chapter ten “THE MONSTER YOU MADE”
In this mess of a story, there is at least one fact no one would dispute: Jimmy Curtis died because the vertebrae in his neck snapped against the edge of a wooden armrest. This is the direct cause confirmed in police reports, medical records, eyewitness accounts.
What is more complicated, more open to conjecture, are the other factors building to the deadly beating he took that night. Not just the business pressures and poor planning and political tensions you’ve maybe read about before—but also the betrayals, inflated egos, lies, and excesses of ambition these collected confessions attempt to reveal. Everyone I interviewed presented a different take on why the Rivington Showcase riot happened, and certain subjects put up a testy defense when my questions leaned aggressive. In the end, perhaps Bob Hize put it best when accepting his own culpability. “It was all my fault,” he told me, “and hers, and his, and theirs, and on and on and on.”
But we’ll start from the top, where the buck proverbially stopped: with Rivington label head Howie Kelly. Following Polychrome, Rivington’s priciest flop to date, Kelly was anxious for a taste of success after spending five years floundering in the industry. His agreement with Bob Hize was nearing its expiration, but Kelly agreed to extend the deal another six months—on the condition that his producer turn his focus toward the label’s other acts.
HOWIE KELLY:
Hizey would get attached to the creatives—he had Nev living with him, for Christ’s sake. You can’t get that personal, because sometimes it doesn’t work out and you gotta move on. I had the other artists coming to me upset. “He won’t take a meeting with me,” or, “You promised we’d be recording by now.” I liked Bob but it was time for him to snap out of it. So I took it upon myself to bring in new people who were gonna shake shit up.
BOB HIZE:
He didn’t have a cohesive vision for what Rivington should be. You can judge that from two perspectives—one, that it’s brilliant strategy, because it means you aren’t beholden to any particular style and you have a diverse roster; or two, that it’s craven, spaghetti-against-the-wall commercialism. Before Polychrome I would’ve agreed with the “craven” camp. But the collapse of that record humbled me and I began to see that maybe Howie had a point. Sometimes survival in this industry requires detaching from personal tastes and going with the flow, as they say. And so we started to develop different kinds of artists we’d signed, to see what might hit.
Waiting their turn to record were the Bond Brothers, a Southern-rock quartet that Kelly had discovered while on vacation in Florida in the late summer of 1970. Chet Bond (vocals), twenty-two; his younger brother, Beau (lead guitar), nineteen; and their neighbors Cole Young (bass) and Donny Pendle (drums), both twenty-one, were born and raised in Live Oak, eighty-five miles outside of Jacksonville, where legendary groups like the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd trace their roots. They met Howie Kelly in nearby Atlantic Beach, where they were spending summer weekends building a following at a dive bar called Sharky’s.
HOWIE KELLY:
Everybody and their mother has an opinion as to whose fault [Rivington Showcase] was, all right? Everybody likes to toss that blame around like a goddamn hot potato. So as long as everybody’s playing that game I’ll offer you two cents you can spend, somebody you should call up and grill: the gal who was my goddamn masseuse, that’s who! Breaking news: She was the one who told me I needed to take a vacation in the first place, so she’s the reason I happened to go down to Florida, okay? If people wanna blame me for bringing on the Bond Brothers, they also need to call up Song… Sing… fuck if I remember.
This was around the time I had to break up that fight between Nev and your father over that song, so obviously my stress level was through the roof. And this gal said my muscles were like rocks and that Florida might be a good place to loosen ’em up. I should’ve gone to Miami or the Keys but Bob was spending a lot of dough making Polychrome—Jimmy and John Squine and those guys were not cheap—so I settled for Atlantic Beach, not knowing any better. And let me tell you, I came back more stressed than before. My God, the heat… The fucking winged cockroaches—one of them slapping against the bathroom mirror in my motel room woke me up… and have you ever seen this thing they call a crawfish? There was a whole giant festival dedicated to ’em near where I was staying, and I swear looking at the color of those boiled fuckers you couldn’t tell the difference between one of ’em and one of the locals—that’s how red the necks were down there. I was hoping for a taste of the Caribbean and instead it’s like I’m in coastal fucking Crackerville.
