For you!

1st record/1st concert

The first record I ever bought was the EARTHWORDS & MUSIC album by John Hartford. In October, 1969, I'd just turned 4 and strode purposefully with my father into the Two Guys department store in Lawnside, NJ and bought the LP when I saw that it contained both "Gentle On My Mind" and "Washing Machine." I followed that purchase with Glen Campbell ("Witchita Lineman"), Flatt & Scruggs, and Mike Nesmith. But John Hartford was the first guy I ever saw playing music (on the Smothers Brothers show), and he made the prospect of playing an instrument look real attractive.

I also trashpicked a great many records around my neighborhood in Philadelphia, and found a blue-label RCA 45 (probably part of a set) of Spike Jones' "Wild Bill Hiccup" and a three-LP set on VeeJay called HALL OF FAME HITS. The Spike was incredibly unlike anything I'd ever heard and really captured my imagination. The VeeJay set was old rhythm'n' blues singles, and I loved everything on it, especially "Whiskey and Wimmen" by John Lee Hooker (I'd never heard somebody play "wrong" chords like that, and I loved the sound of it), Jimmy Reed, and Jennell Hawkins ("Moments To Remember", which I eventually got to play with her, one of the most incredible events of my life).

Seeing/hearing John Hartford, and finding these mysterious records made me want MORE (and thank you Dr Demento for providing a weekly diet of that). These are the elements that led me to disappoint my parents in ways none of us could have foreseen.

My first live music, other than the Mummers, was Elvis Preley live at the
Philadelphia Spectrum on June 23, 1974, 3:00 PM matinee show. He was extremely tan, and he wore the white jumpsuit with the blue peacock on it. His guitar was the black Gibson with his name inlaid on the neck. I don't remember much musically about the concert, but I remember how present he was. I really felt like I was "in a room with Elvis". His personal ability to communicate was that immense. Of all the things about that show, that's the impression that stayed with me the most.

SKIP HELLER

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Fein Mess Jan 03

Elvis Show

January 8th this year will be (or was, or is right now) the 18th annual Elvis Birthday show at the House Of Blues. I'll be co-hosting with Fred Willard.

Elvis Stuff

Two great Elvis things:

1. "Elvis Meets Nixon." An offbeat HBO movie from Allan Arkush. Very sympathetic to Elvis. The treatment of his plane flight to meet Nixon is a gem.

2. "Elvis & The Memphis Mafia" by Alana Nash. One of those books in the narrative style I disdain, four guys pingponging, but has some great insights. The tale of his plane flight to meet Nixon is a gem.

Elvis Club

In the late 1970s I saw a notice in the Valley Green Sheet that an Elvis club met on Saturday nights. I showed up at a house in Van Nuys and walked to the rear. I paid $5, and went into a tent where "Fun In Acapulco" or something was running on the tent wall. "Oh," I said disappointedly to an official-looking person. "Don't you run excerpts from tv, like the Dorsey shows?" You see, I wanted to ROOOCCCCKKK!

This puzzled him. "No, there are plenty of good performances in his movies." It was obvious we were not on the same page, and I never came back. A couple of years later I mentioned this to James Intveld. He and his brother went to the backyard a couple of times too.

The screening of those films reminded me of mid-1970s when I ran with the Rollin' Rock Records crowd. The Valley-based rockabilly label's leader, Rockin' Ronny Weiser, once rented a room in a bank to show a 16 mm print of "King Creole." Ronny wore yellow blue jeans and long sideburns and his hair greased back (1), and he was very excitable. During a musical number he jumped off a desk hollering "Aiyeeee" and broke his ankle.

By comparison to us, every character in "High Fidelity" seemed as suave as Cary Grant.

(1) Another guy was "Boppin' Bob" Hansen, who was quite noticeable in his coke-bottle thick glasses and greased hair and black leather jacket. I'll never forget parking my car on Hollywood Boulevard and my girlfriend looking to the right and elbowing me, "Look at THIS guy." "Bob!" I shouted, and waved. Bob kept on walking bec he couldn't see very well. She walked soon after.

