Treat Her Right, "Just one of them songs that hangs around"

Roy Head and the Traits made some pretty square-headed moves in their day. They all attended High School. They hired an undertaker named Edra Pennington to pick out their suits. What’s more, before Edra agreed to manage them, she insisted on having the boys’ parents’ permission. To this demand the Traits consented. Then, once their second single “Live it Up” earned them an invitation to go on Bandstand, the Traits allowed Edra and their parents to nix the appearance on the grounds that they were too young.

Despite all of this, Roy Head & the Traits, unlike a lot of other American kids of the period, didn’t need the Rolling Stones to hep ‘em to Rhythm & Blues.

The Traits got their name when a San Marcos, TX, radio announcer mis-handled their handle, originally the Treys⎯“Trey,” of course, meaning three, and more specifically, in Texan, meaning the third generation of males with the same name, (eg., Senior, Junior, Trey). The re-naming turned out to be an auspicious accident, because while the Traits might have begun as a trio, with Roy Head singing, Tommy Bolton on guitar, and Gerry Gibson on drums, they soon filled out to become a six-piece, adding Dan Buie on piano, Bill Pennington on bass, and Clyde Causey on lead guitar.

Meanwhile Edra Pennington earned her keep, landing the Traits their first recording contract.“Live it Up,” and “One More Time,” a couple of rockabilly thumpers that each received regional airplay, were recorded for the Tanner ‘n’ Texas (TNT) label, of San Antonio, in 1959. By 1960, during that period when the Traits spent weekends criss-crossing Texas, playing dances⎯chaperoned no doubt by level-headed adults⎯the singer convinced the rest of the group to update their name yet again, this time to Roy Head and the Traits. The front-man had arrived. Around the same time, some of the original Traits quit the band, favoring their square futures with the Navy, or Sears Roebuck & Co. These members were replaced⎯one of the more influential of the new personnel being Gene Kurtz, bassist and co-writer of their 1965 chartbuster “Treat Her Right.”





The Traits had played “Treat Her Right” live for years before Kurtz joined the band. However, Kurtz had the bright idea of making the song about a woman, instead of a cow, and helped to arrange it into the bit of radio-ready trade it became.

From a 2007 interview by Austin Chronicle music writer Margaret Moser:

ROY HEAD: The song was a mistake. I wanted to do "Ooo Poo Pah Doo" by Jessie Hill, and the guitarist played the wrong riffs. So I made up a song about talking to a cow. "If you squeeze her real gentle, she'll give you some cream." It was risqué, but in a hillbilly way. The dance floor packed.

GENE KURTZ: I saw that little horn riff would fit at the end of the song. We didn't do it before that; it was my suggestion. Turned out it was a good lick. I was aware of the Kinks' "You Really Got Me," and I liked their other songs, but it's much more likely I got it from the Ajax ["stronger than dirt"] commercial than the Kinks. Let's face it: Riffs on horns or anything are not copyrightable, and it got used again. There are only so many notes.

Eventually the Traits cut THR at Houston’s Gold Star Studios, at which point they were descended upon by DJ, promoter & producer Huey Meaux, aka the Crazy Cajun (who also produced records by the Sir Doug Quintet, Barbara Lynn, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, and the Hombres), and Don Robey, owner of Duke/Peacock/Backbeat Records, the “Black Ceasar” who had supposedly beaten Little Richard to within an inch of his life a decade earlier. Thanks to Robey’s connections, Roy Head sang “Treat Her Right” at a black DJ convention in Houston that year. Robey apparently didn't want Head to go onstage, didn't want the mostly black audience to discover that Head was white. But on he went, backed by Bobby Bland's band. "I felt like Charley Pride at Panther Hall," Head has said. Apparently he went over, and "Treat Her Right" first broke on a Houston R&B station. It would go on to hold the No. 2 spot Billboard’s Pop and R&B charts during the Fall of 1965, edged out of the top spot only by the Beatles’ “Yesterday.”

Again, from Margaret Moser’s interview:

ROY HEAD: The real key to that song was that it had that push and pull that every little garage band in the world could play. You didn't have to rehearse it for days. All you had to do was hit close to the tempo and melody, and people love it. It's been recorded by Otis Redding and Mae West! Just one of them songs that hangs around. "Treat Her Right." That'll be on my tombstone.


Roy Head & the Traits’ follow-up to “Treat Her Right” was “Apple of My Eye,” a sort of stepped-up, white-boy soul hybrid of Jimmy Reed and Chuck Berry, a highlight of which is Kurtz’ crazy bass guitar on the break. Another great RH & the Traits number is their version of Jimmy McCracklin’s “Get Back,” on the Scepter label. And finally, a psychedelicized Roy Head, fronting Johnny Winters’ Great Believers (was Keith Ferguson in this band?) “Easy Lovin Girl” from the Voxx comp “Acid Visions.”

Johnny Paycheck, The Real Mr. Heartache

About the actor Charles Bronson, someone once asked “was he a good-looking ugly man, or just an ugly good-looking man?” Similarly, about Johnny Paycheck, one might ask was he a bum who sang great country, or just a country star who sang about bums? Mere mortals may never know. One thing is known, his relationship with Aubrey Mayhew and the Little Darlin’ label, for whom Paycheck cut his finest sides, was built on desperation and risk.

Born Donald Eugene Lytle, in Greenfield, OH, in 1938, the son of a laborer, Paycheck came up hard. By age six he got his first guitar. By 16 he dropped out of school. Then he drifted. He played his guitar. He joined the Navy, then he landed in the brig for punching out his commanding officer. Once released from the pokey, in 1958, the young hot-head landed in Nashville at a time when C&W was splitting in two directions: one being the countrypolitan schmaltz of Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, a sound de-twanged and de-balled for crossover appeal, the other being the revised honky-tonk of the Ray Price beat. Donny Young, as Paycheck called himself then, got swept away by the latter current. He bounced around town, wrote songs, cut a couple of go-nowhere singles for Decca, and hired out as sideman for Price, Porter Waggoner, and George Jones, the Possum bringing considerable influence to bear on Paycheck’s subsequent career.




During that period in the early 60s when Paycheck played bass and sang harmony for him, George Jones began a gradual shift away from his earlier Hank Williams/Roy Acuff vocal stylings, developing a more mature voice, a voice likened by Nick Tosches, in his great profile on Jones, to a steel guitar for its nuances and subtle slurs. Just who came up with the style, Paycheck or the Possum, depends on who you ask, but a few examples of their work together are “Love Bug,” “I’d Rather Switch than Fight,” and “Feeling Single, Seeing Double,” all written by Wayne “Beer Thirty” Kemp, who also apparently didn’t smoke Tareyton cigarettes.



Whenever Paycheck wasn’t on the road, he’d often land in Las Vegas, gigging at Wynn Stewart’s club the Nashville Nevada. Here he soaked up the Bakersfield sound and struck up a friendship with brother hobo honky-tonker Merle Haggard, who, in the early 60s played bass in Stewart’s band.

You get the idea that Donny Young could almost grab all the necessary elements⎯the voice, the songs, the production, the catchy name⎯on his own. But somehow they remained out of his reach until Aubrey Mayhew entered the scene. Mayhew, a former Nashville producer with plenty of experience dealing with “egotistical, illiterate" hillbillies "who should have been picking cotton instead of earning more money a week than he ever thought existed.” By 1962 Mayhew held a comfortable exec position at Pickwick Records in NY. That is, until he heard Johnny Paycheck.

The story goes that former manager for Marty Robbins turned down-and-outer Eddie Crandall cornered Mayhew at the 1962 Nashville DJ convention (an annual, much wilder, sort of hillbilly predecessor to SXSW?). Desperate for money, Crandall insisted that Mayhew hear, and purchase, a 10-song demo by a mysterious unknown talent, the “best you ever heard.” Mayhew was used to dodging such requests, but the “dirty, half-drunk, overbearing and desperate” Crandall persisted. Luckily for him, the long-shot came in that night. After one listen, Mayhew didn’t simply buy the tape, but instead paid Crandall to take him to the unknown singer. Crandall reluctantly consented. They caught a cab to the Main Street Bridge, beneath which Crandall led Mayhew, in the dark, to find his new star sleeping there, passed out drunk, beneath a pile of newspapers. Or, like I say, so the story goes.

It was Aubrey Mayhew who re-named Donny Young Johnny Paycheck, stealing the handle from a failed prizefighter. Together they fused that Ray Price shuffle with elements of Bakersfield and their own sheer weirdness to come up with just about the hardest of hard honky-tonk sounds of the 60s. Their loose formula consisted of Lloyd Green’s blazing steel guitar, loud production, and lyrical content that skirted the outer limits of acceptability (“He’s in a hurry to get home to my wife”… “Pardon me, I’ve got someone to kill”… ). Regarding the production, Mayhew explained, “What gets that sound is a combination of three things: highs, natural echo, and distortion.”

Paycheck’s first single to break was his take on the Hank Cochran song “A-11.” Here Paycheck is backed by the Jones Boys, on loan from a reluctant Possum, who agreed to the favor only after Mayhew met his request for a party, thrown in Jones’ honor, complete with hired female companions. Apparently Mayhew arranged to hire one call girl, then persuaded his secretary to likewise attend the party with several of her girlfriends, to, you know, complete the team. Apparently just which one of them was the sportin’ gal, the Possum had to surmise on his own.


Eventually Mayhew broke his own rule against managing and producing anymore egotistical, illiterate hillbillies. In 1966 he threw his comfortable exec position to the wind, and dropped all his savings into the creation of Little Darlin’ Records, with Johnny Paycheck as its featured artist. He put all his chips on that bum under the Main Street Bridge. From 1966 until 1969, Paycheck released a slew of singles, and three LPs, The Lovin’ Machine, Jukebox Charlie, and Johnny Paycheck at Carnegie Hall. Here’s the title track from “Jukebox Charlie,” plus another single from that record, Bobby Bare’s “Motel Time Again.” And to demonstrate the weirdness factor, here’s the post-apocalyptic nightmare “The Cave.”

Mayhew might have held some control over Paycheck in the studio, but he had little say about what the restless singer did on his own time. Together with “ole buddy” Eddie Crandall (who, by the way, penned a couple of Paycheck’s steppinest numbers: “Don’t You Get Lonesome” and “Don’t Start Countin’ On Me”), Paycheck continued to wander out west, continued to fight and gamble and ponder the bubbles in his beer. Such research eventually led Paycheck to the gutters of skid row LA, and culminated in his last single for Little Darlin’, “If I’m Gonna Sink (Might as Well Go to the Bottom)”. Yes sir, sometimes they go out looking about like they did comin’ in. By decade’s end, Mayhew and Paycheck had their final falling out, and Mayhew folded Little Darlin'.


Most this stuff is still available on CD. Pick up a copy of the Country Music Foundation collection The Real Mr. Heartache and Koch Records’ The Little Darlin’ Sound of Johnny Paycheck. Mayhew wrote liner notes for that last one, from which I plucked his quotes. Koch also released a collection by “Groovy” Joe Poovey, who wrote several of those songs Paycheck gave the royal treatment.

Hollywood Suicide #3: Al Mulock

Al Mulock, probably the ugliest so far of our “Hollywood Suicides.” As a fixture in Spaghetti Westerns, he might seem an unlikely fit for the series. But Mulock rates as a Hollywood ghost by virtue of his brief appearance in John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, if nothing else. That ugly mug burned itself onto celluoid most famously, however, as the blabber-mouthed, one-armed bounty hunter in Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly).





The clip above comes from Italian Youtube (if you haven't already figured that out). Translated, Tuco's (Eli Wallach) last words to the stiff run something like "When you're gonna shoot, shoot. Don't talk." Without that scene, and Mulock's final contribution to backlot lore, the Canadian-born bit player would no doubt be lost to oblivion by now.

Mickey Knox, screenwriter for Once Upon a Time in the West, witnessed Mulock’s 1968 suicide in Gidaux, Spain, during production of that film. From Knox’s book The Good, The Bad, & the Dolce Vita (Nation Books):

“The film had a large crew and our base was in Gidaux, a small, hot, dusty village that had minimal accomodations. Most of us were staying in a three-story building that passed as an 'accomodation.' We had returned from a location shoot, some distance from the village, and I happened to glance out the window to see what looked like a body shooting by⎯it was a body, and it belonged to an actor who appeared only in the opening sequence of the movie.

He was still wearing his western costume and Leone, upon hearing of the suicide, told the production manager, 'get the man’s costume before they take him away.' The actor hadn’t completed his role and they needed someone to fill in, but that would be no problem if they had the dead man’s costume. Anyone about the same height and shape would do.

Actually, the man was not quite dead, but Leone didn’t ask if he was still alive. He was only concerned for the next day’s shooting. What actually killed the actor was the ride in a production car over a bumpy road to a distant hospital. He should never have been moved. A broken rib pierced his lung during the drive. We later learned that the actor was a drug addict and couldn’t get a fix in Gidaux. Desperate, he went up to the roof and took a dive.”

Rufus Thomas: Ain't I'm Clean?

Rufus Thomas was born on this date in 1917. Gemini Spacecraft would like to to honor the man who scored early hits for Sun and Stax Records, and always got the drop on the freshest dance steps, by declaring his birthday “World’s Oldest Teenager Day.” Just how one might go about observing “World’s Oldest Teenager Day,” who knows? Maybe when you're waiting at the bus stop remember to break it to the left, then break it to the right, or several times today ask your boss “Ain’t I’m clean?!?”



A worthy holiday, don't you think? Speaking only for myself, having been born the year that “Walking the Dog” was released, I’m definitely no longer fresh chicken (would that then make me “Funky Chicken”?). And yet, this fixation on greasy kid stuff persists despite the hair loss, wrinkles, root canals, etc.

A little background on Rufus Thomas: Originally a tap-dancer, he started out in the 30s playing the tent show circuit with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. Then through his association with Professor Nat D. Williams, his history teacher at Memphis’ Booker T. Washington High School, and also the first black DJ in the South, Thomas landed a spot as emcee for the Palace Theatre weekly amateur show. Here, in the late 40’s, both B.B. King and Bobby Bland would launch their careers. At the Palace, Thomas extended his old tent show training by developing an act that included comedy, singing and dance numbers, essentially the same act he would continue to do throughout his career as performer and WDIA broadcaster.




About Sam Phillips & Sun Records, for whom he cut “Bearcat” in 1953, the label's first single to chart, Rufus Thomas had this to say: “Me and Sam Phillips? We were tighter than the nuts on the Brooklyn Bridge⎯then. Of course he was like all the folk at that time. You know how if blacks had something and didn’t have no way to exploit it and white dudes would pick it up and do something about it, they’d just beat him out of all of it, that’s all. Well that was him, that was Sam Phillips.”*

Rufus Thomas died in 2001, age 84. Who knows who receives royalties on his record sales at this point? I do know that Sundazed reissued the “Walking the Dog” LP, without which no record collection is complete. So I won’t post it here.

*Rufus Thomas quote from Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highway, Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians, Back Bay Books, 1999.

Twine Time: The Deliverance Was Good

So maybe Alvin Cash was not the Hardest Workin’ Man in Show Business. In fact, maybe “Twine Time” could go down as one of the easiest paydays in soul music. Any way you slice it⎯vocal performance or novelty dance number⎯Alvin Cash & the Crawlers got a lot of help on this one. Kids invented the dance that inspired the song, and Andre Williams wrote the song and produced the record. But delivery, baby! That's what Alvin Cash & the Crawlers gave it.

You probably already know the part about how Alvin Cash attended the same St. Louis high school as Tina Turner. In St. Louis, Alvin and his younger brothers also garnered modest notoriety as the dance team the Step Brothers. Seeking greater fortune, and maybe a record deal, the brothers took their act up the road apiece, to Chicago, in the early 1960s.


Around the same time, Andre Williams had entered his post-Fortune Records phase, and was busy forging a career as writer/producer/A&R man. During those frequent periods when he was on the outs with Barry Gordy, Andre moonlighted at George Leaner’s Mar-V-Lus records. Andre caught Alvin Cash & the Registers’ club act one night in 1964 and invited them to lay down some vocals on a new song he’d written with Verilie Rice, “Twine Time,” a song aimed at milking some chart action from yet another Chicago teen dance craze.


Apparently the A&R man’s work takes him far afield, ‘coz up-and-coming talent wasn’t all that Andre scoped in those days. From Robert Pruter’s informative book Chicago Soul (University of Illinois Press, 1992): “The Twine was one of those dances that emerged from the black high school kids before it was put on record. Months before the record was released kids around Thirty-fifth to Thirty-ninth Streets were doing the dance to the Miracles’ ‘That’s What Love is Made Of.' Most of the kids in that area attended Dunbar High, and it was at one of the school’s dances that one of Leaner’s producers, Andre Williams, discovered the dance.”

Kinda makes you wonder how, on these scouting missions, Mr. Rhythm managed to slip past the school chaperones. Did he use a disguise?

Anyway, back to “Twine Time.” It’s generally considered to be a more up-tempo rewrite of Andre’s 1957 R&B hit “Bacon Fat.” In the early weeks of 1965, “Twine Time” b/w “The Bump” climbed as far up as the no. 14 position on the Billboard pop charts, and hung as high as the no. 4 position on the R&B charts. That chart action helped Alvin Cash & the Crawlers land appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand, despite the record being banned by NY stations for its suggestive, rhythmic "ooh" and "ah" background vocals.





During that period Chuck Berry was touring Britain. Melody Maker nabbed him for their “Blind Date” feature, February 13, 1965. “Twine Time” was among the stack of new singles selected for him to identify and rate. Chuck had this to say: “Wine time? Oh, Twine time⎯hmm. Top 40. It sounds very Americanish, yeah definitely American. As a matter of fact I could almost name the part of the country it comes from (laughs)…The deliverance was good but it was just one of those songs…You could dance to it but there was nothing significant there.”


**Chuck Berry caricature by Melody Maker illustrator Jimmy Thomsen.

Lookout Mars! You're Our Next Stop

Got a random twin-pack of B-sides today, far-out rockers with an outer space theme. Don’t confuse these with your more general paeans to teenie-weenie and little green men. These two got a more specific destination in their sights, namely Mars. First up is “Rocket” by Joe Bennett and the Sparkletones, the flip for the single “Penny Loafers and Bobby Socks.” Penny Loafers ain’t too shabby a side either, but my copy rates a lowly VG. Besides, it’s not a very hard record to find, so, fuggit, I’ll post only the B-side.




This was s’posed to be the ‘tones big follow-up to “Black Slacks,” alas, their one and only hit, released earlier that year, 1957. That earlier song featured backing vocals by label-mate and future sun-tanned midget Paul Anka. But don’t hold that against ‘em. As the title would suggest “Black Slacks” elaborated on sartorial themes, rather than outer space travel. Some say it finished the sentence that “Blue Suede Shoes” started about a year and a half earlier. Anyway, about “Penny Loafers” and “Rocket” the November 11, 1957 issue of Billboard had this to say: “’Black Slacks’ is still going strong and the similar styled version of ‘Penny Loafers’ could click in all fields. Fine guitar work helps sell the side. Flip ‘Rocket’ is a rockabilly novelty that can also go well.” Novelty? By now they all sound like novelty numbers, wouldn't you agree? That fine guitar work was provided by Joe Bennett and young Sparky Childress swapping licks. (See them at work in the clip below.) Too bad for them “Penny Loafers” failed to chart. In fact all their subsequent records failed to chart. These chart duds make up the Sparkletones’ best sides. They include “Rocket” and “Cotton Pickin’ Rocker.” ABC Paramount dropped the group by 1959.





Next up is Horace Heller’s “Ed’s Place” b/w “Hello World.” Info on Horace Heller is hard to come by. All I know is that he released these sides in January of 1959, on Dollie Records, of Nashville, TN, the label founded and owned by one-time Grand Ole Opry manager and music publisher Jim Denny. Dollie’s stable of odd-balls also included Johnny Wiggins (Ernest Tubb’s “Singing Bus Driver”) and rockabilly Curtis Gordan.



“Hello World” features a hep hillbilly rap, delivered by “the first cat on Mars.” Exactly how he got there or what’s his brand of rocket fuel remains unclear, tho he does confide this much: “I don’t know how I got here/ I had a hit and drag/ with a miss on a jag/and here I am.” While space travel can be a gas, this number reminds the listener that the come-down’s a bitch; looking back toward Earth, Heller finally admits “Like man, I want to get down!”

The A-side, “Ed’s Place,” another novelty narration set to a swanky lounge groove, is mainly a murder ballad, complete with foley effects, about the dangers of shooting your honey’s other man with a high caliber gun. Altho it departs from the outer space theme, I include it ‘coz it’s so weird. Both sides have been reissued. “Ed’s Place” pops up on Crypt’s “Godless America” comp, while “Hello World” is included on the comp “Rock’n’Roll the Untold Story, vol. 6.”

The Gospel of Riff, Jazzbo Books Part 2: i, paid my dues

Originally published in 1967, the full title is i, paid my dues good Times… no Bread a story of jazz and some of it’s followers, shyster agents, hustlers, pimps and prostitutes by Babs Gonzales.

Mid-way through one might wonder when do the “no Bread” passages kick in, ‘coz young Babs could sure hustle that long green. In fact, schools might consider adding i, paid my dues to their required reading lists just so sis and li’l junior can learn a few useful tricks for survival. For example, if you need to turn some quick cash between gigs, just get you a job selling suits down at the department store, then convince all your musician friends to cop their threads from you. Or if you’ve got to beat the draft, just show up for your army physical dressed like a lady, then scream “never mention girls to me again!!” through the draft hall. Monsieur Bebop Babs Gonzales recounts these and other hepcat anecdotes in a freewheelin’ and loose prose that redefines conventional use of the quotation mark while it weaves a story that criss-crosses the US, Europe, and the paths of everyone who was anyone in the bop era.

Besides being the consummate hipster, Babs contributed to the annals of classic jazz such tunes as "Oo-Pa-Pa-Dah," first recorded by his group Three Bips and a Bop, then as a duet with Dizzy Gillespie, as well as "Pay Dem Dues," "Cool Whalin’," "Weird Lullaby," "Get Out Dat Bed," "Be-Bop Santa," "Dob-La-Blee," "We Ain’t Got Integration," and many others. Despite these contributions, Babs never really received his financial due. Just another version of that all-too-common story of the under-compensated artist in America. To hear him tell it, his uncompromising hipsterism was just a bit too much for the uptight music establishment of the time. He wouldn’t let those shyster agents stiff him. He refused crummy record deals. DJs blacklisted his songs when he wouldn’t kick them a percentage of his record sales.


But hustler Babs Gonzales always managed to adjust to conditions. Necessity is the mother of invention, as he says, and sometimes that meant throwing red pepper in a few eyes, or writing a Bop dictionary, printing and selling it at 50 cents a pop, and sometimes that meant cutting the occasional “novelty” record. For the most part, Babs Gonzalez’s later, post-bop work is defined by records like Tales on the Famous, a “crossword puzzle in wax,” as he called it, where the listener is encouraged to guess who Babs is rappin' about, and Tales of Manhattan, both of which highlight his gift of gab and lessons in bop-o-lo-guy. “These New York Neighbors” is a good example of this type of material.

The book’s lengthy sub-heading offers a clue to its arrangement and organization; the narrator pretty much runs through the list of “followers, shyster agents, hustlers, pimps and prostitutes” in that order. The latter half presents a series of profiles on several pimps he knew⎯the most despicable certainly being Jean, the Parisian kidnapper-pimp⎯the kind of low-life who hung around, trying to soak up some of the jazz musician’s action. Some of this stuff ain’t pretty. But hey, who am I to judge? Such stories do paint a pretty detailed picture of those murky regions where show-biz and crime overlap.


Maybe Babs Gonzalez’s hipsterism was ultimately less than revolutionary, but he mastered the art of never holding a square job, and never (again, to hear him tell it) gave no play to the Man. He ends his missive with a good definition of success (good Times… no Bread…) plus a full discography, and a list of his favorite fellow jazzmen down through expubidence.

