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Soundtracks

Remembering Jimmy Drake

Nervous Norvus: What a Cat

     “Hey, daddy-o, make that type O,” Nervous Norvus whimsically demands at the end of “Transfusion,” one of the most unlikely hit records ever to come out of Oakland. A Top 10 national smash during the summer of 1956, the year a hillbilly cat from Memphis permanently altered the face of pop music, the song is a two-minute, 24-second compendium of highway automobile smash-ups and their bloody emergency room aftermaths, performed by Norvus, the alter-ego of Oakland truck driver-turned-songwriter Jimmy Drake.
     A loner who lived with his mother near Lake Merritt, Drake taped the song at home, singing in a distinctively nasal tenor voice reminiscent of Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards, a star of stage, screen, radio and records in the 1920s and ’30s who later became the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. Drake recorded it using only one microphone, making the jangling chords of his baritone ukulele barely audible, the thump of his foot on the mike stand supplying a steady four-to-the-bar bounce.
     “I took a little drink and I’m feelin’ right. I can fly right past everything in sight. There’s a slow-pokin’ cat, I’m gonna pass him on the right,” Drake sings during the fourth of the song’s six choruses, the musical flow of each briefly broken by the screech of rubber on asphalt, followed by the sounds of crushing metal and shattering glass. Lyrics that make light of drunk driving would never make it onto today’s radio, and many stations at the time refused to play “Transfusion,” not so much for that reason but because of the gory subject matter. Yet, much like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and other crime dramas of the period that required a moral conclusion in order to be aired, “Transfusion” was in essence an auto-safety song.
     “The ghoulish lyrics hiccup hysterically,” famed San Francisco personal-injury attorney Melvin Belli noted in his 1956 book, Ready for the Plaintiff, but “wind up with a gem of jive-y wisdom that is strictly in the groove: ‘Oh, barnyard drivers are found in two classes/Line-crowding hogs and speeding jackasses/So remember to slow down today!’”
     Drake was a wordsmith with a demented sense of humor and a hepster sensibility. “Dig,” the flip side of “Transfusion,” is a virtual thesaurus of synonyms for the slang term, including gaze, ogle, observe and goggle. “ ‘Dig’ means ‘to look at that,’ so dig, dig, dig you solid cats,” he adds.
     “Nervous” itself was at the time a term similar to “cool,” much like “bad” and “ill” would become with later generations. “That’s the most!” disc jockey and sometime singer Red Blanchard says of “Nervous” in his 1955 Columbia recording “Zorch,” a word of his own invention that means much the same and would later turn up in some of Drake’s novelty songs.
     Blanchard broadcast an extremely popular live half-hour comedy program Monday through Friday evenings on KCBS radio in San Francisco during the early 1950s. His science-fiction skits and parodies of such programs of the time as Peter Potter’s Juke Box Jury and Edward R. Murrow’s You Are There were rife with sound effects and often employed gross-out gags. Although Blanchard’s humor contained enough subtle puns to appeal to adults, his audience included many teenagers and persons even younger, both in the studio and at home. Drake, a middle-aged man with a seemingly child-like innocence, poignantly described the radio-listening experience in “I Listen to Red in Bed,” a song he mailed to the disc jockey on a three-inch reel sometime in the mid-’50s.
      By the time Drake sent him a tape of “Transfusion” in early 1956, Blanchard was back in his native Southern California, doing a syndicated deejay program in which he mixed gags and sound effects with hits of the day by such singers as Pat Boone and Elvis Presley. He also played oldies like “Cement Mixer (Put-Ti-Put-Ti)” by jive-talking jazzman Slim Gaillard, whose appendage of the syllables “a-roo-ney” to certain words was sometimes borrowed by Drake. Blanchard’s program aired locally on KROW in Oakland.
     “He intended it as a demo for me to do,” Blanchard, now 88, says of “Transfusion” by phone from his home in Escondido. “I couldn’t do it when I heard how good his voice was. He had an unusual voice, and I believe that’s what sold that record.”
     Blanchard added skids and crashes from a 1936 sound-effects record and began playing “Transfusion” on his program. Dot Records, then hot with Pat Boone, called and offered to put it out. Blanchard is listed on the label as producer, although he ended up losing his 3 percent royalty when the owner of the sound effects sued.
     Drake had a hit record on his hands, yet he turned down all offers to perform in person, including one from CBS television’s top-rated The Ed Sullivan Show. “He was very bashful,” Blanchard explained. “He didn’t want to appear in public. After
he wouldn’t go on Ed Sullivan, that’s about the last time I had any contact with him.”
     Prior to the Sullivan fiasco, Blanchard had “produced” (by interjecting a Tarzan-like “aaaah-eee-yaaah” into the middle of each chorus of Drake’s home recording) a second, albeit minor, Nervous Norvus hit called “Ape Call.” The song, an ode to prehistoric sex containing the lines “a pterodactyl was a flyin’ fool, just a breeze-flappin’ daddy of the old school, but a mama-dactyle could sure make him drool,” is among 33 numbers by Drake (many from Blanchard’s collection of demos) issued in 2004 by Norton Records in New York City on a CD titled Stone Age Woo: The Zorch Sounds of Nervous Norvus. The disc, which opens with “Transfusion,” includes such other ditties as “Elvis, You’re a G.I. Now” and the decidedly politically incorrect “Does a Chinese Chicken Have a Pigtail?”
     The failure of post-“Ape Call” records to garner airplay made Drake bitter, and he turned increasingly to drink. “After his mother died, he became very dissolute,” Blanchard added. Jimmy Drake succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver in Oakland in
July 24, 1968. He was 56.