Butterflies, Turtles and the Closing of the Weekly World News

On his Listen Up blog, Ken Barnes recently linked to a Washington Post article about the demise of the Weekly World News. That tremendously entertaining story revealed that Bob Lind, the '60s pop artist who had the 1966 hit "Elusive Butterfly," had spent a decade writing for the tabloid. Ken wondered what other hit-making musicians had life stories that took them far afield from their most famous incarnation.

I told Ken I'd see his Bob Lind and raise him a Tupper Saussy. Saussy, a Florida-born private-school teacher, ad exec, jazz pianist and songwriter, recorded three albums for Monument Records (jazz great Dave Brubeck wrote liner notes for one) before he and Don Gant hooked up in Nashville to form the Neon Philharmonic, and record the 1969 Top 20 pop hit “Morning Girl.”

Years later, Saussy ghostwrote the autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray. He also decided to quit paying his taxes, then lived underground under an assumed name for 10 years before the feds found him and sent him to prison for 14 months, during which time he worked on his conspiracy-rich book Rulers of Evil: Useful Knowledge About Governing Bodies, in which he wrote, “[T]he papacy really does run United States foreign policy, and always has.”

Later, he returned to Nashville, where he sold watercolors in a local art gallery and ran a blog called "Honest Things." He eventually recorded a new album, "The Chocolate Orchid Piano Bar," but died earlier this year shortly before its release.

Then I noticed something germane from the trade publication Music Row:

"Belmont University has hired Mark Volman, a founding member and lead singer of The Turtles (“Happy Together”) and Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, as Program Coordinator of Entertainment Industry Studies. Teaching at the college as an adjunct professor since 2004, he is also named an assistant professor in Belmont University’s Mike Curb College of Entertainment & Music Business. He taught at his alma mater, Los Angeles’s Loyola Marymount University, from 1997 to 2003 and eventually moved to Belmont. After starting college at age 44, Volman completed an MFA in Screenwriting, graduated Magna Cum Laude, and was Valedictorian of his undergraduate class."

Not as odd as Bob Lind, but still interesting.

Also, I've heard stories about an engineer of many Elvis Presley records who got burned out and wound up working as a butcher in a Nashville-area grocery store. And Darlene Love starts her autobiography about her time, post-Crystals but before Lethal Weapon, working as a maid. She always had to park her old Mercedes off-site because she knew driving it to the house she was working would raise questions, and once she heard "Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)" playing down the hall of a house she was cleaning.

If you're having problems remembering "Elusive Butterfly," let this help.



Here's one for "Morning Girl." The video's not much, but it gives you the song.



And, finally, a clip of the Turtles doing "Happy Together" on the Smothers Brothers show in February 1967.