The car door swung wide, as the reflections of revolving blue lights bounced off the Buick’s front hood.  He stood for a moment, surveying the scene, stifling a yawn.  It was late, after midnight, and he’d not had a lot of sleep over the last week.  But the grin flickered across his face, despite his fatigue.  Mark Fuhrman was happy.

He stepped over to the open gate and first saw the massive amount of blood on the scene.  It took him longer to make out Nicole Brown’s body lying askew, practically in silhouette near the front steps of the property.  A passing officer, Robert Riske, greeted the West LA Detective, telling him they taped the scene moments after calling it in.

Fuhrman gingerly stepped over the woman’s corpse, taking note of the kid lying off to the right amongst the leafy foliage.  His foot slipped on the step, his shoe covered in blood.  The officer made a move to catch the detective.  “Son-uv-a-bitch, there’s a helluva lot of blood,”  Mark barked, nervously chuckling.  The other officer looked to his partner, not sure if he should acknowledge Fuhrman’s joking demeanor.

A sedan pulled into the quiet neighborhood, causing several bystanders to step from the street back onto the grass, whispering about the new arrival.  Detective Ron Phillips sauntered up to the site, wiping a thin line of sweat from his lip.

“Mark,” Phillips nodded solemnly.  “Ron,” Mark chirped back.

“A real massacre,” Phillips muttered into his handkerchief.

He bent down to carefully pull back the hair from Nicole’s neck with his pen.  Her head was barely attached to her torso, a gaping hole slit from ear to ear.  “My God, somebody really lost their nut.”

“And we all know who’s responsible,” Fuhrman added.

Detective Phillips looked up,  “Mark, don’t start.”

The other two officers looked to one another, curious.

“Vannatter and Lange are on their way,” Phillips called out to Fuhrman from just inside the condominium doorway.  Most of the neighbors were talking amongst themselves on the grassy parkway between the sidewalk and street.  Fuhrman nodded in acknowledgement as he peered through the plants near Ron Goldman’s outstretched hand.  ‘Vannatter will be on board with me on this one,’ Mark thought as he parted a small bush.

A bloody glove lay against the garden wall, hidden in the near darkness.

Fuhrman looked to Ron’s feet where another bloody glove and a dark blue knit cap lay in random fashion.  The gloves were a match.

Glancing about the nearby vicinity, Fuhrman felt he wasn’t being watched.  His adrenaline kicked into gear.  He was elated.

Immediately, he about-faced and skirted past the bloody mess, back out to his parked sedan.  Rummaging around the backseat and through the glove compartment, he finally found an old Ziploc baggie under the passenger seat; discarded from a previous lunch on wheels.  Dipping all traces of crumbs onto the floorboard, Mark stuffed the plastic bag into his pant pocket and calmly strode back over to the crime scene.

The two uniformed officers were in the back of the complex, checking the alleyway with flashlights.  Phillips was inside with the kids, Sydney and Justin, arranging transport to a shelter.

Darting his hand into the bush, in one swift move, Fuhrman clutched ahold of the slippery glove, jamming it into the open baggie and carefully slid it into his sportjacket pocket.

No witnesses.

‘The bastard’s goin’ down,’ he cheerfully thought.

LAPD Detectives Tom Lange and Phil Vannatter arrived at the Bundy location around 4:20.  The bear-like veteran Vannatter spotted Fuhrman immediately.  Mark allowed a smile, a knowing smile.  Phil returned a slight wave, looking on a little puzzled.  He had been awoken at his home at 3:00 that morning.  Cobwebs still danced in his head.

The bodies were beginning to have a discernable odor.  Blood had fully drained from Nicole’s corpse, trickling in the cobblestone cracks, a yard or two wide.

Tom Lange spoke first.  “Okay, Mark, Ron here says you have an idea,”

“Phil and I spoke of this a few years back–you remember, Phil?” Fuhrman turned to Vannatter.

“What is it, Mark?” the old detective was irritable.  He had an inkling of what was next.

“About ten years ago, I was called to this house over on Rockingham.  Turned out to be O.J. Simpson’s place.  The yo’s standing in his drive, big baseball bat nearby, looking like he was out of his skull.  This one,” he pointed to Nicole’s body,”is peeing in her panties, scared shitless of him.  Her car’s windshield is bashed in.  He’d just wailed on it.  O.J.’s goin’ on about it bein’ a family thang and what-not, but you could tell he would’ve killed her if we hadn’t shown up when we did.  He was truly bugged.”

“You think he’s responsible here,” Vannatter chimed in.

“Number one suspect.  I guarantee it.  I know of at least a half a dozen times our patrol boys were called to his house to stop him from crushing her head.”  Fuhrman had a captive audience.

“I remember the time you and I met about five years ago, you did mention something about Simpson,” Vannatter offered.

Mark nodded back in agreement.

“Someone wanna call him,” Phillips spoke up.

“No,” Lange commanded suddenly.  “No tip off that we’re interested this early.”

“Why don’t we go over to his place,” Fuhrman said.

The others stared at him, waiting for more.

“I know he lives like five minutes from here.  I’ll show ya.”

Fuhrman made a move for the cars.

“Wait a minute,” Lange said, standing still.  “We just aren’t gonna barge over there, no search warrant, no probable cause as yet, to see if we can find him washing the blood off his hands.”

“What if he’s in trouble?” Phillips pondered.

“Give me a fuckin’ break!” Fuhrman exploded.  “I’m tellin’ you guys, the longer we stand around here, this n*****’s gonna be a ghost.  Out of town.  Trust me on this.  He’s the guy.  He’s the one.”  Fuhrman paused a moment to control his temper.  “Look, we go to the guy’s house and check on his safety.  Simple.  Just like Ron’s said.  We’re concerned he might be in trouble.  Ex-husband.  Celebrity.  You know.”

Detective Lange stepped forward, close to Mark’s chest.  “You’re damn sure about this, are you?”

“Hundred percent,” Mark said, unwavering.

“Phil, tell the officers to lock this up.  No one comes in until we get back,” Lange commanded.  “Let’s roll.”

360 Rockingham.  4:45am.  June 13th.  1994.

“You gettin’ a response?” Phillips asked as he walked back from the street corner.

Vannatter buzzed the intercom one last time.  “Guy’s in a coma in there.”

“I don’t think he’s home,” Lange said, looking to Fuhrman coldly.

“He’s in there.  Just cowering,” Fuhrman growled, as he started to scale the wall.

“Detective, what the fuck are you doin’?,” Lange shot back.

“He could be in trouble in there,” Mark winked, as he disappeared over the top.

In seconds, the gate swung open, and the four detectives walked onto O.J. Simpson’s property.  The sun was bringing ambient light over the horizon.  Phillips trailed off behind the others, suddenly stopping.

“Hey, look at this,” he pointed at the driveway.

The other three looked to the ground around their vicinity and saw the tiny blood drops leading from the gate to the front of the house.

“Son-uva-bitch,” Lange uttered, “You were right, Mark.”

“Could be the killer’s blood.  Come to get O.J.,” Phillips offered.

“No fuckin’ way,” Mark blasted, as he strode to the front, pushing the doorbell several times.

The house was silent.

“Let’s everybody spread out and see if someone’s around,” Lange said, motioning Vannatter and Fuhrman to the east side of the house.

Arnelle Simpson was in a frazzled state.  She spoke with O.J., who was on the line at the other end in Chicago.  Kato Kaelin seemed more collected.  But his eyes darted about, never resting on Detectives Vannatter’s and Lange’s faces.

“He, uh, he…had me turn on the alarm.  Rather he called, I guess from the airport or something and had me turn on the alarm.  I’d never done that before, so he really had to walk me through it.”

Ron Phillips walked into the kitchen from the front staircase.  “No one up there.  Nothing unusual.  No blood that I saw.  Bathroom looks like it’s been used in the last while though.  Towels are moist.”

“Phil!”

Vannatter stopped his questioning of Kato and went in search of Fuhrman’s voice.

“Out here!”

By the guest house in the back, Fuhrman waited on the walkway for Vannatter to approach.

“What do you have, Mark?”

“Come.”

The two walked back behind the guest house, the light branches from the shrubbery grazing their arms.  Fuhrman stopped by the back wall and watched Vannatter.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Vannatter actually laughed.

“Dead to rights, buddy.”

“You planted that glove there, didn’t you, Mark?”

Fuhrman took a moment.  Just stared stonily at Vannatter, weighing the moment.  He stepped closer to the veteran.

“I want this.  I want this fucker to go down bad,” Fuhrman said in a hushed voice.

“Oh shit, Mark,” Vannatter said flustered, “You are stupid.  Jesus, Mark, not this case.”

“Exactly this one.  He’s a public figure.  You know it’s gonna send a big message.”

“What’s that,  Mark?”

“The rich ones aren’t safe.  None of ‘em better step outta line.  You hear what I’m sayin’?  Man, the fuckin’ yo’s are gonna weep if we make this tag.”

Vannatter searched Fuhrman’s face.  “You’re really serious, aren’t you?”

Mark moved up close and whispered, “Why not O.J.?”

“More to the point, Mark, Why O.J.?”

“Shit, Phil, why O.J.!  Have you forgotten that night I told you about ten damn years ago?  What he did to that gorgeous woman now lying in her own blood and urine a mile from here?”

“It’s too risky.”  Vannatter  dismissed him, regaining his senses.

Fuhrman grabbed the elder detective’s  arm, bruskly.

“Bullshit, Phil.  This is the perfect time.  The door is wide open.  I say we do the fix.”

“Mark, the media’s gonna be outside within the next hour.  They’re probably setting up right now.  They’re covering the Bundy scene.  Not just a stringer or two.  I’m talking every damn station freelancer and twerp with a camcorder.  Zooming through the gates.  Climbing on the wall.  Setting up the dishes.  It’s out of the question.”

“Wait, wait,” Fuhrman relaxed, leaning back against the guesthouse, his head resting beside the air conditioner.  “What if I explain how we do this.”

“No, you wait.  What if he has an iron-clad alibi?  What if someone’s been with him the whole time tonight?  Before he left for Chicago.  Shit, what if he wasn’t even in the vicinity, on his way to the airport or something when this murder went down?”

“The evidence will be so–”

“We’ll have our asses hanging in the wind, that’s what will happen, Mark.  Hell, Deputy Dawg would be able to crack that hoax.  You don’t frame someone when you don’t know who the real killer is.  You don’t frame someone when you don’t know all the angles.  For all we know the real killer might stumble into a bar later today and confess to the whole thing.  Or his mistress might call up the station and tell the truth.  ‘My Stanley up and knifed Nicole and Goldman last night.  I was with him.  Waiting in the car.  I took a fuckin’ video of it.’  Mark, we will have our balls ripped out and neatly framed on Willie’s wall.  You get it?”

“He did it, Phil!  We are gonna nail this n*****!”  Fuhrman’s face turned beet-red.

Gripping Mark’s neck, Vannatter bruskly herded the junior detective farther down the walkway.

