ZEKI MÜREN, THE DAVID BOWIE OF TURKEY

ZEKI MÜREN, 

THE DAVID BOWIE OF TURKEY

 

September 12, 2018

 

Never denying his homosexuality, the Turkish showman broke down barriers in his conservative nation, played Vegas, tutored Mick Jagger and tried to give singing lessons to Sinatra. Since his death on live TV in 1996, he has become a mythical hero in Turkey and a symbol of the LGBT movement

 

by Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

 

In 1959, the flamboyant pianist and entertainer Wladziu Valentino Liberace sued The Daily Mirror, a London tabloid, for insinuating that he was a homosexual. He took the action after a Mirror columnist who called himself “Cassandra” described him as “a deadly, winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love.” The lawsuit focused on the word “fruit,” which at the time was a term used to describe gay men.

 

Throughout his career, Liberace had denied he was gay. So, two years after he’d taken Confidential magazine to court over an article titled, “Why Liberace’s Theme Song Should be ‘Mad About the Boy,'” he again sued for libel. When he testified in London, Liberace committed perjury, denying that he was gay or had ever taken part in any homosexual activity. He won the case.

 

That same year, Zeki Müren starred in Broken Disc, his fifth motion picture.  He sang to and romanced the sexy actress Belgin Durok, but there were no illusions that their romance would extend off screen.  Müren and Liberace had both risen to fame in the 1950s, and achieved success in concert and films, on television and records, with a mixture of pop music, delicate handling of the classics and charming public personas. Both were showmen whose stage acts in the decades to follow would have stunning similarities.

 

Zeki Müren, however, never hid the fact that he was gay. Luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing and loved by his mother, he was accepted by his fans and countrymen for who he was. He wound up having such an impact on his audience, nation and culture that after his death, he wasn’t compared to Liberace, but to someone even more barrier-breaking.

 

They call Zeki Müren “The David Bowie of Turkey.”

 

HIGH HEELS & SHORT SKIRTS

 

Zeki Müren was more than a performer, singer and actor.  He also wrote poetry, composed more than 300 songs, painted, and designed textiles and costumes. He was born in Bursa, a large city in western Turkey, in 1931. He worked in summer theater as a boy and, in his teens, moved to Istanbul to pursue a singing career. He was 20 when he got a job singing on Turkish Radio. By then, he knew every standard and classical Turkish ballad, and soon became a fixture in every Turkish home. The joke was that when people bought radios, they asked if the radios played Zeki Müren.

 

__

“Long before Prince flirted with gender fluidity,

Zeki Müren was designing

his own stage costumes and giving them names

like Prince of Outer Space and Purple Nights.”

__

 

Three years before Elvis had a screen test, Zeki Müren starred in his first motion picture (he would go on to make 18 movies, most of them about a singer looking for love and fame, and breaking into song along the way). In those days, he had a fluffy pompadour and a look that seemed to deliberately channel Sal Mineo. He even had a publicity photo in which he posed with a wax figure of James Dean, Mineo’s costar in Rebel Without A Cause.

 

Zeki with James Dean statue.

 

When he wasn’t making movies, he was packing them in to the gazinos and nightclubs of Istanbul. Decades before The Rolling Stones’ Bridges to Babylon tour, he’d designed a T-shaped stage with a catwalk that allowed him to sashay out and mingle with the audience. In those early days, Müren performed wearing a tuxedo or suit. At home, he preferred lots of makeup, high heels and short skirts.

Meanwhile, back in the States, Liberace was living with his mother and recording songs like "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody.”

 

“GOOD TURKISH”

 

In 1965, Zeki Müren starred in a Turkish version of Robert Anderson’s play, Tea & Sympathy. He portrayed a young man accused of being gay. It was the closest Müren ever came to a public declaration of his own sexuality, but with his coiffed hair, heavy makeup, feminine attire and public displays with male companions, there was no need to spell it out.

 

What does seem unusual is that Turkey, the conservative, predominantly Muslim country with a history of violence and brutality, would not only accept but celebrate a performer like Zeki Müren. Yet, when it comes to sexual freedom, the country has proven to be more liberal than supposedly enlightened Western nations. The Ottoman Empire decriminalized homosexuality in 1858. Homosexual activity was a criminal offense in the United Kingdom until 1967. It wasn’t until 2003 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that sodomy laws were unconstitutional.

___

 

"He once performed for top government and military officials in high heels, sparkly tights and miniskirt, with peacock feathers sprouting from his ass.  By then, he was known as 'The Pasha of Turkish Music.'"

__

 

There were more specific reasons why Zeki Müren became part of the Turkish fabric. He was a standard bearer of Turkish tradition, known to sing Ottoman classical music with perfect enunciation of the Turkish language. Parents played his records to teach their kids “good Turkish.” This also won him an older, conservative audience. Long before Teddy Pendergrass hit on the idea, he performed special afternoon shows “for women only” — in this case, conservative housewives.

