Review: Fats Domino - Here Stands Fats Domino (1957)
Tracks: 1) Detroit City Blues; 2) Hide Away Blues; 3) She’s My Baby; 4) Brand New Baby; 5) Little Bee; 6) Every Night About This Time; 7) I’m Walkin’; 8) I’m In The Mood For Love; 9) Cheatin’; 10) You Can Pack Your Suitcase; 11) Hey! Fat Man; 12) I’ll Be Gone.
REVIEW
On February 23, 1957 Fats Domino released one of his best singles — maybe even the best if you count the quality of both the A- and the B-side. ‘I’m Walkin’, credited as usual to himself and Dave Bartholomew, shares all of Fats’ usual upbeat and nonchalant charisma, but throws one more ingredient into the mix: an insanely fast tempo, with Earl Palmer’s martial drums driving the song forward quite relentlessly and Herbert Hardesty’s rousing sax patterns clearly foreshadowing King Curtis’ classic yakety-sax style on the Coasters’ records. Behind this express train speed it is easy to completely miss the lyrics — which, as is common in Fats’ songs, talk about loneliness and empty hopes in the most cheerful and uplifting way possible: "I’m lonely as I can be / I’m waiting for your company / I’m hoping that you’ll come back to me" except the singer is sprinting so fast that even if she decides to change her mind and come back she’s gonna have to put on her jogging shorts first. Slow this thing down and it will become similar to a lazy Hank Williams-style country shuffle à la ‘Hey Good Lookin’; speed it up and you get a wholesome shot of R&B for the rest of the day. It actually even made the pop charts, introducing Fats to a whole new audience at a time when he really needed it, what with all the rock’n’roll competition making his music antiquated.
The B-side was no slouch, either: a fairly modern reinterpretation of the old standard ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’, driven by a loud pendulum-shaped bass line and waves of brass rather than Fats’ piano... and by «modern», I actually mean «replacing classic pre-war Hollywood crooning sentimentality with the down-to-earth feeling of the average citizen of New Orleans on a hot, humid, debilitating summer night», hammocks and mosquitoes included, pass the alligators. You gotta love good old Fats when he drawls out an "I’m in the mood for love..." with the intonation of somebody who’s actually in the mood for a hot dog — and then it gets you thinking about what it is that makes one’s feelings for a hot dog so fundamentally different from one’s feelings for another human being... see, such is the power of great reinterpretations of works of art.
Anyway, the single is perfect. What is not perfect is the decision of the Imperial label to put it right in the middle of Fats’ third LP — which is otherwise entirely comprised of his old singles and outtakes, dating from all the way back in 1949 (‘Detroit City Blues’, the original A-side to ‘Fat Man’) and up to about 1954. Essentially, this is an archival release which, for all purposes, should have been called There Stood Fats Domino, but since it did include his latest single, the producers could at least formally lay down a claim to some current relevance. It does feel weird, though, when the entire first side clearly shows old age, with muffled and muddy old production values, and then ‘I’m Walkin’ and ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’ come along loud, bright, sharp, and clear, only to have the needle dropped once again on ‘Cheatin’.
The best one probably could say in 1957 — or, for that matter, in 2020 — about those older tracks is how clear a picture they present of R&B’s progression from that time, if not in terms of melodic complexity, then certainly in terms of sharpness of sound and immediacy of effect on the listener. Compared to ‘Ain’t That A Shame’ or, in fact, ‘I’m Walkin’, something like ‘Detroit City Blues’ sounds limp, sluggish, and sleep-inducing, even if in 1949 it may have produced a different impression, and, to be honest, it gives us a better demonstration of Fats’ mastery of the piano than any of his actual hits. Against the slow tempo of the song, he does all sorts of trills, rolls, and glissandos which actually show him quite worthy of at least an Amos Milburn, if certainly well below Art Tatum; listen to his work on this song, on ‘Hide Away Blues’, or on the faster moving boogie of ‘She’s My Baby’, and it actually becomes curious how he would later all but abandon these blatant show-offs in favor of comparatively more simplistic pop hooks.
But then it’s really only that good for the first two or three songs: once you get used to Fats’ piano style, the relatively stiff and slow formula of the early R&B years begins to wear off quickly, with nearly identical pieces of 12-bar blues replacing each other with all the excitement of a parade of baby snails. Worse, the album ends on a couple of self-referencing reprises (‘Hey! Fat Man’, ‘I’ll Be Gone’) whose main attraction consists of a call-and-answer session between Fats and his backing band — and the punchline is always about being called «fat man», which I have nothing against if it’s fully consensual, but the joke gets boring fairly quickly, and besides, cheap vaudeville entertainment is something you’d think a guy like Fats was supposed to take us away from, not rub our noses in it.
In the end, most of this material should probably rest in the archives, sitting next to the shelf on which one lays down, for instance, the pre-‘Tutti Frutti’ era of Little Richard. You can always embrace a bit of revisionism, of course, but the truth is, Fats Domino is not very interesting when he does ‘Detroit City Blues’ because he did not invent this formula, he mastered it as an apprentice — old school R&B is always more exciting if you receive it firsthand from the likes of Big Joe Turner and Wynonie Harris. ‘I’m Walkin’, on the other hand, is 100% Fats, and this is why that single song completely trumps all of the man’s pre-1955 material.
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