the Bucket-of-Blood, the Upholstered Sewer, that's where you heard jazz

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Some guy came in for some innocent diversion, only he had about a grand on him. We had about six gals there, all sizes and all types. They worked on a percentage, so many drinks - phonies - drunk a night, so much earned. Well, this unlucky guy comes in. I strike up a tune and the big parade starts. First one gal sidles up to this fall guy; he doesn't give her a tumble. Then another, and still another. By this time he's downed several and is more amiable. Soon he latches on to one he likes. You know these girls could promise strange worlds with their eyes - it didn't pay to gaze too deeply. Well, he invites one of the gals to drink with him, and soon she's warming him up, and he buys me one - and then she invites one of her "girl friends" to join her - and pretty soon it's one big happy family, with our friend for the afternoon buying drinks for the house, about ten of us, and the drinks comin' so fast that nobody got a chance to really drink except, of course, our indiscreet friend. And somehow he passed out and had to be assisted upstairs. Just before my shift was up, he awoke - refreshed, but very short of dough. Very short. He was very outspoken about it, but no one knew where it had strayed, except - "Remember, you were buyin' everybody drinks - remember?" And so he started drinking again, and fell off one of the stools. This time the dishwasher helped him up, but somehow his hand got caught in this man's pocket. But the man with the grand (minus) wasn't that drunk. He put up a squawk. So there was nothing for Old Man McGovern to do but fire the dishwasher. So he got his hat and coat on and with his head hanging low, walked out - out, past the front window to the side door that also led back of the bar (partitioned off) to the kitchen, where I later saw him back at work, washing dishes.

Hot and loud and vulgar music, non-stop for five hours

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To the older generation rock 'n' roll came to mean Teds and violence. There was a riot in Berlin. Some countries banned rock 'n' roll altogether. In Singapore police were called in to stop British soldiers jiving in a cinema foyer after a midnight premiere of Rock Around The Clock. The Rev. Albert Carter of Nottingham denounced rock 'n' roll from his pulpit: 'The effect of rock 'n' roll on young people is to turn them into devil-worshippers; to stimulate self-expression through sex; to provoke lawlessness, impair nervous stability, and destroy the sanctity of marriage.' In Miami, Florida, the head of the local censorship board described rock 'n' roll dancing as 'nothing more than shoving boys and girls around' and 'vile gyrations'! Racialist Asa Carter of the North Alabama White Citizens' Council was scared too: 'Rock 'n' roll is a means of pulling down the white man to the level of the 'Negro'. It is part of a plot to undermine the morals of the youth of our nation. It is sexualistic, unmoralistic, and the best way to bring people of both races together.' Many older musicians hated rock 'n' roll: 'Viewed as a social phenomenon, the current craze for rock 'n' roll material is one of the most terrifying things ever to have happened to popular music ... Musically speaking of course, the whole thing is laughable ... Let us oppose it to the end.'

Big Mama chasing Little Richard with a butcher knife

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Boy, oh boy, the action started. Every conceivable avenue of pleasure was rampant at this center of activity, a drunken man being dragged home by a good Samaritan, a couple of painted lilies standing in the corner smoking and indulging in that favorite West Dallas pastime—profanity. I paused to hear the deluge of obscene language coming from everywhere. A boy, apparently twelve years of age, walked up and asked for a cigarette. I gave him one on his nerve. He took two out of the package. A nickel Victrola started playing “Baby Won’t You Please Come Home?” Couples dancing, couples drinking, some talking in tones that I could not understand. A woman walked up and asked me to put a nickel in the Victrola. In obedience to her command, I placed a nickel in the slot and she requested that I play “Baby Don’t You Stay All Night.” The earthworm wiggling that started with the music was below my dignity, so I moved on down the avenue of “good times.”

a Jew-boy from the Bronx converted to a mambo freak

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Talk about good-time urban corruption! The atmosphere was as thrilling as a James M. Cain novel. Swing was everywhere. And we made the scene, Patty and I, from the Reno Club, where John Hammond had scooped up Count Basie, to Dante’s Inferno, where bottomless topless waitresses held my full attention. Here in the Wild West, the juke joints and blues clubs were in full cry. At the Elks I heard Joe Turner, that magnificent shouter, then a singing bartender, whom twenty-five years later I wound up producing. The big bands were roaring: Bennie Moten’s, led by his accordion-playing brother Bus; Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy; Harlan Leonard and the Rockets. In our room at the Puritan Hotel — no lie — Patty and I left the window open so the late-night sounds from the street, the blistering jazz of wide-open Kansas City, would fuel the fire of our lovemaking.

