Dave Dave was six years old when his father tried to kill him by setting him on fire in 1983. He survived, and grew to become a sweet and gentle man who turned his suffering into art.
Many of his longtime friends were people in the news media who’d met him while telling his story. Others were celebrities like Michael Jackson.
Our friends Burt Kearns and Jeff Abraham have unleashed another riveting tale of the dark side of showbiz, and this one is more twisted, disturbing and timely than ever!
It’s the story of Spade Cooley, "Hollywood’s King of Western Swing” music in the 1940s and 50s. And once again, Burt and Jeff don’t focus on the music, but the man himself-- a man who made OJ Simpson look like Mr Rogers. Soade Cooley not only abused his lovey wife, he stomped her to death. After a sensational trial, he went -- well, we don't want to give up any more spoilers in The Wife & Death of Spade Cooley. (Just make sure you read it to the end!)
Read it at Legs McNeil’s and Gillian McCain’s website, PleaseKillMe.com. The site's tagline is “This is what’s cool” -- though one of the hashtags for the Cooley story is “Uncool People.”
You might remember their first hit, At The Hop. The story of their success in the heyday of Fifties rock ’n’roll, their decline, their incredible comeback, second career -- and their role in a wild American revival of old time show business -- would be a glorious one, if not for the sad end to the life of Danny himself -- Danny Rapp, dead in a mobile home turned motel unit in the dry hot Arizona desert.
Our pals Burt Kearns and Jeff Abraham tell that story, as none has done before, on the Please Kill Me website (no pun intended).
"This is what’s cool” is the tagline of the pop culture and literary website that sprung from the classic punk oral history book by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain -- and this article is very cool, another outtake from the upcoming book by Jeff and Burt.
"So what was the breaking point? The twentieth anniversary of singing the same two songs? Looking through the windshield at another endless highway and seeing only more of the same Holiday Inns, afternoons waking up hungover next to the same middle-aged female fans? Near the end of the decade, maybe it was Danny & The Juniors’ latest and strangest trip: another package tour, traveling by bus with another collection of acts. Only this time it wasn’t rock & roll.
"It was vaudeville..."
So check out The Lonesome Death of Danny Rapp! I don't care what people say, this story is a great one! (even though people are agreeing it’s quite a read!)
"Johnny Ace died at 25, allegedly during a game of Russian Roulette. The legend of his death not only obscures his talent but is built upon a misreading of what really happened backstage that Christmas night in 1954."
So reads the teaser for the item posted on Legs McNeil’s vital literary pop culture website, PleaseKillMe.com (based on his and Gillian McCain’s classic book), leading into a story that gets to the facts behind the death of Johnny Ace, the R&B dynamo out of Memphis. Ace’s backstage exit was the first legendary “rock ’n' roll suicide,” and Jeff & Burt may be the first to cut through the mythology:
"As legend has it, Johnny Ace went out in a most romantic way on Christmas Day 1954 — romantic like the love scene between Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. Johnny Ace died at 25, playing Russian Roulette, the game in which you load a bullet into one chamber of a revolver, spin the cylinder, then pull the trigger while pointing the gun at your head. It’s said to be quite a rush if you only hear ‘click.'
"There’s one small catch to the legend of the late great Johnny Ace...”
Find out the catch. Read the story here. Then share it! There’s also a great hidden news item at the end of the story: Burt and Jeff have written a book about performers who died onstage, set to be published in 2019. And stay tuned!
That story is Burt's latest exclusive on the literary rock website PleaseKillMe.com. The story focuses on an incident tduring a British concert tour on which Chris and Tommy Roe headlined with the Beatles as their opening act! It includes testimony from Chris and Tommy, and a cameo from Andrew Loog Oldham, who was a publicist on the tour and went on to produce The Rolling Stones.
Bob O’Brien died this week. For decades, he was a top street reporter for WNEW-TV’s Ten O’Clock News in New York City. A legendary, crazy, serious, fun, all-business, wild, family man and good friend to all of us.
We miss him but his spirit will live on.
Here's the obituary that ran in his new hometown in Virginia Beach. Colorful as it is, it only begins to paint the full picture of this force of nature who influenced so many of us (after he retired from television news, he moved to Oregon and was elected town councilman!). Thanks for the memory, OB.
Robert Eugene O’Brien Jr., 75, award-winning journalist
Robert Eugene O’Brien Jr.
Robert Eugene O’Brien Jr., 75, went to be with the Lord Tuesday, April 24, 2018.
Robert was born Aug. 22, 1942, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to the late Robert and Clare O’Brien. He graduated from Xavier University to go on to a full career in broadcast journalism in New York City. It was at Xavier that he met the love of his life, Veronica, whom he lovingly called “Ronnie Rose.”
He is best remembered in his illustrious journalistic career for interviewing numerous presidents and heads of state, as well as celebrated individuals from Groucho Marx to Gerry Adams. He covered the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland; the inaugural flight of the Concord; the passing of Princess Diana; and as a true Irishman, the annual New York City St. Patrick’s Day parade. His formidable career is memorialized by three Emmy awards.
Left to cherish his memory are his loving wife of 51 years, Veronica R. O’Brien; daughter, Samantha; son, Sean, and his wife, Katie; brother, Chris Ischay, and his wife, Linda Wolfson; and a wealth of nieces, nephews and friends he called family.
A funeral Mass will be held at 11 a.m., Monday, April 30, at St. Gregory the Great Catholic Church, 5345 Virginia Beach Blvd, Virginia Beach, immediately followed by a wake at Buoy 44 restaurant, 4536 Ocean View Ave., Virginia Beach.
