"INTRODUCTION"

To be published in "Little Stars" ©

         I have been on at least speaking terms with the illusion.

         Almost forty years ago, I spoke to it in a youthful voice filled with expectation and awe, spoke to it from out in the high weeds of Coshocton, Ohio. And it spoke back, as it always does, with a gutteral chuckle, a glint of the eye, and a beckoning with the one hand that isn't already halfway around your wallet or your heart: "Yeah, c'mon boy, I'm gonna make you a star."

         Sure it was. And, like every teen-ager back then, I believed, or wanted to believe. Even though I could only speak to the illusion, couldn't sing to it, couldn't play guitar to it, couldn't even dance with it. The only instrument I could play was the squawky, high-school-band clarinet, an implement that, to my knowledge, has yet to hit its first rock 'n' roll lick, unless you try to count Acker Bilk's big-band throwback, "Stranger on the Shore."

         But that was the catch in the illusion, the sleight-of-hand that hid the trick from you. It infected you with the notion that lack of talent and training didn't matter, injected it directly into your blood stream without even a momentary sense of the needle's prick. There was ample evidence around, too; if Fabian and Freddie Cannon could make it to the top, then musical ability was no prerequisite.

         And no one was immune from it in the late '50s, not even the most tone-deaf, flat-voiced pizza face loitering around the jukebox at the local hangout. Flat feet could still plat-plat to the rhythm, and monotone became so fashionable they named a group after it.

         It was the greatest thing that ever happened to the masses of pink-faced adolescents from WASP families north of the Mason-Dixon Line. For the first time, they were let in on the music.

         If you were young and black in the early '50s, you could dream of singing the blues and ease right into what was becoming known as rhythm & blues. If you were white and Southern, you could envision yourself in front of the mike on the Grand Ol' Opry or the Saturday Night Barn Dance, singing country and/or Western or its newborn offspring, rockabilly.

         But, before 1955, if you were white and pimpled and unacquainted with grits and Kitty Wells, you were stuck with your parents' music. And there was no place in it for teen-agers. Singers with adult voices singing adult songs, and big bands of accomplished, professional musicians playing lush and lazy melodies that had all the youthful energy and excitement of a geriatrics ward. Eddie Fisher, Jo Stafford, Les Baxter, Frank Sinatra, and the McGuire Sisters owned all the spots on "Your Hit Parade" and all the white-bread musical dreams.

         But the biggest cultural revolution since women started smoking public soon freed up the turnstiles. First the black R&B groups and Elvis, Ray Charles, and Johnny Cash, blacks and Southerners, began doing music teen-agers could get something out of -- and their parents couldn't.

         And it wouldn't be long before a bunch of scrubby-voiced white kids from places like Philadelphia or Cincinnati or Seattle broadened the range of the illusion and its irresistable come-on. Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, the Fleetwoods, Ricky Nelson, Jack Scott, and Dodie Stevens put records at the top of the charts, without the benefit of enormous musical talents. Their voices may have been thin, but they were photogenic and clearly had a feel for the music and the people who were listening to it without their parents' permission.

         Teen-age mid-America finally had its own music and its own, new ambition. And it was an easy ambition to fill, or so it seemed. You didn't have to go to Julliard to be a teen idol; you only had to go to the mirror and comb your hair back. And you didn't even need a big-shot producer and a session in an expensive recording studio. Heck, Jan and Arnie recorded "Jennie Lee" in Jan's garage, so how hard could it be?

         It seemed so easy that Carl Day and I, with barely a drop of musical ability between us, could even have a nibble of it. Thanks mainly to two fellow disc jockeys, Bill Buchanan and Dickie Goodman, who had proved three years earlier that, even if you couldn't hit a lick on a guitar or carry a tune in a spitoon, you could carve out a little piece of rock 'n' roll immortality with a tape splicer. Buchanan and Goodman made the charts with a series of "Flying Saucer" records that featured short excerpts from hit songs sliced and diced into what was purported to be news coverage of the landing of alien creatures in the United States. For instance:

         Newsman John Cameron Cameron: "Tell us, have you come to conquer the world?

