When Rami Sharkey, a.k.a. Ballzack, asked me if he could interview Biff Rose, I wondered what shenanigans could’ve led him to discover someone with the name “Biff Rose.” In retrospect, it’s embarrassing that I didn’t already know the enigmatic nature of Rose, who was born in New Orleans and is attached to some of the biggest names in show business. The singer-songwriter got his start as a standup comedian in the early ‘60s (a road Ballzack would travel down over thirty years later) and wrote sketch comedy with the all-time-great comedian George Carlin. David Bowie recorded “Fill Your Heart,” a song Rose co-wrote with Paul Williams, on 1971’s Hunky Dory, after the song had already been released by another star of the day, Tiny Tim. Rose’s contributions to big-time musicians didn’t stop there (Pat Boone and John Denver both covered Rose-written songs) and he not only performed on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show but the classic Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and American Bandstand.
After Rose recorded Roast Beef in 1978, little was heard from him publicly until his work was re-released in 2005, though he kept busy by creating several websites and multimedia work.
Rose’s website and current work is, to put it lightly, controversial. He’s incorporated spoken word and rap into his music and uses to racial stereotypes in his art. One of his websites, jewmanity.com, is but one of his projects that plays with words to make a point. Some have labeled him an anti-Semite and/or racist. Rose denies that. It’s hard to believe that someone featured on online videos teaching African American kids how to play piano is racist, but that’s the paradox of Biff Rose.
After agreeing to chat with Sharkey via e-mail, Rose suggested that we start the print version right then an there, so we’re going to bring you the entire conversation from start to finish and in a different format that our interviews are normally in. The bolded parts are Sharkey’s e-mails to Biff, the non-bolded Rose’s replies. It’s sparsely edited to keep intact Rose’s unique blend of stream of consciousness thinking and metaphorical speaking, so there are misspellings, jabs at other New Orleans publications and Rose’s frank anecdotes of New Orleans, New York and celebrity.
Hi,
I live in New Orleans and I would like to interview you for Antigravity Magazine. Do you think we can make that happen?
best,
Rami Sharkey
Biff Rose: Dear Rami Sharkey…please tell me your name isn’t really Rami Sharkey…If you put your name at the top of the Interview people will like YOU better than ME cuz YOU sound like a killer…whereas I am a gentle flower child Mothuhphuckuh…Antigravity is my favorite “underground” magazine…I wanted Gambit to be..but they’ve squared up so I think that’s the reason I’ve switched to smoking Antigravity.
I think we should start the INterview RIGHT here RIGHT now and you should consider printing all that we say here with your new name, Betty Boop so that I can salvage something of my wannahave-uh carear…without sticking my head somewhere and cafronting my carear.
…and another thing…were you THERE during the storm?…my neighbor’s roof blew off his house into MY yard around the corner from the Bridge House a block from Popeyes on St.Charles and I got a FEMA check in Oakland where I was hiding inside a relationship with a woman named ROCKY taking all my friends out for a mighty good time…buying bootleg whiskey including Chris Champagne and a Krewe of Wan…keep those question comin’, Betty…and we’ll have us an Interview fer dern tootin’…also go see John Swenson at OFFBEAT and tell that Deadbeat he HAD his chance now he has to marry his brother Ed and stop living in sin……cerely…Biff
Yeah! Well, I won’t go in any specific order, I’ll just keep asking questions as they occur to me. So, what neighborhood in New Orleans did you grow up in? Tell me a little about growing up in New Orleans back then. When did you leave to pursue your career (in standup)? I’ve got a lot more questions on the way.
-Ram…umm…Betty
Dear Ram..uh..Betty…hmm…that sounds dirty…I was born in Hotel Dieu in 1937 before it was called University Hospital. They changed the name cuz everybody thot it was a hotel and that everyone in new orleans was born in kind of a whore house. “We” were “The Four Roses”, mother Po, sister Poola, Father P.C. and SonBiff… we lived on Prieur St. downtown by St.Roch Park. I made my professional debut at age four singing Hut Sut Ralston and Maizy Doats at a Roller Derby in New Orleans.. made two dollars.. Mother kept the money…. I went to Gayarre Grammar School on Franklin Av. before it was changed to Whitney Houston Frederick Douglas Sammy Davis Junior Harry Belafonte High……. ya’ll…..
