Screamin’ Jay Hawkins – Live And Crazy

I love Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, and feel that he was never really given a fair shake. Indeed, it’s been tricky for me to even find out which album his only “hit” song was on, much less find it on CD at a reasonable price. Time is running out, and I feel that, in order to talk once more about this unique character in music, I’ll just have to go with the one album I actually have, an unassuming live album called Live And Crazy:

This album is pretty amazing, don’t get me wrong, and I kind of can’t believe that I haven’t written about it yet. Now, by “amazing” I don’t mean to say that “you have to hear this”, in fact you’d probably be better off without unless you know what you’re getting into. Still, this is my chance to tell you what you’d be getting into so you can make this decision for yourself.

Now, the story of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins versus someone like, say, Johnny Cash, is not really a heroic one. The man found a unique spin on performing music (while drunk) and had one really big hit when Rock N’ Roll was being born, and spent the rest of his days finding steady success as a live act wherein he basically played a mentally unstable mix between a black dracula and a voodoo priest, often with his friend Henry in tow:

Henry, of course, is that skull on a stick.

Indeed, no matter what might have been seen visually on that stage in France wherein this album was recorded, there was definitely a lot of insanity and screaming going on. The album did well to capture that; the only issue I have with the album is its inconsistency. While we get all kinds of great Screamin’ Jay tunes, that only makes up about half the album; the other half is Jay butchering the classics, which would be pretty nice, but they’re padded out with so many instrumental solos, usually switching between the guitar and the saxophone, that one might forget what song we’re even on.

The song selection, as far as the covers go, isn’t exactly stellar. We start with a version of “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” that is more like “bellowing” rather than “screamin”, and half way through, there’s a cover of “Ain’t That A Shame” that is equally dull. By the time one gets to “Little Bitty Pretty One”, the lyrics for which are simply “Hmmmmmmm”, and “Tutti Frutti” at the end of the album, one may be wondering if Screamin’ Jay Hawkins only ever performed just to troll people.

Still, that’s the negative side of this album. The positive side is that all the essential Hawkins’ tracks are here, and indeed hearing a particular three of them is kind of interesting.

Of course, “I Put A Spell On You” is here in all its screaming glory. In fact, the song completely cuts out right before the coda so that Jay can have a makeshift screaming match with the audience before ending the song. He really sings it like it was the song that made him famous, and in fact one may try to see the ways in which he was trying to replicate perhaps not so much the song’s success, but just straight up rip himself off twice, but the answers remain unclear.

Basically, early in the set, we get a song that I really love called “The Whammy”. It’s in the same key as “I Put A Spell On You”, and in fact, only the fact that the awesome piano count-down isn’t present keeps one from mistaking it for that particular hit song. The song is brilliant though, as it is about falling in love with a bald-headed voodoo woman, and suffering the consequences (the titular “Whammy”) for pissing her off. This punishment is basically something that, were one to picture it, probably involves Screamin’ Jay being picked up off the ground by voodoo magic, tossed around the room, forced to walk sideways across the wall, screaming in terror as he goes. The song is kind of amazing like that, and is one that I feel should have had more attention.

Then we get a song a little later that is introduced as being “close to ‘The Whammy’, close to ‘I Put A Spell On You’, but is better”. Of course, it’s absolutely not true, but “Hong Kong” is an interesting song nonetheless. Basically, the lyrics are fairly simple, it’s about waiting for your baby in Hong Kong, but inexplicably, between every verse, there’s a tourettes-style outburst of stuff like “BING BONG BING BONG WAP!” and various other stereotypical mockery of asian languages. The song is hilarious, seriously, because that’s all it is. I really have to take my hat off to Screamin’ Jay for this. The best part is, this song is again in the same B flat minor key that the other two songs are in, and doesn’t even bother to change the chord progression or rhythm. It’s just a ripoff of “I Put A Spell On You” that is also making fun of asian people, why didn’t this guy get into some kind of hall of fame?