         Alien: "Don't want the world to have and hold . . . " (from "Band of Gold" by Don Cherry).

         Well, you get the idea. And so did Carl and I. One fall evening in 1959, armed with a tape splicer, a stack of the current hit records, and visions of fast-forwarding fame, we marched into the main studio of WTNS in Coshocton to concoct a hit record of unheard-of proportions. The result was a "Flying Saucer"-style rendition of the congressional hearings on TV quiz shows (they were fixed, it seems) called "Washington Calling" that we were sure would free us from our underpaid and unappreciated roles as small-town radio announcers overnight.

         The fact that you've never heard of Carl & Jerry until now tells you it didn't happen, of course. But we did have the record pressed -- at our own expense, of course -- and played it on WTNS until the listeners and the management were sick of it. Carl and I gave away copies at the record hops we did on weekends (second prize, presumably, was two copies). I don't remember if we actually ever sold a single copy.

         Billboard magazine even reviewed it, and had the nerve to suggest that the quick demise of public interest in the quiz-show hearings probably doomed "Washington Calling" to failure. Billboard obviously wasn't tuned into the grand illusion that was alive and kicking in the birth canal of Coshocton, Ohio.

         But it was tuned into the realities of the record market. The daydream went down the drain like so much dishwater. Carl and Jerry woke up and found themselves with boxes full of the yellow-labeled flop and their same old jobs at WTNS.

         I left Coshocton shortly thereafter for another radio job in Charleston, West Virginia, my share of the surplus copies of "Washington Calling" and a small bud of the illusion that the frost of failure had missed neatly packed away in the trunk of my two-tone green Ford Fairlane.

         I unpacked it one last time in March of 1960. I put together my second -- and, mercifully, last -- attempt at shaking the record world to its foundations. This time, it was a "Flying Saucer"-style treatment of Elvis returning from the Army called "Teenage Idol." It was, if I may say so, a "tighter" (as they say in the splicing trade) and timelier novelty record than "Washington Calling" had been, and I promptly sent it off to the record companies, having neither the inclination nor the necessary cash flow to pay for the pressing myself this time.

         The engraved invitation to stardom never came. I chalked it up to the increasing concerns of record companies over the legality of lifting copyrighted materials willy-nilly as both Buchanan & Goodman and Carl & Jerry had done. Sometimes, all you are left with is the bittersweet satisfaction that it was the fault of some high-priced lawyers somewhere.

         I got over it. So did Carl Day, apparently, although we both traded it for other illusions. I resorted to the literary one I'd always held back in a secret place like a first love affair. Carl, it turns out, continued to dabble in alternative ambitions as diverse as musical comedy and drag racing.

         I looked up Carl a few years ago in Dayton, Ohio, where he was the evening news anchor for the NBC affiliate. Over lunch at Chi Chi's, we talked about those old days at WTNS and the short-lived glories of "Washington Calling." Carl was looking quite comfortable, with his muted plaid sport coat, pipe, elegant town car out in the parking lot, and friendly vocal tones so measured and resonant it was easy to understand how he remained the most popular TV anchor in the Dayton market, with two Emmys for local coverage on his mantle.

         But, as I said, he had still managed to dabble in those restless areas of creative conjecture akin to all those white kids with garage bands in the '50s and '60s. After the brief ambitions of Carl & Jerry, Carl produced some records, including a children's album. He wrote a stage musical that was once performed at the Ohio State Fair. He appeared in an obscure motion picture, "One Night of Anger," that doesn't even turn up on the late, late show. He drove and designed dragsters, too.

         So his explanation of the "Washington Calling" episode seemed a little too nonchalant, too comfortable. "We probably didn't have anything else to do," he said, in those silky, cordial tones familiar to mid-Ohio viewers of the six o'clock news.

         Okay, maybe it was only a giggle on the way to the security of an upper-five-figures paycheck and a place in the hearts and minds of greater Montgomery County. Maybe I am blowing it out of proportion. I was younger back there in Coshocton -- I was nineteen, Carl twenty-one -- and got more infected by it. Could be.

