The Mad Bomber Story Revisited: Director Bert I. Gordon & Exploitation Promoter Jerry Gross Connect to Blow Minds

 

NOTE: This essay first appeared in Severin’s 2024 Blu-ray release of The Mad Bomber, which belongs in each and every home!

In his autobiography, The Amazing Colossal Worlds of Mr. B.IG., Bert I. Gordon describes how The Mad Bomber was his ticket to acceptance into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the director category. It was no doubt a proud moment for the man from Kenosha, Wisconsin, who got his Hollywood start two decades earlier as an assistant on the 1952-53 western series Cowboy G-Men, starring Russell Hayden and Jackie Coogan. Acceptance from the mainstream was rare for a filmmaker best known for his monster movies featuring massive creatures. Gordon might only ring a bell for some people through his movies’ many appearances on Mystery Science Theater 3000, a record eight in all, two more than Roger Corman.

But Gordon had reached a personal career high point in 1972 after working with Orson Welles, also a native of Kenosha, on the currently hard-to-see Necromancy. A photo from the set shows the two men smiling broadly at each other, and Gordon writes of enjoying many “fine dinners and interesting conversations.” Meanwhile, in interviews, co-star Pamela Franklin describes a much less friendly relationship with Welles during filming of the movie, which also existed as The Witching, a version that included nude inserts featuring Brinke Stevens filmed a decade later.

Starting the ‘70s with the silly but kind of fun, kind of adventurous X-rated sex romp How to Succeed with Sex, his first movie after the Hays Code officially fell in 1968, Gordon didn’t seem to need to be introduced to sleaze by legendary exploitation promoter Jerry Gross for The Mad Bomber. Gordon writes in his autobiography that Gross (he avoids using his actual name) came to him with an idea for Gordon to write, produce, and direct what became The Mad Bomber with Chuck Connors and Vince Edwards. Gordon would also serve as cinematographer for the movie, which was based on a story by novelist Marc Behm. As part of the agreement, Gordon, Connors, and Edwards would work for scale, but the four of them would split the distribution profits 25 percent each. According to an undated news brief in the Hollywood Reporter during this time (per the American Film Institute), shooting for The Mad Bomber was to begin in April 1972.

Connors and Edwards both came to The Mad Bomber after their respective hugely successful television shows, “The Rifleman” and “Ben Casey,” were in the rear-view mirror. Edwards was in a few post-Ben Casey movies in the late ‘60s, including The Devil’s Brigade in 1968, but he did many television movies in the years before and after The Mad Bomber. During the ‘60s, Edwards also continued his music career and recorded six music albums while performing around the country. In 1973, Edwards directed his first and only television movie, “Maneater,” a cool riff on The Most Dangerous Game starring Ben Gazzara and Sheree North that appeared on ABC in December. He divorced his second wife, English actress Linda Foster, in 1972. Connors had a busier movie career after The Rifleman ended, starring in westerns like Ride Beyond Vengeance, Enzo Castellari’s Kill Them All and Come Back Alone, and the Proud and the Dammed. He also was briefly featured in another western TV show, the Larry Cohen-created “Branded.” He divorced his second wife, Indian actress Kamala Devi, in 1972. Besides going through divorces at the same time, Connors and Edwards also were in 1957’s The Hired Gun together, but both played a secondary role to star/producer Rory Calhoun. Meanwhile, Connors might have fallen out of the arms of Devi, but he would soon hold Leonid Brezhnev tightly in June 1973, lifting the then-Soviet leader into the air in a bear hug. The two met at a party hosted by Richard Nixon for Brezhnev at the now decommissioned Marine Corps El Toro Air Station in Orange County, California. Connors presented Brezhnev with two matching Colt. 45s, just like the ones used by “The Rifleman.”

Producer and distributor Jerry Gross helped to bless the world with the unforgettable likes of I Drink Your Blood, I Eat Your Skin, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Teenage Mother, Zombie, The Cheerleaders, and many more, with newspaper ads featuring the magic words “Jerry Gross Presents” promising sex, violence, and more. The ambitions of Gross and his Cinemation Industries were increasing in 1972. An article appeared in The New York Times in February announcing Cinemation planned to release 16 to 20 movies in 1972, “comparing favorably” with major film companies and with Gross touting their recent profits. Cinemation’s biggest 1972 release was the X-rated Fritz the Cat in April. In Jan. 1973, A.H. Weiler of the Times reported Cinemation was planning a sequel to Fritz the Cat after it “grossed in excess of $10 million,” according to Gross and producer Steve Krantz. The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat would be released in June 1974 and not involve director Ralph Bakshi or R. Crumb, who had killed off Fritz in a comic strip (with an ice-pick to the skull) to voice his disgust with the original film. It also didn’t involve Cinemation; American International Pictures would ultimately distribute the sequel, which received mostly negative reviews. Gross would distribute and promote 56 films during a 25-year career, according to his obituary published in Variety on Dec. 5, 2002.

Just as she had done since her husband’s first movie, King Dinosaur, Flora Gordon (née Lang, a name would return to later) served on the crew (as production coordinator) for The Mad Bomber. For a time, it was Bert and Flora against creatures big and small as they worked together on visual and special effects in low-budget movies like Attack of the Puppet People, The Spider, and Village of the Giants. After The Mad Bomber, Flora would only work on one more movie with Bert, 1976’s The Food of the Goods, before they divorced in 1979. That year she would also help form the Directors Guild of America’s Women’s Committee, which played an essential role in advancing women’s opportunities to direct in Hollywood. Flora, who died in 2016 at 90, also served as a production manager on Dogs (on which she also was assistant director) and The Great Smokey Roadblock, and she was a unit production manager for four seasons on “Dynasty.”

