The Very Best of Jackie Wilson [Rhino, 1995]I don't begrudge Wilson his three-CD box. Excess is the essence of the man; no point liking him if you can't abide a bit of schlock. What's that you say? Can't hear you with the band blaring. All right, a lot of schlock. Musically, the most transitional of the early masters was the creature of Dick Jacobs, whose orchestral overkill make the guys who buried Bobby Bland and Joe Turner in brass sound like acolytes of Louis Jordan. From "Lonely Teardrops" to "Baby Workout," Jacobs's rockers are suitably--i.e., supernaturally--sharp. But he felt more at home beefing up Saint-Saens, Tchaikovsky, and Pagliacci, and Mr. Excitement felt honored by the company. Raw and wild though Wilson could be, his spectacular chops sold him on a nightclub circuit that catered to big-band fans. So if you actually _can't_ abide a lot of schlock, stick to this rocking condensation and learn why "Danny Boy" is a folk song. A
>>130923518music critics are so fucking useless
>While performing at Dick Clark's Old Time Rock and Roll Revue in Atlantic City on September 19, 1975, Wilson collapsed onstage of a massive stroke. He was in the habit of swallowing sodium capsules with a large quantity of water prior to performances so he would sweat profusely. "The ladies love it," he told his friend Elvis Presley. Audiences cheered at first as they thought Wilson's collapse was part of the performance. He was left an invalid, unable to speak or care for himself, and spent the remaining nine years of his life under round-the-clock nursing care until his death in 1984 at the age of 49.[9]
>>130923540Yeah Wilson was an absolute retard. There are a lot of black singers who died in really cartoony ways (>Bessie Smith getting her arm sliced off in a car accident and bleeding to death)
>>130923518Oh boy, Dick Jacobs. That guy, man, that guy...
i don't really like his original of "Higher and Higher" and feel it has better covers
>>130923563Didn't SJWs claim she died because it was in Mississippi and they didn't take her to the nearest hospital because it was a white-only one?
Yeah...
>>130923796>>130923694so i take it he was some god of housewife pop schlock?
>>130923728they would claim that, wouldn't they. and i agree that Jackie Wilson is something of an acquired taste
>>130923837kind of like Vic Schoen. he was a respectable big band arranger at one time but his postwar stuff was a disgrace.
>>130923518Wilson was like Elvis and Ray Charles, a guy who would try almost anything and was not content being a one-sound artist. His last years before he turned into a potato were bad ones marred by declining popularity and feuding with his label.
>Billy Ward and His Dominoes (Wilson's first group) did three recording sessions in 1954, but the results were released on the parent label of King Records instead of its Federal offshoot. This was thought to be the result of their cover of Tony Bennett's "Rags to Riches" and since the group was leaning towards pop, King was a more suitable place for it since they were a jack-of-all-trades label while Federal specialized in R&B. Unfortunately, the Dominoes had no charting hits in '54 which left Billy Ward disillusioned and ready to move to a different label.
>That August, the Dominoes signed with Jubilee Records and they conducted a recording session a month later. Wilson sang lead on "Take Me Back To Heaven" and "Stop!...You're Sending Me." However, the group quickly got a phone call from Federal reminding them that they were owed 12 sides before they could be released from their contract. Ward had to go back to record those and the group didn't return to Jubilee. The Dominoes did three recording sessions at Federal over the winter and spring of '55. Despite being contractual obligations, they did not phone them in and Wilson sang on four sides.
>Billy Ward felt their lack of recent success was failure by Federal to promote or support them. The group opened a two year Vegas residency on February 4, 1955 and were being paid $5,000 a show (although Jackie Wilson only got $90 out of that). They stayed in trailers as Las Vegas was then still racially segregated. Elvis Presley watched one of their performances and told Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis about the show during a visit to a Memphis studio in December 1956.>The Dominoes next signed with major label Decca on a pop records contract. It has been suggested that they wanted to emulate the Platters as Billy Ward felt they'd make more money doing pop, but in any case the result as expected was more soft and orchestrated. Wilson sang on six songs. He left the Dominoes and went back home to Detroit, where he put together his solo career. Decca signed Wilson as a solo act as part of a package deal to get Lavern Baker, and it was during this period that Wilson would achieve his greatest chart success.