But one night I stopped by the bar, because even after dark that humidity’s like a brick to the face, and I wanted somewhere to breathe for a second and hydrate. That’s when I discovered [the Bond Brothers] playing their set, and I liked what I saw. They had the stuff to fill a place and they had the girls squealing. That was the kind of energy Rivington needed. What’d I care whether they were Boy Scouts?
CHET BOND, LEAD VOCALIST, THE BOND BROTHERS:I
We came up from nothing. The kind of poor white trash that got shipped off daily to Saigon, except by some miracle we got a pass. One way or another, all of us in the band got out of [drafted service]—Cole on account of he caught something off a bad tattoo, my brother and me because our birthdays got pulled late, just luck of the draw, and Donny because he already had an old lady and a kid. I guess we felt pretty invincible in those days. But you best believe if our numbers came up we woulda been the first standing in line when it was time to go. We wasn’t no cowards, you know. We wasn’t no special snowflakes. We had friends who’d had their asses shipped over, a lot of poor brothers who didn’t never come home, so we had respect.
We started the band back in high school, mostly because after hours the music teacher, a real nice woman, would feed us after class. She had a couple old guitars she’d brought in that her son used to play, and later she gave ’em to Beau as a gift. And then come to find out, we liked to play. We weren’t half bad either—did some birthday parties, a couple backyard weddings, and then one of Beau’s little girls with the stars in her eyes got us some gigs at bars in the area. We couldn’t believe it.
Outside of the band we liked to work on cars and bikes. Junk heaps left on the side of the road that my old man would tow home—he drove a tow truck for a mean sonofabitch all his life—and we would juice ’em up and race ’em. Asshole grease monkeys outside with the tunes on, you know? We always loved Elvis, like everybody did, and our mamas loved playing country radio but I admired the rougher guys—Merle [Haggard], Johnny Cash. So later when we started getting more serious, dreaming all pie-in-the-sky about getting a record contract, I always thought, Nashville. But Howie Kelly was the one to come into Sharky’s that night. He was like a walking hundred-dollar bill, and we didn’t know no better than to lunge.
BOB HIZE:
Howie decided to sign them without consulting me—his prerogative, I suppose, considering I hadn’t yet proven myself. The first time they came to the offices to sign their contract, I was uncomfortable. Long hair wasn’t unusual, of course, but they had the denim jackets with the sleeves ripped off and the Confederate flag patches stitched on, and Chet carried a switchblade tucked into the top of his boot. Three of them had these beastly beards and you couldn’t see underneath whether they were smiling or snarling at you. I remember them passing around a flask; I remember one of them complaining about the subway and doing a horrid impression of the person who’d served him in the token booth. I wonder now if it was all just a front because they were in fact intimidated by the city and felt foreign themselves in it.
With their contract signed and money to burn, the Bond Brothers went back down south, where they continued cultivating their live act and an impressive fan base.
CHET BOND:
We spent some of the advance on a cherry-red truck that we used for lugging our equipment and a heap of a van we fixed up to have a bed in the back. And while we were working on the songs for the record we went for runs up and down Florida, then over through the panhandle to Alabama, Mississippi. We’d alternate who got to ride in the van and who drove the truck, and sometimes we squeezed a couple fun girls into the van with us.
I had my fans and my particular appeal, but Beau had the looks that made the girls go nuts. Whenever we were outside, even sometimes when we were on a stage in some hole with no air conditioner, he’d have his shirt whipped off, and he could tan real good and the sun played up the natural blond in his hair. He was our mama’s favorite too, her little darlin’…. We used to beat his ass and call him Little Bobby, for Bobby Sherman—he hated that. [Laughs] Yeah, I’m telling you, ever since he was a kid, thirteen, fourteen years old, my baby brother had the girls following behind him, and like any red-blooded American boys we really loved the girls.
ROSEMARY SALDUCCI:
They would mail Howie photos of themselves partying with total rando nutjobs or groupies with their tops off and Beau or Chet signing their tits. Disgusting. But Howie was grinning and showing them off around the office and he’d bug Bob: “Do you see? Do you see this money we’re losing every day there’s no record?” So Bob started to feel like he didn’t have much choice but to bring them back up and get them in the studio.
BOB HIZE:
The Bond sessions were a nightmare. They’d be blotto off cheap beer; these raccoon-eyed women they’d have hanging around would bring cases of it to the studio, rolling it in on dollies, and then lay about all night complaining. Chet would get into vicious barking rows with the other guys, and once he hurled a bottle at my head when I cut him off in the middle of a song to make some necessary adjustments—I think the primary reason he missed is because he wore sunglasses indoors and could only estimate my general vicinity. After that, I was interested in getting that album done as quickly as possible. In fact, we blasted through it in six nights, and the mixing was done soon after. Other than the constant threats of violence and idiocy by osmosis, making it was simple, wasn’t it? All I had to do was let any thinking and caring and creativity seep away.
I was relieved, but also extremely bitter, when the first single hit.
With a targeted release to both country and rock radio, “Outlaws by Birth,” from the Bond Brothers’ April 1971 self-titled debut, became the first charting single from Rivington Records. (Hize’s postproduction touch on the song: the sound of a revving motorcycle engine that backs up Beau Bond’s guitar.) It reached No. 7 on Billboard’s hard-rock chart, and a follow-up, “Dirty Boots,” entered at No. 18.
NEV CHARLES:
I studied this—these were literally the lyrics to a Bond Brothers song: [reciting in a deadpan] “Good ol’ boys cuttin’ loose in your town / Bring all the booze, bring all the gals / Rev me up, baby, rev me up / Hop yourself on in my truck / Enough could never be enough.” But oh yes, it could be enough, couldn’t it? Certainly enough for me to want to stick my head in the oven, right, and toss in my own tortured notebooks while I was at it.
The hilarious part is that neither Opal nor I, nor any of the other artists we knew on the label, had even met them yet to know the full extent of their boorishness. Before we knew it, they were suddenly getting radio play. I asked Bob, “These are the Bond Brothers you’ve been complaining about at the dinner table? These are the guys you hate but somehow managed to get some attention?” And oh, God, I remember there was a review of their album somewhere, I can’t remember the publication, but I sat down to lick my chops—good old Schadenfreude, everybody feels a bit of it; don’t tell me you don’t root for Rolling Stone to go under every day of your life, young lady…. But then as I was reading along, la-di-da, I realized the review was actually positive! The critic wrote something like, “If you take them on their own terms, the Bond Brothers are a fun and mindless novelty.” And I thought, Fun? Mindless? When’s it ever been passable to be fun or mindless? How about fresh and clever, unique?
OPAL JEWEL, SHRUGGING:
Hell, they could’ve been singing “A-B-C-1-2-3” and I would’ve congratulated them on their little hit record and kept it moving. For me it wasn’t about the lyrics being dumb—and, I mean, it wasn’t like they were saying, “Nigger nigger nigger.” But that image, those symbols, that’s what’s insidious. Folks rally around that stuff, they claim it, they hurt people like you and me in the name of it. So when I laid eyes on that Bond Brothers album cover [a studio shot of the members facing the camera in a line, each wearing a Confederate flag belt buckle on the waist of his jeans]… It was like I had built this life I loved in New York only to zoom right back to summertime in Alabama. Me and Pearl, and our own mother worried about what people who waved flags like that could do to little girls like us.
HOWIE KELLY:
No offense to you, because I understand that the African Americans have some misgivings about that particular symbol. But back then, it just didn’t seem like all that big of a deal. It seemed like another slice of Americana, right? I mean, what’s the biggest movie of all time? Gone with the fucking Wind [in which Confederate soldiers are the noble heroes and their flag flies just before intermission]. And then even a few years after [Opal’s objections], the same flag was on top of the General Lee [the Dodge Charger popularized on the television show The Dukes of Hazzard]! Didn’t every little kid in America, Black, white, or yellow, have the toy version of that fucking car? I know mine did!
On top of that, I gotta say: I thought Opal had some kinda gall to make a comment on what other people wore. Opal Jewel! Of all the cuckoo-crazies! No matter what I ever thought, I never tried to be the fashion police with her. I believe in free speech and I believe in letting artistes be artistes.
