This is a real, on the run, blog.
So I am getting off the flight from Dulles in DC to CDG in Paris on March 26, 2009, and I am talking to a brother from Chicago about the blues and jazz. I started by telling him I am working on a fiction project, "The Bluesmen."
He says, "Yeah, well I'm from Chicago, home of the blues."
"Yeah," I said, "after the blues greats moved up from the Mississippi Delta -- John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, all those great guys. I was in Clarksdale, Mississippi a year ago this month. The heart of the Delta Blues country. And when you see how big those cotton fields are, you get an idea of how the blues was born there."
Then I thought very quickly of the alto sax great Charlie Parker, The Bird. I got very emotional.
"You know," I said, "Charlie Parker flies into Paris and he's getting off the plane. All these people are applauding and cheering. The Bird looks around, and then realizes: They're cheering for me, man. They're cheering for me."
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
WOKE UP THIS MORNING WITH THE RISING SUN...
...and played track four of my digitally-remastered version of Bob Marley and The Wailers' "Legend" album.
If you do not have this work, get it, in whatever format you prefer; then put on the fourth track and listen to Mr. Marley's fine poetry and also listen to the song's fine bass work.
If you do not have this work, get it, in whatever format you prefer; then put on the fourth track and listen to Mr. Marley's fine poetry and also listen to the song's fine bass work.
Monday, March 16, 2009
THE SCREAM THAT CHANGED ROCK 'N' ROLL
BY PAUL HEIDELBERG
STAFF WRITER
www.musicoftheworldXXI.blogspot.com
Listening to a digitally- remastered version of “The Buddy Holly Story” recently, I kept listening to the scream in “Oh Boy.”
I thought, this was very ahead of its time – as in portending the screams of The Doors’ Jim Morrison, and even the primal screams of John Lennon (who was very much influenced by Holly, of course, as Paul McCartney was recently quoted in Rolling Stone magazine).
Also, listening to Holly’s guitar work, I thought, “Presley did not play the guitar like this; this is pretty strong stuff for the 1950s.”
As I have written at this music blog
www.musicoftheworldXXI.blogspot.com
that guitar playing, along with the playing of such great Black guitarists as Elmore James and McKinley Morganfield (aka Muddy Waters) ushered in the “Freaked Out 60s Rock Guitar” of such musicians as Jimi Hendrix, fellow-Texan-to-Holly, Johnny Winter, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, and later, also a fellow-Texan-to Holly, Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Speaking with a member of The Picks, who backed Holly on such classic rock tunes as “Oh Boy,” “Maybe Baby” and seven other songs, I was set straight on that scream.
The man who set me straight is John Pickering, who now lives in Houston, but grew up in Lubbock with Holly. John was several years older than Holly, but his wife Vicky was Holly’s high school classmate. John was honored for his work with The Picks and Holly in a Senate Resolution at the State Capitol in Austin, February 23, 2009.
When asked what he remembers most about Holly, John said: “He was really an average sort of guy. He was pretty tall for the time, and skinny. He didn’t play any sports, and he wasn’t very popular.
“But when he got up on the stage in the high school auditorium and picked up a guitar and started playing, he was a completely different person. He changed completely.”
Bob Lapham and John’s older brother Bill were the two other members of The Picks. Bill died at the age of 58 in 1985 but Lapham was on hand with John to receive the award in Austin last month.
John, who earned a living as a petroleum engineer, later explained to me how tunes such as “Oh Boy” and “Maybe Baby” had been recorded by producer (and co-author of some of Holly’s tunes) Norman Petty at the officers club at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City.
Petty later brought the Picks to a recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico, to add backing vocals.
Petty knew the Picks from Lubbock and was familiar with the work Bill and John had done with their parents as members of The Pickering Family Singers, who had sung gospel and other types of music since the parents started The Pickerings in the 1930s.
Recalling that hot Saturday afternoon, July 12, 1957, when The Picks went into that Clovis, New Mexico, studio to lay down backing vocals, John has written:
“Norman played the tape about 10 times before Bill and I had the background worked out. Then, for about five times through, Bill sang Bob’s part to him [John explained to me that Bill sang the top of the register, Bob Lapham the bottom, and he sang middle]. We rehearsed the tape about five times more, with Bill wearing earphones. Bob and I preferred to sing with the small speakers in the studio, turned down low enough to prevent any feedback.”
Remembering those early days of rock’n’roll, John told me the speakers and Ampex tape machines Petty used were “state of the art” for the 1950s.
“The speakers were huge,” John said. “And Norman was way ahead of his time, the way he overdubbed and laid down tracks.”
When John visited my home recently, I showed him my “The Buddy Holly Story” CD and told him, “You’d better be getting royalties from this.”
He told me that he, and The Picks, never received royalties. John said Petty assured The Picks the work they were doing backing Holly would help their future music careers.
Of course, The Picks’ association with Holly ended abruptly with that tragic plane crash in Iowa February 3, 1959, that took the lives of 22-year-old Holly, The Big Bopper and Richie Valens.
John said he has not sought legal recourse regarding royalties. “I would have to sue the family,” he told me. “I’m not going to do that.”
It was after John had returned to Houston, and I had read some notes from his memoir of his days with The Picks and Buddy Holly (he told me the manuscript is nearly completed) that I read it had been his brother Bill, not Holly, who came up with that scream that takes “Oh Boy” to another level, in this writer’s opinion.
After I had emailed him with words such as: “That was your brother who did that scream? I always thought that was Buddy screaming,” John replied:
Yes, my brother Bill added the "EE-EE-EE-EE" at the end of the "dum-de-dum-dum" bridge. It was a melodious yell, which was unprecedented at the time, as was overdubbing in general. We set a lot of new precedents with our 1957 work, and have been harmonically emulated over the years. It would have helped if people had known it was us, and that was supposed to happen. It never did, but we'll just take what we have now and go on.
Yes, you go on, John, and you too – Bob Lapham, Bill Pickering, and Buddy Holly.
Rock has never been the same since your music was born (not died).
(NOTE: The Music of “The Sixties” figures importantly in Paul Heidelberg’s novel CHASING FREEDOM, which he wrote while living in Spain from June, 2004 to August, 2006 [the neo-nonfiction novel is available at www.amazon.com, www.bn.com, etc.]; Heidelberg is returning to Europe to live later this month, where writing projects include completing his screenplay, “The Bluesmen,” based on his near life-long love of the blues, and his March, 2008 journey to the “Word Capitol Of The Blues,” Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.)
STAFF WRITER
www.musicoftheworldXXI.blogspot.com
Listening to a digitally- remastered version of “The Buddy Holly Story” recently, I kept listening to the scream in “Oh Boy.”
I thought, this was very ahead of its time – as in portending the screams of The Doors’ Jim Morrison, and even the primal screams of John Lennon (who was very much influenced by Holly, of course, as Paul McCartney was recently quoted in Rolling Stone magazine).
Also, listening to Holly’s guitar work, I thought, “Presley did not play the guitar like this; this is pretty strong stuff for the 1950s.”
As I have written at this music blog
www.musicoftheworldXXI.blogspot.com
that guitar playing, along with the playing of such great Black guitarists as Elmore James and McKinley Morganfield (aka Muddy Waters) ushered in the “Freaked Out 60s Rock Guitar” of such musicians as Jimi Hendrix, fellow-Texan-to-Holly, Johnny Winter, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, and later, also a fellow-Texan-to Holly, Stevie Ray Vaughan.
Speaking with a member of The Picks, who backed Holly on such classic rock tunes as “Oh Boy,” “Maybe Baby” and seven other songs, I was set straight on that scream.
The man who set me straight is John Pickering, who now lives in Houston, but grew up in Lubbock with Holly. John was several years older than Holly, but his wife Vicky was Holly’s high school classmate. John was honored for his work with The Picks and Holly in a Senate Resolution at the State Capitol in Austin, February 23, 2009.
When asked what he remembers most about Holly, John said: “He was really an average sort of guy. He was pretty tall for the time, and skinny. He didn’t play any sports, and he wasn’t very popular.
“But when he got up on the stage in the high school auditorium and picked up a guitar and started playing, he was a completely different person. He changed completely.”
Bob Lapham and John’s older brother Bill were the two other members of The Picks. Bill died at the age of 58 in 1985 but Lapham was on hand with John to receive the award in Austin last month.
John, who earned a living as a petroleum engineer, later explained to me how tunes such as “Oh Boy” and “Maybe Baby” had been recorded by producer (and co-author of some of Holly’s tunes) Norman Petty at the officers club at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City.
Petty later brought the Picks to a recording studio in Clovis, New Mexico, to add backing vocals.
Petty knew the Picks from Lubbock and was familiar with the work Bill and John had done with their parents as members of The Pickering Family Singers, who had sung gospel and other types of music since the parents started The Pickerings in the 1930s.
Recalling that hot Saturday afternoon, July 12, 1957, when The Picks went into that Clovis, New Mexico, studio to lay down backing vocals, John has written:
“Norman played the tape about 10 times before Bill and I had the background worked out. Then, for about five times through, Bill sang Bob’s part to him [John explained to me that Bill sang the top of the register, Bob Lapham the bottom, and he sang middle]. We rehearsed the tape about five times more, with Bill wearing earphones. Bob and I preferred to sing with the small speakers in the studio, turned down low enough to prevent any feedback.”
Remembering those early days of rock’n’roll, John told me the speakers and Ampex tape machines Petty used were “state of the art” for the 1950s.
“The speakers were huge,” John said. “And Norman was way ahead of his time, the way he overdubbed and laid down tracks.”
When John visited my home recently, I showed him my “The Buddy Holly Story” CD and told him, “You’d better be getting royalties from this.”
He told me that he, and The Picks, never received royalties. John said Petty assured The Picks the work they were doing backing Holly would help their future music careers.
Of course, The Picks’ association with Holly ended abruptly with that tragic plane crash in Iowa February 3, 1959, that took the lives of 22-year-old Holly, The Big Bopper and Richie Valens.
John said he has not sought legal recourse regarding royalties. “I would have to sue the family,” he told me. “I’m not going to do that.”
It was after John had returned to Houston, and I had read some notes from his memoir of his days with The Picks and Buddy Holly (he told me the manuscript is nearly completed) that I read it had been his brother Bill, not Holly, who came up with that scream that takes “Oh Boy” to another level, in this writer’s opinion.
After I had emailed him with words such as: “That was your brother who did that scream? I always thought that was Buddy screaming,” John replied:
Yes, my brother Bill added the "EE-EE-EE-EE" at the end of the "dum-de-dum-dum" bridge. It was a melodious yell, which was unprecedented at the time, as was overdubbing in general. We set a lot of new precedents with our 1957 work, and have been harmonically emulated over the years. It would have helped if people had known it was us, and that was supposed to happen. It never did, but we'll just take what we have now and go on.
Yes, you go on, John, and you too – Bob Lapham, Bill Pickering, and Buddy Holly.
Rock has never been the same since your music was born (not died).
(NOTE: The Music of “The Sixties” figures importantly in Paul Heidelberg’s novel CHASING FREEDOM, which he wrote while living in Spain from June, 2004 to August, 2006 [the neo-nonfiction novel is available at www.amazon.com, www.bn.com, etc.]; Heidelberg is returning to Europe to live later this month, where writing projects include completing his screenplay, “The Bluesmen,” based on his near life-long love of the blues, and his March, 2008 journey to the “Word Capitol Of The Blues,” Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.)
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