“Now, let me tell you something, Mark.  I know you’ve wanted this a long time.  We talked about this five years ago when we met.  And yes, I’ve said I’d like to see something this big happen too.  We think the same wavelength.  You–maybe more intense than I.  But, dammit, it’s gotta be secure.  It’s gotta be a sure thing.  I haven’t been a clean dick for 25 years, wrapped more cases without a taint to ‘em, put up with more scumbags than Saint Christopher’s ever seen, to have it all get pissed away in one night’s blunder.   Watch my pension vanish like a bride’s nightie.”

“Phil, I’m planting it.  I’m  calling Lange and Phillips out here.  You can back me up or expose me.  If he’s really the killer, this’ll hammer it home.  If he isn’t, this will still be strong evidence toward linking him to the killings.”

“What’s goin’ on back there?” Lange’s voice came from the back door.

Mark looked to Vannatter.

The old detective saw the conviction in this fellow policeman’s eyes.  Sighing, Vannatter said, “You better be slicker than shit with this.”

The uniformed officers taped off the entrance to the Rockingham estate.  Lange and Vannatter conferred with someone on the police radio, trying to speed up a search warrant.  Arnelle had called Al Cowlings, and the two were somewhere in the vicinity.

Shortly before 8:00, Criminalist Dennis Fung pulled up to the Rockingham gate.  Lange escorted him to the blood drops spattered in a trail across the driveway.

“Oh, and we found blood inside the Ford Bronco parked over there,” he pointed to the vehicle parked at a slight cant to the curb.

“Should’ve just used a big painted sign:  ‘This way to the killer’s house’,” Fung said lightly.

Vannatter stepped forward.  “And the glove.”

“Oh, jeez, right, there’s a glove, blood all over it, in the backyard,” Lange said.

“I’ll get to work,” Fung pronounced efficiently, opening a bag of serology equipment.

Vannatter felt a presence next to him.  Mark Fuhrman was standing off to his side.

“Smooth,” he mouthed to the hound-faced detective.

Fung finished collecting the blood from the driveway.  Several cloth swatches absorbed the drops and were placed into evidence bags, marked with the case DR number.  He’d also finished bagging the bloody glove from out by the guest house.  And he swatched the blood spatter from the outside driver door of the Bronco.

Peering into the vehicle,  Fung looked at the blood smears on the driver’s seat, the instrument panel, the steering wheel, the center console, the inside driver door panel.  On the floorboard of the driver’s side, a small beret-style hat lay over noticeable bloodstains on the carpet.  A partial shoe print could be seen.

“The guy was at least a little aware of the fact that he’d been standing and walking through blood.  When he parked, he tossed the cap on the floor to try to obscure whatever stains he’d left down there,” Fung assumed aloud.

Fuhrman watched from the front of the vehicle.  “Gonna be O.J. isn’t it, Mr. Fung?”

“Would look that way.”

Fung walked back to his bags.

At 10:20, Fung left the Rockingham location and drove over to the crime scene at Bundy.  He began swatching the blood drops at 11:00, specifically, the tiny trail which led from the bodies, back towards the condominium front door and all the way back to the carport area.  He would collect cloth swatches at this location for the next 5 hours.  O.J. Simpson was still in flight, returning from Chicago back to LA.

Fuhrman was antsy.  He kept catching Vannatter’s eye, nodding to a private place to talk throughout the morning.  Phil hoped he wasn’t going to trip them up.

“I’ve been thinking,” Fuhrman allowed, his brow creased with concern.

“Just keep cool, Mark,” Vannatter muttered.

“No, really.  This isn’t going to be enough.”

“What?”

“The glove.”

“What are you saying?”

“What if O.J. didn’t do the killing?  I mean, I really don’t understand who else’s blood might’ve been here in the driveway, and whose blood would be in his Bronco, but what if some guy had it in for O.J.   So much so that he risked coming over here after killing Nicole and Ron, looking for the Juice, and didn’t find him home.  The guy’s got a cut on his body and is dripping everywhere.”

Vannatter rolled his eyes.  “That would explain the blood in the driveway.  But why the blood inside, all over, the car?  There’s no signs of forcible entry into the vehicle whatsoever.”

“Doesn’t matter.  It doesn’t make sense to me either.  But dammit, Phil, we’ve got to make this stick.”

“The glove’s enough, Mark.  The media is everywhere.  Cops are everywhere.  People we don’t know are all over the place.  Why risk anything else?”

“I respect that line of thinking Phil, but I can’t abide by it.  We’re gonna have to plant more shit.”

“Fuck, Mark, the glove you planted’s got the two victims’ blood all over it.  It was found on O.J.’s property.  What more evidence are they gonna need to convict the prick?”

“More.”  Fuhrman stormed off, leaving Vannatter muttering expletives.

Photographs were taken of the partial shoe prints left in the escape trail away from the bodies at Bundy.  Hair fibers were carefully picked from the victims’ bodies.  The knit cap and glove were tagged and put into evidence bags.

Secretly, Mark Fuhrman appeared back at the Bundy location and caught up with Fung.

“Ah, Detective Fuhrman, look at this. “  The mild mannered criminalist led the jittery detective along the walkway, pointing at the blood trail which pointed in the direction of the back alleyway.

“See the footprints?”

“Yeah,” Fuhrman said nervously.

“The intermittent blood drops are to the left of the footmarks.”

“A cut, right?”

“Yes.  On the left hand.”

Shortly after 12 noon, Monday June 13th, O.J. Simpson finally appeared at his Rockingham home.  Detectives Lange and Vannatter surrounded him, even put him in cuffs for a while, and talked to him about the situation at hand.

Fuhrman appeared, and spotted the big Juiceman.  ‘You are goin’ to the Big House, Zulu boy,’ he thought ruefully.

He looked to O.J.’s hand.  There was a small cut on his knuckle, a band-aid around it.  On his left hand.

‘Holy shit!’ Fuhrman thought.  ‘How lucky can I get, fer Chrissakes!’  He was absolutely jubulant.  Waving manically at Vannatter, Fuhrman danced on the balls of his feet.

Phil wanted to crawl into a hole.

He sauntered over to the hyper-racist cop.  “What now, Mark?,” he growled under his breath.

“O.J.’s got a cut on his left hand!”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Blood drops at the crime scene are to the left of the footprints.  Don’t you see, it’s him.”

“Good.  Then let’s end this discussion now.”

“Wait.”

Vannatter stopped in his tracks.

“You’re taking him downtown, right?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You’re taking a blood sample?”

“What do you think?”

“Gonna bring it back here?”

“Why?”

“Bring it back when you’re done with him.”

“What the fuck for.”

“You’re gonna have to give it to Fung anyway.  Bring it back.”

Vannatter stormed off, about to explode.  A nearby newsman observed the tet-a-tet and found the body language interesting, but his attention was diverted by the lack of ice in his Big Gulp drink.

O.J. Simpson was interviewed by Vannatter at Parker Center in downtown Los Angeles for approximately 2 1/2 to 3 hours.  At the conclusion of the interview, registered nurse Thano Perato drew blood from O.J. Simpson’s body.  That blood went into an 8mm vial.

Vannatter now had O.J. Simpson’s blood on his possession.  The time was approximately 3:30 in the afternoon.

Detective Phil Vannatter arrived back on the west side of town around 4:00.  Fuhrman was waiting for him.  He was out of his mind.

“It’s about damn time!  We’ve got a hell of a lot of work to do.”

“Mark, what are you going on about?”

“Fung’s back here at Rockingham.  He just arrived from the Bundy location before you did.  He’s collected all the samples from the crime scene.  C’mon.”

Fuhrman practically yanked Vannatter up the Simpson driveway.  Fung stood inside the front foyer examining three blood drops.

Fuhrman cleared his throat.  Fung looked up with a sigh.

“What is it, detective?”

“Could Detective Vannatter and I have a moment here?”

Fung grumbled and shrugged off towards the kitchen.

“Okay, okay, the blood vial.”

“Mark, what are you doing?,” Vannatter protested.

Fuhrman snatched the blood vial from Vannatter’s hand.  He proceeded to pour a few drops of Simpson’s blood over the already-present blood stains on the floor.

“This won’t make any sense, Mark.  You’re either combining two different DNA blood spots, so that the killer and O.J. would have to have stood in one place and dripped on the same exact spot, OR you’re just putting more of O.J.’s blood in O.J.’s blood.”

Fuhrman just nodded intently, still dripping the vial.

“The first scenario is absolutely ludicrous, you fuckin’ nut.”

Mark was deaf to the reasoning.  Two officers walked down the staircase, right by Vannatter and Fuhrman and did not so much as glance at what they were up to.

“Done.”

“Gimme that.”  Vannatter snatched the vial back from Fuhrman.

“C’mon.  Upstairs.”  And Fuhrman was racing up the steps.

Vannatter watched as Mark digged through O.J.’s closet.   Several pairs of shoes spilled out onto the floor.

“What now, Mark?”  Vannatter was positively exasperated.

“Hey, get a sock out of that drawer over there.”  Fuhrman never looked up.

Vannatter grabbed a blue sock off the dresser top.

“Pour a drop from your vial on that thing.  Just one!”

Vannatter simply complied, having given up with arguing.

Mark stood up with a pair of designer Italian shoes.  “Voila,” he said to himself.

Pulling an old sandwich baggie from his coat pocket–the one which previously held the bloody glove he’d transported from Bundy to Rockingham–Fuhrman smeared some of the blood from the baggie onto the sock.

“There.”

Vannatter could barely control his rage.  “Can we fuckin’ stop this, Mark!  The guy is framed.  He’s nailed.  We are going to get caught.  Enough already!!!”

“Nope, I gotta be Real Thorough.”

Midnight.

The city had learned of two brutal murders.

O.J. had been questioned and let go.

Tomorrow would yield more clues.

Rest for now.

…Er, but not for Mark Fuhrman and Phil Vannatter.

“Okay, I think it looks pretty much like daylight.  Just tilt that spot a little more to the left.”

Mark directed Phil, who was busy trying to focus a harshly bright klieg light on the stained walkway at Nicole’s condo.

A few neighbors peered from their window, intrigued.

“Now, I’m gonna put these bloodstained Italian shoe prints exactly over the other ones which we wiped clean,” Mark said enthusiastically, a special gleam in his eye.

Vannatter just drooled a little.  Both were giddy, exhausted, and working on overdrive.

Mark put O.J.’s shoes on his hands and trotted step-wise on all fours along the walkway.  The shoes left prints.

“Okey-doke, time to take the picture.”

Flash!   A bright light captured the awkward, bloodied forgery.

“Careful, the night guy is gonna hear us.  He just went to the crapper.”

Vannatter had knocked over a bucket of cleaning liquid left by an errant janitor.  The two detectives squished through the soapy liquid outside the serology lab at the LAPD Investigative Unit, downtown Los Angeles.

The time on the clock above their heads read 2:45am.

“Yippee, I’m in!,” Fuhrman squealed, as the lock gave way to Fung’s laboratory.  Vannatter kept chanting, droning, like a mantra, completely frazzled from sheer exhaustion, “We’re gonna nail the Juice!   We’re gonna git the Juice!”

Plying through bags and boxes, they came upon the evidence bag marked with the Simpson D.R.

“Start putting O.J.’s blood on every swatch of cloth you find.”

Ripping open evidence baggies, applying blood drops from the vial, Vannatter hooted and cackled, “That fuckin’ Hertz guy’s gonna fry!”

Blood dropped everywhere on the swatches.

