November | 2007 | I, Dynamo

The Ballad Of Bobby And Albert

November 30, 2007

The Ballad Of Bobby And Albert

by

R.E. Prindle

For some reason the notion has grown that Folk music erupted in 1958 with the Kingston Trio’s version of Tom Dooley. I don’t understand this. We sang Folk and Old Timey all the way through grade school. Grade school ended for me in 1950. Folk music was always a conscious part of my life. I grew so tired of singing Go Tell Aunt Rhody and She’ll Be Comin’ Round The Mountain that I shouted for joy upon hearing The Weaver’s sing On Top Of Old Smokey and Goodnight Irene.

That was in the days of ‘Your Hit Parade’. That show was a key program before TV wiped programmed radio off the Networks. They thought radio was dead. Didn’t think anyone would listen to music twenty-four hours a day. We not only did that but we listened to the same four songs over and over in fifteen minute segments. They called it Top Forty but I remember it more like the Top Four. When one song wore out they plugged in another one and kept going. Of course that was only temporary; things evolved fast.

Folk and Folk related music was a strong stream all through the fifties. Burl Ives was the rage for a while but you can only get so far on Jimmie Crack Corn And I Don’t Care and The Blue Tail Fly. Tennessee Ernie Ford and his Sixteen Tons was as close as you could get to Folk without actually stepping over the line. Harry Belafonte occupied the mid-fifties as a Folksinger, academic quality, with his stupid Mark Twain. In a more pop vein Mitch Miller churned out stuff like She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and The Bowery Grenadiers. I didn’t care for it at the time but his sing along stuff is pretty good.

Who can forget the greatest of them all with his fabulous hit tune The Rock Island Line in 1955. The Great

The Great Lonnie Donegan

Lonnie Donegan. The song was played once every fifteen minutes around the clock on every station for a couple of weeks. I once artfully shifted stations so that I got to hear the song seven times in a row. Lonnie Donegan could sing circles around the entire Greenwich Village crowd including any number of Dylans. He was very successful in combining a listenable approach to a trad style. All the trad stuff done trad style was OK for the enthusiasts but had no commercial potential. None of the Greenwich Village crowd had a future except Dylan. Even the best of them, Fred Neil, fell flat.

Fred Hellerman of the Weavers was musical advisor to the Kingstons who merely continued the Weavers’ tradition. The music that Bob Dylan tuned into in 1959 had been an established fact for ten years or better. His future manager Albert Grossman had established the premier folk venue, The Gate Of Horn in Chicago the year before while helping to establish the Newport Folk Festival in 1959

The trad folk types were running the Village by the time Dylan got there. Some people liked the traditional style, they usually smoked pipes. I can handle it but I don’t like those precious antiquarian stylists; I much prefer the pop styles of the Kingstons and the Chad Mitchell Trio. Did you ever listen to Terry Gilkyson and the Easy Riders? Pozo Seco Singers?

It didn’t take Dylan long to understand that the way to success was through the pop style rather than the trad. Thus Dylan as a folk act can be classed with the Kingstons, the Mitchell Trio and The New Christy Minstrels.

His muse, however, spoke with a purer voice; the muse belonged to him, he said, or at least she shacked with him for a couple years before moving on. As talented as Dylan was in those years he did not make it alone. As he said, he wanted to sing to people on his own wavelength. That was a small audience.

While he was shifting the dial to the high numbers at the right hand side of the band he passed through the broad band. In order to get to his own audience he had to appeal to a broader cross section; so he wrote stuff like Blowin’ In The Wind.

As someone who was there at the time I had to roll my eyes at the song’s obviousness while Bob’s vocals drove me up the wall. The sales figures for the first three or four albums bear me out.

So how did Bob get from there to superstar? Two words- Albert Grossman. This article might be subtitled: The Genius And The Promoter. For that brief one or two year period Bob turned out generalized songs that caught the spirit of the g-g-generation. It is questionable how far the songs would have gone had not the promotional genius of Albert Grossman seized the main chance.

Grossman would be as fascinating a study as Bobby. While Dylan has gotten all the credit his early career was in fact a fifty-fifty partnership with Albert.

Bob had no business sense, still doesn’t; nor should any artist be expected to. Everyone would have

The Manager

stolen him blind. It’s the music business. The performers about him either professed to reject financial success because they couldn’t find the handle or may have been so purist that they actually despised the money. Sorta hard to believe but that’s the way they talked.

Now, Albert not only saw the financial potential of the caterwauling Dylan but more importantly he foresaw that phonographs records would be the medium of expression for the entire generation. Records were how the generation would communicate. Rather than looking back at what the recording industry had been he looked foward to what it would be.

Noting the song writing potential of the 1962-63 Dylan he determined to make Bob the keystone of his grab for the golden ring. He succeeded in capturing Bob. He had his keystone but he lacked the supports. He’d already thought that out working at it from the time he founded the Gate of Horn. Having gotten himself a fecund folk style songwriter he now needed a sweet singing Top 40 folk style group a la the Kingston Trio. The latter was perhaps the easiest part of the equation.

Secure in his source of material Albert organized the commercial sounding folk group called Peter, Paul and Mary, three former purists who opted for the cash. Packaging a sound for his group was relatively easy. Taking the songs of his keystone he had them set to pretty three part harmonies. Presto! Albert had dumped the harsh cacophony of Dylan and the songs shone.

Parts one and two of his plan were complete. He had partnered himself with Dylan and he owned Peter, Paul and Mary. The rest fell into place. The public was entranced by the songs of Bob Dylan; now they wanted to know who the writer was. Essentially the singer-songwriter was called into existence by demand. Albert put his publicity act in motion. It is doubtful that he knew how Dylan would respond but Dylan’s mysterioso act was perfect for the times while being executed to perfection. Albert’s keystone captured the imagination of the world.

As a genius promoter Albert understood his contribution to the equation. Albert engineered Bobby’s success while with an artist’s ego Dylan totally underestimated Albert’s contribution. Nevertheless Albert Grossman wanted his fair share which he calculated as much higher than the established ten percent for perfunctuory management while probably going over the line of fair which a promoter’s ego will.

The structure of the contemporary music business was in its formative stages. Albert was a presage of the future. He formed groups with an identity in which he took only fifty percent, but the groups were his creation he was entitled to it. Later the artists would simply be put on salary. By the end of the century when the music industry had evolved, his successors concceived a group concept from start to finish providing concept and songs while merely hiring some musical working stiffs, probably not all that musical, just stiffs. The performers were interchangeable like members of a sports team. Heck they didn’t even play or sing they just danced to records. It didn’t matter whether one or more or the whole group was replaced. The performers had no talent merely acrobatic skills. Promotion had evolved since Albert.

Bob and Albert Out On Highway 61

Albert understood the artistic ego but too well. Two colossal ambitions came into collision.

One of the first things Albert did when he captured Bobby was to buy back the publishing from M. Witmark. He then set up a new publishing company, Dwarf Music, in which he gave himself a fifty percent interest. At first glance fifty percent looks like he really took advantage of Bobby.

Certainly he was underhanded. Remember, this is only the record business and Albert was relatively honest. He never explained himself to Bobby. He did go to lengths to conceal the fifty-fifty split from Dylan. Albert Grossman was after all a promoter. The record industry itself will never get high marks for probity. The equation for theft is when one group controls the money and the other group provides the product.

The question here is not whether Albert stole from Bobby in the sense of juggling the accounting, you can be sure Albert took advantage of his position, but whether he cheated Bobby by taking a fifty percent interest in Dwarf is open to qestion.

I don’t think so.

It is hard to believe that Bob Dylan would have amounted to much if Albert Grossman hadn’t been a promotional genius who recognized the potential which no one else, in fact, could see.

Of course, today, long after the fact, Dylan’s genius seems to have ensured success. At the time that genius wasn’t quite so obvious, indeed, I’m not so sure it ever existed.

I wasn’t Johnny on the Spot when it came to recognizing Dylan’s talent. I didn’t hear of him until 1964 when my brother-in-law played the first couple records for me. All I could hear was a guy thwacking away noisily on guitar punctuating his horrid screeching with cacophonous bursts on an harmonica. It might as well have been an air raid.

I was thoroughly repelled. I wouldn’t have listened to Dylan again but my brother-in-law who had a curious ability to scent out the next big thing insisted I listen to what he was saying. ‘The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.’ To be sure. Well, I’m from the midwest too. I recognized the catch phrases; Dylan uses a lot of midwest catch phrases. I still wasn’t impressed.

To me Dylan sounded illiterate. I ask you, what does ‘How many times can a man look up until he sees the sky?’ mean? What does ‘How many seas must a white duck cross before it can sleep in the sand?’ mean? Is there such a thing as a migrating white duck and do they ever sleep in the sand? Am I supposed to let my heart bleed for white ducks who can’t sleep in the sand tonight? The anwer to those questions, my friend, aren’t blowing in the wind.

The guy just said whatever came into his head. After his mind broke in 1966 and his muse left him he came up with ‘Shut the light, Shut the shade, you don’t have to be afraid.’ I mean, shade and fraid do rhyme. I had problems understanding where the talent was.

Protest singer? What’s that to me? I never did march anyway.

If you listen to the 1963 Newport Folk Festival album Dylan’s singing of Blowin’ In The Wind is sandwiched between Joan Baez and the Freedom Singers. Both back Bobby with a religious fervor the song doesn’t bear before launching into an even more religious shouting of We Shall Overcome…Someday.

