The Blues Muse: Amazon.co.uk: Goodwin, Opher: 9781518621147: Books
Screamin’ and Flamin’ in the South
The chitlin circuit was well established. If you were a competent musician, and I was, you just dropped in and out of bands. It was no big deal.
I jumped from the battle of egos straight into the coffin.
Leastways that’s how it appeared to me. If Little Richard was loud, raucous and straight outa the Baptist church (with an outrageous bisexual camp twist), Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was straight outa the swamps.
He put together an act and a sound that was so primitive and weird that it got him instantly banned. ‘I put a spell on you’ might have sold a million but it never graced more than a few of the most daring radio stations and never featured in any of the charts I saw. As far as I was aware only Wolfman Jack – beaming out from some mad radio station in the outback of the Mexican border, and Alan Freed, who was on a mission to promote and integrate black and white Rock music and had coined the phrase, dared feature him. Alan featured him as ‘The Wildman of Rock ‘n’ Roll’. I wasn’t sure that what he was doing was in the same category as Elvis and Little Richard but it sure grooved. The primitive drunken grunting was indicative to the establishment of everything that was wrong with negroes. It confirmed all their worst fears.
Not that this in any way deterred Screamin’ Jay. If anything it drove him to even more extreme acts. He was accused on all sides of pandering to racial stereotypes with his costumes and primeval grunts, but he went on just the same. He had a vision and he went for it.
When I joined the band he had taken it as far as it would go. He’d start the act by jumping out of a coffin in reed skirt, face paint and a bone through his nose. In his hands he’d have a spear, ju-jus, and a skull and proceeded to prance around the stage terrifying the youngsters with his snarling mouth and big eyes.
I loved him and didn’t find him half as crazy as people made out. He had an eye on the profit margin but he always ensured that the music was good and his huge baritone voice could carry a song.
Although we were a black band, which certainly alleviated a lot of the aggravation for me as I wasn’t constantly confronted with the fact that I was considered second class, we were still playing to segregated audiences and I was getting fed-up with the demeaning costume I had to wear. It was time to move on.
James Brown was entirely different. He was a perfectionist who wanted everything so tight you couldn’t breathe. He took me on because I’d played with Little Richard and he idolised the man but he expected perfection from day one. If you were a minute late you were fined, if you had a button undone you were fined. I don’t think I ever got a cent. I not only had to learn all the guitar parts in no time but I was expected to know all the steps and routines as well. James drove us worse than mules. There were days I found myself wishing I was back working those fields.
At least with James we played to mainly black audiences. We didn’t get the segregation shoved in our faces every day. I got to go on stage at the Apollo in Harlem. That was some experience, but we still had to stay in the dives, put up with the jibes, drink from the ‘coloured’ spigot and pee in the ‘coloured’ toilets.
Standing there behind James Brown was electrifying. I couldn’t take my eyes off the man. I’ve never seen anyone drive themselves so hard. He wanted it bad. He put together the act based around his dance moves, and man the cat could move. He strutted, spun and did the splits. I’d never seen anything like it. Just watching him made me exhausted. But he made me forget what I was doing. At the end of the show he recited a catalogue of every bum note, false move and grimace like he’d been studying me instead of performing. It certainly tightened up my playing but I got to thinking what I was doing with this life. That band was so tight it felt like a machine.
On top of that the pay was poor and I was docked for every mistake. Some of the time I was so short on cash I hardly got to eat.
