Tracks: 1) I Miss You So; 2) It Keeps Rainin’; 3) Ain’t That Just Like A Woman; 4) Once In A While; 5) I Hear You Knocking; 6) Isle Of Capri; 7) What A Price; 8) When I Was Young; 9) Fell In Love On Monday; 10) My Bleeding Heart; 11) Easter Parade; 12) I’ll Always Be In Love With You.
REVIEW
I wish I could say «well, at least there’s no annoying orchestration on this record any more», but the sad truth is that the dragonfly-winged violins on A Lot Of Dominos at least made that LP somehow stand out, not to mention those rare specific cases when they helped bring in extra magic to the Fats Domino sound (‘Natural Born Lover’). Alas, while canceling that approach might have given Fats’ first album for 1961 a respectable purist aura of «let’s get back to the roots», it also makes I Miss You into his first album since 1958 where nothing really stands out: twenty five minutes of pleasant, good-timey Fatsisms with hardly anything left to save up for a rainy day.
Although I lack the precise session details for this stuff, the recent LP re-release on the Jazz Messengers label states that the album "was assembled from a variety of sessions taped between 1958 and 1960"; however, none of those songs were released as singles in the 1958–60 period, meaning that, essentially, we are dealing here with a collection of outtakes and original rejects, and you should adjust your expectations accordingly. When taken off the album to be gradually released through the first half of 1961, the singles did chart — probably still riding the momentum of ‘Walkin’ To New Orleans’ and ‘My Girl Josephine’ — but not too highly, playing up to the tastes of Fats’ well-established fan base and nobody else. ‘What A Price’ was the first of those, a monotonous slow blues with lazy piano and languid horns, «cheered up» a bit by Fats’ melancholic tale of how his lady wrecked his life by making him stop gambling and "staying out all night" (it is probably implied that she still dumped him after making all those sacrifices, though). The song has all the formal trappings of Fats’ classic vibe — but absolutely nothing that would make it stand out even an inch, which, really, is all that is required of a truly classic Fats Domino number: stand out a tiny inch. It doesn’t, so it don’t get to be a true classic. The B-side was Louis Jordan’s ‘Aint’t That Just Like A Woman’, a classic of the misogynistic genre tried on for size by many, but never really improved over Jordan’s original from 1946. At least this one goes really fast and Fats gets to boogie.
‘Fell In Love On Monday’ (which had ‘Shu Rah’ from the previous album as its B-side) is the prototypical «slow and happy» Fats song, with a gospel choir backing the man to add a slightly churchy feel — and, of course, it does not work because the song itself hardly has any genuine spiritual depth to add anything to. Much better, and, perhaps, the closest thing to a classic on here, is ‘It Keeps Rainin’, an upbeat pop song whose vibe is generated by the interplay of a merry mariachi-style horn part with an incessant arpeggiated electric guitar lick, emulating the "it keeps rainin’ and rainin’" mood of the lyrics (funny enough, it merges with Fats’ minimalistic piano playing so perfectly that my ears almost mistook the guitar for the piano first time around!). Apparently, the song had plenty of potential, as it would be turned into a big hit thirty years later by Bitty McLean — with a version that would be fairly true to the original. Given that Bitty’s primary genre was reggae (he used to work together with UB40 for a while), this does bring to mind a slightly more Caribbean than New Orleanian vibe for the song — although in terms of sheer mood, that whole "cheer-me-up-with-a-sad-song" attitude is certainly one thing that New Orleans and Kingston have in common.
As for the LP-only numbers, the first and last thing to notice is how heavy the album is on covers of oldies. The title track itself is a modernized reinvention of the classic hit by The Cats And The Fiddle from about 1940, which would go on to become a favorite for all sorts of vocal jazz artists. The original is still worth revisiting, but Fats’ version is hardly so, and, in fact, its very selection as the title track for the new album brings out an unnecessary nostalgic vibe — with all these covers of Jimmy Henderson, Louis Jordan, Irving Berlin (‘Easter Parade’), and Jimmy Kennedy (‘Isle Of Capri’), it only makes Fats the latest in a series of African-American performers who, in the late Fifties and early Sixties, all started jumping on the grandma-what-great-songs-you-sang bandwagon. It’s a little sad, though hardly tragic; but while back in 1961 the effort to «modernize» all those classics may have had some novelty value, its lasting value was doomed from the beginning. There is nothing intrinsically good about converting all of them to the Fats Domino formula.
In short, the entire point of the album is perfectly summarized in its single most honestly written Domino-Bartholomew original, ‘When I Was Young’: "When I was young and in my prime / The girls used to hold me up all the time / But I’m gettin’ old every day / It’s a pity that now I ain’t gettin’ any!" (Fats kinda slurs that last line, but this is how it’s been enshrined in all digital lyrics collections). Even that song, though, was just a lyrical rewrite of the earlier ‘La La (I’m Gonna Tell You A Story)’, though, admittedly, a superior one.
From this point on, even if Fats would still have occasional hits that would stay with us (‘Red Sails In The Sunset’, etc.), any attempts at (convincingly) broadening his horizons would be abandoned. However, as I said, I Miss You is thoroughly forgettable, but not unpleasant — by staying firmly within his comfort zone, Fats is able to avoid corny embarrassments and failed experiments; and we do at least have to recognize the album’s worthiness in that it never bogs down in schmaltz territory, like so many did at the time. Even all those romantic oldies are done as merry boogie anthems, rather than sweet serenades for the ears of restrictive old ladies. So perhaps you could no longer count on Fats Domino to lead you any place you had not been before, but at least you could still count on him holding on to his bulky integrity.
Only Solitaire reviews: Fats Domino
His "bulky integrity", good one! Impressed me too, at one time, until I realised his musical wardrobe was a bit thin, a bit threadbare. I also mistook the arpeggio runs as being a secondary piano part, and thought it extremely innovative. Are you absolutely sure it's a guitar part? . . . And am I to understand that he recorded on a label linked to Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers??