One Hit No More, No. 98: Steve Forbert, an Unlikely Romeo

First impression.

The Hit
With Steve Forbert’s 1979 hit, “Romeo’s Tune,” we hit…yet another song I’d never heard. No memories or associations with childhood, nothing about the old man playing it and telling me about “real music” (his tastes go back 20 years prior, for the record), which leaves just the song itself.

To speak in the royal mode, Forbert comes off as an acquired taste the first time you hear him. Musically, it’s a fine song, great even, for people who are into sparkling piano phrases tangling with extended keening altos on the guitar and, a personal favorite, that warm, grounding glow an electric organ lends a song…and then Forbert starts singing. His voice sounds pinched to where you wait for him to clear his throat and, if not flat, possessed of a similar quality. Unless he’s not rasping out something like a shout, his vocals seem to fade into the music of the chorus, and so on.

And then, as one does when listening for what else someone did in his career, you keep listening. You find Forbert’s voice growing on you, and in a way you can’t put words to until someone does it for you - in this case, a Rolling Stone article from 1980, where they noted what sold Danny Fields, one of the original interpreters of New York punk to the mainstream, on Forbert as a performer:

“He attacked his acoustic guitar fiercely, took raw, careening harmonica solos, and sang in a manner nobody had heard before — hoarse, almost whispering at times, but with a sure command of texture and nuance and a sense of high drama.”

And, sure, I guess that makes his voice an acquired taste. To wrap up “Romeo’s Tune” - and it is a great song, worthy of a No. 11 hit - Forbert wrote it about a girl he either knew or heard about in his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, but he had it dedicated to Florence Ballard of The Supremes out of sympathy for the way the music business screwed her over. As I discovered bouncing around the internet, that seems pretty on-brand for Forbert.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 37: Al Dexter and His Pistol Packin' Hit

Honky-tonk, from his lips to our ears.

Sources disagree on the birth year of Clarence Albert Poindexter, but most list either 1902 or 1905. Whatever the year was, Al Dexter was born in Jacksonville, Texas. Either nothing remarkable happened in his childhood or people didn’t find anything worth mentioning, but he started playing music during the 1920s. According to Country Thang Daily, Dexter did a little recording even back then, religious numbers mostly, until something other than divine intervention pushed him to another track: “However, after a friend asked him if he wanted to “write pretty songs or make money,” he was inspired to switch to honky-tonk music.”

Dexter made the switch, but the weight of the Great Depression squeezed Dexter out of music and into the painting business. The fire still burned bright enough that he started moonlighting with an all-black band playing private clubs and square dance parties, just to keep playing. For the record, Wikipedia tweaks that narrative, saying that Dexter kept forming bands throughout the early 1930s, including the all-black ensemble because he couldn’t get white musicians to play his style of music. Once he had enough of everything in place, Dexter toured his band and sound around East Texas oil-boom towns, finally earning enough to return to a career in music.

With money he’d earned on the road, Dexter settled down, opened a tavern, named it Turner Town, and set up as the house band. With that as a base, he further refined his sound until he had something new for American audiences. From a bio on the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame's website:

“Al Dexter is considered to be one of the forefathers of the honky-tonk music style. But rather than specializing in forlorn heartache laments, he emphasized the rollicking, good-time, barrelhouse side of this country barroom genre.”

Dexter recorded a smattering of songs in the 1930s, the biggest being “New Jelly Roll Blues” (1935) and “Honky Tonk Blues” (1937). The latter slipped the phrase “honky tonk” into a song’s title for the first time and into the American musical lexicon, but he spent years struggling to write a follow-up. As the slump deepened, people at his then-label, Columbia Records, urged its president to drop him, but Art Satherley still saw potential and the sound and the act and kept him on. Dexter kept playing Turner Town and tinkering with bands until 1939, when he finally found the right mix. With his name finally clipped to Al Dexter and “his Texas Troopers” behind him, he returned to the studio to take another run at recording…and then World War II broke out.

Crash Course Timeline, No. 36: The Harlem Hamfats, Session Musician Superstars

A reason you may have heard of them...

I often type “this post will be short” at the top of these posts, only to delete after going on for four pages. This post, however, will be short. Because it cannot be otherwise.

The Harlem Hamfats barely survived to the Internet age. The entries on individual members top out after a couple paragraphs at most (e.g., Kansas Joe McCoy, and he was the long one) and their Wikipedia page doesn’t run much longer. Normally, that’s enough to convince me to skip an act, but two things recommended them for a short entry. First:

“They were perhaps the first studio recording band to become a performing act in their own right, and they recorded extensively.”

Chicago's pioneering producer J. Mayo Williams brought together The Harlem Hamfats to give Decca Records an in-house band to record that labels talent in the second half of the 1930s. For anyone familiar with the name, Williams bounced between Chicago labels from the mid-1920s until leaving Decca in the mid-1940s. Specializing in what the times dubbed “race records,” Williams recorded several of the early blues greats (e.g., Blind Lemon Jefferson (profiled here), Tampa Red (profiled here with Son House), plus jazz trailblazers, Jelly Roll Morton (profiled here) and King Oliver. By the time he'd moved onto Decca, the trend toward popular singers had picked up steam - i.e., the same shift that, along with the musicians strike of the early 1940s, did in the big bands - which meant Williams needed a stable of musicians he could rely on for recording sessions. Enter the Harlem Hamfats.

As sometimes happens, Wikipedia's entry on Kansas Joe McCoy (guitar/vocals) omits Williams’ role and states that he formed the Harlem Hamfats with his younger brother, Papa Charlie McCoy (guitar/mandolin), after divorcing his wife, a guitarist known as Memphis Minnie. As suggested by Kansas Joe’s name, he didn’t hail from Harlem. None of the Hamfats did. The McCoy’s weren’t even from Kansas; both grew up in Mississippi and came up in the New Orleans’ music scene. Some other members came from New Orleans as well - Herb Morand (trumpet/vocals), John Lindsay (bass), and Odell Rand (clarinet) - while the rest - Horace Malcolm (piano), Freddie Flynn (drums) and Pearlis Williams (also, drums) came from Chicago. It’s likely other members came in and out, but that’s the list I have.

The second thing that recommended the Harlem Hamfats for an entry actually involves a couple things:

One Hit No More, No. 97: Roger Voudouris, Who Did Not Get the Time to Get Used to It

Before...

The Hit
Until this past week, I had never heard of Roger Voudouris (pronounced “Vi-DOR-us,” per the first half of this fascinating little internet gem posted by a guy who seems to be a longtime session musician, Leland Sklar), and I had never heard his hit, “Get Used to It.” From his recollections about recording the Voudouris’ hit:

“It was really fun when we did this, really such tight arrangements, just groove, lots of fun little parts to them. It wasn’t just plowing through a song. It had some thoughtfulness went into the arrangement and Michael was really just great at that.”

The “Michael” referenced in that quote is (or was) Michael Omartian, a producer who churned out hits for Donna Summer, the song Christopher Cross recorded for the Dudley Moore vehicle, Arthur (“Arthur’s Theme (Best You Can Do),” and a couple more. Sklar’s video is the opposite of tight - e.g., he talks about the “mow-and-blow service” he pays to take care of his lawn once a week and, because he shot it in 2020, his first tentative steps out his COVID bubble - but it’s a cool little artifact…still, I only agree on one thing with him about “Get Used to It”:

“It really kind of defines that period in the late 70s, into the 80s musically.”

Omartian/Voudouis built his hit around a loping bass line with a fairly reserved snare tempo-wise and synths (so much synth) one that plays a “rhythm melody” that prances around the bass, with a rising melody coming in ahead of Voudouris’ vocals, and piano helping fill out the bottom. He has a decent singing voice, for what it’s worth, but it’s a little stiff; call it a case of quality over character. If there’s a jumping off point for what will be a very short post, that’s it.

The Rest of the Story
“I got tired of playing everyone else’s album. I decided to sing and make my own record.”

Roger Voudouris, born 1954, Sacramento, California, stood up his first band while still in high school. He called it Roger Voudouris’ Loud as Hell Rockers, which gives a fair sense of where he saw himself within a band. That band had enough heat to land regular shows at a place called the Elegant Barn Nightclub and the same outfit became an opening band for acts as well-known as John Mayall, Stephen Stills, and the Doobie Brothers (when they came through Sacramento, I'm guessing?). Voudouris played for a time with a guy named David Kahne in the exciting named Voudouris/Kahne, but all that must have run dry because, as he noted in a quick-hit interview on an Australian show called Countdown (Part 1 and Part 2), which is where I saw the quote above, he spent some time as a session player.

One Hit No More, No. 96: Tom Johnston, A Doobie Ducks Out Mid-Toke

Not flattering, but definitely rock 'n' roll.

The Hit
“Savannah Nights” open with bare-naked percussion - bongos (I think), definitely a snare, some quick taps on a hi-hat (toms?) - until a percussive rhythm guitar comes in, then horns, then a full standard rock ensemble takes over and it’s off to the races. When the vocals start, you’re pretty sure you know that voice…

…and, if you’re a fan of 1970s Bay Area rock, you do. Shit, how do I approach this one?

The Rest of the Story
“It’s not what I grew up doing and where I came from. So I just said, ‘You know, go ahead and do your thing. That’s cool. I’m gonna go do mine.’ That’s kind of where I left it until such time.”

That’s Tom Johnston, founder, vocalist, guitarist and songwriter for the Doobie Brothers talking about his bad luck, yet brief departure from the band that made him pretty damn famous. And that’s the rub with this chapter of the One Hit No More series: whenever someone talks to Johnston, pretty much all they talk about is the Doobie Brothers. Johnston more or less backed into his solo career and it didn’t last that long, at least not on the studio side. He recorded just two albums - 1979’s Everything You’ve Heard Is True and 1981’s Still Feels Good - and I’ve already covered half the story of his solo career with that one quote.

Talking about the rest of it requires talking about the Doobie Brothers, but I can only do that for so long without going against the animating presence of this series - i.e., learning and writing about one-hit wonders. “Savannah Nights” was Johnston’s one hit as a solo artist - and that only reached No. 34 on the Billboard (in 1980, for the record). That’s not to say the Doobies charted high or often - they didn’t, not for all the materail they put out - but they have legacy (e.g., “China Grove,” “Listen to the Music,” and “Long Train Running”) that stretches toward iconic, if mostly for their era (I know; the Doobies 2.0 had some hits of their own). They also have the kind of longevity that most bands can only dream of. As such, this post covers only how he got started and how his solo career came about, because it’s pretty much all Doobies on either side of that.