Saturday Night Fish Fry!!!

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I don't think anybody plays the role of comical ultraviolent maniac like Louis Jordan.



I don't know about you, but to me this guy sounds scarier than any rap-chart "gangsta" I've ever heard. There's no preening here; he's a natural-born Method Actor. In the right time---meaning at least 15 years after his prime, unfortunately---I think Jordan might have been a very successful mainstream comic actor.

(Editor's note: not my fault, but I apologize for the crappy visuals that the poster attached to the front end of the video. At least he uploaded a masterpiece for us to enjoy, though.)

Dad Gum Ya Hide, Boy, Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five (1954, from "One Guy Named Louis: The Complete Aladdin Sessions"; CD reissue Capitol Jazz CDP 7 96804 2 [1992]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Saturday night

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No fish fry tonight; an elegy.



Christo Redemptor, Charlie Musselwhite (1967, from "Stand Back: Here Comes Charlie Musselwhite's South Side Band," Vanguard Records VSD-79232), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial commentary, critical discussion, and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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It seems that Johnny Otis departed the scene on Tuesday. Listen to this.



It was only recently that I learned Johnny Otis recorded the hit version of "Willie And The Hand Jive." It's a song I never cared for, so that never registered with me. I know of Johnny Otis mainly through some of his popular recordings on Savoy that were compiled by that label as part of a 1977 double LP called The Roots of Rock 'N Roll. And, unlike many other compilations of that same name, that one is aptly named. Roots includes the cut featured here.

This recording is from an era in American pop music that has interested me for a long time, which began right quick after World War II. For economic reasons, big swing bands were no longer affordable to maintain considering that musicians made their big money from touring; a big band, like an army, travels on its stomach. So different things began happening to jazz, most of which involved pared-down orchestras exploring different sounds. One group brought jazz instrumentation to the blues---the "jump blues," to be more precise---retaining a brass section and featuring the emerging electric guitar more prominently than it had been used in most jazz. Others went in a more vocal-oriented direction, sometimes featuring full-harmony groups that provided roots for doo-wop.

I can't find any quick reference to the personnel comprising the Johnny Otis show, but I recall that it was on the largish side---maybe 7 or 8 guys plus vocalists. This cut features "Little Ester" (barely a teenager at the time) and the Robins. It starts with the characteristic arpeggiated chord played by Otis on vibes, which opened many of his sides during the Savoy era. The structure is a simple 12-bar blues, but listen to how much is going on in the mix. In back of Esther there's classic rock-sounding fills, a hyperactive rolling piano, and a bit later lots more vibes. Then there is Robins close harmony buoying Esther's melodic taunts and accusations all the way, and in the third chorus "Daddy" ripostes with his own denunciations. Finally, they spend the fourth chorus dueling to the bitter end.

So to summarize, in this Johnny Otis production, you can hear jazz vibes, rock guitar, doo-wop backgrounds, plus blues vocalists and piano. More roots than you can stake a shick at.

Incidentally, Otis had an extremely interesting career that you can read a bit about here and here. At the latter link you can hear parts of a 1989 interview Terri Gross did with Otis. Worth a listen if you have 20 minutes.

Double Crossing Blues, The Johnny Otis Show featuring "Little Esther" Phillips (1949, 78 rpm recording Savoy 731-A), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes. 

Blind Justice!

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Here's a snap of the first band up today in the Prairie Crossroads Blues Society battle of the bands at Memphis On Main, Champaign, Illinois. The band is named for Mr. Tim Donaldson, center with Fender Strat; and Roger "The Doctor" Prillaman, left with stacked keys. Tim is the owner of The Blind Man, a Champaign window dressing boutique, and Roger is an Urbana attorney. So: Blind Justice!