When they had finished, baggies and swatches lay about the table top.

“Find me some more baggies, Phil baby.  We’ve got to seal these things back up.”

Vannatter skipped about the lab like a big puppy dog, plucking bags merrily from shelves, whistling ‘Ol Man River.’

The swatches went into the baggies.

“Can you write like that Fung asshole, Phil?”

“Sure, Marky boy.”

Vannatter scribbled the correct evidence numbers on each baggie.  Amazingly, duplicating the penmanship of Criminalist Dennis Fung.

The baggies were tossed back into the storage freezer.

“We are finished!  What a day, Phil!”  Fuhrman was beaming.

“You told me it’d be easy, but how was I to know it’d be this easy.”

“That Yamauchi Charlie Chan is slated to get started analyzing these swatches in the morning.  Boy, we work fast.  Let’s go grab some brewskis.”

The two began to head out of the lab.  Fuhrman turned to Phil.

“I thank you from the bottom of my heart, ya big lug.  We’re about to see the biggest, blackest, baddest of the Naked Gun actors go to the slammer .  This is the happiest moment of my career.  Let’s remember to be real invisible on the way out of the building now.”

Vannatter placed his big paw on Fuhrman’s shoulder.

“Got a gift for ya.”

Fuhrman looked at him questioningly.

From his breast pocket, Phil took out his handkerchief.  Unfolded, there appeared to be hair strands stuck all over the cloth.

“Brushed it from his pillow at home.  We can add ‘em into the hair samples they took from the crime scene.”

“You’re beautiful, Phillip baby!”

And Fuhrman placed a big wet kiss on Vannatter.

The preceding was based on a timeline of events which took place on June 13th, 1994.  It is purely a work of fiction.   The reality is that the jury bought this story, hook, line and sinker.

THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL AND CONFIDENTIAL TRADE SECRET INFORMATION BELONGING EXCLUSIVELY TO MCA INC. AND UNAUTHORIZED
USE, DISCLOSURE, DISSEMINATION OR DUPLICATION OF ANY OF THE INFORMATION CONTAINED HEREIN MAY RESULT IN LIABILITY UNDER APPLICABLE LAWS.

Does he have any intellectual capacity or intuitive skills to grasp complex, threatening scenarios and rule with superior discernment above and beyond the wisdom of his inner circle?

One can view the debate videos from October. I won’t spend time detailing all of the points of generalities that Bush sputtered with buckshot focus and the precise, but perhaps longwinded, agendas Albert Gore laid forth to the short-attention span populous of America. Sure Al Gore is an erudite know-it-all. But when the criteria bar for this nation and its pundits rested on the notion that “Gee, Bush sure is folksy, and at least he didn’t say anything really stupid,” we’re in trouble folks. I don’t know about you, but when a Sultan from the Sudan visits the Rose Garden for an afternoon chat with our President, I would prefer our leader to be immersed in the knowledge of the man’s personal background, cultural viewpoints, administrative policies, and hidden customs. Unknown to many, Bill Clinton is someone who truly wanted to know everything he could about his most incidental visitors. So he could dive right into a conversation with them, citing many facts and events concerning their background. He routinely had many books brought over to the White House from the Library of Congress to pore over whenever he had an international guest arriving that he had agreed to receive. Gore, the eager intellectual that he is, seems to seek out this kind of knowledge. He reads voraciously, he is genuinely well-versed in a cornucopia of topics without the benefit of prepared notes. He, in other words, appears to enjoy entertaining avenues of globalism, diversity, alternative solutions, and equality-balanced policies.

We don’t know much about Bush. But judging from the crib note preparation he was forced to learn for the second debate, regarding foreign affairs, this is not a very savvy individual. Yes, he got an MBA from a respectable university. But nowhere in his public speech, off-the-cuff vocabulary, does he elicit pronouncements deeper than a twelfth-grader. Basically, he’s a quick study, a crammer, but he probably doesn’t retain. He’s not a deep thinker. His own staff members from Texas have conceded this. Even more telling, he appears as if he doesn’t CARE if he retains complex issues and knowledge. This is a man who, in the midst of the country’s most tumultuous electoral process, one in which he is a party to, retreated to a remote ranch in the boonies of Texas, without access to cable TV. Yes, he could rely on his advisors to tell him what was going on. A filtered viewpoint. However, shouldn’t a president-to-be want to judge for himself the events going on in the world? Have access to the very technology that delivers images and actual sound bites to every citizen on the planet? Shouldn’t he be hooked into the pulse of situations, not just with this election, but with circumstances involving — oh, I don’t know — let’s say, the Middle East right at the moment? Instead of just isolating himself on a ranch somewhere, detached, listening to blustery partyliners’ plans for what they’re gonna do when they get to the big ol’ White House. This is a man who does not seek knowledge. He does not appear to truly give a damn and throw himself into the details of the nations and continents around him. Let alone our own country’s concerns. The guy’s only been overseas twice.

This kind of arrogance and isolationism is what drives both Mr. Bush, and the Republican party in general, at this juncture of the 21st century. This pomposity is what has effectively snuffed out the notion that an individual’s right to be heard via a vote casting process is now permanently extinguished. For the Republicans are much more concerned about their own necks than anyone else’s, much more than the Democratic party has ever demonstrated in this election. I will expound on that. But know that from here on out, based on all that has occurred, your vote will never be considered completely valid or legitimate to determine the outcome of an election ever again.

The Republican Party and its hardline followers work out of fear, hostility and suppression. Fear is, of course, the most easily-definable of their traits in this election. Notice the tone of their past two administrations. Reagan wound up the country with vitriolic denouncements of the big, bad Soviet Union and those bad Sandinistas and the evil war on drugs. The message of the Republicans is that “forces” are always acting against us. Poor pitiful us. We have to fight back. They’re all out to get US!

The Soviet Union was well on its way to falling long before Reagan took the opportunity to pronounce “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that Wall!” Soldiers returning from the war in Afghanistan in the early ‘80s were unshakably disenchanted with their peers, just in the same manner as the counterculture movement of our ‘60s generation had responded to Vietnam. They were the true triggers to the transition. Capitalism was running rampant in their black market, and access to everything from cell phones, Nikes, and rock ‘n’ roll pushed the regime from its pedestal. It was inevitable. It wasn’t Reagan. He just liked to sound off, pumping himself up in view of the big, bad world. The Contra situation, as later reports indicated, would’ve worked itself out just in the same fashion, had we helped them or not. And drug usage didn’t go down significantly during either Reagan or Bush’s terms with their angry, finger-pointing campaign at the criminals of narcotics. Drug use actually went down more during Clinton’s deceptively laid-back term.

Republicans have feared all along that Gore truly won the majority of votes in the State of Florida in this year 2000. A basic and uncomplicated fear. Out of that emotion rose the two other traits.

Let’s get one thing out of the way. The networks DO need to stop reporting the election returns until all precincts across the country have closed. Neither candidate could do anything about who the networks called Florida for that night. It was a media screw-up and had it been reversed, hue and cry would equally have come from the Democrats, I’m sure. What is interesting is that the method by which the networks used to call each State, that of exit polls, more than likely was not flawed. Based on the individuals leaving the many precincts in South Florida, who were polled in the same manner as those to the north of the state, all probably thought they voted for Gore. Their belief that they had indeed cast a ballot for the Democrat candidate was duly noted and assimilated with the statistics statewide. The method wasn’t really off the mark. It was, of course, those pesky butterfly ballots and chad build-ups in certain machines. Or, if you’re a staunch Republican, you’ll, of course, believe 14,000 people actually went to the polls to vote for the Light Train and a few local candidates…but not a President. A statistic that is so extremely high in concentration in those few counties, that it is not found anywhere near that level of probability in any other spot in the State. Yeah, sure, whatever.

Now let me get the conspiracy stuff off the desk. It’s Oliver Stone time. Take the following with a hefty grain of salt. But if you can walk away from any of these citations with a feeling that maybe one of these elements could be true, you might be a candidate for behavioral and statistical common sense.

Everyone likes to help out a family member. Especially when you’re in a position to help. It’s no secret that Jeb Bush was heard before the election pledging he would do whatever he could to try to help deliver his State for his brother. All very innocent I’m sure.

Somewhere in Seminole County, there’s an election canvassing office. Before the election, several absentee ballots were incorrectly notated with voter ID numbers, for both Democratic and Republican candidates. The woman in charge, Sandra Goard, under deposition, said she allowed two men representing the Republicans to go into a back room, shut the door, and sit down with those absentee applications, and whatever materials were back there, for 10 whole days! She didn’t even recall the name or credentials of one of these mystery men. When the Democratic representatives requested the same opportunity with their applications, they were denied. There seems to be no alternate language, no conflicting statute anywhere in the lawbooks on this matter. Tampering or altering ballots, even the absentee applications, by individuals other than electors or their immediate family or the board’s immediate members is a felony. Period. It is fraud. Goard said she’d never allowed anyone to do this procedure, ever, in the history of her tenure at that office for over 20 years. Somebody did some very HARD persuading.

The room apparently contained 18 computers tied, ostensibly, to mainframes around the State of Florida. Electoral mainframes. Let’s see, 10 days to alter, maybe, let’s be generous, 6,000 applications. 3,000 each guy. Probably could be done easily in four days. No more than six days, let’s say. What were they doing in there for ten full days? Down in south Florida, on the day of the election, many African-Americans were seen complaining as they arrived to their designated precincts. They had registered, legally obtained their Voter ID cards, and were ready to vote. But the clerks turned them away, saying they were not listed on the computer printout registers. Hmmm. Does anyone want to please investigate this possibly overt link?

Also, as witnessed on videotape during the day of the election, many highway patrolmen had pulled over a highly-skewed proportion of African-Americans on their way to the polls in particular areas. Many were turned away. If these actions don’t suggest anything remotely suspect to you, perhaps you’ll be surprised to know that the South was not always very kind to people with black skin. Look it up. I’ll give you a moment.

To suggest maneuvers such as these were designated specifically from the lips of brother Jeb may be taxing believability of scoffers. But the minions who work for the governor could easily have made some calls. Suggested a few tactics to some ardent supporters holding influential positions. It happens, ya know.

The butterfly ballot is a moot issue. I concede that people should’ve figured it out. Gore did not join that lawsuit. While sympathetic to their befuddlement, he obviously felt the same way as I.

The election ended Tuesday November 7th. By the end of the evening, more than any other complaints in the United States, the media focused on South Florida as having been unusually vocal to many irregularities. This is BEFORE Florida was considered the crucial deciding State in the election. If there had been as much moaning in as concentrated an area somewhere else, say in Idaho or Utah, the media would’ve showcased that. They’re no dummies. They like stories of turmoil and dissension. But there simply wasn’t as big an aberrance anywhere else. It is maybe not so coincidental that the one place people seemed to be voicing valid claims of irregular practices and circumstances before all polls finally closed was also the one area that the entire nation has focused on ever since for the last three weeks. There is a kind of validity to these claims that oozes to the surface in light of how viciously the Bush camp has swooped down to squash the entire area in a Blitzkrieg of denouncements and smears. History has shown that the most telling of truths tends to encounter the harshest of adversities. And usually that adversity is borne out of fear. The Republicans have had the stench of fear on them ever since the voting booths shut their final curtain on November 7th.

