Ghoulardi: Lessons in Mayhem
by David Thomas


Text of multimedia presentation by David Thomas delivered at the EMP Pop Conference 2005.
4/15/05 EMP Pop Conference 2005, Seattle WA
9/27/06 Dept. of Architecture, Brookes University, Oxford, England
12/3/07 Dept. of Architecture, Brookes University, Oxford, England
11/27/13 Royal College of Art, South Kensington, London, England
2/27/15 Center For Folk Studies, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

The first and possibly only native punk movement in America ended in the mid `60s, and was to be found not just within rock music but also within the fluid boundaries of local radio and TV media communities. The American Punk rock activity of the late `70s was nothing more than a pop artifice promulgated by foreign cultural imperialists and promoted by corporate interests, Madison Avenue arrivistes and chicken-hawking sexual deviants. It was designed, by intent or circumstance, to subvert and short circuit what was already an emerging wave of third generation American Rock Youth, represented by such literate bands as Television, Talking Heads, Pere Ubu, the Residents, MX80 Sound and others. Simultaneously, a media induced state of datapanik was designed to bury Meaning within a flood of anodyne and charming data-chaff.

In America, in the `60s, most TV and radio stations were locally owned and operated. Though the majority may have been affiliated with one of three national networks and took nationally syndicated programming, there were still vast tracts of time to be filled by local management. Cleveland, Ohio, had three local TV stations and dozens of radio stations. Radio - the senior medium - provided TV with a significant percentage of its on and off screen talent.

Driven by local circumstances, inspired by local characters, and fueled by the sort of unrefined exuberance to be expected even in the last wild days of a technological frontier, isolated pockets of punk activity within American TV and radio markets were capable of throwing up sometimes astonishing phenomena that blossomed and then withered unnoticed outside a limited geography. Where, in former times, mountains, deserts and rivers might have served to isolate communities, in the `50s and `60s, broadcast throw and reception range would act in a similar way. These were the days of regional radio hits - localized charts were the norm rather than the exception. These were the days of the wild child personality radio jocks and their story has been told often and in great detail. Less known, less appreciated and far rarer were the wild child TV punks. There were, of course, influential national figures such as Ernie Kovacs, Soupy Sales and Steve Allen, and radio antecedents such as Arthur Godfrey, but spotted here and there across the country were equally innovative and often far more idiosyncratic local characters. The one I know about is Ernie Anderson. He is the father of Paul Anderson (director of Boogie Nights and Magnolia), and between 1963 and 1966 he was the biggest thing in Cleveland, unrivaled even by the mighty Jim Brown, probably the greatest running back in American football. Ghoulardi's presence dominated the city's zeitgeist at a time when Cleveland was the second largest Hungarian language city in the world, next to Budapest. His catchphrases entered and still remain in the local vernacular. His antics and jokes were recounted in every school and bar and factory and office. He outraged the great and the good. But even so, at the peak of his popularity, the family restaurant chain, Manners Big Boy (think of a sit down version of McDonalds), seeking to capitalize on his popularity, produced green milk shakes in plastic cups emblazoned with Ghoulardi's image and his catchphrase, "Stay sick and turn blue!"

ghoul
Ghoulardi.

Ernie Anderson left Cleveland after 1966 and moved to Los Angeles where he, eventually, became the voice of the American Broadcasting Corporation, Monday Night Football, Ford Motors, and most memorably the announcer for the hit TV series 'The Love Boat.' Imitators who traded in his persona rose and fell and rose again in the Cleveland and Detroit markets over the decades. He died in February 1997. On TV, in Cleveland, he was known as Ghoulardi.

While radio jocks trade heavily in the Persona Marketplace, ultimately, they prosper or fail depending to a significant degree on the popularity of their playlist. Success on TV, however, is more thoroughly reliant on the immediacy of the mask and the masquerade - certainly this was so in the case of Ghoulardi, a Friday night/Saturday afternoon monster movie host constrained by a local TV budget to packages of the cheapest Hollywood B-movies: The Disembodied, World Without End, Ghost Diver, Sh! The Octopus and From Hell It Came. The list makes Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman look like quality. People were not tuning in to see the movie.

The Cleveland/Akron rock underground of the mid `70s has long been subject to speculation and keen interest from musicologists not because of its popular impact but because of the extraordinary Otherness of the bands it spawned. Why was it such a specific and limited generational window? What was the source of such rage, such disaffection from not only the mainstream culture but also from the so-called counterculture - in fact from any subculture you'd care to mention? What could produce such a contradiction as this set of radical innovators who embraced consumerist media with such enthusiasm?

The answer for many of us is simple. We were the Ghoulardi Kids.