 

Zeki afternoon show for the wives.

 

There’s a colorful, cinematic anecdote that’s part of the Zeki Müren legend, about the time a mob of angry men showed up at the stage door, armed with sticks, ready to lynch Müren before he could go onstage. As the story goes, Müren didn’t run. He didn’t hide. He confronted the mob and invited them inside.

 

 

“Just have a listen to my songs,” he said. “If you still want to beat me up, you can.”

 

They accepted the invitation. They stayed for the show. They put away the sticks.

 

 

 ZEKI, FRANK, SAMMY  & MICK

 

Short in stature, but physically strong and long on confidence in what he could do, Müren proclaimed in the early 1960s that he wanted to teach Frank Sinatra how to sing. What few people know is that in November 1963, he traveled to Las Vegas to do just that.  A November 20th memo from an executive at the Sands Hotel & Casino states:

 

“Mr. Muren is top entertainer from Turkey and is considered the Frank Sinatra – Dean Martin of Turkey.  Other two men are special representatives of the Turkish government who are accompanying Mr. M. Please give these people red carpet treatment.” 

 

That red carpet treatment included transportation to and from the airport, a petite suite plus one room nearby, a basket of fruit in each room and a bottle of JB Scotch in Mr. M.’s mini-suite, and comped ringside tables for the dinner show in the Copa Room and the midnight show at the Stardust. There was also a request that Sands publicist Al Freeman introduce Zeki Müren to Sammy Davis, Jr.

Zeki Müren and his entourage were set to arrive on November 21. Müren did not ask to meet Liberace. Liberace’s star was in decline at the time and he was working his way back on the supper club circuit. Liberace and his candelabras were in Pittsburgh on November 22 when he collapsed from kidney failure, apparently from inhaling dry cleaning fumes from all the freshly-cleaned costumes hanging in his dressing room. Liberace later said he was saved from death only because someone woke him up to tell him that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.

 

The Sinatra singing lesson never took place. Müren did get to tutor Mick Jagger in 1977 when Jagger spent a few days in the resort city of Bodrum, visiting “Turkish Prince” Ahmet Ertugen, boss of Atlantic Records (home to the Rolling Stones’ label). Müren sang his song “Madem derdimi sordun, dinlemeye mecbursun” (“If you don’t mind, you have to listen”) at a dinner party and he and Jagger spent time together. No one recorded what transpired between the two superstars, but we can look at what followed. The Stones’ first album recorded after Jagger’s Bodrum jaunt was Some Girls. It went to Number One and was regarded as a return to form for the band, after admittedly sucking through most of the 1970s.

BUTTERFLY

 

Long before Prince flirted with gender fluidity, Zeki Müren was designing his own stage costumes and giving them names like Prince of Outer Space and Purple Nights. Through the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the costumes became more and more extreme, with spangly jackets, sequined hot pants and sparkling capes. In 1970, he realized he was stepping into the unknown when he walked onstage in a costume he named Veil of Fortune: a shiny cape accompanying a glittery micro-minidress. He kept a pair of trousers backstage, in case he upset the audience. When he made his entrance, they cheered, men and women alike.

Throughout the 1970s, Müren was compared to Liberace, as the pianist had a renaissance in Las Vegas with his own glittering and winking outfits. Liberace would get laughs in star-spangled hot pants and high-heeled sneakers. Zeki Müren was Liberace in drag. He wore platform shoes higher than Elton John’s; space-age queen outfits more daring than David Bowie’s, heavier femme makeup than flash-in-the-pants Jobriath. He once performed for top government and military officials in high heels, sparkly tights and miniskirt, with peacock feathers sprouting from his ass.  By then, he was known as “The Pasha of Turkish Music.” “Pasha” is the title of a high-ranking Turkish military officer. It’s also a type of butterfly.

 

In the 1980s, there was no stopping The Pasha. Until he stopped.

THE DEATH OF ZEKI MÜREN

 

Months before Liberace died in February 1987 (still proclaiming his heterosexuality and insisting he was not suffering from AIDS but anemia brought on by a watermelon diet), Müren retired to Bodrum. His health had deteriorated as well, but rather than wasting away, he had ballooned in weight. He didn’t feel beautiful. Turkey’s “Sun of Music” didn’t want his public to see him that way.

 

For most of the next decade, Müren remained in seclusion by the sea, at home with his male partner. He was coaxed into more than a few appearances and more albums were released, but for many, he was fading into the Turkish history he’d help preserve.

 

Ten years had passed when Müren was convinced to travel to the city of Iszmir, to make an appearance on Turkish television. In light of his failing health, the trip would have been out of question, if not for the nature of the appearance. This live broadcast on the TRT network was a tribute to Zeki Müren. He’d be presented with a very special award: the microphone he used in his first appearance on TRT more than forty years earlier.

