WFMU's Beware of the Blog

A Tale of Two Gordons

Today we explore two men of show business named Bert Gordon. First we'll meet Bert Gordon, a comedy actor from the days of old time radio with a crazy face, a funny voice and a wildly popular but short career. Then we will meet the other Bert Gordon, an inept film director who pumped out fodder for the drive-in circuit, almost always about exposure to atomic radiation resulting in monstrous growth.

THE FIRST BERT GORDON...

Most fans knew the first Bert Gordon simply as The Mad Russian (a moniker that would later be co-opted to describe various wrestlers, ball players and communist adversaries). Bert Gordon used his "real name" when doing business, although it turns out that Bert Gordon was also a pseudonym.

Murder in the Kornfield: The Life and Death of Stringbean

Banjo picker, country comedian, originator of hip-hop fashion, Dave "Stringbean" Akeman is a legend in country music. Everything about the man defied convention, but at the same time his music defined tradition. The start of his life followed what seems to be the ready-made template of country music biographies: growing up poor in Kentucky, born into a musical family, a father who played banjo at local barn dances who taught him how to play... if his childhood were depicted in a movie, critics would pan it for being hackneyed, hokey and clichéd. Stringbean traded two chickens in exchange for his first banjo. As he entered adulthood, the six foot five plucker entered a talent show and won. Asa Martin, a musical saw player with some clout, awarded the prize to Stringbean and helped him attain his first paying gigs. While performing part time, Stringbean also travelled the south as a semi-pro ball player, something that also seems to be somewhat of a country music cliché (Roy Acuff, Dave Dudley, Charlie Pride and Jim Reeves all had semi-professional baseball careers).

Stringbean had a remarkable career, staring off slow but eventually ascending to superstardom when he joined the cast of Hee-Haw. Too bad he was brutally murdered.

Yes, They Called Him the Streak

You all know this photo. It's the Oscar streaker. And it's David Niven looking at who knows what. I've searched the internet far and wide and, for the life of me, can not find one image of streaker Robert Opel's uncropped, unblurred "statuette." It might be for the best (maybe he was just born with a blurry penis), but you'd think that at one of the most photographed events in America, there might have been more than two photos of Opel's legendary jaunt. Ah, but here's the thing. Many people believe that the famous incident, where this naked man ran through the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion past David Niven at the 46th annual Academy Awards, was staged. This theory of planned spontaneity receives most of its weight from the fact that Opel wasn't even arrested for trespassing on Hollywood's most exclusive event, but instead got dressed (with clothes provided for him by the Academy) and had security promptly escort him to "winner's row" where he held a press conference! Opel was sporting a blue jumpsuit when he showed up, and still managed to remain undetected. But a little bit of investigation lays the conspiracy theories to rest - it also opens up a fascinating story about a man most know only as a photograph.

Robert Opel (sometimes Opal) was born completely naked on October 23rd, 1939. He was thirty-three years old when he crashed the gate of the Oscars. Moustached, long-haired, flashing the peace sign - he was a member of the fleeting Los Angeles hippy scene and a key figure in the burgeoning gay liberation movement of the early nineteen seventies. Opel was a mover and a shaker (spare me your obvious jokes) in underground art movements on both coasts. His Oscar stunt gave him immense publicity and in art circles, strange as it might seem, a significant amount of credibility.

Opel's streaking tendencies had started several months prior to the Oscar ceremonies. He had appeared naked, on more than one occasion, at Los Angeles City Council meetings. The purpose was to protest the City Council's plan to place a ban on nudity at local beaches. He stood with his balls strategically swaying in front of the seated Los Angeles Police Chief Ed Davis' face. "I thought the Council should see what an actual nude person looks like," he said. When he appeared at his court trial after being arrested for the display, he showed up dressed as Uncle Sam. He was sentenced to four months in prison for public lewdness (later diminished to probation). A 1979 San Francisco Chronicle profile spoke of his advocacy for "sexual freedom." The article stated, "He wanted people to be absolutely free sexually ... He saw sexual repression everywhere. And he believed it was politically motivated ..."

