My Pop Life #251 : Feelin’ Good – Little Junior Parker

Feelin’ Good – Junior Parker

Gonna boogie…….til the break of day

I was a teenager when I started to buy Al Green LPs. The first one was called Al Green Gets Next To You, which had the eternal single Tired of Being Alone (see My Pop Life #101) and his stunning cover of the Temptations hit Can’t Get Next To You among the jewels. Al Green was my definition of soul music back then, and he is still, for me, the greatest singer of all time. Of course I love Aretha and Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding and Anita Baker. Maria Callas! Dionne Warwick!! But Al Green is in another zone.

My favourite LP of his is called Al Green Explores Your Mind. It looks like this.

I look at the green cover and every time I say Al Green Explodes Your Mind in my head. Because he does. Here we have Sha La La (Make Me Happy), One Night Stand, The City and the mighty Take Me To The River, written by Al with guitarist Teenie Hodges who played in the band alongside his brothers Leroy on bass and Charles on Hammond organ. All under the guidance and instinct of Willie Mitchell, who arranged and produced Al Green throughout the 60s and 70s up until that moment when Al renounced pop music after a terrible incident at his home in 1974. Al Green’s girlfriend Mary Woodson (a married woman with three children whom he had refused to marry) threw a pot of boiling grits over him then committed suicide. Two years later, calling it a “wake up call” Al Green renounced pop music and established his ministry in South Memphis at the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church. He only made gospel records for the next ten years.

All of this is background to this song which I only heard because of Al Green. On the opening to Take Me To The River as the Hodges brothers establish the groove, Al tells us that he is dedicating the song to “Little Junior Parker….a cousin of mine who’s gone on, but we’d like to carry on in his name.” The song is classic Al straddling the secular & the sexual with concerns for baptism & spiritual cleansing in the water : I wanna know, won’t you tell me? seems to be addressed to God, but who knows with Al. For such a powerful song to have such a dedication meant I had to follow up, eventually buying the single Feelin’ Good when I saw it in a record shop in Camden Town. It is a cracker and bursts out of the speakers like an explosion of joy.

I’ve never established if Little Junior Parker is actually Al Green’s cousin. But why not right? He was born in West Memphis, Arkansas – not so much across the tracks as across the Mississippi (and the state line) from Memphis, Tennessee. West Memphis was a seedbed for electrified blues in the 40s and 50s with Sonny Boy Williamson II being the elder among a group which included B.B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Roscoe Gordon, and Johnny Ace. As a young man Junior Parker played harmonica like Sonny Boy and he would go on to become part of the Beale Streeters collective with B.B. King and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland (see My Pop Life #28 Too Far Gone).

Junior Parker

In 1951 he formed Little Junior Parker & The Blue Flames with Pat Hare and ace guitarist Floyd Murphy. They cut one single with Ike Turner on Modern Records in 1952, which led to being signed for Sam Phillips and Sun Records for whom he cut a few sides in 1953 including this one Feelin’ Good, (possibly inspired by John Lee Hooker’s Boogie Chillen?), the mighty Love My Baby and Mystery Train, the latter two combined and covered by Elvis Presley. They’re now both rockabilly standards. But the vast majority of his work was playing live on the radio and touring the South with The Blue Flames, and combinations of the above artists. Live R&B was very popular throughout the 1940s through to the 60s especially on the Chitlin Circuit through the southern states.

“Blues Unlimited on the road: Little Jr. Parker, standing (far left), Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, kneeling (far left),
Pat Hare, standing (far right). South Carolina, 1952

Memphis is on the Mississippi River around halfway from New Orleans to Chicago. It is a major staging post for American music, and boasts the Stax Records Museum, Elvis Presley’s house Graceland, Sun Records, Beale Street, Al Green’s church and other hot spots. It was the scene for one of the great rip-offs of my life one December evening in 1988 when I was driving from Washington D.C. to Dallas to deliver a car. I’d just spent two nights in Nashville and visited Grand Ole Opry (see My Pop Life#83 Country Boy) and mucked about with two young women around the hotel pool playing with their (brand new!) camcorder. This is before mobile phones and so on. A brand new moment. Camcorders !! On the morning of the second day I drove to Memphis, just a few hours down the road, and went straight to Graceland and parked up in the parking lot alongside the modest white mansion house and grounds.

Graceland. Memphis, Tennessee

There was no line to get in and I didn’t get a guide as I recall. I started in the Jungle Room which was the first room Elvis decorated and furnished. It has a full-size pool table as its centrepiece, a juke box and a bar and you are reminded how young he was when he earned his first million. It made me like him more. Graceland is a charming snapshot of a moment in time when an electrifying young white boy who wore eye make up and was obsessed with music of all kinds broke the sound barrier and brought rock and roll through the colour bar to the white suburbs of America and the rest of the world. I wrote a bit about Elvis in My Pop Life #80 Heartbreak Hotel but I have to recommend to all of you the greatest book on the subject Last Train To Memphis written by Peter Guralnick which details the rise of Elvis Presley up to him being drafted into the US Army in March 1958 with scholarly detail, compassion and understanding. There is a second book which takes us from leaving the army up to his death called Careless Love. Both highly recommended.

I came out of Graceland and drove into downtown Memphis, had a look at the mighty Mississippi and then on to Sun Studios which is now a museum, and a shop of course. Bought some 45s. Can’t remember now which ones but I’d guess Elvis’ cover of Mystery Train was one of them.

Little Junior Parker is one of those artists
who changes his name on each batch of recordings it seems

Sam Phillips gives himself a writing credit suggesting perhaps the melding of the two Parker songs was his idea

Had a bite to eat in the locality and decided to drive to The Lorraine Motel across town where Martin Luther King was murdered on April 4th 1968. It was fenced off, bleak and shrouded in sadness and an old black lady seemed to be guarding it with all of her soul. I later learned this was Jacqueline Smith who had stood there for over 20 years. She used to be desk clerk there, then became a resident. Now the Motel is the Memphis National Civil Rights Museum, but last time I checked Jacqueline was still there protesting the gentrification of the area, and the celebration of death over life among other things.

I drove south to find Al Green’s Full Gospel Tabernacle Church which I did. I have to remind you that this was all done using maps and addresses. No GoogleMaps, no StreetWise, Ways or SatNav. Got there. It was unoccupied. I paid my respects, went to find a bed for the night, checked into a motel, and then went out to Beale Street, home of the blues. Vibes. Live music everywhere, buskers, neon, beer. A fella on the street asks me if I want to buy a camcorder.

Super sexy sleazy sucker territory Beale Street, Memphis

The suggestion is that it’s a knock-off, no questions asked. He was the Mack Man and I’m a fool so we went ahead and drove to a suburb of Memphis in my car whereupon I gave him $350 and off he went to get the camcorder, and never returned. Wow. What a damn fool. My neck prickled and a feeling not unlike embarrassment crept up my throat and across my face as my stomach sank into my bowels. Jesus H. Christ on ice WEPT. The other sections of this road trip can be accessed at My Pop Life #147 Lost Highway and there will be more, but I’ll just mention in passing where I ended up that night – The Arcade Diner, which is a black-owned diner in South Memphis (where Elvis Presley used to eat banana & peanut butter sandwiches) selling southern staples like grits, sweet potato pancakes, cheeseburgers, BLT etc. That did ‘sweet me’ and I nursed my wounds and the tragic loss of cash and made a plan to survive on the Mastercard from now on. It was touch and go because unbeknown to me it was close to its limit.

The Arcade, South Main St, Memphis

I didn’t visit West Memphis where Little Junior Parker hailed from and which was more of a birth of the blues location than Beale Street possibly, but it was where local white musicians like Steve Cropper, Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn and Charles “Packy” Axton would go to check the local rhythm & blues scene. They formed a band called The Mar-Kays (marquees) who recorded a steaming song called Last Night in 1961 (#3 in the US) which was released by Axton’s mother Estelle on Satellite Records – then Estelle and her brother Jim Stewart formed Stax Records named after them both, and Cropper and Dunn joined with two black musicians Al Clark on drums and Booker T Washington on keys to form Booker T & The MGs, the house band of the record label, the pride of Memphis. I am obsessed with Stax Records.

I really haven’t spent enough of my life in Memphis. Dropped in on the way back from Phoenix on that trip, delivering another car to Indianapolis from Dallas, very low on cash and with a credit card which had started terminally bouncing. I drove to the Arcade Diner and got there in time for dinner, lingered over the banana split and slept in the car outside. Woke up cold to snow at dawn and someone knocking on the car window. It was a local hooker desperate for work at 5.30am. It was surreal. I made my excuses and left, ie I started the engine and turned in the direction of Nashville.

