Cheeseburger & Fries, I Recollect

I

How did it all start? I ask myself this question about a great many things. When I apply it to the subject of Cheeseburger & Fries, I think of the mid-nineties. I even think of the late-nineties. Speak, memory. Good dog. But be forewarned: my own memories don't even necessarily accord with JSH's.

Edward Hireronymus, with whom I grew up with in Jackson County, met JSH first. The Lexington radio station WRFL, on the University of Kentucky's campus, was the converging point. Ed moved to Lex (from Richmond) in '93. I showed up in town the following year. Although I'm certain that I had at least met JSH in passing, most likely at this booth at the Water Street Mall (an indoor flea market) in Richmond. I know that we had printed an excerpt from JSH's novel, 714, in one of the issues of mine and Ed's zine, Abortion Stories.

Bumming around campus, what I recall, is running into JSH, getting to know him better. While he would hang out in Lex and maintain a presence at the radio station, his home-base, at that time, was Richmond. I was in possession of wheels, my old '84 Mercury Topaz, which, for all practical purposes, would become the "Cheeseburger & Fries Express," JSH would require rides back to Richmond, and we would barter, either for a bit of cash money or or old records, in exchange for the gas money of the transport. It was on these road jaunts that our conversations cemented the fact that we had a certain shared old timey primitive space age reality principle.

I don't remember if our very first street performance was in Lexington or Richmond. We would just hit spots around, whether it be in Lex, Richmond, Berea, or parts unknown, sometimes chosen for the location specifically to go for the tip money of passers by, and sometimes chosen for the spiritual isolation, the alchemically correct spot, hanging in a doorway, the right graveyard on the right night, or walking down the railroad tracks, often performing just for the tape recorder, sometimes just for the ether itself, sometimes, if not always, for both. Ed Hieronymus would later call it what Goethe once called it, "the music of the spheres."

I don't know who said it first; it might have been a back and forth, call and response moment. Anyway, the routine went, "We'll play a song for anything...a dollar, ten cents, compliments on our singing voices, hand-me-down clothes, we'll even play a song for a cheeseburger, maybe some fries...who are we? Ain't it obvious? This here's Cheeseburger. This here's Fries. We're Cheeseburger & Fries."

As this moniker attached itself to us, so did, in various stream of consciousness sessions, the first songs that would establish our repertoire of originals and covers began to emerge. We were there to entertain the great outdoors of central and eastern Kentucky...there to entertain bums...college students...to woo women. Mostly, we entertained ourselves.


II

In the parking lot behind a Baptist Church in Richmond. The tape recorder is propped on the hood. I'm using the Topaz itself as percussion instrument. JSH beats out a jazzy/bluesy walking bass line on the acoustic guitar. This invokes in me a talking blues in a gruff, Tom Waits-esque voice. Rather than going with some urban hard boiled tale, my brain flashes on the idea to juxtapose the elements, to do in world-weary tones something childish and mundane. I end up spontaneously telling the story of losing my first dog, Freckles, due to the discovery that I was allergic to the dog. The song, "Never Saw That Dog Again," evolved into a staple of the CH&FR set.

Drinking whiskey in Lexington. JSH and I are hanging out with our half-Mexican writer pal, who will be referred to here as N. The tape recorder is on, we're singing songs in the living room of my first floor apartment. "Don't worry about germs," I hear someone, I think N, say about a dirty drinking glass, "the whiskey'll sterilize it." I sing "Night Owl Screechin'," which is the same basic riff, but with my lyrics, as JSH's "Creeps In My Head," which is the same song as Billy Childish's "Child's Death Letter," which is really just a cover of Son House's "Death Letter Blues." We embrace, rather than deny, these strands of influence and regurgitation. I think this session might have ended up on an officially released tape recording, but I'm not clear on that (later, parenthetically, after following that train of thought, I remember that I released on my own Hanging Dog Productions imprint a cassette entitled Night Owl Screechin' which included the whiskey session and a particularly rowdy literary reading by N and myself, from Kaldi's in Cincy, OH). I think I might have ended up driving blind drunk, but I'm not sure about that. This was not an a-typical night.

