The Final Revival of Opal & Nev

by Dawnie Walton

I been too candid? Simply by relaying my own American story, did they think I was playing a race card? I couldn’t put my finger on exactly how I’d lost the room, but somehow I’d done just that. And it was imperative that I get it back. “Anyway, enough about all that,” I said, with what I hoped was a self-deprecating chuckle. “The thing to really know is, Opal & Nev are playing Derringdo 2016.”

“Oh my God, that is perfect,” said Pooja. “I’m shook!”

“It won’t be announced for a little while yet. Aural’s got the exclusive. So from the beginning we’ll own the story, and when the book comes out, there’ll be really strong interest. There’s a whole rollout plan Sunny’s working on—some really fantastic synergies with Nev’s next tour.” He smiled and gave me the thumbs-up. “Guys, this is a massive win.”

I realized just how much pressure there’d be on nailing this part of the book, about what had gone wrong at Rivington Showcase. Through these interviews I was searching for my father, of course, but for all the Aural History readers, the faithful Mercurials and Phil-level skeptics alike, I had promised to deliver more. To squeeze out the juicy, page-turning details of the riot, and to get at why Opal & Nev—as a singular musical duo, not just as an empty image or the precursor to a solo superstar in Nev—deserved such rigorous attention in its wake.

What is more complicated, more open to conjecture, are the other factors building to the deadly beating he took that night. Not just the business pressures and poor planning and political tensions you’ve maybe read about before—but also the betrayals, inflated egos, lies, and excesses of ambition these collected confessions attempt to reveal. Everyone I interviewed presented a different take on why the Rivington Showcase riot happened, and certain subjects put up a testy defense when my questions leaned aggressive. In the end, perhaps Bob Hize put it best when accepting his own culpability. “It was all my fault,” he told me, “and hers, and his, and theirs, and on and on and on.” But we’ll start from the top, where the buck proverbially stopped: with Rivington label head Howie Kelly.

Everybody and their mother has an opinion as to whose fault [Rivington Showcase] was, all right? Everybody likes to toss that blame around like a goddamn hot potato. So as long as everybody’s playing that game I’ll offer you two cents you can spend, somebody you should call up and grill: the gal who was my goddamn masseuse, that’s who! Breaking news: She was the one who told me I needed to take a vacation in the first place, so she’s the reason I happened to go down to Florida, okay? If people wanna blame me for bringing on the Bond Brothers, they also need to call up Song… Sing… fuck if I remember.

My God, the heat… The fucking winged cockroaches—one of them slapping against the bathroom mirror in my motel room woke me up… and have you ever seen this thing they call a crawfish? There was a whole giant festival dedicated to ’em near where I was staying, and I swear looking at the color of those boiled fuckers you couldn’t tell the difference between one of ’em and one of the locals—that’s how red the necks were down there. I was hoping for a taste of the Caribbean and instead it’s like I’m in coastal fucking Crackerville.

That’s when I discovered [the Bond Brothers] playing their set, and I liked what I saw. They had the stuff to fill a place and they had the girls squealing. That was the kind of energy Rivington needed. What’d I care whether they were Boy Scouts?

I guess we felt pretty invincible in those days. But you best believe if our numbers came up we woulda been the first standing in line when it was time to go. We wasn’t no cowards, you know. We wasn’t no special snowflakes. We had friends who’d had their asses shipped over, a lot of poor brothers who didn’t never come home, so we had respect.

Outside of the band we liked to work on cars and bikes. Junk heaps left on the side of the road that my old man would tow home—he drove a tow truck for a mean sonofabitch all his life—and we would juice ’em up and race ’em. Asshole grease monkeys outside with the tunes on, you know? We always loved Elvis, like everybody did, and our mamas loved playing country radio but I admired the rougher guys—Merle [Haggard], Johnny Cash. So later when we started getting more serious, dreaming all pie-in-the-sky about getting a record contract, I always thought, Nashville. But Howie Kelly was the one to come into Sharky’s that night. He was like a walking hundred-dollar bill, and we didn’t know no better than to lunge.

They would mail Howie photos of themselves partying with total rando nutjobs or groupies with their tops off and Beau or Chet signing their tits. Disgusting. But Howie was grinning and showing them off around the office and he’d bug Bob: “Do you see? Do you see this money we’re losing every day there’s no record?” So Bob started to feel like he didn’t have much choice but to bring them back up and get them in the studio.

With a targeted release to both country and rock radio, “Outlaws by Birth,” from the Bond Brothers’ April 1971 self-titled debut, became the first charting single from Rivington Records. (Hize’s postproduction touch on the song: the sound of a revving motorcycle engine that backs up Beau Bond’s guitar.) It reached No. 7 on Billboard’s hard-rock chart, and a follow-up, “Dirty Boots,” entered at No. 18.

I studied this—these were literally the lyrics to a Bond Brothers song: [reciting in a deadpan] “Good ol’ boys cuttin’ loose in your town / Bring all the booze, bring all the gals / Rev me up, baby, rev me up / Hop yourself on in my truck / Enough could never be enough.” But oh yes, it could be enough, couldn’t it? Certainly enough for me to want to stick my head in the oven, right, and toss in my own tortured notebooks while I was at it. The hilarious part is that neither Opal nor I, nor any of the other artists we knew on the label, had even met them yet to know the full extent of their boorishness.

Hell, they could’ve been singing “A-B-C-1-2-3” and I would’ve congratulated them on their little hit record and kept it moving. For me it wasn’t about the lyrics being dumb—and, I mean, it wasn’t like they were saying, “Nigger nigger nigger.” But that image, those symbols, that’s what’s insidious. Folks rally around that stuff, they claim it, they hurt people like you and me in the name of it. So when I laid eyes on that Bond Brothers album cover [a studio shot of the members facing the camera in a line, each wearing a Confederate flag belt buckle on the waist of his jeans]… It was like I had built this life I loved in New York only to zoom right back to summertime in Alabama. Me and Pearl, and our own mother worried about what people who waved flags like that could do to little girls like us.

On top of that, I gotta say: I thought Opal had some kinda gall to make a comment on what other people wore. Opal Jewel! Of all the cuckoo-crazies! No matter what I ever thought, I never tried to be the fashion police with her. I believe in free speech and I believe in letting artistes be artistes.

Here’s the thing I’ve learned: When you approach art with the goal of making a quick and dirty buck, that’s fine; sometimes it has to be done. But nothing that happens as a result should come as a surprise to you. And with the Bond Brothers that was the whole idea, right? Howie said, These guys seem like gen-u-wine Bubbas—let’s take their Stars and Bars and their bad behavior and their gruff-rough looks, and let’s ride this cartoon straight to the bank. And Bob, he just rolled over and said, Okay. And hell, the Bond Brothers themselves, they wanted that money! They rolled over too and said, All right, yeah, you want a cartoon? We’ll give you a cartoon. But then the cartoon starts to pull away from reality, from the three dimensions that make you a human…. And when the laughs run out, you can’t suddenly ask in the middle of the show, What happened? What you mean, What happened? That’s the monster you made.

So it is with Mad and her men. Perhaps this will make little sense, as it does not fit the heteronormative narrative, but she veritably blossomed with relief at the news of petite impending you. Remember, James was her formative experiment in love—conclusion being that Mad is not a woman who cares very deeply for romantic commitment. She had never wanted to possess James, and more than that, she did not want to be possessed by him. Once they dropped all pretense that they had potential for more, once she knew that she would never be in a position to replace wife and mother and also that she did not prefer to be stuffed down that particular hole, all her guilt regarding their affair went poof poof. I understand, though, that your poor papa, like so many of the others after him, had difficulty processing such modern styles.

