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Friday, August 17, 2007
NERVOUS MAN NERVOUS
Big Jay McNeely
1953
Available on : The King R&B Box Set
King : 1996
[Buy it]
I'M SO GLAD
Skip James
Today!
Vanguard : 1964
[Buy it]
I'M SO GLAD
Iggy & The Stooges
1973
Available on : Wild Love: The Detroit Rehearsals and More
Bomp : 2001
[Buy it]
SO GLAD
Howlin' Wolf
1956
Available on : Ain't Gonna Be Your Dog
Universal : 1994
[Buy it]
SO GLAD
Fats Domino
1963
Available on : Out of New Orleans
Bear Family : 1993
[Buy it]
HAPPY BOYS HAPPY
Small Faces
Small Faces
Immediate : 1967
[Buy it]
Big Jay McNeely was a jazz saxophonist in the late forties before he headed off for the riskier, raunchier world of R&B. He hit number one on the R&B charts with the instrumental "Deacon's Hop" in 1949 and was quickly crowned king of the "honking sax" style. More hits followed, including "Nervous Man Nervous," and after retiring from the music business in the early sixties, McNeely enjoyed a comeback in the eighties and nineties. (There's one story, possibly apocryphal, about how he was playing at the Quasimodo Club in West Berlin the night the Berlin Wall came down, and how the German press called him "the modern Joshua" for blowing down the wall.)
I mention McNeely because he was on my mind yesterday, when my older son, who is six, went on a field trip with his summer camp. It's not the first field trip. He has been to Coney Island, to the Staten Island Children's Museum. He's been bowling. I have lost track of all the trips, in fact. Maybe one time they went to Belmont Park and each were given $10 to bet? But then, Wednesday night, I came home and saw the announcement sitting on the counter. It said "Rye Playland."
I had a strange reaction to it. I became nervous and even afraid. The fear wasn't severe, and I'm not even sure it was my own. It may have been an echo of my wife's--she gets that way more often, and she was standing nearby, giving off high levels of Afraidiation. Whatever the reason, I got a little anxious. Partly this was because Rye Playland is further than the other places he's gone. Partly this was because I remembered that earlier this year, a 21-year-old woman was killed in an accident involving the Mind Scrambler, and that the news reports of that death made mention of an earlier death, from 2004, of a young girl. But the rational part of my mind got to the fearful part in a hurry and smothered it with a blanket. Two accidents in four years is sad, but is it a high rate? How many people go through the park in a year? Besides, little kids aren't going on the Mind Scrambler.
The fear, which was ridiculous, receded while I was awake. When I was asleep, it surged. I dreamed that I was with my family in an apartment somewhere. We were leaving to go outside. My wife and younger son went out the door, but my older son wouldn't listen. He went into the bathroom. I followed him in, ready to yell, and found him standing in the middle of the bathroom, staring upward at dozens of fresh corpses hung by meathooks from the ceiling. I woke up immediately. Not comforting at all. I have already written about the idea of fear, but I should add that I'm rarely fearful. When I was a kid, I liked climbing up to the roof and walking around, or going to the top of the tallest tree. Every once in a while, I'd fall the entire height of the thing. It scraped me up, but it didn't scare me. Once, some years ago, before 9/11, my wife and I were flying from Miami to New York and had horrendous turbulence that lasted almost an hour. The woman behind me was screaming "Jesus, no!" for about twenty minutes. It put me off flying for a year but it went away.
So all of this is to say that fear is foreign to me for the most part, and that I don't know what to do with it when it arrives. Work yesterday was smooth but the ice was thin. When my son got back from the dreaded Playland in one piece, with stories about candy and other kids and rides and candy -- a high percentage involved candy-- I was unpredictably glad. So glad that I went and tried to find a song to explain to myself how glad I was. What I found, for the most part, were songs by classic blues singers who decided to set aside their money trouble, girl trouble, health trouble, floods, death, and nobody's dirty business to celebrate life. They lay off of what Hubert Sumlin called "sad blues" and opt instead for what he called "glad blues." And that's the word they tend to use, "glad," instead of "happy," which makes sense -- happy can just happen to you, but glad is, generally, a result. Glad is how you feel when it turns out that the things you were worried about weren't worth worrying about. Glad has, either explicit or implied, an element of relief.
So how glad was I, according to the giants of glad blues? As glad as Skip James in "I'm So Glad," which was originally recorded in 1931, revisited by James after his rediscovery in the sixties, covered famously by Cream and somewhat less famously by Iggy and the Stooges. As glad as Howlin' Wolf in "So Glad," which was the B-side of "I Asked for Water." As glad as Muddy Waters in "I'm So Glad I'm Living" or Sleepy John Estes in "I Ain't Gonna Be Worried No More." I was as glad as all those songs, but I was exactly as glad as Fats Domino in "So Glad," a little-known but reliably irrepressible specimen of the classic New Orleans sound:
Well I'm so glad my baby's coming home
Don't know what to do
I'm so glad my baby's coming home
All of my troubles are through Labels: ben, blues, rock
posted by Ben
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