JSH and are doing our thing out on North Limestone. This day we get an audience of the older, craggy bums who tend to congregate sometimes in this zone. There's one particular lady, of whom the sun light really shows her age, and she repeatedly requests at every juncture, "Your Cheating Heart." I'm sure we played it at least three or four, or more, times. One of the bums takes my pack of Camels, relieves it of its thin plastic outer-wrapper, and joins in with improvised kazoo stylings. It was a good way to spend an afternoon.

"Practicing" in Richmond at Water Street Mall after-hours (JSH had keys to the joint). As with many of our practices, we're performing for the tape recorder and going off on improv tangents as much as if not rather than nailing down some prescribed set-list. Jeff's explaining to me that he wants to sing in harmony. He exhibits how I should sing my part, and he, his own. I, like a character in the movie Spinal Tap, seem wholly incapable of doing this. JSH gives up on the music lesson, letting me go my own inept monkey-hype-man way.

Never much for monotheism, our gods were masters of hokum, show people, songsters. Louis Prima and his bad gleeby self. Blind Willie McTell. Homer & Jethro. Sinatra, Martin, Davis, the Rat Pack. The indomitable Memphis Jug Band. The list goes on and on. And on (for a couple of louts who hate and rebel against much, we also love much). As Dino put it, "Don't worry about me, I never sing serious." As we can't spend all of our time in the public eye, we spend many an afternoon marking time by listening to our gods speak in the tongues of the ages.

Our Phil friend Phil Francis walks by, as JSH and myself lounge at the picnic tables in front of what was called Paisley Peacock in Lexington, on North Limestone. With a mixture of scorn and humor he says, "You guys need to get jobs." JSH quips incredulously, "What? And quit show business?"

--JTD

The Shoebox

The Cheeseburger & Fries audio archives, consisting of stacks and stacks of crappy cassettes from fifteen years ago, has always been referred to as "the shoebox". Reason being, we originally stored them in a large Nike shoebox. However, the collection of tapes long since outgrew it and the shoebox was placed in a bigger box.

Although a handful of tracks were recently made available online, it's the intention of Creeps Records to make the entire contents of the shoebox tapes available to the world (whether the world wants it or not) in the coming year. Even we don't entirely know what's on these tapes - many of them were never even listened back to after a recording session or street performance.

Ch&F were infamous for their tirelessness, playing gruelingly long sets. I can remember at the Hip Joynt in Lexington, we often played for four hours straight and I didn't even want to stop when they finally made us. Here's an example set list from a show at Mr.Smith's Coffee House, Georgetown, KY, January 17, 1997:

Theme from Cheeseburger & Fries
Like A Prayer
Cigarette Blues
Losing my Religion
1999
One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer
Spiderman
Secret Agent Man
? (Jeff Rant)
Greasy Tit
Sweet Home Alabama
Manic Monday
Another Brick in the Wall
Uncomfortable for God
Angie/Hotel California/Heartbreak Hotel
Mailbag
Paradise City
Blue Moon
Release Me
That'll Be The Day
The Creeps
Cold Cold Ground
Got My 618 On
Love and Marriage
Women Can't be Trusted
Your Cheatin' Heart
It Was the Whiskey Talkin (Not Me)
Night Owl Screechin'
Little Red Riding Hood
Had Me A Girl
No More Hot Dogs
20 Eyes
My War
Theme from Gilligan's Island/Watching the Detectives
Haircut, Shotgun, Bottle of Corn
Beth
China Girl
Act Naturally
Campbellsville Dead Baby Song
Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On
My Babe
Battleship Chains
? (Marijuana song requested by some idiots)
Freebird
The Strangler of Boston Town
? (Blues thing as everybody leaves)
Satisfaction


Although we billed ourselves, a la Sleepy LaBeef, as being human jukeboxes capable of playing any song requested by the audience, our true talent in fact was our cheerful willingness to play any song whether we knew how or not. Don't even hum us a few bars, we'll fake it anyway. It's expressionism, man.