When Al Green name-checked his cousin in 1974 Little Junior Parker had been dead for three years. At 39 years of age he had an operation on a brain tumor from which he didn’t wake up. Al Green talks about carrying on in his name, and two things join these artists for me – one, they like to talk in their records. Some of my favourite talking records include Are You Lonesome Tonight? by Elvis Presley

I wonder if you’re lonesome tonight? Y’know someone said that all the world’s a stage and each must play a part…fate had me playing in love with you as my sweetheart..

Axis Bold As Love has Jimi Hendrix muttering darkly

I’m the one who’s got to die when it’s time for me to die…so let me live my life the way I want to…

Then there’s the classic Stax cut Woman To Woman by Shirley Brown which opens with this

Barbara, this is Shirley you might not know who I am
But the reason I am calling you is because I was going through my old man’s pockets this morning
And I just happened to find your name and number

Pow. But then there’s Barry White the master who is almost always whispering sweet nothings into your ear in a voice two octaves below what I can manage. And here’s Little Junior Parker…

You know, the other day I was walkin’ down the street, I met an ol’ friend of mine
And we stop, we stop and get a little somethin’ to eat
And when I got through, I was: “Say, man, look a-here” – He said: “Yeah, Junior, what’s happening?”
I told him

and then he starts singing this ridiculous note which then goes higher and it is so thrilling as the John Lee Hooker-style guitar zips along beside him that the only word that can do justice to this pure moment is glee. And Al Green also is not averse to expressing pure glee quite liberally in his work. Bursting with glee at the ellipsis.

The only friend of mine who knows this song – as far as I’m aware – is Sir Nick Partridge who has always collected blues records as long as I’ve known him – we met in 1979 and were flatmates for a couple of years in West Hampstead with Pete Thomas and Sali Beresford. We still chat. If you are a buddy and I’ve under-rated your Little Junior Parker appreciation vibes, you may choose to comment below…

This is a joyful song. It is a song full of joy. We need more joy.

My Pop Life #244 : Stay With Me – Lorraine Ellison

Stay With Me   –   Lorraine Ellison

No no, I can’t believe you’re leaving me…

I first met Lewis MacLeod in the downstairs bar of Carr-Saunders Hall, Fitzroy Street in Fresher’s Week, September 1976.  He was sitting with other first-years Derek Sherwin, who’d been at Priory School in my year, and Norman Wilson, who I’d met the day before.  We had football in common, (breaks the ice at parties), and I was introduced to Lewis, who had wavy and very long hair down his back as “A Rangers supporter“.  I looked at Lewis – in fact I think he was introduced as Louie – and asked “Does that mean that you’re a Protestant?”.  Lewis supped his pint and put it down, looking at me without a smile.  “I think that’s a very naive question actually”, he responded.  We became firm friends immediately.

We were both reading Law at the LSE – the London School of Economics – although I’d taken the previous year off and hitch-hiked across North America with Simon Korner after working in a hospital for special needs patients to save money for the trip.  It had been an incredible year.  It was exciting to be in London, walking to college down Tottenham Court Road or through Bloomsbury down to the Aldwych just below Lincoln’s Inn Fields and there to listen to Michael Zander and others lecture us in Contract, Property and the English Legal System.  But we shared far more than Law, even from the early days.  I had long hair too then – but I soon got rid of it after Anarchy In The UK and the first Clash LP was released and the massive subculture of punk beneath our twitchy feet began to rise.  I was always a dedicated follower of fashion, even from my childhood days,  aware of music, hairstyles, gangs.  Always a pop tart.

Norman Wilson and I, autumn 1977, Fitzroy Street London W1

In our second year Lewis and I lived with Derek and Norman on the 4th Floor of Maple St Flats, owned by LSE.  It was a decent-sized apartment opposite Carr-Saunders Hall with an LP constantly on the record player.   We started to do The Guardian crossword every day and checked the answers we hadn’t managed the following day.  In this way we methodically worked out how to crack it, and one morning we did in fact complete the bastard.  And thenceforth never bothered with it again.  During this time Lew and I also compiled an extremely important Beatles A-Level Exam Paper.

Q1.  “She was just seventeen, you know what I mean.”   Discuss

Q3.   Talk about the lack of guitar and use of a) strings and b) horns on The Magical Mystery Tour EP.  Use examples.  Was Harrison simply too stoned to mind over this period?

Q5.   “It’s such a feeling that my love…”  Finish the preceding line with reference to Bob Dylan and marijuana.  Inhale.

And so on.  But the main thing we got into over this year and the following years was soul music.  We discovered it together – sure we knew about the Motown singles, What’s Going On, Otis Redding’s Dock of The Bay and Aretha Franklin’s Say A Little Prayer, of course, but we went deeper, way deeper.   We were mining for soul, pure emotion in song, stuff that made your ears prick up, the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, tears come to your eyes.  We soon found that Stax Records was a goldmine, Otis Redding the King.  Sam and Dave princes too, Carla Thomas the Queen. We loved Wilson Pickett, Curtis Mayfield and Smokey Robinson.  James Brown was the Emporer, self-described Godfather of Soul with very good reason.

I suspect that we were both only dimly aware of race in America, or indeed in the UK.  I may be doing Lewis a disservice, but for me growing up in white East Sussex I was never forced to confront racism.  It was there on British television if we’d had the vision and language to decode it.  But what we cherished as genuine expressions of emotion immortalised on disc (soul music), we later realised were cries of pain and defiant joy released from centuries of slavery and white supremacy.  The sound of pain and courage, generations of loss internalised, managed, endured, a culture of survival in a hostile nation.  This was the soundtrack of black history, along with the gospel music which many of the singers had graduated from, a childhood in the black church leading to local stardom often followed by the crossover to secular song, rhythm and blues, soul music.  A well-trodden path from Sam Cooke to Aretha Franklin, Otis to The Staple Singers, Curtis Mayfield to Donna Summer.  Inevitably our musical quest for moments of exquisite soul became a political quest alongside it thanks to our growing understanding – we were both active in Anti-Apartheid for example.  But our initial position was like a revelation of ignorance – we had so many holes in our knowledge, so many singers to hear and songs to find, so much history to reveal.   LPs were bought with grant money – notably an Atlantic Records box-set of 5 Double Albums of Rhythm & Blues from 1952  doo-wop (The Diamonds’ A Beggar For Your Kisses to 1974 Philly (Major Harris’ Love Won’t Let Me Wait)…

…and everything in-between from Ray Charles, The Coasters, Aretha Franklin, Roberta Flack – an incredible resource for the imaginary Soul A-Level (which we would fail if we took it then!) – along with James Brown’s 30 Golden Greats and Otis Redding’s seminal Otis Blue LP.   And then  I found a book.

The Soul Book changed our world.  This is 1978-9 remember, no internet, only knowledge passed down, read in books or the NME/Melody Maker, or gleaned from careful perusal of a record sleeve.  The Radio.  At the back of the book, a resource : playlists of the writers top 20 favourite soul records.  Stuff we’d never even heard of.  If more than one writer mentioned a tune, bang, we simply had to have it.  It was a short walk down Charlotte Street to the record shops and boutiques of Hanway Street and Berwick Street.  Pre-CD these Aladdin’s caves were stuffed with vinyl.  And 45s were flicked through, perused, and purchased, treasure such as I’ll Take Good Care Of You by Garnet Mimms & The Enchanters, Clean Up Woman by Betty Wright and Stay With Me by Lorraine Ellison.  This last song was like a blinding blast of light which ripped our hearts out, such is the intensity and commitment of Lorraine’s testament to bottomless heartbreak. It topped our own soul chart from that day forth, and still does.

24th June 1978. Lewis at Knebworth Festival watching Devo, Tom Petty, Jefferson Starship

We also went to gigs together, paying our respects to Smokey Robinson, Aswad, The Who, Prince, Parliament/Funkadelic The Specials and Roxy Music among many others.  As we finished University and I moved to West Hampstead and then Finsbury Park.  I started to take the train down to Brighton on Saturday mornings to watch my football team, and Lewis started to accompany me.  Yes, he was a Glasgow Rangers fan with a sometimes impenetrable accent which became thicker and more thicketed with drink, but he became an Albion fan which was very moving.  He was living in Mile End by now and had got to know Conrad Ryle in his own right who was living there next door in Tredegar Square.   We went to the great Rock Against Racism gig in Victoria Park with The Clash, Tom Robinson Band and Steel Pulse headlining.  We watched Brighton & Hove Albion at The Goldstone Ground with Conrad, his brother Martin, my brother Paul and Pete Smurthwaite, Andy Holmes.

Nick Partridge, Lewis MacLeod, Pete Smurthwaite, Paul Brown, Conrad Ryle, Martin Ryle, Kate Soper before visiting The Goldstone Ground in Hove on a Saturday afternoon in the early 80s

One night in late 79 we took magic mushrooms in Lew’s tower block flat on the Isle of Dogs.  I think it was new for both of us.  He had a spectacular view looking West down the river Thames but as the night fell and the mushrooms kicked in I started to feel panic.  The incredible surge of energy reminded me of LSD – the rush which kicks in after about an hour of ingestion.  We were playing records as ever when I was getting fidgety, Blue Öyster Cult’s live LP Some Enchanted Evening was on the deck and its speed-metal crispness was too perfect for the scene.  When their cover of The Animal’s song We Gotta Get Out Of This Place kicked into gear it was both the best and worst song I had ever heard.  I was buzzed off my tits and the song was forcing me OUT of the tower block flat and into a taxi then across the river and south, down to Honor Oak SE23 where I’d lived six months earlier with Mike and Hil and Rosie (my 3rd year at LSE).   They were all in and didn’t appear to mind two buzzed-up punks dropping in for a glass of wine, but I was speeding so much that I couldn’t bear to stand still and so I went outside into the back garden and ran round and round the perimeter for about 20 minutes.   That seemed to do the trick.  Lewis and I thanked our hosts and walked back outside.  Near that house in Canonbie Road was a small park, Honor Oak Park and we climbed up One Tree Hill and sat at the top until dawn smoking dope and slowly coming down, solving the problems of the universe as we did.

Lorraine Ellison

Lewis moved to Reading and worked for the BBC as a journalist in the Monitoring Department in Caversham Park.  He specialised in South Asia, in particular Bangladesh.   He had a long on-again off-again relationship with Alex, a lovely woman he’d met in London.  I would see him for birthdays and other parties while I lived in Archway Road in London, and after we moved to Brighton in the 90s he would travel down for football or just a day trip.

Lewis, Gaynor, Conrad and Simon in the back garden of Archway Road, London 1990

I received an email this Monday just gone from his sister Mairi telling me that Lewis had died in July.  I was broken in half by this news and wept all day on and off.  Lewis lost a lung about 20 years ago and was always really skinny with a shocking cough. He never stopped smoking for long, and drank whisky like a Scot.  Conrad saw him more recently at a Brighton game pre-covid and felt that he wasn’t well, and wasn’t long for this world.  But he felt like the ultimate survivor to me. Until Monday.

Pete, Chris Clark, Erica Clarke, Sophie Holmes, then Gaynor and Conrad just married, best man Lewis, Jenny, me, Andy  – in Lewes 5th August 1989

He’d come down to Brighton for my 60th birthday party in 2017, and was nervous about meeting new people – but there were plenty from the old days there too – Nick Partridge, Tony Roose, Norman Wilson and Conrad.  When Lewis and Conrad saw each other in the party they both burst into tears, because each one of them thought that the other had died.  It was both hilarious and touching.  The very last time I saw Lewis was in the spring of 2018 when my LSE girlfriend Mumtaz Keshani died of cancer and I flew back from New York at short notice for the funeral.  I told the gang who’d known her the time and place of the funeral – in Hendon mosque, then the cemetery – but only Lewis made it that morning.

Uncle Ralph, Lewis and Mikey Keshani at the funeral of Mikey’s mum Mumtaz, August 2018

He was an original fellow, often seeming to be from another dimension or a previous century, possibly a Dickens novel.  One of my favourite Lewis anecdotes comes from that first bar under Carr-Saunders Hall.  People were rude in there. Students.  Lewis would be standing at the bar with his pint of Guinness settling, and a rugger bugger of some sort would be pushing in trying to get served and nearly knocking him off his feet.  Lewis instinctively rammed his Guinness into the toff’s elbow while shouting “fucking hell mate!” in his best Gorbals.  The hooray turned round and saw Guinness froth on the elbow of his coat, apologised and bought Lou another pint.  Ha.

We would go to see plays together too, London being a good place to see plays.  Whenever he bought a programme for a play or a football match, or was in an art gallery and found a wordy plaque, he would refer to these arrangements of words as The Answers.  “What does it say in The Answers?” he would ask.  One of my favourite sayings to this day.

My girlfriend in the late 80s was Rita Wolf, who now lives like Jenny and I in New York City.  She has just reminded me that we travelled up to Glasgow to see the inaugural production of Peter Brook’s extraordinary production of the Mahabharata at The Tramshed and met Lewis up there on his home turf.

Fiercely progressive and essentially Marxist in his politics, he proudly worked on the line at Ford’s Dagenham and drove a Routemaster bus for London Transport before moving to the BBC and was involved in the Union there.  He read profusely and was well-versed in a large number of areas, particularly history, politics and current affairs.  A very bright man.  I am extremely sad at his death.  Mairi told me that shortly his ashes will be taken to the Isle Of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides via Stornaway where I always wanted to visit with him and never made it.  Rest in Peace dear Lewis.  What a short life it is.

Pete and Lewis on Brighton Beach, 1983 (?)

And so I get to some kind of ending for this piece, and what are The Answers?  A list of things we did together, memories almost impossible to recall of jokes, smokes and fervent discussion.  When I learned of his death, I was working on a weekend stint as temporary guru to SongBar, an internet music community that compiles a playlist every week on a different topic.  We take it in turns to be guru, the compiler, and everyone else shouts suggestions.  On a Monday I’m to be found compiling the A-List and the B-list from the various shouts, and awaiting last-minute golden shots when I got Mairi’s email.  It knocked me off-centre, but I still had to complete the work.  The songs could scarcely be heard now.  This is what I wrote at the top of the article:

No writing from me this week. Yesterday I was told that my friend Lewis MacLeod, who went to the LSE with me in the late 1970s to study law and who stayed a good friend, had died in July of heart failure. This crushed me, so that every piece of music was now for him, for us, for moments gained and moments lost forever, for memories and sadness, thus I have nothing to say about the music this week. It will speak for itself. It is for my dear friend Lewis.  Rest in Peace, when your ashes reach the Isle.

And for those who like choir music  – from all corners of the earth I should add, here is the link to SongBar :

https://www.song-bar.com/song-blog/playlists-songs-featuring-choirs

I don’t feel like I’ve done Lewis justice with these paltry words, this rumination in absentia, this frail and patchy obituary.  I prefer the word eulogy.  I wish I could write him a song and sing it.    This one will be for you dear friend – from 1966, the mighty Lorraine Ellison and Stay With Me.  Written and produced by Jerry Ragavoy with a full 45-piece orchestra after Frank Sinatra cancelled a session.  Lightning in a bottle.  Outstanding.  Researchers, soul miners and law students all agree : this is the finest soul record of all time.

My Pop Life #238 : Hot Pants – James Brown

Hot Pants   –   James Brown

Hot Pants…

Number 2 Somerfield Road, Finsbury Park.  Top flat – under the eaves, a one-room attic dwelling with two sloping ceilings.  I lived there with Mumtaz, my girlfriend whom I’d left in 1980 to explore South America with my brother Paul for a year’s travel, but returned after four months spent in Mexico with tail between legs and Hepatitus B.  She took me back in, and life went on.  Finsbury Park, as noted in My Pop Life #42 was a delight.  Every now and again we could hear a muffled roar of delight from Highbury as Arsenal scored.   Not that often obviously, ha ha ha.  One-nil to The Arsenal was the 80s cry.   My beloved Brighton & Hove Albion’s cup run in 1983 took us to a semi-final against Sheffield Wednesday at Highbury.   Down the road.  I went to the game, which we won 2-1 thanks to a brilliant Jimmy Case free kick.  We were in the Cup Final!  1983 was clearly a blessing all round.  Laurie Jones was downstairs, communist, comrade, veteran of the Cable St riots against Moseley’s blackshirts and maker of his own wine.   In work mode :  the premiere and run of  Steven Berkoff’s “West” at the Donmar Warehouse in May of that year.   My first fully professional, fully paid proper acting job.  We ran there for five months then filmed it for the new Channel 4 (see Let’s Dance My Pop Life #221).

In saxophone playing mode I was on this tune – Hot Pants.  Deceptively simple, it has to be precise, punchy, tongued exactly, every note must be the right length, it must attack, and the timing is everything.  Like all of James Brown’s magnificent work, the percussive element is primary, and the bulk of the tune is carried over one chord until the bridge, the long awaited release of the bridge.  Take it to the bridge.  Shall I take it to the bridge?  The famous cry from Sex Machine.  One of the genius elements of James Brown is how long you have to wait for the bridge in almost every song.  He knows his dynamics.  So did George Mack.

Who?  This fella, a tremendous Anglo-Nigerian singer from Finsbury Park.  Where did we meet?  How did we find out that we were both musicians?  I cannae remember captain.  But this I do know – I was playing Hot Pants in the flat while Taj was at work because the band I was in at this time – George’s band Arc Connexxion – had it in their set.   I was one of three horns in Arc Connexxion, an afro-pop outfit which was a bit Fela Kuti, a bit soul, a bit funk, and a bit of George’s own compositions.  It was fun.  Looking back, it is exactly the kind of band I long to play in right now, here in New York : dance music with a brass/woodwind section, african-influenced.

