Why I love Roller Derby Women

If you’re one of the few people who haven’t heard of the resurgence in Roller Derby of the last nine years or so, welcome back from your coma and I’m glad you’re able to read this. You have some catching up to do.


I make no bones about it – I love roller derby women. They represent to me the perfect modern type of the opposite sex. To be honest about it, it’s been that way throughout my life (if you remember the names Francine Cochu, Sherri Erich and Darlene Langois de la Chapelle, you recall exactly why). But the women making up the current-day version of the sport have added some very important elements to that image.

This ain’t your grandpa’s roller derby we’re dealing with here. Mind you, I loved that version, too. In junior high school, how I wished roller derby was a scholastic sport, put on the same level of respect as basketball, football or softball. My Wisconsin classmates idolised Oscar Robertson, Ray Nitschke or Henry Aaron. My sports idol? Psycho Ronnie Raines of the Los Angeles Thunderbirds, who would gleefully goad fans into throwing their paper Coke cups at him when he played the heel on the banked track – and just as gleefully chewed those cups directly in front of the ticked-off fans and spit them right back out. Then he’d punctuate his response by racking up a few points on the next jam just to stuff it up their noses. Now there was a man.

I even attended a match on what turned out to be one of the last tours of the original Roller Derby league, the San Francisco-based International Roller Derby League, in 1972. It was at Kolf Sports Center on the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh campus. I know the Cincinnati Jolters were one of the teams, but I forget who they skated against (maybe Jerry Seltzer can fill me in sometime). I was so captivated by the action on the banked track that I insisted on standing on the floor a few feet closer than the bleachers were; after my dad convinced me to sit back down, one of the Jolter skaters took a spill over the railing and landed almost exactly where I had been standing only a few minutes before. (Dad never let me hear the end of that one.)

One of the images above is of the label of the British 45 r.p.m. single release of “Roller Derby Queen” by Jim Croce. I realise that, to the derby skaters of today, that song comes off as an insult – more than a handful of them have said as much to me. But Croce wrote songs about characters that made up street-level America, some bad (the pimp in “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” the pool hustlers in “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim”) but most good (the truck driver in “Speedball Tucker,” the down-on-his-luck musician in “Box #10,” the stock car driver in “Rapid Roy”). Most of these images were icons of Americana that even Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson weren’t singing about yet. In the concert album Jim Croce Live, he told the story of how he came to write “Roller Derby Queen”: a patron at the bar applauded particularly enthusiastically at one of Jim’s earliest performances at a Country & Western tavern, and when they conversed after the performance she’d told him that she used to be a Roller Derby skater in Texas. She was the very kind of person Croce loved to immortalise in his songs.

Alas, the IRDL ran out of gas a few months after that, and the Bill Griffiths-operated league in L.A., for whose T-Birds Psycho Ronnie skated, somewhat limped along for another dozen years, eventually even landing a weekly slot on ESPN in ’85 before everything finally ground to a halt. The less said about two later attempts to revive it commercially – that over-hyped Griffith monstrosity RollerGames in 1988, and the flaky figure-8-tracked RollerJam that used AWA and WWF reject Ken Resnick as a commentator ten years later – the better.

A few years ago, a curious thing began to happen in Austin, Texas, and Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona – all-female leagues of roller derby teams began competing, independently of any commercial structures. Rather than being held in a top-down business model, the skaters were putting on the bouts – making fun of the kayfabe aspects of the Griffiths product instead of practicing it – as a grassroots-up experience. The Austin TXRD Lonestar league used the banked track of yore, but Phoenix’s AZRD and Tucson’s TRD used simple plastic rings of lights on a flat surface for their tracks. Although there have been other leagues that have adopted the banked-track structure – the Los Angeles Derby Dolls, Phoenix’s Arizona Derby Dames and Oklahoma City’s Red Dirt Rebellion Rollergirls are among the more notable – by far the flat-track version has proven to be the most popular, with over 200 municipal flat-track leagues of one form or another popping up across North America, Australia and Europe.

There are five character traits that these women all possess that make them my favourites:

1. INDEPENDENCE. Yes, it’s a team sport (the occasional match race notwithstanding). But every woman associated with these teams and leagues display fierce independence by the simple act of organising these bouts in the first place. There’s no George Steinbrenners (thank God!) or Ted Turners owning these leagues, and no Michael Jordans making tons of money from playing the game. The vast majority of leagues are skater-organised cooperatives made up entirely of amateur competitors, many of which are registered with the IRS as not-for-profit organisations. Often, they never get serious attention from area media (when was the last time KNBC in Los Angeles gave the score of a Long Beach Roller Derby bout?) And, let’s face it, Roller Derby was, for all intents and purposes, dead for the dozen-plus years before the Lonestars cranked it back up. Hitching your wagon to a dormant star and getting the star moving again is damned independent.

