Back in 1997, when the Jazz Fest schedule still featured the occasional mind-blowing surprise, jaws everywhere dropped when it was announced that Cookie and the Cupcakes would be gracing a stage at the Fair Grounds. It was an opportunity that could only be described as once-in-a-lifetime. The Cupcakes were the seminal South Louisiana rock ‘n’ roll band; the Kings Of Swamp Pop, the originators of anthems like “Mathilda,” “I’m Twisted,” “Cindy Lou” and “Trouble In My Life,” just to scratch the surface. And their most prolific singer, Huey “Cookie” Thierry, had recently been reunited with his old band mates after a mysterious 30-year absence during which no one—including friends, family and fellow musicians—seemed to know where he was.
When the day of reckoning finally came, Cookie strolled to the microphone sporting a handlebar moustache and Zulu medallions, shook his wise man’s staff at the crowd triumphantly, and belted out the first number in a voice that dripped with ethereal Creole soul. The song was the Cupcakes nugget “I Cried,” and although it was sung in the first person, it’s a safe bet that many of the audience members were the ones shedding tears.
When Jin Records prexy Floyd Soileau issued the first Cookie and the Cupcakes anthology in 1974, he named it Three Great Rockers in honor of the band’s trio of lead singers, and all were present and accounted for on that great day, living up to the regal title that Floyd had bestowed upon them. A prerequisite for being a singer in the Cupcakes, it seems, was the ability to play the saxophone, and founding vocalist Shelton Dunaway stepped out of the horn section to lead his segment of the show before turning the spotlight over to tenor player Lil’ Alfred Babino. It was at this point that the house, so to speak, came down. A ball of concentrated lightning, Alfred was, as the old band name goes, One Hundred Proof Aged In Soul. Obviously the Cupcakes’ secret weapon, it was quite evident that even singers as charismatic as Dunaway and Thierry would have had a hard time following him, which is perhaps why he sang last. Alfred brought the history-making event to a close with a rendition of “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye” so tortured that Danny White himself would have had a hard time topping it.
“That was a day,” Alfred recently concluded as he recalled the Cupcakes’ Jazz Fest performance. “You know what? I never will forget what Cookie told me. Cookie used to call me ‘Fredo.’ ‘Fredo,’ he said, ‘This is something, as long as it’s been around, I always wanted to do the New Orleans Jazz Festival.’ I said, ‘Well, Cookie, you’re here, man.’ And it was a great day; the first week it had rained terribly and this was the second week and we were lucky to have a beautiful Saturday, sun shining, not a cloud in the sky and as far as you could see was people. And it wasn’t long after that that Cookie died. That was the last gig we worked together.”
It’s intermission at Baton Rouge’s Casino Rouge and Lil’ Alfred has taken a few minutes to answer the feverish questions posed by myself and a fellow brother in all things Lost Louisiana, the splendidly-monikered Lakeview Kid. The Kid had earlier theorized that although raised in a Catholic stronghold, the gospel-charged fervor that Alfred brings to his performances points to a more protestant upbringing, perhaps Baptist. As always, the Kid has hit the proverbial nail on the head. “I started singing in the Calvary Baptist Church choir when I was about six-years-old,” remembers Alfred, “and I started singing in clubs when I was 15. I wasn’t even supposed to be in there; they’d let me get on stage but that was it!”
Growing up in Lake Charles, Alfred was keenly aware of the band with which he would later make his name. “I had a cousin who played drums, his name was Simon Lubin but they called him Kee-Dee. He was the one who started the Cupcakes; they were first called the Boogie Ramblers.
“When Kee-Dee got out (pianist) Ernest Jacobs took over as leader. That’s when Cookie became the lead singer and they came up with Cookie and the Cupcakes.”
After leaving the Ramblers, Kee-Dee formed the Berry Cups, who cut one record with Cookie’s younger brother, Terry Clinton, as lead vocalist before Alfred joined them in 1960. “The Berry Cups came up behind the Cupcakes and the Cupcakes were the band. They wanted to be so close to the Cupcakes that they named their band the Berry Cups! I had been playing with a group we formed in school called the Whirlwinds. I was blowin’ sax and singing, basically Little Richard songs—when I would sing. Originally, when the Berry Cups hired me, it was to blow horn. When I started singing, the people started reacting to it, so I took over the singing and was blowin’ horn. The Berry Cups was really the first established group that I sang with. That was the band that I did ‘Walking Down The Aisle’ with, it was a good group.”
“Walking Down The Aisle,” Alfred’s first—and biggest—record, came about when Lake Charles label owner George Khoury, who’d issued the first Berry Cups single as well as the Cupcakes’ timeless “Mathilda,” caught Alfred on a bill with some of his star artists, Mickey Gilley and Phil Phillips to name two of them. Khoury immediately signed Alfred to a five-year contract and took the band to Houston to cut the record. “On the other side of the 45 I recorded one of Little Richard’s songs, ‘Miss Ann,’” remembers Alfred. “I recorded about four more things with the Berry Cups, a couple of them I have on my latest CD [Lil’ Alfred:1960-2003], a thing entitled ‘Broken Heart;’ the keyboard player, Raymond Landry, he wrote that song. I wrote another song called ‘It Don’t Hurt No More’ and then a thing called ‘The Only Girl;’ I redid that and put it on my Dealin’ With The Feelin’ CD [Jin Records]. I even did a little thing I wrote called ‘Mashed Potatoes Back Again’ when the Mashed Potatoes was a popular dance.
