Review: Fats Domino - What A Party! (1961)

Tracks: 1) Did You Ever See A Dream Walking; 2) Rockin’ Bicycle; 3) Before I Grow Too Old; 4) Ain’t Gonna Do It; 5) Bad Luck And Trouble; 6) Hold Hands; 7) Trouble In Mind; 8) Coquette; 9) What A Party; 10) I Just Cry; 11) I’ve Been Calling; 12) Tell Me That You Love Me.

REVIEW

Actually, the party was not that great. More precisely, this was merely the title of a short and mediocre pop-rock tune tossed out by Domino and Bartholomew for the single market in September ’61 — and they probably felt it was mediocre deep down inside, so they sweetened it up with extra «party noises» all around (much like the Beach Boys would do for their own Party! four years later), to artificially raise the excitement level. Maybe it helped a bit — the single rose as high as #22 on the charts, not at all bad for Fats at the time — but the songwriting was quite openly lazy here, and letting some anonymous backing vocalists carry the chorus to its conclusion was a fairly corny move, too (even despite the ironic self-reference of "big fat piano man, he sho’ could play!"). You can still dance to it, and enjoy the usual New Orleanian spirit of care-free joviality and everything, but there’s not an ounce of originality or even a single chord change or vocal inflection you haven’t heard a hundred times before. And absolutely the same can be said about the B-side, ‘Rockin’ Bicycle’, a transparent attempt to repeat the inspiration of ‘I’m Ready’ that fails because you cannot really «repeat inspiration» — the whole thing feels tired, rather than exciting.

And it is absolutely not clear to me what in the world made Imperial Records think that the single deserved to become expanded into yet another 12-song LP — other than some weird desire to make Fats beat all his previous records by registering three LPs of previously unreleased material under his name over the course of just one year. Maybe Mr. Domino really wanted to assert his status as that of The Last Survivor of the First Generation of Rock’n’Roll — seeing as how most of his contemporaries were, indeed, either dead, indisposed, or under-productive. Unfortunately, being over-productive under such circumstances would produce an equally negative effect. Actually, What A Party! is the first Fats Domino LP for which I have been unable to locate even a single review ever written by a professional or amateur critic — and although this does not automatically mean that the album totally sucks, I’m afraid that in this case, the vow of silence is more or less justified, because this is certainly the most non-descript Fats LP up to that particular date.

Only one more song was produced during the recording session for that single, and it was ‘Did You Ever See A Dream Walking’, a slow, sentimental, and thoroughly generic shuffle that is impossible to actively dislike — imbued as it is with the gentle and adorable aspects of Fats’ personality — but barely possible to remember. Then, to pad out the album, Imperial had to dig into Fats’ outtakes from previous sessions, with six songs coming from March 1961, two from February 1960, and one (‘Coquette’) even going as far back as 1958, when it was a humble B-side to ‘Whole Lotta Loving’. Considering that none of these tunes had been seen fit for Let The Four Winds Blow, it would be fruitless to expect any forgotten masterpieces, and although the collection might sound fine and friendly if taken completely out of context, pretty much everything here is just inferior variations on superior earlier hits. Short, passable, instrumentally and vocally un-challenging songs that rehash former glories, with barely anything to cling on to in sight.

There are patches of lyrical cleverness every now and then, particularly in the poignant ‘Before I Grow Too Old’ (which had already been issued as a B-side in 1960): "I got to hurry up / Before I grow too old... Because I’m gonna do a lot of things I know is wrong / And I hope that I’m forgiven before I’m gone" cuts pretty deep for a Domino-Bartholomew tune, even if there is little hope that anybody might pay too much attention to the actual words of a Domino-Bartholomew tune. It is too bad that this confessional message is hidden within the depths of an otherwise completely forgettable arrangement, lacking the epic depth, length, and instrumental sweep of something like ‘Natural Born Lover’, for instance.

From slow and lumbering pop Fats moves on to equally slow and lumbering blues: his renditions of ‘Bad Luck And Trouble’ and ‘Trouble In Mind’ feel like they might have been recorded in 1949 rather than 1961, not to mention that they’re almost the same song in terms of lyrics, melodies, arrangements, tempos, and (lack of) energy. As we have already established with ‘Trouble Blues’ off the previous album, Fats developed a bit of a craving for slow 12-bar stuff in 1961 (as long as it’s got the word "trouble" in the title, everything goes), and while I’m sure he might have had his own reasons for feeling a bit more down than usual — either the trickle of royalties thinned out, or somebody shut down his favorite brand of donuts, I really have no idea — neither of these two blues songs do anything to correct the impression that Fats is simply incapable of conveying the classic blues feel. He does play some nice piano on ‘Trouble In Mind’, but it’s relaxing lounge piano that puts you into a soft, purring mood. It’s much easier to believe that "the sun will shine in his back door someday" in the future than that he is truly "blue" today.

The only song to slightly relieve the monotonousness of endless generic blues covers and rehashes of ‘Blueberry Hill’ and ‘I’m Ready’ is the aforementioned ‘Coquette’ from 1958, and that one only because high prominence is given by the song to vocals from The Velvetones, a long-forgotten girl vocal group from New Orleans whose role is to enhance the song’s level of sexiness by taking over a part of the bridge section. It’s a little confusing, though, because they sing the words "someday you’ll fall in love / as I fell in love with you" that are clearly meant to be sung by Fats himself, so it’s unclear why exactly for those few bars the spirit of Fats splits itself into the spirits of three lively New Orleanian girls before reassembling itself back to Fats. But whatever — anything to add a little freshness and surprise to the proceedings.

That said, if you love the Fats formula and want more of the Fats formula, What A Party! will be enough — in fact, it might even seem too short — to satisfy the stereotypical lover of the stereotypical Fats formula. It’s still much better than if Fats began drifting away into the world of sentimental orchestrated ballads, for instance, or, moving in the opposite direction, tried his luck in the trendy fields of surf-rock or acoustic folk. The best thing that can be said about the record is that, throughout (with the possible exception of those blues numbers), Fats continues to stay rigorously true to himself, like AC/DC in the late Eighties or some other of their less-popular periods. Certainly the same kind of thing could not be said of, say, Elvis Presley at the time.

• Only Solitaire reviews: Fats Domino