Jan and Dean – "Dead Man's Curve" (1963)

He passed me at Doheny

Then I started to swerve

[NOTE: The oldest member of this year’s class of 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME inductees was one of the first 45s I ever bought . . . and you best believe I still own it.  Here’s my original July 29, 2010 post about “Dead Man's Curve.”]  

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“The shortest distance between two points” is rarely a term that can be applied to 2 or 3 lines, and today’s post is no exception.  We have a lot of ground to cover today.

Let's begin by going back to 1963, which was the year that Jan Berry and Dean Torrence released today’s featured record, “Dead Man's Curve.” 

“Dead Man's Curve” was 50% souped-up car song and 50% teenage vehicular death song – although unlike all the other teenage vehicular death songs I can remember (think “Leader of the Pack” and “Last Kiss” and “D.O.A.”), there was no girl in “Dead Man's Curve.”

I still have my copy of that 45:

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Now that I think about it, we’re going to need to go back even further – all the way to 1962, when I was a fourth grader at Irving Elementary School in Joplin, Missouri.

That’s the year I won the second round of the KFSB-AM spelling bee and took home a little red portable record player.  Among the records I played on it was “Dead Man’s Curve.”

The very first records I remember owning were “Tossin' and Turnin’” by Bobby Lewis (1961) and “Twistin’ the Night Away” by Sam Cooke (1962), which I think I knew about from the old KODE-TV “Teen Hop” show that aired on Saturday afternoons.  (I had pretty good taste for a 10-year-old, I think.)

I bought those 45s at a little record store that was located on the south side of Main Street between 15th and 16th (I think) with the $3 I had taken home for winning the first round of the spelling bee.  (By the way, I didn’t win the bicycle that was the spelling bee’s grand prize – I got tripped up on an “e-before-i or i-before-e?” word and finished a disappointing third.)

I’m guessing I bought my copy of “Dead Man’s Curve” at that same record store.

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In the early 1990's, when I left my job as a government attorney and went to work for a direct-marketing company, I went to Los Angeles regularly to oversee infomercial shoots.  On one trip I was driving west on Sunset Boulevard and crossed North Doheny Drive.  I immediately thought to myself, "That’s the street they were singing about in ‘Dead Man’s Curve’!”

I was such a fan of “Dead Man’s Curve” that I later bought a Jan and Dean album – “Surf City (and Other Swinging Cities),” which included a bunch of tepid cover versions of songs about cities: “Memphis, Tennessee” (made famous by Johnny Rivers), “Detroit City” (a country hit for Bobby Bare – “By day I make the cars/By night I make the bars”), “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” (originally written in 1922, it was a hit for Freddy Cannon in 1959), “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” etc., etc.  

It was a pretty lame album, but the title cut (which was a #1 hit for Jan and Dean) had a brilliant chorus:

We're goin’ to Surf City ’cause it’s two to one

We're goin’ to Surf City, gonna have some fun

Two girls for every boy!

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Jan and Dean were sort of a poor man’s Beach Boys.  They are mostly remembered today for their surf songs, but they had been around years before the surfing craze hit.  

Dean was in the army when Jan (as part of “Jan and Arnie”) had a top 10 hit with “Jennie Lee” in 1958.  (I’ll have more to say about who Jennie Lee was later in this post.)  Jan and Dean had several other singles that cracked the Billboard "Hot 100" prior to 1963, when "Surf City" hit big.  They followed up on the success of  "Surf City" with six consecutive top 25 songs in 1963 and 1964, including “Dead Man's Curve” and “The Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” which made it all the way to #3. 

(The B-side of one of those hits was a follow-up to “Little Old Lady” that was titled “The Anahiem, Azusa and Cucamonga Sewing Circle, Book Review and Timing Association.”  I remember hearing it on an evening call-in-and-dedicate-a-song radio show on a Joplin station that I listened to religiously in those days.  When you called in to request a song dedication, you only had to give your initials – I was brave enough to request Roy Orbison's "Pretty Woman" for a couple of girls under those conditions, although my initials were probably unique enough to identify me if  either of those girls had ever heard the dedications.)

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Riding their string of hit singles like a real surfer would ride a big pipeline wave, Jan and Dean were invited to be the emcees of a two-night concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in 1964 that featured perhaps the greatest collection of top-40 musical talent ever assembled in one place at one time.  

Those concerts were filmed, and that film was edited and released as The T.A.M.I. Show, which I remember seeing at the old Lux theatre in downtown Joplin in early 1965.  (“T.A.M.I.” stood for “Teen Age Music International.”) 

The movie was finally released on DVD earlier this year, and I just watched it in its original form for the first time in over 45 years.  

