Marvin Gaye – "Hitch Hike" (1962)

Got no money in my pocket

So I'm going to have to hitch hike all the way

[Note: This is the third in a series of four 2 or 3 lines posts about famous and infamous natives of Joplin, Missouri – my hometown.]

You have to feel sorry for people who suffered through awful childhoods.

Billy Cook’s childhood was about as bad as it gets, but it’s hard to feel sorry for him.  

Billy Cook's left hand

That’s because Cook shot and killed a farmer who stopped to give Cook a ride when he was hitchhiking one day in 1950.  

He also killed the farmer’s wife, their three children (who were 7, 5, and 3 years old), and the family dog, and threw their bodies down an abandoned mine shaft.

I don’t care how miserable a childhood Billy Cook had – nothing excuses what he did to that innocent family.

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William Edward “Billy” Cook Jr. was born in Joplin in 1928.    

Billy’s mother died  when he was five.  His unemployed father moved into an abandoned mine with him and his seven brothers and sisters.  One night, after getting a snootful in a local tavern, he hopped a freight and left his children to fend for themselves.  (That may not be the most heartless thing a father has ever done to his children, but it’s right up there.)

Local authorities discovered the children and found homes for all of them except Billy, who was later described by Time magazine as a “small, ugly child with a deformed right eyelid.”  He became a ward of the state.

Billy Cook's mug shot

Young Billy was a truant and a petty thief, and was sent to a reformatory when he was 12.  When he was 17, he was transferred to the Missouri State Penitentiary, where he assaulted a fellow inmate who made fun of his droopy eyelid with a baseball bat.  (Do prisons still allow inmates to play baseball?  Hopefully not.)

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Billy was released from prison in 1950, when he was 21.  He returned to Joplin and tracked down his father, telling him that he planned to “live by the gun and roam.”

Cook then headed west, and ended up working as a dishwasher in Blythe, California, a desert town where the high temperature once reached 124 degrees.

After a short time in Blythe, Billy drifted back east.  He bought a .32-caliber revolver in El Paso and used it to steal the car of a man who had picked Cook up when he was hitchhiking near Lubbock.

The stolen car ran out of gas near Tulsa, so Cook reverted to hitchhiking.  He was picked up by a farmer from Illinois, who was driving to New Mexico with his wife, three children, and the family dog.  

Cook pulled his gun and forced the farmer to drive from Oklahoma to Wichita Falls, Texas, then to Carlsbad, New Mexico, then to El Paso, then to Houston, then to Winthrop, Arkansas, and then back toward Joplin.  

A biography of Billy Cook

He finally shot and killed the entire family – including the dog – and dumped their bodies in a mine shaft.  (The odds are it wasn’t the same mine where his father abandoned Billy and his siblings – the Joplin area is home to many abandoned lead and zinc mines.) 

Cook headed back west, abandoning the farmer’s car – which was bloody and full of bullet holes – along the way.  When authorities found the car, the receipt for Cook’s .32 revolver was inside.

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Back in Blythe, Cook took a deputy sheriff hostage.  He told the deputy about killing the farmer and his family, then forced him to get out of the car and to lie down in a ditch.  But instead of shooting him, Cook drove away in the deputy’s car.  

He then kidnapped a motorist from Seattle, shot him in the head, and left his body in the deputy’s car near Ogilby, a now-abandoned town near Yuma, Arizona.  He drove the Seattle man’s car to Mexicali, Mexico and abandoned it there.

Cook managed to avoid all the law enforcement officers who were looking for him and made it back to Blythe, where he kidnapped two men who were on a hunting trip.  He drove with them to the Baja California town of Santa Rosalita.

Billy Cook with Mexican police

Santa Rosalita police chief Francisco Morales recognized Cook on the streets of the town, snatched the .32 revolver Cook had stuck in his belt, and arrested him.

“I hate everybody’s guts,” Cook supposedly said after the was arrested, “and everybody hates mine.”

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After he was captured, Cook was returned to Oklahoma, where he was found guilty of murdering the farmer and his family and sentenced to 300 years in prison.

After that he was tried in California for the murder of the Seattle man, convicted, and sentenced to death.

Cook was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin on December 12, 1952.  

Peace Church Cemetery today

His body was returned to Joplin and buried in an unmarked grave in the Peace Church Cemetery, which is located just north of the intersection of North Schifferdecker Avenue and West Zora Street.

Some people believe that Cook’s restless spirit still haunts the overgrown cemetery.

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The 1953 movie, The Hitch-Hiker, was inspired by Cook’s crime spree.  The film’s hitch-hiking murderer – who is portrayed by William Talman – even has an eyelid that doesn’t close all the way, just like Cook.  (Those of you who are my age or older will recognize Talman as District Attorney Hamilton Burger from the Perry Mason TV series, which aired from 1957 to 1966.)  

The Hitch-Hiker was one of eight movies directed by Ida Lupino, an actress who starred in dozens of Hollywood films before turning her hand to directing.  She also directed more than 100 network television series episodes.

Ida Lupino

Paste magazine included The Hitch-Hiker on its list of the 100 best film noirs of all time:

As a woman-helmed production, The Hitch-Hiker was a rarity in its heyday, though if you didn’t know [Ida] Lupino held the reins, you might not guess the film was directed with a feminine touch.  The Hitch-Hiker was as much an anomaly in Hollywood as it was a change of pace for Lupino, who, after directing four features that each revolved around the struggles and victimization of women, decided to try her hand with decidedly more masculine fare.  Decades later, her film is still generally considered the first noir directed by a woman, but it should really be thought of first as a slim, unsparing, suspenseful slice of true crime.  She puts her foot on the gas and doesn’t let up until the very end.

Click here if you’d like to watch The Hitch-Hiker.

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“Hitch Hike,” which was released in 1962, was Marvin Gaye’s first top-forty single.  

Click here to watch Marvin Gaye perform “Hitch Hike” in the 1964 concert movie, the T.A.M.I. Show, which I saw at the old Lux Theatre in Joplin when I was 12 years old.  (One of the go-go dancers is the criminally underappreciated actress, Teri Garr.)

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Gary Puckett & The Union Gap – "Young Girl" (1968)

Better run, girl 

You’re much too young, girl

[Note: This is the second in a series of four 2 or 3 lines posts about noteworthy natives of Joplin, Missouri – my hometown.]

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Televangelist Jim Bakker was called “the greatest scab and cancer on the face of Christianity in 2,000 years of church history” by The Rev. Jerry Falwell, who took over Bakker’s PTL (“Praise the Lord”) empire when Bakker was accused of financial fraud and sexual irregularities.

Tony Alamo in 1993

But Pentecostal preacher Tony Alamo’s scandalous behavior – which included embezzlement, failure to pay income taxes, and the sexual abuse of young girls – made Bakker look like an amateur.

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Tony Alamo was born Bernie Lazar Hoffman in Joplin, Missouri in 1934.  His father was a Jewish immigrant from Romania who was once Rudolf Valentino’s dance instructor.  At least that’s what Alamo later claimed.  

Alamo moved from Joplin to Los Angeles when he was a teenager in hopes of becoming a recording star.  He changed his name to Tony Alamo because Italian-American singers were quite popular in the sixties.  

After going to jail on a weapons charge, Tony married Edith Opal Horn – who then changed her name to Susan – in 1966.

Tony and Susan Alamo

Susan – who was also Jewish – was a divorcée who had moved from Alma, Arkansas to Hollywood in hopes of becoming a movie star, but she ended up supporting herself by scamming churches.

According to Tony, he and Susan converted to Christianity after Jesus came to him during a meeting at a Beverly Hills investment firm and told him to preach the second coming of Christ.  

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The Alamos started out as Hollywood street preachers, then established the Music Square Church.  Their followers lived communally and turned over the paychecks they received from outside jobs to the Alamos, who used the money to build a church and buy a number of businesses – including a grocery store, restaurant, and Western-wear store – in Dyer, Arkansas.

Alamo ran into trouble with the U.S. Department of Labor in 1976 because he didn’t pay his followers for their work in those businesses.  Later he ran into trouble with the IRS, which revoked Alamo Ministries’ tax-exempt status and prosecuted him for failure to pay taxes.  Alamo eventually spent four years in a federal prison for tax evasion.

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Susan Alamo died of cancer in 1982.  Tony insisted that she would be resurrected, so he kept her embalmed body on display at his church’s headquarters for six months after her death.  When the feds raided those headquarters, Alamo and his followers skedaddled with the body.  Years later, Susan’s daughter from a previous marriage went to court and was granted custody of her mother’s body.

Tony Alamo with Mr. T

It seems that Tony never got over the death of Susan.  In 1984, he married Brigitta Gyllenhammar who later claimed that he insisted she have plastic surgery so she would resemble Susan.

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Some believe that Tony was married four times prior to marrying Susan, so Brigitta may have his sixth wife instead of his second.

I’m not counting the two 15-year-old girls he reportedly married after Susan’s death because those marriages were presumably not legal.  (Although we are talking Arkansas here – so anything is possible.)

Later Alamo had “wives” who were even younger.  He preached that girls should marry once they start menstruating. “God impregnated Mary when she was about 11 years old.  So the government idiots, the people that don't know the Bible, what you're going to have to do is get a hold of God now, you're going to have to get up there and cuff him and send him to prison for statutory rape,” he said.

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In 2009, Tony was convicted of TEN COUNTS of taking underage girls across state lines in order to have sex with them.  He was sentenced to 175 years in prison.

Tony Alamo leaving his sentencing hearing

A few years later, an Arkansas judge awarded seven former Tony Alamo Christian Ministries $525 million – the largest personal-injury judgment in Arkansas history.  (I assume that little, if any of that judgment was ever collected.)

Alamo was 82 when he died in a federal prison in 2017.

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I don’t think that a record company would touch our featured song with a ten-foot pole if someone brought in a demo of that song today.

But it appears that no one was bothered by the creepiness of “Young Girl” in 1968, when it was a #2 hit single for Gary Puckett & The Union Gap in 1968.

Click here to listen to “Young Girl.”

And click on the link below if you’d like to buy the song from Amazon:

Miss Toni Fisher – "The Big Hurt" (1959)

Now it begins, now that you've gone

Needles and pins, twilight till dawn

Watching that clock till you return

2 or 3 lines is ending the year on a serendipitous note.

While I was researching the song featured in the previous 2 or 3 lines – “Friends,” by Feather – I saw a photo of the 45 of that song, which credited J. R. Shanklin as the producer.

I Googled Shanklin and discovered that his father – Wayne Shanklin, Sr. – was born in 1916 in Joplin, Missouri, which is where I was born.

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Fewer than 40 people from Joplin have Wikipedia pages.  (I’m not one of them.  There’s still hope, I suppose, but I need to get busy.)

Several of them – NASCAR driver Jamie McMurray, golfer Hale Irwin, NFL lineman Grant Wistrom, soccer midfielder Jack Jewsbury, and baseball players Darrell Porter and Tito Landrum – were professional athletes.  (Wistrom grew up in Webb City, MO, and Irwin’s family lived in nearby Baxter Springs, KS, but both were born in Joplin hospitals.)

A couple of major television stars – Bob Cummings (who had his own network sitcom, The Bob Cummings Show, in the late 1950s) and Dennis Weaver (who starred in Gunsmoke and McCloud) – also hailed from Joplin.

Other notable Joplin natives include poet and Harlem Renaissance figure Langston Hughes, romance novelist Norma Lee Clark (who was Woody Allen’s personal assistant for over 30 years), model railroader extraordinaire John Whitby Allen, and silent-film actress Pauline Starke – not to mention Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead of Blondie comic strip fame.

The next three 2 or 3 lines posts will feature three other notable people that I never knew were Joplin natives.  

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It turns out that “Friends” producer J. R. Shanklin was actually Wayne Shanklin, Jr. – the records he produced usually credited him as “Jr.” or “J. R.”

Wayne Jr. was one of five children born to Wayne Sr. and his first wife, who divorced after eight years of marriage.

Wayne Sr. quickly remarried and had four more children by his second wife.

Later he married his longtime secretary.  They had one child.

Wayne Sr. released an album and several singles in the 1950s, none of which sold very well.  (His first single was titled “Up to My Pockets in Tomahawks.”  Hard to believe that it wasn’t a hit.)