The show went live on September 24, 1996. When Müren appeared on the soundstage, he was obviously unsteady and overweight. He looked like someone’s Turkish grandmother, but also looked every inch the star. His heavy makeup and pompadour bouffant were painted and sprayed to perfection. His somewhat conservative black suit shined, decked with silver piping and glittering PVC sleeve panels running from his shoulders to his cuffs.

 

For most of the show, Zeki Müren perched on a throne-like chair behind a table covered with a spray of autumn flowers. Just off-camera, a bank of still photographers, as many as two dozen, snapped away for the momentous occasion.

When it came time for Müren to rise from the throne and accept his award, he leaned on the arm of the beautiful young hostess, then relied on her to help him make the few steps back to his chair where, on live television, he suffered a heart attack.

 

It proved to be fatal.

 

Zeki Müren was 64. After his death on live television, it was revealed that he’d left his entire fortune to funds for education and disadvantaged soldiers. Tens of thousands of people attended his state funeral. It was the largest outpouring of grief that Turkey had seen in years. The comparisons to his contemporary Liberace were forgotten. Zeki Müren was compared to Prince and Freddie Mercury, and given the title of “Turkey’s David Bowie.”

THE AFTERLIFE OF ZEKI MÜREN

 

The Liberace Museum, a display of his costumes, pianos and other memorabilia, tucked in a strip mall about two and half miles from the Las Vegas Strip, closed in 2010. The place was a victim of poor attendance and a failure to rebrand the closeted star for a new generation as “The King of Bling.” There’s been talk of displaying the collection in downtown Vegas, but that hasn’t happened yet. Most Americans have forgotten Liberace, or only know him from the grotesque HBO movie in which he was portrayed by Michael Douglas.

 

More than twenty years after his death, Zeki Müren is a mythical hero in Turkey and a symbol of the LGBT movement. The Zeki Müren Art Museum is one of the most popular attractions in Bodrum. His grave in Bursa is protected by an iron fence because too many visitors were scooping up the soil as souvenirs. A recent exhibition in Istanbul, “Here I am, Zeki Müren,” was visited by an extraordinary 50,000 people in its first two months. The exhibit included thousands of Müren’s photos, diaries, letters, poems, paintings, films and costumes, and in one room, letters from his mother, addressed to “my one and only, darling son.”

 

One letter reads, “You are the world’s sweetest fruit.”

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BURT KEARNS & JEFF ABRAHAM have written a book about performers who died on stage. It will be published in 2019.

THE WIFE & DEATH OF SPADE COOLEY, HOLLYWOOD'S KING OF WESTERN SWING

THE WIFE & DEATH 

OF SPADE COOLEY, 

HOLLYWOOD'S KING 

OF WESTERN SWING

August 7, 2018

 

“Spade” Cooley was a virtuoso fiddler and Roy Rogers’ movie stand-in, who had six consecutive Top 10 hits and was considered Hollywood’s King of Western Swing. He was also a mean, jealous, paranoid, violent, alcoholic man who brutally murdered his wife in front of their daughter.

 

by Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

 

Donnell Clyde Cooley got the nickname “Spade” in his younger days, after he drew three consecutive hands of spades, one a straight flush, during a hot poker streak. Born one-quarter Cherokee in 1910, a decent boxer and virtuoso fiddler since he was a boy, Spade Cooley made his way from the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to sunny California with his wife and son during the Great Depression.

 

Spade showed up at the gates of Republic Pictures in Studio City in 1934. He had his fiddle in his hand and six cents in his pocket. Cowboy movie star Roy Rogers gave him a job. Spade played with Roy’s Sons of the Pioneers western singing group and worked for three years as Roy’s movie stand-in. More roles in western movies followed.

 

In 1942, he joined Jimmy Wakely’s western swing band, which was attracting thousands of dancers every Saturday night to the Venice Pier Ballroom. Spade gained his own following with his fancy fiddling and footwork. When Wakely got a Hollywood movie contract in 1944, Cooley took over the band, turned it into the largest big band in the country, and released six consecutive Top 10 records (including the #1 hit, “Shame on You”). That led to his own music and variety television series. The show went national and was a mainstay well into the 1950s.

 

Spade Cooley was, in short, Hollywood’s King of Western Swing.

 

He was also one mean, jealous, paranoid, violent, alcoholic sonofabitch!

 

Spade Cooley was still married to his Okie high school sweetheart in 1942 when he hired, and then took up with, a singer named Ella Mae Evans. Ella Mae was about fifteen years younger. She sang okay. She was a blonde beauty. Spade took her as his second wife in 1945. Their daughter Melody was born the following year.

 

Shortly before the baby’s arrival, Ella Mae caught her husband with another woman. When she tried to pack her bags and leave, he threatened to kill her. When she ran away to Texas, he brought her back.

