Tag: roy head (Page 3 of 4)

SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS, SOMEWHEN IN THE SEVENTIES

“A man is born to drive, and a Texan is born to drive forever; an American is born to drive Cadillacs. Mustangs is for sissies and actors. A Ford is for the working man, but I tried working on several occasions, and it did not suit me; many co-workers were bitten. Buicks are driven by alcoholics.

“My accountants have always owned Lincolns.

“Growing up in Cascabel, there was a paucity of Cadillacs, but a surfeit of word-a-day calendars. All the cars in town was heaps and Frankensteined pick-ups; Leprous Hank got around with a team of armadillos harnessed up in manner sled-doggian, which worked poorly at best, plus the leprosy. These were mechanical beasts of burden, and a few armadillos, with neither glamour not gallantry! Their purpose was transport, but Roy Head wanted to travel. Yes, that Roy Head.

“You should’ve heard of me.

“I was too damn big for that little town, and its hardscrabblerousers! My kooky legs straddled the highway like the Colossus of the Roads! Daddy needed a caddy, to carve my thesis down to the ineluctable kernel of truth. Fancy-dancin’ would be the down payment, and my storied voice–which once caused the Lord Jesus Christ hisself to come to me in a dream and offer me money and sexual contact–would pay that car note.

“Finance packages were much more flexible then.

“That first record contract got signed at ten A.M.; by noon, Big Bucktoothed Pete, Skippy Joe, and myself were at the nearest Cadillac dealership kicking around paint schemes and the benefits of the Landau roof. Myself and Skippy Joe was for said roofing, but Pete always did like to drive through the monkey enclosure at the local zoo after church. ‘Monkeys need the Good Book more’n anyone,’ Pete would say, and he would run over the fewest monkeys he possibly could. That ride home from church was never the highlight of Pete’s week.

“Though not a Papist, Pete held communion wine as a sacrament.

“Now, as I have brought up the Whore of Rome and her heresies and contrafibularities, I must now make a confession: we didn’t get to no Cadillac dealership by noon. That high-toned car bazaar was three towns over from Cascabel, which in Texas means it was 800 miles. Skippy Joe had borrowed us a 1949 Oldsmobile Holiday 88 with the Hydra-matic four-speed and 5 liter rocket V8 and we intinerized our arrival at that particular American heaven known as the floor of a Cadillac dealership first thing in the morning.

“The plan was to take turns letting Skippy Joe drive.

“The trip was to begin presently, but our throats were coated with the dust of our beloved Texas: we were proud, but dry! Also, Big Bucktoothed Pete had been lettin’ out chimichanga farts all morning and the car smelled like an illegal Mexican hospital. We decided to stop at the establishment outside of town for a road soda, and also Skippy Joe needed to see a guy about a thing.

“The Worst Bar In Texas was a place to find what you needed, plus things you had been avoiding.

“No idle boast was the name! It was a tavern not of ill repute, but no repute at all: no one would talk about the place. The pool table was surly, and picked fights with the jukebox regularly. Your quarters bought you not an occasion upon the back of leather and steel bull, but a mechanical bear: it would throw you off, and then maul you. It was a miracle of a machine.

“The bathrooms were racist, even for the time.

“Fights were settled out back, the Texas Way: by havin’ your buddy hide ’round a corner and shoot the bastard as he was walkin’ out back. Fights were also settled in the hallway, but much more awkwardly: ain’t no room to deploy your rubbery crazy-legs like nunchucks. During slow times, the staff would punch and gouge one another’s eyes in the back office.

“It was the kinda place you didn’t wear a watch to.

“Skippy Joe disappeared into the darkness of The Worst Bar In Texas: that place had more than its share of darkness; in later years, the owner would title his oral history of the bar Darkness at Noon, and lawyers became interested. Never did take Skippy Joe long to find the drug dealer in the room: we conjectured he had some sorta internal Heads Up Display like in them Terminator movies. Big Bucktoothed Pete and myself made our way to the bar.

“We always could find the bar.

“In honor of my impending entrance into high society, automobilically speaking, we decided to honor the motor industry and its proud history in our beverage selection. We drank Auto Worker Unions, which are strong at first, but weaken significantly throughout the drinking. James Deans were served, in which a German liquor is lit on fire. Big Bucktoothed Pete’s contribution was the invention of the Nascar, which is when you get a regional hardware store to sponsor your next drink, and two parts moonshine.

“Some of the blame lies upon us for losing track of Skippy Joe.

“With the right knowhow and tools, anything is possible. With the right knowhow, tools, and enough speed to kill a bison, everything is possible. Out in the parking lot, Skippy Joe had took off his shirt. It was a hot one, with not a cloud from there to Amarillo Now, I don’t got to tell you about Skippy Joe: he liked feeling good and he liked that Texas sunshine beatin’ down on that shallow chest of his.

