A Day On The Tube: 35 Clown-Hating, Sponsor-Trashing, Kid-Riot Years With Wallace And Ladmo

McMahon soon found himself caught up in a different kind of frenzy in 1964, when Thompson devised a savvy musical spoof of Beatlemania and teen pop idols, with the help of an underage musical mastermind named Mike Condello.

Condello was a songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist who quit high school in 1962 at age 16 to become a full-time musician, already an in demand club performer long before he was legally old enough to get in. That year, he released a single on Liberty records (“Ali Baba,” as the Morgan-Condello Combo) and ruled the roost as headliner at the popular Stage 7 teen club. Thompson, a hip music lover with a keen eye for local talent, quickly hired Condello as musical director of KPHO’s local music showcase Teen Beat, and soon brought Condello on board the Wallace show.

When the British Invasion roared, major acts rarely played the Southwest, and locals were primed for a rock star they could call their own. Thompson decided to send up Elvis, the Beatles, and the manufactured pop idol, and put Condello and McMahon to work writing songs and creating a backstory for the show’s own rock star and his band—Hub Kapp and the Wheels. (Originally the group was called Hub Kapp and the Tire Slashers, but even the normally oblivious, er, permissive Channel 5 occasionally objected to something.) The “look” was a little Elvis, a lot beatnik, and eyebrows worthy of Khrushchev, but Hub Kapp’s sound was a groovy, edgy mashup of British invasion and protopunk American garage, driven by Condello’s relentless guitar chops and an ace group of deadpan sidemen.

The whole thing was intended as a joke, but the “joke” became a little bit of a Frankenstein’s monster when Hub Kapp records outsold the Beatles and topped local music charts in Phoenix and the Southwest. Audiences turned out by the thousands to see the band roar through its garage rock gems, and Capitol Records soon caught wind of the mammoth sales figures. Capitol quickly signed the “band” to a deal and whisked them off to Hollywood and Vine.

In Los Angeles, Hub Kapp and the Wheels’ raw pop sound and McMahon’s over-the-top high-concept performance made the band a sensation. The group was the toast of The Steve Allen Show, Joey Bishop, and The Hollywood Palace and made numerous other television appearances. While Allen seemed in on the joke, numerous others saw nothing at all unusual or spoofy about a man in gigantic false eyebrows and a huge pompadour. In short, their sharp satire on pop fame was too sharp, and they found themselves ensnared in the trap they were trying to mock. McMahon was contractually obligated to appear in public in full Hub Kapp regalia at all times, lest L.A. sophisticates discover they’d been had. The Wheels sold out the Whiskey A-Go-Go and were shuttled from screen test to screen test with big showbiz promises of superstardom.

After some soul searching, McMahon and Condello decided to return to Phoenix and Wallace and Ladmo. Condello continued to produce music for the show until the 1970s, and McMahon remained an indelible figure on local TV and radio. (McMahon also appears in director Orson Welles’ unfinished film The Other Side Of The Wind, alongside John Huston, Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich. Locked up in nightmarish litigation and copyright issues for decades, the film seems to be edging ever closer to a release date.)

By all accounts the mid-sixties were the heyday of the show. Thompson wrote at a frenzied pace—five live shows a week—plus an afternoon show centered around Ladmo. The trio also kept up a relentless live performance schedule at theaters, mall openings, state fairs, and amusement parks for thousands of screaming kids. Thompson continued to brutalize sponsors’ products, famously kicking Moon Pies to test their aeronautical capacity, deriding a sponsor’s ice cream as “good—not great, but good,” and generally giving the advertising department fits. The anarchic skits riffing on movies, TV, and politics earned a sizeable adult audience. Like many of the best local kids’ shows, Wallace and Ladmo made a point of not talking down to the kids, but it occasionally seemed like they weren’t talking to the kids at all. The comedy was smart, edgy, political, contemporary; what other kids’ show would feature a jingoistic has-been superhero doing a live on-camera meltdown that was a note-for-note parody of Network?

The mid-sixties also saw the invention of one of the show’s most enduring symbols—the Ladmo Bag. For years, the show had given prizes away to the live studio audience of kids, allowing the lucky youngsters to pick a prize of their choosing from a “Toy Cottage.” But the moment the young prizewinner stepped in front of the cameras and stage lights—standing in front of their TV heroes, no less—they would inevitably freeze like deer in headlights. Agonizing minutes would pass as the hosts tried to nudge the recalcitrant delinquents into making a decision. In a moment of frustration, McMahon suggested jamming a paper bag full of goodies, writing Ladmo’s name on it, and handing it to the kids. A quarter-century later, Ladmo estimated he’d given away 35,000 Ladmo Bags, to the ire (and enrichment) of countless Arizona dentists. To this day, the anguished cry “I never won a Ladmo Bag” rings in local psychotherapists’ offices. So what, exactly, was in a Ladmo Bag?

In its heyday, the Ladmo Bag was a huge grocery sack, loaded to the gills with toys, chips, soda, candy, Moon Pies, Injun Orange Pillsbury Funny-Face drink, an Orange Crush, coupons for free burgers at the Ladmo Drive-In, and various other delightfully unhealthy items. In the late ’70s, the bag “shrunk” to “snack size,” but the Ladmo Bag lost none of its allure.

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