Who is nervous norvus

Because of the beauty and subtlety of the craftsmanship, "Transfusion" could never be considered "camp"or shrugged off by the professionally smug as "atrocious. One inspired line which goes - "My red-corp-suckles are in mass confusion" - will forever be etched into my cranium. The disc went nowhere, but Drake knew he had written a song like no other, a hit even, so he ditched the Four Jokers, re-recorded the tune in his garage and sent the tape to Hollywood DJ Red Blanchard.

Instead of the corny crooning of the Four Jokers, the second recording of "Transfusion" featured Drake speaking the lyrics in the slyest of dead-pans-a delivery that went along with his new moniker: Nervous Norvus. Blanchard arranged for a contract with Dot Records and soon "Transfusion" was chart-bound, reaching 8 on the Billboard pop charts in On the flipside was "Dig", a jive-talking orgy of verbiage on which Norvus laid out his philosophy of life as an ultra-hepster i. Commercially our hero had peaked, but artistically he was hotter than a two-dollar pistol, for his next and final Dot release came his finest achievement yet - "The Fang.

Dot dropped Nervous Norvus and put it's energy into promoting Pat Boone. Nervous Norvus carried on, cutting tunes for small labels into the Sixties. Eventually his name disappears from record labels forever and in he made the desperate career move worked for Elvis of dropping dead, to no avail. The legendary Seattle street performer and medicine show singer Baby Gramps once told me he had a reel of unreleased Norvus material.

I have not heard it, but the sheet music for "Transfusion" includes the words and music to one unreleased Drake original - "The Noon Baboon to Rangoon.

It was about himself, I think. He was born in in Memphis, and lived for a few years in Ripley, Tennessee, near the Arkansas border. A chronic asthma condition led Drake's family to move him to California when he was seven, first to the Bay Area, then soon afterwards settling in Los Angeles. Like everyone else, the Drakes suffered hard through the Depression. In an article published in the Oakland Tribune at the peak of his success, Drake said that his mother bought him a tenor banjo while he was in high school in , but was forced to sell it a year later "along with a great many other family possessions to raise funds for the necessities of life.

He served a year-long hitch with the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program charged with make-work tasks such as forest maintenance, then spent the pre-War years hoboing around the country.

He moved back to the Bay Area in , settling, finally, in Oakland, in a modest house on West Grand which he would occupy for the rest of his life.

He got married the following year, although little is known about his wife. A heart condition kept Drake out of the military; he spent the War years working in shipyards instead. At some point after the War he took a job as a truck driver, the occupation that would sustain him until the success of "Transfusion.

The show's target audience was schoolkids and teens, a group of whom would pile into the studio each night to comprise a live audience. Blanchard's show became a huge hit in the Bay Area, peaking in the summer of Its popularity prompted him to cut a series of novelty records of his own. Its B-side was "Zorch! Zorch was a mock-jive lingo created by his writers, inspired in part by Slim Gaillard, whose patois Blanchard had absorbed when their bands shared bills in the s: Um bully bully bully bully bully bully Zorch means it's edgar Edgar means it's dimph Dimph means it's in there Zorch, man it's nervous Nervous, that's the most Zorch, oh it's threatened Threatened means it's new Zorch, ain't it nervous Nervous, it's the most When some cat looks dimph to you It's difficult to overestimate the influence of Blanchard's show on Jimmy Drake.

In Drake began writing novelty songs of his own, starting with a rather treacly thing called "Little Cowboy. Virtually every song Drake wrote during this period revolved in some fashion around Blanchard and his show. Was he in the throes of a kind of worship, genuinely stirred to write odes to his radio hero? Or was he simply trying to suck up to the man he saw -- correctly, as it turned out -- as the gatekeeper to his musical career?

By , the year-old truck-driver was fishing around for a way to get off the roads, and set his sights on a career as a songwriter. His first move was to buy a reel-to-reel tape recorder and a cheap second-hand piano.

Next, he signed up for a correspondence course in musical notation. I haven't looked at the other The release date of this record remains unknown, and thus it can't yet be placed chronologically amid "Transfusion" and the other Dot releases.

Until such information comes to light, this item must remain apart as an interesting asterisk to Drake's early career. Drake purchased a half-page ad in a issue of the amateur tipsheet Songwriter's Review, announcing himself as a songwriter by including the entire lead sheet for "Little Cowboy.

He accepted, and began supplementing his truck driving income with these demo recordings. He set up a recording studio in his kitchen but, with the tape deck squeezed onto a countertop and hovering half-over the sink, it proved a bit intrusive and was moved into a spare bedroom instead. By April he claimed, in another tipsheet ad, to have recorded some of the suckers.

He was just getting started. I Listen To Red In Bed One of the many connections between Drake's career and Blanchard's is that each, in the summer of his respective peak popularity, was the subject of a feature article in both Time and Life magazines consolidating their reporting and photography expenses since they were published by the same company. In Blanchard's Time article, the uncredited reporter wrote, "The jokes are frequently such morbid items as the jingle about a railroad train hitting a girl named Lucy; 'The track was juicy, the juice was Lucy'.

The article goes on to say, "His fans are currently enrolling in an 'I Listen To Red In Bed' club," a joking reference to the show's p. An unreleased Nervous Norvus song is titled after that same phrase. It was some months before Drake was able to learn of his idol's new whereabouts. Once he did, he sent Blanchard a demo tape of a new song he'd written.

In the wake of its success, Drake would give varying accounts of the inspiration for "Transfusion. To Time, he gave an account that sounded more like something out of a Chuck Berry song: "I was driving, see, cool like down the freeway. A young kid in a twin pipe job come up on me fast on the right. He was a goner. He cockeyed near cooled me, man. So I said, 'Jimmy, let's write a song about this cool cat.

But I got even. Man, I got even! Rather, he hoped that Blanchard would record his own version of "Transfusion. Working on a whim, he pulled a 78 from the Standard Sound Effects series out of KPOP's record library, cued it to "Auto Skids And Crashes," and played the brief track repeatedly to punctuate each mini-tale of wreckless driving that form the song's verses. Before long, Randy Wood, president of Dot Records, called to see if the recording was still available for release.

After making the deal, "I gave him the tape I had," says Blanchard, "and that's what they made the record out of, just that demo tape with the sound effects added. Most immediately, it was adapted from Blanchard's Zorch tongue, where it meant "wonderful" or, more precisely, "cool. He was afraid to even walk in the studio, he was so bashful. The Norvus part Drake came up with on his own. And so Nervous Norvus it was -- double-meaning, alliterative, and vastly cool. Dot released "Transfusion" in May , flipped with another brilliant novelty, the jaunty and equally hep "Dig" Dot The record was unlike anything America had ever heard, and the country responded by making it an out-of-the-box sensation, reportedly snapping up a half-million copies within two weeks of its release, and going on to double that number before its run was through.