Both of these chapters from my proposed book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1) have already appeared separately on this blog. They're combined here today as they will appear in sequence in the book.
In memory of my oldest brother. Safe travels, Art.
Written by Sonny Curtis
Produced by Bob Keane
Single, Mustang Records, 1965
In 1966, my brother Art had a red Alfa Romeo. I'm told it was a shitty car, and I remember its ignominious final days in his possession: a scarlet husk parked, prone, lying in state beyond the shed at the end of our back yard. Collecting dust, collecting rust. A tow truck came to whisk this luckless scarlet husk to its final reward.
But my prevailing memory of this doomed vehicle is a happy one. The memory involves the consumption of Royal Crown Cola, or possibly a root beer and Teen Burger at the nearby A & W Drive-In. The memory absolutely involves the car's one true immortal virtue: Its radio.
That radio? When I was six years old, I thought that radio was magic.
I mean, it must have been magic. There were songs I heard on that car's radio that I never heard anywhere else. But it was a different magic than I imagined; it was Syracuse's 1260 WNDR-AM. Set to 1260, the Alfa Romeo played "I Like It Like That" by the Dave Clark Five, a record that--to me--only existed in Art’s star-crossed Alfa Romeo. Even better, it played--often!--another irresistible exclusive: "I Fought the Law" by the Bobby Fuller Four.
My visceral memory of that terrific song remains inextricably linked to those moments in my brother's Alfa Romeo, of drums, guitars, and a singer bemoaning his fate of breakin' rocks in the hot sun, all pouring forth from the little car's speakers as my big brother cruised suburban streets with his pesky kid brother on board. It's indelible, and I embrace and cherish its vivid image.
A decade and change passed. In 1978, I was finishing my freshman year in college, and immersing myself in the rockin' pop of the sixties and the then-contemporary sounds of punk, new wave, and power pop. In this joyous crucible of discovery and rediscovery, "I Fought The Law" was ripe to reclaim.
I don't know if it occurred to me that the Bobby Fuller Four might have had more than just one great song. Nor did I know that Bobby Fuller himself was dead, and I didn't know anything at all about the suspicious circumstances surrounding his demise. The opportunity to learn about all of this would not present itself until after I graduated from college in 1980.
In 1981, my girlfriend and I were living in an apartment in Brockport. She would graduate that spring, and I'd already leveraged my Bachelor of Arts degree into full-time employment at McDonald's. Success! And rent money, as well as cash for beer and food and beer, and to keep buying music at Main Street Records.
I snapped up Rhino Records' Best of the Bobby Fuller Four compilation. By then, I knew two of its songs, “I Fought The Law” and “Let Her Dance.” It was high time to know more: "Only When I Dream," "Don't Let Me Know," Buddy Holly's "Love's Made a Fool Of You," the Eddie Cochran ripof..er, tribute "Saturday Night," and a trifecta of absolute gems--"Another Sad and Lonely Night," "Fool of Love," and "Never to Be Forgotten"--that could rival "Let Her Dance" and "I Fought the Law" as surefire radio-ready triumphs. How in the name of all that's percolatin' could the Bobby Fuller Four have wound up as mere one-hit wonders...?!
I was twenty-one years old in 1981. I lived inside my pop music. I was also living in the (overrated) real world for the first time, trying to reconcile the frequently conflicting promise of art and the demands of responsibility, adulthood. It can be a difficult line to tread, an ongoing balancing act between the dreams we dream and the clocks we punch. Doing what we have to keeps things going; doing what we want to keeps us going.
Bobby Fuller wasn't much older than that when he died in the summer of '66: a pop star three months shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, a West Texas kid who hit the big time, a rising star with a Billboard smash on his résumé and the world at his feet. The liner notes to Best of the Bobby Fuller Four offered my first hint of his tragic story. Bobby had talent. Bobby had good looks. Bobby had a string of pretty young things on his arm. And on July 18th, 1966, Bobby's body was found slumped in his car outside his apartment in Hollywood. He had been beaten. He had been doused with gasoline. The authorities ruled his death a suicide (later amended to "accidental").
Right.
The record business is big and brutal. And where there's money, there is often organized crime. Ask Tommy James. Or ask Miriam Linna, co-author (with Bobby's brother Randell Fuller) of the book I Fought the Law: The Life and Strange Death of Bobby Fuller. The book suggests that Bobby Fuller was killed by the mob. Sound crazy? Really, crazier than suicide by beating oneself and bathing in gasoline? I'm not one for conspiracy theories. Elvis is dead. Paul is alive. Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. 9/11 was a terrorist attack. Oswald may well have acted alone. I find tinfoil hats unbecoming.
And I also believe the mob killed Bobby Fuller, whether over business (likely) or for revenge on Bobby for dallying with an attractive woman whose dallying allegiance was presumed to already belong exclusively to an underworld boss. Whatever actually happened to Fuller, it's a safe bet it wasn't self-inflicted.
The sordid tale of Fuller's end, as sad and frustrating as it remains, can't dilute the prevailing appeal of his music. Listening to Best of the Bobby Fuller Four was my first real evidence that there could be more--much more--to an act that show biz writes off as a one-hit wonder.
I no longer own my copy of that LP; it was replaced many years ago by a CD that contained even more great Bobby Fuller tracks, and that CD was replaced by the five discs of Bobby Fuller material that now sit proudly on my shelf at home. Fool of love. Another sad and lonely night. Let her dance all night long. Never to be forgotten.
My road to appreciating the bounty of the Bobby Fuller Four began in earnest with Best of the Bobby Fuller Four in 1981. But the road truly began on the road, literally, back in '66: when the magic radio in my brother's unreliable but valiant red Alfa Romeo played a song I could never hear anywhere else. The law didn't win this one, I fear. I needed money 'cause I had none. No time off for good behavior, no chance for parole. I guess my race is run. Only a record on the radio could set us free.
Written by Merle Haggard
Produced by Ken Nelson
Single, Capitol Records, 1968
One of the rules of the road is that the driver controls the radio. My brother Art was driving. That meant the radio would be playing country music.
It was 2004. My brother Rob had driven from his home in Albany to meet up with me in Syracuse. I took the wheel of my car (and my radio) to drive us from Syracuse to Columbus, where Art lived. From there, the three of us traveled in Art's car. Contemporary country music provided the soundtrack for our final trip to Missouri.
It wasn't our first trip. We'd been there individually and collectively many, many times over the years. Our mom was born in Southwestern Missouri, and our grandparents had remained there. Art and Rob are older than me, so most of their family visits to the Show Me State occurred before I came along. By the mid-sixties, summer trips to Missouri involved just me, my sister Denise, and Mom, with Dad remaining in Syracuse. Within a few years, it was just Mom and I making that trek, as Dad and all of the older siblings had responsibilities elsewhere. The whole family went to Missouri for Christmas in 1970. It's the only time I remember all of us being there.
In 2004, Mom and Dad were already in Missouri as Art, Rob, and I made our way West. Denise had moved to England, too far away to accompany us. Grampa had passed away years before. And now Grandma was gone as well. My brothers and I would be pall bearers. Country music played on the radio. The driver controls the radio.
I hate country music. Sometimes I'm lying (or at least kidding myself) when I say that, and sometimes it's the truth. Three chords and the truth. You'd think a love of country and western would be an innate characteristic of a boy whose mother hailed from the buckle of the Bible belt. 'Tain't so. Art and Rob love country music. Denise and I do not.
It wasn't always like that. As a kid, one of my very favorite records was Ben Colder's "Ring Of Smoke," a broad parody of the Johnny Cash hit "Ring Of Fire." Denise says my incessant playing and re-playing of that MGM Records 45 knocked the country right out of her. I loved it. As a kid in the sixties, I wasn't yet aware of genres, of musical boundaries, of virtual barbed wire fences that suggested if you worked that land and played that music you weren't allowed to trespass on this land and play this music. It was all pop music. You heard it on the radio. The driver controls the radio, but the radio drives us all.
When did it change for me? I used to watch Hee Haw on TV, engaged by the cute country girls, the corny banter, and Archie Campbell's weekly rendition of "PFFT! You Were Gone." Country remained a part of Top 40 radio, so my essential seventies AM atmosphere included Lynn Anderson, Charlie Rich, Donna Fargo, Conway Twitty. My memory may be clouded, but I think I was okay with country music.
Until I wasn't.
What happened? I guess it was some weird combination of introspection, self-image, peer pressure, alienation, and teen reinvention. Being called "farmer" was a popular insult at school, and while I only recall hearing it directed at me when I wore Grampa's hand-me-down overalls, I was aware of its toxic condescension. Country wasn't cool. Neither was I, but while I learned to dig in my heels and stand ground on behalf of comic books and pop music and other things I loved that others mocked, I had also come to think of country as uncool. I wanted to be urbane, witty, sophisticated, fast-paced, and elite, city-slicker rather than shitkicker. New York City, not Nashville or Bakersfield. And, in the post-Watergate world, I had no use for country's jingoism. By the time I fell for punk rock, twang was in my rear-view mirror. Country music? I met another and PFFT! it was gone.
It took a long time for me to appreciate country music again. I knew of rock 'n' roll's roots in country, so I was always okay with the Everly Brothers, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, King Elvis I. I knew the Beatles' "All My Loving" was a straight-up country song, and I loved it anyway. In the early eighties, I thought Juice Newton's cover of the Dave Edmunds track "Queen Of Hearts" was the best thing on AM radio. By the end of the eighties, a local Syracuse group called the Delta Rays (led by Craig Marshall and Maura Boudreau, the latter now Maura Kennedy of the fabulous Kennedys, with her husband Pete Kennedy) pried my closed mind wide open to Patsy Cline and George Jones, and to Mary-Chapin Carpenter. In the early nineties, I became a regular viewer of a Saturday night video program on CMT that showcased rockin' country. Nanci Griffith. Rosie Flores. The Sky Kings. The Mavericks. Joe Diffie. Jo Dee Messina. This was country music I could support.
For all that, I still can’t listen to country radio. Nails on a chalkboard. When I'm driving, my control of the radio spins the dial elsewhere.
My work as a pop journalist (and my quest for deliverance as a music fan) reminded me of the appeal of classic country, and my respect for that grew by leaps and bounds. Welcome back to my world, Johnny Cash. Hee-Haw and howdy, Buck Owens! And hello, Merle Haggard.
Haggard had always been outside of my realm. I associated him with "Okie From Muskogee," a track I considered a put-down of hippies and peaceniks, a song that seemed the very epitome of the redneck POV I so detested. Years later, I read that Haggard himself claimed an evolving, shifting view of the song, at times cashing it in at face value, at other times thinking of it as a joke or parody, a wink rather than a sneer. Some have suggested the song was meant to provide the counterbalance of a conservative viewpoint in the face of liberal protest. I dunno. I mean, even though he wasn't really an Okie--his parents moved from Checotah, OK to California before Merle was born in 1937--it's likely Haggard mighta smoked some marijuana in or around Muskogee at some point or another, his lyrical claim to the contrary notwithstanding.
In fact, at the time of his early success in country music from 1966 through '68, Haggard hid a skeleton in his closet: he had fought the law, and the law had won. Teen stints in juvenile detention centers gave way to a robbery conviction in 1957, landing him in Bakersfield Jail. A failed attempt to escape there moved him to San Quentin in 1958. He turned twenty-one in prison. It may have appeared likely he'd die there, too.
But Haggard rewrote his script. Seeing Johnny Cash perform at San Quentin prompted Haggard to play in a country band at the prison. He saw the dead-end roads stretched in nearly all directions around him. One road held the possibility of getting through: the straight and narrow. Haggard was paroled in 1960. He would never be a convict again.
Even the straightest and narrowest of roads may suffer detours, eventual twists and turns. Tolls. As Haggard played, recorded, and began to have hits, he worried that his past would kill his future, that public revelation of his time behind bars could terminate his time in the spotlight. Johnny Cash convinced Haggard to confront the issue. The driver controls the radio, and the narrative. During a 1969 appearance on Cash's TV show, Haggard spoke publicly about seeing Cash in concert at San Quentin, when Merle was an inmate. Haggard's career did not suffer. He was on his way to becoming a legend of country music.
Suddenly, Haggard's 1968 hit "Mama Tried" gained an additional patina of authenticity. It wasn't quite autobiographical--he'd committed robbery, not murder, and wasn't serving life without parole--but the feel was there, the gravitas, the sense of truth. Three chords and the truth.
Turning twenty-one in prison, leaving only himself to blame, because Mama tried, Mama tried. It's the equal of Dylan, insightful and honest, heartbreaking, real. Country music. The music I disavowed as a teenager, the music I claimed to hate. I guess that leaves only me to blame.
My brothers and I arrived at my grandparents' house in Aurora in 2004. Our parents were there, along with aunts and uncles--including Mom's siblings, about to bid farewell to their own mother--and a representative sample of our cousins from California and Florida. Art and Rob brought fast food from the Starlite Drive-In, including orders of chicken gizzards and chicken livers. We all ate together, talked, laughed, and celebrated a life well-lived. The next morning, with our duties discharged and the funeral concluded, my brothers and I left the cemetery, the car now pointed East. The road awaited us. We were leaving Missouri behind, probably for the last time.
Our thoughts were our own, the memories established and permanent. Country music played on the radio. On a freight train leavin' town, never knowing where I'm bound.
The radio didn't play any Merle Haggard on that trip. It's okay. The driver controls the radio. That's the rule. I learned rules as a kid in New York, and in Missouri. I learned to swim in Missouri. I learned to drive in New York. I learned about music everywhere. I still have so much more to learn.
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