JoeMc (Curator)

For almost a week now, I've been fighting off a bad cold. Last week I couldn't call it what it obviously was; but now that summer is officially here, I can say with conviction that I have an especially annoying case of that seasonal favorite known as the "summer cold."

Summer cold? Ha, there's nothing cold about it. Particularly since last weekend, with the thermometer darting into the 90s, the last thing I want to do is sip tea and crawl under the covers. Having a cold in the winter is natural; you put on your sweater, daub your runny nose, and keep the Fisherman's Friend under your pillowcase. Having a cold in the summer is just wrong. It's hard enough to be comfortable when you're feverish and stuffy, but add in grotesque humidity and heat and you feel as if suffocation would be a mercy.

One of the only consistent comforts of being sick in any season, and it's one of the best reasons for the invention of television, is that you can sit on a sofa watching DVDs all day and no one accuses you of being an indolent sloth. Being somewhat perverse, one of the films I chose to watch during this past week of joy was about an epidemic of small pox. This is sort of like watching airplane disaster movies on a plane, but hey, at least when everyone's dying from small pox, a summer cold doesn't feel so dire.

The name of this particular film was The Killer That Stalked New York. Grammarians among you will notice from the choice of relative pronoun that the filmmakers are not talking about a killer who, but a killer what. The "what" in this case is the small pox. A sweaty blonde diamond smuggler played by Evelyn Keyes carries it in from Cuba (a land of plague, apparently, even in 1950) and proceeds to infect man, woman, and child along the way to her rendezvous with her sleazy husband. The sleazy husband, a musician (ha!) played by the dimple-chinned Charles Korvin, has been making time with this Sheila's sister while she's been off smuggling for him. It's okay, though--the jane has the last laugh. Or at least, the last grimace. Although she's covered with sores and doomed to die, he goes first, off of the ledge of a building, about 20 stories up. Splat.

Anyway, The Killer That Stalked New York put me in mind of just how flimsy we all are, and how the smallest thing, often something we don't even know is there, can make us ill. That's right about when I found Roy Atwell on the FMA.

Roy Atwell, who lived a nice long life (born in 1878, he died in 1962), was a stage comedian, radio personality, and film actor who is probably most famous for a film in which he never even appeared on screen. Roy was the voice of Doc in Walt Disney's first feature animation, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Doc, you may recall, was the dwarf who, although probably the wisest of the crew (he's the one with the glasses), was also the one who had trouble getting the right words out.

Snow White: If you let me stay, I'll keep house for you. I'll wash and sew and sweep and cook...
Doc: Can you make dapple lumplings? Er, lumple dapplings?
Grumpy: Apple dumplings!
Doc: Yes, crapple dumpkins.

Crapple dumpkins was just the sort of thing that Roy Atwell was good at. One of his biggest bits as a comedian was crazy wordplay, and he was well-known for it, especially on radio. It's hard to know how much of Doc's stutterstep conversation was scripted and how much came from Roy, but it's definitely a case of the right man for the right job.

Much earlier in his career, when he was still on stage, Roy made a hit with a song he co-wrote, which is the song attached to this post. It's not quite as word-jumbly as Doc's speeches, but it's got great lines in it like:

Eat a plate of fine pig's knuckles and the headstone-cutter chuckles
While the gravedigger makes a note upon his cuff.
Eat that lovely red bologna and you'll wear a wooden kimona
As your relatives start scrappin' about your stuff. 

In those days, performers would regularly stick new songs in shows, and Roy interpolated this one into the show Alone at Last, making it a hit back in 1915. Germs were much in the news in the early teens, so the tune was highly topical for its day. We now take it for granted that germs are just floating around everywhere, being passed and caught on subway poles and in restaurants where employees don't wash their hands, but at the turn of the century, germ theory was a novel idea, still fresh from the minds of Pasteur, Lister, and other big germ heads. Roy's song is mostly concerned with food poisoning, but hey, a germ is a germ is a germ. I feel more germy just listening to it.

Speaking of germs, did you know that last week Rhino Handmade released Live at the Starwood 12/3/80? This is a recording of the Germs' final show with Darby Crash, who OD'd about a week after the show. Parts of it have been available before, but never the whole thing (outside of bootlegs). It includes a cover of "Public Image," as well as versions of almost everything else they ever recorded. Like all Rhino Handmade titles, it's a bit pricey, but you get reproductions of the set list and the gig poster, and of course the packaging is extremely well-conceived.

Just the thing for folks with summer colds: Germs you'd actually like to have around! There's something that even an old lexicon devil like Roy Atwell could support.