Alvin Alexander

Wings On Your Heart

www.a.k.alexander.com

As Chris Owens’ guitarist, Alvin played muchissimo Latin music. While Owens is flashy and flamboyant, Alexander is subtle and smooth as "Silk Like Love" in the tradition of Tom Jobim and Baden Powell. Alvin has internalized Brazilian themes so well that these tunes are originally motivated, not obviously derivative, because there’s a New Orleans thing going on, too. "Bang Bang a Lang" has as much to do with the doo-wop scat of "Oop Oop a Doo" as the concrete poetry of Gilberto’s "Bim Bom." "Feelings, Wishes, Best of Love" and "I Like You, I Love You, I’m In Love With You" are exercises in understated repetition with articulate variation generating rhythms insisting we dance close to senoritas inspiring serenades such as "Ginger" or "Giselle.". Alvin’s acoustic fingerpicking is impeccable—clear, cool ripples on a pure pond of deepest blue. Conversational vocals are clean: no overproduction con queso. Nevertheless, a diva with a big band could make one of these melodies a super hit. Like Allen Toussaint albums, well-wrought songs are waiting for even greater interpretations—compositions as classy as the gems from Adler’s Alvin advertises with as much character as the many roles he has played on HBO. Go for it, ladies! "Eagles were meant to fly," so put "Wings On Your Heart."

Jak Rabit Feast - Autumnal Passage

Feast 1999

Harry Connick, Jr. isn't the only son of a New Orleans politician playing music. Reynard Rochon, Jr. spent decades on the underground scene and has finally released the first of 5 instrumental improv CDs recorded at a Solstice party "like it's 1999" in his parent's den near Jazz Fest fairgrounds. (He's got family at House of Blues, too--lovely Lilith, choreographer for Nipples of Isis.)

In the 80s, Reynard fronted Rosicrucians with funky bassist Lloyd Boisdore of Evil Nurse Shiela and psychic guitarist Jules Ford of Voodoo Jive and Soul Remedy. With "The Sparkle of Broken Glass," Reynard is joined by bass Mike Joseph of Black Problem, Lump and Egg Yolk Jubilee, where Mike plays alongside trumpet Eric Beletto, whose dad leads Al Beletto's Big Band.

Reynard plays strings and winds. Rochon learned lots of guitar licks from roommate Jimmy Bower of EYEHATEGOD, Mystic Krewe of Clearlight, and supergroup Down starring crunchers from Pantera, Crowbar, and Corrosion of Conformity. Reynard's sax is "John Coltrane via Jimi Hendrix." Exotic Middle Eastern flavor is influenced by Klezmer All Stars' sax Ben Ammon's recordings with Lump. Drum Andre Londgnes, bass Joel Webb, and keyboard Nicole Klose show high marks in New Orleans' outstanding jazz education system headed by UNO Prof Marsalis. Enjoy these organically inspired explorations to experience the future of postmodern jazz. (Most of these CDs available at Tower, but you've got to get Jak Rabit Feast from roo2new@hotmail.com)

Nth Life of Eartha Kitt

Cottonpicker, dancer, multilingual singer, not to mention stage, screen and TV star, who has established herself as a respected writer, educator and philanthropist--Eartha Kitt has the uncanny ability to recreate herself into an endless array of personalities. Eartha's Protean metamorphoses project diverse characterizations evolving into archetypal mythological avatars. This woman of a thousand faces is the incarnation of an indominable determination to thrive.

Eartha Kitt can be anything she wants to be. This crafty shapeshifter comes from rural South Carolina. "I found that to survive I had to learn to adapt." Eartha Mae experienced an epiphany at Easter when she first sang to an audience. "It was the first time anyone and everyone paid so much attention to me." The same thing happened when she read aloud at school. "It was like a spell over the room. I didn't understand it at all, but it seemed I had some power that made people pay attention."

Soon Eartha's fairy godmother from "Up-North" sent her a ticket to the Harlem Renaissance. Eartha's aunt was a strict churchlady who insisted on piano lessons and choir practice. "O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing" is the first song in the Methodist hymnal. This hymn shows equality of all who share in the congregational exaltation, but the prophetic words can also mean that one may be granted the talent to sing in several languages. (And bear the duty to develop that talent!) Meanwhile, Eartha caught up on eight years of school in five and successfully auditioned for NY School of Performing Arts at 13 and Katherine Dunham's Dance Troupe at 16. Dunham and Ballet Russe vet George Balanchine choreographed the movies Cabin in the Sky with Louis Armstrong and Stormy Weather with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and Lena Horne in 1943. Five years later, Kitt and Dunham danced in Casbah starring Peter Lorre and Yvonne De Carlo. Marlon Brando also learned The Dunham Technique as we see in Guys and Dolls, Last Tango in Paris and Apocalypse Now.

Dunham studied anthropology at the University of Chicago. During field studies in Jamaica and Haiti, the researcher was able to get into voodoo rituals by telling the cult's godparents that her ancestors were summoning her to call home. During the ceremony, the dancer goes into a trance, emptying her own personality in order to be filled by that of an ancestral spirit through the gatekeeper Legba. "It is the loa that dances, not the individual. The person possessed has no recollection of his conduct or motor expression while under possession....The body of the possessed becomes a temporary abode of the god." The loa of the earth causes one to "bend low in movements of planting," while the water spirit makes "flowing movements." There is an "Interrelation of Form and Function" as "a constant circular flow acts as a mental narcotic and neural catharsis. The dance is decidedly soothing rather than exciting, and one is left in a state of complete receptivity." (Sounds like "Lilac Wine" to me!)

Structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss says in the preface to Dunham's 1947 Dances of Haiti that whether possession is authentic or faked, participation in the ritual strengthens social cohesion. "Katherine Dunham proposed not only to study a ritual but also to define the role of dance in the life of a society." The priestess determines the values of the individual members of the social matrix. "Mass hypnotism and catharsis might be said to be the strongest elements of organization." Thus Eartha offered a white cock to the god Shango in Dunham's Bal Negre touring Europe in 1948.

Kitt's performance won her an offer to headline at a chic Paris club. Soon Eartha as Helen of Troy was getting a crash course in method acting from Orson Wells as Faust. "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships? Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!" Time Runs combined Dante, Marlowe, Byron and puppets with help from surrealist Jean Cocteau and music by Duke Ellington. Eartha as Euphoria the homunculus protege sang, "Hungry little trouble, damned in a bubble, yearning to be, be or be free, all that you see is about me." Originally one of three women, when the play went on the road, Eartha became "all women...of all times." Another epiphany occurred as Eartha read Plato at the Acropolis. "I remained there for many hours, seeking a way to grasp the knowledge symbolized by these ruins of an ancient but never-forgotten world." In Istanbul, Eartha caused an uproar when she was mistaken for an Egyptian princess by milling Muslim masses. Finally, the secret policeman shadowing her blew his cover to quell the crowd.

"Learn to say Eartha Kitt" ran in the NY Times to herald her premier at La Vie En Rose. After a boffo run at Village Vanguard, Kitt joined Paul Lynde in New Faces of 1952 on Broadway scripted by young Melvin Brooks. Her hit song "C'est Si Bon" insured a movie version. Eartha soon filmed Mark of the Hawk with Sidney Potier and St. Louis Blues with Ella Fitzgerald, Mahalia Jackson and Nat "King" Cole as W.C. Handy. Then an Oscar nomination for Anna Lucasta with Sammy Davis, Jr. After a Tony nomination for Mrs. Patterson, Eartha joined Mel Brooks again for Shinbone Alley based on Archie & Mehitabel by Don Marquis illustrated by Krazy Cat's New Orleans Creole creator George Herriman. Eartha played the alleycat Mehitabel, who insists that she was Cleopatra in a past life. Kitt would also ask Einstein what he thought about reincarnation.

Eartha's recordings have gotten renewed interest from new generations of fans. The most collectable Eartha Kitt single is her Afro-Cuban debut on Seeco as told in C&SM #. After that would be the four standards Kitt recorded with Doc Cheatam in 1950. Her RCA career is ably represented on Paul Williams' compilation purr-fect with stunning inner pic from a wild French photo session that brought chastisement from Ms. Dunham. Nevertheless, only an hour of Eartha can get as "Monotonous" as a bimbo's affected boredom--so a true fan will want the Bear Family's Eartha-quake! This box set contains quite a few of the Latin numbers that have always been a staple of Eartha's act and several down home blues tracks as well. Noteworthy RCA LPs include Down to Eartha (55) and Thursday's Child (56) produced by Hugo "Canadian Sunset" Winterhalter (worked with Ames Brothers, Count Basie, Perry Como, Tommy Dorsey, Billy Eckstine, Eddie Fisher, Mario Lanza, Raymond Scott, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra, Kate Smith, Kay Starr) as well as St. Louis Blues (58) with trumpeter Shorty Rogers and His Giants (produced Herb Alpert and Sergio Mendes: See C&SM #20). Eartha attributes her Las Vegas success to arranger Bill Loose (scored Russ Meyer films: See C&SM #22).

In the 60s, Eartha cut several fine sides for MGM including "Love for Sale" and her interpretations of The Very Best of Cole Porter. As Catwoman on Batman, Kitt's popularity took off. Then she was henpecked by Lady Byrd Johnson for opposing the Vietnam War at a White House luncheon. Kitt was purged along with other controversial acts such as Eric Burdon and Frank Zappa when future Californa governor Mike Curb took over A&R for MGM after playing "Cycledelic" bass on biker movie soundtracks for Davie Allen and the Arrows (See C&SM #). That makes Eartha's MGM records almost as hard to find as an original Mothers of Invention. Luckily, Eartha Kitt In Person at the Plaza is still available on GNP Crescendo. In the 70s, Eartha crossed the color line in South Africa and the Carters invited the cast from Kismet adaptation Timbuktu! to the White House with a hearty "Welcome back, Eartha!" Carter also made Kitt's extensive CIA file available, which she promptly published as the appendix to Alone With Me.

The 80s marked Eartha's triumphal return to the pop charts with "Where Is My Man" and "I Love Men" by Georgio Moroder and "Cha-Cha Heels" with Bronski Beat. In 1988, Eartha recorded My Way, a tribute to Martin Luther King with a choir led by Billy Preston's sister Rodena. In the 90s, Eartha has paid homage to Billie Holliday and The Cotton Club with The Ink Spots. And Eartha just finished a stage tour as the godmother in Cinderella.

In her new book Rejuvenate, Eartha appears at chapter headings wearing the toque seen in portraits of voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. The dancer is poised as human heiroglyphic for such symbolic concepts as Stretch (your mind), Bend (your will), Rock'n'Roll (social injustice), Release (material bonds), Balance (priorities) and the catchall portmanteau Etceterate, where Kitt is indeed an Egyptian hierophant.

Whereas Eartha's first three books were chronological memoirs, Rejuvenate is a transcendental choreography of life via symbolic gestures for self-reliance through civil disobedience. Autobiographical souvenirs illustrate principles of living in harmony with the planet, who will provide for us if we show her due respect.