Well, I waved her over—there was no point pretending I was blind. She was wearing this bright orange jumpsuit, for heaven’s sake, with feathers stuck all over it! So she comes over to say hello but he just ducks his head low and nearly sprints past us out the revolving door. And Opal, she has this look on her face, because she knows I’m not born yesterday and she’s waiting for me to say something. So I try to let her know I’m not judging. I say to her, “Gosh, Jimmy must be doing all right these days if he can swing a room in this place.” And I guess she’s trying to prove she’s not ashamed, not scared of what anybody thinks, so she goes, “Yeah, you know, he’s been working more, his wife’s having a baby”—and next to me Bigfoot spits out his G&T. [Laughing]

Chet Bond is the only member of the Bond Brothers to go on the record for this project. Cole Young died of liver failure in 1989, Donny Pendle declined to be interviewed, and Beau Bond disappeared sometime in 1973, when, Chet recalls, his little brother abruptly cut off contact with family and friends. The owner of an auto-body shop in his hometown of Live Oak, Chet—who says he has been sober since 1997—is active in local politics and in 2016 campaigned in his swing state for Donald J. Trump. The ranch-style house he shares with his wife, Shelly, and their three Pomeranians is well-known in Live Oak for the twelve-foot-tall US flag he flies in the sprawling backyard.

Kelly maintains he was unaware of the increasingly blurred line between the Bonds’ persona and their real-life criminal associations. At the time, he says, he was focused on how he might best amplify their success, by using their fame to boost the label’s other, flailing artists—whether or not such creative attachments made any sense.

OPAL JEWEL, REGARDING HER FELLOW RIVINGTON ARTISTS: Of course I told them that the Bonds shouldn’t be representing our label in the first damn place. When their album came out with that terrible cover, with the Confederate flag all over it, I went to a lot of these folks and asked them, Please, back me up in calling bull. Everybody was too scared to rock the boat. Once it looked like the Bonds were gonna gobble up space on their records, though? Suddenly these same people were up in arms. And that right there is very typical of white people—won’t do what’s right till they’re directly affected. I was willing to let them off the hook for that, though, if it meant we were finally gonna band together to say, Nah, we won’t participate in this Bond Brothers business.

My logic was, Let’s just do it in one go. One big show, nothing to be recorded for posterity, nobody’s work compromised, and it will be over. So the idea for Rivington Showcase, I’m ashamed to confess, was actually mine. When I mentioned to Howie that a splashy showcase like this would probably attract the attention of the big boys, the Columbias and the RCAs, and that Rivington could even be acquired, he was sold. To be honest, I wanted something like an acquisition to happen, because even owning that small stake—some responsibility but not a lot of deciding power—was turning out to be a significant source of distress for me. I thought it might be best for Howie and me to cash out, if we could, and move on with our lives.

“If I’m going to sing, I want that baaaad motherfucker Jimmy Curtis on drums.” Now, I could tell you I made that request because your daddy had played on the record and he knew all the songs already. I could tell you that if I was gonna play on the same bill as those dummies, I’d at least score a seriously fat fuck-you check for a Black man. It’s not as if those things would be untrue; it’s not as if I haven’t given those reasons before in every other interview I’ve done about why I chose to go along. But the extra reason was that I was mad at Nev. And I asked for Jimmy, specifically, to mess with him.

For most of the Rivington artists, including Nev Charles and Opal Jewel, this was to be the biggest, highest-profile gig they’d ever had, and the preparations for it were high-stakes and intense.

I was still nervous when we started to plan the thing. All the artists were supposed to share the same instruments and amps so we could go from one set to the next without a lag, but Rosemary told me she’d seen pictures of [Bond Brothers drummer] Donny Pendle’s brand-new kit and it was custom-made with the Confederate flag on the skins. After I told Jimmy that, he made it very clear at the first rehearsal, so that everybody could hear and take note, that pigs would fly before he sat down behind that particular piece of trash.

We had the short skirts and tall boots and sexy dances, and the three of us did this synchronized routine involving bubble gum. And I had the idea for the showcase, Wouldn’t it be fun to have Beau come out and play with us a little bit? I was thinking a tease-y number, something to excite the girls in the audience, but he was too shy to even try it in rehearsals.

