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The Rolling Stones, Howlin’ Wolf, James Burton & Dope

I remember seeing this when it first aired, I must’ve been five or six years old and I worshipped the Rolling Stones the way my older brother worshipped the Beatles.

My asshole stepfather (who voted for George Wallace in ’68, if you’re still alive out there die you vile prick) never had much to say about the Beatles but the site of the Stones on our b&w tv would send him into a red faced drunken Irish rage. “Dope fiends”! It was the first time I’d ever heard of dope. But I knew, from that moment that some day I’d be a dope fiend.  Anything that made him mad had to be good. 
Anyway, it was because of this cameo I picked up on Howlin’ Wolf and even got my grandmother to buy me his Evil album for Christmas the next year, setting off another life long obsession— old blues records.  Seeing this clip now brings all that back, but I never realized that James Burton, star of Dale Hawkins’ “Suzi Q” and many Ricky Nelson, Bob Luman, Elvis, Gram Parsons, Merle Haggard, etc. hits was backing up the Wolf. He sure sound good, no?  It’s a bit of a long clip but it reminds me of just how the right bit of stimuli could change a kid’s life. I knew I’d never have a 9-5 job or house and family in the suburbs as soon as that first door to another world was cracked open just an inch. If you watch the whole clip there’s a funny Righetous  Brothers ripoffs doin’ a pretty cool version  “Work With Me Annie”, them I don’t remember.

Etta James Rocks The House

“First thing I saw was Bo Diddley making movies. Bo’s been making movies–private movies–for over thirty years. Child, Bo’s got him some movies wouldn’t believe. So there he was, going from room to room with his camera, aiming his lens at all the juiciest action. And there I was, with the Shirelles giggling behind me, trying to keep them out of the rooms were they didn’t belong, rooms where I could see the glow of Bo’s horny camera.

The hotel suite was a maze of corridors and hidden corners, and I didn’t know where to look first. With the Shirelles looking over my shoulder I opened a bathroom door, only to slam it closed. “I didn’t know men did things like that to each other,” said one of the Shirelles.
Down at the far end, I saw the glow of Bo’s camera lighting up the transom above an ornate double door. I heard the sound of familiar voices. Something hot was happening. Dying of curiosity, I sent the girls off to the kitchen to fix some coffee while I snuck off to see about the room at the end of the hall. The giggles and groans were getting louder. I tested the door to see if it was locked. It wasn’t. When I looked inside, there was Bo with his camera pointed at Blondene laying on her back on the bed. Except for a French beret cocked ace-duece to the side of her head, the girl was buck naked. Legs wide open. Right next to her was Little Willie John who, talking to the camera, was the tour guide, exploring her privates with his fingers while explaining, “Now this here is so-and-so”. Willie was giving an anatomy lesson….Little Richard was also in the room, enjoying the show….” — from Rage To Survive by Etta James and David Ritz, Villard Books, 1995.
So where are Bo Diddley’s home movies today? Do the executors of his will know what a gold mine they’re sitting on? 
     Speaking of Bo, I posted a few antidotes about the three times my path crossed with Bo Diddley’s at Boogie Woogie Flu after he passed away last June.
Anyway, I love this clip of Etta James. Dig those eyebrows! Dig that wig! She used to play a lot in the 80’s at the old Lone Star Cafe on 13th St and 5th Ave (a building that’s been empty for years now, landlords would rather let a space rot than rent  it at a reasonable price in NYC, they get a tax break for letting it sit vacant!).
One night I stumbled in to catch her late set and Keith Richard came stumbling out of the sparse audience, wobbled onto the stage and jammed for a few songs. Etta was so tickled she kept goosing him! Anyway, thanks to Michele Kozuchowski for pullin’ my coat to the Etta clip.

I’m A Schaapy happy pappy


Ever since they took the Teletubbies off tv at 8:30 am I’ve gone back to listening to WKCR’s Bird Flight every morning. I forgot what a great morning ritual this can be. I mean, I think I own almost everything Charlie Parker ever recorded (except I lost my copy of the bootleg where he plays behind Little Jimmy Scott, sometimes credited to Chubby Newsome, anyone know where I can find it these days?).

For the unfamiliar, here in NYC and streaming on the web, Columbia University’s WKCR (89.9 FM or www.wkcr.org broadcasts an hour and ten minutes (8:20 am- 9:30 am, EST) of nothing but the music of Charlie Parker, hosted by Phil Schaap, probably America’s greatest walking repository of jazz lore. It’s the perfect way to wake up, even if your whole day is fucked, at least you got a good dose of Bird to let you know what  greatness a human is capable of. It’s something to look forward to whether you’re up and making coffee or lying in bed, it beats the hell out starting your day listening to the news and getting depressed before you’ve even gotten dressed.
In the week before and after WKCR’s yearly Charlie Parker/Lester Young birthday
marathon (their birthdates are Aug. 27 for Pres, Aug. 29 for Bird so every year KCR does a 72 hour extravaganza) Schaap, who has been working his way through the Bird discography in chronological order, has spent an inordinate amount of time dissecting the Dial session from 1946 that produced  “Lover Man”, “Be Bop”, “Gypsy” and “The Blues”.
“Lover Man” is one of the milestones of American music (and the record that really got me into jazz courtesy of the late Bob Quine) and a record that Bird hated and didn’t want released at all. As Schaap has explained in painstaking detail, the severely strung out Bird was going through heroin withdrawal during the session and it sounds it. During the fast tunes (“Gypsy” and “Be Bop”) his incredible skills are greatly diminished for perhaps the only time in his recording career. But on “Lover Man”, one can hear and feel the sound of great pain, foreboding, pathos and all those other things anyone who has ever kicked a habit can attest to. It is a masterpiece and has rightly been acknowledged so from everyone from Mingus to Mr. Schaap.
Phil Schaap’s knowledgeand enthusiasm r eally brings all of this jazz history to life. To say he knows his shit is an understatement. He gives session dates and personal details, but he also gives his listeners so much more. Schaap fills the dactual gaps, no holds barred. Like letting us know that “Moose The Mooche” was named for Parker’s dope connection, and that Bird had signed over his royalties to Moose (whose real last name was Byrd) for the price of some smack. Schaap’s critics say  he rambles too long on mike, but I find every bit of it fascinating. So much misinformation and fanciful elaoration has colored the Bird legacy (such as Ross Russell’s book Bird Lives) and there is much b.s. for Schaap to straighten out, and he does, par excellence. But he goes so much further and keeps things in perspective, after all it’s music that is important, the gossip  might be interesting or fun or even enlightening, but it doesn’t make the music any thing other than what it is, and in Bird’s case the is, is brilliant. The other day Schaap managed to sync two turntables to play the ’46 “Lover Man” simultaneously with the version Bird recut in the early 50’s. This was to illustrate just how closely Bird managed to remake his own record, an astounding feat in the das before click tracks or even head phones. What other deejay would go to such lengths?
I came late to jazz fandom (I didn’t really get it until my early  20’s) but over the years I feel like I’ve gotten a pretty decent education in jazz just digging Schaap, who also hosts a Saturday 6-9 PM show called “Traditions In Swing” as well as many birthday salute marathons (coming up are John Coltrane on September 23 and Thelonious Monk on October 10). One year they did ten days straight of Sun Ra.
Schaap’s obsessive style of broadcasting in an anomaly in the modern world and I wish there were more like him.  Why doesn’t cable radio have anyone like Schaap? What will happen to all the lore he carries in his head when he dies? Someday he’ll be gone and like the jazz greats he lives to herald, there’s nobody to replace him. So enjoy it now, nothing good lasts forever.
For those interested in developing an ear for jazz, Schaap teaches classes in jazz history at Swing University which is part of the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex. If I thought I could sit still for two hours I’d sign up (and I may still give it a shot). For more info try: http://www.jalc.org/jazzed/subs/swing_u.html
 

Duh….