BOB HIZE:
[The Bonds’ success] was a mixed bag for me. I got my promotion and the small stake in the label just as Howie had promised, and, more important, Claudia seemed happy. We really needed the money. But the larger part of me was aghast because the Bond Brothers meant nothing to me beyond a gimmick, an appeal to something that made a lot of us nervous. And I was chagrined to face the other artists with whom I’d been working so hard, with little to no result.
VIRGIL LAFLEUR, WHEN ASKED HIS OPINION OF THE BOND BROTHERS’ IMAGE:
With the possible exception of Wonder Woman, I’ve never cared for cartoons.
OPAL JEWEL, CHUCKLING AFTER HEARING LAFLEUR’S QUIP:
My friend Virgil ain’t never lied. That’s exactly what the Bond Brothers were. Cartoons…
Here’s the thing I’ve learned: When you approach art with the goal of making a quick and dirty buck, that’s fine; sometimes it has to be done. But nothing that happens as a result should come as a surprise to you. And with the Bond Brothers that was the whole idea, right? Howie said, These guys seem like gen-u-wine Bubbas—let’s take their Stars and Bars and their bad behavior and their gruff-rough looks, and let’s ride this cartoon straight to the bank. And Bob, he just rolled over and said, Okay. And hell, the Bond Brothers themselves, they wanted that money! They rolled over too and said, All right, yeah, you want a cartoon? We’ll give you a cartoon. But then the cartoon starts to pull away from reality, from the three dimensions that make you a human…. And when the laughs run out, you can’t suddenly ask in the middle of the show, What happened? What you mean, What happened? That’s the monster you made.
Opal Jewel recalls that as the only Black artist contractually bound to Rivington at this time, she often felt frustrated and alone. Offended by the imagery of the Bond Brothers but uncertain what she could do about it, she sought out Jimmy Curtis for advice despite the fact that he had moved on to other labels’ projects. Born and raised in Beaufort, South Carolina, Curtis likely understood very well the fear and outrage stirred by the loaded emblems of the Confederacy and Jim Crow South. By this point, however, the relationship between Opal and Jimmy was undergoing a shift, as my father had other concerns on his mind.
OPAL JEWEL:
People seem to forget we were colleagues too, Jimmy and me. We had similar interests, similar concerns. So yeah, when this foolishness at Rivington was going on, I called him up. It took me a few tries to reach him, it took like a couple weeks actually, and when I finally got him on the phone he apologized and said he’d been booking a lot of regular studio gigs. So I said fine, okay, that’s great for you, Jimmy, but a) have you seen this Bond Brothers mess, and b) would you help me figure what to do about it, because I’m all alone out here? And he made this big deal of meeting up to talk. I was getting my ideas together, I was drawing up language for a petition or something useless like that. But when we got together, he looked at me with this pitiful expression and said he’d probably want this to be the last time we spent together, because Corinne had just told him he was going to be a father.
I think I burst out laughing.
VIRGIL LAFLEUR:
I hear you are an exceptional journalist, so let us test your skills of observation. Of all the many clothing options I selected for Mad at the height of her fame, what is one thing they share in common? [Looking at his Jaeger-LeCoultre gold watch] I’ll wait.
No, no—dig deeper! They’ve all been fabulous, anyone can grasp that. But what I am asking you, chère, is this: Even at the pinnacle of the 1980s, why was the look never leather? Why never spandex? Because our Mad requires a sense of freedom and looseness. Oh sure, we experimented to hit upon the appropriate styles, we made some early mistakes, but it soon became clear what was not going to happen. And so we work the flounce, the flare, the volume, the cutaway… items that allow air for her to breathe, yes? Occasionally I take my liberties with her accessories, or else I would shrivel up and die of boredom. But the clothing itself must never cling.
So it is with Mad and her men. Perhaps this will make little sense, as it does not fit the heteronormative narrative, but she veritably blossomed with relief at the news of petite impending you. Remember, James was her formative experiment in love—conclusion being that Mad is not a woman who cares very deeply for romantic commitment. She had never wanted to possess James, and more than that, she did not want to be possessed by him. Once they dropped all pretense that they had potential for more, once she knew that she would never be in a position to replace wife and mother and also that she did not prefer to be stuffed down that particular hole, all her guilt regarding their affair went poof poof. I understand, though, that your poor papa, like so many of the others after him, had difficulty processing such modern styles.