The Gospel of Riff, Jazzbo Books Part 1: Really the Blues

Really the Blues tells the story of dixieland clarinetist, Jewish hepcat, merchant of muggles, ghost of old Harlem, and professor of jive, Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow. His tale, the title of which comes from a Sidney Bechet tune by the same name, spans the first four decades of the last century, with the prohibition era heyday of Hot Jazz as its centerpiece. While he occasionally played with old-time jazz giants like Bechet and Louis Armstrong, Mezz Mezzrow sounds as much like some original scenester, known for who he knew, where he hung, and for his uncompromising devotion to the “New Orleans idiom.”

The title refers to a superlative state of the blues, the low, lowdown blues, which, paradoxically enough, at least in Mezz’s story, lead to what he calls the “millennium”⎯that peak, mind-blowing ascent into the kind of American life that could have been⎯swingin’, harmonious, and hep⎯if this country wasn't full of racist, ofay squares. Really the Blues describes Mezz Mezzrow’s search for this millennium. Along the way the narrator gets his kicks and takes his share of lumps. He spends a season in Paris, and another several seasons in the pokey, then another in the orchestra pit at the original Minksy Brothers Theater, and several more kicking the gong around. But all of it, good and bad, is just part of that number Mezz wants so badly to be in. One of the book’s funniest moments involves Mezz and his hop-head pals, in dialog that nails the dope-fiend’s detachment from worldly matters, as they continue to get high and talk baseball while their tenement burns down around them. Finally, it will surprise readers (nearly as much as it did Mezzrow himself) to see where he finally meets the millennium.

As literature the book’s no shlub, but surprisingly sophisticated. The chapter titled “The Forgottenest Man in Town” offers a complex and powerful metaphor to illustrate how uncompromising vision is its own reward, and conversely, how selling out can be a form of banishment. And Mezz’s image of 1920’s Harlem, in all its romanticized glory, alive with jazz & jive, represents a utopic ideal. Really the Blues is ultimately a story of survival, which for Mezz Mezzrow means hanging onto his horn, staying true to the New Orleans idiom, and remaining a jazzman despite all those forces in American society that conspire to grind the artist to dust.

RIP Lux Interior

It's taken a couple of days for Gemini Spacecraft to get around to posting the requisite obit for Lux Interior, who died Wednesday of a heart condition at age 62. I gotta say, the news bummed me out. His passing, like Bo Diddley's last summer, and Link Wray's a few years ago, seems to accelerate a sad fade-out that's already happening too fast for my money. Sure, the Cramps got plenty silly during the last 15 or so years, but I still think of Lux as a kind of walking, talking, microphone-munching human antenna, picking up signals from outer space, relaying them back to us in a form we can understand, i.e., as covers of "Strychnine," "Green Fuzz," and "All Tore Up." Many a corn-fed rube, myself included, got hipped to an entire alternate dimension thanks to him. I'll always love "Gravest Hits," "Songs the Lord Taught Us," and "LIve at the Peppermint Lounge," just as I'll always distrust anyone who doesn't keep these records around the house.

As long as we're indulging in Cramps/Lux Interior memories, my personal favorite is of a show in Pittsburgh, 1992. During the "Surfin' Bird" finale, when he'd usually peel out of that two- piece latex body condom he wore, an audience member, probably a plant, tossed some women's panties at him. So Lux stripped all the way down and tried to get into those panties. But his cue came to get back to the mic to sing the next round of poppa-oom-mow-mow before he got the draws on straight. He finished out the song, and the rest of the show, with his shlong dangling. Now that's a dedicated showman!

The above clip comes from a local Memphis TV news story on the Cramps, from when they recorded "Gravest Hits" and "Songs the Lord Taught Us" at Phillips Recording with Alex Chilton. I first saw this spot during Robert Gordon's book tour for "It Came from Memphis," in 1995. Instead of reading, Gordon showed a collection of footage he'd compiled called "Banned, Burned, and Forgotten," or something like that. How weird that this was the subject of a local news spot. And how weird to be standing there watching it nearly 20 years later, in a Borders bookstore, curious shoppers milling about while the anchor wrapped things up, announcing that the Cramps would be appearing that long gone weekend along with "the Clits."