Key to the Highway
2019-01-30 2-5pm
Pacific Gas & Electric
Mary Lou Williams
R.L. Burnside
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This airing will be my last at KKUP. KKUP has been good to me over the last
thirty-plus years and I will surely miss it. When I decide to return to sharing my music,
it will likely be in the form of a podcast but there are still things about it
I need to look into. If you wish to be
informed of my next adventure, feel free to email me at coyledon@yahoo.com and I will add you to
the mailing list for my blog. Anyway,
thank you for listening and thanks to all the friends at KKUP I have acquired
in my decades here.
Since this will be my last radio show, it is a good one to go out
on. We start off with a study of a late
60s Blues-Rock band from Southern California whose significant output consumed
only three years. In contrast, we then
visit a Jazz pianist who first recorded in 1927, took a hiatus to compose
religious music in the 60s and returned to Jazz for a highly successful album
session in 1971 leading to a comeback for a career spanning six decades. We then move to a raw Blues player to round
out the show. Yeah, I think you’ll like
it.
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As the 60s moved toward the end of the decade, the
number of white Blues artists was increasing rapidly. In Chicago, you had Butterfield, Musselwhite,
Johnny Hammond, and Siegel-Schwall; from Texas we heard Johnny Winter and from
Los Angeles came Canned Heat, to name a few.
Also from LA was another Blues Rock band with a shorter length of impact
but put out some good solid recordings between 1968 and 1970. Actually, the band had a black drummer when
they started out in 1966, but Charlie Allen had such a powerful, soul-tinged
voice that he was moved from the drum stool to front man center stage. Allen joined founding members, guitarist Tom
Marshall and bassist Brent Block, before former James Gang guitarist Glenn
Schwartz rounded out the quartet.
Block, who provided comments for their first album’s
release on CD, had this to say about Schwartz: “We were all blown away by
Glenn’s talents. I had a very hard time
keeping up with him. He was nearly a
decade older than the rest of us, and had way more experience than we did. Glenn was also an acrobat of sorts. He told me he would have two James Gang
members hold him upside down by the ankles onstage and he’d do a solo. Glenn thought nothing of jumping off stacks
of amplifiers and rolling around on stage.
One night at the Cheetah, I saw him roll off the stage, fall maybe
twenty feet, and he never missed a note!”
Now that the band was set, they began taking all the
gigs they could find. When they heard
that drummer Frank Cook had left Canned Heat, they approached him to join the
band, but he was interested only in managing and he got them playing more and
larger gigs with some of LA’s big name artists.
Pretty soon, one of Cook’s managerial decisions was to move Allen out
front as he took over the drums himself in addition to his managing
duties. Block, again: “Charlie was a
decent drummer, but he was no Frank Cook.”
More about Allen, as Block recalled, “There may have
been good-natured teasing here and there amongst our inner circle, but there
never was a bit of racial tension in the band, with Charlie being the only
black guy. I think we all felt that his
voice matched perfectly with the music we wanted to play, and we never really
thought about the ramifications of being an “integrated” band. No doubt Charlie’s strong influence helped us
to define our identity, and we were better off for it.”
At one of their gigs they were approached by a staff
producer for Kent/Modern Records, Freddy DeMann, who set them up with a studio
audition. Cook: “Freddy instructed us to
just play every song we knew. I think
they were intent on signing us after twenty minutes, but we must have played
for about five hours. The audition just
broke down into one big party. They even
recorded some of it.” They wound up
putting a couple of sessions together to release the album Get It On in 1968
for Kent’s brand new subsidiary Bright Orange Records label. Cook had wanted the label name to be Orange
in reference to the Beatles having just set up Apple Records and a compromise
was made.
The album saw little commercial success (#159 on
Billboard) but it certainly provides us with a strong set, headed up by their
first single, Wade in the Water, a classic Gospel tune that has long been a
favorite of mine, but it was upon hearing it once again that I realized it was
the version that had been running through my head for about half a century. The B-side, Live Love, is pretty hot and Cry,
Cry Cry (written by Country Music legend Johnny Cash!) shows that they find it
unnatural to stay in a good slow groove by providing it with a nice up tempo
closure.
Block: “Frank also got us our first big tour. It was supposed to be three cities –
Cleveland, Detroit and New York City.
The New York job landed us a spot at the Miami Pop Festival, just after
Get It On was released, and that got us about seven more weeks on the
road. We were now a touring band. All
that playing made us really tight musically.”
Cook, from the same liner notes: “We played every day
of the Miami Pop Festival, and people kept asking us where they could buy our
record. There were none to be found in
the state of Florida. I found out
several other areas of the country hadn’t gotten the album either. I called Freddy DeMann, and told him I was
quite upset about the situation. We
could have sold so many more albums, had they been available.”
After some trouble getting out of their contract with
Kent, Pacific Gas and Electric signed on with Columbia in the summer of 1969
and eventually (summer 1970) had their first hit at #14, the Gospel-tinged Are
You Ready from the album of the same name, charting at #101. That was their second album for Columbia, the
first bearing the band’s name as its title, Pacific Gas and Electric, doing
reasonably well at #91. The combination
of these two albums on a Collectables CD is the source for our second Pacific
Gas and Electric set.