a reaction against such lewd lyrics and a radio ban was imposed

pdfs of issues 65-72, with thanks to the original sharer

The second session was purely to record the song 'Shame, Shame, Shame' which had been selected for the forthcoming film 'Baby Doll', based on a screenplay by Tennesee Williams, starring Carroll Baker, Karl Malden and Eli Wallach. An exhilarating performance, probably the most rocking of all Smiley's records. The original studio version was exciting enough but Elia Kazan, the film's director, wasn't convinced that the first version was suitable for the scene in the film and it was re-cut in October. This longer, riotous version was used in the film but only appeared on the Columbia soundtrack album where the accompaniment was mis-credited to Ray Heindorf and the Warner Brothers Orchestra but, actually, the accompaniment was by Dave Bartholomew's band, as usual. Imperial expected 'Shame' to be a hit and it certainly should have been. I can only assume that the controversy over the film made deejays reluctant to play a record from it. The film was attacked by religious leaders as immoral, and failed to get a showing in parts of the Deep South, where there were threats to burn down any cinema that dared to show it. In Britain It was X -rated.

They used to call him 'Groundhog' because he had some dirty ways

pdfs of issues 21-30, with thanks to the original sharer 

a story involving saxophonist Evelyn Young. The band would often cross into Mexico to visit a favoured bordello when they had some time off in Houston, and on one occasion Evelyn, who liked to dress in men's clothing, insisted on joining the pilgrimage. The bordello was a rather informal affair: lacking actual rooms it had curtained-off areas each equipped with a bed for the patron. Evelyn. undetected as a woman by the girls, had made her selection along with the others and things were proceeding swimmingly for everyone until a scream and a lot of Spanish expletives came from Evelyn's 'room’ and her girl went tearing through the cubicles, breaking down the ropes and curtains and jumping over beds and bodies.

Jimmy Spruill is a very odd kind of a person, just has his own thing

pdfs of issues 11-20, with thanks to the original sharer

I had a deal I used to do when I played saxophone when we'd get into it, I'd get on my knees or I'd fall on my back and me and this other saxophone player would kick our heels up in the air, man. We were playing in one of these real dives, man, I mean the floor looked like it had mud on it all the time, but it was a packed house. We started puttin' on our act and the saxophone player and I walked out through the crowd and we fell down on the floor, so the guitar player decided to join us. He fell down on his knees, and then he fell down on his back, man, and he was playin  his guitar with his teeth and the piano player looked around and saw him on the floor and he stopped right in the middle of the song and he got on the microphone and he told him, 'Hey, get up offa that floor with my suit on!' That cracked the house up.

Crazy about titty ‘cause I sucked my mother’s titties so long

pdfs of issues 1-10, with thanks to the original sharer

Over the past ten years I’ve been doing home improvements, laying rugs, building furniture. I like to go down to Atlantic City, have a good time and come back. Who cares … I’m a cook at the Blarney Rock restaurant, that’s 267 Madison Avenue. We got corned beef, roast beef, daily specials … I was workin’ at the pop factory – Old Dutch pop factory that was on Homan and 13th somewhere around the ABC club … I had a good job at Ford motor factory – at that time I was bringing home $377 every two weeks. I was on one of the hardest jobs in the plant … Being good in this business doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to make it. That’s life …

