Slapstick comedian Soupy Sales has died.
His former manager reported that Sales died of multiple health problems Thursday night in a New York City hospice. Sales was 83.
Another bit of my childhood has been chipped away. I had to revisit this 1997 piece I did with the Soupman when he came Merrillville, Ind. to open for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons at the Star Plaza Theater.
Hope you chuckle at the cornball jokes. I apologize for my puns.

Life has been a bowl of cheeries for Soupy Sales.

Stop it.

The gags are going to fly like pies in the sky. I asked Soupy what people can expect when the 70-year-old pop culture icon opens for Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.

"Jokes," he answered in a call from his Manhattan home. "A woman goes to the doctor, the doctor says, `What's your problem? The woman says, `My water just broke, what should I do? The doctor says, `Get off my rug.' "

Ba-da-boom.

"What do you call a woman who knows where her husband is all the time? A widow."
Let's hang on. The soup's on........

Soupy set out to be a journalist. And that's not a joke.

"I got a degree in journalism from Marshall University (in Huntington, W.Va.)," Sales said. "I wrote for my high school and college newspapers. It was my only creative outlet in those days."

Soupy got his big break in 1955 when he was selected as the summer replacement for "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," a popular prime-time TV show out of Chicago. In 1957 he legally changed his name to Soupy Sales.

Soupy is known for many things. His wife, Trudy, is a former Radio City Music Hall Rockette and June Taylor dancer. Soupy met Trudy when he appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show" to promote his 1964 dance hit "Do the Mouse." She was a dancer on the show.

Soupy's sons Tony (bass) and Hunt (drums) Sales backed up David Bowie in the band Tin Machine and also played with Iggy Pop. They performed on the 1970 Todd Rundgren hit "We Gotta Get You a Woman." Tony, 46, is now working in commercials in Los Angeles, and Hunt, 44, is producing rock bands in San Antonio.

But there's no getting around the pies.

Soupy figures he has taken more than 20,000 pies in the face. The shtick was the hallmark of "The Soupy Sales Show," the 1960s children's television show that featured puppet pals such as White Fang, Black Tooth and Pookie. (Isn't that package tour at the Aragon this weekend?) Sales' old television shows are available on Rhino Home Video.

"A lot of people don't realize the aerosol can didn't come in until 1955," Soupy said. "So up until that time you had to use whipping cream or egg whites. But with shaving cream, you had the cleanest tonsils in town."

In his 2001 memoir "Soupy Sez!" (M. Evans), he elaborated that shaving cream was also better than whipped cream because it didn't spoil. "And no tin plates," Sales wrote. "The secret is you just can't push it and shove it in somebody's face. It has to be done with a pie that has a lot of crust so that it breaks up into a thousand pieces when it hits you."

Are you thinking Halloween fun like I am?

There are just a few certainties in life: death, taxes and someone will always laugh at Soupy Sales getting smacked by a pie in the eye. "If a man falls down and gets up, it's funny," Soupy explained. "If he falls down and doesn't get up it's not funny. The pie thing takes someone's dignity away. You look and you say, `I'm glad it isn't me.' "

Frank Sinatra even took a pie in the face in 1961. "He told me he'd do the show on one condition - that he'd get hit by a pie," Soupy said. "He sang `Foggy Day.' He walks through the door and I go, `You're the greatest entertainer of all time.' There's a knock on the door and I get hit with a pie. Frank goes, `Who was that?' I say, `Dean Martin.' And Frank goes, `Dean wouldn't do a thing like that.' Frank opens the door and he gets hit with a pie. Surprised, he takes a taste and says, `It's rum! That's Dean.' "

Soupy spends about two weeks of every month on the road. He's currently hot in Hollywood. Soupy is featured in the Danny Aiello and Tony Randall film "Behind the Seams." He just finished shooting "Everything's George," a movie set in heaven where God tells George Burns that before he can reunite with his wife and partner Gracie Allen, he has to rescue Cuban cigars from Fidel Castro. "I play a cigar store owner," Soupy said. "Frank Gorshin plays George Burns. There's a lot of cameos from people like Ed McMahon.