Let me explain, I messed up the first post today by inserting the links to the discussed tunes wrong, then it took a few tries to figure out why I had messed up but I finally got it right. So today’s post is Meanwhile Back In The Jungle (scroll down) the rest are attempts to get the links workin’ so you could here those two great tunes, and now this is here to explain to scroll down to today’s post. I did want to add one more link, that’s the one to the archive of Hound radio shows: www.thehound.net. I’ll be updating this blog regular like, and Brian who tends to the Hound archives adds new shows and podcasts weekly.
Also in the next few days I’ll start to add links to some blogs I read. Over & out for today I hope….

try try again

not sure why these links aren’t showing up let me try again:
Percy Mayfield is at: The Voice Within
Al Ferrier is at: I’m The Man
If these don’t work I’ll try and figure out what I did wrong and fix ’em by Friday 9/12 so check back.

addendum


for some reason the hyper links to the two tracks didn’t make it onto my last entry, let me try again (I’m new at this folks):
the Al Ferrier tune is here:
the Percy Mayfield tune is here:
also, I guess I should ad a photo so here’s a nice one of Jane Birkin.

meanwhile back in the states…..

First off I wanted to post the two tunes I talked about in my first post your anyone who wants to hear em, the Al Ferrier tunes I’m The Man
can be heard here: , the 45 is on Excello (the b-side of “Hey Baby”, you can get it on the excellent ACE CD The Rockin’ South, a collection of Excello rockabilly). It’s my favorite type of rockabilly tunes– a greaseball with a pompadour and a hard on tellin’ the world how cool he is.
The Percy Mayfield tunes- The Voice Within is here: , it’s a whole different bag of shells. The original 78 is on Specialty and you can find it on the Specialty CD Memory Pain. Mayfield was perhaps the most tortured and forlorn songwriter of the R&B era. He struck gold in ’51 with “Please Send Me Somebody To Love” which topped the R&B charts but after a car wreck disfigured his mug he stopped performing and turned to full time songwriting and recording. Mayfield wrote many of Ray Charlies early 60’s hits like “Hit The Road Jack” as well as Elvis’ “Stranger In My Own Hometown”. his version of that one (even better than Elvis’ for my $) is on the Rhino/Handmade CD Percy Mayfield My Jug & I a re-issue of an early 60’s LP he cut with Ray Charles and his band and was originally issued on Charles’ Tangerine label.
So it’s 9/11 here in New York. Since I’ve spent the last thirty one years living in lower Manhattan, of course I saw it, smelled it,
got my lungs permanetly damaged by the whole mess. My only comment now is exactly what I was thinking when I saw the first tower fall over– “there goes our civil rights”!. I was right. I’ll try and stick to cultural issues in these posts but I wanted to get that one in. It’s records like these that make me miss doing the radio show.
Speaking of my old radio show (with tons of shows archived and podcasted at
it was fun doing the WFMU interview with Rex, you can hear it archived at http://www.wfmu.org (follow the links to Rex’s show, I was on Aug. 9th). Of course I got censored (I pre-taped the interview at WNYC’s new ultra swank studios). What got cut out was this:
“Holly George Warren, that bug eyed freak ripped me off for $500 for the article I wrote for the crummy book about the blues”! (I won’t mention the title as I refuse to plug the thing) but it was part of the merch package to go along with Martin Scorsese’s crappy blues documentry that ran on PBS (the only good thing in that whole six hour + wank was the footage of JB Lenoir that was part of the Wim Wenders episode). Maybe I’ll dig out my contract and post it here. I like how she just refused to answer my e-mails on the subject when six months later I still hadn’t been paid. Then, shamless as ever writes me (two years later) to ask for free info for her very dull Gene Autry bio. It’s not like I really need $500, it’s the principle of the thing, a so called friend, who has never been shy about asking for favors (like a job for her husband) but then will turn around and beat me for a pissant amount of money and pretend like it never happened. I hope those bug eyes explode the next time you lie to a writer.
I’ll try and post more over the weekend, I’m starting to feel like I have something to say again, after talking myself out over the twelve years of weekly broadcasts.

