Strange Bundle

Mumm-Ra

The first I ever heard of Earl Hammond, I knew him by his character in the afternoon cartoon series Thundercats. He played Mumm-Ra, a menacing mummy who threatened the heroes of the program, using various minions to do his dirty work. I always thought the voice work was strange, that Mumm-Ra had this weird trill to his voice that made him almost seem comical while he was being diabolical. He played the big badguy part in another Rankin Bass cartoon that came later, Silverhawks, and did other voicework until the end of his career.

Mumm-Ra: The Untold Story

As an adult I came across an audio blooper reel from Thundercats, and my semi-wholesome image of voice actors was shattered when the voices for Mumm-Ra and the rest went out of their way to swear and make lurid jokes. Not that those sorts of things bother me in isolation, but I guess when you couple that with more innocent memories it's a bit jarring.

With this mental image of decrepit Mumm-Ra making a dirty joke, I was again shocked to learn that that very Earl Hammond was the same actor playing squeaky clean Sergeant Lane in the old Rocky King, Detective television show from the sadly short-lived Dumont Network.

Sergeant Lane: Paragon of Virtue

Filmed in kinescope, Rocky King, Detective (also listed as The Inside Detective some places), was broadcast live, so there were many flubs and mistakes, but it had a certain immediacy and charm that you got from these old live programs. The writing was smart and quick, and without breaks it feels like it has the right pace even though we're accustomed now to drama programs lasting an hour.

And here was Earl Hammond playing the young, fresh-faced Sergeant Lane, who often assisted Detective Rocky King, and in one extant episode was actually the lead when Roscoe Karns was out sick. The guy was bright and amiable, nothing like my mental image of him as that lurid Mumm-Ra telling dirty jokes. But they were the same, of course.

No More Real than Reality TV

We have this image of the 40's and 50's as an innocent time, with people talking slightly fast, running around in Brylcreem haircuts and (consistently) gray suits. It all comes from these old images from TV and the movies, which seem iconic to us. What we forget is that a lot of these old programs, Rocky King being no exception, were meant to be ideals, and the laws that surrounded broadcast television and movies reflected this. The real world was, of course, full of the same nastiness, both the honest kind and the deplorable kind, that we come to expect from entertainment now. Plays at that time were already trying new, more open portrayals, and books had been doing it for a while. But because the most accessible image is the television show, we somehow think that everyone was as wholesome as the images we saw.

In a way that comes to reflect on our society, I think, because now we tend to have television that goes lower than we can go. Reality TV is an obvious example, but even the straight fiction entries seem to have a seedy tinge to them, showing what we tend to view as a more honest depiction of the world. But it's no more honest than the old shows were I don't think, it just tries to satisfy our increased taste for dissonance.

There's something to be said for the old shows, where we know it doesn't reflect real life, but it still tries to aim high, and show us how things ought to be, with hard-working detectives who are dedicated to nabbing the bad guy and are, in a sense, an example of what we want to see in our own lives, even if we don't always get to see it.

Compare the loftiness of the clean-cut Sergeant Lane and the ugliness of lurid Mumm-Ra, though, and you come closer to that truth than either depiction would ever show by itself. Like the rest of us, Earl Hammond was a human being. It's so easy to forget that when we're only shown characters he depicted.

Explore the Show "Rocky King, Detective" for Yourself

Here's the episode with Earl Hammond playing the lead, but search for Rocky King and you'll find the other 3 episodes:

http://www.archive.org/details/Rocky_King_4

You could probably just replace the "4" with 1 through 3 in the URL to get the other episodes, come to think of it. They're only 30 minutes or so long, but they're paced well and wind up being as entertaining as an hour long cop show now.

Strangely enough, in the link to one of the Rocky King, Detective episodes I'm providing, the person who posted this says that it was the son of Roscoe Karns, Todd, who played the lead in the episode, when it was really Earl Hammond. Karns' son DID play in a great many Rocky King episodes as Sergeant Hart, but he was not the lead, if we're to believe the credits of the episode and the names of the characters!

I keep wanting to write about Metal, I guess because I've sorta learned a lot about it researching it as a little hobby for the past few years. This sort of renewed when I saw the track list for Brutal Legend (with or without umlaut, I don't care. Many people who will play this game wouldn't know how to pronounce the umlaut properly, anyway. I only happen to know because my old Chinese teacher told me one of the sounds we had to practice sounded a lot like the German one).

I realize, though, that listing favorite bands is about as boring as it gets for blogs. I'm at a loss here, really. I also know that a lot of the bands I happen to like are a bit fringe, even as far as Metal is concerned. Last thing I want to do is deal with nitpicking in a realm as broad as Metal-- in a field of music that I feel compelled to capitalize :) If you're curious about one person's peripheral journey around the outskirts of Metal, read on.

In My Metal Beginning, There Was Eddie

My life's experience with Metal had always been on the fringes. It pretty much started with a pen pal of mine from a neighboring town I met through some class-induced pen pal thing that would culminate in us all getting together and being disappointed by each other. Dude drew me this huge -actually pretty awesome for a sixth-grader- drawing of Iron Maiden's Eddie done in black charcoal. I didn't know what to do with it. My religious obsessions at the time had me vaguely fearing the thing, so I didn't keep it for more than a few years, I think. It was actually a pretty great gift, I can't imagine my selfish little self doing that much for anyone back then. When we met he shied away from my geekishness and that was pretty much it.

I was suckered into a particular brand of religious propaganda which tends to try lying in order to do the greater deed of saving. Now I think that's hypocritical, but then I had no idea they might trump up what I saw into something it wasn't. Twisted Sister may not strike you as Metal, but at the time their video for "We're Not Going to Take It", which had a kid rebelling against a patently verbally abusive father in a rather humorous way, was characterized (as the whipping boy of the decade video games are now) as changing nice little boys into monsters. I hadn't actually SEEN the video until I saw it on Youtube a little while ago, (and it's damned funny). I just assumed it was satanic and steered clear.

I can see why people hell-bent on making a false interpretation for the sake of a higher one would look at it the way they did, but now it seems pretty tame. Still, it would take a long time for me to shake that stigma, and I probably carried with me the same prejudice I had for the music to the people I would soon meet.

Now, Actually Listen to it

My estrangement from the group that tended to listen to Heavy Metal continued into Junior High. Kids started wearing jean jackets with penned in band names, black T-Shirts with bands my Weird Al Yankovic listening self had never heard of. One kid, as a joke, asked me if I even knew who Ratt or Def Leppard was. I figured they were bands, but I made some joke feigning my ignorance.

I got into acting then, briefly (I was never good at memorizing lines. Even then I enjoyed making stuff up as I went along rather than trying to stick to a script) as part of an after-school activity thing. There I met upper-classmen who were a bit more forgiving of my ignorance. I saw the T-shirts of one of them with the crazy art from Iron Maiden covers. He told me about the lore, the seventh son of the seventh son bringing about apocalypse or some damned thing, which at the time sounded vaguely satanic to me (I guess it was always sort of designed to sound dangerous. Metal seems to always have been about pushing boundaries and staring into the abyss, even thought most of it isn't quite as "evil" as the sheltered think it is). I still kept my distance until next year, when that same guy introduced me to Testament.

It was loud, but full of energy. It was modern rock (like the stuff I'd begun experimenting with when I was transmogrifying into a teenie-bopper replete with a wall full of posters, zits, and growth anxiety), but it was rougher, and it cut deeper. I was intrigued, and I slowly realized that a lot of the guys who listened this stuff were sort of like me. They were still scary to me, still people I wouldn't want to hang out with, but they weren't monsters. Some of them even became my friends, at least for a time. Around that time someone gave me a dub of Dr. Feelgood, and my outlook on Metal (as well as my hearing) was never the same since. Sadly I was too stupid then, convinced that I had to follow the rigid class system that was endemic at my school, so I eventually looked the other way, abandoning a few of my friends, including the one that introduced me to Testament so long ago. I've done stupid things since, but few that I still feel bad about after all this time. This was one of those.

Into high school, I learned of Metallica and Megadeth. I remember seeing at the local dime store a big poster of Megadeth's mascot Vic Rattlehead standing in front of a burned-out wasteland. Not as afraid of the BS propaganda of sheltered folks anymore, I kept my mind open. I don't know why I picked Rust in Peace as my first album of theirs to try out, but that has to be one of my favorite of theirs ever, one that I'd play over and over (too bad I used earphones all the time. My hearing was never quite the same after a while).

Going home from school, I would ask the ex-con who sat in the back of the school bus questions about Metal all the time to keep him from picking on other people, and he would list off Megadeth albums, other bands he listened to (like Slayer, with its pentagram logo, still scary enough even after I'd stopped pretending an evil spirit could have power over me), and the pronunciation "Sepultura," which I could never get right. Through his recommendations I tracked down the older Megadeth albums, buying them over a period of years well into my post-High School haze until I was disillusioned with one of their latest only a few years ago and quit. By then I'd also bought Metallica's eponymous (which I thought had an all black cover until I caught the snake in matte ink hiding there), several Pantera CDs, begun by hearing Cowboys from Hell late at night on the local college's radio station and ending with buying the Great Southern Trendkill.

It's Getting Crowded/Not Crowded Enough

On cable was stuff I didn't even know was considered by some to be Metal. I still don't quite imagine Nine Inch Nails that way, nor KMFDM, nor many of the other bands listed in the Brutal Legend soundtrack or elsewhere. When I listened to Manowar, it sounded a bit too light to be what I thought of as Metal, and a lot of the bands like Def Leppard that I finally heard years after those kids in black t-shirts faded from my memory sounded way too weak. I even took a stand, classifying the Crue as hard rock, because it didn't have that bite.

Metal has a problem with classifications. Just look at the Wikipedia page on it. Tons, tons of sub-genres. There are some sub-genres which have a PARTICULAR VOCAL STYLE, growling, screaming, whatever. A particular mood. Most of the stuff I liked turned out to be Glam, Nu, Alt, Speed, Power, or Thrash. To me they always seemed a bit more versatile, but I didn't really know they belonged to any classification at all. It was just about how it sounded.

I think that's why I'll always be on the edge of Metal, never feeling quite there. Even after I grew to love it, I began to hate classifications for things and people in my post-high school years, realizing what BS it was to put other people, (or myself) into a category like I was trying to package them for sale. A lesson I wished I'd learned before I'd rejected those friends of mine (I'm sorry Alex, Tim), but once learned it made me feel on the outside all over again when people were trying to let me know about their favorite bands and their hated bands, while dressing the part of a Metal fan.

I've gotten past the point where I need to let other peoples' work define me, and where I need to feel harder core than the next guy. To me it feels a bit backward for Metal to be sequestered in all these tiny categories. I continue to explore it, learn about new bands, ask metal-heads about their favorites and their recommendations, but at times I wonder if Metal is only done a disservice being divided, so I don't bother taking sides.

When taken as a whole, even if separated from lighter rock, the pantheon of Heavy Metal consists of a very diverse bunch, singing about things that are often anything but rote rock cliches. When I said that Metal was about pushing boundaries and staring into the abyss, I meant it. No matter the focus of a particular band, you always feel like they're on the edge of something. Anger. Glory. Doom. All the stuff we're scared of. I'd sometimes wonder why it was these kids were listening to stuff that seemed so bleak or terrifying. But Metal is safe, to me-- safer than most other music styles out there. It lets you explore these strange, frightening emotions and ideas with little risk to yourself. It lets you stare directly into life's intensity and blackness with a flick of a switch.

And when you've had enough, you put it down and go out into the sun again. Suddenly, the world doesn't seem quite so dark anymore.