THE LATE GREAT JOHNNY ACE

THE LATE GREAT JOHNNY ACE

Burt Kearns

June 27, 2018

 

Johnny Ace died at 25, allegedly during a game of Russian Roulette. The legend of his death not only obscures his talent but is built upon a misreading of what really happened backstage that Christmas night in 1954

 

by Burt Kearns & Jeff Abraham

 

 

Johnny Ace. The name doesn’t get much more rock & roll than that, and neither does his story. Even those who aren’t familiar with his music — Memphis R&B from the early 1950s — have heard the name, and most likely the legend attached to it. Paul Simon referenced him in his 1983 song “The Late Great Johnny Ace” (a song in which John F. Kennedy and John Lennon were made honorary “Johnny Aces”). Dave Alvin offered a more straightforward recitation of his early exit in “Johnny Ace Is Dead.” Johnny Ace was one of those tragic legendary rock & roll figures who’s remembered less for the way he played than for the way he left the building.

As legend has it, Johnny Ace went out in a most romantic way on Christmas Day 1954 — romantic like the love scene between Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter. Johnny Ace died at 25, playing Russian Roulette, the game in which you load a bullet into one chamber of a revolver, spin the cylinder, then pull the trigger while pointing the gun at your head. It’s said to be quite a rush if you only hear “click.”

 

There’s one small catch to the legend of the late great Johnny Ace: It wasn’t Russian Roulette, and it was only a matter of luck that it wasn’t a murder-suicide.

 

Johnny Ace was born in 1929 as John Marshall Alexander Jr., the son of Baptist preacher. He served time in the Navy and a bit more in a Mississippi prison before he washed up on Memphis’s Beale Street, the bubbling cauldron of southern urban blues, in 1949. He played and toured with Bobby “Blue” Bland and B.B. King in a band called the Beale Streeters before going solo and signing with Duke Records in 1952. There, he was christened Johnny Ace and out of the box went to #1 with “My Song.”

 

That was the first of eight chart hits in a row, and the beginning of a long slog of touring, much of it with Willie Mae Thornton (also known as “Big Mama” Thornton, enshrined in rock & roll history as the first to record Leiber & Stoller’s “Hound Dog”), a trajectory that blasted him into immortality on Christmas Day, 1954.

 

Johnny Ace’s last day began the day before. He played a Christmas Eve show in Port Arthur, Texas and drove to Houston for a show on December 25th. At 9 a.m. Christmas morning, he arrived at Olivia Gibbs’ apartment. Olivia was twenty-two years old. She’d attended the University of Wisconsin, but worked as a waitress at the Club Matinee, a blues showcase nicknamed “The Cotton Club of The South.” She was Johnny’s girlfriend. She considered herself his fiancée, and hoped to marry Johnny the following June — if his divorce from his wife and mother of his two kids came through by then.

 

Olivia later told a reporter that Johnny had invited his band to her place for Christmas dinner.  Johnny, she said, wasn’t a doper and he wasn’t a boozer and he wasn’t mean. He was a prankster, always acting foolish, and well, truth be told, he was something of a boozer, after all. Johnny was drinking on Christmas morning, guzzling vodka and playing with his gun. It was the little pistol he carried, a .32 caliber number he’d bought off another musician in Florida. He was always playing with his gun. He liked to shoot at road signs and show off, “just like a little boy,” Olivia said.

 

When Olivia told Johnny to knock it off and put the weapon away, he did. Then he showed everybody the gold and three-stone diamond ring she’d bought him for Christmas. When it was time for dinner, Johnny Ace used a big knife to carve the Christmas turkey.  He was in the Christmas spirit.

 

“I loved Johnny and he loved me,” Olivia said.

 

That evening, a crowd of 3,500 showed up for the “Negro Christmas Dance” at the City Auditorium. Johnny Ace was a featured act on a bill that included Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Otis and the headliner, B.B. King. Johnny capped off the first half of the show as usual, by inviting Big Mama onstage and then driving the crowd wild with a duet on his rollicking, rocking hit “Yes, Baby.”

 

Hey-ay-ay, tell me, baby!


Yay-hey, tell me, baby,


What is wrong with you?