I’d bought James Brown’s 30 Golden Hits while I was at LSE a few years earlier, exploring the landscape of soul music with my Glaswegian friend Lewis MacLeod. We were beyond aficionados, we were obsessed with hunting down the very best soul tunes of the previous 25 years.  Motown of course, Stax Records indeed, Atlantic’s huge six-album box set, Philadelphia Records and then all the other smaller labels – Sue Records, Curtom, Brunswick, SAR, Hi, et al.  I remember buying Stay With Me Baby by Lorraine Ellison one day like finding treasure on a desert island and we played it over and over, What A Difference A Day Makes by Esther Phillips, Why Can’t We Live Together by Timmy Thomas, Love TKO by Teddy Pendergrass, all golden.

But James Brown was the record which got played a lot.  James Brown was on King Records, an independent label based in Cincinatti, Ohio. The greatest hits album was on Polydor and was a great primer to the man’s genius.  Hard to remember life before the internet, but the moment I saw Please Please Please on television I’ll never forget – the famous cape drama, the anguish, the concerned bandmates, the eruption of emotion when the cape is cast aside Yet Again. It’s magical theatre of soul music so it is, check it out, never gets old :

Lewis and I were hooked frankly.  Each song was better than the last – I Got You, Night Train, Think, I Feel Good, Out Of Sight, Try Me, I’ll Go Crazy,  Poppa’s Got A Brand New Bag, Cold Sweat.  We wished we could see him live.   He never came.  But, eventually, he did.  It was in Brighton one summer in Stanmer Park in the year 2000.  It was called the Essential Festival.  James Brown’s star had waned, he hadn’t charted for years, but his name was still synonymous with legend.  However, he was 67 years old, all the hype was that he only did 20 minutes in all, the bulk of the show was the band and younger singers & rappers.  And by then I’d immersed myself in Live At The Apollo the greatest Live Album of all time, and gorged on the youtube clips of the man in his prime, It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World, Say It Loud (I’m Black And I’m Proud) and the ubiquitous, brilliant Sex Machine.  I didn’t want those images to be replaced by a disappointment.  So I actually chose not to go.  Do I regret it now?  Kind of.  Yes.  Of course.  Other people I’ve rocked up to when in their 70s – McCartney, Aretha, Roberta Flack – and one in his 90s the amazing Tony Bennett – were all superb.  We were a little nervous about Aretha because there was some word of mouth that sometimes she “doesn’t turn up”, well she certainly did that night (see My Pop Life #225) god bless her, so that was nonsense.  But I remember distinctly deciding to swerve the great Godfather of Soul James Brown.  A fairly childish decision really.  The great festival- going kid of the 1970s had turned into the tight-assed muso-snob of the millenium.  But since I wasn’t there, I can’t tell you about The Essential Festival that year.  Silly me.

Arc Connexxion rehearsed at George’s house just down Blackstock Road from where I lived.  Once a week in the evening.  I do not remember the rest of the band at all.  Who were they?  A racially mixed bunch who could play Motown, Fela and James Brown.  Out of my league perhaps, but playing a James Brown horn line is considerably easier than attempting John Coltrane or Stan Getz (see Desafinado My Pop Life #68), in fact playing in a horn section (this was my first time) is easier than playing solo.  But you have to be tight.  Tight as a camel’s arse in a sandstorm tight. The tongue on the reed has to be exact.  Percussive.  I loved it.  Our crowning moment was playing at Notting Hill Carnival after Aswad in August 1983 where we were last on the bill, and didn’t get to play Hot Pants after all (see My Pop Life #42).  We were hustled on and told we could play one song before the curfew and Carnival had to close.  We played Martha Reeves’ Dancing In The Street, and hundreds of people who didn’t want to go home yet did just that.  Fantastic.  It was our biggest crowd ever.

Jenny and Lulu went to the James Brown gig in 2000 and reported back disappointment and a sense of a great artist being wheeled out, a circus act.  Jenny says that apparently James Brown actually was James Brown for one whole song (I should have gone), after which he went off and the young performers, rappers and funkateers played for 15 minutes before he came back, but he just couldn’t do it again and he simply stopped being James Brown and became a kind of JB tribute act and so she was sad.  So was Lulu.  A few years later Jenny and her sister Lucy saw Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis who were both in their late 80s and while Chuck was still Chuck Berry, Jerry was on a zimmer frame and scarcely present.  I’ve felt this way about Brian Wilson, my absolute musical hero, for the last few years.  They’re wheeling out a cash cow.  He’s not Brian anymore.  Leave him be.

But James Brown?  If you think about it he has to be the greatest genius of popular music.  You could argue Louis Armstrong and it might be difficult to resist.  But JB is a giant.  He emerged from the 1950s as a fully formed soul star before the term had even been invented, fusing R & B and gospel into a funk sound a whole decade before it was even thought of.  During the 1960s the sound was honed and streamlined, the melody lines erased and the rhythms amplified and tightened.  The Vocals were punctuated howls, shrieks, shouts and calls.  Astounding. Pure dance music.  Popular, political, immersive, irresistible.  He was the first and most popular artist to be sampled on the turntables of DJs in the South Bronx, the drum breaks of Clyde Stubblefield are all over old skool hip hop.  All hip hop.  When he stole the rhythm and riff of Bowie & Lennon’s Fame from Young Americans for his song Hot (I Need To Be Loved, Loved, Loved) in 1975, no one blinked.  I suspect Bowie thought it was an honour frankly, which indeed it was. JB was infamous for running his band like a military outfit, musicians would get fined for missing a cue or a bum note or a snare hit on the wrong beat or being seconds late for rehearsal.  Not greasing their patent leather shoes or tying their bowtie.  A number of times bandleader PeeWee Ellis walked out only to come back, but in 1970, Ellis, Stubblefield, Fred Wesley and the other Famous Flames never came back and JB then recruited players from Cincinatti band The Pacemakers to replace them, include Bootsy Collins (see Give Up The Funk My Pop Life #138). He called the new band The J.B.s.  His rhythms are in house music, soul music, funk, hip hop, jungle, drum & bass, disco, you name it.  Michael Jackson’s greatest influence.  I can’t do him justice in this bloglet of mine and by the way he was probably bonkers too but what a musical giant.  What a towering extraordinary figure in the musical landscape. What a force.

When The Brighton Beach Boys played people’s parties or weddings we would play a whole load of other material – disco, funk, ska, rock n roll and even Steely Dan and ELO, and when he can, our very own nutty drummer the itinerant rhythmicist Theseus Gerrard (mentioned in My Pop Life #111 and others) gets up to sing Get Up Offa That Thing and the whole room goes up to a different level.  We played it at Caroline Lucas’ 50th birthday in Brighton at the Indica Gallery in town which is based in an old church, and Theseus quite naturally climbed into the still-present pulpit to deliver his message of funk.  He’s a natural the fucker.  The funk of forty thousand years.

So I’ve played at least two James Brown songs in my short musical career.  Hot Pants is my favourite.  Could I get to play anymore before my ultimate death?  I’m 63 now.  Time is ticking…

 

The original number one hit single from 1971, Parts One & Two

Live and direct in 1985…

My Pop Life #217 : Optimistic – Sounds of Blackness

Optimistic – Sounds of Blackness

*

as long as you keep your head to the sky 

*

I owe everything to my wife in the end.  Almost everything positive in my life has come from her incredible energy, her spirit, her capacity for love above all else.   This is her song.

I write from my dressing room on Broadway.

dressing room, Jacobs Theatre, 45th & 8th

Last August 2018 it was – I was in Malibu with my friend Stephen Kalinich (see My Pop Life #169 : The Magic Hand) when Jenny messaged me – could I make a meeting at 4pm the following afternoon in Los Angeles – with her Agency?  She’d spoken to the boss – Scott Manners – and he’d decided to relax his rule about not representing married couples.  They had an office in New York, and one in Los Angeles.  The next day I am seated at a desk as seven agents, (including Glenn Salners & Michael Chance), ask me questions.  They all love Jenny, but what is my raison d’irt track ?  They’d seen the showreel and liked it.  Good range.  Well, I say, I like to do accents, characters, but I don’t do theatre.  It was a line I’d been using for thirty years.  Ever since playing Macbeth at the Liverpool Everyman in fact, (see My Pop Life #108) although I had done one more play since then at the RSC in 1989, and one at The Bush in 2009.  I do camera.  TV, film. I’m not sure how to do theatre acting.  It seems to require lying on a large scale, expanding the performance to reach the back row, projecting, pretending TOO MUCH.  My wife Jenny Jules is very good at it, in fact she is excellent.  Quite superb.  Better than me by quite a way.  She does the stage stuff, I do the camera stuff, largely.  It’s an amicable if archetypal arrangement.

