Mr. Know-It-All, page 12
Learn to milk whatever success you’ve had. You can keep doing the same thing over and over as long as you have a sense of humor about not having a new idea. Just when Dimples, Betty Wright, Jean Knight, and Premium had begun to move on, along came Barbara Mason again with a new twist on the same old situation. It might have taken her three years and she was now singing disco, not soul, but she had discovered the man they were all fighting over was gay! Yep, in “Another Man,” as the song was called, “another man is beating my time, another man is lovin’ mine.” What a hilarious development! Down-low and without papers! Just think how this new gay guy could have answered her.
Lo and behold, he did! A group known as Tout Sweet challenged her right away with a little ditty entitled “Another Man Is Twice as Nice.” “You stole a man,” they accused her, “but you wound up with two.” Barbara Mason later admitted in an interview that when she first heard this song, she fell on the floor laughing. But who laughs last laughs hardest, and Tout Sweet had a dare for her about the second man: “He’s got a lady too and I already know she’s crazy about you.”
Then it stopped. “Now, what else is going to come out?” Barbara publicly wondered, but nothing ever did. Dimples died in 2000 of a massive heart attack. He probably just couldn’t stand all the trouble he’d caused. But he wound up with the papers all right. A death certificate. The final papers.
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If you’re a junkie, jazz is for you. Bebop is the sound of heroin, isn’t it? Plain and simple. Every jive master I have ever loved was an addict: Chet Baker, Bud Powell, Billie Holiday, Anita O’Day, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker. The cool cats and chicks could practically ooze musical notes out of the track marks on their arms. So hep. So smooth. So DownBeat magazine. So Bleecker and MacDougal. Yelling out “All right” for no apparent reason as you sit with your date of a different color.
I always felt bad for my mom because she claimed to “hate jazz.” When she was very ill near the end of her life and they gave her a morphine drip in the hospital, I thought, “Finally! She can appreciate Coltrane.” I ran for the headphones but the nursing staff gave me judgmental looks so I backed off. I should have told my mother about the Nutty Squirrels. They did jazz and they weren’t junkies. This sped-up vocal group who imitated the Chipmunks actually beat them to television with an animated show called The Nutty Squirrels Present, and they looked down on the pop sound of Alvin and his gang. The Nutty Squirrels actually had a big jazz hit with “Uh Oh, Part One and Two,” but if you go back and listen to the rest of their discography, you’ll be blown away by some of their other riffs. These cats were smoking! If my mom had heard jazz like this at the wrong speed, she might have loved it.
Here’s another nonjunkie jazz vocalist that you can love and impress your family with by your obscure musical knowledge—Mildred Bailey. My favorite jazz singer. Despite a long-lasting career and a critical reputation that placed her second to Billie Holiday by jazz critics in 1943, then first in the following two years, Bailey is largely forgotten today. Maybe because in spite of two failed marriages, she “preferred the company of gay men.” Or is it because she was remembered as “hard as nails,” with “a violent temper” and “prone to nasty tantrums”? Was this what held her back? Oh, yeah, she “passed” as a light-skinned black woman her whole life even though she wasn’t. When the post office put out a series of stamps commemorating jazz and blues singers in 1994, every entertainer pictured was black and Mildred was included. Yet there she was. Not black.
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Aren’t all country songs novelty recordings in a way? A lot of people today claim country-western music ain’t what it used to be, and I kind of agreed until I started listening to the Outlaw Country radio station on Sirius in my car. God, there were so many beyond-cool hillbilly musical gems before and after Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Hank Williams, and Ferlin Husky that I had never heard before. Sure, I had hung around redneck bars all my life, but now I felt the weight of my faux-cracker musical ignorance. Suddenly I realized I was an old Caucasian listener who needed to stick his citified ears through the twanging glory hole of country music to have them rearoused. I might have known how to handle myself at a prison jamboree, but my lack of hayseed history would always make me eligible for a seat on the honky musical hayride to hell. If you can’t appreciate country music, you have no soul. It might be time for a “class-lift.”
How can you inject musical filler to puff out your lack of country music taste? First make an 8-track tape of all the hillbilly songs I’m going to recommend here and then play them over and over so they are drilled into your mind like the Catholic catechism. Tunes that will make you stupider in the academic world yet smarter in real life, the first step to any successful cosmetic country music makeover. These little ditties might get you laid, too.
Start with “Firebug” by J. D. McPherson. It sounds old but it came out in 2010, which just goes to show that retro is a state of mind, not a year. Who cares if the song is about pyromania? Fire prevention has always been the business my family is in (and still is), so I can’t help it that a guy with a match is sometimes my Prince Charming. “Burn it up, burn it down,” J.D. sings, and you can bet if there’s a horndog arsonist listening anywhere nearby, he’ll come sliding down your pole and ignite on contact.
If your tastes are a little less extreme but still salt-of-the-earth sleazy, “Snake Farm” (2006) by Ray Willie Hubbard is the song for you, a real mating call for the ill-bred. “‘Snake farm’—it just sounds nasty,” Ray snarls out, and he sounds kinda nasty, too. So what if his girlfriend in the song is named Ramona and “kinda looks like Tempest Storm”? I bet they’re both so sexy and dirty that one of them will come over to your house and have a little fun if you’d just ask them. You have to aim low. Think linoleum, Gila monsters, jock itch, snake bites, venom you have to suck out of the wound to save lives. Listen hard to “Snake Farm” and you’ll have a sexual musical experience all your own.
It’s impossible to appreciate country music without being at one time or another in your life a drunk. “If I Could Make a Living Drinking” would be the perfect pickup song if you were looking for a date in either the welfare or unemployment office. This 2014 realistic job-hunting ditty by Kevin Fowler says it all about alcoholism as a career move. If he was paid to be drunk, he’d never call in sick, “wouldn’t mind all this working overtime,” and would be “too busy boozin’ to ever join a union.”
Sometimes a hangover is fun: staying in bed all day, taking too many aspirin, jerking off, eating junk food, and ignoring incoming phone calls. This downside of drinking has its own little genre in hillbilly music that you should become familiar with. Even if you’ve reached a bottom, as they say in AA, there’s one place left for you: the “Hangover Tavern” (1961) by Hank Thompson. “My head is heavy, my spirit’s kind of low,” he sings with melancholy, “and every time I feel this way, to Hangover Tavern I go.” I told you a hangover can sing if you’ll just let it.
When you’re feeling despondent just put on more country music. There are thousands of slit-your-wrist hillbilly songs that will make you laugh at your self-indulgence and ultimately cheer you up. The saddest, most heartbreaking, most ridiculous but touching down-home narration can be found in the 1963 Number One country hit “Lonesome 7-7203” by Hawkshaw Hawkins. What a great number! It’s the telephone line the singer put in especially for his ex-girlfriend to call if she ever changes her mind about leaving him and wants to come back. She’s the only person that has this number. He’s disconnected their old phone because friends kept calling asking for her. “If you ever long for love that used to be,” he sings beautifully, “just call Lonesome 7-7203.”
I could break down in sobs just picturing him sitting around at home waiting … waiting for that call. For days … weeks … months! But then something worse comes to mind. There wasn’t any such thing as an answering machine back in 1963. Suppose he had to go out at some point? For food? Or liquor? And he missed the call! Worse yet, suppose the phone finally rings and it’s the wrong number? Or a hang-up? It’s enough to make you jump off a cliff. But wait … there’s more tragedy. Three days after the release of the song, the real life singer, Hawkshaw Hawkins, was killed in an airplane crash. And the final insult? Patsy Cline was also on board and her death got all the attention. Go ahead, laugh. Your sad story ain’t shit compared to his.
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I hated the Beatles when they first came out because they were so goddamn cheery. I didn’t listen to popular music from 1964 until 1976, when I first heard the Sex Pistols. Finally a new antihippie sound that could piss off every musical legend that came first. Before they were even known in America, I remember being taken to see the Pistols outside London and being shocked and awed at this whole new culture. Pogo dancing! Finally, the exact opposite of the cotillion ballroom dances I had been forced to attend by my parents as a young teenager. And punk goddess Jordan! Oh my God, she was a whole different ball game in radical beauty. Spiked Statue of Liberty hair! Those rubber and leather outfits! That geometric makeup on her face. Plus she could scream out vocals just as frighteningly as the Pistols. Divine took one look at Jordan and moaned, “Now I feel like plain Jane.” Jordan is still alive today, living with her mother in self-imposed éminence grise, resting on her laurels as she certainly should as the First Lady of the punk lunatic fringe. No one will ever topple you from that throne, Jordan! You are our punk president emeritus in style and you still rule like a queen.
