Sadly we don’t have Jeff Healey with us anymore to celebrate what would’ve been his 58th birthday. The Canadian blues rocker learned to play guitar at age of three, two years after he lost his eyesight to a rare form of cancer. While we are blessed with a number of blind keyboardists, like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles, in this day and age blind axe-men are a rarer breed. Healey was that rare artist.
By age nine, he was good at it and had perfected his own trademark style of playing it flat on his lap while he sat. Around that time as well, Jeff was becoming not just a fan but a serious authority on old jazz and blues, building his record collection (which eventually would hit 30 000 albums, many of them old 78s), and playing in a blues band that had quite a following in the Toronto club scene. according to Reuters, at a young 16, he was “discovered” there by a Texas counterpart of a guitar legend – Stevie Ray Vaughan. As the ’80s wound down, he was recording with the Jeff Healey Band, a blues-rock outfit which initially hit it big in the U.S. more than at home, with his 1988 debut album going platinum quickly there and giving him his biggest hit, “Angel Eyes” that went to #5 Stateside (curiously it only reached #16 in Canada).
His profile increased more soon after when he got the gig being the house band in the Patrick Swayze movie Roadhouse. His homeland caught up, and by now his first two albums are both multi-platinum in Canada and he would score five top 20 hits, the biggest of which was 1991’s “I Think I Love You Too Much.” Healey had several more hits on U.S. rock radio and fans in the likes of ZZ Top, BB King and Vaughan. Towards the end of the ’90s, his love shifted more towards old-school jazz. He hosted a national radio show on the CBC playing selections from his own jazz record collection and he picked up the trumpet with a band called the Jazz Wizards. As Guitar Player would note, he was “the only cat around who can play the pre-war jazz of Louis Armstrong on the trumpet and the heavy electric blues-rock of ZZ Top on guitar.”
Unfortunately, he succumbed to lung cancer days before his 42nd birthday in ’08; the fourth Jazz Wizards album came out just two weeks afterwards. Toronto named a park after him three years later. His wife Christie said of him “he was a person who really loved life, loved a challenge, loved to laugh… these qualities also allowed Jeff to not only set an example but set a standard of what one person can do with determination.”
Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our 24th round now. If you’re curious, we have an index to past topics covered. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. As March contains International Women’s Day, what better time to honor the ladies? Our topic this month is This Woman’s Work. We asked our guests to pick a great female from the music business and tell us a bit about her. There are certainly no shortage of truly great choices to pick from.
Today we get to Keith , from The Nostalgic Italian. Will our former radio DJ pick an Italian diva he’s nostalgic for? Let’s find out!
For two solid years Dave Ruch from A Sound Day has been hosting a monthly feature called “Turntable Talk.” Each month he provides a topic to me and other musical bloggers to write about. I have been honored to have participated in every one of them. Each of the participants look forward to not only writing our piece, but anxiously await reading the other contributions.
As I stated in a previous blog, this month is International Women’s Month. Dave offered us an easy topic to write about this month. His instructions state “we’re going to turn our tables and sights to the women of music. Pick one you like and write about her. Whoever you want (that might sound creepier than I intended it), singer, songwriter, band member, the lady on the ‘Breakfast in America’ cover, whoever.”
I wrote a blog that teased this topic earlier in the week. In that post, I said, “I really struggled to pick one (female singer). I even posted on Facebook asking my friends to offer up their three favorite singers. I guess I hoped that they would offer up someone that I hadn’t considered (and they did). The results surprised me. The singers that came up the most were (1) Stevie Nicks, (2) Etta James, and (3 – tie) Pink and Karen Carpenter. Etta was the only one that was in my list of considerations. After looking at the list (and the suggestions) I finally chose who I am writing about and NO ONE mentioned her. Along with Etta James, I featured a song from my other considerations: Ella Fitzgerald, Alison Krauss, Aretha Franklin, Billie Holiday, Dusty Springfield, Sarah Vaughn, Diana Krall, Norah Jones, Linda Ronstandt, Pat Benatar, Peggy Lee, Jewel, and Keely Smith in that blog. So how did I finally come up with my choice?
