Lookin' For ... A Coda

 

You know that thing where your memory starts playing tricks on you? Yeah? Well, recently I was playing a  2CD compilation, Northern Soul Underground. It’s a great set, with the focus on the early ‘soul’ years, and I love the fact that the cover proclaims that the ’50 Soulful Rarities’ include The Profiles, Squires, Drapers and Laddins. I bet that got people rushing to the shops. Anyway, the second CD starts with The Valentinos’ 1962 SAR single, ‘Lookin’ for a Love’. For some reason I have been thinking a lot about that track . I knew Barry Gifford had mentioned it more than once in his books, but I couldn’t recall where I first came across him doing so. So I decided to cheat, as you do. There are plenty of mentions of Barry and ‘Lookin’ for a Love’ out there, but they nearly all bring us back to … well, here, sort of, in a tangential sense, which is nice but not helpful.

For some reason, I thought Barry had included the song in his 1980 novel Port Tropique. I was wrong. Although he does mention the very early Smokey Robinson & the Miracles side ‘Bad Girl’ in the book, which is pretty cool. Nope, it was in Night People, which I first came across (and characteristically left a postcard to mark the page) in Southern Nights, a collection of Gifford’s 1990s novels published by Rebel inc., Kevin Williamson’s series, under the Canongate umbrella, which was for a while so incredibly important in making widely available books by Nelson Algren, Jim Dodge, Richard Brautigan, Emmett Grogan, and John Fante, among others. Even better, in its heyday, branches of Fopp always seemed to have heavily discounted Rebel inc. titles.

I haven’t read it in a long time, but I recall Night People had a New Orleans setting, and featured Ruby’s Caribbean Bar on Poland Street, with a Rock-Ola jukebox that had among its contents Little Johnny Taylor’s ‘Love Bones’ and Guitar Slim’s ‘The Things That I Used To Do’. It also had Tony Allen and the Champs’ ‘Nite Owl’, which is the original of the track that achieved immortality on the Northern Soul scene courtesy of Bobby Paris who himself had a doo wop background. And in Ruby’s Caribbean Bar Fabrice Dos Veces, the transexual Cuban bartender, would offer a free drink to anyone who played ‘Lookin’ for a Love’ by The Valentinos. Just by way of being helpful, hit H8 if you are passing and choosing tracks.

Barry mentioned the song again in The Phantom Father: A Memoir from the turn of the millennium (though it was a while later I found a copy). He mentions in the story  ‘Listening to the News’ that he first heard The Valentinos’ ‘Lookin’ for a Love’ as a kid in Chicago on the  Pervis Spann show on WVON, which he describes as a “straight soul station”. Thanks to the excellent Kent CD Chess Radio Soul and Robert Pruter’s liner notes I am aware WVON was owned by the Chess Brothers, and indeed the cover features a couple of the station’s charts, which look brilliant.  

That same story by Barry concludes with him explaining how “the music that was broadcast during the fifties and early sixties changed and formed my existence. I’ll never forget hearing the rhythm section to Little Richard’s ‘Lucille’ – that sound made me realize right then, at ten years old or however old I was, that the world truly had to be a wild and mysterious place.” You could be forgiven for thinking those sentences had been written by Nik Cohn.

I wonder whether Barry Gifford has ever met Nik Cohn. I have no idea if they are even aware of one another. We do know Gifford as a young man was in London in 1965 when Cohn was the press’ hip gunslinger. Gifford had his first poetry published in London, when he was hanging out with Ginsberg and that crowd. That was the circle he moved in. But being a young guy who loved music, he naturally ventured into the Capital’s clubs, and we know he saw The Action at The Marquee, and that he got talking to their singer Reggie King at the bar, telling him that his group’s music made him feel homesick for Chicago.

