WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! Each beat explodes in aural fury. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! Slamming upside your head letting you know you’re still alive. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! Alan Freed, the original Primitive Radio God, raps on your noggin’, screaming at you in his howling Moondog voice that the Big Beat is where it’s at.
If you ain’t no square then get it out in the air. Shake what the good Lord gave you. And if you’re gonna shake it, man, you best shake it to the BEAT.
It’s always been about the Beat. At least as long as music’s been worth listening to. To paraphrase Puff Daddy (and I am in no way condoning the music of the world’s foremost J. Lo stalker), I like Mozart, but the cat would’ve been 100 times better if he had put some thump behind them violins.
Thank God for the 20th century. I don’t wanna cut down on the tribal rhythms of Africa or the deep blues of the plantations, but the big wham bamming didn’t come to the front ’til King Oliver, Louis Armstrong and the rest of the bouncin’ crew hit us with that jumping Ragtime out of them Nawlin’s hoot houses.
Men would stumble into the burlesques of Storyville to loosen their ties (both the ones with their wives and the ones around their necks), lessen their hang-ups and lower their drawers. And on the ivories tickling the dancer’s feet and fueling the copulatory progress upstairs would sit Jelly Roll Morton pounding that “piana” with no thought of panache, just a hunka soul and furious drive to bang out them gyrations for all the debaucherians holding up the joint.
As wild a city as Nawlins is, and as deep as the jive runs in Louisiana, it just couldn’t hold back something as almighty as the Beat. So out it popped and jittered up to Chikagga, where there’s always been stuff to sing sad about, what with the wind blowing so cold and them factories pushing so hard. But the King and his prize trumpeter/shouter turned all that backwards and upside down.
You got the weekends off (unless you’re a Pullman man in which case you’re stuck in perpetual lock down in dry town) so you get to drinking and get to dancing. Don’t drown your sorrows, man, jigger ’em out with a few shakes and a lady. Put your working boots up in the closet and pull down them church shoes. They ain’t church shoes now, boy, they’s dancing shoes. Kick ’em up in the air a few times and let’s see if you member why that foreman was a yellin’ at you today out in the stockyards.
And from Chikagga it couldn’t help but hop, skip and jump right down there to St. Looy where it hit just as hard what with the general state of depression and all that goes along with living in such a city.
Heck, the old Gateway even turned out a few Beat progenitors of its own, but we’ll get to them later. And you know St. Looy ain’t the kind of town to hold on to nuthin’ so the Beat kept a right on storming cross them farms and unleashed itself down there in Kansas City.
Now the Beat had a hold of the hardworking, hardplaying towns in the Midwest. But as vast as the cornfields and factory towns are they still couldn’t put the reigns on all the jack poppin’ and flip floppin’. And eventually it worked it’s way over the Appalachians and Adirondacks and into the juicy bite of the Big Apple, where it got twisted all around again with swing jazz and fancy big bands.
‘Cause in a town like New York there’s money to be spent. And those spenders rile and rave to stay on top of the latest craze. So they jumped right on the Beat and pumped it full of the greenbacks they’d been getting from the Speaks all over town.
They watered it down with ’bout 20 saxes, 20 trumpets and a couple a whatever else they could find lyin’ round the dumpster of the symphony center. But they forgot something. Sumthin’ big. They only had one drummer. Two at the most. And how you gonna tell me you can get out that God awful, awful good feeling of the Beat with just one drummer and a whole army of all those bent tubes that you can’t pound on cause they’ll break? Ain’t no way.
And with all that money pumping in with no real soul, the beat started to fade. It sputtered and shuddered and almost stopped. It’s illin’ caused a mighty big depression across the land, but lucky for us, Louis Jordan figured this one out and came storming out of Harlem with his Tympany Five. He stripped them big bands of Basie and Ellington bare. Right down to whatcha’ needed to get out that Beat. A sax, a bass, that new fangled contraption the ‘lectric guitar, another sax or maybe a trumpet, and them drums. Them big ole Drums.
Louis Jordan knew what he was doing too. He hopped and bopped across the stage leapin’ with joy scream-shoutin’ ’bout Caldonia bein’ stubborn as a mule and gettin’ out on a Friday night to load up at one of those fish fries that shot nutrition right into the veins of the Beat. He barreled out those Jump Blues like no one thought possible, just a laughin’ and a carrying on, putting on a show like you never seen before and pounding out a sound that put a quake in your britches and a bomp in your foot. And you better believe there was no way those big ole bands could keep up with such a streamlined outfit as the Tympany Five, so soon enough all the joints were reelin’ to the sounds of the Beat stripped down once more and not leaving much room for but a few bars of melody each time out. People were happy as could be to feel that jerking jive again.
And when that stuff started to trickle back down to the South from whence it first came, and it got mixed up with what they were a brewin’ down there round about Memphis and a few points lower, boy, you best shutter up your house and prepare for the explosion.
To be continued, so hang on to this issue.
Kyle Pearson is an undecided sophomore who worries about Rock ‘n’ Roll more than he worries about his health. Of course your mom is always there to help him with that. Send love mail, hate mail and credit card numbers to [email protected].
