My thing for 1950’s rockroll, as Steve puts it, goes back to the blues and forward to soul and R&B among other things. Many of these songs are in danger of disappearing, although maybe I’m wrong and they were hits again in movies that I’ve never seen. In any case, it’s good to hear them and surely there are kids who haven’t heard them. Not MY kids, they have been steeped in their rocknroll heritage.
My favorite kid rocknroll incident was about 1991, I’m driving with my sons Gene (age 8) and Matthew (6) and The Beatles’ Please Mr. Postman comes on the radio so I jack it up and sing along because it’s such a great sing along song. When it ends I turn the volume down and Matt pipes up from the back seat “John at his best.” Of course he had heard that from me, nevertheless I almost drove off the road.
My biggest thrill with kid rocknroll was singing Chinese Rocks with my son Gene and his band at a club here in Fort Collins. We nailed it.
So I thought I’d post a great blues song and a great R&B song. They play Howlin Wolf on TV commercials but they don’t play this, as good as anything he ever did:
I wouldn’t try to top that singing but for hard funk it don’t get much better than this:
St. Paul & the Broken Bones and Otis got me wanting this one, no doubt one of the 100 best songs ever. For some reason it’s in danger of going down the memory hole, so just in case you youngsters don’t know it let’s take steps:
I admit it, this is one of my all-time faves. The 1950’s on Aldebaran. It still sounds weird 43 years after it was made. And it has that aching 50’s soul.
What a stance. You mean ALL your songs are better than EVERY OTHER SONG EVER? I gotta see you live. There ain’t enough time to play every great song, why pass up any chance? Just don’t play any bad ones – another impossible task maybe, but why try?
So The Sinatras lucked out for a while. Not only did we get a bass player but we got a great bass player, and he could sing too. Glen Cahill had just quit a band that was making quite the noise at the time, The Slander Band. They ruled CBGB late 1977-78, but they had just broken up. New York Dolls manager Marty Thau offered them his customary $20k deal, on his Red Star label, but they turned him down. Glen quit over that, that and the usual interpersonal band bullshit. Their singer Jesse Blue was a stone belter and could have been a punk Janis Joplin and I ain’t lying. I can’t find any recorded evidence of her posted anywhere which is a crying shame. They did record, somebody must have it.
One of the things that pisses me off about the Sinatras album is that on those same lousy tapes, but not on the record, is us doing “Around and Around” with Jesse Blue singing. Why they didn’t put that on the record is beyond me, it was by far the best thing that night.
After the show we jammed with Jesse and others in the dressing room until 5 in the morning. I remember the Stones’ “Tell Me” was really good.
They found Jesse’s body five days later, smack overdose. Good thing it was winter I guess. R.I.P. Jesse, but what a waste. Not to preach, everybody needs something, but let me tell you something about junkies: every single one that I ever knew WANTED to be a junkie. It takes dedication to become a junkie, at least a month of doing it every day to get even a mild habit. They loved the idea of being a junkie, in most cases before they actually were. They would segregate themselves at parties and talk about nothing but junk. They were just the baddest asses in town because they laid around and dreamed. The funny thing is that a lot of them were real bad asses, until junk turned them into sneaky street rats.
But that all came later. I started out so UPBEAT! I had moved out of the city, quit my day job, and lived in North Pelham with Kenny Lamb, in a sweet if dank basement apartment. I met my wife there. On nights when we weren’t playing or practicing, Kenny and I had a constant party going. There was so much fantastic new music around then, we listened hard and loud, getting high and playing Risk and then going out.
Kenny wanted to do a 45, so we went back to A-1 and cut Teddy Crashes Blonde Dies b/w Some Others Boys, both written by Nicky and me (mostly Nicky’s words and my tunes). The recording went well; the engineer knew what we wanted and he got it. I have to say the songs sounded better on cassettes made in the studio than on 45, because the mastering wasn’t too good. We knew nothing of that arcane process. Teddy Crashes was re-released on two compilations, Hyped to Death and later on No One Left To Blame. Here it is off the 45, play loud please:
It was on the jukebox at Max’s and Meg Griffin played it on WPIX FM. Look Ma, top of the world.
We played our first gigs at The Rat in Boston. We got the gig from a Pelham friend, David Alcott aka David Champagne, who was in the hard pop Shane/Champagne Band. Later he was in Treat Her Right with Mark Sandman. David is one of those mensches. He helps people. I was good friends with his brothers Tom and Toby, but David was three years older and I didn’t get to know him until one night the summer before when he and Gary (Shane) Lavenson jammed with a bunch of us in Mark Lyons’ basement. We played mostly Stones and Rascals songs. It was the first time I ever got off playing with other people. My first musical orgasm. David and Gary told me I should get in a band, so when I told David that I had one, he got us two nights at The Rat.
