To Save Your Doggone Soul
“It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”― Douglas R. Hofstadter
I was already writing the following piece about Big Joe Turner when I heard about the shooting in Kansas City during the city-wide celebration of the Chief’s Super Bowl victory. Turner was a Kansas City native son and the place where he started his career (and, in some ways, ended it as well). This newsletter is dedicated to all of those who were injured yesterday (all of the children) and the person who lost her life. Gun Reform Is Needed Now…
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As often discussed in these digital pages of The Signal, the big bang moment of rock n roll is a fiction, and really more of a series of moments that happened over the course of years. While many site the release of Rocket 88 or Tutti Frutti or Blue Suede Shoes as being “the birthing moment” it can be argued that it started before those recordings, and not in one place time, like when Sister Rosetta Tharp picked up the electric guitar and gave the gospel sound a devilishly enthralling color, or when Jimmy Liggins recorded Cadillac Boogie, pushing the rhythm and blues beat to a whole new level.
Today in 1954, seventy years ago, Big Joe Turner walked into a New York studio with Atlantic Records producing legends Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler and a batch of the Big Apple’s finest studio rats (his “Blues Kings”), and cut Shake, Rattle and Roll. Released just three months later, the song was a smash….a chart topper1…his second hit of the year (the first being TV Mama). Turner had had many hits since signing with Atlantic in the early 50s, and even more with a plethora of the most important record labels of the 40s (Modern, Imperial, National, to name a few) where he would often take other peoples’ hit records and rerecord them with a more brash and fast stride. With Shake, Rattle and Roll, the man referred to as “The Daddy of the Blues” suddenly became a forefather of rock ‘n’ roll with a record that changed culture…mutated the idiom…and thus propelled him to peak stardom at 43 years of age.
Many consider Shake, Rattle and Roll to be the first rock ‘n’ roll recording. And true, the word “roll” is in the title. But hell, Roy Brown’s Good Rocking Tonight had “rocking” in the title and came out seven years before in 1947. Regardless, with its relentless driving snare hit, that raucous sax blowing, Big Joe’s deep barreling vocal delivery, and of course those genius lyrics (“Get out from that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans”) Shake Rattle and Roll shook things up like a 1906 earthquake, still shaking today. When Bill Haley and the Comets covered it mere months after Turner’s version was released (with a less driving beat,I might add) the resultant hit song became a bridge between black and white culture setting the stage for Elvis Presley recording Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog a mere two years later (and yes, Elvis also covered Shake Rattle and Roll).
Turner performed Shake, Rattle and Roll on the Rhythm & Blues Revue in 1954, and it is worth a watch, if anything to see the intensity of his band backing him as he commanded the crowd with that big presence and that huge huge voice.
Auspiciously, also on this date in 1941, Duke Ellington (who Big Joe Turner worked with early in his career) cut what would become one of his most beloved numbers (and one that my daughter is learning on the piano): Take The A Train….
Top 25 Most Expensive Items Sold on Discogs in January 2024
Ahhh….Song of the Gypsy…famous among collectors for its dark psych meanderings and leather-like embossed cover is selling for….$6000. Fantastic record…and I will stick to my (now somewhat expensive in its own right) 1998 reissue. There are some great records selling at cray prices here…like The Germ’s Lexicon Devil going for $3500 and Sun Ra’s original pressing of Angels and Demons At Play selling for $4000. One of the better “EXPENSIVE DISCOGS ITEMS SOLD” list in recent memory.
A great article on on of the most inspiring counter cultural voices of the 60s.
Focus Turns to Brent Sikkema’s Ex-Husband as Questions about Dealer’s Murder Mount
This is an insane story…I am sure the HBO doc is coming….
Booker T. Jones on Why He Recorded Willie Nelson’s ‘Stardust’ in Emmylou Harris’s Living Room
Jones goes deep on this podcast, talking Stardust and beyond!
8,200-Year-Old Rock Art Identified in Patagonia, Argentina
“The Cueva Huenul 1 site contains almost 900 paintings of human figures, animals, and abstract designs. One mysterious comblike pattern, a study recently published in Science Advances found, was made roughly 8,200 years ago.”
Scheherazade
By: Richard Siken
Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.
Dick Waterman passed away a few weeks ago. Dick was one of the legendary guys who went to the South in the 1960s looking for bluesmen who had dropped out of the scene. The story of his and his friends’ escapades is excellently told in the documentary Two Trains Running (you can watch it here). Dick was many things: a journalist, an enthusiast, a manager, a promoter. He was also a fantastic photographer. Here are just a few of his incredible photographs.
“Truth is not spoken in anger. Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love. The gaze of love is not deluded. It sees what is best in the beloved even when what is best in the beloved finds it hard to emerge into the light.”
― J.M. Coetzee
Number one on the U.S. Billboard R&B chart and number 22 on the Billboard singles chart.
I’d be curious to see most expensive purchases on a site, not the asking price—
Mbw (concert promoter, talent buyer, son of a son of a Chevy dealer)