Would You Believe Don Adams was a Joke Thief?

When stand-up comedian Joe Rogan confronted notorious joke thief Carlos Mencia in the middle of "his" routine last February it spawned an internet phenomenon. Rogan suddenly had legions of fans and Mencia was quickly discredited. Video footage of Mencia performing material that belonged to other comedians flooded video-sharing sites. The incident spawned several blog entries, print magazine articles and news channel stories about famous joke thieves through history. There were the standard references to Milton Berle and Robin Williams and the occasional mention of Dane Cook. One story from comedy history fell by the sidelines. Don Adams was a joke thief.

Most people don't even realize that Adams was a stand-up comic. Everyone knows him as the star of Get Smart, but the character of Maxwell Smart was in fact based on Don Adams' nightclub persona. Adams was never really one to produce his own material, but then again, neither were most nightclub comedians of his era. Almost everyone solicited material from writers and Adams was no different. Bill Dana became an accomplished comedy writer having been hired by Steve Allen to work on the original Tonight Show. With Dana's help Adams was able to enjoy a successful stand-up career - but not a particularly honest one.

Bill Thompson: King of Wimps

Bill Thompson had one of the funniest voices in history but his larynges are more famous than his name. The voice of the henpecked husband or meek little pushover in hundreds of cartoons and radio shows, Thompson's characters always seemed to be on the verge of being clobbered with a rolling pin. His most famous voice creation was the mush-mouthed cartoon hound, Droopy. He lent this well-known voice to several characters over the course of four decades, never ceasing to be amusing (incidentally, the picture on the left was harder to obtain than I would have figured - typing "droopy" into Google Image search serves up many undesirable, if not altogether stomach churning, results).

The voice that we now associate with Droopy was in use for years before Thompson first lent it to the MGM cartoon star. The Breakfast Club with Don McNeill, an extremely popular radio variety show during the thirties and forties, featured Thompson as a drooping character named Mister Wimple during the 1934-35 season. He was also called on to provide various animal noises when the script needed it (many of the networks would have an "animal mimic" on the payroll for just this specific service - jumping from show to show). Each day The Breakfast Club featured a popular(!) segment titled Prayer Time that was just as it stated - a minute of dead air while the cast and audience prayed. According to the book Don McNeill and His Breakfast Club by John Doolittle (University of Notre Dame Press, 2001) the show was a favorite of J. Edgar Hoover.

The Multi-Russian: Akim Tamiroff

Akim Tamiroff was a versatile character actor of Armenian and Russian descent with a very thick accent. He was remarkable for many reasons. In his long film career he played Russians, Mexicans, French-Canadians, Arabs and any other ethnicity a script called for. The most remarkable thing of all? He never bothered to play any of those characters differently. They all sounded just like Akim Tamiroff. The man was so talented, you could be convinced he was French or Egyptian or Mexican  - with a heavy Russian accent!

Tamiroff's acting career had him cross paths with an impressive roster of giants from the Russian theatre and American film. The only actor to work with Cecil B. DeMille, Preston Sturges, Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard, Tamiroff got his start at the Moscow Art Theatre School studying under Stanislavski shortly after the revolution. After graduating, he toured with a theatre troupe performing notable Russian plays. He starred in productions written by all the Russian giants: Tolstoy, Chekov, Turgenev and Gorky. In 1923, Tamiroff and the gang landed in New York to perform at Jolson's 59th Street Theatre. Tamiroff decided after the run to remain in America to try and make a go at acting in metropolis (the decision does not appear to have been political in any way). He worked on Broadway in various capacities for the next ten years. I'll spare you the boring details of this period and pick it up in 1936.

You Are What You Eat

You Are What You Eat (1968) is a strange, psychedelic and convoluted film as incoherent as its hippy brethren 200 Motels (1971) and Rainbow Bridge (1972). It belongs with that small collection of movies in which more people own the soundtrack than have actually seen the film. The soundtrack is phenomenal. The bright yellow cover is as eccentric as the vinyl itself that features audio cut-ups, squealing Moog synthesizers, relentless psychedelic improvisations, lounge music, Tiny Tim oddities, and the final appearance of The Hawks before they changed their name to The Band.

The list of those involved with the film is an incredible roster of counter culture heroes and weirdos. Tiny Tim, The Electric Flag, Frank Zappa, Peter Yarrow, Paul Butterfield, Super Spade, David Crosby, Hamsa El Din, Barry McGuire, the radio personality Rosko and several others. And despite the talent involved the film is incredibly difficult to track down in any format other than a blurry, seventh-generation, chopped up version that most likely will get trapped in your VCR. I have posted the sounds of the the soundtrack LP for your listening leisure over here.

Greetings From the Stars: A Mystery ... SOLVED

Last week I wrote about some strange audio oddities titled Greetings From the Stars that tend to surface in downtrodden Canadian neighborhoods. If you haven't yet had a chance to read that piece, please do so before proceeding.

As mentioned in the previous article, this series of cassettes featured old show business legends on their down curve, reduced to providing one-take birthday greetings and other such pablum. The who, what, where, and why of the project is not apparent by looking at them. A listen to the Greetings From the Stars series spawns more questions than answers. I've been struggling to piece it all together ever since I found a box of them, covered in soot, at a ghetto pharmacy. The packaging provides some minor clues to the story such as company names like Pezamerica Resources Corp and Pezzaz Productions, a nineteen eighty-four copyright and a Vancouver, British Columbia address. Finding the worn down building at the edge of that city's ghetto did not, as I might have hoped, lead me to an office filled with autographed Foster Brooks headshots or relatives of Don Adams trying to claim his residuals. My assumption that the series was a confectionary by-product of the Pez dispenser people also could not have been more wrong.

After several failed Google searches I came upon a very promising clue. A Vancouver based recording engineer's online resumé casually mentioned working for a Pezzaz Productions for one year... 1984. Of course, it could have been a coincidence, especially since the resumé mentioned all kinds of interesting gigs, but working with Milton Berle wasn't one of them. Lord knows if I even just delivered room service to Milton Berle it'd be at the top of my resumé - written in bold. A phone number and e-mail address were provided for the recording engineer, and before I knew it I was having coffee with one of the key men responsible for the gaudy looking piece of work you see pictured on the left.

Greetings From the Stars: A Mystery

A couple years ago I was strolling through the poorest neighborhood in Canada and wandered into an old drug store called The Garlane. It had certainly seen better days. No longer was it the local stop for toilet paper and cigarettes, but instead remained open primarily to dispense methadone. Since this paradigm shift in priorities, much of the store's old stock has remained on the shelves untouched. 1970s board games still shrink-wrapped, greeting cards from the early sixties, and all-manner of forgotten product just sitting there, waiting to be discovered by greedy ebay dealers. It was at this store that I came across a box filled with cassette tapes in flamboyant packaging covered in gritty soot an inch thick. Staring back at me were the faces of several fading celebrities; Ed McMahon, Dom DeLuise, Don Adams, Danny Thomas, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Scatman Crothers just to name a few.

What I had discovered was a case of tapes titled Greetings From the Stars, packaged in flimsy cardboard and decorated with airbrushed renderings of celebrity heads all sporting bow ties. The covers each shouted a different theme like Happy Birthday, Cheer Up, Getting Married, Happy Anniversary or What is Love? As described on the packaging, these cassettes were "HUMOROUS RECORDED GREETINGS JUST FOR YOU - reverse side blank for your personal message." With three stars assigned to each tape, and a 1984 price of a dollar each, I naturally lugged a dirty box of these home with me that day.

Whatever Became Of ... Richard Lamparski?

Today tabloid magazines and television shows have made the "Where Are They Now?" concept common place. The internet has made answering questions about one-time celebrities easy to answer. But it wasn't always like this and most of the credit for creating the concept must go to a catty man with an eccentric writing style named Richard Lamparski. Starting in the late sixties Lamparski wrote a series of pamphlet-sized fanzines titled Whatever Became Of... where he tracked down his favorite former stars from old time radio, Republic serials, and silent pictures.

Lamparski had initially been a PR man for Paramount Television, CBS Radio, and the Ice Capades. He used these connections (well, not so much his Capade connections) to track down his favorite old stars. He scored himself a Whatever Became Of...? radio series on WBAI New York and eventually a long running series of hardcover books on the same subject. As fascinating as it is to find out whatever became of these various stars, the real pleasure in reading Lamparski's books often comes from the anomalous writing style he employed. It is often flippant, ambiguous, vulgar, and more often than not, condescending. Because of this, his books are laugh-out-loud enjoyment. Sometimes Lamparski's subjects themselves display these same characteristics with amusing results. The 1974 entry for the late Hollywood B-movie actress June Lang states: June lives in a small, very neat house in North Hollywood. Her biggest disappointment in recent years came when her only child Patricia preferred working with retarded children to a movie contract. "I don't understand people today," she told an interviewer. "I don't like these times and I do not wish to be a part of them." June does not like modern movies or the people who make them. She feels their long hair and beards probably affect their work.

Credit Castrated: The Voice of Walter Tetley

Walter Tetley was a prolific character actor in the media of film, radio and animation for many years. Like thousands of others I enjoyed his appearances in old movies, his cartoon voice work and his steady comedy roles on golden age radio. The thing was, I thought I was enjoying three different people. It took many years for me to figure out that the anonymous bellhop in countless Hollywood films was the same guy I was hearing on Stan Freberg comedy records.

Walter Tetley had the voice of a pre-pubescent schoolboy. Born with a rare hormonal disease that prevented him from fully experiencing the changes that puberty normally brings, Tetley's voice is best remembered today as the bespeckled cartoon nerd Sherman, boy companion to Mister Peabody on The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show. Many would surely be surprised to discover that the brainiac dog's boy companion in all ninety-one segments of Peabody's Improbable History  was actually a man in his late forties.

You're a Long Way From Fame, Whitey! The Forgotten Dick Davy

For just under one hundred years The Apollo Theater has catered, shaped and determined African-American cultural trends. Absurd, yet hardly surprising in the context of American history, is the fact that from 1904 to 1934 the Apollo was a whites-only establishment.¹ There are many notable Apollo legends, some true and some apocryphal. Ella Fitzgerald, it is said, was one of the first African-American performers to perform on the famous amateur night after the Apollo finally opened its doors in 1934 to those who made up the majority of Harlem's population. One fascinating event however hasn't been told in thirty years and is pretty much forgotten.

Google the name Dick Davy and the only information you're likely to find is the article you're currently reading. Davy was a New York born East Village folk singer in the early nineteen sixties. Davy says he was "much more soulful and quiet [than the average folk singer] ... intimate ... and I wasn't making it. But I'd be talking in between and people would laugh at things I said. So I'd start out like very traditional ... Barbara Allen ... about forty seven verses of that. And people weren't listening for a while. And because nobody was paying attention, I'd just start talking and they'd laugh. And eventually whatever I'd say, they laughed at. And I really felt bad that I didn't have more things to say because I really had 'em with the first few things I said and they were ready ... and then I'd go back to singing another song, and they'd go back to bedlam. So I started writing down whatever they were laughing at." Dick Davy didn't know it then, nor could anybody have predicted, that this white folk singer would be, in just a few years, taking Harlem by storm.

The Music Everybody Loves! Everybody Wants! Nobody Has!

Even in this age of the internet making the obscure common place and DVD reissues coupled with YouTube making vague childhood memories concrete again, one cornerstone of pop culture wish lists has remained elusive.

