? & the Mysterians

Question Mark in 1997, stylin'!

One of my proudest moments as a bar owner was back in '98 when we got Camel cigarettes to pay for our Christmas party at the Lakeside Lounge (nowadays, in NY State it's illegal to take advertising money from cigarette companies), which allowed us to hire perhaps the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world at the time (and maybe still are, their only competition being the Stooges)-- ? & the Mysterians to grace the tiny stage of the Lakeside Lounge. They were great in 1966 when they first released 96 Tears on the Pa-Go-Go label out of Bay City, Michigan (it would go to #1 when Cameo leased it the same year), and they have been great ever since. They've never changed their sound, they sound exactly like their original records. Front man-- ? (name on his passport Rudy Martinez) was born on Mars, where they all wear cool sunglasses,

and arrived on earth to settle in Flint, Michigan. It was there he joined up with the Mysterians, a Chicano quartet made up of brother Robert Martinez (drums), Frank Rodriguez (organ), Robert Balderama (guitar) and Frank Lugo (bass).

Anway, Dr. Ike is presenting another Ponderosa Stomp in New York, celebrating the music of Detroit this coming weekend. ? & the Mysterians will be appearing as part of the show at the Damrosch Park Bandshell in Lincoln Center, the bill goes like this: 5 PM- Death, 6 PM- the Gories, 7:15 PM- ? & the Mysterians, 8:30 PM- Mitch Ryder. Earlier that day at the Hearst/Barclays Capitol Grove will be a Detroit Soul Review, also part of the Ponderosa Stomp series, Eddie Kirkland plays at 2 PM followed by the Motor City Soul Review (Dennis Coffey, Melvin Davis, Spyder Turner and the Velvettes) at 2:30 PM. More info here (the Lincoln Center info sight) and here (the Detroit Breakdown page on the Ponderosa Stomp sight).

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Robert Nighthawk

Robert Nighthawk (far right) and the Nighthawks.
Robert Lee McCollum aka Robert Lee McCoy aka Robert Nighthawk.
Ernest Lane, Robert Nighthawk, Hazel McCollum.

The First Rockabilly Record? Dig the slap bass, 1951.

Recording as "The Nighthawks", 1949.

His First Disc For the brothers Chess, 1948.

At Home 2010.

Live On Maxwell Street, 1964. From the film ...And This Is Free (aka Maxwell St. Blues).

Robert Nighthawk (born Robert Lee McCollum, Nov. 30, 1909 in Helena, Arkansas)-- now there was a slide guitar player! He not only had the speed and accuracy of Tampa Red, but he had a unique, dirty, brooding style of playing that put him at the very top of the list amongst his peers. Muddy Waters liked him so much he hired him to play at his first wedding reception, a party that got so wild that the floor of the juke joint it was held in collapsed.

Young Robert had taken up playing harmonica as a tyke, and when his family relocated to a farm in Murphy Bayou, Mississippi he began playing the guitar under the tutelage of his cousin Houston Stackhouse. He was restless sort who spent most of his life on the road, legend has it he had killed a man in self defense back in Mississippi which led him to change his surname from McCollum (sometimes spelled McCullum) to his mother's maiden name McCoy. With Stackhouse he traveled around Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Missouri, meeting and sometimes playing with better known bluesmen such as Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Sleepy John Estes and Will Shade, even backing up country yodeler Jimmie Rodgers for a night.

By the mid-30's he was in St. Louis where he fell in with a group of musicians that included Big Joe Williams, John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson, Charley Jordan, Peetie Wheatstraw, Speckled Red and Walter Davis, this led him to his first recording contract with RCA Victor's Bluebird subsidiary where he cut sides under the name of Robert Lee McCoy in 1937 and Ramblin' Bob in '38. These sides were very much in the Bluebird Records Chicago style popular at the time and one can hear the influence of Tampa Red and Kokomo Arnold in his playing. On some of these recordings he is backed by Big Joe Williams (he of 9 string guitar fame), Speckled Red on piano and Sonny Boy Williamson on harp. The best of these sides include Prowlin' Nighthawk, G-Man, Tough Luck, his first recording of Take It Easy Baby, Mean Black Cat, Freight Train Blues, and Ol' Mose (aka Oh Red). In 1940 he waxed for Decca four sides, two of which feature his girlfriend Ann Sortier on vocals and washboard, Nighthawk was billed as "Peetie's Boy", an attempt to cash in on the fame of Peetie Wheatraw, the Devil's Son-In-Law and Decca's best selling blues artist of the day. He also appeared playing guitar and harmonica on records by other artists too numerous to mention here.

Never one to sit still for long, Robert Nighthawk was next sighted in Mississippi in 1942 where according to Big Joe Williams was leading a full band and playing electric guitar. It was electricity that became the final ingredient in Nighthawk's sound and style, giving him a uniqueness that remains singular to this day. Back in Arkansas, he hosted a local radio show on KFFA sponsored by Mother's Best Flour (the same company that would later sponsor Hank Williams) and Bright Star Flour, and among the musicians that passed through his band were his mentor Houston Stackhouse, Ike Turner, Earl Hooker, Pinetop Perkins, and Ernest Lane. He would not record again until 1948 when he was signed to Chess who had been alerted to his talents by Muddy Waters. His cut three sessions for Chess in 1948, '49 and '50 resulting in three issued 78's-- Return Mail Blues b/w My Sweet Lovin' Woman (Chess 1484), Black Angel Blues b/w Anna Lee Blues (Aristocrat 2301) and Jackson Town Gal b/w Six Three O (Aristocrat 413) and a handful of outtakes (my favorite being Someday) that would surface many decades later. Black Angel Blues was the closest thing he ever had to a hit, and would be the template for B.B. King's Sweet Little Angel, one of King's first hits. These discs were issued under the name of The Nighthawks (vocal by Robert McCullum), and later Robert Nighthawk and his Nighthawks, which would become his professional name until the end of his life. The Chess sides didn't sell, Chess was putting all its promotional energy into their budding star Muddy Waters and they parted ways. In 1951 he was recording for Leonard Lee's United label and its States subsidiary, these were his finest studio recordings. On the United/States discs, Nighthawk is backed by a rhythm section that consisted of Randsome Knowling on slap bass, Jump Jackson on drums and Roosevelt Sykes on piano. They issued three discs which appeared as follows: Kansas City Blues b/w Crying Won't Help You (United 102), the a-side being a flat out rockabilly thumper later covered by Ernest Tubb on Decca, the flip featuring one of his most durable slide solos, Feel So Bad b/w Take It Easy Baby (United 105), and Maggie Campbell b/w The Moon Is Rising (States 131), again, the a-side, best known from Tommy Johnson's 1928 Victor rendition, is taken at a rocking pace with predominant slap bass and Sykes' barrelhouse piano. Given their 1951/52 release dates a case could be made by some someone who likes making cases that Nighthawk recorded the first examples of what we would later come to call rockabilly. All that's missing is the hiccups. United and States would release no more discs by Robert Nighthawk but in 1978 the Pearl label (a subsidiary of Chicago's Delmark Records) would issue the six sides along with some equally rocking outtakes -- all excellent, as good as what was issued, including Seventy-Four, You Missed A Good Man, Feel So Bad, Bricks In My Pillow, an alternate take of Maggie Campbell, US Boogie, Nighthawk Boogie, and Take It Easy Baby on the LP Bricks In My Pillow (Pearl PL-11), one of the finest albums I've ever heard. This would pretty much end Robert Nighhawk's recording career, although he would cut an album for Testament with Houston Stackhouse in 1967, his failing health had diminished his skills to the point that he could only play some perfunctory rhythm guitar behind Stackhouse's leads.