“Skippy Joe was a heliotropic hedonist, if you’ll pardon the parlance.

“The roof of that Oldsmobile Holiday 88 had, in Skippy Joe’s reckoning, shown him its ass, and Skippy Joe only did one thing to ass, and that was kick it. Me and Big Bucktoothed Pete would get up to all sorts of unwholesome dealings with behinds of all of all sorts, but Skippy Joe would have no truck with the buttocks.

“Skippy Joe stayed up front.

“Convertibilizing a hardtop ain’t as tough as you might think, especially it you’re doin’ it to a borrowed vehicle. Niceties can be ignored in favor of velocity, and nobody was better at ignorin’ things in favor of velocity than Skippy Joe. My beautiful friend went so damn fast!

“His speed was the constant and we were relative to it.

“All I know ’bout cars is I gotta have me the biggest, most expensive one: Roy Head ain’t no grease monkey! But I do know enough to know that I don’t know how Skippy Joe managed to cut the brake line while removing the roof. Plus set the gas tank on fire. Them three things is in entirely different sectors of the car.

“It’s your classic three-body problem is what I’m gettin’ at.

“No one in the bar had a chance! The rumormongers, the whoremongers: the monging was to be concluded that day by the runaway ball of death Skippy Joe had loosed that day! Knife fighters, sword swallowers, pickpockets, lockpickers, and all the county’s policemen! Were it not for Big Bucktoothed Pete’s timely theft of a 1951 Chrysler New Yorker, we would have rotted in prison for our natural lives, and I would not get the Cadillac the Lord had promised me! The New Yorker was a convertible!”

…

“I just asked if you wanted paper or plastic, sir.”

“THE ENTIRE SITUATION COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED!”

“Y’know what: you can bag your own groceries.”

“Texas is big, man: it’s like space, but hotter. Where I grew up, you had to drive 50 miles just before you were 50 miles away from anything. You had to learn to drive soon as you could reach the pedals, and even before that: one time my daddy put me in the pickup, and tied tin cans to my shoes, and sticks affixing my hands and the wheel; he gave me a list and said ‘You know where the liquor store is, boy.’

“I had turned four the previous week.

“By the time I was twelve, I was full-grown and had realized the power of my wild and wooly legs: I would let them do the drivin’, while I did the livin’. There wasn’t but two cops in Cascabel, and they didn’t mind much, ‘less you was black or Mexican or any other kind of outsider. They might shoot your ass, then, to be honest. And I am known for my honesty: I’m Roy Head. Yes, that Roy Head.

“You should have heard of me.

“Only thing I liked more than drivin’ fast was drivin’ fancy. Man, I dig a high-class ride, have from the start. I want some leather and fur and cocktail glasses and cruise control and heated ball-warmers. But, there wasn’t no luxury to be found in small-town Texas, just a lotta pickups. And Dodges. You ever driven a Dodge? It’s like gettin’ a blowjob from your cousin. Nicest car around was an abandoned ’38 Caddy that a family of raccoons lived in.

“It was a Jewish family, and they were run out of town.

“Soon as I started makin’ some cash shakin’ my funny, funky, frankly freaky wonder-legs at people all around Texas and also the rest of the world, I got myself a fine automobile, a ’65 Cadillac Calais painted Samoan Bronze; I named her Tahiti. Skippy Joe and Big Bucktoothed Pete–you know them–well, they came by with a block and tackle and got that li’l sissy engine out and me and Big Bucktoothed Pete got to drinkin’ and Skippy Joe, he just started starin’ that engine down.

“Skippy Joe’ll stare ya down.

“Now, it is this point in the story that I will come clean to many things: bawdiness, sluttery, behavior of a nature dipsomaniacal. Roy Head like t’raise a little Hell! And then I like to take that Hell and throw it at people who were just going about their day. That’s just how I do it and I am as the Lord made me, and when I meet Him, I will say, ‘Lord, why did you put such sin in me?’ and He will say, ‘But I also gave you legs that do wacky stuff.’

“I have played out the conversation in my head many times.

“Pete and I was drinkin’ Remember the Alamos, which is when you drink tequila and feel guilty about it. Louis Grabass came by, and he prepared chimichangas of every variety: the man could chimi up a good changa. He had also brought rum, so we switched to drinkin’ a variation on the Mai-Tai that we called the Jai-Alai. You would take a shot and slowly go out of business in Florida.

“Skippy Joe may have left some pills lyin about.