"Regardless of what people say, I think I was influential to a lot of kids and a lot of people. It doesn't seem like it, but I would never do anything that wasn't prepared or planned. You have to be the most disciplined performer to make it seem undisciplined."

And Soupy Sales' timing was impeccable.

4:45 p.m. Aug. 18

I visited Jim Dickinson on a confederate gray Sunday morning during the winter of 2002. He invited me into the pack-ratted front area of his trailer on a forgotten plot of land in North Mississippi.
A trailer. Perfect.
Mr. Dickinson was always going somewhere.
Our two-hour conversation included Sun Records founder Sam Phillips, Bob Dylan, Memphis wrestler Jerry Lawler (a faded photo of the wrestler hung above Mr. Dickinson's sofa), Oxford writer-fireman Larry Brown and Chicago ragtime player Two Ton Baker.
Mr. Dickinson played piano on the beautiful soundtrack of "Paris, Texas," produced the Replacements and the watershed reggae album "Toots in Memphis." Dickinson also brought the Rolling Stones to Muscle Shoals (Ala.) Studio where they recorded "Wild Horses." He played piano on Dylan's 1997 Grammy winner "Time Out of Mind."
Mr. Dickinson died early Aug. 15 in his sleep. He was on the mend from heart surgery at Methodist Extended Care Hospital. He was 67. Listen to "When You Wish Upon a Star," which he released earlier this year:
He still has places to see..........

Mr. Dickinson loved talking about Chicago--although not as much as he loved talking about the mystery of Memphis.
He asked me if I had any Two Ton Baker records.
"My mother started me on music lessons while we were in Chicago," Mr. Dickinson said. "I've got real screwed up multiple vision. I could never read music so my lessons were frustrating in Chicago. But I got very into 'Two Ton' Baker the music maker on the radio."
The rotund ragtime player Dick "Two Ton" Baker was popular on Chicago radio during the 1940s. Baker had two hits in 1947 : "Near You" and "I'm a Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch." My friend Angelo Varias recalls Two Ton's popularity on Chicago television commercials for the since-razed Riverview amusement park.
Mr. Dickinson leaned over and said, "I think about Two Ton all the time. A lot of my musical concepts really go back to him. He would play the piano the whole time, whether he was doing the news, the weather, whatever. It was narration over this piano pad that he was doing. It gave me the idea of continuum, music beyond the box."
Mr. Dickinson also picked up some of his percussive style of piano playing in his early Chicago years. His rambling boogie went down down well in the Memphis blues scene and later in the Dixie Flyers, of which Mr. Dickinson was a member with Michael Utley, long time band leader with Jimmy Buffett.
"I call it 'rhythm piano'," Mr. Dickinson said. "Its like the way I sing. I holler because I started playing without microphones. My first band the New Beale Street Sheiks (discovered by Bill Justis of 'Raunchy' fame) were largely instrumental and we had to play loud. As a teenager I had to get my own piano because my mother wouldn't let me play hers."

Chicago blues were never far from Mr. Dickinson's soul.
His final Chicago gig was at the 2002 Chicago Blues Festival when he made a rare road trip to play keyboards with his sons Cody and Luther in the North Mississippi All-Stars.
Mr. Dickinson first heard Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf on WDIA radio in Memphis. "I just assumed it was Chicago music," he told me. "It wasn't until I started reading books that I realized these people were from around Memphis and had gone to Chicago--about the same time I left Chicago for Memphis. There's an undeniable connection between Chicago and Memphis.
"And I don't think there's anything more important in American music than Howlin' Wolf, who was born as Chester Burnett in Aberdeen, Miss., but came of age in Chicago."
That's how Mr. Dickinson talked: one half raconteur, one-half-lecturer. Earlier this week Billy Gibbons of Z.Z. Top said, "Jim was remarkably honest with a good sense of the blues."
Wolf was the crossroads between Mr. Dickinson and his Memphis mentor Sam Phillips. Wolf embraced the spooky yodel of Jimmie Rodgers and sprinkled over sharecropper's blues with fuzzy amplifiers. "I've heard Sam say he considers his discovery of Howlin' Wolf more important than Elvis Presley," Mr. Dickinson said. "I've head him say it twice. I know he meant to say it."
In a 1987 interview in Memphis Phillips told me that Wolf's voice "contained all the raw beauty of everything I had thought about in one man."
In the late 1990s Mr. Dickinson wrote liner notes for a Wolf reissue. He asked Wolf's former road manager for his best Wolf story. Mr. Dickinson smiled and said, 'He answered, 'My indelible memory of Howlin' Wolf is seeing him sitting on a hotel room bed in his boxer shorts with his hair in a net doing his imitation of Sen. Everett Dirksen."
Mr. Dickinson was a filliballbuster.

