to get away from the pits and the factories, all that cloth-capped bullshit

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When the scene was at its most vigorous there was this tremendous search for obscurities, and a lot of great records surfaced as a result. But after a while, the chances of discovering some old masterpiece diminish. I started Northern Soul but I actually found the music very limiting because in the early days I’d play a Charles Mingus record, then I’d play a bluebeat disc followed by a Booker T. tune, then a Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley record. Gradually there was this blanding out to one sort of sound. When I started DJing, I could play what I wanted. But after three years I had to keep to the same tempo.

This is the land of knee-tremblers and wee bastards

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smoky dance-halls, the meeting places of thieves, spivs and prostitutes.

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He got to know a blonde hostess with whom he fell in love. For days on end he was away from his room in Montmartre, his wife and his monkey. The strange new life he led with her had effects that were as enduring as they were beneficial. In the space of a few months, he acquired an elegant bearing, decided to dress in the approved manner. Soon, though, he was back in his little room in the Place Emile-Goudeau, back with his wife and monkey.  Those Montmartre hotel rooms! The foreigner who frequents Gay Paree sees only the blazing neon signs along the Rue Pigalle, the social round, money flowing as freely as champagne, the women who hang about street-corners, the dance-halls, the dancers. But like those of Marseille, or any other town, the Montmartre hotel rooms are small and square, their flowered or striped wallpaper torn in places. A yellow or red satin eiderdown covers the bed; net curtains hang drearily down each side of the window, through which more dust than light comes in. The faded covers are flecked with cigarette burns. The enormous cupboard holds all the tenant’s belongings and in a shady corner a screen masks off the washbasin.

the Bucket-of-Blood, the Upholstered Sewer, that's where you heard jazz

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Some guy came in for some innocent diversion, only he had about a grand on him. We had about six gals there, all sizes and all types. They worked on a percentage, so many drinks - phonies - drunk a night, so much earned. Well, this unlucky guy comes in. I strike up a tune and the big parade starts. First one gal sidles up to this fall guy; he doesn't give her a tumble. Then another, and still another. By this time he's downed several and is more amiable. Soon he latches on to one he likes. You know these girls could promise strange worlds with their eyes - it didn't pay to gaze too deeply. Well, he invites one of the gals to drink with him, and soon she's warming him up, and he buys me one - and then she invites one of her "girl friends" to join her - and pretty soon it's one big happy family, with our friend for the afternoon buying drinks for the house, about ten of us, and the drinks comin' so fast that nobody got a chance to really drink except, of course, our indiscreet friend. And somehow he passed out and had to be assisted upstairs. Just before my shift was up, he awoke - refreshed, but very short of dough. Very short. He was very outspoken about it, but no one knew where it had strayed, except - "Remember, you were buyin' everybody drinks - remember?" And so he started drinking again, and fell off one of the stools. This time the dishwasher helped him up, but somehow his hand got caught in this man's pocket. But the man with the grand (minus) wasn't that drunk. He put up a squawk. So there was nothing for Old Man McGovern to do but fire the dishwasher. So he got his hat and coat on and with his head hanging low, walked out - out, past the front window to the side door that also led back of the bar (partitioned off) to the kitchen, where I later saw him back at work, washing dishes.

confined to dank spaces playing the rhythms of sin

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Sonny played in the sweaty bars in Calumet City, south of Chicago—“Sin City,” as it was called, packed with sleazy clubs and strip joints run mostly by the mob. The money was good, but the hours were grueling, eight to twelve at a stretch, with strippers coming and going behind a flimsy partition hiding white bodies from black eyes. Bugs Hunter formed a trio with Sonny and Red Holloway on saxophone to comp the sex and sin that simmered in clubs such as the Capital Bar, Sid’s Oasis, and the Peacock Club. Their music was the usual dive-bar bump and grind. Sonny played it straight, honking and tonking while the dancers bobbed.

I was just doing what felt good, if that was a sin, then sin on!

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I loved to watch Don Wilkerson attack Fathead on the stand. It brought out the best in both cats. When someone tries to stomp on you, naturally you’re going to respond. And together—blowing out in front of the band—they’d be burning up the place. I like to think I’m a half-ass composer. I ain’t no Duke Ellington. I heard what West Coast cats were doing, and it was good music. But my heart was really with the East Coast dudes. They were harder cats and had a grittier sound. There was more blues in their playing, the approach was tougher. I still hear something different about the way the cats play back East. They’re pushier, more aggressive. They got a certain stink that the guys in L.A. lack. I miss the filth—the East Coast filth—that you hear on the streets and in the recording studios of New York City. When I do a song, I must be able to make it stink in my own way; I want to foul it up so it reeks of my manure and no one else’s.

