Magic & Flying: Doc Pomus

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That was the original title that Sharyn Felder gave to the documentary she wanted to make about her father, the legendary songwriter Doc Pomus. The 10-minute trailer that she made consisted of brief snippets of conversation with some of the people he loved, worked with, and influenced: Lou Reed, Little Jimmy Scott, B.B. King, and Doctor John. It could just as easily have included conversations with dozens more – because, as Jerry Wexler frequently said, Doc was the heart and soul, the

conscience,

of the music industry.

 Doc would have eschewed such labels, but AKA Doc Pomus, the wonderful documentary that was eventually made by Peter Miller and Will Hechter (with Sharyn’s full participation) and is just now making its way to a theater near you if you happen to live in New York or Los Angeles, makes the same essential point.

He was born Jerome Solon Felder in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 1925 and stricken with polio at the age of six, compelled to spend the rest of his life in braces and crutches, or in a wheelchair. At fifteen he discovered the blues through the message imbedded in Big Joe Turner’s “Piney Brown Blues”; as Doc frequently said, “It was the transformation of my life.”

He started hanging out in Greenwich Village, listening to Frankie Newton’s band at George’s Tavern, and when the proprietor wanted to throw him out one night for nursing a single beer the whole evening, Doc came up with the perfect alibi. “I’m a blues singer,” he said. “I’m here to do a song.” The song he sang, without any further ado or preparation, was, naturally, “Piney Brown Blues.”

He started singing regularly – in the Village, in Brooklyn, “college student by day, professional blues singer by night.” To hide his new avocation from his family he needed a name. That was how he became Doc Pomus, which served as both an identity and a disguise.

He became a songwriter by the same sort of fortuitous accident that he had become a blues singer: he wrote songs for himself, and then Gatemouth Moore recorded one of his numbers for National in 1946 on a session produced by Herb Abramson and engineered by Tommy Dowd. When Abramson co-founded Atlantic with Ahmet Ertegun the following year, and Dowd became the new label’s chief engineer, Doc became an Atlantic songwriter. A couple of years later his idol, Joe Turner, recorded one of his songs for the label.

 His breakthrough came with rock ‘n’ roll: Ray Charles (“Lonely Avenue”), the Coasters (“Young Blood”), the Drifters “This Magic Moment,” “Save the Last Dance For Me”), Dion “"A Teenager in Love”), Big Joe Turner (“Still in Love”), and Elvis Presley (“Little Sister,” “His Latest Flame,” “Viva Las Vegas”) all recorded songs written by Doc, some by himself, some with a variety of occasional collaborators, but most with his principal songwriting partner of the decade, Mort Shuman. The song for which they are best known, “Save the Last Dance For Me,” remains one of the enduring monuments of the era, and indeed one of the most enduring standards of our time.

When you think of Doc Pomus, though, you don’t just think of a list of songs. Because no matter how extraordinary the songs are, the man compelled no less attention. After being stricken by polio, it was his dream to become the first heavyweight champion of the world on crutches, “a man among men,” as he would always say. This is a perfectly understandable fantasy for a lost, lonely child, but it is in effect what he did become: if he was not the heavyweight champion in boxing, he became a champion of another sort.

He maintained his perspective. He maintained his humanity. He maintained his no-bullshit sense of compassion, his omnivorous interest in everything and everyone that was going on (tell Doc a story, and you’d always get two in return), his commitment to help everyone and anyone who needed it – without forfeiting his right to grumble about it. What was most astonishing about Doc was that he denied no element of his humanness. More than anything else, that may have been the quality that most defined his writing.

What I loved most about Doc – well, I loved everything, really – was his sense of constant engagement. Not just creative engagement either, though that was certainly part of it. I first met Doc the same way that almost everyone else interviewed for the film did: he called me up – in my case, to express his admiration for something I had written. Within moments, it seemed, we were fast friends, within minutes we were off to the races, caught up in a dialogue which for me will go on in my mind’s ear for as long as I live.

I certainly can’t claim any credit. If it had been left to me, I might have just sat there for hours, for days maybe, a timid acolyte in the presence of the legendary songwriter. But Doc didn’t permit that. He quizzed me, he grilled me, he voiced his enthusiasms, he sought out mine – he conveyed this incredible life force, this pure energy and love for people and ideas that I’ve rarely encountered in so undiminished, so undisguised a form. “Peter, you got a minute?” he would say on the phone and then just launch into whatever was on his mind at that particular moment: music, politics, philosophy, friends, it didn’t matter. The dialogue just bubbled along irrepressibly, taking its own natural course but always brought down to earth, and into perspective, by Doc’s inevitable conclusion: “What can I tell you? Just the same old nonsense.” Which, of course, it was and it wasn’t – but it was.

