On May 19, Fats Domino played Tipitina’s. He didn’t play for a long time and he may have been a reluctant performer, but he played. Quint Davis couldn’t make that happen at Jazz Fest a year ago, and in recent years, others have tried and failed. Bill Taylor, Adam Shipley and Roland von Kurnatowski of Tipitina’s Foundation made it happen, and rather than being the culmination of great effort, the Domino show was a side project. For the last year, Taylor and Shipley’s primary focus has been Goin’ Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino.The CD features songs performed and written by Fats Domino and Dave Bartholomew as done by B.B. King, Neil Young, Olu Dara, Corinne Bailey Rae, Lucinda Williams, Marc Broussard, Ben Harper and Norah Jones to name a few. Taylor and Shipley tried where possible to pair guest talent with Louisiana bands, so Galactic plays with Robbie Robertson and the New Orleans Social Club backs Taj Mahal.
Taylor, the executive director of the Tipitina’s Foundation, first came up with the idea to do this CD in September of 2006. “Fats had donated the proceeds of his record Alive and Kickin’ to the Tipitina’s Foundation,” Taylor says. “It had done well for us, and he still wanted to help, but he doesn’t like to be in the public eye. What can we do? Hey, wait a minute! Maybe we can do a tribute record to Fats.” Domino gave his okay, and Taylor started researching previous versions of Domino’s songs. “I went out and bought John Lennon doing ‘Ain’t That a Shame,’ and it sounded like it had been recorded yesterday. Tim Donnelly, a friend of the Foundation who has been working on the CD, had a connection with Yoko Ono and called her up. Within a week, she had given us permission and we had it. That opened the door to talk to others. I mean, we got John Lennon—that gave us instant credibility.”
According to Tipitina’s Foundation music director Adam Shipley, “We started sending emails to business contacts. Someone I knew from booking bands in Orlando had an in to Elton John. He emailed me back three days later saying that Elton has a new record out and he’s extremely busy, but he does not feel he can say no to this project. From that point on, there was no stopping us.”
Once it was clear the project would happen, they started brainstorming about artists. Shipley compared the process to putting together a fantasy baseball team, but they found making the fantasy reality was easier than they expected.
“The good news with the Internet is that if you’re savvy enough to find some contact info—and I’m not that savvy—it’s easy to get to someone who may or may not decide to pass your information along,” Taylor says. “You can get that far via email or phone.” Taylor also adjusted to dealing with big names, but it wasn’t that difficult. He says, “When I came to New Orleans, I was starstruck by folks like Monk Boudreaux and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. These stars and their hangers-on just do a good job of making it difficult for people to get to them. The advantage I had was being able to get on the phone and mention Fats.”
Still, he is enough of a rock ’n’ roll fan to appreciate what he was doing. During one session, he called a friend and told his voicemail, “I’m in the studio with Robert Plant and Lil’ Band O’ Gold, and Plant just said that he loved Chris Kenner, but his mother made him throw out all his Chris Kenner singles when he was 12.”
But there were challenges. “I went into this without a ton of knowledge, and I learned how tough the music industry is,” Taylor says. “You have to have armor on to step in that world. You get on the phone with Elliot Roberts (manager of Neil Young) and he’s seen and heard it all. If you say the wrong thing, you can hear over the phone him ready to say, ‘I don’t think we’re going to deal with this guy.’ It’s hard to step into that world.”
Another idea for the record was to involve New Orleans musicians. Taylor says, “Many times we had to put band together, record them, and then have the artist do vocals or piano or whatever separately. Luckily in New Orleans, there are so many good musicians, and being a New Orleans musician, you learn to play any style. The musicians were easy to match up. B.B. King and Dumpstaphunk. Taj Mahal and the New Orleans Social Club. You could put these bands in front of anybody and they’ll kill it.”
When Herbie Hancock came to New Orleans to announce the opening of Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance, Adam Shipley started thinking about who to put with Hancock. He thought of George Porter, Jr., who said “absolutely” when asked. “Adam asked me if I wanted to band-lead a cut with Herbie Hancock,” Porter says. “I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with it, but I sure as heck wanted to try.” Shipley and Taylor chose “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday,” and the band included Porter’s rhythm section foil from the Meters, Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste on drum, and Renard Poche on guitar. “I approached it like Herbie Hancock plays with the Meters. Once I heard it was Zig on drums,” Porter recalls, “it had to be funky.”
Chris Finney, the project’s coordinating producer and engineer for many of the tracks, was behind the mixing board for this session. He remembers, “There was some serious musicianship in that room. Herbie has his brand of funk, and George and Zig do what they do. At first, it didn’t seem like it would fit together, but Herbie found holes to put his thing on.” Porter agrees. “I was scared to death when I got to the studio that morning with arrangement, but the session was very creative. It was easy to play with Herbie.”
As Goin’ Home shows, Domino’s songs are surprisingly adaptable. Toots and the Maytals push the original rhythm until “Let the Four Winds Blow” became reggae, and Robert Plant and the Soweto Gospel Choir make “Valley of Tears” a spiritual backed only by light percussion. “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday” was similarly malleable. “That song has never been played that way,” Porter says. “I thought that interpreting Fats’ song was what we were supposed to do, so we kept the melody but changed the pocket.”
There was an added dimension to this and a number of sessions—Domino in the studio as observer. “I wasn’t intimidated, but I was wondering about what he thought,” Porter says. “During the recording, I could see into the control room, and I saw Fats with a smile on his face. He wasn’t saying, ‘What the hell have they done to my song?’” According to Porter, Domino said simply, “You know, I never would have thought of it that way.”
Galactic had the same idea as Porter for interpreting the songs “For ‘Going to the River,’ we did it two ways and combined them,” says saxophonist Ben Ellman. “We did it more slowly with a Daniel Lanois idea and then kicked it up to a Mardi Gras Indian/Second and Dryades vibe.” They also did a version of “So Long,” and, thinking it was going to be the last song, tried to make it sound like a party. “It was straight-up attitude with Galactic live in the studio,” Ellman says. “We got mad at the song. You know who was our inspiration? The Morning 40 Federation. We kept saying, ‘How would they treat this?’ It’s got them and the Sex Pistols’ ‘My Way’ vibe.” Then there was the musical alchemy of adding a Mardi Gras Indian Big Chief on vocals. “It’s a Fats Domino song, but when Monk got in there, he started doing this thing,” Ellman says. “He’s the Big Chief.” Of his part, Monk Boudreaux says, “We did it the Fats way and then a couple others. If you listen to Fats, he’s saying something. It’s a true story he’s telling.”
The funds raised by this tribute CD will be used to “reinvigorate the Lower Ninth Ward,” Taylor says. “It will used to help rebuild Fats’ publishing house where he used to hang out with his friends in the neighborhood and cook. Fats is also allowing Tip’s to use the property across the street to build a music co-op/community center. The Tipitina’s Foundation is partnering with the group A Beacon of Hope to have a community center focused specifically on the Ninth Ward. “It’s so wide open down there that any sign of progress, any contribution is a positive sign. And what better sign than to be able to drive down Caffin Avenue and see Fats Domino smiling? Giving Fats a place to hang is a symbol of the rebirth of the neighborhood.”
Taylor also sees how Fats Domino is and can continue to be a positive force in New Orleans. He pauses in thought before he states, “There is so much in New Orleans right now that we are struggling with and are afraid of, or don’t want to deal with or are too tired. I think that Fats is a shining light in the middle of it. It’s something we can point to with pride. He is one of those light sources. He makes the world a better place to be in, in a real simple way. We need that bad.”