My mother said, “We’re moving uptown, kid, and I’m sending you to speech school cuz I don’t want you growing up talkin’mushmouth boogalie”. But I remember 1943 and Miss Glass in Kindergarten.
We used to salute the Am. flag like Heil Hitler till one day Miss Glass said, “Now children, we’re not going to raise our hands in the air anymore, we’re going to place them over our hearts….I pledge allegiance…” Uptown was Wilson Grammar School on Tonti St off Napolean Ave. there I fell in love with Miss Sutton my fourth grade teacher who taught me those big things that spurt up in Yellowstone are called “Geysers” and how cypress trees had “Knees”. I’d ride the Napoleon streetcar once a week for piano lessons (Fur Elisa) from Lawrence Oden. We were poor and I’ve wondered in recent years how my mother paid for those lessons…she just loved classical music….
Miss Sutton drove a ‘46 beige Oldsmobile with the fender reaching almost to the back…Buick’s reached all the way to the back. I really loved Helen St.Pierre who was nine and had a slight mustache. I understand from my old fraternity brothers (SAK, Loyola, 55-59) Helen’s still alive but fat. I used to listen to WNOE radio every Saturday morning and model with clay…little Spanish galleons for Douglas Fairbanks,Jr. in Sinbad the Sailor…go to the Tivoli on Saturday afternoons…nine cents serials..fifteen chapters…Zorro..black and white..on Sunday there were “technicolor” movies…Betty Grable, Betty Hutton Dan Duryea… Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe with S.Z. “Cuddles” Zakall.
I’d listen to Sky King and Buster Brown on radio. (That’s my dog Tighe..he lives in a shoe..I’m Buster Brown. Look for me in there, too!) I’d turn off the blues cuz it was the forties and I was nine and white but it (they) sank in anyway..osmosis..ah s’poses….and it began to tell when I worked Greenwich Village in the early sixties playing five string banjo and the owner of the Gaslight Clarence Hood brought up all these Delta blues singers he knew from back home…Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Skip James.. I’d open for those guys and all the little white jewish boys, Eric Weissman, Dick Weisberg,Tom Simon, Jerry Garfunkel would come down from Washington Hgts (fifteen cents on the subway) and gape at REAL black coal blue gum nigguhz instead of always them slick high yaller Harlem Rennaissancers..I’d tell’em..” Aw we used to turn that schitt off when I was kid and listen to Mister Keen Tracer of Lost Persons (Someday I’ll find you) and Oxydol’s Own Ma Perkins or Stella Dallas (the soaps)…Lorenzo Jones and his wife,Belle…Backstage Wife…
I left New Orleans after graduating from Loyola in 59… they had taken the segregation signs off the buses and streetcars in 58 and I always sat next to the fattest blackest ladies I could find. It helped reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged…the smell of blue electricity rising from the rails..the jogging sideways rubbing Spring wet bodies. I learned how to dance sitting down..plus reading The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton helped..All about the Beats.. smoking mari-potta in the Village.. black people playing sax and reading poetry in North Beach, San Francisco, sex out of wetlock everywhere..to a white Catholic boy from the South in the fifties whose girlfriends all were zipped this was manna and womanna from heaven.
I have never quite recovered…I dated Louise Marcello once…Carlos’s bambina..in 1957..I swear my ‘46 two tined blue Chevrolet was followed by six black Cadillacs all the way to the Airline drive-in…she had an aquiline neck…it drove me mad..I wrote music..poetry..
David Bowie recorded two of my songs in ‘72 and sends me a royalty check twice a year..I’m in touch with Royalty ..check it out…
So, tell me about the days writing with George Carlin. How did you and David Geffen meet? When did you come back to New Orleans?