During rehearsals I could feel him looking my way, studying me, but he wouldn’t ever look me in the eye and he wouldn’t talk to me either. I just assumed that was because he hated uppity niggers. [Shrugs] What else was I supposed to think? That was the evidence I’d been given, right? Because at their own concerts, on their own album cover, him and his boys trotted out the literal battle flag of the people who fought tooth and nail to continue subjugating mine, so… Nah, I wasn’t really feeling Beau Bond, and I couldn’t have cared less that he seemed cool on me too. I had other things to get together.

The height would force the front rows to gaze up. I thought, Why not elevate her even more? To the gods! The shoe would be key, the most avant-garde that we could find. This was an investment—Opal and I could craft many amazing garments, chère, but we were not cobblers. We found them in the West Village, a pair of strappy red leather wedge platforms that made a wonderful clamor with every step.

In hindsight, the shoes were a bad idea. They were a cross between leg braces and stilts…. Getting in and out of them was a trip.

Everything else was in service to the shoe, allowing it to captivate and command. We borrowed a tutu from a dancer friend who I prayed would not curse me out when I cut it shorter, dyed it black, and added more tulle—maximum flounce was a must. On top we had a simple black T-shirt, and I cut segments from it so that what remained reinforced the snaking effect of the shoe. When I was done it was a midriff: belly button on display, winking to the masses below. We took her Pocahontas wig and used it to construct a Mohawk—it was trimmed to a strip and placed on the center of the head, and the hair ran like an inky waterfall down the back while the sides remained naked. Silver glittery eyes, bloodred mouth, fini.

On the late afternoon of November 13, 1971, the minor leaguers on Rivington’s roster began gathering at the Smythe, preparing for showtime. The backstage of the theater was shaped like a horseshoe: Artists came out into the spotlight from the wings at stage right; the Bond Brothers’ large dressing room (with sofas, vanities, and platters of cold cuts) took up the bulk of stage left; and in a narrow crossover area between the two sides, the opening acts mingled, made use of the two gendered bathrooms, and warmed up for the biggest show most had ever played.

The stage-right wings had been set up like an elegant holding pen, draped all around with red-velvet curtains that cut off distractions from the back of the house and also shrouded the artists from the audience. It felt private there, nearly sacred—a space where each artist was meant to corral their butterflies in the moments before hitting the stage. Hize brought everyone together here for a preshow pep talk; Kelly, who had decided to play emcee for the night, popped champagne and told them all to break legs.

A photographer was below the stage taking my picture, and I thought, Hallelujah… press! When I was done, there was a critic who’d come backstage with Bob to shake my hand, and she hinted at something on the horizon. So I felt well supported and appreciated by my label, finally, and I was very happy that night. When I was done I wished everyone else good luck and left with my family—they were only in town for the night so that my little sister didn’t miss too much school. We had a lovely celebration dinner, and my father made a toast. When I woke up the next morning and saw what had happened splashed across the papers, I couldn’t believe it.

We had been told the thing was sold out, and the lower level was starting to fill in, but the front rows stayed empty. We kept waiting to spot the high rollers who’d sprung for the good seats; we were making jokes about who they might be. Finally, a little after 8 p.m., the other Bond Brothers arrived with a gaggle of intoxicated friends and women, entering through a backstage door. Chet, Donny, and Cole appeared to be high on methamphetamine, as well as their top-dog status.

As one does...fuck these bros

You’re not supposed to have nonessential people just loitering like that during a show. It was a bad energy, man… volatile. I accidentally jostled one of them, trying to squeeze past him to get to the can, and he got in my face and called me a faggot. I wasn’t trying to get my head bashed in, there was still a lot of show left, so I apologized—“Easy, brother, it’s all right.” And the dude laughed and slapped me on the back like we were old friends. That kind of schizo shit is so not cool.