the long leash people of his generation used when raising their kids.

Sure, they cared. But within reason. “Suck it up and spit it out,” as my Little League baseball coach used to say when someone got hit in the ribs with a pitch.

It all worked out for the best, I guess. I mean, we’re still here to talk about it.

But anybody who grew up in the “Fonzie Decade” knows for a fact that we could have been burned, mangled, or mutilated in any number of inventive ways, just by being normal kids with parents who didn’t hover over us all day long. And we very often were burned, mangled, or mutilated, albeit not by nuns or sulfuric acid.

There was something masochistic about a 70s childhood. Unlike my dad, we actually seemed to be asking for it.

BIKES

A kid who lived down the street from us had this crazy-ass bike. Same color and everything.

Does that look like a good idea to you?! I once rode the thing for a few minutes, and I felt like Wile E. Coyote the entire time— hopeful, but on the cusp of yet another tragedy.

I didn’t have a natural sense for steering a bicycle with a steering wheel, and it didn’t feel like I’d ever develop one. This, I assume, is why bikes manufactured by sane people have handle bars instead of steering wheels.

I didn’t crash, but I would have eventually, probably by the end of the afternoon, had I been allowed to ride it that long. Luckily, I was forced off of it by another kid.

Who then crashed.

That’s okay, though, because I wiped out on my plain old Spyder bike repeatedly. Virtually every juvenile in the neighborhood had a bike that looked something like the one pictured above, and they fell off of them on a regular basis.

With Evel Knievel being a certified Great American Hero (aka “famous asshole”) at the time, my buddies and I weren’t content with merely riding our bikes, which we did with a giddy recklessness verging on clinical idiocy. No, we wanted to jump our bikes the way Evel did. So we jerry-rigged ramps out of sheets of plywood and cinder blocks, and we jumped.

What we failed to consider, though, was the possibility of landing the way Evel did.

Nothing tops the thoroughbred agony of falling off the seat and, for lack of a more evocative way of putting it, crushing your balls on the center bar then falling to the ground in a screaming heap, where gravel would dig into your elbows, not to mention your knees, if you were wearing shorts.

I peeled my skin back so many times, I began to empathize with bananas. But as soon as we healed up, we’d get right back on and start jumping again, because...fill in the blank.

I’m not sure why we did it again.

LAWN DARTS

This is a fontanel, or at least it’s a drawing of one.

For several weeks after babies are born, their skulls are not yet done forming, so there are areas where prime sub-cranial real estate (the baby’s brain) lies unprotected. But, like a drunken wino with his junk hanging out, the baby is in no condition to do anything about it. Thus, parents have to make sure nothing slams into the baby’s fontanel, lest its brain, which it will need at least until it registers as a Republican voter, gets counterproductively dented or gouged.

No toy in recorded history seemed a likelier candidate to re-fontanel a child than a set of lawn darts.

These are lawn darts. Everybody had them. They were first marketed in the 1950s but didn’t become an official American mania until the 70s, along with the Frito Bandito, platform shoes, and cocaine.

You set up those rings on opposite ends of the yard then stood by while your opponent casually flung the dart, with its heavily weighted tip, in your direction. The goal was to make it land inside the ring, as opposed to in the middle of your head, your eyeball, or your groin.

If you were too stupid to hop out of the way when your opponent was especially inept, you’d get what was coming to you. But you’d also get it if you were merely distracted by some kid falling off his bike while trying to pop a wheelie.

Lawn darts (apparently, they were called “Jarts,” but we never called them that) did not discriminate. I never saw a kid actually get nailed by one, although I witnessed more than a few close calls, several of which involved yours truly. Lawn darts were finally banned by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission for being too dangerous...in 1988!!

How many years did they have to think about it?!

That’s the United States government in action, right there. It’s only a matter of time until the Trump administration brings them back with dung-covered tips for maximum wound infection.

AMF VOIT FOOTBALLS

Think of it as the Anti-Nerf.

Football is, of course, a contact sport. So kids are bound to get banged up if they’re playing sans pads in a backyard game, which my friends and I did for many, many hours during the NFL season. It was, for all practical purposes, the focus of our shared existence.

Usually, we had a nice, broken-in Wilson or Spalding leather ball on hand. But every once in a while, we’d have to opt for the horror of an AMF Voit Official. Voit didn’t need no stinkin’ leather. These babies were heavy, hollow pieces of hard rubber!

Those aren’t even real laces. Some craftsman at AMF Voit undoubtedly used a massive steel press to stamp them on.

Proper form was a necessity when you were trying to catch one of these things. If the tip nailed you in the chest, it would leave a bruise that looked like a physical map of Ecuador. And if it was really cold outside, they’d have absolutely no give in them.

BAM!!

You’d have to stand there and shake your fingers out for a minute to get the feeling back. Then you’d have to shake them all over again after the next play, unless you got lucky and they threw it to somebody else.

You can’t see the logo, but these guys are using an early prototype.

HOT STUFF

This is a Betty Crocker Easy-Bake Oven. One of the things it easily baked was your skin.

Everyone’s kid sister had an Easy-Bake Oven because, in the early 1970s, a female child’s place was in the kitchen, goddammit. You actually cooked things in this rickety piece of junk, tasty morsels like cakes, cupcakes, and muffins. The oven came fully equipped with little tin pans and utensils and a lightbulb to heat stuff up.

And it got hot. Note the gateway to the hell in the door. Remember, this was something you gifted to 6- and 7-year-old kids on Christmas morning!

“Okay, Cissy, it’s about 400 degrees now. Just pick up the pan full of batter there. Okay, watch out— don’t spill it! That was close! Now open the rickety plastic door and shove it in. Whoa! Watch out!”

Of course they were gonna burn themselves with it! Of course they were!

There are millions of women walking around today with telltale Easy-Bake scars on their wrists and fingertips. Ask a hand model if she ever had one of these, and she won’t know what you’re talking about.

Don’t worry, though. Toy manufacturers made sure that boys, who were largely leery of playing with a homemaker’s device back in the day, didn’t miss out on the fun of melting their very flesh into oozing mounds of throbbing goo in dire need of Bacitracin.

Meet the Shrink-Machine, by Wham-O. (Has there ever been a better toy company name than Wham-O?! It cold-cocks Parker Brothers, then lights a Chesterfield and goes searching the streets for that delusional namby-pamby, Ideal.)

You see those thin plastic sheets with illustrations on them that are stacked up behind the Shrink-Machine? You’d color those in with some markers, cut them out, and set them on the metal plate, which could reach temperatures of, by my estimate, 4326°. The heat would then shrink the illustration, which would get about ten times thicker than it was and harden into a little chunk of plastic looking just like the original image.

My brother and I had one. In my mind, I can see heat waves wafting from the grill, like when Clint Eastwood comes strolling out of the desert with his horse in a Spaghetti Western. I burned the shit out of myself with it several times, the kind of burn where the hair on the back of your neck stands up and you briefly see God.

Your skin would actually stick to the metal and would stretch when you yanked your hand away. I was about to say they didn’t coat it with Teflon because they didn’t want kids to get cancer, ha-ha-ha, but I’m sure the thinking at the time was that everybody gets cancer sooner or later. It was probably just because Wham-O didn’t want to have to pay for the Teflon.

You could also drive your parents out of their minds by whimpering for a device from Mattel called a Thingmaker, if you preferred to sear your extremities while cooking up little rubber bugs that somehow actually smelled cancerous.

This was capitalism, after all. No reason for everyone to get charred in the exact same manner.

CLACKERS

And finally— Clackers.

Clackers were solid plastic balls, sort of like gigantic marbles, that hung on opposite ends of a string. In lieu of my attempting to explain what you did with them, just watch this brief video, which is rather oddly entitled “Mexican Clackers.” I guess these Clackers were made with real sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup.

Fortunately, this guy had Jesus watching over him.

I know for a fact that Clackers hit their peak popularity in 1970 or ‘71 because of what happened with a set of them in my second-grade classroom.

So many of us were bringing our Clackers to school, my teacher, Ms. Nicoletto (she was really nice), finally decided the only way to limit their obviously hazardous use was to let us stand in front of the class at the end of the day and have a contest to see who, if any of us, could reach Clacker singularity.

Let the games begin!

Ms. Nicoletto was seated behind her big wooden desk about fifteen feet away when the first kid took his shot at glory, and he got them going really fast. For about thirty thrilling seconds they were nothing but a blur of movement and accelerating clackety-clacks!

But suddenly, and I had never seen this happen before, one of the Clackers broke loose from its string and rocketed away, slamming into the side of Ms. Nicoletto’s desk and putting a big vertical split in the wood!

She instantly stood up, gathered up all the Clackers, and locked them in her desk.

No words required— she just snapped her fingers and waved us over. It wasn’t very hard to figure out what she meant. We didn’t get them back until we had our parents sign a note saying they understood that we could no longer bring them to class. Just because she almost got killed!

Jesus, had she never heard of lawn darts?!

I don’t know what it says about me psychologically, but I’ve always appreciated the little things. I have an inexplicable affinity toward miniatures. I just get a kick out of them.

For instance, I’ve got a nifty collection of super-groovy 1:64 scale cars—I’ll definitely do an entire Cool Stuff piece about them one day—and an assortment of shrunken-down favorite movie and cartoon characters that I display on my dresser and around my writing desk so I have something to aimlessly ponder when I’m at a loss.

My wife says I make altars. I suppose that’s a fittng way to describe it.

I even picked up this scientifically reduced ABA basketball last year. They were priced to move. When I was ordering it, I didn’t know exactly why I wanted it; it’s not like I was a Minnesota Muskies fanatic when I was a kid. But now that I have it on display on my bookshelf, the answer is obvious— I wanted it because it’s cool!

I mean, look at it! See my hand there? Surely you know that a basketball is supposed to be bigger than that!

There’s no smooth way to segue from my love of miniatures to a photo of me goofing around with Bo Diddley, even though the two concepts eventually interconnect, believe it or not. So I’ll just say this is a photo of me and Bo Diddley, one of the key architects of an ancient form of music that historians call “rock & roll”.

It was played by “musicians” on devices known as “instruments”.

Some of you may recall that one of the very first Cool Stuff articles I ever posted, way back on Oct. 24, 2024, described how I kind of...you know...I kind of knew Diddley.

Bo used to rent movies and dig through the CDs at the Turtles Records location in Gainesville, FL, where I was the assistant manager. That photo was taken in late 1989, just a few months before I finally answered the siren call and hauled myself all the way to New York City.

I didn’t, however, include this photo in the original article...

That’s Bo’s guitar. He was famous for his square guitars, of which there were many over the years.

Legend has it, he built the first one out of some leftover wood and a pickup he removed from an old Victrola because he didn’t have the money to buy an instrument at a store! Later on, when he became solvent, he’d design them himself and have professionals build them for him.

One day, Bo and a small band plugged up in front of the store and started jamming. He was ostensibly there to autograph copies of his new, self-produced and pressed record, but whoever was supposed to ship them to us never got around to it. So, with nothing to sign, he decided to play for a while anyway...with “a while” turning into two hours of one of the original inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (even before Journey!!) plowing through his greatest hits on the sidewalk outside a strip mall.

There was a Walmart about fifty yards from where I’m standing in the photo. You get the idea.

Anyway, when I saw Bo take his current square guitar out of its case and prepare to hook a strap onto it, I knew in an instant what I had to do. I asked him if he’d let me get my picture made while holding Excalibur.

“Sure, I don’t care,” he said. Then Bo Diddley handed me his square guitar.

It was shockingly heavy! I felt like I was holding a coffee table! If Pete Townshend had tried to destroy that thing at the end of a Who show, he would have taken the stage apart instead.

(Dissolve to current day)

A few weeks ago I was perusing a site called Axe Heaven. The guys at Axe Heaven make and sell miniature replicas of iconic rock & roll guitars. I’ve purchased copies of both Paul McCartney’s Höfner violin bass and Bruce Springsteen’s famous woodgrain Telecaster from them in the past.

I am not getting paid to plug Axe Heaven, by the way. If only. I’m just telling you this because I really dig their product. They do superb work and have an eye for entertaining details; you can tell they care about what they’re doing and they know their stuff.

Springsteen’s Telecaster, for instance, is beaten to hell from too much Bruce action, just like the one he plays...or used to play, anyway. It now looms large in his legend, so he only drags it out for special occasions. (I’m pretty sure I’ve read before that Bruce intentionally damages the veneers of other Telecasters so audiences will think he’s playing his Excalibur. If he doesn’t, he sure wears them out awful fast.)

Anyway, as I was digging through Axe Heaven’s products, hoping to find the blonde Gibson semi-acoustic that Chuck Berry played in his “Johnny B. Goode” heyday, I stumbled upon their selection of Bo Diddley guitars.

And I noticed this one.

Upon closer inspection, I realized they’d made a replica of the exact guitar Bo handed me thirty-seven years ago! That’s it right there! Those eagles and his signature were on it, too, although you can’t see them because of how I’m cradling it in the photo.

Let’s look again.

Yep. That’s it. According to Axe Heaven, Bo called this one his “Twang Machine.”

You bet I bought it! How could I not?!

If that little thing doesn’t qualify as cool stuff, given my personal history with it, I don’t know what does! It now sits on the printer at my desk, with my copy of Bo Diddley’s 1972 Chess Records compilation, Got My Own Bag of Tricks, framed on the wall behind it.

I didn’t hang the album up after the fact, by the way— it was already there before I purchased the guitar. There’s a story to that, too, but I won’t get into it right now. Maybe one day.

As long as I’m on the subject again, I have one more fun thing to tell you about Bo and me.

Not long before he kindly let me pose with a piece of history, my buddy Alec and I had been listening to the above Diddley collection and were flummoxed by a bit of verbal interplay between Bo and his sidekick/maracas player, Jerome Green (that’s Jerome on the left in the photo. Drummer Clifton James is on the right. There is no truth to the rumor that these guys could only play with their eyes closed.)

“Say Man,” the song that was so confusing us, is one of Bo’s wackiest tracks. To be honest, it’s not even really a “song,” as such. It’s more like Bo and Jerome mocking each other and guffawing while a rhythm plays in the background.

It’s basically a version of “The Dozens,” an oral Black tradition where guys trade escalating comic insults with each other, many of them containing the phrase “your mama,” for the enjoyment of whoever might be around at the time.

Sorry to sound like some dumbass white guy examining the unwritten practices of those mysterious Black people. Obviously, I don’t mean it that way. But that’s The Dozens, if you’re not familiar with the concept, and it was a precursor of modern-day rap and hip-hop beefs, except that now artists can make piles of money if they get memorably shitty enough with a supposed enemy musician.

They insult all the way to the bank.

Even though he was a couple decades ahead of the game in 1958, Bo didn’t make much money from adding The Dozens to his music, just as he pulled in very little from the “Bo Diddley beat” that made him a significant figure in 20th-century popular culture and led to scores of other, often much whiter, musicians getting filthy rich.

But back to that lyric.

Listen to “Say Man” all the way through to hear the entire anti-narrative, then skip back to the 1:50 mark, where Jerome asks Bo, “Where your western boots at?!” Then try to decipher the rest of the exchange.

Alec and I listened to that passage repeatedly, trying to figure out what Jerome says when he cries, “Them ain’t no boots you got on, them BROGAAAAAAAAH!!” We never broke the code.

But then, a few weeks later, I realized, “What the hell— I’ll just ask Bo Diddley!”

Bo explained to me that Jerome says, “Them ain’t no boots you got on, them brogans!” Bo and other poor kids he grew up with in Chicago would wear brogan-style shoes because the soles were so thick and sturdy you could wear them for years before they wore out and you had to somehow find the money to buy new ones.

So the joke was that Bo couldn’t afford fancy cowboy boots. He had to wear “BROGAAAAAAAANS!”

Now you know, even if you weren’t wondering. As always, it pays to go to the source.

Stay cool.

I’m a roots reggae fan, but it took me a little while to get there.

I can’t remember exactly what set it off, but roughly a decade ago I grew fascinated with reggae and the livity of Rastafari that surrounds it. So, as I’m prone to do when something really sparks my interest, I grabbed up every book I could find on the subjects and started reading.

There was a period of around two years there where roots reggae and its Jamaican musical antecedents, ska (jazz-inflected and hard-charging) and rocksteady (slower, lighter, and more romantic), were almost all I listened to.

Nowadays, roots reggae in particular has been folded into my regular listening habits, which cover a lot of ground. The music of Jamaica has really nourished me. I’m genuinely sorry I waited so long to investigate it.

I am not what you would call a conventionally religious person, not by any stretch of the imagination. But I do cherry-pick spiritual directives that I think are helpful to me as I make my way through life.

As I was reading about it, I was shocked to find that central aspects of my personal philosophy pop up in Rastafari beliefs, not that I consider Haile Selassie to be anything but a very lucky guy in an ill-fitting military uniform who became the emperor of Ethiopia (Rastas, as you may know, believe Selassie to be the reincarnation of Christ.)

But I can really feel the Rasta notion that all of us share one communal spirit as opposed to separate souls, at least as a guiding principle; to be honest, I have no idea if we have spirits at all. If an unknowable energy lights us up and makes us human, though, surely that gift isn’t doled out in individual portions like so many orders of fries.

This explains the phrase “I and I,” that you hear in so many reggae tunes, rather than the conventional “me” and “you.” If it’s happening to any of us, Rastas contend, we’re all sharing in it, and we should be concerned with everyone’s struggles because they’re our struggles, too.

Maybe systemic oppression, then, is the manifestation of true evil in our society, and decency and compassion are paths to escape it.

Rastas (like my friend John, who’s the real thing, straight outta Kingston) are appalled by the system that rules Babylon. They say “shit-stem” instead of “system,” and if you can’t dig that at this point in time, you haven’t been paying attention.

The only good system, so the roots saying goes, is a sound system.

So create a riddim—that’s how it’s always spoken and written in reggae parlance—and let us hear what you’ve got. And if you’re not a musician, reggae’s one-drop beat can still anchor you and help you locate the sustaining pulse within yourself.

If you have a heart, it’s there. You just have to find it and nurture it.

All of this is why it drives me nuts to type “reggae” into Google Images and get deluged with a hundred and thirty-seven thousand million photos of Bob Marley and some random pot leaves, as if Marley puffing a spliff is the beginning, middle, and end of this type of music.

Imagine searching “rock music” and being presented with literally nothing but pictures of the Beatles and some acid blotters.

It’s like that.

Yes, Marley is the Big Kahuna of reggae; there’s no denying it. And he sold more albums than any of his contemporaries, by a wide margin. He was a deeply creative, impassioned songwriter and performer, an extremely talented and charismatic individual.

However...

Despite his supposed all-encompassing commitment to Jah, Marley owned a couple of BMWs while his peers zipped around on cheaper cuts of Yamaha motorcycles, if not bicycles. One of his biggest blessings, although he was not prone to lingering on it during his pious interviews, was a prosperous British record label giving him access to state-of-the-art studios and promoting the living shit out of him.

That didn’t mean there weren’t scores of other great reggae artists and producers during Marley’s reign of corporate consecration, but very few rock fans had ever heard of them, and they still haven’t. Roots reggae from the 70s and 80s, like ska and rocksteady before it, is rich in inventiveness and artistic daring.

A lot of it sounds like it was recorded in a closet, yes. It was largely made by people from impoverished shanty towns, if not the mountains bordering them, often with minimal budgets and equipment.

But passion and the almighty groove ruled the day, and roots artists were not afraid to confront the powers that be in their songs. Roots reggae said what needed to be said and firmly stood its ground, sometimes with serenity but very often with justified anger and the willingness to put up a real fight.

Roots reggae was built from the street up, through heart, backbone, and sweat, with a palpable sense of right and wrong. So if you break it down to sheer attitude, the engine that moves the vehicle, reggae masters were forefathers of punk rock.

Eventually, a few frustrated white kids outside of Jamaica heard the message and picked up instruments, too.

Although they weren’t as accepted as they might have been by the roots intelligentsia—our paths are rife with obstacles, and even Rastas can fail when it comes to inclusiveness—these strangers from behind enemy lines could also be true believers.

The Clash were nothing if not true believers.

You didn’t have to ask Joe Strummer twice what he thought of a particular subject, and if it had to do with injustice, you could hear his howled answer on the other side of a concert hall.

The guys in the above photo are bassist Paul Simonon on the left, drummer Topper Headon, lead guitarist/singer/songwriter Mick Jones, and rhythm guitarist/singer/songwriter Strummer. Strummer was also the band’s soul, although, as I’ve already argued, these guys actually shared a single soul.

You could hear it when they played together.

Even with Headon, who was a truly superb drummer, never receiving the respect he rightly deserves, I still think the member of the Clash who gets shortchanged the most when people look back on their legacy is Simonon.

Simonon, who grew up in Brixton, where Jamaican sound systems and public dance parties were plentiful, taught himself the bass by playing along with his reggae albums. His forceful pulse and enthusiasm for the genre finally enveloped the rest of the Clash, and they played reggae in a far more candid manner than most people who don’t know the music very well might imagine.

Strummer frequently peppered his lyrics with reggae references and artist name-drops. And reggae’s firm-jawed political stances were 100% in keeping with what he liked to do best— namely, telling the authorities to fuck off.

To paraphrase one of their American forefathers, there was a whole lotta Jamaican goin’ on in the Clash’s music.

The Clash first raised the reggae banner with a cover of Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves” on their debut LP, The Clash, which may well be the single greatest punk rock album ever recorded. It’s certainly in the top three.

Although Murvin and his producer, the possibly deranged reggae wellspring Lee “Scratch” Perry, both stated that the Clash had ruined their song, Perry finally grasped where the band was coming from and later produced the pissed-at-the-record-label rant “Complete Control” for them, at which point he said the Clash were among the few white musicians he ever heard who could properly fall into a 4/4 reggae time signature. It helps to emphasize the third beat.

Many otherwise dexterous and very successful bands have tried and failed. It’s the music equivalent of “white men can’t jump.” They just don’t have it in them.

Marley, for his part, was stimulated enough to write “Punky Reggae Party” in response to the Clash’s Murvin cover. “It is different,” he said of their approach. “But me like how him feel it.”

It’s deeply unfortunate that there was no lyric sheet included with the original UK release of The Clash, which was the most successful rock import ever before it officially hit the U.S. over two years later, since you can’t understand most of what Strummer says through the racket and his phlegm battles.

Strummer and Jones were writing tremendous songs, several of them featuring roots reggae allusions that early Clash heads would have never recognized without the written translation, and tons of fans still don’t know what the hell Strummer is going on about.

So let’s get started here.

“(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais,” recounts Strummer’s deep disappointment in a concert full of reggae heroes that he attended at the titular music hall. To his dismay, righteous rebellion was being transformed into a smooth, mass-marketed product that owed more to the Four Tops than Count Ossie.

Note the riddim in the verses here smacking up against the rock & roll roar of the bridge. A musical baby is being birthed with this tune.

Midnight to six man
For the first time from Jamaica
Dillinger and Leroy Smart
Delroy Wilson, your cool operator

Ken Boothe for UK pop reggae
With backing bands sound system
If they’ve got anything to say
There’s many black ears here to listen

But it was Four Tops all night with encores from stage right
Charging from the bass knives to the treble
But onstage they ain’t got no roots rock rebel
Onstage they ain’t got no roots rock rebel

Dress back and jump back, this is a Blue Beat attack
‘Cos it won’t get you anywhere, fooling with the guns
The British Army is waitin’ out there
It weighs fifteen hundred tons

White youth, black youth
Better find another solution
Why not phone up Robin Hood
And ask him for some wealth distribution?

Punk rocker in the UK
They won’t notice anyway
They’re all too busy fightin’
For a good place under the lightin’

The new groups are not concerned
With what there is to be learned
They got Burton suits, ha, you think it’s funny
Turning rebellion into money

All over people changing their votes
Along with their overcoats
If Adolf Hitler flew in today
They’d send a limousine anyway

I’m the all night drug prowling wolf
Who looks so sick in the sun
I’m the white man in the Palais
Too stoned, lookin’ for fun

Only lookin’ for fun
Oh, please this time just give me a nod
Well I’m only, lookin’ for fun
Lookin’ lookin’ lookin’ for fun, F-U-N

What a great song and performance that is! “Cause it won’t get you anywhere foolin’ with the guns / The British Army is waitin’ out there / It weighs fifteen hundred tons” is a fucking amazing lyric!

Strummer’s heroes weren’t permitted to have any balls now that they were reaching a larger audience. Kingston is one thing, but how can you be a badass with a pistol when you’re facing an entire army? (To be fair, Boothe was always more of a pop reggae type. There’s room for that, too, and he was one of the best.)

“(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” brutally illustrates where the Clash were coming from, and it would eventually explain why they broke up, when Mick Jones, to his own later admission, became too much of a bitchy rock star for Strummer’s and Simonon’s comfort.

That’s the problem with idealism and defiance when you’re creating music within a money-driven industry, rather than in a seedy bar or at a lawn party. The sharp edges get sanded off if you want to survive.

The fight to maintain artistic and spiritual purity drove the Clash, and it tore them apart tragically early, as far as music history is concerned. I’m convinced they still had years of great work left in the tank.

But it was not to be.

“Clash City Rockers”

And then there’s “Clash City Rockers,” the opening track on the delayed American release of The Clash. This one is as straight punk rock as you can possibly get...but wait a minute.

Who’s this “Prince Far I” that Strummer pledges allegiance to at the end?

And I wanna move the town to the Clash City Rockers
You need a little jump of electrical shockers
You better leave town if you only wanna knock us
Nothing stands the pressure of the Clash City Rockers

You see the rate they come down the escalator
Now listen to the tube train accelerator
Then you realize that you got to have a purpose
Or this place is gonna knock you out sooner or later

So don't complain about your useless employment
Jack it in forever tonight
Or shut your mouth and pretend you enjoy it
Think of all the money you've got

And I wanna liquefy everybody gone dry
Or plug into the aerials that poke up in the sky
Or burn down the suburbs with the half-closed eyes
You won't succeed unless you try

So don't complain about your useless employment
Jack it in forever tonight
Or shut your mouth (shut it up) and pretend you enjoy it
Think of all the money you've got, yeah yeah

Yes, I wanna move the town to the Clash City Rockers
You need a little jump of electrical shockers
You better leave town if you only wanna knock us
Nothing stands the pressure of the Clash City Rockers

You owe me a move, say the bells of St. Groove
Come on and show me, say the bells of old Bowie
When I am fitter, say the bells of Gary Glitter
No one but you and I, say the bells of Prince Far I
No one but you and I, say the bells of Prince Far I

And I wanna move the town to the Clash City Rockers
You need a little jump of electrical shockers
You better leave town if you only wanna knock us
Nothing stands the pressure of the Clash City Rockers

Rock, rock Clash City Rockers
Rock, rock Clash City Rockers
Rock, rock Clash City Rockers
Rock, rock Clash City Rockers

Once again— holy shit! By the time those police sirens hit in the outro, I’m convinced! The Clash’s earliest songs were all statements of purpose. Every one of them. This was an upper-echelon rock band, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, and whoever else you’d like to name.