Masters of War? You’ve got to be kidding? This is a really puerile song. Dylan just said what no one else wanted to put into words, although once said all those Sing Out types seemed to love it. But, does anyone really believe that wars are promoted by a bunch of professional warriors sitting in a room trying to come up with ideas? Before Bush I mean. Is that a valid explanation of how politics work? What happened to Bobby’s notions of ‘fixtures and forces.’

I really couldn’t go with stuff like this.

Impressed more by my brother-in-law’s unerring ability to spot the next big thing than Bobby I went out and bought the records but I didn’t listen to them although I was increasingly impressed by the number of cover versions that were appearing. Albert Grossman was doing that work, not Bobby.

And then Bringing It All Back Home with its vicious sounding title tuned into my wavelength down around 1600. I was one of those confused, accused, misused, abused, strung out ones and worse. I placed myself in the accused, abused and misused categories; A.J. Weberman obviously placed himself with the strung out ones and worse sorting through garbage cans. But, here we have the spectrum of Bobby’s wavelength.

It just keeps right on a hurtin’.

By the time of Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde Bobby was like strong drink to me. I became a bobaholic as he backed deeper and deeper into the inner recesses of his mind where a different logic prevailed in an attempt to narrow his audience as much as possible. Strangely the more he found his own audience the greater his reputation grew.

Even though I became absorbed in Bob Dylan’s ‘genius’ I always remembered those lovely cover versions of his early songs. Don’t you think those Byrds’ covers are too beautiful? I asked myself would I have stuck with Bobby if it hadn’t been for those. I can’t say, but they homogenized Bobby’s quirky personality into a palatable product. When you couldn’t handle Bobby’s Mr. Tambourine Man you could switch to that of the Byrds.

Those cover versions Albert obtained are what made Bob Dylan successful.

Bob wrote them but he had nothing to do with either their placement or production. Bobby’s self appointed ‘partner’ Albert did.

First he created Peter, Paul and Mary. Grossman’s group was the key to Bob’s success. It must be credited

Albert Grossman's Group

to Grossman that he seized the moment. This was his one chance for success and he caught the Golden Ring as it came around. The rest of Grossman’s career was trying to replicate this golden moment and that he could not do although he did have a ‘critical’ success in establishing Bearsville Records. The label turned out some nice stuff including the very lovely catalog of Jesse Winchester.

However Grossman’s success was based on PP&M. Albert cleverly recognized the quasi-religious spirt of the times. While the catchword at the time was ‘God Is Dead’ Albert chose to name his group after three Christian saints. This was mildly off-putting to those of us of the time. Grossman, himself a Jew, had his private joke as these three ‘Christian’ saints were all Jews.

His group started out singing stupid quasi-religious songs like If I Had A Hammer and This Land Is Your Land. Guthrie Stuff. Grossman was actually mired in the tastes of the fifties. This material in itself was off-putting, even though popular, as being too overtly political. PP&M really caught fire when Bobby, Albert’s ace in the hole, came up with Blowin’ In The Wind. The song was still quasi-religious in tone but cleaner and more modern sounding while being, from my point of view, completely apolitical.

Jesse At The Time

After a couple successful covers by PP&M the Byrds came in with really stunning contemporary versions of Bobby’s songs. Within a year or two of that whole albums were issued trying to cash in on Bobby as a songwriter. Barry McGuire ex of the New Christy Minstrels for Chrissakes. Even that embarrassing Sinatra clone, Trini Lopez.

So Albert had turned Bobby’s catalog gold. Not a trick to be despised.

Bobby’s star rose as his reputation as a songwriter rose.

He's On His Way

Albert pushed the envelope to secure as large a portion of the revenues for himself and Bobby as he could. Columbia had conned Dylan into a disadvantageous contract so Albert forced a change. He secured twenty-five percent of the revenues from Bobby’s records for himself which was far in advance of practice. However Albert had been right. Pop album sales which had been miniscule in 1960 burgeoned into a mult-billion dollar segment by the end of the decade. Albert had positioned Bobby to benefit from this huge market.

Albert had bullied Columbia Records, Bobby’s label, into giving him producers who would make the most of his talents. His unusual terroristic tactics threw the fear of god into Columbia’s executives. If Bobby hadn’t signed a new contract, a fairly generous contract, behind Albert’s back Albert probably would have secured an even richer contract. Remember Albert had the incentive of twenty-five percent of Dylan’s record revenues.

One must accept the fact that Albert Grossman managed Bob Dylan’s career to perfection. One must accept the fact tht Dylan would have been worth much less financially, perhaps, worthless without the aid and support of Albert Grossman.

But then, Bob discovered that Albert had, and this is improtant, given himself fifty percent of Dwarf Music not only without telling Bobby but actively preventing his knowing.

Bobby saw only his own genius while ignoring Albert’s. Without thinking it out he chose to feel betrayed. Albert traded on Bobby’s trust but I do not believe Albert betrayed him. I think Albert was the best friend Bobby ever had.

I believe that Albert was entitled to fifty percent of Bobby’s earnings in perpetuity. I’d have to say that Bobby played the churl in not recognizing Albert’s contribution to his success.

