Morrissey, Impersonations, and Dorian Gray
Or, The Last English Pop Star
The following article was discussed, agreed, and commissioned with a certain music magazine, and delivered nine pregnant months ago, but never published.
After decades of running with the Devil, you might as well jump — bail, that is. That’s what David Lee Roth did this January when he failed to appear before magistrates of the Supreme Court of British Columbia for multiple sex crimes against children. Except that this was not David Lee Roth, but an imposter who has claimed to be the Van Halen singer in a series of disturbing and demented incidents.
I investigated rock star imposters and impersonators through iconic criminal cases and new interviews with Jose Maldonado - ‘the Mexican Morrissey’ - and theorist Laurence A. Rickels.
The charmingly named David Kuntz-Angel is from the small city of Chilliwack, an hour outside Vancouver. Chilliwack was also the birthplace of serial murderer Keith ‘The Happy Face Killer’ Hunter Jesperson. Let that sit with you as it may. It’s a theatre town. Kuntz-Angel emerged as ‘David Lee Roth’ after his involvement in a bizarre love triangle homicide in 1988. Allegedly enthralled by the Dr. Mabuse-like powers of this less ‘Diamond’ than ‘Cubic Zirconia Dave,’ Kimberly Blinkhorn killed her love rival Rowena Parsons with a carving knife, striking her around 70 times.
“Hot shoe, burning down the avenue…”
Pulled over in May 2008, Kuntz-Angel told Ontario police that he was Roth, and only driving wildly because he was suffering from a nut allergy. Discharged from hospital, he headed for the beer lights of the Liquid Lounge (now Jeffrey’s Lounge on Sydenham Street). Plenty of punters bought into the act, although the real David Lee Roth was camping it up in a red top hat and blue charro jacket at Madison Square Garden at the time.
“If you knew Peggy Sue, then you’d know why I feel blue…”
In 2013, 75-year-old Arkansas widower Don Fulton could not believe his fortune when he happened upon bluegrass heroine and occasional Robert Plant collaborator Alison Krauss on a dating site. She even sang some of her Grammy-winning songs down the telephone. What was Alison Krauss doing chatting up an elderly man? She was in witness protection, forced to used the alias Peggy Sue Evers of New Mexico. Chivalry being alive in Arkansas, Fulton took this disguised Alison Krauss for his awful-wedded wife. She took him for all he had. Arrested in 2014, Peggy Sue Evers jumped bail, and returned to Albuquerque. Quietly, Fulton followed. They attempted to shack up again, until Evers was discovered and shipped back to Arkansas. Her original 8-year probation was extended to 15.
Witness also the excitement at TMZ in July of 2014 when Beverley Hills cops tipped them off: they had picked up former Stone Temple Pilots singer Scott Weiland for possession of meth and stolen razor blades. TMZ ran the story. The doppelgänger Jason Michael Hurley sustained the illusion for a month in jail. It was only shattered when the real Scott Weiland posted a video from the studio where he was recording Blaster with the Wildabouts. “Whether you find it funny or interesting,” Weiland said, “or whether you’re sad, don’t worry, don’t fret. It’s a lie. TMZ, you’ll be hearing from my attorneys.”
“You buy the magazine, in between the lines,
You see my face, you read my name…”
TMZ might have learned from the tabloid Star. In 1991, the Rupert Murdoch-founded rag reported that former Kiss drummer Peter Criss was homeless, scavenging, and sleeping beneath the Santa Monica Pier. But Peter Criss’ would-be doppelgänger was a lost alcoholic named Chris Dickinson who told the story for $500 and some respite from the streets. Cheryl Ann Thompson, an ‘actress’ claiming to be a former girlfriend of Peter Criss contacted Star and paid to fly him to Boston. There she met the imposter. Peter Criss was at his mother’s funeral when the scandal broke. All this led to a tragicomic confrontation of mullets between Peter Criss and his imposter on Phil Donahue’s television show. Peter Criss expressed sympathy for Dickinson, but denied having ever met Cheryl Ann Thompson.
Lest we forget, one of the notorious Oath Keepers arrested after the insurrection of January 6 was Florida man James Beeks. In addition to playing Judas in the 50th anniversary tour production of Jesus Christ Superstar, Beeks was a Michael Jackson impersonator. Indeed, while the other Oath Keepers stacked up in camouflage to breach the US Capitol Building, the not-so-smooth criminal was perhaps easier to spot startin’ somethin’ because he was wearing his Michael Jackson tour jacket.
Laurence Rickels is the author of the trilogy Critique of Fantasy (2020) and numerous works on psychology and popular culture, not least I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick, and Aberrations of Mourning. We talk by phone about imposters and psychopathology. “The analyst sees the imposter as circumventing a certain anxiety that stems from childhood, from self-doubt, and the imposter—by merging [his/her] ego with the ego ideal [the star]—seeks to allay that anxiety, and that doubt.”
He continues, “Other analysts see the imposter as skipping specifically the borderline shame experiences of being a teenager, the sense that teenagers sometimes admit to, that they feel fraudulent. And that’s something that the imposter overrides by forging an identity between ego and ego ideal that has to be accepted by an audience…through friendliness, through charm, through seductiveness. The imposter does get people to believe in the mystery of his being at once ego and ego ideal, by being what everyone wants to be. You need people who are available for being ripped off.”
