Email this article | Printer friendly page The Fat Man SingsBy Rick Coleman |
In the movie 12 Monkeys, a time traveler played by Bruce Willis comes back from an apocalyptic future to 1996 and hears the introduction to "Blueberry Hill" on the radio. Willis' face is overcome with emotion, his eyes watered with tears. "Ah!" the traveler cries, "I love the music of the 20th Century!"
Fats DominoIn 1953, Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, the man who helped name "rhythm & blues" in 1949 at Billboard magazine and went on to produce the likes of Ray Charles, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin, boldly predicted the future in a Cash Box article: "Can't you envision a collector in 1993 discovering a Fats Domino record in a Salvation Army Depot and rushing home to put it on the turntable? We can. It's good blues, it's good jazz, and it's the kind of good that never wears out." By the time of Wexler's autobiography in 1993, he saw his prediction realized, referring in his book to "Fats Domino's earth-shattering sessions with Dave Bartholomew, the extravagantly talented R& B maestro."
There is a timeless, primal sense about Domino's music, a warmth and an intimacy combined with a heart-beating rhythm that is enveloping , almost womb-like. Of course, the world has changed greatly in the half century since Domino began.
Fifty years ago Paul Gayten and Roy Brown put New Orleans on the map for rhythm & blues. Roy Brown went from New Orleans' town crier to the world's with his shout "I heard the news, there's Good Rockin' Tonight!" Antoine Domino -- he had not been dubbed "Fats" yet -- then lived on the nearly rural dirt roads of the Lower Ninth Ward. The shy teenager warmed up for both singers, playing a piano boogie by Albert Ammons and singing some of Gayten's numbers. He even managed to steal the show once or twice.
In late 1949 Domino was playing his regular houserockin' gig at the Hideaway Club (which would be torn down for the Desire Housing Project) when he was he was approached by Dave Bartholomew, a local bandleader, and Lew Chudd, owner of Imperial Records in Hollywood.
"Fats was afraid to come to our table," says Lew Chudd. "He was a very shy guy during those times. His suit consisted of an odd jacket and a pair of pants. He didn't have a suit to his name. Fats worked in the mattress factory when I met him. He didn't have a car either...I wanted him right then and there, it was a different beat, it was a very primitive beat, but it was a very different beat from what I'd heard after being in the music business for a long time, after recording jazz, I'd say about fifteen years."
Together, Domino and Bartholomew re-wrote the New Orleans piano standard, "The Junker's Blues" as "The Fat Man." It was an immediate smash and set new standards in rockin' rhythm & blues for its pounding wall of sound and its joyous youth appeal -- it was rock 'n' roll in all but name.
"With Fats we never looked back," says Dave Bartholomew. "We just kept on goin' and everybody would come to town to get my sound. I don't know that the sound was so great, but it was very successful."
By 1964 Domino's string of hits finally ended. He had had an incredible run. His hits spanned fourteen years from an era of blues shouters and total segregation, through the advent of rock 'n' roll (which Fats said he had been playing "for fifteen years down in New Orleans"), past the fall of the rockers (Domino was the only one who kept rocking solidly into the '60s), to the advent of the Beatles. Even the Beatles closely followed Domino -- the first rock 'n' roll song John Lennon learned was "Ain't That A Shame;" the first rock 'n' roll song that George Harrison heard was "I'm In Love Again;" Paul McCartney often did impressions of "I'm Walkin'" and other Domino hits as a teenager. Fats was escorted to the Fabs' trailer in City Park Stadium before their concert in New Orleans in September 1964, where they serenaded him with their version of "I'm In Love Again." Fats joined in. He would later record three of their songs, nearly having a hit in 1968 with "Lady Madonna." Lennon and McCartney would return the favor, recording Domino songs on their solo records.
In January 1995 Fats Domino played an extremely rare club date in New Orleans at the House Of Blues. Domino had been separated from his great arranger and bandleader Dave Bartholomew for several years. Domino had also recently lost two drummers to strokes. But Domino's band had changed many times in over four decades on the road. One man who had almost always been with him was his great saxophone player, Herbert Hardesty, who played those great rocking solos with a melody that stayed buzzing in your ear.
"Here's the first song I recorded way back in 1949," Fats announced as he sat at the piano. "This is the way I did it then."
Domino opened with a blistering version of "The Fat Man." The crowd inches from his feet gave him a flashback of the "jammed-and-packed" Hideaway when he was just starting out. He played an hour and then came back to encore for nearly another hour. Just like at the Hideaway, he could have played all night.
Tragedy has always followed Domino, striking down many of those close to him and his bandmembers -- greats such as Walter "Papoose" Nelson, Nat Perrilliat, Lee Allen and Walter Kimble, to name a few. In January of this year, Fats tragically lost his 44-year-old son Andre. That same month Domino's great saxophone player of the last three decades, Fred Kemp, was stricken with cancer. Characteristically, Domino's strength has carried him through every adversity.
In May 1997 at the Jazz and Heritage Festival the world will witness a historic concert by one of the most important musicians of this century. Not only is it the 50th anniversary of Domino's professional career, it is his first show in two years -- an eternity for a man who once played eleven months out of the year. Fats' last concert in May 1995 in Sheffield, England was a reunion of the triumvirate of black rockers from the 1950s -- Fats, Chuck Berry and Little Richard -- who together tore through the fabric of white society through its children, in their way doing as much for integration as the freedom marches. Like a titan from a distant, mistily-remembered age, Domino brought the to the world a new kind of fire. Watch and listen closely. There is greatness in his seeming simplicity.
"When Fats plays [piano], it's magic," says New Orleans piano maestro Allen Toussaint. "It's beyond just a general grace note in musical terms. It's something a little bigger than life, just the way Fats is."
To top it off, August 6 is Domino's 50th wedding anniversary to his lovely and notoriously shy wife, Rosemary. Happy anniversary, Antoine and Rose. That's one more gold record.
(Rick Coleman is finishing his book on Fats Domino and the early days of rock 'n' roll.)
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