#5
Really The Blues
by Mezz Mezzrow & Bernard Wolfe
(Random House, 1946 / Signet, 1964)


“To all hipsters, hustlers and fly cats tipping along The Stroll.
(Keep scuffling.)
To all the cons in all the houses of many slammers, wrestling with chinches.
(Short Time, boys.)
To all the junkies and lushheads in two-bit scratchpads, and the hophouse grads in morgue iceboxes.
(R.I.P.)
To all the sweettalkers, the gumbeaters, the highjivers, out of the gallion of good and never going to take it low again.
(You got to make it, daddy.)
To Bessie Smith, Jimmy Noone, King Oliver, Louise Armstrong, Zutty Singleton, Johnny Dodds, Sidney Bechet and Tommy Ladnier.
(Grab a taste of the millennium, gate.)”

Talk about the birth of cool – Milton ‘Mezz’ Mezzrow was there and saw it happen - as music and life-styles began to drift across previously impassable race barriers, and the roots of everything we think of as ‘hip’ 20th century culture was first took shape in America. An incredibly important bit of cultural history and a ferocious, free-wheeling piece of writing that had no less a personage than Henry Miller singing its praises when it first appeared (he actually holds copyright on this revised ’64 edition), ‘Really The Blues’ is in some ways a bit too much of an ‘important’, ‘landmark’ type book for inclusion on this daft list, but the sheer eccentricity of Mezzrow’s rambling muse definitely puts it in the right ballpark, I feel.

Mezz first encountered the blues in a juvenile reform institute in about 1915, when he overheard black prisoners harmonising with each other between cells during the night. And after an enlightened music teacher allowed him to spend some after-class time covertly trading licks with some cats from New Orleans, there was no going back. Out on the streets of Chicago, he found himself packing crates of bootleg liqour for Al Capone, later getting one of his first paying music gigs at a club owned by Detroit’s notorious Purple Gang and (as his own account has it) having to flee to the sticks when Capone’s chief lady took a fancy to him. Subsequently, he played a pivotal role in the creation of one of the first ever artistically valid white jazz scenes, his version of the story describing how he painstakingly schooled his Chicago buddies (including such Trad luminaries as Gene Krupa, Eddie Condon and Frank Teschemacher) in the ways of Dixieland, bringing the joys of ‘hot’ jazz and reefer smoke to the uninitiated wherever he trod.

After a move to New York, the frustrations he encountered in trying to realise his dream of a mixed race band led him to concentrate more on his equally pioneering leisure time activities, becoming the first white dope-dealer in Harlem, with a garbled, proto-beatnik lexicon and wardrobe to match. What follows includes a close friendship with Louis Armstrong, descent into opium addiction (this being before heroin was even refined), a long prison stretch and rebirth as a kind of all-purpose crusader for the power of music (if, admittedly, a very specific TYPE of music) in healing the racial rifts in American society and creating a kind of flawlessly hip super-culture, or somesuch.

Considering ‘Really The Blues’ first appeared in 1946, Mezzrow’s digressive, conversational style and, uh, ‘frank’ approach to his subject matter is really something else, and the way-out lingo he casually throw in throughout – a beautiful kind of hipster patter coined long, long before such beat jive was established as an instant cliché, and otherwise lost to history – is a total joy.

“In those days,” he begins a paragraph, “if you plied the lid off my skull with a can-opener, you might have spotted some weird eels snaking through the whirlpool I lugged around under my hat”. At another point he talks about how his buddies PeeWee Russell and Bix Beiderbecke used to live in a filthy shack, letting piles of unopened milk bottles go rotten on the doorstep because they were too busy sitting around the piano composing. “Looks like no one thought to put a nix on the moo-juice”, he notes, and a whole universe of beatnik splendour is born.

Like most musicians who write great books, Mezzrow is cranky and egocentric as they come, and as the book goes on he unfortunately becomes prone to outbursts of musical conservatism that, though undoubtedly heartfelt, will seem absolutely mystifying to the modern reader. From dismissing his former friends again and again for the dread crime of incorporating ‘modernist’ elements into their music, to a lengthy passage in which he decries the introduction of the hi-hat as signalling the death of all legitimate drumming, his insistence that the New Orleans gospel be observed at all times is stubborn to the point of obsession. God only knows what he must’ve thought when Bird and Miles started to make the scene just as he was bowing out, but thankfully his views on the matter remain unrecorded here, and such grumpery is easy to put aside once you get into the swing of his prose, with his account of the epiphany he experienced leading his prison marching band across an open-field, literally walking over the graves of prisoners they’d helped bury, is simply one of the most moving accounts of the power of music ever set on paper.