He told me about riding with Dylan from the airport during the "Time Out of Mind" sessions in Miami. "They said, 'Don't look at him, don't talk to him'," Mr. Dickinson recalled. "The first thing he asked me was about Tennessee-born country-blues guitar picker 'Sleepy' John Estes. What am I supposed to do? Not answer him?
"This is where he really got me: He said the last time he came to Memphis he went to Humes High School where Elvis Presley attended. Of course, he didn't tell me why, but he didn't have to. He said, 'They let me walk around the halls while school was going on. I went in the auditorium and stood on the stage--and then I found a lucky penny.' This hit me in my heart. Here was this man who changed the world who is still in awe of Elvis Presley, as well he should be. He's got me forever. There are many things in this life that are disappointing.
"Bob Dylan is not one of them."

In his 2004 memoir "Chronicles, Vol. 1" Dylan wrote of Mr. Dickinson, "We were from opposite ends of the Mississippi River. Back then, rock n' roll was hated and resented, and folk music even moreso, and Dickinson stepped to the front in both. His influences were jug band and early rock-and-roll be bop, same as mine.....
"Jim had manic purpose."

Earlier this month a tribute concert headlined by singer-songwriter John Hiatt was held at the Peabody Hotel Skyway in Memphis to assist Mr. Dickinson with his medical bills. Luther Dickinson said the family has no plans for a public memorial and the Peabody gig will remain as a farewell to Mr. Dickinson. He also chose his own epitaph:

"I'm just dead, I'm not gone."

1:45 p.m. April 16---

I had not learned of the death of Edwin Joseph Bocage, Sr. (a.k.a. Eddie Bo) until last week when I visited New Orleans. The visionary Crescent City piano player had a 1962 hit with "Check Mr Popeye," updated by Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. Little Richard recorded Bo's "Slippin' and Slidin' and Etta James had a hit with Bo's "Dearest Darling." His sense of wordplay in tunes like "Pass the Hatchet" are a precursor to hip-hop.
Bo died of a heart attack on March 18. He was 79.
In 2006 I talked Bo into taking a break from a busy New Orleans Jazz Festival weekend to meet me. I was on vacation, but I wanted to see Bo to preview his first-ever appearance in Chicago at the 2006 blues festival.
There was only one caveat: Bo insisted that the conversation take place on a Sunday morning near a small lake in Audubon Park........

"I come here to relax," Bo said while sitting on a park bench. "Music is a series of mathematical sounds that get to your emotions. It soothes people for a short while, anyway. If I didn't have music, I'd be like other people, jumping off bridges or whatever."
Katrina was still on his mind.
Bo looked around the park. It was quiet. Bo spoke in the rich, syncopated rhythms that underscore his music. His hit "Check Your Bucket" has become a staple of sets by Paul Cebar and the Milwaukeeans.
"Check your bucket?" Bo asked. "What does that mean? If your kisses fail to move her and your rap don't seem to groove her and your touch don't turn her on, you got troubles. You better check your bucket. That's what it means.
"Check yourself."

Bo checked in at Charity Hospital in New Orleans and was reared in Algiers and the 9th Ward. His remarkable resume included production credits with Irma Thomas, Art Neville and Al "Carnival Time" Johnson. He had his own 1962 hit with "Roman-Itis" and also wrote the 1963 Oliver Morgan smash "Who Shot the La La," which was a jazz fest standard until Morgan suffered a serious stroke. Bo cut a few sides with bandleader Paul Gayten for Chess Records and had many hits on the regional Ric and Cinderella labels out of New Orleans.
During the mid-1950s, Bo played in the New Orleans house band at the Club Tiajuana, a sister club of the legendary Dew Drop Inn near Charity Hospital. Soul singer Joe Tex lived above the Dew Drop Inn and Bo would catch Ray Charles when he passed through town. The Dew Drop Inn was open between 1938 and 1969. Little Richard was discovered there. It was one of the most important music clubs in the Deep South.