“By this time, the aforementioned Skippy Joe had done some o’ his voodoo to that engine. He was a wizard with cars: fixin’ ’em, stealin’ ’em, crashin’ ’em. He was awful good at sellin’ ’em, especially if they wasn’t his. Turns out that is a felony, but everyone ’round Cascabel would forgive Skippy Joe. And even if you didn’t wanna forgive him, it wasn’t like you could catch him to whip his ass. Sucker was fast.

“He was a sleepless angel.

“We screwed that engine down chassis and hooked it all up and hopped in and HOO-boy, did we shoot down the road like a bat out of Oklahoma. We had neglected to reattach the speedo, so this is a guess, but I would estimate we was going a million miles an hour. Round there. Time became relativistic and you clearly see the effects of gravitational lensing through the rearview. When we returned home, we found that while Big Bucktoothed Pete had aged an hour, his twin sister, Big Normaltoothed Leslie, was a year older.

“Unencumbered was our forward momentum, is my point.

“The speed was too great as we entered town, coincidentally at the exact same time as a busload or nuns and orphans and orphaned nuns! I jammed on the brakes, but even my mighty legs could not help! We had forgotten to hook up the brake system, but in our defense, it looked very complicated and we didn’t want to! The crash was tremendous! So much carnage!

“There were nun parts and unloved children all over Skippy Joe, man.”

…

“Do you want to rent the Yaris or not?”

“THAT CADILLAC NEVER DROVE RIGHT AGAIN!”

“Either take the Yaris or don’t, sir.”

If any of you have ever doubted TotD’s ability to understand people, I present you with this article about Roy Head that Spencer dug up. I don’t want to say I got everything right, but there’s this quote:

“They also had to ban him from Little League baseball because he was ragging on the kids.”

And this:

There was a show when he tricked an audience into expecting a guest appearance by Tina Turner (she was in the same town that night), only to step out in drag. He performed What’s Love Got to Do With It, the only one in the room unaware that his privates were dangling out of his fishnet stockings.

There is more. Go read about a great American and an even better Texan.

SOMEWHERE IN TEXAS, SOMEWHEN IN THE SEVENTIES

“Dunno if you know this, but I come from a place called Texas. Little town called Cascabel; small enough to know your neighbors, but big enough for the occasional race riot: just the right size. And down in Texas, the only thing bigger than football was Jesus, and you’ll notice He did not schedule church for Friday nights.

“That’s a fight even the Lord won’t pick.

“My daddy started me out young, and he started me out the Texas way: once he yelled ‘FUMBLE’ and tossed me in a river. I knew my X’s and O’s before I knew my ABC’s and I made my daddy proud in Pop Warner. Ooh, I was a mean cuss: I didn’t care that I was playin’ children. I’ll send em’ to the children’s hospital and tell ’em Roy Head sent ya. Yes, that Roy Head.

“You should have heard of me.

“When I got to high school, the coaches had been watching me and my magical legs for years. I could carry the ball down the field in ten or twelve steps, all the while juking and shimmying and faking teenagers out of their shorts, which was excellent practice for my show business career. I also did the kicking: I would pick the football up with my weirdo monkey feet and toss that sucker through them crossbars from fifty yards away. I was also the punter, but only on paper, as a true Texan would rather die than feel the sharp sting of shame that is punting.

“Real Texans go for it on fourth down.

“Football was our only bright spot in the dark desert of life. Our high school was underfunded, I guess you might say: our principal was also the football coach and the chemistry teacher and the janitor and he lived at the school, which was made up of salvaged plankery and duct tape. Our Spanish teacher was picked up each morning from in the front of the Home Depot, a different guy every day. History class was taught by a cocker spaniel named Spots.

“Spots was a real smart dog, but the material was beyond him.

“My senior year, we were undefeated and going to the state championship: we were playing the Dillon Panthers, who were the prettiest and most dramatic team in Texas. Always somethin’ going on with them people. Anyway, we was excited as anything, and me most of all cuz I got to do it with my friends. Big Bucktooted Pete was my center, and the only man whose gooch Roy Head has ever touched. Skippy Joe was the fullback and what I could not accomplish with my wonder-legs, Skippy Joe could with speed.

“Also, he was fast.

“Lord, Skippy Joe was a velocitous beast! A sinewy ferret snaking through the holes left by Big Bucktoothed Pete, he would churn them skinny thighs and plus he was covered with so much sweat that you couldn’t get grip of him. Skippy Joe also smelled real bad when he got high–like cat-piss from a foreign cat?–and that added to his untacklability. He would run right through ’em, I tell ya. Now, sometimes Skippy Joe would keep running right out the stadium and we wouldn’t find him ’til three days later. Once, he made it to Oklahoma.

“Skippy Joe didn’t die: he just achieved terminal velocity.

