“An artist is his own fault.” — John O’Hara
If you think you haven’t heard from me in a while, you’re right. I’ve been off paving the road to hell with good intentions, which is a dirty job, and pretty hot as well — not to mention clichéd.
The good intentions here refer to my plan of updating this space every three months – or, as they say in the publishing biz, quarterly. It hasn’t exactly happened that way, although the updates to the radio part of the website have come every two weeks.
Perhaps it’d be more accurate to say “every two weeks.” That’s how often I send the playlists for my radio show, Swing on This, to my webmaster, Jonathan “And Girls, He’s Available” Wooley. Sometimes, though, they haven’t shown up on this site with exactly the same frequency. My son Jonathan, you see, in addition to being my webmaster, is a senior majoring in film at Oklahoma State University, where he stays busy making short films like “Witchcop” and “Edgar Allan Po-Mo” – both award-winning, if I do say so myself. And sometimes, between the last camera setup of the day and his fourth Pig’s Eye Light, his webmaster responsibilities float away like wisps of Vicks Vap-0-Rub.
So, if you’re looking for a new playlist — and I’m told that a lot of people do – and it’s not here in a timely manner, just plan to check back a little later and think to yourself, with a smile on your lips, “that darn Jonathan.” It works for me. Occasionally.
I’ve also updated the “Radio Show” section to reflect that it now comes on just before the great local program Big Band Saturday Night, hosted by my friend Alan Lambert, making for a swell three hours of swingin’ tunes. I should also tell you that Swing on This recently scored a 5.6 rating, making it the top-rated program on KWGS. (I hasten to add that this doesn’t mean more people listen to it than they do any other program on the station. What it means is that I’ve got a higher percentage of those listening to the radio at the time my program airs than any other KWGS show. Got it? I’m not sure I do.)
The Big Book of Biker Flicks, written with my peerless pal Michael H. Price, and Voices from the Hill: The Story of Oklahoma Military Academy, both from HAWK Publishing Group, still represent my most current work. This year, however, should see the publication of three or four more, including the elusive Ghost Band. Jodie Nida at HAWK assures me it’s now in the pipeline, and should be on the shelves later this year.
Also, I just finished a pulp-story collection with John Locke, the pulp historian and writer, called Thrilling Detective Heroes, It’s really a dandy, and it should be out from Adventure House in time to make its debut at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback convention, held in Chicago the first weekend in May.
More news as it comes in. Meanwhile, as always, many thanks for dropping by. Please stick around for a while, and remember: Books make wonderful gifts for people who aren’t morons.
NEW BOOKS
The Big Book of Biker Flicks a deluxe, oversized, color-interiors volume from HAWK Publishing Group has been out since the summer, but sales continue to be brisk as more and more people discover it. Between my collaborator Michael H. Price and I, we interviewed a ton of biker-film greats for the book, including the likes of Jack Nicholson, Herschell Gordon (She-Devils on Wheels) Lewis, Sonny Barger, Peter Fonda, William Smith, Sam Sherman, Dennis Hopper, Roger Corman, and Billy Gray. The book features chapters on 40 of the best — or at least the most interesting — motorcycle movies of all time, featuring original advertising material. And if you don’t remember, or aren’t old enough to have seen, the newspaper ad campaigns during the bike-picture heyday of the late ’60s-early ’70s, prepare to see some of the roughest, weirdest, and most amusing movie ads ever made!
Big Book has drawn more than its share of nice reviews, including a new one from the writer and movie expert Jan Alan Henderson, who, in a piece for Cult Movies, called it a “sure-to-please volume” that he “more than highly recommended.” Booklist said that Michael and I “consider the canon of the chopper epic enthusiastically and thoroughly, mixing stills and promotional graphics with dead-on thumbnail plot summaries, not to mention pithily noting particular films’ peculiar distinctions.” And my pal Dennis King at the Tulsa World wrote, “In a style that ranges nimbly from academic and respectful to populist and irreverent, Wooley and Price have forged a cult book that’s both keenly informative and outlandishly entertaining.” We even got a thumbs-up e-mail from a Tonight Show staffer, telling us that Jay Leno loves the book!
Michael and I are very proud of Big Book. Please keep it in mind when it’s time to buy a gift for the motorcycle aficionado or exploitation-film fan on your list. You can get it from your favorite store or on the web at www.amazon.com.
– June 1 was the release date for Voices from the Hill: The Story of Oklahoma Military Academy (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 debuted June 4 with a great signing during 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.