         I do have something of an excuse. I went to school with Wolfman Jack. Seriously. That kid at broadcasting school, Bob Smith from Brooklyn, who was always sneaking into the student studios on Saturday morning and driving the two old maids who ran the school crazy, ended up being Wolfman Jack, the manic half-man, half-DJ whose gravelly voice boomed across the country from that trillion-watt transmitter across the river from Del Rio, Texas, and later popped up in "American Graffiti" and on the "Midnight Special" TV show.

         I had shared a studio with the living proof of the rock era axiom that, if you have a gimmick, you can be a star. Of course, back in 1959, I couldn't see the price tag dangling from the dream like the one on Minnie Pearl's hat. It was lost in the same shadows where Bob Smith from Brooklyn had disappeared when, several years later, I tried to interview Wolfman Jack on the telephone and he wouldn't come out of character, even for an old schoolmate, when I tried to talk about the old days at the National Academy of Broadcasting. (He wouldn't even refer to his wife as anything other than "Wolfwoman" or put his Wolfman voice back in its cage for a while.)

         But that's another story. The truth is that it may just be easier for people like Carl Day and myself to be philosophical about not getting the brass ring than those who actually get it. This book has more than its share of stories of young men and women who couldn't handle success nearly as well as Carl & Jerry handled their minor failure.

         That is the delusion hidden inside the illusion, the razor blade inside the Halloween candy. It can be a trap people never see coming, and never find their way out of. At least half of the McCoys haven't, caught in the quicksand of trashed ambitions, disillusionment, and/or drug abuse. Joe Dowell hasn't, either, and perhaps has skidded a lot farther off the runway of reality than Wolfman Jack ever did.

         The catch, it turns out, is that it was too easy to capture the lightning, but too hard to keep it in the jar. This book and its honor roll of hit records are filled with singers and musicians who stumbled onto the path to rock 'n' roll stardom in the late '50s and the '60s, took one lap around its cul-de-sac, and then suddenly slid off into the ditch.

         The magazines call them "one-hit wonders" or "one-shots" -- even if some of them managed to put two or three records on the charts. They came, they saw the view from the top of the charts, and then were conquered by the very nature of the illusion.

         That's the way it was back in the first decades of the rock 'n' roll delusion. Any kid with a notion of making a record, even Carl & Jerry, had a shot at it. If they made it, it made great copy, and sold records at a dizzying rate for a very short while. But, as Bobby Helms so aptly describes them, those were disposable hits -- and disposable stars.

         The record producers knew that, recognized the heart of the illusion, and traded on it. If the McCoys can come up with "Hang On, Sloopy" and put it at the top of the charts, then they know the rest of the formula: Have them make some more records that sound approximately like "Sloopy" and, when the teen-age public quits buying them, as they inevitably must, find the next group with something a little different, a little fresher, a little more clever or unusual.

         And scratch the McCoys. Or the Lemon Pipers. Or Joe Dowell. Ad infinitum.

         Keep them moving through the turnstiles, in other words. This way to the egress. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out. Early retirement, with no gold watch or going-away party.

         The casualties of the rock 'n' roll revolving door have been too numerous for this book or any emergency room to handle thoroughly. Even those "Where Are They Now?" compilations can't do it and only deal with where the shot-down one-shots wound up, not the varieties of personal hells they went through to get there. They'll never let you in on the sustained agonies like those of the Rivieras, who have harbored a grudge against their former manager so intently that three decades and a federal lawsuit can't smooth it over.

         True, a few survived. A very few. The late Conway Twitty drifted easily back into country music. Ray Charles moved on to thumping remakes of old standards and Diet Pepsi commercials. Dionne Warwick did movie themes and psychic informercials. The late Bobby Darin became a song stylist in the mold of Frank Sinatra and those other singers our parents kept listening to.

         But Frankie Avalon and Bobby Rydell and Annette Funicello and Frankie Ford tried to do the same thing and couldn't hold the notes. Avalon and Funicello emerged just long enough for a post-partum beach blanket movie a few years ago, but, for most of them, it was back to the alleys of obscurity that lie just beyond the illusion.

         That is where this book goes panning for the pyrite linings of the puffy clouds of rock 'n' roll fame. The people here are not the survivors; if we wanted their stories, all we would have to do is read the liner notes of their latest album or the Rolling Stone interview.

         These are the young men and women who got bad transfusions of the same illusion Carl & Jerry flirted with back in 1959. Their paths back from rock 'n' roll withdrawal have been many-fold, leading anywhere or everywhere or nowhere, to the police work or the unemployment line, to truck driving or job-training programs, to revival shows or the orchestra pit of insanity.

         At best, they provide a few answers to "Whatever Happened to (Pick A Name)?" There are so many more names for which the answers, or even the questions, are not provided here. Like you, I would love to know where the illusion led Dickie Doo & the Don'ts, Ray Peterson, the Fireflies, Linda Scott, Rosie & the Originals, etc.

         In some cases, I did try to find out. But the flaps of the tents of obscurity had already closed around them. Little Peggy March marched off into the jungles of New Jersey. Ral Donner died in Chicago before I could get to him. Johnny Paris of Johnny & the Hurricanes refused to talk to me ("What's in it for me?").

         Jimmy Clanton, the baby-faced Louisianan with the picket-fence smile who recorded such teeny-bop classics as the sweetheart-dance closer "Just A Dream," fled to the ministry and shunned both publicity and his past as a rock 'n' roller. Labeling his days in Bandstand music a "living hell" and blaming his previous involvement in it on "my own worldly ego and vanity," Clanton set up a "born again"-type ministry in eastern Pennsylvania, then later in the Houston area. His new, past-repudiating motto: "Life Is More Than Just A Dream."

         And so on and so on.

         The worst near-miss of all, though, had to be Barry Sadler. The one that absolutely got away. In a hail of gunfire. The one whose absence from this book I most regret. I should have gone to Guatemala after all.

         Barry Sadler was, in case your amnesia covers all of 1966, the former Green Beret combat medic who gave us "Ballad of the Green Berets," the top-selling record of that particular year. That was at a time when the Vietnam war was being fought on the record charts as well as in the main streets of America. Sadler's victory in hand-to-hand combat with the top anti-war record of the mid-60s, "Eve of Destruction," seemed, at the time, to lend credence to Tricky Dick's claim that there really was a silent majority of Americans out there who thought Vietnam was a great little place for a war.

         It wasn't, of course, but you couldn't have told Sadler that. In fact, I suspect you couldn't tell Barry Sadler much of anything. He was, if nothing else, his own man. And his hell-bent pursuit of national illusions went a lot farther and deeper than any of those other one-shot wonders.

         The son of compulsive gamblers, Sadler reportedly spent some time in a New Mexico reformatory before he found his natural home, the military -- most specifically, in the Special Forces unit distinguished by its green berets.

         After he was wounded on a pungi stake in Vietnam, he came back to the United States, where he wrote and recorded his one major hit. RCA billed him as "Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler." His patriotic paeon stayed number one on the charts for five weeks in March and April of '66. The followup, the equally militaristic "The A Team," only reached number twenty-eight on the charts, and his name then vanished from the record charts as quickly and thoroughly as a Viet Cong sniper.

         The rest of his unsettling life revolved around the violence and jingoism that were his personal calling cards. He re-enlisted in the Army, did some acting, some painting, wrote some songs, but without any trace of his earlier, momentary success.

         After the Army, Sadler became a rumble looking for a place to happen. In 1978, supposedly defending a half-blind Nashville woman he knew, he shot songwriter Lee Bellamy between the eyes in front of the woman's apartment. After telling police that Bellamy must have shot himself, he later admitted that he planted his own gun in Bellamy's van after shooting him "in self defense" when Bellamy appeared to draw a weapon. The "weapon" turned out to be a set of car keys.

         Sadler eventually pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and was sentenced to five years in prison, which later was reduced to thirty days in a workhouse and two years' probation. The young woman also got probation for going along with his original cover story.

         He was implicated in another shooting in 1981, this time in Memphis. His former business partner was wounded, but Sadler was never charged in the case. "I'm a Green Beret," he reportedly told authorities. "If I had shot him, he'd be dead."

         He also began a writing career, penning pulp novels that were as autobiographical as they were bloody and patriotic. He created a continuing hero, Casca, the eternal mercenary soldier who couldn't and wouldn't die, and posed for the covers himself. He also wrote Vietnam war novels like "Cry Havoc!" and "Phu Nham" that centered on heroic human killing machines, usually in U.S. Army-issue camaflouge clothing.

         He didn't exactly become poet laureate of the United States with his B-movie novels, but one of his editors did once call him "the Louis L'Amour of action adventure."

         Finally, in the mid-1980s, he found a legal -- or at least semi-legal -- habitat for his non-fictional bent for military machismo. He settled into the unsettled atmosphere of Guatemala, where he once served in the Army. As best as anyone can tell, he helped train Contra rebels and sold them guns, while still turning out a pulp novel a year.

         It was at that point that I tried to set up an interview with the former recording artist who had turned himself into an Ollie North without portfolio, John Rambo without movie rights. My personal preference was to catch him when he touched base back on U.S. soil, to promote a book or simply reload his pumpgun of patriotism. His agent, Bob Robison, was a little vague about when that might be and made the one unheeded suggestion that still haunts me -- why not go to Guatemala to interview Sadler?

         "I think it would be a great idea," Robison advised me then. "You will admit, the smell of cordite would give an edge to the interview."

         The flippancy and the implied peril of that last statement tended to chill my enthusiasm for the agent's suggestion. I sat tight in the good ol' U.S. of A. and waited for Sadler to come to me.

         Unfortunately, when he did finally come back home to stay, in 1988, it was with a bullet in his brain. Shot in the head while training a band of Contras in Guatemala, Sadler was in critical condition when he was brought back to a Tennessee VA hospital. Most men probably would have already been dead, but Sadler clung to life as tenaciously as a New York subway rider to one of those overhead straps.

         I talked to Robison a couple of times during Sadler's hospitalization. At one point, he was starting to be optimistic about Sadler's recovery, and we even discussed my getting the first interview with him when he was strong enough to give one. But, on November 6, 1989, Barry Sadler, who many of his friends truly thought was too tough to ever die, much like his fictional alter ego, Casca, did die, uninterviewed and virtually unnoticed.

         A shame, even if Sadler himself would have seen nothing shameful, I'm sure, about dying in defense of his country, as he saw it, or in the line of duty of a self-ordained soldier of fortune. Even though I disagreed with almost everything he stood for with nearly as much violence and passion as his own, I am sure he would have been a totally fascinating interview. Most anachronisms are. I have interviewed a few dinosaurs in my time and found them enchanting, as most things on their way to extinction are, like convicts intercepted on the last mile to the gas chamber.

         But Barry Sadler ended up as just another bit of wreckage alongside the long road away from the top of the record charts, one of the big illusion's road kills. You will meet some of the others in this book who were only knocked aside and left for dead. Or, in the case of Randy Hobbs of the McCoys, directed down the haunted side road of hard drugs that leads only to a dark dead end.

         You will also meet a few who have managed to stay between the white lines. Like Carl Dobkins Jr., who keeps his days in the fast lane clearly in the rear-view mirror and his clippings put back prudentially in his closet. Or three of the Lemon Pipers, who went "back to the earth" in southern Indiana and only bring out the old road map and toy with it occasionally like a Nieman-Marcus catalog.

         Don't be too quick to feel sorry for any of them. They fell for the illusion we've all been tempted by and made it come true, if only for the time it takes to change records on a turntable. They went farther than we ever did, with the burning ambition all of us thought we would have given up our pegged bluejeans and duck-tail haircuts for. Only it was going to leave them at the side of the road like lost hitchhikers.

         Don't pity them. They had their moment. We only had the luck.

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 Copyright 1998 by Jerry Miller ©

 Photo of Jerry Miller in 1958 (photographer unknown)

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