Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
Huey ‘Piano’ Smith & His Clowns
Having A Good Time
(Ace, 1958)
New Orleans’ party wildness with straight ivories for the queer guy.
Unless you think the guy on the cover is holding a reefer (it’s actually the suave gent’s pocket square) there’s little about the cover of Having A Good Time that conveys either the chaos within or the wildness of the band who brought it into being. Allow Dr. John to explain. While interviewing him back in 2000 for MOJO’s Last Night A Record feature we got to talking about New Orleans party music and specifically Bobby Marchan who sang with Huey ‘Piano’ Smith & His Clowns. I’d read that Marchan had started out leading a troupe of female impersonators at New Orleans' Dew Drop Inn before recording with The Clowns, and that he regularly dragged up when out with civilians but Mac elaborated. “The Clowns was all queer,” he said, “you’d see them walking down the street, all be painted and dragged up. In New Orleans ‘clown’ was ‘queer’ and they was like this queer gang with Bobby as the boss.”
Marchan provided the sleazy contralto vocals for such good-time R&B grooves as Don’t You Just Know It and High Blood Pressure and took the Clown gang of Scarface Williams, Peg Leg Martin and the green-haired Eugene Francis on the road (with the equally camptastic James Booker on piano). Backing vocalist Gerri Hall famously maintained that she was more man than the rest of the Clowns put together, but in the studio and in the trades The Clowns were the brainchild of the far more hetero Huey Smith, a genius songwriter who, with his lazy left hand barrel-roll piano and hand-clap rhythms brought a musical drive (and debonair public face) to the mollyhouse call-and-response anarchy of Marchan and co. Unfortunately, this lack of public exposure for Marchan’s Clowns (try finding a photo of the gang) eventually led to a rift. Following the release of the all-killer Havin’ A Good Time LP in 1958 Marchan left Smith and Ace and went back on the road as a female impersonator before signing with Bobby Robinson’s Fire Records and cutting a terrifying cover of Big Jay McNeely’s bad-love sleaze-blues, There’s Something On Your Mind, which famously ends with Marchan shooting dead his girlfriend, her lover and himself.
Marchan later toured with Otis Redding, cut two singles for Stax, recorded the original version of Slade's first hit, Get Down And Get With It and toured the American south as a female impersonator-bandleader before, bizarrely becoming a key figure in the formation of Lil’ Wayne’s NO rap label Ca$h Money Records in 1991. He died in 1999. ‘Having a good time’ doesn’t really come close.
Andrew Male
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 10:31 AM GMT 29/09/2008
Further Listening
Bobby Marchan - Clown Jewels - the Masters 1956-75 (Westside, 1999)
Esquerita – Capitol Collectors Series (Capitol, 1992)
Various – The Fire & Fury Of Bobby Robinson (RPM, 2000)
Previous Disc of the day
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Earl Brutus - Larky
Last salvo of Ginsters Pasty-Warholism from Britpop ramraiders.
12:04 PM GMT 08/06/2011
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Loudon Wainwright - T-Shirt
An overlooked small wonder from an unpredictable career.
6:00 AM GMT 03/06/2011
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Landscape - From The Tea-rooms Of Mars… To The Hell-holes Of Uranus
Dry computer club Futurists, upon hitting implausible chart paydirt.
6:00 AM GMT 17/05/2011
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Causa Sui - Summer Sessions Vol 1-3
Epic Danish jams, for when the neighbours get you down.
6:00 AM GMT 12/05/2011
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I love Bobby Marchan, Huey Smith, and James Booker... one of Bobby's queerer, though very obscure solo singles is "(Ain't No Reason) For Girls To Be Lonely" in which he extolls the benefits of dressing up in wigs and false eyelashes. I was lucky enough to see him perform at Jazz Fest in New Orleans in 1997, but unfortunately he didn't do drag.
Posted by Larry-bob at 3:51 AM GMT 30/09/2008 Report Abuse
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