My friend, Dawn, from high school actually helped me make my decision. She said, “There are so many talented vocalists, I’d have a hard time picking. if you’re going to write an impactful piece, I think you have to go with somebody you admire because they knocked down boundaries or overcame obstacles. That’s how I’d pick my vocalist.” That really struck me. Now, I am not saying that the ladies I mentioned already did not knock down boundaries or overcome obstacles – heck, Jewel was living in her van before she made it big!
My featured female singer is a talented woman named Diane Schuur.
I was introduced to Diane Schuur back in the late 80’s. I was talking about music with a gal I was dating at the time. We started talking about jazz singers and she asked if I had ever heard of Schuur. I hadn’t. If memory serves me correct, she loaned me a cassette (or maybe a CD) with some songs on it and I really enjoyed it.
One of her biographies online says this: “Diane Schuur is as eclectic as she is brilliant.” In my opinion, this statement could not be more true. While many of her songs would fall into the jazz category, she could easily be filed in the blues or pop categories, too. While preparing to write this, I picked a playlist on YouTube and it was fun to hear the different sounds of each of the songs.
My friend Dawn said to pick someone who “overcame obstacles.” Diane certainly has done that! She was born prematurely in 1953. She has been blind since birth because of Retinopathy of Prematurity. This disorder affected premature newborns who received high-oxygen therapy during neonatal intensive care. This was a standard practice until 1954.
She learned to play piano by ear. She would listen to Dinah Washington songs and began to pound out the melodies at age 3. Dinah was a big influence to Diane as she began singing her songs as a toddler and worked on her own vocal style. She once stated, “As far back as I can remember, singing was in my blood. My parents loved music, and I loved to sing. I was scatting at an early age.” She scats right up there with Ella and Mel Torme’! She also has perfect pitch!
Blindness was not her only obstacle. When she was a young adult, she began drinking and struggled with alcoholism. She also battled an eating disorder. Those obstacles were so much that she actually contemplated and attempted suicide. Thankfully, her brother-in-law stopped her from jumping out a third-story window. She got help and has been sober for several decades.
Diane got her big break when she was 22 years old. She auditioned for drummer/bandleader Ed Shaughnessy (of the Tonight Show Band) after he finished a concert with Doc Severinsen. Ed said, “this young blind girl comes in and sits down at the Fender Rhodes keyboard and starts singing the blues. Well, my hair stood on end!” He hired her to be the vocalist in his orchestra. This led many other musicians to hear her. Those included Dizzy Gillespie and the great Stan Getz. Stan was so impressed that he became an advisor and coach to her. She stated that it was Stan who taught her that “less is more.” This was important because she had many critics that said she often “oversang” when she first started out. Stan once said, “She’s just like Sarah (Vaughn) or Ella (Fitzgerald) to me. She’s taking from the tradition, and what comes out is her own conception and advancement of the tradition.”
In 1985, she met B.B. King at a music festival in Tokyo. The two really hit it off and later made an album together entitled Heart to Heart. It was released in 1994 and it entered the Billboard Jazz Charts at number one!
In 1988, Frank Sinatra asked her to sing with him at a benefit concert when Liza Minnelli was unable to perform. She was a guest at Sinatra’s home and also performed at a concert with him and Quincy Jones. Frank gave her an abstract oil painting that he had created for her afterwards. When Frank passed away, Schuur recorded a tribute album for her late friends (Frank and Stan).
Other inspirations to Schuur include George Shearing, Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles who are all blind as well. She has said that one of her fondest memories was performing with Ray Charles in 1998 for a PBS concert (some of which is available on YouTube)
Her career has brought her two Grammy awards – both for Best Jazz Vocal Performance (1986 & 1987). She is still recording and touring today. She says, “For the future I plan to continue my reading of American song, paying respect to celebrated writers and polishing the gems in the jazz tradition.”
I’ve never had the chance to see her in person, but there are some fantastic live albums available.
All About Jazz says, “Ms. Schuur surely is among the very best jazz vocalists, and she exemplifies, if not redefines the “diva” category with her warm, often humorous and relaxed interactions with the audience and the musicians. Her mere presence is enough to make for a memorable evening.” I hope to be able to see her perform one day.
