Its leader was sax player Billy Diamond, while the primary vocalist was Little Sonny James.
New Orleans certainly wasn’t lacking in the talent department and so after first grabbing Tommy Ridgley and Jewel King for a late November session, Bartholomew took Imperial owner Lew Chudd to The Hideaway Club to check out a 21 year old pianist who was making plenty of noise around town.įats Domino was arguably not even the centerpiece of the band playing that night, not in a traditional sense anyway. To succeed at this role though he’d need good artists to carry out his vision and preferably to contribute something of their own to the emerging style. A talented musician and arranger who recently scored a Top Ten hit himself as an artist, the ambitious Bartholomew was looking for a challenge that being a performer alone couldn’t give him.
When Dave Bartholomew was hired by Imperial Records to lead their company into the rock era in late 1949 he was undoubtedly the right man for the job. In a society where there never seems to be any shortage of acclaim for transformative figures in popular culture, Fats Domino, arguably the greatest – certainly the most consistently great – rock artist of the 1950’s, the only one to be just as dominant commercially when the market was entirely black as when it had a massive influx of white listeners, saw himself be gradually pushed aside until in some quarters he was reduced to little more than an afterthought when recounting rock history.īut if he never quite ascended to the throne as Presley argued was his due, Fats Domino wasn’t that far from wearing the crown for better part of his career.
FAT DOMINOS FULL
Though he’d been performing regularly to packed houses in Las Vegas for a number of years himself, this man was no longer viewed as a contemporary artist, having scored one final Pop Chart hit the year before which barely scraped the listings for two weeks at #100, his first to even do that well in four years.īut while the focus of the media was on the still youthful looking Presley, tanned, fit and full of swagger, Elvis admonished the reporters who asked him about reclaiming his mythical throne as he steadfastly insisted that the man next to him was the REAL King Of Rock ‘n’ Roll.ĭespite this sincere proclamation nobody there paid it, or the artist this statement referred to, much mind and soon after Antoine “Fats” Domino slipped away unnoticed by the throngs.īut two decades earlier the twenty-one year old Fats Domino unleashed a hurricane of rock ‘n’ roll onto the world and for the next fourteen years scored more hits and sold more records than anyone NOT named Elvis Presley.
FAT DOMINOS SERIES
In August 1969, after nearly a decade long sabbatical from live performing, Elvis Presley made his return to the stage for a series of sold-out concerts in Las Vegas and during the circus-like press conference to kick off the event he posed for pictures with an artist just seven years his senior but who to many there must’ve seemed as if he was a relic from another lifetime ago. For while those had a very centralized impact that would soon fade into memory, the one touching down now would shake up the entire world for years to come. The storm now coming into view would be a musical one rather than meteorological, but it was perhaps even more powerful than any Category Five hurricane that whipped through the Crescent City. They’re life-altering events in every conceivable way. They’re the ones that uproot trees, knock down buildings, breach the levees and flood the streets, leaving a path of utter destruction in their wake. In New Orleans, where hurricanes are an all-too frequent destructive force of nature, the names of these biggest storms are well known. You see it in the distance, you feel it in your senses before you actually hear it, but once the wind and rain starts you can hear nothing but those sounds until that storm ends and even then you’ll hear echoes of it still ringing in your ears long after it passes. Like a sudden storm appearing on the horizon as the sky grows dark, the calm tranquil day is about to be upended.
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