Snap it, pal

Two disparate anniversaries that occurred in early January, unfortunately and unexpectedly, converged with Floyd Vivino’s death on January 22.

January 8 marked Soupy Sales’ 100^th birthday. His daily show on WNEW Channel 5 in New York City was a quirky inside joke of comedy bits that often ran way too long, double entendres that went over kids’ heads, puppets lip-synching novelty songs and cheap sets – a format that Vivino would evolve, build on and turn into The Uncle Floyd Show.

The ten-year anniversary of David Bowie’s death was January 10. While performing in The Elephant Man on Broadway in the early 1980s, he watched The Uncle Floyd Show while in make-up, something that another fan of show, John Lennon, turned him on to. In 2002, Bowie wrote Slip Away, a nostalgic, almost melancholy homage to the New York City of the early 1980s, with Floyd and his puppets Oogie and Bones Boy as avatars.

From 1974 to 1998, The Uncle Floyd Show could be found, if you knew where to look, on cable, UHF, regional syndication or New Jersey public TV. All told, something like 7,000 shows total and always with Floyd’s bomb squad supporting cast of aspiring comedians and knuckleheads.

The immortal Oogie and Uncle Floyd

Go snap!

And his puppets. Bratty yet endearing Oogie, whom Floyd always introduced as his partner, was an off-the-shelf factory model named “Walter” produced by a British puppeteer. Bones Boy was an irritable and ill-tempered skeleton in a suit that looked as if he’d been a prize in a claw machine on a boardwalk arcade. His trademark phrase, “Snap it, pal,” captured Jersey attitude (or at least how the rest of the country perceives it). If Bones Boy stopped for breakfast at a diner, he would order black coffee and a hard roll.

Floyd’s career seemed to always be on the verge of something bigger than New Jersey. An Uncle Floyd Show album on Mercury Records was left to die in cutout bins. He had small parts in Good Morning, Vietnam (1987) and Crazy People (1990), but a role in Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony (1980) was cut. When The Uncle Floyd Show went into syndication, it was shown in New York City on NBC, but at 1:30 a.m.

But he persevered and never became one of those stuffed monuments to lower tier show business that used to populate Joe Franklin’s couch. He made seemingly thousands of personal appearances around New Jersey, acting as MC, playing Tin Pan Alley piano in restaurants; he played piano at a record show I attended in the 1990s.

New Jersey lost Bruce Springsteen to international stardom, but Floyd stayed and represented the uniqueness that once flourished in this state, although it’s slowly being squeezed: wooded acres losing ground to yet another townhouse development, dead zone shopping malls that all offer the same stores, CVS pharmacies every hundred feet. The Star-Ledger, Bergen Record and Jersey Journal all gone. Boarded up storefronts along Broad Street, Newark.

Somewhere in the cosmos, Bones Boy is taking names. Snap it, pal.

Wings for wheels

In September 1975, I bought two albums at Korvette’s: David Crosby and Graham Nash’s Wind on the Water and Born to Run.

During the first half of the 1970s, anything bearing the Crosby, Stills, Nash (and Young, especially Young) brand was an automatic buy for me. Wind on the Water didn’t disappoint; it’s easily the duo’s best album despite its front cover yacht rock vibe (and Nash looking alarmingly emaciated). Carry Me, Crosby’s song about loss, was one of his strongest. Their eco-prog To the Last Whale was properly elegiac, the perfect soundtrack for a Jacques Costeau documentary. 

But finding turntable time for Wind on the Water was difficult given how obsessively I played Born to Run. 

It’s one of the great rock records (ironically, it’s not the best record of 1975; that honor goes to Blood on the Tracks; honestly, Born to Run may not even be Springsteen’s best album). Yeah, his lyrics can be purplish at times, Jungleland is a tad overwrought and most of its songs have been long over-exposed. (If you listened to WNEW-FM between 1975 and 1985 you heard the song Born to Run nearly as many times as Springsteen has played it live – 1,875 times). 

But with fifty years perspective, it becomes more obvious than ever that Born to Run is the sound of an artist pouring everything into his personal vision. 

By 1975, more "traditional" rock and roll and soul music were beginning to fall by the wayside as the kids clamored for Kashmir and Wish You Were Here, but Springsteen unapologetically took bits and pieces from the 25-year history of rock – Bo Diddley, Phil Spector, The Locomotion, Duane Eddy, the urban vibe of West Side Story – and customized into a contemporary street racer. 

He made Clarence Clemons’ saxophone the centerpiece at a time when, aside from the occasional Stones record, it wasn’t a popular instrument. And this wasn’t that wimpy soprano sax sound popularized by the Saturday Night Live opening theme, Clemons played it with balls and urgency. His solo in Jungleland still raises the hair on the back of one’s neck, a mini-epic itself, like Clare Torry’s vocalizing on Pink Floyd 's The Great Gig in the Sky. 

I always had some problems squaring with Born to Run’s characters. They hung around parking lots and deserted beaches, seemed preoccupied with their cars and had limited prospects for the future. Unlike them, I didn’t feel trapped in my hometown, for which I’d always had a corny civic appreciation. 

It took a while to realize it, but in 1975 I was like them. I was ready for . . . something. Frustrated with still living at home and going to school, navigating a confused personal life, often feeling inarticulate, unsure and unstuck. 

Under those emotional conditions, you could listen to Crosby and Nash and still feel the same way when the record hit that final runout groove. Listening to Born to Run brought a different reaction, a shared common ground of hope.

Exit strategy

The black-topped spine of New Jersey is the Garden State Parkway, 172 miles of roadway connecting the border of New York State to Cape May across the bay from Delaware, with some 86 local exits in-between, leading to this oft-repeated line: 

PHIL: I’m from New Jersey.

LIL: Really? What exit? 

If it’s possible for any highway in New Jersey to feel more like a golden road paved with promise and freedom, it is the Parkway, as it’s known to the locals, the route taken to the Jersey Shore, where the light and the pace were different than anywhere else in the state. Hot fun in the summertime. 

Driving down the Parkway to the Shore always felt like an event, WABC on the car radio – the only station with a signal strong enough to stretch across the entire trip, as landmarks flew by. The Union Water Tower, billed today as the World's Tallest Water Sphere. The giant beer bottle overlooking the Pabst brewery in Newark. The Driscoll Bridge spanning the Raritan River, a Mason-Dixon line separating the Shore communities from the rest of the state. 

During the night ride home there was the Sayreville drive-in movie visible from the highway, a glimpse of Paul Newman or Lee Marvin silently mouthing dialogue. The families sitting on their front porches in East Orange, homes facing the Parkway, like living on a NASCAR racetrack infield. 

And the exit signs. Coming home, evocatively named shore towns like Spring Lake and Ocean Grove fell behind, their places taken by grey and gritty Freehold and Perth Amboy, a changeover reminiscent of the last days of summer giving way to school. Belmar, another shore town, sharing an exit with its ugly sister Trenton. 

I’ve been making the trip down the Parkway a lot lately, visiting a parent who has suddenly become vulnerable and diminished, driving while getting my mind wrapped around what seems like a slowly unfolding situation that potentially could change overnight. 

The drive-in and the beer bottle were demolished long ago, WABC as we knew it is gone. What endures are the exits, the on and off ramps. The Parkway is dark at night. I can only hope that I get off at the right exit.