I have never met anyone who does not love the background music from the original animated Spider-man cartoon. Although the theme song from the 1967-1970 series has been released and covered several times, the P.D. Francis, Bob Harris, Stu Phillips and D. Kapross penned ditty (four writers were used for that theme song!) pales in comparison to the underscore. Listen to a muddy sounding bootleg of some of this music here. The problem for years was that no living source could remember from which music library the background ditties were pulled. Doubling the problem is the fact that these amazing instrumentals, most likely, did not have a name - let alone any musicians credited with composing them. As often is the case with music made specifically for the purpose of generic use, whether it be for radio station promos, commercials, or in this case, a low-budget cartoon, the fly-by-night companies that produced this stuff often went out of business and their many hours worth of musical reels soon disappeared, ending up who-knows-where. Furthermore, it can be nearly impossible to unearth music that was used for a particular show when the reels were never marked "background music from Spider-man" but instead with titles like "action scene," "city scape," "outer space," or "police chase."

Freak! Baby! Munchkin! The Unique Physique: Harry Earles.

The always impressive Turner Classic Movies showed The Unholy Three (1925) the other night, a film that stands as one of Lon Chaney Sr.'s most famous. The memorable story of three circus performers who leave the stage for a life of crime when they conceive what they feel to be the "perfect" crime is both simple, ridiculous, and highly orignal. The three will get into the parrot selling business(!), unloading the birds on well-to-do members of high society. When their customers phone the pet shop the next day to complain that their parrots don't talk, the three pay their patrons a visit, and rob them. Y'know, that tired story again.

The Unholy Three is notable for several reasons. Along with the absurd plot, Lon Chaney, initially introduced to us as a ventriloquist, appears in drag for most of the film. The opening sequence featuring an assortment of odd looking sideshow performers was predecessor to another of director Tod Browning's demented celluloid contributions which was to come seven years later, Freaks (1932).  Also, the concept of a hulking male dressing as a woman in order to commit crime was, remarkably, re-used eleven years later by Browning in his film The Devil-Doll (1936) with Lionel Barrymore. As if this weren't enough, The Unholy Three is most notable of all for the performance of the most famous thirty nine inch tall actor in Hollywood history, Harry Earles.                                                                        

Earles had an unmistakable look, and in Hollywood's silent era, the aesthetics of one's face was far more important than acting ability. During the twenties when film could not rely on anything but visuals (a reliance that hypothetically should remain today but too often does not), that distinctive look could be pay dirt for an actor. Knowing that a man of his unique physique could easily be type-casted into mere comedic fodder as almost all dwarves, midgets, and general Hollywood little people tended to be in the 1920s, it is said that Earles was the one who brought the stories of both The Unholy Three  as well as the story for Freaks (in the form of a novel by author Clarence A. Robbins called Spurs) to director Browning's attention, Earles knowing full well either could mean a juicy role for himself. Earles eventually did appear in a pair of comedic roles as "a funny little man" in Good News (1930) and Be Big (1931). But don't be concerned if you think Harry's dignity was jeopardized by being laughed at in these films, you can rest assured that in Good News he was billed as "Midget in Trash Basket." The extremely rare piece of footage from this film featuring his sequence has been posted on Youtube which you can watch here.