Another song that isn’t anything like the others is another of my favorite of Screamin’ Jay’s “hits”, famously badly covered by Jeff Buckley, called “Alligator Wine“. The song is basically about a magic potion made out of some crazy voodoo ingredients:

Take the blood out of an alligator
Take the left eye out of a fish
Take the skin off of a frog
And mix it all up in a dish
Add a cup of greasy swamp water
And then count from one to nine
Spit over your left shoulder
And you got alligator wine

I’ve never heard anything but live versions of this song, and sure enough, toward the end, he just starts naming off all kinds of jungle delicacies such as “broiled orangutan hips” and “hippopotamus toes” and various shapes of alligator. One of my favorite lines is “Henry drinks it all the time, that’s why Henry is dying, from drinking that alligator wine”.

If you can make it through the rather bland covers with a million solos, this is a pretty excellent album, especially with Screamin’ Jay’s amazing stage banter and improvisation, which really pulls the tiny audience into his show and makes it sound like it was quite the experience. Hopefully I’ll get to talk about this man once again soon, but until then, I’ve got some sleeping to do.

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins – Black Music For White People

So I guess today is the first day of Black History Month, and I only realized that after deciding to make today’s writeup about an album that black people may very well want to strike from their history: the late Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and one of his “revival” albums, Black Music For White People.

Now, the one thing that ANYONE knows about Screamin’ Jay (besides my loyal readers that know Jeff Buckley covered one of his songs) is that he wrote the “horror” R&B hit “I Put A Spell On You“, and the more adventurous of you may even know that his live performances were known to be a bit… eccentric. He was known for his wild and crazy original compositions, as well as his butchering of the classics, and indeed the 1991 album Black Music For White People is at least one of those! Good luck finding a Youtube video of any of this, at least you can listen along in glorious Rhapsody.

The album starts off, innocently enough, with a decent cover of “Is You Or Is You Ain’t My Baby” (I consider the best cover of that song to be Tom’s), which introduces the super-cheesy plastic-sounding guitar that is present throughout the album. One thing NOT present on this track is Screamin’ Jay’s actual screamin’. What gives?

The next song is a fast-paced boogie woogie called “I Feel Allright”, which is indeed all right, but again fairly lackluster. There is one scream right at the end, but you have to get through the extended plastic guitar and saxophone solos to get to it. I’m quite fond of the lyrics, at least. The end of the track has a very erotic and short blues number, I think it’s called “Shell and Fin”? Oh well.

Then we have…

Oh my.

I… just can’t believe this.

Ok, ok, are you ready for this?

Right, well I’m not going to tell you until you’re ready.

Ok, I assume no liability for any injuries you may receive from the misuse of this information I am about to bestow upon you, but the third track of this album is the “Dance Version” of “I Put A Spell On You”. The 80′s style rap beat kicks in, and then the funk bassline, and then the samples of Jay singing his signature song, only without ANYTHING present that ever made this song good. You think “ok this is just a really terrible remix of the song”, but hold on there, honey cakes, it gets worse.

Yep, there are rap segments in this song.

Rap segments ala early 90′s rap, the very worst kind! It happens at least twice, I kind of lost count, this song is quite long compared to the minute and a half up to 2 minutes of the original. It’s really quite the highlight of the album in a way, as you will probably be pushed to react to it, somehow. My particular reaction was violent laughter followed by depression. The man just had to be put up to this… really thoug, it happens way more than it should in music, best to just keep moving on, if we can force ourselves…

The next song is a song that I shouldn’t have to look up to see who wrote it, “I Hear You Knockin’”. This is an all right cover of a very dull song, and features pretty much the same stuff you already heard, only a bit more shouty, which bodes well for the future.

The future is, strangely enough though staggeringly fitting, a cover of a Tom Waits song, “Heartattack And Vine”, which contains Jay trying to sound like he’s completely drunk, but really he just sounds like he just had some dental work done and his mouth is still numb. He clearly doesn’t care about singing the words clearly, or even at all, but he does replace the line “no devils here, just God when he’s drunk” with “no devils here, just Screamin’ Jay when he’s drunk”. That’s right, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins believes he’s God. Ok, not really.

The next song, if you want to call it a song, is entertaining but bizarre. It’s called “Ignant And Sh*t”, and it’s basically some really articulate verbal abuse he is shouting to some woman. He utilizes a lot of black stereotypes in this rant, so it’s up to you to interpret whether he’s just talking to a black girl, talking about black people in general, or if he’s just trying to appeal to white people in entirely the wrong way. I couldn’t find any information on the song, so your guess is as good as mine. It’s 6 minutes of this, by the way, and I hate to admit that it’s pretty awesome, but it is.

