Music
Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Down of Rock ‘N’ Roll, by Rick Coleman
Although New Orleanian Fats Domino cut a song called “My Blue Heaven,” his most heavenly one—and best—is “Blue Monday.” Written by trumpeteer and bandleader Dave Bartholomew, “Blue Monday” had already been cut by New Orleans singer Smiley Lewis, and it was a great performance. But in 1955 and in the midst of a string of hit records, Fats waxed his version. He took “Blue Monday” at a slightly faster tempo, gave more nuance and patois to the vocals, and substituted eight bars of brilliantly lazy saxophone for the original biting guitar solo in Smiley’s rendition.
Rock and roll songs achieve perfection when they’re happy and heartbroken at the same time, and “Blue Monday” may be the apotheosis of the form. It takes the protagonist through a long week of hard labor, but then comes the weekend: “Saturday morning, oh, Saturday morning/All my tiredness has gone away/Got my money, and my honey/And I’m out on the stand to play.” The singer (with his audience) is at the top of the world, but you can only ever dance with blue Monday at your heels, “‘cause Monday is a mess” and you’ve “got to work like a slave all day.” Monday serrates Saturday and makes it more vivid. In this age between the ages, as the Bible describes it, our joys are always provisional, but so are our sorrows.
Parties in New Orleans aren’t only the best in the world but somehow also the saddest. The levees, so to speak, can break at any time. Because New Orleans R&B—whether trad jazz, big band, rock and roll, brass, blues, or funk—so embodies the ethos and the pathos of its city, my feelings for it are as deep and complicated as for New Orleans itself. I think I have more New Orleans CD’s than any other kind.
Despite Fats Domino’s primus inter pares standing within the New Orleans musical pantheon, not to mention his towering singles like the above and “Blueberry Hill,” “Walking to New Orleans,” and others, his mammoth sales success in the 1950’s had obscured to me the vitality of his recordings and his relationship to the local musical context. If people think of Fats Domino, they’ll recall as well Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Little Richard—other 50’s rock icons but none, save Richard, with a NOLA connection. In comparison to those other artists, Fats actually suffers a little bit. He sold more records in the 1950’s except for Elvis, but he wasn’t Elvis. (His difference from Elvis includes racially, a fraught subject that Coleman treats at length.) Fats also didn’t rock as hard as Richard, spin teen yarns as cleverly as Berry, act as wild as Lewis, or capture melody like Buddy. To my ears for many years, Domino was a more vanilla variant of each of them.
Only recently, however, I began to listen to Fats Domino not as a Rock and Roll Hall of Famer but as a New Orleans piano player and singer, and his music came alive to me. Fats’ songs are polyrhythmic, sax-infused, triplet banging joy, and they encapsulate 100 years of New Orleans’ musical past, present, and future. His singles were always just New Orleans tunes that happened to attract a huge cult following outside the city. It all made sense to me then.
Rick Coleman’s Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock and Roll has helped me immensely to recontextualize the Domino cannon. (Surprisingly, this is the only Domino biography ever written, so it’s definitive by definition.) Even though Coleman gives due time to Fats’ cross-country tours, L.A. record deals, and national record charts, he renders a compelling portrait of a reclusive man who was merely playing what everyone else in his town was playing and only ever wanted to stay at home anyway. Domino performed before royalty in Europe, was given medals by Presidents, and had seen the world many times over, but whenever he traveled, he took with him a mini cooker. Before and after concerts to thousands, Domino hunkered down in his hotel room cooking red beans, ham hocks, and jambalaya. His music is the same way: big-hearted enough for the masses, but misunderstood without Tabasco.
If I’m honest, what makes Blue Monday wonderful has more to do with the subject than the author. Coleman is a workmanlike writer who obviously loves Fats, but the book doesn’t quite match the man. The reader is taken through Fats’ early years, the hardscrabble East New Orleans dives where a teenage Domino honed his skills, we’re inside Cosimo’s studio on Rampart Street, and we rumble across the country in the band’s hoopty wagon, but I would have preferred that the ride come with a little more panache and less Big Statement. (Picture a multi-day road trip with only NPR to listen to; the air’s less fresh by the end.) Better to let Domino’s fingers do the talking in establishing his place in rock and roll than to tell us over and over again. Blue Monday occasionally plods along in a way that the titular song never does.
Still, Domino fans can’t be choosers. Blue Monday increased my appreciation of something I already adored.
General disclaimer: I’ve been reluctant over the last couple of years to start a blog, because I’ve thought to myself that I’d have trouble figuring out things to say, or spend too much time trying to fill a blogospace. But, it seems that one thing I could do would be to keep track of books that I’ve read (plus music), jot down a paragraph about each, and post everything online.
I hope that this list is helpful to people both to give some ideas about what to read (and what not to read), and also to open a window into how I personally process through books and consider issues related to Christ and culture. (In addition, I won’t try to write anything particularly controversial, but I offer these words just as one man’s perspective and maybe some food for thought for others. These aren’t ex cathedra pronouncements that bind anyone into agreeing with me.)