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Roland Stone: Remember Me? |
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Sunday, 05 February 2006 01:37 |
Roland Stone
Remember Me?
By John Sinclair
Once in a while a little window of opportunity opens up for the aspiring recording artist. A record is made, it gets some radio play, people like it and buy it. More records ensue, tours are undertaken, and for the lucky few a career is born.
For most, however, the window closes up before they know it, and the show business life that once looked so promising soon loses its glamor. The hits stop coming, the record contract runs out, the gigs shrivel up and turn sour, and what fans the artist had made start to wondering whatever happened to that guy they thought was so great.
The artist slides into obscurity, leaves the music business and lives out his days with only the yellowed clippings in his scrapbook and a few scratched-up 45s to keep alive his memories of sudden fame and fast decline.
That's the way the story ends for most one- or two-hit wonders. And that's exactly how it looked for Roland LeBlanc, a New Orleans native who cut several singles for Ace Records back in the late 1950s as a teen-age singing sensation known as Roland Stone.
Backed up by fellow teenager Mac Rebennack and his band, the Skyliners, Roland Stone blazed across the radio sky during 1959-61 with regional hits like "Something Special," "Just a Moment (of Your Time)" and "I Was a Fool" before disappearing into what looked like permanent obscurity.
After his hits fizzled out and his shotgun marriage failed in the mid- 60s, Roland left New Orleans and worked around Texas as a pianist, played in several rock bands, and decided to leave the music business in 1978 when a Houston clubowner pressured him to play "Disco Inferno" and get up on the disco craze.
Recently remarried, Roland chose to work as a welder's helper instead, then returned to New Orleans in 1979 to operate his uncle Vincent's cleaning business on Elysian Fields for the next 12 years. He was putting in 12-hour days at the cleaners when the boogie lightning struck him again.
"We had a real hard freeze one year," Roland remembers, "and out of the clear blue, I get a phone call at the cleaners, and they asked for me by name. They said they were with the Times-Picayune, and they asked me how I coped with the freeze. Then they took a picture of me and ran it in the paper.
"So now, all of a sudden, a lot of people looked at this and said, 'Hey, that's Roland LeBlanc! The guy is not dead!' So they started callin' me at the cleaners--Frankie Ford called me, and the cat at WWOZ--the Duke of Paducah--he called me and asked me if I would please take part in a benefit they had coming up for WWOZ."
Meanwhile, a young New Orleans record producer named Carlo Ditta was looking for this guy called Roland Stone who had made an Ace 45 of "I Was a Fool" he'd picked up at a used record store on Airline Highway.
"I kept asking about Roland Stone," Carlo recalls, "and it turned out that the older brother of a friend of mine, Lucien Bauduc, had grown up with Roland. He told me that Roland was running a cleaners here in town, but I called around to a bunch of cleaners and couldn't find him."
"I came across Carlo Ditta through an old friend, Jules Bauduc," Roland corroborates the story. "Jules called me at the cleaners one day and said, 'Roland, they got a record out ya just got ta hear. It's by a guy named Willy DeVille, and you gotta hear this record. A local cat, a friend of mine, produced it, and I'd sure like to tie you up with him.'
"So, sure enough, the cat called me one day and said, 'You interested in doing a record?' I said, 'Sure, man.' A couple weeks later he called me back and said, 'Guess what? I talked to Dr. John, and he said he'd love to play on your session. He was thrilled about it, that after all these years you're finally doin' something, and he's gonna get to play on it! Mac was ecstatic.'"
Talk about coming full circle--not only was there going to be a new recording career for Roland Stone, but it would start again, 30 years later, with the same people who were there in the beginning. I asked Roland how this magical hook-up had come about in the first place, and he reviewed his early career like this:
"I was a senior in high school, at Warren Easton, playing guitar and singing with a band called the Jokers, and that's when I went with Mac Rebennack and the Skyliners. That was in 1959. Paul Staehle was playing drums, Earl Stanley was playing bass, Eddie Himes was playing trombone, and I'm not sure but I wanna say Charlie Madwell was playing tenor sax, and Mac was playing guitar. And I played piano. I was raised with a piano in my house on St. Ann Street, so I could bang chords, and I got by like that.
"We did big shows--big rhythm & blues shows would come through here and play at the Municipal Auditorium--Jimmy Reed, Bo Diddley, people like that. They had a white show and a Black show, and a white band would back up the white cats and a Black band would back up the Black cats. That's how it worked back then. I think it was Joe Jones' band who was always the Black back-up band, and it was Mac Rebennack's band that was always the white back-up band.
"I started singing with the Jokers--we put that band together in 1957. I think I was a freshman in high school. These two horn players--Herman Gilmore and Jerry Marque--ran an ad in the paper for a guitar player. So I called the guy and went to rehearse with them and, shit, they played just as bad as I did, so I went on and joined up with them. They had a singer, two horns and a drummer--no bass--and they just wanted me to play guitar.
"So we played one gig and we got like $6.00 apiece--$30.00 for the gig--and I started thinking about the singer. Like, if we got rid of him there'd only be four of us, and there'd be more for each of us. So that's exactly how I started singing.
"I'll never forget how I met Mac. We were playin' a dance at St. Anthony's on Canal Street, and Mac came up and asked me, 'How'd you like to make some records? Well, I'm an A&R man for Ace Records, and I can get you out on Ace. Quit this band and join my band.'
"Now when I think about it, I was about 17 years old then, and Mac was a year younger than me, so he woulda been 16, and man, he had so much stroke with the record business in New Orleans--a 16-year-old kid!
"That's how I came to cut Preacher's Daughter, the first record I ever cut in my life. It was on the Spinett label, it wasn't Ace. I was playin' in Mac's band, and this one night they were doin' a session on Huey Smith at WBOK radio station. After the session was over, they had some studio time left, and Mac says, 'Let's do this song to "Junco Partner". We did it that way, and then we overdubbed the other words, about the preacher's daughter, later.
"So we did that, and we played it for Joe Coronna. Joe was workin' for Johnny Vincent as sales rep for Record Sales on Baronne Street, catty-corner from what was Pontchartrain Cadillac then. Every time a new record would come out on one of us, Johnny Vincent would say, 'Waal, you can go across the street now and pick out the one you want. We gonna do it this time, baby.' I'm still waitin' to go over there!
"We did this Junco Partner thing, and Joe Coronna said, 'He's got a contract with Ace, so we'll create a label'--the Spinett label--and instead of calling me Roland LeBlanc, because I had a contract with Ace, he says, 'We'll call you Roland, uh, somethin'--Roland Wheels, Roland Dice, Roland Along'.... He says, 'Roland Stone, that's it.' This was 1959, right, and I didn't give a fuck what they called me as long as it would go out on a record.
"This record made a little noise in the city, because a lot of these high school kids--and I was a high school kid myself--they called the radio stations and bugged 'em. They found out that Roland Stone was Roland LeBlanc, and so every time you turned on the radio, they were playin' it.
"Then we cut Something Special for Johnny Vincent. Allen Toussaint arranged that. That got quite a bit of airplay locally, and it even got out nationally a little bit. I went up to Philadelphia and did that scene, with Danny & the Juniors, the Turbans, the Spaniels...and there I was singin' Something Special !
" Just a Moment (of Your Time) was a kick--it was Number One on WNOE, Number One on WTIX, the two biggest Top 40 stations in the city. I never made any money off the record, but what did I care? We just had such a great love for the art, and then hearing our records on the radio, and being recognized by people on the street, and seein' those cats that used to be in those teen-age bands--the Jokers, the Spades, the Barons, the Esquires--they would come up and say, 'Yeah, you made it, man. You made it. Good.' That was nice.
"The Ace thing went on until 1961, and then the band just kind of fell apart. I got out of the music business and sort of withdrew for a while, and then a couple years later I came back and started playin' again. I think the first place I played at was the House of Zin on Royal Street, and Cosimo Matassa came in one night and said, 'Man, we oughta do records.'
"We cut a record on the White Cliffs label--Cos was up on Camp Street then, after he moved from Governor Nicholls. We did these two songs [ Remember That b/w Don't Believe Him Donna ], but they never even got any airplay. This was in 1964, and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were coming in, and that was the end of that. I went to Texas and turned hippie."
Now it's November 1991, 30 years after the break-up of Mac Rebennack & the Skyliners, and all of a sudden there's Mac--now known all over the world as Dr. John--back in Roland LeBlanc's life, ready to make another record date. Roland continues:
"When I heard that, I called Mac up and we talked, and we were in a rush to get songs because Mac had to leave. So we went in and did the session in one day, no rehearsal, just playin' songs that both of us knew off the top of our heads.
"We cut 10 songs one right after the other with Mac, Earl Stanley and John Vidacovich. We started the session at 7:00 pm and finished about two o'clock in the morning, and then Mac says, 'Man, I think we oughta overdub a little guitar on this motherfucker, baby. And I'm gonna do it right now. And he got out the guitar and went through all 10 songs and overdubbed guitar until like six o'clock in the morning.
"We cut the tracks at SeaSaint in November 1991, and then we went to another studio last August and got a bunch of cats together from the New Orleans Musicians' Alumni Association and laid down the horn parts. I said to Carlo, 'Look, to these guys, this would be the greatest thing that ever happened to them.' And these are cats who have remained friends through the years--one of the horn players, Herman Gilmore, started out with me in the Jokers when I was in the 9th grade, in my first band.
"I'm really happy with this project--I did this with Mac, I did this with Earl Stanley, two cats that I began my recording career with. My professional life began in the band with these two cats, so I was thrilled. I said, 'Even if it never comes out, and all I got is a tape copy of it, I'm already happy.'"
Roland's happiness has definitely increased by now, because the sessions are out on a handsome Orleans Records CD called Remember Me, and it's one of the finest New Orleans R&B records released in recent years.
The title track, written by Mac Rebennack around 1959, is passionate, state-of-the-art teenage balladry, delivered with the maturity of voice and vision that Roland brings to all his current work.
The rest of the program strikes a lovely balance between rockers, shuffles and more ballads, including Gene Allison's "You Can Make It If You Try," Hank Ballard's "She's the One," the Moonglows' "The Masquerade Is Over" and a tasty version of "Try the Impossible."
The up-tempo material is drawn from Smiley Lewis ("Go On Fool," "Down the Road" and "Ain't Gonna Do It"), Fats Domino ("Please Don't Leave Me"), and the fabulous Clovers ("Lovey Dovey").
"When I hear Roland sing," Carlo Ditta concludes, "I know that the music never died. He's singing now better than ever. Not only that, but he's the real thing, and he's got a voice dripping with authenticity and soul.
"Quint Davis told me this is the best R&B record he's heard in years. He's gonna put him on the Dew Drop Inn show at Jazz Fest with Lloyd Price, and we gonna bust our ass tryin' to make this the biggest thing since Hannibal crossed the Alps."
--New Orleans
1993
(C) 1993, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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