NEV CHARLES:
Their relationship was none of my concern, but I did hear whispers, and I suppose I did find it disappointing that a woman as progressive as Opal, as bold and feminist and fiercely independent, could be caught up in a situation so sad, so… typical. I didn’t believe a young woman like her was meant to be skulking around as someone’s afterthought! Not to say anything against your father, but I thought Opal deserved better than that sort of treatment. She deserved someone who could love her, really adore her, and publicly at that.
ROSEMARY SALDUCCI:
Oh, they were public! I’ll never forget the first time I saw them out together, because I was on a date myself—this hot guy with a mustache who was the worst fucking dancer, oh my God. We’d gone to Electric Circus and Bigfoot had stepped all over my new white boots. I was so disgusted I almost went home, but the guy says, “Lemme buy you a drink to say I’m sorry.” So we go to this nice hotel bar somewhere and I’m sitting on the plush upholstery in the lobby, I’m sipping my mai tai and looking around for other options, when the elevator dings and who should walk out? Yeah, Jimmy Curtis and Opal Jewel.
Well, I waved her over—there was no point pretending I was blind. She was wearing this bright orange jumpsuit, for heaven’s sake, with feathers stuck all over it! So she comes over to say hello but he just ducks his head low and nearly sprints past us out the revolving door. And Opal, she has this look on her face, because she knows I’m not born yesterday and she’s waiting for me to say something. So I try to let her know I’m not judging. I say to her, “Gosh, Jimmy must be doing all right these days if he can swing a room in this place.” And I guess she’s trying to prove she’s not ashamed, not scared of what anybody thinks, so she goes, “Yeah, you know, he’s been working more, his wife’s having a baby”—and next to me Bigfoot spits out his G&T. [Laughing]
Meanwhile, indignation over the Bond Brothers’ overnight success had lit a fire under Nev. He stopped moping around the Hizes’ apartment and started sketching out ideas for new material with Opal, including one tune featuring a slide guitar (to prove they could beat the Bonds in any given style, he told me). But Opal, he maintains, was increasingly hard to pin down.
NEV CHARLES:
Whenever I think back on this era of my life I feel a tingle up the spine, to tick off everything that happened in the eye-twitch of time that Opal and I worked together. And yet it’s also bittersweet because I really do believe so much more could have come out of our partnership, so much more brilliance and art on a par with my solo work, if only we’d managed to swat away the distractions gobbling us, the extraneous people pressing in on us from the outside and keeping us from focusing all energies toward the music. I take my part in our later tensions, of course, as a proper opioid addiction never helps to solve anything. [Laughs] But early on… Well, let’s take your dad, for instance. You must have considered this, and I’m sure your mum has as well—not with any anger or bitterness, just a wee bit of normal human musing: What if Jimmy Curtis had never been part of the Opal & Nev story? What if, what if? It’s like I’m Gwyneth Paltrow in that alternate-universe movie with the bloody doors on the train!
Well. I know some critics argue we’d have just disappeared off the radar if it weren’t for your dad jumping into the ruckus that landed us in the papers the next morning…. But if the scenario had been such that Jimmy Curtis had never even known Opal Jewel, then he might be alive to know you, right? And I suspect Opal & Nev would’ve found a way—a saner and less dramatic way, of course, but huzzah, a way! So who knows? If things had gone differently, I might not have needed those opioids in the first place.
I. Chet Bond is the only member of the Bond Brothers to go on the record for this project. Cole Young died of liver failure in 1989, Donny Pendle declined to be interviewed, and Beau Bond disappeared sometime in 1973, when, Chet recalls, his little brother abruptly cut off contact with family and friends. The owner of an auto-body shop in his hometown of Live Oak, Chet—who says he has been sober since 1997—is active in local politics and in 2016 campaigned in his swing state for Donald J. Trump. The ranch-style house he shares with his wife, Shelly, and their three Pomeranians is well-known in Live Oak for the twelve-foot-tall US flag he flies in the sprawling backyard.