Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues
Page 34
Snake lived across the street from Muddy at 4340 South Lake Park Avenue on the second floor. He had a room and shared a bathroom in the hall with four other people on that floor. When you visited Snake, you rang bell number two, twice. Snake always answered the door with a pistol in his right hand. Snake had big bones but was skinny as hell. He had long arms and big hands, and his overall look was gangly. He wore sharkskin suits, and when he didn’t have to play, he always had a do-rag on his head. He always wore shades, and he liked to look at you under-eyed over his glasses—the whites of his eyes were always bloodshot and yellow. He drank 100-proof Old Granddad or Wild Irish Rose wine and always kept a pint of wine or a half-pint of whiskey. He’d wash it down with anything—Coke, orange pop, grape Nehi. Snake usually started his day off with a Bromo seltzer and a drink of whiskey. You couldn’t get too close to him because his breath stank like a garbage can.
Snake had a tough, mean, and raw sound on his guitar and his voice was just as raw. His blues were low-down and lonesome. There was an urgency in his playing; it was clear that this was all that mattered. He was a bluesman from his heart. Muddy liked him for his low-down ways. Muddy had a lot of respect for the underdog and for cats who were on the edge. He didn’t pay them too much, but it kept them from sleepin’ in cars and things. They had the blues.
Otis Spann came out of Muddy’s basement, where he lived, and greeted me as “Brother Paul.” Spann told me we were going to St. Louis for the weekend and asked if I had any clothes to wear for the gig. He told me he would loan me some money to get sharp. Spann took me over to Forty-third Street and bought me a pair of rust-orange-colored sharkskin-type pants, a fedora hat, and a black shirt. He also handed me an African carved-head necklace and told me, “This’ll keep the wolves off your back.”
When we got back to Muddy’s house, guitarist Pee Wee Madison and Snake were there, both with garment bags for their clothes. They greeted me and said, “We’re leaving out soon.” Later bassist Sonny Wimberly pulled up in a gypsy cab. He lived in the projects over on State Street. Drummer S.P. Leary was walkin’ down the street, carrying his cymbal and a garment bag. He had taken the El train from the West Side. We were all ready to go. We went down to Muddy’s basement to get the equipment. Bo, Muddy’s driver and valet, lived in the front room of the basement, and Spann stayed in the back with his wife Lucille.
Bo pulled up in a Volkswagen bus, and we loaded up and headed out for St. Louis. The ride was about six hours, during which time we all drank and told stories. S.P. had been workin’ with Howlin’ Wolf for a while and told a story about Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy II. They were working together in this club down South where they were playing for tips. Sonny Boy collected the tips in his hat, walked out the door, and never came back—left Wolf stranded. Wolf never forgave him. Spann said, “Sonny Boy was somethin’ else. We used to call him ‘Ol’ Bigfoot.’ His feets were so big he had to cut his shoes open around the toes.” Spann got to talking about all the great harp players: Little Walter, Forest City Joe Pugh, Pots Henry Strong, James Cotton, and Big Walter. S.P. called Cotton “Big Red.” Spann called Big Walter “Ol’ Shakey Head Walter” because of the way Walter would shake his head like he was shaking water out of his ear after he played a hot lick. Spann said to me, “All y’all harp players are crazy, that harp does somethin’ to your brains.” I laughed. He said, “One time Little Walter made the band stop by some watermelon patch just so Walter could steal him some watermelons. We didn’t do nothin’ but break ‘em open and eat out they hearts.”
When we arrived in St. Louis, the sun was setting. We pulled up to the hotel, and prostitutes, standing on the corner, hiked up their dresses and shouted out greetings: “The Muddy Waters Band is here!” The band got rooms at this little hotel on Enright Street. There was a rib-tip place in the hotel, and we bought bags of rib-tips and went to the lounge, drank some more, then we left and went to Miss Herb’s Moonlight Lounge on Goode. There was a big sign in the window advertising the gig: MUDDY WATERS AND HIS HOOCHIE COOCHIE BOYS. On the way to Miss Herb’s place, S.P. pointed out the Club Caravan and told me, “That’s where the Wolf plays.”
