Poker Party Store Buy Art's Stuff !

Doug

Doug Fieger’s death on February 14th hit some people hard. While I was one of the hard-hit, I was surprised at the number of people who sent me condolences. I had Doug on my show 40 times, but other people were on more. I ran photos of me and him at Astro-Burger every so often, but it wasn’t a signal that we were joined at the hip. I didn’t begin every sentence with “Did you hear what Doug did?” because I didn’t know what he did most of the time. Maybe my affection for him just showed.

In 1991 Todd Everett introduced us at a restaurant on La Brea and we sorta took off from there. In 1992 we went to the Moon Racing Christmas party in Santa Fe Springs to see Ed Big Daddy Roth sign t-shirts and drawings. Went to the last day of C.C. Browns ice cream parlor. We went together to SXSW in 1995. In 1997 he was the only guest at my daughter’s 6th birthday party in Paris. He came along on a lot of my safaris to see bands and eccentrics.

When my friend Frank Sprague asked him to do harmony on a song he was recording in his living room, Doug said “Sure.” When one of the Heaters, with whom the Knack were co-billed in the late 70s, started the band up again in 1995, Doug recorded one of their songs. And when the Knack was recording the “Normal As the Next Guy” album he asked me to play accordion on the wonderful cut “Les Girls, not because I was good but because I had one. I contributed a 30-second part with only 17 patches. And of course, he joined me on the tv show and contributed eagerly when just sitting around with the guys or interviewing Hal Blaine, Larry Levine or other historical figures.

Also, he was a regular player at my annual Elvis Bday shows for many, many years. (I remember warmly his off-topic tributes to the deaths of Frank Zappa and Randy California at these supposedly-secular, but not, shows.) His singing and playing truly rocked the proceedings, and everyone held him in high regard. Not to mention the 1996 appearance of the Knack at the Elvis show, which brought the house down: they got the loudest reception I heard in 25 years of shows.

Sounds like we did a lot, though it wasn’t if you simply measure time. But in quality and laughs and bonhomie it added up to quite a bit.

I paid no attention to the Knack in 1979 aside from hearing the hit and the press flak that followed; I was focussed on the developing rockabilly scene that soon overtook the world for two months. It was in retrospect that I understood what part “My Sharona” played in the scheme of things, that in a music world drenched and drowning in disco, “Sharona” was a blast that brought rock & roll back into play. I heard so many kids attest to the impact of that record that I gained, belatedly, a full understanding of it.

But with a life of Knack half-awareness I had no idea of depth of the band until the 1999 “Zoom” album on Rhino. Doug brought the CD over fresh from the record company and played it in my living room. Sitting with someone whose music is playing can be uncomfortable and I wasn’t eager to be in that spot, but I steeled myself for the unknown music.

The opening cut, “Pop Is Dead,” hit me like a freight train. It was so sensational, so exhilarating, so GOOD I plotzed: did Doug, my friend, and the Knack, produce this magical music? I was dizzy. More songs poured out, one good one tumbling out after another.

I didn’t know how to react. I knew Doug as my friend, a civilian, earthbound like me - where did THIS come from? It added another feeling to our relationship - fright. Did he have other hidden powers? Was he SUPERMAN?

No matter that the album went unnoticed in a world in change, he and the band had the knack to create a masterpiece. Like the kids from 1979 I was bowled over by the Knack’s new and powerful presence.

When the first cancer was discovered in 2004, he wasn’t worried; half a lung was removed and that seemed to be that. Then brain tumors (brain lung tumors) emerged and worries set in. As they were treated and ultimately banished (by whole-brain radiation, summer 2009), other spots arose and multiplied throughout his body. He took a year or two of weekly chemo bravely but was ill six days out of seven. When a final regiment of chemo, itself, nearly killed him he stopped treatment, knowing the consequence. ‘It is what it is’ he always said.

Tuesday before his passing we sat, with others, in his dining room and he asked for an Entemann’s donut from the box bought at his request. A woman or two demurred saying “Those things are plastic. How can you eat them?” “What have I got to lose now?” he said. I, too, took one and he said “See? I’m not the only one.” I called for a toast, and Doug and I bumped donuts. Glee lit his face at the absurdity (and maybe the notion of two guys bumping donuts).

On Thurday, D-day minus three, I went to his bedside to say hello. He opened his eyes a little bit and said “Art, I know you’re not the most ... affectionate guy in the world, but I want you to know I love you.” Employing a touch of the Martin & Lewis lore we both loved, I said “I love you, too, Pally.”