He had better luck as a songwriter.  His most famous song was “The Big Hurt,” which was a #3 hit for Miss Toni Fisher in 1959.  

Some sources claim that Shanklin and Toni Fisher were married at some point, but there seems to be no official record of that marriage.  (Her daughter did marry one of Shanklin’s sons.)

“The Big Hurt” is considered by most to be the first record to use a phasing sound effect called “flanging.”  You can click here to learn more about flanging, or you can just click here to listen to the song.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Feather – "Friends" (1970)

When we are friends

Digging each other

I have what most people would consider to be an unhealthy personal attachment to all the vinyl LPs I collected between the early 1960s (when my parents purchased a Magnavox console stereo) and 1990 (when I bought my first CD player).

A lot of those records are full of great music, but I could replace most (if not all) of them with digital recordings suitable for listening to on my computer on iPod.

I haven’t kept those records for 30 years, 40 years, even 50-plus years to listen to them.  (I do still have a stereo system complete with turntable, amplifier, and speakers, but I haven’t played an album on it in years.)

I kept them because of the memories that are triggered when I look at the covers of those albums – memories of where I was and who I was with and who I was when I played them.

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Like most people my age, I’ve accumulated a lot of flotsam and jetsam over the years.

My plan was to dive into cleaning out all that crap once I left my job, but I didn’t make much decluttering headway in my first year of retirement.  So one of my 2019 resolutions is to devote at least one hour a day to sorting through my possessions and either selling, giving away, or throwing away everything I don’t truly need.  

The Swedish call that “death cleaning” because the point is to spare your children or other family members or friends the unpleasant task of doing that after you’re dead.

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I did a mini-death cleaning a couple of years ago when my law firm moved to a new building.

I’m guessing I threw away at least 75% of what was in my old office.  As a result, my new office was tidy and uncluttered.  What little I brought with me was stored away in drawers or shelved.  

The only things on my desk were a spiral-bound calendar/organizer, a cup of pencils and pens, and a stapler.

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Cleaning out my old office wasn’t at all difficult because I didn’t care much about all the paper I had accumulated.  “When in doubt, throw it out” was my mantra.

My home is a whole different animal.  I have thousands of family photos and videotapes, boxes full of baseball cards, old stamps and coins I collected when I was a kid, hundreds of books, and hundreds of record albums.

After pawing through everything, I decided to start the decluttering process by getting rid of my LPs.  I knew it would be hard for me to get rid of some of those albums despite the fact that I will probably never listen to them again.  But I have no sentimental attachment to the majority of my records.

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So I created a spreadsheet and started entering the names of all my record albums.  The plan is to e-mail that list to a few used record dealers and see what kind of bids I receive.

So far, my list has over 300 albums on it.  Most of them are classic rock albums I bought when I was in high school or college.  I’m talking household names like the Rolling Stones, Beatles, and Led Zeppelin, but also less well-known favorites like Blue Öyster Cult.

I also have a fair number of rock albums from the 1970s and 1980s – including releases by Roxy Music, the Tubes, Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, the Ramones, and X.

I’ve got a few country-western albums as well, some Motown greatest-hits collections, and some miscellaneous compilation albums.

I have no idea how much money all these are worth, but I’ll find out pretty soon and let you know.

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I was pretty picky when it came to buying full-priced albums.  But my standards were a lot lower when it came to the records in the cut-out bins.  

I would often buy a low-priced cut-out that only had one good song on it.  (For you younger folks out there, a “cut-out” is a heavily discounted LP – usually one that didn’t sell well.  The name comes from the fact that the record companies punched a hole in the corner of the album cover to distinguish cut-outs from regular-price records.)

Back in the 1960s and 1970s, regular albums might retail for $4.99 or $5.99.  Cut-outs went for half as much or even less – I still have some decent cut-out albums that cost me only 33 cents at a discount store in my hometown.

(All the albums whose covers are featured in this post are from my collection of obscure cut-outs.)

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One of my deeply discounted albums is Friends, by the group Feather.  I bought it for the first track on side one – “Friends” – which was a minor radio hit in 1970.  (I don’t think I ever listened to the entire album, and I’m guessing it’s been more than 40 years since I heard “Friends.”  If I hadn’t found the album in a box in my basement while preparing to do my death cleaning, I may have forgotten it altogether.)

