Post by AlanB on Apr 7, 2015 9:17:21 GMT -5
I've stumbled upon this which I originally scanned in 2007 for the now deceased Charlie Gillett when he was writing his autobiography.
Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson
by Charlie Gillett
Jazz & Blues 1, no. 11 (March 1972): p. 4-5
IF any musical event of the past twenty years has impressed Eddie Vinson, he has kept it to himself. The way he sings, and plays his alto, and stands at the mike, is like a frozen-frame flash-back to 1950.
People committed to the belief that they belong to "the present" may assume that such a man can say nothing to them, do nothing for them, especially as no singer or musician has shown any obvious admiration for Eddie Vinson's style. Assume that if you like; Eddie won't be surprised, or hurt, or affected if you ignore him. But if you happen to have any doubts at all about the validity of contemporary styles as the only representation of the way people feel, and think, and behave, Eddie Vinson is just the man to feed those doubts, to set your mind wondering about other ways to say this is who I am, how I feel, what I do.
Eddie Vinson is somewhere between fifty and sixty years old now. According to the sleeve notes of one of his albums, he started out as a ballad singer who told jokes between the songs, until Big Bill Broonzy came to play in Houston, where Eddie lived, and introduced him to the blues. Sounds unlikely - that a singer could live in Houston and not know the blues already - but anyway the next step was for Eddie to leave the local Milt Larkins band and go to New York with another big band, led by Cootie Williams.
When the big bands fell apart at the end of world war two, musicians had to make their choices, between playing bop jazz like Dizzy and Bird, or playing simpler dance music which featured blues and ballad singing. Eddie chose the blues, and started making records, first for Mercury, then for King. From 1945 to 1952 he led his own band, and recorded regularly; but then came those fiercer rhythms, rougher singing, and smaller bands of jump blues and rock 'n' roll. Eddie went back home to Houston, where he stayed until very recently.
The Mercury records, made from 1945 to 1947, may well be Eddie's best work, but they have never been issued in LP form and I haven't heard any of the 78's. Several of the songs he recorded then are still part of his regular repertoire: 'Juice Head Baby', 'Cherry Red Blues', 'Cleanhead Blues', 'Kidney Stew Blues', 'Old Maid Boogie', and 'Alimony Blues'. He has recorded them all again since, and they have similar themes, retailing the problems of living with a woman, especially one who drinks a lot and entertains a guest or two while her man is out working, failings which all of Eddie's female acquaintances seem to share. (Would somebody at Mercury Records please look into the possibilities of putting these tracks out on an album?)
From 1949 to 1952, Eddie was with King Records, and in 1957 he cut an album for King's subsidiary, Bethlehem. Last year, King released an album in their Blues Masters Series collecting some of the choice tracks together, 'Cherry Red Blues', King 1087. Blue Horizon, who have access to the King catalogue through Polydor, should be encouraged to consider releasing the LP here.
'Ashes On My Pillow' (with a little thought, you can figure the theme) and 'Somebody Stole My Cherry Red' (same again) are both from the first session with King (August 1949). 'Ashes' features a raucous screaming sax break from Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, but otherwise the sound is marvellously rich and warm, a deep sigh of ensemble saxophones behind Eddie's plaintive vocal. Eddie's gimmick in this period was a peculiar little squeak at the end of each phrase, which had the effect of making a joke out of his most desperate plights. Impossible to ignore, the squeak is irritating at first but gradually blends into the character Eddie presents, somebody who is harassed beyond the endurance of even a reasonable man. Yet somehow he has to keep going, through the worst indignities, and so he does; the squeak is the way he reminds us that he deserves something better.
'Queen Bee Blues' and 'My Big Brass Bed Is Gone' are both from the fourth King session (June 1950), and include good sax breaks by Buddy Tate and beautiful piano by Milt Buckner. Both songs were written by Lois Mann (a pseudonym for King's owner, Sid Nathan)and Henry Glover, who were among the first people to write blues "to order," like Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King, and the rest were to do later with rock 'n' roll. Many Mann-Glover songs are good, but few beat 'Y Big Brass Bed Is Gone', which successfully blended personal loss with social comment - Eddie comes home, opens the door, "all I found was the linoleum on the floor". He admits that he owed a lot of bills, but he had paid for that brass bed in cash, and "who did I owe my baby to?" Piano and saxophone do all that is needed to confirm the mood of emptiness, underlaid with that stretched resilience.
'Queen Bee Blues' is more conventional: "you been slippin' around, you been drippin' that honey all over town". But again the combination of Eddie's voice, the sympathetic backing, and the words conjure -images that are clear and completely convincing.
