You'll remember him from the movies, specifically the 1958 classic
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. This is the Cyclops who caused those poor sailors so much trouble on the beach. He was one of the many fabulous creatures recruited by the legendary Ray Harryhausen to appear in his popular adventure films. Harryhausen carved a lucrative niche for himself in Hollywood by finding character parts for previously unemployable monsters and aliens (he gave horned chatshow king Calibos his first big break in 1981's
Clash of the Titans.)
"Great fella, ain't he?" says Elmore Strang - the Cyclops's sole agent and guardian - when I meet them both for coffee that morning. Strang is a wiry little terrier of a guy with coarse leathery skin and a wheezy Brooklyn accent. "So great! Me and him - boy, what a team! We have some laughs don't we, huh? I said
don't we, huh?" He slaps the Cyclops's huge face to get its attention. It peers down at us in some puzzlement, as if snatched out of some pleasant and wistful reverie. "Don't worry about that," says Strang when I look askance at him. "The big dumb bastard can't feel a thing."
When Harryhausen declined to use the Cyclops in his next film (
The 3 Worlds of Gulliver) the creature found itself out of movie work for a number of years.
"Them was tough times for him, let me tell ya," says Strang. "He was sleeping rough in quarries and eatin' fucking trees. When I found him I knew I could offer him a better life. My background is in stockcar racing -
the promotion of. Soon as I clapped my peepers on this sonofabitch I knew audiences would go fuckin' nuts for him. So I started using him on the racetrack. Used to make him dance before and after races. And any car that crashed he could pick up in one had and take straight to the pit. Them was happy days. 'Til the accident, of course."
In June 1973, the Cyclops was removing tyres from the racetrack when a Plymouth Beldevere driven by NASCAR champion Leonard Arthurs ploughed into his right leg at nearly 200 miles per hour.
"Christ, that was a helluva bang!" says Strang, cackling. "Destroyed the fuckin' car outright. Pow! Gone. Turned it into strips of fuckin' metal. All that was left of Arthurs was a pancake covered in blood and teeth. But this big fella," he pats the Cyclop's arm, "made of sterner stuff, let me tell ya. All it did was bust up one leg a little. But it meant he couldn't dance no more. And that was a problem."
The solution Strang hit upon was ingenious. Teaching the Cyclops a few simple songs on the ukulele, he developed a cabaret act for the creature, an act which he performs to this day.
"We been all over the fuckin' world," says Strang. "We played the Catskills, Vegas, L.A.,
Canada even. It's true we don't fill the big venues no more but people still love the big dumb jerk!"
The crowd is restless. They expected something livelier than a few sweet little folk songs. Strang looks at me nervously as we stand in the wings.
"Dance you big fucking mong!" shouts a young man with a shaven head in the front row and lobs a plastic glass half filled with lager at the Cyclops. It glances off his forehead, dowsing him in fizzing liquid. The Cyclops drops his ukulele and growls. The man in the front row laughs wildly - until the Cyclops reaches down and plucks him up in one hand, biting off his head in a single snap and tossing his corpse back into the crowd.
"
Aw crap," mutters Stang and dashes onstage with a whip. "
Not again."
WINDYPOPS SAYS: I once got stoned at a Medusa gig.