"People just don't get that type of experience anymore," Bo told me. "There's no hangout place. I was beginning. After the gig, there were at least 10, 15 trumpets, saxophones, maybe a dozen bass players. Everyone came to that one place because we couldn't go anywhere else. Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan. I couldn't keep up. Dinah would play as much piano as you wanted to hear. We enjoyed what we did because we passed things on to each other. We'd hang out until daybreak.
"Ray Charles was playing with Guitar Slim. One day, we were rehearsing in an outer room upstairs at the Dew Drop. Ray was playing piano and crying. I said, 'What's the matter?' He kept playing and then he paused for a minute and said, 'If I could only hear my mother pray again.' That moment put me in a different frame of mind musically, because what he played was from his heart. He was crying and playing. I can't begin to explain the experience."

Bo eyed the lake. Swift ripples were being formed by a lean second line. "Look at that," he declared. "That's a water moccasin. That is no water to play in."

In 1989 Bo studied at the Yaweh Institute in New Orleans. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune he said the institute "teaches en that we should seek love and distribute love, and seek to be moral." During the early 1990's Bo's early evening piano gig was a staple at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville in the French Quarter.

Bo was called "The Thelonious Monk of New Orleans R&B" due to his intricate exploration of rhythm schemes. He's also an accomplished carpenter. His family comes from a line of shipbuilders, and Bo rebuilt a former New Orleans doctor's office into the Check Your Bucket Cafe, which he ran with his sister Veronica Randolph for two years before the club was taken out by Hurricane Katrina. They did not reopen.

Bo equated carpentry with music.

He leaned over and told me, "You need a mathematical mind for both. You need to know the 16/18/20 beats. You need to know how to voice horns and strings and where to put them on the track. You don't have to write charts when you're dealing with minds that are good with rhythmic patterns."

Bo's studo was in a century-old New Orleans firehouse with separate rooms for guitar, drums and piano.

"During Katrina my roof decided it liked another neighborhood, so it left," he said. "I'm in the process of putting on another one." Bo lost his previous Tulane Avenue studio in a fire. "Katrina is going to bring a lot of things together," Bo continued. "And things have to come together to be successful. We've been divided in different areas for so long. Music and politics definitely don't go together. Musicians are free to observe what's going on and to try to give people some healing. And as far as I'm concerned, I'm just starting."

Bo checked in at Charity Hospital in New Orleans and was reared in Algiers and the 9th Ward. His remarkable resume included production credits with Irma Thomas, Art Neville and Al "Carnival Time" Johnson. He had his own 1962 hit with "Roman-Itis" and also wrote the 1963 Oliver Morgan smash "Who Shot the La La," which was a jazz fest standard until Morgan suffered a serious stroke. Bo cut a few sides with bandleader Paul Gayten for Chess Records and had many hits on the regional Ric and Cinderella labels out of New Orleans.
During the mid-1950s, Bo played in the New Orleans house band at the Club Tiajuana, a sister club of the legendary Dew Drop Inn near Charity Hospital. Soul singer Joe Tex lived above the Dew Drop Inn and Bo would catch Ray Charles when he passed through town. The Dew Drop Inn was open between 1938 and 1969. Little Richard was discovered there.
It was one of the most important music clubs in the Deep South.

"People just don't get that type of experience anymore," Bo told me. "There's no hangout place. I was beginning. After the gig, there were at least 10, 15 trumpets, saxophones, maybe a dozen bass players. Everyone came to that one place because we couldn't go anywhere else. Dinah Washington, Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan. I couldn't keep up. Dinah would play as much piano as you wanted to hear. We enjoyed what we did because we passed things on to each other. We'd hang out until daybreak.
"Ray Charles was playing with Guitar Slim. One day, we were rehearsing in an outer room upstairs at the Dew Drop. Ray was playing piano and crying. I said, 'What's the matter?' He kept playing and then he paused for a minute and said, 'If I could only hear my mother pray again.' That moment put me in a different frame of mind musically, because what he played was from his heart. He was crying and playing. I can't begin to explain the experience."