While the voting process is designed to ensure the anonymity of each citizen, voting results are intended to be discovered and made known to all. At this point, I can only discuss the generalities. Not being a lawyer, not familiar with every nook, hook, and cranny of Florida statutes and Constitutional concerns, I can only address the surface of the issues that have poured forth from the Sunshine State last month. Reports tell us that three counties, under the auspices of the Democratic Party, asked for the ability to conduct a recount of the vote. Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade all performed a machine recount. Vice President Gore received a net gain in those counties in votes after the performance of this machine recount. The lead between the two candidates was cut to under 1,000. This lead is well below 1% of the State’s 6,000,000 or so ballots cast. With a nation of 100 million watching on, and with Gore leading the popular vote as well as the electoral count in the rest of the nation, this seemed overwhelmingly too close to call. The Gore team felt that those irregularities as reported on Election Day, namely ballots that were spit out by the machine during its count, should be examined. 14,000 of the so-called “undervotes.” Whatever you call ‘em, the machine didn’t call them anything.

Florida law apparently allows hand recounts as do many other States. The three counties – Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade — petitioned for a hand recount. They followed law and did a 1% sampling by hand. Gore’s number went up again. This is where the cloud obscured the light over the Sunshine State. Fear propelled the Republicans into action. And unfortunately, light may never be shed on the true voting results, results that should be open to everyone, ever again. Freedom of Information Act petitioners will eventually have the chance to examine those ballots for themselves and report their findings to the world. But inevitably the Republicans will find a way to slant the ballot results of any re-count to their favor, arguing over chads and indentations, never allowing for a specified legal criteria for assessing ballots in Florida to gain a foothold.

Since they’d never had to conduct a hand recount during a Presidential election, the canvassing boards were understandably seeking some sort of criteria this last month for conducting their procedure the weekend following Vote Day. Now, I’m not going to get into whether the hanging, pregnant or dimpled thing called a chad should be registered. I’m not going to get into procedure. Look to Texas law that allows dimples and what-not if you want my answer. Suffice to say, when they reached out to look for help, the one person, who ostensibly could be perceived as their boss, since it is she who weighs their efforts, Katherine Harris, the Secretary of State, told them they couldn’t recount. She said it during that weekend following the election. Then she put it in writing on Monday. Then she threatened them with the Tuesday deadline. Then she made them hand in a written reason why they should recount. The issue here is not whether she was to act strictly by the law’s literal meaning or whether she was right in imposing a strict reading of a discretionary deadline. The simple fact is she acted as an adversary to the very boards she was supposedly elected to receive ballots from. She strung them along with threats, making them extremely agitated and divided in how they should proceed, which in turn, resulted in a hand recount that could not be undertaken before the deadline.

Is this how we want an elected official who is going to certify an entire State’s vote count to act? Why didn’t she bend over backwards to get them definitive advice, seek out judicial or legislative interpretations, and draw on both parties to come up with a fast, efficient standard or denouncement for the process? Why didn’t she go on the airwaves to voice her concerns and allow for the proper individuals to step forward and help the State rectify its dilemma? Because, inarguably, she did not WANT to help. She did everything she could in her power NOT to help. A man who is committed to helping his brother win election in the State sat on the same hallway as her, 15 paces away from her desk. The candidate was someone she unabashedly supported both financially and voluntarily. This Bush individual was also someone she would truly love to receive a federal position from should he be elected. Do you have any problem ascertaining motive in this scenario? If so, you may be able to align yourself with the same intelligence quotient as the man from Austin.

Where Harris marched, so followed the entire Republican Party. And with them rose forth the two other traits outside of fear. Hostility and suppression. Suppression was easy to spot. Where Gore simply wanted those votes to be looked at, Bush wanted them locked away. The battle leapt about the courts and as of this writing it’s on its last legs. Procedure and adherence to one particular reading of the law were hammered at the Gore lines like shells on Normandy. The Florida Supreme Court, in my estimation, did screw up when they extended the deadline. That resulted in the contest period being shortened. But what’s the underlying message in what they ultimately were trying to do? They were trying to ensure that these votes, that had not been tabulated for either candidate during a machine count, could just be looked at by the human eye. Provide a forum whereby discernment of votes could be ascertained. They only wished to shed light on the matter, make it open for all. And the variance in this notion is what clearly delineated the two camps throughout.

The hand recounts conducted in Broward and Palm Beach were completely fair. Those that were counting, the Judges in charge, concurred with this assumption. It was only Republican “observers” on the sidelines that argued some sort of alleged mishandling notions that unfortunately gained exposure on the airwaves. To say that they were partisan-minded is to say that Goofy talks funny. The recounts were conducted under the scrutiny of so many individuals and video cameras that it’s absolutely impossible that the allegations these Republicans made could be deemed anything other than fantasy. Show me one piece of videotape of someone swallowing a chad or stomping ballots like a hyena, and I’ll give Cheney mouth-to-mouth. On the contrary, juxtapose the process that took place in those counties with the one which occurred in Seminole, in the back office of Sandra Goard, and one will find a truer shade of secrecy and subterfuge in its execution and fairness.

Everyone knows that the Republican Party paid for airline tickets and hotel rooms to accommodate out-of-State partisan protesters to descend on South Florida. Look at the signs each Republican protester held. “Sore Loserman,” “Gore must concede,” “Gore is stealing the election,” “Gore is the evil one.” Now scan the signs held by Democratic protestors. “Gore Lieberman,” and “Every vote should count.” Do you feel the hate? Do you connect with the arrogance and pomposity associated with a particular party? This is the climate that was with us throughout the 1980s. Get ready for a return to that subtext in the 2000s.

After Jesse Jackson led a peaceful street march of protest for those African-Americans, most of them Democratic, who felt they’d been wronged and harassed during the vote proceedings, a mob of fresh-scrubbed white boys screamed at the canvassing board of Miami-Dade outside their office and banged violently on the full-glass doors, scaring the vote counters within. Now, do you honestly believe that if that hallway had been filled with African-American men screaming and banging the doors violently that the policemen and security wouldn’t swoop in with nightsticks and pepper spray, and pummel them to the floor? You know in your heart they would’ve. But frat-boy, white Republicans can get away with it. The hate filled the hallway and the airwaves with this hackneyed suppression tactic. No light was to be shed on those ballots.

Finally, the ballots themselves were under attack at every turn. The Vota-matic designer himself said under testimony that chad build-up on those old machines could very easily block the stylus from breaking through a punch card. He recommended a hand count. The claim that continued handling of the cards was deteriorating their condition is logic unfounded. Chads were seen around the machine count areas (by Republican observers, I have to add), and thus, they said the ballots were being altered. If there were to be a ballot that showed more than one vote for President, hand counters would’ve discarded it anyway. This notion would help the Bushies one would think. Chads that had fallen away were more than likely to be one’s that had already been pushed on at an earlier occurrence. In other words, if the Bush camp truly believes that an affixed chad, one that hasn’t been touched before in anyway, can simply fall to the floor after a machine count, then that particular ballot card itself is completely flawed and should be omitted from the count. An affixed chad could’ve fallen away from a ballot as it was originally placed in its product box at the factory. Or one could have fluttered off when canvassing officials at precincts originally set them out to hand to incoming voters. This is a harebrained argument for people who are truly desperate to close the lid on discovery.

I could go on with many other instances of suppression tactics that were pulled from the Bush hat during this post-election skirmish, but suffice to say, the legitimacy of the vote count was never, and probably will never, be properly revealed. It could have easily been conducted after the petition for recount initially came in. As for the Republicans’ argument that selecting a few counties is wrong, well, we all saw Al Gore offer them the opportunity to get together on this and just recount the whole State. His was a conjoining effort. The Republicans have always pushed away. They declined. The nature of a contest or a dispute on the outcome tally of votes is to select those that you feel are in any way undercounted. And yes, you choose the ones, since it is a dispute (duh), that will invariably sway the lead to your favor. The Bush camp always knew this. They could’ve recount counties favorable to them, quite legally. But, we know, of course, that they ran on fear. Furtive and aware of a looming defeat, they were on the side of non-disclosure. (A funny contradiction, in light of their hyper-vocal calls for disclosure on the Clinton-Lewinsky matter – a far more personal, yet non-nationally-related revelation).

Bush and Cheney have been goading Gore to concede the last few days. I suspect he will before the week is out. Bully tactics, smoke and mirrors, and possible partisan rigging have been their game plan to this point. The Republican-led Florida Legislature, along with brother Jeb, have assured the country that their Man is going to the White House come hell or high water. Those 14,000 or so votes will sit quietly. Cast by folks like you and me. They don’t mean anything. In such a tight race, the legislatures of this country are going to determine who runs the nation. The Constitution does not support the people’s right to vote and for that vote to be heard. A fellow by the name of George W. Bush has seen to that, and he will be our 43rd president.

Postscript

January 18, 2002

Alas, it wasn’t the legislatures who named George W. our 43rd head honcho. It was, of course, five members of the nation’s Supreme Court. Five people picked our current President of the United States. The rest of the votes in this country — yours, mine, your great granddaddy’s — did not matter. That was the thesis of my original article…it remains the same today, over a year later.

Obviously, the world has changed around us. My statement about our country eventually not caring much about the botched election due to potential terrorist threats or biological warfare has eerily come true. After last autumn’s 9/11, polls show that Bush has an approval rating in the 90th percentile. Republicans love to point to that and say, “see, the right man won. Everyone accepts him now.” But, ask anyone who viewed Bush as a privileged goob before 9/11, one who skated by on daddy’s money and dubiously skirted through graduate school, what they think of him today, and I bet they’ll concur he’s still a goob. A man they didn’t want in the White House. Sure, he’s given a rousing speech or two to rally our country. These are meticulous speeches written for him by professionals. And yes, his advisors were adept in planning and striking against Afghanistan. Plus, last time I checked, it was about 100,000 men and woman outside the radar of Washington that were truly fighting for justice overseas.

Nevertheless, listen to Bush talk, unscripted, and to this day, he appears to be a man who has limited intellectual capacity and a veneer of someone who desperately fears being challenged to expound on any one subject. The press has recently commended him for his “simplistic” talk regarding our war on terrorism. This is rhetoric reminiscent of his campaign debates. The subtext to this praise suggests something other than a commendation for his knowledgeable insight and commanding zeal. Each time Bush appears onscreen, there’s a natural tendency to flinch, awaiting a misstep in speech and a short-wire fizzle in thought patterns. It is exactly the same reaction one gets from his debate days. “Gee, at least he didn’t fumble on an Afghan leader’s name or mispronounce a Pakistani city.” The expectations watermark for this man is still set mercifully low.

Who is to say Gore would’ve been a better leader in these times of crises? The attack against our country was so blatant and horrifying that I have to believe any President, Democrat or Republican, would have responded in a firm and unrelenting manner. The idea that Democrats are pussyfoots is truly shortsighted when one recalls the grand glory of Donkey Presidents past, such as FDR and Truman during WWII. I would bet any money in the world that Gore would’ve found his voice and strength in convincingly rallying our nation as one force.