The thing about Doc was that he unfailingly put himself on the line. Not just in his songs but in every aspect of his life. I think that was what I learned most of all from Doc, the notion that you must put yourself on the line, whether for friends or politics or art or merely in expressing your opinions honestly. For Doc there was no holding back. He was passionate – about everything – but he didn’t bullshit himself. And he didn’t bullshit anyone else. Which I think as much as anything else was what sustained his creativity.

In the last ten years of his life Doc wrote some of his very greatest songs, songs that matched, and in some cases surpassed, the quality of his biggest hits. Most were written with Mac Rebennack, AKA Dr. John, his friend, collaborator, sometime lifestyle-debater, above all his “partner.” (“There’s a lot of kind of partners you can have,” says Mac. “Me and Doc was a lot of different kind of partners on some off-the wall level that I hadn’t had with nobody in a long, long time.”)

 With the later songs Doc achieved the kind of profound simplicity that he had been striving for all of his writing life. He knew it, and was proud of it – but he also knew that it wasn’t what went before that mattered, it wasn’t honors or validation (though he liked those, too) that yielded satisfaction: no matter what you have achieved, no matter what recognition may come your way, he would say over and over again – and mean it – it was what came next that mattered, it was the next challenge, creative, personal, it didn’t matter: life was living up to the challenge.

He kept writing almost up to his last breath – on a portable keyboard, with Dr. John, in his hospital room. He kept on reaching out a helping hand to others, too. Towards the end he could honestly say, “I’m doing the same stuff I always did. I’m acting the same way I always acted. The only difference is that now I talk about it. At one time I wouldn’t express my opinions except to maybe my closest friends, because it wasn’t cool to be that animated. Now I don’t hold anything back. I don’t know, maybe it’s just so I’ll get noticed, but I really don’t want to live to see a day where the space that I take up in this world is like some musty closet, some little broom closet somewhere. I want to be able to talk out – even if I’m wrong.”

 Doc did talk out, and he filled an enormous space. He lived and died, as this film clearly shows, surrounded by love.

 AKA Doc Pomus is available on various video and streaming services including Amazon and iTunes

A Word from Mr. C: Marvin's All-Star Moment

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Peter has known FOTB (Friend of the Blog) Mr. C since he was broadcasting on WTUR in Medford. Now he can be heard Saturdays from 12-2 on LuxuriaMusic.com

Having a Las Vegas over/under connected to the length of your song may not be the most comforting entry into performance, much less singing the National Anthem on solo piano at the Super Bowl.  That’s what Alicia Keys was faced with this year, and alone she bravely soldiered on trying to summon some dignity from the whole affair.

Thirty years earlier, Marvin Gaye was introduced at the NBA All Star Game to much less fanfare.  With a click track in the background giving a pulse loosely based on his mega-hit, “Sexual Healing,” Gaye strode evenly to the mike.  Head skewed slightly upward, dressed impeccably in a grey double-breasted suit, with eyes sheathed in opaque, impenetrable sunglasses, Gaye began to sing.  Introspective, gallant and seemingly spontaneous, he began an interpretation as graceful as the athletes lined up in attendance, who smiled and swayed as he sang.  Bombs didn’t burst in the background and U.S. soldiers weren’t standing by. Alone at center stage, Marvin Gaye transformed the potential bombast of the song into a gently parsed hymn - our National Anthem sung as an extremely personal, resolute reflection, part sublime sadness and part quiet triumph.

Great music on TV seems divided into two camps: The Beatles and Rolling Stones on Ed Sullivan, or several Elvis Presley appearances (though a very good argument can be made about the music in his case), which were hugely anticipated Events, where song was almost secondary to just the appearance. Then there’s the unexpected: Howling Wolf on Shindig [1] or this: Marvin Gaye at the 1983 NBA All Star game.  Here, by mid-song the crowd (and many of us viewing), experienced a collective, unmanufactured thrill, a tingle of disbelief…and this became the real event, the transformative, riveting power of great art.  There is something happening here–a pure expression of complex emotion consolidated, into two and a half minutes of song.

