Jan 252009
Who is this man, and what does he have to do with the Rolling Stones? No-Prizes will be awarded in two categories:
1. Correct answers to the question
2. Imaginative but incorrect answers to the question
I expect great things from you — especially *you*, 2000Man!
HVB
p.s.: there really is a connection between this guy and the Rolling Stones — but it is ridiculously obscure.
UPDATE!
Here’s Ward’s connection to the Stones:
Here’s Ward as he looks today:
The one on the left auditioned to take Mick Taylor’s place. I think some of his parts on “Fool to Cry” are buried in the mix.
Puppeteer Ward Hall is the adoptive father of blues singer Vera Ward Hall, who collaborated with Mississippi Fred McDowell, who wrote “You Gotta Move,” a fine blues cover by the Stones. Rumor has it that marionette Pauly was actually her biological father, but this was frowned upon in the South.
Excellent answers, Oats and Mod! But I fear you’ll not be winning the accuracy no-prize.
I remember this guy from talk shows in the 70’s. I think he briefly filled in for Mick when Mick needed that emergency appendectomy during the Stone’s first U.S. tour. Him and the dummy did a great “Under My Thumb”.
Man, I know a ton of minutiae about The stones, but that guy sure doesn’t look familiar. I’ll go out on a limb and guess he’s got something to do with the Rock N Roll Circus. Either that, or he was Elliot Easton’s big talent before The Stones.
The Puppet doubled as Wayne Perkins’ gig bag durning the 70’s. Keith thought he’d be an awesome stash for his smack, but Anita thought 30 suitcases would work best to draw attention away from the one with 2lbs of the stuff. Shoulda stuck with the puppet in hindsight.
The guy on the left looks like Woody. Get it, woody? I crack myself up.
I wanted to cheat, but Google doesn’t know either.
For accuracy’s sake, I’m gonna say he has something to do with the album cover of Exile on Main Street. What, I don’t know…
Gulp! Mod, you are correct. Unbelievable! Ward Hall *is* on the cover of Exile On Main Street. Check out the original – now updated — post to see where.
I’ve actually met Ward Hall, and he’s a character. The last of the great sideshow entrepreneurs, and still going strong at age… what, the guy must be pushing 90. I may have shared this before, but there’s new blood in the Hall, so it may be worth sharing again: the collage on the front of “Exile…” is actually a bulletin board from a famous New York/Coney Island bar and grill (or something) once frequented by sideshow entertainer types. These guys and gals would pin their publicity stills to the board, and it just sort of grew. I’m not sure if the joint still exists, but I know people who would know.
Ward knows he’s on the cover, but it means nothing to him. Like, literally. I’m not sure he knows who the Rolling Stones are. If you want to meet him, I think one of his shows will be set up at the York County Fair in PA this summer. Might be one of the last times you and/or your family will get to see an honest-to-goodness circus sideshow, complete with sword swallowers, three-horned goats, and cheesy optical illusions. And you might get to meet Ward!
HVB
Full disclosure HVB: You’re managing this act, aren’t you?
Truthfully, the reason I wanted to share this was because — I dunno, it just seems surreal to think that one of the dudes on the cover of Exile is still alive, can still be seen and spoken to. Surely I can’t be the only RTH’er who’s spent hours gawking at that album cover, vicariously getting a thrill out of the sleaziness of it all, and assuming everybody in that collage is long dead.
Well, for the most part, they are. But Ward is alive. Ward Hall exists! Come on, don’t you think it would be cool to be able to say you’ve met one of the dudes on the cover of “Exile On Main Street”? 2000Man, surely that would be a feather in *your* completist cap!
I almost went and dug out Exile on vinyl and looked on it but it’s in a closet and my wife said to leave the closet alone. I figured he was part of the unaired acts of the Circus since you said it was so obscure. I used to actually know the guy’s name with the pool balls in his mouth, but no one has asked me in so long I can’t seem to find it in my brain.
I would ask Ward to sign one of my copies of Exile if I knew him. I think it’s a swell feather, HVB!
The Exile cover is a photo taken by Robert Frank that originally appeared in his book The Americans. It depicts snapshots that were posted on a tattoo parlor wall.
“I almost went and dug out Exile on vinyl and looked on it but it’s in a closet and my wife said to leave the closet alone.”
I don’t know what sadder, the fact that your Stones vinyl is in the closet or the way your old lady bosses you around. Maybe you can sneak it out next time she leaves the house.
General Slocum has heard my thoughts on the value of the Exile album cover. Someday I’ll have to see if I can muster up my thoughts on the matter and put them on the record.
My New Year’s Resolution is to hook up a turntable again, so vinyl is in the closet under the stairs. There will be NO sneaking anything out of there but it’s dry and records should be just fine. If I get the albums out, then I will have to redo the closet because they aren’t right up front or anything. It will be a project, believe me. So when I hook up either one of my old turntables or buy a new one, it will be worth it. To look at an album cover it’s really not. She’s good at pointing out the logical part of things I want to do.
BigSteve — not wanting to pull sideshow rank on you, but it seems you and I are both wrong. I have a good friend who is (believe it or not) one of the nation’s leading academic experts on sideshow history, and she says the famous bulletin board was at Hubert’s Museum in Times Square.
http://www.showhistory.com/huberts.html
Hm. Curiouser and curiouser. Huberts Dime Museum closed its doors in 1968. My friend is adamant — the photo board is legendarily famous; it definitely came from Huberts. Perhaps after Huberts closed, it ended up on a tattoo parlor wall somewhere?
Anyhow, this is geekily interesting to me.
