RIP The Fatman...Another legend passed away

RIP Mr. Domino.

Thank you for the joy of your music!

Edit: THE FAT MAN by The Rolling Stones 1978 rehearsals Woodstock:

[youtu.be]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2017-10-25 22:15 by RipThisBone.

RIP Fats. I probably became aware of him via Cheap Trick when the Live at Budokan album came out. Great version of Ain't That A Shame. I'm sure it's on Youtube, just don't know how to link.

Also, I recall reading that Chubby Checker took his name from Fats Domino.

Always loved Fats --- great songs and a master pianist-- one of a kind !
His version of Lady Madonna was killer too !
RIP Fatman

[www.theguardian.com]

Fats Domino: a huge talent who inspired ska, the Beatles and bling

The boogie-woogie master, who has died aged 89, shaped the course of popular music over and over again

Alexis Petridis
Wednesday 25 October 2017

You could argue for the rest of your life about what constitutes the first rock’n’roll record and, indeed, on the internet, there are people prepared to do that. An exhaustive 82-track 2011 compilation comes up with candidates for the title, with varying degrees of plausibility, and with tunes dating back to 1915.


But Fats Domino’s 1949 single The Fat Man has a stronger claim than most. Based on Junkers’ Blues, a 1940 track originally recorded by Champion Jack Dupree, there’s almost nothing to it. A pounding, unchanging backbeat and an insistent bass pulse; Domino on piano, playing in a style noticeably more aggressively than that of his peers; saxes and guitar buried so deep in the mix that you barely even spot them until the song’s finale; some falsetto scat singing and three verses that replace Junkers’ Blues’ references to cocaine, reefers and heroin with lyrics that laud both Domino’s bulk and his irresistible sexual abilities: “I weigh two hundred pounds, all the girls love me, because I know my way around.” It sold a million copies and transformed Domino overnight from the pianist in Billy Diamond’s Solid Senders, a locally popular New Orleans band, into a star.

In later years, Elvis Presley proclaimed him “the real king of rock’n’roll”, but in truth, Domino was an exemplar of boogie-woogie, a style that had been big since the 1920s – some musical historians claim its roots stretch back into the 19th century – that he had been taught by his brother-in-law, a jazz musician. Nevertheless, The Fat Man’s stripped-back potency had something of the future about it: it fitted so well with rock’n’roll that it turned up six years after it was recorded on Domino’s debut album, Carry on Rockin’ With Fats Domino.


By then, Elvis Presley had signed to a major label and Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti was in the charts. Clearly sensing which way the wind was blowing, and the fact that he might have unwittingly predicted its change of course, Domino skilfully transitioned into a rock’n’roller. His debut album was swiftly retitled Rock and Rollin’ With Fats Domino, he appeared in the exploitation movies The Girl Can’t Help It and Shake Rattle and Rock, and released a peerless run of singles, all deeply rooted in the jazz and R&B of New Orleans, but sufficiently in tune with new musical developments to make not only the R&B charts but the US Hot 100, too – a not-inconsiderable feat for a black artist in 50s America. Those singles included Ain’t That a Shame, I’m Walkin’, Blue Monday, I’m in Love Again, and Blueberry Hill, the latter a cover of a 40s jazz standard previously recorded by Glenn Miller that became Domino’s signature song.

Domino was not a wild musical insurrectionist in the style of Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis – when a riot broke out at a gig in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he climbed out of a window to get away. But his influence proved vast, not least on the Beatles. Ain’t That a Shame was the first song John Lennon learned to play, Paul McCartney’s Lady Madonna was created in Domino’s image, the band visited Domino to pay homage and were impressed by his love of what would later be called bling – boggling at a jewel-encrusted watch on his wrist.


Ironically, by the time the Beatles appeared, Domino’s star had fallen. He had continued to have hits after the initial wave of rock’n’roll wave had crashed – Walking to New Orleans and My Girl Josephine among them. However, by 1963, he had fallen in with a record label that disastrously sought to sweeten his sound, making him record in Nashville, and adding elements of the slick, commercial “countrypolitan” style to his releases. His recording career never really recovered, although his sound toughened up again by the decade’s close, taking on influences from contemporary soul, making the point about his influence explicit by recording a version of Lady Madonna, as well as another fantastic Beatles cover, The White Album’s Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except For Me and My Monkey. By the 80s, he declined to leave New Orleans at all. Never a fan of touring, he claimed he hated the food everywhere but his hometown.

