Even if you don’t know Don Fleming by name, chances are you own a ton of records he’s helped make. As a producer, he’s collaborated with the likes of Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Teenage Fanclub, Screaming Trees, the Posies and Hole, to name just a handful. He works for the Alan Lomax Archive and has done archival work for the estates of Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey and others. He’s fronted such groups as the Velvet Monkeys, B.A.L.L. and Gumball and was a member of the band that provided the music to 1994 Beatles biopic Backbeat. Fleming also runs the Instant Mayhem label, which recently reissued the Velvet Monkeys’ 1982 debut Everything Is Right and is about to release the solo Don Fleming 4, which features Kim Gordon, Julie Cafritz and R. Stevie Moore. If all that weren’t enough, Fleming is guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our brand new Q&A with him.
Fleming: In the early 1960s, I was living with my parents at Homestead AFB in Florida. Everyday after school, I’d tune in to Jumping Jack’s “Four O’Clock Club” on WLBW from Miami. One day, I was the lucky kid who got a call from the show, and I was able to answer the question of the day (I can’t remember what) and won a Hands Up Harry game. It was a stand-up cowboy that you would shoot at with a dart gun. First you would shoot Harry’s hat off and his arms would pop up, drawing his guns. Then you hit his belt bucket and his pants fell down, classic!
Video after the jump.
One reply on “From The Desk Of Don Fleming: “Jumpin’ Jack’s Four O’Clock Club” And “Hands Up Harry””
I too lived there in early ’60’s, in Daytona during the Cuban Missle Crisis. Fun! Remember the scary training movies, hiding under a desk and bomb drills?
Anyway, one show they seemed to have there I never heard about again after moving north again, was McKeever and the Colonel, about a Bilko/Bueller-type kid at a military academy alway up to something. Ring a bell?