George Carlin and I were hired to write comedy for the John Davidson Show the summer replacement for Dean Martin. 1966. We’d get stoned in our office at Paramount Studios on Melrose and think up stuff that was one year ahead of its time ..meaning one year later Rowan and Martin used a bit we had thot up in a smoky haze’n’hokey smaze the year before….neither of us ever exhaled…there was this rope in this one bit…and people held part of it as it wound through several rooms at a party..nobody let go..or tugged..it just kinda found its way into each pocket of conversation or grouping…..people might ask.. “What’s this rope?…why are we holding this rope which seems to go nowhere?”….and Goldie Hawn or Mel Gibson..or..wait…it wasn’t Mel..it was..what was that guy’s name…? not Don Gibson..HENRY Gibson..tht’s it..maybe at one end there would be a guy lighting up one end of the rope to smoke it….George and I would pitch such a bit and Bob Banner the Producer would just stare at us…so I was fired because George had schtick…one liners and characters like Biff Barf Sportscaster or the hippie dippie weatherman (“High today…wow….”) while they hired me to be John Davidson’s sidekick like a Don Knotts to an Andy Griffith only I couldn’t abide John’s eternally sunny boy disposition and just wanted to say “God dam, man, will you stop that schitt eating grinning all the time?” so I was fired but not before writing the theme song for the show. Musical Director was Jimmy Haskell and he went on to arrange that Bobby Gentry hit about throwing a baby off the Talahatchee Bridge…I made twelve hundred dollars a week in 1966 for six weeks, bought a house in the Valley owned by Glen Randall who raised Trigger in the backyard and sat in a half lotus posture cuz it almost broke my legs to try a full lotus and started meditating with nothing better to do but a house to do it in when songs started to be born that were of a more serious nature than the comedy ditties I was writing in Greenwich Village in the early sixties with my long neck Pete Seeger model banjo…topical comedy songs like “Kruschchev was my kinda guy”….and “I’m so worried about oh so concerned about the Sino-Soviet Split…”..now more tender ballads conceived on the piano with more than three chords started to flow and I met Paul Williams the Evil Dwarf while writing for the Mort Sahl Show on KTTV in L.A. and asked him out to the house cuz he was writing songs too…..I played him this song I was writing.,.and the first four lines.. “Fill your Heart with love today don’t play the game of time”..and asked him to finish putting a lyric to it….He did..then ripped off the song but Bowie saved the day by putting (Biff) in parentheses when he recorded it for his third album Hunky Dory…..Carlin and I met again in Aug.1985 at Durty Nellie’s Comedy Club in Palestine a suburb of Chicago…he recalled the time I rode him home on my Honda ninety….on the Hollywood Freeway and the bike was so light..we had to exit..it was almost flying…it broke down on Melrose and George said, “…and you just left it there and took the bus home.” I don’t remember that but I didn’t want to call him a liar right there in front of all those fans…I just don’t remember abandoning the bike..but I think he was right…I was paying on it at the time and at eighteen percent interest I soon owed thirty six thousand dollars on an abandoned bike…..Roy stuffed Trigger out in Paradise Valley so I went into the tack room and started writing love ballads. Paul Williams apologized to Sport Murphy Head of my Sport group for ripping me off. He said he had “regrets” and “remorse” about ripping off Biff Rose. I call him the Missing Link between Man and the Planet of the Apes….he helped salve his conscience by playing Swann Head of Death Records in Brian DiPalma’s Phantom of the Paradise. In it Paul sells his soul to the devil for a star on Hollywood Blvd by ripping off “Beef” and is finally consumed in the flames that burn down the theatre and now in the electricity of the Internet as I feature him with the Beast of 666 on my website at Biffrose.biz…Carlin took me on tour for four dates in Oct.’85..I opened for him…I sang “Sometimes I feel like the Mother of Hitler..he was already out of hand by the time he was two…..he was like a baby bird with his mouth open wide…just shoving his brothers and sisters aside..” His crowd just stared at me…they were waiting for jokes….that’s what they paid for..and Carlin never lets ‘em down by George…..
David Geffen used to hang out with us back in Greenwich Village, 64-65…..By ‘US” I mean Herb Gart who wanted to “manage” me…Herb went on to manage Don McLean and sell Bye Bye Miss American Pie to everybody….Jack Soloman who managed Lisa Kindred who is still singing the blues up at the Saloon on Grant Street in San Francisco… Marty Litke who was already an agent at William Morris and David Geffen who wanted to be an agent and was working in the mail room at the time….Herb took me up to Abe Lastvogel’s office, the President of Wm.Morris where I signed a contract and David Geffen was assigned to me for this upcoming gig I had at the Hungry I in San Francisco opening for Glen Yarbrough who had this one big hit, ‘Baby the Rain must Fall” by Rod McKuen…..First thing Geffen asks me in my apartment in SF..I let him stay with me to save money…he asked, “How do you smoke pot?…I wanna learn how to smoke pot…teach me how to smoke pot..please..” “Just suck David…suck in…that’s it….” …David sucked in and I take full responsibility for starting him out being gay….I taught a course in GLOWbalization in Berlin last January and made Geffen Head of BLOWbalization because he said in this bio about him “The Rise and Rise of David Geffen” page 23 “Biff rose was my first musical signing in Hollywood..”