"I strive to make the body love the mind, and the mind love the body, keeping the spirit vigorous as a consequence....I embrace the reality that life is a cycle....When we open ourselves to a situation we revitalize our minds, our spirits, absolving the hurt and thus becoming able to use it in a positive way....It is a way of centering myself in the where-I-am....we do well to do some bending so our minds and spirits do not become stiff and brittle by not allowing other thoughts to come in....sometimes we need to be flexible to find out where we really need to be rigid....This is bending to your own tide....Rocking against what is an outrage to your being and rolling with your flow...enable you to maintain your identity and individuality....When I have defied a rule, I have done so to shed light on the nonsensical." This is the way to rejuvenate!

Psychoanalyst Carl Jung says that the shaman has the ability the dissociate personality to allow possession by the bush spirit. Eartha is gifted with the rare talent to project whatever persona she wishes. She can leave behind introverted Eartha Mae who hid under the porch as a child because she was different and become Eartha Kitt the extrovert. In 1994, Eartha played James Joyce's Molly Bloom in the Penelope episode of Ulysses with tunes by Edith Piaf's songwriter Charles Aznavour such as "Yesterday When I Was Young." Eartha can warble with the vibrato of "The Little Sparrow" or stomp with the twang of Gunsmoke's Miss Kitty on a "Lovin' Spree." Eartha even changes characters within songs when she goes from "prim and proper" to "I Want To Be Evil" or the affected "Old-Fashioned Girl" is caught showing her roots in Las Vegas "at the spinnin' wheel!" What comes closest to home is her paean to vitamins and exercise "I Want You Around."

Eartha's best interpretations are often the Latin ballads she learned from the streetcorner singers of Spanish Harlem, who accompanied themselves with cans, boxes and bells. This class act is a good listener with a phonographic memory that can replay Turkish, Swedish or French as crisp and distinctly articulate as her Continental Standard English. Eartha could have been a blues singer, but it was easier to compete with Marilyn Monroe satirizing the golddiggers smirking and sneering in the ringside seats with "Mink, Schmink" or Cole Porter's sugarbaby standard "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think!" (T.S. Eliot wrote Cats for her.)

Eartha is constantly cast as highly archetypal mythological characters from exotic dancer Salome on Omnibus (52) and storyteller Scheherazade in Up the Chastity Belt (71) to the witches in Wizard of Oz, Earnest Scared Stupid and The Emperor's New Groove and even the Norse goddess Freya in Terry Jones' Eric the Viking. Eartha can depict wicked femmes fatale because she has experienced cruelty and injustice. Not only the Shadow knows what evil lies deep in our hearts. "Although a kitten cries tonight, a panther waits to claw and bite The Heel!" And discrimination is the Achilles' heel of society.

When Eartha does play realistic characters, the roles become identifyable types imbued with motivation from her own experience. We see this method acting in the dramatic application of personal reminiscences that earned Kitt the Tony nomination for Mrs. Patterson and the Emmy nomination for "The Loser" with Bill Cosby on I Spy. Eartha's experiences on the tough streets of New York actualized the horrors of heroin withdrawal in Synanon (aka Get Off My Back) and made Kitt an effective foil for Pam Grier as Friday Foster. Atavistic acting skills were further developed on stage in The Skin of Our Teeth, The Owl and the Pussycat, Bunny and The High Bid. As Dolores in The Wild Party says, "the second you think you know it all, life goes and takes a big bite outta your ass. And I've got the scars to prove it."

Eartha's forte is working a live audience where she can modulate the values of the social matrix through the various roles that she satirizes. Kitt's earliest comic influence was Imogene Coca, and she later admired Bea Lillie and Carol Burnette. The theater audience is a community of taste who respond to in-jokes that reinforce their social cohesion by sharing the sensibilities that make them able to wink at Eartha's references and innuendoes. Thus the scapegoat is sacrificed in the social ritual.

Yet joined to this inspiration is much perspiration. Good has never been good enough for Eartha. She has to be better than good. That is why Kitt keeps rewriting her autobiography. Thursday's Child in the 50s tells how she first met Josh White: "The sound of his music box twanged my womanliness." This awkward comparison that suggests a vulgar four-letter word beginning with "twa-" becomes the more ladylike "The sound of his guitar stirred me sensually." in Alone with Me from the 70s. Josh White was identified as a communist sympathizer in Eartha's CIA file because he had played at labor rallies. And this may be why Kitt was being shadowed in Istanbul. And that is also why she has to be better than good.

Eartha's never too old to rock'n'roll, and her critics from Lady Bird to William F. Buckley know it. Let them scoff, because there are millions who love Eartha. She's been honored several times from Honarary Fellowship of Carver Memorial Institute in 1960 and NANM's Woman of the Year in 1968 to her third Grammy nomination in 1996 for Back in Business. And she has always shared her skills with others as an educator with dance classes in Harlem in the 50s and at Kittsville in Watts beginning in the 60s. In the 70s, Eartha built schools in South Africa. In 1997, the prodigal returned home to endow a dance scholarship at Benedict College in South Carolina. Thus her talents are multiplied manifold in a cult of fans and a corps students.

You can catch her on cable reruns of Mission Impossible or Saint of Devil's Island (61), and may be lucky enough to catch the outlandish German Oncle Tom's Hutte (65). As Eartha sang in Stephen Sondheim's Follies, "I'm Still Here." And as Mehitabel said, "Cheerio, my deario! There's life in the old girl yet!" "Thursday's Child has far to go...."

The Ballad of Claudine Longet

Claudine Longet's albums should be on your Top Ten list if your tastes are similar to those of Gomez Addams. It's not just the French accent; there's something else about Claudine that's "very friendly."

Longet’s debut LP on A&M begins with Francis "Love Story" Lai's 1966 Academy Award winning theme to A Man and A Woman. If that doesn't get you hot, there's also another French song "Tu As Beau Sourire" ("Your Ace is a Pretty Smile"). This being Herb Alpert's label, there are a couple of bossa nova tunes from Antonio Carlos Jobim, her first single "Meditation" and "A Felicidade."

And don't forget the obligatory Lennon/McCartney cover "Here, There And Everywhere," which producer Tommy LiPuma and arranger Nick De Caro probably hoped would repeat the success of Sergio Mendes & Brazil 66's "Daytripper." Little did A&M A&R know that they were creating another Golden Throat who would follow up with "Something," "Goodday Sunshine," "When I'm Sixty-four," and "Jealous Guy." Longet's tasteful renditions of the Beatles are quite a relief from William Shatner's interpretation of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." Beam me up!

The pop genre also includes Fillmore fave Sopwith Camel's ricky-ticky Rudi Vallee put-on "Hello, Hello." The folkies could groove to Smothers Brothers regular Mason Williams' "Wanderlove" and Native American Buffy Saint Marie's "Until It's Time For You To Go." The sentimental standard "Sunrise, Sunset" would appeal to the lounge crowd to obtain a broad base of support to provide make-out music for would-be modern sophisticates.

Claudine would later add other pop covers to her repertoire including The Beach Boys, The Bee Gees, The Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkle, Donovan, Nash & Young--the lighter side of what some would call protest music. Nevertheless she always maintained a base of standard nightclub material such as "Love is Blue" and "Falling in Love Again" familiar to her mainstream audience. (Don't forget "Sleep Safe and Warm," the theme from Rosemary's Baby.)

And as always, Longet worked rather well in the Latin mode on "Dindi" and "Manha de Carnival." No Carmen, yet always waving a cape to beguile us and in the end to help deliver that fatal final thrust.

It is the tension between the square and the mod that makes Claudine most interesting--tradition and the individual talent. Longet lies somewhere between the straight world and something beyond, lifting us into the uncertain interval.

But the most telling song is saved for last: the Motown hit "My Guy"--with special emphasis on the possessive pronoun, for Claudine seemed to be a very possessive woman. In 1976, Longet was charged with reckless manslaughter in the shooting death of her lover Vladimir "Spider" Sabich in Aspen, Colorado.

For fifteen years, Claudine had been Mrs. Andy Williams, and if you grew up in the 1960's, you probably remember their annual Christmas specials and Andy’s NBC variety series that ran from 1958 to 1971. Claudine's several TV appearances included 12 O'clock High, Combat, Rat Patrol and Hogan's Heroes where she personified what we are fighting for--imagine poor Frenchy molested by those nasty stormtroopers. (No Hogan, you may not assist in the interrogation.) Hey, she was even on Mr. Novak and Dr. Kildare as well as in the movie version of McHale's Navy.

There were also several crime dramas, but truth is stranger than The FBI, The Streets of San Francisco, Run For Your Life or Alias Smith & Jones. (One could learn to be an expert witness.)

That's cool, but who was she-- where did she come from?

On his way to the Louvre, Andy Williams had first seen Claudine sailing down the streets of postwar Paris on a single roller-skate when she was only 8 or 9 years old. A decade later, Williams would help Claudine with her stalled car in Las Vegas, where she was dancing with the Folies Bergere.

They married in 1961 and lived the charmed life of the Camelot era often skiing at Sun Valley with Ethel and Bobby Kennedy. Andy would play golf with Henry Fonda while Claudine would play tennis with the actor's son Peter. Jack Nicholson was also a good friend who would show up at her trial in Aspen.

By the mid-seventies, Andy and Claudine were divorced, and she had moved in with twice world pro ski champ Sabich, the model for Robert Redford in Downhill Racer, whom she had met at a 1972 Bear Valley, CA competition. Spider's brother Steve was dating H&R Block scion Candy and had been busted for 850 pounds of pot.

Local gossip had it that Claudine's jealousy had manifested itself in several violent scenes in the Aspen area. She is reported to have hit Spider over the head with a ski during a disagreement and pulled a chair out from him at a restaurant when she caught him talking to another woman. Publicist Jill Lillstrom says Claudine threw a glass at Spider when he was surrounded by admirers and ignored Longet at a Steamboat Springs bar.

Spider's friends said that he had told Claudine to move out because of her prohibitive behavior, and an Aspen real estate agent had records of her inquiry about rental property a couple of weeks before the fatal shooting.

According to Claudine's testimony, she had found Spider's .22 caliber Luger and was asking the skier how to operate it while he was washing his face in the bathroom.

"If the lever is on the spot, is it safe?" Claudine said in court that he had assured her that it was.

"I raised the gun and playfully went 'Boom Boom,' and it went off."

Sabich was shot in the abdomen and died ten minutes later according to Longet, who said she unsuccessfully tried to administer artificial respiration. She spent that night in grief with the John Denver family.

"I have too much respect and love for living things to be guilty of this crime," Claudine would tearfully tell the Aspen jury who may have been as much concerned about maintaining the reputation of this lucrative ski resort as those of its celebrity guests. DA Frank Tucker's test reportedly showing traces of cocaine in Longet's blood was ruled inadmissible. The seven men and five women convicted Claudine of the lesser charge of negligent homicide and District Judge George Lohr sentenced Longet to two years and a $5000 fine.

After serving only 30 days of her sentence in the Pitkin County clink with a couple of drunk drivers, Claudine went to Mexico with her lawyer Ron Austin, who would leave his wife to marry the melodramatic chanteuse. They still live in Aspen.

(Six months later, Ted Bundy would escape from the Pitkin County courthouse.)

Who says there are no happy endings?

* * * * *

Claudine Longet’s various performances may provide a clue to her enigmatic personality. Just a clue, not a key, for hers is not an open and shut case. Those who inhabit the realm of the exotic can make their own rules.

Thus the exotic fascinates and enthralls with the charm of its ultimate Otherness, an oblique spin occult in its origin. The exotic takes us away to a place outside our normal experience where we can stand outside ourselves and uninhibitedly experience ecstasy. Claudine was always already a mystery.

Longet’s most obvious element of the exotic is her Frenchness with its accumulated mythical baggage. And as Plutarch tells us, a myth is a representation that signifies something else. Semiotician Roland Barthes would agree. (Likewise, see Todorov on The Fantastic and just a dash of Gustav Flaubert, Theophile Gautier, and Prosper Merimee.)

From the French curl to the French kiss, French is the language of passion. It is the language of emotion, taste, sensation, aesthetics, and most of all S-E-X. If you thought soixante neuf was something, you should have seen Paris burning in 1968.

Yet Gallic icons can be familiarized into things we take as much for granted as French fries and mayonnaise which are usually made bland in the process of domestication. But still the soothing sounds of the broad vowels and soft consonants enchant us when Claudine tells us she is "een luff."

Longet’s charm is that of the faux naif—the child-woman popularized by Bebe Bardot and extended to Babydoll, Lolita, and Kitten with a Whip. This archetype goes at least as far back as the decadence of the Romantics with their nymphs luring sailors to watery doom or "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" entangling a knight in her silken tresses, as deadly a trap as a black widow has yet devised—the faux naif as the façade of the femme fatale. How French can you get?

Here is the puckish imp teasing the moths to the flame—when their wings burn, she knows she’s not to blame. This woman is really not as naïve as she would seem.

Contributing to the fatality of this charm is the tactic of deception. This woman wears many masks. She is elusive and evasive, telling stories that no one believes. But we want to believe because we don’t want to break the spell that thrills us into captivation.

Several of her songs tell stories ranging from the innocent flirtation of "Walk in the Park" to the more sinister "Man in a Raincoat" who took her money and ran. (Was he Bogie or Chester the Molester?) "Happy Talk" would never be the same until Captain Sensible turned it around.

The masks were provided by A&M’s expert A&R department that had already established a corporate personality growing from that of its founder Herb Alpert. This was the hip Hispanic label whose mellow moods could make us all into smooth and suave Latin lovers—at least for a night.

A&M was the label of Martin Denny sideman Julius Wechter whose Baja Marimba Band provided a rhythmic compliment to The Tijuana Brass. Here was Sergio Mendes, whose arrangements of pop standards brought Bossa Nova across the equator. Mendes' theme from Casino Royale, "The Look of Love" was a likely cover for Claudine.

Here were The Sandpipers, who could even turn "Louie Louie" into a romantic lullaby. Here we followed the Pied Piper of Crispian St. Peter and were lulled by the lushness of the Pozo Seco Singers. Longet's later LP's on Andy's Barnaby label would take her into further realms.

All these elements contributed to the creation of Claudine Longet’s public image--a persona made up of nuances suggested by the many roles she played. Not that Claudine was such a convincing performer. This can be especially observed when she had Peter Sellers as a foil in Blake Edward’s The Party, where she sang Mancini’s theme song "Nothing to Lose." Not on par with The Pink Panther, but definitely a step up from How to Steal an Airplane. But Claudine doesn’t have to be a great actress. We know it's only make believe, but we want to believe because we like playing the game--be it cat and mouse, hide and seek or peekaboo. We forgive her by extending our suspension of disbelief because she was more than a mere musician. She was a bona fide Celebrity: Mrs. "Moon River," godmother of The Osmonds.

How much more mythical can you get? Not since Medea rode off in a flying chariot after killing Jason’s sons in a jealous rage. The sorceress makes her own rules and can get away with murder. She’s an alien whose immunity to our social codes allows her to retreat to the land of the Golden Fleece.

It’s all in her smile. "Hello, hello. I like your smile." Her ace is a beautiful smile, and she plays it close to the vest, occasionally flashing forth her trump. And like the Cheshire Cat, it is only her soft voice and the shadow of her smile that remain after she has faded into obscurity. And if you have once caught that smile, you’ll want to see it again and get involved in an obsessive pursuit that is inevitably futile in trying to grasp the intangible secret of her charm.

Behind this smile is a worldliness that turns the expression into an urbane smirk, a grin as sardonic as any skull in the grip of rigor mortis. It’s this hint of fatality that spices the ecstasy with agony. We are pained by her reckless abandon casting fate to the wind while flying in the face of adversity. We can string together clichés incessantly, but the mystery still remains, the indefinable je ne sais quoi. We know not what she is, but that mystery adds to our curiosity.

Our impressions are ill defined, soft and vague in outline, and can only come together when we stand back and let them fuse together. Each song is a piece of the puzzle that we try to fit together into a portrait. But we find some parts missing and have to fill in the gaps with our imaginations. Somehow she won’t look us straight in the eyes. Coy and demure, Claudine remains an enigma.

Her favorite masque is the nostalgic quest to regain the paradise of innocence lost in the purgatory of experience. Thus the chorus of children reaffirming that she once believed it all. Images of childhood are undercut by the not-so-subtle suggestiveness of "Pussywillows/Cattails" and such. Images of snow now in hindsight bear witness to a fatally ironic foreshadowing.

This homesickness also involves the postwar dissociation of sensibility of a generation whose childhood was deprived of its innocence by the horrors of war and the exploitation of occupation. Was she trying to recapture a past she never had, an innocence she never experienced, skating through the rubble of reconstruction?

That’s what’s so cool about Claudine—her essential isolation and alienation. Whereas most soft pop of the 1960’s was done by squares pretending to be hip, Claudine was a flower child trying to act straight. Did she listen to Donovan with easyriding buddies Fonda and Nicholson? Maybe burn a little incense? Tennis anyone?

Can't get used to losing you

No matter what I try to do.

We can all sing along with Andy. We miss Claudine. Her charm is ageless, and a comeback is belated. She's paid her dues, let her sing the news and be her own touchstone.

Not only those of us who experienced her enchantment on the first go-around, but even more a whole new generation of fans. Netwise, Claudine is as popular as ever, if not more so. Her albums are being reissued in Japan. She has inspired not only her own webpage but also satires by Jagger, Dylan, and SNL as well as tributes from young devotees including Tori Amos, Geraldine Fibbers and Kim Fowley proteges The Rubbermaids. Somehow there is something lasting in what Longet had to say and especially the way that she expressed herself.

The legend continues, but where is Claudine? Has she finally faded into obscurity, or will she be seen and heard again? We want her, we need her, we love her. When will she return? That would be the happy end for which her fans ardently hope!

The Macgillicüddys

Paul "Switchblade" Wells-guitar, vocals

Jheri Laborde-bass, vocals

Jerry "Paradiddle" Paradis-drums

Originally wanting to call themselves "Gentilly Militia", these iconoclastic wise guys settled on the name of a bar owned by David Duke. Hence the umlaut that’s more ironic considering their original drummer was Jewish. However, The Macgillicüddys’ real mentors are the wrestling stars such as "Pork Chop Cash" and "Stylin’ and Profilin" Rick Flair. Jheri’s sister once walked in on him playing with his WWF action figures wearing nothing but jockey shorts and a wrestling mask.

Jheri used to front Gerry and The Bastardmakers, whose bass player Taj Cardona had recorded The Colostomy Bags tape with Paul Wells, a classmate at McMain Magnet School where Offbeat columnist Dale Ashmun taught. After The Bastardmakers lived up to their name, Jheri and Paul formed The Funny Boys with Joe "Pestilence" Phillips (Legion of Decency, Atomic Jefferson, Silver Kings) and "King" Louie Bankston (Clickums with Joe, Royal Pendletons, Bad Times).

After Joe moved to Seattle and Louie got more involved with The Royal Pendletons (produced by Alex Chilton of The Box Tops), Jheri and Paul decided they were tired of being The Funny Boys and wanted a tougher image. Beginning with drummers Sean Johnson, "Lord" George Elder and Shaggy from The Persuaders, The Macgillicüddys recruited Jerry Paradis from Lunch. Yeah, Diddle’s the one who jumped off the balcony into the crowd at the DRI show. Paradis also plays guitar in The Headwoundz with Laborde on vocals, King Louie on drums and Severin of Bonaparte LaGarde & the Conquerors on bass.

Then The Macgillicüddys got to recording. Turducken Records caught them live and features sound clips on line. Mr. Quintron recorded the "monster truck vocals" on "Don’t Shatter My World" for the Engine Number 9 compilation. "Sweet Cotton Drawers" and instrumental "Gentilly Stomp" are radio friendly and free of objectionable language. Much more was recorded at Tom’s House with a nice clean sound that allows you to hear all the dirty words. "The Macgillicüddys Live" video was produced by Peter George of Troma Films (Surf Nazis Must Die, Young Goodman Brown). This concert video played for a week at Movie Pitchers and was reviewed in Gambit and The Times-Picayune.

Several T-shirts feature cartoons by Paul, whose artistic influences run from Marvel to Zap thanks to Psychotronic Video magazine’s underground comics columnist, former teacher Dale Ashmun. It is this cartoon sensibility that makes The Macgillicüddys social satire so enjoyable. Here’s Paul as Mr. Fantastic, Diddle as The Human Torch and Jheri as The Thing, and there goes Captain America with a hammer and sickle on his shield. That’s what Paul gets for hanging out with Dale’s Mardi Gras guests like S. Clay Wilson, creator of The Checkered Demon. When it comes down to it, The Macgillicüddys are tricksters at heart. As cagy Cajun Jheri says, "It’s smarter to pretend you know less than you really do than to pretend you know more."

The Macgillicüddys received the key to the City of New Orleans from Mayor Morial for accompanying Ernie K-Doe at Rock’n’Bowl during Jazz Fest. The Macgillicüddys were the only New Orleans band on the Confederacy of Scum tour. The Macgillicüddys have brought down the houses from Los Angeles to Chicago. And now you can party with them, too!

MANGINA

At War with Black Metal

Jeth-Row Records

"Why Live When You Can Die?" and "Sorry About Da Mess" attack the roots of "Viking rock and Nordick power." As Judas Priest testified, it’s bad business to coax your customers into suicide.. These guys should be committed because they are a clear and present danger to themselves and others. Singer Matt Russell is foaming at the mouth after getting bit by a bulldog in the pit at Mangina’s Mardi Gras show. Opening act Dexter Romweber of Flat Duo Jets grimaced and left.

Former college radio DJ Russell looms over the audience while Holly from Hogjaw runs riot among the crowd. Unlike his other bands The Minions, The Headwoundz, The Scripts and Kajun SS, guitarist Chad Booth parodies Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath, Grishnacht of Mayhem, and Tom Warrior of Celtic Frost, who wrote the flip side "Dethroned Emperor." Although drummer Paul Webb usually plays guitar with Spickle, Dulac Swade, and Mystick Krewe of Clearlight, he got a good lesson in keeping a steady beat at slower tempos when Clearlight played with Dale Crower of The Melvins at Mushroom Records. The multitalented Webb also subs on bass for Hogjaw, works at a vintage music store, and produced these songs on a digital 8-track.

Despite the corpsepaint and Grim Reaper robes, Mangina is more than a theatrical band. Mangina is a Situationist prank meant to lure rednecks to conversion or their doom. As Woody Guthrie said, "This machine kills Fascists." Fans of the Confederacy of Scum tour go too far when they burn black churches. The KKK would like to coopt Southern Metal into collaborators, but we ain’t gonna take it because the new boss is just the same as the old boss. You should see Matt’s Mutt & Jeff routine with a black teenager who works with him at Juan’s Flying Burrito. Matt even offered to let the kid use his choice of weapons to equalize their difference in height. He chose a bass. Good call, young man! "I believe I can fly."

Join in the fun, but don’t take them too seriously. And stay away from Matt. He’s dangerous. He keeps hurting himself and may hurt you, too. When Mangina took "Violence" as their motto, they meant it.

Order this 7" vinyl atrocity for $5 from Chad and Stephanie at www.rocksoffrpm.com and download digital pix of Mangina by Gary Loverde at www.geocities.com/theunfriendly1.

Bossa Nova Ambassador

by Curtis Cottrell

Sergio Mendes is the best-selling Brazilian artist of the 20th Century challenged only recently by hot ticket Sepultura. Yet Sergio is far from hot. His cool transcends trends. What Sepultura tries to do with shock tactics, Sergio has accomplished with subtle strategy.

Let's take a look at his roots to see how Sergio has synthesized international influences into his own interpretations of modern jazz. First let's survey the cultural environment in which Mendes thrived. Then we'll see him grow through collaborations with established artists. Finally we'll be illuminated by the soft, yet steady glow of Sergio's fame.

Sergio Mendes, son of a successful physician, grew up in Niteroi, a fashionable suburb of Rio. Brazil's economy surged with WWII's demand for rubber and other rain forest resources. Waves of European refugees became music teachers bringing with them traditions of romantic impressionism and experimentation with modern atonality. Disney's cigar-chomping parrot Jose Carioca called the streamlined Pan-American lifestyle "Bossa Nova." Meanwhile back in the states, everybody from Mickey Rooney to Bugs Bunny spoofed Brazilian Bombshell Carmen Miranda's stereotypical 10" heels and Tutti-Frutti hat. Soon Bob and Bing were off on "The Road to Rio." "Boom Chica Boom!"

Crooner Dick Farney toured the US with the theme song from Miranda's '46 film Copacabana. The Sinatra-Farney Fan Club included Bossa Nova's founding triumvirate: Tom Jobim, Joao Gilberto, and Vinicius de Moraes, dramatist of Black Orpheus and lyricist of "The Girl from Ipanema." The success of Black Orpheus at the '59 Cannes Film Festival sparked further interest in Brazilian music already represented in the Hollywood scores of samba guitarist Laurindo Almeida, Sabicas student and war buddy of Django Reinhardt.

Johnny Alf pioneered innovative piano arrangements of traditional Brazilian rhythms with songs like '53's "Sky and Sea" and '67's "I and the Breeze." In the 60's, Alfredo played at Bottles Bar with Mendes and recorded with experimental percussionist Airto Moreira and multi-instrumental sorcerer Hermeto Pascoal. In a recent interview, Mendes acknowledged "El Bruxo" Pascoal as his "idol." Sergio also recognized the influence of Be-Bop hipsters Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. From these monumental innovators and personal favorites such as Art Blakey, Bud Powell and Horace Silver, Mendes learned the art of post-modern improvisational permutation of popular melodies.

Rio's weird beards rejected greasy kid stuff like "Rock'n'Roll 'Em Copacabana" preferring the cool style of Nat "King" Cole. No Celly Campello dolls for these cats. Bossa Nova was patronized by social sophisticates whose musical milieu lay somewhere between the salons of Paris and the saloons of Vegas. The Sinatra-Farney Fan Club also produced talented guitar academy alumna Nara Liao of TV's Opiniao--The Muse of Bossa Nova. Parties at her swank pad turned into late night "Bossa Gang" sessions frequented by Rio's rising impresarios.

Sergio got his start playing pocket shows in Rio's Bottle Alley--so called because of irate neighbors' response to late-night music sessions. Mendes' big break came when he accompanied Jobim and Gilberto to the historic 1960 Carnegie Hall concert. (Now on CD!) Jacqui-O even invited the Boys from Brazil to Camelot.

The Kennedys weren't the only powerful people at that show. Many recording executives and jazz musicians also caught the wave. Sergio was signed immediately by Philips and also became a popular studio artist on other labels. Funky flute Herbie Mann flew all the way from Memphis to Rio to Do the Bossa Nova with Sergio. Jazz Meets Bossa Nova when new age sax Paul Winter met Mendes. Most notably, Mendes' Bossa Rio Sextet backed up soul jazz saxman Cannonball Adderley, who had just played alongside John Coltrane on Miles Davis' ground-breaking Almost Blue sessions. The Cannibal's previous pianist was ultracool Horace Silver, an important mentor praised and emulated by Mendes. Sergio also cut Bossa Nova York and Brasil '65 featuring vocalist Wanda de Sah who would marry Mendes' favorite songwriter Edu Lobo.

Mendes' tenure at Atlantic included collaboration with Lionel Hampton's trumpet Art Farmer, Crusaders' flute Hubert Laws and Hi-Los' arranger Clare Fischer who had charted Ellington's swing for Gillespie. Although none of these outings seized the popular imagination as much as his concurrent works on A&M, Sergio's classical apprenticeship was now additionally well-grounded with a journeyman's appreciation of advanced jazz composition.

Mendes' masterpieces came when he signed with A&M. He found the right lyricist in Chicago native Lani Hall, the future Mrs. Herb Alpert. Alpert's arranger Shorty Rogers had a long relationship with Almeida as well as trumpeting alongside Sinatra in The Man with the Golden Arm and even transformed Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos into "The Brass Are Comin'!" At A&M, Sergio established the formula for international success.

Herb Alpert Presents Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 opens with Jorge Ben's idiomatically rhythm'n'bluesy "Mais Que Nada". Then there's the old one-two: a combination of Jobim's twelve-tone exercise "One Note Samba" fused with Julius Wechter's "Spanish Flea"--defamiliarizing a popular hit as the bridge in an imported innovation, balancing cool monotone with its bouncy melodic antithesis. Comfortable popular covers follow with "The Joker" from The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd by the gold fingers of Newley/Bricusse and the even more familiar "Going Out of My Head" taking a new twist. Then the first side finishes with the childishly nonsensical "Tim Dom Dom" taking us to the realm of pure musical joy. This is a hit recipe.

Side Two starts back strong with Lennon/McCartney's "Daytripper" featuring a wild bebop piano solo. Then we return to the cinematically exotic: Mancini's "Slow Hot Wind" from Mr Lucky Goes Latin as well as more Jobim. "Berimbau," Baden Powell's tuneful interpretation of traditional martial arts rhythms, is the forceful finale.

Equinox with TJ Brass guitarist John Pisano followed formula mixing familiar songwriters Cole Porter and Johnny Mandel with more exotica from Jorge Ben and Tom Jobim. Mendes also introduced major influence Edu Lobo, who would have four songs on Sergio's next hit LP as well as providing the title tune for Crystal Illusions.

Brasil '66 climbed the charts: "Look Around" was #5 in '67 followed by '68's "Fool on the Hill" at #3. "Scarborough Fair" also went Top 20. Dusty Springfield sang "The Look of Love" in Casino Royale, but Mendes' version was on the radio. Sergio's talent is that of a master arranger who is able to translate pop standards into the Bossa Nova idiom. He is an interpreter who provides introductions while remaining discreetly in the background. Jazz solos are daring and inventive, but economical in elaboration.

As he progressed into the '70s, Sergio's tone got darker with more shades from the broad spectrum of Brazil's musical heritage. These later LPs are maturations of style featuring more Latin than Anglo material. Primal Roots is the eventual percussive expression of the Amazon's postcolonial ethnicity. Then Mendes moved on.

After leaving A&M, Sergio had no problem finding other opportunities. Fronted by Gracinia Leporace--Senora Mendes when she's at home--Brasil '77 cut a couple of LPs on Bell in the early '70s. But it was '77's workup of "The Real Thing" by Stevie Wonder on Elektra that would chart. Mendes followed up with the Pele soundtrack on Atlantic to inspire a generation of soccer moms. "Never Gonna Let You Go" and "Alibis" went Top 40 in the '80's. Brasiliero's hip-hop styling won a Grammy in '93. Brazil 2000 continues to tour with recent material from Oceano as well as old favorites--and not always the ones you would expect.

What is it about Sergio that has kept him going for over four decades? Whether the contemporary style is Jazz, Rock, Disco, New Romantic, or Hip-hop, Mendes seems to say, "I can do that," and he does it well indeed.

First there is the legacy of Romanticism. An Impressionistic composition necessarily transgresses generic boundaries. The Impressionist writes of the light of the moon--not in its silent illumination, but in its synaesthetic emotional impact on the beholder. An Impressionistic composition may also paraphrase an influential work in another format. Thus DeBussy/Deodato's musical adaptation of Mallarme's poem "Afternoon of a Fawn" where sensual images are clustered in constellations of ecstatic signification: the whole much greater than the sum of the parts.

The Romantic tone-poem can also be a programmatic evocation of forces of nature. Sun, sky, sea and sand all attain elemental iconographic status in the Bossa Nova landscape. These symbols are painted with artful nuance; spare strokes suggest more than they say. "Look Around," Sergio sings, and you will see auguries of innocence and intimations of immortality in every blade of grass or grain of sand. "So Many Stars," so many possibilities. The beach is the boundary between individual familiarity and the insistent throbbing of oceanic unity. Ride the crest of the wave. Hear the eternal murmur of the sea in the string arrangements of "Crystal Illusions"--"I'll go where no one will find me." One finally finds the authentic self by merging with the stillness of nature.

The purest perception of nature to the Romantic is that of the Noble Savage. Thus the thrust of the exotic. Somewhere in the rain forest is an altered state that can be attained through the pulse of a primal rhythm. We can all join in the second line of the samba crews at Carnival parades. Consequently, the Berimbau finale on Mendes' A&M debut is a martial cadence rousing the audience to action. ("For What It's Worth.")

The humanitarian commitment of Romanticism is its ethical dimension proceeding directly from Impressionistic art's primary assumptions. Freedom and equality are categorical imperatives for beings participating in an unmediated perceptual relationship with natural phenomena. Mendes goes to his primal roots to demonstrate that all are enfranchised citizens in the global ecostructure. Songwriter Carlos Lyra says "Bossa Nova isn't some rich 'little daddy's boy' thing. Quite to the contrary, it is the meeting of different socio-economic classes, races, political and religious ideologies, which are united around a single objective."

Mendes' greatest talent as a composer has been to incorporate folk elements into arrangements of the commercial music that has displaced traditional songs in popular consumption. These same native icons influenced cubists leading to the abstraction and minimalism of Modernism. Serial music is democratic in that no tone color is dominant over the others--one note, one vote. The montage technique of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein also contributes to the "verbivocovisual" method of Brazil's vanguard concrete poetry. Compare adman Ronaldo Azeredo's '56 "tic tac":

ate' est est etc

i a i a

c ca ca c

with songs such as "Chove Chuva", "Lobo Bobo," "Bim Bom," and "Tim Dom Dom." Likewise, there is innovation in the homespun concrete music or "som de aura" of Pascoal the Sorcerer who wowed New Orleans at Jazz Fest squeezing a squealing piggy under his arm. How primal can you get?

The Lydian scale of jazz improvisation shares the democratization of serial atonality essential to the off-key harmonies of Bossa Nova. In the Lydian scale, notes of the melody are treated as a series that can undergo any number of variations. Yardbird Parker could drag this out for hours; Sergio works in seconds, the economics of pop. He finds a basic alternative permutation of the melody to bridge the rising and falling movements of a song. Often Sergio reduces melodic components into an insistent riff forming a walking rhythm as basic undercurrent upon which female vocals float. "The Look of Love" has such a beat that propels us into a cinematic synaesthesia, a multi-media sensorial amalgamation. Depth of appreciation relies on concentration of audience response to the suggestions in the music.

Consequently, these sounds carry enough cultural environment with them to invoke escapist fantasies. The urban industrial becomes fixated upon the primal tribal. When we listen to Sergio, we leave the workaday world for a reverie of repose. This daydream brings us to a happy place. Maybe it's out on the beach where we survey the boundary between flesh and floss. Perhaps it's deep inside the hermit's hut in which we await vistas of worlds beyond imagination. "The Fool on the Hill" dreams of a "Happy World for me and for you"--the fundamental existential compromise of the New Romantic. Does it matter that Agent Double-O Soul is a bobo like Peter Sellers or a boob like Woody Allen as long as he's got The Look of Love? Sergio knows that we can get "Lost in Paradise." He always has an urbane sense of self-awareness.

Along with cosmopolitan modern jazz, there is a lot of down home soul. Sergio brings several of his native African, Amazonian and Iberian influences into a complex fusion of cross-cultural dissemination melding North & South, Classical & Popular, Rock & Jazz, Urban & Rural, Industrial & Tribal, Anglo & Latino, White & Black. Jorge Ben, Gilberto Gil, Edu Lobo and Caetano Veloso all benefited from Mendes' Americanized arrangements. So what if Baden Powell complains that overproduced Yankee versions of Bossa Nova are like file of sole smothered in ketchup?

What it all cooks down to is the aesthetics of understatement as the essence of cool. No hype here. Sergio's arrangements rise above the commercial production to attain the sublimity of suggestivity. Mendes' music is a minimized economy of nuance and inference. There's nothing heavyhanded in Sergio's smooth, sophisticated approach.

Each album is a strange-eyed constellation with "a dream for every star." Different moods are illuminated as we witness the unfamiliar celestial configurations of the southern hemisphere. With a little help from his friends, Mendes links global villages into cosmopolitan cooperation. Sergio's ambassadorship has established international networks of communication. The medium is the massage. The message is peace and love with freedom and equality for all.

We may have bought that Sergio disc for his covers of familiar favorites, but the Brazilian imports keep us coming back for more because these delicacies are served in the savory sauce of Sergio's personal interpretation. Beyond his many festive masks, we find the sincerity of Sergio's personality as he continues to sing the song of the fishermen. Somehow he is always out there on the beach just beyond the edge. The tide rises, and the tide falls, but Brazil 2000 floats buoyantly along sipping a chilly cocktail under that ubiquitous umbrella.

Ultimately it is Sergio's skill as an interpreter that has made him Brazil's foremost musical ambassador. Hermeto Pascoal never learned English, which has limited his status to a novelty act. But Mendes is right on the beat in any cultural medium. Whether African, Amazonian, American, European or Latin, Sergio fluently fuses all musical styles. He has applied both classical and modern compositional techniques to arrangements both impressionistic and atonal. He has created a mythology in a minor key.

Mendes is charming, friendly, accommodating. Yet he plays the familiar in an unfamiliar way that becomes accustomed through acquaintance. In that transformation, there are transpositions that compliment and counterpoint each other so well that we will never listen to anything in the same way again.

For Bossa Nova, check out on-line radio www.wwoz.org and www.wtul.fm

For Curtis, see https://cmcottrell.tripod.com/polygrammar/

BUXOTICA

RUSS MEYER SCORES

Everything is excessive in Russ Meyer's bombastic exploitation extravaganzas! The music is blasting, the colors are too bright, and the babes are oh-so Buxotic--bouncing out of tight bikinis as they Go-Baby-Go! Here's an interpretive survey of Meyer's career giving a Who's Who of his musical cohorts. Let's run down the pedigrees of this pack of Double D-movie mongrels!

Russ Meyer has been an action photographer from the age of 12. Russ hit the beach on D-Day with a 16mm camera. His Battle of the Bulge footage was used in Patton. Postwar Meyer was cameraman on Pete de Cenzie's French Peep Show, took stills for George Stevens' Giant and distinguished himself as a trend-setting glamour photographer with several popular centerspreads in Playboy. When it came to making his own films, Meyer was always able to attract top musical talent who share his enthusiasm for Buxotica.

The Immoral Mr. Teas exposed the sexual hang-ups of an uptight generation. This '59 skinflick was so low budget voice-over narrator Edward J. Lakso provided the soundtrack with a small combo. A transitional promenade links various vignettes portraying characteristic fantasies of Modern Man. Thus Lakso's composition takes the inherently voyeuristic form of Pictures At An Exhibition. Significantly the Bourbon Street beat of Dixieland jazz bumps and grinds with the sultry sway of seductive striptease. After this labor of love, Lakso scripted Combat, Mission Impossible, The Big Valley, Star Trek, Hawaii Five-O, Mannix and Starsky & Hutch.

Teas' most memorable landscape foregrounds a guitar strategically shielding a nude while echoing her hourglass figure. The lack of synchronization between the overdubbed audio track and the model's strumming is inadvertently funny. Later films would exploit such incongruity of sight and sound deliberately for intentional comic effects. Meyer's early experiments simply spliced together readymade musical components into makeshift montages.

Eroticon's music editor David Chudnow cut his fangs on The Mad Monster and Dead Men Walk with George Zucco and Dwight Frye. In 1950, Chudnow formed Mutel to provide canned music for television. When the American Federation of Musicians refused to play, Chudnow went to Europe to recycle music from Monogram, PRC and Eagle-Lion films. Eventually, these musical cues were used in Boston Blackie, Captain Midnight, Racket Squad, Ramar of the Jungle, Sky King, Space Patrol and--on CD--Superman!

Chudnow's colleague Tommy Morgan had arranged exotica for harmonica on his Tropicale album. Tommy later sessioned with the Bee Gees, Neil Diamond, Elvis Presley, The Simpsons and Frank Zappa among others. Now the veteran of over 200 films and commercials has gone gospel--Against the Grain.

Like Eve and the Handyman, Wild Gals of the Naked West is an episodic series of melodramatic vaudeville skits with appropriately horny music. Naked West's Marlin Skiles provided music for Lucille Ball in My Favorite Husband on CBS Radio. After Bomba, Lord of the Jungle and 10 Bowery Boys misadventures in the mid '50's, Marlin scored Man From God's Country and Cole Younger, Gunfighter. Meyer cuts the corn to the quick, so don't shoot the player piano!

Meyer then filmed his Southern Gothic thrillers Lorna and Mudhoney in black and white and invested the savings in live sound and original music. Heel we love to hate Hal Hopper provided the theme song for Lorna.

Hopper had harmonized with The Pied Pipers, top vocal group in Down Beat polls from '44 to '49. Originally formed to croon Irving Berlin standards in Zanuck's production of Alexander's Ragtime Band, The Pipers backed up Frank Sinatra on The Old Gold Radio Show (on CD), Tommy Dorsey on The Raleigh-Kool Radio Show and sang "Ac-Cent-Tchu-ate the Positive," "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe," "Personality" and "Winter Wonderland" on Johnny Mercer's Music Shop. The '86 collection Good Deal McNeal compiles favorites such as "Mairzy Doats" and "The Trolley Song." The Pipers appear in several movies with Sinatra as well as joining Ann Miller's '44 Jam Session and howling "Too Darn Hot" in Kiss Me Kate.

In the '50's, Hopper wrote the theme songs for Rin Tin-Tin and Mickey Dolenz' Circus Boy and "There's No You" in Kubrick's Lolita. Ever the Beau Geste Maverick, Hal was the chauffeur in Kitten With a Whip and the vet in Perry Mason's "Case of the Startled Stallion."

Although Hopper extemporized a salty a cappella ditty to tease Lorna's husband into action, Bob Grabeau warbled the theme song. Now with the Bob Noval Orchestra, Grabeau sang "Exactly Like You" from The Eddy Duchin Story on the Pickwick CD Movie Memories, a reissue of '57's Johnny Williams Plays Sounds from Screen Spectaculars. Bob also acted out "Put Me In Your Pocket" with April Stevens in a Scopitone jukebox film loop.

After his Gothic period, Russ moved into a go-go phase to grab the teenage drive-in audience. Meyer's displaced young nomads grooved to the driving sounds of guitar rock. The capable hands of Shefter, Sawtell and Jarrard provided the throbbing, pulsing, and pounding musical motivation for Meyer's gyrating go-go girls.

Bert Shefter, now a trustee of the Film Music Society, directed Motorpsycho's music. In '39, Shefter and Peter de Rose spent 9 weeks on Hit Parade rising to #3 with "The Lamp Is Low." Lyrics were by Mitchell Parish who wrote "Stardust" with Hoagy Carmichael, and melody was adapted from Ravel's "Pavane for a Dead Princess." Shefter performed as a piano duo with Morton Gould, but by '65 Bert had Curse of the Fly.

Paul Sawtell's catalog covers several popular genres. Paul composed music for modern myths Tarzan, Dick Tracy, Black Scorpion and Godzilla. Sawtell fetched Dog of Flanders, rode west with Lex Barker in The Deerslayer and Clint Eastwood in Ambush at Cimarron Pass, spaced out with Kronos: Ravager of Planets and accompanied Irwin Allen to The Lost World and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Sawtell even helped Jerry Goldsmith produce Frankie Avalon Sings.

Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! lyricist Rick Jarrard was a Nashville guitarist transferred to RCA's west coast studio to produce Jose Feliciano, John Hartford, and Harry Nilsson. Jefferson Airplane complained that Rick used too much reverb on Surrealistic Pillow, but his new collection of Love Songs is a bouquet of Balin's best ballads. Feliciano's '98 Senor Bolero continues the collaboration begun with "Light My Fire."

In Meyer's movies, we not only hear the music, but we often see its source as well--no matter how improbable that instrument may be. How can all that noise be coming from a sports car or transistor radio? This disparity has a disturbing effect in an ultraviolent film noir. Meyer uses incongruity of satirical absurdities for exhilarating comic relief.

Mondo Topless is wall-to-wall go-go eye candy often depicting a lone nude dancing with her tiny radio in the great outdoors. Russ inserted footage from '63's Europe in the Raw with whiny concertina a la fromage. Meyer had shot from the hip many of the Continent's hottest acts with his trusty Arriflex concealed in a suitcase. The Aladdins generate the mondo fuzztones motivating the movements of some of the Frisco Tenderloin's most outstanding strippers including Pat Barringer, star of Ed Wood's Orgy of the Dead.

Another Wood alumnus arranged music for Meyer on his series of soap opera satires in the late Sixties. Igo Kantor learned his trade from Wood's Bride of the Monster and produced Hillbillys in a Haunted House with Ferlin Husky and Merle Haggard. Kantor's music direction is unmatched in spoofing Hollywood stereotypes as we hear in his soundtracks for The Monkees' Head and Kentucky Fried Movie.

Kantor's main satirical device is what Roger Ebert has called the "musical pun." These gags may be standard musical motives associated with characters: an industrial worker is accompanied by Handel's "Anvil Chorus" and exotic erotic encounters evoke the familiar refrain of "Stranger in Paradise." It's corny, but it works.

Another comic device is the aforementioned incongruity between music and its source. In Common Law Cabin, the teenage daughter puts a 78 on an ancient gramophone, and we are surprised when modern go-go music comes out of the antique. This non sequitur is a reflective scheme of envagination turning the medium inside out to make us aware that this is after all just show biz. So why take it so seriously?

At the end of a successful decade, 20th Century Fox signed Meyer and writer Roger Ebert to go "Beyond the Valley" of two popular themes in a soap opera plot about buxotic pop stars. The Carrie Nations were played by Dolly Read (Playboy's Miss May '66 bka Ms. Dick "Laugh In" Martin), Cynthia Myers (Miss December '68), and Marcia McBroom.

As good as they looked, the Playmates weren't singers, so their vocals were dubbed in by actor McDonald Carey's daughter Lynn. Her Mama Lion album has a nude centerfold nursing a lion cub and features the single "Give It Everything I've Got." Ivar Avenue Reunion rendesvouzed with harpist Charlie Musselwhite, Space Ranger Neil Merryweather, and Electric Flag's Barry Goldberg. Lynn sang with Eric Burdon in the '80s and is now known as the Mae West of The Los Angeles Jazz Choir.

Carey was lucky to have Stu Phillips at the control board. Stu produced "Blue Moon" for The Marcels adapting the intro from "Zoom" by The Cadillacs, "Goodbye Cruel World" for James Darren, and "Johnny Angel" for Shelley Fabares. Phillips also wrote many orchestral arrangements of pop tunes: 10 LPs with The Hollyridge Strings as well as Castaway Strings on Vee-Jay, Sunset Strings on Liberty, Fantabulous Strings on MGM and Music for Outer Space with Harry Revel. Phillips scored Angels from Hell, The Wild Angels, '72's Martin Sheen vehicle Pickup on 101 with Igo Kantor, Quincy, Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

Working with a major studio allowed Meyer to hire name talent. The Sandpipers of "Guantanamera"/"Kumbaya" fame swoon mood music, and Strawberry Alarm Clock are special guest stars at Z-Man's party. Always trendy, the Clock started as "Swamp Surfer" ho-dads The Irridescents and then went mod as Thee Sixpence. Later axman Ed King strengthened Al Kooper's first Lynyrd Skynyrd lineup.

The studio system cramped Meyer's style, and Ebert who began to use a pen name when Sneak Previews became successful. Meyer himself had long used pseudonyms in credits to make it look like he had a larger crew. Now he could get the best.

Meyer's later independent films were scored by William Loose who had administered the Hi-Q music library for Capital and worked with Kantor on Vixen as well as Cherry, Harry and Raquel. Bill's credits range from the squeaky clean Doris Day and Donna Reed shows to David Friedman's Trader Hornee. Loose even worked with Ozzie--on Love and Kisses starring Rick Nelson directed by his dad. Bill now composes for WQED's Planet Earth series on PBS.

The Hi-Q library was a top source of production themes featuring the "Structural Music" of Sandor Lazlo, a pioneering theorist and master practitioner. This program music elicits moods to indicate the rising and falling actions within a plot. Meyer brings the satirical use of stereotypical cues to hilarious climaxes by framing cliches within ironic contexts.

For Blacksnake, Bill Loose tottered with Al Teeter of The Three Ambassadors. This Coconut Grove vocal group cranked out country standards at a marathon session used for many Republic westerns. Then Teeter became a music editor at Disney for everyone from Alice to Zorro.

Loose rallied reinforcements Paul Ruhland and Syd Dale for Meyer's epic Up! Paul Ruhland is an arranger for the Vancouver Jazz Fest with a background in relaxed improvisation who arranged "I Will Play a Rhapsody" for Burton Cummings. Conductor Syd Dale spent decades with England's Amphonic music library and can be heard on the Scamp compilations Music for TV Dinners and The Sound Gallery.

Here we see Meyer coming full circle. His early low-budget productions used typical program music. After experimenting with original pop music, Meyer went back to using the much more strongly motivated structural music that is the basis of most movie and TV melodrama. This time, however, he was able to hire the musicians who had canned the music in the first place to synthesize original scores based on practical dramatic principles to deconstruct the entire genre. Meyer's masterful sendup of Wagner turns musical motives topsy-turvy.

With this radical agenda in mind, it is not such a great leap from Syd Dale to Sid Vicious. The Sex Pistols raved about Meyer's vision of Who Killed Bambi? in the "Big Tits Across America" radio interviews on Some Product. Julian Temple retains traces of Meyer's original concept in Tenpole Tudor's title tune and the ubiquitous Martin Bormann's return when Sid split with Nancy in the twilight of the gobs.

What Russ really couldn't stand was that stupid swastika Sid wore. Meyer hates Nazis. Russ stands for freedom and hopes to stamp out all the little Hitlers springing up in small town America. Those narrow minds with their tight assets took Meyer to court several times on obscenity charges. But he never gave up.

Meyer released many of his movies on video in the '80's. Immediately his irreverence inspired the punk and metal scenes to emulate his outrageous pricking of middle-class morality. Meyer continued to audition new talent for a magnum opus that has yet to appear. In the '90's, the soundtracks were wisely packaged with three scores on a disc mixing popular favorites with obscure delicacies. All products are available directly from Meyer's website.

Meyer's movies are the ultimate in burlesque. They travesty other genres by reducing self-important stuffed shirts to ridicule. Meyer's absurdity is effective because he's using the same music as the cheesy movies and TV series he's spoofing. And while they may sound the same, Meyer's showing things you'll never see on TV. He's pushing the limit in every way.

The breast man is expansive in his personal expression unlike the cramped anal retentives the extrovert prods. This expansion leads to overstatement as its most natural means of articulation. Hyperbole is Meyer's prime figure of speech: two complimentary conic sections mimicking the female form. These mirroring arcs approach yet never quite reach their limits. Sound echoes sight with the reverberation of thematic icons reaching a thundering climax of hysterically histrionic hilarity.

Do you come when you laugh or laugh when you come?

For Meyer, music is motivated by sex. That primal drive is the beat that pulses through every social transaction. Money, power, fame? These are only means to sexual fulfillment. Our pride leads us into diverse forms of denial, but eventually we have our dramatic comedown. And the music rises and falls with our fortunes. Those who determine their own destinies are triumphant, while those who deny are drowned in the riotous uproar of folly.

We have yet to see The Breast of Russ Meyer. Meanwhile check out his new deluxe illustrated autobiography. Hopefully he will release videos of his early experimental exploitation explorations and discover fresh flesh. Our appetite for delight is insatiable. There can never be enough Buxotica!

2001 Curtis Cottrell

https://cmcottrell.tripod.com/deconscription/

OUTLAW ORDER

Legalize Crime 7" EP

Southern Lord SUNN 27.5

southernnihilismfront@hotmail.com

"Byproduct of a Wrecked Society"

"Delinquent Reich"

"Illegal in 50 States"

"Double Barrel Solves Everything"

Singer Mike Williams is a really sharp guy, but most people think he is a moron when he presents them with enigmatic paradoxes that seem to contradict themselves. How do we attain "Peace Through War?" Let the morons in Washington explain that. Mike will explain himself when his book of lyrics and stories is published later this year. For now, we have Outlaw Order. EYEHATEGOD is on hold while Jimmy Bower follows the yellow brick road to Ozfest with Superjoint Ritual. Brian Patton and Joey Lacaze remain on guitar and drums and Mark Schultz from the first two EHG albums rejoins on bass. Guitarist Gary Mador of Hawgjaw knows EYEHATEGOD’s blend of Black Flag and Black Sabbath so well that he even sat in on vocals at a benefit for a friend’s funeral when Williams was living in New York. It’s Gary’s enthusiasm at finally being able to record with his pals that makes these songs so fresh and exciting. He’s not just imitating Jimmy Bower, but adding his own interpretations to conventions established in EYEHATEGOD’s previous compositions.

And Mike is on vocals. And that’s what makes the difference. Superstars make too much money to be really angry at society. If some rock god gets in trouble, he may have to perform some kind of community service. For the same offence, Mike would do hard time in Orleans Parish Prison. Outlaw Order is beyond teenage angst; this is a fullgrown "Dose of Hostility," because Mike really is "Inferior and Full of Anxiety" like his mentor Darby Crash. Never such nihilism since Nietzsche’s WILL TO POWER.

New Left critic Theodore Adorno interpreted heavy music as the individual overwhelmed by the machine. Jimmy Bower liked to think of the voice as just another instrument, itself distorted by growls just as guitars are distorted by fuzzboxes. "Every once in a while, you make out a few words like ‘Burn her!’" That’s enough to get the message across. Mike struggles to rise above the noise. Eventually it is the working man who is empowered, because he is the technician who operates the machines. What appeared to be conflict was just a fake fight meant to get you startled.

Mike has zero tolerance for the society that will not tolerate him. He floats on the fringe of the underground subculture. There is an order among outlaws when there is honor among thieves. This is why the rock band has become the archetypal paradigm of an anarchist syndicate. Outlaw Order also shows us how beautiful the ugly can be. That is because Mike is applying the full force of his creative energy to Outlaw Order. It’s not just a formula rock side project produced to satisfy contractual obligations like so many sorry solo albums of the seventies. This is the real deal with no artistic compromise. It’s brutal, bro’, but brutality with brains.

The Quintron Controversy

by Peter George & Curtis Cottrell

Just as my fingers on these keys

Make music, so the selfsame sounds

On my spirit make a music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound;

----Wallace Stevens

"Peter Quince at the Clavier"

What fools these mortals be!

----Robin Goodfellow Puck

"A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Is Quintron a quack or the quintessence of cool and strange? (Perhaps, a bit of both.) Seeking a solution to the Quintron mystique sometimes seems quite a quixotic quest. Who is this "'No quotes!'" quasi-stellar sex object receding ever faster as he constantly expands? When quizzed about a technical question, Quintron's credibility quotient is extremely high. But ask about his personal life, and be prepared to be misled by a querulous quarry of mischievous misinformation to a quagmire of quavering quicksand.

Can we quash and quell all criticism and quench your curiosity? Quintron is New Orleans' premier underground patentee, producer, performer and prankster. Sometimes this quaint and quirky subgenius sizzles in the spotlight, and sometimes the mysterious wizard behind the curtain pushes your buttons and pulls your strings--as well as your legs.

As a child, Quintron built Heathkit stereos at home learning electronics from hands-on practical experience. In high school, the budding icon fronted a cover band called Idol Chatter. Eventually the offbeat organist emerged in a Windy City ensemble called Math establishing his DIY lo-tech aesthetic. A Mardi Gras excursion to New Orleans changed Quintron's life when he met Miss Panacea Pussycat. After a brief flirtation with The Milk of Burgundy Love in Chicago, the glad scientist moved his laboratory to the Big Easy Crescent City and began to translate his dreams into reality.

The Drum Buddy is Quintron's first patented invention. This light-activated analog rhythm machine converts beams from a bulb within a perforated coffee can into four discreet layers of sound. As the can rotates, different patterns of holes activate a pair of rhythm sensors corresponding to bass and snare drums as well as two screaming scratch sensors, whose tonal qualities can be altered by toggling various switches. The brightness of both inner bulb and stage lighting affects Drum Buddy's tone as well. Quintron also orchestrates a pre-programmed digital drum machine, a Wurlitzer Sprite Funmaker, and antique Hammond and Gulbranson organs to create primal, sensual, bacchanalian techno-primitive frenzy.

Skeptics scoffed at Galileo, Tesla and the Wright Brothers, but history has vindicated their innovations. Some cynics even claim that Drum Buddy does not actually exist and that all those strange yet compelling sounds must come from a computer or other digital device. The interactive capacity of Drum Buddy--"a direct link between the human hand and sheer electronic voltage"--sets Quintron's invention a quantum leap ahead of soundalike digital drones. Several prototypes such as The Spit Machine and The Disco Light Machine have been purchased by savvy musicians and DJs. Many more of the perfected and patented devices have been reserved for the advanced guard. These opinion leaders will be in the front ranks of Quintron's allies. Greg Wildes of Gas Tank Orchestra agrees that Drum Buddy is like "Mardi Gras in a can!"

As Plato studied with Socrates in the groves of Academia and as Elvis learned from Liberace in the saloons of Las Vegas, so Quintron is mentored by rhythm'n'blues legend Ernie K-Doe, whose Mother-In-Law Lounge mural depicts a symphonic symposium of soul man and disciple. And as Plato's theory was applied by Aristotle, Quintron has inspired a testosterone-fueled jiver in polyester leisure suit and frizzy disco wighat. (ADRV alum Jay Poggi) When asked by a WTUL DJ if he sampled Black Sabbath, MC Trachiotomy retorted, "Yeah, their philosophy...mentality is what it's all about."

This iconoclastic tribal mentality is shared by Crash Worship guitarist Jeff Mattson, who helped build Quintron's basement studio where the Drum Buddy promo was shot. As "Studio Owner Randy Jackson," Mattson swears he loves Drum Buddy's "phat bottom." And if infomercial announcer "Bob Global" looks familiar, you may have seen Eric Pierson acting in Oscar-bound Eve's Bayou, hosting Tribe TV, styling in Barq's and Levis ads, or singing with Gimp or Dulac Swade. Ringside, we find Gentilly stomper Jheri MacGillicuddy and fabled French Quarter eccentric Ruthy the Duck Girl.

In the studio, "The Amazing Spellcaster" despises the pretensions of bad British pseudo-classical art rock appealing to aristocratic snobs and nouveau riche bourgeois upstarts. Quintron is a man of the people who admires the organ stylings of James Brown, Jimmy Smith and the gospel prophets honored on his collaboration with The Oblivians, stars of Memphis director (Damselvis, Apocalypse Meow) J.M. McCarthy's Sore Losers. And, of course, Quintron stands on the broad shoulders of Leon Theremin, Bob Moog, Raymond Scott and Silver Apples' oscillating Simeon. Then go watch "Ghost TV!"

Quintron's production skills can be heard extensively on the Bobby Redbeet CD and the Engine #9 compilation featuring Famous Monster Sean Iseult of White Zombie. The "monster truck" vocals on The MacGillicuddys' rasslin' rocker "Don't Shatter My World" may test the limits of your sound system. And Quintron isn't beyond picking streetcorner hiphoppers as new breed contenders to challenge the tough turf of Master P.

Since this elusive and enigmatic man of mystery categorically refuses interviews, you've got to see Quintron play to know what he is all about. How many concerts have signs prohibiting nudity? Quintron's music is so erotic that it's hard for the crowd to keep their clothes on! No wonder Crash Worship found Quintron's evangelical fervor the ideal fluffer to work up the masses for their infamous Dionysian tribal/industrial orgies. Every show is a carefree return to childhood experimentation.

Each performance begins with a puppet show. Quintron and Panacea are the Punch & Judy of the musical world. And the Pussycat Playhouse is an important frame of reference for understanding their mentality. Harlequin and Columbine outwit baggy pants buffoons with sound effects by Drum Buddy.

Miss Pussycat's contribution to the Quintron equation must not be underestimated. Whether accompanying on backup vocals and percussion or staging her eagerly anticipated puppet shows, Miss P is an integral part of the overall spectacle. Panacea is the storytelling Wendy to Quintron's flying Peter Pan. And it is Pussycat who invites the listener to "Meet Me at the Clubhouse" at the beginning of These Hands of Mine.

A force in her own right, Miss Pussycat is a card-carrying member of Puppeteers of America, who has released several segments of her story cycle beginning with Flossie and the Unicorns. Whereas Quintron was reared as a cosmopolitan, Panacea was raised in the hills of rural Oklahoma's Red River Valley--where the big town is Paris, Texas. Little Miss Pussycat started working with puppets in Bible school: "When you grow up in the country, you learn to entertain yourself."

With episodes like "Free Guitar Lessons for Animals" and characters like Miss Foxyface, DJ Cardboard and Princess Pandora Stardust, Panacea's puppet shows are marvels of irreverence and whimsy. Usually the animals' peaceful play is disrupted by an antagonistic monster whose anger becomes his own undoing--as when an intruder tries to steal the secret of honey from Queen Latifah and her sweet bees. Such mini-morality plays are hints to hostile onlookers to keep cool. Don't take yourself so seriously.

After the puppet show, Quintron hunches behind his vintage Hammond with one hand on the keyboard and the other manipulating the Drum Buddy with teeth clenching a wireless carioke microphone. Miss Pussycat joins in on maracas and harmony vocals--occasionally backed by a street urchin choir or a bottle blonde chorus. Often a bubble machine blows glistening opalescent orbs into the audience. The crowd goes wild! Usually a second line of true believers gyrates in front of the stage to display their ample charms--quivering and quaking, then climactically squeaking, squealing, squirming and squishing. The beat is throbbing and the melody mesmerizing. If you're not totally comatose, you've just got to dance! Quintron is ecstatic, enthusiastic and rhapsodic--standing outside himself while seized and carried away by feeling.

If you want to know your P's and Q's, it's all there in the music and the puppet shows. This odd couple's choice of themes is highly self-referential: The Champs' "Meet Me at the Clubhouse" (calling out a quorum of our posse) and K-Doe's "A Certain Girl" ("What's her name?"/"I can't tell you!") to Leslie Gore's "You Don't Own Me" (Third degree from Kim Fowley). All the songs and stories reflect Pussycat and Quintron's unique alternative lifestyle. "Satan is Dead," so "Do the Stomp!" The secret of making honey is to sing and dance. This humming interactivity is the underground community's Utopian bliss. And of course, the best way to meet Quintron & Pussycat is to see them yourself on tours of America, Europe and--wouldn't you know--they're big in Japan. And when you do, break down!

For more info check out--

http://listen.to/quintron

www.eccentricneworleans.com

www.skingraftrecords.com

www.netway.com/~bulb/quintron

www.southern.com

Peter George is the director of Surf Nazis Must Die, Nathaniel Hawthorne's Young Goodman Brown and The MacGillicuddys in Concert. (www.troma.com and www.surfnazismustdie.com)

Rotary Connection

Cadet Concept (Chess)

Rotary Connection, 1967

Aladdin, 1968

Peace, 1968

Songs, 1969

Dinner Music, 1970

Hey Love, 1971

Harmony was the by-word of pop in the 1960’s.  From the Beach boys through the Mamas & Papas to Three Dog Night, vocal groups personified the unification of the youth movement.  Finally, the “Me Decade” rolled around, and we got those self-indulgent 70’s solo albums.

Chess Records sought to cater to the flower children who were flocking to the Fillmore to see its blues legends since its core audience had shifted its tastes to what was perceived as the more sophisticated sounds of Motown and Memphis.  Marshall Chess persuaded his father Leonard to allow him to form his own label Cadet Concept—with emphasis on the Concept.

Chuck Berry’s soul had been psychedelicized on Concerto in B Goode in 1966, although we suspect that the duke of the duckwalk only had enough songs for one side of an LP and the effect-laden jam on side two was merely an expedient filler.  Marshall Chess would take this experiment further by producing a rock/soul fusion using all studio gimmicks available at the time.  Rotary Connection was the concept that would combine both racial and musical harmony to establish a broad consumer base.  After a half dozen attempts, the label realized that neither rock nor soul audience cared for the concept very much.

This is easy-listening music, but Rotary Connection shouldn’t be lumped with 1001 Strings Do Elevator Arrangements of British Invasion Hits.  This isn’t just smarmy exploitation; these people really believed in what they were doing, and if they flopped, at least they did it with style.  They were trying to subversively appeal to the radical chic, not preach to the converted like MC5.  And then there is all that herbal imagery on their album covers:  this group really smokes!

The first album begins with a pop arrangement of the old-time spiritual “Amen” and follows with Charles Stepney’s gospel arrangements of pop hits by Sam & Dave, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and The Loving Spoonful.  Whereas the original refrain of “Like a Rolling Stone” was a plaintive cry of alienation, RC converts the line into a full-blown chorus, “How does it feel!” to imply that we are not alone in our isolation and estrangement and just need to get together and love one another.  Power to the People.  Right On!

Leading this vocal attack was Minnie Riperton, a veteran of The Lovettes and The Gems who was also receptionist at the Chess office and sand backup for Etta James and Fontella Bass.  After a solo stint in 1966 as “Andrea Davis,” Minnie sang on Rotary Connection’s first five albums before leaving for a solo career bolstered by backing vocals for Stevie Wonder in 1973.  In 1975, Riperton scored the #1 single of the year “Loving You” and was a favorite on the disco scene until her death of cancer in 1979.

Besides the strength of the vocalists, Chess boosted the production values with electronic effects by Bill Bradley that foreshadow the industrial music movement.  Short transitional tracks on the first and fifth albums such as “Rapid Transit,” “Black Noise,” “Pointillism,” and “Pump Effect” point toward devices now common among rappers and ravers.

Whereas the first LP was mostly covers, 1966’s Aladdin had original tunes and explored the theme of transcending the materialism of a “Paper Castle.”  The message was to trade that new lamp for an old one.  In this case, a hookah with a tube that turned into a plug with members of the group as prongs.  Get the Connection?