There’s not much about the record or the group on the internet.  But it seems that “Friends” made its first appearance on the Billboard “Hot 100” on May 30, 1970 – which just happened to be my 18th birthday.  It peaked at #79 a few weeks later, and then disappeared.

I can’t imagine I heard it on the radio more than a few times, but it had enough significance for me that I bought the album when I stumbled across it in a cut-out bin.  

I have a feeling that a girl had something to do with my feelings about the song – maybe I was sitting in the local Dairy Queen parking lot with her one early-summer evening when the song came on the radio and we had a moment.  (A very short moment, and a moment that didn’t really go anywhere . . . but a moment nonetheless.)

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“Friends” is a very good record.

Some reviewers thought it sounded like a Crosby Stills & Nash track.  It does feature close, upper-register CS&N-like harmonies, but it’s much tighter and more energetic than most of that group’s recordings.

There were a lot of smartly-arranged, well-produced pop records in the 1960s and 1970s, and “Friends” was one of them.  It was produced by J. R. Shanklin, whose real name was Wayne Shanklin.  (You can click here to read more about him.)

“Friends” is less than three minutes long, and every second counts.  Drummer Dan Greer’s performance is especially noteworthy – he knows all the tricks, and keeps the song moving forward.  

I had never previously noticed that there are four measures in 3/4 time at about 0:33 and 1:15 of the song, and it’s Greer’s drumming that makes the transition from 4/4 to 3/4 and back to 4/4 so seamless.

Click here to listen to “Friends.”

Irina Menzel and Michael Bublé – "Baby, It's Cold Outside" (2014)

I simply must go

(But baby, it's cold outside)

The answer is no 

(But baby, it's cold outside)

Taking your kiddos to visit the local shopping mall to get an overpriced photo with Santa Claus is one of the great American Christmas traditions.

After standing in line for an hour or so, you and your toddler finally get to the front of the line.  You plop cutie-pie on Santa’s lap and step back so a photographer can snap a picture.

But just as he is about to take the photo, your little darling – who is terrified by the hairy and oddly-dressed stranger who is pawing him or her – bursts into tears,  

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The Washington Post recently reported that some nervous Nellies believe that forcing small children to sit on Santa’s lap is not the best way to teach them about consent and unwanted physical contact.  More and more parents are opting to spare their offspring the trauma of being forced to sit on Santa’s lap.  

This could lead to a decline in enrollment at schools like the Charles W. Howard Santa Claus School, which CBS News once called “the Harvard of Santa schools.”

The Howard School, which was founded in 1937, offers three-day classes for wannabe Santa Clauses each October.  The tuition is $525 – or $995 if you want to bring along a Mrs. Claus.

Students learn about the history of Santa Claus, how to apply a wig and beard properly, what the newest toys and gadgets are, and the habits of reindeer (among other things).  They are also given accounting and business tips, and advice on how to market themselves.

Four meals are included at no extra cost – including a dinner at a world-famous chicken restaurant and a graduation banquet.

Click here if you want to sign up for next year’s classes.

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Today’s featured song was written by famed songwriter Frank Loesser, who wrote several Broadway musicals and a number of popular songs, including “Heart and Soul,” “Two Sleepy People,” and “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have,” which was famously performed by Marlene Dietrich in the 1939 movie, Destry Rides Again).

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” won the best original song Oscar in 1949, and it’s been a staple on radio stations that play Christmas music for years.

At least it was until a Cleveland station banned it a few weeks ago because “in a world where #MeToo has finally given women the voice they deserve, the song has no place.”

Stations in San Francisco and Denver followed the Cleveland broadcaster’s example – at least until their listeners made their displeasure known.

The Denver station reversed its decision after receiving 15,000 responses to an online poll, the vast majority of which demanded that the song be restored to the station’s playlist.

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“Rape Anthem Masquerading As Christmas Carol” is how one “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” hater characterized it in a tweet several years ago.

But here’s an excerpt from a 2016 Tumblr post by a feminist defender of the song who believes that the tweeter has it all wrong:

Given a cursory glance and applying today’s worldview to the song, yes, you’re right, it absolutely sounds like a rape anthem. 

