When The Blues Was
Dues-With The Film “Cadillac Records” In Mind
By Si Landon
[The film Cadillac Records chronicles the rise and
fall of the blues label the Chicago-bound House of Chess, a guy from the
villages in Poland, so a white guy, who nailed the whole trajectory of the
switch from the old timey country blues sung in the acoustic “juke joints” that
could be found out in the rural un-electrified South, the South of
share-croppers, plantation workers just like in the ante bellum times, and the
benighted land of one Mister James Crow to the electrified urban sounds of
those who jumped bail on Mister and headed north up the Mississippi and faced
some of the same stuff-segregation(with some stopping along the This is the background about how a wise Polish
boy, a Polish Jewish boy, who took a bunch of young black men, and later a
black woman and created a sound that lasted-a sound that sounds good today just
like when they sweated those blues in some Chicago tavern practically eating
the microphone.(I am not kidding on that score. Check out Howlin’ Wolf playing
the harmonica down at the Newport Folk Festival in the early sixties on YouTube
if you need visual proof).
Sam Phillips down river in
Memphis with his white-bread boys (who were very aware of black-etched rhythm
and blues from gospel to the juke joints and the street corner singers) and
Brother Chess with his stable of black and night blues men-and a woman pretty
well wrap up in a bow the genesis of rock and roll. Rock and roll the music
that shaped Jack Reardon and Bart Webber, working class guys who hailed from
Riverdale about forty miles west of Boston and who lived and died for the
music-and the girls that the music snagged. S.L.]
****
“Wasn’t that a time,” Jack
Reardon mentioned to Bart Webber his old high school friend who was a
late-comer to the study of the roots of rock and roll or really the same
thing-came to the blues late one night a few nights after he had seen the film Cadillac Blues on his television via the
beauties of NetFlix (he had seen the film when it had first come out but was in
what he would call a “when blues is dues.” Bart had not seen the film so he
asked Jack to give him a short run-down on the film to see if Lana, his lovely
wife of many years, mighty grab that selection from NetFlix and they would
watch it as well. So as they settled into their chairs in the den of Bart’s
house with a drink in hand Jack was happy to chat away about his growing up
music-the music that he had “hipped” all his guys around the corner of Benny’s
Drug Store over on Ripon Road in downtown Riverdale to before that genre caught
on with rock and roll devotees.
[Funny Jack had come to the
blues quite by accident-the accident of modern technology-in this case the
invention, the savior invention, as any generation of ‘68er, anybody who came
of musical age in the 1950s, would be glad to tell you of the transistor radio
which was basically a small portable radio run by batteries that you could put
to your ear and listen to stations like WMEX where the latest rock songs were
being played without having to be hassled by irate parents telling you that you
were going to hell in a hand-basket and more importantly not to have to listen
to their tinny music. One errant Sunday when the winds were up, say 1957, 58 he
could not get the signal for the local rock station, WJDA, for Bill Mathers’ Rock Hour but instead
picked up in the late night WABC out of Chicago where he heard this bad-ass
beat that seemed kind of familiar, not a rock beat but kind of like it, a
little more sweaty if he had been pressed to tell what his ear picked up on Little Milton’s Blues Blast. The song,
Big Ike Turner’s Rocket 88. He was
hooked.]
“It’s funny how some great
movements in music history started out “from hunger.” That really is the start
of Chess Records (the real name of the label-the Cadillac of the film is just
an acknowledgement that one had arrived in the great golden age of the “boss”
car of the 1950s.That was the pay-off for success for both Chess and the
bluesmen). Chess was hustling a junkyard job but with a hunger to get out, to
become an impresario. The first big star of his label Muddy Waters was down in
some forlorn cotton field dreaming about heading north, north to the bright
lights of the city, dreaming “from hunger” dreams too. That first combination
that hit was when Muddy worked the streets and tossing that old acoustic guitar
to the garbage can (not literally such instruments were life-blood remember-and
remember too you might be back on cheap street soon and in need of that old
thing for your new daily bread) and threw some electric cord and amped up.
(Maxwell Street the most famous street for bluesmen to bring their acts along,
maybe get noticed too, maybe nurse a few drinks to keep the devil away too.)
The movie threads it way up
and down through Muddy always in the background, always the guy who made the
whole thing work-until rock and roll swamped the canoe. Along the way they pick
up the greatest harmonica player who ever played that key blues instruments,
Little Walter.
But all musics have their
ups and downs and so the big moment falls back with the onslaught of rock and
roll brought to the Chess label via Chuck Berry and his vaunted duck walk (to lose
his fame and freedom via some bullshit crackerjack
stuff with Mister’s women). And they all ride on his back as they attempt to
figure out how they are going to fit into the new wave. Then Etta James comes
along and does a female version of the guys who brought the music north. Of
course there are the romances (Muddy with his stable, Chess with Etta), the
drugs (and alcohol, stuff that would help do Little Walter in), the tensions
between the various blues persona-Muddy versus the Wolf. With that lead-in Bart
knew that even if he was a late-comer to the blues he was going to see the
movie come hell or high water-or Lana.