 

Intermission began around 11 p.m. Johnny was still pranking around in the dressing room backstage at the City Auditorium, drinking vodka, but not in as fine spirits as he’d been earlier in the day. Now he was grousing about a toothache that was killing him.  Despite the fact that thousands of fans were in the auditorium waiting for the second half of the show, he said he didn’t think he could go on.

 

There were four other people in and out of the room. Olivia Gibbs was there, along with her friend Mary Carter. So was another singer named Joe Hammond and Big Mama Thornton. Olivia crawled up onto Johnny’s lap to try to make him feel better. All the while, Johnny Ace was playing with his little .32 caliber pistol, pointing it at people in the room and pulling the trigger. With no bullet in the firing chamber, every time he pulled the trigger, the gun made a snapping sound.  Snap! Snap! He was really getting on people’s nerves.

 

Willie Mae Thornton

 

Big Mama Thornton, all six feet of her, finally had enough. “Hey, man! What the heck you doin’ with that gun? Don’t you know it might go off?”

 

“It ain’t got but one bullet in it,”  Johnny replied.

 

“Hell, it don’t take but one bullet to kill you!” Big Mama snatched the pistol, turned the chamber and a bullet tumbled into her hand. She took a swig of 100 proof Old Granddad and headed out toward her second set.

 

“Gimme the gun!” Johnny demanded as she neared the door. She handed it over. 

 

“You ain’t gonna play with it no more, is you?”

 

“Where’s the bullet?” She threw it at him.

 

Snap! Now Johnny pointed the gun at Joe Hammond.

 

Snap! Snap!

 

Now he’d gotten on Joe Hammond’s last nerve. “Damn!” Joe spat. “You snapped it at everyone else! Try it on yourself!”

 

“Now watch me,” said the prankster. “Show you it won’t shoot.” Johnny Ace had his arm around Olivia. He placed the gun to his temple. He pulled the trigger once more.

 

‘Crack!’ Johnny Ace fell to the floor.

 

Big Mama stopped dead in her tracks. She swore that when the gun went off, “that kinky hair of his shot straight out.”

 

“I thought he was just up to his usual playing until I raised his head and saw the blood,” Olivia recalled.

 

Olivia Gibbs was lucky that Johnny Ace was playing with a small-caliber revolver and that the bullet didn’t pass all the way through his brain. When he pulled the trigger, he was hugging her close. Her head was pressed right up against his.

 

None of the thousands of dancers in the auditorium heard the gunshot, because Johnny Otis and his band were onstage, playing at the time. They were in the middle of a number when Big Mama came running onto the stage in tears and grabbed the microphone. “The concert is canceled! Johnny Ace has just been killed! There ain’t gonna be no music tonight! Johnny Ace has been killed!”

 

The Associated Press story was carried in newspapers around the country the following day:  “A Memphis, Tenn. bandleader was shot to death playing Russian Roulette last night…

 

“According to the detectives, Alexander would spin the cylinder, put the gun to the head of one of his companions and pull the trigger. Each time, the bullet failed to come into the chamber. The last time Alexander tried it, however, he sat down and pulled the girl on his lap and put the gun to his head after spinning the cylinder, police said. When he pulled the trigger, the hammer clicked on the bullet, which went smashing into his head.”

 

The report was not accurate, but the story stuck.

 

Meanwhile, they carried Johnny Ace’s body back to Memphis. The Reverend Dwight “Gatemouth” Moore, a former blues singer himself, preached over the casket.

 

Duke Records, Johnny Ace’s label, didn’t waste time crying once word of the tragedy got back to Memphis. Johnny’s next single was released within days of his death, before the new year. “Pledging My Love” was produced by Johnny Otis and featured the Otis band. The opening lines were, “Forever my darling, my love will be true, always and forever, I’ll love just you.”  The record became Johnny Ace’s biggest hit, balanced at the top of the Billboard R&B charts for ten weeks beginning February 12, 1955.

 

The magazine stated that the death of Johnny Ace “created one of the biggest demands for a record that has occurred since the death of Hank Williams just over two years ago.”

 

Olivia Gibbs, the girlfriend who just missed joining Johnny Ace on his final journey, said the song had been dedicated to her. “I’ll miss those nightly phone calls,” she said. “He called me every night when he was on the road, as if he wanted to hear me for inspiration before he went on the stage.”

 

###

 

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.

THE TRUTH BEHIND THE BRAWL BETWEEN JOHN LENNON AND CHRIS MONTEZ IN 1963! EXCLUSIVE!

 THE TRUTH BEHIND THE BRAWL BETWEEN JOHN LENNON AND CHRIS MONTEZ IN 1963! EXCLUSIVE!

May 23, 2018

By Burt Kearns

 

Eyewitness accounts finally reveal what really happened in the brawl between John Lennon and Chris Montez, which has become one of the great urban legends of rock & roll!

 

It was March, 1963. Chris Montez’s rock & roll career had just reached its zenith, but was already on the slide. The Mexican-American singer who’d been promoted as the new Ritchie Valens; was slipping off the charts. Chris’s single, “Let’s Dance”, had peaked at #4 on the Billboard charts the previous November, and his follow-up, “Some Kinda Fun,” missed the Top 40 by that much in January.

 

The future was a bit rosier for Montez’s touring buddy, Tommy Roe. The 20-year-old from Atlanta who’d been touted as the new Buddy Holly ever since his Peggy Sue rip-off, “Sheila”, landed at #1 in September 1962. Then Tommy’s follow-up single cracked the Top 40, but just.

 

So in March 1963 the two guys were still hustling. Their careers were born thanks to The Day The Music Died in the wreckage of a chartered single-engine V-tailed Beechcraft 35 Bonanza, near Clear Lake, Iowa.

 

And they were getting as much mileage as they could from their one-hit-wonders.

 

Chris Montez and Tommy Roe

 

Now, following a tour through the segregated Jim Crow South, with a revue of acts that included Sam Cooke, Clyde McPhatter and Smokey Robinson, Chris and Tommy were heading to England. Both their follow-up singles had made it to Top 10 in the UK, and British audiences were always excited to see pop stars from the States, even those past their expiration date.

 

As Andrew Loog-Oldman, the future Rolling Stones producer who did publicity for the tour, said, “America was everything, in music and on the screen. It gave us our language. It gave us our hope, so to speak. It gave us our music.”

 

Chris and Tommy were given the month of March, a tour that pinballed around the UK, from Bristol to Bedford, East Ham to Exeter; twenty-one dates over twenty-three days. Joining them would be their opening act: an up-and-coming band from Liverpool.

 

Tommy Roe remembered: “The agent called me and said, ‘You’re going to England to do a tour with Chris Montez.’

 

“And I said, ‘Oh, great. We’re old buddies, so that should be fun.’

 

“So we get to England, and on the bill with us is this group called the Beatles. Nobody in the States had ever heard of the Beatles. We didn’t know who the Beatles were.”

 

 

The two young Americans found out pretty quickly, once they stepped out of the rickety bus and were crushed by Beatlemania. The Beatles second single, the handjob-begging, blue balls anthem, “Please Please Me,” just happened to be at the top of the UK charts that week. And Parlophone was in the process of rush-releasing their first album, while masses of fans swarmed through every door and window at every stop along the way.

 

Chris Montez said, “Once we got rolling, we couldn’t go anywhere, Tommy Roe and myself and the Beatles. You never know how shocking it is until people rush at you and start tearing at your clothes and screaming. And you’re thinking, ‘Wow, yesterday I was doing nothing, today people are screaming in my face!’ It was kind of exciting.”

 

Tommy Roe remembered, “We started the tour and these guys have a huge following. They’re just kicking off their career, but their fans are everywhere. They’re chasing them around the theaters and it was really pandemonium. The only time I’d ever seen anything like this was with Elvis.”

 

The four young Beatles had a busier time than Chris and Tommy, breaking away from the tour, and driving to London to appear on the BBC, or to EMI Studios on Abbey Road for final touches on their debut album. And, for several nights early on, John Lennon was knocked out by a cold, so the Beatles performed as a trio.

 

Chris remembered the tour this way: “We got along good together. They seemed like regular guys, just rockers. And they loved music. I don’t think the Beatles were aware what was going to happen in their career. Paul was real humble and real nice. Ringo and George were real cards. You know, I had a lot of respect for Lennon, and even more now. But he was who he was. Lennon was, I guess, kind of rambunctious.”

 

Tommy said, “They were very nice. They were very inquisitive about America. I mean, they asked tons of questions about America. And John, he had a Gibson guitar, and first thing he did on the bus, was say, ‘You know, we did your song ‘Sheila’ at the Star Club in Hamburg and people loved it.’

