The Story of The Stools

Rock music has a long history of confusing people. Perhaps its biggest casuistry and chicanery is tricking the record buying public into thinking an artist is black, and therefor “forbidden”, rather than just a sapless white guy.

One such band was the one-hit wonders Bob Kuban and the In-Men out of St. Louis. Bob was the drummer, but owned the van, so they named the band after him. The bass player, John Krenski, would have been a more logical choice, as he was the songwriter. The lead singer on their one and only hit, The Cheater, was “Sir” Water Scott. Of course, once The Cheater made the charts the band’s manager/producer, Mel Friedman, put a bug in Scott’s ear to go solo for a bigger slice of the pie and his name on the marque. The reality was the manager had issues with Kuban, running things, and Friedman was generally an all-around turd in the punch bowl.

The other issue for the band was, in order to avoid the draft everyone in the band got deferments by either taking teaching jobs or enrolling in college, this put a crimp in any extensive touring plans. This is ironic, of course, because the band billed themselves as a clean cut alternative to those stinking peace-nick hippies, while they were dodging the draft. Although a much bigger irony was to come…

When The Cheater hit Number One in Australia, the band was not able to travel down under to take advantage because the US State Department informed them that if they left the country they would be classified 1-A and shipped off to Vietnam.

Scott, Kuban and the rest of In-Men were never heard from again, until 1983, when Scott’s second wife, JoAnn, and her lover James Williams, staged a car accident to kill Williams’ wife and then hog-tied Scott, shot him in the back and dumped his body in a reservoir.

20 years before this happen folks were convinced that Scott was a black man based on his voice, a canard helped along by the In-Men doing their best to ape the sound of Ike Turner’s band, The Kings of Rhythm (who Bob Kuban claims to have played with when he’s had a couple of snorts). Coming from a black guy, somehow, made The Cheater sexier.

The nine-piece doo-wop group the Casinos, The O’Kaysions, the Philly Soul band The Soul Survivors; all white as Trump’s tan line, but made hay copping the ‘black’ sound.

Tony Joe White, The Newbeats, Alex Chilton, The Flaming Ember, Roy Head, Georgie Fame, Michael McDonald, Paul Carrack, the ginger from Simply Red. The list goes on…

While Elvin Anderson, by his own admission, was doing his best to cop the ‘black’ sound in his early recordings too, his voice was of such a unique timber, the public was confident only a white guy could sound that grating on purpose.

Naturally, it wasn’t his voice but the songs themselves that brough the listening public’s interest in The Stools. Junk Yard Polio was one such song.

The first track off of Draconian Messures started its music journey as ‘The God Botherer’, which Critique, a New Jersey Folk Music Newsletter labeled, ‘blasphemy at its most plaintive, bordering on piteous, but venturing into pathetic’.

Consider the times. The race was on to discover a cure for Polio and all of the country was gripped in fear. The public’s hopes were pinned on Dr. Albert Sabin’s oral live-virus vaccine actually working. The dark horse in the race was Jonas Salk, champion of the dead-virus vaccine. Sabin referred to Salk as ‘a kitchen chemist’. Salk often called Sabin ‘that Polack that can’t even grow a decent moustache’. There was no room for niceties, huge pharma-dollars were involved.

Jonas Salk won the race by a nose but was too busy playing horsey with the press to pay any attention to what was going on in Cutter Labs in Berkley where they accidentally inoculated kids with a live strain of the polio virus thinking it was Salk’s dead-virus, killing 200. There were whispers that Sabin sabotaged the batch, but nothing was proven.

As Elvin Anderson later told Chris Coe for his think piece in Handle Magazine, ‘Al Floss always wanted us to write about what was on people’s mind, and everyone was thinking about polio in 1955, so I kind of shoehorned it into this other song I had written, ‘The God Botherer’. Antonio pointed out to me that ‘botherer’ was really a word, so it was that big of a deal to change it’.

‘I’ll tell you how big polio was in the early 50’s,’ Cosmo offered later in the same piece. ‘That panty-sniffer Elvis started raising money for the March of Dimes, who were footing the bill for the research, in 1957… Although, that might have just been part of Col. Tom’s court mandated community service’.