I never signed anything with David…I never even saw him in Hollywood….we spoke once on the phone…he told me his brother Mitch Geffen could handle this divorce I was going through but Mitch Geffen turned out to be such a crook..meaning “The meter was running” from the time I stepped in his car…we rode around the block..I dropped the divorce..I hated that crook worse than I didn’t like being married…he helped hold my marriage together another two years…he said he’d charge me two fifty for the divorce but I dropped it after two minutes…but he sent me a bill for seven fifty including advice on “opening a bar !!!!” …I wouldn’t pay that crook…and when I went to sell my house…the one where I wrote all those songs in Trigger’s tack room….Geffen got it hung up in the courts and stole it…I left L.A. to go live in the woods……
but I did return to my native New Orleans after all these adventures on the road…I sold ice cream outside the cathedral in July 1986….luring the children to “come stick your heads in my cool ice cream cart ice box….nutty buddies, fruit bars, pop cycles, sandwiches…”…the kids would pull at their parents’ hands but their parents would force them into the dour mausoleum like St. Louis Cathedral…..” I started doing plays at Borsodi’s theatre coffeehouse on Freret uptown but got kicked out one Poetry Night. Seems Heather a 17 year old Senior at Holy Angels Academy was hanging out in the theatre at nite and got knocked up by one of the actors..her mother, Lorraine was in the crowd wondering where her daughter was nights..I was pitching my religious art Festival “And the High Reign reigns in the Low Reign”…Sarabeth Wildflower the waitress from Natchez said with her Natchez accent, “He said Low-reign..he said Low-reign…he made Low-reign cry…” To her Lorraine and Low Reign were the same…..so I stayed in the Bridge House thanks to my old fraternity brother at Loyola Buzzy Gainnie who sells cars (Don’t trade it….donate it)….he’s like the fat white Frankie and Johnnie guy who used to say, “Let’er HAVE it !”…..Buzzy introduced me to the drunks. I did a concert. “And now I’d like to introduce Biff Rose..we went to Loyola together and Biff was the songleader and my family owned Colonial Buick..and we’d sing..drink beer..drink beer…oh come drink beer with me..cuz I don’t give a dam about any old man who won’t drink beer with me…and I turned into an alcoholic and lost everything and now I run this Halfway House for alcoholics and would like to introduce Biff Rose…!
hey rami…is your real name Walter? and do you play God sometimes?
I don’t know nothing about no Walter or God, but I think I get the reference. I’ve heard your music referred to as “Broadway songs” or something like that. I get more New Orleans piano from it, like Professor Longhair, James Booker, etc. Were you influenced at all by that style? Is there any correlation there?
Also, I saw a video on YouTube with you playing with some kids in the street while some guys from Germany were filming. Were they filming a documentary, and what street was that? There is something very New Orleans about that video.
