Mission Belle

If it weren't for cars, what would be left for Americans to have opinions about?

Fullerton was quick to pick fights with Cadillac loyalists. "A dishonest machine," he explained to Dorothy Kilgallen after his 1962 appearance on What's My Line. (His "line" was arch-shaman of the First Church of Latter Day Cowboys.) "Dishonest because it's pretentious, and pretention is the hobgoblin of righteousness."

He took a cheerfully post-apocalyptic view of the machine. When the last Cadillac takes its last roll and Venus aligns with Mars, the fleet-footed (and fleet-wheeled) Mercury (preferably a '49 Mercury 8 convertible) will streak to its rightful place as the crown of Fullerton's Utopian cosmology.

Mission Belle - The Black Album (Under construction)

The payload of this collection is a bomb bay full of uncatagorizable Neon Leon tunes. We feel they sing for themselves.

Songs on this page:

Here's To You
Last Cadillac

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1. Here's To You
copyright Leon Fullerton

Let’s raise a frothy flagon
to the fellows in the band,
let’s stand them to a sturdy round,
let’s give the boys a hand.
Here’s to all the good times
and here’s to all the bad,
let’s hoist a few to the whole damn crew,
to every lass and lad,

and here’s to you, may your days be ever bright,
and here’s to you, may you make it home alright.

here’s to every winsome factory girl
and pimply soda jerk,
and to each poor sod who’s lost a job,
may you never need the work,

hats off to you, gravedigger,
may your holes be far between,
a salute to soldiers everywhere,
may your service be serene,

and here’s to you....

Here’s to all the farmers
and here’s to all the cows,
and here’s to Bob the barman
and the strange things he allows.

Here’s to the young and hopeful,
may you truly play your parts,
here’s to them who done their bits,
forever in our hearts,

and here’s to you....

Here’s to all our loved ones
and to all we’ve never met --
those we never ever will
and those we just haven’t yet.

And a round for you tee-totalers
and for those who've joined the bar,
the girls who dance, the boys who don’t,
and you all know who you are,

and here’s to you....

Here’s to the lost and to the found,
fickle and the true,
the pure of heart, the false of start,
the merry and the blue,

here’s to Daddy’s little girl
and every mother’s son,
those who’ve had a hundred loves,
those longing just for one,

and here’s to you....

Here’s to the dear departed
and those still in the queue,
and to those without a flight plan,
may fortune smile on you,

here’s to the thick and to the thin,
the bashful and the bold,
may all your loves be fresh and young
and all your whiskey old,

and here’s to you....

To our fleeting final hours
from the years went before,
we’ve each been given just one chance
but need so many more.

You’ve seen me through some troubles,
I remember quite a few.
You’ve stuck about to bail me out,
and I’ve done the same for you,

so here’s to you....

Fullerton lived for the extravagant toast. The one he delivered at his daughter Gwen’s first wedding is said to have taken twenty minutes, touching on such wide-ranging topics as Ronald Reagan’s hair as metaphor (Tory or wig?), the comparative efficacy of mineral baths versus high colonics, Daffy Duck and Elvis Presley as the true exemplars of the American spirit, and the plausibility of an extra-terrestial explanation for disco.

So, inevitably, toasts appear frequently in his lyrics. In “Here’s To You,” he went all-out, fueled by the equally muse-summoning influences of a fifth of Jameson whiskey and his cousin, poet Declan McCreedy. In the course of a night, they toasted everyone they could think of and wrote half a dozen songs. (McCreedy, for reasons of modesty and murky immigration status, refused to allow Fullerton to give him copyright credit for any of them. Fullerton gave his cousin credit for them whenever he performed one of them, however, and both cousins agreed the amount Fullerton spent on Jameson’s, Old Bushmill, and Paddy’s whiskey for McCreedy far outstripped any money Fullerton ever made on any of the songs.)

Two have survived: “Here’s To You" and “The Molly McGuires.”

“Here’s To You” came within a frog hair's breadth of becoming a standard of the Great Folk Scare of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Fullerton, in an uncharacteristic spell of objectivity, speculated in his Crawdaddy! interview that it could have achieved folkloric immortality if not for the length. "Half as many words would've been twice the punch. Hell, I'da sung it once in a while, myself."

Recounting that night of creative excess in his Pen/Faulkner Award acceptance speech, McCreedy said, “That we were exploring the lyrical potential of the extravagant toast should strike no one as remarkable. We were brilliantly toasted, ourselves.”

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2. The Last Cadillac
copyright Leon Fullerton

[Audio track coming soon.]

When the last Cadillac
runs the last red light on Broadway,
when the last gypsy cab
spirits its last checkered fare into the night,
when the last sweet young thing
kisses her sugar-dad goodnight,
when the last broken hustler
sees the light,

you can come to me,
I'll be your secret stranger,
you can come to me,
I know who you are,
you can come to me,
don't mind my strange behavior,
you can come to me,
I'll be your lonesome star.

When the last gutter-baptized prophet
has been washed out to sea,
when the last marked card
has fluttered to the floor,
when the last pedal steel's strange, silver strains
sweetly moans,
when the last seeds of darkness
are sown,

you can come to me....

When the last murky cafe
has drawn its shutters tight,
when the last deadbolt
is drawn against the night,
when the last ancient hobo
finds his Boulevard of Dreams,
when the last young fool
has found his heart's delight,

you can come to me....