The Story of The Stools

The story of The Stools is a long and disturbing fish hatchery of lies and cruel treacheries, almost as protracted and slimy as the story of Rock Music itself, and just a full of bottom-feeders, chondrichthians and aborted roe as your standard creche nursery. The logical place to start this fish tale is in 1956 with the release of the band’s first long playing album, Draconian Messures (sic), if for no other reason than Dutchco Music is releasing remastered versions of the entire Stools catalog with the hopes of introducing The Stools to a new generation of fans and milking a dead horse one last time.

Originally, the ten tracks on Draconian Messures were released by Dutchco Music on January 27, 1956. Unfortunately, that was the same day as the giggling epileptic hillbilly Elvis Presley released his first ‘pop’ single, Heartbreak Hotel, and since Elvis had just jumped ship from cotton fields of Sun Records to the big house of RCA he was able to tap into the power of appearing on network TV’s Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s Stage Show to help move units, so Elvis stole a lot, if not all, of The Stools thunder.

Heartbreak Hotel, of course, was a total sham itself and holds the honor of being one of the biggest mendacities in Rock’s prevaricated history. The song was written by Tom Durden, a former sharecropper and steel guitar player with Smilin’ Jack Herring and his Swingbillys. Hoyt Axton’s mom, Mae, heard it and got Durden to slap her name on it in exchange for the promise to get the song to Hank Snow. She was working for the fish bellied Colonel Tom Parker at the time as Hank Snow’s publicist.

Snow passed on the song, along with another of Parker’s acts, Glenn Reeves, but Axton finally got the song to Elvis who liked it and wanted to cut the record as a single, but Parker would only let Presley record Heartbreak Hotel if Elvis’ name was added as a third writer on the tune. Durden, knowing a third of something is better than half of nothing, agreed.

Glenn Reeves has sung on a demo of the song before he turned it down. That was the tape Elvis heard and he aped Reeves’ delivery on his recording of the hit.

Tom Durden continued to write songs, some of which Axton would continue to slap her name on, like Honey Bop that Wanda Jackson recorded in 1960; and he played steel guitar with Tex Ritter and Johnny Cash’s bands.

Axton weaseled her name onto hundreds of other songs, including Burton Levy’s Pick Me Up On Your Way Down (she also got Glenn Reeves credit for this one, hoping he would turn it into a hit, but Patsy Cline had the most luck with it). Of course, Levy had lifted the idea for the song from Harlan Howard, but let us not even open that can of worms…

Anything else you might have heard about the writing of the song Heartbreak Hotel is pure mythmaking, which, of course is the wry spine on which the rotting carcass of Rock rests… But we’ll leave the alliteration to the hair farmers in the English Department and return to the terse style of prose you kids seem to love because the story of The Stools won’t be complete until we’ve gnawed on its pointy skull one last time.

The trick here, with a story like this, is to avoid leaning perilously close to the wide open crevasse of blathering fandom and being sucked into the maul, which I can pretty much warranty won’t happen, because I never particularly cared for the band. Sure, their first dozen records or so contain the seeds of what rock and roll is, and conceivably will ever be, but is that enough? Fronted by a brooding hulk of a man, Elvin Anderson, who’s voice wasn’t so much of a rasp, but a din trapped somewhere between the croaking of Clarence “Frog Man” Henry and squeak of the popular Cowboy actor Andy Devine.

The Indonesian music quarterly, Jayus, summed Anderson’s voice up as, “(His) rough, expressive, so ugly it’s beautiful vocals simply obliterate musical and social boundaries.” But then, the Indonesians are well intentioned people but are also known for not just putting lipstick on pig, but buying the swine dinner and taking it out for a shopping spree like a montage from the movie Pretty Women…

The British Press weren’t as charitable, Boost Magazine saying at the time, “If you’re a fan of great singing, I don’t suppose you will make it through this song” and the BBC placed it on its “restricted” play list as “offensive to the ear”, which actually may have helped move more units in England as now it was ‘taboo’.

The other two members of The Stools were no bargain either. Antonio Moretti, a saxophonist who seemed to want to be anywhere other than were the band was at the moment, and Cosmo Ditmar, the mysterious guitarist, an enigma wrapped in a crippling drug addiction. Not the most promising foundation on which to build a legend, but their manager/producer/pimp Al Floss seemed to have seen something in them, and as Floss so famously said, ‘I could make a million dollars if I could just find a dumb white singer I could exploit like a dumb black guy”. Well, he found one, in fact, he found three; and exploit he did, for the next fifty years.

The music was one thing. It was Rock after all, the Wild West as it were, and anything goes in Rock because nobody knows anything about what it is supposed to be, no matter how many times they’ve had a long weekend at Jann Werner’s place in the Hamptons, but with The Stools there is also the humor. As Trill Magazine said upon the album’s release, ““The Stools have shattered the cliches of the past, hopefully they don’t slide into cliches of their own making over the next couple of years, if we’re lucky enough to have them that long.”

Or as Nonet Magazine noted, “Even The Stools most serious songs are peppered with hilarious off-hand comments and commentary.”

It was hard not to like the band’s cheek at the time, but it was almost as if they worked over-time to avoid their own cliches, making them impossible to Pidgeon hole, which, as any student of marketing knows, can be a problem.

Speaking of marketing, the misspelt title of the debut album should be addressed: Al Floss (owner/operator of Dutchco Music) gave his eight-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Alice, the task of designing the cover for Draconian Measures, a brilliant pun from the mind of Antonio Moretti, stumbled across while spit-balling album title ideas at the copper topped bar at The Ransom Hotel.

Young Alice Floss found the photo of her stepmother while rummaging around in her father’s desk and mocked up the cover, spelling Antonio’s title as best she could. Al Floss, busy with other matters, glanced at his child’s artwork and approved it without processing any of the information, a Floss trait. Although this wasn’t just a ham-handed drawing destined for the refrigerator door, it was The Stools debut release on Dutchco Records, and album we’d be talking about decades later and the nadir of laziness on the producer’s part. Also, a Floss trait.

In fact, it is open to debate whether or not Floss even listened to the music on the album, which he supposedly produced, before releasing it. Floss was a salesman, and prided himself on being able to, as he would often say, ‘sell soap to a Canadian’. It didn’t matter what was on the disc, Floss knew he could move units.

The Floss penned liner notes on the back of the album jacket support the theory that he had no idea what songs were pressed into the vinyl:

“You only get one chance at your first time. You hold in your hands your first chance to hear America’s Greatest Garage Band, THE STOOLS! This is the band all your friends will be talking about next week, but you’ve got them now. Be selfish with them while you can, because once the genie is out of the bottle, there will be no stopping them. In fact, you could be ‘that kid’. The one that’s in the know. The hep cat. All your friends will be able to say that you are the one that turned them on to THE STOOLS… but only if your buy this album right now!”

It worked and Draconian Messures moved between 50,000 and 100,000 units in the first month alone, thanks in no small part to the single, Drink Until You Want Me. We’ll get more into the that song, and all the others, in just a little bit, but let’s take a break, for those in the back of the room with short attention spans, and give a listen, shan’t we?