>Since Decca did not feel that a black R&B performer was a proper fit for the main label, they moved him to their long dormant subsidiary Brunswick and assigned Dick Jacobs to arrange his hits; and this partnership would last almost a decade.
>>130924124that's interesting considering guys like Chuck Berry were already big news by this time
>>130924141Decca only had two rock artists then, Bill Haley and Buddy Holly. They used to have a first-rate roster of black artists back in the 40s performing the styles of the day like vocal groups, jazz, standards, etc but they seem to have lost the plot with postwar black pop. The only R&B act they had was Louis Jordan but he left in '54.
>>130924196ok well i'm not that familiar with Decca/Coral/Brunswick, so...
>>130923518The details around Wilson's life are not particularly clear because he never really gave a lengthy sit-down interview. He gave various short interviews with magazines over the years but only one extant radio interview, from 1974, exists though he exaggerated some stories such as being shot by a jealous mistress. People such as Dick Jacobs who worked with him also provided some recollections. It's also not entirely clear what his connections with Nat Tarnopol and Brunswick were (his being the sole artist on that label).
>>130924257Decca was your typical major label of the 50s meaning a lot of housewife pop (this stuff tended to be on Coral than the main label) and more uptown material for the yuppie/lounge crowd, all with big band brass or strings, and occasional token rock signings just to get some of that money. They weren't as braindead as Mitch Miller/CBS when it came to rock-and-roll, but they were still a very conservative label run by people rooted in standards kind of music. Also country, their country division was their biggest profit-maker during this era.
>>130924361i have to say if you read any 50s musician or whatever's interviews they always come off as infinitely more humble and modest than 90% of boomer rockers where everything was unimaginably pretentious. the ego that guys like CSN, Zappa, Roger Waters etc had was awesome. Guy Mitchell or whatever never claimed his music could change the world, bring about world peace, end the arms race, end world hunger, etc.
>>130924303he did say how music saved him from living on the streets of Detroit since like Chuck Berry he had a youthful stint in prison (although unlike Chuck he was at least smart enough to not end up back in prison once he'd made it). perhaps without music he'd just end up a minor street thug/underworld figure in the Motor City selling smack for a living or running an illegal gambling den.
>>130924361Bob Thiele was the lesser Mitch Miller and equally responsible for stuff like >>130923694
>>130923694My understanding is that Alan Freed lied and didn't actually co-author that song like he claimed, it was solely Fuqua.
>>130923518>Grrr, this is the worst thing I've ever heard what a bunch of overblown schlock. A
>>130923518Wilson raped Patti LaBelle supposedly.
>>130924141I've never grasped exactly how popular Chuck was. Even if his stock dwindled after the British Invasion he must've made a mint on songwriting royalties, since every fucking band in the known universe has cut at least two CB covers. On the other hand he feels exactly like the type of guy to sign a horrendous publishing deal for some quick cash.
>>130925594Chuck had business ventures like nightclubs and of course all the covers royalties he collected, so he didn't have to worry about money. Still didn't stop him from getting yet another prison sentence in the early 80s when he was busted for tax evasion.
i feel confident that Buddy Holly would have fallen off when the Beatles came like most of his peers. the era of basic three chord rock was ending and none of those guys had it in to go in the direction rock was going.
>>130925514Why is he like this?
>>130925934Roy Orbison was as big as he could possibly be when the British Invasion began and no other male vocalist in rock could sing like him, but he was also knocked from his perch in two years.
>>130925934"It Doesn’t Matter Anymore" and "True Love Ways" are a bit MOR-ish and have strings. AFAIK Dick Jacobs arranged those. Not the best omen for what was to come.