Almost inevitably Gifford asked the singer if he knew The Valentinos’ ‘Lookin’ for a Love’, which got Reggie nodding enthusiastically, and saying a Guy called Stevens played it at a place he doesn’t go anymore, doesn’t get the chance to be honest. He then asked about what other groups in Chicago Barry rated, who mentioned The Radiants, and suggested The Action should cover one of their songs some time. “Yeah, I know of them,” Reggie replied. “They’re on Chess aren’t they? Cool label. Speaking of which, see that blond guy over there? His name’s Gary, really good singer and a friend of mine. He’s got this thing for Sugar Pie Desanto. A real thing. Keeps saying he’s gonna put her in a song one day.” And, memorably, Barry replied: “That’s a coincidence, as I’m a writer, and I’m gonna put her in one of my books someday.”

Gary Farr did put her in a song, and Barry was true to his word, too: indeed Sugar Pie gets a mention in his novel Wild At Heart, which I guess is the Gifford work people are most aware of, if only because of the film. In it, in a characteristically concise chapter called ‘The Meaning of Life’, two compadres are sitting in a drugstore, drinking 7-Ups while hiding from the heat. One, Buddy, has just made a list of his all-time top ten, which features ‘Lucille’ (naturally), ‘Lonely Nights’ by The Hearts, The Chiffons’ ‘He’s So Fine’, The Ronettes’ ‘Be My Baby’, ‘Sea of Love’ by Phil Phillips, ‘High Blood Pressure’ by Huey ‘Piano’ Smith, Irma Thomas’ ‘It’s Raining’, Betty Everett’s ‘You’re No Good’, Etta’s ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’ and Otis’ ‘Dock of the Bay’.

The other guy, Sparky, nods approvingly (and who wouldn’t?), and shoots some suggestions back, like ‘Just One Look’ by Doris Troy, ‘Stay’ by Maurice Williams, Slim Harpo’s ‘King Bee’, and Barbara Lynn’s ‘You’ll Lose a Good Thing’, before concluding with Sugar Pie Desanto, The Beatles and The Stones. Buddy replies, reasonably, that they can’t all be in the top ten: “Not meant to please anyone but myself.” Understandably, I’d left another marker in that chapter.

Anyway, I have absolutely no idea where or when I first heard The Valentinos’ ‘Lookin’ for a Love’. I know I first came across the group’s music on an LP of Bobby Womack and the Valentinos’ slightly later recordings, part of the Chess Budget Masters series, which I seem to recall getting sometime in the mid-1980s in the Lewisham branch of Our Price. I don’t think I’d actually heard the group, but I knew the name Bobby Womack because of his NME-sanctioned Poet sets, and I was buying any old 1960s soul stuff I could find at a reasonqble price.

The thing that stays with me about that LP is being blown away by the force of their ‘Sweeter Than The Day Before’, and that magnificent roar at the start, one of the great intros, and for me it had the same power as the best of Dexys, and I could imagine them covering it, with Kevin marching on the spot, swinging his arms, before cupping his hands around the microphone. I played that track so much around that time, like when I was getting ready to go and see someone like the Jasmine Minks or Laugh play live. Later it was a highlight of the Kent CD, Just Keep On Dancing – Chess Northern Soul from 1996, which for me is one of the greatest things ever. Maybe in a parallel universe Dexys did actually cover ‘Sweeter Than The Day Before’ as an alternate flipside of ‘There There My Dear’ with Jack Kerouac on the cover, as in the adverts.

I don’t think it registered 40-odd-years ago that ‘Sweeter Than The Day Before’ was written by Cecil Womack with Mary Wells. I doubt I even knew who Cecil Womack was. This was before he and Linda made the immortal ‘Footsteps’, another of the truly great pop productions, which still stops me in my tracks when I hear it in a shop or a supermarket. Listening to that Valentinos compilation again now, I find myself being reminded a lot of Van Morrison, and I mean that in a good way, and I guess that LP’s ‘See Me Through’ does have a literal connection to the Van song of the same name, with the first part on 1990’s Enlightenment and then the second part on the following year’s Hymns to the Silence, which contains another of my favourite pop moments when Van bellows out the name of Sidney Bechet: so good! “Previous, previous, previous.”

I have no idea if Barry Gifford’s a Van Morrison fan. Or vice versa. I think it would be easy for them to find common ground if they were to meet. Both guys have spent a lot of time in their art mapping their shaping forces, and celebrating some of the things that had a real impact on them growing up. For instance, they both have spoken about the powerful influence Jack Kerouac had on them, and how reading On The Road and The Dharma Bums as kids changed the way they saw the world.

In the late 1970s Barry Gifford with Lawrence Lee was the author of Jack’s Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. This was published before Jean Stein’s Edie and what seems an awful lot of other popular culture oral histories. Jack’s Book used to be, in the 1980s, something of a fixture in the discounted bookshops of old Soho and the Charing Cross Road (not forgetting the Waterloo outpost), and presumably it’s where I first came across the name Barry Gifford. Oddly, I never bought a copy until much later, and that aptly would be a Rebel inc. edition. I guess when I think of Kerouac biographies from when I was a young man I think of Ann Charters’ Kerouac: A Biography, which I definitely did have a copy of, and dearly worshipped the unbelievably cool photo of Jack and Lucien Carr in 1942 which it contained.

Then a little later there was Memory Babe, an immense 1983 biography by Gerald Nicosia, which I remember getting really cheap in, I think, Hatchards book shop in Piccadilly, the sort of place you always expected to be standing next to George Smiley. I have lost my copy, but I remember there was a bit about a book Jack wanted to write on the theme of jazz called Hold Your Horn High, which naturally enough back then became mangled into Hold Your Guitar High, in the spirit of Rob Symmons, Davy Henderson, Taffy Hughes and that tradition, back when such things seemed important.

The title Memory Babe refers to a nickname Jack K. had as a kid back home in Lowell, and in the intro to Jack’s Book there is a reference to his books being “the product of a genius at recollection”. I have to confess I have not (yet) read Proust, so am inordinately jealous of those, like Kerouac and Barry Gifford, who adore his work, and have in their own fragmented way set about creating their own Remembrance of Things Past. Can one include Van Morrison here, too? Perhaps. Probably. Why not?

In the case of Barry Gifford this has taken the form of his Roy stories, which have appeared in fits and starts over the past 50 years-or-so. Barry has described them as “history on my own terms, a series of intertwined episodes based on events real and imagined, dosed with sense impressions designed to enable the reader to both visualize and, most important, feel them as does Roy and other inhabitants of this fictional universe. That said, the Roy stories come closer to comprising an autobiography than any other form I might have chosen. People have often remarked that I have a very good memory; perhaps, but memory is subjective beyond doubt or control and therefore unreliable, insufficient to present a viable or even acceptable, let alone accurate, compendium.”

Is Roy really Barry, or is Barry really Roy? Who can tell? Does it matter? There is an incredible amount of Roy stories out there now, and I would not even pretend to have read them all, nowhere near. There is an awful lot of retracking, remapping, revisiting, rewriting, rewording, creating a disorientating sense of repetition, which can be appealing. I would suggest the stories are best absorbed in very small doses, one or two at a time, for example. That can be good for the soul, and a lot of fun.

I think I first encountered Roy in Wyoming, a 2004 paperback I have, where the young Roy and his mum drive around the South and Mid-West of America, seemingly without purpose, simply talking. That’s it. Just the two of them chatting, and pretty much nothing else. And it is so beautiful and wise and moving. Then in ‘God’s Tornado’, right at the end of the book, where his mum says she wishes she could write down some of the things Roy says, he replies: “Don’t worry, Mom, I’ve got a good memory. I won’t forget anything.” He doesn’t, so we are privileged to enter Roy’s world, one filled with characters like his dad Rudy, his mum Kitty, his Uncle Buck, Pops, and a supporting cast of wise guys, tough guys, eccentrics, dreamers, schemers, big time operators and no-hopers who populate the Chicago of the 1950s and various other places too, as the action moves around during Roy’s peripatetic youth.

Barry Gifford’s speciality, his chosen art form, is writing exquisitely short chapters or microstories, presenting his readers with vignettes or snapshots: typically two, three pages, sometimes a little more. He is such a great miniaturist or minimalist, in a world where less is more. Where did that come from? Why do I like the style so much? Simenon’s Maigret books may have something to do with it. They all seem to have short-ish chapters, and all his chapters tend to be the same length in each of his books, which I love and perhaps have made up. Then there’s Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which I also love and which is I think obliquely referenced in Wyoming.  And there’s Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, which was a revelation. And more recently I have discovered a similar approach in random finds like Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street (there is a Chicago connection) and Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighbourhood. And I have to mention Nik Cohn’s I Am Still The Greatest Says Johnny Angelo.

I confess I have not seen it (though no doubt it is available somewhere in the labyrinth of streaming services) but there’s a Roy’s World film from a few years ago based on these stories and Gifford’s memories of Chicago. It features a soundtrack composed by Jason Adasiewicz, with various Chicago jazz musicians, including bassist Josh Abrams, a name we know from associations with Sam Prekop, Tortoise, and so on. The soundtrack has grown into a full-length LP, which really is superb. The relevant Bandcamp page suggests the record features “bluesy, swingful charts with elements that might recall the post-hard-bop Blue Note records of folks like Andrew Hill, Sam Rivers, and Grachan Moncur III”. I think you would need to throw Bobby Hutcherson into the mix, but yeah! Great record.

I am not sure how much of a jazz fan Gifford actually is. I do know that he was the first to write nationally about the AACM or the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the Chicago collective that has featured greats like Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton and Lester Bowie. This was from the late 1960s, when Gifford was back in the States, writing for the evolving music press, including Rolling Stone for whom he reviewed groups like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield and Creedence.

I’ve got to be honest: I am aware of Barry’s early music journalism, but haven’t really read any. I have read a lot of Barry Gifford, but there is still a lot I haven’t yet read, particularly his poetry. It’s funny: I tend to binge on Barry’s books every now and then, then for a while somehow lose track of what’s around, and he and his publishers Seven Stories are wonderfully prolific, so I tend to miss out on things. I did, however, chance upon a new 2024 title recently, much to my delight.

This one’s called Ghost Years and, for now, I think it’s his best book. The title refers to “that time in your life you don’t know won’t never come again”. This time around Roy’s mum Kitty is the lead character in most of the microstories, but there is an incredibly moving one-page piece on Roy’s dad dying, which ends beautifully: “When he was told that his dad had passed away, Roy did not understand that death meant not only that he could not forget the final days of his father’s life but that he would not want to.”

And music? Yeah, there’s some music in the book. Near the end, a grown-up Roy goes into a bar in Ogden, Utah, where there’s a jukebox playing the be-bop kid Freddy Fender and Charlie Rich. I like to think it was Charlie singing ‘Life Has Its Little Ups and Downs’. Or ‘A Field of Yellow Daisies’. Both being Margaret Ann Rich songs. She wrote the best songs Charlie sang. ‘Something Just Came Over Me’. That’s another one of hers that Charlie sang. Such a beautiful sad song.

My favourite story in Ghost Years is ‘The Coolest Cats’ where Kitty hears the sound of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Pretty Thing’ coming from the radio of a parked car and really feels it. Coincidentally just before I read that story I’d been closely studying a Rob Symmons feature in Ugly Things where he talks about searching for something pre-punk, pre-Subway Sect, and says he “became obsessed with collecting Jimmy Reed records and nothing else.” I know Vic Godard has spoken about how in the very early days of Subway Sect they’d play along with things like the Pretty Things, Jimmy Reed and the Velvets. Looking on the web to verify that, I came across a show on Retropopic Radio devoted to The End of the Surrey People and Vic mentions that ‘Talent to Follow’ was originally about Jimmy Reed, so there you go.

Oddly, the blues is one of my blind spots. I have no idea why. It is just a form of music that has never really clicked with me. And I think I only have the one Jimmy Reed recording in my collection, and that is probably atypical, with the electric violin work of Remo Biondi being a key feature. That track is ‘Odds and Ends’, which is on Volume 4 of Kent’s UK Sue Story, a CD dedicated to capturing the spirit of Guy Stevens and his label. ‘Odds and Ends’ was a track first issued in 1958 and which Guy resurrected for release on Sue in 1966. Now, I hate to speculate and to potentially mislead you by setting a hare running, but when you look at the date of that reissue and consider Barry Gifford was in London at that time. Hmmm. What do you reckon? Well, you never know. You really don’t.