That didn’t stop huge stars noting his importance: a 2007 tribute album featured Elton John, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Paul McCartney, Robert Plant and Randy Newman, alongside a host of New Orleans musicians and Toots and the Maytals. The latter’s presence highlighted Fats Domino’s other great musical feat. If it’s a stretch to suggest he unwittingly invented reggae, his records were certainly regularly played on Jamaican sound systems in the 1950s, and his accentuation of the offbeat in his playing is one of the roots of ska, the music Jamaicans started to make when the supply of suitable American R&B records dried up. Listen to the rhythm of his 1959 single Be My Guest and you can hear what they were trying to imitate.

[www.theguardian.com]

Out in his own uncategorisable stratosphere, the vocalist and pianist Fats Domino, who has died aged 89, sold astonishing quantities of records from the start of the 1950s until the early 60s. Domino was an original, one of the creators of rock’n’roll, and by far the biggest selling rhythm and blues artist of that time.

He was crucial in breaking down the musical colour barrier, but too mainstream and popular to retain credibility as a blues singer. He brought a new, heavy back-beat to white ears, yet trailed old-fashioned, jazz-band habits behind him.

His famous records were many, stretching across a decade from the early 50s: Valley of Tears, I’m Walkin’, The Big Beat, I’m in Love Again, I Want to Walk You Home, Be My Guest, Country Boy, Walking to New Orleans, Three Nights a Week, My Girl Josephine, It Keeps Rainin’, What a Party, and, in 1963, when he finally left Imperial Records for ABC-Paramount, Red Sails in the Sunset.

His chart placings were oddly modest. His only British Top 10 success was Blueberry Hill in 1956. In the US he never topped the mainstream charts and by 1962 had no Top 20 entries. Yet in the mid-70s it was still true that, with record sales of 60 or 70m, no one had outsold him except Elvis and the Beatles.

He behaved like a star. When he toured he took 200 pairs of shoes and 30 suits on the road, and wore big diamond rings. Thus he asserted himself on the era’s extraordinary multiple bills. On the first, in 1956, Domino was with BB King, Hank Ballard, Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown and Duane Eddy. A 1957 tour put him in among the Drifters, Frankie Lymon, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran, LaVern Baker, the Everlys, Paul Anka and Buddy Holly.

His performing style was simple, like his songs – he’d sit at the piano sideways on to the crowd, showing his solid right profile and turning his splendid head to grin and beam as he sang and played, but he would add a touch of flamboyance at the end by pushing the piano off stage with his stomach. (That head of his was a perfect cube, thanks to his flat-top haircut. This would became fashionable 30 years after he pioneered it.)

Born Antoine Domino in New Orleans, to Donatile (nee Gros) and Antoine Domino Sr, he began playing the piano in public at the age of 10. He was dubbed “Fats” by the bassist Billy Diamond’s band at his first professional engagements, at the Hideaway Club on Desire Street. The city’s pianists included Professor Longhair and Amos Milburn (from whom Domino took what became his trademark 6/8 hammered triplets), but his main influence was the Chicago pianist Albert Ammons, first recorded in the 1930s.

Domino was offered a record deal by the Imperial boss Lew Chudd, and cut his first sides on 10 December 1949, with the trumpeter/arranger Dave Bartholomew’s band. This would remain much the same on Domino’s huge hits of a decade later, and the band would tour behind him for more decades still. The tenor saxist Herb Hardesty would support Domino for half a century.

The second number recorded was The Fat Man (named after a radio detective), which sold 800,000 in the black market and gave the 22-year-old the first of many gold discs.

Domino and Chudd soon fell out with Bartholomew, the man held to have given Domino his musical credibility. Domino recorded without him, using his own musicians, including his brother-in-law Harrison Verrett. The rift was healed in 1952, after Bartholomew persuaded Domino to play piano on Lloyd Price’s Lawdy Miss Clawdy. It is one of the great contributions to embryonic rock’n’roll.