–Mr. C

For the full story of how this anthem came to be, check out out Pete Croatto’s piece on Grantland.com



[1]  Ed note: This blog has been up for only a few months, and we have already linked to this INCREDIBLE video three times. If you haven’t ever seen this… well… just watch it already!

Jack Clement

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This is the talk I gave at the beginning of the Tribute to Cowboy Jack Clement at War Memorial Auditorium in Nashville the other night.

It was an incandescent evening of real music and true feeling (the reverse phrasing works just as well), pulled together in the best Tom Sawyerish, “You can’t imagine how much fun it is to whitewash this fence” fashion by Dub Cornett and David “Ferg” Ferguson. You can go elsewhere to read about all the highlights, musical, magical, and emotional – or you can just wait for the movie. Suffice it to say that at end of the evening, Jack, who in the face of serious illness has declared that he is “choosing music over medicine,” performed one of the most achingly beautiful (not to mention uplifting) sets I have ever seen, beginning with his recorded masterpiece, Sandy Mason’s “When I Dream (I Dream of You),” and including, of course, his rousing version of “Brazil,” along with the same haunting arrangement of “No Expectations” that he sang at Sam Phillips’ memorial service.

I’m going to include a YouTube clip of “When I Dream” here – but unless and until the film of this Tribute concert is released, you should all bombard Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville with demands to see the almost equally emotional performance that they filmed at the Country Music Hall of Fame for their documentary on Jack, which unfortunately didn’t make the final cut. (Don’t bombard them – implore them, at most pester them.)

Anyway, here are my remarks. And I should add, pay close attention to the penultimate paragraph, which T-Bone Burnett followed up on eloquently in his introduction to “Guess Things Happen That Way” toward the end of the show.

“Jack Clement’s not in the Country Music Hall of Fame?

“WHAT THE FUCK!“

—————————————————————

I first met Jack almost forty years ago at – where else but The Cowboy Arms Hotel and Recording Spa,on Belmont?

Like most of you, I’m sure, I felt as if I had wandered into some kind of enchanted land, a rich Shakespearean landscape in which Jack intentionally played the role of both king and fool.

Even then I knew one thing: it was a world from which I never wanted to escape. And I never have.

I’m sure you all know Jack’s movie – Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville’s Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan – there’ll be a number of clips from it playing tonight, and it may well be the most purely entertaining movie I’ve ever seen. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched it, several times in the company of Jack, and it has never failed to delight. Sometimes I think it may be the measure not just of the man but of his audience, too – but in some respects (and I probably don’t even need to say this among friends), like all of Jack’s work, it is a deeply serious enterprise.

Like Shakespeare, Jack recognized from the start that if you expect people to pay attention, first they need to be entertained. And I think all of us can attest: along with the music, along with the conceptual art (and believe me, there’s plenty of that), Jack has given us more than our fair share of entertainment over the years.

That’s probably what enabled him to recognize Jerry Lee Lewis’ finer qualities when Sam Phillips’ assistant, Sally Wilbourn, came back to the control room (Sam was out of town at the time) and announced, “There’s a man out there who says he can play ‘Wildwood Flower on piano just like Chet Atkins playing the guitar.”

Do you think Jack could resist that?

“I mean,” he said, “who WOULDN’T want to hear that? And then she brought him back, and he really did sound like Chet Atkins. So I went back in the control room and put on a tape.

It was that same perspicacious quality – things just tickle Jack, to this day – that helped him see Johnny Cash’s lighter side, not to mention his broader potential appeal. I’m not sure too many people saw John’s lighter side at the time – but Jack saw this man, whom he recognized as a kindred spirit from the start (it was one of the great friendships of both men’s lives), as a pop star, a status that he almost immediately achieved with the “silly little song” that Jack wrote for him, “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” (that’s Jack’s characterization: never forget that Jack, a life-long dévoté of P.G. Wodehouse, is the self-proclaimed King of Silly) as well as more ironic numbers like “Guess Things Happen That Way” and “Ring of Fire,” which Jack arranged and produced (think of those mariachi horns).

It’s undoubtedly how he could recognize without even a second thought not just the remarkable talent that Charley Pride possessed but the unlimited commercial potential. Like Sam Phillips, probably his one true mentor and one of the few people who could match Jack in eccentricity and the determination to exercise his individualism at all times, in all settings, Jack simply didn’t acknowledge categories, and in the end it was the strength of Jack’s belief that persuaded Chet Atkins to take a chance on so unlikely a prospect.