As for Prince Far I...

That’s the man.

Prince Far I was a Rastafarian reggae producer, vocalist, and deejay whose 1976 track “Under Heavy Manners” was a blast of righteousness aimed at the Jamaican government’s tactics for dealing with escalating political violence in desperately poor, government-generated ghettos.

Far I calls for the youth of Jamaica to find inner peace, to come together as one, and to live a properly spiritual, constructive existence. He believed in rejecting brutal authority and finding the answers within yourself.

“Hmmmmm,” thought the Clash.

“Safe European Home”

The Clash’s second album, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, is a very sturdy collection of songs, if not as consistently powerful as their debut. But its best track, “Safe European Home,” from its opening pistol crack to its closing, self-mocking reggae syncopation, is a hilarious fireball that recounts the fact-finding mission that skinny white boys Strummer and Jones blithely took to Jamaica, thinking they’d be welcomed with open arms by the local musical gentry.

It didn’t quite work out that way. But they did uncover a lot of facts.

Well, I just got back an' I wish I never leave now (where’d ya go?)
Who dat Martian arrival at the airport yeah? (where’d ya go?)
How many local dollars for a local anesthetic? (where’d ya go?)
The Johnny on the corner wasn't very sympathetic (where’d ya go?)

I went to the place where every white face is an invitation to robbery
Sitting here in my safe European home
Don't wanna go back there again.

Wasn't lucky an' wouldn't it be loverly? (where’d ya go?)
Send us all cards, an' have a laying in on a Sunday (where’d ya go?)
I was there for two weeks, so how come I never tell now (where’d ya go?)
That Natty Dread drinks at the Sheraton Hotel now (where’d ya go?)

I went to the place where every white face is an invitation to robbery
Sitting here in my safe European home
Don't wanna go back there again.

They got the sun, an' they got the palm trees (where’d ya go?)
They got the weed, an' they got the taxis (where’d ya go?)
Whoa, The Harder They Come, an' the home of ol' Blue Beat (where’d ya go?)
I'd stay an' be a tourist but I can't take the gunplay (where’d ya go?)

I went to the place where every white face is an invitation to robbery
Sitting here in my safe European home
Don't wanna go back there again.

Rudie come
From Jamaica
Cos Rudie can't fail
Cos Rudie come
From Jamaica
Rudie can't fail
Rudie come
From Jamaica
Cos Rudie can't fail
Cos Rudie come
From Jamaica
Rudie can't fail
Rudie, Rudie, Rudie, Rudie, Rudie
Rudie can't fail
Rudie, Rudie, Rudie, Rudie, Rudie
Rudie can't fail

Cos Rudie's went there
And Rudie's lived there
And Rudie come back, come back now...

Strummer and Jones quickly learned what a century of British imperialism and had done to Jamaican society. They also discovered that believing in the righteousness of people like Prince Far I is easy enough to do when you haven’t been repeatedly beaten down by a ruthless system because of the color of your skin.

Strummer and Jones stepped off the plane—to this day Simonon complains about not being invited—and immediately became targets of suspicion and disdain. They received the same rough treatment that most white people did when they chose to stroll through the poorest (i.e., “Blackest”) parts of Kingston.

Just showing up unannounced with their greaser quiffs, chains, and punk rocker gear was a very bad idea. So our heroes hightailed it back to England, tails tucked between their legs and embarrassed by their starry-eyed naiveté.

“Rudie,” by the way, is a reference to rude boys, a subset of rebellious West Indian youth who grooved to the sounds while drinking Red Stripe, committing violent crimes, and harassing locals and visitors alike, both with knives and guns. The Harder They Come is, of course, the reggae movie starring Jimmy Cliff that Strummer and Jones watched several times during their visit. And Blue Beat is a popular reggae record label.

By the time the Clash recorded their 1979 masterpiece, London Calling, they had moved so far beyond being a mere “punk rock band” it was no longer possible to pigeonhole them, even if you were trying to be unfair. They were simply doing something that no other band had ever done before and were doing it with enormous spirit and invention.

Strummer always credited Jones with opening up the group’s desire to experiment. Jones’ guitar work and songwriting now showed signs of everything from rockabilly to jazz to soul and funk, and, along with the album’s official producer, a tequila-dependent agent of chaos named Guy Stevens who once helmed Mott the Hoople albums, he constructed London Calling’s sound through layered overdubs and a variety of effects pedals.

But a primary component of this startling new construct was the band’s reggae fixation.

I had long known that the Clash had a reggae thing going to one degree or another; it’s easy enough to hear in many of their songs, and it was often referenced by music critics in Rolling Stone and the like. But it wasn’t until I started taking my deep dive into reggae that I realized just how permeated London Calling is with reggae and ska mannerisms and citations.

Simonon is pictured on the album’s famous cover smashing his favorite bass in frustration after a show at the Palladium in New York City, but he could just as well be laying waste to the expectations that fans and the music industry alike had tried to force on the Clash.

“Rudy Can’t Fail”

Lifting a line from “Safe European Home” and building a whole tune around it, “Rudy Can’t Fail” half-ironically examines rude boy culture as an alternative to being thwarted by the ol’ ennui, and Strummer repeatedly explodes into a jagged Kingston groove to move it along...if that’s actually Strummer playing. Jones would sometimes step in on rhythm guitar when more intricate work was called for.

Listen closely. Whoever’s playing it, they really get imaginative on this one. I’m voting for Jones, but who really knows?

That’s not quite reggae, and it’s also not quite not reggae. It is, in effect, Clash music.

That’s what I’m hoping you notice here, the way the band stayed true to themselves. while almost organically reimagining a form that deeply inspired them.

“Wrong ‘Em Boyo”

Bands like the Specials, early Madness, and the Selecter, among others, were certainly playing ska. They did it very well, too, but without the sinuous stylistic interlacing that the Clash displayed with London Calling.

It was called a ska revival for a reason. Nobody had a bit of trouble naming it.

London Calling’s “Wrong ‘Em Boyo”—and I bet lots of Clash fans don’t even realize this—is a cover of a 1966 rocksteady song by the Rulers. But it’s played at about three times the original tempo, thus pushing it into ska territory. Simonon first heard the tune on a jukebox at the band’s rehearsal space and convinced the others to record it.

Gotta love those “Sea Cruise” horns. This is considerably removed from “Clash City Rockers,” don’t you think? The Damned certainly weren’t doing the same thing in the recording studio down the hall.

“The Guns of Brixton”

“Wrong ‘Em Boyo,” however, was hardly the trusty bass player’s most important contribution to the London Calling sessions. Strummer and Jones, who were fond of the handsome, quiet Simonon, were delighted when he unexpectedly show up with a song he’d been working on.

“The Guns of Brixton” is one of only two songs Simonon ever wrote for the Clash, and it features his sole lead vocal. But it’s a very darkly effective piece of work. As the years go on, it just might be my favorite song on the record, even though it doesn’t have the lyrical sophistication of some of the others.

Simonon’s primitive, snaky bass line suggests an uninvited intruder has entered the premises, and the tune as a whole sounds positively sinister.

That seems like it’s about to fall apart at any moment, and it never does. I mean that as a compliment. What an ominous vibe. This is a brilliant performance, all the way around.

Again, there’s a reference to The Harder They Come and its lead character, Ivan. If you want to see the creation of roots reggae in action, watch the movie, which is almost half documentary and half fictional narrative. It’s a valuable chronicle of a musically fertile place and time that will never exist again. Just ignore the clumsy acting.

“Revolution Rock”

Another London Calling track is called “Lover’s Rock.” It’s not a reggae song at all, but the citation is still there— lover’s rock is a reggae genre that’s more on the swoony and amorous side. But the album proper (it actually closes with the hidden track and first Clash hit in America, “Train in Vain”) is a cover of Danny Ray & the Revolutioners’ “Revolution Rock.”

Strummer considerably rewrites the lyrics; Danny Ray, for instance, never suggests that he’s loaded up on pills! But, once again, there’s a remarkable, tumbling-down-the-stairs quality to how the Clash plays this stuff, which leads to Strummer deflating their approach with his closing wedding band self-deprecation.

I know no one’s asking me, but no one’s asked me for any of this! I think London Calling is the single greatest rock album of the 1970s.

I realize there’s heaps of competition there—I’ve spent over half my life listening to them myself—and you certainly don’t have to agree with me on this. Don’t start screaming at me about Born to Run or Blood on the Tracks or Fun House or Rumours or Moondance or Who’s Next or whatever your favorite happens to be. You’re as right as I am.

But if we’re talking startling creativity, pissed-off energy, humor, and passion, this is where I’m planting my flag, followed by a sharp salute to the concept of individuality.

If we’re getting technical about it, that’s my real religion.

London Calling’s highly anticipated followup, Sandinista!, incorporated heavy hip hop and rap elements before any other white band dared venture into that particular territory. And, once again, The Clash sound perfectly at home doing it, but with their usual aggressive rock & roll edge mixed in.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not quite hip hop, and it’s also not quite not hip hop.

Sandinista! is often compared to the Beatles’ “White Album,” and that’s altogether fitting. It’s a big, sprawling, overstuffed mess of brilliantly realized songs, half-successful experiments, and far too many throwaways that should never have seen the light of day.

There’s reggae here, too, but before the (budget-priced, as the Clash insisted) three-record runtime is over, the band’s Jamaican enthusiasms finally get the best of them.

“Charlie Don’t Surf”

But first, one of several battles won before losing the album’s war.

Apocalypse Now apparently had a huge impact on Strummer’s psyche. Vietnam citations became a recurring part of his lyrical arsenal after he saw the film; they’re especially heavy on the group’s swan song, Combat Rock.

Sandinista!’s war-weary lament, “Charlie Don’t Surf,” the title of which is a direct quote from Apocalypse Now’s surfing-obsessed Col. Kilgore, is one of the Clash’s more memorable tracks, sonically speaking. The song’s transformation of Coppola’s slow-motion helicopter rotors into an equally dreamlike riddim is wildly inventive.

I’ve often wondered if one of the band members actually thought of that rotor thing in advance or if they stumbled upon the similarity while sonically altering the tracks in the studio.

Either way, it’s cool as hell. When my son was still in elementary school, I felt compelled to play it for him. That’s called “parenting outside the box.”

Then the fall.

The vast majority of Clash fans were totally flummoxed by Sandinista!’s sixth (!) side, a collection of reggae dubs constructed out of various Clash tunes, not all of them on Sandinista! If you’re scratching your head and wondering what a dub is, that was a major part of the problem.

Dub music is an offshoot of reggae that was largely invented by the previously mentioned Scratch Perry, an audio equipment genius who called himself King Tubby, and another audio adventurer who went by the name of Scientist.

These guys took pre-existing reggae tracks and gave them intense, sometimes downright bizarre sonic re-imaginings by dropping out the vocals and manipulating the remaining sounds with panning, delays, reverb, and anything else they could think of, usually while in an intensely THC-altered state.

The results are often hypnotic and sometimes close to tedious.

I listen to a little bit of dub, especially Perry’s seminal masterpieces, Blackboard Jungle Dub and Super Ape, but it’s hardly a regular occurrence for me. If you’re the type of listener who has to be in a certain mindset to listen to conventional reggae, you might be driven up a wall by the wanderings of hardcore dub.

A lot of people love it, but it’s definitely not for everyone. Which is what the Clash quickly discovered with side six of Sandinista!.

Even now, there are fans who badly lowball the overall quality of Sandinista! due to that dub side, and that’s a shame. The rest of the record contains some remarkable music. It was way, way ahead of the curve.

Had the Clash been able to get over their differences and hold it together for a few more years, God only knows where they could have taken all of this. As it stands, they were arguably the greatest punk rock band of all time and inarguably the greatest punk reggae band of all time.

So put on one of their albums and get a full dose of what visionaries sound like. Ganja not required, but I won’t stop you if it helps.

Now that late-night TV talk shows are something of an afterthought in the grand scheme of things (unless our sociopathic crybaby in chief is trying to force one off the air), it’s easy to forget the impact David Letterman had on the American public’s sense of humor when NBC launched Late Night with David Letterman in early 1982.

Those of us in the right age and cultural bracket were dazzled when Letterman first wrestled the late-night airwaves into submission.

If you only know him from his CBS gig, where he abandoned Late Night’s slapdash “Look, Ma! We’re doing a TV show!” approach, you didn’t experience pupal-stage Dave, which was vastly more adventurous and consistently hysterical than the repetitive, ground-down broadcast veteran he later became.

This is not to dismiss the fitful brilliance of The Late Show; any Letterman fan can reel off a handful of genuine CBS highlights. Dave manning the drive-through at a Taco Bell in New Jersey springs to mind for me, and his takedown of a faux-discombobulated Joaquin Phoenix is one of the defining incidents of Letterman’s late-night career.

But that was still just a celebrity interview via verbal scalpel, as opposed to Dave totally winging it with strangers out on Broadway or getting stuck half-way up a wall while wearing a Velcro suit.

Lyle Lovett once suggested that Letterman back in the day was the most impersonated man in the country. Suddenly, being the mocking wise guy was a badge of honor, provided you were actually funny while you mocked.

Even by my freshman year of college, when Late Night debuted, I was already a seasoned mocking wise guy. So, for me, Dave was a veritable Statue of Liberty of sarcasm, a torchbearer lighting the way for millions of people who had long been thinking, “Can you believe these idiots?!”

I was busy filling shipping drums with nickel nitrate flakes in a greasy chemical factory when Letterman’s first national TV foray, his morning show at NBC, sparked and fizzled out in a mere four months, so I never even saw it. But I remembered him from his comic segments on a temporary 1977 summer replacement show starring...Jesus...the Starland Vocal Band, and that alone was enough to turn me into a fan.

By the time Late Night went on the air, my new college buddies and I were primed for it. I know for a fact that I watched every one of Letterman’s first one hundred Late Night episodes, and I missed very few of them thereafter, at least while I was still in school.

This wasn’t a mere TV show. It was hanging out in Dave’s apartment and laughing my ass off for an hour to wrap up a hard day. I felt like I knew the guy, and Late Night’s low-budget mis en scene only bolstered the illusion.

If not for Letterman, I never would have recognized the serenity I could get out of crushing a tomato-filled Barbie dollhouse with an 80-ton hydraulic press.

It’s not exactly a shock that Letterman idolized Johnny Carson. By the time Late Night kicked into gear, Johnny had been doing his thing on The Tonight Show for almost twenty years and was a TV legend. Like every other comedian in the country, Dave was largely launched to stardom by making Johnny laugh in front of millions of viewers.

But the burnished glow of selective memory, and a soft spot for Johnny himself, suggests that the guy was knocking it out of the park with his comic inventiveness for way longer than he actually did.

By the late 70s, Carson was still a marvel at interviewing guests. No one outside of Dick Cavett has ever done it better, but Cavett’s show was a vastly more intellectual pursuit than Carson’s.

Luckily for Johnny, a casual Midwestern manner and lightning-quick verbal reflexes papered over the fact that The Tonight Show’s skits and monologues were, at best, Catskills mugging that only seemed au courant because he dropped phrases like “mood ring” or “Billie Jean King” or “G-spot” into them.

For years on end, the majority of Carson’s non-interview laughs came from his paid inebriated flunky, Ed McMahon, or as a secondary response to the audience groaning at how bad the writing was— “May the bluebird of happiness fly up your mother’s nose” and all that shit.

After a while, Johnny never even tried to think outside the box of his own making. And he probably never would have, either, even if he’d kept going at it until he finally died right there onstage.

Letterman, who is almost chronically self-deprecating, has long argued that his career hinged on doing a half-assed Carson impersonation, but that seems like the oversimplification of somebody who’d rather not discuss it.

In fact, Dave was breathing badly needed new life into the late-night form, or at least he was until CBS and huge-money pressures sucked the free-range get-up-and-go out of him.

Not every inch of what he was doing was new, though. As in most things showbiz, there were precedents, if you wanted to look for them.

Letterman freely admits to having lifted popular elements of his schtick from Steve Allen, who hosted The Tonight Show from 1954 to 1957 and had a bent for regular-guy oddities. There was actually way more Allen than Carson in Letterman, as well as a substantial sprinkling of the Golden Age surrealist Ernie Kovacs.

These TV pioneers could see that the post-war American gyroscope was spinning off-center. There were elements of our existence that badly needed to be laughed at by the time television overtook this nation’s lives and living rooms, and somebody had to point out the madness.

But, even then, Dave took the ball that Allen and Kovacs inflated twenty-five years earlier and ran with it. Carson’s bluebird of happiness rarely entered into the conversation.

Late Night’s peak years ended in 1986, when head writer Merrill Markoe, who had also been Letterman’s live-in girlfriend, left the show.

Before then, Markoe created Dave’s sturdiest recurring segments, including Stupid Pet Tricks, where people would haul in their doggie, bird, or piglet to show off a useless talent; and Stupid Human Tricks, where people would haul themselves in and do the exact same thing.

Markoe also produced a wide assortment of remote segments that featured Dave, who was not yet an immediately recognizable face, interviewing everyday New York pedestrians and shopkeepers while they solemnly made fools of themselves.

These, for me, were the show’s real reason for being. There are 8 million citizens in this fine city that I now call home. So, based on national percentages, that’s around 4.7 million fools to stumble upon.

All Dave had to do was step out on the sidewalk to find them.

When Dave Met Colleen

Perhaps my favorite of these remotes, however, led Letterman all the way to the wilds of Long Island to meet a charmingly stunned, not especially foolish young fan who wrote him a letter questioning his penchant for wearing sneakers with his suit.

Years later, Colleen said in an interview for Letterman’s website that her manager at Sears was unhappy when Dave showed up with cameras in tow because she was afraid he was making fun of Sears itself. But when she found out he was only making fun of Colleen, she was okay with it.

This says everything you need to know about working retail.

Dave and the Attack Monkey

Just like Carson, Letterman was amusing with animals, especially when the animals didn’t want to cooperate with him (thus the triumph of the Joaquin Phoenix interview.)

In this memorable segment, the woman handling the monkeys also doesn’t seem too interested in dealing with Dave. Notice his exasperation when she barrels right past him after her introduction and falls into rote stage patter that she could probably have delivered while doing a crossword puzzle.

She has zero intention of mixing it up with the host of the show that’s promoting her dated routine to a national audience, and she appears to care even less about his physical well-being.

Honestly, if that monkey had killed Dave, you get the feeling the woman would have simply stepped over his body, grabbed up her co-stars and props, and hopped the next flight back to Vegas.

The Official General Electric Handshake

There were a lot of reasons why NBC passed over Letterman in favor of that unctuous, boot-licking weasel, Jay Leno, to host The Tonight Show when Johnny retired. But “just poking fun at the big guys” behavior like you’re about to witness from Dave reportedly played a significant role in the network’s decision.

Leno was actually Letterman’s top recurring Late Night guest—he was a scream every time he appeared—until Dave’s favorite smelled vast power and riches in the air. Then he thoroughly defanged himself lest he offend anybody in Iowa and pissed on Dave so he could buy a bunch of antique cars and store them in an airplane hangar. Take my word for it, kids— not even Rod Stewart sold out as enthusiastically as Jay Leno did.

Dave, on the other hand, was not the boot-licking type.

When General Electric purchased NBC’s parent company, RCA, Letterman immediately started doing defective GE lightbulb and microwave gags, which apparently were too much for his sensitive new overlords to take. So, in a gesture of faux goodwill, Dave decided to visit GE’s corporate offices with a nice fruit basket in tow as a peace offering.

It did not go well.

You can tell Letterman gets nervous when the head security guy approaches him with his goon-like personage and can’t-do attitude. Dave’s more than happy to hand him off to his loyal director, Hal Gurney...who Dave forever referred to on the show as “Hal Gertner,” for some reason.

Letterman milked that official General Electric handshake for all it was worth in the wake of his rejection. For a long time afterward, it would appear as a quick finale at the tail end of Late Night’s credits.

That’s how you receive a negative work review and find yourself transferred to the Ed Sullivan Theater after years of committed service.

Larry “Bud” Melman at the Port Authority

And now we come to Larry “Bud” Melman. God help us.

It’s hard to accurately explain what Larry Bud did on Late Night, even after you’ve sat there and watched him do it. I’ve seen him referred to as a walking punchline, which seems fair enough, but Larry Bud was damn near close to Dada. Letterman would just hand him the keys, then sit back and watch in amazement while he wrecked the car.

Larry Bud delivered his dialogue as if he were shouting nonsense syllables at someone on the other side of a canyon. And during those countless moments when he fell into a flop sweat, he looked for all the world like a man drowning in oxygen.

Letterman dabbled a bit in Larry Bud when he moved to CBS, but he had to refer to him by his real name, Calvert DeForest, at that point due to NBC’s contention that they had “intellectual rights” on Larry Bud, which is pretty hysterical if you consider there was absolutely nothing intellectual or right about the character.

Still, you had to admire the fact that Larry Bud never gave up and bailed on a skit, no matter how bad things got. He seemed to be simultaneously in on the joke and utterly incapable of comprehending that the joke was him.

This produced an almost David Lynchian conceptual fissure. Larry was funny as hell, but if you took a few steps back and really considered things—or maybe if you were high—he was also close to terrifying.

What follows may well be my favorite David Letterman segment, the one that I think best illustrates the misshapen magic of Letterman’s time at NBC. Larry Bud welcomes incoming visitors to New York City at the Port Authority bus terminal on beautiful W. 42nd St. and offers them hot towels after their long journeys from Philadelphia and Hoboken.

Seems easy enough. For a normal person.

I nearly peed my pants laughing when I watched this during its original broadcast. Listen to Dave fall into hysterics and finally just squeal to himself as Larry Bud repeatedly transforms himself into a living ball of confusion and totally screws the pooch. The absurdity grows deeper by the moment.

Enjoy.

Paul Shaffer, Letterman’s trusty sidekick and bandleader, said that when Bob Dylan was on the show in 1984, the only thing Dylan said to him was, “Paul, do you think you could introduce me to Larry Bud Melman?'“

Surely, this explains the stretch of albums Dylan released in the mid-1980s.

Tom Hanks Nails The Landing

I think Letterman took way too much grief for supposedly being a jerk during interviews. Sometimes there’s just heat in the kitchen.

Cher, for instance, famously told him, live on the air, that she refused to appear on his show for years on end because she thought he was an asshole. And maybe Dave was an asshole when it came to skin-tightened, blow-dried showbiz mannequins who rarely behaved like authentic human beings.

I can’t really blame him there. If they had it coming, Dave would happily give it to them. He was willing to do God’s work, as far as I’m concerned.

But when he was dealing with someone who knew the point was to just loosen up and divert people at bedtime, he had a blast. Teri Garr and Steve Martin always scored big, and yes, so did Leno before The Great Unraveling. Dave also gave Andy Kaufman and Pee-wee Herman enough rope to do whatever it was they thought they were doing, and he always delighted in their antics.

Nothing was better than laughing along with Dave when things were cracking.

I’ll be closing this, then, with one of the best interviews Letterman ever conducted on Late Night, and, rather remarkably, it was the final one in the show’s history! The guest is Tom Hanks, and Hanks, who was always great with Dave, achieved casual talk show perfection on this particular night.

One anecdote after another scores. There are five or six laugh-out-loud moments here. Then, at the end of the episode, Springsteen came out and played “Glory Days!”

Not a bad way to slam the lid shut.

On those very rare occasions when I’ve stumbled upon footage of Slappy White since then, I can’t help but think, “Stop bendin’ the shafts!!” If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have anything to think about Slappy White at all, except maybe to remind myself that he wasn’t Nipsy Russell.

I cannot tell you how thrilled I was by Al Pacino’s performance as an unexpectedly humanized Jimmy Hoffa in Martin Scorsese’s late-career masterpiece, The Irishman, in 2019. It had been so long since Pacino had supplied nuanced, properly modulated work that fit the tone of the movie he was appearing in, I thought he was done for good.

Yes, he was sweetly convincing in Mike Newell’s underrated, low-rung mob picture, 1997’s Donnie Brasco. But I probably got more out of watching Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia than I really should have simply because Pacino wasn’t leaning so hard into his hambone routine (I landed a quote from my CNN review on the movie’s British poster, anyway, which was a kick. I never really pursued that sort of thing, so it was a fun surprise.)

Pacino’s Hoffa, though, with his endearing sense of loyalty, self-defeating stubbornness, and hilarious temper tantrums, is one of the highlights of The Irishman, and it’s filled to the brim with great performances. Honestly, after decades of our man going bug-eyed and shouting dialogue when no one in their right mind would be shouting, I was shocked.

It’s one of the more memorable turns he’s ever delivered. But there was a time in the early to mid-70s when you knew for a fact that this guy was going to deliver the goods. And he did it in a surprising assortment of ways. It wasn’t all yelling.

Not that it precluded yelling.

At his peak, only Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro threw off the kind of sparks that emanated from Pacino’s slowly overloading circuitry. There appeared to be a New York-birthed animal trapped inside of him; the tension arose in his performances because you never quite knew when he would lunge.

But when he did, the attack made perfect sense.

In that scene in The Godfather Part II where Kay finally reveals to Michael that she secretly aborted his child, Pacino drops into a visible tremor, smacks poor Diane Keaton so hard, and unleashes such unmitigated rage, it frightens me every time I see it. And I know it’s coming!

You can almost understand why the triumvirate of Nicholson, Pacino, and De Niro backed down from that degree of ferocity over the years. Brando, too. Surely, putting yourself through such a tight wringer for an entire career could shorten your life.

Better to just shout “Hoo-aah!” once in a while and avoid the early grave.

But, my God, it was great while it lasted. Those guys literally changed my view of the world when I got even more deeply into movies as a teenager and was finally able to see the great pictures I’d previously only been reading about.

Pacino’s methodical, cold-blooded transformation of Michael Corleone in the first two Godfather movies is, of course, more than beyond reproach— it’s one of the finest performances in cinema history. But I’ll tell you what, he’s every bit as electrifying as Sonny Wortzik, the would-be bank robber and born loser in Sidney Lumet’s masterful 1975 anxiety-opera Dog Day Afternoon.

