Ok ah, rhythm and blues was ah really created on the bandstand. A singer would come up, say I'm going to sing a blues in B flat. The simple changes so the rhythm section had their part. The only problem the horn parts. If you were quick enough or good enough you could come up with arrangement like that and we did. It was predominantly black music played in clubs and ah, it was later termed rhythm and blues when it went into the white market. Actually in all of the... the... the music that was created, white musicians used to hang around to find out what the next step was going to be. They would come to the black clubs to listen to the musicians and find out where they were going because it was new at that time.

And with us it was new every night.

Right.

They never knew what was going to come next until they heard it, from the rhythmic standpoint of rhythm and blues, the difference was from the rhythm where they were in the horns had the problem of harmonizing the two horns, you know one played a melody note then the other would have to find a note harmonically fit but from the rhythm, it was opposed... opposed to playing the straight like you would play jazz or Dixieland what made it ah, different from... they added the after beat, you know and... and ah ne... to do it to rhythm in triplets I suppose to just ta ta ta ta da bop bop... di di di di di.... that kind of thing and... and adding that after beat, that strong two and four is from the rhythm standpoint is what made that a little different because prior to that, the only time you ever heard that two and four played is ponderous was the out chorus is a big band when they were playing the out chorus and you'd get a lot of more of the de... two four to let you know, this is the last chorus, you better get it together. There's no more after this. Would be ponderous on that two and four where in... in rhythm and blues, rhythm would be... that went constant throughout the piece.

So when we get in toward the mid '50s and people started calling it rock and roll was it the same beat? Did the beat change between rhythm and blues and so-called rock and roll?

Well here again there was rhythm came into play. The... the notes didn't change very much for the... the melodic instruments ah from rhythm and blues to rock and roll. Where the rock and roll came in was the white beginning to change, adding their ah new things to it and it became rock and roll because the disc jockey in Chicago, he called it rock and roll as opposed to rhythm and blues because a lot of people list... wouldn't let their kids... white kids, listen to the... the black station that was playing the rhythm and blues, but they'd listen to them. They let them listen to the rock because this was something that had began being invented from that by the white population and the white musicians and because they were white musicians, then the parents would let the white kids listen to the radio and listen to those musics and that's the way it became rock and roll, but it all stemmed from that rhythm and blues stuff that ah had started here, which we made a little dirtier from what the older guys were playing. We just added a little more rhythm to it and... and ah made if funkier as I used to... used to always say. Supposed to have credited with first time using that in re... in respect to music, make it funky because um, funky was something we always used when something smelled bad so we was trying to relate to making music smell bad.

Contrary to like whites will say, he's in a funk. We didn't use it like that.

No.

When we say it's funky, it stunk.

When you would play on a rock and roll session, like a Little Richard session or later Fats Domino sessions, Red would you do anything differently when you're blowing horn than you would have done in the old days in a R and B session?

Not really I mean the thing is what we would do is to go into the studio, listen to the rhythm changes sometimes it varied from straight R and B to other little chords that were put in a little things and on the spot, we would try to come up with a concept that would fit. We'd try something one time and sometimes it would wake right off the bat, sometimes it didn't. We'd have to change it. It was hit and miss, but we had no idea when we first went into the studio, what we were going to play. We had no idea.

Let's talk about that in relation to the sessions that Dave ran on Fats, you know starting with They Call Me The Fat Man in 1949 and then into the early '50s, what do you think it was about Fats Dominos records that appealed so broadly at that time?

I'd like to say uncomplicated.

Totally.

Very....

Could you start again and use his name so we'll know who you're talking about?

Ok. Ah, with Fats Domino, I think his popularity ah, was in the fact that he was very uncomplicated, very straight ahead, no gimmicks or anything else and the beat, the beat just flowed along and you know, it wasn... wasn't a complicated thing at all.

