Remembering Music Row's Argyle Bell
by Bryce Martin

Argyle Bell (1951-2001)


Argyle made me feel welcome without ever actually welcoming me. I thought of him as being a Yankee by his looks and the fact I think he told me he was from Boston. Maybe even from New York or Jersey, what with the Ramones hair and clothes.

He always seemed in a hurry, as if he was only where he was because he was running late to his real destination. He was like a marathon runner speaking to observers on the sidelines as he trudged on.

I came to Nashville in 1987 and soon after was writer and editor for a Music Row publication called Independent Record Magazine and later called Nashville Inquirer. Argyle liked the fact I had came from Bakersfield, Calif., and that I could tell him things I knew about Clarence White and about Gary Paxton regarding recording ventures in Bakersfield. He mentioned how much he cherished a picture he had of himself with Buck Owens.

I would see Argyle walking the Music Row area much the way did a long and gangly Zac Meadows. Each of them picked up copy, delivered copy, and ran errands in connection with various small publications they were associated with. Argyle was a hustler, but in the old meaning of someone not afraid to wear out some shoe leather to earn a respectable living.

I drank way too much and was, in fact, a common drunk. Argyle once told me when we met on a sidewalk, "Bryce, you drink too much," and walked on. He wasn't walking away because I had consumed too much Schaefer. He was always walking away. The fact he would always remember my name made me feel good. And I knew he really meant that I did drink too much and was concerned for me, though he didn't know me well enough that it should matter to him.

Once, at the Third Coast bar, I saw him walking across an upstairs level. "Oh, he lives up there," another bar sitter said. I thought that was the neatest thing, living right here on Music Row in the middle of such a show. I didn't even know the place had rented rooms, or even that it had an upstairs area. At the Third Coast, he gave me a flyer about a show he was planning involving mainly Clarence White and The Byrds. I thought it a great idea but a bust commercially. I mean you have to hit the public over the head to get their attention and most had no idea who White was or knew much about The Byrds. This wasn't his first year putting it on he would have me to know. Sometimes I rummage through old boxes to see if I still have that old flyer. I haven't found it yet.

The last time I saw Argyle was when I was in a line in Hillsboro Village to go inside the Belcourt regarding an audition for a movie due for shooting in Nashville at the old prison. I had moved from Music Row years before. I saw Argyle, the same old Argyle, the hair, the slim-legged black pants from the 60s, bustling along like in the old days. I didn't want to lose my place in line, or holler out, so I just watched as he turned a corner and disappeared. Not long after, he was gone. I wish now I had left my place and joined him for a while. We could have talked on the run, as in days of old. I bet he would have still remembered my name. "Take care, Bryce," he would have said as we parted paths.

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Some memories stick like gum on a hot sidewalk, or:
Random ruminations while wondering whatever happened to Wonderful Monds

by Bryce Martin

Some baseball anecdotes and oddities stick with you over the years like gum on a hot sidewalk. Here are some of my favorites:

Hall of Fame knuckleball pitcher Hoyt Wilhelm debuted at age 28 with the New York Giants in 1952. He hit a home run in his first at bat, and a triple his second time at the plate. In a fluttery career spanning 21 years and 432 total at bats, Wilhelm never homered or tripled again.

While warming up in the bullpen, then-Dodgers pitcher Jim Brewer was the target of a heckler.

"Hey, Brewer, why don't you go back to the copper mines in Oklahoma."

Brewer, not looking where the words came from, responded, "They don't mine copper in Oklahoma."

The sucker bit. "What do they mine?"

Said Brewer, "They mine their own business."

Outfielder Mickey Rivers was talking bad about his former teammate Reggie Jackson to a reporter. Informed that Jackson had a reputed IQ of 160, Rivers asked, "Out of what, a thousand?"

Identify this mystery voice: "What's the static's on this boy, Pee Wee?"

Credit sportscaster Red Barber with this one: "Baseball is only dull to dull minds."

A wooden baseball bat is likely to break if held in any rotation other than where, when held straight out, you can read the trademark. That is why you used to always see hitters slightly rotating the bat and adjusting their grip at the dish. "You've got your trademark turned down," a catcher jostled Hank Aaron. "I didn't come here to read," Aaron shot back.

While pitching for the Texas Rangers, Don Durham told me Manager Billy Martin requested he hit a player. Not unusual, except it was the runner at second base he wanted Durham to plunk.

Pitcher Don Dennis was the first (and maybe only) player to ever hit a baseball to the roof of the Houston Astrodome, a distance of -- if memory serves -- 160 feet. He did it with a fungo bat in pre-game warm-ups.

Credit outfielder Glenn Burke with introducing the "high five" to the annals of sports history. It was less than monumental when he slapped palms with Dodgers teammate Dusty Baker in 1977 after Baker homered, but it is now part of the ritual.

Voice: Dizzy Dean asking TV-boothmate Pee Wee Reese to give him some statistics.

By Bryce Martin
First Published: 8/22/2002

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VP Search for McCain No Problemito
by Bryce Martin

I read (as in "reed" and not "red") where so-called GOP presidential candidate John McCain is mulling over a choice for running mate. Any possible vice-president pick would have to share his views, he said.

Okay, how about the obvious choice, Ted Kennedy?

If you're in for a dime, you're in for a dollar.

Or, to coin a new phrase, if you're in with slime, wallow in slime.
...