Dear Ram…uh…Betty…you’re absolutely right about the piano influence being New Orleans…you can get away with anything…and have to or you can’t be from New Orleans..I never heard of Prof. Longhair till I returned to the city in 1986…when I left in 1959 it was strictly Fats Domino as far as local legends go…and Little Richard recording Tutti Frooti at Cosimo Matassas and Dave Bartholemew..and Clarence Frogman Henry and Mother in Law-w-w-w….and Leon Prima Louie’s brother and Sharkey Bonanno and La Casa de Los Marinos (My Oh My) and Emil Para slamming his palm on the grand piano at Patto’s with them two fat lady piano playesr singing On Wisconsin or Hail to the Victors Valiant…hail to the conquering heroes..hail hail to Michigan the champion of the world and of course Hold that Tiger…James Booker knocks me completely out of the ballpark..i have to sing to take peoples’ minds off the fact I just can’t.play like him…
As far as Broadway influence…sure..New York does that to people..and Hollywood slicks it up for the world..but New Orleans does it for the galaxies including the “guy-axease” that’s why Louie Armstrong makes everybody “kneel” reaching for the Moon. In 1949 he was King of Zulu and I got hit on the head by a coconut on Carondelet where Zulu happened to be wandering around…I was stunned…down on all fours eleven years old..my family told me later I got hit by a coconut..I like to think it was Louie but he was King and I think only carried a wand…I’m not influenced by anybody’s style but if you want a list Chopin was first…anything is last..being as by the time I started writing songs they were usually three chord ditties on the longneck banjo. I was imitating Bob Gibson a famous Chicago folksinger and Pete Seeger in the fifties and I had a general love for “that” music which was all-American me being in America at the time and not New Orleans. I tell people the general truth that New Orleans is different. Other places have things called “laws”…it’s in my book about San Francisco and New Orleans called A Sale of Two Titties…San Francisco is too much o’ somethin’ and not enough o’ nothin..New Orleans is….if you can’t make it in New Orleans…..don’t leave…
After sitting down in one place in Trigger’s tack room I started being influenced by Hollywood white MOR bubblegum and so wrote Fill Your Heart and several of “those” kinda easy listening on-beat elevator clean cosmetic love songs Brits can imitate easily and which fit perfectly the Flower Children ethos of the era (1968) to stop burning women and children in the rice paddies of Vietnam. But politics and “message” songs dictated by my religious (medieval Catholic voodoo) upbringing intruded. Like Pere Teilhard de Chardin (the French Jesuit cosmologist’s) “Noosphere”…that undulating aura of magnetic resonance surrounding the earth…now all teched-out and called the Internet..for California ears I call the Noosphere the “New Sphere”…for the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Jenna,La. Seven I say “Noose Fear”..and preach all across America that hotel chains are moving into Jenna so the people have a place to stay inside and sing “Good Noose..Marriot’s a’comin’..good noose…Marriot’s a’comin’
I had written THE MAN to bring everybody together but Helen Reddy wrote the strong invincible woman and I thot, “That’s a lie..no one’s invincible” and so the war was on and didn’t end until last month when this one groupie Radfemmie Fatpattie Nolan of Chicago who stalked me throughout the late seventies finally exploded on my website, “You’re fake and a fraud and a charlatan”…. “No” I e-mailed her back, “I’m real but my music is fake cuz I got it from Fake Books Charley Farmer gave me. Charley plays at the Oak St. Cafe each morning nine to one pm.. and Le Citron corner Religious and Orange St. down by Wal-Mart’s..his family, the Farmers are all outstanding in their fields…I told Fatpattie, “Nor am I a fraud..I am real but my sex life is a fraud because I believed in Sigmung Fraud but stayed Forever Jung…and I am NOT a Charlatan but my records are on the Charlatan label…a Creole-Gullah-Gichee dark roast found in Charleston…the Radfemmie Fatpattie was/is a frustated groupie who got married and is bored after twenty years and when her husband John Shelfstacker pulls his head out of her ass long enough to “…go fishin’ “a euphemism for “looking for Jesus”…or hook the Big ‘un.. she runs to Biff for a quick fix and some excitement. Would you like a desperate blind Black Irish housewife from Chicago who just loves the polka and does the jig?? Lemme know…
when I returned to New Orleans in 1986 I started face painting fleur de lis on Saints fans outside the Dome to get across my religious ideals..My name is Paul, my nickname is Biff and although not a saint…I AM a Saints fan so I DO understand suffering…I give the people the brush on and brush off. I stick it to visiting preachers from Monroe who have won free tickets to Saints games for being the best preachers in Monroe… When I have them trapped between the “fleur” and the “de Lis” I tell them about my fifth album breaking Helen Reddy down to Hell’n’READY. The album is Uncle Jesus and Auntie Christ. They try to pull away..but by then it’s too late.. Preachers can’t withdraw from my Paintspill fast enough and the glitter seals the deal….
the youtube documentary was videoed by a German film crew on France Street by the Industrial Canal. It was financed by the famous blues photographer (juke joints in northern Miss.) Bernie Imes who owns the Columbus,Miss, Commercial Post Dispatch Scimitar Tribune or something. Bernie talks funny..says “Hannakans” for Heinekins and causes eyebrows to raise in Italian Catholic restaurants like Mandina’s. Also “Will it be a long white?” I tell him, “Bernie, the black waiters are looking at you weird….it’s “wait,” Bernie, not “white”.. drop the northen Miss. accent for a little while..repeat after me…. “Gimme a draff’n’a dozen frahd erscherz”… Bernie was knocked out by the way the black kids downtown talk so we made a video, “In Search of the Perfect Snowball” and auditioned a thousand snowball stands pre-Katrina..consensus was….strawberry…coconut and chocolate syrop…we were sick for days….