I love punk. I feel safe in that world and of course I realize it’s hardly new these days. Matter of fact I have hosted for four years in a row what really is a punk rock nostalgia festival in Oakland, California, called Burger Boogaloo, brilliantly programmed by the promoter Marc Ribak. Here punk rock groups from the past (the Dwarves, the Mummies, the Damned) reemerge along with headliners such as Iggy Pop and Devo, and other more obscure groups such as the Spits and the Trashwomen who reunite and play—and this crowd has no trouble remembering who they are. Think about it—punk rock came out in the mid-seventies, so many of the fans are in their fifties. I’ve seen grandmothers pogo dancing here. It warms my black little heart to realize that for some, seeing the Buzzcocks or 5.6.7.8’s is like me going to see a Jerry Lee Lewis, Fats Domino concert years ago. Punk can be oldies but goodies and not lose its threatening edge.
“We’re middle-aged and filled with rage,” I yell from the stage in Mosswood Park to the crowd of new-wave revivalists as a joke, but they don’t think it’s funny—they roar back their approval. Here, for two whole days, grizzled punk rockers can celebrate and relive their youthful defiance and not feel as if time has passed. “Are you bald or a skinhead?” I shout to older guys who have gotten their Bay Area punk outfits out of mothballs, and they give me a good-natured middle finger back and laugh. Stage diving? Yeah, some of the almost-senior safety-pin set would try, but at Burger Boogaloo many of the punks with guts have guts. A lot of them are now too heavy to catch. Does it hurt more to be dropped crowd-surfing at fifty years of age than it did at twenty?
Punk has always been down-low, hasn’t it? Even today, some of the really cool young new wavers are just crazy homos escaping the square gay world to slam dance as a butch way to touch other guys’ bodies. Girls never look fat or ugly if they’re punk; it’s the perfect disguise that turns all nontraditionally beautiful women into poverty pinups. “Remember the first time you puked in your purse?” I yell to all the proud “hags and skags,” as I address them at Burger Boogaloo, and they cheer back affirmatively. Don’t fuck with punk fags or chicks. They’ll kick your ass. Or better yet, vomit on you.
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Musical mayhem is not only a privilege of the young; it’s an all-ages-admitted club in which you should strive for membership. But sometimes you need to calm down. Classical music isn’t just for eggheads. It’s for crazy people, too, especially when they want to be alone just escaping the frenzy of being themselves. You don’t need to know one thing about classical music for it to work. Just read longhair record reviews, and if it sounds like your cup of brain tea, go ahead and buy or download it and give a listen. You only need to make two purchases (and they have a hefty price tag) to feel at ease yet excited about classical music.
First get Glenn Gould: The Complete Columbia Album Collection box set. It’s out of print but you can find it online—all eighty-one albums remastered on CDs with individual original cover art and a 416-page book filled with rare photographs and essays. Glenn Gould is the coolest man who ever lived. The Master. The highly eccentric Canadian pianist who loved cold weather; he stood on the north side of every room he was in just to be sure the temperature would be lower. Yep, he mumbled and hummed all through his performances and refused to edit out his lunatic vocals. This reluctant public performer fetishized his taped-together broken-down piano stool, wore gloves and winter clothes onstage even when it was sweltering outside. He also thought Petula Clark had the most beautiful voice of all singers. Just listen to his elegant, sometimes frantic, always manic piano recitals, which could soothe a schizophrenic, excite a zombie, confuse a violent psychopath, and make a normal person feel at first disoriented and then inferior. Yes, Glenn Gould is the G-word and I don’t just mean genius. I mean glamorous, a genie, a great man of the gramophone with gray matter to spare. A Gould.
The other purchase you need to make in music is Maria Callas. She’s all you need to hear to understand opera. Anyone whose best friend was Pier Paolo Pasolini and got dumped by Aristotle Onassis so he could marry Jackie Kennedy knows how to shriek with beauty, style, pitch, and total abandon. The Complete Studio Recordings, 1949–1969 will make you do mad scenes of your own once you listen to every one of these seventy CDs (including twenty-six complete operas). It takes a while, but once you get through them all, you will feel as if you’ve had a musical orgasm like no other. Maria Callas was the biphetamine of classical voices. You may have thought, “Oh, fuck opera,” before you heard Callas’ voice, but once you experience her life’s work, you’ll change your contempt before investigation. Now you’ve “fucked opera” and it’s a whole different tune. One you’ll never be able to hum.
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Many listeners my age stopped liking popular music once rap came out, but not me. I don’t love all of it—the gangsta “ho, pussy, fag, gun” lyrics of 50 Cent get on my nerves—he sounds like a big nell-box to me, a nouveau-riche, homophobic braggart—the Donald Trump–meets–Chick-fil-A of rap. Yet I do have a soft spot for Ol’ Dirty Bastard because even though he was busted for robbery, murder, drug possession, and a shoot-out with New York police and later fatally overdosed, he was kind of funny when he took a reporter and two of his illegitimate children with him in a limousine to the welfare office to get his check and pick up food stamps. Now that’s what I call a genius publicity stunt.
I love Eminem too and that ex-wife of his, who wore black lip liner around her mouth and upstaged my mustache fashion-wise by flaunting something equally bizarre not only on top of her lips but on the bottom of them, too. I know Eminem has absolutely no desire to meet me, which makes him even more of a hero. “Puke” is still my favorite song of his, and I actually had Jill Fannon, my onetime art assistant, remix it as if the Chipmunks were singing it and used this now helium-happy number for a time as my introduction music whenever I walked onstage to do my Christmas show.
Maybe I should start a rap nostalgia festival just like Burger Boogaloo did for punk, only bring back all my favorite one-hit wonders from the early days of hip-hop. Sort of a Whitey Wattstax that would showcase all the rap numbers that made me feel like a curious Mr. Rogers meets an earlier would-be angry version of the poet LeRoi Jones when he first was published. “I Wish” by Skee-Lo was one such rhyme that stood out because it was happy and upbeat—a rap that put you in a good mood. “I wish I was a little bit taller,” Skee-Lo lamented. “I wish I was a baller. I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her.” Who could argue with that? He wasn’t going to shoot or sexually harass anybody. You could almost pogo dance to it like a racial tourist on a gangsta-lite crossover holiday.
“The Vapors” was another rap number that had a big effect on me. I’d love to bring back Biz Markie (and it wouldn’t be hard because he now lives in Maryland) to freestyle his hilarious hymn to the Victorian disease that high-style women caught in the Oscar Wilde days whenever they’d get so nervous or frustrated that all they could do was faint. Just picturing his hoodlums and skeezers whipping out a lacy handkerchief soaked in smelling salts to recover from “the vapors” has always been a rap fantasy I wish I could have filmed.
Basehead, a D.C. alternative jazzy rap group, fronted by Mike Ivey, would be high on my bill for my new Lollapaloser music festival. Right from the beginning of their career they confused both the hip-hop and hipster worlds with their subtle but highly original beat. As good as A Tribe Called Quest is in my book, Basehead is even better. They started out riffing on pot and depression but then switched over to Jesus and became a kind of slacker Kirk Franklin. There is no chart on Billboard for Pothead Gospel, but if there were, all Top Twenty would be by Basehead.
Tairrie B is my number one homegirl, the headliner of my show. The first white girl in rap who stood her ground against Dr. Dre and got punched in the face by him twice for it, even though she was Eazy-E’s girlfriend at the time. Her whole life story is missing from Straight Outta Compton and it shouldn’t be. Tairrie B was a ruthless bitch, just as one of her rap songs was called. Dressed like Mae West, she bragged, “I take apart men like I took apart Ken and Barbie dolls back when I was ten.” Yeah, she was a blond bombshell from hell but not “brown or black, as a matter of fact, I’m white!” she boasted with unselfconscious racial daring. That’s right—her name is Tairrie B and “B is for bitch!” I wish she’d come back and answer all of NWA’s greatest hits with a comic vengeance all her own. They owe her. Big-time.