But that is the story.  They nod, we chat, it feels good.

About a month later, I meet the New York office, including Scott.  He says he is worried by some things I said at the LA meeting.  Specifically the part about Not Doing Theatre.  Well, I said, following my own pre-recorded script, the story I’d been telling myself for the last 30 years : that “I don’t do theatre”.  I was a camera actor, a minimalist whose talent was for microscopic changes of mood and thought that needed a camera close-up into my boat-race. The Agency listened, nodded and Scott said “Ralph, that’s going to be a problem for us.  We use the theatre to build careers.”

“OK then”  I said,  “I’ll do some theatre“.

It was time.

They signed me up.  Two months later, Scott sends me the script and one particular scene from The Ferryman by Jez Butterworth.  I’d seen it in London with Paulette Randall earlier that year.    My audition, just before Christmas, was with director Sam Mendes who’d asked me why I was going back onstage.  I told him that my wife had scored a great gig (couldn’t say what!) which meant that I really didn’t need to work in 2019, so the shackles were off and maybe I felt it was time to get scared again after only one stage performance in the last 30 years.  He reckoned they could provide that.  I’d practised a Derry accent over the weekend listening to Martin McGuinness on Youtube, and learned the lines.  It felt good.  I was offered the part the following lunchtime.

My shadow falls across Broadway, January 2019

Jenny is the theatre actor, she plugs in on stage and burns incandescent like the sun.  Anyone who has seen her, in Ruined, Sweat, The Homecoming, Wine In The Wilderness, The Crucible, Julius Caesar, Her Portmanteau, Two Trains Running, Gem of the Ocean, Pecong,  The Colour of Justice, The Vagina Monologues, Fabulation, Born Bad, Big White Fog, Death & The King’s Horseman, A Raisin In The Sun, Moon On A Rainbow Shawl or Father Comes Home From The Wars knows what I mean.  She is luminescent.   She makes my eyes water, always does.  So proud and moved, so thrilled to see her every time.  I usually go six or seven times to a show she is doing.  I make the money, she does the art.  What’s the story again ? – I subsidised the theatre via TV shows & movies.  Yaawn.  I think we’d both been telling this story to be honest, we’d just got used to it.   The story was tired and had become bollocks.

On day one of rehearsal Tim Hoare introduced himself to me as the director.  Sam wasn’t going to be around.  I told Tim “my story” and how intrepid and scared I felt going back into the theatre.  He told me how Paddy Considine had never done a play when he started in The Ferryman in London.   Tim then nursed me through the rehearsal process with ease, fairness, compassion and great emotional literacy.  I was back in my twenties, in a rehearsal room with a new family, working on a piece of literature that we would stand on its feet together.  Back when I fell in love with the idea of being an actor.

The Ferryman

There are twenty-one actors in the cast plus a baby & the animals, it is a monster three-hour banquet of a play set in South Armagh & Derry in the North of Ireland in 1981 during the Hunger Strike.   I play IRA Commander Jimmy Muldoon. Most of the cast were new, and most of them were American.  Charles Dale, Fionnula Flanagan, Glenn Speers and the children (Brooklyn Shuck, Willow McCarthy Michael McCarthy & Matilda Lawler) were staying on from the Broadway cast.  Charles is Welsh, Fionnula and Glenn are southern & northern Irish.  The kids are all Americans doing a Northern Irish accent (very well).  The new company included the lovely Brian D’Arcy James as Quinn, Holley Fain as Caitlin and Emily Bergl as Mary, Fred Applegate as Uncle Pat and Annie McDonough as Aunt Pat, Graham Winton as Magennis the IRA man with the Prod surname, and Shuler Hensley as Tom Kettle the Englishman in Crossmaglen.  Sean Maloney and Terence Keeney came over from the West End company and the Guinness started to flow, Collin Kelly-Sordelet (Jersey boy!), Ethan Dubin (Brooklyn boy!!), Julia Nightingale (starlet) and Jack diFalco (doing the accent all day and all night) joined us in the various Irish bars of Hell’s Kitchen.  The belly started to grow.  Stories, politics, Ireland, the Troubles. We drank.  We bonded.

Then we moved to the theatre on 45th St.  The show was still on in the evening, so we worked from 12-4pm on the stage.  Shared dressing rooms with the company and had to clear out every day.  The day approached.  For my Broadway debut.  At the age of 61 and a half.  What blessings are these.

Broadway virgins no more : Julia, Sean, Terry, me, Ethan and Annie

Me and Brian D’Arcy James on opening night

What is inescapably extraordinary is this simple fact : the play is set in South Armagh in August 1981.  If you look back at an early entry in my story (My Pop Life #13 : The Green Fields of France) it is the story of a younger version of me in South Armagh, August 1981.  Crossmaglen.  The Troops Out Movement, protected by the IRA through the countryside on a delegation to the British Army barracks there.  A quite extraordinary circle back through my own history, which I discussed in rehearsals.  How could I not ?  Being told by Jean in West Belfast not to go down the shop in Ballymurphy for cigarettes on my own because I’ll get popped once they hear my accent.  Seeing The Undertones in Finsbury Park and other gigs with Fergal Sharkey stripping down one song at a time from a parka to bare chest as he warbled through their pop-punk repertoire.  Seeing Bobby Sands murals on the Falls Road the size of a house.  Being in a war-zone.  The violence of those years in England – Brixton going up in flames, the Falklands War, the NF, the miner’s strike, IRA bombs in Brighton (see My Pop Life #185 : Between The Wars).

The Ferryman cast & crew in rehearsal, Feb 2019

The infamous IRA scene at the top of Act 3 in rehearsal : Collin Kelly-Sordelet, Sean Delaney, Terry Keeley, Michael McCarthy, Jack diFalco

But beyond all of that, my own blood rushing through my veins every day as I boarded the Q train over the bridge to Manhattan with all the straphangers at 9.00am, finally feeling like a New Yorker.  I revisited my own love affair with acting, where I started, in the theatre.  Throughout my 20s I had done plays, above pubs, at the Edinburgh Festival, at the Royal Court, the Donmar, the Tricycle, the RSC.  I’d even written a couple.  Then after a terrible experience at Liverpool Everyman, revealed in My Pop Life #108 : Sumer Is Icumen In, I quit the stage and concentrated on TV and film acting.  Luckily Withnail & I  happened around the same time, and although it would take a few years to permeate the cultural landscape, my future was, unbeknown to me, already assured.  Lucky doesn’t cover it.  I am simply born protected & blessed and always have been.  I am forever grateful.  There was a moment of course in the joy of rehearsal when I thought – wow!  I should’ve gone back to the theatre YEARS AGO, but hey.  At least I got there.  I absolutely feel at home again.  Born again happy.

Ben, associate director, and Tim Hoare at work

And as Tim said to me on the day of the Dress Rehearsal – “you are a stage animal“.  Such a terrific endorsement at a critical time.  I had the Juice.  I didn’t know that at the start of rehearsal but now I could feel it.  I was using an old muscle and it still worked.  This in itself has been a huge thrill.

The Ferryman – the prologue : Glenn, Charlie, me, Graham

And all the while, there was Jenny alongside me as ever, nurturing and supporting, loving and healing, and holding her own secret, and rehearsing her own mighty show, for she had been cast back in September 2018 and signed an NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) to not release the information to anyone.  We lived in a state of heightened purse-lipped security for three months.  Not even the word “Broadway” was to be uttered to any friends or relations of rabbit. The best gig she’d ever scored and she couldn’t tell anyone.  Until the day my deal was done, just before Christmas, and then there was the Press Release.

Jenny Jules as Hermione Granger

Jenny was going into another hit Broadway show :  Harry Potter & The Cursed Child, replacing our friend Noma Dumesweni as Hermione Granger.  For a year.  At least.  This was the secret we had held for three months.  Mmmmmmnnnnn.  Biting the soles of our feet.  Such a Great Part.  Such a great show.  I’d seen it with Cush Jumbo & Sean Griffin and Rose Leslie in 2018.  Noma was in the cast.  So thrilling, such a wonderful piece of theatre, full of real magic.  So suddenly we were both Broadway Babes, inheriting parts in shows which were already hits, had already been reviewed and were running on with new companies.  Both produced by Sonia Friedman.  We were local hire in the two West End hit transfers.  Perhaps not that surprising, thinking about it.  It had taken us five years.  We were on Cloud Nine.

Cloud Nine – kind of

Jenny started rehearsing long before I did, and didn’t open until a month after we’d opened – a fifteen-week rehearsal period all in all.  The Cursed Child show is in two parts, two complete plays, and they perform each one four times a week, eight show a week in all, the same as The Ferryman.

Ron, Harry, Hermione – Broadway 2019

The Cursed Child is considerably more technical than our traditional play which obeys the unities of place and time, set inside a farmhouse in Armagh.  The Cursed Child has magic for a start.  To say more would be to spoil the surprises for those who haven’t seen it yet.  But they needed their fifteen weeks.  Jenny opened last night in Part One, and tonight in Part Two.  Her sister Mandy (Natasha, Reginelle, Bad) came over for the opening and is sitting there tonight.  She’ll come to see The Ferryman tomorrow night.  What a star.

Max & his dad Sean

Yesterday dear friends Cush and Sean came to the Ferryman matinee.  They loved it.  They’d seen it twice before, and told me this was their favourite.  That was a secret of course.  This isn’t :  Jenny and I are Oddparents to their son Maximilian who is almost one beautiful year old.  After eating and walking up to the flower shop with them for Jenny’s first night bouquet, I split and bought a bottle of Yoichi Japanese whisky to take up to the lads’ dressing room after the evening show.  They hold an impromptu whiskey bar upstairs every night and it was time for me to contribute.  I deliberately use both spellings as we drink both whiskies.  We finished it in 40 minutes between the seven of us, then walked two blocks to Bar Centrale to meet Jenny, her sister Mandy, her room-mate Diane Davis (Ginny) and Charles Randolph-Wright our friend.  Sean and Terry came with me.  We had a few drinks and some toasty cheese and jumped in a taxi home.  Just a few mates from two shows.  It was a perfect end to a perfect day.  No need for Lou Reed after all.

And it was Jenny who’d done it.  Who’d spoken to her agent and wondered if he would represent me.  Who’d sent the showreel. I’d been without an agent all year, since sacking Oriana Elia in January 2018.  Another tedious story.  I have a manager, Michael Lazo at Untitled in LA.  And I’d done a movie early in the year that he had organised as a straight offer – Gemini Man with Will Smith, directed by Ang Lee.  Nice gig.  But I hadn’t acted since.  I’d written a movie and co-written a 4-part TV show so I hadn’t exactly been idle.  But she’d moved some earth and sorted me out.  She didn’t want me idle when she opened on Broadway.  Something to worry about.  And now here we were both on Broadway, at the same time.  I will forever be grateful to her, for her optimism and faith and love.  For her fierce heart.  For her fire and her ice.  And for just being her beautiful self.  Did I mention I was lucky ?

This tune literally lifts her heart.  From 1991, when we were courting, it is a gospel groove from Sounds of Blackness, a large soul/jazz/gospel ensemble out of Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Run by Gary Hines and produced by Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis.  Jam/Lewis formed a band called Flyte Time with Alexander O’Neal in the 1980s who then supported Prince on tour (but now called The Time and with Morris Day on lead vocals).  They then went on to produce Just Be Good To Me for The SOS Band and Janet Jackson’s hit albums Control & Velvet Rope.

In 1991 they nurtured their neighbours Sounds of Blackness, through their 2nd LP The Evolution of Gospel.  This – Optimistic – was the lead single.  It is pure UP music, and Very Jenny.  Very Infectious.  I swear she could heal the world on her own if she had time.  Their 3rd LP Africa to America : The Sound of the Drum is even better and I commend it also to thy ears.  Communal groove music.

Thank you my darling.  You are my world.

Never say die

My Pop Life #135 : I Can’t Hear You – Betty Everett

I Can’t Hear You   –   Betty Everett

you walked out on me once too often now

and I can’t take no more of your jive and that’s the truth

I ain’t about to let you run me into the ground

this girl ain’t throwing away her youth

Betty Everett 1963

The sub-heading of this blog is ‘My Life In The Gush Of Boasts’.  Stand by.  This is a strange, convoluted, small-world-but-wouldn’t-want-to-paint-it story.  I guess the reason why we live in New York now is down to Jenny Jules my talented and beautiful wife, who played the part of Mama Nadi in Lynn Nottage‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined at the Almeida in 2010.   Exactly one year later, Lynn asked Charles Randolph Wright to cast Jenny again in the production he was directing at Arena Stage in Washington D.C.  Charles and Jenny spoke on Skype and the matter was sealed.  After one breakfast with Charles in Washington one morning I knew he would be a friend for life.   It started to feel as if maybe we might end up living on the east coast of America, rather than the west coast where we have spent so much time over the last 25 years.  But we did nothing about it until 3 years later when Phyllida Lloyd‘s all-female production of Julius Caesar in which Jenny was playing the redoubtable Cassius transferred from the Donmar Warehouse in London to St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in the autumn of 2014.  Jenny was housed in a beautiful apartment in Brooklyn Heights for the run, and we stepped outside one bright blue morning and swooned. “We could live here” we said, not realising that we were in the equivalent of Hampstead, and couldn’t ever afford it.    Almost on whim, three months later we were here with two suitcases and a cat each.  The Green Cards we already had from the LA years.  All we needed was work and friends.

Brooklyn

The work came slowly at first then more steadily.  Jenny has already been in a new play by Suzan-Lori Parks called Father Comes Home From The Wars parts 1,2 & 3, and next year she will be on Broadway in Arthur Miller’s  The Crucible.  Phyllida’s 2nd all-female Shakespeare, Henry IV parts one and two combined just finished at the new St Ann’s and Jenny played Worcester and Peto, the high and the low.  My work has been mainly on American TV with parts in Elementary, Agent Carter, Turn, The Blacklist and Legends.   Occasionally I go back to Europe to do some work there.  Work has been fine.

Friends – now making friends is harder, especially perhaps as one gets older and doesn’t socialise quite as much.  I need to find another band to play with, because I miss my old gang.  Our friends here are a tight bunch based mainly on Jenny’s theatrical adventures – thus writer Lynn Nottage and her husband Tony Gerber are our bedrock, with their two children Ruby and Melkamu.   Actors Segun Akande, Donnetta Lavinia Grays and Babs Olusanmokun from the Ruined D.C. cast all live here, and we see them for movies, theatre-readings, and now, weddings !  Segun is marrying Lucy in January 2016.   Things to look forward to!

Jenny Jules & Charles Randolph Wright 2014

Charles  lives in the Village and after directing Ruined in D.C. spent the next two years putting together the mighty musical MOTOWN with Berry Gordy (!) which is Berry’s life story and the history of that great record label Tamla Motown which changed all of our lives.  It opened on Broadway in 2013 (we snaffled a ticket and I will blog it on another occasion) and it is now touring the world – it opens in London in spring 2016.   After we moved to New York in early 2014, Charles introduced us to his lovely friends Vicki Wickham and Nona Hendryx, who came down to Washington and saw Jenny in 2011, and loved her.

Nona Hendryx & Vicki Wickham

So.

We are seeing Charles, Nona, and Vicki  tonight for New Year’s Eve, a small but delightful group, avoiding Times Square and other large drunken gatherings.  Yesterday Vicki sent me a recording of a radio show which she had made earlier in 2015 in London for the BBC.  It was a celebration of the 50th Anniversary of a show called The Sound Of Motown which was produced by Vicki 50 years ago !  Can you hear the soup thickening?

Vicki was then the producer on Ready, Steady, Go! which was the first pop TV show in the UK and was massively influential pre-Top Of The Pops.  The proof was  The Sound Of Motown in 1965 when Little Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, Martha Reeves & The Vandellas and The Supremes all made their first appearances on UK television, in the same show, with Dusty Springfield – they were all close-to-unknown acts in the UK at the time.  This is despite The Beatles having three Motown songs on their first LP – the public first saw all these acts together on their black and white TV sets in April 1965 on Rediffusion.

The Motown Revue at Marble Arch, London in 1965

It was Vicki’s enthusiasm and drive and Dusty’s stardom which made it happen – they’d seen Little Stevie Wonder in Paris doing his hit Fingertips and were bowled over.  Astonishingly in retrospect, the TV company only agreed to host Motown if Dusty Springfield was involved.  She was only too happy to join in and sang various duets – including this song – with Martha Reeves.