Although the narrative is mostly confined to an enclosed space that represents Sonny’s mortifying lack of options, the character is put through a set of paces that eventually leaves both him and the audience drained. Pacino traverses this psychological landscape like a man who simply has to believe, even when he’s obviously doomed.

Like so many outstanding movies from the period, Dog Day Afternoon doesn’t exactly end with a bouquet of roses, but it’s easy to forget that much of it is deeply, darkly comical. It speaks volumes about the complexity of Pacino’s characterization that Sonny doesn’t seem like such a bad guy, not really, even though he’s taken it upon himself to attempt an armed robbery.

He just doesn’t plan very well. And he’s having a chrome-plated motherfucker of a bad day.

The story, which is based on an actual event, opens with Sonny, his disturbingly dimwitted and dour buddy, Sal (the brilliant John Cazale), and another accomplice—who soon chickens out and flees—entering a quiet Brooklyn bank on a miserably hot summer afternoon. When Sonny thinks the coast is finally clear, he (hilariously ungracefully) whips a rifle out of the long box he’s been carrying under his arm, tells the aging guard to lock the front door, and demands that the manager hand over the money in the vault.

Unfortunately, Sonny, who has a gift for miscalculation, miscalculated when the bank’s money would be picked up for transfer. So there’s virtually nothing left to steal. And a businessman across the street has caught on that something’s up over at the bank.

Soon, what was supposed to take ten minutes turns into a grueling, hours-long therapy session hosted by a police negotiator and a SWAT team. Plus, the cops have turned off the bank’s air-conditioning, and the street is lined with New York-style gawkers and TV cameras. Sonny and Sal have to figure out what to do next while fielding phone calls from TV reporters and garden-variety whackjobs.

They also have to keep the group of bank tellers who are now their hostages from driving them nuts via not unwarranted nervous collapses, bathroom-break demands, and outbursts of withering sarcasm.

The entire ensemble is terrific, especially the mouthy lead teller played by Penelope Allen. Allen and her husband, Charlie Laughton, were acting coaches who saw huge promise in Pacino when he was first learning his craft, gave him a place to stay, and practically served as surrogate parents to him for several years! So her casting here is Al returning a life-changing favor, and their interplay is delightful.

Understand, when Dog Day Afternoon was released in 1975, there were no 24-hour news channels, and reality TV wasn’t even a distant stink on the horizon. The idea that a common criminal might become a prime-time media star was still an exotic concept; consequently, Sonny’s predicament quickly evolves into an overwrought sideshow, a summertime novelty gone badly wrong.

There are moments when things get so crazy, it wouldn’t seem out of place if somebody fired up a calliope.

One of the more entertaining aspects of Frank Pierson’s crackling, deservedly Oscar-winning screenplay is how the gathering crowd begins to side with Sonny over the somewhat buffoonish plain-clothes policeman (Charles Durning) who tries to cajole him into releasing the hostages.

Pierson also develops unexpected relationships between the hostages and their frazzled captors, and his dialogue is razor-sharp. Pacino generates a handful of belly laughs with Sonny’s exasperated asides, most of which are directed at himself.

When the bank phone rings for what seems like the three-hundredth time, and Sonny picks it up and mockingly answers with the New York radio station salutation, “WNEW plays all the hits,” the sense of place and time is driven home. Telling little touches like that—Sonny also assures the hostages he doesn’t want to kill anybody by pointing out “I’m a Catholic”—give Dog Day Afternoon a grounding in offbeat reality.

It seems too warped not to be real.

Between this picture and Network, Lumet pretty much had it nailed as the most prescient filmmaker of the 1970s. He grasps how the media dictates the zeitgeist, rather than simply covering it while it blooms on its own.

He also, and this shouldn’t be underestimated, handles the cramped interior of the bank for maximum impact. His shots are laid out in a logical manner that allows you to keep your bearings; you always know where Sonny is in relation to the deadly rifles across the street. And the mostly static camera suddenly barrels into anxious motion, up and down the length of the room, when the tension rises to a boiling point.

Watch the stunning sequencing of shots at the beginning of this scene. The picture was edited by the legendary Dede Allen, who also cut Bonnie and Clyde, Little Big Man, Serpico, and Reds.

Compare this to the Benihana chef editing you get from so many movies today.

Dede Allen knew what she was doing.

The only other film I can think of that squeezes so much angst out of cramped quarters is Wolfgang Peterson’s German submarine pressure cooker, Das Boot. The characters in both pictures are trapped in a small environment and are gulping air rather than simply breathing it.

Sonny certainly has more oxygen at the ready than the sailors on Peterson’s doomed U-boat. But he also knows that his next breath could very easily be his last. No wonder he looks like his head is in a vice.

Lumet always coaxed superb performances from his actors. Cazale, who you undoubtedly know as “Fredo” from The Godfather, brings a dullard’s intensity to Sal that only gets scarier when he says something funny.

Sal, you see, isn’t joking. He just can’t grasp reality and is willing to kill the hostages if it means not returning to prison.

I always laugh at Sonny’s excitedly optimistic question to Sal, “I’ve made it happen so far, right?” So far, they’re lucky they’re still alive!

Sonny’s slow realization that his pathetic friend might be the most dangerous element of an increasingly unstable situation adds yet another dose of off-the-wall intensity. Pacino’s increasingly twitchy, darting eyes convey just as much information as his dialogue.

Sonny’s in so far over his head, he doesn’t know where to look.

Even though Cazale is remarkable, supporting performance bragging rights still have to go to Chris Sarandon (ex-husband of Susan) as a bathrobe-wearing, transgender psych patient named Leon.

I won’t elaborate on Sonny’s connection to Leon, but the desperate telephone conversation that police set up for the two ranks with Peter Sellers’ chat with the Russian premier in Dr. Strangelove as one of the more devastating hook-ups ever filmed.

It’s arguably the best scene in a picture that’s absolutely packed with great moments, including a genuinely iconic one.

That would be when Sonny steps out of the bank to confront the firearm-bearing cops and, realizing that the crowd is actually starting to root for him, chooses to deliver an impromptu, one-word editorial comment on the spectre of police brutality.

It should be explained to viewers who are unaware of one of the uglier events in U.S. law enforcement history (get in line for that one) that Sonny’s cries of “Attica! Attica! Attica!” refer to the slaughter that took place at Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York in 1971. In a nutshell, there was a prison uprising, and state troopers were eventually sent in to take care of a volatile hostage situation by shooting anyone who got in the way, whether they were prisoners or guards who were unfortunate enough to have been captured by the inmates.

When it was all over, thirty-seven people had been killed by the cops, including ten hostages.

There’s consistency to Lumet’s vision here. He’s not an innocent bystander to the magnitude of Pacino’s achievement. Sonny could just as easily be yelling, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” as Peter Finch did in Network, and the sequence would play exactly the same way.

The “Attica” scene is Pacino’s obvious crowd-pleaser, his Oscar moment— not that he actually won one in 1975. Nicholson picked it up that year for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and if there were ever two more intoxicating performances nominated in the same year, I’d be hard-pressed to name them.

The similarities between Sonny and R.P. McMurphy are startling. Both men are straining against an America that dangles freedom like a carrot in front of its citizens, only to snatch it back the moment they make a break for it. Their victory is that they rage until the very end, even though they know that end will be permeated with grief.

They “win” because they simply refuse to acknowledge defeat. In the modern age, when the machinery of our society is dehumanizing us on a daily basis, there’s real honor in that.

If you haven’t seen Dog Day Afternoon, I strongly suggest you give it a look. If you have seen it, maybe it’s time to watch it again, for reasons we couldn’t have imagined fifty years ago.

Neil Young is now a crazy old man, which shouldn’t come as too much of a shock to loyal Neil Young fans, since he started behaving like one well before he found an AARP application waiting in his mailbox.

I don’t want to turn this into a discourse on the lazy-ass albums Young has been recording for the past twenty-something years, because I’m a huge admirer of his best music and I listen to him a lot.

Understand that. I take no joy in talking about the crap.

For the purposes of this particular article, though, I have to examine the meandering slop merchant Young has turned himself into, if you don’t count the vastly more commendable, long-ago recorded albums he’s been releasing via his Archives series for the past several years.

There was a time in the 1970s, and then again for a few years in the late 80s and early 90s, when a new Neil Young record was a big deal for music fans. People bought the thing to hear what one of the true legends of rock was up to, and the albums were often both powerful and uniquely offbeat.

Young has always been quirky, but it used to be to his listeners’ benefit. Take, for example, the brilliant “Pocahontas” from Rust Never Sleeps.

That startling appearance by Marlon Brando gives the tune a potent Young-ian twist by linking this country’s centuries-long abuse of Native Americans to the pathetic nature of a windbag movie star trying to raise awareness of the horror all by his lonesome.

That’s the kind of quirky Neil Young used to be.

Since around the early 2000s, though, Young has repeatedly released apparent jam sessions with lyrics that couldn’t have been labored over for much longer than it takes to play the songs themselves, as well as oddball concept albums like 2009’s Fork in the Road, which is largely about the advantages of mass conversion to electro-hybrid automobiles.

There are no tin soldiers, and Nixon ain’t comin’.

It appears the only thing Young is after these days is for people to say, “Jesus, you just can’t pin down that wacky Neil Young!” Then, once he gets the response he’s looking for, he tosses off another album that’s batty and barely listenable but from an entirely different angle. Or maybe he stars in a laughable-mystical HD video Western directed by Daryl Hannah.

He’s done that, too, in case you didn’t hear.

Young has bounced back from too-much kooky before, though, so there’s still a glimmer of hope. In fact, he reached his peak for inscrutable behavior over forty years ago, when he signed with future mogul David Geffen’s hot new label, Geffen Records.

And a hilarious peak it was.

Geffen—seen here with Ms. Cheryl Sarkisian and Steve Rubell at Studio 54, before Rubell was forced to party in prison—has become, of course, one of the richest, most powerful men in the entertainment industry, through both music and film production. And he didn’t get that way by having the people he works with use his money as a public launching pad for their personal eccentricities.

But that’s precisely what Neil Young did with David Geffen’s money in the early 80s, to the tune of a million bucks per album.

That Geffen eventually tried to sue his new act for not sounding enough like himself is one of the more comical developments in rock music history, arguably the most Neil Young thing that’s ever happened to Neil Young. And that’s saying something.

Young’s first release for Geffen Records, an album called Trans, came from so far out of left field—like waaaay back on the warning track—even his most committed fans couldn’t wrap their heads around it.

After years of Young building his persona through records that were either folk, MOR country, or rip-snorting rock (or mixtures of the three), Trans sounded like a salami-before-bedtime nightmare in which he was suddenly trapped inside of a third-rate Kraftwerk album. He even temporarily took to dressing all “New Wave” (see the photo) and singing through a Vocoder to give his voice a newfangled technological wrinkle that nobody on earth was ever hoping to hear.

Mr. “Heart of Gold” suddenly sounded like a cyborg who was breathing helium, as opposed to his usual quavering Canadian songwriter fighting off a nervous breakdown.

This is “Transformer Man,” from Trans. It’s emblematic of most of the songs on the album, if you can believe it.

I would have loved to have been sitting there when Geffen first heard that!

Young later explained that Trans was an attempt to express the possibility of his son, Ben, who was born with severe cerebral palsy, learning to communicate with his father through computers. So Young had a poignant connection to this music, and it often leads diehard fans to defend the album on his stated intent rather than the actual results.

They’ve only listened to the record once, mind you, because they don’t like it. But they get really offended if you don’t like it.

Personally, I don’t want to have songs explained to me so I’ll feel morally compelled to endure them. The sad part is that there are some really good tunes on Trans whose strengths are totally destroyed by the bewildering digitized arrangements.

Listen to this gorgeous version of “Transformer Man” that Young played several years later on MTV Unplugged.

That’s a superb song, and its deep emotion is right there for the taking. It’s genuinely moving. Wouldn’t it have been better to record the tune this way, or at least something close to it, instead of making it sound like an earworm that’s bugging the robot from Lost in Space?

Everyone was taken aback by Trans, including Young’s racket-raising backing group, Crazy Horse, who played on the album’s original sessions before Neil invented a theme that only he could grasp, then started reworking the tracks accordingly.

Or, as Crazy Horse guitarist Frank Sampedro summarized it, “Next thing we knew, Neil stripped all our music off, overdubbed all this stuff, the Vocoder, weird sequencing, and put the synth shit on it.”

Well put, Frank.

Geffen, of course, was livid. This, after all, wasn’t what he was paying Neil Young to do!

Or was it?

One could argue that whatever Neil Young writes and records for official release is a Neil Young album. What else could it be? I’m sure that’s where Young was coming from when he handed Trans over to Geffen. But he had to have known that his new label would not be dancing a techno jig over this particular piece of work, and neither would the vast majority of his fans, who had never heard from Kraftwerk and didn’t care to.

I mean, how myopic could he possibly be? If he honestly thought Trans was about to be his big new hit, the bales of pot he’d smoked over the years had finally kippered his cerebral cortex. This wasn’t just something kinda different. Young had never even remotely juked toward this type of music in the past.

But there it was anyway.

It wouldn’t have been any more bizarre if Bruce Springsteen had handed Columbia Records a labored-over collection of foxtrots.

After a heated “debate”—there was yelling—Geffen finally relented and issued Trans to, at best, perplexed but accepting reviews and, at worst, extremely hostile ones. But Geffen also made it clear to Young that his next album had to be a rock & roll album, not more of this fucking automaton bullshit!

Or something like that. I’m just making up the dialogue.

However Geffen phrased it, Neil was a big boy and didn’t appreciate being told what to do. His next record for the label was far more listenable and vastly more entertaining than Trans, to be sure. But, in an act of what could best be called faux acquiescence, it was also a snotty, thoroughly calculated mockery of what Geffen was demanding from him.

Get a load of our boy posing through the pomade on the cover of his next Geffen-bankrolled undertaking, Everybody’s Rockin’. That’s about as tidy as I’ve ever seen him!

Everybody’s Rockin’ is an undeniable rock & roll record, just as the boss commanded. In fact, it’s such a rock & roll record it sounds like it was written and recorded by a bunch of high schoolers in 1956. It’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard, and whenever I return to it after forgetting about it for a couple of years, it gives me chuckle fits all over again.

Here’s a sample track, a big favorite of mine called “Kinda Fonda Wanda”.

That’s right, guys. Wanda always wanna wanna wanna. (I absolutely love that single-fingered piano workout! I laugh both with it and at it, so that’s two mints in one!)

“I almost vindictively gave Geffen Everybody’s Rockin’,” Young later said. “Geffen wanted more rock & roll. That was the key phrase. ‘Well, you want some fuckin’ rock & roll do ya? Okay, fine. I can do that. As a matter of fact, my uncle was a rocker, and I’ll be him.’”

Geffen, right on cue, went ape.

As I’ve explained here and here at The Cool Stuff, I am fully capable of digging the shit out of simple rock & roll, and if it’s rampant with overt stupidity, it’s even more enjoyable. And there’s overt stupidity, albeit of an intentional sort, all over Everybody’s Rockin’.

Rock & roll in its nascent form—the type that Neil and his buddies are playing here—was the fanfare of the common teenager. The whole idea was that anybody with a guitar and the ability to strum two or three chords in the proper sequence could play it, and sometimes some sleazebag businessman would even let you record it. Parents didn’t get the point, but that’s because they were parents! Of course they didn’t get the point! That was the point! (if you can follow that.)

The songs were all over in a couple of minutes anyway.

True to the original form, Everybody’s Rockin’ runs a cool 24 minutes and 36 seconds in its entirety! It’s almost certainly the shortest album I’ve ever purchased, and I’m sure Young kept it hyper-concise to even further piss off David Geffen.

When you consider the million bucks per album Geffen was paying him, Young pulled in a cool $41,667 for each minute of music on Everybody’s Rockin’, which qualifies as exceptionally nice work if you can get it. Granted, he may have spent close to three hours writing the tunes, but that’s where it stood as a piece of vinyl.

Now let’s listen to the album’s towering title track, shall we? Of course we shall.

Again with the piano. (Note that Neil, for sheer comic effect, has Ron and Nancy boogying on the White House lawn. Back in the day it was possible to make the president and first lady seem even more ridiculous than they actually were, kids! Crazy, I know.)

Everybody’s Rockin’ climbed all the way to number 46 on the Billboard albums chart, proving that at least some of the record-buying public had a sense of humor. Not enough for David Geffen, mind you. But a few, anyway.

Even the video Young shot to promote the record’s first and only single, “Wonderin’,” is a hoot. For some reason, it’s always been impossible to find a clear copy of this thing anywhere on the Internet, but it’s just too good for me to not post it.

I’m not sure how he did it, but it looks like Young cut out several frames of footage per second to give the proceedings a thoroughly pointless herky-jerky quality. I went nuts the first time I saw this on VH1, years after the fact.

Don’t go telling me Michael Jackson doing pelvic thrusts with a bunch of zombies is better than that!

As for that lawsuit.

Geffen eventually attempted to sue Young for making albums that were “uncommercial” and “uncharacteristic of his previous work,” which certainly seems like a cut-and-dried case if it weren’t for the fact that we’re talking about the creative impulses of a human being.

If you knew precisely what Neil Young, or any other musician for that matter, was going to do next, he wouldn’t be an artist anymore. Good, bad, or mediocre. It’s not like he’s dispensing frozen yogurt.

Young sued Geffen right back for $21 million, saying his contract gave him complete artistic freedom, which it did.

Geffen finally withdrew the lawsuit and later admitted it was all a huge mistake. Neil then submitted three conventional, rather middling Neil Young-style albums to the label before returning to his old home, Reprise Records, where he should have stayed all along.

Lesson learned the hard way, but you have to wonder if David Geffen is currently looking into this newfangled AI music he’s been reading so much about.

That’s Geraldine Jones in 1971, wresting control of an interview from author and sex therapist Dr. David Reuben.

At this stage of the game, I can understand your not knowing who David Reuben was (he wrote Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex, if you’re ever on Jeopardy), but it really bothers me that you could be unfamiliar with Geraldine, or, to be more specific, with the groundbreaking comedian playing her, a man named Flip Wilson.

When I was eight years old, I thought Flip Wilson was the shit, and so did the rest of America. That Wilson’s name is now packed away in the mothballs of baby boomers’ memories seems a real injustice.

He deserves far better than that.

The fact of the matter is, for several years in the early 70s, Flip Wilson was the king (and queen, as the character’s case may be) of primetime variety programming. My mom used to let me stay up later on Thursday nights just to watch him.

I was a vocal fan.

Wilson was the first Black comedian to host his own network TV show, and his gracious but still hip and unapologetic Blackness was initially a topic of discussion in newspaper op-ed pieces. Soon enough, though, he was merely just Flip, and I’m sure more than a few racists forgot who they were dealing with while he cackled and cavorted with his guest stars on Thursday nights.

The Flip Wilson Show was a cash cow for NBC, with Wilson’s ingratiating playfulness being the key reason for its success. But Wilson was a far more complex, bruised individual than he appeared to be. After unexpectedly taking himself off the air in 1974, he all but disappeared from sight.

Aside from an occasional movie cameo or TV commercial and a couple of very quickly failed sitcoms, he was pretty much gone for good after having been one of the biggest names in show business.

Clerow Wilson was born in Jersey City, NJ, in 1933; he had nine siblings. When his father couldn’t find work and his mother abandoned the family, young Clerow bounced around to various foster homes and reform schools.

In 1950, he lied about his age in order to join the military and escape this dire situation, but you get the sense his childhood was forever with him. The people who worked on his show noted that Wilson had real trust issues and was a control freak, which doesn’t come as a huge shock, considering.

After a stint in the Air Force, where his natural sense of humor was so popular that commanding officers had him tour bases to cheer up his fellow servicemen, Wilson decided to give standup comedy a shot. (He got his nickname when the other guys in his barracks said he was always “flipped out.”)

For almost fifteen years, Wilson earned a living playing for segregated Black audiences on what was known as the Chitlin’ Circuit, where comedians like Redd Foxx and Dick Gregory, among many others, also got their lengthy starts before reaching nationwide fame. Wilson eventually became a regular at Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater.

“Those Black audiences in the little weekend clubs were the toughest I’ve ever played for,” Wilson later said. “With all the trouble Black people have, they try to forget on weekends. You’ve got to be good to make them laugh.”

Performing in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Bill Cosby, Wilson told funny, relatable stories rather than punchline-focused jokes. A drummer wouldn’t have known when to nail a rim shot behind him.

This was a new development in standup, and Flip excelled at it. He had a charming, casual manner that caught the eye of broadcasting giant Ed Sullivan, whose attention any comedian would have been happy to catch, as Sullivan hosted the single most watched TV show in America.

Flip would appear on The Ed Sullivan Show eleven times, gaining new fans with each performance.

Soon enough, he was a regular guest on The Tonight Show, where he was a favorite of Johnny Carson—when Wilson guest-hosted the show one night in 1967, he interviewed Jimi Hendrix—and appeared several times on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In. He also recorded a string of successful comedy albums for Atlantic Records (check out the antiquated title on the above release.)

After the ratings success of a stand-alone Labor Day TV special, NBC offered Wilson his own sitcom...but he refused to take it!

In a pretty astounding move, considering the circumstances, he said he wanted to do a variety show or nothing because he knew he could do that. He also knew how badly the network wanted him, and he was prepared to walk if the higher-ups didn’t give him what he wanted!

NBC finally agreed to his demands, and The Flip Wilson Show was born.

Wilson was no dummy. He negotiated the rare position of being the creator, producer, and star of his own show. He also landed the program’s lucrative syndication rights. Not even Dean Martin and Carol Burnett had managed that!

Initially, Wilson wanted his old Chitlin Circuit buddy, a then very troubled Richard Pryor, on his writing staff, but that was a bridge too far for NBC...at first, anyway. Wilson would get Pryor later. He did, however, sign George Carlin.

That’s a pretty good writers’ room.

The Flip Wilson Show became the second most-watched program in America behind All in the Family (by the second season, Flip was regularly pulling in 40 million viewers), and he had the clout to bring the greatest Black entertainers in the country to prime time on a weekly basis.

So that’s what he did.

Big-name white entertainers were welcome, of course, and you got plenty of them. Burt Reynolds, Bing Crosby, Lily Tomlin, Lucille Ball, Tony Randall, Lee Marvin, Ed Asner, etc. NBC said people were calling them to make guest appearances; they didn’t have to recruit anyone.

But a list of legendary Black stars who shared the stage with Wilson over the course of just four seasons is astonishing. I know this is long, but it’s worth noting: Ella Fitzgerald, James Brown, Muhammad Ali, Louis Armstrong, Moms Mabley, Richard Pryor, Lena Horne, Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Harry Belafonte, the Jackson Five, Ray Charles, Curtis Mayfield, Cicely Tyson, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight & the Pips, the Pointer Sisters, Sammy Davis Jr., Redd Foxx, Johnny Mathis, the Temptations, and the Supremes.

And that’s not even all of them!

Plopping down in front of The Flip Wilson Show on Thursday nights was a learning experience for a kid growing up in a small Alabama town where Black people—unless they played football for Auburn or Alabama—were routinely viewed as something other than “normal.”

Flip’s guests sure seemed normal enough to me when I was watching. In fact, I really liked them. Everyone looked great, and they were quick-witted and self-deprecating.

They weren’t strange visitors from another culture. We shared a culture.

Wilson had great rapport with his co-stars; there was a sense of joy about the show. You could tell he delighted in his own antics during their skits together, and his enthusiasm was contagious. Guests often cracked up at him.

One recurring character was Reverend Leroy from the Church of What’s Happening Now, a con man preacher who coined the then-popular catchphrase “The devil made me do it!” But Wilson also launched a straight-shooting young woman named Geraldine Jones on the unsuspecting public...

And Geraldine was a star. For a while there, she was practically America’s new It Girl.

Nowadays, cross-dressing humor can be viewed askance, but there was nothing demeaning or derogatory about Flip’s embodiment of Geraldine. He said that he based the character on the way his sister used to clown around when she was getting dolled up for a big date.

Geraldine, Wilson said, “demands respect, and she’s never asking for favors. Geraldine’s liberated— that’s where she’s at. Everybody knows she don’t take no stuff.”

It’s fitting that another Flip-generated national catchphrase was Geraldine’s “What you see is what you get!” She was hiding nothing and boldly announced her intentions.

Here’s a choice display of Geraldine’s uninhibited charms, featuring a very entertained Ray Charles (Don Rickles is also on hand, seeming like he was told he’d be in the skit moments before hitting the stage.)

That’s The Flip Wilson Show in a nutshell. It was always like that. Everybody seemed to be having a blast together.

When Pryor was on the writing staff, he’d complain that Wilson’s humor wasn’t angry enough for the times, and he wasn’t subtle about his distaste, even after Flip took a stand to get NBC to hire him. But Wilson wouldn’t have had a show for very long if he had performed with the degree of racial pique that Richard Pryor did.

Years later, NBC yanked Pryor’s own show after a mere four episodes. So there you go.

Surely, it was enough for Wilson to be hilarious and likable, and his writers repeatedly made references to Black culture, both overt and subtle. He was the first to do this and was breaking down barriers, regardless of whether or not Richard Pryor thought he should be orchestrating weekly confrontations with white viewers.

“I do these characters because they’re what I know,” Wilson said in a 1972 Time magazine interview. “But people are just people to me. The way I see it, I don’t have to think Black or not think Black. I just have to entertain. I’m just a comic.”

And then the fall.

Wilson obsessed over details concerning the show; he once bought a different doorbell for NBC’s sound effects department because he didn’t like the one they were using in his skits! This degree of focus, and wearing so many different hats while creating an hour-long TV show every week, finally wore him down to a nub.

Never an angel, he used recreational drugs for much of his adult life, starting when he was in the Air Force. Smoking too much pot and snorting too much coke in his off hours finally became an issue. His ego was out of control, and he had easy access to anything he wanted.

When his good friend, the singer Bobby Darin, died at the age of 37, leaving behind a young son, Wilson decided to bow out of the show and focus on developing a real relationship with his own children. Or at least that’s what he said. Ratings were slipping, and he may have also wanted to quit before he got canceled.

So he told NBC he was hanging it up, and The Flip Wilson Show was over in 1974, just four seasons after it had launched him to superstardom.

