"May We Graft Chicken Wings
To Your Head In The Interest of Aviation?"
By Kenny G
James P. Coyle and Mal Sharpe hit the streets of San Francisco on local
radio in the fall of 1963 as two clean cut guys looking like IBM
executives dressed in suits and ties carrying one of those big old
fashioned reel to reel--in those days called "portable"--tape players out
doing man-on-the-streets interviews. Looking really straight, they would
pull in unwitting and unsuspecting passers-bye to answer their ultimately
absurd questions, often convincing the victim to do something as
outrageous as agreeing to kill someone or rob a bank.
It's incredible now to hear the gullibility of these people--you think,
it just couldn't happen today--people are too weary and paranoid. But it
was a different time in America--the post-Eisenhower-pre-Vietnam-Cold War
period. The only really alternative thing that the media was picking up
on at the time was the Beats; the hippies were still several years away.
Coyle and Sharpe were not hanging on the Beat Scene, rather they lived in
a residence house on Russian Hill, which is where they met in 1960, and
spent their days doing recorded put-on's that really verged on conceptual
performance art. In a sense, what they were doing was an audio version of
Candid Camera, although with a real dark and underground twist. It was
not uncommon for them to propose then-morally repugnant or culturally
oppositional ideas to their victims. While always presented in the
interest of humor, many of these ideas found full bloom in the
counterculture years later. Mal Sharpe claims that this was all
coincidental; their works were done with only humor in mind--political or
artistic considerations were not part of their agenda. As a matter of
fact, both Coyle and Sharpe have claimed to have no interest in the
"pretension" of high art. It's eerie to listen to the work 30 years later
and discover how right on they were in their humor--they called for
nothing short of a complete overhaul of society as it was then known and
commonly agreed to.
James Coyle was a professional con-man who, according to Mal Sharpe, had
conned his way into 160 jobs by the time he was 24 and took none of
them--the simple act of getting the job was enough. Mal Sharpe had
arrived in San Francisco from Boston, a communications major bumming
around the Bay Area when he fell under the persuasive spell of Jim. Soon
enough, they were out on the streets with a hidden microphone honing what
was to become a paying gig. In 1963 they were contracted by radio station
KGO to come up with three hours of material five days a week to be
broadcast that very same night. The result was spontaneous radio, the
likes of which is unknown today. Each morning they would meet at a coffee
shop and brainstorm the day's ideas. They would look at everyday objects
around them and invent absurd situations--a lamp post would become "human
lamp post", a chicken wing on a plate would become something to be
grafted on to the head of a person "in the interest of aviation"--and so
on until they were ready to go out on the streets seeking their "victims"
(Jim's widow, Naomi has told me that their victims were carefully
selected, usually by their shoes). At the end of the day, they would turn
their tapes into the station where they would be broadcast that evening
up and down the West Coast.
Admittedly, lot of what they did was sheer hassle for hassle's sake. They
spent their days roaming the city, looking for people to bother wherever
they went. There is one interview in which they approach a gentleman
sitting leisurely under the shade of a tree on a lovely fall afternoon.
As the leaves begin to fall from the tree, they accuse the man of being
anti-arboreal and an enemy of nature, a claim which he adamantly denies.
More arguing ensues and in his characteristically brilliant manner,
sophist James Coyle forces the conversation to the point where the man
has been accused, tried, and found guilty of arboricide. His sentence is
to have to endure the abrasiveness of Coyle and Sharpe. In another
situation, they walked on to a construction site and with no idea in mind
found a carpenter eating a sandwich for lunch whereupon they insisted
that the man give them a bite of his sandwich. Surprisingly enough, the
confrontations rarely came to blows as Coyle and Sharpe would defuse the
interview by saying, "May we tell you something? This is all in the
interest of humor!", whereupon all would laugh and recall what was going
through their minds during the interview as if they were old friends.
Sometimes, the work is chilling. In one scene, they try to convince a
passer-by to make a phone call for them and say "We have little Jimmy
Jones here with us and we'd like to arrange a meeting..." There is a lot
of work involving cults, conspiracy theory and political revolution that
all too unfortunately came to pass in the following quarter of a
century.
In addition to street interviews, Coyle and Sharpe also did several
"studio" pieces--small bits of Dadaist/Surrealist humor that went over
everybody's heads (Listening to them today, they strike me like
Sound-Poems/Zen koans. I can't imagine what the average AM listener made
of them 30 years ago!). Over the course of time, they developed threads
running through the work that evolved into elaborate political conspiracy
theories and included a cast of characters such as: Mayor Harry Kodiak,
his arch nemesis Chancellor Eric Argyle, Repugno and his child the filthy
Baby Rasputin. These fictitious beings were involved in a series of
kidnapping, murders, political upheavals and power struggles centering
around the L.A. Invasion (a fictitious war between San Francisco and Los
Angeles led by Field Marshall Coyle and Field Marshall Sharpe). Of
course, the average citizen on the streets of San Francisco became
involved in the struggle and was asked to take sides and to perform
absurd tasks for the cause. Much of this work predated and influenced Bay
Area artists like Negativland and Survival Research Laboratories, as well
as The Firesign Theater. It is also possible to see their influence in
David Letterman's humor as well as (for better or worse) the Jerky
Boys.
Things started to pick up for Coyle and Sharpe around 1964. Their radio
show was gaining national attention to the point where they were featured
in a Time Magazine article. Then came the recording offers--they released
two albums for Warner Bros., "The Absurd Impostors" and "The Insane But
Hilarious Minds of Coyle and Sharpe." Following a move to Los Angeles,
the duo made a television pilot called "The Impostors"--a series of
street interviews and set-up situations where they bust people's balls
(tennis great Poncho Gonzalez being one of them). However, these guys
were essentially artists and they resented the influence and control that
the "Hollywood Mafia" wanted to assert on their work--and to be honest,
Hollywood wasn't exactly crazy for them either--they were too "weird."
One day Jim Coyle just up and split. No one knew where he went and even
Mal Sharpe was not to find out what happened until 15 years later when
they finally spoke. Hollywood was nauseating him, so he and his wife
moved to New York where they waited for Jim's father to die so they could
inherit some money. After this happened, they moved to Austria and
finally settled in Cambridge, England where they lived quietly for years
reading the classics and listening to Wagner, Mahler, and Bach. Jim died
in 1992 of complications arising from Diabetes. Mal Sharpe stayed in Los
Angeles and began a career in radio, which he continues to this day. He
moved back to San Francisco and found an interest in Tibetan Buddhism.
Mal has continued his man-on-the-street work often with a more humorous,
philosophical, and gentle bent.
Listening to Coyle and Sharpe is a bit like traveling to a foreign
land--suddenly "everything you know is wrong"--and it's up to you to
question and reinvent attitudes you have complacently long taken for
granted. A mirror is held up to our seemingly random and absurd societal
conventions; they make us question what we call "common sense" and
"everydayness" in a way that "high" art, cinema, and literature are
capable of. In their unsuspecting victims we squirm in sympathy as we see
more than a bit of ourselves reflected, uncomfortably laughing along, of
course, "all in the interest of humor."
WFMU will be broadcasting one hour of Coyle and Sharpe material each
week from June to September in the 6-7 PM time slot on a day yet to be
determined
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