In lieu of flowers, the family appreciates donations made to Alzheimer’s Association: Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia at tmcfunding.com. At the end of the 30-day campaign, the family will present Alzheimer’s Association, Southeastern Virginia Chapter, with a check of all proceeds raised in the name of Robert Eugene O’Brien Jr.
Share online condolences with the family at altmeyerfh.com.
A piece of rock ’n' roll history has been revealed this week, as music legends Brian Wilson and Chris Montez talk about their days at Hawthorne High in their first meeting in fifty years!
The story and video come from Burt Kearns, who's been better known for his documentary and television work the past two decades, but who recently has been exhibiting his writing chops on PleaseKillMe.com, his old pal Legs McNeil’s literary and pop culture website (in March, Burt and Jeff Abraham cooked up a much-lauded piece on sixties comedy album star and sexual revolutionary Rusty Warren).
The reunion took place during the filming of El Viaje Musicial de Ezekiel Montanez: The Chris Montez Story, the documentary that has shown up in a “preview form” at film festivals around the country. The story on PleaseKillMe.com tells the story of the still-in-progress film work, what led to the reunion -- and even includes a cameo from Gary Busey.
Most impressive however, is the reunion film clip.
(By the way, 'Please Kill Me’ is the name of the punk oral history written by Legs and Gillian McCain, which was recently released in a 20th anniversary edition and has been recognized and awarded as a modern literary classic.
Brian Wilson (second from left) onstage at Hawthorne High
Chris Montez returns to Hawthorne High with a film crew
Burt Kearns and Jeff Abraham interviewed legendary musician, comedian, and leader of the sexual revolution Rusty Warren a few weeks ago in southern California. Today, their time with the famed ‘Knockers Up Gal’ of the Fifties and Sixties has been turned into a long article posted on PleaseKillMe.com, the rock, pop culture and literary website based on Please Kill Me, the definitive punk rock history book penned by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain.
Burt, as you know, wrote Tabloid Baby. Jeff is Hollywood’s leading comedy historian. The pair collaborated on a book we can’t tell you about just yet. Their piece on Rusty unearths many anecdotes about her life and career, and brings to the forefront for the first time the sisterhood alliance among the top female comedians of the era.
Here’s a sample, as Rusty Warren looks back at the heyday of Las Vegas:
“In Vegas, you’d always have three comics, myself and two other people,” Rusty recalled. “We’d trade off. The men were all dressed to go onstage, except they’d pull their pants down and the gals came over and gave them blowjobs. And then: ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen… dadadadada…’ Up… Zip! Pull up, out and get out to go on. My room was right next to theirs.” Whether working the lounges or the big rooms, the male performers went their own way, she said, kissing up to the mobsters running the casinos or hoping to pal around with big stars like Milton Berle or that prickJerry Lewis. The women supported each other. “Joan Rivers was always nice to me, even when she was working the main room,” recalls Rusty. “Phyllis Diller gave me her house when she was gone. I was there three times a year and she let me use it. TotieFields, she was younger. Her house was nearby, she’d come round. She made it big, but she came to me as a friend because I was one who didn’t go on (in the main room) where she goes. She’d ask, ‘What shouldI do with so and so?’ She was very nice. It was a nice combination of friends. “Las Vegas was different then. I don’t go to Vegas today.”
The influential celeb-centric Huffington Post placed the small-theatre production alongside -- and even above -- multi-million dollar productions at the Ahmanson Theatre (three in total) and Geffen Playhouse!
The HuffPo raves:
"Using the headline 'Democracy is a terrible thing to waste,' Ray Richmond’s hilarious reimagining of Obama turning over the White House to Trump in a private meeting is uproarious. Harry Murphy has an easy target in an orange-haired despot but it is Joshua Wolf Coleman who completely nails Obama’s speech patterns, authority and hispatience.Theaudience delightedly finally gets to see the latter blown out of the water.”
The one-act TRANSITION was a prescient imagining of what went on during the first private Oval office meeting between President Barack Obama and the unexpected President-Elect. Harry S. Murphy inhabited a Donald Trump that went far beyond the usual parody. Joshua Wolf Coleman slipped uncannily into the Obama suit. The play had a successful run in March and April at the Lounge Theatre in Hollywood, returning in June as a hit of the Hollywood Fringe Festival.
Additional productions of TRANSITION are expected to be presented in cities around the country.
Meanwhile, Richmond and Coleman have teamed up for a series of Internet shorts calledThe Obama Monologues.
Chris Bearde was our pal. He was one of the greatest comedic talents in television history, with a rapier-sharp wit and young man’s rage against injustice.
Chris created The Gong Show, produced The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour and wrote the television special Elvis, also known as the 68 Comeback.
One of Chris’ last Facebook posts
Up until this weekend, he continued to stand up against Donald Trump and his thugs with Facebook posts that were often hilarious, always full of righteous anger and disbelief that this country he’d arrived in from Australia had come to this! Eighty is a good run, but Chris, like Joan Rivers when she died, was so youthful, energetic and passionate right up until the moment it stopped, that the shock is real.
That story is Burt's latest exclusive on the literary rock website PleaseKillMe.com. The story focuses on an incident tduring a British concert tour on which Chris and Tommy Roe headlined with the Beatles as their opening act! It includes testimony from Chris and Tommy, and a cameo from Andrew Loog Oldham, who was a publicist on the tour and went on to produce The Rolling Stones.
“In Vegas, you’d always have three comics, myself and two other people,” Rusty recalled. “We’d trade off. The men were all dressed to go onstage, except they’d pull their pants down and the gals came over and gave them blowjobs. And then: ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen… dadadadada…’ Up… Zip! Pull up, out and get out to go on. My room was right next to theirs.”
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