Remembering Kelly Keller…


Aug. 16 is the birth date of Kelly Keller. She passed away on Sept. 24, 2004, she would have been 48. I think of Kelly every day.
Sometimes every hour. She was my business partner (one of several) at the Circle Bar in New Orleans, and one of my best friends.
And one of the best people I’ve ever met. I spent twenty years hanging out with Kelly, in New York, Boston, New Orleans, and many other places. Every place we went we had fun. Where Kelly was was the place to be at that moment, she was the hippest person there ever was. I’ve never met anyone with as much charisma, and as much passion for the things that make life worthwhile, whether it was great music, food, or just driving around shooting the shit. Kelly knew everyone worth knowing from Classie Ballou to Andre Williams. She loved great music and made the Circle Bar into the coolest bar in the world for the five years she ran the joint. She brought in talent like Barbara Lynn, Howard Tate, Andre Williams, Sonny Burgess, Roger Lewis, and too many others to name. All in a space smaller than your average living room. Nobody else could’ve done it. She brought in Dr. Ike and we formed the Mystical Knights Of The Mau Mau giving
Ike his first venue and through him we got many of the aforementioned artists as well as R.L. Burnside, Billy Lee Riley, Lazy Lester, Tousaint McCall, Jody Williams, Slim Harpo’s band, shit, I can’t remember them all. This photo was taken at the Lakeside Lounge in New York City, left to right are Suzanne Charbonet, me, Virginia Prescott, Kelly, and the late, great Bill Pietsch (more on him in a later post).
The world will never see another one like Kelly, it seems like the good ones are dying out fast while the bad ones go on forever.
In the past few years many of my favorite people have died: Bob and Alice Quine, Joey Ramone, Dee Dee Ramone, Hasil Adkins, Cordell Jackson, Bill Pietsch, I’m afraid to pick up the phone lest the list grows longer.
So Kelly Keller’s gone, at least she didn’t have to see what happened to her beloved New Orleans. I’ll always remember her,
and when I think of her I think of something an old junkie passed on to me many years ago– “What ever it is enjoy it now, nothing good lasts for long”.  Kelly enjoyed her life and lived it to the fullest.
Goodbye Kelly, where ever you are.

The Hound On Rex’s Fool’s Paradsie

So I finally went back to WFMU to visit. Actually, I pre-taped my interview w/Rex Doane at the new WNYC studio (a two minute bike ride from my house), and Rex ran it last Saturday, Aug. 9th @ 2 PM. You can hear it from the WFMU Archives here:
It was fun, in addition to the interview Rex ran some old clips of me and Hank Ballard (Hank audibly snorting coke into the mike), and Nick Tosches, as well as some old theme sets including the beloved Poultry Section of the show. Also appearing that day was Danny Fields who was hilarious. Rex told me that Dave the Spazz had gotten a death threat about Danny via e-mail b Terry who interviewed Danny didn’t seem to know anything about it.
I also caught the Stooges Friday night, they played a very loose and sloppy set (on rented gear, the stuff was stolen in Montreal last Wed.). They were still great, they even did a few James Williamson era tunes: Search & Destroy and I Got A Right. I never thought I’d hear Ron Asheton play those tunes but I guess they were in the Stooges set back in ’71 when Ron and Williamson were sharing lead guitar duties. Even on an off night, the Stooges are the best rock’n’roll band out there and they always give it their all. God Bless the Stooges!
I added Eric Asimov’s 1991 NY Times Arts section profile on yours truly to the site. I hope to be able to add some tunes for you all soon as I figure out how to post ’em. In the meantime you can download single tunes, sets, or whole shows from It’s even cross referenced by artists, there’s also around a dozen podcasts complete with recently added commentary from me.
Rex kept referring to my appearence as “The Hound Rides Again” but under what circumstance would a Hound ride? Unless you put your dog in the bed of your pickup truck. Maybe he should’ve called it the Hound Woofs Again.