I was sitting in the parking lot of the Bentleyville Foodland on a rainy day in late March of 1984. My mom was grocery shopping and gave me the option of staying in the car to listen to the radio. I was fourteen. I took that option.
We were six weeks or so past the release of Footloose, and all those songs were in the feeding tube, lined up and ready to be drip fed into to 1984 pop culture. On this particular afternoon, B94 cued up Denise Williams's "Let's Hear It for the Boy" so I could listen to it for the 193rd time. The first 192 times had gone without a hitch. I didn't love the song, but I'd liked the way it was used in the movie. I had no beef.
But eight bars into #193, I lunged to turn off the radio -- certain that I'd punch the windshield if I heard one more note. What was this?
It was me hitting my Top 40 threshold.
There wasn't much you could do to remedy pop music fatigue in a 1984 suburban radio market. You had the Led Zeppelin station, you had the Big Chill Soundtrack station, you had public radio, you had the LP collection at the public library, and once you'd done your homework and were ready to commit something like ten dollars, there was the record store.
After a series of false starts with big band music and military marches (why in the name of John Phillip Sousa did I think I wanted to hear marches all day?), I read a couple of articles about B. B. King and bought the cheapest album I could find, Back in the Alley.
As a teenager in the deep eighties, my perspective of music was limited to what I read in gear-obsessed magazines that gushed over players with classical music backgrounds and/or engineering degrees. Music was turning slick and was careening toward being an entirely digital affair or, alternately, flush with the backlash of artists trying to manufacture organic nuance. "I thought it'd be nice if we could get a little feedback squeal going into the last chorus. Let me notch the EQ, and you get closer to your amp."
The Back in the Alley album was raw in a way that can only exist when it is produced by people who don't use the word "raw" to describe their own records. It wasn't engineered to capture an aesthetic, it was engineered so you could still hear the ride cymbal when the organ player sped up the Leslie. Grittiness was a byproduct. Not a product.
Everything seemed to be a first take. King responds verbally to a sour note at the four-minute mark "You'd Better Watch Yourself". The extemporaneous narrative of "Lucille" drifts wide and then is brought back clumsily by King who then asks the band (through the microphone) to stretch so he could have one and then two more choruses. These were moments that might have been stricken from other recordings but were left unedited here out of sheer lack of concern and absence of regret. I felt like the blues audience was in the room with the performer in a way they never were with pop music.
The crowd on the live cuts didn't sound like the crowds on other live recordings I'd heard. More rowdy? Maybe. On "Sweet Sixteen", a woman positively shrieks after the opening line of 'when I first met you baby'. In the closing moments of that same song, one guy in the audience seems to be in some sort of dialog with either the band or someone else in the crowd or himself as King stretches a fermata and gears up for a crashing finale. This wasn't the kind of audience I'd ever been a part of.
But beyond the recordings, Back in the Alley was really unnerving. Most of the songs are about retribution against women in a menacing tone I hadn't expected. "You'd Better Watch Yourself" is nothing but a list of grievances and a vague threat. "Don't Answer the Door" is a manifesto of an asshole.
I was a liner note junkie and was always looking for the names of session players that I recognized. Here, there was nothing but a blank cassette insert telling me that the names of the horn players were none of my business. Everything about this album made me feel unwelcome.
Still, I listened to it constantly, because nothing else I had on tape or vinyl made me feel this uneasy. This was a pre-punk discovery for me. I didn't know music could serve that purpose. Eventually I realized that these recordings were from a time when King and his band were touring the south, constantly harassed by white cops and playing for audiences going through much the same thing. The spiritedness of the crowds was, as much as anything, the celebration of homogeneity, which was something we were trying to get away from in the eighties.
I've tried approaching Klezmer music with this perspective, by the way. It's not really the same thing.
I also realized, via Randy Newman records, that sometimes songs are written in the voice of unsavory characters -- not every lyric performed for an audience has to be autobiographical.
Eventually, I learned about the real guy who was singing in these voices. He was an extraordinarily humble guitarist who downplayed his own contributions to the genre. He was a record collecting nerd, a former Dj, and a Keno player who once split a huge jackpot among his band without taking a cut for himself so they would stop razzing him about Keno being an "old lady game". No one had a bad thing to say about B. B. King. No one except him.
I bought Greatest Hits a year or two later. The tracks on it were well-produced and things like "Hummingbird" and "Ain't Nobody Home" deformed the envelope around things I thought of as blues. Even now when my phone shuffles "Hummingbird" up into the rotation it amazes me. If I had a playlist of goose bump songs, "Hummingbird" would be on it.
I should really have a playlist of goose bump songs.
In April of my senior year, he played the Syria Mosque ballroom, the same place that a number of my friends would later see The Ramones. I figured it might be my last chance to see him, because he was, after all, impossibly old (62). I had an idle daydream of going, but it wasn't realistic. That was pretty much the end of my exploration.
I never became the blues aficionado that I thought I'd be. I didn't delve much more deeply than with these two albums and a handful of others, mostly anthologies, so B. B. King has remained as the voice and the face and the timbre I'll always associate with blues most deeply. When I heard he was ramping down in his own home in Las Vegas, I was surprised by my mood. I don't feel grief or sadness, because I'm not entitled to it, but I'm grateful to have him in my head again.
We were six weeks or so past the release of Footloose, and all those songs were in the feeding tube, lined up and ready to be drip fed into to 1984 pop culture. On this particular afternoon, B94 cued up Denise Williams's "Let's Hear It for the Boy" so I could listen to it for the 193rd time. The first 192 times had gone without a hitch. I didn't love the song, but I'd liked the way it was used in the movie. I had no beef.
But eight bars into #193, I lunged to turn off the radio -- certain that I'd punch the windshield if I heard one more note. What was this?
It was me hitting my Top 40 threshold.
There wasn't much you could do to remedy pop music fatigue in a 1984 suburban radio market. You had the Led Zeppelin station, you had the Big Chill Soundtrack station, you had public radio, you had the LP collection at the public library, and once you'd done your homework and were ready to commit something like ten dollars, there was the record store.
After a series of false starts with big band music and military marches (why in the name of John Phillip Sousa did I think I wanted to hear marches all day?), I read a couple of articles about B. B. King and bought the cheapest album I could find, Back in the Alley.
As a teenager in the deep eighties, my perspective of music was limited to what I read in gear-obsessed magazines that gushed over players with classical music backgrounds and/or engineering degrees. Music was turning slick and was careening toward being an entirely digital affair or, alternately, flush with the backlash of artists trying to manufacture organic nuance. "I thought it'd be nice if we could get a little feedback squeal going into the last chorus. Let me notch the EQ, and you get closer to your amp."
The Back in the Alley album was raw in a way that can only exist when it is produced by people who don't use the word "raw" to describe their own records. It wasn't engineered to capture an aesthetic, it was engineered so you could still hear the ride cymbal when the organ player sped up the Leslie. Grittiness was a byproduct. Not a product.
Everything seemed to be a first take. King responds verbally to a sour note at the four-minute mark "You'd Better Watch Yourself". The extemporaneous narrative of "Lucille" drifts wide and then is brought back clumsily by King who then asks the band (through the microphone) to stretch so he could have one and then two more choruses. These were moments that might have been stricken from other recordings but were left unedited here out of sheer lack of concern and absence of regret. I felt like the blues audience was in the room with the performer in a way they never were with pop music.
The crowd on the live cuts didn't sound like the crowds on other live recordings I'd heard. More rowdy? Maybe. On "Sweet Sixteen", a woman positively shrieks after the opening line of 'when I first met you baby'. In the closing moments of that same song, one guy in the audience seems to be in some sort of dialog with either the band or someone else in the crowd or himself as King stretches a fermata and gears up for a crashing finale. This wasn't the kind of audience I'd ever been a part of.
But beyond the recordings, Back in the Alley was really unnerving. Most of the songs are about retribution against women in a menacing tone I hadn't expected. "You'd Better Watch Yourself" is nothing but a list of grievances and a vague threat. "Don't Answer the Door" is a manifesto of an asshole.
You might feel a little sick, baby,
And you know you're home all alone,
I don't want the doctor at my house, baby,
You just suffer, suffer, suffer till I get home.
Against these lyrics, a mournful Hammond groans -- panned all the way to one channel like a cringing wife shrinking into the corner.
I was a liner note junkie and was always looking for the names of session players that I recognized. Here, there was nothing but a blank cassette insert telling me that the names of the horn players were none of my business. Everything about this album made me feel unwelcome.
Still, I listened to it constantly, because nothing else I had on tape or vinyl made me feel this uneasy. This was a pre-punk discovery for me. I didn't know music could serve that purpose. Eventually I realized that these recordings were from a time when King and his band were touring the south, constantly harassed by white cops and playing for audiences going through much the same thing. The spiritedness of the crowds was, as much as anything, the celebration of homogeneity, which was something we were trying to get away from in the eighties.
I've tried approaching Klezmer music with this perspective, by the way. It's not really the same thing.
I also realized, via Randy Newman records, that sometimes songs are written in the voice of unsavory characters -- not every lyric performed for an audience has to be autobiographical.
Eventually, I learned about the real guy who was singing in these voices. He was an extraordinarily humble guitarist who downplayed his own contributions to the genre. He was a record collecting nerd, a former Dj, and a Keno player who once split a huge jackpot among his band without taking a cut for himself so they would stop razzing him about Keno being an "old lady game". No one had a bad thing to say about B. B. King. No one except him.
"I just wonder where I was when the talent was being given out, like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Eric Clapton... oh, there's many more!"
Telegraph interview, 2009
"I'm no good with chords. I'm horrible with chords."
From Rattle and Hum
I bought Greatest Hits a year or two later. The tracks on it were well-produced and things like "Hummingbird" and "Ain't Nobody Home" deformed the envelope around things I thought of as blues. Even now when my phone shuffles "Hummingbird" up into the rotation it amazes me. If I had a playlist of goose bump songs, "Hummingbird" would be on it.
I should really have a playlist of goose bump songs.
In April of my senior year, he played the Syria Mosque ballroom, the same place that a number of my friends would later see The Ramones. I figured it might be my last chance to see him, because he was, after all, impossibly old (62). I had an idle daydream of going, but it wasn't realistic. That was pretty much the end of my exploration.
I never became the blues aficionado that I thought I'd be. I didn't delve much more deeply than with these two albums and a handful of others, mostly anthologies, so B. B. King has remained as the voice and the face and the timbre I'll always associate with blues most deeply. When I heard he was ramping down in his own home in Las Vegas, I was surprised by my mood. I don't feel grief or sadness, because I'm not entitled to it, but I'm grateful to have him in my head again.
"It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales."
Telegraph interview, 2009
No comments:
Post a Comment