Spy Der Spider

OKLAHOMA CITY –  Just last night, I was researching background on a band I liked in college named Dillon Fence. They were a likable, indie-rock outfit out of North Carolina. I caught them in early ’93 when they played the Georgia Theatre in Athens with Dreams So Real.

While researching Dillon Fence, I learned that Dillon Fence and the lead singer, Greg Humphreys, contributed music to a low-budget horror film titled Immortal.

While the movie apparently was seen by maybe two people in 1995, the synopsis on IMDB is interesting. A rock guitarist discovers he’s a vampire – and immortal – and he is struggling to understand his bloodlust. There are plot issues related to a mysterious pocket watch and a train crash.

The audience is essentially told that the guy – named “Dex Dregs” – can’t die and quits his band, playing the streets for loose change. A rather sad story, really. He is immortal but essentially miserable.

Oh, and Dillon Fence? I listened to their best album, Rosemary, released in 1992. It opens, appropriately enough, with a song titled “Daylight.”

LITTLE BASTARD

Again, I have not seen Immortal. I did not even know it existed until last night – last night, when I went to bed thinking how the next day – September 30^th – was the 67^th anniversary of actor James Dean’s death in a horrific car crash, while driving to a race in Salinas, California. It was in his Porsche Spyder, nicknamed “Little Bastard.”

I became a bit obsessed with the James Dean car crash legend in the mid-1980’s after reading a Sunday strip from the comic Bloom County. Essentially, readers are told of the backstory of “Bill the Cat.” The off-putting orange cat – a mangier, uglier version of Garfield, essentially – is a celebrity who takes things too far and is killed on September 30, 1983 when he drives his Ferrari 140 miles an hour into a cactus. Later, Bill’s tongue is found and a Bloom County character is able to clone Bill.

I later learned that Bloom County creator Berkeley Breathed was alluding to James Dean driving 85 mph and into oblivion and immortality.

It is said that Dean’s “Little Bastard” lived up to its name, even after Dean’s death and for years to come. People who came into contact with parts from the Spyder would end up dead.

There was a curse on that car. Even Alec Guinness, the actor who played Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars (which I just rewatched the other night, focusing on Guinness’s performance, oddly enough) met Dean shortly before his death. “The Force” – or something – warned Guinness not to take a ride with the Rebel Without A Cause actor, because death would soon follow.

And Guinness would be proven correct. There was something about the “Little Bastard” that was wrong. Evil. And it was a “Spyder.” That is a word that had been coming up a lot lately, as well. I was thinking how the “der” in “Spyder,” could be turned around to “red.” A “Red Spy.” And in 1955 America, “red spies” were being hunted down.

TURNING ON

So, the first thing I thought of this morning, when I awoke, was that today was James Dean’s death day and about that word – “Spyder.”

I walked to the living room and did something I normally don’t do – I turned on the television.

Why? Well, something compelled me to do it, because on the screen was James Dean and his Porsche Spyder!

It was unbelievable. It was a Brad Meltzer’s Lost History episode from 2014 about James Dean’s cursed car!!! It was airing on one of the local channels and seemed too bizarre for words. Were they airing it because today was Dean’s death day?

“His death car took on a life of its own. It’s known as the cursed car,” says one of the car enthusiasts featured in the episode.

It notes that after car designer George Barris (who died on November 5, 2015 – just short of his 90^th birthday – and a date Back to the Future fans are familiar with) had the car after Dean’s death, as a warning to people about unsafe driving. But by 1960, the remnants of “Little Bastard” were gone. They remain missing to this day.

The thing about this is that it was an episode about the alleged rocks from the Moon missing. The James Dean part of the show was in the final 10 minutes. And I just happened to turn on the TV right as it was airing!!

There has long been something about the date – September 30^th – that has intrigued me. When I ran Red Dirt Report, I wrote about a woman and her daughter seeing a “flying jellyfish” on September 30, 2013, while at the stop light at 33^rd and Broadway Extension.