The best recordings Nighthawk would make after the United and States discs, in fact, perhaps the best recordings he would ever make period, were recorded on Maxwell Street in Chicago's Jewtown section one Sunday afternoon in 1964 by a film crew who were shooting the documentary ...And This Is Free (the title was later changed to Maxwell Street Blues). Originally issued on vinyl in the early eighties by Rounder (with some tracks mislabeled including Mike Bloomfield's rendition of Charlie Parker's Ornithology being credited to Nighthawk), and then re-issued as a two-CD set with all the other performers that were filmed (including Johnny Young, Carey Bell, Big John Wrencher, Blind Jim Brewer and the ever popular Unknown) called And This Is Maxwell Street (Rooster). Here we get a rare earful of electric delta blues the way it was played in the jukes and at frolics, on the street and early morning radio broadcasts--distorted, dirty, and gloriously shambolic. Among the highlights are Robert Nighthawk's seething version of Dr. Clayton's Cheating and Lying Blues (aka I'm Gonna Murder My Baby), a foreboding Peter Gunn, the ever popular Dust My Broom, a rollicking Honey Hush, a medley of Annie Lee and Sweet Black Angel, the simmering I Need Love So Bad, and a chuggin' take on Honky Tonk. The sound is so ominous, so brooding and foreboding, there are no other blues recordings even close to these. Shortly after the filming, Nighthawk headed back down south, his health was failing and he knew he didn't have long. He took over Sonny Boy Williamson #2 (Rice Miller)'s King Biscuit Flour radio show on KFFA when Williamson died in '65, but he was fading fast. Convinced he had been poisoned with bad whiskey (the same way Robert Johnson went), Houston Stackhouse took him to a hoodoo woman healer in Arkansas who diagnosed him as having "old time dropsy", she told him had he not been a sinner, if he had lived a Christian life, she would have been able to heal him, but her magic could not undo a life in the blues, and on Nov. 5, 1967 he died in a hospital in Helena, Arkansas, the death certificate sighting "congestive heart failure due to myocardial infaction", no mention of "old time dropsy" or his life as a sinner. Among his peers, Robert Nighthawk was not only well liked, but well respected, he was the bluesman's bluesman, the favorite slide player of Muddy Waters, Big Joe Williams, both Sonny Boy Williamsons, and Earl Hooker. Mine too. Robert Nighthawk may have never had a hit record, and he didn't live long enough to cash in on the white blues revival, but he had his own sound, dark and ominous, it's lost none of its power.

Essential Robert Nighthawk: The sound samples here are just that, if you like what you hear, I suggest buying them and hearing it in its full glory. The complete Bluebird and Decca pre-war recordings can be found on the Catfish label's Robert Lee McCoy:Prowling Nighthawk (Catfish CD 150), although the label is out of biz, the CD is still easy to find. His Chess output was issued on Charly Records Black Angel Blues (CD Red 29) on which his twelve Chess/Aristocrat sides share a CD with Forrest City Joe's ten tracks, again, it's out of print but easy to find. Pearl/Delmark issued Bricks In My Pillow (Delmark DD-711) as a 14 track CD in 1998, it's still in print and is an essential purchase. The live Maxwell Street recordings have been issued in several different forms, but for sound and completion, I suggest getting the triple CD box-- And This Is Maxwell Street (Pearl). It has tons of music not seen in the film, all of it great, and a long interview with Nighthawk by Mike Bloomfield. Speaking of the film, And This Is Free: The Life and Times Of Chicago's Legendary Maxwell St. was released on DVD in 2008 and is available from Amazon in a multi disc package (one DVD, one CD, one booklet), again, it's pretty essential as the above clip proves.

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Percy Mayfield

Percy Mayfield, Specialty Records promo shot, 1950

Percy Mayfield with Ray Charles, 1961.

Percy near the end, notice the facial scars from the car accident.

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At home with Percy Mayfield, early 80's.

For those of you who like their geniuses tortured, Percy Mayfield (b. Aug 12, 1920, in Minden, Louisiana), may have been the greatest song writer in the history of rhythm and blues, he was certainly the most uncompromisingly bleak tune smith the music has ever known. While Robert Johnson might've had to "keep movin'" to stay ahead of the hellhound on his trail, Percy Mayfield knew there was no place to run. In the sound of his voice, and the subtlety of his lyrics you can hear him genuflect to the horrors of every day life, resigned to the shitty luck of being born into a world that tore apart sensitive souls like himself as a matter of course. He took these forlorn feelings and made them into some of the greatest rhthym and blues records of all time. And of course, he has a story.

Mayfield left Louisiana as a teenager, kicked around Houston for a bit and washed up on the west coast. Most bios put the beginging of his musical career at 1949 when he showed up at Supreme Records, supposedly to attempt to sell his song Two Years Of Torture for Jimmy Witherspoon to record. The owner of the label liked Mayfield's singing so well that he insisted that Mayfield record the tune himself, and this set him on his path to a musical career. This may have well happened, but what virtually every bio I've read leaves out is that Mayfield had already recorded a version of Two Years Of Torture for the Gru-V-Tone label in the Bay Area (where last week's subject Pee Wee Crayton had started) at least two years (possibly three) earlier. Gru-V-Tone not only released the first recording of Two Years Of Torture b/w Get Way Back (Gru-v-Tone 102), but first released, from the same session, a two part Louis Jordan styled jive number called Jack You Ain't Nowhere Pts. 1 & 2 (Gru-v-Tone 101), a somewhat trite record, but a record none the less.

Whatever, history is just whatever some one manages to get published somewhere. What ever happened, Supreme re-recorded Mayfield singing Two Years Of Torture releasing it with Half Awake (Baby You're Still Square) in 1949 (Supreme 1543) and it must have been a decent seller since they also leased it to Swing Time, King and Recorded In Hollywood at various times. The a side would eventually be covered by Ray Charles, the flip by B.B. King. But Percy Mayfield, for whatever reason never gave Supreme a follow up disc, and was soon recording for Art Rupe's Specialty Records, the label that would give us Roy Milton, Joe and Jimmy Liggins, Guitar Slim, Lloyd Price, Wynona Carr, Professor Alex Bradford, Little Richard, Larry Williams, The Soul Stirrers (with Sam Cooke), Dorothy Love Coates, Mercy Dee (of One Room Shack fame), Don & Dewey, Sonny Bono, Willie Joe & his Unitar, and may have had the highest ratio of great records of any label in history. His initial session for Specialty, produced and arranged by the great tenor sax player Maxwell Davis (the man who taught Leiber and Stoller how to make records, his importance to R&B and rock'n'roll is criminally under acknowledged) birthed Percy Mayfield's biggest hit, and one of his greatest compositions-- Please Send Me Someone To Love, a clever plea for racial harmony disguised as a torch ballad, it struck a deep chord in record buyers in 1950 spending 27 weeks at the #1 spot on the R&B charts and becoming one of the most enduring standards in the blues canon. The flipside- Strange Things Happen had it's own chart run, hitting #7 R&B in early '51.

Between 1950-1952 Mayfield put seven discs in the R&B top ten, recording with Maxwell Davis, he waxed some of the greatest, and most desolately beautiful blues ballads ever heard.

Among these spine tingling dirges were this catalogue of pain: Hopeless, Life Is Suicide, Nightless Lover, Cry Baby, The Lonely One, Lost Love, Lost Mind, Wasted Dream,The River's Invitation, The Hunt Is On, Memory Pain, You Don't Exist No More, Nightmare, The Big Question, and to my mind, his greatest moment at Specialty-- The Voice Within.

A slim, handsome man with wavy hair and suave demeanor, he was becoming a major attraction on the Chitlin' Circuit, but as if to fulfill his recorded litany of gloom, a 1952 car wreck disfigured his handsome face, leaving a huge, Quasimodo like hole that ran from his eye to the hairline, (he would spend five months laid up in the hospital recuperating and underwent multiple operations to put his face back together), it virtually ended his career as a live performer. Over that five months laying in a hospital bed, I can't help but wonder if the chorus to Memory Pain-- "It serves me right to suffer" rang in his ears as some sort of cosmic, sick, ironic joke.

It was at this point in late '52 he parted way with Art Rupe and Specialty Records, although their exists a heartbreaking letter he wrote to Rupe begging to let him record again even though he was "too ugly to be seen in public". He wouldn't record again until 1955 when he cut Double Dealin' b/w Are You Out There for Chess in Chicago. He made another single for the tiny Cash label in L.A. the same year--Look The Whole World Over b/w The Bluest Blues, and then returned to Specialty for one final session, the rather goofy pop tune Diggin' The Moonglow b/w Please Believe Me. He would cut singles for Home Cooking, Imperial and 7 Arts in the next two years. None of these are good as his earlier Specilty work, and his career was losing momentum fast. Enter Ray Charles who signed Mayfield to a contract as both a songwriter (a move which would immediately pay off with the massive Hit The Road Jack, one of Charles' biggest and most enduring hits, here's Mayfield's demo), and as a recording artist to his Tangerine/TRC labels, for which he recorded two excellent albums-- The Jug and I (1963, the single from which Stranger In My Own Hometown was perhaps his greatest recording, and later covered by Elvis in the King's last truly transcendent recorded performance) and Bought Blues (1966). Excellent as these two LP's are they produced only one minor hit, a remake of The River's Invitation that peaked at #25 R&B in July of '63.

After parting way with Ray Charles, Percy Mayfield would cut one LP for the mob run Brunswick label-- Walking On A Tightrope, followed by three really good ones for RCA--Sings Percy Mayfield, Weakness Is A Thing Called Man, Blues and Then Some, again only one minor hit, To Live In The Past which scraped its way to #43 R&B in March of 1970. These records were far outside the type of R&B that ruled all important radio in the early 70's, there was simply no niche for Mayfield's music that the record companies radio and marketing department could find (good music is hardly enough for these generally dullwitted types). He cut one single for Atlantic with Johnny Guitar Watson producing-- I Don't Want To Be President, his final chart entry, only making it to #84 R&B in the fall of '74, it would also be his final studio recording.

Sometime in the early 80's Percy Mayfield returned to performing live, appearing mostly in small clubs around L.A., a new generation of mostly white fans had been turned on to his music through re-issues of his Specialty sides by both Specialty (who would issue two killer CD's full his classics and un-issued material from it's vaults, Poet Of The Blues Vol. 1 and Vol. 2,) and in Europe through the U.K. Ace label. In his final days he was fronting a band that featured guitarist Pee Wee Crayton and plans were made for them to record together when he died of a heart attack on his 64th birthday-- Aug. 12, 1984.

In the years since his death, Rhino Handmade has re-issued his Tangerine sides, his Specialty output remains in print both in the U.S. and the U.K. , although his various one off 45's, as well as Brunswick and RCA LP's get tougher to find every year (I can use a new copy of the Brunswick album myself), but his songs remain, he's been covered by hundreds of artists, in fact, a CD compilation of the best Percy Mayfield covers would be a good idea. Speaking of which, they're is supposedly in RCA's vault a third, x-rated, take of Elvis' version of Stranger In My Own Hometown (the first was the stunning finale to the Elvis In Memphis LP, an alternate take surfaced on the UK Elvis Blues CD in the late 90's), anyone out there have a copy they want to send to the old Hound?

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The Fugs, Goodbye Tuli Kupferberg

The Fugs 1966 (Tuli w/tambourine)

Tuli Kupferberg near the end, he never lost his looks.

Tuli Kupeferberg of the Fugs died last Monday, age 86, he looked exactly the same as he did

46 years ago (full obit here). For someone who lived in the East Village and Lower East Side for over thirty years, the Fugs, even more than the Velvet Underground were what the streets of the neighborhood sounded like for white Bohemians. Salsa might have been the sound of the neighborhood streets blasting from the ghetto blasters and car radios, but the soundtrack for our lives sounded more like the Fugs. I remember the first time I heard the Fugs, I was eighteen and sitting on a stoop on East 9th Street with a gallon of Canadian Ace beer and passing a joint with some friends, we'd been up all night tripping on acid, and some hippy was blasting the first Fugs album in an apartment above us. It sounded so perfect. I mean who hasn't fallen for a Slum Goddess on a hot summer night in a Polish bar drinking .75 cent draft beers? Or done the Amphetamine Shriek in the middle of Tompkins Square Park after being up for four days? The Velvets moved among the beautiful people, the art fags, the rich and famous, but the Fugs were like us, ugly and frustrated, singing for the speedfreaks and glue sniffers, drinking in Polish bars and eating Challah french toast at 5 AM to soak up the booze. They had a long and glorious career, better documented in other places, they even reformed several times and were making records into the nineties. Co-founder Ed Saunders also wrote the two greatest books on the so called counter culture-- The Family (about the Manson family, easily the best book on the subject, look for the first edition with the chapter on the Process Church which was removed in subsequent editions) and Tales Of Beatnik Glory. While Ed Sanders and Ken Weaver may have been the main musical forces behind the original Fugs, they wouldn't have been what they were without Tuli Kupferberg. Probably best known as the character in Ginsberg's poem Howl who "jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and walked away.....", he edited small poetry zines like Birth (1958), wrote books like 101 Was To Beat The Draft (1966) and The War Against the Beats (1961), and was still active into the 21st century. He made two solo albums, No Deposit No Return (1966) and Tuli and Friends (1989), neither of which I own a copy of anymore (some things just disappear over the years). Anyway, I thought I put up a few of my favorite tunes as a memorial to Tuli who will be missed: Slum Goddess, Frenzy, Mutant Stomp, In The Middle Of Their First Recording Session The Fugs Sign The Worst Contract Since Leadbelly's, and probably Tuli's greatest musical contribution to the Fugs-- Carpe Diem.

Goodbye buddy, the neighborhood won't be the same without you.

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Gillian's Found Photo #51

Among the strange rituals found in the American suburbs in the late 20th century, perhaps one of the most peculiar, and least studied is that of "ass Twister", a rite of passage said to be particularly popular with Mormons, swingers, and certain country club sects gone culturally astray. Here is rare photographic evidence of an ass Twister cult ceremony in practice. I'm not sure what to make of it, has anyone out there ever witnesses such a thing in person? If so, we'd love to hear from you.

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