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CounterPunch
February
8, 2003
Rebel Angel: a memoir
Dive Bomber
By DAVID VEST
My high school years were spent running back and
forth from classroom to bandstand, at first in theaters, gymnasiums
and concert halls but increasingly in smoky dives. I would often
arrive back in town from a road trip just in time to rush to
class still wearing the clothes I had performed in. My schoolmates
were interested in cars, sports, dances, games and movie stars.
I cared little for any of those things and felt utterly alienated
from my peers, who for the most part left me alone to do my thing.
I just wanted to rock.
By the time I graduated, I had been shot
at (outside a club called the Chicken Shack, in a case of mistaken
identity), stalked (by a woman in a wheelchair who saw me at
a concert and pursued me relentlessly for months), and carried
off the stage too drunk to leave under my own power by a club
owner who intended for his daughter to marry me the minute either
of us turned 16. I had toured summertime Georgia by bus and the
wintry mountains of East Tennessee in a car with no heater or
defroster. I had arrived at primitive churches in a reconditioned
Chrysler hearse (now a "limousine") only to be condemned
from the pulpit for my ability to stop my leg from twitching
when I played the piano. Yet I sat quietly in English class,
rode the Trailways charter to New York and back on our senior
class trip, sang "Battle Hymn of the Republic" with
the glee club, collected my diploma and went out and got a day
job moving pianos.
I lasted three weeks. A co-worker and
I shoved an enormous upright grand up three flights of marble
stairs at the Elks Building, only to learn that we'd been sent
to the wrong address.
So much for the working world. I moved
down to Birmingham and joined a working band, Jerry Woodard and
the Esquires. We played seven nights a week at Pappy's Club,
eight hours a night except Saturdays, when we stopped at midnight.
I had made thirty bucks a week moving pianos. Now they were paying
me eighty to sit at one. We went from Birmingham to Pensacola
for a few months at the Southland Club, where I jammed with the
Tommy Dorsey Band (Lee Castle was leading it by then), Bobby
Goldsboro and Bill Black's Combo, drank Old Charter with Ace
Cannon, and saw Cotton Watts, a comedian on the southern circuit
who had appeared in an Ed Wood film ("Jail Bait") and,
incredibly, still performed in Blackface in the 1960s.
I saw Watts by default. A friend of mine,
a stripper, had taken me to see a competitor. We had left in
an aesthetic huff (hers, not mine) when the performer came onstage
and proceeded to remove her long white gloves. "Amateur!
Fucking amateur!" hissed my companion. "Any professional
knows you take the gloves off last. When they see your arms,
the show's over." So we had wandered around the block and
into another club to watch the aging Watts gamely fend off hecklers,
armed with nothing but material at least fifty years old ("I
thought I told you to stay in the truck!").
From Pensacola the Esquires went to Atlanta,
where I watched my first presidential press conference on TV
while eating a hot dog at the Varsity and met Lillian Barker,
a ghostwriter, war correspondent, official biographer for the
Dionne quintuplets and bitter rival of Margaret Mitchell. Barker
had interviewed Adolph Hitler for a New York paper (was it the
Trib?). On her way to Germany she stopped in Paris and consulted
a fortune teller who, as Barker told me, "knew where I was
going and what for."
"Ask him if he remembers me,"
said the clairvoyant.
Against her better judgment, Barker brought
up the subject at the end of her interview. To her amazement
Hitler confirmed the fortune teller's claim. The woman had told
him "everything that would come to pass," he said.
However, she had predicted that it would all come to a bad end,
which showed you the "limits of such foolishness."
A pity that anthologies of female war
correspondents always seem to omit Lillian Barker.
After a dispute over money, I quit the
band and returned to Birmingham. The Esquires were later in a
movie ("Toys in the Attic") for about two seconds.
When I saw the film I was surprised to see my own photo leering
over Dean Martin's shoulder in one scene.
In Birmingham I gigged six nights a week
at Bryan's Lounge downtown until 2:00 a.m., slept a couple of
hours, then did a live television show weekday mornings at 6:00
a.m. before rushing off to classes at Birmingham-Southern College.
Legendary underground cartoonist Howard Cruse and novelist Robert
Houston were classmates. We studied creative writing with Richbourg
Gaillard McWilliams, who had been department chairman since 1921
and could remember the name of everyone who had made an "A"
in his classes.
