7 Responses to “ERICK “Pastor Pickin'” (inspirational LP with ventriloquist)”

  1. Allee Willis

    What is it with “inspirational” religious albums and puppets and marionettes? Are they special wooden vessel messengers of God? What a consistently odd choice of front men.

    Is Erick pickin’ pastors or is he Pastor Pickins? Whichever, I like his Glen Campbell hair.

  2. Douglas Wood

    This may be my favorite of all your LPs. The concept of a ventriloquist on a record album is so ill-conceived it transcends everything else. And the fact that it’s “inspirational” and performed by a Pastor pushes it beyond kitsch into David Lynch-ville.

  3. denny

    Doug….there is a TON of this stuff out there. There seemed to have been a craze for a while of ventriloquists on lp covers. Look thru my older posts, you may find some other goodness in there! How’s things?

  5. Mark Blackwell

    oh. my. god.

    denny, my friend, you’ve hit pay dirt with this one!

    erick’s “manipulator,” beverly massagee, is quite a treasure trove of weirdness!!!! here’s one little bio blurb i found:

    “beverly massegee is not the typical preacher’s wife. but then, her husband, charles massegee, is not a typical preacher. beverly is a former movie actress and playboy circuit entertainer…”

    she was apparently also “a personal friend of jack ruby” and she wrote a book called “nightmare in dallas” – which is described as a “factual account of beverly oliver (now beverly massegee) who was a key eyewitness to the assassination of president john f. kennedy.”

    the cover features a little arrow pointing to her (she’s known as “the babushka lady”) standing right next to the limo at the time of the assassination…

    here’s a webpage of her merch, including a number of albums (some recorded with “erick,” others on her own), a dvd of “an exciting, heartwarming motion picture” called “suddenly the light” (about how her “life as a performer…led to a dark and empty existence”) and, of course, her book “nightmare in dallas”: http://www.massegee.org/Donations.htm

    here’s an interview with her: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-IXYfge2Ys

    and this website goes into great detail questioning whether or not beverly was actually “the babushka lady”: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/oliver.htm

    good one, denny!

  6. denny

    Mark…..Can’t thank you enough for this. Sometimes the research on kitsch is almost as exciting as the piece itself. I can’t wait to have a look around at this info!

  7. denny

    I used to have a crowd of ventriloquist dolls in our guest room at our house in Florida. Every time someone would stay with us, I would have to put them away. One time, my friend Tammy spent the weekend (we were thriftin’ of course) and when she popped out to the store, I lined them all up on her bed and even sat one on the toilet. She plotzed when she discovered what I had done and we laughed like mad over it! Kitsch is so much fun.