An Encore Presentation-“Searching
For The American Songbook” With New Introductions By Allan Jackson-Smokestack Lightning,
Indeed-
With Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf In Mind
Allan Jackson Introduction
I have been around the publishing,
editing, writing business a long time so I know when the dime drops it can drop
for thee. Know first-hand having been the subject of a vote of no confidence by
the younger writers at this publication aided and abetted by my long-time
hometown high school friend Sam Lowell who cast the deciding vote for my ouster
based on his notion that “the torch had to be passed.” Naturally I was pissed off although maybe in
the end Sam was half-right to do what he did. In any case that is politics in
this cutthroat business and it comes with the territory. After the purge and my
exile Sam sent out an olive branch to me in what he too called my “exile” and
got me back here to do a plum job doing the Encore
Introductions to the very successful and sweated out The Roots Are the Toots rock and roll series which I fathered and which
I claim was the best job of editing, cajoling, whipping, nagging, etc. I ever
did in my long career.
That assignment though whetted my
appetite to do more encore introductions (although definitely not looking to
get back the site manager’s job which fell to Greg Green whom I actually
brought in to do the day to day operation which I was heartily sick of and who
wound up with the whole ball of wax) and I was fortunate enough to get Sam, now
head of the Editorial Board put in place after my exile to ensure that there
would not be a return to “one man” rule, to get me an assignment doing the
encore intros for the Sam and Ralph
Stories about the improbable life-long friendship and political activism of
two very different working-class guys who met on the “battlefields” of the
struggle against the Vietnam War.
Then,
apparently, I pressed my luck when I asked to do the encore presentations for
the Film Noir series which really was my baby despite the fact that Sam Lowell
did all the heavy lifting and Zack James most of the best of the writings. I
tussled with both Sam and Greg over this to no avail. Sam for obvious reasons
wanted to do what he considered his baby and Greg because I don’t think he
though it was a good idea for me to be continuing to work here even as a
contributing editor. I proved to be wrong and I should have slapped my hand to
my head when I thought about it in this damn cutthroat business. Sam pulled
rank, pulled his chair of the Ed Board card and Greg fell down and payed homage
to his request. As the next best thing in the universe today I got this highly
regarded assignment which Si Lannon was supposed to do but begged off of having
been ill for a while and passed off to me.
Of course Searching for the American Songbook, the idea behind it anyway was,
is very far from the devotion that we of the Generation of ’68, those who came
of age in the mid-1950s paid to rock and roll, now called the classic age of
rock and roll, the age begat by Elvis. Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee
Lewis and a ton of other talent that got us on our dancing feet. Frankly, as
Sam mentioned in one of his introductions, we were rebelling, naturally
rebelling looking back on the times, against our parents’ slogging through the
Great Depression and World War II music from the likes of Frank Sinatra and the
Andrews Sisters heard wafting (Sam’s forever-etched in the brain word) through
the early 1950s house on the family radio). Having now gone through a couple of
generations of changes in musical taste, guess what, those latter generations
have up and rebelled against our “old fogie” music. What age and experience has
taught though is that the mystical mythical American Songbook is a very big
tent, has plenty for everyone. Even that music from our parents’ generation
that sounded so “square” has made a big “comeback” even if the emotional
roller-coaster for a lot of us who used that musical uprising as a big step
toward our own understandings of the world have never quite calmed down, the
battle of the generations never quite settled at anything but an “armed truce.”
(Truth to tell the passing on of that parental generation has left many of us
with things that now can never be resolved.)
Which brings us to the idea behind the
idea. This series for the most part was Bart Webber’s “baby” since he was the
first guy to “break-out” of the classic rock and roll music we lived and died
for in the 1970s. No, that is not true, not true as many things are not true in
dealing with events and personalities of guys from the old neighborhood, the
old Acre section of North Adamsville. The driving force toward the big tent
look at the American Songbook was done by one Peter Paul Markin, forever known
as the Scribe, who was the first guy out of the blocks to make the connection
between ancient blues and the roots of rock and roll. Was the first guy who
caught the whiff of that “folk minute” from the early 1960s and dragged some of
us in his wake. All Bart did was expand of those understandings to visit jazz,
Cajun music, Zydeco, be-bop, and a host of other musical genre including those
World War II pop hits that used to drive us crazy. Two things you need to know
going forward-the sketches will be very eclectic as the big tent idea implies and
the reason that Bart Webber was tagged with this assignment originally was the
still bitter fact that the Scribe had given up the ghost long ago murdered
through his own hubris and delusions down in Mexico on a busted drug deal in
the mid-1970s. A big fall from grace, a very big fall which we still mourn
today.