The Forgotten Woody Woodbury

If you are a record collector or if you've frequented a thrift store, the name Woody Woodbury should sound familiar. If not, this picture on the left may jog the memory. Woodbury's records are among the most common comedy LPs available in thrift stores, flea markets and junk shops. Most record stores will have at least one of his albums in their comedy section, moderately priced and collecting dust. Joining Vaughn Meader's million-seller JFK take-off, The First Family, and the raunchy nightclub recordings of Rusty Warren, Woody Woodbury is the most common of the thrift store comedians. Woody and Rusty were, respectively, king and queen of what is called the 'Adults Only' comedy genre.¹ Although neither Rusty or Woody became part of the revolutionary "New Comedians" movement that started with Mort Sahl and climaxed with Nichols and May, Woody Allen and Bill Cosby, the two were still extraordinary phenoms in the world of vinyl. Both sold records well into the millions but neither had their sales boosted by the privilege afforded most other popular comics: television exposure. To listen to a Woody Woodbury record today is primarily an exercise in patience. The jokes are the same stale bits re-used often by the era's nightclub comics on record labels like FAX, After Hours, Surprise, Jubilee, Laff and countless others. No material on a Woody Woodbury album would make a person blush today, nor does the disclaimer on most of his LPs "Not Suitable for Radio Play" seem particularly apt anymore. However, there was a time when Woody Woodbury, Rusty Warren and any number of lesser known comedians released on a handful of obscure labels struggled and fought for fame simply through word of mouth. In the case of Woody, the overwhelming popularity of these "banned" albums had disc jockeys trying to figure out how to get around the prudish restrictions of playing the records on the air.

As Woody Woodbury recalls, "[Radio stations] refused to play some of them in their entirety. What they did was take what they deemed the purest stories, but you could play them in their entirety today during high mass. They were innuendo. They were called risque. But today... they're child's play." Woody belonged to a small Florida based record label with a wonderful name. StereOddities had Woody as its star and a small handful of others who, to put it crudely, were nobodies. Bill Barner, Billy Carty and Nino Nanni, the three other comedians released by the outfit are actually quite uncommon in thrift stores. The few other releases that the label put out were mostly of ragtime music by Eubie Blake.

E.T. The Terrestrial Failure.

I am not particularly interested in revisiting what was one of my primary interests as a seven year old (unless it has something to do with Hanna-Barbera, natch). That isn't to say I hold any of my contemporaries that obsess over their latest Atari thrift store find in contempt. Playing old Atari games just isn't high on my list of priorities. Regardless, I was over at a friend's house that is indeed one of these Atari obsessives, when the topic turned to, "What was the greatest Atari game?" Well, for me the answer was easy. Without question, the Atari game I played and enjoyed the most was Atari's interpretation of the Steven Spielberg hit ET. Those present laughed in an esoteric Atari aficionado type way and dismissed my answer. "All joking aside, what was actually your favorite game?" I had to plead ignorance. I had no idea why my answer was so implausible. When I steadfastly insisted I wasn't joking, my defense of the game became highly controversial.

I had mastered the game at the age of four, and admittedly, the object of ET was incredibly stupid. I hadn't even seen the film at that point but I knew that there was no way this piece of amusement was following the movie plot. The object was for ET to collect a series of black dots and coveted gold pieces while trying to avoid falling into pits. You also had to dodge a oddly animated scientist and an FBI agent in a trench coat that would steal your dots and gold. Once you had collected a certain amount of dots and gold without falling into pits, you would return to a field, pump the joystick's red button and summon a space ship to take you home: the end. Well, I thought it was fun.

It wasn't until my friends enlightened me last year that I realized I was the only kid in North America enjoying the game. When I first plugged the cartridge into my Atari on a joyous Christmas morn, I was instantly impressed with the image pictured on the right. This was the best-looking Atari graphic I had ever seen! The Atari-ized ET theme was nothing to sneeze at either. As I have learned, most people found the game frustrating, difficult to learn, impossible to master and not particularly fun. I don't know why. I, for one, enjoyed the otherworldly and somewhat creepy feeling I got from it. Elliot, The Professor, and a man in a trench coat enforcing the PATRIOT Act were void of facial features. This made them seem like terrifying creatures from an old drive-in movie, which I always felt added to the mystique. Although, I did not enjoy losing all my lives, thus bringing an end to current play, the graphic of a pathetic ET skeleton was always something haunting to behold. Can you imagine the rotting corpse of Mario or Zelda (or a much more current reference) appearing on your screen? Of course not.