All four songs from Eddie's last King session (July 1952) are included, all of them written by McRae and Singleton, featuring liquid jazz guitar by John Faire and strong sax by Charlie Rouse. The songs are good without being outstanding - 'Lonesome Train', 'Person to Person', 'I Need You Tonight', and 'Good Bread Alley' - but have a marvellous relaxed pace to them, giving Eddie all the time and space he needs to say what is to be said.
Curiously, the two 1957 tracks, 'Kidney Stew' and 'Cherry Red', are more rushed by this time the big band arrangements were beginning to be anachronistic, and maybe some inspiration was missing at the session. But these are the earliest versions of these two songs available at the moment.
In 1961 Eddie Vinson left Houston to record an LP for Riverside with the Cannonball Adderly Quintet (which I should have heard, but haven't), and some time in the mid-sixties he cut another album for the Black and White label, in France, with American musicians.
Bad years, those were, for an old-fashioned band blues singer, although curiously they were good for even more old-fashioned country blues and primitive city blues men, like Lightnin' Hopkins and John Lee Hooker, who could be identified as folk artists. Recently, though, things have begun to look a little better for the more sophisticated singers, especially since people have discovered B.B. King. Probably as a result of B.B.'s commercial success, his record company, ABC, introduced a Bluesway line in 1967, with Bob Thiele as chief producer. A number of people who hadn't made records for quite a while were given the chance to make albums, including T-Bone Walker, Joe Turner Charles Brown, Roy Brown (whose record was never released, owing to behind-the-scenes conflicts about publishing rights), and Eddie Vinson
By this time, Eddie had grown his hair again; he'd lost it years before when applying some wrongly-mixed solution to his head as part of a hair treatment, and his bald head had inspired a number of songs, including 'Cleanhead Blues': "If it wasn't for you women, I'd have my curly locks today. but I've been hugged, kissed, and petted, till all my hair was rubbed away".
The Bluesway album, Cherry Red, includes one track which shouldn't be allowed to disappear, called 'Cadillac Blues.' The lyric is a nice contradiction of that essential American truth, that a car is bait and aphrodisiac for the nation's most desirable women: Eddie sits in his brand new Cadillac, describes its varied devices, but admits it hasn't made any improvement to his powers of seduction. Buddy Lucas plays warm, strong tenor sax, Patti Brown takes a good solo on piano, and Mike Bloomfield rides along quietly at the back.
The rest of the LP, though, is some kind of fight between Mike and the rest, as he consistently pushes too hard, constantly attracting - distracting - attention, when he should be filling in and reaffirming, as Lucas does so well. 'Somebody's Got to Go' boasts a peculiarly naive break from Bloomfield but otherwise moves well and finishes excitingly. The second side of the record is depressingly mundane, compared to the kind of thing Eddie did with King.
Fortunately, Bob Thiele has taken another shot at recording Cleanhead, this time for his own Flying Dutchman's label, Bluestime. 'The Original Cleanhead' is a much better album than 'Cherry Red', partly because the production admits that there isn't much connection between Cleanhead Vinson and any of the blues stereotypes. Instead, there's a loose mainstream jazz flavour to the parts of the record, which includes a couple of mellow duets between Cleanhead on alto and Plas Johnson on tenor. Plas was once a rock 'nt roll session musician on the West Coast, and has recently begun to get more work again; he's never sounded better than he does here, where Earl Palmer, another veteran of New Orleans/Los Angeles R-and-B and rock 'n' roll, plays drums.
'Cleanhead Blues,' 'Alimony Blues,' 'Old Maid Boogie,' and 'Juice Head Baby' are revisited, and all come over really well, with a rock-oriented guitarist (David Cohen) and a jazz-styled guitarist (Joe Passalagua) managing to hit a balance that suggests R-and-B without simply echoing the exact sound of the King records.
Now, Eddie is with the Johnny Otis Show, singing as well as he ever did, with a marvellous dead-pan expression while the audience is creased up in laughter over the peculiarly suggestive 'Cleanhead Blues.' That show really should have been brought to this country by now; maybe it will when people hear the Epic LP, the Johnny Otis Show recorded live at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
The records to get
Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson - Cherry Red Blues - King 1087.
The Original Cleanhead - Bluestime 9007.
As a postscript here's the response I received from CG on receiving the above scan.
Thanks so much, Alan
Curiously deadpan tone from the author, but it's nice to know that I spent
so much time listening to Eddie Vinson. I confess I don't remember writing
this. How many other such pieces are there, I wonder, involving hours of
time spent listening and writing, hours that had been lost from memory until
you bring them back to light?
