It was when T-Bone smiled that we
felt the happiest. There we were, listening to him rattle a guitar at us and it
sounded so good you wanted to drink it neat. (We settled for bourbon.) He
cranked it down hard, then harder, then tight, then tighter. And then he smiled.
He smiled! He was having fun up there!
This was a revelation.
When T-Bone came out he looked huge.
When he started it SOUNDED huge. A producer knows what tight means. He knows you
pull everything as tight as you can get it, and then you get something like a
wrench and crank it tighter. And then you go get a big pipe and you slip the
wrench handle in the big pipe and you stand back and you gingerly crank it that
way and let Archimedes grind the sucker down tighter yet, until the wrench
handle bends. And then you pull really hard and snap off the handle and
everything is damn tight like a molecular bond, and I mean one of the ones in a
little bitty molecule like, say, water.
That was how tight T-Bone and his
band were.
When you listen to Louis, or you
listen to Ray Charles, or you listen to Lyle, and you hear them live (or
recorded onstage), what you hear sounds the way it sounds in part because it’s
so tight. The musicians have subordinated themselves to the process, to the
flow, to the machine and to the staff. Such leadership onstage makes everything
sound like it should. It allows the band to achieve that miracle, the
realization of the idea of the music, a frictionless delivery of the notion that
the music is meant to fulfill.
Tight is tough. Ray Charles was
famous for being a hard man to work for. My friend who was a music student had
an ugly story to tell about failing to satisfy the visiting Dizzy. James Brown
was said to be unthinkably tight, and you hear that music? I can believe it.
“Fun” and “tight” are infrequent associates.
So when T-Bone smiled it was a
revelation. I hope it wasn’t just stage business, and it sure didn’t look like
it. It looked like him rejoicing, and the playing from his boys sounded like it.
The upright bass in the back was a deep river, a rippling power flow that looks
placid until you see the tree trunk upended and spinning in it as it slides
toward the bridge piling. When they cut that river down front and personal in
the mix it sounded like Godzilla had given up tearing the roof off the House of
Blues and settled for rubbing its scaly back on the exterior stairwell. The
guitar was sharp, versatile and varied; the keyboards backed the message; the
drummer was too righteous to be confined.
But I am here to tell you – I am
here to tell you! – it was the whole thing that mattered. I was how it all
sounded together. “I got a love that’s seven times hotter than FIRE!” was the
first line I could understand, and the last I remember, and it was ALL hotter
than fire, primitive and primeval and original. Rock and roll has had almost
nothing original said in far too long. T-Bone had it to say, fabrics of bass and
keyboard smeared thick in traditional patterns over rhythm, and also blues.
Tight doesn’t even BEGIN to say it. Go on, smile.
