Skip to main content

Ain‘t That a Shame: Fats Domino

 

Nobody but nobody communicated joy and pleasure better than Fats Domino. Oh, the Beatles came close, but early on John got mopey, George got petulant, and Ringo simply kept his head down, so that doesn’t count. But for Fats Domino, happiness was a given.

At a time when rock ’n’ roll seemed rife with sex and noise and the wild beat of anarchy, Fats Domino was the odd man out. A date with Elvis would start and end in bed, a night out with Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis would probably land you in jail, but a date with Fats Domino would probably just involve pork chops.

From his first recordings in the early 1950s through his final album in 2006, his style never changed, nor did it need to. With his sly, loping piano mixing barrelhouse with boogie-woogie, with those warm, casual vocals, his way of stretching words halfway around the block, and with Earl Palmer, the best drummer in New Orleans, and arranger, cowriter Dave Bartholomew in tow, his records sounded like nothing else on the radio.

And what records!

You made
BLAM BLAM
Me cry
BLAM BLAM
When you said
BLAM BLAM
Goodbye ….
Ain’t that a shame?

“I’m Walking’,” “Ain’t That a Shame,” “Blue Monday,” “Walkin’ To New Orleans,” “My Girl Josephine,” “Blueberry Hill,” “I’m Gonna Be A Wheel Someday,” “I’m In Love Again.” Those songs took him round the world many times, but always brought him back to New Orleans. In a career that spanned seven decades, he never changed his sound, he didn’t leave his wife or his neighborhood, and he seldom changed band members. His nods to fame were a habit of traveling with two hundred pairs of shoes, upward of thirty suits, and a penchant for jewel encrusted rings on at least five of his fingers.

When I interviewed Leonard Cohen in 1994, Fats Domino was one of the few musicians he name-dropped.:

People often think that I play some kind of conditional kitsch in relation to cultural artifacts, which simply isn’t true. “The moon stood still on Blueberry Hill” That’s as good as it gets, as far as I know. You know everything about that moment. You’re continually see-sawing back and forth between the secular and the spiritual, and from time to time you hit it right. It’s there in “Blueberry Hill” from Fats Domino. Everything is embraced, nothing is left out. “The moon stood still on Blueberry Hill.”

The first time I visited New Orleans, friends took me down to see the shiny pink Cadillac outside his house in the Ninth Ward. Most days, they said, he just stayed home and cooked jambalaya, gumbo maybe. We waited a while, just loitering outside, but he never came out, though one of his thirteen children looked out the window and waved. It felt like a blessing. Go in peace.

Years later, I heard him play at New Orleans’s Jazz Fest. He tore through an hour of his hits, backed by the best players on the scene, jazz cats and street cats, up-and-comers and veterans alike, playing their hearts out with love and clarity, leaning on the New Orleans’s groove he helped put on the map. And then he tore into another hour of blues and bawdy house music, songs I’d never heard before and will probably never hear again except in dreams. It was terrifyingly beautiful.

I slipped backstage, or what passed for backstage : an enclosure out of the sun with cool drinks and a few chairs. I was still shaken from the music, tongue tied, but I managed to ask if he could come up to New York and play.

“Oh, man,” he sighed. “I’d love to. You know, I’d love to!  But … what would I eat?”

 

Brian Cullman is a writer and musician living in New York City.



from The Paris Review http://ift.tt/2zIRuvz

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Sphere

Photograph by Elena Saavedra Buckley. Once when I was about twelve I was walking down the dead-end road in Albuquerque where I grew up, around twilight with a friend. Far beyond the end of the road was a mountain range, and at that time of evening it flattened into a matte indigo wash, like a mural. While kicking down the asphalt we saw a small bright light appear at the top of the peaks, near where we knew radio towers to occasionally emit flashes of red. But this glare, blinding and colorless, grew at an alarming rate. It looked like a single floodlight and then a tight swarm beginning to leak over the edge of the summit. My friend and I became frightened, and as the light poured from the crest, our murmurs turned into screams. We stood there, clutching our heads, screaming. I knew this was the thing that was going to come and get me. It was finally going to show me the horrifying wiring that lay just behind the visible universe and that was inside of me too. And then, a couple se...
Post a Comment
Read more

DEMOCRACY DAY SPEECH BY PMB; MAY 29 2016

www.naijaloaded.com My compatriots, It is one year today since our administration came into office. It has been a year of triumph, consolidation, pains and achievements. By age, instinct and experience, my preference is to look forward, to prepare for the challenges that lie ahead and rededicate the administration to the task of fixing Nigeria. But I believe we can also learn from the obstacles we have overcome and the progress we made thus far, to help strengthen the plans that we have in place to put Nigeria back on the path of progress. We affirm our belief in democracy as the form of government that best assures the active participation and actual benefit of the people. Despite the many years of hardship and disappointment the people of this nation have proved inherently good, industrious tolerant, patient and generous. The past years have witnessed huge flows of oil revenues. From 2010 average oil prices were $100 per barrel. But economic and security co...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Private Life: On James Baldwin

JAMES BALDWIN IN HYDE PARK, LONDON. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN WARREN. Via Wikimedia Commons , licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .   In his review of James Baldwin’s third novel, Another Country , Lionel Trilling asked: “How, in the extravagant publicness in which Mr. Baldwin lives, is he to find the inwardness which we take to be the condition of truth in the writer?” But Baldwin’s sense of inwardness had been nourished as much as it had been damaged by the excitement and danger that came from what was public and urgent. Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room dramatized the conflict between a longing for a private life, even a spiritual life, and the ways in which history and politics intrude most insidiously into the very rooms we try hardest to shut them out of. Baldwin had, early in his career, elements of what T. S. Eliot attributed to Henry James, “a mind so fine that it could not be penetrated by an idea.” The rest of the time, however, he did not have this luxury, as pub...
Post a Comment
Read more