Charlie
Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson
by Charlie Gillett
Jazz & Blues 1, no. 11 (March 1972): p. 4-5
IF any musical event of the past twenty years has impressed Eddie Vinson, he has kept it to himself. The way he sings, and plays his alto, and stands at the mike, is like a frozen-frame flash-back to 1950.
People committed to the belief that they belong to "the present" may assume that such a man can say nothing to them, do nothing for them, especially as no singer or musician has shown any obvious admiration for Eddie Vinson's style. Assume that if you like; Eddie won't be surprised, or hurt, or affected if you ignore him. But if you happen to have any doubts at all about the validity of contemporary styles as the only representation of the way people feel, and think, and behave, Eddie Vinson is just the man to feed those doubts, to set your mind wondering about other ways to say this is who I am, how I feel, what I do.
Eddie Vinson is somewhere between fifty and sixty years old now. According to the sleeve notes of one of his albums, he started out as a ballad singer who told jokes between the songs, until Big Bill Broonzy came to play in Houston, where Eddie lived, and introduced him to the blues. Sounds unlikely - that a singer could live in Houston and not know the blues already - but anyway the next step was for Eddie to leave the local Milt Larkins band and go to New York with another big band, led by Cootie Williams.
When the big bands fell apart at the end of world war two, musicians had to make their choices, between playing bop jazz like Dizzy and Bird, or playing simpler dance music which featured blues and ballad singing. Eddie chose the blues, and started making records, first for Mercury, then for King. From 1945 to 1952 he led his own band, and recorded regularly; but then came those fiercer rhythms, rougher singing, and smaller bands of jump blues and rock 'n' roll. Eddie went back home to Houston, where he stayed until very recently.
The Mercury records, made from 1945 to 1947, may well be Eddie's best work, but they have never been issued in LP form and I haven't heard any of the 78's. Several of the songs he recorded then are still part of his regular repertoire: 'Juice Head Baby', 'Cherry Red Blues', 'Cleanhead Blues', 'Kidney Stew Blues', 'Old Maid Boogie', and 'Alimony Blues'. He has recorded them all again since, and they have similar themes, retailing the problems of living with a woman, especially one who drinks a lot and entertains a guest or two while her man is out working, failings which all of Eddie's female acquaintances seem to share. (Would somebody at Mercury Records please look into the possibilities of putting these tracks out on an album?)
From 1949 to 1952, Eddie was with King Records, and in 1957 he cut an album for King's subsidiary, Bethlehem. Last year, King released an album in their Blues Masters Series collecting some of the choice tracks together, 'Cherry Red Blues', King 1087. Blue Horizon, who have access to the King catalogue through Polydor, should be encouraged to consider releasing the LP here.
'Ashes On My Pillow' (with a little thought, you can figure the theme) and 'Somebody Stole My Cherry Red' (same again) are both from the first session with King (August 1949). 'Ashes' features a raucous screaming sax break from Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, but otherwise the sound is marvellously rich and warm, a deep sigh of ensemble saxophones behind Eddie's plaintive vocal. Eddie's gimmick in this period was a peculiar little squeak at the end of each phrase, which had the effect of making a joke out of his most desperate plights. Impossible to ignore, the squeak is irritating at first but gradually blends into the character Eddie presents, somebody who is harassed beyond the endurance of even a reasonable man. Yet somehow he has to keep going, through the worst indignities, and so he does; the squeak is the way he reminds us that he deserves something better.
'Queen Bee Blues' and 'My Big Brass Bed Is Gone' are both from the fourth King session (June 1950), and include good sax breaks by Buddy Tate and beautiful piano by Milt Buckner. Both songs were written by Lois Mann (a pseudonym for King's owner, Sid Nathan)and Henry Glover, who were among the first people to write blues "to order," like Leiber and Stoller, Goffin and King, and the rest were to do later with rock 'n' roll. Many Mann-Glover songs are good, but few beat 'Y Big Brass Bed Is Gone', which successfully blended personal loss with social comment - Eddie comes home, opens the door, "all I found was the linoleum on the floor". He admits that he owed a lot of bills, but he had paid for that brass bed in cash, and "who did I owe my baby to?" Piano and saxophone do all that is needed to confirm the mood of emptiness, underlaid with that stretched resilience.
'Queen Bee Blues' is more conventional: "you been slippin' around, you been drippin' that honey all over town". But again the combination of Eddie's voice, the sympathetic backing, and the words conjure -images that are clear and completely convincing.
All four songs from Eddie's last King session (July 1952) are included, all of them written by McRae and Singleton, featuring liquid jazz guitar by John Faire and strong sax by Charlie Rouse. The songs are good without being outstanding - 'Lonesome Train', 'Person to Person', 'I Need You Tonight', and 'Good Bread Alley' - but have a marvellous relaxed pace to them, giving Eddie all the time and space he needs to say what is to be said.
Curiously, the two 1957 tracks, 'Kidney Stew' and 'Cherry Red', are more rushed by this time the big band arrangements were beginning to be anachronistic, and maybe some inspiration was missing at the session. But these are the earliest versions of these two songs available at the moment.
In 1961 Eddie Vinson left Houston to record an LP for Riverside with the Cannonball Adderly Quintet (which I should have heard, but haven't), and some time in the mid-sixties he cut another album for the Black and White label, in France, with American musicians.
Bad years, those were, for an old-fashioned band blues singer, although curiously they were good for even more old-fashioned country blues and primitive city blues men, like Lightnin' Hopkins and John Lee Hooker, who could be identified as folk artists. Recently, though, things have begun to look a little better for the more sophisticated singers, especially since people have discovered B.B. King. Probably as a result of B.B.'s commercial success, his record company, ABC, introduced a Bluesway line in 1967, with Bob Thiele as chief producer. A number of people who hadn't made records for quite a while were given the chance to make albums, including T-Bone Walker, Joe Turner Charles Brown, Roy Brown (whose record was never released, owing to behind-the-scenes conflicts about publishing rights), and Eddie Vinson
By this time, Eddie had grown his hair again; he'd lost it years before when applying some wrongly-mixed solution to his head as part of a hair treatment, and his bald head had inspired a number of songs, including 'Cleanhead Blues': "If it wasn't for you women, I'd have my curly locks today. but I've been hugged, kissed, and petted, till all my hair was rubbed away".
The Bluesway album, Cherry Red, includes one track which shouldn't be allowed to disappear, called 'Cadillac Blues.' The lyric is a nice contradiction of that essential American truth, that a car is bait and aphrodisiac for the nation's most desirable women: Eddie sits in his brand new Cadillac, describes its varied devices, but admits it hasn't made any improvement to his powers of seduction. Buddy Lucas plays warm, strong tenor sax, Patti Brown takes a good solo on piano, and Mike Bloomfield rides along quietly at the back.
The rest of the LP, though, is some kind of fight between Mike and the rest, as he consistently pushes too hard, constantly attracting - distracting - attention, when he should be filling in and reaffirming, as Lucas does so well. 'Somebody's Got to Go' boasts a peculiarly naive break from Bloomfield but otherwise moves well and finishes excitingly. The second side of the record is depressingly mundane, compared to the kind of thing Eddie did with King.
Fortunately, Bob Thiele has taken another shot at recording Cleanhead, this time for his own Flying Dutchman's label, Bluestime. 'The Original Cleanhead' is a much better album than 'Cherry Red', partly because the production admits that there isn't much connection between Cleanhead Vinson and any of the blues stereotypes. Instead, there's a loose mainstream jazz flavour to the parts of the record, which includes a couple of mellow duets between Cleanhead on alto and Plas Johnson on tenor. Plas was once a rock 'nt roll session musician on the West Coast, and has recently begun to get more work again; he's never sounded better than he does here, where Earl Palmer, another veteran of New Orleans/Los Angeles R-and-B and rock 'n' roll, plays drums.
'Cleanhead Blues,' 'Alimony Blues,' 'Old Maid Boogie,' and 'Juice Head Baby' are revisited, and all come over really well, with a rock-oriented guitarist (David Cohen) and a jazz-styled guitarist (Joe Passalagua) managing to hit a balance that suggests R-and-B without simply echoing the exact sound of the King records.
Now, Eddie is with the Johnny Otis Show, singing as well as he ever did, with a marvellous dead-pan expression while the audience is creased up in laughter over the peculiarly suggestive 'Cleanhead Blues.' That show really should have been brought to this country by now; maybe it will when people hear the Epic LP, the Johnny Otis Show recorded live at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
The records to get
Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson - Cherry Red Blues - King 1087.
The Original Cleanhead - Bluestime 9007.
As a postscript here's the response I received from CG on receiving the above scan.
Thanks so much, Alan
Curiously deadpan tone from the author, but it's nice to know that I spent
so much time listening to Eddie Vinson. I confess I don't remember writing
this. How many other such pieces are there, I wonder, involving hours of
time spent listening and writing, hours that had been lost from memory until
you bring them back to light?
Charlie