Steve Bergsman - I Put a Spell on You: The Bizarre Life of Screamin Jay Hawkins

I Put a Spell on You,

The Bizzarre Life of Screamin Jay Hawkins

copyright 2019 Steve Bergsman

ISBN: 9781627310758

Introduction copyright Eugene Robinson

Feral House

1240 W Sims Way #124

Port Townsend WA 98368

www.feralhouse.com

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

SpeLLboUNd It rankles. In the murk of Americas wholly dishonest relationship with the confusion and our obsession with the confusion attending race relations, faking it until you make it has been deemed necessary by both greater and lesser personages. Martin Luther King Jr., I imagine, could have found half a dozen better ways to spend his weekends without getting his head kicked in, but compelled by higher ideals and a lot more than animal needs for cash and succor he took one for the team. Where it gets hazier is when we lose sight of what both taking one and the team are.

He stood off to the side of a stage in Portland, Maine. The usual receiving line for performers at the conclusion of a performance. I had, in a departure from my usual time on stage with OXBOW, performed with local greats Conifer in a special one-off encore. One song appended to a show that had seen me sing acoustic OXBOW songs. Lack of volume and electrification slowed none of the burn, and by show end the stage had been slathered with slobber, sweat and bile.

But there he stood. I had grabbed my suit in a sweaty bolus of clothing that would never come clean, before he spoke.

I just watched your show. He was a light-skinned Black cat. Possibly biracial. Definitely shaking. Shaking badly enough that I noticed and I noticed enough to put my sweat-stinking clothing to the side. If I had to fight it always pays to be ready to fight.

OK.

Yeah. And I think its going to take me some time to figure out why Im so angry with you. It it felt like. when I looked out at the audience. and then you on stageI dont know. Like I was at some kind of SLAVE AUCTION.

In Portland, Maine the audience for an OXBOW show is mostly White. Not just Portland, Maine. Portland, Oregon, Berlin, Madrid, Helsinki, Rome or wherever else weve played in the 30 years weve been playing, excepting Japan. Me? Im mostly Black, as I have consistently been since 1962.

So then from me to the twisted rictus of a face truly trying to figure it out, I laughed and then added right afterward, As light-skinned as you are that maybe made you feel right at home?

We stared at each other. Glared at each other. He shook his head. He walked away.

But you know Paul Robeson, Bill Bojangles Robinson and dozens up and down a long timeline of Black artists understood both the calculus of going along to get along and the need to rock your muse. Doesnt mean they liked it. Also, doesnt mean that they didnt like it. Sort of like how most of us manage life where we dont call the shots.

So when genius and payola-encrusted DJ Alan Freed decided to have Screamin Jay Hawkinsa name Hawkins hated that he had been glossed with by his record labelclimb out of a coffin in the mid-1950s, right after Hawkins broke big with the song that would end up defining his career, and to a certain degree his character, I Put a Spell On You Hawkins declined.

No black dude gets in a coffin alive Hawkins reportedly said. Three hundred dollars later Hawkins climbed out of the coffin, sporting some variation of what would be a lifelong outfit of gold and leopard print, sharkskin suits festooned with voodoo accoutrements, up to and including a smoking skull on a stick that he called Henry.

Like the Kafka scribble about the children that had been given the choice of being kings or couriers of kings, it became pretty clear early on that Hawkins would have preferred to have given up his miserable game, but after stints in the military and an expanding base of both inside and outside children, well, a mans got to eat.

What Hawkins lacked as a father he more than made up for as a force on stage. As long as he was on the stage, which was nonstop from the 1956 release of his signature song to his death at 70 from an aneurysm on February 12, 2000.

And what he was on stage, the physically imposing former boxer, was a man who wholly occupied what he had created and, embodied by both his role as a creator and the creation itself: a player of a game that he was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, winning. This is the curse of the clown and the cure of the clown. Because while the bones through the nose and the drunken ooga-booga act were dangerously close to the kind of pop culture niggerisms that fundamentally drove comedian Dave Chappelle off of his feed when he walked away from his show and the $60 million paycheck for said show, Hawkins owned that shit. Every bit of it.

So while being vocal about how much he hated the prison it had afforded him creatively, he still managed to be creative within that prison. Well beyond competitors (a steady list of everyone covered by The Cramps over their wonderful career) and whole branches of rock that he could be credited with creating. From The Cramps to The Damned to maybe even the whole damn goth rock deal, the most significant lesson they had gathered even if not directly influenced was Hawkins refusal to let there be any daylight between Jalacy Hawkins, his birth name, and Screamin Jay Hawkins.

In other words, he didnt feel a need to laugh with you if you were laughing at him. He didnt feel any need to validate that this was just an act. He didnt exhibit any need to embrace serious arts to take what he had done and who he was as the person who had done it, seriously.

He was as he was. Like other great American icons and here Popeye comes most quickly to mind with his I yam what I yam.

And beyond that with his hair conked to the high heavens and the gun-brandishing, drinking, philandering, tall tale telling, personal reinvention, TV, movies, later songs of note like Constipation Blues, Feast of the Mau Mau and Frenzy, Hawkins rode life hard and clearly put it away wet. Regardless of how out of step he might have been in the 50s, 60s and, well, pretty much any time.

Yeah, it was that kind of edge-riding that made Hawkins as a ride so well worth taking. He made everyone uncomfortable and uncomfortable for as many ways and reasons as there were. Black folks for his jive-y primitivism, White folks for his unmistakable sexuality, men for the threats to their physical safety represented by a Negro with cash and a gun, and women lest they fall under the spell that got him 33 kids.

There was no corollary that did it as long and as well. Ol Dirty Bastard recalls him but Ol Dirty Bastard is dead while Screamin Jay lives on. In about 43 recorded pieces of history, eight films and several hundred cover versions of a song he had written but was so drunk when he recorded it that he had to re-learn it later when it became a hit.

Not just a hit but name a song covered by Nick Cave, Nina Simone, Bryan Ferry, Marilyn Manson, a disco version by Sonique, Grammy noms, Billboard charts, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fames 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll, and a Rolling Stone magazine nod for being one of the 500 greatest songs of all time.

And standing on stage in England on an OXBOW tour, well lubricated, wearing nothing but shoes and underwear, bottles exploding around my head on the wall behind me because I had just choked an audience member into unconsciousness for having totally misunderstood whats going through the mind of a well-lubricated, near-naked man on stage, I bust loose with a little doggerel before trailing off with because youre mine.