It went well for a first gig, nervous and rushed at first but we settled in and rocked. The place was not packed but close and the crowd was into it. They booked us with The Real Kids, another stroke of luck since they had a following and musically they were at least in the ballpark. Unlike many New York gigs in both respects…
We came back, the record was out, we had CB’s and Max’s lined up, then the Hot Club in Philly, some big barn in Jersey, the Electric Circus which had just reopened, and back to Boston and Atlantis uptown, then Max’s again. We’re writing new songs, Glen has really solidified us and added creative touches, there was a little blurb about us in the Daily News (“Sinatras will dooby doo at Max’s”).
No shit: the National Enquirer had a story “Frank Sees Red Over NY Punk Band.” We had nothing, but the future looked bright. Of course right around the corner, the blackjack of fate was poised to strike.
Who said it first I don’t know. It could have been Homer or Moses; sounds just like them. But it’s true. Even the Stones are the living doomed. As for the rest of the old bands who in some form still exist, please go home. You ruin your best songs. Nay, do not protest, ye fans of persistent remembrance. Any songs they haven’t killed yet will be put to sleep next summer at Red Rocks.
Naturally, The Slumlords were doomed too. I don’t remember exactly how it happened but I do remember that Nicky and I were chomping to play more of a Heartbreakers/Dolls style. (You are shocked to learn.) I think Nicky and Andy had a fight. Definitely, Billy Dick was out of control freebasing coke. He had to go no matter what. When the CBGB album thing fell through I took it hard, having built everything up in my mind with Kramdenesque ludicrousness. I remember talking to Andy, and that the split was amicable. My attitude was “we gave it a shot so let’s do something else.”
Nicky knew a guitar player from Sheepshead Bay, Harold Richland. Harold was already a blues master, much more a soloist than a punk. He blew everyone away with his screaming speed riffs. Nowadays Harold is Calvin B Streets the Brooklyn Bluesman, operating out of LA. This is a long video but if you start at 12:00, Harold talks about The Sinatras and plays some acoustic blues, and he can still fly.
And Calvin understood rocknroll, and he could write songs. He had a few, and I had a few new ones, and Nicky would sing words to me and I would arrange them into songs. Plus we all wanted to play some covers. Harold quickly grasped that economy was essential to the concept, and I think that made him much better – he could still whale but he had to be concise and that’s always good.
But we still didn’t have a bass player. We thought we did, first a kid from Pelham named Anthony, who was just learning bass but he was learning fast and learning the right way. Until one day he told me he didn’t “want to do it anymore.” I think it was the dead body we found in the stairwell of our rehearsal studio, scared him off. Only the guy wasn’t dead, EMS revived him after Harold dialed 911. We actually followed his blood trail until we turned the corner and there he was, lying fetal with bloody newspaper all over the place. Nicky wrote a song about it, all I remember is one line about the blood – “I thought it was rat shit, nobody cares.” I think I’ll resurrect it.
You might remember in the Heartbreakers piece that one of my friends that night at the Village Gate said “I’ll manage you.” That was Kenny Lamb. Kenny is the Whiz Kid, skipped his senior year of high school to go to Notre Dame on a 4-year free ride. Which he did, and when he graduated he was immediately hired as a chemical engineer for 80k, a fortune in those days. Kenny had money and Kenny believed, so one night he says “How about I pay for the three of you to go into the studio, and you overdub the bass?” I said sure. Nicky and Harold were ecstatic.
Kenny chose A-1 Sound on Broadway, upstairs from the Beacon Theater. A good studio, not the Record Plant but a good 16-track in those pre-digital days. I liked it right away, especially the little Fender Princeton amp that absolutely cranked. We played live in the studio with baffles, in a pretty big room. We cut four songs, three of ours and a cover of Pipeline with a different bridge that we wrote ourselves. I still have the master tape for all the good it does me. Here’s a live version of one song, actually two versions, from two sets at Max’s:
Peter Crowley of Max’s called us “the workingman’s Heartbreakers,” a compliment I cherish cuz that’s what we were aiming at.
I hate this album BTW. It was not one of our better nights, among other reasons because every time my lips touched the mike they got a massive electrical shock. What a surprise! Ten seconds into the set! And the bass player, that’s another story.
What perfect bullshit. You often see it in reference to the Ramones or the Pistols or the Dolls. It must be just writers’ laziness, they want a snappy pseudo-philosophical way to say “it’s simple music.” Or maybe the line appeals to their democratic souls. Whatever, anybody can’t do it, it’s hard as hell to play anything right. And before you play a note you have to have something to play. They’re saying that everyone has ideas like Dee Dee’s and David’s and Steve Jones’? That is not my experience.
Just wanted to get that off my chest.
So back to The Slumlords. Now we had Nicky for a drummer, but we were still a trio and we couldn’t find a bass player. Out of nowhere – I don’t know where he came from, he was just there one day – appeared Billy Dick. His real name. He didn’t play bass but he played guitar, so we decided he would be “low tone” and I would be “high tone.”
Billy Dick: 6’7” and thin, but he remains the strongest guy I ever knew. He had a little MG car that he could lift off the ground from either end. He could beat both my arms with his left arm at arm wrestling. Once at Max’s some asshole walked up to him and said, “You suck.” Billy punched him in the face, once, and the guy was out so cold I thought he was dead.
Billy had a nice simple style, a lot of Keith/Paul Kossoff basic riffs with good tone, speeded up of course. He was perpetually broke. Half the time he couldn’t even come up with practice money, except once in a while he would show up in brand new Capezio shoes or some $300 jacket. I never asked but I assume he hustled from time to time, he was exactly what a lot of gays like, and he did bring down some “possible managers.” Also, he showed up at every gig with a brand new piece of equipment that didn’t work.
We played fast but not that fast, occasionally hitting Ramones tempos but usually a bit slower. Andy’s songs were of a type that became more popular in the 90s, melodic but abrasive, especially his singing. A lot of people hated his voice, which was shrill and he shouted, sort of a Louisiana Johnny Rotten. “She was a New York model, she sucked a New York bottle.” I thought it was great.
The only recorded remains of The Slumlords are a couple of rehearsal tapes recorded on a boom box and one live gig (at Rockbottoms on 8th St), also recorded on a boom box. Perhaps I can convert it. More than one set was recorded off the board at CB’s but I have no idea what happened to that stuff. We played for the Yippies at 10 Bleecker, across the street from CB’s, we played at Max’s two or three times, but mostly we played at CBGB.
We got better. Andy kept coming up with new songs, killer songs I believe to this day, which inspired the rest of us to play up to them and we did. For the first time I felt competent on guitar. I wrote my first two real songs and everyone liked them too. They were called “I Want My Atom Bomb” (“I fooled the 4-star generals, I said I’d kill for peace”) and “This is My Church”, that title taken from Karl Malden’s righteous speech in the ship’s hold in On The Waterfront.
We never drew much of an audience or got any reviews but some people liked us. Hilly Krystal for one, who kept giving us gigs and told us that we would be on the second Live at CBGB album. You know, the one that was never made despite the fact that the first one sold pretty well.
Our big live moment was when Johnny Thunders played with us at Max’s. We opened for the Voidoids that night, who were showcasing for record companies and who actually opened for us. Naturally, the hip New York biz audience couldn’t be bothered to stick around for peasant bands like us. But Johnny stayed, and after we played two songs Peter Crowley (who ran Max’s) came up to the stage and said that JT wanted to play with us, was that OK? Yeah, that’s OK. Johnny plugs in and turns the reverb up to 10. He says, “Let’s do something traditional.” We had been doing “Around and Around” at practice and Johnny played the intro and off we go. It was the high point of my life up to that point. What a fucking feeling! We even ended on a dime. Then Johnny says “How bout ‘Bye Bye Johnny’” and we did that, both of us singing but neither remembering half much less all the words. To me that made it better. Then JT stepped down and we finished the set on top of the world. Afterwards we were all getting high upstairs and he said, “You guys are hot, you need a bass player.”
Here’s one of the bands we played with once, Von Lmo. Not exactly party music but no doubt worth seeing live. This might be the night we played with them, but anyway it was around that time.
It could be a fresh take on a classic but it fails. It’s not Jack White’s fault. He sounds great, stuttering and raunchy and just a little sloppy. The singing is OK but perfunctory, neither adding nor subtracting. It’s the drums that ruin it. Unless you go for arrhythmic rhythms. I don’t.
Here’s a better sloppy version of the same tune, JT in his later days:
Andy Towns of the Slumlords said of him many years ago, “Johnny’s like an old ex-champ boxer. Once every 10 or 12 shows he gets up off the mat and shows everyone who’s boss one more time.”
I can’t tell you how pissed off I used to get when Johnny played a show and was too fucked up to play. That started in the late 70s. Eyes rolling in his head, he couldn’t even get the words out, abscessed and evil. I don’t use the word lightly, his attitude was “I’m a fucked human being and I’m bringing everyone down with me.” While I never exactly idolized Johnny, I was a huge admirer of everything he put into his music. To watch him turn to shit, and not give a shit, just broke my heart.
He had the best instincts – playing, singing and songwriting – of any rocknroller ever, and early Elvis is the only serious competition. I always thought the ultimate band would be Johnny, Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, Steve Jones on rhythm guitar and what the hell, James Jamerson and Benny Benjamin on bass and drums. I wonder if it’s possible to use technology to assemble a real song with that band. I’ll ask around.
There are many other versions of I Ain’t Superstitious of course. Here is what I think is the original – who the hell really knows – by the incomparable Howlin Wolf. This is not one of Wolf’s great performances sez me, but it’s earth-shaking by normal standards:
