Cutting the Mustard

"I was driving, see. cool like down the freeway. A young kid in a twin pipe job come up on me fast on the right. He was a goner. He cockeyed near cooled me, man. So I said, 'Jimmy, let's write a song about this cool cat.' I don't even know the name of the guy. But I got even. Man, I got even!"

The frenetic speaker is a 44-year-old singer-composer known as "Nervous Norvus" (real name: Jimmy Drake). His revenge consisted of writing and recording a nerve-jangling rock 'n' roll tune called Transfusion, and within three months it made its composer one of the most successful song peddlers in the business.

Bonk, Bonk, Bonk. As is clear from his opening measures, Jimmy Drake achieved his overnight success without the benefit of a musical education. What he has in abundance, however, is the ability to regard the world with the fractured gaze of a teenager. Reminiscing about his career, he recalls that his mother gave him a banjo when he was still a schoolboy in Los Angeles and remarked, "Here, go make something of yourself.'' But. says Jimmy sadly, "I just couldn't cut the mustard. So then my grandmother, she bought me a uke and said, 'Jimmy, try this thing,' and boy I really cut the mustard!" Three years ago Jimmy was driving a truck to support his family and idly plunking away at his uke in the evenings ("I dream--I go 'bonk, bonk, bonk'--I just fool around"), when he became inspired by the high wit of a local rock 'n' roll disc jockey named Red Blanchard and enrolled in a 96-lesson musical correspondence course ("I learned to read music in the first ten and quit"). He bought a tape recorder and started strumming his own tunes, singing the lyrics aloud in an adenoidal tenor. "All I do," he says, "is just take it easy. I sit in my own backyard, and I got dark glasses on. Then I start going 'ump, ump, ump,' like I get the rhythm first, see? I take it cool, and there's nobody irritating me in my own backyard."

Pass the Claret. Transfusion, which is punctuated at regular intervals by the screech of tires and a deafening crash, tells the adventures of a crazed driver who cracks up repeatedly and requires countless pints of blood.

My foot's on the throttle and it's made of lead But I'm a fast-riding Daddy with a real cool head.

I am a gonna pass a truck . on the hill ahead . . .

CRASH Transfusion, transfusion My red corpsuckles are in mass confusion, I'm never, never, never gonna speed again.

Pour the crimson in me, Jimson.

After successive crashes, this final appeal changes to "Shoot the juice to me, Bruce," "Pass the claret to me, Barrett," "Put a gallon in me, Allen," and finally, in a weak whisper, "Hey Daddy-O, Make that Type O." Shocked by all the claret, NBC and ABC banned the song, but Transfusion sold half a million records in two weeks, is now inching toward the million mark. As Nervous Norvus ("I invented Nervous; I'm the cat that invented that"), Drake found himself famous. He has since produced another hit called Ape Call. "The pterodactyl was a flyin' fool, a breeze-flappin' Daddy of the o-o-ld school." He expects to make around $65,000 this year, but he has an anchor to windward. "The boss told me I can always get my job back with that cool trucking company," he says. "Now wasn't that something for a real cool cat to do?"

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