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| Visit Bop City in 2009 and celebrate 50 years in the Town Rock and Roll BuiltTM! More great shows, events, and celebrations are planned for the golden anniversary of Bop City!
I've asked our old friend Chet Kicsson to offer his thoughts on what drove Sam to build the Park. Chet is uniquely positioned to offer this essay because he is currently writing Sam's biography, due from Jolene Press this fall. Welcome back. Chet again. If you’ve been around the site you’ve probably read my old piece on Bop. If you haven’t, it follows this essay. Not like that makes me any authority on Bop…the city or the man. I guess they asked me to write this because they felt like I’d dealt square with them before and they wanted an outside voice for a change. I’m no saint, and Bop’s no charity, but I refused to be paid for this. Rob and Angel said they wanted an essay, and I told them if they paid me it made it a commercial. Besides, if I didn’t get paid, I could make them run exactly what I wrote. So, you’ve probably visited at least once if you’re back this far. Maybe it’s only your first trip to Bop. First time on the Comet or the Flying V, the Volcano or the Awe Chute. First Fight Seentm between Wallop and the Living Beat, or first dinner at Camelot. Did you meet Doo Wop Duck, or the Witch Doctor, or the Iconoclast? You must have seen a Jesse—they’re everywhere. Cuban Jesse, movie Jesse—hell, maybe you met Real Jesse. It’s something, whether it’s your first trip here or your five-hundredth. I’ve been writing about music and musicians for 35 years, because I love it. I wrote my first, terrible review in middle school, about the best album I could ever imagine hearing: Hi Voltage’s ’74 Escape. It’s not a bad album, you know. I won’t say my tastes have matured, or evolved, or even changed—I’ve bought that album 6 times, one way or another. But as I grew older and realized there was more to music than three chords, a beat, and aggression, I also realized somebody out there likes almost everything. I can’t stand Corazon; I leave the room when it starts if I can’t turn it off. But I’ve interviewed those sisters three times, and I’ll tell you: some people love them more than air. And the band themselves are utterly devoted, sublime musicians, love a lot of the same things I do. Just went a direction I’m not into, but I’d never say that they aren’t great at what they do.  Sam at the 1978 debut of Caliland. Bop City is like that, too. Everyone doesn’t like every part of it. I think that’s why Mr. Bop put so much into it while following his vision of what it could and should be. Some people have no use for theme parks, but you could live all your life here and ignore that aspect. Sam was never cynical or manipulative; he didn’t add anything to sate people who didn’t dig what he was laying down. Everything he did was for the glory and love of music he felt. The Wacky Boys studios and the Ranch were practical moves on his part and had a natural role here. He didn’t add Texasland and Caliland as any kind of sop; he saw the importance these regions and styles were having. Arrandem was a godsend for him. If he had been able to start Bop City the way he did Arrandem, I don’t know—can’t imagine—how the world might have been changed.
And how did Sam change the world (because he did, no question)? It’s easy enough to see that the Park changed things; no theme park had existed like it before, celebrating a single artform and welcoming everyone. That inclusiveness will stand as Bop’s greatest legacy—proving the viability and appeal of music its detractors denied. Without Sam and the Park keeping rock and roll in people’s minds it could have been the end by 1961, the music fading to an anomalous blip as MOR singers and easy-listening bands made life safe again. Would the folk explosion have happened? The British Invasion? The soul conversion? Possibly, but by creating a home for the music Sam declared its legitimacy and guaranteed its survival. I don’t think any artform has ever had a cheerleader like Sam. And why? Why does popular music need a salesman? It’s there in the name—popular. People already like it.  Sam's last publicity shot, for the 1982 release of The Odyssey
I think Sam was afraid. With record-burnings, riots, airplay bans, cancelled concerts and blacklisted bands, and the disastrous year for music the year the Park opened—I think Sam believed it could all be wiped away. People like Sam and Adam Friehs would be squeezed into obscurity and the Hit Parade would trample the joyous noise Sam loved.After people learned about Amwerth’s Cassandra device, it made me rethink that, made me wonder if Sam was unwilling to put his faith in that technology or if something else drove him to pursue this living monument to music. You’d think a man with a machine that foretold the future would have some worries off his mind. But if anything Sam’s actions and plans seemed to defy what Amwerth told him. Of course, given the Big Change, that’s for the best, but surely Sam realized rock and roll was out of danger by then, and if anything he worked harder than ever. So, why? What did Sam fear so that drove him to build a city on rock and roll, to prove rock and roll was here to stay? I don’t think I’ve ever met someone so devoted to music who did not play, sing, produce, write… his years as a DJ were as close to performing as Sam ever got. And honestly, for all his success in animation and film, he was not an artist or technician in those fields either. What makes a man so devoted, obsessed with music? I’ve talked to the people who knew him best and longest, thinking I could assemble the puzzle. Angel Black, Burk Wise, Dr. Amwerth, Laura Kaempfe, Jesse Aron, Sam Soul, dozens of Sam’s confidants and acquaintances, hundreds, even thousands of people who passed through his life, thinking no piece would be too small to offer some insight. I audited and watched months of recordings Sam made looking for clues. Even my old ‘chauffeur,’ Billy Blue, offered his experiences with the man, and you know how hard it can be to get a word with Billy—or to distill the truth from it when you do. So this was supposed to be an objective look at Sam, a bar-napkin analysis of what turned a California orphan into the most important figure in the preservation of American music in the 20th—and now the 21st—century. All I know is, if the Blues had a baby and the named it Rock and Roll, they must have left him in an orphanage in 1927. And we’re all forever lucky they did.
Lodestone reporter Chet Kicsson tells the following story about his visit to the Land of the Beat and the Home of the Rave.
The journalist contemplated the remains of his drink and pondered how he could be so miserable in the Rockinest Place on Earth. Bop City, not New York, not Vegas, was truly the city that never sleeps, where you could literally find your choice of entertainment or distraction, any time, day or night, year-round, in perpetually perfect weather and statistically impossibly safe conditions.
Old news. Common knowledge to the world and certainly to the tourists who still milled around this bar tonight. Not the worst bar in the Bop, but not its poshest either. The conversation was typical for the Bop and a bar: “Omigod!! You said that??” “So how long are you in town?” “You know, you wouldn’t think it now, but I played high school lacrosse.” “No way. Evan was never the writer Rustey was.”
So how was he to fulfill his mission—find a new angle on Bop? He recalled his conversation last week with Jean. Every time he was in Jean Werner’s office, he was struck by how much it reminded him of Jerrie Tyler’s Daily Globe office in “King Cougar.” Of course, Jean was at least 20 years younger than Tyler, even the 1977 model, and due to the nature of Lodestone magazine Werner was immeasurably cooler than the no-longer-Little Rascal. Werner looked different too. Like a younger Gore Vidal, maybe. Framed covers from the 35-year life of the magazine, beginning as a struggling San Francisco-based journal of the music and drug scene and becoming…well, a successful one, lined his office walls, along with autographed album covers (some from the days when you could see the art), original sketches from Win Stone, Stu Wycliffe, and Bryan White-Duke, poetry from Pete Dickens and Rob Shelley, and photos from tours, appearances, trials, crime scenes, marriages…a private shrine to pop and rock music since the dawn of psychedelia. If you loved the music, it was hard to have a bad experience in Jean’s office.
Unless he wanted you to.The journalist had come in to ask for some time off. “I need a vacation, Jann. Three months on the road with the Mannish Boys takes it out of anyone.”“So take a vacation. We’ll pay for it. Bring me a piece with a new angle on Bop City.” He had the nerve to smile when he said this.“A new angle on Bop? Like a fresh take on breathing? People know more about Bop City than they do about their own families, Jean—be serious!”“So that’s a challenge then, isn’t it? You relax, recreate, but let those literary muscles pump. Tell the world how a park that celebrates revolutionary music can make a profit without selling out.” Still smiling. When was this guy in black ops? He could smile while he asked you to kill your grandma and stuff her in your best friend’s mailbox.The journalist had picked up his coat and headed for the door. “When?”“Need it for the June, so…by the 17th.”The door was almost closed.“Hey—maybe I’ll give you the cover!”He glanced back through the crack in the doorway. “You can be such a ----- for such a nice guy.”So here he was, almost halfway through his budget and his schedule, without even a concept, let alone a draft. He paid the check and stepped out into the perfect evening air—65 degrees, 55% humidity, but rising. About 1:45—the rain would start in about an hour and a half, for the nightly 45 minutes. One of Bop’s great mysteries, unexplained, but hell, why fight it? Nothing succeeds like success. And Bop City is nothing if not a success. Bop City.The Theme Park that is a City.Stars, Cars, and Wild Guitars.Where the Bop Doesn’t Stop.Land of the Beat, Home of the Rave.Where Rock Met Roll.And where I apparently can’t get a -----ing cab. Three blocks off, headlights approached, pretty quickly, even for this time of night. In seconds, a ’56 Corvette slowed and stopped, too close to the journalist to be an accident. He glanced over and realized it wasn’t a Vette…exactly. It looked sort of like one, but it had elements of other things. Other models, maybe, but even other makes—a little T-Bird, a little Caddy, something so old or obscure he couldn’t name it. It was a convertible, a ragtop, and the sky was already clouding up. It was definitely a classic rod, but he’d never seen anything quite like it. Nothing quite like the driver, either.At first you might think Deane James had dropped by for a chat, but then he looked a little like Jim Jordan, Jesse Aron, Josh Gray…he seemed to shimmer, like a reflection in a mountain lake, someone you thought you recognized but couldn’t see clearly. He spoke: You looking for a story bout Bop City?The journalist, strangely for him, was hesitant. “…Yeah. Yeah, I am.”The driver leaned over and swung the door open. “Get in.”Too much to take in all at once. The leopard-skin interior—not print, either, it felt like honest-to-Jack Hanna leopard skin. The huge dice on the rear-view, the impossibly-large original equipment radio in the dash playing just what he would expect from this guy—Hut Jenkins, Vince Gallup, Howlin Mad Merton, Ray Robinson, Mac Ellas, Slim Laidlaw, Jim Rock and the Rollers, all in glorious mono and sounding like they were in the back seat. Probably had been, from the looks of the car. And the driver. Even if he lost the shades (at night—too cool for school, this fella), impossible to tell this guy’s age. 20? 50? 17? Was he legal to drive? Old enough to smoke. The cig dangled improbably from his left hand, adhered against physics in the rush from the ride. How the ---- fast were they going, anyway?The speedometer—when in the ---- did they calibrate them to 300mph?“Hold on.”He wasn’t kidding. He shifted again and the car couldn’t possibly still be on the road.“So what are you looking for? The Real Bop City? That’s what most of you boys come down here for.”The journalist didn’t answer. He was still searching for his response when the driver flicked his stub into the night and continued.“When you walk along the sidewalks in Vieux Carré and hear the melodies of Anthony Chess and Richard Flambeau cascade from the always-open doorways, you feel it.“When you cruise by the jukejoints of Billyville and the beat hits you from the Blue Boys or the Tennessee Two or the Jenkins Brothers Band, you feel it.“When a coffee-colored Cadillac smooths you through Checkerville and the grooves of Mac Ellas and Thunderbolt Perkins leave you black and blued, you feel it.“It’s the beat, the rhythm, the kick of America.“It’s Bop City.” They were on Bop Street now, the Main Vein, where it all happened and you were there to see it. The rain had just begun to spit down.“It used to be Rockville, until a rebel genius named Sam Bop bought the town council and turned a dying sharecroppers’ town into the first whole-city theme park ever in 1959. There was plenty of noise, but Sam knew that Sammy Rapp was right…rock and roll was here to stay, and no pile of broken 45’s was gonna change that. By 1961 Bop was the third biggest city in Arkansas.”They were headed south and east, out of 54 Acres on their right, Littlepool on the left, into Dolce Voce and Wheel City. They were directly under one of Bop’s massive statues, the Atlantic Crossing, bridging 54 Acres and Littlepool. Of course, they could see McCarty Tower downtown, the thousand-foot-tall, four-sided flying V, but they were close enough to see the Statues of the Titans, too—Paul Stellar, Abe Goodie, Coy Carson…“Course, that ain’t all good.”The anonymous driver was still talking. They were almost into downtown now.“Bigger towns get bigger problems. Rockville was a river town, so it had always had its share, but with five times the population, the tourist trade, the party feel, now it had more. That’s where me and my friends come in.”Through the Tower, crossing onto Thunder Road out through Billyville, or maybe take Main Street out to Mount Rockmore. The driver cupped a fresh cigarette (Pall Malls—when were those cool?) in the palm of his hand against the wind. The ash fell into his palm, but the thing stayed lit.“Who am I?”The journalist knew the answer would come from the same place the question had. “I’m that spirit again, the charge you feel when the drums kick in. I help keep the peace in Bop City.”What, that’s it?? “Sir?”The driver, for all that speed, now acted like he had all the time in the world. “Yeah?”“When you hold your cigarette like that, doesn’t the fire hit your hand?"He looked over the lenses of those impenetrable sunglasses at the journalist. “It don’t hurt.”Down Main Street, past Saville Row and toward the neon-lit, poster-painted faces of the Quarries on Rockmore. “Look, you don’t come to stay in Bop if you don’t get it. You don’t come here if the music is your calling. You come here if it’s your life.”This better be a story. The guy’s sounding a little loose now. “If you don’t feel alive till you’re dancin, drinkin, pettin yore pet, Bop City’s yore home. Now, some folks come here to visit, and that’s fine. But some come to prey. And that’s bad. See, the music’s got its own downbeat; it don’t need no help.”On cue, a late-night cruiser stepped from shadows along one of Haley Heights’ avenues. “I been here as long as Sam’s been buildin, and there ain’t been no shortage of work for me yet.”Need facts, if this is gonna be something besides Tracker Thompson 2008. “But,…who are you? What do you do?”Frustrated, the journalist wondered--was he annoyed, or just playing with me? He hadn’t shown a sense of humor yet. “Hell, I told ya oncet.”The driver turned south, toward Checkerville and Miller Swamp. “I’m the spirit of the music. I’m the soul of Rock and Roll.”The Dell-Victors’ “Walkin’ that Walk” segued into “All for My Baby” by Davey Viera. “I ain’t no Hillbilly Cat, nor Man in Black, nor a Killer. I ain’t the Godfather of Soul, nor the Genius, and I sure ain’t no brown-eyed handsome man. I’m the rhythm that cain’t be put down. They put Jesse in the Army, Jim in jail, Richard in the church, Billy Ray in exile, Vince in braces, Slim, Davey, P.J., Jimmie, Robby, Tommie, Cool Jim, Stovall, and so many more in the ground. Hell, I done buried more pioneers than the space program, but I cain’t be stopped. I’m Billy Blue, and you better believe I’m here to stay.”It would be several hours before the sun rose, but the journalist knew his day had finally begun.Thanks for visiting Bop City! Please stop by and leave a comment at Feedback--the Boppers here need to know what you like and what you'd like to see at the City Rock and Roll Built, BOP CITY!! | |
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