We then get into a jungle swing beat as the song “Swamp Gas” brings us to the second half of the album. It’s not too bad a song, and fits right into Screamin’ Jay’s voodoo persona. I really wish the guitars weren’t all straight from the 80′s, because with proper instrumentation and the total exclusion of that dance remix of “I Put A Spell On You”, this might be a fairly decent album.

The next song, “Voodoo Priestess”, doesn’t really matter in the sense that it’s an actual song, but does matter because it starts with Screamin’ Jay explaining the concept of ghosts to a confused Japanese woman, possibly during an interview. It’s wonderful. The song itself is actually quite nice, but more of a tame version of the previous track. We then move on to “Ice Cream Man”, which is a song containing sexual innuendo if I ever heard one. It was also written by Tom Waits, on one of the few albums by Waits that I’ve actually heard, Closing Time. Perhaps less “innuendo” and more straight-up “sexual” is the antepenultimate “I Want Your Body”, about which the less said, the better.

Second to last on the album is  “Ol’ Man River”, which starts with a jazzy piano intro, and then cools down to a slow jazz ballad. Prepare yourself, however, because it’s a trap. The song basically explodes shortly after the 1 minute mark and then calms right back down for a bit before exploding again and the whole thing becomes a tug-of-war between Screamin’s unusual style of crooning and his quite usual way of shouting. It can be quite the stressful thing if you’re trying to sleep while listening to this album and trying to do a write-up and keep falling asleep at your desk. Blah.

The final song on the album is called “Strokin’”. It’s an upbeat funky blues number, and before you go thinking dirty thoughts about this album’s title, let me put those vicious rumors to bed right now… it’s a song about masturbation.

Good night, everyone!

 

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Jeff Buckley – Grace

In what I can only assume is yet another grand example of my total ignorance of popular music from a time I should have been listening to it, I totally missed the Jeff Buckley boat. About 8 years ago, I heard a friend play a song called “Hallelujah”, and since this was a particularly good musician, I wondered aloud if he had written it, and of course he didn’t, but I didn’t bother to ask who did. A year after that, I saw the film Shrek and heard the John Cale version of the same song, and again loved the song but didn’t think to pursue the author or even the performer’s identity. Then, years and years after that, I was at my local Starbucks and the Rufus Wainwright version played, and I listened and was again amazed (only I didn’t remember it being so whiny), and THIS time I was curious. I looked up the song and all its cover versions and I discovered 2 musicians whose discovery were years past due for me: Leonard Cohen, the actual author of the song, and Jeff Buckley, the dude who made the song famous. Though I’ve been slowly but surely collecting items from Cohen’s rather large discography and falling in love with each one, there was only one album to show for my interest in Jeff Buckley, which is the one I’m now writing about, in case you don’t read blog titles:

If you’re like I was a couple of months ago and never heard Jeff Buckley, may I offer one piece of advice going in: you must lose ALL concept of manliness and machismo, listening to this album unprepared for its lilting vocals and silky smooth instrumentation may actually cause you to grow a uterus. If you are already in possession of one, congratulations, you’re already a Jeff Buckley fan.

Buckley’s voice is something that sails straight in from Heaven on wings of eastern-influenced vocal scales and lungs that just don’t quit, all hidden behind a set of teeth that frighten ALL the children. If you could imagine Thom York (singer for Radiohead) and Matthew Bellamy (singer for Muse) combined their voices and were also women, that’s about close to what it sounds like. Hence my advice, if you are not prepared to have your balls drop off from listening to this stuff, you’re going to miss the point entirely and probably wind up making fun of it (like my roommates did when I was watching one of his concert videos on the livingroom TV).

Jeff Buckley knows this about his voice, so the opening of the first song, “Mojo Pin“, is an extended organ chord and Jeff’s voice (also an organ in the anatomical sense) playing on forever as some fancy guitar is brought in. From the near-whisper of the first few verses to the still-melodic screaming in the song’s rockin’ breakdowns, it’s quite apparent that the entire album is based around that magical singing.

However, that doesn’t stop the rest of the band, particularly with the next track, “Grace“, Jeff’s guitar work is precise and the dude knows some really awesome chords, and the rest of his band is a top-shelf bunch of young musicians. “Grace” also introduces a certain singing crescendo that Muse fans will be very accustomed to, and that is one that ends with the Very, Very High Note. It’s quite the thing, I assure you.

After another awesome original, entitled “The Last Goodbye”, we’re introduced to the first of 2 excellent covers in the album, the Nina Simone version of James Shelton’s “Lilac Wine“, which is a beautiful song (one of my friends, a long-time Buckley fan, cites it as her favorite song) featuring some impressive jazz guitar chords. I consider it a feat worth noting when a guitarist can actually make a solo clean electric guitar work extremely well as the only accompaniment to singing, so please note that I am noting that here.

The next song is actually my favorite of the original songs on the album, “So Real“, which is really reminiscent of “Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong” by Radiohead on their My Iron Lung EP, unless I’m just going crazy. “So Real” contains a really awesome breakdown with distorted bass guitar as well, and I am all about distorted bass.

Then comes the song I was waiting for, the “ultimate cover” of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah“. Jeff’s version certainly does deserve the praise heaped upon it. It’s just Jeff and the electric guitar, and it’s quite excellent. The only thing I would dare take away from that cover is that it doesn’t contain my favorite stanza, the last one, but considering the original has something like 15 or 17 stanzas that Cohen changes up himself from time to time, I can surely forgive. I found out, a little bit after obtaining Grace, that Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” became the number 1 most downloaded song on iTunes, following a cover of that cover by a kid with dreadlocks on that awful American singing program. I can only surmise that, after seeing the stoner’s version of the song, people were clamoring to find a version that’s actually good.

We’re then treated to a lovely break-up song called “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over“, which features a gospel choir made entirely up of Jeff Buckley being multi-tracked to bring the song home. I think this is my favorite song of the originals as far as lyrics go.

Then the third of the covers on this album is “Corpus Christi Carol“, which is a really good song, no doubt, but definitely my least favorite on the album. It might be that we’ve already been treated to 2 slow songs that are mostly just Jeff and a guitar, so to have a 3rd one waiting at the end of an album of only 10 songs kind of kills the effect. It could also be that the singing is actually too feminine, but I am not stating that as a fact because I heeded my own warning about what this album does to people.

It could also be that the next song, “Eternal Life“, is so rockin’ that I can’t wait to skip to it. So why put a lite-metal song not only right after a really feminine soliloquy, but also at the tail-end of an album that sounds nothing like it? I dunno, but it works! I guess the song may have been a bit incongruous if it were placed earlier in the album, but I’m glad it’s there anyway. Once again present is distorted bass, I just wanted to throw that out there (so cool).

Finally, “Dream Brother” takes the album out in a very distinctly Eastern-influenced flavor. Really, one could hardly ask for a better song to end an album with, as it is a strong track indeed, and it meanders just enough to where one doesn’t just wonder where the rest of the album went (10-tracks-or-less albums should always heed the risk of sounding incomplete with an incorrect end song). Interestingly enough, “Dream Brother” is the song Buckley used to open his shows on his “Mystery White Boy” tour.

It’s always an unfortunate thing for an artist to die before reaching their full potential, or at the very least, a sizable discography. Jeff Buckley is quite possibly the worst case of died-too-soon that I have ever seen. For one, he only has Grace as far as full albums go, and for two, his death was a complete and total accident. No drugs, no alcohol-induced-vomit-choking-upon, no guns, knives, depression, or anything. The guy drowned in a lake. That is an injustice that really makes you think… about how much it sucks to drown in a lake. Still, if one were given only one shot at creating an album that would touch the lives of others and earn the love and reverence of the masses and one particularly sleepy blogger, it would be hard to do any better with your life than this album.

So, gentle readers, do yourself a favor and get in touch with your girly, emasculated side with a copy of Grace. If you’re crazy like me, you should pick up the Legacy Edition, as it features a second disc of some interesting B-sides, including a cover of… of all things… a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song called “Alligator Wine”. It’s worth the price of admission just to hear him try to emulate the screamiest voodoo man in all of music.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s entry, which just might be written after a proper night’s sleep this time!

 

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