I first heard about
JIM SULLIVAN in a glowing piece on
National Public Radio. I heard excerpts from a few of his songs (which utterly captivated me), but the story mainly dealt with his mysterious disappearance and the attempts of his record label –
Light in the Attic Records – to track him down. They didn’t figure it out, and even reissuing his first album,
U.F.O. on CD in
2010 was a major challenge, since the master tapes were long since destroyed, and the few available vinyl copies had sound problems of all kinds to deal with.
Jim Sullivan (who liked to be called “
Sully”, just like the hero airline pilot of several years back,
Chesley Sullenberger) was a big man:
6 foot 3, and a high school quarterback in the
Linda Vista section of
San Diego. He was the seventh son of a
Nebraska farmer who (like countless others) moved to
California out of the
1930’s Dust Bowl. At 16, he had a
Sears Silvertone guitar and amp.
He met his wife
Barbara Sullivan when she was in junior high; in that time period, he was in a band called
the Survivors that performed in the
San Diego area, with his sister-in-law
Kathie Doran on lead vocals.
The family set out for
L.A. in
1968, when son
Chris Sullivan was 7.
Barbara landed a job in the storied
Capitol Records tower, while
Jim Sullivan gradually became known in the show biz scene and was constantly writing songs and fiddling with his guitar. His manager was
Bob Ginter, who also managed
Judy Carne, the “Sock it to Me” girl on the hit TV show
Laugh-In.
Ginter began getting him better gigs, such as the
Lindy Opera House on
Wilshire Boulevard and
the Lighthouse in
Redondo Beach. But they really loved
Sullivan at
the Raft in
Malibu; he packed the place night after night and was able to rub elbows with
Hollywood figures lik
e Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Lee Majors, Lee Marvin, Harry Dean Stanton, and Vic Morrow.
By
1969,
Jim Sullivan’s friends in the
L.A. scene pooled their money and invested in getting his first album produced. Called
U.F.O., the music is an amalgam of folk, country and rock and has a real spiritual side. It might have been just one more lo-fi singer-songwriter album, except that Jim Sullivan had several musical heavyweights from the legendary Wrecking Crew backing him up: Don Randi (keyboards), Earl Palmer (drums), and Jimmy Bond (bass), plus Bond handled the string arrangements that lent a haunting quality to songs that were conceived as being purely acoustic. At times, there were 15 or 20 musicians in the studio. Jim Sullivan had a strong belief in mysticism, and the family were all big fans of spiritual healer Edgar Cayce.
There were personal connections to many of the songs that were not at all obvious to the casual listener. “
Jerome” opens the album and is about a ghost town in Arizona – but it also happened to be the name of Kathie Doran’s hometown. “So Natural” was written in honor of his older brother, Jack Sullivan, an insurance salesman who died of a heart attack on his way home from work. “Whistle Stop” was inspired by the 1951 film Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (a personal favorite of mine as well), starring James Mason as the cursed seaman who was able to escape his fate with the help of a beautiful and spoiled village girl played by Ava Gardner.
The album came out on their own label
Monnie Records in
1969, named after the daughter of one of the investors. (
Monnie is also the name of one of the daughters of my old boss,
John McCracken in
Greensboro; her name
Monnie McCracken shows up as the creator of untold numbers of my appraisal reports when I call up “Properties” in Word, since I never put my own name in).
Al Dobbs, an actor friend who mostly worked as a cue-card holder, worked hard to get the word out about
Jim Sullivan’s music (it just wasn’t in
Sullivan’s own nature to do that). Among those he pitched to were
Jim Hughart, the bass player for the band on the
Steve Allen Show.
Dobbs also made the rounds at
Nashville radio stations when he happened to be working there one time and tried to get in to see
Johnny Cash’s manager.
The LP was later reissued on the
Century City label with new artwork. Two years after the first album,
Jim Sullivan made a second, self-titled album
, Jim Sullivan with Jim Hughart that came out on Playboy Records. (I had not known that there was such a thing before this actually). Many of Sullivan’s friends and the members of his family think that the big production values on the albums got in the way of his great songs; but for whatever reason, Jim Sullivan never got his big break in the music business. He and his wife started drinking too much, and their marriage was falling apart.
In
1975,
Jim Sullivan packed up and headed east, intending to meet up with his sister-in-law
Kathie Doran – his band mate from his
Survivors days – and her husband,
Nashville session guitarist
Dave Doran. He called his wife
Barbara Sullivan from a pay phone in
Santa Rosa, New Mexico and, at some point, was stopped by the
New Mexico Highway Patrol. Then he simply vanished into thin air; his car was later found abandoned in
Santa Rosa with his wallet, guitar, suitcase, everything. Among the theories were that he was murdered or that he was abducted by aliens, the latter theory lining up with the title song on the first album,
U.F.O..
For 35 years,
Jim Sullivan’s album became a kind of Holy Grail for record collectors.
Matt Sullivan (no relation) of
Light in the Attic Records worked diligently to try to solve the mystery and to get the tracks cleaned up for re-release, and he collected some remarkable artifacts about the man and the disappearance that are shown on the CD insert. The CD came out way too late to help
Jim Sullivan himself, but now we have these marvelous songs to wonder over all over again.
* * *
The
Honor Roll of the
Under Appreciated Rock Bands and Artists follows, in date order, including a link to the original
Facebook posts and the theme of the article.
Dec 2009 – BEAST; Lot to Learn Mar 2010 – BANG; Record Collecting I Jul 2010 – THE EYES; Los Angeles Punk Rock Mar 2011 – INDEX; Psychedelic Rock (1960’s) Oct 2011 – JIM SULLIVAN; Mystery
Nov 2013 – CHIMERA; Women in Rock II Jan 2014 – BOYSKOUT; (Lesbian) Women in Rock IV Apr 2014 – HOMER; Creating New Bands out of Old Ones Jul 2014 – MIKKI; Rock and Religion I (Early CCM Music) Sep 2014 – NICK FREUND; Rock and Religion III (The Beatles) Mar 2015 – PHIL GAMMAGE; Songwriting II (Woody Guthrie/Bob Dylan) Dec 2016 – THE IGUANAS; Iggy and the Stooges; Proto-Punk Rock Jun 2017 – THE LOONS; Punk Revival and Other New Bands Dec 2017 – SS-20; The Iguana Chronicles