Still, Bobby is the artist, Bob Dylan, while Albert is only the promoter, Albert Grossman. Which is the tail and which is the dog? Did you ever see a dog run round and round chasing its tail?

I Ate The Whole Thing

The End.

Posted in Bob Dylan, Greil Marcus, Jews, R.E. Prindle, Uncategorized, Writing | Tagged Albert Grossman, CBS, Columbia Records, Jesse Winchester, Mary Travers, Paul And Mary, Paul Stookey, Peter, Peter Paul And Mary, Peter Yarrow, Sony Records, The Byrds | 14 Comments »

Edgar Rice Burroughs As An Outsider

November 25, 2007

Edgar Rice Burroughs As An Outsider

By

R.E. Prindle

…the great cats roamed this strange valley of the gorillas.

=Edgar Rice Burroughs

And the Great White Ape stood before the wall that surrounded London of Africa. Cats, gorillas, walls, doors, London England deep in the Heart of Darkness…he was the Lord of the Jungle, Tarzan Of The Apes.

Tarzan is alone as usual as was, one suspects, his creator Edgar Rice Burroughs. The year is 1933 both in Burroughs’ imaginary Africa and temporal Los Angeles where the writer plied his trade.

After a lifetime of trying to break into society Burroughs has Tarzan standing outside the wall of London into which he must break like a burglar or thief in the night.

Within the walls is the citadel of ERB’s desires, the great city on the hill, the castle of redemption. Now fifty-eight years old Burroughs had achieved all the material attributes of success only to have the prize dashed from his hands.

Symbolically he enters the castle of his dreams to find instead only a prison. The long climb up the stairway to heaven leads only to jail.

Nineteen thirty-three was the one hundredth anniversary of his father’s birth. The old ghoul who had imprinted him so evilly had come back from the grave to haunt him, to deny him what he had worked so hard to attain.

As in real life where MGM had stripped him of his life’s work in one deft move so now in his imagination his castle was destroyed by a raging fire storm. Symbolically he portrays his relationship with his father as an old coot who had led him around with a halter round his neck. In his great apocalyptic dream ERB reverses the roles and puts the halter about his father’s neck.

Too late ERB realized he had signed away his great creation to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In a desperate attempt to reclaim him ERB formed a movie company in which for a logo he adopted the MGM symbol but replaced the roaring lion, Leo, with an image of Tarzan shouting Tar-man-gan-eeee. ERB failed to detourne the image and MGM added insult to injury by forcing ERB into exile in Hawaii. Now seventy years old our big cat was exactly where he had been in Chicago when he entered manhood- on the other side of the wall. Still outside. It wasn’t supposed to be that way as Burroughs lamented.

How did it come to pass? How could he succeed so magnificently and yet fail so egregiously? How could life treat him so bad. ERB was just born under a bad sign.

His life began propitiously. He was in effect a little prince in his family for his first seven or eight years but then things began to mysteriously unravel and the little prince became a pauper. And that was more or less how ERB explained his life to himself. The three most influential books in his life were Mark Twain’s The Prince And The Pauper, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Owen Wister’s The Virginian.

Burroughs apparently understood his life at least until 1930 in terms of these three books. The Prince became a Pauper then a Prince again. Little Lord Fauntleroy, a disinherited prince lived his young life as a pauper realizing his destiny as a prince at last. These two books were published in Burroughs’ childhood. One assumes he first read them as a boy.

The Virginian was published in 1902. Burroughs said that he had read all three books six or seven times by the early twenties. It is impossible to know when he read The Virginian the first time but as his life was in a turmoil during 1902-03 and ‘04 I wouldn’t think that his first reading was before ‘05 but one can’t be certain.

It would appear that ERB modeled his adult life on Lin McLean, the Virginian.

McLean was essentially a loner who went West to Wyoming much as ERB had repeatedly gone to Idaho. Wister tells the story of the famous Johnson County War through the eyes of his hero, McLean. ERB was in Idaho when the Johnson County War was in progress so Burroughs would have understood the novel with an intimacy denied the rest of us. McLean was a Tarzanic figure who wooed and won a school marm who was culturally far above him. This was perhaps not unlike ERB and Emma. Emma always referred to ERB as a lowbrow.

The most memorable episode in The Virginian is McLean’s marriage. He and his bride honeymoon in the wilds, in romantic scenery quite reminiscent of Burroughs’ dream Africa. Perhaps his taking Emma to Idaho in 1903 was an attempt to recreate this romantic honeymoon. A basis of Tarzan then can be found in Lin McLean the silent Virginian. Also ERB’s apparent vision of himself.

As Burroughs complained that ‘it wasn’t supposed to be like this’ his condition changed began to go wrong about the fifth grade. Here his father began his role as the monstrous ‘God’ of Tarzan And The Lion Man. ERB had attended Brown School up to this point. At this age his father moved him from Brown and sent the young boy to, of all places, a girl’s school. One can only imagine the young boy’s anguish at attending a girl’s school. ERB’s connections with his early schoolmates was disrupted. He had barely begun his tenure at the girl’s school when his father transferred him to a Latin school named Harvard for two and a half years. There is no indication ERB formed any abiding friendships at Harvard School.

While the kids in his neighborhood were walking to Brown everyday ERB was riding his pony alone to Harvard. Undoubtedly the students of Harvard were drawn from all over Chicago so that apart from seeing his fellows in class ERB had little else to do with them.

His father then pulled him from Harvard School sending him off to his brothers’ ranch in Idaho. At this point then he had no contact with his fellow Chicagoans while he was thrown into a delightful situation but one in which he associated with rough cowboys with little education while he attended no school himself.

Why his father was doing this is open to interpretation. Certainly he must have known what the effects would be on his son. His father’s next move was to transfer young ERB to the snobbery of the East at Phillips Academy where he essentially flunked out within a year.

One can only imagine the turmoil in the young man’s mind as he returned to a Chicago he no longer knew and more importantly where no one knew him. It doesn’t seem possible that he could have any but a few acquaintances in Chicago to whom he would still have been a near stranger. So already at sixteen young Burroughs had been placed beyond the pale of society. He was already an outsider. The most he could hope for was to be allowed to return to Brown to finish high school. There at least he had a viable connection with Emma however he would be a rough cut diamond lacking the polish and sophistication that would have appealed to Emma’s father.

Such an opportunity was not to be. At this point ERB’s father placed him in the Michigan Military Academy. ERB described the Academy as a place where parents warehoused their young juvenile delinquents. The resentment is clear in ERB’s attitude. Indeed he rebelled at this latest insult from his, by this time, inscrutable father.

The boy ran away from the MMA returning to his father’s house in Chicago. One wonders if he hopped freights to get there. One can only imagine the anguished pleading of Burroughs as he begged, perhaps on his knees, to be allowed to stay home and attend Brown. His old martinet of a father would have none of it. He packed the boy off again to the Military Academy.

Military Academy! How distasteful the very sound is. To be packed off again to a place where you knew no one and they as ERB believed, were juvenile delinquents. One can only imagine how crushed the boy’s spirit was. He became a class clown. What his fate might have been if his Commandant hadn’t been one who commanded his respect by the name of Charles King one can only guess. King who was not as well remembered by his classmates as he was by Burroughs nevertheless he bucked the boy up perhaps saving his life. At any rate Burroughs developed a dual personality as a class clown while at the same time being responsible enough to lead the football team to undreamed of heights while becoming an outstanding horseman and trick rider.

It was at the MMA that Burroughs formed the only long term friendship of which we are aware; this was a young man from Beatrice, Nebraska by the name of Herb Weston. Weston’s correspondence with Burroughs over the next forty years or so has been preserved for us by Matt Cohen in his book Brother Men.

Burroughs knew Weston only from September to May of the year before he left to join the Army. They saw each other but seldom after that apparently neither corresponding or meeting from 1896 to 1905 or so, but still the friendship flourished in later years.

In 1896 ERB joined the Army requesting the worst post they had and that was willingly given to him. So at this point ERB severed whatever and all ties that he had with anybody. He was the quintessential outsider. He was flying solo.

He apparently took a train to the end of the line wherever that may have been taking a stage coach into his post, Fort Grant, Arizona.

Whatever his fantasy of the Army was he was immediately disabused. He and four other fellows formed an informal club romantically named The Might Have Seen Better Days Club. There’s an element of self pity in the name. It deserves further comment.

The name implies a certain amount of depression. That is implied in Burroughs’ asking for the worst post in the Army. Only one fairly deeply depressed would ask for such a post. It’s the same as the fit of depression in which men used to join the French Foreign Legion.

Burroughs says he joined the Army with the intent of working his way up through the ranks to become an officer. I’m sure it didn’t take long to disabuse himself of that notion. Thus he began to petition his father to get him out of his commitment. His father had enough pull to do so.

So in 1897 he was back on the outside without a plan, presumably just as depressed. At that point in his life he was free to go anywhere, California, New York, the Bay Area, within a year the Yukon Gold Rush would be on. Heck he might even have traveled North with his future hero, Jack London. But ERB took his depression back home to Chicago.

Chicago was his home town but he knew no one there except Emma. ERB went to work for his father. Probably difficult enough but more importantly the office was located on Madison Avenue. That street was the main stem of Chicago’s huge hobo population. These were really outsiders, the men who didn’t fit in to use Robert Service’s memorable phrase.

ERB saw them everyday and must have spoken to many of them, had conversations so that he probably recognized some affinity with them. Hobos would certainly figure large in his writing from time to time.

He undoubtedly fantasized embracing the life of the road and may have on an experimental basis. He was to form a relationship with one of the foremost Hobo poets, H.H. Knibbs later in life. So the pull of the road was there.

He still had no idea what to do with his life. He had joined the Army without telling anyone including his future wife Emma Hulbert. She had sent a letter to him at Fort Grant in September of 1896. When he returned he discovered that he may have been away too long. As improbable as it may sound she was then being courted by a millionaire’s son, Frank Martin. As ERB had no real wish to be married he probably should have let Martin marry Emma.

It seems quite obvious Emma preferred the impoverished ERB to the wealth of Martin. These things obviously do happen. In the denouement thirty-five years later it would have been better for Emma if she had gone with Martin..

At this time ERB chose to return to Idaho. That didn’t work out well so he bounced back to Chicago. Now comes a very critical moment in his life. Perhaps Martin had been on the verge of success with Emma who may have been hurt and confused at the latest abandonment by the man she truly, truly loved.

When Burroughs returned heartening Emma once again Martin very obviously became exasperated at what he considered a bad penny who kept turning up at disadvantageous times.. It appears that he decided to settle ERB’s hash. Martin’s father was a railroad magnate possessing his own private rail car. Martin invited this nemesis of his to take a round trip to New York City with the return trip through Canada and Toronto.

It would appear that he set up a murder attempt to remove his rival in Toronto. On a night on the town in Toronto ERB was either lured into a fight with a couple thugs or accosted by them. The thug delivered a vicious blow to ERB’s forehead with a sap or leaded pipe that ripped his scalp open and laid ERB low.

While the injury was not obvious ERB was seriously hurt. Apparently internal bleeding formed a clot between his forebrain and skull hat had a profound effect on his personality as well as giving him excruciating headaches half the day for every day of his life at least through 1913-14.

Judging from his writing the pressure caused memory lapses during which he was unable to recall people he was familiar with. As this trait would not have been understood ERB was misinterpreted and become even more of an outsider. After his injury in Toronto ERB married Emma probably to spite Martin as he later said he regretted getting married. Nevertheless he now had a wife along with what must have seemed a very peculiar personality.

It is difficult to imagine what options ERB had open to him now that he had to abandon his rough and rowdy ways to take care of his young wife. Working for his father must have been a difficult experiences as it most often is for a son. In addition to that problem ERB came down with typhoid fever. The convalescence completely disrupted his finances. Now having excruciating headaches, a mind that just came and went and no money, no prospects, no future and little hope the man must have been plunged into the depths of despair.

Perhaps in all those Tarzan stories when Tarzan loses his memory they may reflect ERB’s actual experience at this time being periodically bereft of his memory for more or less short periods of time.

Obviously not thinking very clearly he decided to return to Idaho with his new wife and absolutely no prospects of making a living. Well, it worked for the Virginian.

Now, the Yukon Gold Rush had occurred in 1898. Out of that gold rush came a young writer by the name of Jack London. Burroughs was an inveterate reader in those days before movies, TV and radio so that his imagination was fired by London’s stories. London had also been a hobo as a boy.

On the way out to Idaho ERB had Emma riding in an open boxcar so as to comfort their dog. So in his strange way ERB was actually hoboing and doing it with his wife.

Two years later they returned once again to Chicago. Already an outsider ERB now embarked on a career that pushed him further out. Already declassed by his father’s treatment he now declassed himself further by taking an odd assortment of jobs. This period has not been inadequately covered in existing biographies. Perhaps the job that pushed him beyond the pale of social acceptability was his association with a patent medicine man by the name of Stace. Patent medicines were among the most disreputable vocations a man could have. ‘Snake oil’ pitchmen have been parodied in so many movies one has visions of their being run out of town one step ahead of the sheriff.

Burroughs association with Stace occurred just after the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and an expose of the business by Samuel Hopkins Adams. A most unpropitious time to be in the patent medicine business. Stace was run out of business by the authorities. It was probably at this time that Burroughs picked up his experiences with grand juries and the police that he displays in The Girl From Farriss’s

Rather than dissociate himself from Stace as he should have done ERB joined with him in a successor venture named Burroughs-Stace. This could not have helped his reputation but would have implicated him as a principal in the snake oil outfit. One can only believe that it wasn’t very desirable to know Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Thus as his mind began to jell around the fiction that would make him famous his prospects were getting slim and slimmer. Perhaps he was grooming himself for the solitary profession of writer.

His experiences and reading all came together in 1911 when he wrote and sold his first effort, A Princess Of Mars. Unusually for a new writer he had more than one good story in him so that within two years he had achieved literary success being able to quit his day job to take up writing full time.

2.

By this time ERB had been outside the loop for so long, from the fifth grade on that his behavior was gauche. He didn’t know how to behave or discourse in polite society. So at this point it didn’t matter how much money he made or how famous he became he was truly a man who couldn’t fit in. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his writing.

One is astonished that between 1912 and 1918, a mere six years, Tarzan became a household word. It was that by the time the first movie was released there was virtually no one in America who hadn’t heard the name Tarzan. This is a level of success rarely attained.

And yet one is mystified as to how this came about. Certainly the penetration wasn’t achieved by a pulp magazine like All Story. The fiction magazines while popular had limited distribution. If we are to believe the sales figures Tarzan Of The Apes had substantial success but nothing like the novels of Zane Grey for instance.

His publisher, McClurg’s made no effort to capitalize on the phenomenon. Their hard cover first issue was very limited in numbers going into reprint status almost immediately. At the end of the decade ERB was reduced to urging them to print at least 40,000 copies before they turned a book over for republication. McClurg’s was loath to do so and I have seen no evidence they did. So one has the phenomenon of Tarzan being a household word with no clear evidence of how it came to be.

Today such success would make an author a celebrity yet the evidence is Burroughs was scorned in his own home town of Chicago. The city had a vibrant publishing scene in those days. There were plenty of famous authors in town with clubs and gathering places yet Burroughs apparently was welcome in none of them.

It is true that he was a pulp writer which was the lowest rung on the literary ladder. It is possibly true that he was the first truly imaginative writer in the sense of today’s sci fi, horror and fantasy genres. One may argue that Wells was first and while his stories are highly imaginative they are still extensions of reality.

Burroughs severed the connection with reality; he deals in impossibilities as if they were possible. One can’t stretch reality far enough to possibly cover Mars, Tarzan’s Africa and Pellucidar. They are clearly impossible. The Land That Time Forgot? Get out of here. So, as an originator of something new, a term I hate to use, Burroughs was a pioneer way out in front of the van. Hence he would have been incomprehensible to the average mind. In the language of the fifties he would have been a phenom. Weird, strange and that’s the way he seemed to have been treated.

In today’s terms his personality would have been vulnerable. Already an outsider the doors were politely shut in his face. Indeed, if one reads his stories they are full of closed doors that won’t open or can’t be opened. In Tarzan And The Lion Man, and this is a great scene, one of an array of doors is standing ajar while all the others are shut tight. The one open door is a trap that puts Tarzan in prison.

So we may assume that all doors were closed to him in Chicago. Whether his reputation followed him or his subject matter put people off or a combination of the two ERB was firmly kept outside. Chicago had that unwanted sign upon its heart.

There was one club that was open to Burroughs. That club was a catch all called The White Paper Club that was open to anyone who made marks on white paper. I suppose that could include anyone who intended to write that novel but had yet to put pen to paper.

Thus the man who had created a household word was forced to mingle with anyone who had soiled a piece of paper. Is it any wonder that ERB wanted to move.

Porges records ERB’s farewell dinner as though it were some sort of complimentary send off but Mr. Prindle dissents.

Among a number of unusual things ERB did that I don’t want to go into here was to circulate the story that he was going West to raise prize hogs. Now, Carl Sandburg called Chicago the Hog Butcher to the World. So one wonders what ERB was thinking. He actually did raise hogs at Tarzana but pig farming darn near broke him.

I can only guess what his fellow White Paperers thought but drawn on the menu was a picture of a pig with wings flying West. If I were ERB I might laugh with the fellows but I wouldn’t think it was a very funny joke. After all the phrase ‘when pigs have wings’ means something impossible while if I were ERB I might think that pig meant me and I might think the message was ‘good riddance and keep going.’ But, maybe I’m hypersensitive.

At any rate Burroughs went and he didn’t come back. He never seemed to miss Chicago a lot although there are many references to the city in his later work so he kept a watchful eye on the town.

So, at the age of forty-three ERB began a new life in sunny SoCal. The world had changed: without possibly understanding why there was no place in the new world for people like Edgar Rice Burroughs. Part of his problem was caused by himself. As a newcomer in town ERB took it upon himself to be morally outraged by Hollywood. Hollywood had itself outraged the morals of the nation so the town was tender and sensitive on the subject. By the time ERB published his book in 1923 Hollywood was mired in some serious scandals not least of which was the Fatty Arbuckle murder trials. ERB’s novel discussing the seedier side of Hollywood life offended some sensibilities. As a newcomer to Hollywood the novel, The Girl From Hollywood, was ill considered. While an excellent novel, in the circumstances it had been better left unwritten.

In combination with his novel the political situation of the world had changed. The World Revolution had succeeded in Russia in 1917. Everyone not in sympathy was anathema and ERB was not in sympathy. He was not loath to advertise this fact. Hence the Communists reacted: in the years 1920-24 his novels were neglected in Britain; they were under assault in Germany; his movie revenues dried up in Hollywood while one wonders if his books received the circulation their popularity demanded.