The ‘unaffectionate’ thing was that I’m not a natural hugger. I never know who hugs who. I’ve had a circle of a half dozen friends for 35 years and none of us have ever hugged, not even when one of us died. So he thought I was unemotional.

You would have thought that for a while, too, the day he died. I got to the house 3 hours after it happened, and was greeted with warm forced smiles by redeyed people. Shuffling around not knowing what to do, I was invited upstairs to see his body. “No thanks” I said, and Ed the caregiver said “Come on, you need to do this.” In death he looked just like the day before only stiller. I did not cry, then or downstairs.

But when the mortuary people called and said they were on their way, two women went upstairs and tucked his shroud: “He was such a fussy dresser, he would have wanted it this way.”

When the body was carried down and put on the gurney (?) the reality overwhelmed me. But it wasn’t ‘til it was wheeled away followed by people chanting and singing the Beatles’ “Blackbird” that my composure crumbled. As it does now, writing this.

A while later I was handed an envelope. In it was a Valentines Day card from Doug. “He wanted me to give it to you in case he didn’t make it through today.” It showed a bunch of monkeys watching tv.

My pal.

... Photo Album

Another Fein Mess
A.F. Stone’s Monthly
March 2010

Face the Music

* The night after Doug’s death I went out to a club to maybe shake off the pallor. Ruby Friedman, unknown to me, had been hectoring me (and the world) with her “See my show” notices on Facebook, but this night my resistance was as low as my spirit so I went to the Hotel Cafe and handed over a sawbuck on the remote chance I’d be slightly, maybe a little, cheered up. Holyfrigginmotherooney was that a good idea. She, wearing a tiara to drive home the JP idea, rocked the place with a 5 piece band - keyboard, drum, guitar, bass, and trombone - in an onslaught that fairly flattened me. I don’t think I have ever heard a voice that strong. The Bette Midler comparison comes easily, but this was driving, exhilarating pop-rock. I was so happy, so blown away by it, that I dragged a friend to see her 10 days later at a club atop Hollywood/Highland. He was as impressed as I was. (“Melanie on steroids with Buffy Ste. Marie’s vibratto” I think he said.) What a thrill to find something so great and new - this was only her 20th show.

* Mid-month I went to the Egyptian Theater to see a double-feature I wouldn’t til now be caught dead at: “Muscle Beach Party: and “Bikini Beach Party.” The huge-screen showing was the first time many of those films’ fans had ever seen them projected. My seatmate Domenic Priore was duly thrilled and provided running commentary: “The guy in the striped shirt is Gary Usher,” “that guy there is Mickey Dora.” Singer Donna Loren, who appeared in both films (and had a longstanding spot on Shindig) was interviewed between flicks by Sheryl Farber, and sang a couple of songs. With the magnification available you could see just how helmet-headed Frankie and Annette were: their plastic hair-hats rivalled Big Boy’s. Still, given the passage of time I enjoyed the films, anthropologically at least, and got to put another notch in my Timothy Carey belt. (And also, I was shocked to realize I recognized beach girl Donna Michelle from her then-recent appearance as Playmate of the Month.)

* February 19th marked the reemergence from hibernation of the full-scale Chuck E. Weiss & The Goddam Liars. Playing at the small Piano Bar on Selma near Wilcox in Hollywood, they were back in the groove they established playing for 10 years at the Viper Room back when it was the Central. (They had a Monday night slot there, and I attended approximately 52 of their shows a year.) You can’t explain the show easily. He is a white ‘kid’ singing blues, New Orleans-based not unlike Dr. John, but without the handicaps that face most whiteboy blues acts. He is genuinely ... ungenuine, just wailing and jumping with a very special style that cannot be lumped with others’. The joint was rocking. I figure 20% were recidivists like me, the rest newcomers. Smiles were plastered on every face in the room and by the end when Carlos Guitarlos and George Thorogood joined in it wasn’t any better, it just continued being sensational.

PHOTOS

Chuck asks George to join the fun.

Thorogood plays, Chuck snaps fingers, Carlos sings.

-------------------------

Oh No, Not Another ....

On February 24th I got youtube comments on the Topa Twisters songs -- “Damon Kaye, RIP.” What kind of twisted joke was it? No joke. Damon, who’d played for me with the Topa Twisters at Club Lingerie, on my Rockabilly Bandstand tv extravaganza in 1988 and with Ian Espinoza as the Domino Brothers, had died. This was 6 weeks after he’d reunited the Topa Twisters for the Elvis show. Terrible, terrible news.