 

The beatings and insane jealousy continued throughout their marriage, after the birth of Donnell Jr. in 1948, and into the late 1950s as public musical tastes changed and Spade Cooley’s career cooled. The abuse got worse after Spade moved the family from their mansion on Ventura Boulevard into a palatial home on their isolated Water Wonderland Ranch, way out in the Mojave Desert in eastern Kern County.

 

In February 1960, Spade Cooley was honored with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. By this time, his television series had been canceled, he’d fired his orchestra, and he was basically semi-retired. He devoted much of his time to planning Water Wonderland, which he envisioned as a 1,000-acre amusement park with swimming pools, boat racing and a broadcast studio for a new television show.

 

He also had time to drink, stew, and blame his fading popularity and other troubles on his pretty young wife.

 

The following year, Ella Mae was in the hospital suffering from what was diagnosed as “extreme strain.” Ella Mae told her doctor more than once that she was in fear of her husband. Certain she was catting around, Spade had accused her of affairs with men, women and his former boss, Roy Rogers. From the hospital, she retained a female attorney to start divorce proceedings. She claimed her husband had beaten her, the abuse was increasing and she feared he would kill her.

 

Spade responded by harassing and beating her more.

 

On Friday, March 17, he filed for divorce in Bakersfield, citing incompatibility and seeking custody of the kids.

 

“Ella Mae has moved out and I’m heartsick,” he told reporters at his ranch. “But there isn’t a chance of a reconciliation.”

 

In reality, Ella Mae remained on the ranch, virtually a prisoner. Spade had pulled the innards out of the phone receivers so she couldn’t call out. On March 23, he administered a savage beating to Ella Mae and forced her to sign four deeds, transferring all their property from joint ownership to him alone. The next day, he called Anita Aros, a violinist in his band. Spade told Anita he was getting divorced and asked her to marry him as soon as the divorce was final. Anita agreed. She said she thought he was joking.

 

In the days to follow, Spade Cooley forced Ella Mae to call friends and confess to having an affair. He made her say the same to their daughter, Melody, now 14. He even forced her to sign a confession.

 

Sometime after 6 p.m. on April 3, 1961, Spade Cooley unleashed a savage attack on his estranged wife in their home. He knocked her to the floor in the living room and beat her in the bedroom, leaving blood spattered on the floor, walls and his trousers. He choked her, stomped her, yanked the hair out of her head and, with the handle of a broom, violated her vaginally and anally.

 

In the middle of the frenzy, 14-year-old Melody walked into the house and interrupted her dad.

 

“Come here, I want you see your mother,” he said, leading the girl through the dining room, past the broken furniture, broken glass and whiskey bottle, to the bloody walls of the master bedroom. Her mother was not there. Spade walked into the bathroom.

 

“Get up, Ella Mae,” she heard him demand. “Melody is here.”

 

He dragged Ella Mae’s nude, bruised and blood-covered body from the shower into the bedroom, and slammed her head on the floor. Twice.

 

“Melody, I’ll give you three minutes to get her off the floor or I’ll kill her if you don’t get her up.”

 

Spade Cooley went into the living room and began a countdown. “One minute left!”

 

“Half a minute left!”

 

The body remained limp.

 

“Time’s up, Melody.” Spade Cooley entered the room with a rifle in his hand. “All right, Melody, you are going to watch me kill her.” With that, he stomped Ella Mae in the abdomen. He called her a “slut.”

 

Then he knelt down by her body. “We’ll just see if you’re dead,” he said.

 

He burned the nipples of her breasts with a cigarette.

After he was arrested, Spade Cooley had a pretty simple defense. He claimed that Ella Mae had slipped in the shower. When that didn’t wash, he said he’d never meant to hurt her, but blacked out after she told him she was having sex with two other men.

 

Psychiatrists found 54-old Spade Cooley legally sane to stand trial for the murder of 36-year-old Ella Mae Cooley. Even so, he pleaded innocent by reason of insanity.

 

While awaiting trial, he suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized for several days.

 

The jury trial began in Bakersfield Superior Court on July 10, 1961, and became what at the time was the longest and most spectacular trial in Kern County history. People lined up for the sixty-odd available seats in the courtroom. The testimony was lurid. One witness testified that Ella Mae told her she indeed had an affair with Spade’s archrival, Roy Rogers. (Roy’s wife Dale Evans was forced to say that the claim was “ridiculous”). Anita Aros talked about Spade Cooley’s marriage proposal and, in what was the most wrenching moment in the trial, Melody told the story of the day her mother died.

 

When Spade’s daughter took the stand on Thursday, July 27, the former Hollywood King of Western Swing wept openly. Melody testified that she arrived at the ranch to see her father drag her mother from the shower, slam her head on the floor and burn her with cigarettes. By the end of her testimony, Melody was crying like a baby, as well. When she stepped from the witness stand and paused at the defense table, father and daughter stared at each other and both began bawling.

 

The court took a recess. Spade was in a holding cell, talking with defense investigator Leonard Winters, when he became emotional again.

 

“Wasn’t she beautiful? Wasn’t she beautiful?” he said.

 

A cigarette fell from his mouth. Winters realized what was happening: Spade was having another heart attack. The private eye gave the defendant a heart pill and called for the jail physician. Spade was taken to County General Hospital. After an electrocardiogram showed no heart damage, he was brought back to his cell.

 

Spade Cooley took the stand in his defense. He testified he struck his wife after she admitted engaging in unnatural acts with two men and told him the details of a “free love” sex cult she was part of. There were to be ten “senior members” and each was to recruit ten more for a total of one hundred people.

 

“Rockets were going off in my head,” he said from the stand. “It was on fire.”

 

Spade admitted giving Ella Mae a slap (“I don’t think I would hit her with my fist”), after which he claimed they sat on the bed, she said, “Donnell, you think I don’t love you,” snatched a cigarette from his hand and burned her own breast.

 

“It wasn’t like Ella Mae at all,” Spade testified. “It was though she was an animal.”

 

On August 19, after six weeks and after 19 hours and 14 minutes of deliberation, the jury of ten men and two women announced a verdict. It was a Saturday afternoon, so most of the spectators who’d fought for seats in the courtroom each day of the trial weren’t around. There were more television, radio and newspaper reporters on hand than the public.

 

Spade Cooley was found guilty of first degree murder. He “sat almost impassively when he heard the verdict read by a clerk. At first he seemed to stare blankly at the jury,” George C. Flowers from the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram reported. “Then his face seemed to dissolve into the handkerchief in his hand and it was obvious that he was crying, albeit quietly.”

 

Sentencing took place on Tuesday. Spade’s attorney withdrew the insanity defense, and spared the state two more trials on whether Spade was sane at the time of the killing and what the sentence could be. The maximum penalty could have been death in San Quentin’s gas chamber.

 

Judge William L. Bradshaw sentenced Spade Cooley to life in prison.

"We have a somewhat sketchy story of him,” the judge said while passing sentence. “He has been a source of pleasure for a segment of people, so we can’t say he has been antisocial. There was nothing in his life to indicate he would not be amenable to rehabilitation.”

 

Spade Cooley was transferred from the Kern County jail to the state’s penal processing system in Chino. Doctors there examined him and determined he was subject to extreme mood changes and periods of depression, enough to have him classified as mentally disturbed after all, and unfit for a suitably country music-style term in a prison like San Quentin or Folsom.

 

He was sent to the California Medical Facility, a state mental hospital in Vacaville.  Instead of a cell, he had a private room. His treatment included carving violins in the Vacaville Hospital machine shop and teaching in the music department.

 

He remained in the Vacaville hospital, never having to see the inside of a prison. Due to his past heart troubles, he lived under a restricted health regimen and was spared normal prisoner duties. He played music, and wrote the song “Cold Gray Bars”, which became a hit for Ned Miller.

 

“He said he had a thing about killing animals — he couldn’t bear it, not even a mouse,” said Dr. Eugene Prout, Vacaville’s chief medical officer. “He wouldn’t eat meat at all. He didn’t have many visitors but he had lots of friends among the inmates. He was a very humble man.”

 

On August 5, 1968, the California State Adult Authority voted unanimously to parole Spade Cooley from the California Medical Facility on February 22, 1970. By then, he would have served nearly nine years.

 

In November 1969, Spade received a 72-hour furlough from the hospital to perform in a benefit concert for the Deputy Sheriffs Association of Alameda County at the Oakland Auditorium.

 

He took the stage for the Grand Ole Opry Spectacular on Sunday afternoon, November 29th. He was nervous as he walked onstage for his first performance in nine years. He thanked the deputies for “the chance to be free for awhile,” and played his fiddle.

 

The audience of 2,800 lawmen and officials cheered him throughout. It was like the glory days. When he was done, he took bow after bow.  He walked offstage to a standing ovation.

 

At intermission, the applause still ringing, Cooley stepped backstage. He was out of breath. He told an attorney named David Lucchese he was suffering chest pains, and signed a few autographs. He told some friends that he felt “today is the first day of the rest of my life.”

 

Then he dropped his fiddle and dropped dead of a heart attack. Spade Cooley was 58, three months away from real freedom.

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BURT KEARNS & JEFF ABRAHAM have written a book about performers who died on stage. It will be published in 2019.

