“Everyone knows all there is to know about the ascension and destruction of Elvis, and how Chuck Berry violated the Mann Act and Jerry Lee married Winona Ryder and Little Richard was the Ted Haggerty of Rock And Roll, and Rhythm and Blues was once the music of rebellion that blew open the schoolhouse doors for the Little Rock Nine and all of them and tons of lessers took a little bit of everything this country had ever made up and cranked the torque up to twelve and set it loose on the world under a new made-up term that really meant teens were screwing in those spacious back seats up at Inspiration Point.
And everyone remembers Fats Domino belongs in there somewhere. "Blueberry Hill" and "Ain't That A Shame" are in the canon of Great American Cultural Touchstones, and rightly so. But it's Rick Coleman's contention that Fats hasn't gotten half of his due, and he makes a pretty good case.
"Blue Monday" shows how different the music of the late 20th century and beyond would have been without Antoine Domino, by showing the wide array of people he managed to reach and touch. He may not have been the first to use music as a tool for racial understanding, but without him, the civil rights movement would have had one less bridge with which to cross that divide. He wasn't the first to use the piano as a percussion instrument either, but he taught everyone else you've ever heard of how to do it, from Jerry Lee to McCartney & Billy Joel & Joe Jackson & Randy Newman & Elton John and everyone. Along with Louis Armstrong, he was New Orleans' greatest musical ambassador to the world, a huge mantle he has worn with relative ease and great pride. The triplets, the strut, the Delta whomp that made up the backbeat, Fats became a virtuoso at making pianos do tricks of which Carl Bechstein would never have approved.
The book follows Fats from birth and early influences through his beginnings playing off-the-street clubs in New Orleans, his first recordings with his friend and Salieriesque mentor Dave Bartholomew, his hits and how they managed, inexplicably, to find their way into white ears, and how he just kind of went with it, taking this brand new mongrelized hybrid of dance & make-out music out on the road for a tour that seemed to go on more or less uninterrupted for the next half century.
This is a quick read, full of saucy anecdotes and half-remembered tales, and while it covers Fats' life from birth right through his rescue from Hurricane Katrina, it leans most heavily on his first flourish of stardom, from the mid-1950's through the early 1960's, when his popularity, influence and importance were at their peak. The last 75 pages or so devolve into little more than a list of recording sessions, celebrity meetings, festival show appearances and testimonials from his artistic descendants, with a generous sprinkling of bandmates dying or disappearing, but even that nod to brevity only serves to illustrate Fats' great salvation and curse: that despite his own long-running battles with drink and gambling, he seems to have outlived everyone.
Fats was that rarest of characters in the great mural of Rock And Roll history: he lived hard, worked hard, and mostly avoided the worst decisions about what to do with his life and his work. He kept enough of his royalties that he didn't wind up destitute, and he was always proud of his crucial influence on British pop, reggae, ska and hip hop. He truly loved what he did, he did it for more than half a century, and he managed to get through his life with no small amount of goodwill. May he live long yet, and when he goes, may the second line at his funeral be the grandest New Orleans has yet seen.”