I will include just a couple of my favorite cuts at the end of this blog, but before I do, I want to again thank Dave for hosting this monthly feature. I hope that you enjoy reading this as much as I did writing it. I love that with each topic, I am not only enjoying old favorites, but I am introduced to new songs and singers. Perhaps this blog is your introduction to Diane Schuur?
Earlier this month, we devoted a round of Turntable Talk to the Rolling Stones who have been, as you may have noticed, much in the news again of late. With a new album out this fall, they are relevant again (arguably they never stopped being that) out going back a few years, they seemed to be running out of steam. But never count them out, and on this day in 2016, the put out their first album of new material in 11 years, Blue And Lonesome. It was quite a surprise not only had it been so long since fans heard anything new from them but also because the album was a throwback to their roots – American blues from the early-20th Century.
In the U.S. it was their 25th studio album – a surprisingly small output when you consider their reputation and their durability, going back over 50 years at that point. What’s more, 17 of those 25 were put out by 1980. And while they’ve put out rock album after rock album touching on pop, disco, even funk from time to time, they’d never really bowed down before their original muse before. Blue and Lonesome changed all that, being an album entirely consisting of covers of the music they bonded over in the early days – the Delta and Chicago blues.
The album was recorded in a three-day flurry of activity with Don Was co-producing. It started out as something more typical, a Rolling Stones album of original rockers. but something wasn’t right for Jagger and Richards (along with late drummer Charlie Watts, guitarist Ronnie Wood and their longtime touring bassist, Darryl Jones and ex-Allman Brother keyboardist Chuck Leavell.) Things weren’t “gelling”. Songs weren’t coming together.
That’s when, according to Keith Richards, Mick said he wanted “to play Little Walter’s ‘Blue and Lonesome’. We cut that, we listened to it back and suddenly the sound is there. Mick turns around and says ‘I want to do this Howlin’ Wolf song and then he says ‘and I’d like to do this Lightnin’ Slim’…I’ve got the man on a roll, keep the tape rolling,” telling The Guardian that they do record on tape not “digital crap.” Soon they had a dozen covers of musical idols from their youth down. However, Jagger at first didn’t see it as a Stones album, but Richards insisted and told him “this is Mick Jagger at his f***g best!” Jagger acquiesced and Polydor, their label by now, wasn’t going to argue with rock’s most iconic ongoing act.
The album was 12 songs, written by such early Blues stars as Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Slim and two by Willie Dixon -“Just Like I Treat You” and this one. They were names the Stones have revered but many fans had never heard of. One fan who had and who dropped by was Eric Clapton who added guitars to two of the songs.
While the album lacked the commercial appeal of a radio hit like “Start Me Up” or “Miss You”, the true fans loved it and critics lauded it more than anything they’d done this century. USA Today gave it 3 out of 4, saying it was a “sort of homecoming for the Stones” and pure “blues magic.” Rolling Stone graded it 4.5-stars, noting the authenticity. They point out how Jagger and Richards met at a blues concert and suggesting “the Stones first heard the songs as a foreign language – the lust and trials of old, hardened men. That rough weather now fits.” Across the sea, British papers agreed. The Guardian gave it 4-stars, saying they sounded “more alive than they’ve sounded in years” and applauding them since “the biggest band of the British blues boom were were always among the loudest cheerleaders for the real deal” noting how they liked taking BB King on tour, and in a jab at Led Zeppelin adding that they never stole old bluesmen’s songs and tried to pass them off as their own. The Rolling Stones ended up winning their first Grammy in 23 years for Blue and Lonesome, this one in the blues category.
The fans liked the record as well, but this is one area that isn’t a throwback to the Stones early days. The album didn’t sell in the multi-millions but did very well for an album in the 2010s consisting of old blues music. It was their first #1 album in the UK in over 20 years and it got to #4 in the U.S. It sold platinum in Britain and double that in France. Over here, the song “Ride Em On Down” , written by Eddie Taylor, got to #4 on the singles chart. They released that one as a limited edition 10” single on blue vinyl for Record Store Day.
Richards’ says they have no plans to slow down: “Howlin’ Wolf almost died on stage plugged into his kidney machine, so there’s no reason we wouldn’t do exactly the same.” To whit, they’ve announced their next major tour, to promote both their 60-year career and most recent album, Hackney Diamonds, for next year. Hopefully no kidney machines invovled!
Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our 20th round, for those keeping count. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers,first, welcome! And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. This month our topic is Like A Rolling Stone? Our very first topic here, nearly two years ago, was whether the Beatles were still relevant, so with the recent release of HackneyDiamonds, we thought why not look at the other huge act of the British Invasion – the Rolling Stones. Our guests were invited to share their thoughts on Mick Jagger and the lads.
Today, we turn to John , who gives us The Sound of One Hand Typing. There he often shares a song of the day, so the question is do the Stones works still seem like songs he’d want to hear some days?
The Rolling Stones are one of the greatest bands (maybe the greatest) to come out of the British Invasion. The core of the band, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, are still at it and keep the band’s light burning after almost sixty years. They’ve produced a significant body of work: 31 studio albums, 13 live albums, 28 compilation albums, 3 extended plays, 122 singles, 31 box sets, 51 video albums, 2 video box sets and 77 music videos, according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones_discography). They’ve always been relevant, while staying true to their roots in blues and rock & roll. The band’s name is taken from the title of a Muddy Waters tune; their first several albums were almost entirely Chicago blues, featuring songs by Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Jimmy Reed, J. B. Lenoir, Chuck Berry (who, at heart, was a bluesman) and others; and “2120 South Michigan Avenue,” recorded for their 1964 EP Five By Five, is a tribute to Chess Records, record label of most of the biggest names in Chicago blues and R&B.
What’s not to love, right? I’m a huge blues fan, as many of you have noticed. Many of the great blues men and women (and plenty of the not so great ones) were still around when I turned 19 and was old enough to get into the clubs to see them. Had I met Mick and Keith the day that they discovered that they were kindred spirits, I would have been one with them. Their albums of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s were works of art, even as they moved away from being strictly a blues band. They blazed their own trail, drawing together their roots and what was going on musically around them.
Now, having said all that, I’m more what you would call a “casual fan.” As much as I’ve enjoyed the songs that played on the radio, I’ve never bought one of their albums nor attended one of their concerts, nor have I ever had the desire to. It has to do with my being a Beatles fan, first and foremost. I had invested a lot of my time and effort being a fan of The Fab Four, and didn’t feel like putting forth the same kind of effort for the Stones.
An analogy: Chicago has two baseball teams, the Cubs and the White Sox. The Cubs play on the North Side, and the Sox play on the South Side. What part of town you grew up in determined which team was your favorite. Although I grew up on the Far North Side, my mother’s family were all South Siders, so I became a White Sox fan. Switching loyalties was akin to apostasy; it just wasn’t done. There were more than a few occasions when the Pale Hose were rumored to be on their way out of town (to Milwaukee, Denver, Seattle, Tampa Bay, and, of late, Nashville), and the question was always “if the Sox leave Chicago, would I become a Cubs fan?” To which the answer was “Hell no! I’ll become a Milwaukee/Denver/Seattle/Tampa Bay/Nashville fan.”
In the same way, there are Beatles fans and Rolling Stones fans. A lot of people say they’re fans of both, but the truth is they like one more than the other and just don’t want to get into a fight over it. Just because The Beatles went their separate ways in 1970 didn’t make me a Stones fan just because they won the war of attrition.
Nevertheless, I admire the fact that the Stones have stayed together, despite the death of two of their members (Brian Jones and Charlie Watts), the retirement of a third (Bill Wyman) and the departure of another (Mick Taylor, who replaced Jones and was subsequently replaced by Ronnie Wood). The release of Hackney Diamonds shows that they are still a vital musical force. They’ve put out a tremendous amount of music, much of which was written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who were inspired by John Lennon and Paul McCartney of The Beatles to write their own songs. Lennon and McCartney wrote “I Wanna Be Your Man” for the Stones, which shows the the mutual admiration they had for each other.
Before there was “the King of Pop,” Michael Jackson, or his father-in-law, “The King”, Elvis, there was a guy who influenced them…and a good chunk of the pop and rock musicians before and since. Today, we’re rembering the birth of the “King of the Blues” 95 years ago today – Riley “B.B.” King.
King grew up poor, raised largely by his grandma, in rural Mississippi and honed his singing skills as well as learned the guitar at the local Pentecostal church. However, his early life was spent picking crops, but when he heard some “Delta blues” on the radio as a teen, he decided that was the life for him. By the early-’40s he’d moved to Memphis and built up a following as “Beale Street Blues Boy”, later “Beale Boy” or BB. By 1949 he’d signed with Sam Phillips (who later started Sun Records) and began his lengthy, legendary career. By 2008 he’d put out 43 studio and 16 live albums and was still often performing 200 or more shows a year and he’d eventually win 15 Grammys.
Although he had a string of hits on R&B charts, starting with “3 O’clock Blues” in ’51, and gained a considerable following, widespread recognition of his “voice that groaned and bent the weight of lust, longing and lost love” and guitars which married “country, blues and big city rhythms” (in the words of the New York Times) didn’t come until a couple of decades later. A high-profile show at the Fillmore for “long-haired white people” in ’68, followed by opening for the Rolling Stones on a ’69 tour led him to the mainstream, and his biggest hit, “The Thrill is Gone” in ’70. Remarkably he didn’t really score a significant “hit” album until 2000’s Riding With The King (a top 5 and 2X platinum in the States), his influence was huge. He was one of the first inductees of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame which called him “the King of the Blues and the genre’s most recognizable and influential artists.” He never learned to read music and hence played “Lucille” (his name for his Gibson ES345 guitar) by plucking and bending strings rather than strumming or playing complicated chords.
King got to play for president Obama at the White House in 2012 not long before he passed away from complications of both dementia and diabetes at age 89. Upon his passing, Eric Clapton called him a “dear friend and an inspiration,” while even country star Brad Paisley noted that “I loved his music and his spirit. He changed music forever.”
A big loss for the musical world 33 years back. Guitar virtuoso Stevie Ray Vaughan , along with three members of Eric Clapton’s band and a pilot were killed in a helicopter crash in Wisconsin after a Clapton concert this night in 1990. The four were trying to go to Chicago, nearby, and the pilot took off in fog and seemingly didn’t see a hillside he flew into in the dark. Vaughan was just 35.
The Dallas native by then was well-known for his blues-rock band Double Trouble which put out six studio albums (the last two posthumously) which all went platinum in the U.S. but maybe even more for his session work. He played on James Brown’s comeback hit “Living In America,” Jennifer Warnes’ “First We Take Manhattan” and most-famously, David Bowie’s Let’s Dance.
Bowie had noticed Vaughan, as did much of the music world, at the 1982 Montreaux Jazz Festival. Prior to that, he’d been a favorite in Texas but not widely-known elsewhere. Vaughan’s older brother Jimmie is also a talented guitarist and the two were always competitive. Stevie Ray grew up in a racially-diverse area of Dallas, and because of young Black friends, listened to a lot of jazz and blues as a youth which greatly influenced his style in later years. He in turn opened up the airwaves for a new generation of Bluesmen like Jeff Healey and Colin James, who along with Bowie, ZZ Top (whom he’d performed with back as far as 1970) and Jackson Browne, were in attendance at his funeral. Texas governor Ann Richards declared Oct. 3’91 “Stevie Ray Vaughan commemoration Day” in the state. Not surprisingly, Guitar World named him “”the Greatest Texas Guitarist of All-time”, suggesting “it’s difficult to overstate how much Vaughan revitalized the blues in the 1980s. He could draw on every lick and phrase from the blues masters, and presented them with the power and volume of Jimi Hendrix.”
Third time was the charm for ZZ Top. Of maybe that’s “tres” time. Their third album, Tres Hombres, came out this day in 1973 and quickly elevated them from an obscure Texas bar band to a major force in American rock.
It seemed a matter of perserverence paying off more than a changed gameplan for the Houston blues-rockers. Bill Ham produced the record, as he had the first two, and although they recorded it in Memphis rather than Texas, little about it was much of a departure from their previous work or live sets of the time. As allmusic would say later, the 10-song, 33-minute set delivered “low-down, cheerfully sleazy booze-n-boogie” rock at its best. The trio wrote the songs (with typical Southern Rock sounding titles like “Jesus Just Left Chicago,” “Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers” and “Master of Sparks”) but drew heavily on old bluesmen like John Lee Hooker for the inspiration.