Domino’s early singles had mixed success, but he re-signed to Imperial and packed out live shows, clinching his stardom at Alan Freed’s Cleveland Arena show in 1953 and thrilling the new white audience for black music at Freed’s New York rock’n’roll Jubilee Ball in January 1955. Then came Ain’t It a Shame (AKA Ain’t That a Shame). Though Pat Boone’s cover topped the pop charts, Domino’s original chased it, the blackest sound that had ever hit the hot 100, and the No 1 R&B side for 11 weeks.

Domino rarely took sole composer-credit for songs. Most were written with Bartholomew, some by Bartholomew alone, including Blue Monday, a hit from the 1956 Frank Tashlin film The Girl Can’t Help It, starring Jayne Mansfield and Tom Ewell, in which Domino appeared, as he did (this time with top billing) in Jamboree (1957).

Domino’s voice had dropped an octave around the end of 1954. Before that, his was a high, reedy voice; by Ain’t It a Shame he had a rich warm baritone. What unites these two styles as much as the shared big beat is Domino’s magnificently quirky pronunciation, New Orleans-based but carried to a disarming extreme. His way with the title of his hit My Blue Heaven (Mah, Blee-oo, HeaVON) still delights, as does the rhyming he could achieve: “cryin” with “down”, “man” with “ashamed”. Irrational pronunciation was always a factor in rock’n’roll’s appeal – there’s no overestimating the attraction of non-received English in the 1950s. In his amiable, non-confrontational way, Domino offered this liberation early.

His career dipped in the 1960s when a new black consciousness rejected the pre-soul stars, and white consciousness shied away from hit-singles artists and the suddenly embarrassing, unhip simplicities of 50s music.

Creatively, the 60s and beyond was one long period of decline. The songwriting ended; a 1961 album showed a painting of nonchalant, cigarette-smoking Domino as if he were Dean Martin; another was called Twistin’ the Stomp. He sounded equally perplexed on Ah Left Mah Hot in San Francisco and the Beatles’ Lady Madonna and Lovely Rita, but he understood country material perfectly, as with Hank Williams’s Jambalaya and You Win Again.

Nor could decline be blamed on his tendency to cover “standards”. Some of his biggest hits had made rock’n’roll classics of them, especially When My Dreamboat Comes Home, Blueberry Hill and My Blue Heaven. He sometimes proved his mastery of boogie-woogie on them too: gasp at his Stephen Foster makeover on Swanee River Hop. There was one fine later album, the self-produced Sleeping on the Job, cut in New Orleans in 1978. Authentic and fresh, it surprised everyone. He never managed that again.

Domino was reduced to night clubs and Las Vegas. It demonstrates his limitations and artistry that he could play his hour’s worth with such enthusiasm so many hundreds of times. But his vice was gambling, and trying to work off his debts by touring only kept him in the Vegas trap.

Worry thinned him. Even yellow crimplene suits couldn’t disguise his being disappointingly less than massive, yet he still pushed the piano off stage with his stomach at the end of his high-energy show. He was still at it in London at the Royal Festival Hall in 1985, and the Royal Albert Hall in 1990, his mike still placed so that he took up a supplicating pose, crouched down, head twisted round and upwards, radiant smile fixed on the punters in the circle.

Illness overtook him in 1995, on a UK tour with Little Richard and Chuck Berry. His performance ended when he tried the piano stomach-push in Sheffield, and was taken to hospital with breathing problems. He would not tour again, restricting his live appearances to his home city of New Orleans. He refused to travel to Cleveland, Ohio, for his induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and even declined a White House invitation from Bill Clinton to receive a National Medal of Arts in 1998.

He was at home when his house was one of those ruined by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Domino had always lived in the badly hit Lower Ninth Ward – he’d built his mansion there – and though he and his wife, Rosemary, whom he had married in 1948, were rescued by a Coast Guard helicopter from their roof, he was thought to be missing for several days afterwards. His daughter Karen, living in New Jersey, recognised him in a newspaper photograph of survivors at a shelter in Baton Rouge. It was months before Domino could revisit his home and reportedly only three of his many gold discs were retrieved.

Moved by the widespread concern for his welfare, Domino responded with a new album, Alive and Kickin’, donating proceeds to the Tipitina’s Foundation, dedicated to preserving and restoring New Orleans’ musical culture. The album’s title track opens with as simple a lyric as any of Domino’s classics: “All over the country, people wanna know / Whatever happened to Fats Domino? / I’m alive and kickin’.”

