A week or so ago, there was a programme on BBC TWO titled Tom Jones’s 1950s: The Decade That Made Me. It featured the green, green grass of home man going home to Pontypridd and his roots in Wales. When Tom got tired talking we got short clips of Joan Bakewell or Michele Hanson telling us about their experience of the Fifties.
The way Tom told it, there was WWII which ended some ten years earlier, and most of the population were just grateful for not having the Germans drop bombs on them any more. But just when they thought it was safe to go back into the pubs and clubs, blimey, here comes rock ‘n’ roll – almost worse than the Germans. Tom played ‘Rock Around the Clock’ on an old record-player to show how different the music sounded.
There were clips from the rock films of the time – Elvis in Love Me Tender, Little Richard in The Girl Can’t Help It, lots of second-rate British singers on The Six-Five Special. Ah, memory. I can still recall being in the City Cinema in Derry while a posse of wee girls in the row behind me screamed their lungs out as Fats Domino hit the piano chords and sang “ You made (BUM BUM!) me cry(BUM BUM!]/When you said (BUM BUM!) goodbye/ Ain’t that a shaaaaame” etc.
Stirring stuff. So stirring , Tom confided, that he got his teenage girl-friend Melinda pregnant. Marriage swiftly followed and Tom told us how they were still together after 50-something years. He forgot to tell us about his boast that he’d had, um, relationships with over two hundred young women in one year.
But he did tell us how people told him he’d never be really big. OK, a great singer at the dances in the local Catholic hall and in the clubs, but hitting the big time internationally, going on to meet Elvis? Ah no, Tom. Cue a picture of Tom with Elvis.
The Welsh songbird emerged as a cheerful sort of Pontypridd lad, marveling at the changes in his old home town and the changes in his career. I actually missed much of what he was saying, because I was busy trying to figure out how his face could be smoother and younger in his early 70s than it did in his early 20s. Must be clean living.
But wouldn’t it have been interesting to have his wife Melinda’s view of the great man? She was alive when the programme was being made but she has died since. While she lived, though, did she blame the 1950s for making Tom the man he was? Or did she figure Tom should have taken responsibility for having done the Delilah thing with all those women? And what would she have had to say about the prostitution of a great blues voice by soaking it in two-hanky ballad after two-hanky ballad?
It’s terribly unfair that Tom’s contemporaries like myself and yourself, Jude, should be clapped-out old geezers, while he exudes perfect health, goodwill, kindliness, handsomeness.
Perhaps he had the right prescription?
Funny, all the same, Esteemed Blogmeister, how Mrs. Tom Jones didn’t sue for divorce, or indeed, D.I.V.O.R.C.E. which is a Curly Putman-penned song, as is ‘The Green, Green Grass of Home’.
Could be, of course that the D-word option night have been unnecessary as the lady is on record as having gone for faithless Tom on at least one occasion with all eyes blazing and handbag flying. Who, seemingly, just stood there and took what was coming to him.
Luckily, it was a handbag and not a knife she felt in her hand; otherwise it might have been another D-word situation, going forward: Delilah. And it might well have been Tom himself who’d have been no more.
All of which is reminiscent of the answer Muhammad Ali gave to the question as to who was his toughest ever opponent. Without hesitation, he replied:
-Sonji Roi, mah first wife.
Sadly, Mrs. Tom Jones passed over earlier this month, though Curly Putman is still alive and writing songs on his farm outside Nashville, Tn at the sprightly age of 85.
You mention Fats Domino, EB: now there’s a performer. During the 80s caught him in the National Boxing Stadium on the South Circular Road, one of a trio of great black performers: Ray Charles and Chuck Berry being the other two, each at different times, in the same venue.
In terms of performance, one would rate them as follows:
1. Fats Domino, a fabulous show, highlighted by the Fat Man, resplendent in a Joe Dolan-type white suit, bellying his grand piano across the stage while pounding out ‘Blueberry Hill’ and without dropping a note.
2. Chuck Berry, perfunctory.
3, Ray Charles, narky.
Yesterday, as it happens, the name of a tall, slim performer was on one’s mind even as a helicopter landed on the front lawn of Parasite Castle at Windsor. Where one was reminded of a quote from a poet whose 400th anniversary it is today:
-Uneasy lies the head that wears a headscarf.
The tall, slim performer in q. in that royal setting was not Barrack O’Bama but rather the aforementioned C. Berry. Now, there is real royalty: rock and roll royalty. Not unlike The Great Shakes aka the Birthday Boy, Chuck Berry could look at a commonplace piece of prose and morph it into poetry on the spot:
-They furnished off an apartment with a two room Roebuck sale
The Coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale
But when Pierre found work, the little money comin’ worked out well
‘C’est la vie’, say the old folks
It goes to show you never can tell.
One was reminded yesterday of King Chuck the Incomparable for the following reason: the companion item on the news was the great crowd which had gathered in Minnesota outside the home of the lately deceased Prince.
To say that this second home was rather less than regal, with its noticeable absence of battlements, buttresses and bastions, is not to exaggerate. In fact, it resembles nothing so much as an upmarket Sub-station such as might lie within the remit of the ESB.
Goethe, who is revered among the German-language people, much in the same way as Shakespeare is among the English-language folk ( one can only speculate on just how conflicted Hausfrau Saxe Coburg Gotha must be between both writers !) once opined:
-Architecture is frozen music.
Prima face evidence would suggest that while the adjective is definitely present in the house of the late Prince there is an equally definite absence of both nouns.
Luckily, for planet music, Chuck Berry at the right old sprightly age of (gulp) 89 can still be caught shaking his storied booty at the legendary music venue in his native St. Louis, the Blueberry Hill.
Other octogenarian members of the Genuinery still on the road with their great wheels of fire still turning are Willie Nelson (82) and Jerry Lee Lewis (80).
Come to think of it, might not at all be a retrograde step on the part of the National Boxing Stadium if they dispensed with the likes of the Prince of Wince, Robed Roy McGregor and concentrated on the Octogenarians rather than the Octagon.
Long distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee