Don’t make me nervous – I’m holding a baseball bat

Season’s greetings to one and all.

I hope you’re taking full advantage of the benefits of the season. Boxing Day, one of my favourite of all days, made for pissing away…

And what better way than listening to your Christmas haul and gleefully jumping down a series of YouTube wormholes?

Santa has been particularly good to me this year and with luck I may well be moved to go off about one of the other records I was given this year. For today though, I’ve spent my time listening to a wonderful Johnny Burnette record that my daughter in law kindly bought me. (The Boy chose well…)

The Rock and Roll Trio

The wormhole part comes with the discovery that a debate “rages” amongst rockabilly heads about the guitar part on the early recordings. Apparently, I may well have been adding to the general spread of misinformation and fake news, when I casually repeated the line that Paul Burlinson played that rickety old distorted guitar part on “Train Kept a Rollin’”.

If you recall, the guitar part on said record is credited with being one of (if not The) first times that a fuzz-tone guitar sound appeared on record. So it’s not quite the academic exercise that it sounds – you can say it does kind of matter. Certainly to some folks…

Paul Burlinson claimed throughout his life that he played on all the early recordings and was indeed a founder member of the trio with the Burnette brothers. He was certainly a cracking player of jump guitar (he also claimed to have learned to play at the feet of a passing blues player as a ten year old. I’m just saying).

There is a lovely clip of Burlinson playing live with Rocky Burnette (Johnny’s son) in the nineties here, which came off the back of Burlinson’s solo album released in 1997. But here’s an even better clip of part of the recording session for the record (there’s quite a nice nod to the Yardbirds at the end – I wanted to see Jeff Beck’s boot going through one of the speakers…)

This is a record that apparently Rick Danko and Levon Helm played on, but I can’t see either here (although DJ Fontana is the older of the two drummers used).

Anyway, it turns out that a number of people reckon that session player (and pioneer of the twin-necked guitar) Grady Martin was the actual guitarist responsible for the gritty tone of the guitar on “Train Kept a Rollin’”. I haven’t got a clue obviously but this feller makes quite a convincing case and this other bloke too… They’ve done their homework so who am I to argue (homework never being one of my strongest suits…)?

Here’s a clip of Martin playing “Freight Train Boogie” with Red Foley but really there are loads of clips on YouTube (Look up “The Fuzz” for some really strange bass fuzz guitar)

(The Burlinson loyalists can’t resist chipping in on the comments here, you’ll notice…)

It all doesn’t matter too much I guess in the long run. In any case, I reckon the real heartbeat behind all of these early Rock and Roll Trio records is the harsh, impatient vocals. The best of the early tracks are driven by the frustration and aggressiveness of Johnny Burnette’s voice and I think his is the real genius behind the songs. His voice is not so different to Elvis’, and it’s only when you realise that the majority of these songs were written and recordings made on or around the same time as Elvis’ Sun recordings and the release of “That’s All Right”. Burlinson actually worked with Presley and Burnette grew up on the same housing project. (Inexplicably, Sam Phillips gave Burnette an audition at Sun but turned them away…)

Here’s the other great Rock and Roll Trio song from the period, “Honey Hush”. Again, the same growling guitar / nervy voice combination – a winner every time.

I chose this video because again the Burlinson/Grady scrap comes up in the comments – and someone claiming to be Burlinson’s son actually says they both played on the record.

Look.

It’s Christmas fellers, we’ve all had a drink, shall we call it a draw?

We’ll do it hot and we’ll do it fast!

Writing about Jerry Lee a couple of months ago, I had a whole other post lined up to follow it. I was ready to construct a fifties punk post along the lines of Gene Vincent as Johnny Rotten and post-war America as Bill Grundy. It would almost certainly have been a real doozie – a dazzling post that would have gone “viral” for sure (I think is the term…).

I should’ve struck while the iron was hot or at least luke warm, but in truth I put the iron down somewhere and by now I can’t quite remember where that was. Shall we just agree that it was destined to be an absolute stonker, one of my best…?

There are a couple of things that even this addled old fool can still remember, though…

Fifties Punk

I’ve been meaning for a while to “get into” the furious, foul-mouthed whirlwind that was Hasil Adkins, a fifties rockabilly star for whom the prefix “proto” was surely invented. A “proto-punk” before the Sonics picked up their guitars, before Iggy had got his first pair of leather trousers, before Sky Saxon had grown out his fringe. Punk was not even a glimmer in Lydon’s beady red eye. Before all of this, Hasil Adkins was making a series of stunningly ill-advised life decisions, and creating his own dumb soundtrack along the way.

There’s a YouTube doc about the man which runs through some of the highlights of a dizzyingly reckless life which you can find here. And even if all you do is stick with the first two minutes of “She Said”, you’ll have a fair idea of what fifties America was dealing with. (Although if you do check out at that point, you’d miss the giddy happiness of seeing Adkins donning yellow afro, tap dancing and then playing an electric organ on the roof of his car. You’d also miss a lengthy hiatus in one of the man’s stomping-ground performances while a particularly bitter catfight breaks out and is then broken up by a formidable third woman. You know you want to…)

Adkins’ had a “distinctive” DIY style that was derived from the fact that he played as a one-man-band in the mistaken assumption that Hank Williams didn’t employ a band (he did), so why should he? Or that (in the words of his sister) “they was doing it theyself… which they was not… but he thought they was… so he took it from there.”

Can’t imagine many other session musicians coming up with the guitar sound on this record, mind…

It’s not just me, though, is it? Fifties punk…

If Santa is reading this post, I am hoping to become something of a Hasil Adkins expert by Boxing Day… but until that point, we’ll leave it.

The other thread around which I was hoping to weave my beguiling tapestry was a song by big band leader Tiny Bradshaw, first brought to my attention by this clip from Blow Up:

Again I love the guitar tone here, it’s properly gruff.

There is another, less satisfying clip of the Yardbirds doing “Train Kept a-Rollin’” on YouTube, a proper live version from French TV, but sadly without the feisty charms Jeff Beck and with rather too much of the more foppish stylings of Jimmy Page.

No matter, this is better, and way more punky…

(Disappointingly, there’s precious little footage of the band, this is about all I can find…)

This is the Johnny Burnette Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio version of the Bradshaw song and for me it exudes as much attitude and sheer mutiny as pretty much anything else I know. Again, the sound Burnette’s guitarist, Paul Burlison, grafts from his six-string is pure adrenaline and I’d like to think that a youthful Dave Davies’ life was never the same. There’s also a slightly unnerving synergy with the Jeff Beck scene shot ten year later.

Burlinson claimed that he got the tone by accident “after accidentally dropping his amplifier, which dislodged a power tube and later, ‘whenever I wanted to get that sound, I’d just reach back and loosen that tube’” (Wikipedia).

It’s claimed that this is the first example of deliberately distorted guitar sound on record, and considering it was recorded in the impulsive days of 1956 (a good two years before “Rumble”), it’s hard to think of anything earlier.

Wretchedly, the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio broke up in 1957, and Johnny Burnette forged a lighter career as a bit of a crooner. Burlison moved back to Tennessee to start a family and his own electrical business. Burnette died in a boating accident in 1964. All over too soon. Ridiculously short, agonizingly intense…

Again, Santa… c’mon! I’ve been good!