Okay, me talking about “My Life in Music” is absurd. People like Aaron Copland, Julian Bream, and Lalo Schiffrin write things called My Life In Music. People who have had utterly no impact on the world of music do not—or at least should not. Still, here I am. Even an unknown wannabe can be in love with music for a lifetime. For what it’s worth, this is part of my life.
I want to tell you about the spookiest, most exhilarating thing that ever happened to me in music.
However, it involves my brother, Hal, so a bit of context is required. After all, little brothers shadow big brothers. Just look at the way Hal and I walk, an arrogant, insinuating motion which our wives call “The Broadhead Swagger.” So, if you want to understand this thing I want to tell you about, you need to know a bit about my brother.
If you don’t give a fig about context, jump down to the bold blue text below.
But the point of the thing is its context, so I’m going to keep nattering on.
My brother is six years older than I, and he has always done the big brotherly things. If I was three or four years old and duded up in chaps, bandana, and six-shooter, he would obligingly pose as the craven rustler brought to justice.
On the other hand (and there is always an other hand where brothers are concerned), at times he could baffle me. When I was six or seven (making him 12 or 13), he and a couple of his pals invited me to follow them down a suburban alley near our home. How unusual! We ended up in a yard I’d never been in. There were some other guys of Hal’s age hanging around, and one other kid about my age. There was a reason for this.
My brother instructed me to fight the other kid. Since neither the other kid nor I had any idea what “fight” meant, a pretty long pause ensued. Eventually, I think, the kid and I may have briefly and ineffectually wrestled and pushed one another around, to the vocal contempt of the onlookers.
I think that kid may have been one of the DePew twins, who were Catholic; and at that time my brother was attending the Church of the Good Shepherd, so this physical contest may have been intended to answer some burning theological issue—something like “Resolved: That a little Catholic kid can beat up a little quasi-Methodist kid (or vice versa).”
Or they might just have wondered who had the more useless younger brother. In either case, it was a disappointing draw all around.
In other ways, too, I learned that my brother and I were not exactly alike. He was a good athlete; I was a basket of oops. He was (and is) a perfectionist; I usually finish practical things badly if I finish them at all. He was good-looking and natty; I was nicknamed Gravy. He has explored various religions at one time or another; I have never been anything but a heathen. In high school woodshop, he made my parents a massive, beautifully-crafted, impeccably-finished, 12-foot-long redwood picnic table with intricate attached benches; I made a small, scarred, unevenly-stained, gloppy-with-runny-Deft “magazine holder” (which my mother inexplicably kept around the house for years, perhaps out of spite).
He is a Republican. If you are, too, don’t read my Facebook posts.
But he likes music, and so do I, and here’s the nitty gritty of that context thing.
When I was growing up, if our household radio (a tall console in our tiny living room) played music, it played country-and-western music. The tall radio console included a 78 rpm turntable, and one of our few family records was Little Jimmy Dickens singing “Take an Old Cold Tater.” Later, on our Hoffman “Easy Vision” TV, the music might be Cliffie Stone and his Hometown Jamboree (telecast from nearby El Monte Legion Stadium), or maybe some god-awful schlock played by a faux-Nudie-clad, out-of-tune “cowboy” singer doing an extended commercial from his car lot on La Cienega Boulevard. Even later, the adult taste mysteriously evolved into efficiently-played, cloying dreck on the Lawrence Welk Show.
My brother, however, listened to something else entirely. He attended Monrovia-Arcadia-Duarte High School (MAD), which had significant populations of African-Americans and Latinos. And he liked to dance. So he was exposed to a lot of great music of what was then called rhythm and blues—not the smooth stuff currently called R&B, but small-group music that was a groovy blend of swing, urban blues, and jump bands. He had a over a hundred 78-rpm records of people like Earl Bostic (“Flamingo”), Tiny Bradshaw (“Soft”), Billy Ward and the Dominoes (“60 Minute Man”), Todd Rhodes with Connie Allen (“Rocket 69”), the Orioles (“Crying in the Chapel”), early, bluesy Fats Domino (“Please Don’t Leave Me”), The Trenniers (“Go! Go! Go!”), The Clovers (“One Mint Julep”), Big Jay McNeely (“Big Jay Shuffle”), Jimmy Liggins and His 3-D Music (“Drunk”), as well as a couple of dozen records by the honking, play-on-your-back-while-scooting-across-the-stage master of the iterated and reiterated and re-reiterated one-note solo: “The Fabulous” Joe Houston (“Cornbread and Cabbage Greens”). I listened to them ceaselessly then—and though my tastes have largely changed to jazz, I still do pretty often. It’s happy, swinging music.
When Hal played the radio, it was “Huntin’ with Hunter,” i.e., Hunter Hancock on KFVD—who could make that up? Another favorite was Huggy Boy: “This is your old Hugg, Dick Hugg ‘Huggy Boy,’ coming your way from Dolphin’s of Hollywood Record Store at the corner of Vernon and Central, inviting you down to Adams Barbecue, where there’s three kinds of sauce—mild, medium, and WOW!” The corner of Vernon and Central was in Watts.
When older brothers are not trying to set up anti-ecumenical fights, they take care of little brothers, and Hal was no exception. In 1954, for my twelfth birthday, I wanted a 78 rpm recording by The Late, Great Johnny Ace: “Pledging My Love.” The song had been a big hit in 1951, but had fallen into oblivion. None of the local record stores had a copy, so my brother drove all over the place trying to find one, and ended up driving 30 miles to the self-same legendary Dolphin’s of Hollywood Music Store, which of course had it in stock.
But life moves on. Just after he graduated from high school, my brother moved from hopped-up, “modified” ‘42 Chevy coupes and ’49 Ford convertibles to sports cars. In keeping with this new automotive and social niche, he bought a 45-rpm player—and gave me his old 78s. I still have them.
When Hal bought the 45 player, he got a bonus gift of a box of 8 or 10 extended-play 45s (EPs, with two tracks per side) consisting of airchecks by the Artie Shaw band of 1939-40, which featured drummer Buddy Rich. Good? Listen to “Carioca” sometime [see below].
Since I played clarinet (not all that well, but well enough that my parents had bought me a LeBlanc Dynamic), Hal gave me the Shaw 45s, and that got me started on big band swing, though with some disdain for Benny Goodman, who after all was not Artie Shaw. What did that mean, practically speaking? Well, when I was 17 or 18, playing in a four-piece combo at a private club (maybe the American Legion, maybe the Elks, or a country club, whatever), I was approached at the end of a set by an older guy who said “You remind me of Artie Shaw.” I think what he probably meant was “I see you’re holding a clarinet.” But for the last 60 years, I’ve nurtured the thought that maybe, somehow, something I had played actually resembled something played by Artie Shaw.
In the mid-to-late 1950s, moving into college meant moving into modern jazz. At some point, Hal tired of listening to me listen to Artie Shaw, and since I had a little Mulby record player that could handle 33-rpm LPs, he came into my bedroom one evening and handed me a 10-inch LP of a Shorty Rogers album called “Cool and Crazy.” I listened to the first track and complained “That’s awful.” He said, “It’s modern jazz. It’s good. Don’t be an idiot. Listen to it until you like it.” He also gave me his two-LP boxed set of “Stan Getz Live at the Shrine.”
I listened; I liked. Decades later, when I formed my Safe Sax jazz septet, I did arrangements of five songs from that record, and I forever sought to achieve a sound like Getz’s. The stuff is lovingly stuck in my brain.
Since I was just entering high school, my parents decided to buy me a saxophone so I could play in the marching band, concert band, and (most importantly for me) the unofficial Arcadia High School Dance Band, “The Continentals,” directed by music teacher Ray Bowman. I thought an alto would be pretty cool, but my brother said “Listen to those records” (i.e., the 78s he gave me). “ What do you hear in the middle of every one of them?” What you heard, of course, was a tenor sax solo. The economics and style points led to a clear decision, and my ever-generous parents bought me a King Super 20 tenor sax, with full pearls—a beautiful horn, which I duly played in school marching bands, concert bands, and big bands, as well as a life-long string of gigs at innumerable wedding receptions, anniversary parties, public dances, street fairs, supermarket openings, country-club dinner-parties, bar mitzvahs, and bar bars until just this year.
Okay, that’s the context, and here is my eerie, exhiliarating musical experience
When I was 17, in my last year of high school, I got a call to sub with a quartet that was playing a fraternity party at Pasadena City College. I didn’t know any of the other players, and of course they didn’t know me, so we tried to figure out a song list for the first set. I was trying to be a jazz musician, so I knew a lot of old standards and jazz originals. They were trying to be a rhythm and blues band, and they didn’t know any of that stuff. But it turned out that we all loved Fats Domino, so that’s what we played all night long: one Fats Domino tune after another.
At some point, when we were playing a fairly uptempo blues (but not too fast for the dancers, and God knows not too fast for me), I got into a groove and started playing 12-bar chorus after 12-bar chorus. As I played, I could see the dancers getting more and more involved, and (possibly from becoming more and more drunk) they became more and more frenetic as I honked out bluesy riffs. And then, in the midst of my seventh or eighth or ninth chorus, it happened: suddenly, I felt like I wasn’t playing, but the music was just happening. I seemed to be hovering behind myself, watching my fingers fly over the saxophone keys while the increasingly frantic dancers jumped and writhed and shouted ever more fantastically. Incredibly, I was in the zone. The Zone. It was weird, and exhiliarating, and it never happened again in my life. I have had lots and lots of good fun and quite a few thrills playing music, but I never again inched a timid toe into The Zone.
At least I got there one time. The music might have been simplistic and haphazardly played, but the emotion was real, and so was the zone.
And all of it—the dancers, the rhythm and blues, the Fats Domino, the tenor sax, the doo-wops, the bar honkers, and every well-worn lick that I strung together one after another—I owed to my brother. Thanks, Hal.
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Some Miscellaneous Comments and Links:
Actually, I like to hear Little Jimmy Dickens sing “Take an Old Cold Tater (And Wait)”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBi_CyJe604
And I loved to hear red-hot, jazzy solos on Hometown Jamboree by guitarists Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant, especially things like “Stratosphere Boogie”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yIFsbOtmao
Oddly, another of our family recordings was a 12-inch broadcast of the 1946 Santa Anita Handicap (the Arcadia racetrack was only a few miles from our house in Temple City). Go figure.
I still hate the Lennon Sisters. I’m sure they were very nice girls. But four girls singing three-part harmony is just. . .just. . . . Well, anyway, I still hate them. Not THEM, but, you know, them.
Here is the “Huntin’ with Hunter” radio show’s stirring theme song, giving a brief window into the depth and scope of rhythm and blues music of the early 1950s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVLmRLLrXtw
Curiously at odds with their on-air personas, both Hancock and Hugg (like bandleader Johnny Otis) were white.
“Carioca”: The studio version was short and relatively staid, but on the aircheck version, you can hear Buddy Rich shouting encouragement to the band, upping the energy and the swing. To me, these airchecks from 1939 and 1940 are the best of all the great Artie Shaw recordings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lnQOS5bteQ
If you’ve really got time to spare, here are a few of my most favorite songs from Hal’s collection.
Earl Bostic, “Flamingo” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v44cbyBRJHY This is possibly the most perfect recording ever made.
Tiny Bradshaw, “Soft” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBSsRdB8OJs This would be the only other perfect recording.
Billy Ward and the Dominoes, “60 Minute Man” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpQuNY3XFI0 Spicy stuff for the 1950s. Supposedly it was banned (like “Work with Me Annie”), but not at our house.
Todd Rhodes with Connie Allen, “Rocket 69” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWLaBz-R2j0 I don’t think my parents ever listened closely enough to make sense of this wonderfully salacious ditty.
The Orioles, “Crying in the Chapel” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEwcMvcWKgk A cross-over classic from the Gospel music tradition.
Fats Domino, “Please Don’t Leave Me” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFFLis3rO10 Early Fats at his frenetic, bluesy, boogie-woogie best. Way before “Blueberry Hill.”
The Trenniers, “Go! Go! Go!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qclvZql5kjU These guys must have been the hardest-working band in show biz before James Brown.
The Clovers, “One Mint Julep” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eESFSdzolfU Yes, I love the Ray Charles version, too, but this is the true classic.
Big Jay McNeely, “Big Jay Shuffle” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ril4TeocM74 Swing, swing, swing.
Jimmy Liggins and his 3-D Music, “Drunk” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiPAOT9QFR8 Impressively decadent. I still sing it around the house.
The Fabulous Joe Houston, “Cornbread and Cabbage Greens” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55JyFNXnZlc Shoot the juice to me, Bruce!