THE LONESOME DEATH OF DANNY RAPP: THE FRONT MAN FOR DANNY & THE JUNIORS

THE LONESOME DEATH 

OF DANNY RAPP: 

THE FRONT MAN 

FOR DANNY & THE JUNIORS

Danny Rapp, the man who first sang “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay” and “At The Hop” stumbled and fell after stardom faded

 

July 24, 2018

 

by Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

 

The Juvenairs were four teenagers from southwest Philadelphia who got together in 1955 to make music. They’d meet on the corner of 54th and Pentridge streets and harmonize, singing doo-wop under the streetlight. Dave White Tricker, Joey Terranova and Frank Maffei were pals at John Bartram High. Danny Rapp, who sang lead, was still a student at Shaw Junior High.

 

A little guy from a big Irish-American family, Danny was smaller and younger, but he was the leader. He’s the one who made the guys practice, and came up with some choreography and routines that would turn them into an act. Thanks to Danny, they got good. The Juvenairs performed at school parties and sock hops and made a name for themselves around Philly — and that was a good place to make a name, because Philadelphia was a center of the rock & roll industry.

 

In 1957, a local producer named John Madera got involved. He and Dave White (Dave dropped the “Tricker”) wrote a song called “Do The Bop” and then he arranged for the group to record it.  The record got into the hands of Dick Clark, who was not only the city’s most powerful deejay, but hosted an afternoon dance show on television called Bandstand. Dick Clark liked what he heard. He suggested they change the song’s title to “At The Hop” and change the band’s name to Danny & The Juniors. They did.

 

Danny & The Juniors recorded “At The Hop” and it became a local hit. That same summer, Dick Clark’s television show was picked up by ABC and went national as American Bandstand.  After Clark invited Danny & The Juniors onto the show in December, “At The Hop” took off nationally and sold millions of copies.

 

Danny Rapp was all of 16 years old.

 

Well, you can swing it you can groove it


You can really start to move it at the hop


Where the jockey is the smoothest


And the music is the coolest at the hop


All the cats and chicks can get their kicks at the hop


Let’s go

 

Danny & The Juniors, with their white bucks and sweaters, looked like their audience.  They were approachable teen idols, and only got more popular after they released their follow-up single a few months later.  This song was a genuine teen anthem, a manifesto, a confident yet confused call to arms.  Before “My Generation,” “I’m Eighteen” or “Rockaway Beach” was “Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay.”

 

Rock ‘n roll is here to stay,


It will never die


It was meant to be that way,


Though I don’t know why


I don’t care what people say,


Rock ‘n roll is here to stay.

 

Of course, the boys didn’t see money from the records. Teenage stardom in 1958 meant television appearances, spots in a few exploitation flicks like the Julius LaRosa movie Let’s Rock, and life on the road. The Juniors hooked up with Alan Freed’s travelling rock ‘n’ roll show, riding a bus with fifteen other acts and getting out to play theatres, nightclubs and halls around the country. The headliner at each stop depended on whose record was where on the charts.

 

Danny & The Juniors recording 1958

 

Danny & The Juniors’ record company kept churning out the singles. They charted with a few, even hitched a ride on the Twist train, but never again reached the Top 20. In 1962, Dave White quit the group and moved west. He and John Madera wrote more hits for other people, like “You Don’t Own Me” for Lesley Gore and Len Barry’s “1-2-3.”

 

Danny & The Juniors soldiered on as a trio, and when the American teen idol rock & roll scene was destroyed by Beatlemania in 1964, went their separate ways for a while. They stayed close to Philadelphia. They took a shot at civilian life. Danny had a wife and kids. He got a job as assistant manager in a toy factory. For a while, he drove a cab.

 

Then, in 1969, in the middle of Vietnam War protests, drug culture and the Nixon administration, something called the “Oldies format” caught on at a radio station in New York City, and spread through the country. All of a sudden, the old groups from the Fifties were getting back together or reforming around whoever was still alive, and starring in rock & roll revival shows. Fifteen or more acts who’d had hits at least fifteen years earlier were trotted out the way they were on the old Alan Freed tours. Danny & The Juniors came along with their two hits. They hired Bill Carlucci to make it a foursome again, dusted off those stage moves and were back on the road.

 

I was 16 when I saw Danny & The Juniors perform at one of those shows. It was Saturday night, January 20, 1973 at the New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum. They were squished in the middle of a bill that included Ben E. King and a version of The Drifters, The Five Satins, The Ronettes and Jay & The Americans. The emcee (and the reason I bought a ticket) was Don Imus, then the hottest thing in radio.

 

Danny & The Juniors did their two or three songs, opening strong with “Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay,” closing with “At The Hop.” To me, all of the acts except for Imus were from a different era. I was a toddler when Danny Rapp was in the Top 20. I was looking forward to Thursday, when Neil Young would be playing the Coliseum.