2. COURAGE. Most people of either sex wouldn’t have the guts to even venture onto a baseball diamond or a hockey rink, let alone a roller derby track.

3. INTENSE DEDICATION. These women practice their skills for hours on end at least two days a week (many three) on top of those weekends when bouts are scheduled.

4. OUTRAGEOUS WIT. Only in roller derby can somebody calling themselves Dr. Mary Lu Botomy compete as a top jammer for a team called The Coffin Draggers, as is the case with who is probably my very favourite skater in the Arizona Derby Dames. It takes a truly wicked sense of humour to keep coming up with event names like Girl on Girl Traction (Long Beach), The Final Smackdown (Stuttgart Valley Roller Girlz), It Came From The Roller Rink! (Colorado’s Castle Rock ‘n’ Rollers), Autumn Slaughter (Derby Revolution of Bakersfield), Coal Miners Slaughter (Australia’s Sydney Roller Derby), 2010: A Rollerderby Odyssey (Edmonton’s E-Ville Roller Derby), Hassle at the Castle (Edinburgh’s Auld Reekie Roller Girls) and Boutin’ for Boobies (a Central Oklahoma Roller Derby fundraiser for breast cancer research).

5. LOYALTY. Not only to their fellow skaters, even on opposing teams and leagues, but especially to the fans who keep coming to the bouts to support their efforts.

In all of my relationships with women throughout my life, I have yet to find a partner that displayed independence, courage, dedication, loyalty, or a tolerance for my admittedly sick sense of humour. (One woman wondered aloud within my hearing range, exactly what the hospital did with the tissue taken from breast reduction surgery? I instinctively responded that she may want to avoid the meatloaf in the cafeteria. That relationship didn’t last much longer.) That’s probably why, if I ever do pursue another relationship with a woman, it’ll almost definitely have to be with a modern-day derby skater. Any Derby women reading this – especially between Tucson and San Francisco -- interested in taking me up on that idea? You know where to find me…

The Doctor is Out, and you’re not looking all that well yourself…

Mind you, The Dr. Demento Show is still heard in one community over the terrestrial airwaves, thanks to a contractual obligation with KACV in Amarillo, Texas, although that’s simply an edit of his online show. And the show will still be available as an Internet stream at drdemento.com for future programs. But, for all intents and purposes, Dr. Demento as we knew him for the last 40 years is gone from the airwaves, and the era of creative radio programming went with him when he left.

The illustration for this post happens to be the front cover of Dr. Demento’s Delights, a 1975 Warner Brothers concoction of novelty songs ranging from the brightly amusing (Jim Kweskin’s revival of “If You’re a Viper”) to, frankly, the disturbingly demented (Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” has never generated a laugh out of anyone with a loved one who has been institutionalized for mental problems, or for that matter anyone who has had to deal with a stalker). It was my first exposure to the good Doctor’s works, as I lived at the time in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a community that didn’t have any radio stations hip enough to add the show to their schedules. A few months after the purchase, I moved to Kenosha, where I got a weekly fix of Dementia over WRKR in Racine (somehow fittingly, on Sunday nights, right before falling asleep for the next day’s scholastic traumas). This just proved to me that Kenosha has always been cooler than Oshkosh.

Dr. Demento, born Barret Hansen in Minneapolis (also cooler than Oshkosh) on the day after April Fool’s Day 1941, was the last living morsel of the era of creative radio programming known as “Underground FM.” After making his daily bread by writing liner notes for those $2 two-record LP mail-order sets that Warner Brothers used to advertise on their inner sleeves, and being a talent scout for Specialty Records before that, Ol’ Barry Hansen got a radio gig at one of the country’s first outlets of the hippie counterculture, KPPC-FM in Pasadena, California. After a couple of 1970 hours of material like Harry “The Hipster” Gibson’s “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine” and The Novas’ affectionate immortalisation of The Wrestler That Made Milwaukee Famous, “The Crusher,” relief jock The Obscene Steven Clean took over the KPPC airwaves by uttering, “Man, you gotta be demented to play that stuff on the radio.” Ol’ Barry relished the recognition of what his work had thus accomplished, and the Demento handle stuck.

Flash forward to the end of May, 2010. The last major affiliate of Dr. Demento’s syndicated radio show, WLUP in Chicago, cancelled the program after running it for over 30 years. (For a while, when WLUP used Steve Dahl as the big “star” of its roster, Dr. Demento was the only thing worth listening to on the station.) From a peak of over 100 affiliates – including KMET and, later, KLSX in Los Angeles and WNBC in New York, all now long gone from those communities’ dials – the show’s affiliate roster is now down to one, that straggler in Amarillo. And at the end of the summer, even Amarillo will most likely be gone, too.

Thanks in large part to Bill Clinton’s signing that horrendous broadcasting deregulation bill in 1996, terrestrial radio has now become 57 boring varieties of the same basic glop. There may be more stations licensed in the United States than ever before, but there are less station owners in the United States than at the end of the Coolidge Administration (1929, for the historically-challenged). Music radio is invariably plucked off a satellite or a computer file sent from Nashville or Hollywood, regardless of the type of music it is. “Air personalities” (if there are any left with actual personality, please let me know) are invariably not at the radio stations’ studios when you hear their voices over the signal, and in most cases have never even set foot in the stations’ offices or cities of license, either. Talk radio has mutated from thoughtful conversations featuring flesh-and-blood humans (Good God, how I miss Tom Snyder, Chicago Eddie Schwartz and Don Vogel) to five tiers of satellite-fed fascist demons pounding into their audiences’ heads who their Orwellian daily three-minute hate should be aimed at today. Past, say, my old acquaintances Steve King & Johnnie Putman on WGN Chicago and Danny Bonaduce on Philadelphia’s WYSP, Harry Shearer’s Le Show on KCRW Santa Monica, Duke & Banner on KBBF Santa Rosa (and dukeandbanner.com for you virgins) and maybe Tom Leykis’ Tasting Room syndicated show, there’s precious little justification in tuning to a terrestrial U.S. radio station anymore.

And I can’t exactly call what my business has turned into “iPod Radio,” since my own mp3 player is stocked with old KHJ and KRLA airchecks from the 1960s heyday of “Boss Angeles” radio. The Real Don Steele may have died a dozen years ago, but every day I still hear him at the peak of his powers, making even the worst of ‘60s pop music – Herb Alpert should never have taken that trumpet off his lips in order to sing – worth waiting through.

Whenever I visited with him, Tom Snyder would rib me about how twisted a mind I maintained in my brain. Well, it was he, along with Larry Lujack, Wolfman Jack, Connie Szerszen, Jerry & Dody Cowan and Dr. Demento who did the twisting. Now they’re all gone from the airwaves (and, in the cases of the Wolfman and Brother Snyder, gone from the planet). I weep at the thought of the newest crop of radio listeners having to draw inspiration from, horror of horrors, Ryan Seacrest. Perhaps that’s the real curse mentioned at the end of the Book of Malachi?

Elton John Kisses Rush Limbaugh's Cyst

I love the way that the French honour performing artists. When the seminal film director D.W. Griffith died, his colleague Erich von Stroheim eulogised him for the BBC and, in said process, explained why he had himself moved to France permanently after the Second World War. Stroheim explained (I’m paraphrasing here) that Hollywood only gave a damn about whether you had a film in production in the last three months and, if you didn’t, you were forgotten; in France, if you wrote one good book or made one good movie or made one good performance on a stage fifty years ago, regardless of whatever utter shite you may have had a part of perpetrating in the decades since then, you are still recalled for the good work you did generations ago and accordingly honoured as an artist.

It’s because I subscribe to that French philosophy of artistry that I must admit that Elton John, based on great admiration of only two songs in his catalogue – “Friends” and “Grow Some Funk Of Your Own,” neither of which, you’ll note, were among his biggest hits – is truly an artist. Those are the only two singles of his I can recall actually buying at the time they were on the pop charts, and yet today I enjoy their sound like very few other pieces of 1970s pop music. And I love 1970s pop music in general.

To quote Jerry Reed (a man whose own artistry is criminally underrated, about which I’ll be expounding on a Refried Vinyl post sometime later this month), I said all that to say all this. I also firmly believe that Elton John’s true talents are wildly overhyped, and his reputation as a superstar of the first water is hysterically undeserved. That his clumsy reworking of “Candle in the Wind” from a memorial piece for Marilyn Monroe to one for Princess Diana became the biggest-selling single in world history speaks vastly more to how beloved Diana was (Chumbawamba’s withering anti-royalist critiques of her notwithstanding) than anything John himself ever did with that dreary tune. The most charitable thing that can really be said about his success is that he was no more than a glam rocker who somehow got lucky and cashed in big, which can’t be said about more deserving glam rockers like, say, Beggars Opera or, outside of Canada anyway, Michel Pagliaro.