**********
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Sometimes a picture really can be worth
a thousand words, a thousand words and more as in the case Howlin’ Wolf doing
his Midnight Creep (the capitals no accident since we always reverently used
that term once we had heard in one of his songs) in the photograph above taken
from an album of his work but nowadays with the advances in computer technology
and someone’s desire to share also to be seen on sites such as YouTube where
you can get a real flavor of what that mad man was about when he got his blues
wanting habits on. In fact I am a little hesitate to use a bunch of words
describing Howlin’ Wolf in high gear since maybe I would leave out that drop of
perspiration dripping from his overworked forehead and that salted drop might
be the very thing that drove him that night or describing his oneness with his
harmonica because that might cause some karmic funk.
So, no, I am not really going to go on
and on about his midnight creep but when the big man got into high gear, when
he went to a place where he sweated (not perspired) profusely, a little ragged
in voice and eyes all shot to hell he roared for his version of the high white
note. Funny, a lot of people, myself for a while included, used to think that
the high white note business was strictly a jazz thing, maybe somebody like the
“Prez” Lester Young or Duke’s Johnny Hodges after hours, after the paying
customers had had their fill, or what they thought was all those men had in
them, shutting the doors tight, putting up the tables leaving the chairs for
whoever came by around dawn, grabbing a few guys from around the town as they
finished their gigs and make the search, make a serious bid to blow the world
to kingdom come. Some nights they were on fire and blew that big note out in to
some heavy air and who knows where it landed, most nights though it was just
“nice try.” One night I was out in Frisco when “Saps” McCoy blew a big sexy sax
right out the door of Chez Benny’s over in North Beach when North Beach was
just turning away from be-bop “beat” and that high white note, I swear, blew
out to the bay and who knows maybe all the way to the Japan seas. But see if I
had, or anybody had, thought about it for a minute jazz and the blues are
cousins, cousins no question so of course Howlin’ Wolf blew out that high white
note more than once, plenty including a couple of shows I caught him at when he
was not in his prime.
The photograph (and now video) that I
was thinking of is one where he is practically eating the harmonica as he
performs How Many More Years (and now like I say thanks to some
thoughtful archivist you can go on to YouTube and see him doing his devouring
act in real time and in motion, wow, and also berating the father we never knew
Son House for showing up drunk). Yes, the Wolf could blast out the blues and on
this one you get a real appreciation for how serious he was as a performer and
as blues representative of the highest order.
Howlin’ Wolf like his near contemporary
and rival Muddy Waters, like a whole generation of black bluesmen who learned
their trade at the feet of old-time country blues masters like Charley Patton,
the aforementioned Son House who had his own personal fight with the devil,
Robert Johnson who allegedly sold his soul to the devil out on Highway 61 so he
could get his own version of that high white note, and the like down in
Mississippi or other southern places in the first half of the twentieth
century. They as part and parcel of that great black migration (even as
exceptional musicians they would do stints in the sweated Northern factories
before hitting Maxwell Street) took the road north, or rather the river north,
an amazing number from the Delta and an even more amazing number from around
Clarksville in Mississippi right by that Robert Johnson-spooked Highway 61 and
headed first maybe to Memphis and then on to sweet home Chicago.
They went where the jobs were, went
where the ugliness of Mister James Crow telling them sit here not there, walk
here but not there, drink the water here not there, don’t look at our women
under any conditions and on and on did not haunt their every move (although
they would find not racial Garden of Eden in the North, last hired, first
fired, squeezed in cold water flats too many to a room, harassed, but they at
least has some breathing space, some room to create a little something they
could call their own and not Mister’s), went where the big black migration was
heading after World War I. Went also to explore a new way of presenting the
blues to an urban audience in need of a faster beat, in need of getting away
from the Saturday juke joint acoustic country sound with some old timey guys
ripping up three chord ditties to go with that jug of Jack Flash’s homemade
whiskey (or so he called it).
So they, guys like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy
Waters, Magic Slim, Johnny Shines, and James Cotton prospered by doing what
Elvis did for rock and rock and Bob Dylan did for folk and pulled the hammer
down on the old electric guitar and made big, big sounds that reached all the
way back of the room to the Red Hat and Tip Top clubs and made the max daddies
and max mamas jump, make some moves. And here is where all kinds of thing got
intersected, as part of all the trends in post-World War II music up to the
1960s anyway from R&B, rock and roll, electric blues and folk the edges of
the music hit all the way to then small white audiences too and they howled for
the blues, which spoke to some sense of their own alienation. Hell, the Beatles
and more particularly lived to hear Muddy and the Wolf. The Stones even went to
Mecca, to Chess Records to be at one with Muddy. And they also took lessons
from Howlin’ Wolf himself on the right way to play Little Red Rooster
which they had covered and made famous in the early 1960s (or infamous
depending on your point of view since many radio stations including some Boston
stations had banned it from the air originally).
Yes, Howlin’ Wolf and that big bad
harmonica and that big bad voice that howled in the night did that for a new
generation, pretty good right.