 

Danny Rapp at 31 had bigger things to look forward to. Somebody had the bright idea of filming some of the big oldies shows and turning it into a movie. Let The Good Times Roll was released in May 1973. Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Fats Domino were the stars, but Danny & The Juniors were squished in the middle somewhere and that was good enough. The movie was a hit that summer, and in August came American Graffiti, George Lucas’s movie about teenagers, cruising and rock & roll in 1962, with a soundtrack filled with oldies.

 

American Graffiti was a boost but still a kick in the nuts to Danny Rapp and the Juniors. They didn’t make the soundtrack or the movie, but “At The Hop” made it to both. The song was performed in a sock hop scene by the retro rock 'n' roll band, Flash Cadillac & The Continental Kids. Kim Fowley produced the track, which was also released as a single. Flash Cadillac’s “At The Hop” didn’t intrude on the Billboard charts. Neither did Danny & The Juniors when they re-recorded the song that same year.

 

Nevertheless, the Seventies was the decade to cash in on rock & roll nostalgia. There was Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Grease the musical and then Grease the movie (on that soundtrack, “Rock & Roll Is Here To Stay” was performed by  Sha Na Na).  Danny & The Juniors stayed on the road, playing lounges, hotels — class joints. Only now they weren’t fresh-faced kids in sharp suits. They were men heading to middle age, with lacquered, sprayed comb-overs and matching polyester outfits with big collars. Danny Rapp didn’t dig it. His marriage busted up and it ate at him. His fear of flying got worse. After the shows, spent, he turned off the charm. He kept to himself, he and a bottle. He wasn’t fun to be around.

 

So what was the breaking point? The twentieth anniversary of singing the same two songs? Looking through the windshield at another endless highway and seeing only more of the same Holiday Inns, afternoons waking up hungover next to the same middle-aged female fans? Near the end of the decade, maybe it was Danny & The Juniors’ latest and strangest trip: another package tour, traveling by bus with another collection of acts. Only this time it wasn’t rock & roll.

 

It was vaudeville.

 

In 1978, Danny & The Juniors were booked into another version of Roy Radin’s Vaudeville Revue. Radin had hit on the vaudeville idea during the Summer of Love, back when he was a teenage publicist for the Clyde Beatty Circus. He saw how they raked in big bucks touring backwater towns with old clowns and tired elephants, so he copied the model. Radin assembled a troupe of jugglers, magicians, dancers and ventriloquists, convinced old comedian Georgie Jessel to headline, and sent them out in a bus. It worked.

 

Roy Radin’s Vaudeville Revue rolled through the Seventies, with tours featuring forgotten old stars like Cab Calloway, Gloria DeHaven and Milton Berle, comics like Jackie Vernon and Stanley Myron Handelman, and oldies groups like the Shirelles. On that 1978 tour, Danny & The Juniors would bound onto the stage following a knockout set by Tiny Tim. They’d perform “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay” and “My Prayer” and close with “At The Hop”. Emcee Frank Fontaine — Crazy Guggenheim from the old Jackie Gleason Show — would usher them off and introduce the star, “Mr. Show Business.” That was the cue for Donald O’Connor to come out and do a soft shoe to “Mr. Bojangles.”

 

With Donald O’Connor.

 

Around this time, twenty years after Danny & The Junior’s season at the top, Roy Radin was heavy into cocaine and intent on becoming a Hollywood movie producer. He and bigtime producer Robert Evans established a production company to make a film about the legendary Harlem venue The Cotton Club. On June 10, 1983, Radin was found dead in a ditch, shot up and blown up with dynamite by hitmen hired by the woman who’d arranged the Evans deal.

 

When the vaudeville tour ended, Danny & The Juniors blew up, as well. Like a couple of Philly mob bosses, Danny Rapp and Joe Terry had a sit down and divided up the group and the territories. Joe Terry and Frank Maffei got the East Coast. Danny Rapp took the South, Midwest and West. He hired a couple of other guys and called the group Danny & The Juniors.  Terry and Maffei hired Maffei’s brother Bobby. They called their group Danny & the Juniors.  The two Danny & The Juniors went their separate ways. They did all right. They played the classy clubs. The two outfits did not overlap or collide.

 

Danny Rapp- The last ad March 9, 1983

 

There was Danny Rapp, not yet forty, living on the road and dead tired of it, driving by car from town to town with his little band, playing nightclubs and hotel lounges. He’d made decent money all those years, but he never invested or saved any. He could not see an end to the grind.

 

Twenty-five years after his summer at the top of the charts, Danny Rapp was behind the wheel, on the road with his latest version of The Juniors: a four-piece band, a singer who called himself Bobby C, and another singer, a young woman. 

 

On March 7, 1983, the group opened a month-long engagement in the brand-new Pointe Tapatio Resort overlooking Phoenix, Arizona. The place was so new they were still finishing off the last of the five hundred rooms.  Danny and his band were following a successful four-week run by a version of The Platters (that contained no original members!) in the Silver Lining Lounge of the Different Pointe of View Restaurant. Danny & The Juniors were advertised as “light-hearted nostalgic entertainment,” two shows a night, excluding Sundays. Danny would pull down about a grand a week, with a free room and half-price food and drinks, but he was feeling anything but light-hearted and nostalgic.

