WISER ANGEL:
A TALK WITH JOEL DORN (Continued | Page 2)

 

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It was Dorn’s close friend, the legendary Doc Pomus, who hipped him to the Nevilles. “He called me up one day and he said ‘You wanna hear the greatest bar band in the world? And the best singer living?’ Yeah, who wouldn’t wanna do that? So I met him at the Bottom Line, I saw the Nevilles. I went nuts. It was very difficult to get a deal. Eventually, Bette Midler spoke to Jerry Moss, who was one of the owners of A&M at the time, and she convinced him that it was a worthwhile act. I made the record, and they hated it.”

Huh?

“I never worked for A&M again. I was so sure Fiyo on the Bayou was gonna be a smash, I went out to A&M, I took people out to dinner, I kissed ass, I did all the stuff you have to do at a record company to let people know you believe in this.” The marketing people at A&M insisted that the Neville Brothers were an R&B act by virtue of the fact that they were black. Dorn vehemently disagreed. “I said, if you put them out on the college circuit and get them to the places where kids at, say, the University of Ohio go on a Friday night to drink beer, watch what happens.” The marketing people promoted the record to R&B radio anyway, where it flopped. Dorn was subsequently pulled into a meeting with the label’s marketing director, “some idiot who had been brought in because he had been successful at Toyota selling cars.”

The marketing director talked about market share and demographics, drawing circles and lines on a blackboard. The he told the veteran producer, “Now, let me play you a record that’ll show you where you should be, the direction you should be heading.” Dorn is still dumbfounded as he tells the story. “I gave him the Neville Brothers. And he played me a record by a group called Pablo Cruise. You know, you talk about a one hit wonder and nothing happenin’ on the one hit, right? And he said to me ‘this is what you should be doing.’”

Dorn’s story is more than a rant about the idiocies of the record business, where squares make decisions for the hip people. It demonstrates the fact that most of the great popular music we have today got recorded in spite of, rather than because of, the music industry. Most of the best music recorded and handed down to subsequent generations over the years was recorded because of the personal taste and singular vision of someone who understood that the word “music” precedes the word “business.” “The days of the Alfred Lion, Norman Granz, Leonard Chess, Berry Gordy…all these one of a kind guys who ran labels according to their passion, or their own taste…that’s over. They can come up with all the bullshit in the world about, you know, piracy and MP3 and downloading and the economy…let me tell you something. You make a record tomorrow that makes you feel like a Marvin Gaye record did thirty years ago, I don’t give a fuck how bad the economy is, people will be in there. They’ll buy that record.”

Despite his assertion that “I don’t like jazz any more than I like doo-wop or blues or country or gospel,” Dorn has put out an awful lot of great jazz material from his days at 32 Records, straight through Label M, and continuing on Hyena. Label M released some choice recordings from the fabled Left Bank Society’s archives of live shows, including Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard, and Jimmy Heath. Dorn says there is still “boatloads” of material there that he hopes to start releasing again in a year or so. But first there are some other major items in the works at Hyena. The label has reached an agreement with the Thelonious Monk estate to put together packages from the family’s archives of unreleased Monk material. There’s another blues project with Blood Ulmer and Vernon Reid. There’s a guitar/banjo and percussion duet called the Frank and Joe Show. And Dorn is “on the edge of a deal with someone that I can’t talk to you about, but a major, major American pop artist of the last forty years, and we’re going to do something from that stash.”

And then there’s Rahsaan Roland Kirk, the mutli-instrumentalist/composer/bandleader/visionary who was blinded in his infancy and refused to recognize any kind of boundary, be it musical, cultural, or racial. “There was never anything like him,” Dorn tells me. “For some reason the critical community and some jazz fans looked at him like he was a clown or a vaudeville act or a gimmick thing.” The reason for this is undoubtedly because Kirk played multiple instruments at the same time, some of them not even recognized as instruments by most folks. He also exhorted his audience with all the enthusiasm and hyperbole of a carnival barker. But to judge the seriousness of Kirk’s intentions by these measures is to ignore the very real talent that the man displayed. In any case, these “gimmicks” as some folks call them, have been part of jazz since its earliest days, as evidenced by some of the music of Jelly Roll Morton and other jazz musicians who were on the scene when jazz went hand in hand with broad comedy and spiritual exhortation. Another reason Kirk aroused the ire of the critical community was his refusal to recognize the boundaries of jazz. He included elements of soul, R&B, and funk into his music, giving them their rightful place beside bebop, hot jazz, gospel, blues, and the most nascent styles of jazz to come out of New Orleans.

“He did OK when he was alive, nothing phenomenal. When he died I figured ‘well, he’s not here anymore, people are gonna get it now.’ Not only did it not happen, he practically disappeared from the radar screen. So about fifteen years ago I started something called the Rahsaanaissance. And I just said I’m gonna bust my balls to make sure people hear him and slowly but surely over the last ten, twelve years we’ve raised people’s awareness level of him, and he’s much more accepted by the critical community and by the general jazz population than he was.” Dorn has released a variety of Kirk material, including multiple CD sets (the 32 Records releases Dog Years in the Fourth Ring and Aces Back to Back) and live sets (Label M’s Here Comes the Whistle Man and Hyena’s The Man Who Cried Fire). Hyena has just released the phenomenal Rahsaan Roland Kirk Compliments of the Mysterious Phantom recorded at the Backdoor in San Diego on November 5, 1974. “This is as close as you’re gonna get to knowing what it was like to go into a club and see him” Dorn asserts. “And I think people who love him are gonna love this, and I think that part of that hip-hop crowd, the Tribe Called Quest kinda kids, Roots kinda kids, I think they’re gonna dig it. Little by little we’re making progress with Rahsaan. And, ultimately, at a certain point, people are gonna get it.”

 

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