When the New York Herald Tribune deemed this a “WALLOPING HUMAN DOCUMENT” is capital letters, they weren’t pissing around.

Labels: books, jazz, Mezz Mezzrow

Five Music Biogs Actually Worth Reading:
Introduction.

This is a post I’ve been meaning to get around to writing for a long time, and, as there’s nothing particularly pressing going on here at the moment beyond lounging around in the newly-stifling heat playing Peaking Lights and Miles Davis records again and again, now seems as good a time as any.

So: music books! I read fucking loads of them, I’m afraid. A more artistically benighted corner of the publishing industry you’d be hard-pressed to find (well, I guess they’ve at least got one up on cookbooks or exercise books or something), but nonetheless, I’ll plough through just about any of ‘em. I guess that for me music books fulfil the same function that other readers assign to fantasy sagas or police procedural crime books or whatever: low effort, time-filling comfort reading. Motor through the words, harvest the relevant info and anecdotes, stick it on the shelf.

Some of them are better than others of course – at least some journalists and rock-writers have risen to the challenge of the full length book over the years with fine results, and well-researched biogs telling the genuinely incredible, culturally resonant stories of bands like, say, The Beach Boys or The 13th Floor Elevators, are deserving of a place on anyone’s bookshelves. By and large though, music books are pretty weak tea from any kind of literary POV.

Which makes it all the more thrilling when, occasionally, you happen to stumble across a certain, specific kind of music book which is little short of flat-out genius.

These books tend to be late-career autobiographies written by successful/iconic musicians who would almost certainly have never written a sentence intended for publication in their lives, had not their musical career given them a financially viable excuse to do so.

I don’t want to try to impose a half-baked, catch-all term upon these books, but they’re a very specific, almost accidental thing – less like bland, ‘people and places’ industry memoirs, and more like what might happen if you started dragging troubled, inspired people of one kind or another off the street, forcing them to write about their lives, and waiting until you struck gold.

Over the next week or two, I’m going to attempt to do a series of short posts running down my five favourite examples of this particular, nameless literary sub-genre. I hope you’ll enjoy the results, and if I succeed in drawing some attention to these volumes then, well.. good.

Labels: books

People Who Died.

Guess a lot of people are gonna be posting that video this evening.

Given that I often do obituary posts here, I never know how to handle it when someone whose records I like dies, but I don’t really have anything pertinent to say about them that you can’t find in a thousand other places.

I had the same problem a couple of weeks back when MCA died. I mean, just re-posting videos for the hit songs and saying “gee, s/he sure wuz a great guy” seems a bit redundant.

Oh well. Having got that out of the way, let’s belatedly waste some bandwidth, because, as recent karaoke and DJing engagements have proved, this one never gets old;

And this one and ‘old’ are not even concepts belonging in the same universe, I suspect;

RIPs duly issued: you know the score.

Labels: bad news, deathblog, Donna Summer, The Beastie Boys

… this excellent documentary following Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra as they try to reignite their career as a duo via Las Vegas stage-show in ’72 should suffice.

(Thanks. Don’t mention it.)

Labels: Lee Hazlewood, music docs, Nancy Sinatra, videos

…you should probably read this masterful demolition of the current state of print music journalism by Neil Kulkarni.

Labels: further reading, Neil Kulkarni, ranting

I like King Tuff.

Hey guys, why didn’t anyone tell me about King Tuff before… ?

I mean, don’t kid me, I know you’ve all been digging his stuff for years, sniggering behind my back – ‘oh, check it out, that guy’s never even HEARD of King Tuff, can ya believe it’, and so forth. Well no more.

His royal tuffness finally came to my attention a couple of months back, when a few online sinkholes I frequent posted up reports that he had a new LP on the horizon, an announcement that seemingly prompted Second Coming level excitement. Curious, I thought. From the fragmentary descriptions therein, this King Tuff fellow seemed to be right up my street, so before you know it I was clicking my way through his 2008 album ‘King Tuff Was Dead’, wondering how I could ever show my face in public again, have remained ignorant of the legitimate monarch of a certain, specific corner of electric guitar-based party music for so long.

