Ponderosa Stomp FocusBy offBeat Staff Ronnie SpectorBy Faith Dawson Wednesday, April 30, 11:15 p.m., Main Stage
When Ronnie Spector plays New Orleans this month at the Ponderosa Stomp, the “original bad girl of rock ’n’ roll” will finally perform in that bad girl of American cities. It’s a perfect match for the woman known to many for those beehive hairdos and whoa-oh-oh-ohs of Spector’s 1960s girl group, the Ronettes. The young Veronica Bennett was born to rock.
“I went to a Catholic church and prayed for a hit record,” the 64-year-old Spector says by phone from Connecticut. “I loved [music] since I was 8 years old, while the other girls were having fun. I was thirsty for it, and I still love it, love it, love it!”
And her impact on popular music is profound and evident. She has recorded with the E Street Band, the Bangles, Keith Richards and Patti Smith. Brian Wilson is an admirer, as is Amy Winehouse (who didn’t brainstorm that beehive by herself, after all).
Spector led the Ronettes to international notoriety via slit skirts, girlish pouts and cascades of long, dark hair. Framed by (now ex-) husband/producer Phil Spector’s famous “wall of sound” production technique, Spector sang about love and longing. But what made it distinctive was her tremolo, with its soft rasp and raw edges, contrasting with her sharp diction. Early 1960s audiences responded by throwing beer bottles at each other and rolling around on the floor, moaning.
“I enjoy every second of it, riots and all,” Spector says.
Early on, hearing Frankie Lymon set the course for her: “He was most endearing, he made you feel good,” Spector says of seeing Lymon’s act as a youngster. “He had that innocence. He gave me goosebumps.” Her own fans would say the same thing about the Ronettes.
Today Spector is a chatty, flirtatious, personable woman, passionate about the old days but still enamored of performing. “I don’t sing at home. I save it all for the stage,” she says. If she gets the urge to sing, she drives to the grocery store instead.
And after all these years, her formula still works. She sports a lush, tousled mane, says she feels incomplete without high heels, and regards audiences with a sort of innocent wonder. And the audience is guaranteed to hear Spector’s favorite term of endearment: “baby.” As in “Be My Baby,” “Don’t Worry, Baby” and “Baby, I Love You.”
“I love the word ‘baby,’” she says. “That’s so innocent and pure to me.”
The Mighty Hannibalby Jeff Hannusch Wednesday, April 30, 10 p.m., Main Stage
The Mighty Hannibal is the secret identity of Atlanta’s James T. Shaw, who began recording under his given name in 1959 before becoming “Mighty” in the mid-1960s. By the early 1970s, he made a royal assent to “King” Hannibal, but today he’s once again merely “Mighty.” Hannibal recorded for nearly a dozen labels and his enviable body of work contains a number of brilliant recordings, many which are contained on the 2001 reissue Hannibalism! Hannibal biggest hit was 1966’s Vietnam anthem, “Hymn No. 5.” One reviewer gushed: “Once in a great while, there comes along a recording that throws the reviewer into palsied seizure, simply because he does not have sufficient command of the English language to give adequate praise. ‘Hymn No. 5’ is that kind of rare recording.”
Hannibal, did you ever perform in New Orleans back in the day?
Wow. What kind of a show can we expect?
Being from Atlanta, Georgia, do you think the city and the state gets overlooked as source for R&B music?
You spent a good deal of time in L. A. too.
Your songwriting is quite diverse. You wrote dance songs like “Fishin’ Pole” and “Jerkin’ the Dog,” but also some socially conscientious songs like “The Truth Shall Make You Free,” “Trying to Make It Through,” and of course, “Hymn No. 5.”
That didn’t stop WLAC (then the most powerful R&B radio station in the U.S.) from playing it.
There was another jock at WLAC, Bill “Hossman” Allen. He had TV show in 1966, The Beat!!!, that you appeared on that’s been reissued on DVD. I have to say, your segment was some of most astounding stuff I’ve ever seen. (The sight of Hannibal clad in gold boots and a pink turban lip-synching “Jerkin’ the Dog” is not to be missed.)
With current situation is Iraq the way it is, does a song like “Hymn No. 5” still have significance?
James “Blood” UlmerBy Donald Miller Tuesday, April 29, 8:45 p.m., Parish Stage
So what is a Harmolodics? The new food processor that OxyWhiteMan sez Oxycauterizes your beets? Or the brand of keys we always see shot from the ceiling on The Piano Guy late nights on WLAE?
