One Hit No More, No. 54: Jean Knight, "Mr. Big Stuff" and the Bakery

Which may or may not contain the bakery...

The Hit
It’s a funky, strutting, table-turner of a number, “Mr. Big Stuff,” fun, satisfying and triumphant all at once. The backing vocals give it the feel of a pile-on, a dude living life at several pegs too high getting dragged back down to Earth by a woman who won't even start putting up with his shit - and in front of all her friends to boot. I like how the different sounds and instruments fit together in the song. The bass, the guitar, even the punchy horn parts, all pretty simple and short on their own, each of them almost the beginning of a thought, a bunch of “oh, this is just something I’m working on,” laced together in a fun little piece of pop. On the one hand, isn't that most of pop music? On the other, this one's basic in the best way.

Fun detail: “Mr. Big Stuff” started as a ballad…no, I can’t hear what that would have sounded like either. When the people who worked it up played her the demo, Jean Knight liked it but didn’t think it sounded quite right. In the words of the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame’s bio for Knight:

“She’d heard a tape of Mr. Big Stuff and she liked it, but it was a ballad and she wanted to liven it up. Joe Broussard, one of the co-writers of the song, told her to sing it the way she felt it. In the Malaco studios, she nailed the song on her second take.”

Knight had a smart ear, but a year would pass before the world learned about it. It wasn’t the first time she went back to her day job, nor would it be her last.

The Rest of the Story
New Orleans-born Jean Knight (born Jean Castile; she thought “Knight” would be easier to pronounce) rarely struggled to impress with her vocals. After hearing her sing at her cousin’s bar (“Laura’s Place”), several bands invited her to sing with them; people approached her about recording - and she did several times - but that’s where it ended more often than not.

In 1965, a producer named Huey Meaux trying to launch Barbara Lynn with “You’ll Lose a Good Thing,” either spotted or heard Knight. He picked her up and tried to shop a version of “Tain’t the Truth” (a cover of an Ernie K-Doe song), but couldn’t get the single to go anywhere outside the regional market. (She’d actually recorded at least once before, a demo/cover of Jackie Wilson’s “Stop Doggin’ Me Around,” which landed her a contract with the Jet Star/Tribe label…but, again, nothing she did broke out of the region.) With reality not lining up with her dreams, Knight hung up the microphone and picked up a job as a baker at Loyola University.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 2: Ma Rainey, Her Black Bottom & More

Wanted a fresh angle. As a tribute to hers.

“Earlier, purely acoustic methods of recording had limited sensitivity and frequency range. Mid-frequency range notes could be recorded, but very low and very high frequencies could not. Instruments such as the violin were difficult to transfer to disc.”

While the limitations of acoustic recording are tangential to the immediate subject, discussions of music from the 1920s should start by admitting the obvious: the sound on the recordings is shit, poor enough to make already dated music sound almost foreign. Richard Crawford’s America’s Musical Life: A History goes into more and better detail on the instruments and vocal ranges that dissolved into aural mush (though not the abridged version; of which, I wouldn't buy it), but acoustic recording turned some sounds tinny while flattening out everything else. As such, as you listen to just about anything recorded during that decade, cut it at least some slack and understand you’re hearing none of these artists at their best, never mind as they were. That applies everyone, even Ma Rainey.

Gertude “Ma” Rainey (nee Pridgett) sits astride at least half a dozen cross-currents of popular music from the 1920s: she came up on the “minstrel” side of vaudeville; she recorded prolifically just as the phonograph outstripped sheet music as the primary vehicle for sharing music; she brought one of the earliest iterations of blues to white audiences and did it while collaborating with pioneers of another famous black genre, jazz; finally, she embodied “jazz age” lewdness, and proudly, singing songs that tore up a handful of taboos:

“In her songs, she and other black women sleep around for revenge, drink and party all night and generally live lives that ‘transgressed these ideas of white middle class female respectability.’”

This was during prohibition, mind, though I just read the other day that Prohibition only outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol, not the consumption of it…so one could drink. Even a black woman. Songs that heavily hinted at (and possibly referenced a 1925 “orgy” with members of her chorus), however, broke taboos that it took the world seven or eight decades to catch up to (the most infamous song was 1928’s “Prove It on Me,” which came very late in her career).

One Hit No More, No. 53: Derek (Clapton), the Dominos and "Layla"

Gateway drugs take many forms.

The Hit
Have you seen Goodfellas? If so, you’ve heard Derek & the Dominos, “Layla,” if only the outro. You know the part when Robert DeNiro’s character cleaned up after the Lufthansa heist because all those people started spending too loudly? The part where those two kids walk up to the pink Caddy? Or when they open the meat locker and that one guy, gangster who was kind of a goofball, is hanging in the refrigerated truck with sides of beef? Ring any bells?

Forget about it. Even it lasts over four minutes, the outro feels like a moment of Zen transcendence, of floating away after the twisting turmoil of the first half (or less) of the song, the tangled, tortured guitar, a man bellowing “Stella!” in a New Orleans monsoon, only in the form of a song.

The funny thing was, not many people heard that anguished shout in the dark when “Derek” first sang it. When Derek & the Dominos released Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs in 1970, a couple critics perked up but not enough to goose sales. It was “a critical and commercial flop” and, as one of the major players in producing the album later said, even “Layla” “died a death” upon release.

The funny thing is, it might not have if one of the aforementioned “major player” had any desire to announce himself.

The Rest of the Story
“We were a make-believe band. We were all hiding inside it. Derek and the Dominos – the whole thing. So it couldn't last. I had to come out and admit that I was being me. I mean, being Derek was a cover for the fact that I was trying to steal someone else's wife. That was one of the reasons for doing it, so that I could write the song, and even use another name for Pattie. So Derek and Layla – it wasn't real at all.”

“We were all hiding inside it” sounds a little rich once you put together the fact that it was mostly Eric “Derek” Clapton doing the hiding. Derek & the Dominos deliberately hid Clapton’s involvement with the band because he’d had enough of the “Clapton is God” mythology that he felt destroyed both Cream and Blind Faith, his short-lived project with Steve Winwood. That said, telling the whole story involves a little backing up. (Also, this oral history fits together the parts in the most clarifying way I’ve come across so far; whatever errors I make here are corrected there.)

Crash Course Timeline, No. 1: Introduction to the 1920s, When Everything Was Okeh

Apt overall. You'll see...

I’ve felt a certain ignorance about the history of American popular music for years, where and with whom the sounds originated, and, no less important, where the currents carried from there. After putting off the inevitable for too long, I started this project to fill in the blanks, first one decade at a time and then, when I hit the sounds and decades I’m familiar with, maybe the time-line compresses to five year cycles, maybe it starts going one artist at a time. That decision will come when the timeline forces it - which I expect will come at a painfully obvious crossroads, say the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.

That’s about 35 years in the future from where this timeline starts - the 1920s. A little historical grounding feels appropriate, something to put the reader in, for lack of a better word, the mood.

Popular culture recalls the 1920s as a happy, carefree time; going the other way, it started with a raging pandemic and the memory of a savage war (aka, the War to End All Wars) and ended with the first, baffling year of Great Depression, which, together, go some way to explaining the hunger to freedom and diversion. It was also a whole damn decade of Prohibition, a time when Americans tried to shelve the sauce, but the take-home lesson from the experiment was that they were (and remain) incurable lushes. Anyone who wanted to find a drink didn’t have to look that hard and for the simplest reason of all: supply follows demand, laws be damned. (Ask anyone who lived through the “just say no” era how little effort it took to find pot - or any drug for that matter.)

The 1920s also saw the birth of mass, and crucially, nationwide consumer culture. Regular people had excess money to spend - and spend they did on all kinds of useful/fun crap, e.g., ready-made clothing, surprisingly affordable cars (as low as $260), modern conveniences for the home like washing machines (which produced idle hands), early birth control (e.g., the diaphragm), going to the movies (just stumbled on an estimate that 3/4 of Americans went to the movies once a week), radios, speakeasies, just going out dancing, generally…and now we’re getting closer to the subject.

Crash-Course No. 32: At the Drive-In, Rock Band Made Flesh

Oh, man. Memories...