And his material was something that you heard once and you could sing it right away, not maybe remember the lyrics, but you hummed the melody with... just stuck right with you because it was so simple. You could relate to it immediately even non-musicians could relate right away because it was that simple and uncomplicated and it was also, his sound if you will... as we were talking about it, his sound ah that he did was very rem... reminiscent of what you later heard ah Professor Longhair doing ah, and that all went way back to guys who... piano players in the... in the neighborhood bars like Bernell Santiago and... and ah what's the old guy that was on this documentary with Alan and ah...

Toots.

Toots Washington who was... who was the guy that actually Professor Longhair used to listen to all the time and copy playing in the Caledonia and ah it was Toots Washington that really was the forerunner as far back as I can remember and Bernell Santiago who played those ver... basic New Orleans feel like ah just plum caught a few notes on the piano and became fantastic pianist from doing just that.

Fat's records really crossed over and sold millions. Was he doing anything new?

No because I would say... I would say wh... what his records became so popular even among the ah, the white faction of bl... music listeners is because he was very easy to sing immediately right after and ah, and at the risk, I don't want to sound insulting, but at the ri... the fact that they were less musical in this particular idiom then it make it a lot easier for them to accept and to emulate because he was so simple.

What were those sessions like? Maybe you could just describe a little what it was like to go into a session with Dave and Fats in those days.

Oh ah, Dave was a very hard taskmaster. He wanted it his way and that's the way it would be and we had no problem with that. Ah I often say that it really used to rub me the wrong way because he used to have all the horns playing unison [hums] and I'd get so sick of those same things over and over, but it worked and he knew what he was doing. He... it worked, very simple, and to the point, you know what I mean, but that's the way it was. We'd go into the studio and ah, he says, this is what I want you to play and we'd play it like that and it worked. Another interesting thing, the first thing ah, They Call Me The Fat Man was a split session with Jewel King and she had the hit out of the split sect... session. They did Three Times Seven, she was the... the hit out of that, strange as it may seem and then after that you never heard anything about her again.

Well what happened in that instance, I may relate, is ah, when we first went on that tour with Fats, ah, it wasn't supposed to be Fats as the headliner, Jewel King's record sold more than the Fat Man Three Times Seven. Jewel King's husband was a band leader here and because she was the star of the package, she wanted her husband's band to go out Jack Scott, was the guitar player and he had a good band around town, but ah, when Lew Chudd said no, ah, it was because Dave was already on the contract to Imperial for his first record so then Dave was also had found Fats and found Jewel King and whatever other Imperial artists that... became from here, so naturally ah Lew wanted to use Dave's band on this tour, which was a flop incidentally, this particular tour but ah, Jewel King wouldn't go and that was her big mistake. You never heard anything about her since and she had the bigger record of the two.

What was Fats like in the studio? Was he a perfectionist?

Very shy man and still is to a great degree, very shy withdrawn person. Ah he was no problem at all, ah whatever Dave said, went at that particular point and ah we had to conform strictly to what he was doing because he wasn't very musical at that time. He did the boogie-woogie and the triplet things like he did on Blueberry Hill and those kinds of things. This is what he did. This is all he knew how to do so we had to conform to that and with Dave's making the things so simple, is what made the things hits records, us conforming strictly to him and not trying to create... you couldn't get too far away from what he was doing because then you'd have a mish mash of music there.

Were you surprised when those records sold so widely in the white market?

I'd like to say, yeah. I'd like to say something about that. Yeah, I... I was quite surprised as a matter of fact when you talk about Fat... what... what he was like in the studio, you have to realize he hadn't been a big star. It's only after you become a big star that you become difficult. Believe in your press reviews. You know I mean I've seen artists going into a studio and you put an arrangement behind them, they get a hit and the next time they come back because they had a hit, they start telling the band what to do and they're not qualified, you see. So at that time Fats had no idea he was going to be as big as he eventually got. So he was very mild and whatever you say, ok.

That's why many times, you're asked, did you have any idea you know in interviews I'm sure Red it's happened it's happened to you.

Tell me about how you recorded I'm Walking with Fats and then when you moved to L.A. you were hired with Ricky.