 

You couldn’t tell when he was performing. Onstage, Danny was a pro. After twenty-five years, he could do it on his head. Offstage, he was all too often off his head, buying too many of those half-price drinks in an attempt to erase a mistake he made by hiring his latest girl singer a few months earlier. The mistake was having sex with her. Lonely Danny fell hard for her. It was a real romance for a while, but now she wanted to keep things businesslike. Danny would see her after the show, flirting with the yokels in the bar, and it made him crazy. He drank more and his mood got darker. A couple of times, when some hick made a move on her, Danny staggered over, all five-foot-five of him, and things got ugly. Hotel security had to step in to break it up.

 

Fighting with the hotel guests didn’t sit well with the owners of this classy joint. The last week of the engagement, the girl singer told them that Danny had threatened her. She said she was afraid of him. With three shows to go, she stuffed all her things in a suitcase and flew the coop.

 

The resort’s vice president scheduled a meeting with Danny at 4:30 the following afternoon, Friday, April 1st. Ken Nagel also had booking agent Charlie Johnston in his office when he read Danny the riot act.  Johnston wasn’t happy. He’d booked Danny & Juniors to play Pittsburgh the following week.

 

“We wanted to make sure we had a quiet ending of an engagement that wasn’t so quiet during the four weeks,” Johnston said.

 

Nagel recalled that although Danny had been drinking before the incidents in question, he seemed completely sober when he showed up in his office. Yet it wasn’t as if he was paying attention. “I had to repeat things three, four times. It was as if he never quite understood,” Nagel said.

 

“He was completely out of it,” Johnston said. “Ken was reading the security reports and Danny just said, ‘That wasn’t me.'”

 

“He kept saying he was not responsible,” Nagel said. “I said, ’Danny, if you’re not responsible for your behavior, who is?’”

 

Danny responded by changing the subject. He asked for a pay advance so he could get his truck fixed.  Nagel gave it to him. April Fools. Now it was Danny’s turn to fly the coop. He packed his bags and drove away. He did not return to the Silver Lining Lounge.

 

What was left of the band, four musicians and singer Bobby C, performed that night and the next, without their star. “The show is built around him,” Bobby C said. “We pulled it off, but it wasn’t the same show.”

 

On Saturday, April 2nd, Danny Rapp wound up in the middle of the desert, about 140 miles from Pointe Tapatio. In the tiny town of Quartzsite, Arizona, he checked into one of the mobile homes that make up the Yacht Club Motel. According to La Paz County sheriff Ray Evans, he bought a .25 caliber automatic weapon that day or the next. He was seen drinking heavily at The Jigsaw, one of the town’s two bars.

 

On the afternoon of Monday, April 4, a maid at the Yacht Club Motel found Danny Rapp dead of a gunshot to the right side of his head. At least the cops were pretty sure it was Danny Rapp.  They couldn’t make a positive identification at first because the corpse’s face was blown off.  The sheriff said the shot was self-inflicted. He said bottles of booze and some money were found in the room, but no drugs. There was no suicide note, either, but there were notes on several calendars. The sheriff would not reveal the contents.

 

“It never dawned on me that he would kill himself,” Nagel said after Danny Rapp’s death was official. “He had been having quite a bit of trouble, personal problems, and we wanted to talk to him.  He just wasn’t acting like a mature adult.”

 

“It’s really too bad,” added Johnston, the booking agent. “To think he had reached the pinnacle of stardom in the 1950s and ends up in a little motel in Quartzsite, Arizona. He obviously was really despondent. I don’t know over what.”

 

Danny Rapp was 42.

 

They shipped his body the 2,300 miles back home to Philadelphia. About three dozen people showed up for his funeral at St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church. Danny Rapp was buried in New Saint Mary’s Cemetery in  Bellmawr, New Jersey, about ten miles from where he grew up.

 

When Joe Terry was asked about his former bandmate, he wasn’t very nostalgic. “Danny was an alcoholic,” he said. “He had some problems… He had trouble getting a grip.”

 

Thirty-five years after Danny Rapp shot himself in the head, sixty years since “At The Hop” went to Number One, Joe Terry and the Maffei brothers are still out there, performing as “Danny & The Juniors featuring Joe Terry.” They’re available for corporate and outdoor events, concerts, and shows in casinos and clubs. DannyndtheJuniors.com

 

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BURT KEARNS wrote the book TABLOID BABY and produces nonfiction television and documentary films. JEFF ABRAHAM is a comedy historian and public relations executive who has represented comedians from George Carlin to Andrew Dice Clay. The two of them wrote a book about performers who died on stage. It will be published in 2019.