Me and Damon, Raji's, Hollywood, 1989


Politics

* I wrote to my friend at SXSW, “Our shame is now yours. Kenneth Starr is moving from Pepperdine University in Malibu to Baylor in Waco.” He replied “That’s in Texas. I live in Austin.”

* 2-20 L.A.. Times - More on Arizona speed cameras. People there have shimmied up poles and blackened camera lenses! Alright! On a tv report boosting redlight cameras here, they showed a car plowing into a motorcycle on a red light and a light-runner broadsiding a greenlighted car. Which proves? That the cameras do no good, just provide evidence of accidents they haven’t prevented.

* I’m thinking of running for mayor again. Thinking again, I mean.My platform: Elected officials take a 30% pay cut, in sympathy with fired and laid-off workers. I’m registering with the Poker Party.

Music Over Time

When you look up Eddie Lawrence records on ebay, Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence pop up. But so do 45’s by Steve Lawrence and EDDIE Gorme! (Is that what’s bothering you, Bunky?) ... In a 2004 movie set in 1972, two teenage lovers lay in a bed while music plays, and the camera sweeps to a record player with the tone arm wobbling meaninglessly in the runoff groove ... In the 1980 UK tv movie “Deep Cover,” a teenage girl retreats to her room and listens to ‘Rockabilly Rebel’ by Matchbox. What a quark! That record actually topped the UK charts in mid-1979, and I was there when some people thought that rockabilly would take over the world ... I recently heard two lyrics for the first time. One was “If I Were a Carpenter.” Actually, I had to ask a songwriter about the line “If I were your colored boss.” Turns out it’s “color box.” Huh? And half-listening at a drug store I heard “Bus Stop” by the Hollies and suddenly heard “thinking of a sweet romance, beginning in a queue.” Hell, I never knew what he said, thought it was something like ‘last June.’ Darn Briticisms .... Perusing a double-CD of Nappy Brown, I heard the first couple seconds of the early-1956 song “Open Up That Door” and nearly fell off my chair. It was the musical opening to Buchanan & Goodman’s “Flying Saucers”...

Open Up That Door -- Nappy Brown

Life’s Little Irritations

On SNL “news” Feb 27, a correspondent says “Look at this youtube clip on my computer” and then it takes a long time to load, and then freezes, while the other guy sits in uncomfortable silence.

Do they read my mind there? (Not much, judging from their skits.) When someone closes a book and says “Come over here, I have to show you something” I refuse til they’ve found it. If that person is a close relative I must come, and 10 times out of 10 they start to search saying “I think it was right here.” Not that I’m impatient but IT ALWAYS WORKS THAT WAY.

Ya Gotta Admit

There’s a certain symmetry to the insurance company’s argument that its high prices caused people to cancel their health insurance so they have to raise their prices.

There are a dozen different insurance company ads wallpapering tv - the Allstate spokesman, the gekko. But the nurse in the arctic Wal-Mart is the worst, offering personal interaction with shoppers when the company exists online only to take your money electronically, there is no store, no chirpy 50’s style girl. It’s so cynical.

-----------------------

More Rockin’ Pics

James Intveld holds the floor Feb 13 at Joe’s American Bar & Grill in Burbank.

Jimmy Angel rocks Viva Fresh in Burbank Feb 21st at Jonny Whiteside’s Sunday must-go. Dave Raven drums, Harry Orlove strums.

Harry poses with his daughter Charlotte and our late friend Doug Fieger at Elvis Birthday Bash, Jan 8, 2008



The Believers do a mid-December fill-in date on their western tour at the 322 Club in Sierra Madre.

“Columbo” Tech Notes

- In a Robert Culp episode, the murder was committed with a .22 caliber bullet, but Culp’s guns were .32’s. At the end, Columbo finds a long tube in a lamp, and deduced it had been inserted in the barrel of the .32 to convert it to the smaller caliber. Is this actually possible? I saw the episode 5 times before I could figure what they were talking about.

- In the Jackie Cooper episode Columbo writes a counter check to the gas station guy. That is a blank check kept by merchants, for you to fill in the bank name and the account number. Different times!

- Jack Cassidy is outed as a Nazi by Columbo reading, up and down and backwards, the letters removed from the carbon ribbon in the IBM typewriter. (When struck, they left a shadow, and were not re-strikeable.) Who the hell can understand that now?

- In the Vera Miles episode he sees a phone with a slot and a plastic card with punch-outs. You insert the card in the slot and it will dial a phone number for you. It was amazing! I still want one.