So as to save you from a similar fate, let’s take a deep breath and reluctantly do the old ‘attempting to describe the music’ thing.

Evidently a man who has devoted a great deal of time contemplating the mysteries of T. Rex, King Tuff takes all the cool bits of that era of glam rock – the bad-ass shuffling/strutting rhythms, minimal fuss/maximum rock recording aesthetic and strange quasi-psychedelic glimmer - and weds them to a kind of endearing ‘Swell Guy’ persona, like a kind of beer-quaffing, hair-freak Buddy Holly, pulling off all the iconic rock moves you could hope for, with an earnest, slightly off-message romanticism that’s wholly individual.

The lazy will likely have deemed this ‘power-pop’, but I don’t wanna go there again, cos this has little in common with the leadfooted vacuum of 95% of those who would self-identify as ‘power-pop’. Shit this effortlessly cool just doesn’t need these tired genre tags. Awesome is its genre.

The recorded sound on ‘Was Dead’ is, appropriately, awesome – like the kind of ‘home-recording’ that transpires when you decide that the Visconti T. Rex albums are technically ‘home recordings’ and work from there. That the songs are inspired and the playing killer is also a given. This guy knows how to write a good song, how to keep it bubbling along with the kind of little nuances that reward repeat listens, and the kind of contented grooviness that stops you ever needing to check yr watch as the 3:30 mark comes and goes.

He knows how to capture the fuzzy, happy glow of infatuation and lustful anticipation really nicely, and I like the way he has of mixing up universal 'rock song' type imagery with weird, personal details that keep the whole thing specific and earth-bound (check out the bit about him driving in his Chevrolet in ‘Sun Medallion’ or “eating pizza all fucking night” in ‘Animal’).

And boy, the dude has got some LICKS too – I mean, I hate to get any more ‘Bill & Ted’ on you that I am already when writing about this sort of thing, but there is only word for the guitar-work on this record, and the word is *sweet*. Not showy or overcooked, but just *sweet*. I mean, just check out the clip below – the strumming stuff’s all fine, but just look at him go come solo time – whoop. There’s a guy whose bedroom years were not wasted.



Saying that King Tuff sounds like the natural next stage on the evolutionary ladder from party-punk greats like Mean Jeans and Personal & The Pizzas is disingenuous, because the last thing I ever want that stuff to do is EVOLVE… or at least, I didn’t think I did, until I heard King Tuff amping up the happy spirit of that aesthetic to shimmering new heights with all these real cosmic/romantic burners, singing a song called ‘Lady’ (as every great rock band should, just to prove their worth), and really makin’ it, like if some ‘70s behemoths like Dust swapped their ug for maracas and a gigantic heat-haze grin… you could almost call it ‘psychedelic’, only that would be silly. Oh wait, I already did a few paragraphs ago. Anyway, real A+ moment is after the solo when he sings “hanging out on the corner… with your girlfriends / you call my name from the window / NO NO NO!” Beautiful.



And that’s only, like, my third or fourth favourite song on the record. ‘Stone Fox’ does the same trick even better (STONE FOX! That’s the song rock bands should have to write after they’ve passed the ‘Lady’ challenge), and this one’s gotta be my #1 fave:



It’s pretty rare these days that I find a record that I find myself listening to compulsively, and that continues to make me happy across a period of several months, but ‘..Was Dead’ is it and does so.

King Tuff’s new self-titled record is out at the end of the month through the venerable auspices of Sub-Pop, so you’ll probably be seeing it here and there if you read free music papers, frequent record shops and the like.

On the basis of the two pre-release tracks they’ve put up, it’s sounding like a winner.

Five years late, but I’m glad to be here, a humble subject in King Tuff’s dominion.

Labels: I like, King Tuff

The Evolution of Awesome.

All kinds of wonderful.

Did Zeppelin sue Schifrin?

Did Schifrin sue Carpenter?

I guess not.

I'd prefer to think they just had a big group hug and basked in a contented sense of mutual badassery.

Labels: Lalo Schifrin, Led Zeppelin, Our Lord John Carpenter