Bo eyed the lake. Swift ripples were being formed by a lean second line. "Look at that," he declared. "That's a water moccasin. That is no water to play in."

In 1989 Bo studied at the Yaweh Institute in New Orleans. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune he said the institute "teaches men that we should seek love and distribute love, and seek to be moral." During the early 1990's Bo's early evening piano gigs were a staple at Jimmy Buffett's Margaritaville in the French Quarter.

Bo was called "The Thelonious Monk of New Orleans R&B" due to his intricate exploration of rhythm schemes. He's also an accomplished carpenter. His family comes from a line of shipbuilders, and Bo rebuilt a former New Orleans doctor's office into the Check Your Bucket Cafe, which he ran with his sister Veronica Randolph for two years before the club was taken out by Hurricane Katrina. They did not reopen.

Bo equated carpentry with music.
He leaned over and told me, "You need a mathematical mind for both. You need to know the 16/18/20 beats. You need to know how to voice horns and strings and where to put them on the track. You don't have to write charts when you're dealing with minds that are good with rhythmic patterns."

Bo's studio was in a century-old New Orleans firehouse with separate rooms for guitar, drums and piano.
"During Katrina my roof decided it liked another neighborhood, so it left," he said. "I'm in the process of putting on another one." Bo lost his previous Tulane Avenue studio in a fire. "Katrina is going to bring a lot of things together," Bo continued.
"And things have to come together to be successful. We've been divided in different areas for so long. Music and politics definitely don't go together. Musicians are free to observe what's going on and to try to give people some healing. And as far as I'm concerned, I'm just starting."

12:20 p.m. April 15---

We were hungry.
Adriana and I were camping on a mountaintop an hour south of Tupelo, Miss. along the Natchez Trace. It was around 10 p.m. and the heavens were clear. The sky was a star-filled skillet and the heat of possibility kept me warm against a cool breeze.
But were hungry for something. The boiled peanuts we picked up at the Shady Acres Fruit Stand on blue Highway 49 outside of Hattiesburg didn't do the trick. Adriana was longing for a can of Colt 45. I missed my Diet Mountain Dew.
We awoke early the next morning with empty stomachs. We exited the pristine trace around Tupelo and we agreed we would not stop until we found a Waffle House.
No Huddle House.
No Toddle House.
It had to be a Waffle House......

Every Waffle House has a jukebox full of country music and classic rock. Even better, the diner has its own stable of artists who appear on the jukebox. Many of the peppy songs were written by Atlanta-based Jerry Buckner and Gary Garcia, who scored the 1981 hit "Pac-Man Fever." Eddie Middleton sings "Waffle Do Wop," and Danny Jones celebrates the fact that "There Are Raisins in My Toast," in the style of The Four Seasons. My favorite is Mary Welch Rogers' "Waffle House Family (Part 1)." Rogers is a former gospel singer who appeared on "The Lawrence Welk Show." She was married to Joe Rogers Jr., the 58-year-old CEO of Waffle House. His father, Joe Rogers Sr., is Waffle House co-founder. ("Waffle House Jukebox Favorites Vol. 1" CDs can still be ordered through (877) 9-WAFFLE.)

No one pitched me to write a story about all this. Waffle House does little in the way of promotion. Its hearty, greasy-spoon food is strictly word-of-mouth. So it was hard work to get co-founders Rogers Sr. and Tom Forkner to talk about the 50th anniversary. Rogers Sr. is 85, Fornker is 86. The food must be good for you; Ray Kroc of McDonald's fame didn't live that long.

Rogers and Forkner are still alive as of this blog. They are both 90 years old.

In 1949, Rogers bought a ranch house from Forkner in Avondale Estates, a suburb of Atlanta. Forkner lived two houses down. Rogers was vice president of the Toddle House chain, established in 1932. (Toddle House was founded by Fred Smith. His son Frederick Wallace Smith started Federal Express.)
Forkner was in real estate, and he and Rogers became friends. In a separate interview from Atlanta, Forkner said, "I told Joe we needed a Toddle House in the neighborhood. He said, 'You build the restaurant, and I'll show you how to run it." On Labor Day, 1955, Rogers and Forkner opened the first Waffle House right there in Avondale Estates.

McDonald's influenced the naming of the Waffle House. "We started around the same time as you boy's McDonald's carry-out concept in Des Plaines," Rogers said in a rare interview from Alpharetta, Ga., outside of Atlanta. "I wanted people to know you had to come in, because if you tried to carry a waffle out, it would get a little flimsy."

Rogers merely shifted the ideas that worked at Toddle House, such as waffles with pecans, into the Waffle House concept. He always served lots of grits, which Rogers likes to call "Georgia ice cream." Toddle House also was known for its chocolate pie, drenched with cornstarch and sugar. Toddle House was extinct by the early 1970.

Waffle House is headquartered in Nocross, Ga. Rogers described the chain's geography: "We go up to Indianapolis, out to Ft. Collins, Colo., turn southeast and go down to Phoenix, come back around and go into Delaware and south of Washington, D.C. ... We stay out of cold country because we're 24-hours. When I was with Toddle House, I spent some nights in Cleveland where there was nobody on the streets but me. You have the same expenses, and you're taking in nothing. So we try to stay out of the snow line."

Waffle Houses started in downtowns, but Rogers and Forkner soon moved them out of town around the birth of the interstate highway system. "We have about 20 real estate boys who study this stuff," Rogers said. "Sometimes we put one on the south side of the interstat, then we will go put one on the north side. We have found out that people going north will not go to the other side. So we do well on both sides. We call 'em double-ups."

The diner took the high road during the civil rights movement. During 1961 sit-in demonstrations at all-white restaurants in downtown Atlanta, protesters descended on the Waffle House at Peachtree and 10th Street. Rogers calmed the demonstration by inviting anyone who wanted a bite to eat to come in the store.
Anyone.

Waffle House is a popular fork in the road for minor league baseball teams and country music stars. When Michael Jordan played baseball in Birmingham, Ala., he would lead his teammates into Waffle Houses throughout the Southern League. Regular Waffle House customers include country legend Merle Haggard and actor Billy Bob Thornton. A Waffle House even was featured in a scene in the 2002 Britney Spears movie "Crossroads."

"We're the poor man's Ritz-Carlton," Rogers said. "We've sobered up more drunks at night than the police department. Coffee is our biggest seller. Then waffles. We're the largest T-Bone steak seller in the United States. We like to get you in and out in 22 minutes. Put your watch on next time and if we don't do it, let me know."

In 2000, Rogers wrote a 200-page memoir called Who's Looking Out for the Poor Old Cash Customer?, which was given only to friends. He was born and reared in Jackson, Tenn., and migrated to Memphis, which was home base for Toddle House. There he lived near the corner of Poplar and Perkins, where his neighbor was a pre-Graceland Elvis Presley. "He was a fine gentleman," Rogers recalled. "He'd come into a Toddle House, you'd say something to him and he would stand up. As long as his mother lived, Elvis was in good shape. Elvis couldn't handle it when his mother died."

Rogers never thought Waffle House would last 50 years. "I thought we'd get to 25 and Tom and myself would go fishing," he said with a laugh.

And all that time, Rogers has been loyal to his purveyors. If you laid all the fine hickory-smoked Bryan bacon end-to-end that Waffle House serves in a year, it would stretch from Atlanta to Los Angeles and back seven times (21,000 miles of bacon). Rogers said, "You're going to think I'm crazy, but I hardly buy from somebody I don't fish and hunt with. They become friendly enough with you that if you have problems you sit down and talk about them."

No doubt over a cup of coffee and some grits at the nearest Waffle House.

2:30 p.m. Sat Mar. 28--

Aubrey Mayhew has checked out of the library.
Mayhew, 81, died last weekend at hospice care facility in Nashville.
He was one of the nation's biggest collectors of 1960s JFK memorabilia, with more than 300,000 Kennedy related items in his possession. He was so obsessive about Kennedy, he purchased the infamous Texas School Book Depository at a 1970 auction.

Mayhew also was the left-of-center producer at Little Darlin' Records.
The renegade country label sprang came from the big dreams of the 1960s. Bodacious songs such as Stonewall Jackson's "Pint of No Return," Groovy Joe Poovey's "He's in a Hurry (To Get Home to My Wife)" and Johnny Paycheck's "(Pardon Me) I've Got Someone to Kill" were drenched in steel guitar, edgy vocals and pop-top bass.
I spoke with Mayhew in 2005 when Koch Records/Nashville reissued the Little Darlin'
catalog. Here's some excerpts from a very memorable conversation...........

"Clint always said he was a singer," Mayhew told me. "But he got trapped into doing an album by some slick guys in Philadelphia. This is when he was doing the 'Rawhide' thing." In 1961, the singing cowboy got off to an inauspicious start when he cut the country-pop single "Unknown Girl" that was more Bobby Goldsboro than Clint Eastwood. "That put a bitter taste in his mouth," Mayhew said.

Eastwood decided to give music another try when an industry friend told Eastwood that Mayhew could be trusted. By 1970, Little Darlin' had morphed into Certron Records. And so Eastwood went to Nashville to cut the Certron single "Burning Bridges," featured in his movie "Kelly's Heroes" (which also co-starred roots singer Harry Dean Stanton) and "six or eight other things," according to Mayhew.

"Little Darlin'" started out as a New York-based "hip pocket operation," in Mayhew's words. "Little Darlin' was a country phrase people used," said Mayhew, who hails from Gretna, Va. "Well, maybe I used it more than anybody."

Mayhew was a lifer in the record business. In 1961, he was working at Pickwick Records, then a 99-cent budget line based in New York. Mayhew had heard about a down-on-his-luck Nashville singer named Donald Lytle. After a little investigating, Mayhew found Lytle sleeping under the Shelby Street Bridge in Nashville. He soon changed Lytle's name to the more renegade-sounding Johnny Paycheck. (The first Johnny Paycheck was a Des Moines boxer who was one of Joe Louis' tomato cans in his "Bum of the Month" fights.)

With Paycheck on board, Mayhew asked Pickwick to start a country label. "They didn't want to do it, but they allowed me to release a record ['The Girl They Talk About'] with him, which got some action," Mayhew said. "Then we recorded 'A-11' in New York with George Jones' band. That took off and that's when I started building Paycheck."

After "A-11" hit, Mayhew quit Pickwick and set up his own office in New York, and then in 1966 moved to Nashville, where he formally launched Little Darlin'.

While at the label, Paycheck wrote "Apartment #9," which became a huge hit in December 1966 for Tammy Wynette. Mayhew and Paycheck also wrote "(Pardon Me) I've Got Someone to Kill."

"I didn't want to do what anybody else was doing, so we came up with the most extreme things we could," said Mayhew, who lived and worked in the renovated Roxy movie theater in East Nashville during the time of our conversation. "Most of it came natural. Paycheck was a writer like Hank Williams. Williams was a songwriting icon, but he didn't write songs. Fred Rose [Williams' publisher] wrote songs. Williams had great ideas but he didn't know how to complete them. Fred would finish them up. That was like Paycheck. He was one of the best songwriters I ever met, but he was so loose and unsettled that he didn't have the patience to finish the songs."

Paycheck died in February 2003, after a long battle with emphysema. He was 64.

Paycheck did his share of hell-raising. Mayhew wrote "The Pint of No Return," which would become a signature song for Stonewall Jackson, after a night out with Paycheck. Early in his career, Paycheck was playing a nearly empty club in Secacaus, N.J. "Two girls were at a table and I went over and started talking to them," Mayhew said. "During his break, Paycheck came over. We all ended up going out after the show. Paycheck was driving. We had no idea where we were. We went down this long road and came to a pier on the seashore. It was 5 in the morning. There was a sign that said 'Point of No Return.'

"I looked at Paycheck, he looked at me. He was drunk. I wasn't. I said, 'Paycheck, you've just reached the pint of no return.' We took the girls home, went to the hotel and wrote the song. It had to be pretty important to turn down two pretty-looking women."

