Hollywood Suicide #3: Al Mulock

Al Mulock, probably the ugliest so far of our “Hollywood Suicides.” As a fixture in Spaghetti Westerns, he might seem an unlikely fit for the series. But Mulock rates as a Hollywood ghost by virtue of his brief appearance in John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, if nothing else. That ugly mug burned itself onto celluoid most famously, however, as the blabber-mouthed, one-armed bounty hunter in Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly).





The clip above comes from Italian Youtube (if you haven't already figured that out). Translated, Tuco's (Eli Wallach) last words to the stiff run something like "When you're gonna shoot, shoot. Don't talk." Without that scene, and Mulock's final contribution to backlot lore, the Canadian-born bit player would no doubt be lost to oblivion by now.

Mickey Knox, screenwriter for Once Upon a Time in the West, witnessed Mulock’s 1968 suicide in Gidaux, Spain, during production of that film. From Knox’s book The Good, The Bad, & the Dolce Vita (Nation Books):

“The film had a large crew and our base was in Gidaux, a small, hot, dusty village that had minimal accomodations. Most of us were staying in a three-story building that passed as an 'accomodation.' We had returned from a location shoot, some distance from the village, and I happened to glance out the window to see what looked like a body shooting by⎯it was a body, and it belonged to an actor who appeared only in the opening sequence of the movie.

He was still wearing his western costume and Leone, upon hearing of the suicide, told the production manager, 'get the man’s costume before they take him away.' The actor hadn’t completed his role and they needed someone to fill in, but that would be no problem if they had the dead man’s costume. Anyone about the same height and shape would do.

Actually, the man was not quite dead, but Leone didn’t ask if he was still alive. He was only concerned for the next day’s shooting. What actually killed the actor was the ride in a production car over a bumpy road to a distant hospital. He should never have been moved. A broken rib pierced his lung during the drive. We later learned that the actor was a drug addict and couldn’t get a fix in Gidaux. Desperate, he went up to the roof and took a dive.”

Rufus Thomas: Ain't I'm Clean?

Rufus Thomas was born on this date in 1917. Gemini Spacecraft would like to to honor the man who scored early hits for Sun and Stax Records, and always got the drop on the freshest dance steps, by declaring his birthday “World’s Oldest Teenager Day.” Just how one might go about observing “World’s Oldest Teenager Day,” who knows? Maybe when you're waiting at the bus stop remember to break it to the left, then break it to the right, or several times today ask your boss “Ain’t I’m clean?!?”



A worthy holiday, don't you think? Speaking only for myself, having been born the year that “Walking the Dog” was released, I’m definitely no longer fresh chicken (would that then make me “Funky Chicken”?). And yet, this fixation on greasy kid stuff persists despite the hair loss, wrinkles, root canals, etc.

A little background on Rufus Thomas: Originally a tap-dancer, he started out in the 30s playing the tent show circuit with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. Then through his association with Professor Nat D. Williams, his history teacher at Memphis’ Booker T. Washington High School, and also the first black DJ in the South, Thomas landed a spot as emcee for the Palace Theatre weekly amateur show. Here, in the late 40’s, both B.B. King and Bobby Bland would launch their careers. At the Palace, Thomas extended his old tent show training by developing an act that included comedy, singing and dance numbers, essentially the same act he would continue to do throughout his career as performer and WDIA broadcaster.




About Sam Phillips & Sun Records, for whom he cut “Bearcat” in 1953, the label's first single to chart, Rufus Thomas had this to say: “Me and Sam Phillips? We were tighter than the nuts on the Brooklyn Bridge⎯then. Of course he was like all the folk at that time. You know how if blacks had something and didn’t have no way to exploit it and white dudes would pick it up and do something about it, they’d just beat him out of all of it, that’s all. Well that was him, that was Sam Phillips.”*

Rufus Thomas died in 2001, age 84. Who knows who receives royalties on his record sales at this point? I do know that Sundazed reissued the “Walking the Dog” LP, without which no record collection is complete. So I won’t post it here.

*Rufus Thomas quote from Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highway, Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians, Back Bay Books, 1999.

Twine Time: The Deliverance Was Good

So maybe Alvin Cash was not the Hardest Workin’ Man in Show Business. In fact, maybe “Twine Time” could go down as one of the easiest paydays in soul music. Any way you slice it⎯vocal performance or novelty dance number⎯Alvin Cash & the Crawlers got a lot of help on this one. Kids invented the dance that inspired the song, and Andre Williams wrote the song and produced the record. But delivery, baby! That's what Alvin Cash & the Crawlers gave it.

You probably already know the part about how Alvin Cash attended the same St. Louis high school as Tina Turner. In St. Louis, Alvin and his younger brothers also garnered modest notoriety as the dance team the Step Brothers. Seeking greater fortune, and maybe a record deal, the brothers took their act up the road apiece, to Chicago, in the early 1960s.


Around the same time, Andre Williams had entered his post-Fortune Records phase, and was busy forging a career as writer/producer/A&R man. During those frequent periods when he was on the outs with Barry Gordy, Andre moonlighted at George Leaner’s Mar-V-Lus records. Andre caught Alvin Cash & the Registers’ club act one night in 1964 and invited them to lay down some vocals on a new song he’d written with Verilie Rice, “Twine Time,” a song aimed at milking some chart action from yet another Chicago teen dance craze.


Apparently the A&R man’s work takes him far afield, ‘coz up-and-coming talent wasn’t all that Andre scoped in those days. From Robert Pruter’s informative book Chicago Soul (University of Illinois Press, 1992): “The Twine was one of those dances that emerged from the black high school kids before it was put on record. Months before the record was released kids around Thirty-fifth to Thirty-ninth Streets were doing the dance to the Miracles’ ‘That’s What Love is Made Of.' Most of the kids in that area attended Dunbar High, and it was at one of the school’s dances that one of Leaner’s producers, Andre Williams, discovered the dance.”

Kinda makes you wonder how, on these scouting missions, Mr. Rhythm managed to slip past the school chaperones. Did he use a disguise?

Anyway, back to “Twine Time.” It’s generally considered to be a more up-tempo rewrite of Andre’s 1957 R&B hit “Bacon Fat.” In the early weeks of 1965, “Twine Time” b/w “The Bump” climbed as far up as the no. 14 position on the Billboard pop charts, and hung as high as the no. 4 position on the R&B charts. That chart action helped Alvin Cash & the Crawlers land appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand, despite the record being banned by NY stations for its suggestive, rhythmic "ooh" and "ah" background vocals.





During that period Chuck Berry was touring Britain. Melody Maker nabbed him for their “Blind Date” feature, February 13, 1965. “Twine Time” was among the stack of new singles selected for him to identify and rate. Chuck had this to say: “Wine time? Oh, Twine time⎯hmm. Top 40. It sounds very Americanish, yeah definitely American. As a matter of fact I could almost name the part of the country it comes from (laughs)…The deliverance was good but it was just one of those songs…You could dance to it but there was nothing significant there.”


**Chuck Berry caricature by Melody Maker illustrator Jimmy Thomsen.

Lookout Mars! You're Our Next Stop

Got a random twin-pack of B-sides today, far-out rockers with an outer space theme. Don’t confuse these with your more general paeans to teenie-weenie and little green men. These two got a more specific destination in their sights, namely Mars. First up is “Rocket” by Joe Bennett and the Sparkletones, the flip for the single “Penny Loafers and Bobby Socks.” Penny Loafers ain’t too shabby a side either, but my copy rates a lowly VG. Besides, it’s not a very hard record to find, so, fuggit, I’ll post only the B-side.




This was s’posed to be the ‘tones big follow-up to “Black Slacks,” alas, their one and only hit, released earlier that year, 1957. That earlier song featured backing vocals by label-mate and future sun-tanned midget Paul Anka. But don’t hold that against ‘em. As the title would suggest “Black Slacks” elaborated on sartorial themes, rather than outer space travel. Some say it finished the sentence that “Blue Suede Shoes” started about a year and a half earlier. Anyway, about “Penny Loafers” and “Rocket” the November 11, 1957 issue of Billboard had this to say: “’Black Slacks’ is still going strong and the similar styled version of ‘Penny Loafers’ could click in all fields. Fine guitar work helps sell the side. Flip ‘Rocket’ is a rockabilly novelty that can also go well.” Novelty? By now they all sound like novelty numbers, wouldn't you agree? That fine guitar work was provided by Joe Bennett and young Sparky Childress swapping licks. (See them at work in the clip below.) Too bad for them “Penny Loafers” failed to chart. In fact all their subsequent records failed to chart. These chart duds make up the Sparkletones’ best sides. They include “Rocket” and “Cotton Pickin’ Rocker.” ABC Paramount dropped the group by 1959.





Next up is Horace Heller’s “Ed’s Place” b/w “Hello World.” Info on Horace Heller is hard to come by. All I know is that he released these sides in January of 1959, on Dollie Records, of Nashville, TN, the label founded and owned by one-time Grand Ole Opry manager and music publisher Jim Denny. Dollie’s stable of odd-balls also included Johnny Wiggins (Ernest Tubb’s “Singing Bus Driver”) and rockabilly Curtis Gordan.



“Hello World” features a hep hillbilly rap, delivered by “the first cat on Mars.” Exactly how he got there or what’s his brand of rocket fuel remains unclear, tho he does confide this much: “I don’t know how I got here/ I had a hit and drag/ with a miss on a jag/and here I am.” While space travel can be a gas, this number reminds the listener that the come-down’s a bitch; looking back toward Earth, Heller finally admits “Like man, I want to get down!”

The A-side, “Ed’s Place,” another novelty narration set to a swanky lounge groove, is mainly a murder ballad, complete with foley effects, about the dangers of shooting your honey’s other man with a high caliber gun. Altho it departs from the outer space theme, I include it ‘coz it’s so weird. Both sides have been reissued. “Ed’s Place” pops up on Crypt’s “Godless America” comp, while “Hello World” is included on the comp “Rock’n’Roll the Untold Story, vol. 6.”

The Gospel of Riff, Jazzbo Books Part 2: i, paid my dues

Originally published in 1967, the full title is i, paid my dues good Times… no Bread a story of jazz and some of it’s followers, shyster agents, hustlers, pimps and prostitutes by Babs Gonzales.

Mid-way through one might wonder when do the “no Bread” passages kick in, ‘coz young Babs could sure hustle that long green. In fact, schools might consider adding i, paid my dues to their required reading lists just so sis and li’l junior can learn a few useful tricks for survival. For example, if you need to turn some quick cash between gigs, just get you a job selling suits down at the department store, then convince all your musician friends to cop their threads from you. Or if you’ve got to beat the draft, just show up for your army physical dressed like a lady, then scream “never mention girls to me again!!” through the draft hall. Monsieur Bebop Babs Gonzales recounts these and other hepcat anecdotes in a freewheelin’ and loose prose that redefines conventional use of the quotation mark while it weaves a story that criss-crosses the US, Europe, and the paths of everyone who was anyone in the bop era.

Besides being the consummate hipster, Babs contributed to the annals of classic jazz such tunes as "Oo-Pa-Pa-Dah," first recorded by his group Three Bips and a Bop, then as a duet with Dizzy Gillespie, as well as "Pay Dem Dues," "Cool Whalin’," "Weird Lullaby," "Get Out Dat Bed," "Be-Bop Santa," "Dob-La-Blee," "We Ain’t Got Integration," and many others. Despite these contributions, Babs never really received his financial due. Just another version of that all-too-common story of the under-compensated artist in America. To hear him tell it, his uncompromising hipsterism was just a bit too much for the uptight music establishment of the time. He wouldn’t let those shyster agents stiff him. He refused crummy record deals. DJs blacklisted his songs when he wouldn’t kick them a percentage of his record sales.


But hustler Babs Gonzales always managed to adjust to conditions. Necessity is the mother of invention, as he says, and sometimes that meant throwing red pepper in a few eyes, or writing a Bop dictionary, printing and selling it at 50 cents a pop, and sometimes that meant cutting the occasional “novelty” record. For the most part, Babs Gonzalez’s later, post-bop work is defined by records like Tales on the Famous, a “crossword puzzle in wax,” as he called it, where the listener is encouraged to guess who Babs is rappin' about, and Tales of Manhattan, both of which highlight his gift of gab and lessons in bop-o-lo-guy. “These New York Neighbors” is a good example of this type of material.

The book’s lengthy sub-heading offers a clue to its arrangement and organization; the narrator pretty much runs through the list of “followers, shyster agents, hustlers, pimps and prostitutes” in that order. The latter half presents a series of profiles on several pimps he knew⎯the most despicable certainly being Jean, the Parisian kidnapper-pimp⎯the kind of low-life who hung around, trying to soak up some of the jazz musician’s action. Some of this stuff ain’t pretty. But hey, who am I to judge? Such stories do paint a pretty detailed picture of those murky regions where show-biz and crime overlap.


Maybe Babs Gonzalez’s hipsterism was ultimately less than revolutionary, but he mastered the art of never holding a square job, and never (again, to hear him tell it) gave no play to the Man. He ends his missive with a good definition of success (good Times… no Bread…) plus a full discography, and a list of his favorite fellow jazzmen down through expubidence.

The Gospel of Riff, Jazzbo Books Part 1: Really the Blues

Really the Blues tells the story of dixieland clarinetist, Jewish hepcat, merchant of muggles, ghost of old Harlem, and professor of jive, Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow. His tale, the title of which comes from a Sidney Bechet tune by the same name, spans the first four decades of the last century, with the prohibition era heyday of Hot Jazz as its centerpiece. While he occasionally played with old-time jazz giants like Bechet and Louis Armstrong, Mezz Mezzrow sounds as much like some original scenester, known for who he knew, where he hung, and for his uncompromising devotion to the “New Orleans idiom.”

The title refers to a superlative state of the blues, the low, lowdown blues, which, paradoxically enough, at least in Mezz’s story, lead to what he calls the “millennium”⎯that peak, mind-blowing ascent into the kind of American life that could have been⎯swingin’, harmonious, and hep⎯if this country wasn't full of racist, ofay squares. Really the Blues describes Mezz Mezzrow’s search for this millennium. Along the way the narrator gets his kicks and takes his share of lumps. He spends a season in Paris, and another several seasons in the pokey, then another in the orchestra pit at the original Minksy Brothers Theater, and several more kicking the gong around. But all of it, good and bad, is just part of that number Mezz wants so badly to be in. One of the book’s funniest moments involves Mezz and his hop-head pals, in dialog that nails the dope-fiend’s detachment from worldly matters, as they continue to get high and talk baseball while their tenement burns down around them. Finally, it will surprise readers (nearly as much as it did Mezzrow himself) to see where he finally meets the millennium.

As literature the book’s no shlub, but surprisingly sophisticated. The chapter titled “The Forgottenest Man in Town” offers a complex and powerful metaphor to illustrate how uncompromising vision is its own reward, and conversely, how selling out can be a form of banishment. And Mezz’s image of 1920’s Harlem, in all its romanticized glory, alive with jazz & jive, represents a utopic ideal. Really the Blues is ultimately a story of survival, which for Mezz Mezzrow means hanging onto his horn, staying true to the New Orleans idiom, and remaining a jazzman despite all those forces in American society that conspire to grind the artist to dust.

RIP Lux Interior

It's taken a couple of days for Gemini Spacecraft to get around to posting the requisite obit for Lux Interior, who died Wednesday of a heart condition at age 62. I gotta say, the news bummed me out. His passing, like Bo Diddley's last summer, and Link Wray's a few years ago, seems to accelerate a sad fade-out that's already happening too fast for my money. Sure, the Cramps got plenty silly during the last 15 or so years, but I still think of Lux as a kind of walking, talking, microphone-munching human antenna, picking up signals from outer space, relaying them back to us in a form we can understand, i.e., as covers of "Strychnine," "Green Fuzz," and "All Tore Up." Many a corn-fed rube, myself included, got hipped to an entire alternate dimension thanks to him. I'll always love "Gravest Hits," "Songs the Lord Taught Us," and "LIve at the Peppermint Lounge," just as I'll always distrust anyone who doesn't keep these records around the house.

As long as we're indulging in Cramps/Lux Interior memories, my personal favorite is of a show in Pittsburgh, 1992. During the "Surfin' Bird" finale, when he'd usually peel out of that two- piece latex body condom he wore, an audience member, probably a plant, tossed some women's panties at him. So Lux stripped all the way down and tried to get into those panties. But his cue came to get back to the mic to sing the next round of poppa-oom-mow-mow before he got the draws on straight. He finished out the song, and the rest of the show, with his shlong dangling. Now that's a dedicated showman!

The above clip comes from a local Memphis TV news story on the Cramps, from when they recorded "Gravest Hits" and "Songs the Lord Taught Us" at Phillips Recording with Alex Chilton. I first saw this spot during Robert Gordon's book tour for "It Came from Memphis," in 1995. Instead of reading, Gordon showed a collection of footage he'd compiled called "Banned, Burned, and Forgotten," or something like that. How weird that this was the subject of a local news spot. And how weird to be standing there watching it nearly 20 years later, in a Borders bookstore, curious shoppers milling about while the anchor wrapped things up, announcing that the Cramps would be appearing that long gone weekend along with "the Clits."

Small Faces and Stanley Unwin: You're Talkin' Gobbledygook!

Pictured above is British comic Professor Stanley Unwin, aka Codlington Corthusite, aka the Chancellor of Vulgaria, inventor of his own language of gobbledygook "Unwinese." Imagine James Joyce's opening rap in Portrait of the Artist crossed with some sort of strange, Midlands jive. BBC Radio announcer once a polly tito, Unwin also narrated the tale that runs through the Small Faces rather twee Ogden's Nut Flake LP, their foray down the dodgy mews of British rock opera. What the hell, I like the song "Lazy Sunday" well enough. Here it is from a German television appearance from '67.



The brief clip of Unwin, his epilogue to the tale on ONF, comes from a British television broadcast of the Small Faces performing the entire album live, circa 1968. As he says, "Stay cool, man. Stay cool."

Hollywood Suicide #2: Pina Pellicer

During her brief run on the screen, Pina Pellicer was more well-known in Mexico and Europe than the US. Daughter of an affluent Mexico City lawyer, niece to a famous modernist poet, and sister to a tele-novela actress, Josefina Yolanda Pellicer López de Llergo had art--not to mention a wicked long name--in her blood. But then, the old world leisure class often had art in its blood (and time on its hands).

She first appeared in a Mexican production of Macario, released in 1960, the Academy's runner-up for best foreign film for that year. That Macario came first for Pina Pellicer was Marlon Brando's fault. She'd already had a role in One-Eyed Jacks, the weird transitional western that Brando commandeered from director Stanley Kubrick and writers Sam Peckinpah and Rod Serling. It began production in '58. However, as Brando's ego sent director & writers packin, and the enfant terrible took over, work on the film slowed. The new actor/director shot more and more film, release dates got postponed, and the picture didn't hit theaters until '61.

In One-Eyed Jacks--which also stars Karl Malden, Slim Pickens, Timothoy Carey, Katy Jurado, Ben Johnson, and Larry Duran--Pina plays Luisa, adopted daughter of former thief turned scum-bucket sherriff Dad Longworth (Malden). As part of his revenge on Longworth for an old doublecross back in their bank robbing days, the outlaw Rio (Brando), cons the pretty step-daughter out of her virtue. Here's a clip.

Wish I could find a clip of one of the film's finer moments, when Dad's evil deputy Lon (Pickens), tips him to Luisa's new condition. "She came in this morning," he whispers, "A-lookin' kinda messy." As compensation for my failure to find this clip, I offer Timothy Carey's scene (if there's a bad movie with Tim Carey, I never saw it), the one with the classic "Get up, you tub-o-guts!" line.

So what happened to Pina Pellicer? Was her 1964 suicide, in Mexico City, at age 30, another case of life imitating art? (All that art in the blood.) Some like to interpret from the storyline in One-Eyed Jacks that Pina and Brando had their own real-life case of unrequited love. Leading man snubbed leading lady, etc., etc. But she died several years after her brush with the big man. Maybe she had a vision of the future, and it showed her The Island of Dr. Moreau. Other rumors claimed that she wasn't hung up on Brando at all, but that she was bugged by the the same sort of difficulties that beset Montgomery Clift, and the resulting depression made Pina Pellicer take that early bow.