|
Thursday Night January 8th we (myself and band leader Ronnie Mack) pulled off another exquisite Elvis's birthday show at the House Of Blues -- 47 acts doing one or two Elvis songs (well, Dwight Yoakam did three), 1200 people on hand, money goes to charity. It is the greatest place in the world to be on Elvis Day. The music is sensational and the vibes are supreme (no Vegas jumpsuits, no fat-Elvis jokes). It is our 12th year (Ronnie's eighth as bandleader, co-founder James Intveld did it the first four years) and it gets better every time.
The second edition of my first book, The LA Musical History Tour,  is due out in May on 21361, Henry Rollins' publishing company. (I always thought the 213 referred to the LA area code, but it's HR's birthdate.) It will have 80 to 100 new entries on top of the old. Previous publisher Faber & Faber are a venerated old firm in the Boston area, a small branch of the larger English company which has employed, at different times, e.e. cummings and Pete Townshend. As a distributor for my book they were ...well they didn't mess with the content, but they made the cover dull and "architectural" and they made it a sideways book (postcardlike) which was difficult for bookstores to stock (all the vertical space is wasted), and they treated it as a regional book, which it isn't: few stories are local, most are of national and worldwide significance. (Also, here's a book writer's secret agony: publishers give you TEN free copies of your work then charge you 60% of retail, the same price stores get them for.) I'm looking forward to seeing it come out on an L.A. "label."
 And my second book, The Greatest Rock & Roll Stories (Rhino/GPG, 1997) has just been published in France, in french.
C'est la vie, and that ain't bad! Many thanks Phillipe Manoeuvre.
 I have slowed down doing my tv show (Art Fein's Poker Party, public access cable) because my main outlet, Century Cable in Los Angeles, is backed up 6 months with old shows. I am currently mailing them to Neil Skok in Seattle who is airing them there weekly, and the old ones still run in Austin, Texas (where public access switched in 1995 to home grown shows only). It ran in San Francisco part of 1997. And Marshall Crenshaw in Woodstock New York runs shows on their public access when he has time to go in, turn on the machines, and sit there while they air!
I WOULD LIKE THE SHOWS TO BE ON NATIONWIDE, but it is not easy to find people to lug in tapes in other cities.
 FYI: Between mid-1996 and mid-1997 I taped about 40 shows. Among the guests were Stan Freberg, Los Straitjackets, Chip Taylor, The Big 6, Ian Whitcomb, Doug Fieger, Lee Rocker, Terry Kirkman, Nik Venet, Hal Blaine, Swamp Dogg, Billy Vera, Cliffie Stone, Jerry Capehart, Tim Polecat and Smutty Smith -- among others. Last week I had Wanda Jackson. I've been doing it for 14 years, with this level of guests. I do these things for posterity. If you want to air them in your town, contact me at this website, or on my e-mail. (SOFEIN @ AOL.com.)
I am not a Zappa buff, but traveled with him in 1974 for a Cashbox cover story.  In 1988 I came in contact with movie character actor Timothy Carey, and he appeared on several of my tv shows before his death in 1995. Carey hired Zappa in 1963 to score his homemade feature film, The World's Greatest Sinner, but a rift developed between them when Zappa, sporting short slicked-back hair and a mild demeanor, appeared on the Steve Allen show (playing the bicycle!) and commented sarcastically that The World's Greatest Sinner was "the world's worst movie." (WGS is analyzed, for rock content, in Marshall Crenshaw's book Hollywood Rock.)
In that movie Carey sported a lower-lip Imperial `mustache' that Zappa would soon adopt.
When I spoke to Romeo Carey, one of Tim's children, he said Zappaphiles call him about his mother's relationship with Frank: Tim's wife wrote poetry, and Frank set her poems to music.
And that leads to this.
Timothy Carey was a far-out avant-garde weirdo who made people uncomfortable throughout his hit-and-miss career. He was a wildman both on and off-screen, and he frightened directors and studio heads so roundly that he rarely got roles. (Though the ones he got were delicious.  He was in Lee Marvin's gang in The Wild One: he menaces the phone operator. He is the guy who shoots the horse in The Killing. He kills a cockroach in Kubrick's Paths Of Glory. He is a crazy man in a cape in the Monkees' Head. He pops up on Columbo and other detective shows of the 70s.) He was a vocal proponent of farting, and died while in rehearsals (the run was sold out in advance) for The Insect Trainer, a play he wrote about a man who trains a cockroach after he's imprisoned for killing a postal worker with a fart in a Chinese restaurant.
 When Zappa appeared on the Steve Allen show of 1963, only his voice was recognizable -- his manner was so timid that you wouldn't connect him with the far-out creation he became.
It could well be that Timothy Carey lit the fuse, and inspired him to become the Frank Zappa we know.
- 30 - |
|
