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Roland Stone: "Live" on the Creole Queen |
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New Orleans
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Tuesday, 24 January 2006 02:03 |
Roland Stone
Live on the Creole Queen
Orleans Records
Roland on the River
By John Sinclair
Many years ago, when this writer was just entering high school, rock & roll was Black music, a hyper offshoot of the segregated rhythm & blues idiom that was propelled into the consciousness of young white Americans by great creators like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Bo Diddley and Fats Domino.
The fantastic R&B vocal groups like the Clovers, the Drifters, the Moonglows, the Flamingos, Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, the 5 Royales sang their incredible tunes to an ever-widening audience, and the airwaves were filled with beautiful music all day and all night.
By the end of my senior year the whole concept of rock & roll had pretty much been taken over by the white people. Characters like Fabian, Bobby Vee, Dion and the Belmonts, Paul Anka, and Pvt. Elvis Presley had the charts locked up while Black artists strained to reduce their sound to be small enough to fit on to Top 40 radio.
One could take hope only in the emerging Black artists like Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, James Brown and Little Willie John, and in the relative handful of young white men who could feel the music inside themselves and make an authentic registration of their feelings in song--people like Buddy Holly, Dale Hawkins, Jimmy Clanton, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Billy Riley.
Their ranks were thin, and most were from the South, where Black music crossed over long ago to influence and inspire two or three generations of white youths, whether they played it themselves or just listened and danced to it as a central focus of their lives.
Here's where we meet the original Roland Stone, a New Orleans native named Roland LeBlanc, who blazed across the radio sky during 1959-61 as a teenage singing sensation with regional hits for Ace Records like "Something Special," "Just a Moment (of Your Time)," and "I Was a Fool" before disappearing--like so many of his peers--into what looked like permanent obscurity.
Roland's short-lived recording career began "when I was a senior in high school, at Warren Easton," he remembers, "playing guitar and singing with a band called the Jokers. That's when I went with Mac Rebennack and the Skyliners. That was in 1959.
"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!
"Where did I get my stage name? I cut 'Preacher's Daughter,' the first record I ever made in my life, 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 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.
"'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 teenage 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."
But the good times ran out before long, and Roland left New Orleans in the mid-1960s to work around Texas as a pianist. He played in several rock bands there but decided to leave the music business in 1978 when a Houston clubowner pressured him to play "Disco Inferno." He 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."
Meanwhile, a young New Orleans record producer named Carlo Ditta was looking for a 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 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. "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 [Mac Rebennack], 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.'"
"When I heard that," Roland continues, "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.
"I was 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."
Remember Me was one of the finest New Orleans R&B records released in recent years. The program strikes a lovely balance between rockers, shuffles and ballads, and Roland delivers each song with great power and warmth, his voice ripe with maturity and confidence.
"When I hear Roland sing," Carlo Ditta says, "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."
Remember Me drew enough attention to the rejuvenated Roland Stone that he could draw a featured spot at JazzFest, a rave review in Rolling Stone, an appearance at Piano Night at Tipitina's, and a series of special spotlight performances arranged by Carlo Ditta.
Last year during JazzFest Orleans Records presented Roland Stone in concert on the paddlewheeler Creole Queen, with Ditta at the mobile recording controls to capture the show for Roland's next release. This writer had the honor of hosting Roland's appearance with a very kicking band as we floated down the middle of the Mississippi River on a lovely spring night.
Roland is in splendid form throughout, and the band drives him through a program of New Orleans R&B classics--from Chris Kenner's "Sick and Tired" to Danny White's local favorite, "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye," from Eddie Bo's "Every Dog Has Its Day" to Aaron Neville's "Waiting at the Station," from Lee Dorsey's immortal "Ya Ya" to Smiley Lewis's "Go On Fool," the rousing closing number.
Roland's ballad hand comes down hard on his own teen classic, "Just A Moment (of Your Time)," the obscure Shields opus "You Cheated, You Lied," and an unattributed doo-wop number, "Is It A Dream."
"I used to do that song with The Jokers, when I was in high school," Roland laughs, "and I knew it from even before that, like way back in the early 50s." He even reaches into his Texas years for a song by his British namesakes called "Honky Tonk Women" and plays it half to death.
What you have here, in a nutshell, is an impassioned presentation of genuine rhythm & blues played by men, like myself, who have magically remained 19 years old for almost 40 years. It's the kind of program played by the kind of band that entertained New Orleans teenagers in high school gymnasiums, CYO clubs, American Legion halls and frat parties back in the days of segregation in the late 1950s and early 60s, and it sounds just as heartfelt and fresh as good rhythm & blues always does.
Stick this disc in your player and come on down to New Orleans for a night of musical fun with the original Roland Stone, rollin' on the river and rockin' up a storm on the riverboat Creole Queen. Or blow it up at a party and shake your ass to these swinging sides. Roland Stone will always be there for you, baby!
--New Orleans
February 21, 1997
(c) 1997, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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