BUT! Let’s look closer! 

“Hey what’s in this drink” was a stock joke at the time, and the punchline was invariably that there’s actually pretty much nothing in the drink, not even a significant amount of alcohol.

See, this woman is staying late, unchaperoned, at a dude’s house. . . . [S]he’s having a really good time, and she wants to stay, and so she is excusing her uncharacteristically bold behavior (either to the guy or to herself) by blaming it on the drink — unaware that the drink is actually really weak, maybe not even alcoholic at all.  That’s the joke. . . . It is not a joke about how she’s drunk and about to be raped.  It’s a joke about how she’s perfectly sober and about to have awesome consensual sex and use the drink for plausible deniability because she’s living in a society where women aren’t supposed to have sexual agency.

Basically, the song only makes sense in the context of a society in which women are expected to reject men’s advances whether they actually want to or not, and therefore it’s normal and expected for a lady’s gentleman companion to pressure her despite her protests, because . . . if she really wants to stay she won’t be able to justify doing so unless he offers her an excuse other than “I’m staying because I want to.”  (That’s the main theme of the man’s lines in the song, suggesting excuses she can use when people ask later why she spent the night at his house: it was so cold out, there were no cabs available, he simply insisted because he was concerned about my safety in such awful weather, it was perfectly innocent and definitely not about sex at all!) 

So it’s not actually a song about rape – in fact it’s a song about a woman finding a way to exercise sexual agency in a patriarchal society designed to stop her from doing so.

If you say so, sweetie.

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Click here to listen to Irina Menzel and Michael Bublé’s 2014 recording of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Rolling Stones – "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (1969)

We’re gonna vent our frustration

If we don’t, we’re gonna blow a 50-amp fuse

Are first-class oboe players scarcer then first-class flutists?  (If you say “flautist” instead of “flutist,” you’re either a Brit or a showoff.)

The Boston Symphony Orchestra’s management says it pays its best oboist $70,000 more annually than its principal flutist because the oboe is more difficult to play, and that topnotch oboists are scarcer than hen’s teeth.  

Flutist Elizabeth Rowe

But Elizabeth Rowe, the BSO’s top flutist, thinks she’s paid less than principal oboist John Ferrillo because she’s a woman and he’s a man.  So she’s filed a sex discrimination lawsuit against the orchestra.

Most symphony orchestras are unionized, and they pay their musicians the base salary specified in the collective bargaining agreement.  But the best musicians can negotiate an “overscale” wage – the base salary plus a certain percentage – in the same way that star professional athletes can negotiate a higher salary than lesser-paid than lesser players.

I don’t know much about whether the oboe is tougher to master than the flute, or vice versa.  (I’m a pianist, and we all know that those who play the “king of instruments” deserve to be paid more than those who play lesser instruments.)  But I’m not sure why the BSO chose that as its defense to Rowe’s allegations.  

Rowe’s lawsuit alleges that there are five BSO principals who are paid more than she is – all of whom just so happen to be men.  That does sound suspicious.

Oboist John Ferrillo

But what her lawsuit doesn’t tell you is that there are nine other principals who are paid less than Rowe is – and that eight of those nine musicians are men.  That fact would seem to throw cold water on Rowe’s discrimination complaint.  

By the way, Rowe is paid over $250,000 a year.  That ain’t hay.

But if she thinks she’s being underpaid, she’s free to find an orchestra willing to pay her more – just like a free-agent athlete is free to move to a team that offers to pay him more than his current team will fork over.

But Ms. Rowe doesn’t want to leave Boston and take her talents to another orchestra.  She wants to have her cake and eat it, too.  

I don’t blame her.  But you can’t always get what you want – right?

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“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” doesn’t feature the flute or the oboe, but it does have a French horn solo by the multitalented Al Kooper.  (I wonder how much the BSO’s prinicipal horn player makes?)

For some reason, Stones drummer Charlie Watts – one of the truly great rock drummers – couldn’t handle the drum part on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” so Stones producer Jimmy Miller did the drumming on that track instead.

“You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was the first song recorded for Let It Bleed, the Stones’ best album and arguably the greatest classic rock album of all time.  (I personally would give the nod to the first Led Zeppelin album.)

Click here to listen to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: