Dear Marvin:
The phenomenon we’re going to examine today is a kind of disease, a happy contagion. For me it began in teenhood (look back, Marvin, at how much of our lives were shaped in these shaky years) when my great good friend Lloyd Blomeyer gave up football. Lloyd had a heart his body couldn’t afford. So, he got a job.
Lloyd became a juke tending man for Morgan Entertainment. He was the guy who brought sacks of nickels to the Morgan house (Morgan’s wife was cool) and they sometimes dumped all that money out on the living room carpet. It was ’39 when a nickel would buy a hamburger.
Lloyd also got to handle records. Never stole one. But we got to listen free. We learned what everyone in the pop music business knew: You white boys were fine as kitty fur, but talking music, or MUSIC, in ’39 you wanted to go sepia – Hampton, Ellington, Lunsford, Basie, Calloway et al. If you don’t understand this, go listen to Glenn Miller, the Numero Uno white bread band of the day, and compare and contrast it with, well, Basie.
Heh-heh.
Then we segue to a troop ship in the mid-40s. It’s night, the war just ended and the guys are coming down a landing net into an LCI which will take them to an island shore ... well, almost. The boat drivers let the guys out early so they could wade some water and sleep in wet clothes on the Okinawa coral. Not a big deal, Marvin, I mean I was 19 and could sleep on a rifle range in zero temps.
I lay on the ground, first taking off wet boots and socks. I awoke to hear the Count Basie band although that wasn’t possible. But there it was in the dark of 4 a.m.: “Red Bank Boogie.” Judas priest. Not on Okinawa. It didn’t even have electricity yet.
One of the GI cooks had rigged up a speaker that he hung in a tree. The thing was powered by a small gas generator. That was just to show you how the thing got around and across the planet and all.
So when I got a Bose radio (what they say about the sound is true) I slapped “Count Basie—Golden Legends” on the hooked-up Sony player and went sailing back through the Early Years. And, gee, never noticed that baritone sax.
Jimmy Rushing is there. The vocalist about whom the song, Five by Five (“He don’t measure no mo’ from head to toe than he do from side to side.”) was written.
Rushing’s reading of Harvard Blues (“I wear Brooks Brothers clothes and white shoes all the time . . . Get three C’s and a D.”) is not on there. Too bad. Rushing is a story unto himself. A lot’s gone down over the years. Some has remained the same. At least for me.
God bless,
Hank.
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