>>130925993>"It Doesn’t Matter Anymore" and "True Love Ways" are a bit MOR-ish and have strings. AFAIK Dick Jacobs arranged those. Not the best omen for what was to come.that was the normal practice for the big record labels at the time. they grudgingly tolerated rock-and-roll as a way to extract coin from teenagers but encouraged the performers to mature out of it and become Tony Bennett or something. it worked with Bobby Darin but only because he really wanted to be Tony Bennett all along. Most of the rest couldn't pull it off.
>>130925934tbqh the real change came in '67 and prior to that rock during 64-66 was still pretty simplistic three chord stuff not out of reach for any of the 50s guys. and anyway a lot of them matured into country music.
>>130925908The Beatles covered Roll Over Beethoven on their first LP, a huge US and UK seller, and he profited handsomely from that.
>>130925934Holly's records were big sellers almost right up to the British invasion, a couple years after his death. However I don't think he'd have grown his hair out long and taken acid, he'd move into country in the late 60s. Perhaps he'd be like Cash or Nelson and continue to make country/roots rock masterpieces into his old age. He wouldn't be able to adapt to rock as it was evolving though.
>>130926203lol if you think Buddy wouldn't end up exactly like Orbison, the Everly Brothers, Connie Francis, Little Richard, etc when the flower power era started. he might still make good albums but nobody would care and he wouldn't get any record label promotion.
>>130926283Music was really generation-segregated back then in a way it isn't now. Back then being 14 and listening to anyone over 30 was nearly sacrilege.
>>130925908btw Carl Perkins almost went bankrupt at one point and was bailed out by the Beatles covering his songs. he'd never been told they covered them and one day he finds a check for $75,000 in his mailbox. he later became friends with George Harrison.
>>130926203had BH lived he would have been pressured by Decca to come up with a hit during 1959. his '58 releases didn't do that well and his wife was due to have a baby soon. what then? he probably would do what he needed to do to sell records.
>>130926468Holly could write so he probably had a better chance than acts like >>130923694 who depended on the graces of songwriters that eventually moved on to newer, fresher performers.
>>130926491being writers didn't help the Everlys, Berry, Little Richard, Orbison, etc in the late 60s
>>130926468the difference is that later on in the 70s people had hits by covering Buddy Holly but not eg. Dion or Neil Sedaka songs. the unfortunate thing is that Dion and Sedaka's songs were very of their time and did not transcend it. nobody had hit covers of "A Teenager In Love" in the 70s the way Linda Ronstadt did with Berry and Holly songs.
>>130925934Most of the 50s rock-and-rollers were from the South and their roots were always in blues and country not any of the influences that led into psychedelic rock or prog or whatever. The South in general didn't produce a whole lot of talent in the 60s outside country and the whole rootsy Southern kind of vibe was not necessarily cool then (things would be different in the 70s when being earthy was "in").
>>130926602his fellow Texan Jerry Fuller, before his demise, expressed his distaste for the emerging psychedelic scene so i doubt Holly would be any different
>>130926618that's true. none of the surviving 50s rock guys went hippie and there's no reason to suppose Holly would have either. Holly's later recordings as lush and as pretty as they are seemed to have been mostly passed by. The whole UK beat era phenomenon seemed to repudiate that whole shift towards a more soft chick-friendly form of rock-and-roll with orchestral backing in 59-61. it was a return to straight-up hard rock with no frills.
>>130926602Southern music goes through phases of being cool and not cool, it wasn't especially cool in the 80s but did become cool again in the 90s.
>thread about Jackie Wilson wanders off into a Buddy Holly discussion
>>130926650he might have gone outlaw like his buddy Waylon, the outlaw country scene was kind of the South's version of the counterculture. they had their own way of doing that stuff.
>>130925908Must've sucked to be an influential artist in the days before the pop music business truly solidified and learned how to handle careers for the long haul
>>130927206not at all. lots of pre-rock people like Ellington, Armstrong, Fitzgerald, and Sinatra had multi-decade careers. rock was in the beginning a teenager fad so the idea that you had to grow out of it into more Sinatra-like music was very much present in the 50s-early 60s.
>>130927265Yeah but i meant those early rockers. Like no non-jazz album made before 1966 is getting a "super deluxe edition" naamsayin, it's all so slapdash