Who They’re For
On the most basic level, fans of hard rock, but it gets a little complicated from there. At the Drive‑In’s sound is aggressive, no question, but it possesses a subtlety that goes beyond the indie-rock, semi-traditional loud/soft/loud pattern; the vocals and instrumentation combine in melodies qualities that contrast against brash, staccato elements, as well as the ones that, for lack of a better word, crash or even collide. There’s a violence to it, on some level. Some more advanced descriptors - and from a couple places.

First a note: whereas you get “just the facts” on some Wikipedia pages (e.g., bare lists of album releases and tours), some editors give a little love, not unlike mash-notes from a doting fan. For instance, their Wiki-editor dished this helpful breakdown of At the Drive-In’s sound:

“The band's guitar-playing, in the majority of their songs, is characterized by unusual chords, a fast tempo, and a quiet-loud-quiet song structure. While Jim Ward and Paul Hinojos provided the rhythmic structure of the song, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez often played more experimental riffs and melodies over the top. Effects were heavily used by Rodriguez-Lopez, especially on Relationship of Command, while Ward used the keyboard to create melody, often switching between the guitar and keyboard such as in "Invalid Litter Dept.”

Or, for simpler name-drop description from a 2017 piece in The Guardian:

“...they looked and sounded like a post-hardcore version of MC5 crossed with Os Mutantes.”

If those names don’t ring a bell, here are some influences (from Wikipedia): Indian Summer, Swing Kids, Fugazi, Sunny Day Real Estate, Bad Brains, Nation of Ulysses and Drive Like Jehu.

A Little More
At the Drive-In "started in a ditch" in the mid-1990s when Cedric Bixler-Zavala met the first person in El Paso, Texas who took leaving El Paso as seriously as he did, a guitarist named Jim Ward. (Fun aside: Bixler-Zavala briefly played in a band with Beto O’Rourke…yes, that one, but decided he wasn’t serious enough; he still had very kind things to say about O’Rourke in a 2017 interview with Las Vegas Weekly). They added members piece-by-piece (which takes a bit, actually), and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez came in early, but, once they had enough members, that hit the road and just started going, show after show, EP after EP, tour after tour after tour. The process started with the Hell Paso EP in 1994, followed by the Alfaro, Vive Carajo! in 1995 and they took the songs, first, all the way around Texas, then all over the country, using a 1981 Ford Econoline van as their chariot.

One Hit No More, No. 52: Mungo Jerry, Borderline Skiffle Revivalists

The dream.

The Hit
“And it’s become…it’s almost, I mean the longer it goes on, it becomes more like ‘Happy Birthday,” because, when anybody thinks of the summer, they think of ‘In the Summertime.’”

Asking whether a person knows Mungo Jerry’s, “In the Summertime,” isn’t so different from asking whether she’s seen a commercial air either before or during summer. So, yes, of course she has. That quote comes from snippet of a 2012 VH1 interview snippet with Ray Dorset, the man so synonymous with Mungo Jerry that that might as well be his name - a thought he has voiced in other interviews.

Songs don’t come more free and breezy than “In the Summertime,” all the way down to the famous lyric, “have a drink, have drive, go out and see what you can find.” It’s an unusual tune too, and all the way down to the dude blowing into a jug; all acoustic, it’s minimalist as a drum circle outside your local dorm, only there are no drums on the track (and hold that thought). Less a story than an experience - specifically, the beginning of a day that feels destined to fall into place - it brims with hope, requiring nothing more than asking the right questions…and, yeah, a big nod to young, male horniness. (“You got women, you got women on your mind.”). What’s not to like, y’know?

That song over and over again, for starters…

The Rest of the Story
“Dorset was the composer, guitarist, blues harp, kazoo player, frontman and singer.”

First, a confession: dear God in Heaven, did I suffer through Mungo Jerry. I can say kind things about them and they have an interesting/semi-comic history, but I chose that sentence to start because I can’t think of one good reason to put a kazoo in any piece of music. And yet Mungo Jerry did it over and over again. At any rate, and this isn’t a question of quality, the only way I will listen to this band again is on a fucking dare.

Now, the good/interesting stuff.

Crash-Course, No. 31: The Stranglers, Long, Slow and So, So Good

At the beginning...

Who They’re For:
Depends on when you listen: punk (or thereabouts) from 1977 to 1979 (Rattus Norvegicus, No More Heroes, Black and White, maybe The Raven), art/proto-goth in 1981 (The Gospel According to the Meninblack), and what one Wiki-editor called “sophisti-pop” from 1981 to 1984 (La Folie, Feline, and Aural Sculpture). I struggled with their late-middle catalog - i.e., when they sought to establish “cult status” in the States (Dreamtime and 10). Stranglers in the Night aside, Spotify either lost track of or didn’t bother with the rest of their 1990s material - though I read good things about Norfolk Coast - but I well and truly rate their last studio work, 2012’s Giants, which is just straight, savvy rock.

A Little More
“Not anyone can be a Strangler. Paul Roberts and Jon Ellis could sing and play very well but they didn’t feel like Stranglers. Baz on the other hand does. He has the attitude and the music.”

The Stranglers were a rain-check from one of my earlier, dog-pile playlists - the one of two featuring pioneering punk bands - and it foundered on my need for variety. That’s never an issue with The Stranglers, a band with enough catalog for five. This feels like a good starting point:

“Burnel: There were some funny incidents in those early days. We were booked to play a Young Conservatives dance.

Black: At the start of the first song, there were 300 people in the hall. By the end, there were four left watching. But they started following us. It was a similar story all over the country.”

The “Burnel” in that quote is Jean-Jacques Burnel, the band’s original bassist and…arguably, The Stranglers’ standard-bearer as they enter their fifth decade; “Black” is Jet Black (aka, Brian Duffy), was the band’s drummer/founder, but he was always older than the rest of them. The rest of the key members were Dave Greenfield, their second keyboardist after Hans Warmling, and Hugh Cornwell…and, holy shit, there’s a story. The Stranglers came together piece-by-piece but several came in with hefty resumes - e.g., Cornwell had spent time with the well-respected Richard Thompson, Black spent some years as a jazz drummer, while Burnel had enough polish to play with symphony orchestras. When they became The Stranglers, they kept the smarts and quality, but embraced the liberty of playing under the “punk rock” banner.

One Hit No More, No. 51: Brewer & Shipley Walked Tarkio Road

Just picture "Brewer & Shipley."

The Hit
I first heard Brewer & Shipley’s “One Toke Over the Line” when Benicio del Toro bellowed it out through a manic smile at the beginning of Terry Gilliam’s take on Hunter S. Thompson's Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. I’ve rarely heard it since. I found it a little surprising a song that didn’t reach the era of legalized marijuana with a little more popular “oomph.”

I did, however, just read that Brewer & Shipley played the song at the Denver County Fair “Pot Pavillion,” on April 20 and with their set timed to kick off at 4:20 p.m. According to the date of the source, that would have been some time in the early 2010s, so maybe it could be I'm moving in the wrong circles.

As for the song itself, it’s got country elements, certainly, but the piano in the score and the chorus structure comes from the late-60s/early-70s folk-rock music movement - much like the men who wrote it, Mike Brewer and Tom Shipley. It’s not innocent of the association with pot - the inclusion and reference are both conscious and deliberate - but Brewer & Shipley didn’t write the song as any kind of grand statement. By all accounts, they wrote it either preparing for or winding down from a performance and didn’t think it would go much further than an inside joke. They happened to have it on hand one night while opening for Melanie at Carnegie Hall, so they played it during the encore and, as they say, the crowd went wild. When they walked off stage that Neil Bogart, the head of the Kama Sutra label they’d just signed to, told them to record it immediately. Which they did.

It wasn’t long before Brewer & Shipley had their one and only hit; Vice President Spiro Agnew calling them “subversives to American youth” by name came shortly thereafter, and they wound up on President Dick Nixon’s enemies list to top it all off. And that’s not even close to the weirdest thing that happened with “One Toke Over the Line.” That came when a duo named “Gail and Dale” performed a cover of it on the Lawrence Welk Show and Welk signed it off by calling it “a modern spiritual.”