In the `60s, the authority of TV, as an agent and arbiter of reality, was nearing its Golden Age. The elitism and do-gooder worthiness that the British Broadcasting Corporation still clings to with bloodied fingernails, even now, was de rigueur. TV news anchormen were regarded as nothing less than high priests - incredible as that may seem in these days of the Dinosaur Media.

I was nine years old in 1963 when Ghoulardi went on air. He was 40. I was 13 years old when he quit in 1966. After him I believe that I could only have perceived the nature of media and the architecture of the narrative voice in particular ways. Describing how he devastated the authority of the media priests, and of the Great and the Good, how he turned the world upside down and inside out is nearly impossible for an outsider to appreciate. Prankster sloganeering, whacked hipster dialect, primitive blue screen insertions, and firecrackers exploding inside plastic-kit Rat Fink dragster models - all were sandwiched between movie segments over the course of 90 minutes on the TV every Friday night. How unsafe could that be? You have no idea! Ghoulardi was the Flibberty Jib Man - Ken Nordine's drifter who enchants the populace of a town with nothing more than the sound of his voice.

(You can get some sense of the expressive power of Ernie Anderson's voice from the vocal symphony that is his delivery of "The Luuhv Boat," a phrasing and performance that, decades later, is still fixed in the popular consciousness.)

Such claims may sound improbably portentous for a mere monster movie host but you really had to experience it - experience the mayhem - to appreciate how powerful this masquerade was. Everyone who saw Ghoulardi will tell a favorite story, many apocryphal in the way that pre-literate folk culture encourages. Like the night he set off an egregiously large homemade explosive device sent it by a fan - he was always setting off fireworks and blowing up things in the studio - and quite clearly off-camera crew were telling Ghoulardi not to light it up and you could see people running across the studio, the camera abandoned to skew, pointing at the floor, and then the entire room was stunned senseless for some minutes... live... on the air... smoke, studio curtains on fire, people stumbling across the screen...

Or the night he repeated Alfred E. Newman's "What, me worry?" phrase (reference: Mad Magazine) for ten minutes, progressing through the range of all possible inflections and dramatizations. Or the times Ghoulardi set out, perversely, to induce tedium as its own form of mayhem. In a parody of 'Gunsmoke,' a long-running Western TV series, he and supporting characters sat round a table not saying anything, not moving - stone cold nothing - for a minute. "Let me think," he had said and then he sat there. If you've never experienced sixty seconds of no sound, no movement on TV then you've never experienced a practical demonstration of eternity.

The most memorable and distinctive feature of the Ghoulardi show involved the lexicon of audio, film and blue screen drop-ins that he and his crew developed to artfully disrupt any linear experience the audience might hope for, and to generally punk out the proceedings. Some of the staple film drop-ins included clips of an English gurning competitor, two trains colliding, an improbable multi-winged aircraft collapsing in on itself, and a fat lady dancing like a ballerina. Audio drop-ins were likely to be bits of polkas, Rivingtons and Trashmen riffs or Screaming Jay Hawkins eruptions.

The best drop-ins were the real time blue screen improvisations; each timed out to the second and cued by an engineer looking at a stopwatch. The technique, traceable to John Zacherle in New York City, seems to have been independently developed by Chuck Schodowski, Ghoulardi's producer/engineer, but to a more artful degree. In a haunted house, Ghoulardi appears in a hallway warning, in slurred hipster dialect, "Don't open that door!" Dropped in next to a caveman gnawing on a bone, he offers to take him out for a pizza. And there is a particularly memorable scene from Dr. Cyclops, repeated to great effect in Attack of the Crab Monster, where Ghoulardi appears in a cave scene amongst a bunch of nervous characters who have been surrounded by giant man-eating, talking crab monsters and he's running from side to side waving his arms and jumping up and down like a goof.

The B-movie was for Ghoulardi a canvas; an open invitation to spread mayhem, and generally engage in ransacking any sense of good taste, worthiness or respectability that local TV might aspire to. The amateurish enthusiasm and naive intention of the B-movie encourages a kind of communal abstraction that approaches folk culture, and the frequent lack of a coherent agenda leaves lots of wiggle room for whatever personalized context or agenda an audience - or TV host - chooses to overlay.

But Ghoulardi was in a different league from other monster movie hosts. He eschewed the gothic makeup, and Bela Lugosi affectations. Even his name subverted the genre - the first syllable was a setup, the next two a sucker punch. Chef Boyardee, a brand of canned spaghetti, served as his inspiration. Et voila! Ghoul-ar-dee!

Look at him - fright wig, fake mustache and goatee in constant peril of peeling away - lab coat, sunglasses with a missing lens.

