| November 8th, 2004 06:02 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Jimmy Norman's roots revival
Astounding return for desperate and nearly forgotten musician
GREG QUILL
ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNIST
NEW YORK "Few years back ... don't know how long ago ... I was finding watches everywhere I went," recalls veteran American R&B singer and composer Jimmy Norman. "On the sidewalk, in parks, in the back of taxis, in the subway ... if I looked around, I'd find a watch.
"And it started to get to me. I thought someone was trying to send a message ... time was catching up with me."
His reading seemed prophetic. This was the man credited with co-writing the R&B standard "Time Is On My Side," subsequently recorded by dozens of artists including the Rolling Stones, for which Norman has never received a dime, he says, thanks to legal squabbles. But just a couple years ago it looked as if he was indeed out of time.
A pair of heart attacks had finished his 30-year career working the chitlin circuit and retro rooms in the most legitimate version of the Coasters. (Several groups tour under the name of the 1950s vocal act who sang "Charlie Brown," "Yakety Yak" and others.)
"I came in in 1969 to produce the band, and stayed on as a member ... but 10 years ago I could barely breathe, I was down to about 20 per cent of my lung capacity, and it was a tough life, touring constantly, singing the same 10 songs every night," says Norman on the eve of an extraordinary comeback.
On Monday night Jimmy Norman stepped back into the present tense into real time, his time with a short show at Au Bar on 41st St. The concert celebrated the North American release of his first album in more than 20 years, the CD Little Pieces, a group of luminous and contemporary-sounding original folk/soul R&B songs. The CD, distributed on Judy Collins's Wildflower Records label, is what Norman calls "swamp funk;" it is being described by critics as a roots classic.
"Finding this recording is like stumbling on an undiscovered gem, full of history, depth and beauty," Collins tells me Monday night.
The songs, retrieved and pieced back together from notebooks and cassette tapes left in garbage bags, are both a testament to Norman's childhood in Nashville where he says he grew up listening to both Grand Ole Opry and "everything from the blues to Sam Cooke to Billy Eckstine" and evidence of a remarkable gift from New York musicians.
"I've never had an album party before," says Norman, grinning as he tucks into a huge pile of seafood linguine on the patio of an elegant Italian eatery on uptown Broadway. "In New York, whenever you ask a musician to play something, the next question is, `How much does it pay?' No one asked that question from the time Kerryn and I started on this."
Kerryn Tolhurst is the expatriate Australian guitarist and songwriter who produced Little Pieces. (Full disclosure: Tolhurst and this reporter toiled together in the 1970s Australian roots rock band Country Radio; we also put out a CD last year.)
Tolhurst used to scour Melbourne record stores in the 1960s for music like Norman's, looking for blues, country and R&B licks to copy. Norman's notebooks were akin to buried treasure.
"These were songs that had been frozen in time from the 1960s and '70s," Tolhurst says. "They had been put aside for 40 years, but when Jimmy started playing them on his old piano, you could hear all his influences Muscle Shoals, Stax, Joe Tex. But to give them that sound would have been a mistake, a retro project with no contemporary relevance.
"We had no money, no studio, no record company backing ... only the trust of the handful of musicians who knew him and admired him. But how could I not do it?"
Norman smokes only once or twice a day now against his doctor's orders, of course and, at 67, he walks cautiously with the help of a cane. Still, he's in considerably better shape, he says, than he was in 2000, when he lay helpless on the sofa in his tiny Manhattan apartment for hours on end, wondering whether he could pay his rent, or afford the medical care he needed.
His circumstances came to the attention of the New York Jazz Foundation, a charity that provides assistance to ailing musicians. On the foundation's behalf he now regales students and hospital patients with stories of his colourful past. For example, he mentored Bob Marley when the young Jamaican arrived in New York in the 1970s determined to become the next James Brown.
"We hung out, wrote a lot of songs together," says Norman. "The songs with Bob were okay, but his sense of time was just a hair behind mine. I even went back to Kingston with him for a while, and he taught me the rudiments of rock-steady, which became reggae."
Norman got close to Jimi Hendrix during the guitarist's tenure with bluesman King Curtis in the late 1960s.
"Jimi used to play his own stuff down in the Village when he was in New York, but no one really paid it much mind. I was with him on his last night here. `I'm going to England tomorrow,' he said. `People here don't understand my stuff.' It was a sad time for him. But the next time he was in New York he was in a limo, and there were hundreds of people climbing all over it and screaming his name."
Thirty years on, Jimmy Norman, in his quiet, unassuming way, drew the attention of the Monday night jam crew at Penang, a midtown Manhattan Malaysian restaurant where the cream of New York's musicians like Tolhurst, under the directorship of well known pianist/singer Johnny Rosch, gather to unwind and challenge each other to largely unseen feats of musical excellence. Usually Norman sat at the bar, and occasionally stepped up to the microphone "for a song or two."
Tolhurst became fascinated by Norman's songs. He started building the album "back to front, recording the vocals first, because I had no idea how long Jimmy's voice would hold out."
Over the next year Tolhurst added his dobro and guitar parts, and bringing in New York notables (including bassist Paul Ossola, drummer Tony Beard and Rosch on keyboards, who performed onstage on Monday) one at a time to his home studio in Brooklyn to add subtle Southern and urban textures.
On Monday night, Norman's set ended with a slow and soulful rendition of "Time Is On My Side," and with his hands held high, he stepped off stage and into the loving embrace of an admiring crowd. On Nov. 8 he'll sing it again, this time at Carnegie Hall, with the New York Pops Orchestra.
"This whole experience has saved my life," Norman says later, after he was moved to tears during his performance. "I do feel blessed. My motto has always been: `Hope for the best, expect the worst, and take it as it comes.'
"But I never thought I'd have another chance, not like this."
Additional articles by Greg Quill
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| November 8th, 2004 01:09 PM |
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| jb |
Where's Corgi? |
| November 8th, 2004 03:22 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
How come Mick and Keith won't give the poor soul any money for that song????? But I suppose Klein "owns" that one. Man, music can sure be a dirty business. |
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