After premiering as The Mad Bomber, the movie also did business as Confessions of a Dirty Cop, Detective Geronimo, just Geronimo, and finally in September 1973 it was re-released as The Police Connection. Across its various names, the movie played on double bills with movies like The Daredevil, a stock car racing movie set in the South, Don Sharp’s The Death Wheelers (doing business as Maniacs on Wheels), Skyjacked, and Pretty Maids All in a Row. At a Troy, New York, drive-in it even played on a double bill with Teenage Mother. Interestingly, several newspapers articles in spring 1973 indicate that another movie was changing its name to The Police Connection: Badge 373, starring Robert Duvall. The Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph even called it the “new and final title.” The Mad Bomber had a few taglines: “It Will Blow Your Mind,” and as The Police Connection, the wonderfully insane: “In Handcuffs or a Paper Bag, They Don’t Care How They Bring Them in!” For Detective Geronimo, dots were connected fully: “Where French Connection and Dirty Harry Stop, Geronimo Begins.”

A monumental year for movies, 1973 stands tall in the ‘70s and looms large across movie history. The year brought us The Exorcist, Mean Streets, The Last Detail, Coffy, and many more all-timers. In April alone, the month The Mad Bomber premiered on the 4^th, a Wednesday (the same day the World Trade Center opened in NYC), theaters and drive-ins hosted The Candy Snatchers, Theatre of Blood, The Baby, Soylent Green, and Sisters, to name just a few. Two members of The Mad Bomber cast also appeared in Soylent Green: Connors and Faith Quabius, who plays George Fromley’s (Neville Brand) first victim, Martha, in The Mad Bomber. These would be Quabius’s only two movie roles, but she and Connors obviously hit it off. They got hitched in 1977 – and divorced in 1980.

In January 1973, Mary Murphy reported in the L.A. Times in her “Movie Call Sheet” column that Bert I. Gordon would next be working on Scarface Al Capone as part of a two-picture deal with the notorious Philip Yordan, who helped in an uncredited role on The Mad Bomber. Meanwhile, according to Gordon’s autobiography, The Mad Bomber did “exceptionally well” at the box office in the United States and beyond, but he, Connors, and Edwards never saw a cent from Gross and Cinemation, which filed for bankruptcy in 1975. Variety reported in April 1973 that a sequel to the movie called Stake Out was being considered. An earlier article by the Copley News Service, published in October 1972, indicates ambitions for The Mad Bomber were even higher. The article (“Star Denies Nags Stirred Home Rift”) features an interview with Edwards, discussing his on again/off again divorce with Foster. He denies gambling on horses caused their marriage issues and describes his belief that “the man should be the head of the house.” Edwards also talks about The Mad Bomber and his role as an “Indian-Italian policeman, Geronimo Minelli.” The article says the movie will be the first of six (!) flicks about the “ethnically interesting cop who may become hero of a television series.” Says Edwards about his character: “He’s like Ben Casey in many ways. He’s a good cop obsessed with the law. And he’s a tough cop, real tough, manically tough.”

Quentin Tarantino singles out Neville Brand for praise in his brief mention about The Mad Bomber in Cinema Speculation in the chapter about The Getaway as he describes why he doesn’t like Al Lettieri in the Peckinpah movie. He calls George Fromley “one sick son of a bitch” but believes Brand gives the most enjoyable performance in The Mad Bomber, one that connects to the audience despite him playing a “grotesque bad guy.” By comparison, Tarantino says Lettieri’s performance causes audiences to disengage from the movie. Indeed, Brand is outstanding – and all in as a photography hobbyist/husband/ police harassment victim/serial rapist. His death scene, as Fromley masturbates delightedly to sexy, arty photographs of his wife, is impossible to forget – in a movie filled with explosions, rapes, frequent nudity, and intense violence. Connors is less believable in his role as the anal-retentive maniac Willaim Dorn. In his various “manners” confrontations, he plays Dorn like a bully more than someone unhinged or unpredictable and lets his tiny glasses do a lot of the work. Edwards is better, if a little too sleepy, except when he’s threatening to blow out Fromley’s brains or yelling at his partner for eating shelled pistachios on a stakeout.

In his 1985 book, The B-Directors: A Biographical Directory, genre and experimental movie expert W. Winston Wheeler concludes his entry on Gordon with this analysis: “Gordon persists, but he does not succeed.” And it’s true that in a career that covered seven decades, Gordon, who died at 100 in 2023, never stop persisting. But The Mad Bomber shows that Gordon should have taken more chances like he did with this movie, and maybe he would have liked to do just that. His daughter Patricia said in an interview with me celebrating the life of Gordon for Wisconsin Public Radio that Gordon’s best screenplay was for a “subtle” unpublished anti-war movie.

 

Ramblin' Fever: The Playlist Pounder

 

I entered my heavy Hag phase when Merle Haggard’s career-spanning box set came out in 1996, Down Every Road: 1962-1994. I even remember where I first heard about the box: on the late, great Carol Taylor’s “Defenestration 89.5”freeform radio show on WHRV in Norfolk, Virginia (sadly the show ended soon after that, and Taylor was dead of cancer at 32 later that year). Before buying the box, I think I had only had bought a couple of Haggard’s budget-line greatest hits collections and some random late ‘80s and early ‘90s efforts, all on cassette.

“Ramblin’ Fever” (the title track for his 1977 MCA debut) became a quick favorite for me on the box. The opening drums and guitar revs up into something funky and lowdown and grabs you right off: turn up the volume, roll down the windows—we’re getting out of here. The first line is a simple but timeless-sounding declaration: “My hat don’t hang on the same nail for too long.” It sounds like something Hank Williams might have written 30 years earlier, or words from a cowboy hundred years before that (ironic because the next line is “My ears can’t stand to hear the same old song”). We learn that the narrator sure has this fever bad. It’s uncurable. It’s “in his blood,” and “it can’t be measured be degrees.” No woman will tie him down, and he’ll never be too old to ramble. Haggard sings, “I want to die along the highway and rot away like some old high-line pole.” Imagine coming to that line and feeling it, the miles it would take.