There is a difference between the conscious impersonation, acting, and appropriation we all engage in and pathological imposture. This applies to artists also, using their own influences, transforming their awkwardness into stardom, merging their ego with their chosen ideal. Analytically, Rickels says, “this sense of imposture is rampant.”
“Lifeguard, save me from life…”
Jose Maldonado has been refining his impersonation of Morrissey for 30 years since the fan convention debut of The Sweet and Tender Hooligans in 1992. He’s the perfect person to talk to, since Morrissey’s love of Oscar Wilde invites allusions to The Picture of Dorian Gray. After all, as Wilde wrote: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”
Ironically, ‘Maldonado,’ meaning ‘ill-favored,’ is the kind of attribution Morrissey might give himself. “It’s not just me up there doing an impersonation of Morrissey,” he explains. “The audience is doing an impersonation of seeing Morrissey at a Morrissey show.”
“That’s where it’s not psychopathological,” Rickels says. “Whereas, in the pathological version, they don’t know that they’re wanting to be ripped off.”
Maldonado recalls seeing Morrissey at the Wiltern in LA, and how Morrissey jokingly introduced his band as Maldonado’s band, and himself as Jose Maldonado. It was, he laughs, “a wonderful way of saying yeah, yeah, I see you. I stood there as a fan, watching the man I impersonate, impersonate me.”
“I take the cue from certain people I know…”
He’s extremely affable, this ‘Mexican Morrissey.’ We’re all magpies when it comes to identity and nothing has amplified that tendency like rock’n’roll and the invention of the teenager in the nineteen fifties. The only time he is at all defensive is when I ask him about other Smiths/Morrissey tribute acts. “Next question.” Why? Does he feel like there’s a territory to protect, an authenticity? “Next question.”
Maldonado reflects on the two years lost to the pandemic, when artists and audiences faced alienation. “The project that kept us going was recording some of Morrissey’s songs with lyrics that I’ve translated into Spanish. And what was really rewarding to me was finally showing my parents the lyrics to those songs in their native language, and having them tell me, ‘Oh, I finally get it now, I see why this was so important to you when you were 19…And I remember my dad, when I told him the title of “Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me,” the look on my dad’s face…” And his mother’s favorite? “Some Girls are Bigger than Others.”
It’s the glittering moment of understanding that Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) can only dream of in Todd Haynes’ film Velvet Goldmine, turning from the image of Bowie doppelgänger Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) on television, and crying out to his blank parents, “That is me! That’s me, that! That— That’s me!” Velvet Goldmine’s identification of Oscar Wilde as prototypical pop star was anticipated by Michael Bracewell’s beautiful book England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion, from Oscar Wilde to Goldie.
“It would be ironic” Bracewell writes, “that Wilde and Morrissey, both Anglo-Irishmen, would be England’s underground analysts at either end of the century…It would be doubly ironic that they would find themselves first fêted then pilloried for going too far by the respective generations who had found wit, solidarity or guidance in their philosophies. If Morrissey (like Wilde) had sat on the psychoanalyst’s couch to accept the troubles of a nation’s youth…then it was the conviction with which he took the role that would eventually place him as an outsider beyond outsiders. A case could be made for describing Morrissey, romantically, as the Last English Pop Star.” I suspect he is correct.
Jose Maldonado had some trepidation about the first Sweet and Tender Hooligans show in Morrissey’s Manchester in 2001. “I’ll never forget that first time playing at The Star and Garter watching the audience looking on with their arms folded, but we had them in the first minute, and by the time we played ‘The Queen is Dead,’ everyone was just having the time of their lives…In fact, it was the Saturday night after September 11th, and it was one of the most beautiful moments…in a somber time, a sad time.”
That the towers under assault had been ‘Twin Towers’ underscores the relationship of exchange, replication, and the ironic mythology of the individual—as soon as we see one, we either want more of the same, or to destroy it. The unoriginal Bin Laden resented the paradoxes of Western individualism.
“The impersonator is trapped,” Maldonado reflects. “Some people say, Ha! You think you’re Morrissey! And others demand You should be more like Morrissey!”
Historically, Rickels says, “The photorealistic emphasis on the double looking the same was always being called into question, even in [Edgar Allan Poe’s] ‘William Wilson’ the protagonist can’t find anyone to agree with him that his double looks like him.”
The sheer number of tribute acts today reflect the impacts of digitization. Rickels says, “Further valuation of the personality and the performance are the fetish of the loss of any kind of substance in the music industry.” Now, we witness holographic and rotoscoped performances, virtual duets with the dead, Tupac, Elvis, and so forth. Rickels notes, “A lot of surviving children have staged performances with their dead, famous singer fathers, or what have you. Nat King Cole’s daughter comes to mind. Once the media can do that through digital special effects, sort of this apotheosis of Photoshopping, you can be on the same stage or screen with your dead progenitor in music…Again, that’s all about the performance, that the performance has become a fetish since the industry became socioeconomically unreliable.”
James Reich’s latest book is The Moth for the Star.
As ever, I hope this provoked some ideas, and thank you for reading,
James Reich
www.jamesreichbooks.com