As of this writing, Democrats are starting to look at the Bush legacy, pre-9/11, and are beginning to rattle a sabre or two. When the Texas oilman assumed office in January 2000, gas prices shot through the roof in this country. We in California were raked over the coals by greedy Texas electricity magnates. Talk of alternative energy sources were swept under the White House rug, as Bush tapped a bill to drill in environmentally sensitive areas of Alaska. The pollution standards set internationally in the Kyoto treaty — standards that have remarkably helped cities like LA over the last decade curtail its smog — were wiped off the books to aid industry bigwigs with their problems in adhering to strict emission guidelines. This country felt like it took a major step backwards the second “W” entered office. And this is not to be overly reactionary, but I swear that the day the Supreme Court handed Bush the election, I began noticing more homeless people on our streets in LA. After the Inauguration, I honestly spotted and was accosted by more homeless people than I had ever seen in the ‘90s. It reminded me very much of the Reagan ‘80s here in town.

Perhaps the Enron scandal will blow through the White House halls and smear the good feeling the Bush administration has achieved over our recent tragedy. (Isn’t it saying something that this administration’s highest approval marks were achieved not during tax cuts and education proposals, but instead during the period when the country feels absolutely skittish, fearful, and excruciatingly vulnerable? Not a very cheery reflection on the nature of his approval, is it?). It is, however, laughable how Bush, who was such a friend to Enron chief and fellow Texan, Kenneth Lay, is vexingly distancing himself from his big-business buddy. Actually, it would be laughable, if it weren’t so darn sad for our country and its economy. The economy that George W. Bush sent into the toilet.

Remember my assertion, from over a year ago, which referred to the negativity and hostility Bush, and the Republicans in general, displayed in the election fiasco? And how that tone would set the mood for the 2000s? Well, Bush first pronounced his death-knell forecast of an imminent declining economy in his debate speeches. We, as Americans, were coasting still from a wonderful buzz of growth and prosperity from the Clinton years. We laughed at how he was spouting economic sour grapes. But, as soon as the deal was done, and he sneaked into the office of the presidency, Bush amped up his rhetoric tenfold. Negative, negative, negative. To say that the highest leader in our land doesn’t affect big business and, most importantly, Investors(!), with his views and pronouncements of our country’s state of affairs is to wield the hand of naivete. Within weeks, stocks plummeted, gas prices soared, unemployment rose, and companies tumbled. We’ve been on that path, on the downslope, ever since. Bush was the clarion call for this disaster of an economy. From his lips to our reality, it became truth. I firmly believe he is a very negative influence on our country and its economic outlook. His tax cuts are a joke. What the economy needs is what Clinton afforded. More help to small business and lower interest rates for borrowing in these risky endeavors. Big business is a disaster for this country now. We learned that lesson from Bush Sr.’s legacy. The middle class needs to continue to be nurtured. We do not need a $500 tax rebate to every man, woman and child, so Bubba can upgrade the fiberglass beer cooler on the back of his Evinrude outboard.

A lot of people I know still have a bad taste in their mouths about the election. I plan on voting nothing but Democrat for the 2002 House and Senate seats. Do I want Gore to run for 2004? I’m not sure. He’s been out of sight longer than the Hollow Man and donned such a bearded, Fed-protection-program-kind-of-countenance since the first of 2001 that I’m not sure who he is anymore. He may not know who he is anymore. But if I had to pick between him, Lieberman, Biden, Gephart, or Kerry, Gore might get my nomination. Daschle’s up there with him.

A final note to this postscript:
Talk magazine featured an article on Lieberman recently. Apparently many Democrats were angered back in December 2000 by Joe’s statement that he did not wish to toss out the absentee ballots sent in by the military from overseas. In his eyes, and perhaps rightfully so, it would seem contrary to the “every vote should count” chant the party was emitting from the southern sandpit State. While various news organizations from around the country have performed independent counts of all of Florida’s vote cards since the election, and depending on “chad” criteria, have shown varying results, there are many factors that still hover on the periphery of discovery that I continue to find intriguing. One of those factors involves the absentee ballots. According to the magazine, “In the thick of the recount fight, Nick Baldick, the Gore-Lieberman Florida field director, heard a rumor that Bush operatives had been contacting military personnel to get them to vote via absentee ballot after the election. These ballots had until November 17 to reach county election boards. Whether or not that rumor was accurate, hundreds of these absentee ballots, most of them for Bush, came in suspiciously late for ballots that were to have been mailed on November 7. And hundreds (!) of them could have been disqualified for not meeting election requirements.”

Do you still recall how adamant the Bush party was in adhering to all the rules and regulations of Florida law concerning election requirements? How they argued that the butterfly ballot controversy could not be an aberrance in the proceedings ripe for discussion? How they wanted to square off the controversial debate about chads? How they wanted to run the whole thing into the Florida legislature for a final deciding vote based on their interpretation of election rules? This absentee ballot tardiness could have easily and validly been interpreted as being a violation in election requirement rules. Strictly by the rulebook, without question, it could have invalidated a majority of those tardy absentee ballots. Yet, Lieberman’s comments, said on a “Meet The Press” program in the thick of the scuffle, effectively snuffed out a huge number of Democrat’s desire to pursue this suspicious violation, and the absentee ballots were subsequently counted. Bush won Florida, and thus the election, by only 537 votes (without the count, of course, of those 14,000 voting cards still laying dormant somewhere). Those 537 votes came from the absentee ballots. Ballots without which Gore-Lieberman would have won Florida by 202 votes.

I’m still awaiting this century’s Woodward-Bernstein to dig into all of these intriguing blind alleys and uncover some truths to the quickly fading discrepancies and actions undertaken by the Republicans over a year ago. Time is both my, and any determined reporter’s, enemy. May the country rebound in its determination to stomp out terrorism. May it also have the backbone to stomach some of the horrible excesses wrought by the Republicans in the 2000 elections should they ever be unearthed.

Although born to a vicar, Lemmy Kilmister certainly did not choose to use his musical talents towards angelic hymnals. Playing in various rock and soul bands throughout the ‘60s, Kilmister joined the progressive rock band Hawkwind as a bassist in August 1971. Originally slated to be a temporary member for 6 months, Lemmy stayed with the band for four years. As Hawkwind played its trippy space-rock to legions of fans, a mishap occurred in the spring of 1975. As the band was leaving Canada, having completed a series of concerts, Lemmy was detained in a jail after his amphetamine pills were suspected of actually being cocaine. Following 5 days of incarceration, he was released, not only from prison, but from the group Hawkwind. Not one to cry over his losses, the outspoken Kilmister simply stated plans of forming another group, and sure enough, a month later, his new band was already making appearances at London shows. At first he wanted to call the group Bastard, but tamer minds talked him out of it. He instead named his band Motorhead, in deference to the last song he had written while with Hawkwind. Hawkwind had recorded two versions of “Motorhead” earlier that year in January 1975, one with Hawkwind’s Dave Brock singing lead vocals and one with Lemmy crooning to a backing violin solo. In July 1975, Brock’s version of “Motorhead” was released by Hawkwind as the B-side to their single “Kings of Speed.” Both Hawkwind and Motorhead have survived over the years and continue to play numerous annual gigs far and wide.

“Oh-oh, yes, I’m the great pretender. Pretending that I’m doing well. My need is such, I pretend too much. I’m lonely but no one can tell.” With their rich harmonies and doo-wop verve, The Platters staked a goldmine with these words to their hit “The Great Pretender” in 1956. Written by their manager, Buck Ram, over a brief half-hour’s time, the song rose quickly to the top of the charts and influenced the stylings of many ‘60s soul singers to come. As a teenager in Ohio, young Chrissie Hynde loved the Motown sounds of the 1960s singers of her day, and so, she began playing guitar in a high school band. Moving to England in her 20s, she eventually teamed with three other musicians in 1978 and recorded a cover of the Kinks’ Ray Davies’ tune “Stop Your Sobbing.” The song kicked onto the U.K. top 40, and the band soon after referred to themselves as The Pretenders, in tribute to the Platters’ hit. Chrissie was one of the first female rockers to front an otherwise all-male band, and The Pretenders scored several top ten hits in the U.K. and the U.S. over the 1980s with “Learning To Crawl,” “Back On The Chain Gang,” and “Don’t Get Me Wrong.” Hynde went on to have a child with Ray Davies in 1983.

In 1985, a part-time teacher in Scotland sent a demo tape of his songs to several London music publishing houses. He was advised to form a group that would be able to showcase his talents more properly. So, Ricky Ross put together a quintet of musicians, including his girlfriend on backing vocals, and they called themselves Deacon Blue. A huge fan of the group Steely Dan, Ross had named his band after their 1977 song “Deacon Blues,” which was released on Steely Dan’s landmark album “Aja.” The soft jazz tune chronicled the yearnings of a straight and narrow guy wanting to chuck his rigid lifestyle, adapt a catchy nickname ‘Deacon Blues,’ and head out into the jazzy nightlife with its card games and women of the streets. While some of Deacon Blue’s output was peppered with a little Steely Dan influences, their pop-rock was more straight-forward in its melodic lines, without the jazzy interpretations of their namesakes’ song. Nevertheless, Deacon Blue garnered a huge following in the United Kingdom in the late ‘80s, with a number one album, “When The World Knows Your Name,” in April 1989, and sold-out stadium concerts, including three at the Wembley Arena in London. Their popularity never blew stateside and by the mid-‘90s, the band had stopped recording.

Before they virtually pulled the plug, Deacon Blue had recorded a 1993 album, “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” with dj/mixer/producers Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne. They had hoped this creative duo could instill their songs with notable sounds in the way they had infused an earlier group’s music with catchy rhythms. It didn’t work for Deacon Blue, but the producer’s magic had worked for Happy Mondays. Formed in 1984, playing mostly at youth club functions, singer Shaun Ryder’s band in Manchester, England coined its name from New Order’s dance hit “Blue Monday.” After Happy Mondays released their first single in 1985, they had a chance to work with New Order’s Barney Sumner, who produced their second single “Freaky Dancin’.” Both bands went on tour together in 1987. But by 1989, after the release of two albums which had barely charted, Happy Mondays was looking for fresh inspiration. Enter Oakenfold and Osborne. With their lush production chops, they remixed some earlier Happy Mondays tunes and helped the band craft their best album, 1990’s “Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches.” The album entered Britain’s top ten and got them noticed on U.S. shores. The Manchester “sound” of the early ‘90s, which fostered bands like Oasis, could be traced to the rave-house music of Happy Mondays. Unfortunately, Ryder fell prey to the demands of a heroin addiction, which, in turn, sent the band into disarray until the end of the decade.

Around the time Happy Mondays were enjoying the pinnacle of success, five students at Oxford University in England had already formed a band called On A Friday. With three of its members playing guitar, one of them being lead vocalist Thom Yorke, the band’s raucous sound seemed to belie the quaint name they had chosen back in 1988. They took note of a 1986 song by The Talking Heads that had the following lyrics: “Baby your mind is a radio, got a receiver inside my head; Baby, I’m tuned to your wavelengths, lemme tell you what it says; Transmitter! Oh! Picking up something good; Hey, radio head! The sound…it’s a brand new world.” The song, having been released on their “True Stories” soundtrack, was “Radio Head.” Yorke and his friends felt this reggae-styled song’s name aptly summed up the vibe of their band. With the release of their first album, “Pablo Honey,” in 1993, the group became popular in alternative circles with the college smash hit “Creep.” With lyrics of angst and self-loathing, Radiohead’s definitive guitar sounds and melodies were highly-lauded by prominent critics in the music world, they became “buzz bin” heroes on MTV, and the group won a Grammy for Best Alternative Music Performance for their 1997 album “OK Computer.”