I love the way Haggard sings “pretty lady” when he offers these lines: “There’s times I’d like to bed down on a sofa/And let some pretty lady rub my back/And spend the early morning drinking coffee/ And talkin’ about when I’ll be coming back.” I was just rewatching Paul Newman in Harper, and there’s a part that almost plays out similarly to what Haggard describes when a battered Newman as Lew Harper returns home to his wife played by Janet Leigh, who is divorcing him, who is trying to stop loving him, and convinces her to give him another chance, to spend the night, but Harper slinks away again the in the morning as she’s making him bacon and eggs.

In November 1976, news came that Haggard and his wife of 11 years, country music singer Bonnie Owens, were divorcing. In the same archived newspaper where I read about the Haggard-Owens split, there was also an article from Utah’s death row about Gary Gilmore hoping to get married to 21-year-old Nicole Barrett before his date with the firing squad, a relationship “destined to achieve melodramatic status.” A few weeks earlier in November, the Associated Press reported that Haggard had canceled shows in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Reno and had gone missing. Utah police had been trying to locate him, and their search had become more intensified after they received an anonymous call that “Haggard’s body could be found in a Nevada gully.” But manager Fuzzy Owen told the reporter Haggard was OK and “somewhere between Arizona and Los Angeles.” “He’s be under quite a strain,” Owen said.

After the divorce, Bonnie Owens continued to perform in Haggard’s band into the early ‘80s. She even served as a bridesmaid for Leona Williams, another country musician, when Williams and Haggard married in 1978. “Ramblin’ Fever” was only one of two songs Haggard wrote on Ramblin’ Fever, which marked his switch from Capitol to MCA, motivated in part by Haggard’s desire to cross over to new audiences. The other song, “I Think It’s Gone Forever,” was a co-write with Williams. They divorced in 1983. Here’s a great live version of “Ramblin’ Fever” recorded in the Netherlands in 1978. Watch, it almost seems like Owens is smiling when he sings those lines about the pretty lady and back rubbing.

View the entire playlist for the Dec. 5 Zero Hour (scroll to the correct date) and listen to the archived audio.

 

Corman's 1980 Sci-Fi Hit: Battle Beyond the Stars

 

Note: This article originally appeared in Drive-In Asylum’s 1980 Yearbook published in March 2025. You can find the zine on Etsy.

Roger Corman entered the ‘80s with great ambition and sci-fi on his brain, opening a new studio at the site of a former lumberyard in Venice, where the new studio’s first movie, 1980’s big-budgeted (for Corman), John Sayles-scripted BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, would be filmed.

The movie is said to have cost about $5 million with Corman, who passed away at 98 on May 9, 2024, providing $2.5 million and Orion Pictures putting up the other half to distribute BATTLE BEYOND to the rest of the world outside of the United States and Canada. According to the Hollywood Reporter (via the American Film Institute), the movie made $1.3 million in just three days of limited release during the summer of 1980 and would go onto to make about $11 million, according to Beverly Gray in Roger Corman: Blood-sucking Vampires, Flesh-eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers.

In a New York Times article, “The Golden Age of Junk,” published Aug. 17, 1980, film critic Vincent Camby bemoaned the state of the movie industry, describing a trend of what he considered excessive movie budgets (“giddy and dangerous times”) and aiming his fire at movies in the current box office top 10 he considered basically junk: CHEECH & CHONG’s NEXT MOVIE, BLUES BROTHERS, BLUE LAGOON (“a joke”), CADDYSHACK, ZOMBIE (“an even bigger joke” ha!) and others (THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK was on his junk borderline.) Camby also included BATTLE BEYOND, because it too was in the box office top 10. He admitted he had not seen it but still made a negative STAR WARS comparison.

But despite being lumped in with the supposedly spendthrift proprietors of the junkpile, Corman was still a cheap SOB at heart. He famously left the lumberyard sign up at his new studio for years afterward because he didn’t want to pay to have it taken down. “I found out it would cost $200 to take the sign down. I couldn’t see a profit in that so I left it up,” he told the LA Times in 1980. In the same article, Corman also expressed dismay at the $20 to $30 million price tags for movies like the BLUES BROTHERS and 1941. He called the prices offensive: logically, efficiently, and morally so. Nevertheless, the low-budget legend was apparently ready to embrace sci-fi and slightly bigger budgets than he had in the past. He told the newspaper New World was going to become a “very heavy science-fiction company.”

The article described several upcoming movies from the company in the sci-fi genre: “Among the future projects are PLANET OF HORRORS (made with United Artists), where visitors come face-to-face with things that scare them the most; JOURNEY BEYOND THE GALAXY, (this time a $7 million budget in partnership again with Orion) and NIGHTFALL, based on a short story by science-fiction writer Issac Asimov that will cost $6 million, shared with a Germany company.” PLANET OF HORRORS, aka GALAXY OF TERROR, came out in 1981, and Corman made NIGHTFALL twice, with Julie Corman producing in 1988 and a straight-to-video version in 2000. What exactly happened to JOURNEY BEYOND THE GALAXY is uncertain, but Corman told Starburst magazine in Britian in 1982 about the movie, which was described as “the biggest science fiction movie he’s ever tackled”: “It will be comparable, state-of-the-art in special effects, to what George Lucas is doing.”

Corman was optimistic with good reason after the success of the Jimmy Murakami-directed BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS, which focuses on a peaceful planet named Akir that must defend itself and the recruitment of mercenaries (of delightfully different forms) throughout the galaxy to take on the evil Sador of the Malmori, the twisted but shrewd leader of an “army full of genetic mistakes.” Written by Sayles with his noted sharp humor and intelligence, the movie is modeled on the SEVEN SAMURAI and THE MAGNIFICIENT SEVEN with influences including the WIZARD OF OZ, Asian and American West philosophy, and science fiction and fantasy literature.