To purchase a copy of Voices, contact the Rogers State University Office of Development at (918) 343-7773 or toll-free at (800) 256-7511. It’s also available on the Internet at, you guessed it, www.amazon.com.
— The Price-Wooley team should soon have a second movie-releated volume out this year. Forgotten Horrors 4: Dreams That Money Can Buy is the latest in our series about low-budget independent pictures of bygone days. Our only ground rules are that the films have to have been made by someone other than a major studio, and that they contain horror or weird elements.
This volume deals with films made in 1947 and `48, and includes everything from the Jungle Jim series of pictures to obscure thrillers like The Cobra Strikes to films that defy explanation, like Ken Murray’s Bill and Coo, which is acted entirely by birds. Really.
The book has been in production for some time at the series’ new home, Dinoship Press, and publisher Bob Madison tells us it should be on the market soon. Meanwhile, there’s the preceding volume, Forgotten Horrors 3: Dr. Turner’s House of Horrors, available at your local bookstore or from www.amazon.com or the Midnight Marquee-Luminary Press website, www.midmar.com.
— 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, Adventure House. They’re also distributed to stores by Diamond Distributors.Roscoes is carried by www.barnesandnoble.com.
RADIO SHOW
— Swing on This, my radio show on Tulsa’s KWGS (89.5 FM), is now well into its third season, and if the emails to this website are any indication, we continue to add new listeners. It’s a full hour of western swing, cowboy jazz, hot string-band music, and a song here and there that defies categorization, airing Saturday nights at 7 p.m., right between Prairie Home Companion and a longtime Tulsa favorite that recently moved to KWGS, Alan Lambert’s Big Band Saturday Night. KWGS is Tulsa’s NPR and PRI affiliate, which means there are no commercials and, really, no restrictions on what I can play. I’m trying to be responsible with all this freedom, but I freely admit that I slip from time to time and play something that would’ve gotten me busted back when I was doing a similar show on commercial station KVOO-AM (now regrettably defunct; see below) with country-music great and my hero, Billy Parker.
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 Texas 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.
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 at www.kwgs.org, and please tell your friends — at least the ones you think might be interested. I appreciate it very much.
NEW VIDEO
— First of all, VCI has reissued the western-swing documentary I wrote, Still Swingin’, which first came out over a decade ago. It’s now on DVD with a ton of extras, including some interviews I did with Bob Wills’ brother Luke, his sister Lorene, and several members of the Bob and Johnnie Lee Wills bands, material that was intended for a second documentary. There’s also some TV and movie footage of Bob and the boys performing various songs, and lots of other stuff. Chris Lewis, who directed the original, came back into town to shoot wraparounds with yours truly, whose big Okie face introduces the extras on this edition. We shot the new footage in VCI head Bill Blair’s home movie theater, which is beautiful. Bill’s son Bob, also a VCI executive, was there with us as well, and they gifted me with some B-western DVDs starring Ken Maynard, George Huston and Johnny Mack Brown — from their extensive VCI catalog — after the shoot was over.
SECOND PARAGRAPH, FIRST SENTENCE: REWRITE TO READ “The Still Swingin’ video was officially released on March 6th, 2005, the 100th anniversary of Bob Wills’ birth. (He and my younger son, Steven, share the same birthday, albeit 82 years apart). If you’re interested in getting a copy — it retails for $19.99, which isn’t bad for a little over five hours of western-swing music and interviews — contact VCI toll-free at (800) 331-4077 or on the web at www.vcientertainment.com
— I should also mention that I’m working with VCI and my good pal Bill Boyce, the cult-movie star of Slime People, Rat Fink and my own Cafe Purgatory, on another DVD project that should be out by Halloween. I don’t want to say
too much more, except to add that it reunites Bill and me with Leo Evans,
director and co-writer of Cafe Purgatory and writer of the ’80s slasher flick Hell High, which itself was recently released on DVD.
If you’re a reader of
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.
AND IN OTHER NEWS…
— A reminiscence of mine will be coming out sometime in The Phantom of the Movies’Videoscope, having to do with the first horror movie I ever saw and what it did to me, and I’m told my interview with singer Mark Lindsay will be out soon in Discoveries. You can also catch more of my stuff than you’d ever want to read in the Tulsa World the big-city newspaper that’s allowed me to work as its country and Oklahoma music and horror-movie writer, among other entertainment assignments, for 23 years and counting.
— Back atcha soon, you bet…