Big Mama chasing Little Richard with a butcher knife

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Boy, oh boy, the action started. Every conceivable avenue of pleasure was rampant at this center of activity, a drunken man being dragged home by a good Samaritan, a couple of painted lilies standing in the corner smoking and indulging in that favorite West Dallas pastime—profanity. I paused to hear the deluge of obscene language coming from everywhere. A boy, apparently twelve years of age, walked up and asked for a cigarette. I gave him one on his nerve. He took two out of the package. A nickel Victrola started playing “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home?” Couples dancing, couples drinking, some talking in tones that I could not understand. A woman walked up and asked me to put a nickel in the Victrola. In obedience to her command, I placed a nickel in the slot and she requested that I play “Baby Don’t You Stay All Night.” The earthworm wiggling that started with the music was below my dignity, so I moved on down the avenue of “good times.”

he lived ‘for kicks’ - jazz, sex, marihuana, or any other stimulants going

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At all events the hipster described in the post-1945 years is not the same man as the one whose ‘fraternal order’ Mezz Mezzrow joined around 1930. He is the collective ‘outsider’. He does not live in this world, but escapes from it into a world of bop music, which the square cannot understand, and pot (marihuana), of ‘kicks’ — sensations — which the square cannot feel. ‘He may earn his living as a petty criminal, a hobo, a roustabout, or a free-lance moving man’, it does not matter how, for the hipster (whose very essence in Mezzrow’s description was action) no longer acts, but simply exists. Even his one triumph, jive-talk, seems to have contracted into a featureless, simplified vocabulary of monosyllables, grunts, and tacit gestures, which serves almost exclusively to differentiate him from the square. Only two things remain of his former self: a total refusal to conform to the squares and a savage integrity about his own standards and the things he likes.

I had a big booty and a cute face, but I guess that wasn’t enough.

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Solomon loved to be called Daddy. He had dozens of women and hundreds of children. He liked to call me into the bathroom when he was sitting in the tub, naked as a beached whale and nearly as big.

“Bettye,” he said, “I still haven’t gotten you in my church.”

Solomon was a preacher with a mail-order divinity degree. In church, he sat on a throne and wore a crown on his head.
“And you won’t be getting me in that church anytime soon,” I said.
“You don’t think it’s good to praise and worship God?”
“If this God of yours is so perfect, I’m wondering why he needs all this praise and worship. Is he that insecure?”
“He’s not insecure. We are. We need the security we get when we tell him he’s worthy.”
“So that’s the deal—kiss God’s ass and God makes you feel okay.”
“You twisting it around.”
“You’re the one who’s twisting to make sense out of something that’s plain nonsense.”
“How can you live without faith?”
“You need faith, I agree. But faith in what? Faith in the fairy tales you read about in the Bible? I don’t think so, Solomon. Faith in other people, faith in yourself. Oh, Lord, save me from this preacher man!”
Solomon laughed and got out of the tub. I liked our conversation, not because I was about to convert to whatever form of Christianity he was peddling, but because he was a genuinely nice guy.
“How you make love to someone that big?” my cousin Margaret asked me.
“Simple,” I said. “You sit on him.”

"I can’t stand to be around squares. They drag me so much..."

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"They’ve got a nice class of people out here. Of course, they’re squares, I’m not trying to deny that. Sure, they’re a bunch of fucking squares, but who the fuck pays the bills? They pay ‘em, so you gotta play what they want. I mean, what the shit, you can’t make a living if you don’t play for the squares. How many fucking people you think aren’t squares? Out of a hundred people you’d be lucky if 15 per cent weren’t squares. I mean, maybe professional people - doctors, lawyers, like that - they might not be square, but the average person is just a big fucking square. Of course, show people aren’t like that. But outside of show people and professional people, everybody’s a fucking square. They don’t know anything."

“Squareness” is felt to penetrate every aspect of the square’s behavior just as its opposite, “hipness,” is evident in everything the musician does. The square seems to do everything wrong and is laughable and ludicrous. Musicians derive a good deal of amusement from sitting and watching squares. Everyone has stories to tell about the laughable antics of squares. One man went so far as to suggest that the musicians should change places with the people sitting at the bar of the tavern he worked in; he claimed they were funnier and more entertaining than he could possibly be.

a Jew-boy from the Bronx converted to a mambo freak

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Talk about good-time urban corruption! The atmosphere was as thrilling as a James M. Cain novel. Swing was everywhere. And we made the scene, Patty and I, from the Reno Club, where John Hammond had scooped up Count Basie, to Dante’s Inferno, where bottomless topless waitresses held my full attention. Here in the Wild West, the juke joints and blues clubs were in full cry. At the Elks I heard Joe Turner, that magnificent shouter, then a singing bartender, whom twenty-five years later I wound up producing. The big bands were roaring: Bennie Moten’s, led by his accordion-playing brother Bus; Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy; Harlan Leonard and the Rockets. In our room at the Puritan Hotel — no lie — Patty and I left the window open so the late-night sounds from the street, the blistering jazz of wide-open Kansas City, would fuel the fire of our lovemaking.