The movie boasts a variety of very good performances from a strong cast of character actors, especially John Saxon as Sador, George Peppard as Cowboy, and Sybil Danning as St. Exmin, a Valkryie warrior, who wears an unforgettable, uncomprehensible outfit, and says things like, “Live fast, fight well, and have a beautiful ending.” Faron Young, eat your heart out. Robert Vaughan plays Gelt, a similar character to his role in THE MAGNIFICIENT SEVEN, and Jeff Corey is Zed, leader of Akir. Corey, also a famous acting teacher, had taught Corman back in the ‘50s, in a class where Corman was introduced to Jack Nicholson, Corman says on the commentary track.

Director/ artistic mastermind James Cameron famously got his start creating the limited but well-executed special effects on BATTLE BEYOND, where his impressive work landed him a promotion to art director. On the movie, he also met Gale Ann Hurd, with whom he would make THE TERMINATOR in 1984, and marry and divorce. Corman would reuse several of the Cameron-constructed spaceships from the BATTLE BEYOND in his other movies (as well as getting his money’s worth from the title sequence and James Horner score. Horner would go onto win an Academy award for Best Original Score on Cameron’s TITANTIC.)

Critic Gene Siskel panned BATTLE BEYOND in his Chicago Tribune review (1½ stars) and named it his “Dog of the Week” on Sneak Previews, claiming it ripped off teenagers who thought they were going to see another STAR WARS. Amazingly, in his newspaper review, Siskel raged that he had been distracted while watching BATTLE BEYOND by a crying baby who had been put in a stroller that had been placed in the theater aisle. He announced he was upping his standing offer from $5 (for merely tossing out ma or pa & tyke) to $10 for any theater ushers who bounced the baby, guardian, and stroller right out into the street. Said ejection needed to occur in the film critic’s presence. In my mind, I imagine Siskel bitching to Roger Ebert outside the theater after the movie and telling him about the $10 idea, and Ebert calling Russ Meyer on a payphone, and they giggle about Siskel before they talk about BENEATH THE VALLEY OF THE ULTRA VIXENS or something.

Kevin Thomas in the LA Times called BATTLE BEYOND “the most elaborate but most derivative production” pursued by New World and Corman. “While BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS is quite acceptable to the youngsters and less discerning space freaks it’s disappointing to anyone who has admired its innovative and talented principle creators.”

BATTLE BEYOND, which hit theaters regionally and then widespread in July and August 1980 was joined on drive-in double bills with were THE MIGHTY PEKING MAN (1977, as GOLIATHON), METEOR (1979, which uses footage from New World’s AVALANCHE and also features Danning) and the New World-distributed THE PRIVATE EYES (1980), staring Don Knotts and Tim Conway. According to Corman on the commentary track, BATTLE BEYOND was New World’s widest release and the company had to twice order extra prints to satisfy demand.

Thomas, well cast and engaging as the straight man, was described as “ineffectual and limp” and at his “neurotic wimpiest” in Tom Shales’ Washington Post review. He would head back to the stage and TV after BATTLE BEYOND. Thomas would perform in a long line of TV movies, including WALTON THANKSGIVING REUNION (1993), WALTON WEDDING (1995), and WALTON EASTER (1997), not to mention playing Hank Williams, Jr. in LIVING PROOF: THE HANK WILLIAMS JR. STORY (1983), a movie he also executive produced, before landing in the WONDER BOYS in 2000.

The Arlington Heights Daily Herald interviewed Thomas shortly before the movie came out. Thomas told the reporter he had a blast making the movie: “All I had to do was go in and wave my space gun around. I just sit around and drive my spaceship. It’s terrific. Can you imagine sitting behind one of those things. Everyone should try it once.” A spirit that no doubt resonated with Corman.

 

Love You More: The Playlist Pounder

 

One characteristic of the Pounder I forgot to mention last week is its ability to be lost and found again, perhaps over and over. Sometimes maybe you find it again exactly when you need it most. The Buzzcocks’ “Love You More,” like all the songs on Singles Going Steady, played on repeat, on glorious cassette, in my childhood bedroom, in cars, and in assorted dorms. I’m not sure what happened to that tape; it disappeared through various moves and adopting new formats (side note: my current approach is an all-formats approach, which is a lot of fun certainly, but you find yourself seeking more and more new cases on eBay to hold all your various formats in.).

Last week, while driving, when I played Singles Going Steady, now mine on groovy CD, “Love You More” grabbed me by my grayed sideburns and forced me to hear it like I did as a 16-year-old, for just a moment. I can remember listening to it in my bed, too loudly (some habits never go away), bouncing a tennis ball off the wall and ceiling, ringing guitars, sneering, singing it out sometimes, “I’ve been hurt so many times before,” and “although I’m not a child” and “with every heartbeat I want you madly.” I loved the way Pete Shelley sang, “I just can’t explain,” emphasizing “can’t” so very British. And then it ends: suddenly, violently. Then rewinding it and playing it again and feeling it so hard, like only a teenager can.

“Love You More” is only one minute and forty-five (ish) seconds long. According to George Gimarc’s Punk Diary, 1970-1979, when the song came out, on Friday, June 30, 1978, the band promoted it as the second shortest single ever to be released in the U.K. (“Noise Annoys” was the B side). Swell Maps had claimed first place with “Read About Seymour” at 1:27 earlier in the year, he writes. But Girmac also points to Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ famously short “Stay” from 1960. Beyond oldies radio, I think I can certainly credit “Love You More” as one of my more foundational songs that made me appreciate brevity. I mean also obviously there’s the Dead Kennedys’ “I Like Short Songs” at 29 seconds (“Rick Wakeman, eat your heart out”), which like “Love You More” I included on early mix tapes.

In October 1978, Kit Rachlis, in the Boston Phoenix, wrote about the difference between Shelley and original Buzzcocks vocalist Howard Devoto, while discussing Shelley-voiced songs like “Orgasm Addict,” “What Do I Get,” and “Love You More.” Rachlis described Shelley’s voice as “moonier, more vulnerable,” writing, “If Devoto’s ideal was (Johnny) Rotten, Shelley’s is Jonathan Richman.” Also released on June 30 was the Sex Pistols’ “My Way,” with Sid Vicious on vocals. He was dead by the next February. Singles Going Steady debuted in Sept. 1979 on IRS Records, but The Buzzcocks, who had been signed to United Artists on the day Elvis died, had released the last album of their original run, A Different Kind of Tension, the month before. Here’s the band playing “Love You More” on Top of the Pops, the announcer cutting in perfectly after “until the razor cuts.”