Two Movies

Two movies I like have disappeared. Not from 1917, from the 1970s.

1. "Scarecrow In A Garden Of Cucumbers." I went to see "Groupies" at the Fox-Venice Theater in the mid-1970s, and this ran first. It was Holly Woodlawn as a girl who moves to New York from Ohio and encounters hardships. In the early part she plays a man! The movie was brilliant, and people, including me, stood up to cheer at times. It has completely vanished from the earth. Maybe I saw the only screening ever held.

2. "Love Is A Dog From Hell." Three Bukowski stories, from Belgium, in Flemish. It is erased from history.

Capital Thoughts

I capitalized "Elvis Birthday" up top. It was a personal choice, an honorarium. It's not 'right' in any style book (2) but mine.

But Thursday, January 2nd, 2003, in a New York Times book review, Janet Maslin wrote that the Motown name was "so well known that at least one computer (4) won't allow it to be typed with a lower-case M."

Huh? It MUST be capitalized. It's the name of a record company. "Motor City" was (and is) the known name for Detroit (only a dope would call it Motown), and nobody would write "motor city."

(2) On an allied note, a recent article about a judge who was chided by the bar for writing his decisions in the form of poems referred to him as "the poetic justice." Justification enough for the whole piece (3).

(3) "The whole piece" is the last, choral, line of what Freberg record?

(4) Gee, could that be HER computer?

More

Oops. More on "Tales From Detroit's Other Industry," Janet Maslin's review of Gerald Posner's "MOTOWN: Music, Money, Sex, and Power."

She praises Berry Gordy's craftiness with this:

"'Money,' written by Mr. Gordy, was designated Tamla 54027 even though it was only the label's eighth release."

He put a higher number on it. To make it seem like the label had more records out. So what's the big deal? I didn't start my checking account at #1 either. And furthermore, what were the previous Tamla numbers - 1,2,3,4,5,6,7? I honestly want to know!

And next graph, she is breathless at Gordy's savvy when he names his company Hitsville, when it hasn't had any hits. Like you'd put up a sign saying "No hits yet"?

OK, she's bent on a puff piece. But she should have known this:
"Money" was not on Tamla, it was on Anna (5).

Book-writer Posner didn't know it? Everyone I called did. Gordy RE-issued it on Tamla, later in its run. But it was not "issued" on Tamla.

Maslin must know plenty about movies bec that's her beat, but that leads - inevitably? - to music fact- and nuance-blindness. (We've established here irrefutably that "outsiders" always get music info wrong.)

Maybe she should be assigned a fact-checker for music stuff.

(5) With the less-cunning release number 1111.

Nothing New

I've noticed this malaise in my world of commerce: nobody seems to know nuthin'.

It's not just asking for stuff from 1955, like radio tubes. I go to Radio Shack and ask if the new Sprint phone has 80 numerical presets (6) like the Motorola I bought there 6 months earlier, and the guy says "No phone ever had that." In other words, "I've worked here three months. Anything before that is irrelevant." Heck, he might be right.

And my mother-in-law went into Costco and asked if the new cinnamon rolls were the same as the ones they discontinued in 2001. The baker blankly said "I don't know" like she was asking for dodo steaks. Nobody not only knows nuthin', nobody also remembers nuthin'.

It's not new. In her book "The White Album," Joan Didion, in Honolulu in 1977, asked a book store clerk for "From Here To Eternity," an important 1951 book set in Honolulu. The puzzled clerk, whom she called a "golden nitwit," suggested the psychic science dept. Dumb then, dumb now?

Not exactly. The problem is that as we, all of us, grow a day older, we grow a day wiser. We repeat things til they're rote, and the things we know are reinforced.

Store clerks, seemingly all of them, are 18-20. They know little, just like we knew little at that age (7). And each day, as a new 18-year-old blank slate enters the marketplace, a 65-year-old or something retires, so the average intelligence -- I actually mean experience -- of the marketplace drops. We individually, get a day smarter, as they, as a whole, get a day dumber.

The problem is we've lived too long. In the wild, people reproduced at 13 and died before 30. These inconveniences are nature's way of reminding us we're aberrations.

(6) It was a wonderful feature for me. Not that I could remember 80 codes, but if A's main number was Code 7, then his work would be Code 17, cell Code 27 etc. Music people were in the 50s. Relatives in the 60s. I love systems.

(7) I was dumb young AND today. When I left Chicago for Boulder in 1965, I looked on a map for Colorado, where I'd chosen to go to school. I thought it was down by Missouri. When we moved to Paris in 1997 I looked at a map of Europe for possibly the first time. I knew where England and Spain were and, vaguely, France. But where was Germany? I was shocked to learn that Switzerland bordered Italy.

Enter The Young

Young people's malleability makes them desirable employees. Their conscience is clear bec they don't know what's going on. When I go to my bank and learn that money orders, which formerly were free with a certain bank balance, are now $4.50, the young gal cheerfully chirps "It's our new policy!" like that explains it.

She has no clue; I have too many.

I still laugh thinking about when I drove a garbage truck (one day) in Boulder. The owner said if I ever smelled smoke in the back I should raise the bed and dump the contents no matter where I was. (The pneumatic and electrical lines inside were punishingly expensive.) I now marvel at the idea that I would have simply stopped the truck and dumped a ton of garbage on the car behind me if I had smelled smoke.

I would have. He told me to. I was a college graduate.

Useful Information

We bought our biggest-ever tv set, a 32-inch. (I don't believe in 36-inch; American broadcast definition is too soft for it.) But I noticed I wasn't getting the "big" punch of the rather-large screen when viewing movies in letterbox format.

I diagonally measured the visible area and learned that a letterboxed Cinemascope movie turns your 32-inch tv into a 19-inch with "wings."

Ads Nauseam

I hate soul yodelers who use a note as a starting point for an off-note avalanche.
It's scat-singing in the most literal sense.

I had never seen my point of view expressed til the ad for that phone service, featuring Hulk Hogan and Alf. A chanteuse is warbling all over the scale in that strangulation style, and Alf says "That's awful. Make her stop!" I almost made a 20-minute long-distance phone call in gratitude.

And there's a beer ad where a band asks if there's a bass-player in the house. The audience moans when nobody responds, and the middle-aged (8) fry cook puts down his towel, strolls out of the kitchen and grabs a bass and lets fly. Everybody's happy, and beer is drunk. (This may be an ad for jeans, or Wal-Mart. But who cares.)

And I'm happy, because I recognize the older guy as Lou Whitney of the Morells-cum-Skeletons.

(8) Someone recently pointed out - speculated? - defensively insisted? - that middle-age now begins at 60. I buy it.

The Boss

Springsteen is "the Boss." Is that good? The boss tells you what to do. The boss has power over you. Why cheer the boss? Sinatra was The Chairman of The Board. The CEO? Those are the guys who juggle the books and overpay themselves. We hoi polloi should listen to serf music.

But I also see misplaced worker-solidarity. At the bank, a woman asked a teller if there was a bathroom. The teller said, No, try the restaurant next door. The woman was angry: "I'm a customer here, why don't you offer restrooms?" The teller said, "We don't," like the woman was wrong asking. The woman left with unkind words for the bank. The guy in front of me got to the teller and said, shaking his head, "I guess you get all kinds in here." The teller sighed, yes.

I thought, Why the hell CAN'T they supply restrooms for customers? When I got up to the window I said, quietly, "You know, you really owe your customers rest rooms." She said, quietly, nothing.

Am I wrong? Am I Warren Zevon, "Mister Bad Attitude"?