‘the women was wild, man! They was trying to rape me on the floor.'

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Eddie Billups came to me with this idea of coming out of a coffin before his act. So he put this casket behind the club and I had it all advertised, you know, 'Come and view the body of Eddie Billups' (laughs). Eddie put on this white make-up and got into the casket and we got some guys to bring the casket through the audience and lay it down up front while we played this Screamin' Jay Hawkins music. What we didn't know was this lady's momma had just died and she was in the audience. So when we opened the casket. Eddie threw out a cherry bomb 'Bam!' and this girl went crazy, screamin' and cryin.’ The owner drawed a shotgun on us, ran us out of there.

The 'Snatch and the Poontangs' album is a different kettle of fish

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Johnny was sitting there with a girl in his lap at the auditorium in Houston. She had a white dress on, and he was there spinning a pistol revolver. Willie Mae Thornton took the pistol from Johnny and she thought that she had removed all of the bullets. It was a seven-shot revolver, not a six. She took out six bullets and she thought she had them all. Then she handed the revolver back to him. So a fellow came into the dressing room, and Johnny started snapping the revolver at him, and he told Johnny not to do that - 'Point it at yourself'. And that's exactly what Johnny did. Bang! That was it.

They used to call him 'Groundhog' because he had some dirty ways

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a story involving saxophonist Evelyn Young. The band would often cross into Mexico to visit a favoured bordello when they had some time off in Houston, and on one occasion Evelyn, who liked to dress in men's clothing, insisted on joining the pilgrimage. The bordello was a rather informal affair: lacking actual rooms it had curtained-off areas each equipped with a bed for the patron. Evelyn. undetected as a woman by the girls, had made her selection along with the others and things were proceeding swimmingly for everyone until a scream and a lot of Spanish expletives came from Evelyn's 'room’ and her girl went tearing through the cubicles, breaking down the ropes and curtains and jumping over beds and bodies.

Dance halls are notoriously great factors in breaking down morality

 

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Rubbishing all those etiquette strictures, the freedoms allowed partaken of by female swing fans also included sex. "The girls would wave at us and many of the boys in the band would motion to the girls to meet them at the stage door." Goodman remembered seeing his first jitterbug in 1934, when a dancer started to go "off his conk. His eyes rolled, his limbs began to spin like a windmill in a hurricane - his attention, riveted to the rhythm, transformed him into a whirling dervish." The Catholic bishop of Dubuque denounced swing as "evil" and "communistic": "We permit jam sessions, jitterbug and cannibalistic rhythm orgies to occupy a place in our social scheme of things, wooing our youth along the primrose path to hell." ...

Secretly attending a February 1940 dance, the Gestapo agents were horrified: "There was only swing of the worst sort. Sometimes two boys danced with one girl, bent double, with the top half of the body hanging loosely down, long hair flopping into the face, they dragged themselves round practically on their knees. The band played wilder and wilder items; none of the players was sitting down any longer, they all 'jitterbugged' on the stage like wild creatures. Several boys could be observed dancing together, always with two cigarettes in the mouth, one in each corner." The swings' lifestyle reversed almost every Nazi tenet. Instead of uniformity, they proclaimed difference; instead of aggression, overt sexuality.

"Bobby was into intergalactic sex. I went to a couple of orgies with him."

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“This was long after Prohibition, but they were still bringing sugar in from Cuba to make illicit booze so they wouldn’t have to pay the government tax. So they kidnapped Sam and put him on one of these sugar boats that came from Cuba to America. To try to cold turkey him, dry him out. But they couldn’t cure him, so they had to cut him out. And then he got arrested. He was working with a gang that was stripping cars in Harlem. Costello said to Miller, ‘I went to Polly. And I tried to give her money. Polly wouldn’t accept it. But what’s so ironic, I once gave them a present, which is probably how Bobby learned all his music. I gave them an upright piano.’”

wearing a miniskirt but no knickers, the latest trend among the hippies?

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We’re not a nation of prudes whatever anyone thinks. It’s only when you come on television you’re led to believe the people of Britain are very delicate flowers who must be nurtured and not offended. Unfortunately, the people who dislike us or who are critical of the BBC are very vocal and well-organised, viz. Mary Whitehouse. She says, ‘I have 800,000 people who all agree with me, this is obscene.’ But it’s nothing against the 18 million people who actually enjoy it. They don’t actually fill in questionnaires and say, ‘Yes, I’d like to see more filth on television.’