View the entire playlist for the Nov. 28 Zero Hour and listen to the archived audio.

 

When We're Dead & Gone: The Playlist Pounder

 

I haven’t let the fact that the The Moaners, Melissa Swingle and Laura King, last released an album in 2010 — about a year after the debut of Zero Hour — stop me from playing the late Chapel Hill band all the damn time on my show over the last 15 years. It’s no surprise then that I’m making them the first honorees for something I’m calling The Playlist Pounder. I’m planning to highlight one song each week from my weekly radio playlist. A “pounder” to me is a song that can hit you in the head, heart, toes, ass, whatever at whatever moment you fully connect with it, and it does not matter if it is from 2025 or 1925, or if it’s the first time you’ve heard it. It’s whenever you surrender to the song’s now undeniable and overwhelming power and just let go, just let it pound you, baby. But a pounder is so well constructed you can also more superficially feel its marvelous magic.

 

“When We’re Dead and Gone” comes from The Moaners’ last album for Yep Roc Records, 2007’s Blackwing Yalobusha. The band produced the album with Jimbo Mathus of Squirrel Nut Zippers at Money Shot Studios, located in a former school lunchroom in Water Valley, Mississippi. A lot of certified bad asses recorded there, including Fat Possum’s Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside, Hasil Adkins, T-Model Ford, and the Neckbones, as well as Jack Oblivian and Blue Mountain. The Moaners’ song has some of the booty-moving crunch and grind that Fat Possum’s stars rode to glory, and the song is no doubt catchy and rocking, but it is also rough and jagged in ways not uncommon with the likes of someone like Billy Childish, especially his more recent work with CTMF. It’s also made memorable by the tenderness in Swingle’s voice, her slight Southern twang, its wonder and sweetness, mixed with clever lyrics that center on life and death, desire and pain, history and the eternalness of songs.

 

The Wrong Man Revisited: Nope, Not That One

 

Let’s turn the channel back a few decades to the early 1990s, when cable television’s premium networks were airing more and more original movies and shows, especially of the “adult after dark” variety, to build and hold on to audiences that had dwindled some since cable’s great expansion in the 1980s. Showtime was especially prolific in this period, debuting dozens of movies and cool movie series such as Rebel Highway, in which modern directors of the time such as Joe Dante and Robert Rodriguez tackled the American International Pictures catalog. During this period, Showtime also delivered some solid crime and neo-noir movies, today mostly long forgotten and secluded on formats like VHS and laserdisc, including Dennis Hopper’s Nails (1992), Past Tense (1994), and today’s interest, The Wrong Man (1993), directed by Jim McBride.

It is not a remake of Alfred Hitchock’s 1956 movie starring Henry Fonda, but it does borrow its title and central focus of a man wrongly accused of a crime. McBride’s movie was the first of several efforts for Showtime by the director most famous for the groundbreaking David Holzman’s Diary (1967) and his remake of Breathless (1983), not to mention the first movie I saw by him, The Big Easy (1986). His failure to sell the mother humpin’ legend of one Jerry Lee Lewis in 1989’s Great Balls of Fire seems to have brought him premium cable’s way. For Showtime, he also directed 1997’s Pronto, based on the Elmore Leonard novel (review of that Peter Falk-starring movie coming soon), The Informant (1997), and an episode of the unjustly unavailable mid-‘90s noir series Fallen Angels, “Fearless,” co-written by Walter Mosley.

Set in Mexico, The Wrong Man is about Alex Walker, a merchant sailor (Kevin Anderson) who gets in murder trouble while on leave, and on the run from the police, links up for a wild, drunken, road trip to hell with the magnificent Mills: Missy (Rosanna Arquette) and Phillip (John Lithgow). Walker, like Warren Oates in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, wears a white suit through the movie, but The Wrong Man is not a dark tale of decapitation and annihilation in Mexico. It is a saucy and sleazy and sometimes silly film noir satire with touches of Tennessee Williams that is a fun, deliriously acted road movie about Americans being assholes south of the border.

Coming off Brian De Palma’s Raising Cain (1992), Lithgow plays Phillip with delight and maximum blustering that the actor expertly filters through levers of drunkenness, giddiness, and peckerwoodness and greases it all with a hard-to-pin-down moral code. He meets Alex’s youthful defiance with lines like “I like someone with shit in their shoes.” Rich Kogan in the Chicago Tribune did not appreciate Lithgow’s approach, which he called “stunningly weird.” He meant that as a bad thing, but Kogan might have been playing with a different set of rules than Lithgow and McBride had adopted for this Showtime effort.

While some praised Lithgow’s performance, Anderson seemed to bring out the grumpiness in a lot of critics. None more than the Toronto Star’s Craig MacInnis, who calls Anderson “an annoying little snip whose dramatic range veers from wooden determination to determined woodenness.” But for me, Anderson manages his role, which does not really ask very much of him, fine. Alex is a bit of youthful blank slate, a guy who deludes himself about his purity while stealing pickup lines from the man he is accused of offing, introducing himself to Missy by telling her he is in “the monkey business.”

Not surprisingly, Arquette’s Missy stirred the most attention, and, oh, yes, yes, Arquette most certainly sizzles through an assortment of monkey business in The Wrong Man. The promotional VHS I have hypes the movie as a “sultry sexpenser” (apparently a phrase Variety also used for Body Double, according to a recent episode of the Guide for the Film Fanatic podcast) and an “old style thriller with up-to-date nudity.” Arquette and McBride subvert the idea of a “femme fatale,” showing Missy sucking her thumb and twirling in her tight dresses and smiling like an eager little kid ready to hit the playground. Her husband, Phillip, is significantly older, and Alex is the perfect stupid playmate for her.