Note the Nixon-Lodge button. The 'LBJ for the USA' button. The 'I've Had Enough, I'm Voting Republican' button.

Think of Ghoulardi as a Last Hurrah of that pop culture masquerade, The Rebel Without A Cause. Just a guy with a Bad Attitude. Apolitical, non-aligned, drifting across the landscape content to leave behind nothing other than mayhem.

"What are you protesting against?"

"Whatta ya got?"

The mayhem I speak of is, truth to tell, not much more than a benevolent form of terrorism. The goal of each is the same - to disconnect the population from its roots, from its foundation in absolutes. Mayhem, if the proper lessons are learned, serves as a powerful tool in the pursuit of a narrative model that can accurately imitate the human condition by introducing the Uncontrollable, the Inconceivable, and the Incomprehensible into an aesthetic production, countering artifice.

It is the abiding lesson to be learned from the Dada/Surrealist movements. But the lesson is learned, not from elitist High Art mavens (which for all their declarations and manifestos, Dada-ists and Surrealists aspired to be), not from books or intellectuals, museums or universities, but from a whacked out prankster on the TV. Ostracized by the world of adulthood.

The politicization of `60s pop music - and the effective end of the Rebel Without A Cause mask - was certainly well under way when Ghoulardi bowed out in 1966. Ghoulardi hated pop. He was a jazz fan. He and Schodowski orchestrated the musical side of their mayhem with mainly instrumental rock, jazz and blues clips - The Ventures, Booker T, Tom King and the Starfires, Oscar Peterson, Jimmy McGriff (who wrote 'Turn Blue' for Ghoulardi) - along with... polkas. Duane Eddy's 'The Desert Rat' was his theme tune. Frankie Yankovic's 'Who Stole the Kishka?' figured prominently. The instrumental tracks featured lots of raw guitar. The fewer vocal tracks were pointedly aggressive nonsense like the Rivingtons' 'PAPA-ooM-Mow-Mow' and 'The Bird's The Word,' or barely articulate rages like Screaming Jay Hawkins' 'Constipation Blues' or 'I Put a Spell on You.'

Ghoulardi didn't do safe. As we smugly revel in the quarantined ward of our present enlightened age, consider the impossibility of encountering anything like Ghoulardi in any media. When you hear someone declaiming the 'dangerousness' of some feeble cultural product, think of Ghoulardi gleefully igniting industrial strength explosives in a TV studio... live, on the air, in real time 1964. Consider also that there has been a paradigm shift over the years. The media is now the natural habitat of ravenous punks for whom the very notion of worthiness is a joke. I saw a stenciled graffito of a windup robot with the motto 'Consume.' A modern day Ghoulardi would have used the word 'Revolt.'

In the days when network news anchors like Huntley and Brinkley or Walter Cronkite, and any number of local luminaries, were demigod arbiters of truth and worthiness, Ghoulardi launched an assault on their credibility, ravaging the third rail untouchable righteousness of the Media Priests - and the most devastating effect was achieved with a single word, three syllables and one question mark: "Dor-o-thy?"

Dorothy Fuldheim was a frumpish intellectual drawn from academia to serve as a nightly commentator on Channel 5 News. She was the Grande Dame of the media elite; the great and the good were tucked up snug and warm inside her huge handbag. The master of mayhem, the rebel with no cause, Mr. Bad Attitude, locked her in his sights and homed in. Ghoulardi understood the medium of TV better - far better - than his targets.

"Dor-o-thy?!" he exclaimed. It was only a question – usually followed by a drop-in of the exultant intro to ‘Who Stole The Kishka?’ The incredulity of the delivery was withering in its impact. ‘The Emperor has no clothes,’ it shouted out in the irrefutable language of the inarticulate front-end that is television. What response is possible? Logic? Reason? Counterargument? Impotent, the great and the good could only bemoan the corruption of youth.

Years later in the early `70s in Cleveland, there was an art terrorist crew, on the fringes of the Coventry Road/American Splendor crowd, called ‘Fred and Ethel Mertz.’ They ‘adjusted’ billboards – always smiley faced, perfectly coiffed local TV news team group portraits – with the slogans ‘Question Authority’ or, more often, ‘Nuke The Whales.’ They painted on sunglasses and goatees. They were Ghoulardi kids.

One more chapter of the Ghoulardi story needs to be described and relates most significantly to his downfall. It concerns ‘Parma Place,’ a mini soap opera incorporated into his program slots. Parma is a western suburb of predominantly Polish extraction. The vocal performance that is “Dor-o-thy?!” had been previously honed and perfected with the exclamation, “Par-ma?!” to such effect that Parma City Council would spend much effort countering the mischaracterization of their town. ‘Parma Place’ featured three ‘certain ethnic characters,’ as they were described, played by Anderson, Schodowski and the wife of a well-known local DJ. They were usually seen sitting on a couch watching TV and talking about what they had been doing or might do if they only could stop watching the TV. It was parochial, unabashedly working class ethnic and full of inside jokes.