- - JSH

Doc's Dec/Jan Checklist

I'm still hungover from the holidays. I mean, when are the holidays over? I still got a birthday and Valentine's to work my way through in February. Anyway, some observations are in, or maybe out, of order...this is by no means a complete checklist, but, then again, I never said I was a complete person...

I got on a Raymond Chandler kick again. I re-read Farewell, My Lovely. And picked up a couple of books, Raymond Chandler Speaking (a collection of letters, etc.), and Creatures of Darkness (subtitled: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir). The latter, despite its academic leanings (published right here in the KY by the University of Kentucky press), is a humdinger in its complete history of Chandler in Hollywood, the work he did directly, and everything that was ever adapted from Chandler source material. Speaking of checklists, this is the ultimate handbook for keeping track of such stuff. Besides reminding me that Murder My Sweet is really the best Chandler adaptation to screen (all you gotta do is relax and get past the idea that Bogart is Philip Marlowe, and let Dick Powell do the job), I really see Chandler as thee noir novelist. If you take Hammett and James M. Cain, along with Chandler, as the holy trio of noir, Chandler sets the tone for what I think of when I think noir (and I think noir more than any healthy man should).

The Collected Jack Kirby Collector (Volumes Four & Five). When I'm not thinking about film noir, I often think of Jack Kirby. The Jack Kirby Collector seems to be put together by people who think of Jack Kirby more often than most anything else. There's worse things to do with one's time, and for my money, worse ways to waste time than by reading up on all the minutiae. I have to confess that early on in my misguided youth, I never gave all that much credit to Kirby as an Artiste. Sure, I gave him credit for being an originator, and surely almost single-handedly responsible for Marvel's Silver Age characters. But I turned a corner when reading some of his seventies work for DC a few years ago, and more and more I've come to see him not just as a great comics artist, but a great artist on any level. To see that the recent Kirby coffee table book was placed in a local book store in the general fine art section, was enough to almost bring a tear to my eye.

The Silver Age (subtitle: The Second Generation of Comic Book Artists). This is a heckuva book by Daniel Herman. Oversized, Herman prefers to use original artwork to illustrate his history, which is fine by me. Chock full of detail on the artists themselves, it's a pretty good read. The author also fills in some more blanks in my ongoing interest in all things Ramona Fradon. The timing of my reading of this book synced up with my buddy, artist Ben Durham, retrieving a box of actual Silver Age comics from his grandparents' attic, and let me borrow 'em to peruse 'em. Remind me to tell you about Patsy Walker, and discuss "my darling pet monkey." No, you took that wrong.

Reckless Road (subtitle: Guns N' Roses and the Making of Appetite for Destruction). With the recent comical emergence of Chinese Democracy, and the uselessness to me of the Use Your Illusion platters lingering in my memory, now seems as good a time as any to revisit what made Guns great, the Appetite for Destruction album. This book is great in that it charts the rise of Guns up to the point of the release of Appetite, and it becoming the mega-smash that it was (which, if you don't remember, didn't happen right away). The book is mostly eye-candy, what with the multitude of early photos by author and friend of the band (and on that level, I give it a big thumbs up), Marc Canter, who seemingly kept every single ticket stub or flyer the band produced on its way to infamy. But there's enough to read to make it mostly worth the while, but be forewarned, much of the text is padded with transcriptions of what the band said on stage, culled from the author's collection of bootlegs of a majority of the band's early gigs. And these transcriptions, in which the band do not come off as bards of the ages (although some of the banter about requesting drinks and smokes from the audience are funny), are not only repetitive in content, they are also poorly transcribed. A lot of "here" when there should be "hear," that sorta thing. But, hell, it's rock n roll. Read it like the band lived it, drunk. Turn up the volume.

Don't get me wrong, I haven't just been reading the past couple of months. This message is also brought to you by Bell's Two Hearted Ale, Negra Modelo, BBC Dark Star Porter, one of the Flying Dog Ales (I can't remember which, however), Four Roses single barrel, and Jura single malt scotch, all of which I endorse. And, hey, kudos to ShoBox for Miranda Vs. Cruz on Jan. 16th, in which all three fights were something to see (sometimes matches between up and comers can be uneven, but I always find them interesting, but this one was just a good night of boxing, period). I'm glad the new (and final) season of Battlestar Galactica is now in full swing. And...and...and...wait, what was I talking about?