© 2000 Ned Truslow

Two of the earliest known rockers to champion this method were The McCoys and The Pretty Things. The McCoys were a quartet of teenagers from Union City, Indiana, who formed in 1963 and toured around under the name Rick and the Raiders. Opening for the Bang Records’ darlings, The Strangeloves, in 1965, Rick and the Raiders were given the opportunity by The Strangeloves’ producers to record a song which had been first released by the R&B group called The Vibrations in 1964. The tune was “My Girl Sloopy.” Since Paul Revere and the Raiders were becoming a household name in the mid-60s, Rick and the Raiders needed to change their name. Their leader, Rick Zehringer had once taught a bandmate how to play bass by riffing on The Ventures’ 1960 song “The McCoy.” Released as a Dolton Records’ single, on the B-side to the number 2 smash “Walk, Don’t Run,” “The McCoy” was typical Ventures formula, a guitar-driven instrumental. The producers, overseeing Rick and the Raiders’ recording, loved the name McCoy, and soon the band changed not only its group moniker, but also the lyrics to that Vibrations tune they’d been hired to record. It now became “Hang On Sloopy,” and during the week of October 2, 1965, it went to number one on the Billboard chart. The McCoys continued recording for Bang Records, and Rick Zehringer, enamored of the gun design on the record company label, tweaked his last name to Derringer. When he went solo in the mid-70s, Rick Derringer released the notable rock anthem “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo.”

Across the Atlantic, around this same time in 1962, Dick Taylor was a student at an art college in Kent, England with another lad named Keith Richards. Both teens loved the blues music that was trickling in from the States, and they played in a group with a guy named Mick Jagger. When Keith and Mick went on to form their own group, a globally-famous band named after a Muddy Waters song (as covered in the “Bands Named After The Blues” article for this column), Taylor quit music for a while to study at a more prestigious art college. Soon, however, he formed his own rock ‘n’ roll group. For band name inspiration, his group chose the song of another R&B icon, namely, a tune of Bo Diddley’s. In 1955, Bo had written and released a single for Checker Records called “Pretty Thing.” It’s opening lyrics said, “You pretty thing, let me buy you a wedding ring, let me hear the choir sing, oh, you pretty thing.” Taylor and his bandmates, now called The Pretty Things, released their first album in 1965, and it contained four Diddley cover songs, including “Pretty Thing.” Although they garnered some success in Europe, especially with the song “Don’t Bring Me Down” (later covered by David Bowie), they never really made a dent in the American market. By the late ‘60s the band moved away from their blues roots and got lost in the musical haze of psychedelia.

In 1968, two English bands, Roundabout and The Iveys, were playing club gigs under these monikers, but their names would soon change. Ritchie Blackmore and Jon Lord had both played in several local bands before Chris Curtis, a former drummer for The Searchers approached them to join his new band, Roundabout. Within months, Curtis had departed Roundabout, and Blackmore and Lord forged on with the group. After a debut live performance in Tastrup, Denmark, the band shuttled back to England by boat, and while on-board, an interviewer asked them what their name was. Blackmore, sensing a need to distance himself from what Curtis had started, reportedly blurted out “Deep Purple.” The reference was allegedly to an old song Blackmore’s grandmother once liked. The song “Deep Purple” begins with the verse “When the deep purple falls, over sleepy garden walls…” and ends with the line, “…and as long as my heart will beat, lover, we’ll always meet, here in my deep purple dreams.” Blackmore and company would not pattern their writing after such innocent ditties like this, however. The Deep Purple sound was the forebear to all things heavy. Their 1972 album “Machine Head” defined and crystallized their high voltage sound, and the single “Smoke On The Water” went gold, hitting number 4 on the U.S. chart in July 1973.

The Iveys, on the other hand, were a gentler, more acoustic quartet of musicians. Having been discovered by Paul McCartney in 1968, the band was signed to The Beatles’ Apple label, and began work an album called “Maybe Tomorrow.” At the last moment, the LP was withdrawn, and Paul had them work on songs for a film entitled “The Magic Christian.” During this period, Apple felt the band should change its name, and after drawing up several lists, Neil Aspinall, a manager at the label came up with the title Badfinger. The reference was to an old John Lennon song. As he mentions in “Without You: The Tragic Story of Badfinger,” Lennon “was playing the piano and he had a bad finger so he called the piece he was playing ‘Bad Finger Boogie’ (which evolved to become ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’).” Under this new designation, Badfinger went on to release several smash hits, including “Day After Day,” “Baby Blue,” and “No Matter What.” The group fell apart after the suicide of its guitarist, Pete Ham, in 1975, and after a brief resuscitation in the early ‘80s, Badfinger, lost its second member, bassist Tom Evans, to suicide in 1983.

In 1971, a band formed on Canvey Island in Essex, England under the name Dr. Feelgood. Actually, they evolved from the Southside Jug Band to The Fix to The Pigboy Charlie Band, and finally, to the aforementioned medical moniker. The band was notorious for covering many rock ‘n’ roll tunes by early legends like Chuck Berry, Elmore James, and Sonny Boy Williamson. They also liked jamming on the songs of early British bands, especially those of Johnny Kidd and The Pirates. It was from this latter band that the four members of Dr. Feelgood cripped their name. In 1964, Johnny Kidd and The Pirates released a single that reworked the Italian song “Santa Lucia” into an English counterpart, renaming and issuing it as “Always & Ever.” On the B-side to this single was the song “Dr. Feelgood.” Dr. Feelgood, the band, played the U.K. circuit throughout the years and scored a few hits on British soil, but they never truly were afforded much notice outside of those environs.

However, a song Dr. Feelgood wrote in 1974, in turn, became the name of a popular Swedish group in the mid-‘80s. The song told of an obsessive lover who follows his girlfriend around, watching her with other men. By the song’s end, the lover is going away on business, but he tells his girlfriend, “I don’t want no more of your tricks, I’m gonna get some concrete mix, and fill your backdoor up with bricks.” He was saying this to his girl named Roxette. Guitarist Per Gessle and vocalist Marie Fredericksson, both fans of this single, teamed up in 1984 under this name, and by the end of that decade, had become as big a Swedish phenomenon, if not more so, than fellow popsters ABBA.

Far from the land of pop, Judas Priest defined the leather and chains aspect of heavy metal for generations of headbangers to come. Formed in late 1969, the band went through a personnel shake-up in its formative months until it settled into its trademark hard-rock, speed-guitar status as a quintet led by former lighting engineer, Rob Halford. The early incarnation of this group decided upon its name as a result of being fans of the Bob Dylan song, “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.” The tune provides a morality tale about wanting more than what you bargained for. A mysterious Judas Priest, possibly Death himself, tempts his friend, gambler Frankie Lee, into seeking “eternity,” a house at the end of the town’s road, which inevitably leads to Frankie’s death. Certain parents in the mid-‘80s felt the band, Judas Priest itself, had called their own boys to death when two Nevada teens shot themselves while listening to the group’s 1978 album “Stained Class.” The charges of subliminal enticement within the songs were eventually dismissed in 1990.

© 2000 Ned Truslow

The Buzzcocks’ frontman Pete Shelley also helped name a new group starting out in the Manchester club scene, calling them The Stiff Kittens. Bernard Albrecht, Peter Hook, Ian Curtis, and Stephen Morris later settled on a different name, choosing a reference out of a WWII Nazi concentration camp account called “House of Dolls,” written by Karol Cetinsky. In this harrowing non-fiction narrative, Cetinsky described the travails of Jewish women who were kept in the camps for the purpose of pleasing Nazi soldiers on leave. Their select group was named the Joy Division. Obviously, more than one critic of the band felt they were exploiting a very delicate subject matter with their moniker, and accusations of Nazi empathy followed the band in several circles of discussion. It didn’t help matters when, after the suicide of their lead singer, the other members re-emerged in a subsequent, much more successful band, named with the Aryan-catchy phrase, New Order. Despite some of these drawbacks, Joy Division cracked the U.K. top 20 with the single “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” and their album “Closer” went to number 6, both achievements happening in the summer of 1980.

Steering clear of controversy, a quintet of lads from Aylesbury, England got together in 1978 with a purpose of bringing back progressive rock in an era of punk anarchy. Led by a guy named Fish, born Derek Dick, who wore elaborate face paint onstage, the group called themselves Silmarillion, after the J.R.R. Tolkien book of the same name. Tolkien’s creation contained many stories, but the primary plotline centered around the planet Arda and the two Simarils, gems that contained light, which were stolen by an evil Vala named Melkor. Okay, so we’re confused too. Just read the book. Fish and his mates truncated their name to Marillion for simplicity’s sake and proceeded to release a succession of hit albums over the 1980s in Great Britain. Although some of their work cracked the top 200 on the Billboard charts, the band’s greatest achievements occurred in the U.K. as 7 of their albums between the years 1983 to 1991 climbed to and sometimes debuted on England’s top ten chart.

After the release of two albums with the group The Human League, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware, two synthesizer maestros, felt the strain of having to tour left them drained and yearned for a creatively-different outlet. Striking out on their own, they brought singer Glenn Gregory into their fold in 1980 and formed a groovy electronic-dance outfit named Heaven 17. The source of literature they borrowed their name from was none other than the controversial ‘70s bestseller “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess. At the Corova Milk Bar, famous hangout for Alex and his malevolent Droogs gang, a jukebox featured a band by the name of Heaven 17. Their debut single “(We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang” pounded the dance floors in the United States and Great Britain. While their first three albums all cracked the U.K.’s top 20 charts, Heaven 17’s single “Let Me Go” played heavily in the States on MTV’s formative early year of 1983.

Uptempo hits of the ‘80s didn’t get any frothier than songs like “Something About You” and “Lessons In Love,” both of which were crafted by the four members of London’s Level 42. Formed in 1980, bassist Mark King sang lead while his keyboardist Mike Lindup chimed in with perfect harmony. The two singles made it to #7 and #12 on the U.S. charts respectively in the years 1986-87. The band members were fans of the hilarious sci-fi spoof “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy,” written by Douglas Adams. The book, which eventually expanded to a trilogy of novels, concerned a man named Arthur Dent, who in an instant, is plucked from Earth’s obliteration by his friend Ford Prefect, and the two travel the universe on hilarious misadventures. The strange band name came from the reference of 42 in the book, which answered the question, “What is the meaning of life?”

Science fiction once again figured in the name of a band in 1980, when a Liverpool trio of musicians took their moniker from a piece of fiction by famed author Frederick Pohl. Published in the February 1960 issue of Galaxy, the short story “The Day The Icicle Works Closed” inspired this rock pop group to adapt their name as The Icicle Works. Their debut album charted in the top 30 on both sides of the Atlantic in 1984, and the band’s finely-crafted pop songs like “Love Is A Wonderful Colour” received favorable independent airplay on college radio. By 1990, after several personnel changes, the Icicles had melted and gone their separate ways.