It didn’t necessarily seem like the public was done with Flip Wilson. TV shows eventually get canceled. It was more like Flip Wilson was done with the public. Unfortunately, he also seemed done with himself.

The drug issues did not subside in the ensuing years. He was even arrested for cocaine possession at LAX in 1981 (the case was dismissed for technical reasons in 1984, but he could well have gone to jail.) The only time he really felt a sense of control was when he was onstage, but he was no longer drawn to show business, and he had earned more than enough money to avoid working.

He was tired of the pressure and the hustle, and he encouraged his kids to start smoking pot with him.

The latter part of his life was a haze of drugs, women, blowing money—at one point, he got into racing hot air balloons!—playing in golf tournaments, driving cross-country in luxury vehicles, and treating his family like second-stringers, if that. Sadly, his son, David, was paralyzed from the shoulders down in a 1993 motorcycle wreck, which didn’t exactly slow Flip’s guilt or drug intake.

Flip Wilson died of liver cancer on November 25, 1998, in Malibu, at the age of 64. He had been a trailblazing performer, but he found it easier to make people laugh than to live his own life with a sense of purpose and connect with the people who loved him.

I still do what I can to keep the memory alive, though.

One day, some old man in my Harlem neighborhood will recognize the logo, and we’ll have a great conversation.

I’ve never been so sure that the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, a three-day slate of music, peace, and love held in upstate New York in August 1969, proved the viability of a bold social experiment.

Taken as a whole, lots of adventurous music was played at Woodstock, there was tons of dope, and there were too few places to pee, poop, or screw in private.

Rather than being the moment of countercultural self-actualization that millions of disaffected kids and young adults claimed it to be—you didn’t actually have to be there to feel you had participated—it seems more like a miracle of self-control by an enormous group of diversely fucked-up people.

The rose-colored impetus was there, though. You have to give them credit for that.

Woodstock was reckless, but in a benevolent way. It sure beat the most powerful country in the world trying to swing another country’s civil war by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people who didn’t have to die.

A low bar, I know, but at least it beat that. And Jimi Hendrix finally played The Star-Spangled Banner with the munitions-heavy oomph it had long been crying out for.

And then, four months later, while the counterculture’s memory still glowed with the warm light of we-told-you-so, there came Altamont, in which the Rolling Stones told Woodstock to hold its free cases of beer and watch.

The Altamont Speedway Free Festival on December 6, 1969, was supposed to be the Stones’ California version of Woodstock, but they did even less organizing for the event than the gang at Woodstock did!

The result was a well-documented monument to bad drugs, bad vibes, and rampant delusion, with, you guessed it, the now-traditional shortage of places to pee, poop, or screw in private.

The very special bonus at Altamont was the presence of LSD-spangled Hells Angels as onstage security who took to leaping into the crowd and beating people to a pulp.

When one poor kid unwisely pulled a gun on the Angels, they proceeded to kill him, right there in front of Mick and boys, who were in way over their heads regardless of how groovy Mick looked when he pranced around and shook ass.

Keith got really mad and yelled at the out-of-control motorcycle gang at one point, but somehow that didn’t stop them. Go figure.

The most astounding part of this is that the Stones, out of all the bands in both America and England who were being viewed as dispensers of The Truth by the experimenting masses, should have seen it coming. Or, at the very least, they should have been wary enough to proceed more carefully.

After all, just four days before the concert, they released an album that kicked off with a song about just such perilous possibilities.

Don’t worry. The opening track on the Stones’ Let It Bleed is substantially better than the album’s cover.

“Gimme Shelter” is a deeply troubling blast of fear and loathing with a “hopeful” final verse that’s all the more effective for feeling like it was tacked on as an insufficient apology for the rest of the tune.

The Stones, of course, started out as a first-rate blues and R&B cover band, then mutated into something more explosive— white boys with too much superstar insulation and a blatant disregard for propriety. Lots of other bands eventually climbed onboard that particular train, but the Stones got there first and drove it the most effectively, at least until it ran out of steam.

“Gimme Shelter” rocks the nasty eternal truth that human beings are capable of frightening savagery, and once they let it fly, those of us who’d rather not participate often have no choice in the matter.

It’s the Stones’ peak, both as musicians and as cultural avatars, and stands as one of the defining artistic statements of the 1960s.

Here’s the tune, if you need a refresher. Lyrics are included for those who’d like to sing along.

The blunt-instrument qualities of “Gimme Shelter” were a shock to record buyers and FM deejays alike in 1969. Yes, the mostly unheard Velvet Underground had ventured that deep into the heart of darkness before, but a band of the Stones’ stature had never even approached it.

The Beatles sure as hell didn’t.

Eleanor Rigby may have been sad and lonely, but that was as far as Lennon & McCartney were willing to take it. She hardly feared that someone might rape and murder her in the church vestibule.

Backup singer Merry Clayton’s suddenly featured female cry of despair in the midst of the Stones’ boys’ club jamming is enough to raise the hair on the back of your neck. It’s one of the towering moments in all of rock music, or in all of blues music, for that matter. The Stones at this point were fairly unclassifiable.

There was nowhere else for them to go after “Gimme Shelter,” certainly not with such a candid degree of bleakness.

They released a couple of terrific albums in the wake of Let It Bleed, including Exile on Main Street, which may well be their best. But if they had continued to ring the bell as savagely as they did with “Gimme Shelter,” surely it would have been too much for both them and their audience to take.

After Altamont, the Stones seemed, if not timid, then at least a little bit spooked. The dissipation remained, but the brutality lessened until they were basically a corporation with a bellowing CEO.

But for every force there’s an equal and opposite reaction.

These upstanding young gentlemen are The Band.

Left to right, that’s Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson, Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, and Rick Danko. Each member of the group played three or four instruments, and they performed round-robins on vocals, too. For the most part, Robertson wrote their songs and manned lead guitar.

These guys were a collective whose music conveyed a tangible sense of warmth and community. Although their self-titled 1969 album is an end-to-end masterpiece, I’d argue their finest individual song is 1968’s “The Weight,” off their torch-bearing debut, Music from Big Pink.

I personally rank “The Weight” and “Gimme Shelter” as the two most penetrating tunes of the rock era, groundbreaking works by way of a musical form that had moved several thematic steps beyond Chuck Berry and Hank Williams.

No one could have seen them coming when Elvis lit the commercial fire in 1956.

But it was only recently that I was struck by the songs’ relation to one another. They effectively contain the flip sides of what it means to be a human being, the strains we endure as we try to proceed with a glimmer of hope and a guiding sense of compassion toward others. There’s wisdom in them.

Let’s listen to “The Weight” now, in all its somewhat exasperated glory.

Robertson’s lyrics and Levon Helm’s magnificent, grounded vocal (he was one of the very best, and not enough people know it) are humane and totally free of music biz posturing.

No one is playing to the cheap seats here. The song runs counter to nearly everything else going on in rock music in 1968. Just to give you an idea, The Doors’ “Hello, I Love You” was the number one song the day “The Weight” was issued, and “Born to be Wild” was in the top ten, too.

The Band’s creaking-wood presence, as is the case throughout their best music, bolsters the austere, no-nonsense vibe. The tune is simultaneously sepia-toned and thoroughly of-the-moment, because, once again, it hinges on a core truth that runs counter to the one examined by the Stones.

Leaving people in peace while still helping them along when they need a hand is not always easy to do, but it’s a very effective way to live when you can manage it. “The Weight” feels like a modern-dress Biblical tale illustrating this generous concept.

Robertson, who had to have been at least unconsciously influenced by his neighbor Bob Dylan’s similarly evangelical John Wesley Harding, later explained that the song was inspired by the films of Luis Buñuel.

“In Buñuel,” he said, “there were these people trying to be good, and it’s impossible to be good. In ‘The Weight,’ it was this very simple thing. Someone says, ‘Listen, would you do me this favor? When you get there, will you say ‘hello’ to somebody, or will you give somebody this, or will you pick up one of these for me? Oh? You’re going to Nazareth; that’s where the Martin guitar factory is. Do me a favor when you’re there.’

The narrative, then, is about someone who tries to carry out a good deed, but so many people are in need of good deeds he grows overwhelmed by his own compassion.

Although the song is simple, warm, and funny—”Wait a minute, Chester.”—it contains multitudes, a sacred truth that admits its own flaw. The struggle of a brotherhood is the struggle to do right by others when there isn’t enough energy or time in the day to comfort everyone.

Cracks are available to fall through, and you should try to embrace your neighbors before they take the tumble. Hopefully someone will do the same for you when you’re reaching the precipice.

In “Gimme Shelter”, the Stones were dealing with victims. “The Weight” suggests victimhood isn’t necessarily a given. Maybe it’s even possible to save people, to give them a moment of grace.

We have a shared duty to at least try. We encourage pain when we avoid that responsibility.

Martin Scorsese has said that he had “The Weight” in mind when he was filming his breakthrough movie, Mean Streets, in which his main character, a low-rung Little Italy gangster named Charlie (Harvey Keitel), is saddled with his own impossible moral task— taking care of his hyper, self-destructive cousin Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro.)

When Scorsese was directing The Last Waltz, his 1978 documentary about The Band’s celebratory final concert, he and Robertson decided to honor “The Weight” with a pre-filmed, beautifully choreographed sequence that stands apart from the concert itself.

The Band is joined here by one of their biggest inspirations, the legendary gospel-soul group, The Staple Singers. This mixed congregation of spiritually connected musicians gives “The Weight” even more breadth than its original version.

If it’s possible to surpass perfection, that may be it right there.

Forgive me if I’m not quite prepared to whoop it up on the 4th of July this year. Somehow I just don’t have it in me.

Any national celebration hinges on symbolism. So when the iconic reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial has been overtaken by green algae, dead ducks, and escaped strips of “American flag blue” paint, we’ve reached a Strangelovian impasse.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d like to celebrate America; I really would.

I’d also like to celebrate my Cleveland Browns. But that ain’t happenin’, either. Both institutions are now taking grotesque circles down the drain, although the Browns will permanently bench their enriched sex-pervert quarterback before too long.

Not so in D.C., where committed Republicans still have to figure out how to get an elephant to take a shit in the reflecting pool.

You need a real leader for that.

So, yeah, I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, etc. But even before a horde of mouth-breathing buffoons started gang-banging the Bill of Rights, the only thing that’s ever made the 4th of July really special to me is the promise of injurious explosives being tossed by a bare hand.

I mean, of course, firecrackers. Lots of them, and the bigger the better.

To be honest, I probably haven’t handled a festive combustible in over 40 years. But back when I was growing up in Alabama in the 70s, the 4th meant the sudden appearance of little plywood shacks by the side of the highway featuring subtle, five-foot-tall red, white, and blue signs stating “FIREWORKS.”

Plain and simple— FIREWORKS.

All you had to do was extinguish any open flames, choose your deafening poison, and fork over the all-important MONEY. After that, rather unbelievably, you were on your own.

Fireworks were not supposed to be sold to anyone under a certain age anyway. But unless that age was five, the law wasn’t particularly effective.

Since Alabamians are used to people shooting their brains across the room with a dropped firearm, they may have viewed children inadvertently losing a few fingers as an improvement.

By June 25th of each year, every elementary school-age kid in my neighborhood was packing a Bic lighter and a brown paper bag loaded with firecrackers, bottle rockets, and anything else you could possibly want to light and run away from.

But come on, man. Who wants to do that?! That’s like hiring a prostitute then running away.

The whole point of a firecracker is to do something completely idiotic with it, something that wavers in the haze between tawdry and demented. Anyone who treated the things with the level of respect suggested on the wrapper was either lacking in courage or idiocy or both, and probably wasn’t worthy of your friendship.

After all, you only get to be 10 years-old for a year. So we blew shit up. Anything we could think of. Soda cans were popular, because they were easy to find, and you could ooh-and-ahh at the exit wound when you were done.

Model cars were great, too, but they were expensive and time-consuming to build if you were just going to destroy them anyway. Besides it was better to shoot those with a BB gun, because that took longer than a firecracker and you had a whole afternoon to waste.

Remember, this was a town of 6,300 people. When someone dared to open a hardware store, the headline on the front page of the newspaper was just a little smaller than the font the New York Times used when the Japanese surrendered. There wasn’t much to keep you occupied.

Thus, we blew things up when we got the chance, and we somehow convinced ourselves that Black Cat firecrackers were the crème de la crème of firecrackerdom. If you didn’t have Black Cat, you weren’t shit.

I really mean this. We were actually firecracker snobs.

I’ll be damned if I know why. If you put Black Cats in an ant hill—because ants deserve it, you know—they blew a hole in it the size of your fist, just like any other firecracker. From the distance of several decades, though, I’ll take a wild guess and say that the Black Cat label was the real draw.

I mean, look at this.

That’s a rabid cat. If that thing scratches you, you have to get shots in your stomach.

Also note that they were made in Macau! What kid could pass up the chance to spray a rotten tomato across the backyard with an exploding rabid cat stick manufactured on another planet?!

The only thing better than that would be a pack of Whoopee Flashlight Crackers specially designed to make muchee loud noise. But those didn’t exist.

Okay. I stand corrected.

Every now and then, some kid in the neighborhood would get his hands on an M-80. M-80s were advertised as being as powerful as half a stick of dynamite, and I’m inclined to believe it. When you lit one of these babies, they’d let off a deep-chested blast that could part your bangs and wake up your dead grandmother.

I certainly don’t expect you to watch all of these clips, but skim through this video of people setting off M-80s, and note how far away they run after lighting the fuse. Some of these bozos fire several of them at once, which is above and beyond the call for me.

I wouldn’t dare do that.

You get the picture. These things were monsters.

Once, when I was about sixteen or seventeen, we somehow had an M-80 with us, and a friend of mine stuck it in a random mailbox that was standing on a wooden post by the side of the road while we were driving around.

The box burst like John Hurt’s chest when that little creep pops out of him in Alien. Mind you, this was a huge, country-style metal mailbox! M-80s were nuts, but—probably thankfully—few and far between.

My fireworks mainly consisted of firecrackers and bottle rockets.

I remember one time when my brother and I and a handful of our buddies went out water skiing. We had a bag of bottle rockets, so somebody (it was me) got the idea of shooting them at one of my friends while he waterskied behind us.

So we did that, which is essentially the exact opposite of “light fuse, run away.” The other guys shot them at me when I was skiing, too, which only seemed fair when you consider I started it.

We all lived.

And now, a public service announcement...

Oops.

This guy, Jason Pierre-Paul, used to be a star defensive end for the New York Giants. On July 4, 2015, the firework Jason was about to toss during a family celebration detonated in his right hand. Being an NFL player with one too many connections, Jason was using a professional-grade explosive, the kind of thing they shoot off at city fireworks shows.

I planned to utilize Jason’s story as a dire warning that there really can be serious consequences if you play around with this stuff, but he appears to think the whole thing is hilarious!

So who am I to issue warnings?!

Just know that if you screw up and find two or three of your fingers lodged in a pine tree across the street, you may not be able to conjure the degree of mirth that Jason displays here.

Look on the bright side, though. If something goes wrong, you’ll still have another hand to throw them with next year!

God bless the concept of America, everybody. And do tell your uncle who thinks everything on the fruited plains is finally coming together to go fuck himself. Don’t be afraid to shame him, if it’s still possible to do it.

You’ll feel better for taking a step in the right direction.

I’d be willing to lay money that all you had to do was glance at the above photo of the Beatles, and, even with some other guy sitting behind the drums pretending to be Ringo, you immediately thought, “Hey, look! It’s a photo of the Beatles!”

You may have also thought, “Why are they dressed like a motorcycle gang?” But you definitely knew they were the Beatles.

Of course you did. Once someone or something reaches the point of iconicity, babies practically sluice out of the womb with a full awareness of them (or, as the case may be, an awareness of it) instilled in their baby noggins. Right off the bat, it’s pretty much eat, drink, poop, Marilyn Monroe, and the Beatles. But icons weren’t always iconic.

As Paul McCartney himself has said, when he and his pals John and George first changed their struggling beat group’s name from “the Quarrymen” to “the Beatles,” everyone told them they were nuts.

When you said “Beatles” back in 1960, people thought of these things.

That right there was—and if you want to get technical about it, still is—a beetle. (There are many variations of beetles. This one obviously comes from their psychedelic period, which started roughly around the tail end of 1966 before kicking into full gear in 1967.)

But bug-style beetles couldn’t compose, play, and sing “She Loves You” (yeah, yeah, yeah) and “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” They didn’t even have hands, and they seldom, if ever, took part in witty press conferences after disembarking from privately chartered jets.

They were beetling at a deficit.

Once the Fab Four conquered America with their mythical Ed Sullivan Show appearance, bug beetles were the second creatures the masses thought of when they heard that particular word, if they thought of a second creature at all.

That’s how it works, even with landmark movies. As hard as it may be to grasp for millions of people today, I’m ripened enough to recall when there was no such thing as a Star Wars!

Before the summer of 1977, when someone uttered the phrase “star wars,” which they never did, you wouldn’t think of anything at all, unless you conjured groups of luminous plasma spheroids accumulating weaponry, breaking off into opposing groups, and shooting at each other.

What kind of shit would you have to be smoking to think of that?!

Or, perhaps a tad more realistically due to the participation of human beings, you might envision famous Hollywood actors accumulating weaponry, breaking off into opposing groups (maybe MGM vs. Warner Bros.), and shooting at each other. But even then you’d have to have a pretty spirited imagination.

The words “star wars,” then, didn’t mean a thing until there was Star Wars. There was no C-3PO, no R2-D2, no Darth Vader, and no Luke, Han, or Leia, either. There was no Greedo to shoot first, second, or never. There was also no Alderaan going kaboom, no structurally flawed Death Star, no light sabers, and no cantina scene.

“The Force” just meant a bunch of fucking cops.

The first time I ever heard of Star Wars, my family was up in Cleveland visiting relatives. We were at my grandmother’s house.

She handed me the May 30, 1977 issue of Time magazine with Israeli leader Menachem Begin on the cover. “Here, Paulie,” she said. “I saved this because I know you like movies. I thought you might want to look at this article.”

Contained within was a big, photo-filled feature about an upcoming sci-fi film called Star Wars that was written and directed by George Lucas, who was the whiz kid behind the mega-successful 1973 nostalgia comedy American Graffiti.

I was a big fan of American Graffiti’s oldies-filled soundtrack album but hadn’t watched the movie yet, although I knew what it was about. I didn’t see it in the theater, and it had never been broadcast on network TV. And, just as there were no Star Wars pictures in those days, there were no home video cassettes!

Even without having seen his previous work, though, I could tell that Lucas had created an entirely different beast with Star Wars. To my 14-year-old mind, it seemed like an entirely different beast from everything ever filmed!

I can remember being both fascinated and deeply puzzled by the beat-up look of the world the Star Wars characters inhabited, since every sci-fi movie before then featured immaculate surfaces and what appeared to be straight out of the box, pristine technology.

This image was included in the magazine article. It’s hard to explain how disorienting it was at the time. The story was supposedly set in outer space, but there were clouds in the sky, and this guy, whoever he was, didn’t require a helmet or an oxygen tank to breathe. And he was actually driving a used space vehicle! That heap looked like some redneck’s El Camino.

Since when?!

Previous sci-fi films were all buffed and polished and ready to go!

HAL the computer wasn’t asking Dave or Frank to download an updated operating system, and Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still—seen above, having just realized he locked his keys in the house—didn’t look like he’d been serial-dinged with a monkey wrench.

It was also pretty difficult for me to follow exactly what Star Wars was supposed to be about via the contents of the article. I kept getting thrown off by all the weird names, for one thing.

Who or what was an Obi-Wan Kenobi? How do you even say that?! And Time kept referring to...wait a minute…Artoo Detoo and Threepio?! Was that a misprint? There were actually characters in this movie called Artoo Detoo and Threepio??!! Really??!!

I had to see it.

And, as you well know by this point, so did everybody else in America. Most of them had to see it more than once, as well as eat its pudding packs, suck its lollipops, don its t-shirts, sleep on its bedsheets, carry its lunchboxes...

...and even buy this R2-D2 necklace that I still have in its original box! I got it at the mall somewhere.

They drew the line, though, at watching its holiday special.

I valiantly and quite proficiently hauled in fly balls for my Pony League baseball team in 1977 and had been picked as a member of the All-Star team that year; we’d soon be competing against other squads from towns all over North Alabama. That doesn’t sound like such a big deal now, I know, but at the time it was a major thing for me, because I was a kid, and what the hell else did I have to worry about?

Well…movies, that’s what.

I was way more interested in movies than I was in baseball, and one day my big sister Dianne volunteered to haul me, my brother Jim, and my sister Christine down the mountain to Huntsville in her dirty green Maverick with 8-tracks spread around the floorboard to see this new Star Wars movie everybody was carrying on about.

So, at the risk of my very existence, because I knew if my coach found out I was skipping practice to go see a movie, he would have literally murdered me, I danced en pointe and pirouetted like Baryshnikov down the gravel driveway to that beckoning green Maverick.

Then we popped in a tape (let’s say it was Carole King’s Tapestry) and gunned it north on Highway 231 to get in on the fun.

It was a hot June day in Alabama, my friends. The kind of hot where if you’re wearing cutoffs, the backs of your thighs stick to the car seat the way the cheese on a Stouffer’s French Bread Pizza sticks to the roof of your mouth.

I remember the theater’s air conditioner was cranked up high, so it was extra cold when we grabbed our seats. But during the movie’s now-famous opening scroll, I forgot all about the climate!

And then this…

I know you’ve seen the following clip before, probably more than a few times, but try to rid your mind of those memories. Re-enjoy this, then we’ll discuss.

Imagine sitting there watching this sequence before these characters were known the world over, with nothing outside of 2001: A Space Odyssey ever having special effects that were this overwhelming (I had also read about 2001, but had not yet seen it. I doubt more than a handful of other kids in the theater had seen it, either.)

Understand, there was no concept of a “special effects picture” at this point. I know nowadays you get glistening CGI stuffed into every available orifice when you watch most movies, but this was a thoroughly newfangled, honestly staggering thing to see!

Regardless of what Kinsey said, size mattered here.

Watching that Imperial Star Destroyer slowly reveal its full bad-ass self to the audience on a giant screen is one of my favorite movie-going memories. Top five, easily. You just couldn’t believe what you were seeing, and the still new Dolby stereo system, coupled with John Williams’ spot-on mutated Holst score, made for a mind-blowing experience.

Plus, there was major weirdness going on. You don’t think it’s weird now, of course, but it sure was back then.

First of all, the rebel forces look like terrified school teachers. I suppose many real-life rebels actually have been terrified school teachers, but I was a youngster and expected, you know, an army to be doing this kind of thing, not a bunch of wimps who should be grading your civics test!

This guy looks like Steve McQueen’s dad!

And what about these crazy bastards?! What the hell was this??!

When the Stormtroopers first came stumbling through that smoking doorway, everyone in the theater burst out laughing! It was all just so damn wacky!

I’m not saying the audience should have been shuddering with fear, but come on! There was no precedent for what we were looking at! Were they robots? Good guys? Bad guys? Was this supposed to be taken seriously?!

Who the hell knew?

Then here comes Vader with his padded shoulders and heavy breathing, like a demonic Joan Crawford about to get down on her kid with a wire coat hanger. If the rebels reminded me of school teachers, Vader was the comically mean principal!

And now, nearly fifty years later?

People have credit cards with Darth Vader on them. Lucas, it appears, was onto something. His current estimated net worth is $5.5-billion.

I don’t think I need a Darth Vader Visa card, as my commitment to the teachings of Star Wars has waned considerably over time. I couldn’t care less, for insatance, about Baby Yoda. But the second biggest box office draw of 1977 was Smokey & the Bandit.

If Visa were to come out with a Sheriff Buford T. Justice model, I’d apply for that sumbitch!

As you may recall if you’ve been reading The Cool Stuff for a while—and many thanks for that, if you have been—I moved to New York City in 1990 to pursue screenwriting to the detriment of virtually every other aspect of my life, including eating.

Anyone who romanticizes that kind of thing, and I know they’re out there, has never actually done it for themselves.

Imagine the excitement of watching your friends enter into clearly defined careers, move into nice apartments, and go on actual vacations while you sit in a cockroach-infested dump with no air conditioning and windows you can’t yank open, creating narratives that have maybe .03% chance of ever seeing the light of a movie projector.

I won’t even get into the roommates I found in the back pages of The Village Voice.

I finally managed to climb a few rungs up the Hollywood ladder, though, with the first script I ever wrote, the love of my life at the time, eventually landing in development at Paramount Pictures after I had diligently shopped it for a soul-numbing eight years to any person in the industry who would offer me a chair and a bottle of water.

When I’ve mentioned this adventure before, I’ve avoided naming the actor who, entirely out of the blue, called my agent one day and told her that he really wanted to produce and star in my script.

But, what the hell, I’ll tell you now.

It was this guy right here. Woody Harrelson.

I only met with him in the flesh a couple of times while I was dealing with Paramount (Official “Am I in a weird dream?” moment: he once insisted I sample macrobiotic mashed potatoes off his plate in a fancy restaurant.)

Woody was perfectly amiable, if perhaps a bit pot-foggy during one memorable phone conversation, and I enjoy him as an actor.

I could have done a lot worse. The studio executive behind the project was consistently enthusiastic about what I was writing, too. I had nothing to complain about from a creative standpoint, and I didn’t.

We all got along fine during a nearly two-year development process.

It doesn’t usually work out that way. I have a full-blown horror story about a producing team who hired me for a different project right around the same time, but that’s for another article, should I ever generate the will to write it, which seems unlikely.

I complained like a motherfucker on that one.

This episode at Paramount, as you might expect, was extremely gratifying after the years-long struggle I’d put myself through. But, as it usually does with the vast majority of movie studio projects, the whole thing eventually collapsed and was finished.

My guess—I have to guess because, out of sheer habit, nobody ever gives you the straight story on anything in the film industry—is that commercial matters intervened.

Woody, who’d been nominated for an Oscar for The People vs. Larry Flynt not too long before he stumbled upon my script, hit a cold streak at precisely the wrong moment to be shepherding what was then estimated to be a $98 million movie (a bit pricey for a non-effects picture at the time; the story is set in the 60s and 70s, and period pieces always cost more.)

While I was toiling away, Woody’s new movies as a lead actor began to tank.

He’s obviously a much more solid draw these days, especially in high-end cable projects, and he’s now been nominated for three Oscars. But back then, Woody was mainly known for Cheers and for appearing in pictures whose success didn’t rise and fall on his participation (Natural Born Killers, for instance, is very much an Oliver Stone movie, not a Woody Harrelson movie.)