So one night at Severance Hall, home of the imperious George Szell and his Cleveland Orchestra – then at the very peak of its internationally acclaimed powers, considered to be the most disciplined and talented symphony orchestra in the world – maestro Szell introduced a violinist, noting that he had grown up in Parma. From all accounts, there in the very belly of the High Culture Beast, the epitome of All That Is Worthy, a shockingly large proportion of the audience spontaneously erupted with the “Par-ma?!” question.

The hammer had to come down. The contagion was no longer confined to the hoi polloi. This had gone too far. And Ernie Anderson himself had grown tired of the masquerade and of the escalating hassles. He quit – like Jim Brown did – at the very peak of his powers. He moved on. And he left behind a generational window of kids with a different sort of Point of View.

So, without Ghoulardi would there have been The Cramps – a band so thoroughly co-optive of the Ghoulardi persona that, when they first appeared, Clevelanders of the generation were dismissive? Would there have been an Electric Eels dressed in tin foil running a lawnmower over the stage? Or a Tin Huey, dressed in white hot pants and playing amputated stub guitars? Or, a Rocket From The Tombs with a name that so obviously synthesizes sci-fi and horror B-movie-isms? The Mirrors sang about the people who live on the inside of the earth. Pere Ubu drew on a Ghoulardi-esque persona for its name.

Consider the common characteristics of these bands, particularly the distinctive narrative architecture that is an idiosyncratic mixture of the observational, the self participatory, and the Intrusive Other, by which I mean the notion that the telling of a story should involve the incorporation of additional, intrusive Points of View that might run in parallel or at some angle to the central narrative – crossing it, intruding, overlaying, contradicting, deprecating, or even ignoring it. In other words, mayhem. Certainly we, the Ghoulardi Kids, could have, and eventually did, encounter this form of sur-reality in various literary and art traditions, but we were introduced to the basics from some guy on the TV, at a young age, unencumbered with the baggage of pretension, elitism or dogma. To tell a story this way was simply how you did things – it wasn’t sophisticated, or clever, or important. But it made a neat mess. And that was cool. Consider the startling musical inserts and abrupt image jumps beloved by these bands, the enthusiasm for noise and abstract sound, the appreciation of absurdity and extremism, the sense of the theatrical but an abhorrence of artifice. Running a lawnmower across the stage – the equivalent of shooting off fireworks in a TV studio – sounds about as artifice laden as you can imagine but you had to be there, you had to see it – the diminutive cripple Dave E partnered with the hulking Aryan bleach blonde giant John Morton – and it all looked pretty normal – well, natural, or right or, uh, clear – dare I say organic? (You had to be there.)

These bands were fronted by guys with extreme persona, odd hosts archly mediating a musical experience, each serving as a funhouse lens through which the musicians look outward at the audience and through whom, in turn, the audience receives context, perspective, and scale. The observer is himself observed. The narrator is generated by the story he tells. And the glue that holds it all together, the sleight of hand that fuels, the Skinnerian behaviorism that seals the deal, is the response to mayhem. (It is the same Skinnerian revelation that is at the heart of the Flying Saucer belief mechanism. Confront a human being with a startling incongruity and we seem to be hardwired so as to then accept, without question, the next incongruity that comes along.)

In Cleveland poet Charlotte Pressler’s seminal piece, ‘Those Were Different Times,’ she asks a question that she is not able to answer:<br> “Why, for example, are so many of the people in this story from the same background? Most of them were from middle or upper-middle class families. Most were very intelligent. Many of them could have been anything they chose to be. The Sixties dropouts dropped in to a whole world of people just like themselves but these people were on their own. You can ask, also, why they all turned to rock n roll. Most of these people were not natural musicians. [They] would probably have done something else, if there had been anything else for them to do. One can ask why there wasn’t; why rock n roll seemed to be the only choice.”

Maybe the answer to her question is that rock music provided the best medium, the most readily available masquerade through which to pursue artful mayhem, to practice the narrative extremism of the host mediator, and to leave a mark worthy of Mr. Anderson’s approval.

Reference Materials:
Tom Feran and R. D. Heldenfels, Ghoulardi: Inside Cleveland Tv's Wildest Ride (Gray & Company Publishers, 1997).
URLs:
http://www.cleveland.com/tv/index.ssf/2013/01/clevelands_ghoulardi_went_on_t.html