Jack was reciting Shakespeare when I met him, and he was planning his voyage to Alpha Centauri (he’s probably still planning it) – but, you know, it didn’t matter what was the idea of the day (one of Jack’s many visionary concepts, none of which necessarily entailed making money, was MTV – ten years before MTV came into being), it was the profusion of the ideas, the profundity of the ideas that just kept pouring out of Jack’s fertile imagination. His poetic­ sensibility was constantly at work.

Without meaning in any way to categorize, let me just state it plain. Jack, the most genial of genial fellows (except when he gets into a Hamletty mood) has his enemies. Jack is an enemy of the predictable, he is a fierce foe of convention, he opposes narrowly defined logic and linearity, he disdains the dull, he is bound and determined to defeat expectation – as much as any of his literary or musical heroes, he is committed to conveying hard truths.

But with a difference.

Because Jack, I think more than anyone else in this town – maybe more than anyone else you’ll meet in this life – believes in the spirit of play. He is a kind of holy fool, with the emphasis on both words, in the manner of both Shakespeare and the great Russian literary masters – but maybe with a little more emphasis on humor than some of those Russians. Because Jack has never shied away from – in fact he has embraced – the greater truth of the cosmic pratfall, what he has sometimes referred to as the universal joke. Which is probably best characterized by the highly evolved version of the uplifting reality show (another genre that he pioneered – though the networks may have failed to pick up on the uplifting part) that has been his life.

Jack will tell you he’s been lucky all his life. If all else fails, he always says, Get lucky. I mean, who else breaks into show business by getting himself arrested on Christmas Eve in Jonesboro, Arkansas? Unjustly, I might add – and he would, too. Which led in turn to his meeting Billy Riley, his first major artist, who picked him up hitchhiking back to Memphis on Christmas Day. Which led in fairly short order to his being hired by Sam Phillips. Which led to his being fired by Sam Phillips, another stroke of luck, because it set Jack free to start off down his own highways, byways, and divagations, without ever forsaking his lifelong friendship with Sam. The point is, for Jack luck is just another part of the great Wheel of Life – you simply don’t want to miss your chance to get on it.

Jack said of Sam Phillips: “Elvis was a star, but Sam was the superstar. Because he discovered all them stars.  And led them around by the nose.”

That’s a quote.

Well, the same could be said of Jack, except I don’t think he would accept the designation any more than Sam would. Because to Jack – and I don’t mean to get all corny here – it’s always been about family. I mean, you could say community, but I really think it’s the greater intimacy of extended family that means the most to Jack.

The Cowboy Arms was like a clubhouse to which everyone had the key. Johnny Cash, Jack said, had a key one time – but he lost it. But it didn’t really matter, because the doors at the Cowboy Arms were always open.

It would be easy to tick off all of Jack’s manifold accomplishments: the songs, the industry honors, the records sold, the studios built (he’s probably building one right now), all those friendships made and, more important, kept. But that would be kind of missing the point. It was the FUN of it. As he first learned in the Sun studio, if you weren’t doing something different, you weren’t doing anything. And it wasn’t worth doing if it wasn’t big fun.

For Jack, like all true geniuses, life is a continuing adventure and a continuing education. Doesn’t matter if you lose all your money making a horror film that after you’ve finished editing it (which you never did before and never will again), nobody can understand. YOU LEARNED SOMETHING.

You know, I can’t enumerate all the things I’ve learned from Jack.

About grace, humor, honor, feeling, spontaneity – ACTION (you know – the word that Jack calls out from time to time, almost as if to mock the very concept that he is seeking most to promote: the need to be RELAXED if you ever want to accomplish anything).

But most of all it’s just been fun trying to keep up, as I’m sure it has for all of you. And for those of us who might have been just a little faint of heart, Jack has opened up not just new ways of looking at things but new and exciting (which is not to say safe and insured) paths to pursue.

You know, Jack is living testimony to the fact that if you don’t chase fashion, you will never go out of style.

People say – everyone­ says – that Jack should be in the Country Music Hall of Fame, he should be in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame – and there’s no question that he should. But remember one thing: Jack is in the Cowboy Jack Clement Hall of Fame, and that’s the most important one of all.

And now as Jack might say (even though I know I can’t say it right – well, I’m going to call on Jack’s sidekick, Alamo, here): ACTION!