Oh, Atlanta

ATLANTA. Burned once by William Tecumseh Sherman and again by Irving Thalberg, city of Tom Watson and Gregg Allman and Bert Lance and Jimmy Carter, --populists all, huzzah! From Peachtree Plaza to the White House, springing up from the ashes, born again --the place you have to go to get to almost every other place. The air crossroads of the western world, or at least those southernmost provinces of These United States --oh, Atlanta!

So they said to me, they said --there's a clone army, a"Rock and Roll Heaven," these people, they've had plastic surgery, they're there, in the City of the Peach and of the Peanut, assembling to take over rock and roll from the Stones and Dylan and, and, WE WANT YOU TO GO!

And I said, Oh, Atlanta! And I went.

There I was, 9:30 a.m., wiping sleep from my eyes in front of the white stucco Building Four of the Southeastern Fair on the outskirts of Georgia's fair capital city, watching a television crew from the NBC show "America Alive" set up their lights and paraphernalia. Caught in the middle of a yawn as a big black Al Capone limo rolled up. Out jumped--no, not hoodlums bearing Tommy guns--but masked men and women, towels up around their faces to conceal them from the members of the press and the old black men lounging in the shade of a melt-your-polyester-shirt-by-seven August morning. Yes, this was it, this was the Big Time Under the Big Top, Perspire Under the Whelm as it were; this was It, the Big Meltdown. Perhaps it should be explained, start at the beginning, linear like, a very good place to start as Julie Andrews informed us in the dawn of our existence back in those sweaty movie theatres of Pittsburgh and Grosse Point and Santa Fe and Santa Monica...

A.J. Liebling had this theory that Lousiana was the westernmost Mediterranean principality, what with its Byzantine politics, and all. If that's true, then Florida is perhaps the northernmost Caribbean principality--ruled by Holiday Inn instead of United Fruit. Subject to coups and missile shots and crazed Cubanos and Ed Gurney and Ed Gurney's ghost, where the great Northeast goes to die of the pulmonary diseases contracted in 40 years of living in the great Northeast, hospitable only to snakes and gators, the Miami Dolphins and Richard Petty, ah Florida--my Florida, home of Danny O'Day.

Who, you may ask (and be entirely correct in asking) is Danny O'Day? A promoter, comes the answer, full-square and high-balling down a narrow-gauge track, and the man behind "Rock and Roll Heaven".

It was O'Day's idea, this Rock and Roll Heaven: six individuals who were persuaded to undergo plastic surgery to become lookalikes of deceased rock and roll stars. "It'll be a non-stop review of people's deceased heroes," O'Day told the Associated Press last month.

They went under the knife. "Nobody is crazy in my little clone army," O'Day was saying, "I don't want any kooks. I don't need any kooks. Everyone is definitely playing with a full deck. People think we're all crazy..."

And they emerged, and there they were: Duke O'Connell as Jim Morrison of The Doors, Mona Caywood-Moore as Janis Joplin, Marc Hazebrouck as Jim Croce, Jesse Bolt as Elvis Presley, and wonder of wonders, Bolt's girlfriend Erin Rhyne as a female Elvis Presley.

Meanwhile, O'Day was refusing to name the surgeon. "We lost three in one week," he said. I understood--but didn't that devoted practioner want to take credit for his achievement? "He achieved his check, which incidentally wasn't a check. He wanted cash in advance."

And here they were! The highest state of the art of American medicine. "America Alive" was ready, we were ready, O'Day was ready, attired for the day in brown polyester and aviator shades, feeling like...Orville Wright!

AMERICA ALIVE" was not ready. Thus neither were we. Thus I talked with Mona Caywood-Moore, who had earlier told me, "People think its morbid, or something--I'm having the time of my life. I never laughed so hard. It's no less morbid than women who have breast enlargements--get a little built up for the magazines. And I've been in more pain having braces put on my teeth."

On this sultry New South day, Caywood-Moore was bouncing around Building Four in a frilly Janis outfit, fluffing her boa. Her surgery is only half-complete--which is why, O'Day explained, she looks nothing at all like Janis Joplin. "Maybe I could put in zits," he said thoughtfully. "Anything but get fat," said the scrawny Caywood-Moore, "I've been fat all my life."

They were kicking around, this clone wehrmacht. Jesse Bolt has been playing Elvis for three or four years, and his girlfriend Rhyne was seeing less and less of the Jesse Bolt she knew and loved, more and more of the corpulent Memphis shaker. She tried to understand, and one day made the mistake of saying she'd give anything to understand --within the earshot of Danny O'Day. He said, "Anything?" and voila, she had cut off her long brown hair and dyed it black and was Miss Elvis Presley.

"America Alive" finally got under way, the American Experience on the half-shell, Dr. Joyce Brothers analyzing the five by satellite live from New York. A man in a Bozo the Clown outfit wandered in off the midway to watch. Photographers clicked, including one from Time who was repaying a favor to a friend on Paris-Match. He said he hoped they wouldn't credit him. The A.P. photographer was snapping away, grumbling. "I'd rather be out coverin' civil rights marches, shit. Or a convention--them Kennedy people taught me how to buy a convention. Nineteen-sixty, there I was, lil' country boy from Dothan, Alabama, coverin' Johnson, shit, they'd paid off everybody. Paid off the goddam elevator boys. If you was with Johnson, you couldn't get an elevator for 25 minutes." Click click click. "Shit, this is weird, ain't it boy?" Indeedy sir, it's right weird.

IT'S NOT SO WEIRD, Duke O'Connell was telling me. "I've done lots weirder things in show business." Oh? "There was the Groovy Booby". Oh? "... the Booby Sisters.. came out in drag on roller skates and did a strip tease..." Oh yeah. "...and pest control commercials for radio... they had guys who did frogs and things... I was into crickets." He made cricket noises.

The media event was over. That night they would open the Southeastern Fair amid Joie Chitwood's auto thrills show, greased pig contests, the rest. Forty-one dates in 17 days, the beginning of a tour that will go around the world, include major motion pictures and, hopefully, Carson. They came out as a smoke machine smoked--"Rock and Roll Heaven," don't you understand. Hazebrouck/Croce sang "I Got a Name". Women swooned for Bolt/Elvis. He ran out of scarves to give them. There were 75 people in the audience, and they were knocked dead. And the next morning I was on a plane back to Washington, D.C., a city which, unlike Atlanta, remains undimmed by human tears. Washington, D.C., for respite, to seek mercy and mortality there. A city that is acoustically dead, where I brought tales of life beyond the Chevy Chase Circle and the Beltway. Acoustically dead, but I didn't care, because the shrill tones of Atlanta, oh Atlanta, had left me emotionally deaf.