Mongoloid, he was a mongoloid
One chromosome too many
Bob Frank, who was born in Cleveland in 1953, heard blues music for the first time when he was 14 years old.
“My mother had bought me an FM radio for my birthday, and I used to listen to it late at night, hunting for different kinds of music when I was supposed to be sleeping,” Bob told me recently. “One Friday night, I discovered a blues program on a local college radio station, and I had what I guess I would describe as an epiphany. That night was the beginning of my lifelong obsession with the blues.”
A week later, that program featured blues harmonica records. So Bob took a train into downtown Cleveland the next day and purchased a Hohner “Marine Band” harmonica (in C):
When he moved to Boston to attend Boston University a few years later, he bought a Fender Telecaster and taught himself to play blues guitar. His sophomore year, he put together a band – they called themselves the Nathaniel Graves Band – that played at many of the colleges in the Boston area and eventually got a regular gig at Charlie’s Place, a Harvard Square bar where they played seven nights a week.
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When the Nathaniel Graves Band broke up, the bar owner asked Bob if he could put together a new group to play there. “I told him I really needed to go back to school and focus on graduating,” Bob told me. “So he went out and got this guy from New Jersey – Bruce Springsteen.”
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Music journalist Jon Landau met Springsteen at Charlie’s Place in April 1974 – shortly after Bob Frank’s band had given up their regular gigs there.
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Landau reviewed Springsteen’s performance for Boston’s The Real Paper:
I saw my rock 'n' roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time.
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| Landau and Springsteen in 1974 |
Landau later became Springsteen’s manager and produced many of his most famous albums.
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A couple of years after he graduated from BU and moved back to Cleveland, a friend of Bob Frank’s hired him as the music director for a local production of Diamond Studs: The Life of Jesse James, a musical that featured a bluegrass score. When the play’s run was over, Bob and several of the musicians who had performed in the show decided to start a bluegrass band, which they called the Hotfoot Quartet.
I interviewed Bob a couple of weeks ago about the Hotfoot Quartet and their famous – infamous? – cover of Devo’s “Mongoloid.” (Bob handled the lead vocal and played the guitar on that record.)
2 or 3 lines: Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think of Cleveland as a big bluegrass town. Was the Hotfoot Quartet able to get jobs performing bluegrass live?
Bob Frank: Our first regular gig was at a bar called the Coach House, which was right by the Case Western Reserve University campus. We played there every Friday night. They had a jukebox in the bar, and whenever we took a break, someone would play Devo’s “Mongoloid.” Sometimes they would put it on when our break was almost over, so when we were back up on the bandstand ready to start our next set, we would kind of play along with the record until it ended. Eventually people started asking us to play it, so we would play the whole song a couple of times a night.
Q: How did it happen that you put out a record of “Mongoloid”?
A: There was this high-school kid named Russell Potter who used to hang out at the bar, and he came up and said, “Do you guys want to make a record?” Back then if someone asked you to make a record, it was a big thing, so of course we said yes.
Q: Where did you record “Mongoloid”?
A: Russell took us to this cool studio called Boddie Recording, which was in the basement of a house owned by an African-American couple. Besides the recording studio, Boddie had a record pressing machine. He had rigged up a TV so that his wife could watch her soap operas while she pressed records one at a time. We had to throw out the first batch of records she pressed for us because she didn’t let them cool off enough before she picked them up, so she left fingerprints on each record.
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[NOTE: The Boddie Recording Co., which was owned by Thomas and Louise Boddie, was Cleveland's first African-American owned and operated recording studio, serving a clientele that included not only gospel, soul, and R & B groups but also rock, bluegrass, and country musicians from as far away as Detroit and West Virginia.]
Q: So it was kind of like someone walking on a cement sidewalk before the cement dried and leaving foot prints?
A: Exactly. We had to go back and ask Mr. Boddie to make us new records to replace the ones his wife had ruined. I think we ended up with a thousand copies of it.
Q: What was the flip side to “Mongoloid”?
A: Our fiddle player suggested a waltz called “LaZinda Waltz” that he had heard on a Johnny Gimble album. It was an instrumental – no lyrics – and was totally different from “Mongoloid.” At one point I wanted to cover “Ramshackle Shack,” a classic old Stanley Brothers song, but we ended up going with “LaZinda Waltz.”
Q: On the cover on the “Mongoloid” record, you guys are wearing suits that look like the weird yellow one-piece suits that Devo wore in their concerts.
A: After we recorded “Mongoloid,” I asked this guy who called himself Johnny Dromette – his real name was John Thompson – to do our record cover. Thompson owned a record store and released some records by Cleveland punk bands on his own label, and did a really good job on the sleeves for those records.
Q: How did you know Dromette – or Thompson?
A: I met him before we formed Hotfoot Quartet. I used to hang out at his record store, and one day he asked me if I wanted to help him put on some concerts. I was about two years out of college, and I had just gotten fired from my first job – which was selling advertising for a radio station – so I had absolutely nothing else to do. When Johnny asked me to find a place to hold these concerts, I remembered that my father had a friend – Kellman was his name – who owned an old auditorium downtown. So I went to Mr. Kellman and rented the auditorium for Johnny’s first show for $150.
Q: Who were the bands who played in that show?
A: Johnny hired three bands. One of them was Devo. The second band was this act out of Ann Arbor called Destroy All Monsters. I forget who the third band was.
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| A poster for the WHK Auditorium show |
[NOTE: Click here to hear a bootleg recording of Devo’s performance that night.]
Q: Was the show a success?
A: Oh yeah – we had a lot of people come to the thing. Johnny wanted to do another show after the first one, so I called up Mr. Kellman again and rented his building – which was called the WHK Auditorium – for a concert that Pere Ubu headlined. It was about a year later that we recorded “Mongoloid.” Johnny not only designed the cover, he distributed the record, too. He got it played all over.
Q: What did people think of ”Mongoloid”?
A: The Hotfoot Quartet was trying to get really serious about playing bluegrass at that time, and the record kind of held us back with a lot of local bluegrass purists – they thought we were just a novelty act. Bluegrass was a tough nut to crack back then. I think we eventually lived it down – we recorded three albums, and we were together almost 20 years.
Q: Do you have any idea what Devo thought of your cover of “Mongoloid” – assuming they knew about it?
A: I don’t know if they ever heard this record. I’ve got to be honest with you – to this day, I’ve never spoken to anyone from the band. I helped put their Cleveland concert on in 1977, I ran the sound that night – but I never spoke to them.
Q: A lot has changed since you recorded “Mongoloid,” and a lot of people today probably consider the song inappropriate and offensive. Did you ever hear from people who said they were offended by the record?
A: Nobody reacted to it negatively back in 1979. I always wondered why no one ever came up and said, “How dare you!” But that never happened – no one ever complained. But we only played it live for about a year after the record was released. I’m sure the reaction would be very different if the Hotfoot Quartet was still together and playing it today.
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Hotfoot Quartet stayed together for almost two decades, recording two albums and touring extensively. After they broke up, Bob went back to his first musical love and formed a blues band called Blue Lunch.
In 2018, Bob released his first solo album, True Stories and Outrageous Lies, which features a number of original songs:
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We’ll feature a song from Bob’s solo album sometime in the feature. But for the next few months, 2 or 3 lines is featuring only records that he heard on legendary DJ Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio program in 1980. The Hotfoot Quartet’s cover of “Mongoloid” is certainly one of the most distinctive of those records.
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Click here to listen to the Hotfoot Quartet’s cover of Devo’s “Mongoloid.”
[NOTE: In addition to Bob Frank, the other musicians who played on that recording were Paul Kovac (banjo and vocal), Bob Yocum (fiddle), Jim Blum (bass and vocal), and Bobby “Bobby Smack” Smakula (mandolin).]
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