I haven t a clue where I was when John F. Kennedy died, but I remember hearing Screamin Jay Hawkins for the first time.
Standing on a chair in the kitchen with my ear pressed against the wireless, a Saturday night, between eight-thirty and nine, Radio Luxembourg, 208 metres on the medium wave, Alan Freed, America s King of Rock n Roll, with the latest and greatest from Stateside USA.
I had to listen like that because the kitchen was always packed on a Saturday night and nobody else wanted to hear the stuff. Some of the relatives thought I wasn t the full shilling. Some of them will tell you today they were right.
There had never been anything ever like Screamin Jay Hawkins I Put A Spell On You . Released in 1957, it marked the moment when rock n roll erupted out from the categories which had come before. It was the Big Bang which generated all subsequent creation.
Prior to 1957, only 25 R&B albums had ever been released. Screamin Jay went into the studio blind drunk to record a mildly melodramatic ballad. But the devil in the drink got a hold of his soul and he wound up snarling, growling, sobbing and screeching, his voice soaring and swooping after the notes as the session-men behind him rip-roared in all directions at once to try to keep up, and succeeded in creating an anti-gospel operatic R&B sex-number which had thrice the energy of anything previously put down.
Few would play it on radio when it was released. Time magazine thundered that it threatens the soul of the nation . Some well-forgotten Senator hinted that it celebrated bestiality.
Eventually, Okey Records ran an advertising campaign: DJs Be brave . . . Put a spell on your fans . . . Tie up your switchboard . . . If you get fired, well find you a job .
They had to accomodate Bob Friesen of CHWK in Chilliwack in British Columbia who was escorted by police from the premises after putting the song out in the afternoon.
Screamin Jay died a fortnight ago. He d never had a hit to match that first moment. Sometimes a performer makes such a promethean impact at the outset that all after is overshadowed.
But all that came after owed much to Screamin Jay, one of the handful of innovators from the century just gone who can be said with certainty to have changed the world we live in.