Martha Reeves,the Vandellas, Dusty Springfield

So I’m sitting listening to this radio show with Paul Gambaccini, that motormouth media man interviewing Vicki and alongside her the great Berry Gordy, (now in his 80s !) founder of Motown, writer of ‘Money‘ and best friend of Smokey Robinson (see My Pop Life #3) and there the BBC are trying to recreate some of the songs that featured on that night in 1965 with modern artists.   Thus we get Lamar singing My Girl for instance.  And I’m thinking – all these connections – Charles and Vicki – and suddenly Gambaccini announces I Can’t Hear You No More  “and here to sing it for us is Lucy Jules !“

the great Lucy Jules

Could have knocked me down wiv a fevver guv.  Lucy of course is Jenny’s sister, my sister.  She is a professional singer.  She’s a brilliant singer, always has been.  She is very dear to me, naturally, I’ve watched her sing over the years, I’ve accompanied her, she has sung with my band and there she is on the radio doing connections singing !  She kills the song, so do the house band.  But it lights a living echo within.   The amount of coincidences and small-world shrinkage shuffles is starting to ‘do my head in‘ as they say in London,  but hear this : the song Lucy Jules is singing is one which I owned back in my 20s, back in my soul-music-odyssey days, a tremendous song called I Can’t Hear You, or sometimes called Can’t Hear You No More, depending on who is singing it.   And I haven’t heard it for 30 flipping years.  I had it on a 45rpm 7-inch vinyl single by the great Betty Everett.   It was her follow-up to the huge Shoop Shoop Song which I also had on 7-inch :

“if you wanna know if he loves you so, it’s in his kiss : that’s where it is !”

I think the reason why I had some singles by her was down to Elvis Costello covering her 1965 hit Getting Mighty Crowded in 1980 as an out-take of the personal favourite Get Happy LP – which appeared on Taking Liberties, an album of out-takes and B-sides.  For a musical archeologist like me there were plenty of clues there, back to the time when soul music was made out of soul.      I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down (original by Sam & Dave) was one of the singles from that tremendous LP.

Betty Everett in 1963

Betty Everett was born in Mississippi and moved to Chicago in her early 20s, signing a deal with Calvin Carter and Vee Jay records (the first US label to sign The Beatles).  Her second single “You’re No Good” is also a tremendous blues/pop song and was a hit for Linda Ronstadt in 1975.  But this one was always my favourite.  So to suddenly hear it on the radio, sung by MY SISTER was ridiculous.  As I say, I hadn’t heard it since 1985 when I finally at the 3rd attempt left my girlfriend Mumtaz and made the mistake of leaving my record collection behind.  I never saw any of those records again.   All the punk singles in picture sleeves, LPs from my teenage years, soul 45s, african records, everything.   It hurt, but I guess Mumtaz hurt more – she thought we were to be married.  But we weren’t to be married.  And so I started again, aged 29, both in Love and with a Record Collection.   But I forgot many of the records which I used to own.  Bound to happen.  And so now and again I get the joy of rediscovery, a tingle of recognition, and in this case a full circle of musical joy through Motown, Ready Steady Go!, my family and our new friends.

I looked the song up and found that Helen Reddy had a big disco-esque easy-listening hit with it in the 1970s, Lulu covered it, Alan Price and of course, so did Dusty Springfield, calling it I Can’t Hear You No More and singing slightly behind the beat, but still sounding like a black soul singer like she always did.   I guess it was her choice to sing it on the Motown Revue show – but it never was a Motown song.  Except that night when she duetted on it with Martha Reeves.

I think the Betty Everett song was picked up by the Northern Soul DJs in the early 70s and gathered a whole new set of fans – it had that fast beat and passionate vocal that they liked.  The classic pop feel comes from the writers Gerry Goffin & Carole King, she wrote the music, he wrote the lyrics.   Interesting when you know their story :

“This girl ain’t throwing away her youth”

Carole King & Jerry Goffin

Jewish New Yorkers, they married when she was 17 and pregnant and he was 20, and during a reportedly turbulent ten-year relationship they created many top hits for different artists : Take Good Care Of My Baby, (Please) Don’t Ever Change, Will You (Still) Love Me Tomorrow, One Fine Day, The Loco-motion, Pleasant Valley Sunday, Oh No Not My Baby, Up On The Roof, Natural Woman and many many more.

Credit where credit is due.

Happy New Year everyone, thanks for reading.

Ralph Brown 2015

My Pop Life #126 : Blue Monday – Fats Domino

Blue Monday  –  Fats Domino

Saturday mornin’, oh saturday mornin’ all my tiredness has gone away

got my money and my honey & we’re out on the stand to play…

 When Jenny and I finally got married on July 25th 1992 we did it in style.  We did it in the way we wanted to.  We’d postponed the original date (see My Pop Life #20) waited a year then walked up the aisle eventually in 1992.  Our perfect wedding consisted of : a gold wedding dress for Jenny;  a bootlace tie for me;  a choir composed of our friends to sing things to us (see My Pop Life #56);  including Maureen Hibbert singing Oh Happy Day (My Pop Life #199) ;  a wedding reception where someone played Chopin and where we both made speeches;   a party in the evening where we could invite EVERYONE;  a wedding band which played at the party that we could both play in.  For starters.  We planned every detail.  Some people don’t do this obviously – some people run away to Las Vegas, or in Dee’s case, Grenada.   Yes, Jenny’s oldest sister Dee flew to New York and thence to Grenada to marry Mick Stock (Jamie and Jordan’s dad) and made Jenny’s mum Esther furious for denying her a wedding.  We included Esther in our wedding – it was about 18 months of serious hard-nosed negotiation, mainly by Jenny.   OK, all by Jenny.

              

         Stephen Warbeck                                     Joe Korner

      

                       Simon Korner                                     Andrew Ranken

The wedding band was made of people I’d gone to school with and played in bands with, almost exclusively.  Andrew Taylor “Tat”on guitar, from school band Rough Justice (see My Pop Life #80);   Joe Korner on keyboards/piano from art-rock band Birds Of Tin (haven’t written about them yet);    Patrick Freyne on drums also from an early incarnation of Birds Of Tin;   Simon Korner my oldest and best friend on bass guitar – rather remarkably I’d never played in a band with him before so we were making up for lost time;   Andrew Ranken on vocals who had gone out with Simon’s sister Deborah Korner for years through school and beyond before Deborah had a baby boy and then tragically and awfully died shortly afterwards of an aneurysm in 1991.   The shadow of that death was still cast over our wedding quite naturally.  Andrew and Patrick had both been excellent drummers at Priory School in Lewes, (as had Pete Thomas) and they had performed a memorable drum battle on the school playing fields one summers day in 1974.   Pete Thomas went on to join The Attractions in 1977 and has been playing with Elvis Costello ever since off and on, while Andrew  joined The Pogues in 1983 and had recorded five LPs with them by the time of our wedding.  I’d seen them live many times with Simon and Joe.  He brought multi-instrumentalist and good bloke Jem Finer, co-writer of Fairytale in New York with him into the wedding band on saxophone alongside myself.

James Fearnley,  Jem Finer,  Andrew Ranken,  Spider Stacey,            Shane McGowan, Cait O’Riordan early 1980s

Stephen Wood, close friend of Andrew who also went to Priory played accordion and went on to change his name to ‘Oscar-winning composer ‘ Stephen Warbeck (for Shakespeare In Love).   On the night of the wedding a third sax player called Chris turned up and played tenor.  He was good, but he needed to be because he hadn’t been to any rehearsals.   Jenny’s sister Lucy Jules was on backing vocals with Jenny herself alongside our good friend Maureen Hibbert.  They looked like The Supremes or The Emotions ie : great.  And they could all sing.  It was a good wee band.

The Mysterious Wheels

Andrew, Simon and Joe are still playing together in that band, now called Andrew Ranken & The Mysterious Wheels.  Catch them live in London!

We rehearsed in IGA Studios as I recall, close to Mount Pleasant Post Office in WC2.   The early discussions about a setlist were interesting since they mainly consisted of Andrew casting a veto over any song which he didn’t fancy singing – which was most of the songs that we wanted at our wedding.  Oh well.  The only exception was Try A Little Tenderness which we had lined up for Lucy, who has an exceptional voice, but that’s for another post.  In the end our setlist was based on Andrew’s tried and tested setlist emanating from the great city of New Orleans and primarily songs written or performed by the great Smiley Lewis:  One Night, I Hear You Knocking, Dirty People and Blue Monday.   I knew Smiley Lewis – I’d bought the above-pictured CD in the mid-80s, it is Fantastic.  One of the inventors of rock and roll or R’n’B as we knew it.  (They’re very close.)  All songs made famous by other players – One Night by Elvis, I Hear You Knocking by Fats Domino and Dave Edmunds, Dirty People by Omar & The Howlers.  Who?   I also owned Fats Domino’s greatest hits from way back in the late 70s and considered him to be a genius.   Fats covered all these songs.  We also threw in Robert Parker’s Barefootin’, Chuck Berry’s Nadine, Leadbelly’s Goodnight Irene, Dr John’s version of Junco Partner,  and Lloyd Price’s Stagger Lee and Lawdy Miss Clawdy (I think!).

