The true origins of HOLEHOG! have always been a mystery, until now!! I am very excited to bring you this new, unofficial, unendorsed, independent website. Not because I disrespect the band, because I love the band. Their inability to cooperate with any biography or profile has always been a source of great frustration to Hogheads like me.
Up until 1985, I had resigned myself to just accepting the fact that I would never get the real scoop behind my favorite band. I would have to just sit in my room and stare at the album covers, imagining my own background story.
The popular rumor back then was that they were four wayward monks who needed to rock as part of a spiritual journey they had planned for themselves. My parents, however, remembered Wolfman Jack saying they were four siblings from St. Louis who met when they were all filing a similar lawsuit against Chuck Berry (they settled out of court). My grandparents tell me that Walter Winchell used to spend an inordinate amount of time praising the band as a healthy, all-american alternative to jazz and swing music. Write ups in Dynamite magazine, bubble gum cards, comic books, and made-for-tv movies all confused the matter even more.
I consider the summer of ’85 to be the most awesome (sic ed.) time in my life. It was then that I first began to learn the REAL story. I was an intern for Jet magazine and spent my days running errands for the staff. I would get lunch, deliver letters, whatever the staff wanted me to do. One of my favorite stops would be the newsstand right outside the building. I would pick up all the major newspapers and sometimes bubble gum for the reporters.
What I liked about it though, was the owner of the newsstand. A seventy-six year old ex-marine, who three days out of the week, wore an old, beat up HOLEHOG! t-shirt. He never gave me his name, even when I asked for it. He always said if I had to call him something, call him Darling Jill.
Darling Jill had an interesting story, not about himself, but about our favorite band, HOLEHOG! He claimed to know several ex-marines that worked as roadies for the infamous 1965 Pig Pen tour. Any Hoghead knows this to be the tour when all four band members supposedly beat a mentally challenged fan when they mistook his unadulterated enthusiasm as sarcastic mocking. The incident led to a sharp decline in the HOLEHOG! fanbase. Even though some of their best work appeared after that incident it was the last time they would see crowds of that size in the U.S.
To be continued…
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