MacInnis did not think Arquette was right for the role, and added disapprovingly, “no major American actress I can think of has appeared without her clothes in so many scenes.” Indeed, Arquette’s nudity prompted a story in the Tribune before the movie aired with the headline “Arquette and Lithgow Do Nude Scene for Cable.” Arquette, who was about to turn 34 as the movie debuted, is fully committed to her steamy performance and in interviews seemed to mostly relish the role. However, she told USA Today that her request to McBride for a body double was denied, but ultimately, she decided the nudity was “crucial” for the scene. In a syndicated interview with Frank Lovece, she voiced her love of TV and cable movies and called most theatrical movies of the time “big action movies with no depth to them.” For The Wrong Man, Arquette said “the actors all fell in love with the dialogue, because most of us don’t get a chance to speak really sharp, interesting dialogue anymore.”

Filmed on location in Veracruz, Mexico, McBride’s movie is engagingly debauched throughout. In one scene, our merry Americans, as heavily sauced and rowdy passengers, cause a tourist bus to crash into a river. The Mexican police in pursuit of Alex are also quite entertaining, especially Jorge Cervera Jr. (Three Amigos, Real Women Have Curves) as the older bored, jaded cop who tracks him down. Los Lobos’ great moody “Blue Moonlight” plays over the ending credits. While the movie played only on Showtime in the United States, The Wrong Man hit some theaters in Europe and was screened at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival.

Written by Michael Thoma, The Wrong Man was based on a story by Roy Carlson. Thoma played Gentry in Major League and wrote The Set Up (also not a remake), starring Billy Zane, for Showtime in 1995. As for Carlson, he also served as a producer on The Wrong Man and as screenwriter and producer for the following year’s China Moon, giving him a slight neo-noir double punch from which he promptly disappeared. His only other movie credit to date came on the 1985 vigilante flick Stand Alone, directed by Alan Beattie, who also served as a producer on The Wrong Man.

The Orlando Sentinel was ready to start a Roy Carlson Fan Club after seeing China Moon, which is set in the Tampa Bay area. Filmed in 1991, the Ed Harris and Madeleine Stowe-starring movie was left to dry until 1994. But back in 1990, with cinema glory and the sound of money singing a sweet melody in their ears, the Sentinel thought Carlson, who had “come from Hollywood to show what can done,” might be the spark the state needed for more Florida-set movies. I guess they had the wrong …

You can find The Wrong Man on the Internet Archive.

Memphis's James Godwin and the Power of Hog Jowl (2020)

NOTE: I interviewed James Godwin for the late, great Quixotronic back in December 2020. Godwin just this week released two groovy new songs on Bandcamp: "Goin' Back to Arkansas" and "Ain't Nothing Goin' On in Memphis." Happy to see he is back in action!

You know James Godwin from Memphis’s James and the Ultrasounds, and if you don’t know them – hot damn, check ‘em out. You’ve got some fun in store!

Godwin has just released a new solo EP, Hog Jowl, on his new label, Rainbow Recording Co. The fantastic five-song EP shows a similar rock’n-roll fervor as the Ultrasounds at times, like the fun, slabby title track or the gospelized and groovy “Down to the Valley,” but Godwin ends with a pair of more heartfelt and low-key – but not unnoisy – songs in “I Told You This Would Happen” and “Only I Know.”

Godwin recently checked in with us from Memphis about the new EP and what else he’s been doing since tearing up Circle A (photographic proof above) on the Ultrasounds’ visit to Milwaukee last year.

You’ve recorded two albums and a few singles with your group the Ultrasounds to great acclaim. I read that this solo EP isn’t just a break. What made you decide to move on from the band?

Oh, I haven’t officially put an end to the Ultrasounds or anything like that. I’m just putting that particular musical coat in the closet for the time being, given the circumstances. Right when Covid hit, I was playing and touring with a few different bands, and it had become easier to tell people to just look me up under my name. All that, plus the fact that I no longer feel like the person that’s on those Ultrasounds recordings. I’m just somewhere else in my life and in my mind, and I think certain moments on my new EP reflect that. I’m really just trying to continue to create music during these weird days, and hope that people check it out. I don’t know if the traditional 4-piece rock band that tours is gonna be a thing again anytime soon, but hopefully we'll get to a point soon where a very stripped down, yet energetic duo might be a thing. Maybe me and a cocktail drummer from the back of a U-Haul in a field?? Who knows what it’s all gonna look like a year from now. But still, I’d like to do a third Ultrasounds record someday with weird combinations of all of the different members that never actually played together. That could be fun.

Were these five songs all written and recorded during the pandemic? Any of them have earlier origins?

The songs were pretty much written and recorded between late February and October minus one song. I wrote “Down To The Valley” while driving back and forth from Memphis to Water Valley, MS doing studio work at Dial Back Sound Studio in the early months of 2020. The title “Hog Jowl” comes from having Jimbo Mathus over on New Year’s Day of 2020. We were doing rehearsals for an upcoming string of shows. Since it was New Years Day, Jimbo wanted to cook up some Greens and Black Eyed Peas. He also had a large and mysterious block of meat going in a skillet. I asked him what kind of meat he had going there, to which he enthusiastically replied,“Hog Jowl.” That just stuck with me for some reason. Then when Covid hit full on, with the news, the politics, all of it, ya know.. I just kept thinking about that big chunk of meat sizzlin’ on New Year’s Day, and how my mind was starting to feel the same way.

Do you have any plans for a physical release or will this be digital only? After spending time with Madjack for the two Ultrasounds albums, are you talking to any labels about the EP or any future recordings?

It'll be coming out on CD soon, and then there will be a very small 7" release as well. Both on my own micro label, Rainbow Recording, Co. which is something I was thinking of doing pre-Covid. I'm hoping it’s something I can build up into 2021, and I've already got a few releases lining up with a handful of different artists in Memphis. It’s going to be a very small operation, just funky, small batch stuff and digital, but it’s going to be 100% artist/musician operated. Like farm to table music. I'm also hoping to work with all different kinds of artists, not just “rock and roll” people.

Besides making music, what else have you done to keep your sanity/inspire you during the pandemic?

Hmmm..some painting, the home improvement kind...chopping up branches from fallen trees in the yard and burning them has brought me a great deal of satisfaction. Intense cat observation. I think this year has taken quite a toll on everyone.

How much do you miss performing in front of a crowd? Any particular past performances stick in your mind as you find yourself stuck on pause because of the pandemic?

I do miss it. I miss traveling with other musicians, and that good feeling you get when you’ve got something good going on, and the calendar is filled with work. Maybe my first show ever in London. That was the first stop on the first Ultrasounds European tour. You’re in this room full of strangers in a strange place, and you’re up there with your boys from Memphis and ready to take ‘em for a ride. I miss that shit.

 

Things Change for Lonesome Bob (2002)

 

NOTE: Here's an interview I did with Lonesome Bob, aka Bob Chaney, for Country Standard Time back in June 2002. The interview was timed to promote his second solo album, Things Change. Unfortunately, it was Lonesome Bob's last album to date, but he continues to perform shows in and around Pittsburgh, where he now lives.

Just call him Lonesome - Bob, that is. Look at him quickly, and it's hard to believe that Robert Chaney - aka Lonesome Bob - a big lumberjack of a man at 6-foot-4, is capable of the songs he writes and sings with rocket-fire force, undiluted and straight to the heart.

The man on the cover of Chaney's new album, "Things Change," is bald, bearded and fierce, clad in boots, faded jeans, sunglasses and a black sleeveless shirt. He towers imposingly over a cloudy industrial setting - smoking, pissed off, ready to get the hell off work.

But listen to "Things Change" or his first album, 1997's "Things Fall Apart," and you'll know big Bob of Nashville with the extra large voice is capable of much more empathy than you would have ever thought at first glance.

Perhaps, the character who most seems to exist on a different planet than that rough man on the cover is the Volvo-driving office worker in "Heather's All Bummed Out." Heather's blue, and it's hard to explain why, Bob sings, other than she's 35 and running out of time. She looks for love on the Internet and fails miserably: "There's something missing from her life and today it's making her cry/and she'll never take another chance, and that's the crying shame."

The biggest crying shame is that not more people know Chaney's music. Compare him to fellow Americana musician Mike Ireland (who recently released his first effort in four years, the excellent "Try Again"), another guy whose reward for laying it all out emotionally seems to be indifference from record buyers.

However, Chaney's music is even more emotionally raw than Ireland's countrypolitan confessions. He simply rages and rocks, soft and hard, with humor and sadness. Hell, he actually has warnings on "Things Change" and "Things Fall Apart," telling listeners to avoid taking songs like "Plans We Made," a dandy murder ballad duet with Allison Moorer, or "Got Away With It," a dandy murder rocker with Moorer, too seriously. They're just songs, after all. 

But it's hard not to take songs like "Where Are You Tonight?" or "Dreaming the Lie" seriously. These songs are among several on the new album that deal with the death of Chaney's son, Zachary, who died in 1998 at age 18 of hepatitis, contracted after he used a dirty needle.

"I sit, I stare, I wonder, I swear," he howls on "Where are You Tonight?" (the vocal was recorded in one take) as you find it impossible to ignore the suffering of a father. He played the song live just once at an in-the-round in Nashville.

"People were pinned to the back of their chairs," Chaney says.

He grew up in Mount Ephraim, N.J., a "classic suburban" town outside of Philadelphia, where he graduated from high school in 1974 and learned to love the Grateful Dead. "I deprogrammed myself from being a Deadhead," he explains.

After high school, Chaney attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he played basketball for two years. By 1984, five years after Zachary was born, he moved to New York City and joined the Ben Vaughn Combo as a drummer. As a member of the combo, he played songs like "Lookin' For a 7-11" "blotto, balls to the wall, as crazy as you can make it." Vaughn, a high school friend, has gone on to do the music for television shows like "That '70s Show" and "Third Rock From the Sun."

After the group broke up in 1988, Chaney began his brand of country music around New York. "I was looking around New York City, where there are a chunk of people big into country. People told me you're not never to get anywhere playing country here. All of the country music industry is in Nashville...I was told I needed to come down here if I was serious enough about it."

In 1994, he decided he was serious enough and made the big move to Music City USA. Once it got there, it wasn't exactly what he expected. "I guess I should have listened to country radio to at least know what to expect," he says. "Robbie Fulks ran into the same thing, with a publishing deal where you basically write bad songs for people who suck. Robbie left before the next wave (of talented musicians) came to Nashville."

That next wave includes people like Greg Trooper, Gwil Owen, Tim Carroll, Phil Lee, Tommy Womack and Moorer.

"We're the same 12 people at each other's gigs," Chaney says.

He established a special musical relationship with Moorer, who sings on both of Chaney's releases. Bob remembers the first time he heard her sing.

"My draw just dropped," he says. "It was like, 'Where have you been?' It was amazing. And I really haven't worked with anybody else since."

He and Moorer even performed together on the Grand Old Opry at the Ryman Auditorium. "They're over really fast," Chaney says. "You think about it. This is going to be cool. What am I going to wear? I hope I don't fuck up."

There was a tense moment, however. 

"I walked up to sing the first line, and the monitor's not on. There's a panic. I thought, 'I'm going to suck.' It's a really great way to break the ice."

After "Things Fall Apart," Checkered Past, which released the album decided not to exercise its option on Chaney and set him free along with fellow Nashville artists Tom House, Paul Burch and Womack. "We all scrambled and found new homes in varying lengths of time," he says.

One year after "Things Fall Apart" was released, Zachary died in April 1998. "It was hard to put one foot in front of the other," he says, "much less make a record."