The Moonlight Lounge was a pretty good-sized room with a circle bar and tables on either side of the room. There were pictures of flamingoes on the walls. The area for the band was in the rear of the room, roped off with a chain. We set up the equipment and Spann tuned the piano; he always carried a tuning wrench for that purpose. We went back to the hotel and got ready for the gig. Snake made a deal with one of the prostitutes that she could use his room to turn tricks, in exchange for a piece of the action.
The band opened the set with “Chicken Shack” and some other instrumental numbers. Snake sang. Spann sang. Albert King sat in. Muddy didn’t play the first set, just sat at a table nearby entertaining
some female companions. When Muddy played the second set, the place went wild. He sang “Long Distance Call,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” When I played my harmonica solo on that number, I dropped down on my knees. A woman in the audience shouted with a big, gold-toothed grin, “Don’t stop now, baby, my drawers are wet.” We played “Mannish Boy” for our last number, and Muddy had a longneck Budweiser bottle concealed in his pants before the song. He really worked the crowd on that song, shouting like a preacher possessed, and when he got the crowd hot enough, he’d shout out, “I’m gonna show you a man,” then he’d move that bottle in his pants like he had a huge hard-on. The audience screamed.
The next night the band played even more intensely. Muddy walked the bar and sang, “Got My Mojo Workin’.” The crowd went nuts. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me. These were my heroes. I was living out my dreams.
HOW I MET MY HUSBAND BY SUZAN-LORI PARKS
The first time ever I saw Paul Oscher’s face, it was on the cover of his CD: Knocking on the Devil’s Door. A good-looking guy. A good-looking white guy—and me a blues lover who’d been learning the harmonica. My harp teacher hipped me to the Oscher album, just handing it to me one day. “Is this another one of those white guys lost in the blues?” I ask.
“Hell no, this dude’s the real deal,” my harp teacher, Jasper, tells me. Jasper’s black. Jasper also knows the blues. I listen to the album and love it.
A few years pass. I’m between harmonica teachers. Out of the blue, I get a phone call.
“You want a harp lesson?” the man asks, his voice rough and sexy from too many beers and cigarettes. It was Paul Oscher himself calling me. A friend had given Paul my number saying, “There’s a cute chick who wants harp lessons.” So it’s around 11 p.m. and he’s calling me.
“Is this really Paul Oscher?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “The guy who got his start with Muddy and all that?” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “I heard you were looking for a harp teacher.”
I want to say yes but I play cool. “Maybe I’ll call you next week,” I say.
About a week later he calls again, closer to midnight this time. This guy’s got a good rhythm, I’m thinking. He asks me what I can play on the harp and starts teaching me for free over the phone. Then we get to talking about all kinds of stuff. Six or seven hours later we’re still talking.
“I’m playing at Frank’s Lounge tomorrow night,” he says. “You can hear me play and decide if you want lessons. I’ll put you on the guest list.”
I show up at Frank’s with two girlfriends. Frank’s Lounge is this hole-in-the-wall bar in downtown Brooklyn, on Fulton Street. Frank and Ruby are owners and hosts. They’ve got Christmas lights up year-round with photographs of blues and jazz legends on the walls. The place, with its Southern roots, has the snugness of an alley, neat and close—friendly and a little dangerous at the same time. The feeling of the place can pull you in off the street and keep you sitting at the bar for longer than might be good for you. It’s got a black clientele for the most part. A hangout for old-school hustler types.
I st
and in the doorway. There’s this guy on the bandstand tuning his guitar. It’s Paul. His vibe is strong. And he hasn’t even started playing yet.
“That’s my guy,” I tell my friends, hoping he isn’t married or engaged already. From my spot in the doorway, I wave. We meet in the middle of the room. He guides us to a table, covered with a red checkered oilcloth, and we sit down. He orders us some drinks and tells his band to start playing without him ‘cause he has to talk to me. He puts his arm around me, touching the small of my back.
He’s really checking out my butt, but he says, “Nice back.”
The man in Parks’ life: Paul Oscher (right) onstage with Muddy Waters at Miss Herb’s Moonlight Lounge, 1967
“I washed it just for you,” I say.
He joins the band onstage for the second set. Paul sings “Tin Pan Alley,” “Dirty Dealing Mama,” and other songs from his records. During “Dirty Dealing Mama,” a guy jumps up shouting, “Man, that sounds like my woman! Tell it like it is!” When he plays “Tin Pan Alley,” he walks out in the audience, falls to his knees, and plays his harp solo in a girl’s lap. The crowd goes wild. I’m hooked.
We schedule a harmonica lesson for the next afternoon. I show up at his room. He lives in downtown Brooklyn in a rooming house that looks like a skid-row hotel. I never did get the harmonica lesson, but we’ve been together ever since.
Paul tells me that Otis Spann once told him, “Every baby child born into this world is gonna have a touch of the blues someday. I don’t care what color they are—red, yellow, orange, green, or purple—everybody gets the blues.”
Paul Oscher’s a bluesman. He lives the life. He’s taught me lots of things—from how to play the guitar to the tricks of three-card monte—but I’m still waiting on that harp lesson.
RED, WHITE AND BLUES
Directed by Mike Figgis
My dad was crazy about jazz and blues. Growing up, my first memories are of albums, actually of 78s, because my dad inherited this very concise, catholic collection of blues and jazz records: Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith. I learned everything I know about music from listening to albums. In the case of my dad, he’d put on, say, an Eddie Condon record, sort of white Chicago blues from the thirties and forties, and say, “Just listen to the drummer. He is maybe the greatest drummer you’ll ever hear, because you can’t hear him. But if you really listen carefully, you’ll hear what he was doing and it’s miraculous.” And so through my dad, I developed the skill of just listening to what bass players did, and what drummers did, and understanding rhythm sections and things like that. Talking to all these musicians whom I had the good fortune to meet while making Red, White and Blues, it emerges that they all had the same experience. It was all about listening to albums—whether it was in London or Birmingham or Newcastle or Manchester. They all got together in a house, smoked some dope, or drank some beer or whatever, and listened to albums all night.
My dad played the piano, so I started playing drums when I was ten, trumpet when I was eleven, took up the guitar when I was about fourteen, and eventually took up the piano, as well. I understood the structure of the blues, in terms of the music, pretty early on. And as I then expanded into free jazz, classical music, and things like that, I always retained the sense that musicians whom I loved, like Charlie Parker or John Coltrane, remained grounded in blues. I never went for music that didn’t contain some element of blues. So it was always something that was, I guess from birth, ingrained. If you listen to Bessie Smith, you understand what blues is.
One of the first things that my dad made me do when I got a trumpet was put a Louis Armstrong record on, and he said, “Play along with it,” to develop my ear by listening and playing along.
My ambition was to be a jazz trumpet player like Armstrong or Bix Beiderbecke. Then I started listening to bebop, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie when I was sixteen, seventeen. Then, about the mid-sixties, there was an explosion of pop music, even up in the north of England where we lived. I found a pop band looking for a trumpet player; the band played covers of Del Shannon, the Shadows, the Beatles, and stuff like that. So I started to play and discovered I really enjoyed public performance, being in a pop band. And then in the local university, at Newcastle, there was a blues band called the Red, White and Blues Band. The lead singer was Bryan Ferry, and the guitarist was John Porter. They were looking for a brass section, because they were just getting into Otis Redding and Bobby Bland. I found myself very popular because there weren’t that many trumpet players around who understood that kind of stuff. So I found myself in a blues band, and I really got into it, started playing guitar a bit more, singing a little bit. Interestingly enough—much as the documentary charts some of this—you go into a band and do covers of Otis Redding and Bobby Bland, then you start listening to Dylan and more way-out stuff from the Beatles, or the Byrds: You start fusing those ideas and what’s happening culturally. I didn’t see that expansion as being detrimental to what the blues was.
What characterized that period, which is the middle and late sixties, early seventies, was a very open attitude toward music and culture, and toward race, as well. So the idea that, for example, in a place like Britain, which was far enough removed from the problems of race as it was experienced in America and the problems with blues musicians there, you could listen to a very eclectic range of music, from, say, Ray Charles, to a guitarist like Steve Cropper, or to the Beatles, and think of them as coming from the same idea. There wasn’t a wall between those cultures.
I’ve always felt that a kind of certain selective amnesia takes place, and also a selective viewpoint takes place when people talk about the period of the sixties, and it’s just fallen into its cliche compartment. Having been through it myself, and being, in a limited way, part of it, and certainly as an observer very passionately a part of it, I’ve always felt the story wasn’t really told properly. I still have some bands’ albums; I still listen to them, and they are stronger than ever. A classic example would be Steve Winwood, a young guy who could sing “Georgia on My Mind,” play the piano like a cross between Ray Charles and Oscar Peterson, play the guitar really well, and sing like a dream. In talking to Steve, I’ve realized he had a very similar background to my own. You realize that there is a very interesting viewpoint and story to be told about that aspect of the blues and the reinterpretation of it.
What we talk about in terms of the evolution of black music has entirely to do with the invention and development of recording. Really, this is as much a documentary about that phenomenon, about recorded music. Eric Dolphy once said that music shouldn’t be recorded, it should be heard and kept in the memory. Well, great if you were at Woodstock, great if you were at that famous Ellington concert at Newport, great if you were at the Ray Charles gig; but what a terrible loss that would be if it hadn’t been recorded.
What I didn’t want was to put together a jam session to film at Abbey Road studios that was self-indulgent, where musicians are having a great time and there are great moments, but the selfindulgence is what comes across and it cuts people out. The great temptation with fantastic musicians is for them to become florid, and I didn’t want that to happen. I made a rule that it should be acoustic; that there were to be no headphones; the amplified guitar could only be as loud to the point where it wasn’t overwhelming; string bass; brushes on the percussion; and the piano would be an acoustic piano and not amplified; to get a great room with great acoustics; and to make everyone sing live. I felt if that were the discipline, it would not allow people to get indulgent. Indulgence comes when there are two electric guitars and they keep turning up the volume, and it keeps getting louder and louder, and at a certain point you can’t hear the rhythm section anymore unless they use sticks. I just felt that set of rules would be repressive enough to make people listen to each other. Every time I felt it was getting a little indulgent, I would say, “I’d like it to be more minimal. I’d like you all to cut back a little bit.”
During one of the first conversations I had with Tom Jones, we were talking about Sinatra and Harry “Sweets” Edison playing with Sinatra, and Tom was saying the great thing about those sessions was that the accompanying musicians who were playing loose and free never ever cut across a vocal line. That was the genesis of the idea for an Abbey Road studio to be a great venue, because it has history and the room has great acoustics. The idea of using brushes and string bass meant that everyone had to listen and play quietly. And then the singers came in, and I just did my best to make sure that everything stayed tight and down in that way, so that the singers had all of the room to express themselves and were never having to fight, in terms of volume, with anyone else.
I brought saxophonist Peter King in because I think he’s a phenomenal musician, a phenomenal blues player, and he can play anything. He’s one of the most respected British jazz musicians alive. I’d been a fan for years and finally got to play with him and also just to feature him. I felt that bringing in someone from a jazz background but who is a blues player would temper Jeff Beck in a way that would make them both listen to each other because they weren’t familiar with each other’s styles. They’d never played together. I think Peter had played with Van Morrison once, but Van and Peter weren’t particularly familiar with each other. I know Van has a very jazz ear, so he likes jazz blues, that sort of Jimmy Witherspoon, jump-and-shout-and-jive blues. When