Doug Lief Lief is a third-year English
student, and thus feels it is his right to invent words like
"crimdiddly." Give him a rama-lama-ding-dong at dlief@ucla.edu. Click
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Who put the bomp in the bomp ba bomp bomp bomp? Who put the ram
in the rama lama ding dong? In this era when popular music has
taken a fatal nose-dive in quality, it’s time the public
finally learns the answer to these questions.
It is a well-known fact that our generation has turned out some
pretty disappointing acts. My parents get to talk about The Who and
Led Zeppelin. I get to brag about Blink-182 and O-Town. What is
missing from current rock ‘n’ roll is the roll. By
“roll” I mean the blues. Right now the only blues going
on are the Kraft cheese and macaroni blues (made famous by Etta
James on her gold album “Songs About Fattening Crap, Live at
the Apollo”).
This was made all too clear by the recent death of a renowned
rock legend, made all the more tragic because he was fictional. I
am talking about the great doo-wop pioneer and scat lyricist,
Clarence Stubbs. Throughout this column are excerpts from my
interview with Stubbs, taken from the final cut of Ken Burns’
“Jazz” because, as Burns put it, “17 hours is the
perfect length for a documentary, 18 would just be dragging it
out.”
Stubbs entered the world on March 12, 1932, in the midst of what
rich people called “The Great Depression,” and what
everyone else called “Wednesday.” Born in the log cabin
he helped his father to build, he first learned the art of
gibberish from his grandfather Eugene, who was kicked in the head
by a petting zoo mule.
“Grandpa Eugene came up to me one day singing
“˜boo-diddy boo-diddy heidy-ho doo-dah,'” he said.
“Most folks ran when they saw Grandpa, but I thought, this
makes sense to me.” Soon after, Stubbs was featured in choirs
as “the boy who sings in tongues.” He was about to
bring his special brand of looby-dooby hoo hah to Motown.
 Illustration by JENNY YURSHANSKY/Daily Bruin Thankfully,
some of real rhythm and blues is left in the genre that bears its
initials, R&B, but when the singer who seems to have the best
handle on it is a rat-faced 3-foot-tall waif named Christina
Aguilera, we’re in trouble. After all, Aretha Franklin is 10
times the singer Aguilera is, literally. Rock ‘n’roll
should be reclaimed by the black people who invented it, or at the
very least loaned to very talented British people.
The rest of rock ‘n’roll, however, could use a
lesson from guys like Clarence Stubbs. What we’re left with
now is a bunch of bands who are kind of sort of pseudo-posers for
punk bands, minus the anger and social relevance. Take that away
and all you’re left with is a privileged suburbanite who only
knows three chords. I miss blues lyrics. We need stuff like,
“My ice-skatin’ lady she done up and left me, she said
I ruined her triple-lutz. Ooooh my lady she done up and skedaddled,
’cause I done fouled up her triple-lutz. Now I’m
sittin’ in a fetal position, drinkin’ cheap gin and
cigarette butts.”
As Stubbs once said, “Back in the day it didn’t
matter if you only knew three chords, because back then rock
‘n’ roll wasn’t just about music, it was about
the institution of cool.” He was fairly nonchalant about his
rock revolution.
“Me, Otis Redding and Phil Spector were in a restaurant
jammin’ one day, and we were trying to come up with some scat
lyrics,” he reminisced. “Otis’ best effort was
“˜squippity menkin debbie’ and there was no way that was
gonna fly. Then, I put my elbow in the ranch dressing and said
“˜dip dip dip dip dip dip.'” It was as though
Stubbs had touched the face of God, held His tongue in his hands
and unfurled it into a cloak of unbridled genius.
After that, Motown couldn’t get enough of that gibberish
sound. Stubbs sang back-up bass scat with several bands including
The Perfections, The Reasonables, The Acceptables, The Average
Brothers and finally The Flunktones. Unfortunately, some truck
driver beat them up with his gyrating hips backstage at the Ed
Sullivan Show and took their place, forever denying them rock
superstardom.
This tradition of standing on someone else’s shoulders to
get ahead continues into music even today. Puff Daddy, or as he is
now known, “P. Diddy” or Sean “You’re Not
Fooling Anybody” Combs, has made it his milieu to rob at
gunpoint, or as he would say, “sample,” the works of
people who actually know how to write music well.
Where is the dippity dipping hoo dah in today’s music? It
seems the rollicking joy of real rock ‘n’ roll has been
lost. Currently we’re in the midst of what has been dubbed
“The Latin Explosion.” The explosion consists of
one-hit-wonders Ricky Martin and Marc Anthony,
singer/actress/posterior J-Lo, and Carlos Santana, a virtual
unknown who just recently burst onto the pop music scene over 30
years ago. Four people do not an explosion make.
This would be like calling the emergence of Eminem and Kid Rock
an “Annoying Explosion.” I think the addition of a
Latin sound to the music scene is great, but let’s get back
to basics. At this point I’ll take a hair band over what
we’ve got now. We can just take existing pieces of Quiet
Riot, Iron Maiden, and Guns “˜N’ Roses and fuse them
into Quiet Maiden of Roses. Pierced through the cockles of mine
heart, and thou art to blame, thou dost givest unto love a
disgraceful nomenclature!
There is no comparison between today’s sludge and real
rock ‘n’ roll, and nowhere was this more apparent than
the 2001 induction ceremony into the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall
of Fame. Michael Jackson and Steely Dan aside, two acts got up and
brought the house down. Aerosmith almost had a perfect performance
of “Sweet Emotion” except somebody invited Kid Rock
along to embarrass our generation yet again. Joe Perry wailed out
an unbelievable and
rock-‘n’-roll-hall-of-fame-skill-level guitar solo,
while Kid Rock moved a vinyl record back and forth a few times. It
was like a duet between Yo Yo Ma on cello and Ralph Wiggum with a
flute up his nose.
Rock ‘n’ roll may be dying a slow death, but
Clarence Stubbs went peacefully. He is survived by his three
children, Weeeeooooo, Bumba, and Speedoo. At the funeral, comedian
Adam Sandler took the stage for an unusually poignant moment. He
said, “Clarence’s life and music has touched us all.
After all, without words like “˜flibbity floo’ I
wouldn’t have a career.”
I don’t mean to say that there aren’t some talented
and innovative people out there (Lauryn Hill, Elliot Smith, Bernie
“Polkamon Master”Grabowski). Every generation has
complained that the newer generation’s music is
incomprehensibly awful. This time around they may actually be
right. There can be only one B.B. King, and we don’t need to
find others.
What we need is a reinvigoration of rock ‘n’ roll
from the ground up, not a reinvention. Let us not allow our most
cherished American art form to die. We need another Johnny B. Goode
more than another Justin Timberlake.