You were only getting close if the guest “student” was Cecil Taylor.
Harmolodics has been for several decades the musico-philosophic bywords of the original splatter saxist and avantjazz icon Ornette Coleman, also spoken most notably by his protégé and guitar wizardo at this year Stomp, James “Blood” Ulmer. It simultaneously seeks to merge the positions of maestro composer and master improviser, oft misthought an oxymoron, while providing a rationale for the extended techniques developed since the 1960s in free jazz and improv as part of a sonically valid and valuable whole freed from self-indulgence.
But this mind meld of melodic-harmonic-rhythmic-kitchensync presents many an interpretive challenge: en avantgarde!
Now reed players can over blow and chomp their reeds into flaming arcweld mode, and the smaller and larger strings have bows to arcoweld doublestops of harmonics galore, but what for us poor six-string players? Cap’n “Blood” handles it thissaway:
Take the hypervirtuoso jazz guitar technique of playing a lead made entirely of chords, a true meeting of melody and harmony if ever and the accomplished equivalent of a Jazz Fester chewing gum, clog dancing the mambo in the Gospel Tent; then accidentally-on-purpose misplay just enough of these chordnotes to fuck with your audience. There is synco-chop to cauterize all them beets into borscht, but with unsettling chunks of soundmeat and no Oxybleach. These are the Tales of Captain Black (title of his ’79 debut as a leader), and this is clunky funk. It is NOT meant to be smooth.
From his discipleship in Coleman’s delightfully irritating Prime Time, he forged a career pitting totally “outside” ensemble work with ur-hardrockfunk, confronting saxists from Sam Rivers and George Adams to all the World Sax 4tet in different sizes. He has of late settled into the sit-down post-Delta blues. Some of the recent recorded examples are reverently overproduced by Vernon Reid; but live I still gotta imagine that duo session ’twixt John Lee Hooker and Sonny Sharrock that was supposed to have but never did.
The Collins KidsBy Andrew Hamlin Tuesday, April 29, 1 a.m., Main Stage
Hailed by Ranch Party TV show host Tex Ritter (John’s father) as “those two little bundles of bouncin’ T-double-N-T,” the Collins Kids deserved all that and maybe another double-N—except that Lorrie, two years older and one head taller than Larry, never deserved the “little” sobriquet. In fact, she wooed and won Ricky Nelson between two-minute explosions on successive Ranch Party episodes. If Lorrie sang any more like a female Jerry Lee Lewis, she’d still merit a lot more respect than she gets now. Younger brother Larry Collins eventually outgrew having to jump up and down to get his mouth level with the mic, but he still plays twin-necked six-string like the missiles went into the air and he has to finish the song and then score before megaton incineration.
They manifested everything manic about rockabilly and hell, rock—no-“abilly.” Any performer trying to get everybody on their feet, should consider kissing theirs first. Where’s that drafty museum in Cleveland when you need it? (Purely rhetorical question.)
Mama Collins, may she rest in peace, taught Larry a few chords somewhere around first grade. He learned most of the rest from Joe Maphis and Simi Mosley, who hung around Tex Ritter’s show while Larry hung around them. “They wouldn’t teach me, they didn’t have the patience for that crap,” he says, but he studied their flash-pickin’ examples and took off like the Concorde that lay another decade in the making. Lorrie stuck to simpler strumming, but when she sang, “My rock-boppin’ baby’s got tricks,” you could reach for the OED and still not find all the meanings chirped out of that last, simple word.
Lorrie married Johnny Cash’s manager in 1959 and retired from touring two years later. Offstage, Larry cooked up country classics including “Delta Dawn,” but he’ll take Bette Midler’s version of that by a hair over Tanya Tucker—“I always thought [Bette] nailed what my feeling was. Alex [Harvey, the co-writer] might have a different impression.”
Nudged out of retirement by European admirers and Simi Mosley’s gift of a new double-necked guitar (“He said, ‘Get back to work!’”), Larry doesn’t see much newfangled in the reborn Collins Kids. “I don’t want to say I look like an old fart, jumpin’ up and down, but we still boogie. We haven’t slowed down much.” Watch for a new Collins Kids album before the end of this year. Look for Tex Ritter to jump out of his crypt over in Port Neches. Subscribe to offBeat and receive a FREE JazzFest CD! |
