WHAT WAS ROCK AND ROLL TO ME? from "Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story" (Da Capo Press, 2000), Chapter Four: “Runnin’ Wild in This Big Old Town, 1945-1957" (excerpt)

"The first time I felt like a page was being turned was Little Richard. I'd never heard anything like it. He went into that 'ding-ding-ding-ding' at the piano and I thought, 'This sumbitch is wild!'"

As I told readers in my Substack of November 5, 2024, my first book, Backbeat: Earl Palmer’s Story, is in the early stages of being turned into a documentary film. This has caused me to devote more thought to the book and its complicated protagonist than I have in many years, which has led in turn to publishing excerpts. I’ve already shared several, along with a quick narrative of Earl’s productive life, in that November 2024 post. There are more to come in the next three posts, which explore Earl Palmer’s life and times in depth.

Skipping for now over Earl’s extraordinary childhood—he was a child tap-dancing star on the black vaudeville circuit of the 1930s—I’m going to let Earl tell you a bit about his early years as a professional musician in his native New Orleans, propelling the orchestra led by trumpeter Dave Bartholomew (who died, aged 100, in 2019). Bartholomew’s band was the cream of New Orleans R&B bands, a fixture at the city’s best dance halls. A half-dozen members of the Bartholomew organization also comprised the so-called Studio Band, arguably rock’s first great recording-session unit. After an introductory paragraph, you’re in Earl’s company.

In 1947 the best rhythm & blues band in New Orleans was led by a young trumpeter named Dave Bartholomew. Although he had a sterling background in traditional jazz and big-band swing, Bartholomew was a clever businessman who tailored his music to the day’s fashions. Driving the band (and singing the occasional ballad) was a prodigy who, though he had played for less than two years when Bartholomew hired him, was shortly known as the most exciting young drummer in New Orleans: “the new sensation on the tubs,” as the Louisiana Weekly called twenty-two-year-old Earl Palmer on March 15, 1947. “Earl was better than any drummer they had in New Orleans,” Bartholomew told me. “He was the talk of the town. We had a lot of good ones, but they all of them admired Earl.”

“The whole time I was in New Orleans, the only bands I played with were Harold Dejan, Dave’s, and the Earl Williams Quintet.” The photo is of the last-named band, playing at Natal’s, a popular club on Gentilly Highway. Left to right: Alvin (Red) Tyler, tenor saxophone; EP, drums; Earl Williams, bass and vocals; Sam Mooney, guitar, and Edward Frank, piano. “Earl couldn’t play. We used to cheer every time he hit a note that was actually in the chord. Three of us in Earl Williams’s band were the best jazz players in New Orleans at the time: Edward Frank, Red, and me. Ellis Marsalis used to sub for Frank.” Photo ca. 1953.

NEW ORLEANS WAS A TOWN THAT WAS known for drummers. Stanley Williams, boy, he was a drumming sumbitch with Papa Celestin’s band. Manuel Sims, who went on to play with Buddy Johnson, they called him Foots, because he played that bass drum. There was June Gardner and a little guy named Little Dibbs and Wilbert Hogan. Max Roach fell in love with Wilbert’s playing, wanted him to come up to New York, said, “Man, I’ll get you straight up there.”

Vernel Fournier played with Dookie Chase’s band and he was boiling. I heard Vernel and Art Blakey the same night just after I come out of the service and right then and there that’s what got me playing drums. Blakey always was strong, but he was younger then and that stamina was—man! After romping through some of them big-band arrangements, they’d do a ballad like “Cottage for Sal” and Art played brushes so beautifully.¹

Ed Blackwell was an up-and-coming bebop drummer then, a very, very fine drummer. Blackwell, Alvin Batiste, and Harold Battiste were together all the time, and Ornette Coleman, too, when Ornette was around. Everybody else avoided Ornette. He was a drag to play with, man, he sounded terrible. Whether he knew the right changes or not, he didn’t play them. If Blackwell wasn’t playing with Ornette, he played like he was supposed to, with very good taste.

We avoided Ray Charles, too. There was a time when Ray and Big Joe Turner and Al Hibbler was all hanging round the Dew Drop doing nothing. Ray and Al Hibbler got in a fight. If I recall, it was about who was going to sing first. They both said, “I’m going to kick you in the ass!” and we cracked up laughing. “How you going to find his ass?”²

Guitar Slim was another character that hung around waiting for us. One of the stunts he’d do, he had a long cord where he’d run out on the sidewalk and keep playing. While he was outside we’d unplug his amp. Came back in, we were playing bebop.

“Who pulled my cord out? I’ll cut his throat!” Kind of a wild guy, Slim. When he said, “I’ll cut your throat out,” he looked like he meant it.

Earl King didn’t really come to the forefront until after I left. Earl recently told me I was the first person he ever heard using the term funky about music. We had a guy in the Tremé, old Foley. Called him Drag Nasty, which means just what it sounds like, it means you’re and drunk and nasty and drag your ass around. You stink. You could smell Foley coming if the wind was right. He’d fall in a gutter of stagnant water by Roland’s Bar and sit there. So I told these guys at a record date, “Think about Foley, how funky and dirty he stinks and smells. Think about playing the music just like that.”

Professor Longhair? I never really thought of him as something special. People got caught up in the excitement and never heard all the bad notes. A totally unschooled piano player and not a very intelligent person, didn’t even know he was funny. He played at Caldonia’s on Liberty and St. Philip, just a guy that played for nothing, played for wine.

I’m telling you, a lot of famous cats loved the musicians from New Orleans. Sonny Stitt, the first thing he thought of when he came in town was jamming at the Dew Drop. I was doing an amateur show at the Carver Theater, me and Red Tyler. A little girl was singing “Pennies from Heaven” and down the aisle comes Stitt, right up onstage. Higher than a kite. Scared that little girl to death. She ran offstage.

Stitt leans right in on me.

“What time you get off, man?”

“Sonny, I’m playing!”

“What time you get off?”

“Sonny, you chased that poor child offstage!”

He looks over his shoulder. “Oh, I’m sorry. Hey, I’m get a drink, I’ll be back.”

Tyler said, “That motherfucker’s crazy!” Me and Tyler talked about that incident a long time.³

The first record I ever made was Dave’s first record, “I’m a little old country boy, running wild in this big old town.” It was at Cosimo Matassa’s place, J&M’s, a record store that had a recording studio in the back. J&M’s was the only place I ever recorded in New Orleans. As a matter of fact, it was the only studio in New Orleans.⁴

That little room was hardly bigger than a bedroom. Picturing it, I see Lee Allen and Red Tyler in the middle, the piano and me on opposite sides, and the singer by the horns, near the piano. Everyone faced Cos, who was in the little bitty booth. Cos never had an assistant; he came in and out and set them mikes himself. As unsophisticated as he was, I think Cosimo was a genius. I’ve seen engineers use two dozen mikes to get the sound that Cos got with three. He knew how to position mikes and he knew each mike like it was a person. Didn’t even have no mike on the drums, just a mike on the bass and piano, one on the vocal, and the one that Tyler and Lee used was pointed at the drums. Cosimo knew that room. Today they put a dozen mikes on the goddamn drums alone! They put drums in a separate room now, or behind a baffle, but Cos never had no baffles in that studio. You couldn’t fit ‘em.

Union scale was $41.25 for a session. If I had a gig at night, I wasn’t doing bad at all for 1955, damn right. Though it wasn’t like I was in the studio every day. We might not do a recording for a couple weeks.

I’d go to a session at one, finish about five or six. We’d cut three songs. Take our time. Stop and go eat, come back and finish. Smoke a joint, perk up our sense a little bit. Cosimo didn’t particularly like us smoking weed, so we didn’t do it unless he wasn’t around. Take a break and walk down Dumaine Street, get high, come on back.

The core of the Studio Band was guys from Dave’s, mostly. Me, Fields, McLean, Tyler. We could take directions better than other guys. A few guys had nothing to do with Dave’s. Edgar Blanchard, Roy Montrell, Justin Adams, Lee Allen. Roy was a great all-around guitar player, good jazz, good blues, good rock and roll. He died, he was a junkie. Justin Adams was never in Dave’s band; he played with his mother and his brothers Placide and Gerald. Edgar Blanchard was a quasi-proper dude. That was his humor, to appear proper, though he wasn’t and you knew it. He’d raise one eyebrow and say, “Earl, you are full of shit.”

Oddly, someone went and stuck a photograph of Earl Palmer in the center of Roy Montrell’s 45 “Every Time I Hear That Mellow Saxophone.” Montrell, a top Crescent City guitarist, was an active session player who only recorded a few singles. But with Earl providing a locomotive of a beat and Lee Allen playing the tenor saxophone solo, “Mellow Saxophone” is a snazzy piece of New Orleans funk.

Lee Allen wasn’t in Dave’s, but he was a honking tenor player. Lee was from Denver; he came to New Orleans to play football and basketball at Xavier. He played the shit out of the blues; any other tunes, he had trouble with the chords. He didn’t have the knowledge of chords to be a first-rate bebop player, and he didn’t read music very good.

