Lightning striking, p.1
Lightning Striking, page 1
Dedication
For Rylan and Emmet
My Rock and My Roll
Epigraph
Lightning is striking
Again and again and again and again
—LOU CHRISTIE
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
0: Cleveland 1952
1: Memphis 1954
2: New Orleans 1957
3: Philadelphia 1959
4: Liverpool 1962
5: San Francisco 1967
6: Detroit 1969
7: New York City 1975
8: London 1977
9: Los Angeles 1984 / Norway 1993
10: Seattle 1991
Aftermath
Acknowledgments
Selected Biblio-Discography
Index
About the Author
Lyric Permissions
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
I WAS BORN WITH ROCK AND ROLL.
One of my earliest memories is hearing Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” over the radio in our Brooklyn apartment, rolling on the floor in uncontrollable laughter and joy in its infectious, unbridled release and madness.
I grew up with rock and roll.
The music marks each stage of my awareness, a life lived in parallel with its intimations of immortality. It has charged and challenged the way I perceive and understand the world about me, continuously renewing vows taken at the junction where the spark of a vibrating guitar string jumps the gap to a magnetic pickup and becomes electricity.
I grow old with rock and roll, traversing its leap to faith over a lifetime spent in quest of Spinal Tap’s mystical 11, turning it uppermost.
The odds of being struck by lightning are 300,000 to 1. I think that’s an underestimate. I’ve been struck by lightning many a time, many a place.
* * *
EVERYWHERE MAKES MUSIC. Everywhen makes music. But where and when space and time align, undercurrents spinning into whirlpools, stars binarying, trends signifying and amplifying, a mile marker notches the road map of musical cartography. An energy locus. In these key moments, each with its inner dynamics and outer radiances, flashpoints irradiate station and crossroad, border and bridge, the beginning of again.
Lightning Striking traces rock and roll’s geographic and temporal journey, its kulturati impact and shifts in style and identity, as it moves from epicenter to epicenter, the stopovers where music evolves and renews, distinct with elements of chance, cunning, inspired personalities, major players, hustlers, and bystanders.
The impulse to convert sound waves and microtones into repeatable scales, a heartbeat into recognizable rhythms, at times adding word-based lyrics or “singing” beyond lyrics, defines cities of ethni- and filters emotions. Music accompanies, commemorates, backtracks, and soundtracks, fills silence in the air, and moves us consciously or unconsciously whether we’re listening or not. Shapes of sounds, how they’re made, their tonal quality, the instruments chosen to express, the blend of different sources and the way an octave splits its defining notes; this belongs to the moment. As Lerner and Lowe put it in their ode to dimensional mating, Who Knows Where or When.
Each time and place, no matter how unique, offers a similar narrative of invention and diaspora on the way to mutation. There is an onrush of accidental-on-purpose discovery, of insular triumph, and then archetype, after which decadence. Like the moral fable of empires, this ebb and flow spirals a staircase ascending or descending, depending on taste and circumstance. Musical generations usually have a life span of half a decade, with most of the action happening in the terrible two’s. Catch ’em while you can.
These conflagrations usually begin as a consequence from what came before; reactively predicated. Old guard, new guard, each feeling they’re the guard dogs of future past. Nineteen seventies Nashville countrypolitan, with its sleek strings and carefully contained contraries, schisms into outlaw country; the pole-dance of 1980s hair metal gives way to shambolic grunge in the 1990s. Does rock and roll even exist anymore or is it a continuum of revival?
Within each scenario, musically inclined characters intermingle, form alliances, give each other encouragement and head, dream up a mood and performance that reflects cultish identifiers, garb and gadget, guitar tone and preferred aphrodisiac; and gathers a like-minded audience. Those onstage mirror those off, evening the odds. The moment calls forth a mood-swing pendulum hardening into definable style, eventually becoming the cliché that will mark it in the future, even though it’s still a-borning. Outlanders and immigrants infiltrate hit charts as they step into the spotlight, planting seeds of demise in their ascendance.
Change never arrives unbidden. Mainstream and substrata inextricably mix, helped along by wild-card prophets and profiteers, who sometimes can’t stop long enough to realize what they’re doing, or realize it all too well, understanding after the fact.