Alive and kickin’ maybe, and living back in New Orleans, but in poor health. Domino was to have been the closing act at the city’s first post-Katrina jazz festival in May 2006, but he was admitted to hospital shortly beforehand. A year later, at the 2007 festival, he gave what would be his last performance, of just five songs. A tribute album, Goin’ Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino, by artists including Dr John, Norah Jones, BB King, Willie Nelson, Toots and the Maytals and Neil Young, was released later that year.

Other artists continued to record and perform Domino’s repertoire, and always will. He was one of the few true giants of postwar American popular music: no one sounded like him, yet ask who he influenced, and the answer is everyone.

"Domino was married to Rosemary Hall, who passed away in 2008. The couple had eight children. The family released the following statement:

"We are all touched by the outpouring of love and tribute for our father. He passed away peacefully at home surrounded by those he loved and those who loved him. His music reached across all boundaries and carried him to all corners of the world.

"…Then I rock myself to sleep
Prayin’ that I am here to keep
Then I ride the rising sun
Gee ain’t I being a lucky one
'Rising Sun'(Domino) ©1960 EMI Unart Catalog, Inc.

"We thank you for allowing us to grieve privately during this difficult time. Funeral arrangements are pending."

[www.fox8live.com]

On ebay, they have a 124 song box-set (another is 81 songs about) quite a bit more than songs like "Red Sails in the Sunset"; so, he did quite a lot.

He didn't write "Blueberry Hill" but he owned it, to this day, the song is irresistible. "Blue Monday" is another great one, he may have penned that.

He was unheard from when Hurricane Katrina struck but luckily, found to be safe.

All due respect, what a great recording artist that made all of our lives richer.

Gene Vincent, Buddy Holly, more kings, Gene Vincent seems to be about as big of any of 'em in England and France, to me, from what I've seen.

I mean, Ervin Travis did the Gene Vincent show, he's not getting paid the big bucks for his act (not big like the Stones) but I love watching him perform, he got lyme disease and that has sidetracked him.

[www.youtube.com]

Might as well say Johnny Cash is rockabilly which basically Vincent, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis did a lot of at a minimum.

Only Elvis sold more records than Fats in the 1950s. A legend and a true American original. Only 3 originators left from the birth decade of RnR. One Everly, Jerry Lee, and Little Richard. Fats I understand loved his red beans and rice and a beer so tonight Ill have all of those in his memory and listen to his tunes. RIP Fats and thank you for your gift you shared with us.

One of the best shows I've ever seen was Fats at the Universal Amphitheatre in 1985 with Rick Nelson (just a few months before his death). John Fogerty and Randy Newman were in the audience, (my wife said she saw John singing along, directly to the lady he was with!)as were Jan & Dean (who sat right in front of me!)

The great Dave Bartholomew led the band.

Fats hadn't played L.A. in something like 20 years, and they handed out white handkerchiefs to wave. When he started,the crowd went nuts, and that mood sustained the entire night. It was a New Orleans party!

[www.youtube.com]

A couple versions:

[www.youtube.com]

Fats starts at 23:00 or so

[www.youtube.com]

I flew into Alabama on a Friday in April 1999 and drove over to New Orleans for the Jazz Festival. My brother and a couple friends had a hotel on Bourbon St. and had been partying hard since Wednesday. By the weekend they were too out of it to go to the festival. But I had come down specifically to see Fats so I caught the bus and went alone. Ray Charles was playing that day as well on the same stage. Fats came out in a Hawaiian shirt and played 21 songs. I loved every minute of it. A beautiful day and show I'll never forget. Heck I got to see Ray Charles and Fats Domino the same day!

RIP Fats. Thanks for roll. You rock brother.

RIP Fats one of the greatest...........not long time ago I was wandering if he still was alive after some googling he was...it's one of those who we discussed to too less............hope he made the Hall of Fame

rip, a legend

RIP. 1 of the pioneers.

...always super greats saxo solos in his records....!

video: [www.youtube.com]

Keith singing I'm Ready. Great version

Great version indeed

Posted on page 1, though

Fats fans in Southern California should turn on KPFK 90.7 right now.

The "Rhapsody In Black" radio show is all-Fats today.