I was second in line at Taco Bell. The woman customer at the window asked for a drink cup and the clerk put her thumb solidly inside one and handed it to her. The customer said "Look, could you please hand me a cup WITHOUT putting your thumb in it?" The clerk, not familiar with hygiene or English, put her thumb in another cup and handed it. "PLEASE," the woman said, "DON'T put your thumb inside the cup." The woman put her thumb in a third cup. "HOW ELSE CAN I SAY TO YOU, MISS? I DON'T WANT YOUR FINGER IN MY CUP."

The working class hero in front of me then bellowed to the customer, "Why are you giving her such a hard time? The woman's only trying to do her job!"

He was lucky he made the choice of being bigger than me, or I might've hurt him.

Poker Party

Did two shows with Paul Krassner recently. Sometimes I can hardly believe I know this guy who I idolized in the 60s. Matter of fact, the three guys I admired most then were not-tall Jewish guys: Krassner, Phil Spector, and Bob Dylan. Krassner for the political satire (he had formerly worked for Mad magazine, which is only now plain to me), Spector for the music and swagger, and Dylan for the hair.

The latter two have not yet been on the Poker Party, but I can dream.

Throw The Bums A Dime, Past My Prime

I save cans and bottles, and periodically load 4 or 5 bags into my car and seek bums. In Hollywood, USA, that would hardly seem difficult, but, like a cop, try and find a bum when you need one. Sometimes I drive around for a week with a trunk full.

Record News

My albums are stacked on end: only a nut would pile them horizontally.
A few years ago someone said, "Do you turn them once in a while?"

"Turn them?"
"Yeah. Pull the album out and move it a quarter turn."
"What for?"
"Well the album's weight is going on the bottom edge isn't it? After a few years it will form a lip."

Like I don't have enough to worry about.

In 1982 a music magazine editor in New York showed me his music collection. Like most record collectors, all his 45s were non-hits: twelve Brian Hyland singles but no "Itsy Bitsy TWYP-DB." He showed me his custom-tapes. I saw a 60-minute cassette holding 2 albums: Supremes "Talk of the Town" and "A Little Bit Of Liverpool."

"Well, Adam" I said, "I know those albums aren't 30 minutes each. What do you do with the spare minutes of tape? Put on singles?"

"Oh, no" he said. "I pair up albums that are exactly the same length."

"But then you have, you know, several minutes left on each side."

"No. When I finish taping one side, I open the cassette and cut off the remaining tape, and re-attach it to the hub."

His wife, suddenly ashen, said "I...didn't....know...that..."

How History is Written - again

In the 1970s I got a 50's record by Jimmy Stringer & The Sabers. It was on a Vidalia, Georgia label, and had that unmistakable Jerry Lee Lewis left hand. A friend said "All those Lewis cousins had that sound. Maybe that was Jimmy Swaggart trying his luck at secular music." I liked that. I mentioned it to some friends as a delicious postulation.

A year later one of them wrote a book about tv ministers and said "Don't forget Jimmy Swaggart's rock record, which he did under another name." This information was credited to me! The Swaggart people wrote to my friend and said "This is preposterous! Who is this Fein person and where does he get his information?"

It wasn't the first or last time someone said that.

Songwriting Tip

My friend Scott put out an album in the late 70s. One song he wrote was called "Leroy."

No one bought Scott's album, that I'm sure of. But he proudly showed me a BMI report showing airplay for "Leroy" in Holland.

I thought for a second, then said, "You know, there's another song called 'Leroy."

"Yeah, by Jack Scott."
"Scott, like you."
"Yeah, but Scott is my first name."
"Unless they have it inverted."
"Nah, they love me in Holland."

I made this connection bec a friend of mine registered a song called "Yesterday" or "Come Together" or "Blue Moon," and every once in a while he gets an errant royalty check for airplay on his unrecorded song.

I wish my dad, Sam, had thought of this: Sammy Fain wrote a lot of hits.

- 57 -

Art Fein