Most social histories, this one included, usually work from the top down, the visionary artists who embody transformation. Brian Eno, speaking at the Sydney Luminous Festival in 2009, upends this concept with what he calls scenius, “. . . the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of genius.” He adds, “Let’s forget the idea of ‘genius’ . . . let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.” Not only epic characters, but those hovering off-frame, there for the instamatic and then gone.
* * *
WISHING I COULD BE THERE.
I’ve always been drawn to a scene, its shared togetherness, its come-hither weave, its stars, its character actors and bit players. To feel the adrenaline rush of excitement and possibility as convergence coalesces into where-it’s-at. What was it like on Fifty-Second Street in Manhattan, when jazz clubs lined the block in the late 1940s, and the high-flying sounds of bebop came out of the Onyx and the Three Deuces; or when, after hours, the goateed gang would gather at the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter’s suite at the Stanhope Hotel and she would ask them their three wishes. How did it feel carrying an acoustic guitar along that much hitchhiked song-and-cinema intersection of Bleecker and MacDougal in the folk sixties? The something’s happening here that Buffalo Springfield caught in the air when Los Angeles rioted on the Sunset Strip? Or more revealing to my own lifeline, what was it like tripping in San Francisco on that New Year’s Eve ushering in 1967, when the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service headlined the Fillmore. The poster on my New Jersey wall from that show, bought at an East Village psychedelic shop, made me want to journey there, to see its beacon firsthand.
Then, as luck and the alignment of the stars would have it, I entered my own scene, which centered on CBGB, a small Bowery bar in Manhattan in the mid-seventies, and became the place I’d always wished I’d be.
What was it like? The had-to-be of there. To play your part. Going somewhere as it meets arrival, crossing the porous border between past and future when music is remade in its own image.
* * *
BY THEN, EVERYONE IS BEMOANING shoulda-been-here-when. When it was only spending the night at the local, cold beer, importuning, watching who cavorts in front of you. At the Cavern, the Grande, CBGB, the Roxy, other stations of my particular cross to bear. My route chosen; or did my route choose me, from the music I learned to play, the space-time crossroads where I grew up, when I came of age, race-religion-gender, my fault lines and high times, the reveal of who I’d be. “Definitions define limit,” Mayo of the Red Krayola taught me on The Parable of Arable Land in 1967, all my yet ahead. I identify rock and roll when asked, but that’s just ancestry. I sing all kinds, as Elvis will say in a couple of pages.
You can’t be everywhere at once. Sometimes it doesn’t matter if you’re there or not. Kool Herc on a Bronx playground, Fugazi at D.C.’s 9:30 Club, Green Day at Gilman Street, that Happy Mondays all-nighter at the Hacienda in Manchester; Lagos, Kingston, Koln. Maybe next pilgrimage. There is always refraction, heard and misheard from afar.
You, making a loud noise in the night.
A strobe of incandescent bolt.
Count the seconds from flash to thunder. That’s how long it lasts. And then the storm.
Lightning. To be filled with light.
0
Cleveland
1952
START A RIOT.
The Arena on Euclid, March 21, spring’s first full day. The Moondog Coronation Ball, hosted by WJW disc jockey Alan Freed (“He spins ’em keed / He’s HEP that Freed”) has brought Paul Williams and the Hucklebuckers, Tiny Grimes and His Rockin’ Highlanders, Billy Ward’s Dominoes, Varetta Dillard, and Danny Cobb to town. The highlight will be the crowning of a teenage king and queen chosen from the audience, and a chance for Freed to connect with his Moondoggers, the increasingly biracial tune-ins to 850 AM for his late-night slot starting at 11:15.
The bill promises a raucous time, but except for the Dominoes, who have the coital “Sixty Minute Man” topping the r&b charts the year before, most are between or awaiting hits, another night on the endless road, Flexible bus by the backstage door on the way to the next stop. Three nights ago they were an hour outside of Cleveland in Meyers Lake; tomorrow they head up to Detroit, where Williams was discovered. Paul provides the house band, named after his 1949 dance hit, “The Hucklebuck,” based on a riff by Charlie Parker from Bird’s 1945 session for Savoy, “Now’s The Time.” Tiny Grimes, a four-string tenor guitarist, has Parker solo over his 1944 “Romance Without Finance,” also on Savoy: the bebop roots of rock and roll. What Freed—Blues, Rhythm, Jazz—spins has bebop’s frantic energy, but it never leaves the dance floor.
Freed plays records supplied to him by Leo Mintz, whose Record Rendezvous on Prospect Avenue has been recycling used jukebox 78s since 1939. He specializes in releases of the many independent labels fanned out across the country, musics not fit for the pop charts: blues, country and western, salvation, crackpots. In 1951 Mintz sponsors Freed on WJW’s 50,000 clear channel watts, covering most of the upper Midwest, starting from the premise that you play the records, I sell ’em. Alan insists on featuring original r&b hits before they are made over by white artists, pumping up the show’s frenzy with howls and hollers, keeping time on a phone book, and finds a crossover audience of white listeners who want the real thing. Shared publishing royalties and promotional payments might be involved, along with other tempting inducements, but that’s the music business as usual. Who knows where a hit begins?
The broadened appeal requires a signifier to set it apart, to reflect newness and novelty. Rock and Roll: fraternal syllables made for each other, twin r’s, the first clipped, the second a sigh of breath. Countless are the sightings: a Male Quartette at “The Camp Meeting Jubilee” in 1910 (rock and roll me in your arms); Trixie Smith in 1922 with “My Man Rocks Me (with One Steady Roll)”; the Boswell Sisters’ “Rock and Roll” in the 1934 movie Transatlantic Merry-Go-Round; Buddy Jones’s 1939 “Rockin’ Rollin’ Mama”; Wild Bill Moore’s 1948 “We’re Gonna Rock, We’re Gonna Roll.” Freed and Mintz take the mate and give it a married name.
It would’ve been a memorable show. Varetta Dillard, on crutches, undeterred by a childhood congenital bone illness, sassing it up, her next year’s hit of “Mercy Mr. Percy” in the wings. Danny Cobb, born in Greensboro, North Carolina, winner of a talent contest at the Baby Grand in New York in 1950 when he was nineteen. He’s the “boy singer” in Williams’s band, a shouter in the Wynonie Harris tradition, and he’s already cut a record, also on Savoy, with Williams: “I’m So Happy.” He has a Latin tinge, the mambo-phonic of “Hey Isabella” coming in 1955 and burlesque humor with his 1957 “Hey Mr. Warden,” where he requests dinosaur eggs for his last meal. Search and ye shall find.
Clyde McPhatter is the voice of the Dominoes, though bassist Bill Brown takes the lead on “Sixty Minute Man”—I rock ’em roll ’em all night long—and takes leave of the group after it’s a hit when Ward’s penny-pinching discipline proves unbearable. Billy handpicked the group, played piano and arranged, but he had been in the military and ran his Dominoes like a drill sergeant. Members were confined to their hotel rooms after a show, chronically underpaid, required to drink a glass of milk each night. In the wake of their un-appearance at the Cleveland Arena, they release “Have Mercy Baby” in April, a secular conversion from the gospel “Have Mercy Jesus.” A year later Clyde will quit the Dominoes to lead the Drifters; his replacement is an ex-boxer named Jackie Wilson.
Grimes is an interesting anomaly, a tenor electric guitar player—four strings, “’cause I couldn’t afford the other two”—amid all the honking saxophones, a progeny of Charlie Christian who doesn’t adhere to the roughened guttural amplification of Chicago blues when he goes r&b. He has a 1949 hit with the Scottish chestnut “Loch Lomond”—You take the high road, I’ll take the low road—and it’s a choice many jazz musicians have to make postwar, to go for the hit parade or explore the new innovations coming out of West Fifty-Second Street. Grimes has a deft and dexterous touch on the guitar, easily able to keep pace with Art Tatum’s keyboard flourishes in the early forties, but r&b wants it simple, subtracting notes where bebop multiplies the harmonies. Tiny burlesques his presentation by having his Highlanders wear kilts, prompting tenor saxophonist Red Prysock to quit in protest.
The saxophone’s insistent bleat holds sway in these post-swing dance bands. Illinois Jacquet’s “Flying Home” stokes the frenzy of Arnett Cobb, Big Jay McNeely, Sam “the Man” Taylor, Willis “Gatortail” Jackson, and Prysock, an animal wail that will find purity of expression in free jazz. Freed uses Freddie Mitchell’s growling “Moon Dog Boogie” as his theme. Williams’s baritone showstopper is “The Twister,” where he plays one note over and over as the microphone lowers, he bending down, down, until he’s writhing on the floor, one continuous squeal, biting the reed, crowd eating it up. He is barely through his first number when the fire marshals arrive with the police in tow.
“Suddenly I looked up,” Williams remembered to the Plain Dealer twenty years later. “The doors seemed to be moving. Just like they were breathing.” A newborn’s first cry. The Arena has a 10,000-person capacity, but Record Rendezvous keeps printing tickets, until twice that number are impatiently jostling for entrance. Glass shatters as the crowd pushes its way into the arena. Fistfights break out, knives brandished, arrests made. It takes three hours for the Arena to clear.
MOON DOG MADNESS is the next day’s headline, along with threatening legal action, but when Freed goes on the air that evening, apology quickly dispensed with (“I was hired, just as the bands were hired . . . to allow the Moondog name to be used in connection with the dance”), he asks his listeners to telegram or call the station to support the music he champions, adding that WJW’s management has just added a Moondog Matinee, five to six each afternoon, and extended the evening show. “So you see, Moondoggers,” he proudly says; “it all goes to show ya, that you can’t push people around.”
Two months later the Moondog Maytime Ball returns for three nights at the Arena, accompanied by fifty extra police officers, with the Dominoes headlining along with H-Bomb Ferguson and the orchestras of Todd Rhodes and Freddie Mitchell. Two years later, Freed is on his way to New York City, WINS, television, movies, holidays at the Paramount. Seven years later he’ll pay the price for having a ball, the mortal sin of crowning rock and roll.
1
Memphis
1954
LEVI. THAT’S WHAT THEY NICKNAME HIM—HIS REAL name unusual, not a Johnny or an Eddie—inside the covenant ark that is Sun Studio. The Levites are the tribe of Aaron, overlooking the Promised Land, poised to enter. Can he?
“We were hittin’ it that time, Levi,” the stocky, jocular stand-up bass player encourages, flashing a grin at the jumped-up teenager barely able to contain himself. “That’s just fine, Levi,” the engineer-producer-studio-owner adds from the control room. Levi nervously strums at his acoustic guitar while the electric guitarist on the other wing of their arrayed isosceles fiddles with his amplifier.
He’s chosen, in this birth moment before choice is made. His twin brother, stillborn; he knows it could have been the other way around. It makes him want to honor his mother twofold, to be both himself and sibling for her. When he drives past the neon reds and blues of a record-yourself facility on Union Avenue in his truck, delivering for Crown Electric, Levi thinks that he would like to make a disc of himself singing for her, perhaps one of her favorite songs, “My Happiness.” It’s from the late forties, and hard to say where he learned it, from the Steeles (Jon and Sondra), the Marlin Sisters, the Pied Pipers, or Ella Fitzgerald. He accompanies himself on guitar.
Or maybe he just wants to hear how he looks in the mirror of a microphone. He’s heard Johnny Bragg of the Prisonaires this summer of 1953, the group brought to 706 Union from the Tennessee State Penitentiary in Nashville under armed guard to record. As “Just Walkin’ in the Rain” gathers airplay around Memphis on the black-slanted radio stations, on the jukeboxes and off the porches of shotgun houses, he can sense the exalt and release of the song, its quality of mercy. Like Bragg, like the Ink Spots’ high tenor Bill Kenny, Levi’s voice floats along the upper registers. He sticks close to the Spots’ “That’s When the Heartaches Begin” until he twists the melody aloft in the last chorus. He will use this beguile to his advantage.
The woman at the front desk of the Memphis Recording Service is impressed when he walks in. Thinks he’s cute. His mix of bravado and uncertainty, his shy demeanor. His sideburns. The studio owner is out in the back, or maybe on an errand; the story gets murky after so many years. She thinks he’s cute as well, heartbreakingly so, because he’s a married man, and not to her, even if she’s more partner and helpmeet than he cares to admit.