Frankly, man, nobody considered what we were doing a big thing. “There that drummin’-ass nigger playing on them records”—that’s what my old friend Butsy said when he saw me around the Tremé. “Man, he think he cute. Gimme dollar, nigger, or I’ll whip your ass.”

A lot of people didn’t even know records were being made here, they thought records came from New York. Andrew MacRoyal was a friend of mine didn’t know anything about records or nothing. We listening to a Fats Domino record one night in an oyster place on Orleans and Claiborne.

“You hear that?” I said.

“It’s good. It’s good music, man.”

“That’s me playing.”

“No!” He jumps up and starts shouting to everybody, “Guess what!”

I’m pulling on him: “Aw man, I didn’t tell you to do that!”

We was just going on the job, looking forward to when it was over so we could hang out. Oh, I enjoyed going to the studio—I knew I’d make more money in six hours than in a week of gigs. But we didn’t realize how popular that stuff was getting. What was rock and roll to me? I lived in a jazz world. I was not interested in Little Richard or Fats Domino. That’s difficult for you to understand, because you come from a generation that is. I don’t. It’s something we did that was not important to us musically. Fats Domino was a bigger star everywhere else in the world than New Orleans, because everybody knew him at home. If Fats was on TV and it even got shown in New Orleans, I think his family and his good friends would be about the only people watched it.

“Hey, Fats on TV.”

“Yeah?” Very blasé. People from New Orleans are crazy. They’re the least appreciative of their music. They take it for granted. People in New Orleans didn’t mob stars, they do that in California.

Fats was a very shy guy, man, shy and insecure a lot. Came from one of those real country little places out on the edge of town, never been out of New Orleans. We made a tour with Fats that went to Kansas City, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Fats didn’t want to go. We had three days of chasing Fats from place to place. Every time we came for him he was somewhere else, at this or that cousin’s. Dave finally caught him and said, “Man, you can do what you want. But if you don’t come out of there, Imperial Records is going to sue your ass.” The stars were supposed to be Fats and Jewel King, but Jewel wouldn’t go. You know who we got? Fess. And he killed them. That tour bombed except for Professor Longhair. Fess was a hit out there, even if the club owner in Kansas City wouldn’t pay us because Fess kicked a hole in the piano. I don’t know who the hell booked that tour. I guess Lew Chudd at Imperial wanted to see how Fats drew on the road. Didn’t draw shit. We ended up playing behind a shake dancer in Kansas City named Rose, the club owner’s daughter; her costumes was hanging all over the dressing room and she didn’t smell like no rose, I’ll tell you that.

At the opening of “I’m Walkin’,” one of Fats Domino’s many hits, you’ll hear Earl play the quintessential New Orleans bass drum lick, taken straight from Black New Orleans’s parades. Another member of the Crescent City drum fraternity, Freddie Kohlman, explained how New Orleans drummers developed their fancy bass-drum style. “All that footwork,” Kohlman said, “come from the New Orleans parade style of carrying the [the bass drum] and playing it with their hands. That’s why New Orleans drummers got it over all the different cats that are away from here.” Earl sprinkles that Crescent City bass-drum beat throughout Bonnie Raitt’s “Let Me In,” on her third album, “Takin’ My Time.” Raitt was an Earl Palmer devotee, who had Earl play on every track but one on “Takin’ My Time.”

The first time I felt like a page was being turned was Little Richard. I hadn’t heard anything like this before. He went into that ding-ding-ding-ding at the piano and I thought, “This sumbitch is wild!”

Richard wasn’t a star when he met us, but I thought he was. He walked into J&M like he was coming offstage: that thick, thick powder makeup and the eyeliner and lipstick and the hair everywhere in big, big waves. Walked in there like something you’d never seen. And meeting him all them times since, I still get the same feeling.

I don’t remember exactly what I said; something like, “What the fuck is this?” Not who, what. I said to Tyler, “What the fuck is this?”

And Red said, “Wow! Go on in there, child!” That was a New Orleans term. You’d put your hand on your hip, stick out your little finger and bend it a little. It meant, “He’s round the bend, this guy is gay.” But Richard was so infectious and so unhiding with his flamboyancy, he sucked us right in. We got laughing with him instead of at him. I never thought Richard was crazy, never thought he didn’t know exactly what he was doing. I just thought, “What the fuck is this?”

I’d go anywhere with Richard now, but at that time everybody was a little concerned about being seen with somebody that looked and acted so gay. He didn’t need us anyway, he had his own entourage. Young black guys, all nice looking younger dudes. We’d be joking: “Which of them’s gonna fuck him tonight?”

Richard liked to record right after a show, when he was wired. Came in the studio with a briefcase full of bills and set it up on the piano. I remember Lee Allen dipping his fingers in it and pulling bills out and laughing. Richard looked at Lee and say, “Lee, will you get out of that bag!” I said, “Play your cards right, Lee, and you could walk away with the whole bag,” Richard said, “Shut up, Earl!”

What I remember about those Richard sessions is how physical they were. You got to remember how he played—can you imagine matching that? I’ll tell you, the only reason I started playing what they come to call a rock-and-roll beat came from trying to match Richard’s right hand. Ding-ding-ding-ding! Most everything I had done before was a shuffle or slow triplets. But Little Richard moved from a shuffle to that straight eighth-note feeling. I don’t know who played that way first, Richard or Chuck Berry. Even if Chuck Berry played straight eights on guitar, his band still played a shuffle behind him. But with Richard pounding the piano with all ten fingers, you couldn’t so very well go against that. I did at first—on “Tutti Frutti,” you can hear me playing a shuffle. Listening to it now, it’s easy to hear I should have been playing that rock beat.”

It’s on the version of Little Richard’s “Slippin’ and Slidin’” that the Studio Band cut on February 7th, 1956 that Earl, for the first time, matches Little Richard’s straight eights note-for-note. This is the emergence, long smoldering and lacking only the right spark, of what became the classic rock & roll beat, the same as what you get on the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ Safari,” the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.”

The paradigm shift, February 7, 1956: an inspired Earl Palmer matches Little Richard’s straight-eighth-note rhythm on Richard’s “Slippin’ and Slidin,” and, to risk exaggeration, if not by all that much, rock and roll was born.

Critics have long recognized Earl’s signal contribution. Although he never made a close analysis of Earl’s straight-eight breakthrough, Robert Palmer (no relation), The New York Times’s first full-time rock critic, was shrewd enough to write, in 1990, that “If any single musician can be credited with defining rock & roll as a rhythmic idiom distinct from the jump, R&B, and all else that followed it, that musician is surely Earl Palmer.” ⁵

Richard’s music was exciting as a sumbitch. I’m not talking about the quality of it. It wasn’t quality music. It wasn’t no chords, it was just blues. “Slippin’ and Slidin’” sounded like “Good Golly Miss Molly” and they both sounded like “Lucille.” It was exciting because he was exciting. Richard is one of the few people I’ve ever recorded with that was just as exciting to watch in the studio as he was in performance. He was just that kind of personality, on edge all the time, and full of energy. But I never remember him angry with anyone. He was a sweet-tempered guy. Still is. Whenever I’m around that way these days, I stop at the Continental Hotel where he lives, go up and see him, sit down and talk awhile. Always come away with a pocketful of little Bible booklets.

1. I am not going to footnote this excerpt as thoroughly as I did the book, whose endnotes sometimes amount to brief essays. Drummers such as Vernel Fournier, for instance, became internationally known when they left New Orleans—Fournier played with the pianist Ahmad Jamal for years, inventing the famous “Poinciana beat”—but I’ll leave it to the curious to do their own digging.

2. The Dew Drop was a club much frequented by jazz musicians, “a run-down joint with gingham tablecloths,” as Earl says, to which local and visiting musicians flocked after their gigs to play bebop.

3. The tenor and baritone saxophonist Alvin (Red) Tyler was Earl’s lifelong comrade, his best musician friend. Like Earl, Tyler was a member of the elite Studio Band, who, accompanying—“collaborating with” is more accurate—Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, Smiley Lewis, Thurston Harris, and Little Richard, were vital contributors to the mid-Fifties rock and roll explosion. Yet also like Palmer, Tyler considered himself a jazz musician first, and when the New Orleans recording business collapsed in the mid-Sixties, Tyler took a day job and spent nights playing his beloved bebop.

4. Matassa’s major source of income was his family’s grocery store.

5. In his 2017 biography Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life, author Jonathan Gould points to another Earl Palmer innovation. African-American R&B (and gospel) were characterized by an emphasis on the two and the four: the backbeat. What Palmer did was to take the backbeat and give it an emphatic wallop. As Gould puts it, “In an of itself, the backbeat was nothing new.” But playing the backbeat emphatically, and throughout a song, not just in the climactic “shout choruses” was new, giving black pop music a kick in the pants.