Rolling Stone quite liked it when it came out, and would later on put it in their 500 greatest albums of all-time, albeit just barely (#498 in 2012). At the time they wrote they were “one of several competant Southern rocking bands”, they “sound Black” and that “Billy Gibbons plays a tasty Duane Allman lead while Dusty Hill and Frank Beard pound out the funky bottom.” Hometown paper the Houston Chronicle wasn’t so sure though, noting it was “full of characters and doing so steeped in caricature…as to invite skepticism.” In later years, Pitchfork would rate it 9 out of 10, calling it a “masterful melding of complementary styles, cramming Southern rock and blues boogie thru the band’s own idiosyncratic filter.” Allmusic would rate it 4.5-stars – as good as any of their ’70s output – and note that it “made them stars…it couldn’t have happened to a better record.”
That it did, with the album getting to #8 in their home country. Neither of the predecessors had even made the top 100! It was soon certified gold and has gone on to sell some five million copies since, largely on the strength of the blues boogie classic “La Grange.” The song about the Chicken Ranch brothel near La Grange, Texas was their first hit single, hitting #41 in the U.S., #34 to the north in Canada and #18 in rowdy Australia, where it is their biggest hit next to the MTV smash from a decade later, “Legs.”
Sadly only “dos” of the original Tres Hombres are still around after Dusty Hill passed away in 2021. At that point ZZ Top had set a record for the longest-running band (50 years or more) without any lineup changes. Happily though, they’re still rolling with “nuevo” hombre Elwood Francis on bass. Francis was their guitar tech before Hill’s death. Those wanting to check out Elwood and his beard can do so with them playing several concerts in the Great Plains and Southwest through the coming month.
Welcome back to Turntable Talk! Thanks to all the regular readers and welcome to any new ones. If you’re keeping count, this is our 11th instalment! But for new readers, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columns from other music fans and writers, sounding off on one particular topic. This month, our topic is A Really BigShow. We’ve asked our guests if they had a time machine, and could go back and see one concert what would it be? It could be a show from before they were born, one tey missed or one they actually attended and would like to relive. Big festival, small club show, you name it.
Today we have Randy from Mostly Music Covers, where as the name suggests he deals with all the great cover songs through the years. Being from Canada, will he pick a Canadian show to take the time machine to? Randy suggests:
Well, if Dave says it’s possible to go back in time to hear some music, then who am I to argue?
It’s cold, it only got to up to 31 degrees today and this evening it’s much colder than that, just a dusting of snow so it could be worse for New York this time of year. We had a few inches back in November. Standing in line it’s hard to keep warm but fortunately they are moving us in quickly. Once inside I make my way up to the first level balcony, first row, front and center, my favorite spot in any venue. I’m flying solo tonight, here at Carnegie Hall the seat cost me $2.70, a full day’s wages plus; but I know it will be worth it. This place is breathtaking and enormous. I have never been in a larger hall.
Marian Anderson performs for an audience at Carnegie Hall in 1947
There is lots of commotion on the stage. Somehow, I managed to miss getting a program. No matter, when I saw the poster I had recognized several names. It’s tribute to the late Bessie Smith. I have two of her records and I saw that her sister Ruby will be singing tonight, but I’m sure they’ll announce all the acts. Much as I love to listen to Blues and Jazz records, mostly the only way to hear these acts is in a Nightclub or at one of the hotels. I heard Count Basie is at the Woodside Hotel in Harlem. Truthfully, it was a stretch to get this ticket; any spare change goes to buy records. Needless to say, with this recession going on I’m lucky to have a job, so no, I don’t get out much. Looking around this place seems to let working stiffs like me and Black Folk too come to shows. Still it’s mostly full of rich folk I’d say. Glad I wore my Sunday best!
Speaking of the Count, that’s him with his orchestra right off the bat, “Swingin’ the Blues”, man it’s going to be a night! John Hammond comes out to do the introductions, and it’s one knockout act to the next, some crazy trumpet from Hot Lips Page, and when they push The Kansas City Six out from the rest of Basie’s group, we are swinging indeed. Then Helen Humes fronts them for some dreamy Blues.
Later it’s back and forth with Big Joe Turner, Pete Johnson, and the damnedest Boogie Woogie Piano you will ever hear with Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Page, Jones, I mean I am starting to lose it now. Honestly, I didn’t know about the Gospel stuff but when this lady comes out, Sister Rosetta Tharpe she’s called, never heard a canary sing like that, no sir! And playing that guitar, she was aces!
I still can’t believe I inherited that phonograph, small as it is, there is going to be room in the record budget for her! Mr. Hammond came out at one point and said that one of the names on the poster, that I did not recognize, the singer Robert Johnson had passed away. They played a couple of his songs from a record, me, and everybody else I’d imagine never heard anyone play guitar like that, there was a stunned silence. First Sister Rosetta and now this guy, guitar ain’t never gonna be the same again. Someone I did recognize, just by name mind you, and he knows his way around a guitar as well was Big Bill Broonzy out of Chicago. “It was Just a Dream.”
Following that it was Sonny Terry with some mean harmonica. Then Basie and some of the boys finished out the night with a couple more songs. Now I’m no hep cat but that music was swingin’. No, I’m thinking it’ll be slug burgers and dog soup on the menu for a long time if I am going to buy all these records. Hope I keep my job too. Long as I live, I will not forget this night. More than a bit of walk home but I won’t mind the cold so much, not tonight.
Welcome back to Turntable Talk! As by now, regular readers know, that’s when I have several interesting guest writers sound off on one topic related to the music that we look at here daily. This is our seventh round of it, and if you’re new here, I recommend taking a look back at some of the earlier topics we’ve covered like why the Beatles are still relevant, or “did video kill the radio star?” or the one dealing with “guilty pleasures” we ran at the start of this month.
Elvis Presley had 114 top 40 hits in the U.S., a couple of them making the charts posthumously. The Beatles, 52 on the Billboard charts… and that doesn’t include songs like “Dear Prduence”, “A Day in The Life” or “Here Comes the Sun”, which were beloved pop-rock classics but weren’t released as singles and thus never hit the sales charts. This time around, it’s pretty safe to say we won’t be dealing with those greats, nor Bruce Springsteen, or U2 or Madonna… because this time we’re looking at Wonderful One Hit Wonders.
Sure, we all love those great, reliable artists who’ve churned out hit after hit for years, or decades. But our musical landscape is made a whole lot more interesting and enjoyable by those acts who have the brief moment in the sun, when their song is heard everywhere and when their name is known…and then disappear from the public’s radar.
“One Hit Wonder” is often seen as a derogatory term but it shouldn’t be. It’s one more lasting piece of music history than I’ve had, or most of us ever do, and in many cases, that one hit will live on after the band is broken up or the artist long retired.
Leading off this time is Michigan’s Lisa from Tao Talk, where she shares poetry, pictures and political thoughts. She writes:
Jeff Healey (full name Norman Jeffrey Healey) (b. 3/25/66 – d. 3/2/08) was a Canadian blues, rock and jazz singer, guitarist, and songwriter per wikipedia. Jeff and The Jeff Healey Band first came to my attention in the 1989 blockbuster movie, Road House, starring Patrick Swayze, Kelly Lynch, Sam Elliott, and Ben Gazzara. In Road House, Jeff’s band is the house band at the place where much of the movie is set. As soon as I heard, “Angel Eyes,” I was sold and immediately went out and bought the album. I admit I didn’t listen to the album much and think I ended up trading it at the used record store for something else, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love the song and don’t still love it. The other two members of the band are bassist, Joe Rockman and drummer, Tom Stephen.
“Angel Eyes” is the fifth song on the debut album of The Jeff Healey Band, See The Light, released in September 1988. John Hiatt, who co-wrote the song with Fred Koller, finally released his own version of the song on his 1994 live album, Hiatt Comes Alive at Budokan? the title being two parodies of Peter Frampton’s, FramptonComes Alive” and Cheap Trick’s, Live at Budokan. (source, wikipedia)
Songfacts says that “Angel Eyes” stands as Jeff Healey’s only Billboard Top-40 hit; however, considering what a unique character he was, it seems most unfair to dismiss him as a one-hit wonder. Amongst many other things, he was much bigger on the Canada Singles chart; he picked up Juno Awards, got an Independent Music Award for Best Blues Album, and played alongside such talent as Dire Straits, Stevie Ray Vaughan, BB King, ZZ Top, and Eric Clapton.
The director of Road House gave Jeff a lot of screen time. After the chicken wire, the most noticeable aspect besides the wonderful melody and lyrics of the songs was the way that Jeff played his guitar; flat like a steel guitar. He played that way reportedly because he was blind. Reading about his childhood, I learned that Jeff was adopted as an infant; when he was less than a year old he had to have his eyes surgically removed due to retinoblastoma. Listening to and reading interviews with him, he never considered his blindness as a limiting factor to his success as a human being or as a musician.
In 2006, Jeff had cancerous tumors removed from his legs. In 2007, he had cancerous tumors removed from his lungs. (Makes me wonder if he lived near a toxic landfill!) Unfortunately, at the age of only 41, Jeff passed away on March 2, 2008.
If you’d like to learn more about Jeff Healey, there is a short documentary here (beware there are some reading glitches in it.)
Yesterday we looked at the final show at Shea Stadium and mentioned the first one there was by the Beatles… that had been what some figured was really the beginning of the “big concert” rock era. Today we look at a record Rolling Stone would suggest ushered in rock & roll in general. It was 68 years ago today Elvis Presley hit the store shelves, and rock music hit the airwaves with the release of his first single, “That’s All Right.” The 1954 vinyl single didn’t exactly set the music world on fire… but it sparked the match that did.
Remarkably, in an example of how different things in music back then, the song had been recorded only two weeks earlier! Elvis, his lead guitarist friend Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black were trying to record a few songs at the Sun Studios in Memphis, with owner Sam Phillips producing. In between “real” songs, Elvis began fooling around and broke into this song, a Blues number from eight years earlier. However, Elvis was playing it on his acoustic guitar and singing almost twice as fast as the original and the others joined in. Phillips liked what he heard, and told them to do it again from the top. This time he had tape rolling. They played it through in 1:57 and Phillips recorded it and after a little fine-tuning, pressed it as a single. Live to the disc, so to speak.
One has to recall, at the time, Elvis was unknown, except for in clubs around Memphis. So this, the first of what ended up being 117 singles he’d put out (according to Wikipedia; getting an exact count is difficult due to re-issues and different ones released in limited markets) didn’t generate a whole lot of buzz. It did become a local hit in the Southwestern Tennessee area, and got some airplay around the land on country radio… once again, remember in the early-’50s, since “rock” wasn’t a thing yet, neither was “rock radio” or even “top 40” stations. It’s estimated to have sold 20 000 singles, but failed to hit the Billboard charts. It did make some country music charts, getting to #28.
Elvis’ profile kept rising, but at first it did so as slowly as the Mississippi off Memphis after a drizzle. He, and Sun Records, would put out three more essentially unsuccessful singles before catching a bit of a break in 1955 with “I Forgot to Remember To Forget,” which went to #1 on country charts around the country, and up to #2 overall in Canada. That of course set the stage for the levee to break so to speak, with him quickly running off four-straight #1 selling singles now considered classics before they rang in 1956 – “Heartbreak Hotel”, “I Want You, I Need You, I Love You”, “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog.”
Although Mental Floss agreed with Rolling Stone, saying it “stands as a convincing front runner for rock & roll’s ‘ground zero’”, a few suggest Arthur Crudup’s ’46 original was because it had seemingly the first electric guitar solo ever. Which seems a slim criteria for determining “rock and roll.” What isn’t in debate was that Crudup wrote the song. Or is it in debate?
The Sun single lists Crudup as the writer, but apparently they never paid him any royalties, there was a lawsuit in the ’70s, and he was due about $60 000, but he, or his estate allege they never received it. But that led to another argument. Some suggest that Crudup more or less plagiarized an earlier work, a 1920’s blues number called “Black Snake Moan” and its artist, Blind Lemon should be given co-credit.
No matter who actually came up with the idea, Elvis put it on the map, and soon Memphis would put Elvis on the globe – the map worldwide!
To mark the 50th anniversary of the song, a CD single of it was put out in 2004. Although it didn’t sell huge numbers at home, it did hit #3 in the UK, where it had been ignored 50 years prior.
A Sound Day 