the days when jazz and sex were practically inseparable

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“Any time I got broke, in a sporting house I would go,” said Morton, and the best houses clamored for his services. He even worked for Emma Johnson’s Circus House, where naked dances and sex acts were performed, close up, for paying customers—a distinctly New Orleans brand of theatrical entertainment. While the erotic acts progressed, Morton played music to match, both setting the tempo and following it. He usually worked from behind a screen, but to get around this impediment, Morton often cut a hole at eye level with a pocket knife, so he could ogle the action while his fingers stroked the keys. The ambience inspired a red-hot music, which became still more brilliant and rhythmically free at the Frenchman’s, an after-hours saloon nearby, at the corner of Bienville and Villere. After working the brothels or catching cornetist Joe Oliver at the Big 25 (at Franklin and Iberville) or hoisting a few at Billy Phillips’s place (around the corner from Tom Anderson’s), the New Orleans professors headed for the Frenchman’s. They started filtering in at about 4 A.M., ready to blow off steam after a long night’s work. This was where they gambled, drank, took turns at the piano, and tried to cut each other with their newest and flashiest keyboard repertoire. More than at the brothels, where the piano men played for money, here they played for each other. Music lovers, insomniacs, and late-night women swarmed the place, a hothouse for a newly emerging sound that still had no particular name, except for “New Orleans music.” In the front room, a bar and nearby piano kept spirits high, while a table in the back room accommodated food, drink, and cards. Morton went so far as to call this “the place where jazz originated,” the birth of an art form attended by whores dripping diamonds and delivered by bone-tired musicians stoking up with a toot of cocaine or winding down with a pinch of heroin.

loud, degenerate music promoting deviant behavior of all kinds

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Eventually, though, the new sound played by Bolden and his emulators became so popular—among working-class audiences both black and white—that it began to draw attention from some unwanted quarters as well. Police would show up at so-called cutting contests and begin “whipping heads” to restore order. And eventually the city’s reformers began to take notice, and they did not like what they heard. To their ears, the new sound was dangerous, an affront to their notions of respectability, restraint, temperance, and civil order. This new black music represented excess and licentiousness, a direct flouting of traditional moral values. Perhaps most perniciously, it promoted contact—much of it of the most scandalous type—across the color line, and in a context of social equality that was simply intolerable to most Southern whites. Even before Bolden began to make his mark, reformers had already started protesting about the detrimental effects of so-called coon music. In 1890, the Mascot had railed against a “nigger band” then playing in one of the city’s more notorious venues: “Here male and female, black and yellow, and even white, meet on terms of equality and abandon themselves to the extreme limit of obscenity and lasciviousness.” Soon the Daily Picayune was also taking up arms against the new sound, calling it “demoralizing and degrading”—something “wholly forced and unnatural.”

chitlins and incest and other southern contributions to culture

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“Dolls. Fucked-up dolls. They got a little blind doll. She come with a walking stick painted red on the bottom and a Seeing Eye puppy. Dig? Got a little boy doll tricked out in running shorts and running shoes, but he got braces on his legs. No, wait. Lemme finish. It’s more dolls. But you got the picture. Now, they got one doll you can buy that ain’t got nothing wrong with him, but you can buy this shit on the side to make him fucked up any way you want. You can buy a blind walking stick and put it in his hand or you can buy a little wheelchair and put him in it or braces for his legs or hearing aids. All kinda shit to fuck him up like you want him. Now, dig this. You oughta buy that little doll that ain’t got nothing wrong with him. The doll that ain’t got nothing wrong with him, see, that’s you. Then you can fix him up like you gone be if you keep on knocking yourself out. Blind? Wheelchair? Mouth won’t talk, legs won’t walk. Truly, one fucked-up boy. What do you think, man?”

“If you ain’t gonna shake it, why did you bring it?”

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Two or three pickup trucks parked at the street junction already have barbecue cooking up in the back, with smells of charcoal, hot sausage, and pork chops to drive you crazy. On a couple of vacant lots, there are little white tents also selling barbecue. And you can get beer, cold from the bin full of ice, to wash it down. The band plays “Hi Heel Sneakers,” “When My Dreamboat Comes Home,” “Blackbird Special,” “Iko Iko,” “Second Line,” “Food Stamp Blues,” and “Gimme My Money Back” — it has all the wildness and excitement I remember from the Olympia in the late eighties. The vibe from the crowd is sheer joy, the energy is as tangible as the electrical charge before a thunderstorm, and the mood is forward — to try and drop back down the line would be to defy the impetus. The barbecue vendors have kept pace with the parade, and so, incredibly, have the cold beer salesmen. Over on the neutral ground (what those outside New Orleans would call the “median”), a couple of operators are splitting cigars and adding herb to make “blunts.” Soon, the sweet smell of skunk weed, protected by the sheer density of the crowd, winds up the euphoria another couple of notches.