Tim and Roger are geezers of approximately RubberCrutch vintage. Tim's longtime aggregation, the No Secrets Band (which I think must have been named after Carly Simon's nipples), broke up a few years ago, and he has been playing with his talented sons and one of my talented sons for almost a year. Roger was a mainstay in Captain Rat and the Blind Rivets, which was probably the leading Champaign-Urbana bar/party band through some of the 1970s and much of the '80s (not sure---didn't get out much back then).

On tubs, in background with head bisected diagonally by Roger's mic boom, is Ben Donaldson, a graduate of Champaign Central High School's nationally renown jazz program. The ultra-handsome gentleman plucking bass strings at the right, also an alum of the Central jazz program, is Dave "Rock Head" C****," who officially adopted that stage name as of today. (The crowd seemed to be tickled by it.) The 20-minute set included one original composition by Big Rock Head entitled "Weathered Man."

Winner of the battle gets to compete in a national battle at Memphis at some point.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Here's Jackie Wilson, singing lead for Billy Ward and His Dominoes.



I really like this performance and arrangement, but it certainly is a noodle-scratcher.

First, consider the most prominent facet of this track: Wilson belting out the lyrics with depression and mania, bundled under tension tighter than a gnat's ass. But he sounds like nothing so much as a freshly minted graduate of the Dudley Do-Right School of Voice.

Then there is the chart, which definitely has the upbeat "fish-fry" feel as a frame for some pretty "prayer-meeting" lyrics. I'd started to post this several times in past months but couldn't figure out which rubric it belonged under. But since it's in a tempo suitable for shagging at a Carolina beach music club with sand on the floor (it's a dance, perv!), here it is on a dog-day Saturday night.

And, as a production artifact---but not one engineered into the original---there's this cheesy post-production reverb hovering conspicuously over the recording like a cloud of corn aphids wanting to get into your ear canals.

Frankie Sinatra recorded this tune the same year as the Dominoes---1955. The lyrics sound like a natural for Sinatra, and with a Nelson Riddle arrangement one might expect his version to be the definitive one. I'm sure most people familiar with it agree with that sentiment, but not me. The way I hear it, Riddle's chart doesn't surpass "OK" and neither does the orchestra performance. And Frank's fiddling with the melody at the margins, which is a key to his interpretive genius, falls flat on this one and actually weakens the line considerably. If you want to compare it with Wilson's interpretation, go look for it on YouTube---Sinatra's version doesn't rise to the level of interest that I need in order to be bothered to embed it and track down the catalog data for you.

But Wilson's peculiar version of this composition totally kicks ass. Not sure why it didn't hit in 1955, but they didn't even try because it was the B side of another Dominoes tune few people have heard of---"May I Never Love Again." I'd guess the studio chumped it as a throwaway track because the lyrics were too mature of a take on getting the bum's rush from a lady to have broken through on the emerging rock charts of the day. That is, it did not reflect the standard teenager-style sentiments about such matters.

Learnin' The Blues, Jackie Wilson with Billy Ward and His Dominoes (1955, King Records 1492), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening After Hours

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You ain't so well-to-do
Unless you got a little koo-chee-koo



Sad but true. However, most of us weren't endowed at birth with the considerable talent, charm, and other assets of Mr. Bull Moose Jackson. There's a nice, concise Wikipedia bio of him at the other end of this link. He blows melodic lines with a big, smooth classic tenor R&B sound during intermissions from his vocals. His lyrics are always full of good humor, especially when he steps a bit over the line into lewd territory (not here so much as in fan favorites like "Bow Legged Woman" and "Big 10 Inch [Record]"). And he sings in a voice of the people---unremarkable in terms of sonority, maybe, but delivered with punch and excellent phrasing.

Editor's note: to enhance your enjoyment of this song, it is recommended that you close your eyes for the duration. The video is an excruciatingly embarrassing thing to behold and will distract you like the stare of a cobra. Also, the catalog information below may not be correct since the discography typesetting on my Charly (record label) compilation is garbled and misaligned. Thank you for your attention to these matters.

If You Ain't Lovin', Bull Moose Jackson (1955, 78 rpm single King 4775), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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John Mayall twin spin twin spin twin spin DOINNNGGG!!!



Marginalia wrote from across the deep blue sea to give us a few more details about Mayall's 1960s British R&B laboratory, the Bluesbreakers, which served as a training ground for British pop music royalty, including Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Mick Fleetwood, and many others. With hindsight it seems sorta weird to me that Mayall wasn't much bigger in the United States, at least in the late 1960s. Don't think I ever heard a peep about him from the Beatles, either---also strange considering their own reverence for American "roots" music and Mayall's role as a champion of it.

This cut is the opening track on The Turning Point; the YouTuber clipped off a portion of the band introductions, but the song is intact. It's a standard 12-bar blues construction, but that easily cliched form doesn't jump right out at me because the arrangement is so interesting. It's a good example of how the band uses their instruments so effectively to make percussion unnecessary. The harp is sharp as razors, the bass bubbles and pops along, and the tenor works as a rhythm instrument while infusing the sound with the jazzy warmth that is so important to this quartet's sound. There's also a bit of mouth percussion on the track, which is the central feature on "Room To Move," another track you can find on YouTube.

To my ears, Mayall on this album sounds like a graduate of the Dudley Do-Right School of Voice. I don't mean that in a mean spirit at all, but that association baked itself into my skull upon first listening. And I call this a "school of voice" because I've heard it in a number of other places; the one that comes immediately to mind is J.W. Hodgkinson, who was lead vocalist for a unique-sounding UK band called If. I have to wonder if they're emulating the style of an American blues hero I'm not aware of.

One other distinguishing aspect of this cut is the lyrics. It's an unusual protest song that invokes the memory of American free-speech hero Lenny Bruce, who fought obscenity charges in the courts for the better part of two decades. He was also a pot smoker and a junkie. Mayall makes the case that weed should be legal, but since it's not then you shouldn't blame cops if you get busted for possession---you should respond with political activism, instead. I remember thinking the lyrics were somewhat "square," but not really objectionable. Looking back, I think Mayall's presentation was remarkable during an era when the terms "police" and "pigs" were synonymous with many, many youth in the United States.

Acknowledgment: I thank my old friend Gurlitzer, known to some people in southwest Cook County as Janet, for scraping up the catalog information.

The Laws Must Change, John Mayall (1969, "The Turning Point," Polydor Stereo 24-4004), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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This may sound like too laid-back of a band to call "experimental," but that's what I'd call it anyway. Listen to John Mayall's impressions, jamwise, of California.



This four-piece string-driven band was recorded in 1969 and released on Mayall's album The Turning Point. It was a Easy Rider-era favorite amongst the high school outcasts who started growing our hair about then since we didn't fit in with any other group and couldn't get near girls except in marching band.

I don't know much about Mayall even though he was so influential in the British blues scene, and his Bluesbreakers band was a proving ground for many players I admired in other settings, including Sugarcane Harris and Aynsley Dunbar (violin and drums, respectively, with Frank Zappa), and Dick Heckstall-Smith (reeds with an under-known British jazz-rock band called Colosseum). (I'll bet Barry or Sam can offer some interesting facts.)

Anyhoo, although it's somewhat subtle, one will notice that this combo uses no dedicated percussion instruments. The guitars, bass, and Mayall's impressive harp-sucking are deployed throughout the album in highly rhythmic and percussive ways, yet the overall sound is predominantly mellow. In addition to that innovation, Mayall added a straight-ahead jazz component with Johnny Almond's sax and flute. Almond isn't that dazzling, technically speaking, but he really doesn't have to be---it's a goddam blues band, after all. Listen how the crowd responds when Almond hits the altissimo register at the end of his tenor solo; it doesn't require virtuosity, but he uses the sound to excellent climactic effect.

Altogether, what impresses me most about this band is how well everyone fits with everyone else. I think this is a sound that has been under-explored over the years.

California, John Mayall (1969, "The Turning Point," Polydor [catalog information not available because I can't find the damned album in my junk]), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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Listen for the "chicka-chickas."



It's John Mayall without the Blues Breakers, live at somewhere. The quartet consisted of himself, Jon Mark (guitar), Johnny Almond (reeds), and Steve Thompson (bass). This tune exemplifies what was unique about this lineup: a highly percussive sound without the use of any percussion instruments except Mayall's tambourine here and there. (Personally, I think he should have left the tambourine at home for purity's sake.) To my ear it's remarkable how percussive Mayall makes the "harp," and most of the other percussion sounds come from "chicka-chickas," blowing on the mike, tapping hollow-body guitars, and so forth. Mayall, incidentally, comes from what I call The Dudley Do-Right School of Voice." This is a peculiarity of several British blues and rock performers of the era, and I'll dig a few more up in the future.

Mayall was a giant in British blues and rock in the '60s, but most Americans probably know him more by his proteges than his own self. I'm not well versed in this aspect of pop music history, though, so I won't bother with a bunch of Wikipedia cites for something I know little about. However, I'll bet the 59er may know a thing or two about Mayall and his British associates of the period.  (If you do, S, send me a note and I'll append this post for the information of myself and the Fifty50 community.)

Room To Move, John Mayall (1969, from "The Turning Point," Polydor), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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As a birthday indulgence to one Big Hussein Otis on this, his happiest day in the whole wide year, I present an encore performance by Earl Bostic. BHO says he really enjoyed Flamingo, which I embedded as part of this post a few weeks ago. So here's another Earl Jam with the same vibes-infused combo: a swinging up-tempo arrangement of the Cole Porter standard, "Night and Day."



Not my favorite recording of Earl playing this song, but a reasonable facsimile of it probably from several years later. Like you, I have no idea what was on the mind of "Dadreno" when he attached the awful, geezerly railroad slide show to this nice Bostic dance number. Probably ultra-lameness. Don't blame me. Or Big Otis. And especially, don't blame Earl Bostic.

Night and Day, Earl Bostic (1955, King 4765, b/w Embraceable You), via YouTube, embedded for noncommercial critical discussion and educational purposes.

Saturday Night Fish Fry

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An origin story, of sorts:



The lyrics are indicative of the motivating sensibility (so to speak) behind this copyrighted Fifty50 feature.

I think my first two Fish Frys featured Louis Jordan with his Tympany Five, but not this song. The reason, oddly enough, was that up until a few months ago no one had uploaded the original version of the it to YouTube. I say odd because this is one of Jordan's most well known and beloved hits. As with many of the most popular race music recordings, there appear to be a zillion versions out there --- some sounding similar to one another, and others from much later years sounding very different.

Such as this horrible thing, which was the only version available on YouTube when I launched this feature. The YouTube poster says this one is from 1958, and the special bonus lyrics in it refer to "bobby socks." Sheeeeit. One year earlier, Mercury Records assigned Quincy Jones to help re-energize Jordan's career as a rock performer, possibly because black rock pioneers like Chuck Berry and Little Richard were doing so well, chartwise. The result of that collaboration, which you can listen to here (but labeled with the wrong date), might not be bad in its own right if (1) you didn't know that it was being performed by a well known veteran jump R&B artist of the highest caliber, and (2) the lyrics weren't so obviously out of sync with the everyday world of the white teen audience the record was intended for. Not Jordan's fault. Maybe not even Jones' fault, although he obviously didn't know rock from shinola in 1956 - 57. Listen to that prominent roller rink organ trying to propel things along in the Mercury version. Sounds more like Henry Mancini than anything Alan Freed would be caught playing, even with a truckolad of payola. Jones, purely a jazzman and orchestrator up to that point, was just the wrong man for the job. And it also sounds like Jordan's heart wasn't really into the project anyway.

So listen to this one --- it's the big one with the bullet!

Saturday Night Fish Fry, Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five (1949, Decca 24725), via YouTube.

Addendum: the performance dates for this side are all over the place, and not even the discography at LouisJordan.com is definitive. Best guess is 1949, but my ear and gut tend to agree with the YouTuber who dates it at 1946. Maybe there was a second version in '49. Whatever, it's the classic performance. And if you ever want a fist in your eye, just mention... a Saturday Night Fish Fry!

Friday Evening Prayer Meeting

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So go on and live....



I fell in love with this song, like so many others in the 1966 - 1967 timeframe, before dawn. The situation was this: every Wednesday evening the Williams Press truck would engine-knock up our driveway and throw me a bundle or two of The Homewood-Flossmoor Star, the biweekly area newspaper. I would roll 'em all up in rubber bands (or when they were fat or I was lazy I'd use the flat trifold method) and get to bed early. Before bed, though, I'd snatch my sister Peggy's red and white plastic transistor Sears Silvertone radio/record player, which was the size of a Belgian paver but also a marvel of miniaturization at the time, and stash it with the bulldog edition of the Star in my old-school canvas paperboy bag. Then, around 4 or 4:30 a.m. I'd drag my scrawny carcass out of bed, get dressed, and head out into the suburban dark. The important thing was that radio, even more important than the princely paycheck. I started every Thursday all alone in the calm, dark reverberating open-air auditorium of suburban concrete, brick, and cedar siding with the predawn sounds of WCFL-1000, one of Chicago's two Top 40 powerhouses in the mid-'60s. (At that time WLS-890 didn't start broadcasting music until Chrome-Dome Weber came on around 6:05, after all the farmer nonsense.) These were formative mystical experiences for me, and I gratefully soaked up everything from The Casinos to the Doors. I remember first taking note this song, "Tell It Like It Is," around February 1967. This was the same month I heard the early-morning Chicago premier of a jaw-dropping Beatles song called "Strawberry Fields Forever," which literally brought me to a dead stop in the snow flurries as I tried to puzzle out its melody and structure.

So I originally felt a little weird about luxuriating in "Tell It Like It Is" because to my innocent ears it sounded like (wait for it) serious country and western! That's right: I heard it as a crossover country-pop tune (not actually knowing that term at the time), and it would have been damn uncool for me to admit liking such a thing in the winter of 1967 even as the crocuses of The Summer Of Love were starting to think about peeping their randy little budding heads up out of the earth. (Editor's note: some country was OK by me even back then, such as Roger Miller and a Jack Jones hit or two, but that stuff kinda at least sounded like rock.) It's not that I was some kind of proto-hippie or was even aware of such things beyond how they were made fun of on "Petticoat Junction." But it wasn't rock and roll, so what the hell else could it be!?! Sorta jazzy, but definitely not jazz. Well, "country" or whatever, I'd never heard a more beautiful rhythm guitar sound before then, and the piano and percussion kept things peppy with a 6/8 beat in back of the seductive melody. And that voice... like a choir of bells.

I rediscovered this song in the mid-'70s when I started hoarding 45 rpm records from thrift stores with Larry K. With more mature ears, informed by three semesters of college-level music theory (harmony), I was bowled over by it again. By then I'd recategorized it as "country soul" in my still-underdeveloped bean, and remember thinking to myself about Aaron Neville's vocal performance, "this guy is like a white Al Green!" I don't think that it was until sometime in the 1980s that I finally discovered that Aaron Neville and his brothers were, uh, black. Today I can recognize the vivid New Orleans flavor of the chart, especially in the horn sounds and even the rhythm guitar, but I still hear "Tell It Like It Is" as a small masterpiece of country soul.

Tell It Like It Is, Aaron Neville (1966, Par-Lo Records), via YouTube.