Here’s a list of the performers who appeared in The T.A.M.I. Show:

– Chuck Berry

– Gerry and the Pacemakers

– Smokey Robinson and the Miracles

– Marvin Gaye

– Lesley Gore

– Jan and Dean

– Beach Boys

– Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas

– Supremes

– Barbarians

– James Brown and the Famous Flames

– Rolling Stones

Click here to view the trailer for the movie.

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Most of the those acts played three or four songs at most.  But Lesley Gore and the Rolling Stones each did six songs.  (Lesley Gore was a really big star at the time.)

James Brown, who absolutely stole the show, may actually have been on stage longer than any of the other performers.  

I need a nap just from watching his performance.  He must not have had anything left in the tank at the end of his shows.  I've never seen a man sweat so much.  It's an amazing contrast to the robotic, lip-synched performances that were the norm on American Bandstand and similar TV shows of that era. 

The one thing I remember from seeing the movie in 1965 is the way Brown would fall to his knees while singing, either from exhaustion or despair (or both), then be helped to his feet and led off the stage by a couple of his backup singers, who placed a cape on his shoulders as they did so.  But Brown would fling the cape off and stride back to the microphone stand to deliver one more impassioned chorus.  

Click here to watch a clip of Brown performing in The T.A.M.I. Show. 

Mick Jagger – who looks about 14 in the movie, but is actually 21 – does his best, but he couldn't hope to match Brown's showmanship.  (Keith Richards later said that agreeing to follow Brown in this show was the dumbest thing the Stones ever did.)

Click here to watch the Stones performing. 

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A couple of years after The T.A.M.I. Show was filmed, Jan crashed his Corvette into a parked truck in 1966, suffering serious brain damage and partial paralysis.  Ironically, the crash occurred not far from “Dean Man's Curve.”  

At the time of his  accident, Jan was attending medical school – he was said to have had a near-genius IQ. 

Jan never recovered completely from his injuries, although he did continue writing and producing music and eventually started performing in oldies shows with Dean.   He died in 2004.

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Some three years after I saw The T.A.M.I. Show at the Lux in 1965, I returned to that same theatre to watch Bonnie and Clyde with several friends.  

When that movie was over, my friends and I came bounding out of the theatre like seven-year-olds on a sugar high, all jacked up from the old ultra-violence (you remember Clockwork Orange, don't you?), especially the apocalyptic final scene.  

You might remember that Bonnie and Clyde paid a visit to Joplin, Missouri – my hometown – where they had to shoot their way out of a police ambush. 

Here’s a photo of the garage apartment in Joplin where they hid out prior to that shootout:

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One final note.

As noted above, Jan and Arnie Ginsburg had a hit in 1958 with a record titled “Jennie Lee” before Jan and Dean became a thing.

The “Jennie Lee” of that record is your basic innocent and lovable girl-next-door type, but there was a real Jennie Lee as well:

Jennie Lee

The real Jennie Lee – a/k/a/ “The Bazoom Girl” – was a famous burlesque dancer in the 1950’s.  (Arnie Ginsburg had seen her perform in a Los Angeles burlesque house.)  Jennie had actually started a strippers’ union – the “League of Exotic Dancers” – in 1955 in hopes of doing something about the low wages paid by burlesque joints in Los Angeles.  Jennie also collected photographs and burlesque memorabilia, and her collection was eventually turned into a burlesque museum.  She died in 1990, at age 61, a victim of breast cancer.  

Jennie Lee had been born Virginia Lee Hicks in Kansas City.  After graduating from high school, she got a job as a chorus-line dancer at the Folly Theatre there.  When another dancer at the theater said she could get Jennie a booking as a strip-tease dancer, Jennie thought it sounded like a good idea. 

The rest of the story can be found on the website of “The Golden Days of Burlesque Historical Society”:

So she bought a gown with red fringe on it from a gal for $10 and headed off to work a stag show in Joplin, Missouri. . . .

For this first booking Jennie was required to appear on stage twice.  The first number was to be played straight, but in the second number she was told to take it all off.  Needless to say her first performance as a strip-tease dancer was a smashing success.  But Jennie Lee was so embarrassed she couldn’t go back out on stage for a curtain call and hid in a closet backstage until the audience left.  Of course it’s quite apparent that the initial shyness wore off and Jennie Lee eventually became a star in the world of burlesque.

Anyone out there have a father or grandfather who told them about seeing Jennie Lee strip in Joplin before she made it big in the world of burlesque?  Anyone?  (Bueller?)

Jennie had one unusual talent – she could twirl the tassels that were attached to her pasties in opposite directions.  Click here to watch a truly astonishing video of her exhibiting that skill.

And to think that she got her start in my little ol' hometown!

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Click here to listen “Dead Man's Curve” in all its 45 rpm glory. 

Click here to buy “Dead Man's Curve” from Amazon.