by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Alan Cumming special KPBS ran the fifth episode of
Soundbreaking, “Four on the Floor,”
which wasn’t about songs about cars (as the title would have suggested, though
there’ve been enough great rock songs about cars, from Ike Turner’s pioneering
1951 record “Rocket 88” to the efforts of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean in
the early 1960’s to Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” they could have sustained an entire episode about car songs)
but was about rhythm and its importance in pop music. The show emphasized one
particular sort of rhythm and even got its origins right: from gospel music in
general and in particular the “ring shouts,” the fast hand-clapping done in
Black churches when the choir did fast songs. (One of the quirkier stories in
the George Gershwin biographies is about the trip he took to Charleston, South
Carolina in 1934 to research the background for his opera Porgy and
Bess, based on DuBose Heyward’s novel and
play Porgy: Heyward, a Charleston
native, took Gershwin to one of these church services, where Gershwin quickly
“read” the ring-shout clapping rhythm well enough to duplicate it, something
Heyward thought no other white man in the U.S. at the time could have done.)
There’s some footage from Black churches showing the “ring shout” and the music
it was performed to — and damned if it doesn’t sound like proto-rock ’n’ roll,
yet more evidence that all the
syncopated musics that have dominated the world’s pop charts since the turn of
the last century (ragtime, jazz,
blues, R&B, rock, soul, hip-hop) ultimately derive from the
African-American church and its musical traditions. (Even hip-hop, as
disgusting as most of its lyrical content may be, clearly began in the cadences
of Black ministers delivering their sermons and shading over from simple
speaking to syncopated declamation over musical beats, and sometimes into
outright singing; there are records of Black preachers from the 1920’s that
compress this into three minutes, and there’s a re-creation of it in Daniel
Haynes’ sermon in the 1929 film Hallelujah!)
The film abruptly cuts from the gospel footage to
Little Richard, of all people — when I saw Little Richard in 1971 and reviewed
him for my junior-college paper I called his stage persona “a bizarre mixture of the preacher and the Queer,”
and I stand by that — and features an interview with Charles Connor, who played
drums for Richard’s touring band but got to record very little with him for
reasons that shall be explained later. Connor said the gospel rhythms came from
boogie-woogie piano playing (it was really the other way around, of course) and
recalled Richard taking him to a train yard, telling him to listen to the
sounds the train made as it was getting enough steam pressure to pull out of the
yard, and saying that that was
the sort of rhythm Richard wanted Connor to emulate in drumming for him. (One
recalls that George Gershwin said he got the rhythm for Rhapsody in
Blue by listening to the sounds made by the
train taking him to the 1923 out-of-town tryouts for his musical Sweet
Little Devil, and also that one of the genre-defining records of boogie woogie was Meade Lux
Lewis’s 1927 “Honky Tonk Train Blues.”) The Documents label reissue of the
1920’s recordings of church pianist, singer and choir leader Arizona Dranes
quotes Little Richard as saying her records influenced him (which they likely
did; certainly Dranes played those hammering piano triplets that became one of
Richard’s particular trademarks and were emulated by many rock pianists), but
she wasn’t mentioned here and neither was Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who did more
than any other person to bring gospel sounds to the secular music marketplace,
both Black and (later) white. The show traced the influence of rhythm from
gospel ring-shouts through Little Richard — one of the interviewees was New
Orleans studio owner Cosimo Matassa, whom they introduced just as an “engineer”
but who in fact not only owned a New Orleans recording studio but put together
one of the most fantastic studio bands of all time (on a par with the fabled
Wrecking Crew from L.A. and Motown’s Funk Brothers from Detroit) and recorded
just about everybody, including
Fats Domino and Little Richard. Domino was a New Orleanian and so it made sense
for him to insist that his records be made at Matassa’s studio, but it does seem odd that Little Richard, a native of Macon,
Georgia recording for a label (Specialty) based in L.A., would insist on making
his records in New Orleans. He did it because Cosimo’s band was so damned good
— and Arnold Shaw in his book Honkers and Shouters pays tribute to Cosimo’s musicians by noting how
perfectly they matched their styles both to Domino’s slow, rolling, boogie-like
piano and rich, mellow vocals and Richard’s pounding and screaming. (This also
explains why Charles Connor made only one record with Richard — “Keep
A-Knockin’,” a 57-second tape Richard recorded on the road and gave to
Specialty when he decided in 1958 to drop out of secular music and go back to
the church. It was played on this show and Connor’s drumming is incredible.)
Then the show worked up to Motown and the famous hesitation beat on their
records — they did mention James
Jamerson’s name and showed his fingers in action, plucking those bass lines
with just one finger (no one else, including Jamerson’s son, has been able to
play them without using at least two plucking fingers) — and also paid tribute
to the excellent sound quality of Motown’s records even though they were made
on three-track equipment in a basement studio. (As I mentioned in connection
with an earlier episode of Soundbreaking, Berry Gordy deserves acknowledgment as one of the best record
producers of the 1960’s. Not only was he able to make, with equipment far below
the state-of-the-art for the early 1960’s, records that still sound great,
musically and technically,
today, he also managed to create a consistent “Motown Sound” while still
allowing his artists to project distinct musical personalities — which is why
Phil Spector’s artists were largely forgotten and Gordy’s have remained popular
for decades.) It also discussed James Brown and how over time Brown evolved
from a pretty standard R&B singer (The Federal Years, containing his recordings from the late 1950’s,
show him sounding pretty much like every other Black male singer on the King
label and its Federal subsidiary) to what he was in the 1960’s, an almost
totally rhythmic figure. Apparently before he recorded “Papa’s Got a Brand New
Bag” he told his band he wanted every instrument to sound like drums — and he did that with his voice as
well, spitting out lyrics in precise rhythmic patterns and making them
virtually unintelligible in his quest for a tough, staccato delivery. (One name
the show did not mention is that
of Brown’s drummer during the glory days, Clyde Stubblefield, for whom Brown
and his band wrote the song “Funky Drummer.” Stubblefield’s sad story is told
in the film Copyright Criminals,
a fascinating documentary about “sampling” and the issues of ownership and law
it raises, in which it’s shown how he got screwed over first by James Brown,
who never gave his band members credits, let alone royalties, for writing songs
they in fact worked on with him, then by the hundreds of dance and hip-hop
producers who’ve sampled Stubblefield’s beats from Brown’s records.)
The show
works up to the disco era — it openly argues not only that classic disco was
better than its reputation but suggests that the “Disco Sucks” reaction against
it was racist, sexist and homophobic — and makes ridiculous claims that disco,
especially when played in its natural home in discos, created an endless “trance” that allowed
Blacks and whites, men and women, Gays and straights, to come together in a
positive fashion. (Frankly, compared to what’s passed for “dance music” since,
disco doesn’t sound so bad now — especially when a strong personality like
Donna Summer stood front and center and sang those songs with real power and
presence.) Among the artists from the disco era profiled are Robin Gibb of the
Bee Gees (I believe he’s the only survivor of the Brothers Gibb) and Nile
Rodgers of Chic, who thought of himself as funk rather than disco but got
lumped into the disco group, then saw his career tank after just two years (1977 to 1979) because of the “disco
sucks” backlash and saved himself only by shifting over from artist to producer
and making some great records, including David Bowie’s Let’s Dance. The show sort of crawls through disco to the rave
scene and the evolution of so-called Electronic Dance Music (EDM), which is
pretty much like disco — the steady, usually machine-generated beat, use of
long running times for songs and the intent that they can be blended into each
other to create seamless moods (I remember when my then-girlfriend Cat and I
read in 1979 an interview with a disco D.J. in which he said he had tried doing
D.J. sets with rock songs but he couldn’t because rock songs were too short and
sounded too different from each other, we both said, “You see? You see? They admit that all disco sounds the same!”) — but mostly
dispenses with vocals as distractions that just get in the way of the beat.
Charles came home from work during the later part of the show, just in time to
hear an EDM D.J. say that one reason EDM works is that the human heart’s
natural beat rate is 120 beats per minute. “No, it isn’t!” Charles said (and
he’s right; according to the Mayo Clinic’s Web site, http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/expert-answers/heart-rate/faq-20057979,
it’s between 60 and 100 beats per minute, and the more fit you are, the lower it is).