“The big game was that night and we was all so nervous. It is here that I will freely admit to being a man with no defenses against Lady Temptation, and her siren song. She sings to me in times of trouble, or when I’m bored, or before a show, or after a show, or the holidays. And do I harmonize with her? I do. Oh, Lord, save a sinner from hisself, I do.

“Me, Pete and Skippy Joe was three-part harmonizin’ that day.

“We started in on Beerios, which are Cheerios with beer ‘stead of milk: it was breakfast and you know I have strict rules about breakfast. Then we began the day, and we caroused with a football theme. First, we drank Vince Lombardis, which are equal parts whiskey, rye, and yelling. Then, we had Y.A. Tittles, which are just shots of tequila, but it’s such a fun name to say. Finally we had some Bill Romanowskis, which is when you break into a pharmacy and start randomly mixin’ things.

“We were no longer nervous, so that was a plus.

“It was gettin’ late and the school was dead across town, so we was gonna have to run it, but none of us was in the proper shape at the time. Big Bucktoothed Pete was naked and had begun to preach at people; when Pete was lit up, he always did get saved. And usually, people didn’t mind so much–being that people in Texas always got a minute for the Lord–but he was, as I said, naked. Parked on the corner was a convertible Lincoln Continental.

“If the car’s owner didn’t want it stolen, then why did he park it in my story?

“The keys were in the ignition and the pedal was to the metal, baby! We were flying, and the car was going real fast, too. Big Bucktoothed Pete was still naked and standing up in the backseat, spraying vomit and spreading the gospel at the top of his lungs. Skippy Joe was running alongside the car. I was drivin’ with my funky-legs and getting frisky with a couple cheerleaders.

“Shoulda mentioned: we met some girls, cheerleaders.

“We was a sight to behold and it should not have surprised me when the law spotted us and began to give chase. I was almost at the school, so I thought I could lose him with some fancy-type drivin’. I wasn’t thinking right: I don’t know no fancy-type drivin’! The powerful automobile spun out of my control! We drove through the school and took out dozens of children, their bodies flying this way and that. Our history teacher, Spots, was killed.

“We forfeited the game and never learned who won the Spanish-American War.”

…

“Do you want an Orange Julius or not?”

“SPOTS GRADES PAPERS IN DOGGIE HEAVEN!”

“I’m gonna get my manager.”

First of all: Roy was either not a details man, or someone at his record company hated his guts; probably both, because these are the worst things I’ve ever seen.

That first one would be a shitty design even if it weren’t resting on a shade that can only be called blurple; the second one is out of focus, for fuck’s sake; and then there’s that third one.

That might be the worst album cover I’ve ever seen, and the title is included. Dismal Prisoner is not just depressing, it’s tough to say.

Try it.

Right?

Plus, the damn thing is piss-yellow. And in case you didn’t get the subtle urea flavor to the shot, there is an actual toilet on the album cover. I’m almost shocked there’s not an impressively coiled turd in the bowl, that’s how off-putting this record looks.

How was this allowed to happen? Was this album made under the auspices of a scam like in The Producers, where they were trying to fail? Or, was this Roy’s idea and no one could stop him?

This last conjecture might be the case: Snowman from the Comment Section asked about Roy Head’s relationship with Elvis. Now, we all know that the depths of Hell write themselves love letters within the comments on YouTube; it is the single dumbest place on the planet, but the Rock Nerd obscurantists listening to old 45’s from half-forgotten Texans tend to be a bit more thoughtful, and I found this comment you should see.

Roy and Carolyn were FRIENDS with Elvis…look it up, Roy got drunk one night (imagine that!). You know him, you know he loves tequila ….haha as Elvis was going onstage, ROY DECIDED TO JUST BITE HIM ON THE LEG!!!!!!!

Obviously, we must take Innertube randos with a grain of salt, but let’s have a thought experiment: if I asked you, “What kind of man bites Elvis?” what would you picture?

Right? Roy Head bit Elvis. This is now the truth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1rGp5D-9Ss&spfreload=1

OHMIGOD, ROY HEAD CAN DO EVERYTHING.

This is from 1970 and Roy is backed by a band full of utter motherfuckers and it is perfect in many ways.

Also, a blog post about Roy Head covering a song written by Doug Sahm wins the Rock Nerd Bingo game, if you were playing at home.

Sure, I get obsessed by things and , but this is another genuinely good song from Roy Head.

And, fuck: here’s another one. (It is about lowdown women breaking Roy’s heart and I am starting to see a theme.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lApAq53nVP0

Okay, I was originally just going to post this song and mention the neat stutter-step that the rhythm section does in the chorus, but then Roy got the second verse and starts talking about what’s going on in his marriage and Roy gets real deep real quick and this is the greatest song of all time.

I am not joking: this is the greatest song ever.