EDDIE AND THE SHOWMEN–Squad Car: The Eddie Bertrand Story (Oldays Records CD, Japan)

1 Eddie & The Showmen– Border Town
2 Eddie & The Showmen– Toes On The Nose Border Town
3 Eddie & The Showmen– Squad Car
4 Eddie & The Showmen– Scratch
5 Eddie & The Showmen– Mr. Rebel
6 Eddie & The Showmen– Movin’
7 Eddie & The Showmen– Lanky Bones
8 Eddie & The Showmen– Far Away Places
9 Eddie & The Showmen– We Are The Young
10 Eddie & The Showmen– Young And Lonely
11 The Belairs– Mr. Moto
12 The Belairs– Little Brown Jug
13 The Belairs– Volcanic Action
14 The Belairs– Vampire
15 The Belairs– Kami-Kaze
16 The Belairs– Baggles
17 The Baymen– Bonzai
18 The Baymen– Daybreak
19 The Challengers– Torquay
20 The Challengers– Bull Dog
21 The Challengers– Tidal Wave
22 The Journeymen (4)– Work Out
23 The Baylanders– Surfers Blues
24 The Baylanders– Surfers Rule
25 Thom Starr & the Galaxies– Chiflado

EDDIE AND THE SHOWMEN—Squad Car—Eddie Bertrand Story (Oldays, Japan), CD

It’s been 24 years since the AVI collection of Eddie and the Showmen’s Liberty sides, so the time is right for a new collection of surf guitar pioneer Eddie Bertrand’s work, and this attractive cardboard mini-LP sleeve Japanese album fills the need well.

Inspired by Duane Eddy’s early records, surfer Eddie Bertrand, from the South Bay section of L.A., took up the guitar and joined fellow guitarist Paul Johnson to form The Bel-airs, who had a hit with their hypnotic instrumental “Mr. Moto.” The Bel-airs featured a twin-guitar attack and were quite a local phenomenon. Bertrand eventually left the group as he desired to pursue a more “wet” guitar sound (and he worked with Leo Fender himself to develop a unique amp to achieve that) and created Eddie and the Showmen, including future Standell Dick Dodd on drums, who’d also been in The Bel-Airs.

Eddie and the Showmen issued five singles on Liberty in 1963-64. The first paired the Latin-flavored “Border Town” with the driving “Toes On The Nose,” about which Bertrand said, “with the ascending guitar lines, I visualized as I walked to the nose of the surfboard.” This was followed up with the wailing “Squad Car,” which kicked off with a siren and was a highlight of their live act. The band had a devoted local following through weekly shows at the Retail Clerks Hall in Buena Park, and some accounts from people involved in the local scene back then state that Eddie’s band was a strong challenger to Dick Dale’s and local fans tended to side with either one band or the other. Every Liberty side is equally strong, and only the British Invasion knocked the wind out of the surf instrumental scene. Eddie and the Showmen did adapt to that by recording some vocal sides in 1964, unreleased at the time but eventually showing up on a Moxie EP many years later. Those are not included here, only instrumentals.

The album begins with the ten Showmen sides on Liberty and then six Bel-airs sides including Bertrand. The remaining nine songs are local 45’s by other bands from the South Bay area, including the Journeymen and The Baymen, as well as three 1962-63 Vault sides from The Challengers, whose Richard Delvy had played with Bertrand in the Bel-airs.

All of the Bertrand sides here sound as fresh as the day they were recorded, and the additional material helps to provide a context for the active South Bay scene…a very worthwhile release for the surf guitar fan!

BILL SHUTE (originally published in Ugly Things magazine in 2019)

FIRE AND ICE, LTD. “THE HAPPENING” (Capitol LP, 1966)

FIRE AND ICE, LTD. “THE HAPPENING” (Capitol LP) 

    This 1966 Capitol album (a grey-market CD is available on UK Kismet, although copies of the original LP can easily be found for what you’d pay for a new CD) is for me a classic of the psych-sploitation genre. It contains five trippy jams  ranging between 2:48 and 9:56 (one of which uses Gershwin’s “Summertime” as its basis) with spontaneous beat-poetry vocal interjections (the kind parodied by Kim Fowley on his OUTRAGEOUS album and on the track “Is America Dead” on the DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL album), but not full poems like the immortal Christopher Columbus poem recited by John Drew Barrymore in the film HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL.

    The music mixes beatnik flute, garage-band organ, and trebly guitar riffing not unlike such exploito outfits as T. SWIFT AND THE ELECTRIC BAG or THE ANIMATED EGG. Except for the “Summertime” adaptation, each track takes a basic riff and uses it as a framework for the soloists and vocalists to work themselves in and out of the audio fabric, and then after a certain period, it fades out. In 1967, the tracks would have been longer and more tribal, but this was still 1966, and there is a heavy beatnik vibe wrapped around the whole thing….with 60s garage band organ and guitar swirling in and out of the audio collage. As one era fades out, another one fades in…

    This collective gave at least one public performance, as there are two video clips you can watch at Getty Images with silent footage of a  Fire and Ice, Ltd. “happening” performance on the Sunset Strip in 1966, with a banner of the Capitol album cover in the background (see B&W pic).

    The perfect audience for this album would be someone who enjoys the Velvet Underground’s long Exploding Plastic Inevitable jams and also albums like BEAT OF THE EARTH, but who also has a sense of  humor and enjoys cheapo  exploito-psych cash-in albums like the previously mentioned T. SWIFT AND THE ELECTRIC BAG. Also, if you’ve heard the obscure Louisiana 60’s single “An Experimented Terror” by THE GREEK FOUNTAINS and consider it one of the all-time greats (available on the compilation BEYOND THE CALICO WALL), then you will love THE HAPPENING by FIRE AND ICE, LTD. as much as I do. While it’s clearly a psych cash-in on the part of Capitol Records, it could also be performed at some gallery in Venice, CA, to a “serious” audience sipping espresso or wine (see the 1966 video footage of the live performance mentioned above) who would politely applaud and pronounce it as “exciting and going beyond boundaries” or “an action painting in sound that’s NOW!”, but at the same time, some stoner who stumbled in off the street could jerk his head up and down to it and exclaim, “far out, maaaaaaan” at the climax of some loud passage. It takes a master-stroke to hit all those bases at once. Don’t be expecting The Red Crayola’s FREE FORM FREAKOUT passages or anything transcendent—you could play this album before a screening of the 1966 Spanish-made film THE HALLUCINATION GENERATION with George Montgomery to get the audience in the mood (hey, I should do that some time!). There are probably other performances of this sort documented on reel-to-reel tapes or private press LP’s of the day, but until you find something like that, this major-label COMMERCIAL EQUIVALENT will do just fine.

Fire and Ice Ltd “The Happening” performance on Sunset Boulevard.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2019

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My newest poetry book for 2023…only $6.95 and available internationally at your local Amazon platform

NEUTRAL by Bill Shute

KSE #420, 125 pages, 6″ x 9″ perfect bound, softcover

published 2 January 2023

available for immediate order from https://amzn.to/3IFS5Vs

A new book-length poem for 2023, and in some ways it is my most ambitious work (IMHO) since POINT LOMA PURPLE (2007).

And coming in 2024 will be a new book-length poem, STATIC STRUT (KSE #421)….keep an eye out for it!

CONQUEROR OF THE ORIENT (Italy 1960), starring Rik Battaglia

CONQUEROR OF THE ORIENT (Italy 1960), starring Rik Battaglia

     Coincidentally, the evening I am watching this film is the evening of the Academy Awards, so it’s a fitting FU to the Academy to champion something like CONQUEROR OF THE ORIENT, a film in opposition to the pretentious, self-congratulatory jerkoff-session that’s being broadcast on TV.  Welcome to the wonder-world of KSE….where Cameron Mitchell is best actor, Mamie Van Doren is best actress, Al “Fuzzy” St. John is best supporting actor, Christine McIntyre is best supporting actress, Al Adamson is best director, Fred Williamson gets the Life Achievement Award, the best foreign film goes to NIGHT OF THE BLOODY APES, and there’s a statue of K. Gordon Murray at the entrance to the auditorium.

     Let’s get the plot out of the way. Years ago, an evil usurper (as he’s called in the dialogue), Dakar (Paul Muller), has taken over the sultanate rightfully belonging the family of Omar, now elderly, who lives with his adopted son Nadir (Rik Battaglia), who knows that Omar and his people have been screwed but not that he himself is the rightful heir. Dakar requires massive and painful tributes from his subjects, who cannot afford them, and during one lavish presentation of gifts, he is presented with a lovely slave girl, Fatima (Irene Tunc). At the same time, at the palace, there is the presence of the sultry and ravishing Dinazar (Gianna Maria Canale), who seems to be the betrothed one to Dakar, but that’s not 100% clear from the dubbed dialogue. Dakar is taken with Fatima and desires her, which causes Dinazar to be quite jealous. Fatima escapes and vanishes into the country, where she is rescued by Nadir. Dakar’s subjects have had enough repression and decide to revolt; at the same time, Nadir rises to the occasion and fights for both the oppressed people and for his rightful position. You guess whether Dakar or Nadir winds up with Fatima.

     Director Tanio Boccia’s name might not ring a bell, but the pseudonym he used on many of his later films will: AMERIGO ANTON. It seems like every other sword and sandal film I saw on low-power UHF stations as a youth through AIP-TV packages was directed by him, and most of them starred KIRK MORRIS: TERROR OF THE STEPPES; ATLAS AGAINST THE CZAR; DESERT RAIDERS (which re-used character names and plot elements from the film under review today); SAMSON AGAINST THE PIRATES. There was also the classic CAESAR THE CONQUEROR (a great performance by Cameron Mitchell), and the old favorite, REVENGE OF IVANHOE. CONQUEROR OF THE ORIENT predates any of those, but all the elements were in place. Boccia/Anton tended to like “exotic” settings that are not the Greece or Rome of antiquity (except for the Caesar film, obviously), a kind of generic storybook “near East”. I would dare anyone to tell me what nation this film is supposed to be set in. Oh, the people wear turbans and the occasional character mentions “Allah” in his welcome to someone, but it’s about as culturally specific as a Jungle Jim film, which is great in my book because a film like this exists in a kind of fantasy “Arabian Nights” world. It has elements of the kind of film that might have been made at Universal in the 1940’s and starred someone like Yvonne DeCarlo, but it’s done on a much lower budget and also has more location photography. It’s interesting that there are two DP’s credited on the film: one labelled interiors, one labelled locations. It’s like some pulp magazine “exotic adventure” story that would engage a 12-year old….or someone like me, a 12 year old at heart, reading the “adventure” story on the night shift as a security guard.

    Another curious aspect of this film is that star Rik Battaglia’s voice is dubbed in English by Edmund Purdom, a fellow leading man in Italian historical epics of the day, but someone with an instantly recognizable voice, always with a rich, velvety Shakespearean approach to anything.

As we move further away from the Golden Age of Italian color historical costume epics-on-a-budget of the 1950s and early 1960s, they cast even more of a magic spell on the viewers, because now with their dubbed English dialogue and lack of CGI or other computer effects, they are historical artifacts themselves. I hope that someday that will command the kind of attention and archival reissues that the Eurowestern and Giallo and Eurocrime genres have experienced….and I hope that I’m around to see it.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2019

==========================================

My newest poetry book for 2023…only $6.95 and available internationally at your local Amazon platform

NEUTRAL by Bill Shute

KSE #420, 125 pages, 6″ x 9″ perfect bound, softcover

published 2 January 2023

available for immediate order from https://amzn.to/3IFS5Vs

A new book-length poem for 2023, and in some ways it is my most ambitious work (IMHO) since POINT LOMA PURPLE (2007).

TRAIN TO TOMBSTONE (Lippert Pictures,1950), starring Don ‘Red’ Barry, Robert Lowery, Wally Vernon, and Tom Neal

clever Don Barry post-Republic western set on a train–excellent cast!

TRAIN TO TOMBSTONE is one of the films Don Barry made at Lippert after leaving Republic. These films are often a bit different from the norm (Red Desert, for instance…) and usually have excellent supporting casts. Barry wrote the story for this film also, and it’s cleverly constructed as we have a train that throws together a diverse lot of people, PLUS we have the suspense of knowing the someone on the train is a criminal, PLUS we have the added suspense of knowing that the train will possibly be attacked along the way, but we don’t know for sure or when or how or by whom. So there are a few different levels of suspense, yet most of the film can be shot on a small, static set. Barry, considered a young Cagney when he first came on the scene before his western star days, was always one of the better actors among series western stars, and he commands attention well here. Robert Lowery, with added mustache and now in his “supporting actor” days, adds more tension to the proceedings as a marshal overseeing the train (or is he?), comedian Wally Vernon is funny as a salesman trying to sell corsets to Indian women, and Tom Neal plays a doctor, although his character is not really developed very much. While it’s easy to fault the film (there are external shots of bad guys chasing the train, but usually there’s just a mediocre projection screen out the window that looks about as real as the one used in THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, and in one scene the characters are firing guns out the window at the projection screen!), if you come to it with enough willing suspension of disbelief, it’s an exciting ride, and it only takes less than an hour. The same director and four stars also made I SHOT BILLY THE KID the same year–one wonders if they were made back to back, although Berke and three of the four stars were Lippert regulars anyway. Overall, this is solid b-movie entertainment. The train plot device was a nice change of pace, and anyone who has enjoyed Don Barry’s work in other films should check this one out.

BILL SHUTE, originally published elsewhere online in 2004

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RAMBUTAN & BILL SHUTE, “BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU” new poetry-and-music album!

NOW AVAILABLE: the sound sculpture of RAMBUTAN meets the poetry of BILL SHUTE on the new CD album on the Tape Drift label BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU, which you can order here: https://rambutan.bandcamp.com/album/bridge-on-the-bayou

1.
Bridge On The Bayou 05:41
2.
Revelation in Slow Motion 05:47
3.
Reconditioning 04:57
4.
Satori in Opelousas 04:38
5.
Scrapple 06:20

Over a decade after meeting in upstate NY and performing together twice, San Antonio-based poet Bill Shute and Albany’s Eric Hardiman (aka Rambutan) team up for an official collaboration. “Bridge on the Bayou” features five masterful poems by Shute, written during the sweltering Summer of 2016 while staying on Bayou Teche in Arnaudville, Louisiana. The evocative words and imagery in Shute’s poems are set to music by Hardiman, using a combination of field recordings, random electronics, and guitars. The music and words merge together to create sonic portraits of a dark and murky Louisiana geography.

released April 1, 2023

Poems and readings by Bill Shute, recorded in San Antonio, Texas. Music by Rambutan (Eric Hardiman), recorded in Delmar, New York. Poems available in book form from Kendra Steiner Editions. Cover photo by Wyatt Doyle. 2023

You can sample the first track below via You Tube: