Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) (6 page)

During my high sc
hool years I'd ride into Princeton on Saturday afternoons and watch foreign movies at the Garden Theatre, an art house. The early and mid-sixties were great years for European films. On a regular basis, the Garden ran masterpieces by Fellini, Antonioni, Truffaut and a slew of British films by John Schlesinger, Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz, Joseph Losey and others. One weekend, intrigued by an ad, I decided to go slumming at the crap theater in New Brunswick and see an Italian-made western,
A Fistful of Dollars
. This turned out to be some illin' shit, and the music, by Ennio Morricone, was hilarious. So, when
Premiere
asked me in 1989 to interview Morricone, I bought a little recorder and met him at his hotel in midtown Manhattan. His English wasn't so hot, so we talked through his translator.

Fagen:
Maestro, the picture I have of Italian filmmaking comes mainly from Fellini films like
8½
and
La Dolce Vita
. When you were scoring spaghetti westerns in the sixties, was the scene really swinging?

Morricone:
La Dolce Vita
focused on a small group of people who got up at eleven p.m. and lived at night. While I, then as now,
got up at five in the morning to compose and was asleep by nine in the evening.

Fagen:
Your music has always had a life here in America apart from the films. In the past few years, though, your influence has surfaced in a lot of rock music and in the works of “avant-garde” composers. Why is this music from twenty-five-year-old Italian westerns the talk of the town?

Morricone:
I don't know. You tell me.

Fagen:
Well . . .

Morricone:
But I have a hypothesis. When I begin a theme in a certain key, say, D minor, I never depart from this original key. If it begins in D minor, it ends in D minor. This harmonic simplicity is available to everyone.

Fagen:
But isn't it true that the Leone films, with their elevation of mythic structures, their comic book visual style and extreme irony, are now perceived as signaling an aesthetic transmutation by a generation of artists and filmmakers? And isn't it also true that your music for those films reflected and abetted Leone's vision by drawing on the same eerie catalog of genres—Hollywood western, Japanese samurai, American pop and Italian opera? That your scores functioned both “inside” the film as a narrative voice and “outside” the film as the commentary of a winking jester? Put it all together and doesn't it spell “postmodern,” in the sense that there has been a grotesque encroachment of the devices of art and, in fact, an establishment of a new narrative plane founded on the devices themselves? Isn't that what's attracting lower Manhattan?

Morricone:
[
shrugs
]

Fagen:
What about your use of unusual solo instruments? You've hired Zamfir, master of the pan flute. You've featured whistlers and the human voice. Do you hear a specific color when you watch a scene?

Morricone:
When I write a passage, I find out who's available. If the violinist I want is out of town, I'll use, say, a great flute player who is on a day layover in Rome. Sometimes it's even simpler. In
The Mission
, the character in the film plays the oboe, so . . .

Fagen:
After scoring so many films, it must be hard to come up with fresh ideas.

Morricone:
I saw
The Untouchables
on Monday, I thought of the main theme in the cab back to the hotel and played it for De Palma on Tuesday.

Fagen:
You've worked with many directors, each who must present a different set of problems for the composer. I have a list here. What was it like working for Bertolucci?

Morricone:
Bellissimo!

Fagen:
Pontecorvo?

Morricone:
He is my old friend—
bellissimo!

Fagen:
John Boorman?

Morricone:
Bellissimo!

Fagen:
Terrence Malick?

Morricone:
A man with bad luck but . . .
bello, bellissimo!

Fagen:
Roman Polanski?

Morricone:
Bellissimo!

Fagen:
Brian De Palma?

Morricone:
Bellissimo!

Fagen:
Leone?

Morricone:
Bellissimo!

Fagen:
Your scores for Leone in particular had a very sly humor. Will you be composing for any comic or semicomic films in the near future?

Morricone:
If they offer. I can only choose from the films that are offered me.

Fagen:
Maestro, are there days when you wish you were still playing the trumpet?

Morricone:
The trumpet was exhausting. I have always wanted to compose.

Our next subject is entitled to his custo
mary introduction: Ladies and Gentlemen, the Genius . . . the Genius of Ray Charles!

W
hen Ray Charles died in 2004, we came to the end of American culture as we had known it. By alchemically combining elements of the sacred and the secular—basic country blues, club blues, country-and-western music, black gospel, the bebop of Charlie Parker and the canon of American standards—Brother Ray, musically speaking, solved the mind-body problem.

Ray's first models were the slick, popular trios of Nat Cole and, especially, Charles Brown. After a brief period of mimicry, he shook off Brown's twee, club-style delivery and found his own confident physicality that combined the Chicago cool of Cole with the passion of the black Baptist church. In other words, he decided to be Ray Charles. This could not have been that obvious a move for an ambitious black entertainer in 1952. Ray brought soul out of the closet.

At a recording session on November 18, 1954, Ray famously hijacked a gospel tune and, as he used to put it, “replaced God with a woman.” The result, “I Got a Woman”—followed by “Drown in My Own Tears,” “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” “What
I Say” and so many others—rescued a generation from the deadly, neurotic suppression of feeling that had afflicted the nation after World War II. Two years later, “I Got a Woman” appeared on Elvis Presley's first album. Elvis wasn't the white Ray Charles, though. Tennessee Williams, maybe, comes closer.

The Ray Charles Effect was not limited to popular music. Ray's big and small bands (Ray did the arrangements, singing each man his part) had a huge influence on the direction jazz was to take in the fifties, a movement the unimpressed French critic André Hodeir used to call the “funky hard-bop regression.” Horace Silver, Count Basie's “atomic” band, Charles Mingus, every funky artist on Blue Note—they all owed Ray Charles. Quincy Jones was a Seattle teenager when Ray moved to that city in 1948:

Ray showed up, and he was around sixteen years old [actually, Ray was at least eighteen by then] and . . . he was like God, you know! He had an apartment, he had a record player, he had a girlfriend, two or three suits. When I first met him, you know, he would invite me over to his place. I couldn't believe it. He was fixing his record player. He would shock himself because there were glass tubes in the back of the record player then, and the radio. And I used to just sit around and say, “I can't believe you're sixteen. You've got all this stuff going.” Because he was like . . . a brilliant old dude, you know. He knew how to arrange and everything. And he . . . taught me how to arrange in braille, and the notes. He taught me what the notes were, because he understood.

Ray's soul revolution ran parallel to, and interacted with, the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties. In the more militant seventies, the funk of James Brown and Sly Stone took over to provide a more obvious sound track. Ray's attempts to jump on the funkwagon were halfhearted. The new black sound was colder and right up in your face, based, in fact, on a smaller division of the beat.
*
James Brown, Isaac Hayes and Barry White seemed less interested in pleasing a woman than in collecting body parts. In contrast, Ray's sage interpretation of “America the Beautiful” (1972) was at once a taunt, a healing gesture and a blind man's dream of the Promised Land. Perhaps a eulogy as well. Ray's work, even in decline, was always wiser and subtler than that of the new breed. It was music for adults.

For me, though, and a generation of suburban boomers, Ray was the Professor of Desire, and “Georgia on My Mind”—square-ass backup singers and all—just may have been the most beautiful three minutes and thirty-nine seconds in all of twentieth-century music.

The general public, knowing little of Ike Turner's
innovations as a player, producer and bandleader, seems more intrigued by his reputation as an iconic addict and wife-beater. But, by all accounts, Ike never even took a drink until he was in his thirties. Then he got lucky
.

 

I got to keep movin'

I got to keep movin'

Blues fallin' down like hail

(Blues fallin' down like hail)


And the days keeps on worryin' me


There's a Hellhound on my trail


(Hellhound on my trail)

—Robert Johnson

M
ost all the musicians of my acquaintance know the legend of Robert Johnson, the great Delta bluesman. At a crossroads at midnight, Robert meets the devil (or Eshu or Papa Legba) and, in exchange for his immortal soul, comes away with supernatural skills as a singer and guitarist. Many versions of this Faustian story put the crossroads at Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Highway 49 meets Highway 61.

Muddy Waters was raised in Clarksdale. John Lee Hooker and Sam Cooke were born and grew up there. Ike Turner was a Clarksdale boy, too. This was the 1930s in the Deep South. Real bad stuff happened. Nevertheless, by the time he was a teenager, Ike could bang out a boogie on the piano and play the guitar with an authentic Delta twang. But in truth, talented as he was, there wasn't anything really supernatural about Ike's skills as a musician. His singing was always spirited, but, relative to the wealth of local competition, no big deal. What Ike excelled at was leadership: conceptualization, organization and execution. It's intriguing to think: if Ike walked down to the crossroads one moonless night, what exactly did he ask for?

Long before he met Tina (originally Anna Mae Bullock) in St. Louis in the late 1950s and began the sixteen-year partnership that would end with his name used mainly as a comic byword for “blow-addicted megalomaniacal black wife-beater,” Ike had already been successful at some half dozen careers in music. He was a DJ, a relentless talent scout, an arranger (for Sam Phillips at Sun, among others), a bandleader (with his own group, the Kings of Rhythm) and a session player (he recorded with B.B., Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James and many others). His employers included the Bihari brothers at Modern Records, the Chess brothers in Chicago and a host of tough club owners. They didn't like to fool around with their money. Ike had to be at that session on time, he had to book those gigs, make sure the band's suits were pressed and that they rolled into the next town ready to play. Organization!

Ike could make things happen. Take “Rocket 88,” a jump
blues tune about an Oldsmobile, which Ike and his Kings of Rhythm recorded in 1951. Chess Records released it under the name Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats (Brenston, Ike's bari sax player, was the vocalist that day). A lot of music critics seem to think it was the first record to make the leap from R&B to rock and roll, probably because the busted amp that guitarist Willie Kizart was using added some serendipitous distortion to his sound. But it's Ike's stomping piano that drives the tune. “Rocket 88” went to number one on the R&B charts and, no doubt, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were listening.

The next year, the Bihari brothers sent him to Memphis to find bluesman Rosco Gordon. Ike liked Gordon's tune “No More Doggin'” and had Rosco bring in his band for a session. In fact, Ike liked the tune so much, he secretly had the band come back and record it again with himself singing. (Fortunately, Rosco heard what was going on and broke up Ike's game.) “No More Doggin'” made it to number two on the charts that year. Rosco Gordon's piano style—particularly on that record—was a quirky sort of boogie with a deep shuffle and a heavy accent on the upbeats. If it sounds almost like ska music when you hear it, it's no accident: the record is often cited as the template for Jamaican ska rhythm—whence came rock steady, whence came reggae. No wonder Ike tried to steal it.

When Papa Legba, the Crossroads Devil, steered Anna Mae Bullock into his path, Ike found his muse. I love all those early singles Ike worked up for Tina and the Ikettes: “A Fool in Love,” “I Idolize You,” “I Think It's Gonna Work Out Fine” and so on. Ike's concept (really a more raw and countrified version of Ray Charles's act) was simple: the band plays tight; Tina goes
berserk. My favorite from this period, though, is “I'm Blue (The Gong-Gong Song)” by the Ikettes, with Dolores Johnson singing the lead vocal, a performance that actually justifies the overused term “kick-ass.” A static sequence of stylized, transparent cells, this piece is Ike's overarching masterpiece (most people might be familiar with it as the sample used by Salt-N-Pepa in their 1993 hit “Shoop”). In 1965, Ike hired young Jimi Hendrix as a second guitarist for the Revue, but he was a big show-off, and Ike had to let him go: Jimi wouldn't stay inside the lines.

Papa Legba started to work overtime on Ike's behalf in the late sixties. Ike and Tina opened for the Stones and crossed over big-time by covering rock tunes like “Proud Mary” and “Honky Tonk Woman.” Now they were superstars and the greenbacks were flowing. As is usual in these cases, Legba closed in to collect the vig. By all accounts, Ike got higher every year, and meaner, too. It's really hard to focus when there's a Hellhound on your trail. From Ike's point of view, squinting through the harsh fallout from all that booze and goofy dust, he may have figured that forceful action needed to be taken to ensure that everything in his world was up to his rigidly high standards of organization. He may have determined that, with the Hound so close and all, he'd better at least have his ducks in a row. Chaos had to be fended off, and the ends justified the means. Or something like that.

Or was it that Legba had given Ike exactly what he'd wished for—a schoolboy's dream of a girl who could be both a soul mate and a creature he could mold into the perfect lover and musical partner—knowing that Ike would never have the empathetic chops to see what he actually had? Ike had been programmed to blow it with Tina from the git-go.

After Tina finally left in 1976, Ike, already way shredded from the whole sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll thing, totally came apart. Years of continued heavy drug use and run-ins with the law ensued, culminating in his serving seventeen months in a California state prison. He was still in jail when he got the news that he and Tina had been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Finally, just when things were starting to look up, Tina's book came out, followed by the film
What's Love Got to Do with It
.

Now the poster boy for spousal abuse, Ike started to fight his way back. He reconstituted the Kings of Rhythm and came out with a book of his own,
Takin' Back My Name
(“Sure, I've slapped Tina . . . We had fights and there have been times when I punched her without thinking . . . But I never beat her . . . I did no more to Tina than I would mind somebody doing to my mother in the same circumstances”). Obviously, there was something Ike just didn't get about the whole hitting problem. In his comeback shows, he had a series of surrogate Tinas come out in Tina-type outfits and sing Tina's songs. It seemed like he still couldn't figure out why she was gone. And yet he soldiered on, releasing two respectable albums, the second of which,
Risin' with the Blues
, won a Grammy in 2006.

How did Ike make out with the Crossroads Devil? We'll never know. Faust, in Goethe's version, does horrible things, especially in regard to his honey, Gretchen. At the end, he's about to be thrown into the yawning jaws of hell when a posse of angels comes to the rescue, singing:

He's escaped, this noble member

Of the spirit world, from evil

Whoever strives in his endeavor,

We can rescue from the devil.

And if he has Love within,

Granted from above,

The sacred crowd will meet him

With welcome, and with love.

I'd like to think Ike's version came out the same.