“L’arte dei Rumori” was a manifesto ahead of its time in the 1920s. Written by Luigi Russolo to a “great futurist musician” by the name of Balilla Pratella, Russolo championed the notion of severing routine orchestral configurations and stylings of his day and instead try to “conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds.” He advocated the use of everyday noises like trolleys, autos, gurgles, and rainfall to be molded into a musical collage of sound. “L’arte dei Rumori” translates in English to The Art of Noise. In 1983, a group of experimental musicians decided to forge ahead with Russolo’s manifesto, and named their band in its honor. The Art of Noise incorporated buzzsaws, racecars, and other noisy ambience into a danceable beat-driven style of music that captured both the ear of the avant-garde and the club-hopper. The band won a Grammy for their instrumental take on the TV theme “Peter Gunn,” and incorporated animated icon Max Headroom and Welsh singer Tom Jones in their respective songs “Paranoimia” and Prince’s “Kiss.”

“Wake Up Boo!” was a hit on British radio in February 1995, and the album “Wake Up!” from which it was released hit number one on the U.K.’s charts. Who’s Boo? Why The Boo Radleys, of course. Darlings of American university students, with wide-ranging songs that touch on rock ‘n’ roll, Beatlesque melodies, reggae, cajun, and the kitchen sink, this Liverpool outfit formed in 1988 and took their name from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. In the book, Boo Radley is the mentally-ill next door neighbor of attorney Atticus Finch, who befriends Finch’s children, Scout and Jem. Aptly-titled “C’mon Kids,” their subsequent album unfortunately did not yield hit singles, but indeed, continued in their tradition of delivering seamless rock-pop from the land of the moptops.

As you can see, literature has played a significant role in the world of rock. And as Camus said, music need not be analyzed or reasoned. It should just make you feel something. Take you to another place. Help soothe some of your concerns and worries. We bid you adieu with the words of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
“And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infect the day,
Shall fold their tents like Arabs,
And silently steal away.”

© 2000 Ned Truslow

Members of a particular band in the early days of rock ‘n’ roll made a special effort to link their musical persona with literature and the art world of their day. After meeting in 1965 at New York’s Syracuse University, Lou Reed and John Cale, along with guitarist Sterling Morrison and percussionist Angus MacLise, decided to name their band after a pulpy, pornographic S&M novel that MacLise had in his possession. No reason behind it really, just a nod to the smutty work called “The Velvet Underground.” Bringing the German-born, smoky-voiced chanteuse Nico into their fold, the Underground linked up with Andy Warhol and his Scene, and became a part of his multi-media show, “The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.” The group would go on to explore dark, edgy themes in their music, including “Venus In Furs,” (another allusion to S&M, inspired by a novel of the same name by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch), as well as cult classics “Heroin,” and “White Light/White Heat.” Although their heyday was short-lived, The Velvet Underground’s music made a lasting impression on adoring critics and artists like David Bowie and Sonic Youth to name but a few.

In the following year, 1966, seven musicians got together in Cardiff, Wales to form a bluesy rock band called Amen Corner. Their name was taken from a play by heralded African-American author James Baldwin. Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner” related the story of a devout woman who tries to keep her son on the righteous path after his wayward father returns to their Harlem home to play jazz. Perhaps in keeping with the jazzy notions of Baldwin’s piece, Amen Corner, the band, was keen on having two saxophonists as members of the group. While not charting significantly in the United States, Amen Corner broke through the British top 10 on several occasions, and toured in 1967 with Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd.

German author Herman Hesse was noted for his severely analytical, introspective works after World War I. In one particular novel, protagonist Harry Haller tried to resolve the clashes he had within himself and the outside world, which resulted in his life being split into countless extremes in polarity. Pretty heady stuff. So why did the headbanging forefathers of rock, the lookin’-for-adventure, “Born To Be Wild” tunesmiths called Steppenwolf, decide to take their name from the title of that Hesse novel? Well, first of all, their producer suggested it, and second, well, it sounds pretty cool, man. So be it. German-born lead singer, John Kay (born Joachim Krauledat) guided his heavy metal band through hits like the aforementioned “Born To Be Wild” which held the #2 spot in the U.S. charts for three weeks in August 1968, and “Magic Carpet Ride,” which reached #3 in November of that year.

The following year of 1968 brought another heavy metal outfit known as Uriah Heep. Formed in London originally with the name Spice, they switched their name to the one conceived by Charles Dickens in 1850, which Dickens gave to a conniving clerk character in his landmark novel “David Copperfield.” While Dicken’s Uriah Heep wormed his way to the top as a partner in a law firm, the band Uriah Heep barely cracked the top 40 in Britain and the United States with their songs “Easy Livin’” and “Sweet Lorraine.” Fading away in the 1970s and then resurfacing in the heavy metal scene of the ‘80s, Uriah Heep’s blend of bass-heavy metal and organ-driven blues would influence sounds of the big hair metal groups of the early ‘80s.

A benevolent millionaire funded the formation of another group in 1969, and the group went on to garner a number one album in the United States. Sounds like something out of a modern-day Charles Dickens novel too, doesn’t it? Alas, it was one Stanley Miesegaes, a wealthy Dutch playboy, whose real-life philanthropy enabled keyboardist and singer Rick Davies to gather a group of musicians in London to form a band. It’s not like they were begging for money, but perhaps that is why they settled on naming themselves after an obscure William H. Davies novel called “The Autobiography of a Supertramp.” The story dealt with the musings of a wandering English hobo whose life only seems to go downhill after being born in a public house in a nondescript village. The band’s fortunate turn of fate led to a series of underwhelming first releases throughout the early ‘70s, but yielded a monster smash of an album, “Breakfast in America,” in 1979. With tunes like “The Lyrical Song,” and “Goodbye Stranger” receiving massive airplay, Supertramp’s successful LP was #1 on the Billboard charts for an overall six weeks.

Another benefactor was helping a band in 1969 find its voice and its literary name. Guy Stevens was an A&R executive with Island Records when he listened to a demo tape of a quintet of musicians calling themselves Silence. He liked what he heard, but didn’t like their name. Possessing a knack for bestowing unique names on bands (Stevens supposedly had given another band, Procol Harum, their moniker), the executive remembered a book he’d read in prison while serving a short stint for a drug charge. It was an underground comic novel about a man who wants desperately to break from the conformity and labels of daily life, but, through a series of misadventures, learns exactly where his position in society is destined to be. Written by Willard Manus, “Mott The Hoople” became the band’s new name. Stevens replaced their lead singer with curly-tressed, sunglass-wearing Ian Hunter, and after a series of poorly-received cover tunes, the band scored a sizable hit with the David Bowie-penned “All The Young Dudes” in 1972.

A very different kind of literature influenced part of the name of a band that formed in Winnipeg, Canada in 1972. Technically-defined as a gearing mechanism of a vehicle engine that reduces the power output required to maintain driving speed in a specific range by lowering the gear ratio, the word “overdrive” became synonymous with tire-peeling, pedal-to-the-medal rock ‘n’ roll when it was incorporated into the name of C.F. Turner and Randy, Robbie and Tim Bachman’s band. Having already tasted success with the Canadian band Guess Who, Randy Bachman helped christen his new group with the aid of a trucking industry magazine named “Overdrive.” BTO, as they came to be fondly called, scored a couple of successes with “Let It Ride” and “Takin’ Care of Business” before they went to number one on the U.S. charts for a week in November 1974 with “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.”

A drive shaft of a different nature was the germination behind the cult-favorite band Steely Dan when Donald Fagen and Walter Becker answered guitarist Denny Dias’ ad for musicians in 1972. Coining their name from the hardcore, drug-laced, underground novel “Naked Lunch” by William Burroughs, the moniker referred to a Steely Dan model of rubber phallus made by a company named Yokohama. The band did not face any stiff competition in their field of jazz-laced, obscure style of songwriting in the early ‘70s, and as their group line-up became more tumescent with ever-changing session players, Steely Dan produced their best album “Aja,” containing the hits “Peg” and “Deacon Blues” in 1977.

Be sure to log in next week for part two of Bands Named After Published Works

© 2000 Ned Truslow

During the spring and summer of 1989, it seems you couldn’t drive anywhere without hearing the ska-sounding rock of Fine Young Cannibals spilling out of your dashboard radio. The British trio signed to a record deal in December 1984, but it wasn’t until April 1989, when their song “She Drives Me Crazy” leapt to number one on the U.S. charts, that the band became well known. Their album, “The Raw & The Cooked,” also held America’s number one for 7 weeks starting on June 3rd, and the band’s follow-up single, “Good Thing,” bopped to numero uno in early July. Guitarist Andy Cox had heard of a film called “All the Fine Young Cannibals,” and the band had decided on the name in what proved to be a rushed decision, even though no one had seen the movie. Released in 1960, the film was a veiled biography on the life of jazz trumpeter Chet Baker and starred Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood.

Originally calling themselves Death of Joey, brothers Jim and William Reid of East Kilbride, Scotland claim they heard a line in a Bing Crosby film, presumably 1945’s “The Bells of St. Mary,” which triggered their band’s name change. The sequel to Bing’s “Going My Way” featured Mr. Crosby as Father Chuck O’Malley, a priest who helps out the Mother Superior of St. Mary’s parish, Ingrid Bergman. Thrashing, feedback-driven songs characterized much of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s output, formed in 1984, and the band was anything but holy with its lyrical drug references, club fights, and an unreleasable single called “Jesus Sucks.” However, a substantial number of their songs like “April Skies,” “Blues From a Gun,” and “Reverence” were able to crack the top 10 in the United Kingdom and had a cult following in the States.

Casting about for a worthy follow-up to his success in the role of the Count in 1931’s “Dracula,” Bela Lugosi signed on to a low-budget eerie thriller set on the island of Haiti. The film was called “White Zombie,” and it detailed the efforts of Lugosi, as the leader of a band of zombies, trying to steal a newlywed wife away from a young tourist couple. Robert Straker, alias Rob Zombie, had a love of these old B-grade-type horror films, so when he named his Black-Sabbath-like band White Zombie in 1985, the reference was understandable. Their album “Astro Creep: 2000 Songs of Love, Destruction and Other Synthetic Delusions of the Electric Head” debuted at #6 on the U.S. charts in April 1995. In 1996, White Zombie was named the Best Metal Band by both Rolling Stone Magazine’s critics and readers, and their song “Thunder Kiss ‘65” was blasted for 4 hours at meddling photographers during Barbra Streisand’s July 1998 wedding to James Brolin.

Six Oscars were bestowed on the Bette Davis/Anne Baxter satirical film, 1950’s “All About Eve,” yet unlike the Broadway star of the movie, who ruthlessly climbed her way to the top, Julianne Regan and Tim Bricheno’s band of the same name, formed in London in 1985, did not reach such heights. With a mixture of folk lamentations and Goth bravado, All About Eve were revered by British critics in the mid-to-late ‘80s with songs like “Martha’s Harbour,” which cracked the UK’s top ten. By 1992, however, the show was over, and the band’s four members went their separate ways.

