The Blues Aint Nothing But Lucille On Your Mind- With The Late B.B. King’s Lucille In Mind
Here is the drill. Bart Webber had
started out life, started out as a captive nation child listening to singers
like Frank Sinatra who blew away all of the bobbysoxers of his mother’s
generation before he pitter-pattered the Tin Pan Alley crowd, Bing Crosby, not
the Bing of righteous Brother, Can You
Spare A Dime? but White Christmas
put to sleep stuff (and to his brother Bob and his Bobcats as well), the
Inkspots spouting If I Didn’t Care
and their trademark spoken verse on every song they touched, Miss Patti Page
getting dreamy about local haunt Cape Cod, Miss Rosemary Clooney telling one
and all to jump and come to her house, Miss Peggy Lee trying to get some no
account man to do right, do right by his woman, the
Andrew Sisters yakking about their precious rums and cokes (soft drinks), the McGuire
Sisters getting misty-eyed, the Dooley sisters dried-eyed, and all the big
swing bands from the 1940s like Harry James, Tommy Dorsey (and his brother
Jimmy who had his own band) as background music on the family radio in the
1950s which his mother always had on during the day to get her through her
“golden age of working class prosperity and single official worker, dad, workaday
daytime household world” and on Saturday night too when that dad, Prescott, joined
in. Joined in so they could listen to Bill Marlin on local radio station WJDA
and his Memory Lane show from seven to eleven where they could listen to
the music that got them (and their generation) through the “from hunger” times
of the 1930s Great Depression and then right on its heels when they slogged
through (either in some watery European theater or the Pacific one take your
pick) or anxiously waited at home for the other shoe to drop during World War
II.
Bart, thinking back on the situation
felt long afterward that he would have been wrong if he said that Delores and
Prescott should not have had their memory music after all of that but frankly
that stuff then (and now although less so) made him grind his teeth. But he, and his three
brothers, were a captive audience then and so to this day he could sing off Rum
and Coca Cola, Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree (the Glenn Miller
version not the Andrew Sister’s) and Vera Lynn’s White Cliffs of Dover
from memory. But that was not his music, okay. (Nor mine since we grew up
in the same working class neighborhood in old Carver, the cranberry bog capital
of the world, together and many nights in front of Hank’s Variety store we
would steam about the hard fact that we could not turn that radio dial, or shut
off that record player, under penalty of exile from Main Street.)
Then of course since we are speaking
about the 1950s came the great musical break-out, the age of classic rock and
roll which Bart “dug” (his term since he more than the rest of us who hung around
Jimmy Jack’s Clam Shack on Main Street [not the diner on Thornton Street, that
would be later when the older guys moved on and we stepped up in their places
in high school] was influenced by the remnant of the “beat” generation minute
as it got refracted in Carver via his sneak trips to Harvard Square) seriously dug to the point of dreaming his own
jailbreak dreams about rock star futures (and girls hanging off every hand,
yeah, mostly the girls part as time went on once he figured out his voice had broken
around thirteen and that his off-key versions of the then current hits would
not get him noticed on the mandatory American
Bandstand ) but that Elvis-etched time too was just a bit soon for him, us,
to be able to unlike Bart’s older brother, Prescott, call that stuff the music
that he, I came of age to. Although the echoes of that time still run through his,
our, minds as we recently proved yet again when we met in Boston at a ‘60s retro
jukebox bar and could lip-synch quote
chapter and verse One Night With You (Elvis version, including the
salacious One Night Of Sin original), Sweet Little Sixteen (Chuck
Berry, of course), Let’s Have A Party ( the much underrated Wanda
Jackson), Be-Bop-a-Lula (Gene Vincent in the great one hit wonder night
but what a hit), Bo Diddley (Bo, of course, who had long ago answered
the question of who put the rock in rock and roll), Peggy Sue (too soon
gone Buddy Holly) and a whole bunch more.