One thing I would like to add is that James Dean was good friends with actress Maila Nurmi, who was the “Vampire Girl” in Ed Wood’s notorious 1959 B-picture Plan 9 From Outer Space. It is a film about aliens resurrecting dead people to take over Earth on their behalf. It was once voted “worst film ever.” Although the people who said that clearly have not seen enough bad films – and there are tons.

The aforementioned Immortal, could be on that list, from the single review I read of it while researching Dillon Fence.

Maila Nurmi came to James Dean’s attention thanks to her hosting the Vampira Show during 1954-55 on KABC. They would meet at a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard and talk about their “neuroses.”

Dean was analyzing Maila Nurmi in those months before his launch into immortality. Gossip columnist Hedda Hopper knew Dean and knew of his friendship with Nurmi, who would say that she talked to James Dean “through the veil” after his death. Hopper says Dean told her: “I had studied The Golden Bough and the Marquis de Sade, and I was interested in finding out if this girl was obsessed by a satanic force. She knew absolutely nothing. I found her void of any true interest except her Vampira make-up. She has no absolute.”

But Nurmi, descendant of Finnish immigrants who made their way to Astoria, Oregon, where Nurmi graduated from high school, would lead an interesting life.

In the Vampira Show, which was canceled before Dean’s death, she would talk to her pet spider, Rollo. This reminded me of the song “Spy Der Spider” by the Tulsa band Mellowdramatic Wallflowers. It appeared on their whimsical-yet-excellent album Daffadowndilly, released in 1992, the same year as Dillon Fence’s Rosemary. The album has been popping up at opportune times over the past 30 years. In the early 2000’s I had a sync-spiracy blog called Spelunking Through the Chaos, named after one of the best songs on Daffadowndilly.

As we enter October – which was once the “eighth” month, hence the name, “October” – I play “Spy Der Spider” with bassist Mark Carr talking over the pulsing band sounds about encountering an eight-legged beauty – a spider – that makes him think about life. And death.

Or in the thin liner notes: “Curiosity. Fascination. Contact. Experience. Guilt. Depression. Death

Two songs later is “Kingdom of the Damned” which the band dedicates “to our friends who should know better.” In 1979, the UK punk band The Damned released a single called “Plan 9, Channel 7.” It is about Maila Nurmi’s relationship with James Dean.

“She plays her mouth into a smile / And offers that he stay a while / Two hearts that beat as one
And eyes that hardly ever saw the sun / Hollywood babbles on
She lays a wreath of lilies on his grave / His flame gone along with the love he never gave.”

BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD 

Of course, when Plan 9 From Outer Space was released, horror actor and cinematic legend Bela Lugosi was friends with director Ed Wood.

He wanted Lugosi to appear in his next film, which was loosely about gravediggers from outer space. But Lugosi would succumb to a heart attack before he could appear in the film. However, scenes with Lugosi had been shot by Wood, just to have on hand. It proved dumb luck – or something more. A stand in would take the rest of Lugosi’s appearances in the film.

As one of the actors who appeared in the film would later say that Wood’s desire to have Lugosi was odd simply because … “Bela Lugosi’s dead.” Indeed. Peter Murphy and Bauhaus would remind punk and goth and new wave fans of that fact in the form of an epic song released in August 1979.

But back to Mellowdramatic Wallflowers …

Two songs after “Kingdom of the Damned” is “Candleboy.” “There are doppelgangers out there / There are snakes beneath the floor / There are vampires in the TV …”

Vampires seemingly everywhere. The newly-crowned King Charles III is a descendant of Vlad The Impaler, who was later known as Count Dracula. A role Bela Lugosi knew well.

Mellowdramatic Wallflowers would break up and reform with most members as Admiral Twin, named after the famous Tulsa drive-in movie theater that was featured in a scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film The Outsiders, based on S.E. Hinton’s 1966 classic young adult novel.

No vampires in that novel, that I am aware of.