 

And he said, ‘But I don’t think I’m playing the chords right….’

And he played it, and sure enough, he was playing a D before the E.

I said, ‘Nah, it goes like, A, E, D, A, like so…’

And he said, ‘Ah, that’s it!  I knew I was doing something wrong.’

And then John let me use his guitar on the bus, to write songs.”

 

The Beatles were driven off on the morning of March 14 for business in London. When they arrived back at the hotel, it was time for the show in Wolverhampton. Chris was holed up with a beer, in a private den set aside for the musicians, safe from the packs of screaming girls outside.

 

Chris remembered what happened next. “I said, ‘Hey, where were you guys?’

 

“They said, ‘Oh, we were finishing our album.’

 

“I said, ‘Really?’

 

“And they said, ‘You want to hear it?’

 

“And I said, ‘Yeah,” and they put the record on. The first cut. When they put the needle down, it just knocked me out. I said, ‘What a rocker!’

 

“And they played me the rest of the album and I said, ‘Paul, play that one again for me. I love that one. That’s my favorite.’

 

“He said, ‘You like that one?’ 

 

“I said, ‘Yeah!”

 

That first cut on the Beatles’ first album was “I Saw Her Standing There,” the one that began with the count-in: “One, two, three, FUCK!”

Chris Montez would turn out to be the last pop star the Beatles would open for. He was also the first to hear The Beatles’ debut album. And, by the final week of the tour, Chris would be the one standing right in the middle of the road, the first victim of Beatlemania, run over by the locomotive of sex, adolescence and rock & roll, stoked by those four words. One. Two. Three. FUCK!

 

As Andrew Loog Oldman remembered, “Chris came in just as the curtain was coming down and he watched. He had a wonderful experience, as we all did, but there was just now no denying what was happening with this incredible phenomenon, the Beatles. By April, they were it.”

 

The tour moved along. Everyone got along on the bus. The Beatles did their half dozen numbers and made way for the American headliners. Chris learned to perform with the Beatle fans stragglers rushing the stage.

 

The album Please Please Me was released on Friday, March 22. On Saturday night, way up in the northeast, in Newscastle-Upon-Tyne, there was a celebration after the show, and the dispute that until now has been the most disputed moment in rock & roll history.

 

"John comes in, all the Beatles come in, and John’s 

got a beer in his hand and he’s really whacked,

 you know, just drunk out of his head and…”

 

Late Saturday night, March 23, 1963, or possibly in the early morning hours of March 24th, John Lennon and Chris Montez got into it.

 

As Tommy remembered it, “Somebody in the business threw them a party. It was in a beautiful house, kind of a country house out in the forest. Everybody was drinking beer and having a good time. And Chris had left the party and was on the bus asleep in his seat. And we all come piling back on. I come on, I sit down next to Chris. And John comes in….”

 

One would think that this would be one triumphant night on which Lennon would have held his fire, except for the fact that he never could hold his liquor. Remember March 14, 1974?

 

The Troubadour, West Hollywood?

 

You know, the waitress who responded to his, “Do you know who I am?” with, “Yeah, you’re some asshole with a Kotex on his forehead.”

 

Tommy Roe and Chris Montez. 1963.

 

Tommy continues, “I sit down next to Chris, and John comes in, all the Beatles come in, and John’s got a beer in his hand and he’s really whacked, you know, just drunk out of his head and…”

 

Chris interrupts, “Lennon poured beer on my head!”

 

Tommy continues, “He pours the beer on Chris’s head, sitting in his seat, and Chris wakes up, he’s wet with beer, and he goes, ‘Oh man, what’s that?’ He was pissed!”

 

Chris interjects, “And John says, ‘You son of a so and so.’ I was shocked. I was perturbed, I got real pissed, and I got up and I said, ‘Hey, you! What the hell you think you’re doing? You want some?’ and started rushing at him.

 

“Because I didn’t take any of that crap, you know?

 

“We started throwing punches and we got tied up together.”

 

Tommy picks it up, “And the big scuffle starts, and we start fighting in the aisles and scuffling and, you know, it was kind of ugly.”

 

Chris said, “Actually, Tommy Roe stepped in and broke it up.”

 

Tommy again, “I got between them, everybody was scuffling, and we kind of scuffled down in the floor, got between the seats and stuff.”

 

Chris recalled, “Tommy said, ‘If you want anything with him, you want something with me, too!'”

 

Tommy said, “Well, it was only against a dozen, man. We were the only American acts. Chris was getting ready to hit him, and it’s like, we don’t want to go there. We’d already had a fight on that tour between the road manager and one of the guys in the band.  And the road manager butted this guy, and his face just opened up. It was like a really a rowdy group, from what we were used to.”

 

“And that’s how it ended. There was no winner.”

 

Everyone settled down in their seats. Paul McCartney tried to make peace with Chris.

 

Chris said, “Paul sat by me and said, ‘Come on, Chris, let’s be friends….’

 

“I said, ‘Paul, just get away from me, I don’t want nothing to do with you guys. You know, you pissed me off!”

 

As for Lennon, Chris recalled, “John? I guess he was a wise guy. But I got the sense that, I shouldn’t say this, that he was jealous of who I was or what I did. I don’t know what his problem was, but I didn’t like it too much.”

 

The next day, the show rolled into Liverpool. It was a homecoming for the Beatles, and a chance for Chris Montez to show he didn’t harbor any hard feelings.

 

Chris remembered it this way, “When we arrived in Liverpool, I told my manager, ‘This is their town. Let them close the show.’

 

“He said, ‘You sure?’

 

“I said, ‘Yeah, It’s no big thing.’

 

“And that’s the way it was with me.”

 

The Beatles closed the show in Liverpool and they wound up headlining the remaining six nights of the tour. Chris Montez had no problem with that, either, although it turned out that one performer did hold a grudge that final week on the bus. Turned out, John was just a jealous guy.

 

Tommy said, “Before the fight, John was letting me use his Gibson guitar on the bus to write songs. The next day he said, ‘You can’t use my guitar anymore!  That’s it. That’s it! No more. Leave my guitar alone.’ It just got cold after that. And by this time, they had the tour locked up. It was really a Beatles tour by this time.”

 

It really was.

 

###

 

[Chris Montez and Tommy Roe would rebound with phenomenal reinventions and success a few years later. Chris Montez as a MOR crooner in Herb Alpert’s A&M stable, and Tommy Roe with bubblegum hits like “Sweet Pea” and “Dizzy.”]

 

 

 

CHRIS MONTEZ & BRIAN WILSON: A 50-YEAR HIGH SCHOOL REUNION

 CHRIS MONTEZ & BRIAN WILSON: A 50-YEAR HIGH SCHOOL REUNION

 

April 25, 2018

By Burt Kearns

 

While making his documentary about Chris Montez, the rock ‘n’ roller known for hits “Let’s Dance” and “Call Me,” Burt Kearns managed to reunite him with his old high school pal, Brian Wilson

 

“Chris Montez would have made a great Beach Boy. He really would.”

 – Brian Wilson 

 

So let’s get the backstory out of the way. This all began ten years ago. I was driving down Sunset Boulevard when a song came on the radio. A song from somewhere out of the Sixties: opening notes on a xylophone, then handclaps, piano, and after the intro, this high, sweet, tentative tenor: “The more I see you, the more I want you… Somehow this feeling just grows and grows…”  The verses, then a reprise with the words replaced by “la la la’s” —  Whoa! What a song!

I said, probably out loud in the car, “I know this chick!”

 

At home, I looked up the song online, and realized it wasn’t a chick at all. It was Chris Montez, the rock ‘n’ roller who had a hit with “Let’s Dance” in 1962, whose career was resurrected three years later when Herb Alpert signed him to A&M Records and turned him into an easy listening idol by pushing him to record standards like “Call Me,” with handclaps and xylophones and la la las. Montez, it turned out, had quite a story, a pioneering role in the history of rock ‘n’ roll and pop music, from Ritchie Valens to Clyde McPhatter, the Beatles to Los Lobos.

 

Two days later and fourteen miles east on Sunset Boulevard, I was sitting with Montez in his manager’s office, at the bow of the ship-shaped Crossroads of The World building (Ford Fairlane’s office in the movie), making a deal to produce a documentary on his life and career.