--JTD

A Ghost Film about a Ghost Camera

I've seen the majority of the filmic works of the great noir actress-auteur Ida Lupino, but there's a few early obscure ones that are still escaping my all-seeing eye. Most notably among them is something called The Ghost Camera from 1933, which is described on IMDB thusly:

"When a photograph is taken at the scene of a murder, the camera is tossed out of a castle window to destroy the evidence and lands in the back of a passing car belonging to chemist John Gray who becomes amateur sleuth after developing the film and goes in search of the woman captured by the photograph".

The IMDB's page about The Ghost Camera is here, and their page about a 1936 film called The Last Journey is here. Compare and contrast for puzzling evidence:

Both pages show a VHS tape box for The Last Journey.

Both list identical directors, writers, runtime and aspect ratio.

Each lists a completely different cast.

One film is from 1933 and the other is from 1936.


It don't make no sense.

I'm guessing that the confusion lies in that The Ghost Camera was renamed The Last Journey for overseas release, or vice versa, but that there's another film by that name and IMDB is getting their wires crossed and mixing info about the two under the same listing.

But that doesn't help me in my quest - when, where and how can I see The Ghost Camera on DVD, dammit??

- - JSH

Journey into Fez

Just last month Dr. Dockery and I were chatting about a crusty old Orson Welles flick called Journey into Fear, and admiring the man's monstrous furlined icebucket headgear. This morning I caught it on Turner Classic Movies on demand, but fell asleep halfway through it in an uncharacteristic afternoon nap, which funnily enough, is the same thing that happened to Todd when he last tried to watch it. I got to see the hat and take a pic of it, though, and that's good enough for me.

- - JSH

The Mickey Rourke Rundown

As regards Senator Dockery's musings on Mickey Rourke yesterday, I'd like to throw my two cents in.

For me, it all began with Rumble Fish, which is in my top five films of all time, largely on the strength of Mickey's mumbling/whispering tough guy/soft guy performance that managed to do it without invoking James Dean, Elvis or any other prior archetype. This movie was Coppola's greatest "fuck you" prank to the world, sneaking a French-style avant-garde art film into the mainstream and tricking the public into going to see it because they thought it was the sequel to The Outsiders. It had a huge influence on me regarding how I think about fiction and drama (so if you hated Toulouse-inations, well, now you know who to blame.)

Angel Heart is, for my money, the finest modern film noir (unless you count the exaggerated pose of the deliberately self-conscious The Man Who Wasn't There) and was fan-fuckin-tastic as a private detective who finds himself in New Orleans and increasing embroiled in intrigue, conspiracies, the occult, and missing time. Which is pretty much what I was going through in New Orleans around the very same time.

Those two movies alone are so personally defining for me, that Mickey could be forgiven if he never made another good movie. But he did loads of great work in the 80s: Diner, The Pope of Greenwich Village, A Prayer for the Dying, Johnny Handsome, Desperate Hours, 9 1/2 Weeks, Year of the Dragon, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, Barfly, Homeboy, Wild Orchid, and Heaven's Gate. (Okay, I don't actually like Heaven's Gate but it's just nice to see Mickey Rourke, Isabelle Huppert, Jeff Bridges and Christopher Walken all in the same picture.)

After White Sands in 1992, I sort of fell off the Mickey boat and he went to do a decade and a half of movies that not only have I never seen, but when I look at the IMDB it occurs to me I've never even heard of most of them: The Last Outlaw, F.T.W., Fall Time, Bullet, Exit in Red, Double Team, Buffalo '66, Point Blank, Thursday, Cousin Joey, Shergar, Thicker Than Blood, Out in Fifty, Animal Factory, Shades, The Follow, Picture Claire, Spun, Masked and Anonymous, Stormbreaker, etc. Someday I'll have me one hell of a video-store weekend and rent a stack of these and immerse myself in Mickey's wild years.