the youtube is to show me as the Last Man Standing in a sea of boys trying to take over the media. I just spoke to my German “Vyfe” in Berlin…not my wife..my VYFE..my VYFE. I teach her e-bay. she teaches me O-Bay…she’s a teacher and told me the assignment for her thirteen year old seventh graders on Monday will be to memorize my youtube “Hello Beer Can” and it will be videoed and added to my growing youtube empire…thirteen year old Germans learning English by singing Biff Rose’s “Hello Beer Can”….Buzzy Gannie would be proud..(don’t think it…drink it…)…more candidates as we “Bridge” the gap between animal kulturs old and gnu.
Hey Rami…I just finished a record in New Orleans recorded in my living room by Charlie Farmer …..he plays weird piano at the Oak St. Cafe every morning nine to one p.m.,,,my cd is about protecting prostitutes…and is called “Guardin’ Ho’s “…but I left N.O. as I do every Spring to escape the summer heat and return for the first Saints game in Sept to face the fans and force my religious views on them in a paintful way…I’m a Prophet of Dome…if a mad dog Jihadist comes atcha…Muzzle’im….remember New Orleans is the Crescent City and the Crescent and the Star of Islam is right there…the Star is a restaurant on Decatur….good strip steak for twenty bucks….baked potato, salad..I used to drink with the waiter down at BJ.s in the ninth ward…I won’t give his name..some things are scarred….the Crescent City Connection goes to Algiers the capital of North Africa and the controversial West Bank…Arabi is the first burb south……I always fall from a flaming tower when the “Tarot-ists” do me in the square…I leave N.O. to do coffeehouses, clubs and house concerts in America mostly… First stop this year Chapel Hill, No.Carolina so I changed the name of the album for the Protestants to “Chapel on the Hill” and would be glad to send you a copy…send me an address…then on to Richmond,Va. to try out some old material…no first…I hooked up with Espinola my own private jew from Brooklyn who bores the hell out of the Gov.librarians in the basement of the Libarray of Congress till they let him in the secret files to hear some old Biff Rose on the Carson Show tapes…you’re not supposed to record them but Espinola has this hi tech thing you stick in a computer..I told him “I do not want to be any part of this…I have a reputation to get rid of…I can supply you with guns and ammo but count me out of any wrongdoing……”…then on to Richmond to try out some more old material…Like the OBAMA/osama EQUATION…..and how the South lives through continued wry ZINGS to avenge the Fallen Towers (9/11) of the old plantation by that dastardly field hand, Osama in the basement plotting revolution,…Obama in the penthouse stemming the tide. We have to elect a Field-Condo “Mammy” in the Fall….House-Condi will be out….it’s between Queen Latifah and the Grand Ol’ Oprah…all I can say about American politics is Whoopie !!!. ..and all scheduled to be filmed by Robert E. “Spike” Lee…The 18 and 19 years olds at this house concert at Virginia Commonwealth Univ (VCU) kinda held their breath at my presenting Am. politics in such a “Neo-southern-noir” manor…. But “Noir” is “in”…along with “genre” and “anything-esque”…esp. the genre called Neo-southern noir-esque….The kids are used to B.S. meaning the Bruce Springsteens of the world coming out for one candidate or another….which is stupid if you’re a poet..you’re supposed to lead the way if you’re an artist, writer, musician or poet..not follow…whoever runs with McCain if he’s the candidate or whoever the enemy is…(Osama) …if “Cain” wins it’ll still be McCain vs. McAble..a battle of biblical portions (are you yawning?)…with McCain dropping the bomb probably quicker than Obama would… holding latent grudges as he might be against any “enemy” who would keep him cooped up like that for five years …
The kids I performed for were about half-anal…society generally is so uptight I feel like Public ENEMA number one…I have a black girlfriend in Chicago, Gayle Mitchell..she calls herself the Bastrop Butterfly being from Bastrop,La. and having a well developed myth …the certitude of math with the fancy of myth…Mythamatics…BB’s not trying to hide anything except her white boyfriend Bubba…a pig farmer from Iowa I told you about she keeps changed in the basement…we did a house concert for all the white people…you can tell them from a golden beige lady from Bastrop..they all talk like “Fargo”….BB gave me five ancient books to read her family had been keeping in their private ex-slave holding treasures…Uncle Remus and Br’er Bear, an original Harriet Beecher Stowe, not Uncle Tom’s Cabin…one called Black Mammy and I forget the other ones…I was astounded..I told her, “BB..these books are forbidden..” She said, “I know it.” I told her, “You won’t find these books in any public library…” If you even mention them you might be suspected of being racist… I called John Davidson last night. He’s that peaches and cream always smiling white boy Broadway singer who hired George Carlin and me to write his TV Show in 1966..the summer replacement for Dean Martin (The Kraft Summer Music Hall) I haven’t seen John in forty years. He was playing in “Rumors” at The New Theatre in the next white burb over… He burst out of the dressing room at the end of the show…”Biff Rose! I haven’t seen you in forty years.” I introduced him to the guy by my side, Saint Gregory who owns the world’s greatest Indie label, Wascals here in Kansas City…John asked, “Are you still playing the banjo?” I caught my breath…” No,John…after you fired me..” “I didn’t fire you” he stoutly defended himself…so I guess it was Carlin and Bob Banner the Producer teamed up…I didn’t have any canned lines….they used to always try to urge me, “Biff, be nicer to John…be gentler..” but all I could ever think to write was “John you ass hole..” We laughed last night but then in came all these grey haired ladies to get John’s autograph and he was suddenly “on…” …and ladies…this is Biff Rose…Biff and I were in a show together forty years ago..”
“Yes..and tell the ladies you’re gay now, John.” The ladies all twittered….John is so good natured…that’ll always be our relation..him white me black…….I mean him light ..me dark….hey …if you’re light be bright…if you’re dark spark…..I’m headin’ to Eugene,Oregon to play the Tsunami Bookstore and do a show over KBOO Portland and make a record with Brian QTN the great follsinger and acid burnout….Pope Peter the Wilde is booking the tour…I’ve made three popes in the last eight years to keep alive my Catholic upbringing in the voodoo manner to which I’m accustomed..carrying around a little Jesus hoodoo-YOUdoo doll made of twigs and moss and little pieces of cloth and a pin to stick him or “it” with cuz he doesn’t like me to gossip or lust after anyone before seven….or thirty…or seven thirty…..
But first I have to stop off in Ponca City Oklahoma and do a singing joke car commercial (being influenced by the old pre-K’s Frankie and Johnny’s on Franklin Av) “Let ‘er HAVE it!” for Col. Roy Pemberton who owns Pemberton,Chevrolet…I’ll smack every car on the hood cruising rapidly through the lot like that guy in Picayune Mississipii with his granddaughter saying, “That’s a good caw,…paw paw…” I’ll carry a Yamaha portable electric with unweighted keys of course for that airiest of touches” and beat out an Indian rhythm …call it Ponca Rock….and tell’em, “Don’t be an Uncle Tom Tom…remember Jesus may have walked on the water but he drove home in a car from Pemberton Chevrolet…..”… I’m concentrating all my “road efforts” into making youtube after youtube to flood the market with car commercials from Pemberton Chevrolet to get across “secret codes” to my religious fun-attic fanz…….flower children grown into Venus fly traps…the pacifist grown into the pass-a-fist…I could fill you in with details from now till Sept 7 when the Saints open against “The Buc stops here”…and I probably will…..but I gotta go heat up this cold cup o’ Folger’s Instant..these bloody Kansas wheat necks don’t have any coffee to speak of…I can’t find any Community dark roast….so I suffer and am irritable….but you lift my spirits Ravi Shankar just like you did in the sixties so you keep the questions comin’ and I’ll keep the Passing Parade passing like Dylan spraying the crowd at Forest Hills with machine gun fire and saying “I’m not there”
This interview originally appeared in ANTIGRAVITY Vol.5 #8 (Part 1) and #9 (Part 2).
Biff Rose is Biff Rose. Find out more about Biff Rose at biffrose.com, biffrose.biz and biffrose.net. Ballzack’s third album, Yeah Indeed, was released in July. Find out more about Ballzack at ballzack.com.
