Sunday, January 22, 2012 / 10:40 am
They Might Be Giants
R&B loses two in a row.
by Gary Phillips
Tags: Johnny Otis | Etta James | rhythm and blues
So my 25-year-old, still at home son has a job, praise Jesus. It’s in Compton and as he doesn’t have a car, most mornings, he has to be up and out of our Mid-City house by 7 AM for his bus and train rides to get there by 9 AM. But on Saturdays he has to be there at 7 in the morning so my wife and I trade off driving him to work. Thus I was on one of the three freeways taking him in this past Saturday and listening to KPFK rebroadcasting two of the many Johnny Otis Show recordings in their archives. Johnny was also remembered on Bill Gardner’s Rhapsody in Black show the night before on KPFK. Gardner had worked on Johnny’s show, who was 90 at the time he died last Tuesday at home in Altadena.
It was great hearing that cat again as he played R & B and blues tunes, and riffed about the old days with his in-studio musician friends, Big Jay McNeely, Koko Taylor and Screaming Jay Hawkins—a former Golden Gloves boxer, who told a great story about getting locked in his coffin on stage once at the Apollo by the Drifters, busting out, and dealing with these pranksters. As we drove along, I remembered once taking a then girlfriend to see him play, as Johnny was a vibraphonist and band leader. Fact he had a music TV show locally on Channel 5 in the 50s I believe. Anyway, my blonde girlfriend was surprised to find out Johnny was white as she had only heard him in those days on his radio show—and a whole lot of folk, black and white, would have sworn by his intonations he was black.
John Velotis, a Greek American who grew up working in his family’s grocery store in Oakland, became a voluntary black man and never looked back. I guess if anybody was the living embodiment of Ashley Montague’s contention that race is but a social construct, Johnny was it. I never had the pleasure to meet him, but if you heard him or read his wonderful Upside Your Head! Rhythm and Blues on Central Avenue book recounting those halcyon days of “The Stem,” including his adventures running his Barrelhouse Club in Watts, you couldn’t help but dig a dude doing his thing to make this world a better place who race-baiters like Newt Gingrich ain’t fit to shine his shoes, as my pops would have said.
How crazy then that in the same week here in the Southland, about three days after Johnny dying, Etta James, 73, also died on Friday. He produced her first hit, the bawdy “Roll With Me Henry,” and she sang with his revue when she was just a teenager. Miz Etta never achieved the true status she deserved. If I had my way, the noir movie I’d write would have her soulful renditions of “I’d Rather Go Blind” and “At Last” on the soundtrack Certainly there were dark currents in her life, being fathered by a white man she never knew, a prostitute mother, overcoming drugs and alcohol, and winding down her life wracked by leukemia and Alzheimer’s. I certainly count it as memorable me and my wife Gilda got to see her perform along with the late other under-recognized singer Solomon Burke at the Hollywood Bowl.
Right on, you two. Rest in Peace.
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