You'll recall Mystery and Imagination as the Glendale, CA bookshop where Josh Alan appeared not long ago, performing a special birthday set for the great Twilight Zone writer George Clayton Johnson. In addition to its first-class selection of new and used books, the shop has long served as a unique hub for both writers and book lovers, offering frequent signings, readings and fiction workshops that connect brilliant talents with their readers and fans. In addition to Josh Alan and George, Mystery and Imagination has hosted Ray Bradbury, William F. Nolan, Earl Hamner, Jr., Ray Harryhausen and many others.
Josh Alan performs in Mystery and Imagination's intimate upper alcove.
It's where Frank Black (aka Black Francis of The Pixies) got his signed copy of Black Cracker...
...and it's where you can still get yours.
Today, the shop is in crisis, with less than a week to raise the money they need to keep the lights on. Your purchases can help save the store, and the shop is asking for your help.
We've lost far too many great independent bookstores in recent years. Whether in person or online, please support Mystery and Imagination.
Mystery and Imagination Bookshop 238 North Brand Boulevard Glendale, CA 91203 (818) 545-0206
From the bookshop's staircase wall, home to graffiti from visiting luminaries.
Peep shows were the meat-and-potatoes attraction of Times Square, like slot machines in Las Vegas. Ghetto girls subwayed in from the boroughs for hard cash tips, one filthy dollar at a time. A pipeline of girls from Eastern Europe added to the merriment, before the Iron Curtain fell.
Depraved, pathological? Lighten up, Charlie, don’t get all academic. Overt racist caricature, you say? J’accuse! Go ahead, if that makes your day. You might consider that brother Drew doesn’t make white people look too pretty, either. But I witnessed poor womenfolk at Show World revolving on platforms in their ninth month of pregnancy. My usually taboo–defying editor, Jeffrey Goodman, at High Society’s line of mens mags, balked at running this comic strip. And so this Times Square sitcom ended after two episodes. I hereby present “Ubangi Our Wangi” for the first time ever.
"Ubangi Our Wangi" by Josh Alan Friedman and Drew Friedman
(click images to enlarge; click twice to maximize view)
Upon Ed Koch’s election as Mayor of New York on Jan. 1, 1978, the glass partitions of Times Square peep shows began to disappear. The “Peep-Alive” mechanisms, which utilized a worm gear to raise the shade, had their glass windows removed. This allowed for bodily contact or abbreviated prostitution through the portholes. All hell broke loose. Mayor Beame, who had personally padlocked the front entrance of Show World, had retired.
For me, this was Mayor Koch’s greatest legacy, which went unmentioned in his New York Times obit. So in honor of his passing, here is Part I of an obscure Friedman Bros. series on Olde New York. It ran in High Society Live in 1982. Part of a monthly section assigned to me called “New York: The Wrong Side of Town.”
Koch said at the time, “You’d have to be insane to love West 42nd Street.” Well, what’s not to love?
"Peep Show Girls of 1982" by Josh Alan Friedman and Drew Friedman
(click images to enlarge; click twice to maximize view)
Regular readers of this blog likely need no introduction to the wild world of vintage men's adventure magazines. Josh Alan has written extensively on the subject here, in the books Men's Adventure Magazines and It's a Man's World and elsewhere.
But the focus of this new book emphasizes an essential aspect of the magazines inexplicably never given its due until now: the magazines' stories.
And so, six decades, countless man hours and hundreds of weasels later, we proudly present Weasels Ripped My Flesh! Two-Fisted Stories From Men's Adventure Magazines of the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Collecting 22 stories by master scribes from three decades of men's adventure writing — most of which haven't seen print since their original publication — Weasels Ripped My Flesh! supplements them with interviews, commentary and reminiscences by the original authors, plus iconic illustrations and wacky magazine advertising from the mags.
Weasels Ripped My Flesh! is your paperback passport to this all but forgotten era of American letters.
To learn more or to buy your copy today, visit the book's official website here.
Gene Casey is in the driver’s seat with a disc that should wear out jukeboxes across the country. There are no A or B sides—all are sure to be first-rate coin cullers at the jukes. Let it be said at first, the man has a great voice. And the guy knows how to make a record. So does his band, The Lone Sharks.
Kicking off this platter is an autobiographical ditty, “I Think About Elvis Every Day.” He wonders what Presley might say, although about what doesn’t matter. Good riff and holler. They may never let Casey sing “Come Home with Me” on The Ed Sullivan Show (without changing to come out). But “Cadillac For Sale” is a road song that should make inroads at diners and gas stops along Route 66. The tracks also have a dramatic Spector-like drama that cries out for inclusion in movie soundtracks.
Gene Casey’s lower baritone vocals are his strongest weapon, his voice a picture-book blend between Ernest Tubb and Ronnie Spector. With a subtle hint of Lennon. Maybe he was born with golden pipes, but the lyrical diction Casey has developed comes from the ages. He knows how to deliver lyrics, has a good way with vowels and does killer background vocals. (Dig the way he enunciates a “soft p” on “Gone Hollywood,” a cut from his 2008 masterwork, What Happened.)
This may be esoteric praise, but to the masses, Casey is the premier barroom troubador of Eastern Long Island. That includes Montauk, the Hamptons on up to Riverhead and any town with an Indian name. But there’s no doubt he would sweep the Sons of Herman Hall crowd in Dallas off their feet, not to mention The Broken Spoke in Austin. A few $50 handshakes from Morris Levy or Don Roby would secure heavy rotatation in Southern radio markets (and reap teen coin amongst both bobby soxers and aging intellectuals alike).
As a guitarist, Casey has refined the Duane Eddy single-note lead line. But this album isn’t about showoff picking. Americana (which categorizes real music they don’t play on commercial radio) is rarely done with such exquisite taste and production. Untrained squares favorably against the latest Johnny Cash, Johnny Burnette or Junior Brown.
In recognition of the worldwide celebration of The Rolling Stones 50th Anniversary—an occasion almost too good to be true—I present this primitive comic strip, which ran in High Times, Feb. 1981. The World’s Greatest Band contains two geniuses, and such grand, fantastical characters, that we are blessed to still have them on earth. But, being Englishmen, there once was this problem with their teeth. I sometimes wondered why The Rolling Stones didn’t have a cartoon series on Saturday morning television, like The Beatles. Perhaps it could have gone down like this:
The storm, the election. . . Now, let’s get back to why Joe Franklin matters. . .
In September I received a request from Joe Franklin to take down a blog that originated from this site. It contained a few parodies of Joe my brother and I, then known as The Friedman Bros., did in the 1970s. I was happy to oblige. This might constitute a breach of journalistic ethics if it involved anyone but Joe Franklin. At 86, he is Olde Times Square’s foremost senior statesman. An intimate of Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor who still walks amongst us. Like Hugh Hefner, Joe cares about his image and legacy. Even the minutiae of what appears on esoteric blogs.
Here are several reasons Joe Franklin’s legacy is so valuable:
He was New York’s—and therefore the world’s—first TV talk-show host, circa 1950. The ABC studios on West 66th Street were a former horse stable when Joe broke his new format there. Seated at a particular angle, nose-to-nose, eyeball to eyeball, at a desk, the microphone positioned just so. According to Franklin, his very first week on the air included guests John Wayne, Cary Grant and (17-year-old?) Kim Novak. There are no records to prove this or the hyperbolic lore surrounding who may or may not have appeared through the decades. But that is not the point. (Joe himself would swear Abe Lincoln was on the show.) From Joe’s humble format sprung the TV talk show. That may sound like a curse unleashed, considering the cesspool of programs that appear today. But once upon a time, the format had some dignity.
Thirdly, I might add some lore on Franklin the man. It is implied in his autobiography (Up Late with Joe Franklin, Scribner, 1995) that notches on his bedpost include Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Veronica Lake. And that these actresses literally threw themselves at him. More likely, however, he might have banged Kate Smith. He worked for her at the time when Kate Smith was at the cutting edge of patriotism, the country was at war, Joe was young and anything seemed possible. Should we not honor Joe for those conquests alone? Sarah Silverman can only wish she had a shot with Franklin, were he not 50 years her senior.
As a reliable source of misinformation, his capacity for tall tales is legendary. Especially the Franklin telephone buttering-up process, upon which he heaps praise and promises into a high art of hyperbolic show-biz malarkey. But Joe gets a pass on this conceit.
Joe did indeed did collaborate with Marilyn herself on her first (extremely rare) autobiography. He also may have had Elvis on his show before Ed Sullivan and Milton Berle—but there is no kinescope to prove it. He booked Eddie Fisher’s first TV appearances, along with the earliest Streisand, Woody Allen and Robert Redford appearances. Yet not a moment survives on kinescope or video of Franklin’s show from the 1950s or ’60s, excepting 39 seconds of Japanese silent screen star Sessue Hayakawa on Memory Lane in 1957:
Sessue Hayakawa, hugely popular 90 years ago, in 1957 on Joe Franklin’s Memory Lane.
Thus, Joe’s YouTube series is reduced to titles like "Joe Franklin Remembers _____." Minus the kinescope or video, Joe is reduced to recalling hundreds of guests, including five U.S. presidents. He recalls a lineup of 20th century giants, some who rarely, if ever, did intimate TV interviews: Irving Berlin alongside Sophie Tucker and Ethel Merman, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Rocky Marciano, Eddie Cantor, Jimmy Durante, Jack Benny; all surviving silent screen actors, as well as bedroom conquests Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield and Veronica Lake. There was no studio audience, so it was the only time you heard comedians like Milton Berle talk without playing to an audience. If the footage existed it would comprise an archive like no other at the NY Museum of Television and Radio, where Franklin should be canonized.
I hope the radio waves will be captured in interstellar space and a future civilization will behold The Joe Franklin Show. But let us honor this man now.
"I will be in attendance (and onscreen) to talk at the Austin Film Festival premiere of AKA Doc Pomus on Friday Oct. 19th (9:30 pm). The doc on Doc has been garnering emotional rave reviews."
For more information on the film and screenings, check out the AFF website here.
Also this weekend:
Black Cracker Online moderator and Josh's co-editor on the upcoming Weasels Ripped My Flesh! book, Wyatt Doyle, will be appearing at the San Diego Comic Fest this Friday, Saturday and Sunday. A very limited advance edition of the Weasels anthology will be available for sale there, while they last!
Tomorrow night—Monday Sept. 3—point your ears to KNON 89.3 at 7 pm Dallas time to hear Josh Alan debut two new, upcoming blues hits: "(You Can Kiss) My Big Black Ass" and "This Radio Don't Play Nothin' But the Blues." Dig the premiere on Texas Blues Radio with JMac, KNON 89.3 (Dallas-Ft. Worth, but available by streaming here.
Then, Friday night in Dallas...
Black Cracker author Josh Alan Friedman presents a solo performance/reading and signing to celebrate the new edition of the Friedman Bros.' notorious Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental from Fantagraphics.
Fri. Sept. 7th, 8pm-11 tickets $10
The Hi/Lo Speakeasy at The Mason Bar
2701 Guillot St. (in new State-Thomas/Uptown district)
Dallas Texas 75204
If you're not already a fan, get thee to his website(s), his Vimeo channel and his Borgnine on the BusYouTube channel —a world of wonderful strangeness awaits you.
Josh Alan Friedman presents a solo performance/reading and signing to celebrate the new edition of the Friedman Bros.' notorious Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental from Fantagraphics.
Fri. Sept. 7th, 8pm-11 tickets $10
The Hi/Lo Speakeasy at The Mason Bar
2701 Guillot St. (in new State-Thomas/Uptown district)
Dallas Texas 75204
Josh will also debut two new upcoming blues hits: "(You Can Kiss) My Big Black Ass" and "This Radio Don't Play Nothin' But the Blues." Josh will premiere these songs Mon. Sept. 3rd, 7pm, on Texas Blues Radio with JMac, KNON 89.3 (Dallas-Ft. Worth, but available by streaming here.
I have a recurring dream, which I will embellish only a little: It is of an old, but not entirely abandoned, amusement park that once rivaled Coney Island—but apparently never existed. An alternate Coney Island on the other side of the borough, North Brooklyn, near the Navy Yard. They have their own trademark mascot, a competitive cousin of the Steeplechase Imp. They have their own famous hot dog joint, an alternate Nathan's. An abandoned subway El runs alongside their own famous roller coaster, both casting rusted-iron shadows. The cityscape is sepia-toned. Nothing is gentrified here whatsoever. When I awake, I feel certain this place exists.
Is this amusement park the foiled plan of some visionary—not George Tilyou or Walt Disney—but some would-be conjuror of mass entertainment whose dreams never got off the ground? Are these the ruins of what never was—as if it once had been?