Well of course the ah, the... doing it with Fats it just had been decided to do I'm Walking...

Let's just start again and you use the title of the song in your....

Well actually when ah, when I'm Walking was done with Fats Domino, it was Dave that wan... wanted something particularly different from the usual thing we had done so I tried up a whole bunch of things and he didn't like that. He didn't like, I said, well I don't know what do you want? He said I don't know what I want so I kept trying something and finally I said, well why don't I do something completely away from the cymbals and I thought about starting it with the old bass drum parade beating and going to the snare and playing like the snare parade kind of thing and he said, that's what I want so based on that, it was a hit. It wasn't Fats first hit, but when I moved to California shortly after, the reason I wound up doing that with Ricky Nelson is because he wanted to do a cover so when he found out I... I was there, he... they hired me to... his father ah, ah Ozzie Nelson hired me to come and do this cover the.. drum beat just like it was and they... they made the arrangement as close as they could to Fats' arrangement and I think it was Jimmy Haskell that did the arrangement, I think. I'm not sure but at any rate ah, based on that is why be... later began doing a lot of other things with Ricky because after talking with Ozzie which we would do on purpose to get in a long conversation and he'd begin reminiscing about the band and we'd go into overtime and... but ah, we'd used... used to reminisce about the fact that when he used to come her to the... the whe... the Fairmount which was then the Roosevelt...

Let's pick up the story again. I want to make sure we get it. Just from where you moved to California and then you were hired to play the same style on Ricky Nelson's version.

So at, ah when I moved to California, I was hired by Ozzie Nelson to ah, to do this cover of Ricky's of I'm Walking, which was a big hit for Ricky also because he wanted the same drum beat and he found out I was... they hired me to do it and ah, and it was a very big hit for Ricky and I wound up doing a number of other things with Ricky because we talked with Ozzie and he'd get to reminiscing about the old band days when I was working at the Roosevelt, which is now the Fairmount, his band used to come in there all the time, Ozzie Nelson and ah Harriet Hilliard, Ricky's mother was a singer and we'd get to talking about that and he'd just go on and on and we'd run into overtime and Ricky's brother David was born here in New Orleans at the time and this was what intrigued him that I remembered that, but I was working at the Roosevelt then as a busboy.

Was that a pretty common thing in those days, white artists covering black records could still sell a lot more?

Well they found out that ah as a white aud... audience they had more white people so they would sell more records. Ah, it wasn't something that was done ah, in the beginning when it was rhythm and blues because it was supposed to be not nice music at all, so you didn't have white artists doing black music. It wasn't acceptable, but when it crossed over ah, to the white audience, and it was a song that did well with blacks and with some whites, they said well hey, this is a good vehicle. We'll make even more money you know. So it started out being more and more.

It would be listened to because it was Ricky Nelson or Pat Boone. It would be listened to why they wouldn't listen to Fats record. Just because it was bl... black music. Same music, different singer singing it so it would be able to be used in differ....

You know I think that... that ah, Fats Domin... Domino more than any black artist I know at that time ah was accepted by whites more than any artist black audience ah artist I know. They really latched onto what he was doing. Whites really latched onto what Fats Dom... in fact, Fats Domino was bigger with white audiences than he was... ever was with black audiences.

Lets shift gears a little bit here and talk about Little Richard another person that you guys played with. Tell me about when you first saw and heard Little Richard. What your impressions of...

WOW!

You have to realize that he came in with this high pompadour on his head with a collar that was made ah like an oriental up in the back and I saw him, I said the dragon lady from this... from the cartoon, you know that I saw in the movies… and ah actually we had recorded with so many different people until ah we weren't really ah phased by a new audi... artist coming in ah, but Richard was really...

He was outside.

Yes it was really different you know and ah when he came in and we listened to what he was doing and we changed our whole concept of what... about Little Richard. He wasn't a joke anymore.

I think it was because he was the first of the ah rhythm and blues and rock artists ah what have you that wore a costume all the time as opposed to on the stage. He was, you know he'd wear pretty much the same thing on the stage that he wore on the street. He was always dressed in that to let you know I am a performer.

What about his singing style. Was that something new to you in those days?

What was unique about Richard is that he sang more words than anybody I ever heard on a record. When you listen after some of the things that he's... he's recorded, ah, there's so many words that he had to get in along with the music man, you know, I had never heard anybody do that. So it was a different thing that I'd ever heard, you know I... I hadn't heard anybody do that many words in... and get them in. If you just listen at some of those things, you now, and we'd do forty takes.

The thing about it was as fast as those words and as many words as he used, there's something about his ah not perfect diction, but there was something about the... the clipped way he did it that you were able to understand these words as fast as they were said, you know and...

Can either or you imitate it a little bit. Give us an idea of what...

I wouldn't attempt to. I would say one thing, he had a line that really cracked us up and I forgotten what tune it is, he said ain't what you do it's the way how you

do it. It ain't what you eat, it's the way how you chew it.

He was always coming up with things like that. He was poetic.

But now you know what's strange about that, there was a lady that didn't get any of the credit that she should of that did a lot of the song written, Dorothy Labostry. She did a lot of things that were instrumental in... in Little Richard hits. She would come in and alter the words to a song that were too risque you know. She did a lot of work and ah nobody even ah very... insiders know who she was but most of the pub... the public don't even know ah who Dorothy Laborstry was and she was instrumental in a lot of songs that he recorded.

And there was quite a few of those things that ah other people took credit for and she got no credit whatsoever for.

Tell me a little bit about that session that Tutti Frutti came out of. Could you just tell the story as you remember it like the session was kind of ordinary, that's what I've heard and then you all took a break, came over to the Dew Drop and Richard started fooling around with Tutti Frutti and then... tell me how you remember it.

You see the thing is, that... that... how stories come about. I don't ever remember ah recording and then leaving and... and coming to the Dew Drop Inn going back. We did it there.

I don't ever remember recording being done here us.

No I don't either.

I don't ever remember us doing no recording.

No, no.

Well how did the Tutti Frutti session come about? Was the song too risque and you had to stop and...

I don't know if it was that particular tune, but I know there was some things that ah, ah one of the tune, I can't recall which one it was but ah, they say that the words were too risque so Dorothy Labostry changed the words. Ah in the studio with Little Richard ah, we worked a lot with Bumps Blackwell and ah... you know he would say well guys this is the way tune goes. Richard you do it near the rhythm section, drums and everything. This is what we going to try and we tried and not everything we tried the first time worked. So it was hit and miss and we had no idea whether it was going to be a hit or no. We just went in and we did the recording. If it was a hit, we remembered the tune, if it wasn't a hit, we forgot it.

You know there was another thing that we didn't know about that when he came here and he said, now this is what we going to try and it was because he was trying to get... he came here to record with this... with this particular group, but then getting here, he tried to extract more from us then he really needed to because what we didn't know at the time, if you look at the Little Richard box set now, you will see that most of the things that we did, were the hits he had and a lot of those things had already been done with the Upsetters and were turned down. The ones that they used were the ones that we did here and ah, and he would you know... we didn't know that at the time because we didn't... I had never heard of Little Ri... Richard having recorded before he came here and recorded with us, but those things had been done already by Speciality in California and he didn't like them and if he did like them when he... when he came here and heard this group doing things, he decided to use this group on... and many of them were the same things he had already done, which we didn't know so he was trying to get more out of us without us knowing that... I guess he figured that if we knew that it had been recorded already I mean why he wanted to them with us. We wouldn't have put out as much as we did, you know what I'm saying so he used a bit of psychology on us in that... in that respect.

Yeah, but see Little Richard was not the first artist that we had recorded that had hits as such. We were the studio band and that came about through accidentally because we would go with Dave bands and we'd do a remote with his band over at the J and M on Rampart and ah, ah, ah, Domaine and we would go on Sundays, you recall and that's how we came to know Cosmo Matassa.

We do radio broadcast there.

Right and ah...