Just got word from my sideshow expert friend: she knows from folks in the industry that the famous cover shot was definitely taken *at Huberts.*
Robert Frank’s book The Americans (which everything I’ve read says is where the photo of the photos comes from) was published in 1958, so the date is not a problem. The tattoo parlor is the location given everywhere I could find on the internet. Some sources said it was in NYC, and some said “somewhere on Route 66.” There is a distant possibility that the internet might contain some inaccurate information.
On the other hand one article I checked was a feature on the Exile cover in the 8/15/08 issue of Goldmine, where they interview John Van Hamersveld, who designed the cover package. I can’t point you to it, because it’s subscription only, but here is one relevant passage:
“As Marshall starts the meeting, Norman hands another album cover by another designer to him. The cover is passed to Jagger for approval. He rejects it. Marshall then hands me a Robert Frank front photo collage across to me. The tattoo-parlor-wall cover image is from Robert’s photo documentary “The Americans.” Mick, on my right, looks on for both of us to agree, so I nod. This then becomes the famous photo composition for the Exile On Main Street album cover. As the meeting progresses, the other pieces of the package are handed to me.”
Frank was present at this meeting. He was filming Cocksucker Blues at that time. I just checked, and my library is supposed to have a copy of The Americans, so I could take a look when I return to work Wednesday.
I’m not going to argue with anyone who has a “sideshow expert friend,” but maybe I can do the research and get back to you.
I sense a rare and spine-tingling RTH Pince Nez Battle Royale in development. In this corner, with his sideshow expert friend, Hrrundivbakshi! And in this corner, just a few days away from returning to his seat among hundreds of thousands of books, including a copy of Robert Frank’s The Americans, BigSteve!
In the interest of full disclosure, but wanting to keep a friendly barrier of anonymity between my friend and the rest of the Internet, she’s the editor of this scholarly journal:
http://www.shockedandamazed.com/
And here, just by luck, is an excerpt from “Shocked and Amazed”‘s profile of Ward Hall:
http://www.shockedandamazed.com/hall/hall1.html
I sincerely believe this is one of those occasions where somebody’s faulty memory has become canonized in rock lore. (What, you’re going to trust the recollections of somebody doing lines and hittin’ the bong with Keef and Mick in 1972?!)
HVB
I’m perfectly willing to believe misinformation about rock music has perpetuated itself on the net, but the memories about Hubert’s go back even farther. What remains to be seen is whether Frank’s book has detailed annotations on each photo (and whether it’s on the shelf). Sorry about the delay in attempting to consult it. Anyone else who wants to try is welcome to. It’s pretty famous, and it has an introduction by Kerouac.
Yes, but the memories about Huberts are collective. Everybody in the sideshow industry remembers that board; it was legendary. Anybody who played Huberts stuck their glossy on the board, and it became a unique repository that people in the industry recognized on sight. Or so I’m told.
I can hear the following dialog in my head, which may better illustrate my point:
Robert Frank: Yes, I remember taking that picture at a tattoo parlor in 1959, part of a series of shots I took detailing the seedy underbelly of American culture.
200 sideshow artists, in unison: That’s not a tattoo parlor — that’s the bulletin board at Huberts!
I’m not taking sides, but sideshow artists are also known as freaks, right? Robert Frank, on the other hand, was hanging out with reputable sorts, like the Beats.
Only on RTH would there be a debate over the comparative reliability of the collective memories of sideshow freaks and rock&roll freaks.
Remember that the whole idea behind the Exile cover is that the snapshots on the cover and the snapshots of the Stones on the back and on the inside were equivalent.
And btw let me say that that collection of photos of performers being in a tattoo parlor doesn’t make obvious sense. If a tattoo parlor had photos up on the wall, wouldn’t it be of people with tattoos? If you didn’t know of the existence of a place like Hubert’s, which almost no one does and I didn’t until yesterday, but you had to conjecture a location for those photos, ‘tattoo parlor’ is a readymade stand-in, in the sense that it would have been a place for outsiders, part of a mythical underground America. This was before they had tattoo parlors in malls.
I know in Stones lore it’s always been a tattoo parlor from Robert Frank’s book. If it’s wrong, then I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s incorrect in Frank’s book. I can’t imagine it being in a tattoo parlor unless it was an artist that did sideshow performers, or was a sideshow performer. It seems plenty likely to me that it was just a photo in a large stack that Frank had as options, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t in the original book at all.
Another odd trivia bit about Robert Frank – if he’s in the audience the unreleased film, CS Blues can be shown in theaters. A friend of mine went to a showing and got to talk to him after the movie. He said he was very friendly and answered anything he was asked. It’s too bad I didn’t know HVB and his deep Side Show connections back then. If anyone sees the movie screening near them Frank will be there, so make sure to ask if he knew of Hubert’s.
Then again, it may just be the almighty Exile on Main St. choosing to reveal just a little more of itself to us at this time.
As I had feared, Robert Frank’s The Americans is not on the shelf. That’s a classic kind of title for some hipster to think it’s his duty to liberate. I’ll try to get it on interlibrary loan if no one else has access to a copy.
Damn, I was counting on resolution to this Pince Nez Battle Royale TODAY!
I’ve got some good news and some bad news. My library’s copy of The Americans turned up. It was misfiled. Really great photos, and I was surprised how many of them I’d remembered seeing before. Highly recommended.
But no Exile cover. I thought maybe the page with the Hubert’s/tattoo parlor photo had been excised, but all the pages seem to be there. This is the 1969 edition.
The mystery deepens.
Thanks for staying atop this, BigSteve!