As you may or may not have noticed, I get weirdly obsessed with a lot of indie bands that I’ve stumble upon over the past couple of years — none more so than Voodoo Planet. I actually went so far as to seek out and devour a free download of the pulp sci-fi novel that shares the band’s name. Though I interviewed Voodoo Planet a little while back, I never go the story behind one of their quirkier tracks, the spoken-word “Sandals on South Truman.” Until now…

Here’s Voodoo Planet’s John Gilbert on the track:

My wife and I owned and operated an independent bookstore for 25 years. We had a longtime customer named Joe Whittington, who referred to himself as “Funky Joe,” and we always called him “Sandalman” due to his year-round habit of wearing socks with sandals. It was always a weird experience when he dropped in the store. He would take over the entire store, talking to everyone. An Older guy, retired, who had a lot of time on his hands, but he sure had some weird stories and quite a way with words. He would talk about his ex-wives and his experiences when he was traveling around. 

I would write down phrases that he would say during these visits. I spoke with a writer friend, Dan Schwent, and asked if he would write a pulp fiction short story and utilize some of these colorful anecdotes. They were too good to not use! Dan got to work and turned out a short story. It was about a man, possibly this fellow, who seemed to be a detective upon first reading but really was finding his way home and needed to be reminded when he got there that he actually lived in the place. 

We imagined it as a “noir narrator” walking up and down Truman Boulevard, where our store was located, and stopping in different places, his observations, and all that sort of thing. Dan gave me the story and we talked about it, and wouldn’t it be great if we could get him to read it? One day Dan was in the store and “Funky Joe” arrived. We told him our idea and he was all about it…

Here we are in the bookstore, customers coming in and out, and we recorded him performing it in one read. That was all he had time for, and then he had to go. I thought, okay, we can work with this. 

I had been listening to a band, Double Naught Spy Car, and read about how they would perform musical accompaniment for the crime novelist James Ellroy at some of his live readings. Their music had that vibe and it inspired me to write something in that vein and see what we could make of his recording. 

We shelved the idea, and I think the first step was me sitting there late at night with headphones trying to edit the iPhone audio of him reading this in the store. It took me a week or two because there were a lot of phones ringing and interruptions with the door dinging back and forth. 

Several months later, I get a phone call from this woman who said that she was Joe’s partner, basically his wife, and she wanted to let me know that he had passed away recently. I told her that “this is going to sound really weird, but over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working late at night listening to Joe reading this stuff and editing his reading of the story that Dan wrote, kind of a tribute to him, and we’re going to record a song based on it.” She was surprised but said that he really would have liked that. 

We released it in 2013 and didn’t think much more about it, as spoken word is definitely for a niche audience. We’ve been going through a string of remasters of some of our older stuff, as our home recording skills have improved quite a bit since then. Ed recently remastered his voice to cut out extraneous noise, so the new 2023 version of that song is a lot cleaner. I thought that was a weird situation, and I’m very pleased with how the song turned out. It would have been nice to have had him perform another take because I think he was as surprised as everyone at the zinger ending of the wife telling him to get inside, “You f*ing live here!” 

And here’s what writer Dan Schwent remembers:

Long before I met the Sandal-Man, I knew he was a Character with a capital C. Referring to the spinster bookseller in the next town as “Sweet Pam” and using phrases like “The pussy trail had gone cold” were the spark that ignited his legend.

I don’t think I spoke to him more than two or three times in the coffin-narrow Books Galore location on Truman but each time was an hour long event, punctuated by tales from his days in the navy, his commanding officer nicknamed “Hog Jaw,” and other misadventures.  Like I said, Character.

And he left his wife in the car while he held court in the book store for hours at a time! Who does that?  Who leaves their wife in the car while they’re bebopping and skatting all over the place?

Anyway, Funky Joe, as I learned he was called after he passed, had a whisky smooth radio voice so John asked me to write some detective dialog for him to read aloud. I said I would and forgot about it.

A couple weeks later, John asked for it so it was time to scramble. I had a Raymond Chandler-esque noir short story I’d written on the tail end of National Novel Writing Month the year before that I borrowed a little material from but it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind and didn’t fit the flavor I was going for. 

Once I imagined Sandal-Man as a down and out detective, things quickly fell into place. The long walk to an unwelcome destination seemed like a good vehicle for his musings and something he probably experienced more than once. The twist ending came next and I jammed as much of Sandal-Man’s personality in it as it could hold. Eventually, John talked Sandal-Man into reading it and the end result was even cooler than I expected, even if he did pronounce “5 AM” as “Sam.”

Everyone says sappy things when people pass but I wouldn’t mind hearing some of Funky Joe’s stories one more time.