If you dialed a particular New York phone number in the mid-80s, you would be treated to a new song for that day. This brainchild Dial-A-Song idea was conceived by two musicians, John Linnell and John Flansburgh, who made up the offbeat, sardonic members of the group They Might Be Giants. Their name was based on a 1971 film of the same title, which starred George C. Scott as a daffy man in New York City who thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes and is the patient of psychiatrist Dr. Watson, played by Joanne Woodward. They Might Be Giants never garnered a rousing success, but songs like “Don’t Let’s Start” were favorites in the indie/college radio circuits.

Slide guitar aficionados usually bring up the name of Ry Cooder as one of the all-time greats when it comes to this style of playing. Cooder’s influence was definitely studied by one Scottish band, in particular, a band that named themselves after a movie on which Cooder composed its soundtrack. The movie was 1984’s “Paris, Texas,” starring Harry Dean Stanton as an absent man trying his best to reacquaint himself with his wife and son. The band’s name became Texas, one of England’s favorite sons, with the personable Sharleen Spiteri as their lead vocalist. Formed in 1986, the band’s first single “I Don’t Want A Lover” reached number 8 on the U.K. charts in March of 1989. Their last two albums, “White on Blonde” and “Hush” both debuted at number one in Britain, and this band continues to churn out catchy, slide-guitar-driven ditties just waiting to be discovered by a big audience on America’s shores.

© 2000 Ned Truslow

The film world has been influential in many facets of popular culture. Music and film have been virtually symbiotic, especially since the onslaught of music videos in the early 1980s. Nowadays, if a band is hard-pressed to come up with a “knowing” moniker for their outfit, they may look to an obscure film title or movie character to present themselves as a savvy, retro-hip, or counterculture rock unit. Incidentally, “Goldfinger” must be perceived as such a hip movie that another band named itself after the Bond classic. Honor Blackman’s character of Pussy Galore became the name of a punk outfit in Washington D.C. in 1985 whose “Dial M for Mother******” became a moderate underground success and whose lead guitarist went on to form the blistering Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

In 1956 director John Ford focused his lens on his favorite leading man, John Wayne, to create their most famous Western masterpiece “The Searchers.” The story revolved around Wayne, an ex-confederate soldier, riding for years, searching for his niece, Natalie Wood, who has been kidnapped by Indians. Two Liverpool lads by the names of John McNally and Mike Pender began performing at local pubs five years after the movie’s release and decided to honor the film by naming themselves The Searchers. Bringing two other musicians into their fold, The Searchers were ready to launch their career when The Beatles took America by storm. Several of their songs cracked the U.S. 100, and their cover of the Clovers’ “Love Potion #9” made it to #3 on the Billboard charts the week of January 16, 1965.

The rest of the 1960s consisted of bands who focused their branding efforts mostly on psychedelic and “Summer of Love”-sounding titles. A Lancaster, California musician, Don Van Vliet, would oftentimes think of fantastical movie plots. One of his brainstorms for a film, which was never made, was called “Captain Beefheart Meets the Grunt People.” Vliet decided to adopt this movie moniker and started a band called Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band in 1964. The group never had a successful single in the U.S. but broke onto the top 50 charts several times in Britain over the next decade.

As the 1970s rumbled in, two members from the rock band Free and one from Mott the Hoople joined to form a new group in London under the management of Peter Grant. A little-seen 1972 film directed by Robert Benton, and featuring Jeff Bridges and Barry Brown as two outlaw drifters — one carefree and one careful — told the tale of their light-hearted thievery as they headed across the Old West after the Civil War. Grant, having shepherded the image of Led Zeppelin, wanted to give his new band this film’s outlaw aesthetics, so, in 1973, Bad Company was derived from the title of its cinematic forebear. Bad Company’s macho lyrics and gritty guitar crunches put songs like “Can’t Get Enough” at #5 and “Feel Like Makin’ Love” at #10 on the U.S. charts.

In the 1930s depression era, immigrants traveled to the oilfields of Oklahoma to make a scruffy living from the rich black tea that bubbled from the plains and only seemed to benefit but a few entrepreneurs. These new arrivals were highlighted in both the folk singer Woody Guthrie’s biography and a film made on his life in 1976 called “Bound For Glory” which starred David Carradine. Around that same time, Bob Geldof of Dublin, Ireland must’ve felt some camaraderie spirit with these upstarts because he saddled his new band with their name, The Boomtown Rats. The Rats’ infamous best-selling single, ‘I Don’t Like Mondays,” based on the 1979 shooting spree of San Diego schoolgirl Brenda Spencer, was a number one hit in Britain and peaked at #73 on the U.S. charts.

Punk lover Susan Dallion was working as a waitress in Kent, England when she had a chance to sing with a hastily-assembled band at the “100 Club Punk Festival” in London in 1976. She refurbished her given name with a Native-American Indian slant, Siouxsie, and shortly after the gig, hit the club circuit with a backup band christened The Banshees. Their name was derived from the 1970 Vincent Price horror flick “Cry of the Banshee,” a film in which Price plays a magistrate witch-hunter whose family is cursed by a coven of witches. True to the meaning of the word banshee, which concerns a woman who wails to signal a pending death in a family, Siouxsie screeched her way onto British charts many times from the mid-70s to the mid-90s, with albums like her #12-ranked “The Scream,” and the band’s 1983 cover of the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence,” which went to #3 in the U.K.

A mad scientist yearning to gain possession of the universe is eaten by a lava-lamp-like form that feeds off evil. The latest installment of George Lucas’ “Star Wars” opus? Not likely. The character played by actor Milo O’Shea, was featured in the sexy 1968 Jane Fonda space romp “Barbarella.” Duran Duran was his name and a band from Birmingham, England, that occasionally played gigs at their local Barbarella’s Club, pounced on the name for their group in 1978. Blasting off with the hit “Planet Earth,” the band conquered the cosmos throughout the 1980s with new-wave pop gems like “Rio,” “Hungry Like The Wolf,” “The Reflex,” and “Notorious.” Incidentally, Capitol Records, the band’s label, was the first major record company to introduce a single via the Internet in September 1997 with the release of Duran Duran’s “Electric Barbarella.”

© 2000 Ned Truslow

The most well-known band to name themselves with a blues moniker were The Rolling Stones. Long-time admirers of many blues artists, and having covered several popular blues songs over the years, Jagger and Richards decided to take the name of a Muddy Waters’ tune, “Rollin’ Stone,” as their namesake. Muddy Waters, born McKinley Morganfield in Rolling Fork, Mississippi and nicknamed by his grandmother for his penchant of getting himself dirty in a childhood creek, made this popular blues song his first single when he began recording for Chess Records in 1950.

Soon, other rock bands jumped on the blues bandwagon. In 1964, Los Angeles band The Stone Poneys played their folkie music in small venues with their lead singer Linda Ronstadt. “Different Drum,” a song written by The Monkees’ Michael Nesmith, would prove to be their only prominent hit in 1967. The group had derived their name from the blues song “Pony Blues” by Charley Patton. Patton, like his co-hort Mr. Waters, was another Mississippi native who had made this riff, about social mobility, his first issued recording when he was offered sessions in Richmond, Indiana.

In Cambridge, England, a man named Syd Barrett was enamored of the South Carolina bluesman Pink Anderson, who had traveled for 30 years playing in a medicine show, oftentimes with another obscure artist by the name of Floyd Council. Syd decided to name his new band, Pink Floyd Sound, in honor of the two men in 1965. Of course, the word Sound was dropped, and Syd’s band went all the way to The Dark Side Of The Moon.

Also in 1965, John Sebastian took a sabbatical from New York and traveled the South, listening to a variety of local artists. One of these artists, Mississippi John Hurt of Teoc, Mississippi, had worked as a farmhand most of his life but also found time to play his brand of blues in several coffeehouses. His song, “Coffee Blues,” had the line, “I love my baby by the lovin’ spoonful.” Sebastian conveyed the term to his partner Zal Yanovsky, and the Lovin’ Spoonful was given birth. The group scored a number 9 hit with “Do You Believe In Magic” in 1965, and a number one hit for three weeks in August 1966 with the seasonal favorite “Summer In The City.”

As a joke, a bluesman in the San Francisco Bay area related a fictitious story of a character named Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane to guitarist Jorma Kaukonen in 1965. The phony name was a spin-off of an actual musician in Couchman, Texas by the name of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Blind Lemon sang in a “country blues” style, spinning tales of early 1900 black culture in the South. Kaukonen made a point to bring up the name with his fellow bandmates Marty Balin and Paul Kantner, and soon after, the Jefferson Airplane took off.

In Terry, Mississippi, Tommy Johnson was perceived as a wild man. Womanizer and alcoholic, who oftentimes turned to Sterno or shoe polish to get his liquid fix, he would brag that he sold his soul to the Devil in order to acquire his astonishing musical talents. His songs were usually autobiographical in some respect, and one, in particular, highlighted his desperate, sobering struggle with the jinxing juice. It was called “Canned Heat Blues.” In 1966, a Los Angeles quintet of musicians settled on this name, and Canned Heat’s boogie blues rocked the Hollywood scene. Their cover of Henry Thomas’ 1928 blues song “Going Up The Country” went to number 11 on the U.S. charts in January 1969.

Even though many bands didn’t overtly choose to name themselves after their favorite blues gods, they found great satisfaction in translating bluesy standards for the benefit of their own output. From Led Zeppelin covering Willie Dixon’s “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” and “You Shook Me,” to The Allman Brothers covering Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues,” to Eric Clapton covering Freddie King’s “I’m Tore Down,” there are countless instances in which our legendary rock kings owe a great debt to the bold inventions of their blues forefathers.

© 2000 Ned Truslow

In 1970, John Lennon was pissed. Paul McCartney had beaten him to the punch, officially quitting the Beatles, and John felt slighted, wanting to be the one to break the news to the world. Feeling humiliated by all the craziness he’d had to endure as a former moptop, John stole away with his gal-pal Yoko to the clinic of Dr. Arthur Janov in Venice, California. The pioneering doctor immersed Lennon in primal scream therapy, a process by which people allegedly can grow emotionally when they break through the superficialities of life and examine their private pain and repressed memories. The result was the timeless “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band” album, featuring highly personal songs, many screamed in rage. Unsentimental expressions of John’s psyche with titles like “God,” “Isolation,” “Remember,” and the gut-wrenching “Mother,” had direct ties to the work of Arthur Janov.

In the 1980s, the spirit of Janov would affect the songs of one of Britain’s top acts. Tears For Fears was a name derived from a chapter heading in Janov’s book “Prisoners of Pain.” Fearmen Roland Orzibal and Curt Smith drew heavily on the teachings of Janov’s process for their album “The Hurting,” and their “get-it-off-your-chest” anthem “Shout” ruled the U.S. charts for three weeks in August 1985. Perhaps as a nod to some Janovian link, Tears For Fears’ 1989 album, “The Seeds of Love,” sounded very close in spirit to the work of Mr. John Lennon during his psychedelic Beatles phase.

As the ‘90s began, Arthur’s healthy howlin’ regimen was used to christen the name of one of England’s funkiest, non-stop partying bands. Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie loved Janov’s first book and “Screamadelica,” the band’s 1991 milestone, is considered by many to be the most important dance-rock record of that decade. Interestingly enough, one of the first singles off the album was “Come Together,” a Beatles’ masterpiece written by, yes…now you’re catching on.

© 2000 Ned Truslow