by wolfgangguhl » Mon Oct 30, 2017 4:19 pm
By Jon Cleary (as originally posted on Facebook):
Fats used to sit on his porch, about fifteen or twenty blocks from my front door, and wave back to local fans as they drove home from the grocery store. His house, modern and stylish in the early sixties, still stands out like a run down birthday cake on a tray of old vegetables, and when the levee broke and the neighborhood drowned he was taken away in a helicopter from the streets he’d grown up in to a suburb a way away from the city.
The first time I visited him in his new place we had to punch in a combination for an electric gate to swing silently into a private world of empty neat streets and manicured lawns. This was a long way from the old and funky New Orleans 9th ward. These neighbors were politicians and lawyers, not musicians, gangsters and plumbers, a long way from the funk on the other side of the Mississippi river.
His memory was failing and he’d stopped gigging when he started to forget his song lyrics. ‘Is little Booker still living’? he asked me and seemed confused when I answered, as gently as I could, that no, James Booker died nearly thirty years ago. His eyes misted over and he seemed to focus on a distant time somewhere in the past. He thought for a second, looked back at me, and asked ‘Is little Booker still living?’ and when I gave him the same answer he was obviously lost.
After the storm, a piano company from Arkansas had given him a new baby grand, but his daughter said he rarely went near it. Through neglect it had become a bit plunky and a little out of tune but I squeezed a few bars of a blues out of it and from the other side of the room I could see Fats look up with a curious expression. It was as if, for him, everything in the periphery had been shunted to the side and someone had flicked on a switch.
He came over, a bit cautious at first, leant on the right side of the piano looking concerned and then, at a flourish smiled and edged round a little closer. By the second chorus he was reaching out to the keyboard, tentatively testing the water, and then he set his beer on top and moved around so that he could join in properly and started playing some octave runs that were the hippest licks I think I’d ever heard him play. I mean, really good! The man was in his mid-eighties with his head somewhere in the clouds but for a minute there his touch was as light and dextrous as it had probably been back in the fifties when he’d tear up the keys at the club Desire. Fats Domino was getting down.
We brought it to a close, laughed and patted each other on the back and as he stepped away to sit down again the light in his eyes seemed to dim a little.
As we stood in the door way to say our goodbyes he turned to me and asked ‘Is li’l Booker still living’?