I had some interesting "classmates"
on the TV show, too. There were lively conversations with guests
who came on the show to plug movies or recordings. Slim Pickens,
there to plug a re-make of "Stagecoach," seemed embarrassed
by his role in "Dr. Strangelove" when I asked him about
it. "That was a strange movie," he said. "Most
people like me better in westerns." Jock Mahoney told me
he had been nearly devoured by tsetse flies while filming a Tarzan
picture in Africa. Ralph and Carter Stanley gave me a copy of
their latest 45 rpm record. I still have it. Richard and Jim,
a great folk-country duo, were semi-regular guests.
But it was two women who really made
my time at WBRC-TV memorable. Fannie Flagg was hired to give
the weather report and turned her segment into probably the first
slapstick weathergirl routine, falling off the stool, poking
herself in the eye with the pointer and cheerily predicting sunshine
when the entire viewing area was being pounded by hailstorms
and tornadoes.
Fannie and I did a show together at the
Little Theater. James Hatcher directed it. He adored Fannie and
tolerated me, usually not well enough to speak to me directly.
He preferred to address others in my presence, saying things
like, "Listen, Sweet-Ass, why doesn't someone should tell
this man that the days of the sallow young pianist are over?"
The show was a big success and got a rave review from the Birmingham
News. There was only one problem with the review: it appeared
in the paper a day before the actual show occurred. The critic,
eager to get off on vacation, had filed early and fled. At any
rate, he called me, sight unseen and note unheard, a "dazzling
virtuoso pianist."
The other woman was Wynette Byrd, later
to become world-famous as Tammy Wynette, the First Lady of Country
Music. She was working as a hair stylist when she got up the
nerve to come up to the station one morning and ask to sing on
the show. She quickly became a regular. I've written extensively
about my relationship with her (<www.rebelangel.com> <http://www.rebelangel.com/>
), but I don't believe I've mentioned that we were each paid
the princely sum of $35 for five shows a week at WBRC. Not $35
per show, $35 for all five of them, plus an extra show that we
videotaped on Fridays for a Saturday morning slot.
Occasionally we would drive down to Montgomery
after the show and tape a week's worth of shows there for an
extra $35. That's where I met Wiley Walker, who wrote "When
My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again," a song Elvis recorded
for his second album.
Elvis also recorded a number written
by Ted Brooks, a great guitar player from Birmingham with whom
I worked for a couple of years. Ted also wrote tunes for Al Martino,
Eddie Arnold and Wanda Jackson. He took me to Nashville with
him and introduced me to Arnold, Red Foley and Jack Clement.
Over dinner at an underground restaurant, Clement told us of
his recent discovery, a Black country singer named Charlie pride.
While gigging with Ted at the Gulas Restaurant,
I met a woman named Flo, a waitress there, and struck up a friendship
with her. She came from Sand Mountain and was sister to the Louvin
Brothers. I remember the night the highway patrol came into the
club and asked to speak with her. She went into the manager's
office with them. After a few moments she came back out and resumed
waiting tables until the night was over. I gave her a lift home
and we had a few drinks together before I remembered to ask her
what the official visit was all about. I was thinking that maybe
she had bounced a check here and there or failed to pay a traffic
ticket.
"Oh, they just wanted to show me
some pictures," she said.
"Pictures of what?"
"My brother. It was pictures of
my brother."
Ira Louvin had been killed in a car wreck
that night. The officers had asked her to make "positive
identification" from grisly black-and-white photos taken
at the scene.
A day or so later, when I heard Roy Acuff
sing "Wreck on the Highway," it sounded unbearably
sanctimonious to me. "I heard the crash on the highway,
but I didn't hear nobody pray," he complained, and I couldn't
help wondering, "What the hell were YOU doing?"
I supplemented my meager income with
a few happy hour gigs at the Birmingham Country Club, playing
dinner music for the patrons while the manager gave tours to
prospective members. On my last day there I heard him tell one
couple that the BCC had provided "full service" even
during the darkest days of World War II (i.e., while my father
was starving in a POW camp) and had never "knowingly served
or admitted a Jew."
Next: I discover
politics.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
Today's Features
Linda Heard
Powell
at the UN: Spiel, Stunts and Special Effects
Anthony Gancarski
Peggy
Noonan, Space Case
The Columbia and the Manufacture of Tragedy
Robert Fisk
You Wanted
to Believe Him: Powell Does Beckett
Robert Jensen
Powell
at the UN:
Smoking Guns and Big Guns
William Hughes
Colin
Powell's Big Flop
Ali Abunimah
Dissecting Powell's Speech:
Hearsay and Old Allegations
Phyllis Bennis
Powell vs. Blix
The Case for War Remains Unmade
Rahul Mahajan
Responding
to Colin Powell
Is This All You've Got?
Paul de Rooij
Where Are the Incubators, Gen. Powell?
Website of the Day
Iraq:
the War Game
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