Remember when audiences were clamoring to see Welcome to Sarajevo, Palmetto, The Hi-Lo Country, and Play It to the Bone?

No, you don’t. Because nobody saw them. And just like that, Woody Harrelson, who is an inarguably solid actor with a winning screen presence and has gone on to have a long and admirable career, was not a marketable enough leading man for what we were attempting as far as Paramount Pictures was concerned.

And that was that. The script now sits on a dusty shelf in L.A. with literally tens of thousands of other victims.

I was hired to write a small handful of other scripts, too, sans an attached movie star, before it all evaporated out in L.A. and I finally got on with a more conventional life.

That was a bummer at first, but it doesn’t bother me now. It really doesn’t.

I’m a fan of great movies, not people bullshitting each other like it’s an Olympic sport—if you ask me a question, you get an honest answer—and I am not built to crank out screenplays by the yard the way you have to if you want a long career in Hollywood.

From the very start, I knew I wasn’t right for the studio treadmill. It constantly felt like I had parachuted behind enemy lines while I was doing this.

I always suspected it wouldn’t last, because it rarely does. I was not the first.

I don’t start writing to order when someone drops a coin in the slot, not that there’s anything wrong with that; lots of people do it extremely well. I write when I feel I have a good idea and I’m moved to pursue it. It’s truly personal to me. That’s just how my creative mind works, for better or worse.

That’s who I am. Beyond that, you only get so many years on this earth before you cease to be, and this stuff sucked up my entire existence.

I’d far prefer to have a loving family gathered around me when I’m drawing my last breath, as opposed to lying there by myself and thinking, “Well, at least I was the seventh writer to work on Spider-Man 27. And I almost got a credit on it!”

Anyway, at one time I was paid to write some scripts for some producers in that amorphous blob known as “Hollywood.”

I haven’t totally abandoned screenwriting, by the way. I have a script I’m really proud of sitting here right now, should any agents be reading this. I’m not holding my breath, though, and I’m not about to start tap-dancing for bottles of water again.

People are always fascinated when I tell them about this period in my life. Hollywood being HOLLYWOOD, it makes me seem like I’m some kind of anointed being. But I want to make it very clear that I was just me, exactly the same way you’re just you, when I started writing.

Here’s the magical thing that I did: One day, I picked up a pen and a yellow legal pad, having never written much of anything outside of well-received essays in high school and college, and I wrote a script.

I thought of a movie I’d love to see, and I tried to convey it through the written word.

If you feel you have a compelling idea for a film and a knack for writing, even if it’s just entertaining letters to your friends— sit down and try to write something. I strongly encourage you to do it, if for no other reason than to find out if you actually can do it.

But you never know. Maybe you can sell the thing or get it into development. I didn’t know if I could, either, but it turned out that I could.

Never mind that it just about killed me.

I’m about to tell you how I went at it, then, while hopefully demystifying the process enough that you’ll be able to focus when you get down to work.

So here are a few tips to maybe get your juices flowing, as well as a bit of philosophy about creativity. Feel free to ignore any of this that you want to ignore; this is my opinion based on personal experience, not a bible:

First— watch tons and tons and tons of movies.

If you haven’t done this already, it may be too late to start now. But if you haven’t, why are you trying to write a screenplay?! I hope it’s not to get rich from selling action figures, because your interest in this process is far more likely to make you too poor to buy an action figure.

That’s just a fact.

I watched so many movies with my equally film-obsessed buddies when I was in college, the rhythms of my favorite directors practically leeched into my bones. When I’m working on a script, I’ll often pull a little narrative or dialogue maneuver that seems very familiar to me, but I won’t know where it came from. Then, years later, I’ll be re-watching some favorite film, and I’ll think, “That’s it! That’s what I was feeling!”

The script I almost got made at Paramount is basically One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest set in the world of major league baseball, but I didn’t even realize that until years after the fact. It just struck me one day.

My suggestion is to let the feel and tempo of your favorite films guide you; that’s obviously what happened with me.

What series of emotions do they generate within you? Then, that feeling will blend into your own ideas, and you might wind up with something personal that’s also part of an unconsciously familiar lineage.

This will make you stand out from the crowd, and your script will still be a comfortable reading experience for whoever gets their hands on it at a studio, if anybody ever does.

Don’t go thinking that’s likely to happen. By now, countless great scripts have never been read by a single person who works in the film industry, and even if they are, the person who reads it will probably toss it on the reject pile anyway.

Welcome to the wonderful world of screenwriting.

Don’t read a big book about screenwriting!

Not at first, anyway, and if you feel confident enough with your writing, avoid doing so forever, or just skim through one after you’ve completed a first draft.

I have a personal distaste for really complex tomes about the mechanics of screenwriting—I covered this more fully right here, if you’d like to see it—because too much concern about that sort of thing can hem you in.

A little concern, the amount I’m covering right here, will do just fine when you’re starting out, and the process can be boiled down pretty readily. You don’t have to sit there poring over an entire book. You’ll just get overwhelmed.

There’s no guarantee you can do any of this at all until you try. So, at the very least, write a first draft on your own, then read a screenwriting book and employ the parts that might help you in your second draft.

Here’s a condensed version of what one of those books will tell you: ask an interesting question, make it exciting while the audience waits for the answer, then answer it. The “make it exciting” part in the middle is the vast majority of the screenplay. The other two pieces are really just bookends.

I have an even more simplified version of this process tattooed on my left wrist.

That’s a question mark, an exclamation point, and a period. Keep that in mind, get a bit loosey-goosey with it if you want to, and start making up a story.

I just saved you thirty-five dollars on a book you don’t need.

Be prepared to work your ass off.

If you think this is something you can do casually, don’t even try it. Simple as that. And don’t lament how hard it is after you’ve started. This isn’t like learning how to whistle.

I’ve always said that talent is what you can manage with little effort. Then you have to work to the point of exhaustion to shape what your talent has given you into something convincing. Think of writing a screenplay (or a novel, or a play, for that matter) as doing group improv, except you’re the entire group of actors as well as the audience member who shouts out the situation.

God will not be setting all of that on a silver platter inside your brain. You’ll have to go looking for it. If you wish it were easier than that, tough luck. It isn’t.

Be absolutely brutal with yourself.

If you’re thinking “Ah, that’s good enough” about something you’ve written, it isn’t good enough.

Don’t fuck around here. You’re trying to convey an entire movie before a movie has been made. There are no actors, directors, editors, set designers, or composers around to help you out at this point.

It’s just you.

This will sound crazy, but one of the most satisfying parts of the screenwriting process for me is when I cut a scene I love because I recognize it doesn’t serve the script as a whole. It means I’m really working toward something solid, rather than showing off about some clever joke or dramatic piece of dialogue.

If it has to go, take it out.

Illuminate believable characters and move the story along. That’s your job. If you want to show everybody how clever you are just for the sake of being clever, go to an open mic night at a comedy club or spin some bullshit at a dinner party.

Don’t just write what you know, the way they always say you should. Write about a deeply held belief.

The often-cited fundamental principle of stories is that they’re about conflict of some sort. Put obstacles in front of your characters as they try to get something they want, then create an entertaining path to their goal, whether it’s dramatic, humorous, or both.

These obstacles need to throw real sparks, not just exasperation. For that reason, I think it’s constructive for a first-time script to be about something you feel intensely. Ideas flow more readily that way.

Really consider this before you begin.

Cotton candy dissolves. You may have nowhere to go after the first several pages of bippity-bippity dialogue, and you’ll wind up basically copying some drivel you’ve seen before.

This happened to me on a hired-hand comedy project one time. I eventually just faked my way to something funny enough but totally unconvincing.

There was no meat on the bones, and there was never going to be, considering the vacuous initial idea that was handed to me. If there’s a subject you can passionately talk about for hours on end without even trying, do yourself a favor and write about that.

As for the actual content of the script...

Know your ending before you start!

Many writers will sit down and carefully map out what they’re hoping to do in advance, then write the script accordingly. If you feel that’ll work for you, go ahead. But it seems like a trap to me personally; your imagination will be caged in by it.

I suggest thinking of an underlying theme that means a lot to you (We’ll get to that in a moment.) Then invent a character who might experience the push and pull of that particular theme. Now imagine a setting where that type of friction would impact the character, and start writing.

But always have a concept of where the story is going to end. This is pivotal for a first-timer. It’s the ultimate point you’re trying to make. Always remember to aim for that target.

That way, you can wander around with brief character moments or somewhat unnecessary set pieces to give the story a sense of life, then pull it all back in and aim for your ultimate goal before things get out of hand.

Have a point! That makes sense, doesn’t it? Don’t be that guy at the bar who just keeps going and going in circles until you want to scream.

As for that underlying theme— make sure there’s an underlying theme!

I’m genuinely shocked by how many writers and producers don’t understand this.

Rocky isn’t about a down-and-out boxer who gets to fight for the heavyweight crown. That’s merely what’s happening on the surface of the story. It’s actually about two lonely people who blossom when they fall in love with each other.

It’s about love, connection, and decency, as opposed to putting on silk trunks and punching people in the face.

If all you have is an ongoing series of “this happens, then that happens” to your story, it’ll just lie there when you’re done. Shitty movies get made every single year that are shitty because of this failing. Or, at least, that’s their key failing as a narrative.

Determine what elemental facet of life lies beneath the story you’re telling and let it bolster the plot. Either that, or write a superhero movie that’s about things blowing up and buildings falling over, then fight it out with the other eight-five thousand scripts that are currently being written about the very same thing and see if anybody wants to film it.

Don’t show it to me when you’re done, though, because I won’t care.

Have a sense of rhythm.

I cannot overstress the importance of rhythm. Don’t get all choppy, especially in your dialogue. This isn’t a pamphlet you’re handing people on the sidewalk. Create a bit of a dance in order to pull the reader in and keep them engrossed.

As far as dialogue goes, try to have your characters say things in unexpected ways. People don’t speak like they’re reciting instructions for screwing together a bookshelf.

Remember that writing, like any creative endeavor, is driven largely by instinct. Try to relax and get a flow going. You may find your rhythm that way. But you still have to be able to take a step back periodically and honestly—and, once again, brutally—assess if your initial impulses were correct.

If they weren’t, what’s the next step? That’s right— dump it and write it again.

There’s one last piece of advice I want to give you...

Do not hand your script to non-writers and ask them what they think of it so you can change things to their specifications!!!

No! No! No! Never do this!

If you did the best you could as conscientiously as you could, you’re done. No other input is needed. Let people read it, of course, but not so they can tell you how to “fix” it, unless you’re at a studio and they’re actually paying you to do that. Then you’re partners, and you have to work well with others.

You’re the only audience you can fully please, and now, hopefully, you’ll find other people who share your wavelength.

I had scores of everyday citizens as well as industry types tell me what was “wrong” with my Paramount script over the years, and I nodded politely while giving zero shits about what they had to say. I wrote the damn thing to the best of my ability, and I knew it worked from my perspective.

It was finished.

I was looking for people who understood and enjoyed what I had written, and I found lots of them over the years, although they didn’t have enough weight to get me into development at a studio. One of them, though, finally happened to be a movie star, so all of a sudden nobody had anything negative to say about it!

It was the same script that had been repeatedly criticized to varying degrees by scores of people, and now it was a towering hot fudge sundae.

Funny how that works.

If somebody has a problem with your script after they’ve read it but you’re satisfied with what you did, thank them and move on. Let them write their own fucking script.

Honestly.

I don’t know if any of that helps or not, but I truly hope you’ll give that script you’ve always wanted to write a shot and that you’ll one day get it filmed.

Good luck, though. Surely to God in heaven, they’ve got AI cranking out dazzling garbage as you read this, regardless of what the Writers Guild contracts might say. I have no doubt about this.

After all, why bother making bad movies with a writer when you can make them via artificial intelligence?

Some guy once wrote, “What’s in a name?” Then he wrote something about how roses still smell nice regardless of what people call them. The precise wording is unimportant. What I’m getting at is...

What is in a name? I mean, it’s a good question.

The absolutely definitive answer is “probably a lot,” at least in certain situations. For instance, I’ve long felt that if Jesus Christ had been named Bernie Christ or Larry Christ, Christianity never would have caught on the way that it did. Could anybody seriously believe Marvin Christ was the son of God sent to earth to save us from our sins?

I think not.

Mary and Joseph really nailed it when they named the kid Jesus, although, to give proper credit, God may have suggested the name Himself. If L. Ron Hubbard’s success proved anything, it’s the importance of marketing.

This is the first picture ever taken of me when I was a baby. I’m glad I was able to find it.

That’s Mom and me in the middle, and Dad’s on the right. The chick in the plaid photobombed us. We didn’t even realize she was there until we got the pictures back from Walgreen’s.

The name my parents gave me, of course, is Paul, but I can’t say that I’ve gotten very much out of it. Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, and Paul Newman have all done far better with it than I have...although, since Paul Newman is no longer living, I guess I’ve got him beat on a technicality.

It occurred to me the other day, though, that I haven’t always gone by plain old “Paul.” At several points in my life I’ve been renamed, or, if you want to get fancy about it, I’ve been blessed with other monickers.

So let’s take a look at these monickers, since I’ve written this much on the subject and see no reason to turn back now.

The many names of Paul...

“Paulie”

My dad used to call me Paulie all the time. Mom didn’t do it all that much, but Dad and his brother, my uncle Ted, were invariably Louie and Teddy with each other, so it must have been a thing. My buddy Chris drops a Paulie on me sometimes, too.

Over the years, though, I’ve noticed that almost all of the people who opt to call me Paulie are women.

My friend Debbie, for instance, has just about always called me Paulie, with a charming Birmingham drawl that makes it sound more like “Pow-lee.” She uses it as a term of endearment, and that’s nice, I guess. But I also sense something gently demeaning about it, as if Debbie has forever thought that I’m really just a fourth grader trapped in an adult’s body.

It bothers me that she figured that out.

“Paulie-wog”

One person and one person only has ever called me “Paulie-wog,” and that was my late friend Mary DeCasper. Mary also called me Paulie, but often threw in the wog for good measure, as she was a certifiable goofball.

What I wouldn’t give to have her call me Paulie-wog again.

“Peter”

I was raised Very Catholic, not just regular Catholic like everybody else. Peter is my chosen confirmation name.

When you’re confirmed in the church, you’re supposed to take the name of a role model saint and publicly recommit to the teachings of an organization that you’ll be leaving as soon as you have a moment to consider how it actually operates. While you’re still there, though, you can pray to your saint in times of need, and you’ll supposedly get a response because said saint feels a special kinship with you.

It’s like slipping a twenty to the maître d’ to get a better table in the spiritual nightclub.

Here’s a little secret, though— I picked Peter as my confirmation name when I was 14 years old because I thought it was hilarious that I’d then be “Peter Paul,” which is the name of the company that manufactures Almond Joy and Mounds candy bars.

Here’s a ubiquitous TV commercial from the time that inspired me to do this.

I didn’t tell my parents or the priest anything about this, of course, but word’s out now. So I guess I’ll be going to hell when I die, at which point Paul Newman will once again be doing better than me.

“Crazylegs”

That’s me, holding the football, with my cousin Gary and my sister Christine in my aunt and uncle’s backyard in Cleveland when I was about 11 years old (look at my almost certainly K Mart-purchased Popeye t-shirt! I’d wear that thing now!)

At that point in my life, I was a football-playing maniac. You can see how comfortable I am cradling the ball. I practically had one attached to me back then.

Once, when I was in the fifth grade, I was playing a weekend pickup game with a handful of classmates in a huge rural backyard in Grassy, AL. (That’s right. The town is called “Grassy.” No nickname. There’s another community bordering it called Hog Jaw, and that’s not a nickname either! Someone actually decided to call it “Hog Jaw!”)

After we’d been playing our game for about thirty minutes, I had just run for a touchdown, and my team was about to kick off when one of the other guys shouted to me from the far side of the yard, “Do you realize we haven’t tackled you yet?!”

I thought about it, and he was right. I’d touched the ball four or five times and scored every time! “It’s your crazy legs!” he said. “You look like you’re going in one direction, then you end up going the other way! We’re gonna call you ‘Crazy Legs!’”

And they did, for a while anyway. Whenever we played that year, somebody would eventually call me “Crazylegs.”

I always liked this because I was a student of football history and knew that one of the superstar players of the 40s and 50s was Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch, who toiled for the L.A. Rams.

Look at him! That’s a man’s man right there! Like many football players of the period, Hirsch could actually run in the air. You can’t ask for crazier legs than that!

My legs, not being of NFL caliber, were merely sardonic in comparison.

“Kalil Chal Wakan”

I’m pretty sure I butchered the spelling on this one. I have it written on a piece of paper in a box somewhere, but I’m not about to rip the closet apart looking for it.

Around 1992 or so, I was writing a screenplay for a would-be independent film producer (don’t ask) that was set in and around the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in Nebraska and South Dakota. She and I went out there one time to soak up the local color.

Our guide as we drove those endless highways—at one point I had to stop in the middle of the road for twenty minutes while we waited for a disinterested bison to move his ass out of the way—was a lovely, much-respected Lakota tribesman named Joe Brown Thunder.

Joe knew tribal history up, down, and backwards, and he had a great sense of humor.

I was pulled over for speeding at one point because there are literally no structures by the road for miles on end to clue you in to how fast you’re moving; it’s just flat land stretching to the horizon. If your eyes aren’t glued on the speedometer, you can start barreling along without even realizing it!

Anyway, Joe, who liked me for some reason, laughed really hard when he saw how upset I was as the cop strolled up to the car (the cop understood this displaced New Yorker’s argument and let me go with just a warning.) Later on, Joe thought it was even funnier that I was concerned I might step on a rattlesnake while he had us hiking up an historically significant hill somewhere in the far reaches of South Dakota.

At that point, he gave me an honorary Lakota Sioux name! Again, I’m almost certainly not spelling it right, but it was something close to “Kalil Chal Wakan.”

Joe told me it means “great but afraid.”

A couple of years earlier, a friend of mine watched Dances with Wolves with me, and when we were leaving the theater, she told me my Native American name would be “Drinks Coke A Lot” (I haven’t for years, but I used to drink gallons of Coke every week.)

If I had to pick one of the two, I’d choose Great But Afraid, but if “Great And Drinks Coke A Lot” were an option, I’d go with that.

Remember that absolutely horrendous, semi-autobiographical movie Richard Pryor wrote, directed, and starred in called Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling?

Well, I do. The week it was released in 1986, I was stunned by its lousy title. In fact, I thought it was just about the worst movie title I’d ever heard in my life. You couldn’t have forced me at gunpoint to go see it.

If Pryor was wrongheaded enough to call it that, I figured he made a mess of everything else, which, I discovered years later while trying to watch Jo Jo Dancer Your Life is Calling on DVD, he did.

I was hanging out with some friends at the time when I started going off about the lousy title and had the bad luck of blurting out, “I want everyone to start calling me Paul-Paul Tatara. From now on I’m Paul-Paul.”

A guy I knew then—I haven’t seen him in almost forty years and will surely never see him—took up the challenge and proceeded to refer to me as “Paul-Paul” from there on out. Every single time I saw him or picked up the phone when he called the house, he’d say, “Paul-Paul!” He’d even call me that if he were referring to me during a conversation.

If I had known he’d so loyally comply with what I said, I would’ve told him he should give me all the money he had in his pocket whenever he saw me.

“Lucan”

This is my late, truly great friend, Benny Powell. You may recall that I quoted Benny in a recent article about Miles Davis. I’ll definitely be writing an entire piece about him one day.

Suffice it to say at the moment, though, that Benny played trombone for Count Basie for twelve years and had a long career as a jazzman, a music educator, and a session musician after he very amicably parted ways with Basie. You can hear Benny on recordings by such luminaries as Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, and Frank Sinatra, among many, many others.

He and I were having lunch at a diner on Ninth Avenue one afternoon when he started talking about how he played tons of sessions out in L.A. in the 70s, where he laid down music for shitty TV shows. It was easy work and he made a killing doing it.

Benny had better things to worry about than what lousy cop or hospital show he was goosing along while he blew charts on an assembly line, but he said for some weird reason the only title that stuck in his head over the years was a stupid thing called Lucan.

“I remember Lucan!” I said. “It was about a kid who was raised by wolves!”

Benny burst out laughing. He said I was the only person he ever mentioned it to who knew what the hell he was talking about. Then he said, “That’s your jazz name! Your jazz name is ‘Lucan!’”

And so it is. My jazz name is Lucan.

And here’s the opening of Lucan. Benny’s trombone is buried somewhere in the horn section.

Benny was probably a little high on weed during that session, by the way. He said he used to toke up to do junk like this, enjoy the buzz for a couple of hours, then get the hell outta there.

He told me he did much the same thing during the ten years that he played in the orchestra for The Merv Griffin Show, except then he got to ogle gorgeous singers and actresses (he mentioned Lola Falana one time) who had dropped by to promote their latest projects.

Benny was cooler than every cool person you and I have ever known balled up into one. He actually knew Sammy Davis, Jr.!!

I was a considerable step down.

There’s no good way to end this, so I guess I’ll just go with a commercial and rake in some money before I sign off.

Sorry about the quality. You’d think this would have been remastered by now and entered into the National Film Registry.

A society of down-and-out romantics lives in singer-songwriter Tom Waits’ head, and its citizens have grown very peculiar over the years.

When he first hit the scene way back in 1973, Waits presented himself as an uproariously funny jazz-head piano man who could bring you to tears with a forlorn minor chord and a brokenhearted turn of phrase. He dealt in unabashed sentiment, and, even with a voice that sounded like he was gargling Jack Daniels, his gift for melody was a thing of beauty.

Even if you’ve never listened to Waits before, you’re probably still familiar with a handful of his songs as covered by much more popular artists than he’s ever been.

Millions of West Coast rock fans, for instance, can readily sing along to the Eagles’ “Ol’ 55,” but have no idea that Waits wrote it and recorded it first. And “Jersey Girl,” the dreamy boardwalk ballad that Bruce Springsteen closed his live boxed set with in 1986, may ooze an especially overripe Bruce-ness, but it was also written by Waits.

Like Randy Newman, Waits usually sings in the first person and populates his songs with fully realized characters. Their dreams are tattered at best and shattered at worst, and he wrings every drop of melodrama he can out of their plight. He exposes the fragile heart beating inside his discarded misfits, seeing them not as rejects to be scorned, but as fellow human beings who just can’t play the game, and he paints them with profound grace and beauty.

For my money, Tom Waits is one of the more egregiously under-appreciated songwriters this country has ever produced.

But he’s never made it easy for himself.

By the end of the 70s, Waits had transformed himself from an intentionally mawkish throwback boho into a sometimes startling, often caterwauling stew of Charles Bukowski, Captain Beefheart, and a vaudeville comedian plying his trade for an audience of variously wounded miscreants.

His music changed just as radically.

Though many of the tunes were still delivered by way of a jazz trio, Waits’ albums suddenly might feature dissonant electric guitars, marimbas, banjos, accordions, cheap Wurlitzer organs, someone rhythmically smacking the side of a metal filing cabinet with his palms, and even more inscrutable percussion that suggests a wino drumming with human bones in a dark alleyway.

This metamorphosis started cautiously enough, with the 1980 album, Heartattack and Vine.

That record’s title track introduced Waits’ listeners to a more overtly outlandish protagonist than his usual romanticized reprobates, one who sucks down gin, snorts up coke, and generally behaves like a volatile ne’er-do-well with warranted jail time in his past.

Waits had certainly delved into this type of thing before, but not with anywhere near this much gusto and unalloyed tackiness. You can’t help but gape at the sordid blues grandeur of it.

If you’re uninitiated, be aware— Waits’ vocals can be a step or two beyond 40-grit sandpaper. But you’ll be losing out if you take a hard pass because he doesn’t sound like Josh Groban.

I’ll post the lyrics to this one to help everyone along.

Liar liar with your pants on fire
White spades hangin’ on the telephone wire
Gamblers reevaluate along the dotted line
You’ll never recognize yourself on heartattack and vine

Doctor, lawyer, beggar man thief
Philly Joe remarkable looks on in disbelief
If you want a taste of madness, you’ll have to wait in line
You’ll probably see someone you know on heartattack and vine

Boney’s high on china white, Shorty found a punk
Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk
Well this stuff will probably kill you, let’s do another line
What you say you meet me down on heartattack and vine

See that little Jersey girl in the see-through top
With the peddle pushers sucking on a soda pop
Well I bet she’s still a virgin but it’s only twenty-five ‘til nine
You can see a million of ‘em on heartattack and vine

Better off in Iowa against your scrambled eggs
Than crawling down Cahuenga on a broken pair of legs
You’ll find your ignorance is blissful every goddamn time
Your’re waitin’ for the RTD on heartattack and vine

(repeat as the dirty neon flickers)

I defy you to name another songwriter who’s capable of a line as brilliantly hardboiled as “Better off in Iowa against your scrambled eggs than crawling down Cahuenga on a broken pair of legs.” That’s a keeper, right there.

Waits doesn’t just “sing”; he’s practically method acting in front of a band (he’s a fine film actor, too! You should check out his violently obsessed gold prospector in the Coen brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.)

“Heartattack and Vine” ventured deeper into the recesses than Waits had previously dared; there’s a distinctly unhinged quality about it. Most of the other tunes on the album hew much closer to the tone of his previous work, including a particularly exquisite ballad that I’ll be getting to at the end of this article.

But those days would soon be over.

I took a promotional copy of the new Tom Waits album, Swordfishtrombones, into the listening room at WEGL, Auburn’s campus radio station, one night in 1982. I used to hang out at the station between classes and on slow evenings, and I met a handful of first-rate people there who remain my friends to this day.

They were all deejays. I was just the station’s unofficial mascot and sarcasm connoisseur. I’d occasionally enter the booth and throw out a couple of one-liners for the listeners’ benefit, then retreat to the lobby, where I did pretty much the same thing for whoever happened to be there.

Anyway, when I first slapped Swordfishtrombones on the turntable, I was immediately fascinated by its ambience, but I didn’t quite know what to make of it. The Felliniesque cover shot was not lying. This was Tom Waits as viewed through a newly cracked, knowingly distorted lens.

Waits Satyricon, if you will.

What had happened was Waits’ soon-to-be wife, sometimes co-writer, and overall partner in crime, Kathleen Brennan, had introduced him to the avant-garde and encouraged him to pursue conceptual and musical ideas that he would have previously abandoned.