Andrew had played in Lewes band The Grobs when Simon and I, Tat and Joe and Patrick and Stephen were at Priory School.  He’d always been cooler than us.  One year older is a long time when you’re sixteen.  I’m not sure when he settled on New Orleans as the source of his live act, but it is definitely a sign of muso grooviness, like a faintly secret musical society.  Everyone knows Motown, most people know Philly, some know Stax but who knows Imperial Records or Specialty  Records from Louisiana ?  The sound of New Orleans is different from everywhere else in the States in that most songs will be piano-based rather than guitar.  This rolling style exemplified by Ray Charles, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint and Dr John gives all these records their own unique flavour, my own personal favourite style of boogie-woogie rhythm and blues.  Andrew Ranken, in short, was right.  Perhaps The Pogues, a punk-flavoured London Irish band led by the inimitable Shane McGowan had formed an attachment to the city when they’d passed through.  Original member Spider Stacey now lives there with his wife, having worked on a couple of episodes of that great TV showcase for the city Treme.

Fats Domino 1956

Almost all of these chosen wedding night songs were born in New Orleans.  Days after the wedding night, in a completely star-crossed, fortuitous and magical co-incidence,  Jenny and I were drinking our way around the Crescent City on our honeymoon, courtesy of MGM Studios who had employed me to act in their film Undercover Blues alongside Fiona Shaw, Dennis Quaid, Kathleen Turner and Stanley Tucci.   For another post !

New Orleans is where jazz was born in those days before recording was invented.  Instruments abandoned by the marching bands of the Confederate army after the Civil War ended in 1965 were currency in New Orleans where whites and blacks mixed more than they did elsewhere in the segregated south, giving rise to a creole property-owning middle class in the late 1890s when the riverboats would steam up the Mississippi and gamblers, hucksters and nascent capitalists rubbed shoulders in the gin-joints and speakeasys of The French Quarter where Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton could be found forging the music of the 20th century.   It became known as Music City long before Nashville stole that crown.  There are blues joints and hops all over town, some of them such as Tipitina’s legendary.   By the mid-forties the blues had acquired a bit of bounce and this is where Smiley Lewis comes in.   A rural Louisianan who hopped a tramcar to N’Awlins after his mother died, he hooked up with bandleader and key figure Dave Bartholomew, and cut Dave’s song Blue Monday.

It’s a Monday to Friday song,  some of my favourite songs have this structure : Friday On My Mind by The Easybeats, Diary of Horace Wimp by ELO.  Solomon Grundy springs to mind :

Solomon Grundy,

Born on a Monday,

Christened on Tuesday,

Married on Wednesday,

Took ill on Thursday,

Worse on Friday,

Died on Saturday,

Buried on Sunday,

That was the end, of Solomon Grundy

A nursery rhyme ‘collected’ in the 1840s.   Bartholomew’s song was re-recorded by Fats Domino two years later and became a huge hit in 1956, the year that I was conceived.  Smiley Lewis’ biggest hit was I Hear You Knocking but again Fats’ version of that also outsold it by hundreds of thousands, and Dave Edmunds took it to number one at Christmas 1970.  Smiley Lewis didn’t have no luck.

Our version of Blue Monday featured a crappish saxophone solo by me and a wonderful chorus of the girls singing “Saturday morning oooh Saturday morning…” as they swayed in the breeze at the microphone.  I remember watching our friends Conrad and Gaynor dancing, and others too.  Jenny’s primary memory of the gig is Stephen Wood’s leather sandal beating time into a puddle of beer as he squeezed that accordion.

The wedding party itself was at The Diorama near Regent’s Park, and was brilliantly stage-managed by blessed Neil Cooper may his soul rest in peace.  We had an open parachute suspended from the ceiling above the dance floor.  Flowers everywhere.  The band went on at around ten-thirty I think.  It was nerve-wracking, but no more so than standing in a church in front of everyone and saying your vows.  I tried to enjoy it, and some of the time I did.  I’m really really glad we did it.  I remember standing round in the Diorama earlier in the evening in my brand new blue suit from Paul Smith gnashing my teeth at the non-arrival of Jenny’s brother Jon who was doing the DJ-ing at the party (he never did show up) and playing Songs In The Key Of Life as people arrived and overhearing two people standing in front of me – the light was low and there were hundreds of people there – discussing the event… “I heard The Pogues are playing later…”  “No…!“

The Pogues

Well two of them were.  My main confession concerns the song itself.  I always thought that the Sunday section was “Sunday morning my head is bare, but it’s worth it for the times that I’ve had” but apparently that’s a mis-hearing.  I’m imagining Fats Domino or Smiley Lewis in church on Sunday morning with bare head.  But apparently all the lyric sites quote “Sunday morning my head is bad…”  Make up your own mind dear reader.

Fats Domino himself is simply a legend.  One of the primary forces behind the birth of rock’n’roll he was remarkably still alive when I wrote this entry, as was Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.  Sadly the last few years have taken their toll on these mighty originals who paved the way for the entire rock/soul/pop era (along with Ray Charles & James Brown, let’s be fair) an era which is still evolving.  Four of that group of six are pianists.  Fats lived in the 9th Ward in New Orleans and he went missing after deadly Hurricane Katrina in 2005, as did many people including Allen Toussaint.  But he surfaced a few days later.  One of my favourite Fats Domino stories involves boogie-woogie ivory basher Jools Holland making a documentary who was visiting his house.  “Good morning” said Jools in his scrawny Lewisham gobshite accent, “We’re here from the BBC making a documentary about pianists and we’re very pleased to include your good self“.  Fats blinked and stared.  “What’d he say?” Fats eventually asked.  Jools repeated his sentence probably slightly slower to no effect.  They all stood there looking at each other.  Eventually Jools sat down at the grand piano and played the intro to Blue Monday.  Fats broke out in a big grin and shook his hand : “I don’t understand a word you’re saying, but if you can play that tune, you can stay“

Blue Monday was my favourite of the wedding band songs I think.  It’s a great great song.  Still in the Ralph & Jenny playlist.  Enjoy.

My Pop Life #45 : If You Love Me – Brownstone

 If You Love Me   –   Brownstone

…but if you want my heart then it’s time that you start
To act like you’re mine in the light and the dark…

We finally moved into our new house in Brighton in March 1996, after Eamonn Walker (brother from another mother) and I had sanded and varnished the floors of three rooms, and Tony Roose (expert!) had helped me lag beneath the floorboards.   Lovely wooden floors in place, Jenny was welcomed down, previously restricted from visits due to her asthma.   The dust now settled, we brought the cats down and moved into the top room with views of the Palace Pier and across to Worthing and Chanctonbury Ring on the Downs.   It was a great move.   A new life.

Brighton was local newspapers, slower pace, less happening, and trains to London.   After a few months we wondered if we’d made a Terrible Mistake.    Then people started to come down – the first visitors were Paulette and Beverley Randall, and we moved the kitchen table out into the garden and ate alfresco whilst drinking quantities of wine.   Summer arrived and we started to really fall in love with being in Sussex, taking trips out to my childhood haunts, finding lovely country pubs and walks and butterfly sanctuaries, lying on the beach with the tourists, becoming deeply involved in the Brighton & Hove Albion story as chairman Bill Archer announced that my beloved Goldstone Ground was to be sold “to pay debts” – and there were no plans in place for an alternative home ground.   1996-7 was a dreadful season to follow the Seagulls, but the fans were amazing, letting the board know their feelings about having our home sold from under our feet.   We were rooted to the bottom of the entire league for weeks that autumn, manager Jimmy Case was sacked and it felt like the people running the club would be happy for it to fold.   The fans and players eventually saved Albion in dramatic fashion – but this is not the place for that reminiscence.

I turned 40 in the summer of ’97 and held a legendary party in our new house to celebrate and mark the passage of time.   It was attended by neighbours from across the street, new friends from Brighton, and many old mates and new who had travelled down.   It was billed as running from midday June 21st to midday June 22nd – a proper midsummer night’s dream.    I finally crashed out at lunchtime on the Sunday.  It was a big old-fashioned dirty young people’s party and I kissed goodbye to my 30s in defiance.  Dancing went on literally all night, guests such as Chiwetel Ejiofor (with whom I’d just shot “Amistad“) slept on the bouncy castle erected in the garage, people went down for a swim in the sea at dawn, I became 40 high on ecstasy, drink, marijuana and dancing.

Brownstone’s If You Love Me was a key song for Jenny and I.   I can’t remember where we first heard it (Trevor Nelson? or maybe before we left Los Angeles…) but the tune, the lyrics, the voices, the swing of it became our sound in the party years 1996-2000.   Jenny enjoyed DJ-ing too, and she always targets her DJ set at the women on the dancefloor.  Once the women are dancing, the guys will tend to follow…  So there’s a bit of Whitney, some Bee Gees, Abba, TLC, Prince, Ghetto Heaven, Aretha…and Brownstone.  Turn the lights down low, turn up the bass, and grab the nearest honey…

and here is an acapella version :