Johnny Otis

This interview was conducted when the Johnny Otis Show appeared on August 1, 1972, at the Aquarius in the old holiday and fishing town of Hastings, some five miles east of Bexhill-on-Sea. Singing, playing piano and vibes, Otis led his band, which included Clifford Solomon (tenor sax), Big Jim Wynn (baritone sax), Gene “Mighty Flea” Connors (trombone and trumpet), Willie “Jitter” Webb (guitar), Jimmy Reed Jr. (bass), and Thomas Norman (drums). The headline act was Marie Adams and the Three Tons of Joy.

Although there was only a short time between arriving at Hastings and going on stage, Johnny insisted on giving an interview. I had long thought about his story, written by the man himself, which was among the best things BU had published (nos. 75–78); he was such an intelligent and fascinating man that almost anything he had to say was of interest. Hence we were content to let the interview develop quite freely, discussing different subjects as they arose in the course of conversation.

—John Broven

A Rap with Johnny Otis

Mike Leadbitter, Simon Napier, and John Broven

Blues Unlimited #101 (May 1973)

My First Record

I started my own thing in 1945 after I had formed the Otis–Love Band with Preston Love in Omaha. I made my first record for Otis Rene, who owned the pioneering Excelsior Records. On that date Count Basie loaned Jimmy Rushing as a singer, also two sidemen. I had a nice big band of my own at the time and we were well rehearsed. We did an instrumental with Preston Love and two sides by Jimmy Rushing. I said, “Great, we finished early!” “What do you mean, we finished early?” came the reply. “Three records in four hours.” Rene said, “No, four records in three hours.” “Oh, shit!” I said. So we hurriedly looked in my music book and found Ray Noble’s “Harlem Nocturne,” which was really Mickey Mouse music. We did our own arrangement, and although it was done as an afterthought, that was the one that made it.

The West Coast Labels

The main labels were Swing Time [Jack Lauderdale], Aladdin [Eddie and Leo Mesner], Modern/RPM [Jules, Saul, and Joe Bihari], Excelsior [Otis Rene], and Exclusive [Leon Rene]. At the time I was not aware of the Bob Geddins labels, or that the Jimmy McCracklin records I was hearing were made in Oakland. Although I came from Berkeley, which is near Oakland, we concentrated on Los Angeles, where the scene was all happening.

I am sure that people like the Rene brothers or Art Rupe never dreamt their records would smack and crash their way across the country when they first started. “Drifting Blues” by Charles Brown [with Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers, Philo/Aladdin, 1946] was the black national anthem for two years. It was all you heard; hits lasted in those days. Things like “The Honeydripper” [Joe Liggins, Exclusive, 1945] and “I Wonder” [Cecil Gant, Gilt-Edge, 1944] were on the jukeboxes all over Central Avenue. At the time, to hear a record you either had to buy it, listen on a jukebox, or maybe see an artist in person. There was not much air exposure. The pressures and competition which cause a record to die quickly today were not the same. The record owners used to work out deals with the jukebox men. The jukebox was a vital outlet, but I was not aware of the details of these deals.

Radio Outlets

Radio was to become all important in promoting records, but first it was limited to a few hours a day. The important disc jockeys on the West Coast were Joe Adams and Hunter Hancock. Adams hardly played any blues at first, mainly big band swing. But Hancock was more into folk. His first show was Harlem Matinee followed by Huntin’ with Hunter. Al Jarvis, the first big white deejay in L.A., died two years ago [1970]. He said there was an unwritten law about playing black records—they just were not played. Joe Adams, a young black from Watts, was his assistant, and learnt a lot from Jarvis; he later had his own show on KDAY and acted as announcer when my shows were broadcast from the Club Alabam. Today Adams is Ray Charles’s manager. Hunter was on for one hour every Sunday and was the first black program in South California. At first it was mainly big band jazz by Duke Ellington and Count Basie. He took “Harlem Nocturne” and made it into a hit. Later when I had the Barrelhouse club, he played other of my records. Then at last he got music on the air every day and hit a wider audience. Little by little rock ’n’ roll was born. Then whites started to trickle into my audience. Way back East the song pluggers used to operate, and they spread to the West Coast when Hunter got going. The magic of airplay … and then payola. That’s how civilization develops!

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Johnny Otis Show poster, 1972.

Later Johnny was a deejay on KFOX in Long Beach and naturally came across payola firsthand. He didn’t like it for the simple reason it would affect the content of his program, “but it was hard when old friends brought along their records and they were bad.

Drifting with Charles Brown

In the late ’40s the big artists on the West Coast were T-Bone Walker, Joe Liggins, Johnny Moore and Charles Brown, Roy Milton, and Gerald Wilson, who had a big band like Jimmie Lunceford. Roy Brown was one of the biggest names in the black community in 1948 with “Good Rocking Tonight” [De Luxe], but Charles Brown’s “Drifting Blues” was revolutionary, man. I first saw him in 1944 at a talent show when I was drummer in Bardu Ali’s band. He was a tall, handsome young man in a light suit and he played “Clair De Lune,” of all things, in a black theater. He broke the show up; he followed with “Rhapsody in Blue.” He was a schooled musician and had been a music teacher in a black college in the South. Bardu then asked him to play piano in the band. This was long before “Drifting Blues,” and I played drums on the session. He did three sides with Johnny Moore and no thought had been given about the fourth song. He was asked if he remembered a Christian gospel number his grandmother used to sing. Charles, who was very much into the Nat Cole Trio thing, didn’t think it was sophisticated enough. But it turned out to be the black national anthem for the next two years. People like Floyd Dixon, Little Willie Littlefield, Johnny Otis, and ten thousand others tried to sound like Charles; this was why I hired Mel Walker.

Floyd Dixon? He’s doing nothing now. I remember when I was on a ladder painting the Barrelhouse sign. Somebody turned on the PA system, which had an outside speaker to attract people into the club. A kid had wandered in and started to play; he sounded so much like Charles Brown that I thought it was the jukebox. It was Floyd Dixon. He had a nice run with “Dallas Blues” [Modern] and “Call Operator 210” [Aladdin] and other Charles Brown interpretations. Amos Milburn and Ray Charles were also influenced by Brown. Milburn’s “Chicken Shack Boogie” [Aladdin] is a thing unto itself, probably one of the greatest records of all time; so much electricity and energy—it’s supercharged. I put it on a par with Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” [Sun] and Ray Charles’s live version of “Drown in My Own Tears” [Atlantic].

Struttin’ with Duke and Peacock

I first met Don Robey when we took our first tour with the Blues Caravan in Texas. Little Esther was starring. Promotion in Texas was in the hands of two competitors, Carl Lewis and Don Robey. Robey had already started Peacock by then, and he was mainly a dance promoter, promoting different attractions through Texas. Robey asked for about eight different artists to appear on my show, and this was how I found Marie Adams and Willie Mae Thornton. By 1951 Marie had a hit with “I’m Gonna Play the Honky Tonks” [Peacock]. I was featured as talent scout and A&R man, and I did the Little Richard sides for Peacock and later Johnny Ace [for Duke]; “Pledging My Love” was recorded in Houston and “Saving My Love for You” in Los Angeles. [Thornton’s] “Hound Dog” was written in full cooperation with Leiber and Stoller and was part of a deal I had with them—the song was not stolen from me.

The Start of Rock ’n’ Roll

At first there was so much overlapping. There was more emphasis on rhythm, more animation, less bluesy. Historians point to “Gee” [the Crows] and “Sh-Boom” [the Chords, both 1954] as the beginning of rock ’n’ roll. Admittedly, they were the first records that went “pop,” but there was a white audience before that. In 1948 the whites used to turn up at the Barrelhouse every Friday night. I don’t know why, but it was always a Friday. They ranged from the young up to forty. The accent was far more on rhythm on Friday. Big Jay McNeely was my tenor man, and the crowd went wild when he played on his knees, then on his back, shaking his legs; big fat shake dancer came out singing jump numbers. There was also comedy and burlesque skits. We used to cook Mexican dishes and drink beer and wine.

Country Blues?

We didn’t hear or see much in the North, but the country blues singers influenced everyone. I can remember hearing Peetie Wheatstraw, Big Bill, Dr. Clayton. I heard Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” [Vocalion] recently, and although I didn’t know the artist or the title then, it was something I remembered from my childhood. The porters who worked on the trains used to bring in records from Chicago and places and would play them on Saturdays or Sundays in the neighborhood. We liked them because they were risqué, you know: “look under your hood,” “squeeze your lemon.” I didn’t record anything like that; I used to aspire to being Count Basie’s drummer. We had fun, but didn’t take them seriously.

Annie and Her Sexy Ways

At this point, Mike recalled the controversy that arose in 1954 over Hank Ballard’s series of “Annie” records for Federal.

A group of people left your country a long time ago and called themselves Puritans. They’re still with us. There is nothing as powerful as an idea whose time has come. Rock ’n’ roll’s time had come, but the public didn’t think so. There was a tremendous campaign by the white establishment against the blacks when rock ’n’ roll became big. They pointed to the effect of degenerate black lyrics on white youth. It was racism at heart. Not only Basie and Ellington, but “slum” bands like mine and Roy Milton were playing ballrooms and drawing large crowds; whites and blacks were rubbing shoulders together. This is what rancored.

Fats Domino and the Rock ’n’ Roll Era

I don’t know why, but Lady Dee [Devonia Williams], my piano player, and I had decided we wanted to do the beat of “The Fat Man” [Fats Domino, Imperial, 1949] for about a year before it came out. Then they beat us to it. We didn’t know it was good for about another ten million records! We must have first heard it, the beat, from somebody from New Orleans. We were in the Barrelhouse when a man serviced the jukebox and punched the button of one of the new records. We looked at each other and that was that; it’s what we’d been thinking about for the past year.

We played with Fats. During the heyday of rock ’n’ roll Hal Zeiger and myself were partners in real estate on the West Coast. With our radio and TV shows we had a kind of monopoly on venues. The Little Richards, Chuck Berrys, Fats Dominos would be stars for the night and my band would play the first set. [There was] the Rendezvous Ballroom [Balboa–Newport Beach], the Pacific Ballroom in San Diego, there was another in Santa Barbara [probably the Carrillo Ballroom]; they were all dance halls, no concerts in those days. You couldn’t sit the kids down. We would start at 9 p.m. through to 11:30. After a half-hour break, we would come back for a further hour. Everybody was on stage all the time and we used to work to death. It’s not so hard today. At first we played in the rough black clubs, although there were a few fine places in Chicago and Los Angeles where people like Count Basie played. We played at the Apollo Theater about ten times; the first time we were second on the bill to Louis Jordan. We became one of the hottest attractions and got a plum holiday week, usually Easter.

Our TV show in L.A. was called the Johnny Otis Show. It ran for half an hour every week. We used to have all the rock ’n’ roll and R&B stars: Coasters, Drifters, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Moonglows, Little Richard. It was all music and occasionally had comedy with Redd Foxx; the program was sponsored by a local Ford dealer and also a furniture company.

My stay with Capitol? We had a nice relationship, but they weren’t geared for R&B; they said themselves that if Atlantic had had “Willie and the Hand Jive” it would have sold twice as many copies. But the studios had a giant, sterile, super-slick atmosphere. I saw the Dick Clarks, Fabians, Avalons, Pat Boones making a dent by watered-down R&B. My Capitol records were contrived to make a hit, although I do like “Willie and the Hand Jive.”

Today, Today Blues

Today the picture has not changed much. The radio stations and music is all lily white. The future of black music? If I was an 18-year-old musician or singer, I could tell you. I can see things changing or moving. Folk music is slow-moving, conservative by nature. But why has black music changed so quickly? The black man has always been creative, placing one lay on another. However, when a black artist has created and innovated, white music takes over. Therefore there is added pressure to find something the white man cannot steal.

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Johnny Otis. Los Angeles, May 1974. (Photo Bill Greensmith)

It is easy to look back over the past and just remember what was good; you forget all the shit. Maybe we will look back in fifteen years and say Otis Redding, some Wilson Pickett, Aretha [Franklin] was good. Only the good will last. But music must change with a lifestyle because of sociological change. However, it is tragic the way our national treasures have been treated. It is a national disgrace. Joe Turner, a great, great man, a contributor to the culture of America and the world, cannot get a job; Ivory Joe Hunter, Eddie Vinson, Roy Milton … it’s not fair. A partial answer is the white superstars whose success has been based on black music. If each of them felt a responsibility to take one out, not as a fucking flunky, but talk to the audience it would help. The R&B Hall of Fame? Flopped through lack of interest, and, unlike C&W, the R&B artists are not in a position to help themselves.

I must say that Blues Unlimited have been missionaries in the field and I couldn’t wait to meet you all.