“When Ernest came to hire me for the Cupcakes I had left the Berry Cups and I was working with [Goldband recording artist] Bill Parker. Bill had come down from Oklahoma City with some dynamite musicians, I mean these guys were so good. Bill always had a big band and a bus. He was backing up people like Little Willie John, he was on the road with him for a long time. And I started working with them, wasn’t with them long when Ernest came and talked to me about going with the Cupcakes. Cookie was still in the band, but he had gotten messed up in a car wreck—one of a few—and that’s how they wound up hiring me.”
Whether fronting the band himself, as he did on his own “Even Tho’” and a devastating take on Chuck Willis’ “Charged With Cheating,” or dueting with Dunaway on “I Almost Lost My Mind” and “Feel So Good,” Alfred’s high register tenor was a natural for the Cupcakes, and the songs he cut with them stand as some of the band’s strongest sides; no small feat when one considers the gauntlet that had already been thrown down by Dunaway and Thierry.
In 1967, Alfred began a two-year stand with legendary blue-eyed soul group the Boogie Kings. “I had always worked with them off and on and I enjoyed the band, they were a great, great band. And we would always talk. One day [bandleader] Ned [Theall] said, ‘We’re going on tour to California. If something happens, I’m gonna call you.’ I said, ‘I’ll be ready.’ I think they’d played San Francisco and Redwood City, that started the tour. And they got to Hollywood. They had Gary Walker singing, and something happened. Ned called me, I think it was a Wednesday or Thursday night. He said, ‘You ready to come to Hollywood?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, we need you here by Saturday.’ I said, ‘Can you give me a little more time?!’
“Oh, I hated to leave, but we had gotten into a rut and I was young. Ned sent me a ticket and that Saturday I was on the plane. I got there about twelve or one o’clock, they were still playing; a place called The Red Velvet right there on the Strip. I was just blown away, I had never been anywhere and here all of a sudden I’m right out of Louisiana and into it. And this was in ’67 when the hippies with long hair, they were all in the street and I said, ‘Wow, this is another world!’ I get to the club and had time to get me about one drink, sit down, and they called me on the stage. I’m a nervous wreck. This guy down on the floor with his camera, he had been takin’ pictures, I didn’t know who the guy was; come to find out he was Dewey from the Buffalo Springfield! You know? It was something. I enjoyed playing Hollywood. We played Hollywood for two or three months and then we left and went to Vegas. I was with them from ’67 to ’69.”
The sole recorded artifact from this period is a 1968 single on A&M Records. “A&M didn’t like the name the Boogie Kings so they changed it to the American Soul Train. One side was called ‘Can You Dig It?’ and I did a version of ‘The Tennessee Waltz,’ Otis Redding style, on the flip side.”
Following his stint with the Kings, Alfred with his old friend Charles Mann. After Ernest Jacobs found Cookie in the ’90s and began putting the Cupcakes back together, Alfred reunited the group with whom he’s still most closely associated.
“Just this September I had a light stroke,” he says, looking two decades younger than his 60 years. Band mates and friends sprung into immediate action, organizing a benefit for him at Lake Arthur’s Lakeshore Club. “G.G. Shinn and Ned, they got right on it. It really got to me, the way the guys really came out. It was the first time just about all of the Boogie Kings were together in a long time. Jerry LaCroix, Duane Yates,Clint West and the whole gang. It was great, the support that they showed me. I was overwhelmed. I’ll never forget that day, I’ll never forget it.
“It was a wake up call,” says Alfred of the recent set back, “but I was really blessed. I had about two weeks of therapy and I went back to work on the stage. My doctor wasn’t too happy but I told him, ‘My best therapy is on the stage.’”
It’s a factor that’s never more evident than in his performance at the Casino Rouge, where the intervening years since his landmark Jazz Fest appearance hardly seem to exist. He grants every request that his audience musters with equal energy—from Tommy McLain’s “Jukebox Songs” to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll”—then digs into deep soul territory for James Carr’s “Dark End Of The Street” and touches on New Orleans with Johnny Adams’ “I Won’t Cry.” When it comes time for the sax break in Fats Domino’s “Hello Josephine,” Alfred grabs his tenor and downshifts his incredibly tight band into Bill Senigal’s “Second Line.” Most impressive, though, are his letter-perfect versions of “Walking Down The Aisle” and “Even Tho,’” which he delivers with the same intensity that George Khoury surely heard when he first recorded them.
Besides his monthly Casino gig, Alfred can be found every Sunday in Lake Charles, hosting an early evening performance at Yesterday’s. “I played there for about a year, just me and the group,” he says, “and then I started bringing in other people. Every Sunday we have a guest: this Sunday Jivin’ Gene is gonna be with us and Warren Storm was with us last Sunday, that’s my buddy there. And Charles Mann will be with us next Sunday.”
If you can’t make it to Lake Charles, with a little luck Alfred will be playing in the New Orleans area soon. Meanwhile, you can pick up his new CD by calling (337)-433-2357.