Father Come Home was the follow-up single which fared
just okay, but by now, the band was beginning to fall apart. After completion of the Are You Ready
sessions, Frank Cook was in an auto accident and had to give up drumming while
maintaining his managerial status. The
band was barred from playing in Canada after one of the guitarists publicly
announced he was giving up drugs. This
might have been Tom Marshall because he was invited to leave the group. For religious reasons the other guitarist,
Glenn Schwartz, gave up the touring musician’s lifestyle and returned home to
Ohio.
Bassist / now guitarist (his original instrument) Brent
Block concludes: “At the end of 1970, there were disagreements as to what
direction we should take. Some thought
we should become more of a revue-style band, with Charlie up front being backed
by nameless sidemen and a horn section.
I wanted us to stay as a group. I
had gone to see another manager who was interested in representing the rest of
the band. Once it was found out what I
was up to, I was fired from PG&E.”
Columbia carried on with Allen for one more LP, again
using the band name for the title, this time the shortened version of PG&E
after the California utility requested they not use their full name. Allen recorded an album for Dunhill, Pacific
Gas & Electric Starring Charlie Allen, in 1973, and continued to perform
under the PG&E name in some form up until his death in 1990 at the age of
48 in Los Angeles.
I
would like to note that I ran into some discrepancies on this history with Wikipedia
and even the AllMusic website so, since the Get It On liner notes had the
guidance of two key band members, I chose it for almost all of this essay.
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The opening line to the liner notes for the CD pair
The Mary Lou Williams Collection
1927-59 (the source of today’s material) provides an excellent start for this
essay: “It is arguable that Mary Lou Williams was the most important female
musician in the history of Jazz.”
AllMusic Guide adds, “she would have been a major artist no matter what
her sex. Just the fact that Williams and Duke Ellington were virtually
the only stride pianists to modernize their style through the years would have
been enough to guarantee her a place in jazz history books”
The fact that she was a woman combined with her
contributions divided between composing, arranging and performing certainly
hindered her talents from receiving their proper acknowledgement. Beyond that, she was able to quickly rise
with the changing tides of Jazz music and was always willing to mentor aspiring
musicians. Duke Ellington tells us in
his autobiography, Music is My Mistress, “Mary Lou Williams is perpetually
contemporary. Her writing and performing
have always been a little ahead throughout her career. Her music retains, and maintains, a standard
of quality that is timeless.”
Born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta, Georgia in
1910, she performed initially, using her stepfather’s surname, as Mary
Burley. She was one of eleven children
when the family moved to Pittsburgh and, early on, she began on the piano, playing
for money at parties by the time she was six years old, and becoming known as
“the little piano girl of East Liberty”.
When she was fourteen, she became one of the musician’s performing in
the Orpheum Circuit, a chain of vaudeville theaters.
In 1925 she stopped in New York City and joined the
Washingtonians, Duke Ellington’s first orchestra, and began meeting more
musicians at the jam sessions at Harlem’s Rhythm Club. While playing a gig in Cleveland, she met
saxophonist John Williams, who was leading the Syncopators, a band whose
members played on Mary’s earliest recording sessions in 1927. That year, at the age of seventeen, John and
Mary were wed and moved to Memphis and put together a new version of the Syncopators.
In 1929, John joined Andy Kirk and his Twelve Clouds
of Joy in Oklahoma City right after Kirk had taken over the band of Terrence Holder.
When the band got a long-term gig in
Kansas City, Missouri, Mary rejoined her husband and, while not playing with
the band regularly, provided them with her composing and arranging talents. On our playlist at the end of this blog, I
have placed an asterisk in front of the tunes Mary wrote.
Mary’s first solo recordings were for Brunswick in Chicago
in 1930 and, at the suggestion of the label’s Jack Kapp, Lou was inserted into
her name and she would forever be known as Mary Lou Williams. The recordings were well received and Mary’s talents
were starting to be recognized. Possibly
because of the Depression, neither Kirk nor Williams recorded after 1930 until
1936. By this time, Mary had become Kirk’s
permanent pianist and arranger and free-lanced through the 30s with
arrangements for the likes of Earl “Fatha” Hines, Louis Armstrong and Tommy
Dorsey.
Mary stayed with Kirk until July of 1941 and, on the occasions
she did her own sessions, it was either solo or with backup by some of the
members of the Clouds of Joy. One of
those members was trumpeter Harold “Shorty” Baker, who would later become her
second husband. She was also writing and
arranging for Les Brown and Benny Goodman; Goodman, in fact, wanted Mary to write
exclusively for him, but she preferred to remain independent.
She moved to Pittsburgh, where Baker soon joined her,
and put together a sextet which also included drummer Art Blakey. Baker played a season in Cleveland then
joined Duke Ellington’s band in New York.
Mary Lou joined him there and they were wed, taking up Duke’s arranging
and touring with the band, curtailing her own recording. In the year with Ellington, she wrote or
arranged about fifty tunes.
Tired of the road, Williams returned to New York and
picked up a residence at Café Society, which in turn led to a weekly show on
WNEW radio she called Mary Lou Williams’ Piano Workshop. She opened up her apartment as a mentoring
station for artists essential to the Bop movement such as Bud Powell, Dizzy
Gillespie and Thelonius Monk who were not that much younger than her but ready
to soak up her knowledge gained from her vast experience. “During this period, Monk and the kids would
come up to my apartment every morning around four or pick me up at the café after
I’d finished my last show, and we’d play and swap ideas until noon or later.”
With the lifting of the American Federation of
Musicians ban in 1944, Mary was able to return to recording and quickly signed
on to Moe Asch’s label, doing sessions from solo work to leading small combos. She wrote an extensive piece called the Zodiac
Suite with a composition for each of the twelve astrological signs, recording
it for Asch before ultimately performing it at the Carnegie Hall Pops Series in
1946 with the 70-piece New York Pops Orchestra.
Artists of note for her sessions were tenor saxist Coleman
Hawkins in December 1944 and a quartet of other women, Mary Lou Williams’ Girl
Stars in 1946, including Harmony Grits from today’s airing, and trumpeter Kenny
Dorham in 1947. She also did a lot more
arranging work for Goodman between 1946 and 1948 and we include a rare
recording with clarinetist Goodman (featuring also tenor saxman Wardell Gray),
Benny’s Bop from 1948.
After a session with her ex, Shorty Baker, in 1952
Mary embarked on a recording and performing trip to Europe. Hampered by Britain’s strict musician’s union
policies, Williams returned to Paris in 1953.
From London we present Musical Express and from Paris Lullaby of the
Leaves, which also featured Don Byas on tenor sax, both from 1953. What was intended to be a short escapade
turned into a two year stay during which, as she put it, “I found God in a
little garden in Paris”. With little
work during her time in Europe and a building discontent with the music
industry, she walked off a stage professing never to perform again and returned
to New York in December 1954.
Directing most of her time to religion, she did have
to earn money with a few gigs, but it was not until Gillespie convinced her to
join him at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival that she was back into the
scene. With her priest as her manager,
she found performing and broadcast opportunities, as well as setting up the Bel
Canto foundation to help troubled musicians get back to work.
Her next recording session was in 1959 and she
continued performing through the 60s, but her composing was primarily for
religious themes. Included in her
writings were three masses, one of which was performed at St. Patrick’s
Cathedral by a sixty member youth choir in 1975.
In
1971 she recorded the solo Blues piano album From the Heart, the quality of
which brought her back into the limelight and led to several more studio
projects. She took a residency at the
new club of Barney Josephson whom she had played for at his Café Society. She also starred at Benny Goodman’s 40th
anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall in 1978.
She was artist-in-residence at Duke University where she was teaching
Jazz to young musicians up until her death from bladder cancer in 1981 at the
age of 71.
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R.L. Burnside
is an artist I became aware of while here at KKUP and, although I liked his
raw, electric style, I never took time to look deeply into his music. Indeed, the music heard today is from a few
albums I downloaded from library discs so do not have liner notes, nor do I
have time to do a full write-up, so let’s all just sit back and enjoy.
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And
now, a word from our sponsor. Okay, I
don’t get to say that on KKUP, so here are some things you probably already
know. KKUP is accessed in the San Francisco
and Monterey Bay Areas at 91.5FM and, elsewhere, on the interweb. Just go to our homepage at KKUP.org and
select “listen live” and choose either computer or other device. From the home page, you can also go to “our
music” and get to the spinitron playlists to access past airings and often, if
not always, for the show you are listening to.
And, of course, there is an option labeled “donate”, the closest thing
to advertising you will have to put up with here at KKUP. If for some reason you wanted to backtrack
and read an old blog, they are all still available at
key2highway@blogspot. What more do you
need to know to navigate life?
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Wade in the Water
The Hunter
Cry, Cry, Cry
Live Love
The Motor City is Burning
Blues Chant
Dirty Mistreater
Pacific Gas & Electric 32min
*Walkin’ and Swingin’
*Bearcat Shuffle
*Little Joe from Chicago
*Twinklin’
*Mary’s Idea
*Scratchin’ the Gravel
Ring Dem Bells
47th Street Jive
Andy
Kirk & his Twelve Clouds of Joy 23min
Jumper Hangin’ on the Line
Goin’ Down South
I Love Mississippi
Goin’ Away Baby
Bad Luck City
Rollin’ and Tumblin’
Sound Machine Groove
R.L.
Burnside 23min
Are You Ready
StaggoLee
The Blackberry
Elvira
Mother, Why Don’t You Cry?
Bluesbuster
Screamin’
Pacific Gas & Electric 29min
*Mary’s Boogie
St. Louis Blues
Blue Skies
Roll ‘em
This ‘n’ That
*Harmony Grits
*Bobo
Benny’s Bop (Limehouse Blues)
Lullaby of the Leaves
*Musical Express
Mary
Lou Williams 28mins
Shake ‘em on Down
Old Black Mattie
.44 Pistol
Sitting on Top of the World
How Many More Years
Well, Well, Well
R.L.
Burnside 20min
