My mom loved the song "Minnie the Moocher." She would sometimes sing parts of it as she cleaned house or cooked. So I grew up knowing the song and that was about smoking opium, but it wasn't until I was in my early 20s that I heard it from the man who wrote it: Cab Callaway.
What a singer! His distinctive voice has such range. And his band was excellent. Dizzy Gillespie and many other jazz stars got their start with Cab.
"Minnie the Moocher" was the first single by a Black performer to sell over a million copies. It was featured in a very weird Betty Boop cartoon and in the Blues Brothers movie.
"The Hi-De-Ho Man" is one of my favorites. His vocal range and scat singing are just incredible.
And no one ever rocked a zoot suit like Cab.
Cab's career continued almost until his death in 1994. In 1981 he made three appearances on Sesame Street.
I saw him in the late 80s at the Venetian Room in the Fairmont in San Francisco. His voice was still amazing and he still had the moves, even in his 80s!
While living in Chico during college, I was lucky enough to find a very small one-bedroom, furnished house for $35 a month plus yard work. The yard was big and included walnut and almond trees as well as peach and apricot and a gorgeous flowering mimosa. There was also a big front porch and a noisy swamp cooler. It was perfect for an introverted college boy.
One day, my cousin Chris showed up. The last I had seen him, he was a 10-year-old Cub Scout with buck teeth who played violin. Now he had gone full hippie: long hair and beard, hitchhiking across the state with just a backpack and a mandolin.
We drank cheap jug wine late into the night and talked politics and music. He assured me that "Don't Mess With Bill" by the Marvelettes was a work of genius "way ahead of its time" and played some great country songs on the mandolin.
I was especially taken by "I'm A Lonesome Fugitive" and "Sing Me Back Home" by Merle Haggard. I soon became a big fan of his, especially the songs that came out his brief time in prison.
I bought his newest album: "Okie From Muskogee," recorded live in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and loved it. This was the time of the First Culture War, and many people took the song "Okie From Muskogee" as a straightforward political statement--"We don't burn our draft cards down on Main Street." But I thought it was hilarious. I mean "We like holding hands and pitching' woo?" come on. Later Merle insisted that the song was always meant as a joke, and I want to believe him.
Whichever way you take it, the album is a classic. You have to love the part where Merle is given the key to the city by the mayor.
Merle has a lot of great drunk songs, too.
I also appreciated Merle's take on the music of Jimmie Rodgers (the Singing Brakeman) and Bob Wills (King of Lone Star Swing), and over the years I collected most of their work, too.
In 1971, I was able to see Merle in concert at the Hollywood Bowl. My sister and her boyfriend and my future first wife and I bought a front row box and packed a picnic dinner with plenty of wine. Merle's regular fans were a bit skeptical at first of the presence of four stoned hippies in their midst, but once they saw us enthusiastically singing along with every song, they decided to embrace us.
It was one of the best concerts I've ever attended.
When I was younger (so much younger than today), I loathed country music--the lugubrious singing, the twangy guitars, the corny lyrics. Then in college, a friend of mine introduced me to Hank Williams. Sure the lyrics were often corny and unintentionally hilarious, but they were also often cleverly constructed. The twangy guitars were satisfyingly bluesy. And the singing was touchingly heartfelt with a refreshingly rough edge.
Best of all, they were excellent to sing when you were drunk (I did mention that this was college). Hank's career was unfortunately short. He died of heart failure caused by the combination of alcohol, morphine and chloral hydrate at the age of 29. But in that brief career, he wrote dozens of classic country songs, becoming known as the "Hillbilly Shakespeare" because of his gift with lyrics.
The first songs of his I ever heard were "Cold, Cold Heart" and "Take These Chains From My Heart." I still love singing them when I get buzzed.
When I was in my early teens, Miles Davis was music that my older (by 11 years) sister and her husband, an advertising exec, played while sipping a pre-prandial martini or two. They were especially fond of "Sketches of Spain," probably my least favorite Miles album. I liked Miles, but wasn't excited by his music. I preferred sax-based jazz (Coltrane, Stan Getz, Charles Lloyd) to trumpet-centered music.
It wasn't until 1970 and the release of "Bitches Brew" that I really began to dig Miles. While Coltrane took jazz to remarkable spiritual heights, Miles decided to get funky and visceral. Fusing funk and rock tropes with his own spare, incisive horn work, he created a whole new genre of music.
Of course, jazz purists howled that he'd sold out, but I loved it. I listened endlessly to the two discs on the Radio Shack system I'd bought with my dad's death benefit, reveling in the dark, multilayered, rhythmic gumbo that Miles and his band played down.
Later I discovered the live albums that he subsequently recorded in Japan, where fans really got what he was doing. I love those albums even more than "Bitches Brew:" "Pangea," Agartha," and "Dark Magus," especially. Wonderful dark, primal stuff.
I lived in Chico from 1969 until I graduated from Chico State in 1971. I had inherited my father's old VW, but I didn't have much money for gas, so I hitchhiked a lot, especially when I went home for the holidays in Southern California or to visit my girlfriend and future first wife in Oakland.
In late '69, I hitched to Altamont to see the Rolling Stones free concert. I wound up sitting in the dirt about 100 yards from the stage next to a fat naked Mexican man who wept inconsolably through much of the concert. I was almost trampled when the Hell's Angels killed Meredith Hunter.
In December of 1970, my dad died after being bedridden for about six months. I was sad and angry, but also determined to make something out of my life. I changed my major from anthropology to communications and blitzed through my final year in six months. Social Security sent me a survivors benefits check for $150. I used $75 of it to buy a fairly credible stereo system from Radio Shack. That little system served me well for many years, and always a reminder of my dad. Thanks, Dad.
On one of my Oakland trips I visited one of my favorite used record stores on Telegraph Ave. and discovered Chicago blues.
The album "I Am The Blues" by Willie Dixon is still one of my favorites. It has only nine songs, all written by Willie, and all blues classics that have been covered by pretty much every blues band ever: "Back Door Man," "I Can't Quit You, Baby," "Seventh Son," "Spoonful," "I Ain't Superstitious," "You Shook Me," "Hootchie Coochie Man," "Little Red Rooster," and "The Same Thing." All had been released by various blues artists like Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters in the 50s and early 60s, but it''s great to hear Willie doing his own material backed by some of Chicago's best session men.
1969 was a major turning point in my life. In 1968, after flunking out of college and losing my student draft deferment, I reported to the Selective Service Center in Santa Ana for my physical, expecting to be whisked off to Vietnam. Instead, I was classified 1Y, undraftable except in a national emergency. My bad eyesight had saved my ass.
Without the draft and imminent death hanging over me, I went back to Orange Coast College to improve my grade average. In January 1969, a guy down the block who was classified 1A fled to Canada. His parents asked me to drive his VW van loaded with all his belongings to Vancouver for him.
Even then I loved road trips and really loved the idea of doing one solo. I left Laguna early one morning in the underpowered, overloaded van. As the sun came up, I was pulling into Santa Barbara and the radio announced some exciting news: they were going to be playing an exclusive--the debut album of a brand new British supergroup called Led Zeppelin.
I was a fan of Jimmy Page from his days with the Yardbirds, so from the first chords of "Dazed and Confused," I was hooked.
But the real musical revelation wouldn't occur until later in the trip.
I stopped in Chico, California to visit my cousin Ruth and her husband Tommy. He was an accomplished artist who taught at Chico State. I was stuck in Chico for several days because heavy snows closed the pass through the Siskyous, so I had time to fall in love with Chico and forge a bond with Tommy and Ruth. Later that year, I transferred to Chico State and began my college career anew, completing my last three years in two and a half with a 3.8 grade average. But that was in the future; to get there I had to get through the Siskyous. I eventually did, making my way through the mountains in a blizzard at night without chains.
The next stop was Portland Oregon and a visit with my Uncle David. As I arrived in Portland, I heard the song that changed my musical tastes yet again: "Crosscut Saw" by Albert King. I have always preferred Albert to B.B. The reason is his spare, uncluttered style. He bends and stretches the notes and makes each one count with little or no fill. To me his music has an almost Japanese/Zen quality, simple and elegant and clean. "Crosscut Saw" is a showcase for his style, featuring notes stretched out beyond all reason and a staccato drum track that is infectiously propulsive.
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"Oh, Pretty Woman" is another one of my favories.
From the Montreaux Jazz Festival, this is one of my favorite live sets. The great Rory Gallagher puts in an amazing solo, but Albert tops him.
The highlight of the rest of the trip was being detained and harassed at the border by agents who wouldn't believe that I wasn't fleeing the draft. I had to leave the van in Washington while I crossed into Canada. One of the owner's friends was finally able to retrieve the van after a few days.
I flew home from Vancouver, my first ever flight. I loved the sensation of flying. Still do.
Later I found out that, without telling me, the owner of the van had stashed a kilo of grass amongst his stuff. I was extremely lucky that the van wasn't searched or the story of my life would have been quite different. I never forgave him for that.
All in all, the trip was quite a rite of passage for me. Years later, I was able to see Albert King a couple times at the Golden Bear, a very small venue in Huntington Beach. He played "Crosscut Saw."