I walk along the rusted perimeter of this archeological ruin. I sense that a few sparsely attended attractions still operate somewhere inside. The roller coasters, shoot-the-ducks midway games and sideshows are closed. The park had an affiliation with the image of comedian Joe E. Brown—the "Generalissimo of Joy," who was once chairman of National Smile Week. He, too, had a grotesquely overblown smile, like the Steeplechase demon. Brown’s trademark cavernous mouth is on the twin pillars of the park’s main entrance.
I can barely make out faded depictions of Little Lulu, Popeye, Olive Oyl, Betty Boop and Wimpy on fun houses. Faded ads testify there was once a spin-off here of Auster’s Egg Creams, from the Lower East Side, called Egg Cream Land. And for longshoreman or wayward dads at night, there was The Ritz Bros.' Shayna Tuchas Burlesk.
The park peaked in the 1930s, when Coney was long past its technological prime. It was slightly more modern than Coney, 1930’s state-of-the-art, yet not so futuristic as the 1939 World’s Fair. One concession’s faded logo claimed to have first introduced cotton candy, the first spinning sugar machine. There is a pre-WWII airplane ride for children. Little planes that once rose and fell have lost their original colors; the metal parts have rusted through. Yet, I wonder whether this ride still operates. There’s an abandoned electric-track spook house, with dancing Mr. Bones skeletons on the facade. One advertises a choice of three doors to enter, like the spook house in a Little Rascals short. Its entry doors that burst open are, of course, embossed with the giant mouth of Joe E. Brown.
A creaky hot dog joint around the corner still operates. I head for it. The front entrance swings open like a spring screen door. This joint once competed head-to-head with Nathan’s from the other side of Brooklyn, like the underdog Dodgers against the Yankees. They still serve seltzer bottles and egg creams. I’m one of the only customers present. There are old-timers who swear by it, over Nathan's. But how do they maintain a license to operate, much less a Board of Health rating?
There appears to have been some kind of bathing pavilion—not Brooklyn by the Sea, like Coney Island, but Brooklyn by the River. The East River. The presence of the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge looms nearby. Tires once swung over barnacled dry docks where kids could leap off and swim. Floats are now obscured in seaweed. Popeye the Sailor's tattooed anchor forearm is on the Admiral's Row pavilion. Some kind of longshoreman ethic once ruled. The skeleton of a carnival tent rusts by the pier, where you could once get an illegal tattoo.
Closer to Manhattan, right over the bridge, these were the stomping grounds of incredible hipster Al Dubin, lyricist of "42nd Street," "Lullaby of Broadway" and "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." His heart belonged here, not in Coney Island, and his enormous girth was enhanced by the hotdogs and egg creams. After all, this park was just a few subway stops from Tin Pan Alley on 28th Street.
People in this part of Brooklyn today seem barely aware that it exists and are indifferent. The amusement park is just over there, always had been, no one pays any attention. Time marched on without it. But is it possible no one ever sees it, just me?
My dream also begs the question of whether New York City, not to mention Brooklyn, could have handled two great amusement parks simultaneously. Well, why not? They nearly supported three major league baseball teams for 75 years. Palisades thrived for 70 years in New Jersey. Freedomland in the Bronx only lasted four. But just how much had these two parks—Coney and The Joe E. Brown Grounds—undercut each other's business over the decades, leading to the demise of both?
In popular song, this park was associated with the ditty "I’ll See You My Dreams." Ukulele Ike performed it there. “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland” was Coney Island’s most famous song. And by odd coincidence, 50 years later, "I’ll See You in My Dreams" became popular by another, unrelated Joe Brown, the English ukulele player who does fine throwback numbers. Always playing second fiddle, many things were nearly, but not quite the same, as Coney.
There once was a certain breed of men (and manly ones, to boot) that specialized in crafting journalistic “pieces” for magazines. Some had yearly contracts to tackle say, six assignments; others freelanced like gypsies on the road. Robert Ward was one such road writer during the last hurrah of “New Journalism,” with notepad, plane ticket and bourbon in hand. Deadlines were their own form of amphetamine.
As a teenager, Bob Ward was so innocent, he “didn’t know mere mortals could even meet Elvis.” He learned this when carousing as a teen with a seafaring vaudevillian who appeared in the 1964 Presley flick, Roustabout. The fellow was a mate of Ward’s sea-captain grandfather. Finally, granddad took Bob himself on as a “mate” one night. Cap Ward introduced his grandson to Baltimore’s waterfront bars, strip dives and Blaze Starr herself. Bob never realized his granddad even knew about such things. Ol’ Cap Ward beats young Bob to the punch, slugging out a longshoreman who insults Bob’s grandmother.
A few years later, Ward trips down the rabbit hole, escaping working-class Baltimore for anything-goes New York. New intros and postscripts to each article give Renegades an autobiographical flair.
We meet the deposed leader of South Vietnam, reduced to operating a liquor store in California. Ward reveals the “core” of painter LeRoy Neiman, the Liberace of art. The Outlaw Country movement in Texas is shown up as an impure enterprise of Capitalism. He’s there during Mark “The Bird” Fidrych’s phenomenal rookie season, wherein the pitcher comes off as baseball’s Gomer Pyle. However, among the athletes profiled, Pistol Pete Maravich and Johnny Unitas earn our highest admiration.
Shadowing Larry Flynt during Hustler’s second year, Ward found his delicate sensibilities offended. Having narrowly escaped atrophy as a young Lit professor at William Smith College, Ward deemed the upstart magazine “gross.”
“I’m here to set the record straight,” he told his subjects. None of them questioned the neutrality of such a claim. Until they saw themselves in print. Hold a mirror up to almost anyone, and they’ll want to kill you.
Ward knew exactly what he was doing on the page, and made his point without stating it pointblank. He could size up a character or scene quicker than a hundred psychiatrists. Unimpressed by mere celebrity. Confronted with pomposity or self-deception, he questioned what’s fake and celebrated what’s real. All those good things, now rare in the dying magazine market, dominated by fluff pieces that submit to publicists and advertisers. Editors left Ward alone, let him do it his way—which is usually the only way a master can work.
Weasels Ripped My Flesh! A shirt-ripping, gut-punching anthology of two-fisted writing, ripped from the pages of long-lost men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Outrageous, 100% true tales of sex, crime, combat, jungle goddesses, beatnik girls, LSD experiments, animal attacks . . . and nymphos. Always nymphos.
Following his highly regarded contributions to the justly-lauded History of Men's Magazines and It's a Man's World (both men's adventure mag bibles), Josh Alan Friedman contributes essays and rare interviews with some of the heaviest hitters from the pulp mags' glory days.
Steel your nerves for bare-knuckle stories and gutsy reminiscences by some of the toughest writers ever to punch a typewriter: Bruce Jay Friedman, Mario Puzo, Lawrence Block, Robert F. Dorr, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, Walter Kaylin, Walter Wager, Jane Dolinger, Ken Krippene and more.
Weasels Ripped My Flesh! Edited by Robert Deis, with Josh Alan Friedman and Wyatt Doyle.
Coming this summer from New Texture. Man up.
For updates, watch this space—and subscribe to the MensPulpMags feed on their site, here.
The Weasels Ripped My Flesh! Facebook page is here.
After too long out of print, the Friedman Bros. debut collection, Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental, is back in print this April! This all-new edition includes new painted covers by Drew and a new introduction by Chester "Chappy" O'Daniel (elevator man, emeritus).
I don’t know if he invented the genre—but Richard Jaccoma has melded vampires, werewolves and sex scenes in his fiction longer than virtually any other writer currently in vogue. This, in a volatile mix of Old Lefty politics. Lesbo vampire pirates meet commies, mummies ’n’ Nazis. The political slant reflects the leanings of Jimmy Underhill, which gives Jaccoma’s detective noir its unique flavor. The pornographic parts merely describe action that would have been omitted in Chandler or Hammett’s time. Many of Jaccoma’s stories saw light in the men’s magazine demimonde, now part of the last century. Jaccoma is, to say the least, a master pornographer.
Any rational thinking reader acquainted with his first novel would be forced to agree on one controversial matter concerning Richard Jaccoma: The Yellow Peril, published in hardcover by Putnam in 1978, contained a point-by-point blueprint for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Indiana Jones franchise emerged during the following decade. Jaccoma took the gentleman’s path, so to speak, and decided to forego unpleasant litigation that might have resulted in a slam-dunk settlement.
He put his energy into a series of high-adventure pulp novels that are only pulp on the surface. The Werewolf’s Tale begins in New York, 1939. Poland is on the brink of falling to the Nazis, and Jimmy is drinking off his 1930s sorrows in Germantown on the upper east side of Manhattan. He barroom brawls with Nazi sympathizers from the German-American Bund. Mysterious Asian folks are “Orientals,” an incorrect term these days unless referring to rugs. Who would have known that Manhattan was awash in mysticism, the occult and cannibalism?
So will today’s youth, whose political consciousness was awakened by Occupy Wall Street, be intrigued by this 1930’s brew of Lefty politics and occultism? Would followers of Taylor Swift (“Swifties”), Katy Perry or the Twilight series get turned on by Jaccoma’s narratives of violent sex with werewolves? My guess is that The Werewolf’s Tale will indeed unlock the disturbed sexual fantasies of teenyboppers. And elevate their social consciousness. Originally published in 1988, it raises the bar a few notches to the Left of Sookie Stackhouse. And will provide young readers the thrills they’ve paid their money for. Especially when describing the alien spice of the female werewolf’s steaming breath; the sweet, pungent musk of her fur, the emerald green glow of her eyes through membranous lids. If that isn’t romantic enough, this succubus violently rapes hero Jimmy Underhill, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, fighter of fascists. Artfully plotted, and with more substance than most pulps of yore, Jaccoma wears his politics on his sleeve. And they are correct by righteous standards.
The Werewolf's Tale is now available on Kindle, HERE.
Jack Stevenson is a writer and film-festival curator in Denmark. His bird's-eye view into the odyssey of Al Goldstein and Screw comes from a uniquely European perspective--where America's madness can be sanely analysed and enjoyed. I recommend this book to the Queen of England.
"New history and fresh insight into that counter-cultural battering ram once known as Al Goldstein. Stevenson's work has resulted in something rarely seen: an important book. (Full disclosure: I don't come off too bad, either.)"
--Josh Alan Friedman (Tales of Times Square)
Order your copy of Beneath Contempt from Amazon here.
He made it to Barney Miller's station house on seven occasions (playing seven different characters), Kojak twice and The Streets of San Francisco three times. A television mainstay, he's guested on series from Benson to Twin Peaks to Beverly Hills, 90210. He acted for the incomparable Robert Downey, Sr. in No More Excuses, Pound and Greaser's Palace. He's memorable in Bugsy, The Star Chamber and Weekend at Bernie's. But the role he's probably best known for is his unforgettable comic turn as Ernie, the jumpy Teutonic mortician, in Return of the Living Dead.
Just in time for Halloween, the greatDon Calfa does the cover!
Send your good wishes to Mr. Calfa on Facebook here.
Atlantic Records co-founder Jerry Wexler and songwriter Jerry Leiber both related this anecdote:
Leiber never went out to see live music—not even his own groups like the Coasters, Drifters or Elvis. But in June 1971, Wexler coaxed him to attend closing night of the Fillmore East. The moment The Allman Brothers, an Atlantic/Capricorn group, broke big. Leiber was claustrophobic and couldn’t stand crowds. Furthermore, he told Wexler, “These guys are your band, they’re bad-ass musicians—but I don’t know who they are, and I don’t give a fiddler’s fuck about them or the Fillmore.”
Wex said, “There are people around the world who idolize you. You don’t go out to music, you don’t fuckin’ know. I told Duane Allman I’d bring you up to the dressing room and he said, ‘You’re full of shit. Jerry Leiber’s been dead for years.’ I want to prove that my word’s good.”
So they go to the Fillmore, where flowers are arranged on reserved seats for the two Jerrys.
“I sat in the audience,” said Leiber, “and it started to fucking rain on the inside of the theater. I panicked and told Wex to get me the fuck out of here, but it was too crowded to leave. He said somebody set off the sprinkler system but there’s no fire. I said I don’t give a fuck, get me out of this goddamn auditorium. We went to the exit which was barred shut, bolted from the outside because kids were trying to break in.”
Wex turns to Leiber, who’s soaked, and says, “Hey, man, do this for me. Just this once. Come visit Duane.”
“I’m about to have a heart attack,” remembered Leiber, “there could be a fire, the doors are barred. And he’s worried what Duane Allman thinks, to show I’m alive to impress him. Wexler collects people like big-game hunters collect heads.”
So Wexler maneuvers them into the dressing room. Duane Allman is shirtless, pale and skinny, whacked out of his skull while stringing his Les Paul. (He would be killed in a motorcycle wreck a few months after this night.)
Wexler says, “Duane, didn’t I promise you? Well, here he is. Jerry Leiber.”
Allman stares up hazily at this wet, anxiety-ridden figure.
“You’re fulla shit. Jerry Leiber’s been dead for four years.”
“I’m not kidding you, this is the man,” says Wexler. “Tell him who you are, Jer.”
“I wanted to say I’m Max Schmeling, leave, and destroy the moment for Wexler forever,” Leiber remembered. “I could see it meant so much to Wex, so I complied. ‘He’s telling the truth. I’m Jerry Leiber and I didn’t die four years ago.’ But whatever I said was gonna be pointless.”
The most potent songwriter and producer of the rock ’n’ roll era was such an iconic, remote figure, that 24-year-old Allman thought it was some con. As if Jerry was a myth, couldn’t possibly exist. Leiber bolted out of there, more resolute than ever to avoid live concerts.
Well, forty years later, as of last week, Jerry Leiber is now finally not alive. My father brought him home and introduced me in 1965, when I was nine years old and clueless. Some guy who’d written Elvis’ songs before my time, which meant nothing to me. But he also wrote something called “Kansas City,” that just appeared on Beatles ’65. That fact got my attention in a big way. It was straight-out rock ’n’ roll, different than regular Beatle songs, the odd music they’d apparently grown up on.
The sheer magnitude of what Leiber & Stoller accomplished is mind-boggling—they fathered rock ’n’ roll, they put the dominant AABA song structure in popular music, and were the first to be called “record producer.” They began as R&B songwriters, and I wonder whether they ever listed their mission statement on tax returns: Making Black Folks Laugh.
I never let cosmic distractions, as listed above, get in the way of friendships. Especially when preparing cornbread and ribs in the kitchen with Jerry Leiber, like an old Jewish grandma. As with any great figure, you’re also dealing with a mere human being. He had a preference for writer friends over music people. He grew up in a Baltimore slum speaking Yiddish, but learned meter from Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Allan Poe (also from Baltimore). He devoured Proust as a child. Privately, he kept revising the lyrics from songs he wrote long ago, always reaching for what he considered to be the perfection of Irving Berlin.
The “playlets”—those 50 two-and-a-half minute radio plays that Leiber & Stoller did with their alter-ego vaudevillian do-wop group, The Coasters—were the most lyric-driven canon of songs ever written. Leiber & Stoller’s range was magnificent, from early ditch blues to late Sinatra. “The Girls I Never Kissed” would have been a smash, had Sinatra’s voice only behaved during two attempted recording sessions.
Jerry Leiber bequeathed me the only unreleased song from the Leiber & Stoller catalog of the 1950s, “Strike A Match.” The song takes place in a dimly lit Negro bar where, after dancing and before the first kiss, the guy tentatively asks the girl to: Strike a match/Let me see/Yo’ face/Yo’ face.” They’d written it for Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy. Then it got lost in a closet for 45 years. Leiber thought the three greatest male blues voices were Memphis Slim, Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf.
“I can’t sing like that,” I said. And didn’t want to affect a Black voice. Different physiology.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s attitude.”
“Strike A Match” came out, if such could be said, in 2001. A few years later Leiber agreed to produce a solo album of me doing his purest blues songs. He hadn’t really been in the studio in a few decades. Not since the ’70s when he and Mike Stoller last produced Peggy Lee, Elkie Brooks, Procol Harum, a T-Bone Walker tribute album, and Stealers Wheel, including the single “Stuck in the Middle with You.” After that, they even refused the Rolling Stones.
So why, you might ask, would Leiber take interest in a bum such as I? Well, many entities that Leiber & Stoller bestowed their magic upon were cherry-picked from out of nowhere. That’s how those groups became famous.
“I wrote for people I loved,” he once told me. “The rest got my leftovers.” So maybe I was getting his leftovers. And I knew I was born too late. Come back 30 years ago, and he’d put you on the charts. He could do it with anybody.
He also produced the construction of his early 20th century Greene & Greene-style house like a record, in Venice Beach, California. He put me up there for a manically enchanting week. We rehearsed some and even attempted to write new songs. Off the clock, bullshitting, Jerry’s wit was sharp as ever. He still maintained a childlike playfulness in his genius with language and could pull lines out of the sky like lightening.
But when play turned to work, it turned mundane. He immediately excised all lines about gynecology from a song of mine. And the song was about a gynecologist.
“But Jer, that’s the best stuff.”
“Whaddya crazy, you can’t say that shit.” Well, I figured, maybe he knows what he’s talking about.
The first session was booked at Nightbird, his son Jed’s recording studio under the Sunset Marquis Hotel, near the Leiber & Stoller offices. On the way to the studio, Jerry got a call from the studio manager who wanted his credit card number. Jerry had originally financed the whole joint, and here his son was going to charge him by the hour. He went ballistic over the phone—and thus our production was, predictably, cancelled. There was no way Jerry Leiber was going back to the studio, any more than Muhammad Ali was going back to the ring.
I spent a year under unpaid contract with him, to be billed equally as co-writer of his autobiography. It was to be called Kiss My Big Black Ass. The cover was to be a mule’s ass, its head turned around with the face, naturally, being that of Jerry. Leiber’s handlers were, of course, appalled, and pressed on for a sanitized Leiber & Stoller autobiography to be written with David Ritz, the official biographer of music pioneers. Ritz had about eight other books going that year. Stoller wanted a mannered, politically correct book that, in spirit, might be called, And Then We Wrote...
But Jerry always reached for the jugular. Even with his talented sons, who endured the most stinging Jewish-father tsuris since Abraham bound Issac to the altar (Look at you, you’re 50 years old and never had a Top 10 hit.).
I salvaged some of our material for the 77-page lead-off chapter of Tell the Truth Until They Bleed. Though he gave his permission, he ended up furious with several revelations. A few tidbits about money, and his tendency to become what he called “Grandma Hyde” (as in Dr. Jekyll) and go off the deep end, destroying one project and collaborator after another. But there remained an abundance of unpleasantness that I left out of my book forever, in deference to my enormous respect for both Leiber and Stoller and their legacy.
Leiber & Stoller’s Brill Building office had the highest level of staff songwriters in history. Inspired by Jerry and Mike, they worked 9-to-5 in little piano cubicles. The smaller the cubicle, the bigger the hit. Songwriting was a highly specialized craft and art in Leiber’s heyday. Most groups did not write their own material. That was left to experts. If you take a cold look at what happened in the wake of Dylan and the Beatles—suddenly everyone in the world was a songwriter, and groups wrote their own songs. There was a burst of collective genius in those times. But songwriting basically changed from a professional’s domain to a free-for-all where amateurs took over the ship. To this day. If you don’t see any disparity in that, compare your songs to the full-time professionals of Leiber & Stoller’s stable—Goffin & King, Barry and Greenwich, Pomus & Shuman, Mann and Weil, early Burt Bacharach, Neil Diamond. There’s a difference, right? Songwriting was a business.
Jerry Leiber occupied his own hipster universe: “I have no sense of long distance and time and ancient history. It’s like we cut our songs last night.” He was a walkin’, talkin’ street-wise sharpie, the embodiment of his own songs. He was reckless, but a great connoisseur of clothes, art and ghetto cuisine. Turned on by intellectually pretentious women, several notches down from pretty. He felt double-crossed by everybody, and double-crossed them back.
But I believe Jerry Leiber was wittier, greater and more important than Irving Berlin. I love and miss the bastard. I imagine the mythical Jerry in his final hours, like the character of his song “D.W. Washburn,” a gentleman who won’t get up from the gutter with his bottle of wine. Who toasts his saviors, but says No Thanks, “I believe I got it made.”
Josh - For the record, not so famous guys are among your readers too. (Your book cover ended up as a Kilroy Was Here look, but it still works.) - Michael
Self-described "not-so-famous" Texas-based novelist/actor Michael Zagst is author of M.H. Meets President Harding, The Sanity Matinee, The Greening of Thurmond Leaner, The End of the World, Blood Flow and The Wonderful World of Color. Several have recently become available in electronic format.
To view on YouTube, click the above image. To watch via Vimeo, see below.
Rev. Branch merges "Rollin'" and "Just as I Was" while Josh Alan taps out percussion on the body of his Martin. Live from the Heavenly Rainbow Baptist Church, June 2011
Heavy Metal Parking Lot
(Tyrus Books, 2012)
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