Well, as the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers used to say, a year passes like nothing. (For you youngsters not hip to the underground comics of the ’60s and ’70s, the Freak Bros. were characters created and drawn by the great Gilbert Shelton, who also gave the world Wonder Wart Hog.)
Actually, it hasn’t been quite a year since something new came along in this space, and technically, something new shows up each week, as we (and by “we” I mean my webmaster, Joltin’ Jonathan Wooley, the Co-ed’s Friend) post in a weekly log sheet for my western-swing radio show, Swing on This. (For more on that, including how you can get it outside the Tulsa area, please see the“radio” section.)
Anyway, the reason I haven’t been flapping my gums — or, technically, flexing my fingers — more here is that there hasn’t been a whole lot of a lot of big-time news since last we met here, in mid-spring of ’04. I’m happy to say, however, that situation seems to have improved, and now there’s plenty to talk about.
NEW VIDEO
— First of all, VCI head Bill Blair’s home movie theater, which is beautiful. Bill’s son Bob, also awww.vcientertainment.com
— I should also mention that I’m working with Fangoria, the world’s No. 1 horror-movie magazine, you probably saw the piece on Hell High that Mike Price and I did in our regular “Forgotten Horrors” column.
NEW BOOKS
— There’s a little something for everyone in the books I’ve got coming out this year (he said hopefully).
First of all, late May should see the long-awaited release of The Big Book of Biker Flicks a deluxe, oversized, color-interiors volume from www.amazon.com or the Midnight Marquee-Luminary Press website, HAWK Publishing Group). It’s the first book-length history of OMA, an institution dubbed the West Point of the Southwest. From 1919 to 1971, it sat atop College Hill outside of Claremore, OK, about 15 miles from where I type this. Right across from the Will Rogers Memorial, it’s now metamorphosed into the classy Rogers State University.
The book is full of photos as well as text, documenting the famed school’s history in the words of its former students, all placed in historical context. It will have its debut in June at the reunion of former OMA cadets, and while those interested in military institutions, Oklahoma history, and OMA itself will be the book’s primary audience, I have to tell you that my research turned up some neat movie and music connections, which the book also documents. In 1935, for instance, when Will Rogers was the No. 1 box office attraction in America, he brought the OMA polo team to Hollywood to play a match with Stanford. An anecdote involving the cadets’ tour of the 20th Century-Fox studios is one of my favorite stories in the book.
— Finally, book-wise, the new novel Ghost Band, should also make its debut later this year. It concerns a trumpeter named Miles West, touring with a group that still performs under the name of a dead bandleader (these outfits are known in the trade as “ghost bands”). It is, indeed, a ghost story, but I’d like to think that it offers ghosts that are a bit different — that might, in fact, open up our minds to other possibilities. It opened mine, up, anyway. I’m hoping it’ll be out by the fall.
— And don’t forget my pulp-fiction collections Roscoes in the Night (collecting Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective stories by Robert Leslie Bellem) and At the Stroke of Midnight (collecting all the Steve Midnight stories of John K. Butler) They’re both still available, along with a whole bunch of other pulp-related books, from their publisher,www.barnesandnoble.com
RADIO SHOW
— Swing on This, my radio show on Tulsa’s KWGS (89.5 FM), is now well into its second season, and seems to be continuing on an upswing. It’s a full hour of western swing, cowboy jazz, hot string band music, or whatever else you want to call it, airing Saturday nights at 7 p.m., right between Prairie Home Companion and Riverwalk, Live from the Landing. KWGS is Tulsa’s NPR and PRI affiliate, which means there are no commercials and, really, no restrictions on what I can play — which can be sort of dangerous, I guess, but I’m trying to be responsible about it.
Tulsa is the place where western-swing grew up, after Bob Wills, Milton Brown, and a couple of others started this new amalgam of fiddle music, Dixieland jazz, blues, hillbilly and pop down in Fort Worth, Texas, in the very early ’30s. Bob was basically chased out of Tulsa by a vengeful ex-employer in 1934, ending up at Tulsa radio station KVOO, a huge clear-channel station in those days before FM, when it could be heard over most of the Southwest on a good night. Bob’s regular broadcasts from KVOO as he fiddled with and refined his western-swing sound helped build a huge audience for that musical genre. At one point, Wills and his Texas Playboys were the top-earning band in the country, outgrossing the likes of Harry James and Benny Goodman.
Bob broadcast from his Tulsa home, the Cain’s Ballroom, and while that historic venue doesn’t only still exist but has just been wonderfully restored by its current owners, the Rodgers family, KVOO-AM is no more, having succumbed to the regrettable fad of turning AM music stations into repositories of rancorous rants. Once the most famous station in Tulsa (the VOO stood for Voice of Oklahoma), it now has different call letters and air “personalities” offering a baffling mix of pursed-lipped Puritanism and peep-show prurience. A couple of the former KVOO’s FM sister stations still play country music — one of which is actually called KVOO — but I’m told that the music of Bob and Johnnie Lee Wills are pretty much off-limits to the deejays.
So, if you live in the Tulsa area and you want western-swing, please tune into Swing on This. (I should also note that Dave Boyd and his staff at the fiercely independent Vinita-based station KITO — 96.1 FM/1470 AM — also remember the Wills heritage on their programs.)
Those of you outside the Tulsa listening area can pick Swing on This up at 7 p.m. Central Time, right after Prairie Home Companion. Tune us in on the web atAdventure House) atwww.heartlandauthors.com.
SPECIAL OFFER
— Yep. It’s still our indie feature film Cafe Purgatory, which One Step Beyond. It’s also got Elvis in it, or a surprisingly reasonable facsimile thereof, and comes in its own lovely hardshell case.
THAT’S IT
— Again and as always, many thanks for stopping by.