Waits has described Brennan as “a remarkable collaborator. She’s bold, inventive, and fearless. That’s who you wanna go in the woods with, right? Somebody who finishes your sentences for you.”

Brennan noticed the makings of something richer and more exotic within her soulmate, and Waits, willing to listen because he loved and trusted her, chopped a new trail of offbeat creativity through the tangled vines of his mind.

I couldn’t shake that initial hearing of Swordfishtrombones, so I picked up a copy for myself and soon became a huge fan of the record. It’s bursting with life and warped compassion, by way of songs that alternate dark beatnik humor with what can only be called a binding sense of community.

The novelistic detail in Waits’ lyrics is a marvel, and he cares about his characters regardless of their quirks or shortcomings. He’s released a great many albums by now, but none, in my opinion, are as consistently well-written as this one.

Asylum Records did not embrace this experimentation and refused to have anything to do with Swordfishtrombones. So Waits jumped ship to Island Records, where the album was issued to permanent critical acclaim and virtually no sales.

Radio, not surprisingly, wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot program director.

I’m hoping to convey just how gifted a lyricist Waits really is, so here’s an especially rich track from Swordfishtrombones— an ode to local color and somehow deeply moving aggravation called “In the Neighborhood.”

I can’t say enough about this song as a writer. If you’ve never taken it upon yourself to sit down and create time, place, and character through a limited number of words, you might not sense the accomplishment in it.

The imagery, from greasy eggs and bacon sliding around a cast iron skillet in the morning to a flatbed truck pissing off a guy who, please God, just wants to go somewhere in his car, is meticulous and extraordinarily evocative.

Waits, for reasons that maybe only he can understand, often sets his songs in the 40s and 50s. If he mentions a brand of hair cream, a make of automobile, or a style of clothing, it’s usually one that disappeared years ago. Here, he generates this misty past through the main character’s lament that the milkman no longer delivers butter to the door, yet another strike against the world he once knew.

When was the last time anyone expected their butter to be delivered?!

There’s sad resonance to the details here, an implication that conventions as well as people—I love how the narrator suddenly remembers Butch joined the Army— are destined to fade away.

These people all share the same daily frustrations. They endure their headaches and rely on each other whether they like it or not, and they’ll wake up and start all over again the next morning because they have no other choice.

There’s beauty as well as sadness in that, too.

This may seem preordained because Waits thought it up and sang it for you. Again, though— try scratching out something that vivid and perceptive in the few words it takes to write a three-minute song and see what you end up with.

It’s not easy. If it were, more songs would be bursting with this much emotional complexity and recognizable life.

Only the greats can do it.

Surrealism began to seep into Waits’ writing with Swordfishtrombones, and it would quickly become a mainstay of his approach. The album’s title track is a potent study of yet another failed wanderer who can’t do right for doing wrong.

“He got twenty years for lovin’ her from some Oklahoma governor” is a ringer of a line, too.

Waits has obviously read Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs, but his ability to shift the Beat sensibility to a setting that feels like a worn studio-era film noir pulls you right in. He’s way out in left field lyrically—there’s often a dollop or two of insanity in a Waits tune—but he still generates a familiar narrative pulse. It’s a distinctly fascinating process.

In effect, you feel like you’ve heard this story before, if not seen it in black & white, but there’s a reckless danger to it.

Something, as they say, ain’t right.

This devastating Swordfishtrombones ballad, “Soldier’s Things,” still features a straight jazz arrangement, and Waits’ tenderly delivered vocal creates an underlying narrative of devastating grief.

Whoever that protagonist is, whether it’s the mother, father, or wife of a dead soldier, they seem permanently adrift in a sea of loss, bewildered by a fog that they’ll never be able to escape.

The song is so powerful it’s not until you look back on it that you realize it’s literally nothing more than a list of items from a yard sale! What’s not being said permeates the tune.

One hopes the objects being peddled don’t belong to Butch, the kid who joined the Army in “In the Neighborhood.”

But they probably do.

Now let’s get back to the noise! Waits can make a huge racket when he wants to.

This uproarious ode to a big, hot mess of trouble, “LowDown,” was co-written with Brennan but sat unreleased until it was included on Orphans: Brawlers, Ballers & Bastards, a collection of studio outtakes that, much like Springsteen’s first Tracks collection, contains a handful of songs that clearly did not deserve to be shelved.

There’s an awful lot of clamor on this one, so I’m posting the lyrics for you again. I wouldn’t want you to miss anything.

Play it loud.

She’s a crooked sheriff in a real straight town
She opened the door, shake shake, the lights go down
Clover honey and the Jimsonweed
Red leather skirt way up above her knees
Oh yeah, my baby’s lowdown

She’s a gone lost dirt road
There ain’t nowhere’s back, I’ve been told
Well, she’s a story they all tell
She’s a rebel, she’s a yell
Oh yeah, my baby’s lowdown

White heat in a cold rain
I’m merging here in your merging lane
Jockey LaFayette, Pig-Eyed Al
That secondhand moon is shining for my gal

She’s a big, red flag in a mean bullpen
Sit there and promise, then right back doin’ it again
Well, she’s a wild rose, she’s a knife petal
Cold gun of ice blue metal
Oh yeah, my baby’s lowdown

White heat in a cold rain
I’m merging here in your merging lane
Jockey LaFayette, Pig-Eyed Al
That secondhand moon is shining for my gal

She’s a cheap motel with a burned out sign
She’ll take care of you definitely every time
She got a stolen checkbook and legs up to here
Singing into a hairbrush right in front of the mirror
Oh yeah, my baby’s lowdown
Oh yeah, my baby’s lowdown
Uh huh, my baby’s lowdown

Yes, Tom, that is pretty good, now that you mention it.

What a piece of work, both as a song and a character! You can practically smell the over-applied cheap perfume.

“LowDown” might just be the best Rolling Stones song of the past thirty-five years, if you’re willing to ignore the fact that the Stones had absolutely nothing to do with it. That down-and-dirty guitar is the perfect setting for such a down-and-dirty character.

With that in mind...

Yet another of Waits’ underestimated talents, and he’s done it repeatedly over the years, is his ability to devise a track that actually sounds like the character inhabiting it.

I’d be hard pressed to name my favorite Tom Waits recording, since there are so many bizarrely effective ones. But if push came to shove, I’d probably go with “Hang on St. Christopher” from 1987’s Frank’s Wild Years.

I couldn’t begin to tell you what’s going on here, but it’s fucking great! Let’s just say some guy I wouldn’t want to have a beer with is obsessing over his sweet ride and the demon sitting shotgun, and leave it at that.

Keith Richards (the Stones again) once compared the sound of Waits music to a film with a little hair flickering in the corner of the frame, and I know what he means. Just that bit of unexpected intrusion creates a completely different vibe. It imbues the image with a vaguely disturbing quality.

“Hang on St. Christopher” has that in spades. From the dual bass (one of the them being a conventional upright) to the barely-there horn punctuations and out of tune guitar “solo,” the whole thing is both amiss and right on target.

Thelonious Monk used to hang framed pictures at awkward angles on his walls, just because he liked them better that way. I’m convinced Monk would have gotten along swimmingly with Waits.

By the time Waits released his 1992 album, Bone Machine (it won that Grammy that year for Best Alternative Album), he’d gone so far around the abstract bend, you had no choice but to just hang on tight and see if you could handle the trip.

Waits played tons of percussion on Bone Machine, saying at the time, "I like to play drums when I'm angry. At home I have a metal instrument called a conundrum with a lot of things hanging off it that I've found, metal objects, and I like playing it with a hammer. I love it. Drumming is therapeutic. I wish I'd found it when I was younger."

I can only take it in small doses, but Bone Machine contains one legitimate mad dog masterpiece in “Goin’ Out West,” which is basically Waits’ clear-eyed, as well as dilated-pupiled, version of “Hooray for Hollywood.”

I’m goin’ out west where the wind blows tall
‘Cause Tony Franciosa used to date my ma
They got some money out there, they’re giving it away
I’m gonna do what I want and I’m gonna get paid
Do what I want and I’m gonna get paid

Little brown sausages lying in the sand
I ain’t no extra, baby, I’m a leading man
Well, my parole officer will be proud of me
With my Olds 88 and the devil on a leash
With my Olds 88 and the devil on a leash

I know karate, voodoo too
I’m gonna make myself available to you
I don’t need no makeup, I got real scars
I got hair on my chest, I look good without a shirt

Well, I won’t lose my composure in a high-speed chase
Well, my friends think I’m ugly, I got a masculine face
I got some dragstrip courage, I can really drive a bed
I’m gonna change my name to Hannibal or maybe just Rex
Change my name to Hannibal or maybe just Rex

I know karate, voodoo too
I’m gonna make myself available to you
I don’t need no makeup, I got real scars
I got hair on my chest, I look good without a shirt

I’m gonna drive all night, get some speed
I’m gonna wait for the sun to shine down on me
I cut a hole in my roof, the shape of a heart
And I’m goin’ out west where they appreciate me
I’m goin’ out west where they’ll appreciate me
Goin’ out west where they’ll appreciate me
Goin’ out west where they’ll appreciate me

Goin’ out west
Goin’ out west

(repeat until dead)

That may be the most accurate song ever written about Tinseltown. The scariest part is that guy seems fully primed for success.

I’m sure Tony Franciosa was thrilled with the call-out.

And now, as I promised, let’s swing back to the beginning of this piece with “Ruby’s Arms” from Heartattack and Vine. This song is as gorgeous as anything Waits has ever written. I still can’t listen to it, as I have repeatedly for over forty years now, without getting tears in my eyes.

There’s simply no way to follow this. It’s so stunning it has to be the closer.

My God, what a song. There’s nothing I could possibly add. It’s just breathtaking.

Especially in recent years, Waits can get too self-consciously twisted for total enjoyment. But his best work is damn-near majestic.

If you want to do further streaming, try “Ol’ 55,” “Martha,” “Yesterday is Here,” “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” “Fannin Street,” “Trouble’s Braids,” “Shore Leave,” “Telephone Call from Istanbul,” and “Black Wings,” for starters.

You won’t be sorry.

There’s a streak of genius in Tom Waits. Laugh, cry, and swoon at his behest. And don’t forget to tip your hat to our stranded brothers and sisters who took a wrong turn and never found their way back into the fold.

There but for the grace of God, folks. There but for the grace of God.

Times change, and sometimes you get left behind.

By the mid-1960s, it had to have been a bitch to make a living interpreting the Great American Songbook or even singing pop tunes in front of a big band. Unless you were in the upper reaches of showbiz—icons like Sinatra and Tony Bennett and a handful of bland, TV-friendly performers like Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormet—doors quickly began to close.

Once the Beatles’ pimply-faced apostles grew their hair out and learned how to play newly purchased guitars, bells tolled for finger-snapping smoothies fronting orchestras. Throw in free love, protest tunes, and acid trips, and it was close to game over as far as lucrative careers went for the suddenly old school.

Outside of appearing on an occasional Jack Benny special (brought to you by Timex) or delivering a single song on The Tonight Show, the only other possibilities were playing Vegas, which had a limited number of stages, or toughing it out on the ever-shrinking supper club circuit. Minus the band, of course, because who could afford one?

And forget about releasing actual hit records. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was not about to battle it out with “Smoke on the Water” for chart supremacy.

That’s just the way it was, and long-working performers had to decide for themselves how far to lean into modern hits to remain solvent.

They seldom pulled it off.

Take, for instance, this cover of Tony Orlando & Dawn’s ghastly 1973 smash, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree,” as sung by Ol’ Blue Eyes himself, from his 1974 album, Some Nice Things I’ve Missed.

Dear God.

This man was a musical genius. There’s no way he thought that song was anything but a total piece of shit, let alone a “nice thing.” He made his name on “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” and “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” for Christ’s sake. He shared booze with Hoagy Carmichael and Sammy Cahn.

I realize I implied a moment ago that Sinatra was so big he didn’t have to lower himself for anybody, but he did it anyway. He also didn’t have to become a Republican just because Jack Kennedy pissed him off one time. He didn’t have to wear that lousy toupee, either.

But he did.

Oh, yeah— he was also in Cannonball Run II. Tony Orlando wasn’t even in Cannonball Run II.

One time, though, the “Ah, screw it” actually worked, or at least the singer didn’t make herself seem like your crazy aunt trying to do the Mashed Potato at a wedding reception.

This is Julie London’s 1968 capitulation to the kids, Yummy, Yummy, Yummy. It failed to reach the top 200 on Billboard’s albums chart and was the last record London, who had released thirty-two albums over the previous fifteen years, would ever record.

Yummy, Yummy, Yummy signaled the end of a once-thriving musical career, yes, and that’s a sad thing. But London was a sharp cookie, and as a concerted act of reinvention, it’s both hilarious and incredibly cool. I get a big kick out of it.

But first, some background.

London, whose parents were a vaudeville song-and-dance team, had been singing and acting in B-pictures from the moment she was out of high school, with her first role being in 1948’s Nabonga with Buster Crabbe. She got cast in Westerns a lot.

Then, if you can believe it, she married actor-producer Jack Webb. You know Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday (“just the facts, ma’am”) on the old Dragnet TV series!

Jack didn’t want his wife to work, so London quit acting and had a few babies, which, unfortunately, is what women were expected to do in those days. But when she and Webb divorced in 1954, she decided to get back to her singing.

And, good for her— she had a hit record right out of the gate!

London’s first and most successful single, “Cry Me a River,” made it all the way to number nine in 1955. From there on out, she was a staple on TV variety shows and in nightclubs. She didn’t land tons of hit singles, but she had an electric stage presence and was one of the more popular female vocalists in the country. Her albums sold.

Then...the British invaded.

In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, Julie London was smoking hot. There’s no point in pretending otherwise— she certainly didn’t, and who could blame her? Marketing is marketing, and she was just as famous for her sultry album covers and onstage slinking as she was for her voice.

But make no mistake, she was also a first-rate vocalist with noticeably fine control of a deeply seductive whisper. She could project a bit if she needed to, but once she got to purring, it was game over.

As she once said herself, "It's only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of over-smoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate."

You can feel London’s warm breath when she delivers a quiet ballad, and you’re damn near post-coital by the time she’s done with you.

As an example—and there are many to choose from—here’s “I Wanna Be Loved” from 1957’s subtly titled Make Love to Me. There is no truth to the rumor that the album was originally called Let Me Give Up My Career While You Produce Dragnet and Adam-12.

So that’s what Julie London did, and there wasn’t a lot of call for singers like her once Janis Joplin started screaming like she was being chased by a blues banshee.

Just like the majority of her peers, London’s album sales took a nosedive, so at the tail end of the 60s, she finally decided to try to pander her way back to relevance. Which brings us once again to the cockeyed majesty of Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.

The album is gorgeously arranged; the sound is deep and lush. And the band includes drummer Hal Blaine, who played on roughly 112% of the hit songs recorded in Los Angeles in the 1960s.

This record was made by a bunch of pros. The songs just aren’t the kind of thing one would expect Julie London to sing, and the incongruity of hearing her apply her alluring approach to AM radio fodder makes for a very entertaining experience.

The most obvious 60s pop song for London to cover, if you think about it, would be the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” since that’s basically what her aim was every time she sang.

So she sang that one.

If Jim Morrison projected no shirt and tight leather pants with “Light My Fire,” London rocked silk loungewear and a snifter of brandy. Plus, she’s not an insufferable blowhard who’s convinced herself she’s a poet.

Win for Julie!

Okay. This is nuts. Julie does Dylan, and it’s one of the Bobster’s more inexplicable grab bags of inexplicableness, “Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)!”

Even Dylan couldn’t bring himself to officially release that one. He recorded it with the Band at Big Pink, then gave it to Manfred Mann (who scored a top 10 hit with it, by the way.)

I’d like to know if London was a fan of the song already or if somebody pushed it on her. I’m guessing the latter, although it’s fun to imagine her digging through record bins down on Sunset until she scored a bootleg of the Basement Tapes!

Either way, she’s almost alarmingly comfortable with the song’s nonsense, and producer Tommy Oliver is wise enough to keep it under two minutes, lest the cockeyed charm dissipate.

I kind of love it.

And now we have the album’s title track, a cover of Ohio Express’s inane bubblegum masterpiece, “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.”

Prepare thyself.

Let me say in advance that I think this one is close to miraculous. London just lies back on her chaise lounge with a log crackling in the fireplace and lets you have it!

I’m sorry, but that’s amazing. She practically puts a leash on you and leads you into the bedroom while singing one of the stupidest songs ever written!

This should have been a hit single. There— I said it.

If Nancy Sinatra could score with the pampered-girl go-go stomp of “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’,” surely there was room for this on the radio.

Alas, nobody cared.

And finally, there’s the L.A. garage band go-to encore, the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie.”

You read that right. Julie London closed Yummy, Yummy, Yummy with a cover of fucking “Louie, Louie,” and she once again pulls it off with flying MOR colors!

You’ve now heard the actual lyrics! That alone was a public service!

When the final chord was strummed on her singing career, London picked herself up and went right back to acting...and if you didn’t know already, she was on a hit show!

She had remained good friends with her ex-husband and father of her kids, Jack Webb, who in 1972 cast her as the levelheaded, wisecracking head nurse, Dixie McCall, on what would become NBC’s Saturday night time-killer, Emergency!

The actor next to London in the photo is her second husband, Bobby Troup, who played Dr. Joe Early on the show. They married in 1959 and stayed that way until Troup’s death forty years later. London died of lung cancer less than a year after that.

By all accounts, they were a warm, funny, extremely likable couple.

Even Jack Webb liked them! You certainly wouldn’t expect an ex-husband to hire his ex-wife and her current husband to co-star in the new TV show he was producing!

Before I wrap this up, here’s another piece of Emergency! trivia— Bobby Troup was a prolific songwriter who penned “The Girl Can’t Help It” for Little Richard, as well as the many-times-covered hipster classic “Route 66!”

Since Julie London had the industrial-strength cajones to perform the music of the younger generation, let’s have those rabble-rousers, the Rolling Stones, return the favor with this hard-charging, if poorly recorded, live version of “Route 66.”

If that was too much for your aged heart to take, have someone apply an IV of Ringer’s lactate and get yourself transported to Rampart General Hospital immediately!

That most happy fella is Bill Veeck, who, during a four-decade career in Major League Baseball, was the owner of the St. Louis Browns, my Cleveland Indians (the Guardians were way off in the future), and the Chicago White Sox. Although Veeck loved to laugh, he was no fool and was pretty darn good at turning a profit with a baseball team.

And in 1948, the Indians won a championship while he was in charge!

My dad was 18 years old when this historic event took place. Dad is now dead, I’m 63 years old myself, and Cleveland baseball loyalists are still waiting for another World Series win. Veeck, though, delivered, and for that he is fondly remembered in Pierogiville.

But building great teams wasn’t necessarily his strong suit as an owner. Getting butts in the bleachers was where he really excelled.

Veeck was a showman who knew how to draw people to baseball stadiums with wacky stunts that generated lots of free press for his team, and he had a great time doing it.

His plaque in Cooperstown actually says that he “heightened fan interest at every stop with ingenious promotional schemes, fan participation, exploding scoreboard(s), outrageous door prizes, names on uniforms…” among other more socially significant achievements that I’ll be getting to.

Even when Veeck’s teams weren’t any good, and they often were not, loyal fans rallied behind them, with the owner guffawing, slapping backs, and shaking hands all the way. He never met a paying customer he didn’t like.

Veeck actually communed with the fans and had a good time at the stadium, as opposed to being an isolated billionaire asshole charging seventeen bucks for a beer and fifty-three for a t-shirt.

I know I’ve previously written with disdain for the antics of one Charles O. Finley, who liked to fool around with things like orange baseballs and bases, and even forced his players to grow mustaches when he owned the Oakland A’s back in the 70s. But Finley was distinctly unlikeable and badly needed to trim his eyebrows.

Veeck, on the other hand, was the hilarious class clown who made better grades than most of the other kids while hardly even studying. He was crafty and knew exactly what he was doing.

“The fan comes away from the ballpark with nothing more to show for it than what’s in his mind,” Veeck once told Sports Illustrated, “an ephemeral feeling of having been entertained. You’ve got to heighten and preserve that illusion. You have to give him more vivid pictures to carry away in his head.”

Many of Veeck’s publicity stunts were relatively mundane but still a lot of fun, like pie-eating contests, cow-milking contests, and potato sack races between the players and the fans. But several of his crowd-pleasing schemes were thinking-outside-the-box masterpieces.

Possibly my favorite happened on May 26, 1959, when he owned the White Sox and treated the citizens of Chicago to “Martian Night,” during which a helicopter landed in the outfield at Comiskey Park and unloaded a crew of actual Martians who then ran around the infield for a few minutes while the fans cheered.

Here they are, in case you don’t believe me. Sorry the shot is so blurry, but nobody ever gets a clear photo of a Martian.

Who’s a liar now?!

But Veeck had been up to his shenanigans long before he made extraterrestrial contact.

On Aug. 24, 1951, in St. Louis, he boldly orchestrated “Grand Stand Managers Night,” during which one thousand fans were selected at random and seated in the “managers’ section” of the stadium, where they held up big “YES” and “NO” cards when the Browns needed to make decisions during the game, like whether or not to steal a base or pull a pitcher.

The team’s real manager, Zack Taylor, sat in a nearby rocking chair, smoking a pipe and wearing street clothes.

The fans filled out lineup cards before the game started, which were then tallied by the ushers. So at least they strategized that much. But no one has ever explained how they might have secretly told a man to steal a base while holding up an uncountable mess of poster board votes in the stands.

In reality, the fans didn’t manage the team very much at all, but they felt like they were managing it, and that’s what really mattered. The Browns won the game 5-3, thus lifting their season record to 38-81. Veeck shot off celebratory fireworks afterwards.

When your team is 37-81, you can do things like that, although baseball’s brand-new commissioner, Ford Frick, strongly warned Veeck never to do it again. You’d think with a name like Ford Frick he would have had a better sense of humor.

Veeck was used to stern warnings, though. He had already been in hot water with the league just five days earlier, on Aug. 19th, when he signed an unknown player named Eddie Gaedel to a one-game contract to play for the Browns.

This photo of Gaedel batting in his sole Major League plate appearance should give you a clue as to why the contract was for only one game.

Eddie Gaedel was three feet seven inches tall and weighed sixty pounds. His uniform number was 1/8.

When Gaedel stepped out of the dugout against the Tigers and approached the plate with a toy bat, the umpire immediately called a halt to the proceedings. But Zack Taylor, who had not yet been retired to a rocking chair, trotted over with a handy copy of Gaedel’s signed and perfectly legal contract.

So Eddie stepped into the batter’s box.

Veeck is said to have warned Gaedel before the game that if he actually swung at a pitch, there were snipers on the roof of the stadium who would shoot him...which would have been a major buzzkill for everyone involved, especially Gaedel.

Eddie played along, though, saying later on that he had a hell of a great time. And who wouldn’t?! Surely, he never imagined he’d one day be batting for a professional baseball team!

Detroit pitcher Bob Cain walked him on four straight lobs— I’m sure he was afraid he might kill Gaedel even before the snipers did if he were to hit him with a fastball. When Gaedel got to first base, he was replaced with a pinch runner. St. Louis fans cheered so hard once he was back in the dugout, he had to step out and take a curtain call.

Gaedel’s uniform is now on display at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. People say Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak is the one baseball record that will never be broken, but my money is on Eddie Gaedel forever remaining the shortest player in league history.

Surely, one of the reasons Bill Veeck enjoyed a good laugh was because he knew he was lucky to be alive.

In 1943, while he was still the owner of the minor league Milwaukee Brewers, he volunteered for the Marines— at the age of 30!! He was stationed in the South Pacific when an anti-aircraft gun recoiled and crushed his right leg. It had to be amputated just below the knee.

Veeck owned a conventional prosthetic limb but more often than not wore a pirate-style wooden peg leg with a convenient ashtray built into it! He never complained about the loss of his leg and made jokes about it constantly. It was just another element of his off-the-wall approach to life.

But there was a lot more to Bill Veeck than a lengthy series of stunts and sight gags. Along with Branch Rickey, who famously signed Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Veeck was one of the key forces in the integration of baseball!

Iconoclast that he was, Veeck signed outfielder Larry Doby to the Indians, making Doby the second Black player in Major League history and the first ever in the American League.

I’ve always felt that Doby, who would go on to a Hall of Fame career, never received the credit he deserved for this. He appeared on the scene a mere three months after Robinson broke the color barrier. Don’t think that racist players and fans were any easier on him because they got the slurs and heckling out of their systems with Robinson.

Later that same season, Veeck also signed the legendary Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige, at an age when most players have long been retired...whatever that age was. Nobody knew for certain when Satchel was born. Satch, who was quite a character himself, along with being one of the greatest pitchers who ever lived, poo-pooed the issue by asking, “How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?”

The best guess is that he was in his early 40s, but it didn’t make a bit of difference. He had a very respectable 6-1 record with a 2.48 ERA for the ‘48 Indians and became the first Black pitcher to ever win a World Series game.

He and Doby were also the first Black players on a World Series-winning baseball team, because they were talented ballplayers and good men, and Bill Veeck wanted them on his field and in his locker room.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Cleveland never won another World Series title in my lifetime. But if ‘48 is the last one we ever get, it’s a great one, and the owner’s sense of humanity was a contributing factor in the victory.

Long-time losers or not, how many teams can claim that?

I don’t eat breakfast as often as I used to when I was a kid, even though the only lessons I remember from my third-grade health class are that breakfast is the most important meal of the day and you should never stick anything in your ear.

I call minor bullshit on that.

I’ve somehow made it this far by eating a banana or an apple maybe two mornings a week, if that, although I have steadfastly avoided ramming sharp objects into my ear canal for over fifty years now.

My ear, after all, is the most important ear of the day.

But when I was a growing boy, Mom insisted I eat something. And breakfast at my house, at least on busy school mornings, meant one thing and one thing only— sugar-coated cereals and whole milk squeezed from a living cow. Fuck almonds.

I’m over 60 years old, as unfathomable as that may be, so when I eat cereal now, it’s almost always granola, because granola is supposedly better for your cholesterol, and high-fiber ingredients like oats and flax seeds help move the poop-mobile down the ol’ turnpike, if you get my drift.

Here’s a shot of world-class granola being crafted by a team of trained granola technicians in a precisely cooled Swiss laboratory. They wear those masks to avoid the contact high.

The problem with granola is that it isn’t much fun, and anything that’s good for you should be viewed with at least a little bit of disdain, as far as I’m concerned. Back in the 70s, I was basically eating bowls of candy, and you got a little bit of showbiz with your meal courtesy of the graphics on the box.

And sometimes there was a toy inside! I remember my brother and I really pissed off my mom once because we poured almost an entire brand new box of cereal into a mixing bowl in order to find some crummy plastic duck or something like that.

She didn’t seem to care that we planned to pour everything back into the bag when we were done.

So let’s take a look at the cereals I most enjoyed during my chirping-bluebird-filled childhood, when it didn’t matter what I ate because I could easily fall off my bike one afternoon and spread my brains on burning-hot pavement regardless.

I know some of these are still on the market, but I haven’t touched them in years, so I’ll be speaking in the past tense...

Cap’n Crunch

Cap’n Crunch was, and probably still is, the best cereal ever made, unless they’ve stupidly tried to “improve” it, which would be impossible. (If Tide detergent were really being improved as many times as it’s now been called “New and Improved,” you’d be able to just shout “Tide!” at your clothes and they’d get clean out of fear.)

As I am in most things, I’m a purist when it comes to cereal. So, even as a kid, I preferred straight-ahead Cap’n Crunch, although, I have to say, I was not averse to the version with those fruity Crunch Berries in it.

The box didn’t lie, by the way. It took a lot longer for milk to turn this stuff into mush than it did most other cereals, so you could spend several extra minutes slapping your sister at the breakfast table and still receive full crunch for your mom’s dollar once you started eating.

Here’s something pretty wild that I just learned about the cereal’s mascot. No one noticed until 2013, fifty years after this stuff was launched, that Cap’n Crunch—his full name was supposedly Horatio Magellan Crunch, although God knows where he put his birth certificate—actually wore the uniform of a Navy commander rather than a captain!

In 2023, Quaker Oats tried to make a big deal out of their turning him into a real captain by adding more stripes to his sleeve, but I never heard a thing about it.

They probably would have gotten more publicity had they court-martialed him, then made him walk the plank and get eaten by new blue-and-yellow sharks.

What I don’t understand is how nobody ever noticed Captain Beefheart didn’t follow military dress code at all.

Seems easy enough to tell in retrospect.

Quisp

Quisp was, for all practical purposes, Cap’n Crunch in the shape of blood platelets.

The goofy alien on the box was named, as you’ve probably already guessed if you’re not an idiot, “Quisp.” This particular bowlful of marketing was a companion piece to another cereal called Quake, which also tasted pretty much like Cap’n Crunch.

There was a lot of inbreeding in the cereal world back then. They stopped when Post released a new one called Crosseyed Billy Bobs.

The Quake character was originally a musclebound coal miner wearing a hard hat with a headlamp on it, but he must not have belonged to the UMWA because he was eventually made skinnier and was dressed in a bush hat and cape! He didn’t have an Australian accent, though, so I don’t know what the hell was supposed to be going on.

All I knew was that I was a Quisp fan.

Weirdly, Quisp and Quake were meant to be competitors— kids were specifically asked to takes sides over which one they liked best! This didn’t happen naturally, like when the world pledged allegiance to either the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Quaker—them again—wanted you to fight about it.

Nothing like encouraging kids to argue!

Here’s the first Quisp and Quake TV commercial, created by Jay Ward of Rocky & Bullwinkle fame. (Quake’s voice is supplied by the great character actor William Conrad, who people my age best remember as the pleasantly plump TV private detective, Frank Cannon.)

This preconceived feud culminated in 1972 when Quaker asked kids to mail in their votes as to which cereal was their favorite, with the loser disappearing from grocery store shelves forevermore.

I actually took the time to do this, believe it or not, and Quisp won because he was a sarcastic alien who flew around via a propeller that grew out of the top of his head, and Quake was an easily annoyed cosplay Australian.

The deck was stacked.

Lucky Charms were supposed to be toasted oat pieces and variously shaped marshmallow bits, but they could just as well have been Pomeranian turds with marshmallow bits because the only thing a kid in his right mind would eat was the marshmallows.

Think about it. You’re in the third grade, and you’ve got a spoon and a bowl of marshmallows and oats sitting in front of you first thing in the morning.

Is there any contest?

The marshmallows were freeze-dried, and they had a wonderful firmness to them before your teeth crunched through to the orgasmic sugar bomb held within. It’s instructive to note that you can now buy bags of just the marshmallows online, but somehow no one has seen fit to market just the oat pieces.

Outside of those marshmallows, there wasn’t a single thing I liked about Lucky Charms, very much including that damned leprechaun. General Mills tried to make him a victim in their annoying commercials, but I knew the score with leprechauns and wasn’t buying it.

Leprechauns give me the willies. Am I really supposed to be enchanted by a miniature con man who tries to trick me into doing things I’m not supposed to do??

Every time I get an email from a supposed Nigerian prince who needs me to send him $5,000 so I can grow filthy rich in a few days, I imagine it being typed by a leprechaun.

I won’t even watch Finian’s Rainbow just to see exactly how bad it is.

Super Sugar Crisp

Then we have Super Sugar Crisp. It’s described on Wikipedia as “sweetened, candy-coated puffed wheat” that’s “noted for its high sugar content” (my italics.)

Given the sugar content of the cereals I’ve already mentioned, they must have been injecting each puff with a glucose solution to squeeze more in.

In a fit of unexpected discernment from my pre-teen palate, I never really enjoyed Super Sugar Crisp all that much. But I couldn’t get enough of its mascot, a turtleneck-wearing hipster smoothie called Sugar Bear!

With apologies to Prince— dig, if you will, this commercial. And note its all-inclusive message!

No shifty leprechaun or befuddled would-be ship commander, Sugar Bear sounded like Bing Crosby would have sounded if he had just smoked a fatty with Bob Hope in The Road to Jamaica.

One can imagine him slapping Chet Baker Sings on the turntable in his bachelor pad and mixing a Cutty and ginger ale for a slinky lady-bear...or, at least, I can imagine it now. I don’t think I had ever heard of Chet Baker when I was 9 years-old, and I certainly wasn’t concerned with how Sugar Bear got himself laid.

I just assumed that he did.

Life

And finally, there’s the runner-up to Cap’n Crunch as my favorite childhood breakfast cereal— Life.

Life is the only cereal I’ve covered here that I return to as an adult. The taste is far less of a sugar-dipped backhand to the mouth than the others, and it’s apparently packed with protein, which keeps me...um...fortified with protein, I guess.

As much as I enjoy it, though, no product has ever been as over-named as Life cereal. I mean, come on!

Why not put this image on the box? It’s like calling a deodorant “Human Existence.”

Everybody remembers, of course, this highly effective Life commercial featuring “Mikey.”

Whoever wrote that was a genius. I can recite every line of dialogue, word for word, with proper pauses and everything, and I bet you can too! It’s practically a jingle without the music.

Years later, a rumor started going around that the kid who played Mikey grew up, was drafted, and was killed in Vietnam, which would have been a pretty nifty trick when you consider the commercial first aired in 1972, when Mikey appeared to be about 4 years old, and Saigon fell in 1975.

So, unless we were so desperate for grunts that we covered a 7 year-old with insect repellent and shipped his ass to Indochina, Mikey did not die in Vietnam. Besides, I read on the Internet that he tried to wash down a mouthful of Pop Rocks with a Coke, and his head exploded.

I wish more people would do their research.

Miles Davis was without an official band when he returned from his trip to France in 1957, having grown so frustrated with John Coltrane’s drug intake, he actually punched the saxophonist backstage at a club and fired him. Then he let drummer Philly Joe Jones go for the same reason, and that was that.

But, being Miles Davis, he had little trouble finding other people to record with.

Davis and arranger Gil Evans first collaborated in the late 40s on a handful of small group sessions that included rather arcane instruments (for jazz, anyway) like French horns and tuba. Originally released to little notice from jazz fans, they were compiled years later on an LP called Birth of the Cool.

Regardless of the lack of initial public interest, these recordings were definitely heard by jazz musicians at the time and pointed the way to a smoother form of the music that would eventually take root in the West Coast scene of the 1950s, where such icons as Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, and Art Pepper made their names.

When the First Great Quintet was still a viable entity, Miles once again worked with Evans on a very carefully arranged big band record called Miles Ahead. Yet another groundbreaking album, Miles Ahead was an offshoot of Duke Ellington’s orchestral approach, although, in a completely new twist, overdubs were used during the recording process.

The later Davis-Evans collaborations came to be called “third stream” jazz, music with both a jazz and a classical bent that relies more on written charts than improvisation. Other landmark third stream albums by the two men are Porgy & Bess (1959) and Sketches of Spain (1960.)

Although I personally feel Miles’ natural gifts are too often suppressed by Evans’ formalities, these albums are regularly lauded as masterpieces and contain many radiant tracks.

Here’s a lovely “It Ain’t Necessarily So” from Porgy & Bess that gives Miles the room to breathe.

So, if we’re keeping score here (see also: Part 1), Miles was on hand very near the inception of bebop; created the “cool movement” with Birth of the Cool, which led to the West Coast jazz genre; was one of the shepherds of hard bop; and had now launched orchestral third stream jazz!

One can see how he might be considered the most significant jazz artist of the past seventy or so years, even without the limitless instrumental dexterity that enabled many of his peers.

He was forever searching and creative, and he just kept going for it, year after year after year.

And, in 1959, he recorded Kind of Blue, one of the great works of art of the 20th century, a masterful mood piece that deserves every accolade it receives.

Kind of Blue is the Citizen Kane of jazz— if it’s not listed as the top jazz album of all time, it’s always pretty close and may be number one again the next time they take a poll. There are literally thousands of tremendous jazz records out there, but it’s difficult to name another one that’s this flawlessly executed from beginning to end.

It needs to be said that Kind of Blue’s pianist, Bill Evans, who is one of the most influential players of that instrument in jazz history, may well have deserved co-leader credit here, so closely did he collaborate with Miles on the creation of the music.

Evidence points to significant input from Evans, and it’s not the first time Miles was accused of hogging a credit. But even Evans emphasized that the initial idea for the record belonged to Miles and that he recruited the perfect group of musicians once he and Evans fully conceptualized what they wanted to do.

Coltrane, now done with drugs and apparently over getting punched out by Miles, returned to the fold one last time. The rest of the lineup is Cannonball Adderley (alto), Paul Chambers (bass), Jimmy Cobb (drums), and Evans (piano.) Wynton Kelly, one of my favorite pianists, replaces Evans on a single track, the bluesier “Freddie Freeloader.”

Having been inspired by the approach he took while scoring Louis Malle’s film, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, the year before, Miles (and, it would appear, Evans) built the songs on Kind of Blue through a then-new concept called modal improvisation.

I won’t cut and paste a technical explanation of modal improv, because this isn’t a technical treatise. But if you’re a non-musician like myself who’s listened to tons of jazz, it’s possible to sense the feel of modality. To me, it often creates the hypnotic, floating tone of a snake charmer’s flute.

And here we go again— modal playing became a huge thing in jazz in the wake of Kind of Blue. It’s now a part of any jazz artist’s regular tool kit, and Miles Davis was the first to seriously employ it.

So chalk up another breakthrough.

There are simply no second-rate tracks on Kind of Blue. None. But my favorite is the opener, “So What,” which was named after Miles’ pet dismissive phrase.

So many elements stand out on “So What,” starting with the abstract introduction by Evans and Chambers that was, definitely this time, composed by Evans. This leads to the rare event of the bass playing the melody rather than serving solely as a rhythmic source when the song opens.

Miles’ solo at the beginning of “So What” is one of the most famous in jazz and arguably the most beautifully crafted of his career (later on, Gil Evans even orchestrated the solo into a composition of its own.) Then Coltrane adds just enough bite while keeping his more expansive inclinations in check, followed by Adderley biting back and occasionally rocking things like a baby in a very hip cradle.

I simply don’t have room to include more Kind of Blue tracks in this piece, but I’m fine with that because the album really should be experienced from beginning to end, such is its splendor as a cohesive statement. You should stream it the first chance you get, or, in lieu of that, head over to YouTube when you’re done reading this article and listen to it there.

You can thank me later.

One night, a mere eight days after Kind of Blue was released, Miles was taking a cigarette break on the sidewalk in front of the jazz club, Birdland, on Broadway above Times Square.

A passing police officer, treating him as a (Black) loiterer, told him to move along, but the famous trumpeter pointed out that his name was on the club’s marquee; he’d be returning to play another set in a few minutes.

The cop told him to move along again.

“I just looked at his face real straight and hard,” Miles later wrote, “and I didn’t move. Then he said, ‘You’re under arrest!’ He reached for his handcuffs, but he was stepping back. I kind of leaned in closer because I wasn’t going to give him no distance so he could hit me on the head. All of a sudden from out of nowhere, this white detective runs in and BAM! hits me on the head. I never saw him coming.”

Miles wound up with ten stitches in his scalp and had to spend several days in a cell on Rikers Island, charged with disorderly conduct and assaulting a police officer, neither of which actually occurred.

He was later acquitted of the charges, with a judge calling the arrest “a travesty on justice.”

Miles said this incident made him even more cynical and bitter than he might have been otherwise, and you can’t really blame him for that. But it also seems to have served as a catalyst in his playing.

My late friend, Benny Powell, who was a trombonist in Count Basie’s orchestra throughout the 50s and into the early 60s, once told me that Miles became something more than a mere trumpet player after the assault. His work somehow carried even more weight in the wake of this unwarranted, race-driven brutality.

If nothing else, it appeared to have opened a stream of intense radicalism in Miles’ approach to music. After a few years searching for the right group of musicians, he would push boundaries in jazz that he had never even bumped up against before.

Enter the Second Great Quintet, comprised of Miles (trumpet); Ron Carter (bass); Wayne Shorter (tenor); Herbie Hancock (piano); and Tony Williams (drums.)

When the quintet was formed in late 1963, Hancock and Carter were in their 20s, and Williams was a mere 17 years old! Shorter, who wouldn’t join until 1964, was the old man after Miles. He was 31.

Miles wanted adventurous musicians who didn’t have a lot of preconceived notions about what jazz was “supposed” to be, and he encouraged these sidemen to find their own ways through the music with just a bit of nudging rather than actual guidance. He also wanted to be challenged by the unexpected himself, even relishing unschooled mistakes that might lead to something new in his playing.

This was the 1960s. Conventions were being broken throughout our society, and Miles moved with the times. What the Second Great Quintet played together was yet another bold leap ahead from Miles, although, be warned, it might be a tricky one if you’re new to jazz.

It might also excite the hell out of you. Bring yourself to the table and decide. Be an active participant.

Remember the languid, cool-toned “So What” from Kind of Blue? Well, here’s the quintet’s version of it from a 1964 Philharmonic Hall performance at Lincoln Center. (The tenor man here is the vastly underrated George Coleman, who would leave after a year and eventually be replaced by Shorter.)

Get a load of both the flying tempo and the energy of Miles’ playing on this!

Holy shit! Where did that come from?!

The Second Great Quintet studio albums that were recorded between 1966 and 1968 (in sequence, E.S.P., Miles Smiles, Sorcerer, Nefertiti, and Miles in the Sky) are different beasts than anything Miles had done before. Set melodies were all but gone now in favor of a free-flowing, elasticized rhythm that pushed and pulled the music as it developed.

Incredibly, Miles allowed teenage Williams, a certifiable prodigy, to guide the tunes from his drum kit, a bit of unorthodox encouragement that even the generous Charlie Parker would have blanched at.

There was no net here. If any of the quintet were to let their minds wander from what was going on for even a moment, there was a chance they’d get lost.

In fact, here’s a remarkable piece of footage of Miles getting pissed off at Herbie Hancock for doing just that during a live performance!

This is a tune called “Eighty-One,” a “sometimes swinging, sometimes floating” track (as Hancock once described their approach) from the album E.S.P. You can clearly hear the band shift gears together as they progress.

This gives you an idea of what they sounded like in the studio, although these musicians were so expansive they were liable to head pretty much anywhere at any given moment.

Their focused interplay here verges on unbelievable.

The music, especially the rhythmic pulse, is smeared into compelling form as you listen. Obviously, you’re not going to get up and dance to this, but if you focus on the web that’s woven between these daring musicians, the process is fascinating.

Miles, rather than working the hard groove that many jazz fans craved, was growing more challenging as time went on. The Second Great Quintet reinvented the groove!

But bigger fame and even more money was a distinct possibility, and Miles went for it in a manner that absolutely no one could have seen coming and that many jazz fans simply didn’t want to consider.

Having grown enamored of the electric funk of Sly Stone and the raw, flowing energy of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar playing, Miles broke up the Second Great Quintet quintet after four years of lauded experimentation, bought groovy new threads and shades, and turned jazz on its ear for the final time.

And boy did it cause a ruckus.

He invented jazz rock, or jazz fusion, or just plain fusion, although I’ve always thought jazz funk is closer to the point. And this wasn’t a transition that had been building in multiple corners of jazz only for Miles to step up and coalesce everything.

He made this one up from scratch, folks, creating an entirely new genre of music that continues to be explored to this day.

Like Bob Dylan before him, Miles went electric and moved on to something like rock, and the uproar it caused in the jazz world was not unlike the howls of outrage that met Dylan’s conversion.

On top of that, Miles no longer even pretended to write tunes. He simply gathered together groups of superb jazz and rock instrumentalists, then jammed with them while the tapes rolled...and sometimes, but not always, made suggestions about what to do next.

When they were done, producer Teo Macero would meticulously blend and crossfade what he and Miles felt were the best parts, and voila— a new album!

Miles didn’t merely think outside the box. He showed open disdain for the box.

But this is where he largely loses me, and I’m not the only one.

He and his bandmates were now literally inventing music on-the-spot, playing in whatever manner struck them while looking to generate a groove. Unfortunately, that's precisely how they sound on a lot of the releases.

There are stretches where the musicians, gifted as they are, obviously just noodle around until somebody does something rich and interesting, and that can take way too long to occur for my tastes.

I have no doubt that there are moments of great power that I haven’t heard before on Miles’ jazz rock albums, but I don’t have the patience to sit there waiting for them to evolve.

As I said in Part 1 of this piece, though, Miles had every right to do whatever he wanted to do with his music, and many of his fans love this stuff. The thought that he was supposed to hold back because some listeners might not dig his new direction is ludicrous.

He was Miles fucking Davis, and now he was playing jazz rock. End of story. If you didn’t like it, you could go put on a Dave Brubeck album.

What Miles didn’t count on, I think, was having to present this formless new music onstage in front of mostly stoned white kids while opening for acts like the Grateful Dead and Steve Miller, the latter of whom he referred to in his autobiography as “a sorry-ass cat” and a “non-playing motherfucker.”

Miles made his converts, of course, but most of those kids didn’t know what the hell was going on. Pink Floyd was one thing, but few rock fans, stoned or not, were looking to be challenged to this degree.

1970’s Bitches Brew is widely considered to be the real masterpiece from this period, but I’ve tried to listen to it repeatedly over the years, and it does nothing for me. I would argue, though, that you don’t have to respond positively to every passage of an artist’s career to fully recognize their talent.

If you prefer Picasso’s “blue period” over his pursuit of Cubism, that doesn’t mean he suddenly lost it when he made the transition. It’s easy enough to grasp that he was still Picasso regardless of your personal response to the work.

But Miles recorded a jazz rock album in 1971 that I very much enjoy and listen to quite often. So—keeping in mind that this man started out playing bebop with Charlie Parker—let’s close our examination of the key movements in his untouchable career with A Tribute to Jack Johnson.

A Tribute to Jack Johnson was originally conceived as the soundtrack to a documentary about the legendarily flashy, outspoken Black boxer who was Muhammad Ali roughly five decades before Ali got around to it himself.

In 2003, a boxed set was released containing all of the raw studio takes that were recorded while Miles and Macero compiled passages for the Jack Johnson soundtrack. This unused piece, entitled “Ali,” is a ridiculously funky example of what Miles was doing at that time.

Give it a minute to build. Also, listen closely to the opening, during which Miles drops a suggestion to bass player Michael Henderson, then berates drummer Billy Cobham for coming in too hard on the cymbal. You can actually hear Miles say, “Why you wanna do that?!”

Cobham tries it a couple more times, then the tune starts to gel.

Now, that may or may not be jazz—Miles began to hate the term “jazz” anyway, saying it was made up by white people to compartmentalize Black expression and had nothing to do with his new music—but this track works for me, whatever it is.

The Jack Johnson album proper opens with a cut called “Right Off” that’s driven by a pulverizing groove courtesy of John McLaughlin on guitar, Cobham on drums, and Henderson on bass.

It wanders here and there, for sure, but that’s just sick, and Miles plays his damn ass off on it.

“Right Off” kicked into gear as a warmup jam—with the tape running, as always—between McLaughlin, Cobham, and Henderson. When Miles heard them starting to really cook, he sprinted out of the control room where he had been having a casual conversation with Macero, grabbed his trumpet, and proceeded to deliver one of the most exciting performances of his life.

Genius can be like that. And Miles Davis clearly was a genius.

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I feel like I’m taking a calculated risk every time I approach jazz at The Cool Stuff. Millions of listeners who can easily recite the touchstones of rock music history seem intimidated or confused by jazz, and they immediately take a pass when confronted by it.

I can tell you from personal experience that they’re missing out. Jazz is seldom about confrontation. It can, in fact, be quite welcoming if you’re curious about life and what it means to be an artist.

In 1994, I decided to give jazz an honest shot after almost twenty years of focusing solely on rock & roll, and, very quickly, I got it. The music fed me. I now listen to almost as much jazz as I do rock, and I honestly believe I’m a better person for it.

I discovered I didn’t have to be a musician or have a degree in theory to enjoy it. I felt as if I were suddenly able to grasp a new language without quite understanding every single word I was hearing.

I wasn’t expecting this to happen, but it did, and I’m forever trying to find ways to write about jazz that might light the same flame in the uninitiated that was kindled inside of me all those years ago.

So, in my next two Cool Stuff pieces, we’ll be examining the decades-long musical odyssey of Miles Davis, a story that’s emblematic of what I find so fascinating about jazz. (Be aware, also, that May 26, 2026 will be the 100th anniversary of Miles’ birth. This is his centennial year.)

Miles was a wounded, passionate young Black man who followed his creative muse and grew in expertise and confidence until he became a cultural giant in a country that initially had little use for him.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to open up your heart and mind, to really try to hear and understand one of the pivotal figures of a great American art form.

Let’s listen to some of Miles’ music and ponder how it came into being.

To me, jazz is about musicians finding the rhythms and harmonies within their creative spirits, then pursuing those leanings as they evolve over time, whether that space of time is a single tune or an entire career. Notations on a sheet of music are merely a starting point.

When an exceptional jazz artist plays an instrument, you can feel that person’s pulse— their heartbeat and their attitudes toward life. There’s great skill involved, yes. No one can fake playing jazz with a group of professionals. But skill is infused with instinct to spontaneously take the music to rewarding places.

I find real drama and inspiration in that, both as a writer and a person. The tenets of jazz—allowing yourself to think and feel simultaneously, to enmesh the two sensibilities—can serve as a guide to a richer life.

As jazz musicians listen to each other and add their own ideas to a group improvisation, the beauty of democracy is revealed in a living work of art. This, to me, is why jazz represents the highest ideals of the American experiment and why it’s so significant that it first sprang from the imaginations of Black musicians, men and women who were being treated as less than full human beings by their society.

Jazz leaves no room for dictators, and individuals are given opportunities to solo, to stand out and have their say as a tune moves forward. A musician’s belief in the importance of his own voice is paramount.

There can be joy and deep compassion in this, as well as sadness, anger, and everything in-between. There are as many variations on the music as there are groups of people playing it.

That’s the entire point. Listen closely to jazz, and you’ll hear a monument to our shared experience, with top-tier performances often reflecting the times in which they were delivered.

Understand, it’s impossible to compress all of Miles Davis’ accomplishments into a mere two articles. There’s good reason that entire books have been written about him. I’ll be forced to cherry-pick and summarize significant aspects of his life and career that deserve to be looked at more deeply.

But I’ll do what I can.

Even non-jazz fans are familiar with Miles’ intense don’t-fuck-with-me glare and raspy voice—the result of shouting at a club manager too soon after vocal cord surgery—and they’ve probably at least heard of, if not actually listened to, his classic 1959 album, Kind of Blue, which is the best-selling jazz record of all time.

But they’re probably unaware of just how big a deal he is in jazz’s overall history.

Miles was an endlessly searching, inventive musician who never rested on his laurels. Although there are periods in his music that I don’t listen to as much as others, particularly his jazz rock experiments from the 1970s, that’s not to say he was “wrong” to pursue his instincts, even when he left some listeners behind or offended jazz purists.

He rightfully viewed himself not as an entertainer but as a creative artist on the order of a painter or a sculptor (in the 80s, he actually became an accomplished painter himself.) He rarely spoke to audiences from nightclub stages during the peak of his popularity, and he didn’t mingle with them between sets.

He’d gladly accept their money, of course, and he needed it to maintain his luxurious lifestyle full of tailored suits, desirable women, and sleek foreign cars. But he considered audiences lucky to watch him create, a belief that led to an often humorous degree of belligerence toward the very people who supported and admired him.

Surely, Miles’ second most-played instrument after the trumpet was hostility. He was, without a doubt, a troubled human being who too often lashed out, both verbally and physically. He even released an album in 1967 called Miles Smiles that featured a photo of the rare event on its cover!

But friends say he could also display a warm, gentle side, and he had a sharp sense of humor. You just didn’t know which version of him you would get from one moment to the next, which may well have driven him and his bandmates to higher levels of creativity.

The pearls Miles drew from the oyster were formed by his own sand.

Miles spent his formative years on a 300-acre farm in East St. Louis, IL. A rather sheltered child, he began playing the trumpet when he was 9 years old and showed immediate aptitude for the instrument.

His father, Dr. Miles Dewey Davis, Jr., was a successful dental surgeon who lived with riches, pride, and dignity at a time when those things were almost impossible to come by for a Black man.

Miles made his way to New York City in 1944 under the guise of receiving classical training at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music, but he didn’t tell his parents he was more interested in looking for Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the city’s jazz clubs, where he quickly found them.

Soon, he was performing in those clubs himself, and the hardscrabble life of a jazzman, with all the humiliation and ingrained racism that entailed, hit him hard.

But his anger fed his creative impulse, and his determination to not be pushed around by anyone, whether they be white, Black, or polka-dotted, enabled him to keep exploring new sounds while many of his peers took to gracefully repeating themselves for years on end.

When Charlie Parker—who is to bebop and every permutation of jazz to follow as the Beatles and Bob Dylan are to rock music—first recruited young Miles for his combo, Parker’s fans and fellow musicians were perplexed.

On many tracks from this period, Parker’s effortlessly hard-charging improvisations are countered by trumpet breaks from Miles that are noticeably tentative.

Miles was barely 20 years-old at the time, and he sounds like he’s hanging on for dear life.

During one famous recording session, he simply refused to attempt Parker’s blast into the future, “Ko-Ko,” because he knew he couldn’t keep up with its accelerated tempo and chord changes. Dizzy Gillespie stepped in and played the tune instead, on a record that became a touchstone of modern jazz.

But Parker was a visionary who heard something compelling in the young trumpeter’s reserved tone, a bit of ice to compliment his own fire, and, over time, the student learned enough from the master to break away from him.

If only Miles had also received the wisdom to shun heroin, the drug that finally killed Parker in 1955 at the ripe old age of 34.

After building the foundations of a career in support of a musical godhead, Miles wound up so addicted in the early 50s that he disappeared to Detroit for a couple of years and became a pimp—he bristled at people calling it that, but when he explained what he was really doing, he always ended up describing a pimp—who merely dabbled in the trumpet to maintain his drug supply.

I’ve always felt that this photo, which was rather uncharitably used as the cover shot for his album The Musings of Miles, conveyed his personal struggle.

His gaze is timid and questioning here, his skin looks bad, and he’s wearing a cheap suit that appears slept-in, a look that clothes-horse Miles would recoil from once he got his shit together. Frankly, he looks lost.

Miles would have recurring problems with narcotics, the scourge of numerous jazz artists of his generation, throughout his lifetime, not that he was always willing to admit it. Like most drug abusers, he was fond of misdirection and excuses. But when he largely cleaned himself up after this initial nightmare, he got down to serious work.

His physical presence changed. He was now dressed in impeccably tailored suits from Brooks Brothers; a 1960 Esquire magazine article named him one of the best-dressed men in America, and they were right. He even wore a distinctive, no-nonsense game face, one that he would forever maintain.

He now exuded class and composure— or “cool,” if you will.

Returning to the New York scene with more difficult experience than anyone really needed under his belt, he chose to pull back from bebop’s freneticism, playing a rather less busy, gospel-inflected variation of the music that was eventually labeled “hard bop” by music critics.

The sound most people hear in their heads today when someone says “jazz” is likely either hard bop or some descendant of it. And Miles Davis was one of its originators.

His first genuine masterpiece as a bandleader, “Walkin’,” from 1954, is one of the finest hard bop albums ever recorded and one of the greatest albums in all of jazz.

Here’s the track “Blue ‘n’ Boogie.”

If you enjoyed that, I encourage you to start listening to Miles with Walkin’, which also features the gifted pianist Horace Silver, another pivotal voice of hard bop, as well as several other truly exceptional musicians.

Realize that jazz artists appear on each other’s albums in different combinations all the time. So if, for instance, you’re taken by Silver’s piano or J.J. Johnson’s trombone on Walkin’, there are scores of records by those two men alone that are well worth hearing, and you never know who might be playing with them.

During this same period, Miles took to playing ballads with a deep, almost feminine lyricism while muffling his horn with a Harmon mute, a sound that would become his most enduring trademark.

Listen to this gorgeous rendition of “It Never Entered My Mind” from another 1954 session.

Note that no other major jazz musician played as many “clams” as Miles Davis did, and it’s revealing that he was willing to leave them in on his releases.

Apart from a particularly robust period when he was in great health and taking no prisoners, he would often crack a note during a solo or slur it ineffectively. He was not a technical master of the trumpet in the manner of Louis Armstrong or Dizzy Gillespie. But he allowed his battered spirit to pour through the instrument with as much honesty and bravery as anyone who ever played.

“It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note,” he once said to pianist Herbie Hancock. “It’s the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.”

When Miles plays a tune like “It Never Entered My Mind,” it feels like he’s whispering an intimacy that you, and you alone, are supposed to hear. Frank Sinatra, whose singing Miles greatly admired, did this with his voice. Miles did it with his trumpet.

The mid-50s is when Miles really took control of his talent.

The groups he recruited and performed with between roughly 1955 and 1967 are commonly referred to in jazz circles as his first and second “great quintets” and were packed with groundbreaking musicians. Most of them would later become major voices in jazz in their own rights, both as sidemen and leaders. Tenor man John Coltrane, in particular, was an indisputable genius, a towering, transformative figure on a par with Parker and Miles himself.

And Miles was the first to notice Coltrane’s enormous promise.

My jazz heart lies with the First Great Quintet and its series of albums from the second half of the 50s that are full of interlocking power and passion. The members of this historic group are Miles (trumpet), Coltrane (tenor), Red Garland (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), and Philly Joe Jones (drums.)

Starting with four fabled, contractually obligated albums (Workin’; Relaxin’; Steamin’; and Cookin’) that were laid down for Prestige Records over two marathon sessions (!!) in order to jump ship to the major label riches of Columbia Records, this group was absolutely untouchable. And everyone in jazz knew it.

Here’s their muscular rendition of Parker’s “Ah-leu-cha,” from their first Columbia release, 1955’s ‘Round About Midnight.

The complex stream of counterpoint woven between Miles and Coltrane is astonishing, but listen to Chambers cook on that bass and Jones riding his cymbal then pounding away like a piston during the breaks!

This is a staggering group effort.

This wasn’t rehearsed over and over again until everyone knew their precise parts and the engineer hit the “record” button. Yes, an arrangement was laid out in advance so each member knew how many choruses to play and when to enter into a solo, etc. But after that, they were on their own and part of a powerful collective.

That’s how jazz works.

Surely, you can hear the energetic excitement in this moment of creation. You don’t have to know exactly what they’re doing to really feel this any more than you have to know what Jimi Hendrix or Pete Townshend are doing when they play their guitars.

This rendition of Thelonious Monk’s classic “'Round Midnight” from the same album is as effective a reading of the tune as anyone outside of Monk himself ever played, and it’s one of the most often recorded songs in jazz history.

Shortly before laying down this version, Miles performed “’Round Midnight” backed by a band of superstars, including Monk himself on piano, at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival, and the audience went nuts.

Newport in ‘55 was, in a way, his true coming-out party.

In his 1989 autobiography, Miles wrote of the moment, “When I got off the bandstand, everybody was looking at me like I was a king or something...all the musicians there were treating me like I was a god.” True to continually annoyed form, though, he also complained that he didn’t know what the big deal was— that was how he always played “’Round Midnight”!

What took them so long to notice?

For any other group, ‘Round About Midnight would have been considered the mountaintop. But 1958’s Milestones, in which the quintet was transformed into a sextet with the addition of the swinging alto saxophonist Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, actually upped the ante.

Milestones’ title track pulsates with clean punch and energy. It’s modern music of the highest order from a man who expected nothing less from his group members than the gold standard. Miles is in total command of his playing as well as the conception of the music at this point.

He knows what he wants, and he gets it.

Adderley takes the first sax solo, then Coltrane, with each musician bringing his own imprint to the tune. Miles’ minimalism, with the space given being as important as the notes that are played, again stands in contrast to busier talents, but that’s how he chose to do it.

That was his style. At this point in his life, he was a man of few notes as well as few words.

That sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday.

This was seven years before the march on Selma, and Miles Davis, along with such artists as James Baldwin and Sidney Poitier, signified bold new developments in public-facing Black identity.

The punch and rhythmic drive of this album convey the same confident attitude of the 31-year-old on its cover, whose steely gaze all but dares you to suggest that he doesn’t deserve your full respect.

Miles had become something more than merely an adventurous trumpet player. He was an iconic symbol of Black manhood, style, and artistic achievement. That kid who often fumbled his notes next to Charlie Parker was a distant memory.

He was now a world-famous artist and an indisputable badass. And there was a great deal more to come.

After disbanding the First Great Quintet in April of 1957, largely due to the consuming heroin addictions of Coltrane and drummer Philly Joe Jones, Miles took a three-week working trip to Paris. While he was there, he was asked by film director Louis Malle to team up with a group of French musicians and improvise the score to the moody New Wave heist film, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows.)

This amazing piece of footage gives us a glimpse of him doing just that.

Not a hell of a lot happens in Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, unfortunately, but the black & white photography is so gorgeous and Miles’ music so arresting that audiences were transfixed.

This approach to recording, with the absolute bare-bones minimum of a preconceived idea guiding the playing, inspired Miles yet again. When he returned to the United States, it would lead him to record the most famous jazz album of all time.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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Yep. We’re back in Hollywood again.

In the fall of 1995, I had my first of what would become several little nibbles of success as a screenwriter. But, as I’ve made clear here in the past, I never got a script filmed, not the script I created from scratch or the two I was hired to write based on someone else’s idea.

So what difference did it make?

I was doing what I’d set out to do when I moved to New York City almost five years earlier, though. I was experiencing some “movement,” as they say in the biz, which is more than most people who try to break into this kind of thing ever manage.

This was all totally surreal to me.

I mean— come on. I had been working at a record store on E. 86th St. and had been eating a single slice of broccoli pizza in a cockroach-infested apartment virtually every night for several years because broccoli fills your stomach more than pepperoni does. That was the best meal I could afford!

All of a sudden I was being flown out to L.A. first-class—where I was served caviar and toast points, no less—by a studio that shall remain nameless to meet with a couple of producers who would almost immediately earn both my deep distrust and dislike even though they were hiring me to write a script for them.

I knew I was doomed the moment they started feeding what I had to offer—the very writer’s voice that convinced them to hire me in the first place—through the movie industry’s patented ACME Deflavorizer, not that filming would have been guaranteed had I graced them with Casablanca II.

I was coerced into writing a lowbrow piece-of-crap comedy full of empty sight gags that was totally unlike anything that was mentioned to me during the hiring process. I felt my soul congealing while I typed it.

In a word, it was humiliating.

And don’t think I was getting filthy rich here. A powerless, first-time screenwriter is paid the WGA minimum for his work, which, in those days, anyway, was enough to keep me living as a nearly middle-class New Yorker for a couple of years.

That was certainly a step up from how I had been living; pretty much anything outside of sleeping in a shipping crate under the West Side Highway would have been. But it’s not like I was chortling while I smoked Cuban cigars and drank Cristal from Dorothy’s ruby slippers.

I did, however, eat more than a few of these corned beef sandwiches from Sarge’s Deli, as they are fantastic and do not contain broccoli. Sarge’s was just a block away from my new humble abode— a studio apartment on E. 35th St. that I soon wouldn’t be able to afford anymore.

Anyway...

I had been out to L.A. once before to visit various production offices and pitch a screenplay idea with my good friend and fellow would-be screenwriter, Andrew Friedman (if you’re a foodie, check out Andrew’s acclaimed podcast, Andrew Talks to Chefs, and his fascinating book, The Dish: The Lives and Labor Behind One Plate of Food.)

Andrew was doing the driving during our visit together because he knew his way around the city to some degree. I was alone this time, though, and my agent had set up meetings with development people all over town who wanted to listen to my story ideas, tell me how brilliant and funny they thought I was, then never speak to me again.

This was before GPS was standard equipment in every American automobile. I didn’t have GPS, but I did have what I like to call “map dyslexia,” which is standard equipment in me.

When I see a little red circle with a caption that says “You Are Here,” I simply can’t grasp the concept. In fact, I didn’t know where the fuck I was the entire time I was in Los Angeles. From the moment I drove away from LAX until I hopped a flight back home to Manhattan, I was lost.

I’d glance to my right while I was on the freeway and mentally register, “That’s the Hollywood Bowl!!” then immediately get back to the directions that were scratched out on a piece of notepad paper lying on my lap.

I sweated so much behind the wheel in L.A., I didn’t have to jog. I lost weight while I drove!

Sudden V.I.P. that I was, the studio had me staying in a suite at the Mondrian Hotel rather than the Days Inn, which, at that point, I would have had difficulty paying for on my own dime.

That’s the Mondrian pool in the photo. One night there was a knock on my door. It was a housekeeper who asked me if I’d like her to turn down my bed. I thought this was hilarious and told her, “That’s okay. It’s not so loud.”

Between the accommodations, the first-class plane ride, and the fact that the bill was being footed by a major film studio, the experience was beyond trippy. Every now and then, I would burst out laughing at the craziness of it.

I truly didn’t feel like myself, which I think is what made me choose one sunny morning in West Hollywood to take the leap and actually be someone else!

Needing to find some music to play while I drove around in stark, discombobulated terror, I dropped into a mall in what may or may not have been Century City—God only knows—to look for a record store. Having found one, I bought cassettes of the Miles Davis classic Round About Midnight and the debut release from a band I had read about in Rolling Stone that very morning called Wilco.

Wilco would, of course, go on to become...Wilco! Here’s a song off the album to establish the period.

Jeff Tweedy, everybody.

Understand, I am not one to overdress, even when I wake up in exorbitantly priced L.A. hotels. So, as I browsed through the bins at the record store, I was wearing one of these.

A long-sleeved promotional t-shirt celebrating the release of R.E.M.’s latest chart-burner, Monster. I called dibs on it at HMV Records, the store where I worked back in New York, when a label rep dropped it off one day.

That morning as I ate pancakes and drank coffee at an amazing diner on La Cienega called Norm’s, I read, in the same issue of Rolling Stone that alerted me to Wilco’s existence, that Bill Berry, R.E.M.’s drummer, was going to fully recover from the brain aneurysm that befell him during a concert in Switzerland several months earlier.

The article said that his relieved bandmates would be hiring a replacement drummer to finish the scheduled tour. (Berry would finally choose to retire from music to better take care of himself.)

This information was still fresh in my head when something astounding happened. A grinning kid in his early 20s who worked at the record store approached me and said, “Hi, Pete! How’s Bill doing?”

I’m amazed that I figured it out so quickly, but I immediately realized— “This guy thinks I’m Pete Buck!”

That’s Peter Buck, the Rickenbacker-wielding guitarist for R.E.M., standing against the wall in this 1995 photo promoting Monster. I know what you’re thinking— I don’t look at all like Peter Buck. But it’s not as preposterous as it may seem.

At the time, I had long hair a great deal like Buck does in the picture, and we have similarly shaped noses. Buck is also tall and lanky like yours truly. I guess the R.E.M. t-shirt put me over the top with the kid in the store, even though it’s ridiculous to imagine Buck would put on a t-shirt advertising his own band and then go hang out in a record shop in West Hollywood, new album on the shelves or not.

Surely, Warner Bros. Records had a heftier promotional budget for one of the biggest bands in the world than that!

Regardless, this guy was convinced I was Peter Buck. And for whatever reason, I decided to go ahead and pretend I actually was Peter Buck!!

The kid just seemed so thrilled to be meeting one of his rock & roll heroes. I also remembered how excited I felt when I met Bruce Springsteen at my own record store job the previous year (a story I’ll get around to telling at The Cool Stuff one day, for sure.)

So I answered my fan’s question, knowing full well that I wasn’t lying: “Oh, Bill’s gonna be okay. It was scary, but he’ll get through it. He can’t finish the tour, though. We’re getting a different drummer to fill in for him.”

Then the kid told me how much he loved Monster and said he played it in the store all the time. I, famous rock & roller Peter Buck, thanked him for that and shook his hand. Then I turned around and casually kept thumbing through the bins as if I had simply met yet another big R.E.M. fan and now wanted to get to what I was doing.

I could feel the kid gazing at me from the register after he walked away.

My heart was pounding because I was afraid he’d tell one of his co-workers to look at who was shopping over there, and they’d say, “Are you crazy? That’s not Pete Buck!”

The last thing I wanted to do was get caught, so I paid for my cassettes, thanked him again, and high-tailed it back to my rental car.

To this day, that guy, who’s now in his 50s, loves to tell the story about the time he met Peter Buck from R.E.M., who was friendly and cool as hell. A big music fan has every reason to believe he interacted with a real live Rock & Roll Hall of Fame member who plays on some of his favorite albums.

Life may be an illusion anyway. I ask you— what’s so wrong with that?

The afternoon before I flew back to New York, I was having a Guinness by myself in a nearly empty Irish pub on Sunset when singer-performance artist-whatever-she-is Grace Jones walked in by herself and sat down at a table.

She was dressed like a relatively normal person. It’s not like she was wearing a metal bustier with rivets in it or anything. For a split second, I considered introducing myself to her as Pete Buck from R.E.M., but, even in conventional clothing, she was scary as shit and was clearly capable of punching my lights out.

So I just finished my beer and left. No point in pushing my luck.

Listening to music on the radio could be pretty rough going when I was in high school in the late 1970s, especially if you were trying to be ambitious about things. Back then, you didn’t carry a little device in your pocket that gave you immediate access to every song ever recorded in recorded history.

If you know what I mean.

All I ever had in my pocket was ten bucks, a set of keys, and some watermelon Jolly Ranchers. So I largely had to rely on the airwaves to discover new music.

The big station in the region at the time was Q-104 FM, broadcasting from beautiful Gadsden. The deejays at Q-104, if not the station’s programming executives, were like pimply-faced freshman who were terrified of seeming different in front of the other kids, so they latched onto the most obvious music possible and shoved it down their listeners’ throats with a plunger.

This was the station North Alabama most chose to listen to. It was impossible to get away from it. If you climbed into someone else’s Toyota Corolla or were waiting in line for a Dilly Bar at the Dairy Queen, Q104 would likely be playing.

I could read about artists like the Clash, Graham Parker, and Elvis Costello in Rolling Stone, and I was very interested in hearing what they were up to, since their aesthetic hinged on getting back to basics— guitar, bass, and drums played loudly and non-masterfully, with lots of angry, often smirking attitude.

That was right up my alley!

But try hearing any of them on the radio. I couldn’t even find copies of their albums at the record stores down in Huntsville, never mind that they topped every conceivable year-end poll and were throwing kids into assorted frenzies out in England.

I just had to pretend they didn’t exist. Those guys were far too meaty for Alabama radio.

But, believe me when I tell you, we had a lot of applesauce.

If you were into Journey, Boston, Foreigner, or the dreaded Styx, good news! That was just about literally all you got from Q-104, along with the Barry Manilow Experience and a few more compelling, but still smoothly commercial entities like Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Linda Ronstadt, the Bee Gees, and Billy Joel.

Buffed-and-polished hits came at you one after another, all fucking day, every day. Just a never-ending loop of “been there, done that.” Even the legitimately good ones would wear on you after a while.

It just about drove me out of my mind. That’s not to say, though, that everything I listened to on a regular basis was earth-shattering in its depth and originality. And one favorite in particular was all over the radio.

That would be the Electric Light Orchestra, aka “ELO.”

Led by singer-songwriter-guitarist-producer-mastermind Jeff Lynne, ELO was originally an unwise attempt to duplicate the overriding vibe of the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus,” a cello-filled load of near-bullshit that’s the ugliest sounding thing the Fab Four ever turned into a countercultural event.

A lot of people, of course, fell for “I Am the Walrus” because a lot of people fell for literally anything the Beatles did...which is exactly why John Lennon, being snotty again, wrote the song’s grating nonsense lyric in the first place.

After releasing some decent, commercially unsuccessful singles with a group called the Idle Race, Lynne jumped ship and joined a rather heavier British band called the Move.

Unfortunately, the walrus was strong in that one.

Although the Move could rock & roll convincingly, its leader, Roy Wood, formed the idea of incorporating “Walrus”-style strings into a four-on-the-floor rock format, and he convinced Lynne it was a really swell idea.

It turned out it was a swell idea, but it took years of fine-tuning to get it right.

Over time, the Move evolved into the Electric Light Orchestra, with Wood and Lynne serving as co-leaders. But it wasn’t long before Wood, who forever seemed to be higher than you or I have ever been in our lives, wanted to add jazz saxophone solos to the mix! This led to his getting booted from the group, thus making Lynne ELO’s sole driving force.

ELO’s initial albums were burdened by pretentious classical interludes that wavered uneasily between mind-numbing and plain old silly, although this track, “Ma-Ma-Ma Belle,” springs to fantastically crunchy life on album number three, On the Third Day.

A real stomper that features the sound of Lynne spitting on the ground during a pause in the opening guitar riff (guest star Marc Bolan of T. Rex also jams along here), it’s a somewhat atypical tune for these guys, sort of a cross between Cream and Led Zeppelin, but with cellos and a sense of humor.

That’s harder-hitting than anything else ELO ever recorded, before or after. I stream it on heavy rotation, and I’m always happy to hear it when I’ve got my Tidal app on shuffle.

Lynne openly admits to viewing lyrics as a secondary concern, and it’s often easy to tell, but these are pretty great. I mean, one thing that’s on my mind is to get ahold of you before I serve my time is really funny and surprisingly tough.

So, yeah. “Ma-Ma-Ma Belle” is top-shelf ELO while not really sounding all that much like ELO, outside of the strings, and even those flex their muscles a bit more than usual as they saw along.

About four albums into the breach, though, Lynne’s pop instincts finally took over for good, and ELO became the most successful band in the world, releasing a series of inventive singles that sparkled brightly on Top Forty radio like ABBA with a Chuck Berry bent. Their tours were showcases of au courant laser beams and theatrical staging that filled stadiums.

ELO was the only rock band with a violin and two cellos in its lineup, but the strings now supplied terrific hooks rather than making you groan at their presence, and Lynne had taken to lifting one or two (or three or four) extra-bouncy things from the Beatles when it came to writing melodies.

Not that he was the first.

ELO’s best songs are catchy pieces of synthesized ear candy presented on a bed of 50s-style rock, with a Little Richard piano often pushing things along. They’re a lot of fun to listen to.

The group sold over 50 million albums, which is a pile, but it’s hard to find a decent picture of them onstage. To millions of listeners, they were merely a cool logo and a studio-thickened sound…and a lot of people hated them for their commercial-driven facelessness.

Frankly, any band that can record a song called “The Diary of Horace Wimp,” or a cheesy synthesizer opus called “The Whale,” deserves at least a bit of ridicule. But the hits were definitely the hits, with “Evil Woman” being one of ELO’s first and one of its best.

I really love Richard Tandy’s piano intro on that one. Actually, Tandy was a key member of the band who worked closely with Lynne on creating their signature sound. A lot of what people loved about ELO was supplied by Tandy’s gifted fingertips.

Then there’s “Livin’ Thing” off of A New World Record, a pizzicato-goosed confection that suggests it has Linda McCartney on backing vocals (Beatlemania is one thing, but you really have to be into McCartney to duplicate vocal stylings from Ram.)

These are pretty great records, if you ask me. It’s still easy to hear the hitness in them.

Many years after the band broke up, Lynne started renting out ELO’s catalog to any movie or TV producer who came knocking. So it’s surprising that, as far as I know, no one has gotten around to co-opting what I consider to be the group’s most successful single, “Sweet Talkin’ Woman,” off the mega-selling 1977 double album, Out of the Blue. This song starts out soaring and keeps on rising, and it contains four or five different hooks.

There’s a refreshing, positive energy to it.

That melody, featuring a gorgeous slide into a minor key, is almost damnably catchy; to paraphrase another ELO hit, you can’t get it out of your head. And the arrangement, which sports more nifty piano work from Tandy as well as human voices blurting out the bass line (as heard on the Beatles’ “I Will”), leaves space for individual instruments to stand out while still creating something of a wall of sound.

Listen to “Sweet Talkin’ Woman” in the car, and it’s a blast. Put on a good set of headphones, and it’s even more enjoyable. This is what Nick Lowe called “pure pop for now people,” a catchy little thing that glistens from every angle. It sold like studio-built hotcakes.

It also happens to be my favorite hit single by any group in the 1970s, barely beating out Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom” for the title, although I still love those French horns on “Philadelphia Freedom.”

I’ve even got a mint-condition original copy of it on purple vinyl!

ELO’s beautifully remastered greatest hits package, All Over the World, as well as prime cuts from A New World Record (1976) and, especially, Out of the Blue (1977), are first-rate Seventies pop.

There’s some really great stuff on Out of the Blue, and I don’t mean just the hits, like “Sweet Talkin’ Woman.” “Sweet is the Night,” for example, is somehow dramatic in spite of the slathered-on gloss.

I just about die when the backup singers throw in that goofy “coo-coo-cah-cooca-coo.” It’s so uncalled for and absolutely perfect; I look forward to it, and I can’t help but sing along when it happens.

Lynne clearly wasn’t taking himself too seriously, as he often seemed to be doing on the first three ELO albums, and the music benefits from it.

“Birmingham Blues” is also fun, with another appearance by Tandy’s patented “Little Richard piano,” handclaps, and Bevan pounding the bass drum and cymbals to maximum effect. It’s got a little bit of everything, including a surprisingly hot electric guitar solo from Lynne.

It may be kind of homely, but it sure is sweet / Industrial revolution put it on its feet is another example of Lynne accidentally writing a really clever lyric. It didn’t happen all that often, but he dropped a sweet one every now and then.

Although the group wasn’t done quite yet, the wind was already leaving the sails by the time of Discovery (1979.) My buddies and I listened to it a lot, because it was the new ELO album, but it wasn’t hard to detect a drop in quality. Lynne’s sudden infatuation with the disco market didn’t help.

Bevan was now sounding like a human drum machine, and the string section isn’t integrated anywhere near as successfully as it had been on the previous handful of releases. Most of the time they weren’t used at all, which rather negated the very concept of ELO.

But Lynne still supplied the world with a classic Big Dumb Fish of a single in the form of Discovery’s closing track, “Don’t Bring Me Down.” Outside of “Mr. Blue Sky,” which has been played to death in movies and TV commercials by now, this oversaturated piece of silly bombast may be ELO’s lasting legacy.

Even with an all-time classic Jeff Lynne “fuck it, that’s good enough” filler lyric (you’re lookin’ good just like a snake in the grass / One of these days you’re gonna break your glass), there’s no denying the boomity-boom-boom charm of this one.

That door slamming at the end unintentionally signaled the closing of the door on ELO as a commercial entity, outside of a nifty space age rockabilly single called “Hold On Tight” that made the Top 10 in 1981.

Otherwise, the remaining albums were strangely impersonal affairs. The final one, Balance of Power (1986), didn’t even crack the Top 40. The band was a delight for a while there, though, and people have grown to appreciate them even more as time marches on. Even McCartney sings the group’s praises, and, if fair were fair, he would be getting a cut of Lynne’s profits, although he probably doesn’t have much trouble paying his rent without one.

Oh, by the way…

I still have my Out of the Blue belt buckle. Gaze upon the coolness.

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