Another social issue forcing him to the outside was his response to a questionnaire forwarded to him from Chicago sent by the American Jewish Committee. The questionnaire apparently wanted to know his opinions on Jews- was he unequivocally a supporter or did he have reservations. ERB had a reservation that was reasonable but not reasonable enough for the American Jewish Committee. ERB was apparently black listed as all income from the movies ceased from 1921 to 1928. Tarzan was persona non gratis in Hollywood.

When his income dried up ERB was no longer able to support his magnificent estate of Tarzana. Thus began years of economic problems. Hollywood does not tolerate economic problems so there is no record of ERB having a social history in Tinseltown.

ERB began having problems with his publishers most likely because of his anti-Red politics. This resulted in his forming his own publishing company in 1930. So, really by 1930 ERB was virtually outside society. Like his creation Tarzan he was backing down a limb followed by a panther. Undoubtedly it was thought that he would fail as a publisher but he didn’t.

His movie fortunes had changed in 1928 when the ‘anti-Semite’ Joseph P. Kennedy, Jack Kennedy’s father, broke the black list and released a Tarzan movie.

This caused a reaction in the Jewish community that apparently sought to undermine the FBO film Tarzan And The Golden Lion that is available today and a very good silent film starring ERB’s son-in-law, James Pierce who draws a mean bow on the cover.

Two quick films were released by a Jewish film company that held the rights to two novels purchased in 1922 but never filmed. One of these is currently available Tarzan The Tiger while the other isn’t. Frank Merrill of Tarzan The Tiger isn’t a bad Tarzan either.

Apparently heads were put together for a long term solution to Burroughs. A plan was put in effect by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, MGM. In 1931 ERB signed a contract with them that virtually stripped him of control of his creation. Although MGM’s 1932 Tarzan Of The Apes was a hit there is good reason to believe it was a clownish attempt to finish the career of Tarzan. No one was more surprised than MGM when the movie became a box office smash. This was the first sound movie and maybe the famous Tarzan yell, that also might have been meant as a joke, put the movie over. But the career of Tarzan was effectively out of Burroughs’ hands. He fought back with a couple really good Tarzan novels. The last of that batch, Tarzan And The Lion Man, ridiculed MGM’s fabled African epic Trader Horn in revenge for MGM’s treatment of Tarzan.

That Burroughs realized he had been frozen out is evident by the scene with which I started this essay where Tarzan is standing outside the walls of London wanting in. This is some of the most masterful writing of a dream sequence imaginable. The room for interpretation is almost unlimited. For this essay I choose to see the scene as representing Burroughs/Tarzan in 1911 when he was standing out in the cold wondering how to be become a success.

Symbolically Tarzan leaps up grasping the down pointed sharpened stakes impossibly lifting himself straight up then rolling forward past the stakes. Burroughs success as a writer was about that impossible and sensational.

Once inside the symbolic London that is populated by a colony of apes who are literal descendants of Henry the Eighth and his court Tarzan skirts the partying crowd to begin a solo attempt to ‘heaven.’ So in real life as Burroughs was shunned by society Tarzan avoids it here. The apes as descendants of Henry the Eighth have been created by a renegade Englishmen known as God to the apes who created them by a process similar to DNA

God’s castle then is known as Heaven and it is that to which Tarzan ascends. As noted earlier he enters a door and is trapped in prison. There is no viable way out so that Heaven is torched going up in flames just as Burroughs career had with the loss of Tarzan. Thus everything Burroughs had worked for for twenty years went up in smoke. This is a very simple interpretation. A more complete one would take fifty or more pages.

Now in control the Judaeo-Communists set about ridding themselves of Burroughs in much the same way, perhaps, that Chicago did.

Burroughs rashly undertook to make his own Tarzan movies. He was led into this disastrous effort by Ashton Dearholt. This man was the husband of Florence Gilbert Dearholt who left Dearholt to marry Burroughs at just this time. Linking up with Dearholt was a recipe for disaster it seems to me.

Burroughs’ venture into film making was disastrous. He had antagonized the radio people so the successful and lucrative Tarzan series were off the air until after his death. His productive years as a writer were behind him so he was almost entirely dependent on MGM for his income. While MGM could have successfully made two or three Tarzan films a year profitably they chose to make a movie only every two or three years keeping Burroughs on a short financial lease.

Unable to sustain a high profile Hollywood life style ERB was forced into exile in 1940 leaving the film capitol for Hawaii.

Thus the process of placing him outside begun in the fifth grade in Chicago was completed in 1940 when he was run out of Los Angeles virtually stripped of his great creation Tarzan.

With their nemesis gone MGM tired of the game giving up the lucrative character a couple years later to Sol Lesser.

Lesser’s Tarzan movies redeemed ERB’s declining years allowing him to return to Los Angeles to quietly live out his life without worries.

I have presented here only as aspect of ERB’s life but in many ways what a life it was. One wonders if ERB was joking when he told a reporter he lived an uneventful life.

The Old Tiger capped his astonishing career in 1950 when he passed to the outside one last time. He passed through an open door that softly closed behind him allowing no return.