- In the Nicol Williamson episode, Columbo picks up a phone still ‘open’ after the guy is chewed up by dogs and recognizes the incoming-call signal tone, different from a dial-out signal. This is news to me.

- In the Dick Van Dyke episode, preposterousness is the linchpin. Columbo is amazed to learn that photos came from negatives.

- In a later William Shatner episode, he is found to not have been able to make the cellphone call he claimed because Columbo drives his own car round the Malibu Hills and gets no reception.

- In the Theodore Bikel episode, he places a marking pen by a tone arm on a turntable, which falls and knocks a book off a stand, which precedes the trigger being automatically pulled back a gun. Some tone arm! Must’ve been written by Rube Goldberg.

Quotes

(-) Towering gall (but is it mitigated?). Food-writer Barry Glassner in the NY Times last year discovers watermelon - “an antioxidant food,” “long associated with lower caste African Americans” “recast as an ideal food for white folks.” Where did they find this nit who thinks no white person has ever eaten watermelon? Under a rock?

(-) In the 2-27 L.A. Times, a long front page article about a young woman who rides the bus. Really. She “has a quick grin, long, brown hair and a penchant for bright-colored clothes” you’ll want to know so you can spot her. A photographer rode with her on this perilous expedition. Who turned the paper over to babies?

(-) 2-11 L.A. Times, Rene Lynch opener: “As a woman, I know I’m supposed to swoon at the sight of chocolate.” No, as an idiot.

(+) T. Coraghessan Boyle in the 6-7-09 NY Times called Updike “Our spy in the house of old.”

Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Avoid Cliched Heds

LAT 2-27 “She curbed her enthusiasm - for cars”
LAT 2-28 “Mostly Ready for its close-up” (a new hotel in Hollywood)
NYT 2-27 “Heroes of DC Comics Get Ready for Closeup”
NYT 2-27 “Coming-of-Age Filmgoers: You’re Not in Kansas Anymore”
LAT 2-2 “Life in La La La Land” (Nobody HERE should use this drizzling derogator)

True Colors

In 1989, a gal I knew from Canada observed that everyone in L.A., in the music/club crowd, dressed in black. She thought it was stupid. Today, a whole new generation marches to that same color tune. Is it symbolic - has there been a pall across the land for that long?

I dunno, but it sure isn’t the 60s anymore, palettically speaking. Black still garbs sadly-called hipsters, and also cars. Look on the highway: 95% of cars are black, white and silver/grey.

But on an up note, it’s the best time in history to be colorblind.

Simps

Neal Gabler, in the 1-23-10 L.A. Times, tells us that the Leno-O’Brien flap 1 is a struggle between “younger, hipper 2” people (O’Brien) and “older, statelier ones” (Leno). The childishness is adorable. Post-30’s are so awesome they are stately. Grownups get to be that.

“Young vs. old, cool vs. uncool” writes young (I’ll betcha!) Gobbler with a sandbox enthusiasm that makes a full-brained person goes “Awww.” The long, thin piece is loaded with rockheadedness: “Everyone agreed” one thing, “a lot of people” thought something, Leno was “your grandmother’s comedian” and O’Brien’s stints with the Simpsons and SNL, well - ”It didn’t get any cooler than that.” From the mouths of babes.

1 I liked ‘kerfuffle’ for a while, but it’s done. Brouhaha is OK.

2 Are there old hip people? C’est imposible!

Some Losses Are Improvements

Recently I wrote a personal email to someone and somehow copied another person. It was a tad embarrassing. I asked them to erase it, and I suppose they did.

But I didn’t shake or shiver. I am just grateful that “Copy All” is no longer an easily hit email button.

Discomfort

On one of my tv shows I threw this out..

“We’re all gay, aren’t we?”
- What? Like we have male and female characteristics?
“No. We have no jobs. We jabber about old records on tv. Who has a gayer life than we?”
- Oh.
“Our conversation, is it not queer? Who do you see on tv talking about the junk we talk about?”
- Great.
“I mean, we’re having homosexual relations, right? No women here.”
- Uh huh.
“Seriously. I drove here with Joe. On the way I wanted to stop at 7-11 but he insisted we go to Safeway. Finally I gave him his head.”
- Right.
But for that, I made him blow me to lunch.
- Can we stop now?

Doug’s Last Laugh

When I went with his sister to get his ashes, she took the box and I carried her bag. “Is it heavy?” I asked.

Beth, seizing the straight line, paused nary a second, smiled and said “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother!”

- 57 -

Mark Is Motionless This Month