The excellent UK website Rock's Backpages recently posted this story of mine published in the NME in 1986, based on an interview with the great Screamin' Jay Hawkins (of I Put a Spell on You fame) at his Bondi beachfront hotel. (Most of the site's huge archive of popular music writing is behind a paywall, though some material is free).
I'm grateful to website founder Barney Hoskyns and his team for reviving the piece. I lost my print copy years ago - stored inside the sleeve of my vinyl copy of Hawkins's Greatest Hits that was borrowed and never returned. Of the 100s of features and reviews I wrote for the British rock press in the 1980s, this is the one of which I'm most proud - for reasons I hope will become apparent.
But then, in Hawkins, who went on to appear as the hotel receptionist in Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, I had a gift of a subject. With interview material as colourfully hilarious as this, the writing was an absolute pleasure.
The delight Hawkins took in belittling Nick Cave ("I'm looking to drive the great Nick Cave CRAZY!") after finding the Australian had top billing on the tour they were sharing certainly puts into context Cave's later claim to have had contempt at the time for Hawkins as an artist.
In the ABC documentary on the making of Cave's Murder Ballads album, Cave claims he and the Bad Seeds were unhappy to find they were sharing the bill with a figure they considered but a cheesy vaudeville artist. The piece below is a reminder some history was busily being rewritten, since at the time of the tour Cave had been singing Hawkins's I Put a Spell on You on stage. Performing the most famous song of an artist he had no time for - in what universe does that even begin to make any sense?
Screamin' Jay Hawkins: The Man Who Ate Nick Cave
THE MAN IS just about getting into his story-telling stride when the maid, committing the gravest error of her previously uneventful career, sticks her key in the lock, swings the door open and enters the hotel bedroom uninvited.
"NO, MAAAM!!!! And Pleeeeeeeeeeaaaaaase, maam, pur-leeaase in the name of The Dear Lord In Heaven Aburve, I coulda bin standin' here nekkid. KNOCK on the door!"
Slightly bemused, the woman objects. "You were speaking too loud, I thought you were the TV."
The man is not looking pleased. The man is becoming angry. The man is furious...
"*@*@*@*%*+1/3???&!&I&V8****!!!!"
Sweet Screamin' Jesus! Who'd be a housemaid for a living?
TO ENTER the realm of one Jalacey Hawkins Esquire is to mix with the very same demons who were present at the birth of rock'n'roll itself. This man – Screamin' Jay Hawkins, to give him his full and honourable title – possesses a voice that is Beyond Thunderdome, beyond Sound itself.
When the mouth of this mighty figure opens, the walls of the universe begin to shake, rattle and roll. The owner of a set of stentorian pipes that seem tapped into the earth's very core, Screamin' Jay is the man who put his signature on the whackball blues classic 'I Put A Spell On You' over two decades ago and instantly entered the annals of the legendary. Believe this, kiddy cats: Screamin' Jay is the Grandfather Of Groove, the Guru Of Voodoo, and if that ain't your hoodoo, prepare to DIE.
But this isn't yet another crusty old-timer, dug up from history so that a few past-it hacks can pay their respects. Right now SJH is in the middle of a well-deserved revival.
The person to thank is Jim Jarmusch, formerly a member of the most unfairly neglected New York group of the'80s, the Del-Byzanteens, and now better known as the director of the widely-acclaimed cult movie Stranger Than Paradise. One of the delights of this wryly observed film is the attempt of an East European emigree to turn on her spectacularly disinterested US relative to the sound of "Screamin' Jay 'awkins", inadvertently turning on a new audience in the process.
Has Hawkins seen the movie, I enquire innocently?
"Twelve times," comes the reply, without a microsecond of hesitation. The soundtrack, he reckons, got his music across "to the young kids who weren't even a gleam in their Daddy's eye when I started all those years ago, they weren't even a smile on a man's face when he knows he's gonna get involved in horizontal recreation."
"I look at Nick Cave the same way," he says, referring to the man he's recently supported on a tour of Australia. "This man should have payed his dues to be on the same show as me. He wasn't even born when I was paying dues. And this is why I said I'm gonna make him suffer."
Sat here in the Bondi Continental, Screamin' Jay Hawkins isn't just doing an interview, he's conducting a performance, and having the time of his life in the process. The idea of pairing Hawkins and Cave came from a local promoter after the young whippersnapper had begun to include a version of 'Spell' in his stage act. Trouble is, Hawkins says, his agent didn't tell him anything about this Cave character. Imagine arriving in a new country expecting to top the bill and finding your name in small print beneath some upstart you've never heard of. Why, the insult.
Very soon it becomes obvious that the only person to feel sorry for was Cave.
"Yes, I've had the unfortunate pleasure of meeting Nick Cave," intones Jay, with all the mischief his gruff Howlin' Wolf voice can muster. "Now, if it sounds like I dislike the man, let me make it clear to you and to all who hear my voice. I do NOT dislike Nick Cave. I have no bones to pick with the man. I RESENT youngsters, barely in the business long enough to get their own fingers dry or to develop any kind of knowledge of showbusiness, being put before me in the headline position in the show. BUT, as I said, it's a new day, it's a young world, it's an atomic age...Jay Hawkins is an olllldddd table, been around for YEARS."
Their first meeting is recalled by Jay, warming to the theme; "I rolled the car window down and I said, HEY, NICK!!!!" A titanic bark fills the air.
"I said, C'MERE... C'MERE!!!! and he came over to the car. And I said, I JUST WANNA GET A GOOOOOOD LOOK AT THE MAN I HAVE TO WORK WITH FOR THE NEXT COUPLE OF MONTHS. And he said in his accent, part-Australian, British or whatever he is, 'Ah, wha, who, uhh, duurrr, who are you, wha, durr, ugh?'
"I said, what other black man would you be working with for the next month?" A perfect impersonation of an inarticulate, wallyish voice rolls from Jay's wickedly satirical tongue: 'Oh! You must be...I shoulda known, Screamin' Jay, oh yeah!"
Looking at this commanding presence, shoulders as big as his voice, it's hard to believe that any body could fail to recognise that this is a personage of impeccable pedigree.
Atop eyes that could hypnotise a frog balances the kind of coif that Teddy Boys would kill for. It's kind of shiny and wet-looking, stacked up like an oil slick breaking in waves over a stony beach. Down below. Jay wears a bootlace tie, knotted at the neck with a brooch made from a scorpion in perspex ("My wife gave me this instead of a wedding ring," he later confides. "If she caught me without this thing on, she'd kill me"). Somewhere between this lot lies a most dapper pencil moustache, and it's moving rapidly up and down.
"I was given a tape cassette, which I played of Nick Cave. I HEARD a man trying to sound like Muddy Waters. I said, I'm going to have to teach this little youngster a lesson. A lesson in showbusiness. The lesson is. You don't put youth against experience, it just don't work.
One night Cave was spotted peering down from a catwalk into the hordes that Hawkins has managed to whip up into an orgy of maniacal pleasure. Jay transcended the mundanity of his rock'n'roll pick-up band by employing a combination of rip-roaring voice, white Cab Calloway suit, Henry the skull on a stick, the zaniest personality this side of Mars and a general mastery of vaudevillian trickery. Cave looked troubled. The ovation Jay received was so loud, it was painful to the ear-drums.
HAWKINS STANDS loosely among company that includes Calloway and Louis Jordan – he has performed with both – and the great master of Vouterounie, Slim Gaillard. These are the loose marbles of the black music tradition (Sun Ra, beneath that placid exterior, probably shares their goofy sense of humour too), the terminally flipped lids of jazz and the big band era.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929, Jalacey Hawkins shares a similar background. A pianist and former saxophonist, he's played with the likes of James Moody, Lionel Hampton, Earl Bostic, Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, Milt Buckner and Nat King Cole. Like Louis Jordan – who's widely credited for inventing the backbeat (though Hawkins claims it was due to Alan Freed) – he's one of the progenitors or rock'n'roll, one of the people who stirred up the music and made it happen before whitey put up a young hillbilly called Elvis to front the show.
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What made Screamin' Jay different – apart from a voice that owed something to Big Joe Turner, only more akin to the Red Sea parting in stereo – was his gimmick: the macabre. If the idea of climbing out of coffins, letting off smoke bombs and setting up joke-shop props on stage now appears mildly old-hat, that's because it's been done to death by people who've ripped off Hawkins' act. Jay reels off names like a shopping list: David Bowie (?), Rod Stewart, Alice Cooper, Nick Cave, Funkadelic, the Isley Brothers, the appalling Screaming Lord Sutch...
"If it wasn't the coffin they stole, it was the smoke. Everybody has stolen part of me one way or another. Kiss stole the make-up I used to use, when I used to come on stage dressed as an African with a bone through my nose. I feel MARVELLOUS. It's a COMPLIMENT. What they're doin', they're remindin' people about Screamin 'Jay Hawkins. I HATE it, because I feel sorry for 'em – should I drop dead, they ain't got nobody to do their thinkin'."
What prevents Jay from being just some ham my vaudevillian with a good croak, it has to be said, is a stomach-tightening sense of humour. His stage craft is to start weird, stay weird and upset 'em.
"I do a lot of songs by other artists and I do 'em Screamin' Jay Hawkins' way," he confides. "I don't sing 'em – l DESTROY 'em."
The coffin is now relegated to his kitchen in LA, "which my wife don't like, 'cos it stops her from getting to the ice-box." The reason? The Drifters once decided to play a jolly jape and lock the coffin lid with our Jay inside. He managed to get out – with only three minutes of air in total – by rocking it off its stand onto the stage floor."I tried to kill 'em for that, I tried to commit murder," he says, recalling the five years of sleepless nights that followed. "MURDER!!! I wanted to break all the Ten Commandments, right on their head."
And the story about him punching out Atlantic supremo Ahmet Ertegun for trying to make him sound like Fats Domino during a recording session is only partly true, he says. It wasn't Ertegun, but producer Jerry Wexler who received the fury of the former 1947 Golden Gloves boxing champ. The record, Screaming Blues, was never released. Now, ain't life full of surprises?
IN PERSON he lives up to his legend as a man who doesn't expect contradiction. Given a hostile question, the high-energy showmanship could tilt over into a more forceful expression of intent, the interviewer often feels – with one eye on the medication Jay has to take during the conversation to ease his high blood pressure.
"There are some artists who don't realise their own worth and they'll go anywhere for peanuts," he thunders, hurling down another hefty declamation for the world to chew on. "And I despise them – the John Lee Hookers, the Champion Jack Duprees, in case you wanna know who I'm talking about. I'll name them, they're there. I call 'em Uncle Tom niggers. That's my word for 'em, y'understand. I like people like Tiny Tim."
Whaaa???
"I like people like Boy George, Boy George ain't got nooo talent whatsoever, but Boy George dares to be different. AND IF YOU DARE TO BE DIFFERENT IN SHOWBUSINESS, YOU CAN MAKE IT.
Liberace ain't that great a piano player, but he's flamboyant, and I like that. Singers are a dime a dozen; anybody can stand up in front of a microphone and sing their hit record, but if you don't have anything to offer after that, it's kind of a let-down."
Far be it for me to suggest that Hawkins' biographical anecdotes should be treated with caution, but let it be said that his life has been a tapestry embroidered with wild colours. His craziness, he says, comes from the days when his mother used to beat him with a strap. "I was screamin' to make sure everybody in the neighbourhood could hear it when I got beaten. Figured maybe they'd come and bust her for child cruelty. DON'T HIT ME, DON'T HIT ME! In the end I found out I was preparin' myself for Screamin' Jay Hawkins – unbeknowin' to myself."
An inquiry about his taste for sorcery yields the information that he was taken out of an orphanage at the age of 18 months and raised by spirit-worshipping Red Indians. Hence the books at his bedside: Curses, Hexes And Spells and Witchcraft, Past And Present.
"Those books are almost my bibles. I just about know every page by heart. I got about 50 or 60 other books even worse than that."
Coming from Cleveland, Ohio, turned out to be fortuitous for the young Jalacey Hawkins. It was also the town where Alan Freed came to notice, playing black R&B to white kids on a radio slot called The Moondog Rock'n'Roll Show. Freed got to know Hawkins and told him to bring in any record he made anytime; first he broke I Put A Spell On You in Cleveland, then did the same thing all over again when he moved his show to New York.
The association is commemorated in a brief appearance in the 1978 film American Hot Wax, a moment of glory that Jay isn't about to let us forget.
"What brief appearance?" he demands. "I had three brief appearances and I cut six." Okay, so the scenes were small ones, he admits, "but the money I received was FAAAAAN-TASTIC."
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| Arthur Brown |
Money is something he doesn't have to worry himself with too much these days. The man may act cuckoo, but when it comes to greenbacks he's strictly on the ball. Thanks to an astute business sense he manages to live very nicely off the royalties of the 28 cover versions of 'Spell' (including Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown, Nina Simone, Alice Cooper, Manfred Mann and Alan Price, he says, reciting the names as if they were grandchildren, "and Nick Cave... Heh heh! Heh, heh, heh!!!").
If this engrossing fruitcake has one major regret in life, it's that he never got into the world of opera, never became as great as Caruso or Mario Lanza.
"The records I make, I've got to make macabre, metaphysics, cult science. I'm like a prisoner in this world, 'cos no matter where I go, on my back or my front it says, I Put A Spell On You. It's not a curse, it pays the rent, it makes my wife happy. But I still have dreams of being able to do just one opera. I'd like to go to Carnegie Hall and do Figaro."
Roll over Beethoven and tell Rossini the news!
© Lynden Barber, 1986
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