 

    Crossroads of the World 1937

Chris was in his mid-sixties when we met. His hair was long. He was still youthful, soft-spoken and self-effacing, same as that guy who I thought was a chick singing “The More I See You” on that record from 1966. Chris was still the Mexican-American kid, one of ten kids in a family from the wrong side of the tracks in Hawthorne, a working-class community that grew around the aircraft industry in L.A’s South Bay. He was “Zeke” then, born Ezekiel Christopher Montañez. When I met him, Chris said he still kept in touch with his pals from Hawthorne High, like Ron Arias.

 

“He had this old-fashioned car and we’d hang out. I used to go to his house all the time,” Chris told me. “And when I’d go over there to his house, he had this little sister. And she’d always smile and she was kinda shy. That was Olivia. Olivia grew up and ended up working at A&M Records. I was there at A&M, after the “Let’s Dance” era, but I didn’t know. And then I found out that later, that’s where she met George Harrison. And she and George were married. This young girl turned out to be Olivia Harrison. It’s just –”   He laughed.  “It’s funny. Everything came full circle.”

 

 Ron Arias – George and Olivia Harrison

 

Yeah, full circle. That comes back around to where we started. Chris had other pals in Hawthorne’s Class of 1960, like student athlete Al Jardine and class cut-up Brian. Brian Wilson.

 

“I had Brian in a couple of my classes,” Chris recalled. “I remember Brian in my science class. The teacher was Mr. Giddinger. And he was like six-foot-three and bald-headed, and when he’d be giving us a lecture on whatever he was teaching us, he’d always wipe his forehead, blow his nose, wipe his forehead. And we’d look at him kind of strange. And one day, he got called out of the classroom and he says, ‘Hey, Brian, you take over the class for a minute.’ So when he left, Brian got up there and said, ‘Okay guys, settle down, settle down.’ He imitated him. He said, ‘I want you guys to behave yourself, I need you to pull out a piece of paper.’  And he wiped his forehead and blew his nose in it, and we all started laughing. And the teacher came back in, and we all straightened out.

 

“Brian was a joker, yeah.  So was I, but he was a funny guy.

 

“And I used to go to their house, and play with them.  I remember going over there and practicing. Brian would be on the organ, and Dennis would be on the drums, and Carl on guitar, and we just jammed together.  Never knowing where it was going or what they were going to become.”

 

“You jammed with the Beach Boys in high school?” I already knew he did. “Before they were the Beach Boys?”

 

“Yeah. Yeah, I jammed with the future Beach Boys in their living room,” Chris said. “I remember going over there and we’d always jam and I’d always want to play the hard rock.  I can visualize Brian always sitting there with his organ.

 

“I remember having a conversation with him one time, when we were getting out of high school. And Brian said, ‘Hey Zeke, we just signed a contract.’  I said, ‘So did I!’  He said, ‘We’re gonna call ourselves the Beach Boys.’ And I said, ‘They’re going to call me Chris Montez.’  I’ll never forget that conversation.

 

“I guess Brian Wilson got the name the Beach Boys because Dennis used to surf, and surfing was a trend coming on then. And it’s funny, because I used to surf all the time. I used to think to myself, ‘Who are these guys to call themselves The Beach Boys? I surf more than any of them. I’m always in the water.’ But that’s the way it was.”

 

The Hawthorne High stories, along with Beatles and Herb Alpert, all came together in the work-in-progress we screened around the country while trying to raise funds for the film that would be called El Viaje Musical de Ezekiel Montañez: The Chris Montez Story. We brought the preview to Beatles fan conventions in Chicago and New Jersey, and film festivals, including the Paso Robles Digital Film Festival in Sideways wine country, where Chris was featured in an afternoon outdoor concert in a line-up that included Buddy Holly colleague Sonny Curtis (who took over lead vocals in The Crickets after Holly’s death), and Gary Busey, who’d sing Buddy Holly songs like he did when he played the rocker in the movie.

 

When Curtis went onstage before him and went into a song from the Holly canon, Busey — and this is true, I swear to God– ran behind the stage and pulled the plug on the power.

Gary Busey – Burt Kearns photo

Two years passed. It’s not easy financing a documentary. The filmmaking team scattered. Then, we got the call that Brian Wilson was available to participate and was looking forward to talking about his old pal Zeke, whom he hadn’t seen — in person, at least —  in more than fifty years.

 

We arrived late in the afternoon at Brian Wilson’s mansion in a gated community off Mullholland Drive. We set up in a room upstairs — a room with a piano and awards and walls covered in wine-colored curtains —  that was set aside for Brian’s interviews and photo shoots. We’d been warned that he could be a difficult interview, prone to one-word answers.

 

Brian entered the room. He was camera-ready, in slacks and nice patterned shirt, looking good for a guy his age. And while microphones and lights were adjusted, this giant of music, this broken genius pleasantly awaited the first question. There were a few short answers, a silence or two while I regrouped with a follow-up that might elicit a run of sentences, and though it seemed at times he might have been swimming a few yards to the surface in his efforts to respond, Brian Wilson was comfortable talking about music and high school and his old pal Zeke.

 

Brian Wilson slides in.

 

Me: So, we’re here to talk about Zeke, Zeke Montañez, back from the Hawthorne days.

 

BRIAN WILSON: Ezekiel Montañez!

 

Chris has really fond memories of Hawthorne High. What do you remember about high school?

          

“Um, a bunch of pretty girls. I used to, you know, I fell in love in my senior year, and I couldn’t stop thinking about this girl all day long.”

 

What was her name?

 

“Carol.”

 

Did you write a song about her?

 

 “No.”

 

What was Hawthorne like, growing up?

 

“Had a little, nice little hamburger stand, you know, called Skippy’s, and of course the beach, you know. We used to go to the beach.

 

Chris was a surfer back then, too, he said–          

 

“Oh was he? I didn’t know that!”

 

Yeah, he said he was a surfer. You didn’t surf much, that’s one thing I know, right?

 

“No, I never surfed.”

 

I understand Chris was one of the only two Mexican kids in the class.  Did he stand out, or was he one of guys?

 

“He’s one of the guys, yeah.”

 

What do you remember about Zeke from high school?

 

“I was in one of his classes, and he used to make people laugh. He would say things that made people laugh in the classroom. I can’t remember anything specifically. He really was funny. He really had a good sense of humor.”

 

It’s funny you say that, because he told us the same thing about you. He said you were the cutup, like in chemistry class, when you used to imitate the teacher.

 

“Really?”

 

(laughs)  Remember that?

 

“No!”

 

He also talked about going over to your house and jamming in your living room.

 

“Yeah! We used to do that.”

 

What kind of music were you doing?

 

 “You know, I can’t remember. It was rock ‘n’ roll, but I can’t remember.”

 

Did Zeke stand out at all? Did you think that someday he would be a musician?

 

“No, I had never guessed that he would, you know?  I don’t think that he thought that I would, either.” (laughs)

 

What is it about Hawthorne, do you think, that is so special, that grew all these great musical talents?

 

“Well, it was just an open place, you know, like, people rambling around, you know, it’s just like — I wish I could do that again.”

 

When you were starting your first groups in high school, Carl and the Passions, was there ever a chance that Chris would’ve joined your group?

 

“You know, that’s a good question. I don’t think so — I don’t know, I don’t really know.”

 

You think he would’ve made a good Beach Boy?

 

“Chris would’ve made a great Beach Boy, he really would.”

 

Around that time, we invited Chris Montez into the room.  It wasn’t a surprise to Brian; we’d told him in advance that Chris would be joining us.  Even so, he wasn’t sure what to expect. It was their first meeting in more than fifty years.

 

BRIAN WILSON:  Hey Chris!

 

CHRIS MONTEZ : Oh, my man!

 

BRIAN WILSON: The sweetest guy in the world.

 

CHRIS MONTEZ:  Oh, no, go on!  The sweetest guy …

 

BRIAN WILSON: You are the sweetest singer in the world.

 

And what did they talk about, the legendary composer of teenage symphonies to God and the singing star with no less than three international anthems? In their first meeting in more than fifty years, Chris Montez and Brian Wilson caught up like any couple of high school pals who hadn’t seen each other in decades. They reminisced about high school.

 

Chris Montez is 75. So is Brian Wilson. Both musicians are still on the road. Brian is on tour now, playing Beach Boys hits with Al Jardine. In May, Chris will be touring Australia with The Crystals. The documentary, as documentaries tend to be, is still in production.

COMING SOON: Another PleaseKillMe.com video exclusive! Eyewitness accounts of Chris Montez’s brawl with John Lennon!