It may well be the dawning of a new era for Mickey, but even if it's not, nothing can take away the inherent glory of Rumble Fish and Angel Heart. These productions earned him an indulgence.

- - JSH

Mickey Rourke

It's good to be vindicated...when mainstream pop culture finally catches up to one's own private/eccentric preferences in things. People, it happens to Cheeseburger & Fries (aka Holland & Dockery) all the time. Witness the return of Mickey Rourke, who just won the Golden Globe for best actor in The Wrestler, with some already saying he's a cinch for the Oscar.

There are certain artists/writers/actors out there that both JSH and I mutually covet (of course, there's things we disagree on, but that's just the nature of the way things work). Rourke is an actor that neither of us have ever denied. Even with pictures that aren't worth the celluloid they're puked up on, a Rourke performance will stand out. But it's not just that Rourke was in some stink-bombs, his stature in our universe is based on the many fine films he has participated in...if the jury will just note these examples...

Oh, wait, what, you forgot that he was in the neo-noir classic Body Heat? Actually, I don't think that movie has aged well, but Rourke's performance has, aged well, that is. As part of the ensemble cast of Diner, Rourke had his act down. Rumble Fish, in addition to being one of Francis Coppola's crowning achievements as a director, is also one of Rourke's finest turns (not to mention Dennis Hopper and Tom Waits). I'll stand behind Year of the Dragon any old day. Angel Heart, unlike Body Heat, is a real neo-noir to be remembered, this time with Mickey Rourke in the lead. Despite or because of its flaws, Barfly will always be the best adaptation of writer Charles Bukowsi to film (especially with Buk's direct involvement in the movie, and director Barbet Schroeder's intent to not change a work of Buk's script), with Rourke as Chinaski/Bukowski.

Some of you all people perceive Sin City as Rourke's return to form (but props to co-director Rodriguez who, ahead of the curve, used him also in his Once Upon a Time in Mexico)...but don't call it a comeback, babies, Rourke's been here fo' years...oh, well, okay, except for his stint leaving the thespian profession to go pro as a boxer, which led to the facial injuries that have shaped the current, ahem, mature look for Rourke. Maybe he ain't as pretty as he once was (but who is?), Rourke also stands alone as the single most willfully eccentric contemporary actor in the public eye (Tom Cruise's tics just seem like the blandness of a frat boy turned Scientologist in comparison), making Rourke the heir apparent to Brando.

So with this rehabilitation of Mickey Rourke in the mainstream, all I can say is, welcome back to our world. We didn't miss you, world. We had our tapes and DVDs of Rourke's movies to entertain us while you were gone.

And, oh, Mr. Rourke, if you read this, we unceremoniously anoint thy head with Cheeseburger & Fries, make you an honorary Transylvania Gentleman. Drop us a line if you're ever in Kentucky, wanna watch some fights, smoke a few cigars.

--JTD

Banjer (Crispy)

- - JSH

Patrick Amsterdam

My new play, Patrick Amsterdam, has been accepted to Brian Walker's annual short plays competition, Finnigan's Festival. Rehearsals will begin Sunday, March 15 in St. Matthews. Performances will be at The Rudyard Kipling in Old Louisville. The dates are: April 16, 17, 18, 23, 24 & 25, at 7:30pm.

- - JSH

Man's Best Friend

A dog may be man's best friend, but give me a hip flask any day. There are days when I forget to bring my cellphone out with me, days when I forget my business cards or laptop or day planner, but I never forget to bring ye olde hip flask.

Whether you're at a tractor pull or the Opera, a man's flask brings him warmth and succor and companionship when he's surrounded by idiots or faced with the prospect of being forced to endure an event he'd rather not be attending. A man's flask offers him an alternative to overpriced, watered-down, improperly-made drinks in establishments that may or may not be named after a late 19th century British author noted for his adventure stories.


Mine is usually filled with caipirinha or just straight-up bourbon. I got mine at the great J. Shepherd cigar boutique, 1429 Bardstown Road in Louisville and recommend you do the same.


- - JSH