The ringer of the Little Darlin' reissues was "The Little Darlin' Sound of Stonewall Jackson (The Mighty Stonewall Jackson Sings Modern Hits & Original Favorites)." Now 77, Stonewall Jackson -- his real name -- occasionally still appears at the Grand Ole Opry.

"He was with Columbia for years and put out over 60 albums," Mayhew said. "I revived Little Darlin' in 1979 after it laid dormant for 10 years. Nothing was happening with Stonewall, so I asked if he'd like to start recording again. He's pure country. I wanted to change him to the outlaw image, which was the thing going in country music at the time. I gave him a big black cowboy hat. We gave him different songs. And, boy, he resisted all of that."

Jackson was assigned to sing "Spirits of St. Louis," "Alcohol of Fame," Mayhew and Paycheck's "We're the Kind of People That Make the Jukebox Play" and Jackson's own "Listening to Johnny Paycheck."

Jackson, who has lived in the Nashville area since 1956, now lives on a 27-acre gentleman farm in Brentwood, Tenn., purchased from crooner Eddy Arnold. In a separate interview, Jackson recalled with a sigh, "Oh, the boy from New York [Mayhew]. I didn't like that hat they put on me. It looked like I had been out on the range for quite some time. But I didn't mind the songs much. I wrote 'Listening to Johnny Paycheck' because an attitude like 'Take That Job and Shove It' could get you in a lot of trouble in real life. You can get in trouble listening to Paycheck.

"'The Pint of No Return' goes along with country music. Hank Williams would have loved that song. My first No. 1 record was 'Life to Go' [1958] that talked about the honky tonk in town. There was a time at the Opry when they frowned about you singing anything about drinking."

Conversely, Little Darlin's reissues with Lightnin' Hopkins were modest field recordings that Mayhew made in 1968-69 with Hopkins when he was living in Houston. "I cut five albums on him," Mayhew said. "It's good stuff nobody has heard. It's just him and his guitar. There's a lot of conversation on it. I couldn't convince him I was from Nashville. He always thought I was from New York, so he wrote a song called 'The Man From New York.'

As fate would have it, the Man from New York was in Houston in November 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. At the time, Mayhew was working for the New York-based Diplomat Records. "I was staying at the Shamrock Hotel in Houston, trying to buy some George Jones tapes from Pappy Daily [the owner of Jones' Starday record label]," he said. "The Kennedy assassination happened right there on television. I immediately called a friend in Houston, who brought over two tape recorders and all the tape he could carry.

"We recorded everything off the television for about 12 hours. I rushed the material back to New York, and we put out the first 'Kennedy Speeches' album. At that time, we had 300 Woolworth stores in our pocket. We got prime display. We sold about 3 million albums in four months."

This incident led Mayhew to his affinity for Kennedy memorabilia. His prize possession is the Texas School Book Depository. "Why did I buy it?" he asked me. "It was a premium item for my collection. I paid $600,000 for it."

Mayhew removed the original window where Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly shot Kennedy. Mayhew claims the window is stored in Nashville, but some in Dallas argue that it is not the original window. "There's a debate over everything in life," Mayhew said emphatically. "I don't lie! I don't cheat! I don't steal! I saw them take that window out."

In a somewhat ironic footnote, Mayhew began his Kennedy collection by purchasing hundreds of metal objects that were created with JFK's likeness. It made sense for a rebel country producer with an extreme sense of mettle.

At the time of his death Mayhew was involved in a lawsuit with Caruth Byrd, who argued that he inherited the book depository window from his father, who owned the Texas School Book Depository building and removed the window shortly after the assassination. Mayhew argued he had the true window because the elder Byrd removed the wrong one. According to the Associated Press, Paul Fourth, Mayhew's attorney said his client did not leave a will. The trial in Dallas was recently delayed until April.

Former Little Darlin' singer Dugg Collins told me about Mayhew's passing. He wrote, "'No will' says it all about the way Aubrey lived his life. He figured he'd live forever and didn't anyone to take care of things. That's one of the reasons he lost all rights to everything Little Darlin' He was trying to be his own lawyer.
"May he rest in peace. I knew him for 40 years and got along with him for 32 of those years. Like most of his relationships, he drove me away, too."