The music that Bart really called his
own though, and where we parted company since I could not abide, still can’t
abide, that whiny music dealing mainly with death, thwarted love, and death, or
did I say that, accompanied by, Jesus, banjos, mandos and harps, was the stuff
from the folk minute of the 1960s which dovetailed with his, our coming of
chronological, political and social age (the latter in the sense of
recognizing, if not always acting on, the fact that there were others, kindred,
out there beside us filled with angst, alienation and good will to seek
solidarity with which neither of us tied up with knots with seven seals connected
with until later after getting out of our dinky hometown of Carver and off into
the big cities and campus towns where just at that moment there were kindred by
the thousands with the same maladies and same desire to turn the world
upside down). By the way if you didn’t imbibe in the folk minute or were too
young what I mean is the mountain tunes of the first generation of the Carter
Family coming out of Clinch Mountain, Buell Kazell (from Harry Smith Anthology
of American Folk Music times), Jimmy Rodgers the Texas yodeler who found
fame at the same time as the Carters in old Podunk Bristol, Tennessee, the old
country Child ballads (Northwest Europe old country collected by Child in
Cambridge in the 1850s and taken up in that town again one hundred years later
in some kind of act, conscious or unconscious, of historical affinity), the
blue grass music (which grabbed Bart by the throat when Everett Lally, a
college friend of his and member of the famed Lally Brothers blue grass band
let him in on his treasure trove of music from that genre which he tried to
interest me in one night before I cut him short although Everett was a cool
guy, very cool for a guy from the hills and hollows of Appalachia), and the
protest songs, songs against the madnesses of the times, nuclear war, brushfire
war in places like Vietnam, against Mister James Crow’s midnight ways, against
the barbaric death penalty, against a lot of what songwriter Malvina Reynolds
called the “ticky-tack little cookie-cutter box” existences all of us were
slated for if nothing else turned up by the likes of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Tom
Paxton, Dave Von Ronk and Phil Ochs. Bart said that while he was in college (Boston
College, the Jesuit school which was letting even heathen Protestants in as
long as the they did not try to start the Reformation, again) the latter songs (With God On Our Side, Blowin’ In The Wind,
The Time They Are A-Changing, I Ain’t Marching No More, Universal Soldier and
stuff like that) that drove a lot of his interest once he connected their work
with the Harvard Square coffeehouse scene (and the adjacent hanging out at the
Hayes-Bickford Cafeteria which he has written plenty about elsewhere and need
not detain us her where he hung on poverty nights, meaning many nights).
Bart said a lot of the drive toward
folk music was to get out from under the anti-rock and rock musical counter-revolution
that he kept hearing on his transistor radio during that early 1960s period
with pretty boy singers (Fabian, a bunch of guys named Bobby, the Everly Brothers)
and vapid young female consumer-driven female singer stuff (oh, Sandra Dee, Brenda
Lee, Patsy Cline, Leslie Gore say no more). I passed that time, which I agree
was a tough time in the rock genre that drove our desires, playing my classic
rock and roll records almost to death and worn down grooves and began to hear a
certain murmur from down South and out in Chicago with a blues beat that I
swear sounded like it came out of the backbeat of rock. Of course both of us being
nothing but prime examples of those alienated teenagers whom the high-brow
sociologists were fretting about, worried that we were heading toward nihilism
and not sure what to do about it, worried about our toward going to hell in a
handbasket, like our hurts and depressions were what ailed the candid world I
would not have characterized that trend that way for it would take a few
decades to see what was what. Then though the pretty boy and vapid girl music
just gave me a headache. Bart too although
like I said we split ways as he sought to seek out roots music that he kept
hearing in the coffeehouses and on the radio once he found a station
(accidently) which featured such folk music and got intrigued by the sounds.
Part of that search, my part but I
dragged Bart along a little when I played to his roots interests after he found
out that some of the country blues music would get some play on that folk music
station, a big search over the long haul, was to get deeply immersed in the
blues, mainly at first country blues and later the city, you know, Chicago
blues. Those country guys though intrigued me once they were “discovered” down
south in little towns plying away in the fields or some such work and were
brought up to Newport to enflame a new generation of aficionados. The likes of
Son House the mad man preacher-sinner man, Skip James with that falsetto voice
singing out about how he would rather be the devil than to be that woman’s man,
Bukka White (sweating blood and salt on that National Steel on Aberdeen
Mississippi Woman and Panama Limited of course Creole Belle candy
man Mississippi John Hurt.
But those guys basically stayed in the
South went about their local business and vanished from big view until they
were “discovered” by folk aficionados who headed south looking for, well,
looking for roots, looking for something to hang onto and it took a
younger generation like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, and the guy whose
photograph graces this sketch, the late B.B. King, to move north, to follow the
northern star to the big industrial cities (with a stop at Memphis going up
river) to put some electric juice in those old guitars and chase my blues away
just by playing like they too had made their own pacts with the devil. And made
a lot of angst and alienation just a shade more bearable.
B.B. King was by no means my first choice
among electrified bluesmen, Muddy Waters and in a big way Howlin’ Wolf got
closer to the nut for me, got closer to that feeling that the blues could set me
free when I was, well, blue, could keep me upright when some woman was two-timing
me, or worst was driving me crazy with her “do this and do that” just for the sake
of seeing who was in charge, could chase away some bad dreams when the deal
went down. Gave off an almost sanctified sense of time and place, after a hard
juke joint or Chicago tavern Saturday night and you showed up kind of scruffy
for church early Sunday morning hoping against hope that the service would be
short. B.B. might not have been my number one but he stretched a big part of
that arc. Praise be.