Thus, it doesn’t surprise me in the least, as it seems to have so many gay civil rights activists, that Elton John was the main entertainment at the wedding reception this weekend of Rush Limbaugh, one of the most virulently homophobic public figures ever to breathe syllabically within audible range of a microphone. (Had John sang for Michael “Savage” Weiner’s wedding reception, even I would have truly been surprised, not only that John would have consented to do so but also that any human being would consent to being the new spouse of such an acidic misanthrope like Weiner. At least with Limbaugh, sometimes it’s the oxycontin talking.)

More than anything, Elton John is what could probably be considered a “House Queer.” (My attitude towards the use of the word “Queer” in relation to homosexuals, bisexuals and transgendered people will be the subject of my next post. I’ll just say for now that I don’t like having to use the term in such a manner, or any other epithet for that matter.) I liken this to Malcolm X’s delineation of (in the terminology of Minister Malcolm’s day) “House Negroes” and “Field Negroes” during America’s slavery days. The “House Negro” was the personal servant slave that the slave owner permitted to live in the mansion on the plantation. S/he ate the same food as the slave owner, often wore the same clothes as the slave owner and, when it came down to it, probably loved the slave owner multiple times more than the slave owner loved himself. The “Field Negro,” on the other hand, was limited to working in the fields, planting and picking the crops that the slave owner made his money by selling. The “Field Negro” had to live in shacks and barns not horribly unlike those dwellings (like Mohandas Ghandi, I will never dignify them by calling them “homes”) in which the slave owner’s livestock were minimally sheltered. The food that the “Field Negro” had to eat was often unfit for human consumption. And the “Field Negro” was likely to hate both the slave owner and the “House Negro” with the same passionate loathing.

Since I reject the junk philosophy of sexual orientation identity that approves of the term “Queer” being applied to any human being, but a very significant amount (perhaps even a majority?) of BLGTs do, I have to consider Elton John to be a prime example of what a “House Queer” would be like. He is satisfied with second-class status in his native United Kingdom; he has publicly questioned why gay civil rights activists are so concerned with same-sex marriage, and has suggested to some that they should knock off their pursuit of equality when “civil unions” are “just as good.” Part of this comes from John’s social status, being one of the wealthiest entertainers the world has ever known and, therefore, able to afford the legal fees for the court filings that make his domestic relationship roughly equivalent to the rights of the most ardent heterosexist “married” couple. He can afford his own in-house doctor if he wishes. He can simply ignore the bigotry that maintains homophobia and heterosexist social supremacy if he so feels like it. His money, granted him in large part by a global society that loves his stage act and doesn’t mind his being “queer” as long as he doesn’t try to violate the limits of what “queer” really means to these people, cushions his very existence. And so what if he does challenge those limits and some fundamentalist imam issues a fatwa on John’s head for publicly stating his belief that Jesus Christ was and is a gay man? He can afford the costs of the additional security men, and he just won’t perform in the shadow of the Pyramids anymore, that’s all.

The money that has been dumped into Elton John’s lap has made him at least temporarily immune from the effects of what a Limbaugh, or “Savage” or O’Reilly or Coulter for that matter, does to the rest of us. The playwright and gay American man Terrence McNally wrote the stage play Corpus Christi, which displays Jesus Christ and his disciples as being homosexual men in the modern-day Corpus Christi, Texas. For his merely suggesting such a thing in fiction, McNally has himself been the target of a fatwa by the London-based Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad of Al-Muhajiroun, an Islamic group with pre-9/11 connections to Osama bin Laden, as well as a propaganda campaign by William Donohue, chief of the self-styled (and ironically misnamed) Catholic League for Religious & Civil Rights. McNally may have won several Tony Awards for his other work, but he can ill afford the security force that would guarantee that some religious fanatic won’t take him off the count for writing a play the fanatic hasn’t even bothered to read or view.

If anything, this situation that finds John privately entertaining America’s leading propagandist of homophobia and other bigotries should (but probably still won’t) prove to every non-heterosexual American, once and for all, that nobody deserves to be considered a cultural leader in any manner, primarily based on his frequent habit of having sex with another man. Far too often, simply being one of us qualifies too many of us to be our collective heroes. Actual qualification of such leadership is only dependent on said individual’s demonstrated integrity and courage in publicly acting against said bigotry. By coming to the stage of Limbaugh’s party simply because the propagandist waved his checkbook, Elton John has proven himself to be a morally corrupt artist whose day has long passed and whose integrity has been lacking a core, or the core has become comfortably numb, for far too long for him to realise what he is really doing.

Oh, the bloody irony...

Meanwhile, Over in the Gulf of Mexico...

McCain's Back on the Border Again!!!