The movie "Semi-Pro" is wrong from the git-go
by Bryce Martin

Listen, I realize Will Farrell is no great actor. He can hide behind that lack of distinction by being known as a comedian. His greatest acting job thus far was when he convinced thousands of NASCAR fans he was laughing with them and not at them. Well, maybe that didn't take all that much skill. After all, they are NASCAR fans.

I won't be seeing Farrell's new movie, Semi-Pro, but it has struck a nerve nonetheless.

I can see now how Farrell is able to play the clueless bumpkin over and over in one disposable movie after another. Just take any one of his movies, once you've bought and viewed it, and plunk it in a sink of warm water and it will dissolve before your eyes like a foam dinner plate. The reason why Farrell is so good at being permanently OTL is because he apparently is. I've seen the mini-interviews where he touts Semi-Pro as being authentic in detail and a sort of time capsule of the era captured on celluloid.

What hogwash. The most un-authentic part about the movie is its title. It's a movie about the old American Basketball Association (ABA), which was a professional league and not a semi-pro league. That's not just my opinion, it's a fact. It's not even up for debate.

For years I have battled Average Joes who refer to players on minor league baseball teams as "semi-pros." Even some old-timers I read about who actually played professional minor league baseball back in the, say, the 1950s, refer to that experience wrongly as "semi-pro." It's not just minor league baseball of course, it's about any professional minor league team or player. Mr. AJ (Average Joe) thinks anything less than major league is semi-pro, which is just not true and is highly inaccurate and a slam against those who were and are pros and not semi-pros.

The guy who pitches for a fast-pitch softball team on weekends and who gets gas, meal and motel money for weekend out of town tournaments is a semi-pro.

It's a battle I will never win, educating the American public. Especially now that Will Farrell has set me back another 10 years or so.

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When "gospel rock" was an oxymoron
by Bryce Martin

It's the Devil's music with the Lord's chorus serving as counterpoint.

That might be my definition for the music genre known as "Christian rock" or "gospel rock." It, to me, is still an odd combination of words and an even more odd genre of music. When I first heard the term, I was stymied. Surely, it was an oxymoron, in the vein of "dry ice" and "jumbo shrimp," or everybody's favorite, "military intelligence." Rock 'n' roll was the Devil's music, birthed, bought and paid for in the 1950s, so why kowtow to it? Why humor it? Dismiss it outright and be gone with it.

In a recent newspaper filler, I read that the man who invented the genre had moved on to that rockin' band of angels in the sky, presumably. I imagine that history will little note nor long remember Larry Norman ("Christian rock pioneer Larry Norman dies at 60"; Tennessean; February 27, 2008). Norman, as noted in the small article, was inducted into the Gospel Hall of Fame in 2001. But it was his 1969 album Upon This Rock that introduced the concept of Christian rock and the act that prompted his title as "father of Christian rock."

Christian-themed lyrics to Chuck Berry chords or a Bo Diddley beat.

Even a casual historian on the subject of rock 'n' roll music knows the genre owes a kinship to blues and gospel music. Some oldtime gospel songs even long before Elvis rocked in a way that Elvis was to rock later on. Elvis, in fact, received much of his music tutelage as a young churchgoer.

It gave me goosebumps to hear hundreds of combat boots stomping in an unrehearsed, completely inspired unison/cadence in my place of order in the balcony of a large chapel while our godforsaken pitiful selves sang "Onward Christian Soldiers" each Sunday in U.S. Marine Corps boot camp in San Diego in 1964.

The sound was there then -- and had been around for who knows how long -- many of us just didn't know it.

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Suicide Bombers dumber than dumb
by Bryce Martin

Now we find out that the Feb. 1 market bombings in Iraq carried out by women suicide dingdongs were females who did not have Down syndrome as originally reported, that they were not women with that disability who killed innocent people and themselves in the name of their religion.

I suspected as much. People I have known with Down syndrome were smarter than that.
...

Turnip Truck Talk

I was amused when Oprah Winfrey seemed shocked that many weeks after she endorsed Barack Omama she couldn't believe people felt she did it because he was black. Imagine that. Blacks vote for democrats (read liberals) at a 90+rate. (No bloc of voters would vote that high a percentage on the sun rising in the east each morning in the U.S. of A.). Plus, Omama is a strict liberal, with nothing new on the same old liberal agenda we haven't heard for years. It's not like she can say she offered her support because he is a fresh voice.
...

The Real George

"Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi."

George Orwell, October 1941
...

Favorite Recordings

Take Five
Dave Brubeck Quartet
1961

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Gene Pitney
1962

Soulful Strut
Young-Holt Unlimited
1968

The Poor People of Paris
Les Baxter
1956

Cherry Bomb
John Mellencamp
1987

Hot Rod Hearts
Robbie Dupree
1981

Blinded by the Light
Manfred Mann
1977

Pancho & Lefty
Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard
1983

Somethin' Else
Eddie Cochran
1959

I Love L.A.
Randy Newman
1983

In the Mood
Ernie Fields
1959

Tusk
Fleetwood Mac
1979

For a Few Dollars More
Ennio Morricone
1967

A Whiter Shade of Pale
Procol Harum
1967

Topsy II
Cozy Cole
1958

Roll Truck Roll
Red Simpson
1966

Tequila
The Champs
1958

Made in Japan
Buck Owens
1972

Slow Motion
Wade Flemons
1959

Pretty Baby
Jimmy Thurman
1959

Sugar Town
Nancy Sinatra
1967

Patricia
Perez Prado
1958


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