He eventually got back to writing songs and completed "Things Change" with former 20/20 guitarist Steve Allen serving as co-producer. The album was released this spring on Leap Recordings. Chaney says he's pleased with the results. "I'm looking forward to getting sick of it."

 

Workin' at the Car Wash: Michael Schultz Returns to Milwaukee

Big, big news in Brew City. Milwaukee native and legendary film director Michael Schultz is returning home this weekend, and you can catch him at the Oriental Theater on Saturday. 

Milwaukee Film is paying tribute to the 86-year-old with screenings of Car Wash (3 p.m.), Cooley High (7:30 p.m.) and Last Dragon (8 p.m.) Schultz will appear for Q&A sessions after Car Wash and before Cooley High, which will also include an awards presentation.

I was very lucky and honored to interview Michael Schultz in 2022 for Wisconsin Public Radio, and I’m thrilled he is coming to town. All three movies are well worth seeing. Cooley High is the best, and certainly the most acclaimed, but there’s something about Car Wash that draws you in every time, and it’s not just Norman Whitfield’s funky ass theme song performed by Rose Royce.

I asked Schutlz about the joy the movie brought to audiences, including me, when I interviewed him, and I wanted to share some of his comments about his experience making the 1976 movie starring Richard Pryor, Bill Duke, Ivan Dixon, George Carlin, Antonio Fargas and others. I talked to Schultz for more than an hour, and, of course, I didn’t get to use everything from the interview in my radio segment and web story. So, here’s a little more about Car Wash, a music-filled movie that wildly tells the story of a Los Angeles car wash over the course of a single day.

Coming off 1975’s Cooley High, a film that had combined comedy and drama to devastating effect, Schultz was unsure initially he wanted to follow up with Car Wash after reading Joel Schumacher’s script.

“I almost turned down the movie because it was just all sorts of humor, slapstick, kind of what I call bubblegum comedy,” he said. “And I was talking to a friend of mine, Suzanne de Passe, who was like Barry Gordy’s right-hand person. She had discovered the Jackson 5 and all that. And I said, ‘Suzanne, they offered me this movie, and I’m going to turn it down.’ She said, ‘Are you crazy? It’s like, if it’s not what you want, take the job and make it what you want,’ which is some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.”

Schultz went forward and set out to put a “spine of seriousness” in Car Wash to balance the comedy. But at the time, he said, “dramedies” were not the rage they have become, and Universal Pictures did not understand why he wanted to make changes.

“They said, ‘you can’t do that,'” Schultz said. “'You can’t mix comedy and drama, or comedy and melodrama, or whatever you want to.' I said, ‘Why not?’ Because I came out of theater, and I knew from the experience of Cooley High, which was all comedic in the beginning that led to some serious drama at the end, and how effective that was on the public in terms of storytelling.

“So, all through the making of that movie, I’m fighting with the studio to have the film end the way I wanted it to end,” he said. “So, I built this throughline between the old school ex-convict, Lonnie (Ivan Dixon), and the young revolutionary, Abdullah (Bill Duke). Because again, like in Cooley High, the bond and love between young black men. But this time, I wanted the father figure to save the young revolutionary and learn from his experience, and the studio just hated that idea. So, I convinced them to let me shoot the film in chronological order, which is almost never done in Hollywood.”

Shooting chronologically can be less efficient and can result in a loss of time and money, he explained, but Schultz thought he could convince them to accept the ending he had planned if he did that way. But he told executives he was shooting chronologically because he had been influenced by Robert Altman’s approach in Nashville.

“I said, ‘Look, I've modeled this movie after Nashville, and like Robert Altman was doing multiple stories in audio, I’m doing multiple stories in the visuals that we might be seeing something happen, you know, through the glass of the of the car window, that’s as much a part of the story as the people who are talking, you know, and there’s no way to keep track of that if you don’t shoot in order. But the real reason was, I wanted to keep trying to convince them that the way I wanted to tell the story was the best way to do it.

“And the hardest part of convincing them was the scene at the end of the movie where Abdul was coming in to rob the place and Lonnie stops him. They embrace, the revolutionary cries, breaks down and all that.”

According to the 1978 book Creative Differences: Profiles of Hollywood Dissidents by David Talbot and Barbara Zheu, Schultz was given only 28 days to shoot Car Wash, and he exceeded that time limit by about 10.

“It’s so finally I’m going to one day over schedule, two days over schedule, three days over,” he said. “The head of the studio calls me and says, ‘Schultz, you finish the damn film.’ I said, ‘Yeah, if you let me shoot it the way I want to shoot it, OK?’ Go ahead, because they figured they could change it in the editing, right?

“So, that’s kind of how it kind of came to be. So, yes, it was joyful. It was a lot of fun. I got Richard Pryor to do a dick part, you know, yeah, and the Pointer Sisters, and that led to a whole experience of working with Richard on other movies.”

Schultz told the authors of Creative Differences in 1978 that he was about 75% happy with Car Wash and the movie “has its values.”

Roger Ebert praised the movie for its “tremendous sense of life.” “It’s one thing to have an idea like this — a zany, sometimes serious day in the life of a car wash — and another thing to make it work,” Ebert wrote. “But the screenplay and the direction juggle the characters so adroitly, this is almost a wash-and-wax M*A*S*H.”

Pauline Kael, meanwhile, ripped Car Wash, writing, “it has no more class than a Hostess Twinkie, though it, too, might make you gag a little.” However, Kael also knocked Norman Whitfield’s music in her review, so she was obviously out of her mind when she watched the movie.

People have certainly wanted to return to the vibrant 1976 world of Car Wash, as it has enjoyed cult success and attempts to revive it over the years. A pilot for a TV version of the movie, starring Danny Aiello, was made in 1978, and a roundly dismissed remake came out in 2001 with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.

The movie’s energy, the perfectly selected cast, most especially Dixon and Fargas, and Schultz’s passion and determination make Car Wash feel so right-on -- even if "you might never get rich.”