Prolific, Unknown Songwriter Keeps Nothing Bottled Up

E.W. (Dutch) Franz, on this, his 69th birthday, is swaying to the sound of his own voice coming from the tape player, grinning and chuckling here and there, while his wife of 46 years, Lois, is rolling her eyes and shaking her head in an exasperated kind of “what next?” appeal and not to any particular beat.

“That’s happened to me!” Dutch tells me, pointing at the tape player in reference to a certain stanza of “Running Out,” which is sort of a musical ode to ketchup that Dutch wrote, oh, about 15 years ago.

That would be the part where the ketchup, swelled with fright, starts to take its revenge.

They passed me round the table

Until I came to Dad,

Who grabbed me by my skinny neck

To show that he was mad.

He turned me round and upside down

To smash me on my end,

Until I squirted out in spurts

To make a messy blend.

Then the chorus kicks in.

I was just a bottle of ketchup

Sitting all alone,

Hoping no one wanted me

Enough to take me home,

To put on crispy french fries,

Steaks or how they choose

To ever want to use me

Though I was grown to lose.

Yes, Dutch is a country music fan.

Fact is, the inspiration for “Running Out,” one of some 400 unpublished songs and poems that Dutch has worked up over the years, was born of a conversation at the Palomino, in North Hollywood.

Tiny, who used to be the doorman and once got shot with a crossbow by a patron who wasn’t quite ready to leave, introduced Dutch to a guy named Jimmy Rabbit--not Eddie Rabbit, but Jimmy Rabbit--who was a DJ and country music singer and a Wild Turkey drinker.

Dutch was drinking beer at the time.

“So, we’re sitting there at the table and I look down and say, ‘Hell, I could write you a song about a bottle of ketchup, ‘ “ Dutch says.

And Dutch, now a retired Los Angeles County deputy sheriff and newspaper delivery truck driver who lives in Buena Park, is a man of his word.

Driving home that night from the Palomino, Dutch started singing about ketchup into the tape recorder that he had learned to keep with him, just in case the Muse started to rear her pretty head.

Jimmy Rabbit, however, was sort of noncommittal about the whole deal.

And, you know, the folks at Hunt-Wesson foods didn’t really appreciate “Running Out” too much themselves. A few letters were exchanged before they told Dutch that a revengeful tomato didn’t fit into their marketing plans.

“Maybe I should have tried Heinz,” Dutch says now.

Instead, lo these many years later, Dutch wrote me, after he’d read what I’d written about a pigeon lover in Newport Beach. He enclosed “Pigeon Lane,” which was inspired by a woman who used to feed pigeons in a parking lot in downtown L.A.

I put it aside, for a while, so Dutch gave me a call.

And this is a man who can talk.

“He’s hard of hearing, so he’ll just keep going,” Lois says.

Dutch acknowledges that his wife is no fan of most of his work. “It’s pretty ridiculous” is how she sums it up.

Still, there are certain things that a man’s got to do. Lois understands this, bearing witness all these years to the creative urges that would monopolize her husband’s mind.

Lots of nights Dutch couldn’t sleep what with the verses coming out of nowhere, looping through his brain until he was forced to get up and jot them down.

“It’s like a fever,” Dutch says. “I used to write while I drove, but then I couldn’t read it. That’s when I got the tape recorder, which was a good idea.”

Except that, in anticipation of my visit, Dutch says he listened to some of the tapes just last night. They were so bad that he had to laugh. And the traffic noise in the background was the coup de grace .

Dutch says there were some good ones, though, like “Old Folks,” which he had in his mind to send to Johnny Cash.

It just sounded like Johnny’s kind of ballad, touching, truthful, a little spiritual, a might redneck, sad. A young corrections officer Dutch used to work with offered him $100 for it, but he turned him down.

And he hasn’t done anything else with it either. Dutch says he’s become a procrastinator of the worst kind, ever since his medical problems began to slow him down.

You can start with the operations on his ears, the four brain surgeries after he was hit in the head at work, then there was the heart attack and double bypass surgery, and the three types of cancer in his lungs. Dutch has often wondered why he’s still around.

“Maybe Lois’ mother is looking down on me. She wants me to take care of Lois. She’d get less pension if I died. And who would she yell at if she got mad?”

Which she doesn’t, too much.

Lois just worries about Dutch going dippy in the head. Like last night when he told her that seeing as how I had expressed interest in the ketchup song, maybe he’d just sing it for me himself.

Instead, he decided to make the tape. Only Lois banished him to the garage, with the cat, whose meow can be heard in the refrain.

“I can laugh at it by myself,” Dutch says. “But if someone can identify with you with what you write, it makes it all the better. If one person can, that makes it all worthwhile.”

Dutch, you’ve got that person here.