This second foray was followed by a Christmas album Peace that may have been a bit rushed in execution to get it out on the shelves in time for the holiday season.  “Sidewalk Santa” does stand out in its ironic portrayal of commercialism.  And peace is given a topical interpretation in the repetition of the album’s title in Russian and Vietnamese.  And what is Santa smoking in that long, Oriental pipe?

By 1969, the group decided to do another album of covers, this time including arrangements of some of the heavier hitters of the Woodstock Generation.  Songs’ standout tracks include Cream’s “We’re Going Wrong” and Hendrix’ “Burning of the Midnight Lamp,” and their treatment of “The Weight” hasn’t dated as much as some other versions.

1970’s Dinner Music has a few fine originals such as “Living Alone” and “Merry Prankster,” but their climax is “Stormy Monday Blues,” which had long been part of the group’s live repertoire.  By this time, Riperton was on her way out, and the last album without her was not widely distributed indicating little effort to promote it on the part of the label which was by then a division of GRT Corporation.  The earlier albums are worth looking for, especially the first two and Songs.

Will the circle be unbroken?  By and by, buy and buy.

Rotary Connection's Psychedelic Soul

Royal Blood

An Inside View of What It Means To Be A Pendleton Man

by Curtis Cottrell

Once upon a time around ten years ago, I ran an audition notice for plaidophiles in Dale "Psychotronic" Ashmun's "Spare Parts" column in New Orleans' monthly entertainment rag Offbeat. (And to think that these stiffs would eventually share the cover of Offbeat with Frankie "Sea Cruise" Ford.) Explaining that Pendleton flannels were favored by The Beach Boys, I referred said sartorial cultists to Mike Hurtt, a man with a mission from beyond. Beyond what, I'm not sure.

Mike Hurtt cultivates more than a slight resemblance to Eddie "Summertime Blues" Cochran. He is always impeccably dressed in vintage threads with two-tone shoes and nary a hair of his blond ducktail out of place. No mousse or gel for this greaser; it's got to be either Brylcreme or Brilliantine. Mike and his brother Eric grew up in South Bend, Indiana where their father is an architecture professor at Notre Dame University. Little did the elder Hurtt know what gargoyles would loom in his sons' future.

An early incarnation of The Royal Pendletons included bassist Kevin O'Brien and the mysterious Dr. Wolf on drums. Like Hurtt himself, the former was an Indiana transplant trying to juggle another band called Bim Bom and a job as a librarian at LSU Medical Center while the latter was a successful surgeon. Such a lineup was bound to be doomed, but Sir Michael looked onward and upward for truly royal blood to fulfill the Pendletons' duly-appointed destiny.

His prayers were answered in the unlikely form of King Louie the 69th, whose lineage included thrashmongers Paralysis and The Clickums--the dumbest band in the land fronted by Joe "Pestilence" Phillips of Legion of Decency and Atomic Jefferson who now reigns as one of Portland's Silver Kings yclept after a Mexican wrestling team. How dumb were they? They even did a song called "Surfin' Dog"--can you imagine--"poppa oom bow wow!" And had the nerve to follow it up with "Clickum Nocturne" to a beat that would make even Mike Hammer cringe. Joe Pest also played with Hurtt on the incredible Emulsifiers session on Rampart Street next to Louis Armstrong Park produced by Alex Chilton of The Boxtops and Big Star. (OK, so what if Alex only pushed the button on the boombox!)

With him Louie Bankston brought bassist John West, erstwhile roadie for N'awlins New Wavers The Normals. That's right, kids, as in Your Punk Heritage--available from Airline 61 Records, POB 1265, Metairie, LA 70004. (As in "God told Abraham, 'Go kill me a son!' down on Highway 61.") John's songs included "Sex on Drugs"--uncannily foreshadowing his eventual demise. This lineup was billed as The Royal Pendletons when they played with another great Airline 61 artist Eugene "Shockabilly" Chadbourne at The Howlin' Wolf but continued as The Dirt Boys and finally recorded "Little Girl" and "Jailbait" ("I went to jail, but it was worth it/All they gave me was community service") as The Harahan Crack Combo. (For whose corny name, yours truly must take the blame.)

The Dirt Boys' brief moment of glory included headlining at The F&M Patio Bar block party, which was coincidentally across the street from the domain of none other than bassist West. This minor triumph could only be matched by their becoming house band at the notorious RC Bridge Lounge on Magazine Street next to The Bridge House rehab center and The Abstract halfway house. You had to be a diehard fan or stone cold reprobate to hear The Dirt Boys practice every night on a PA pieced together from five different amps and cabinets. But wail they did on numbers like "Saw Her in a Mustang (Whole Lotta Poontang)" to The Dictators' anthem "Stay with Me" from Bloodbrothers. John West proceeded to fall of the wagon after his marriage to mercurichrome-maned Leesa Browning, who made dolls for the Voodoo Museum down in the French Quarter. (I'm sorry I introduced them.) John had the kick, but he got the boot.

Time to regroup, and what a group! King Louie brought in former Clickum Barry Gubler on bass, a man with his ups and downs, well befitting an elevator operator at the Maison Blanche building on Canal Street. If that wasn't enough, lo! forth from Indiana came renowned Modoc axman Matt Uhlman. (Modoc's "Hot Rod Dissertation" is still on The Pendleton's playlist.) And from Michigan's Monarchs sojourned Tommy Oliver with his not-so-secret weapon, a Farfisa Compact with matching speaker cabinet. Yes, an organ legendary since Sir Douglas attempted to woo his long lost teenybopper back to Mendecino. Other influences include Sam the Sham, who is honored in "Sheep Suit," and Suzi Quatro's "What A Way To Die." The Pendletons even brought the composer of "Losing Hand" out of retirement for a special guest appearance.

Ah, what tales could be told of the debassed Sir Barry and his dark lady Melva, but that would require a diving helmet, a gorilla suit and the mandatory Billy Barty reference. ("I must, yet I cannot!") Ah, what tales of Sir Eric with The Hurtt Brothers and The Swamis. (Looks like a Shriner's fez to me, folks.) Ah, what tales of King Louie's alliance with what would become the MacGillicuddy clan in Gerry & the Bastardmakers and The Funny Boys. And don't forget The Persuaders and "Lick My Tattoo" by Christy's Padded Toilet Seat. (So drop the king a line at Ask King Louie @ Eric Oblivian's goner-records.com.)

Ah, what tales of The Royal Pendletons' shows with Impala at Checkpoint Charlie's, with Ready Teddy at Pepina's Cafe, with The Oblivians at Beachball Benny's, with Mr. Quintron in Las Vegas, with ? and the Mysterians at The House of Blues and annually at Estrus Records' GarageShock festivals.

Ah, what tales indeed of their several mighty seven inchers! The Smokin' EP, The "Melvin/Gloria" single

And what about those movie soundtracks? First, New Orleans' own Zombie vs. Mardi Gras produced at Anagram Studios by Mike Lyddon, Will Frank and Karl Demolay. Oh yeah baby, they're tapping kegs with the living dead. There's King Louie in Matt's red and white motocross jacket barely alive on stage at the RC Bridge Lounge with the usual gang of idiots front and center giving him the high sign.

Then The Royal Pendletons did the theme song and a cameo appearance in The Sore Losers. This saga of reckless rockabillies unstuck in time was produced by Tupelo-born and Memphis-based filmmaker J.M. McCarthy, director of Gorotica, Damselvis, Teenage Tupelo and Apocalypse Meow featuring Louie's ex-wife Ashley. The Sore Losers stars Jack Oblivian and features a special guest appearance by Japan's own lords of leather Guitar Wolf. Unfortunately, all Japanese dialogue had to be overdubbed, so this flick's got the kung fu factor, too. But the sonic dislocation is all right because the movie is about being out of sync with what everyone else is doing.

Their Sympathy for the Record Industry CD Oh Yeah Baby was produced by Alex Chilton with the same frantic fervor he put into The Cramps' first two records. The Pendletons also appear on the Blood Red Battle Royal compilation with The Fleshtones, The Woggles and Girl Trouble. King Louie has moved to Portland to join Joe Pest in The Silver Kings and has toured the US and Europe as King Louie One Man Band. Mike and Matt have reformed The Royal Pendletons with Jay "Big Daddy" Thomas on organ and Aron Culotta from The Ramparts on drums. You can catch Matt during Carnival season with his Mardi Gras side project The Rex Pistols or with The Darkest Hours featuring Chilton's girlfriend Peg O'Neill from The Gories on drums and WTUL DJ Art Boonparn from The Ramparts on guitar. The late John West finally learned what it means to "Pay the Chinaman."

And that is part of what it means to be a Pendleton man. It means to follow your own tastes rather than latching onto fads. These guys listen to obscure garage relics such as The Monks and Downliners Sect. Their suits come from Goodwill and Thrift City. They eat at Clover Grill on Bourbon Street and The Hummingbird Hotel on skid row. Royalty in exile, forsooth and/or for sure!

But not for long. Soon The Royal Pendletons may be coming to your town, and you will live happily ever after.

THE SONS OF HERCULES

A Different Kind of Ugly

Saustex CD

www.saustexmedia.com

Frank Pugliese is one of the founders of San Antonio’s punk scene.  His brother Joe brought The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, The Runaways and Squeeze to Randy’s Rodeo.  Their band Loose, later known as The Vamps, opened.  Frank continued to sing in the 80s with Mystery Dates and since the early 90s has fronted The Sons of Hercules.  Their fifth album has nine new originals, covers of The Saints and Lazy Cowgirls, and a reprise of Mystery Dates’ “Easy Action.”

The Sons of Hercules’ new album portrays la bruta figura, the brutal face of someone who doesn’t know how to act right, a man-destroying Deianira.  She is a woman who may be good looking, but because of her bad behavior has become “A Different Kind of Ugly.”  She lies and cheats waking up in a strange bed.  Most of her problems come from the excesses of substance abuse and “Too Much Fun.”  She is inconsiderate and unreliable, so her lover is “Still Waiting” in the cold rain.  He’s not as “Brain Dead” as she thinks, but has become “Numb” and can no longer help her:  “Don’t look to me for your salvation./I won’t be there to break your fall.”  Nor is he the “Rock of Gibraltar” that the ancients called The Gates of Hercules and moderns recognize as the trademark of Prudential Insurance.

Sons of Hercules stand for strength and endurance in the face of adversity.  Frank Pugliese has survived the hazards of the rock’n’roll lifestyle while others have bitten the dust.  He’s a tough guy who can cut off the heads of the Hydra, clean the Augian stables, and bear the weight of the world.

Sons of Hercules have contributed to the compilations Texas: A Collection Of Texas Garage Punkers, A Fistful Of Rock N Roll Vol. 12, Beginning of the End Again and John Michael McCarthy’s Broad Daylight soundtrack.  YouTube.com has videos of “Easy Action” and several songs from earlier albums by Sons of Hercules.  Sample audio tracks at www.myspace.com/sonsofhercules and www.sonsofhercules.com.

Curtis Cottrell