When the wheels come off
Marcus Berkmann
Rock stars these days have all the advantages, which may be why so few of them are of much interest as human beings. If the rock biography has become debased curency, it's at least partly because most of its subjects have enjoyed such incident-free lives. So they released anoth- er record? So they played a few more gigs? Do we care?
Rock's pioneers had none of the advan- tages, and so lived predominantly terrible lives that are much more fun to read about. Some, like Buddy Holly and Hank Williams, died almost surreally young, hav- ing packed more experiences into a couple of decades than most of us manage in seven. One or two, like Ray Charles and B. B. King, are still going, and are never photographed without huge smiles on their faces. All too many, like Elvis Presley and Jackie Wilson, managed to hang on only until middle age, when the wheels fell off with a mighty clatter. Of all these, perhaps the saddest story is that of Jackie Wilson, which makes it all the more surprising that no one has told it before.
Tony Douglas's book is the first full- length biography of a remarkable singer. Wilson is probably best known in the UK for `Reet Petite', which rather bizarrely reached number 1 in 1986, a mere 29 years after its first release. But between 1957 and 1968 he notched up 24 top 40 hits in the US, including 'Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher And Higher' and 'I Get The Sweetest Feeling'. If you know these songs — and you surely do — you will know that Wilson possessed one of the most distinc- tive and fluid pop voices of them all, with a vocal range that defied physics. His wild and charismatic live performances — Dou- glas generally favours the adjective 'raptur- ous' — inspired Elvis and countless later singers. Possibly because it has not been played to death on dismal 'Gold' radio stations, his music remains amazingly fresh. The best songs still sound as though they were recorded yesterday, and maybe always will.
His life, though, was a complete sham- bles. Born in Michigan in 1934, and brought up like so many blues and early R&B performers under the paternalistic shadow of the Detroit motor industry, young Jackie was what indulgent parents usually call a handful and everyone else calls a nightmare. Heavily involved in gang warfare in between his spells in a local 'cor- rectional institute', he also found the time to impregnate 15 young women before he left school. But his singing career swiftly prospered. Disovered by Johnny Otis in 1951, he worked the local club circuit until chosen as Clyde McPhatter's replacement in the Dominoes two years later. At the age of 23, already married with several chil- dren, he left the group and released `Reet Petite'. Then things really took off.
Restraint was not a word in Wilson's admittedly slender vocabulary. Cocaine was consumed by the mound and distilleries were drunk dry. The Mob controlled him professionally, and the Internal Revenue Service pursued him relentlessly. He slept with thousands of women, and should probably be applauded for marrying only three of them. In 1961 he was shot and crit- ically wounded by a crazed female fan. By 1968 he was exhausted, his career as a hit- maker effectively over. But he maintained his relentless touring schedule until a mas- sive heart attack in 1975 plunged him into a deep coma. He died nine years later, never having regained consciousness, and was buried in a pauper's grave.
It is, in short, a cracking story of a con- firmed lunatic, ably chronicled by an assid- uous biographer. You don't read Douglas for his prose, which clunks along as though some important component needs replac- ing. But the raw material of Wilson's sorry existence is compelling, and provides a fas- cinating glimpse into a lost age. The names are a particular pleasure: if they are not called Johnny Otis or Clyde McPhatter, they are called Morris Wasseman, Jack The Rapper' Gibson or Singin' Sammy Ward. It's that sort of book: you wouldn't believe a word of it were it not all true.
B. B. King's autobiography is an alto- gether mellower affair, as befits a mellower man. Grinning as ever, and apologising immediately for 'struggling with words' (sadly his ghost seems to find them equally troublesome), B. B. takes us through his long and eventful life, from the Mississippi cotton fields of his childhood via the urban blues circuit of the 1950s and 1960s to his current semi-legendary status as the Great Blues Survivor. It's an utterly unpreten- tious book which functions primarily as an extended love letter to the music he has been playing professionally for more than half a century. Staying alive may be the least of his achievements, but I doubt he'd have it any other way.
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