The Spell of Screaming Jay

“...I feel it very well, but I don't know how to express it...I only have at my disposal poor words completely worn out from having served everyone and everything...”-Nathalie Sarraute

Sunday nights in the late 1970s, listening to the Dr. Demento show on KSAN….that is where I first heard I Put A Spell On You by Screaming Jay Hawkins.  I was 8? 9? and glued to my radio every week to hear the great doctor play Fish Heads by Barnes and Barnes (Billy Mumy from Los In Space’s band), My Name Is Larry by Wild Man Fischer and Pencil Neck Geek by wrestler Fred Blassie.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, the Dr. Demento show was deeply impactful to my taste in music…to my being…by weaving in truly subversive material and influential rock n roll with more joke-driven recordings. 

I Put A Spell On You is like no other song I have ever heard.  It is right up there with Percy Mayfield’s Please Send Me Someone To Love or Righteous Brothers’ Unchained Melody as a genre unto itself.  It is not Rock n Roll, R & B, or even a broadway show tune (although in retrospect it is probably closest to that): the song is a tour d’ force monster movie meets late-night-limbo-lounge jam with Hawkins spitting out operatic voodoo howlings in between preaching lyrics, all framed by the prodding, rhythmic sounds of a horn section keeping an iconic ghoulish beat. 

I love wikipedia’s notes about the song:

Hawkins had originally intended to record I Put a Spell on You as "a refined love song, a blues ballad.”  However, the producer Arnold Maxin "brought in ribs and chicken and got everybody drunk, and we came out with this weird version ... I don't even remember making the record. Before, I was just a normal blues singer. I was just Jay Hawkins. It all sort of just fell in place. I found out I could do more destroying a song and screaming it to death."

And with the recording, a legend was born—Hawkins leaning in with a skull-topped cane and a Bela Lugosi cape, bejeweled from nose to shoes with animal bones and teeth.  I Put A Spell On You was a hit…and he followed that hit up with a career, recording insane track upon insane track right up until later in his career with the impossible-to-forget Constipation Blues of which Hawkins begins by saying:

Ladies and gentlemen, most people record songs about love,
Heartbreak, loneliness, being broke... nobody's actually went out and
Recorded a song about real pain. the band and i have just returned
From the general hospital where we caught a man in the right position.
We name this song: "constipation blues.”

Yet, to frame Screaming Jay Hawkins as an exploitation-style jokey singer is missing the Truth. His talent…his songwriting and singing style…his recordings and arrangements…are groundbreaking…they sounded like nothing else.  What’s more, he kept an incredible output of killer recordings for decades.  Third Man Records recently reissued the 1970 LP Because Is In Your Mind, and I was reminded of how soulful and hip-shaking and fresh it is…fourteen years after I Put A Spell On You was a hit.  Hawkins kept busy through the 80s collaborating with up-and-comers, being celebrated by musicians and filmmakers who grew up with his music…even making acting appearances in a number of films, my favorite as a hotel worker in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train.

I got to speak to Hawkins in the late 90s.  A band I worked with at Warner Bros. Records, Bloodloss (featuring Mudhoney’s Mark Arm), had an idea of Hawkins singing on one of their songs.  He was living in France at that point, and I was able to track him down pretty easily through some record collector friends.  While he turned down the offer to record…he really wasn’t recording that much at that time…he spoke to me for almost an hour, with that signature deep gruff voice of his, talking about how it was a much better life in France than in America for a black performer…how he was loved wherever he went, whenever he walked down the streets of Paris…and had work whenever he wanted it, even though he was happy takin’ it easy. He was living a fantastic last chapter abroad. 

Happy Birthday to Screaming Jay Hawkins.  He would have been 93 years old today.

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The Story Of Rather Ripped Records - Where Every Record Was A New Release & Chaos Was Guaranteed!

File this under: DAMN, it is a drag that I was too young to hang out at Rather Ripped. With the Jars as a house band and a young future music industry legend Ray Farrell working the floor along with a lot of other furry freaky music heads, many of them interviewed for this piece, Rather Ripped seemed like the ultimate place to record shop. A great read.

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Ada Limón, the Nation’s New Poet Laureate

A somewhat local (she comes from Sonoma) with just and incredible voice (check out today’s feature below), Limón will make an incredible poet Laureate.

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Evel Knievel, Astronaut (aka Rocket Man)

I have been waiting for The Alta to publish this piece on-line ever since I read it in the physical journal. This article is not just about Evel Knievel, even though it is just crazy that he plays a huge part in this story, but the untold story of early private company attempts at space travel….before Musks’ Space X, before any of the other stupidly rich children started companies with insane amounts of cash they could be using on their employees or vital issues like feeding the hungry or climate change (ok, sorry for imposing my opinion here).

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Historic Jean Eichelberger Ivey Recordings Now Online

Johns Hopkins University has digitized and made available a slew of recordings from electronic music pioneer Jean Eichelberger Ivey. Her work is truly of another world. While much of the collection, because of copyright restrictions, is only available by request, there are enough available to stream now, on their website, to get a great taste of her craft (and the librarian at Johns Hopkins is easy to communicate with if you want more). Just check out: Continuous Form [unidentified selection], approximately 1967-1973. The aliens are landing.

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Claes Oldenburg, Pop Artist Who Monumentalized the Everyday, Dies at 93

The world needs more artistic visionaries like Oldenburg who can create such whimsical yet epic pieces of art. RIP.

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What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use

By: Ada Limón

All these great barns out here in the outskirts,

black creosote boards knee-deep in the bluegrass.

They look so beautifully abandoned, even in use.

You say they look like arks after the sea’s

dried up, I say they look like pirate ships,

and I think of that walk in the valley where

J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,

No. I believe in this connection we all have

to nature, to each other, to the universe.

And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there,

low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss,

and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets,

woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so.

So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky,

its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name

though we knew they were really just clouds—

disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.