• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Photo

Photo

  Doug Lief Lief is a third-year English student, and thus feels it is his right to invent words like "crimdiddly." Give him a rama-lama-ding-dong at dlief@ucla.edu. Click Here for more articles by Doug Lief

Who put the bomp in the bomp ba bomp bomp bomp? Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong? In this era when popular music has taken a fatal nose-dive in quality, it’s time the public finally learns the answer to these questions.

It is a well-known fact that our generation has turned out some pretty disappointing acts. My parents get to talk about The Who and Led Zeppelin. I get to brag about Blink-182 and O-Town. What is missing from current rock ’n’ roll is the roll. By “roll” I mean the blues. Right now the only blues going on are the Kraft cheese and macaroni blues (made famous by Etta James on her gold album “Songs About Fattening Crap, Live at the Apollo”).

This was made all too clear by the recent death of a renowned rock legend, made all the more tragic because he was fictional. I am talking about the great doo-wop pioneer and scat lyricist, Clarence Stubbs. Throughout this column are excerpts from my interview with Stubbs, taken from the final cut of Ken Burns’ “Jazz” because, as Burns put it, “17 hours is the perfect length for a documentary, 18 would just be dragging it out.”

Stubbs entered the world on March 12, 1932, in the midst of what rich people called “The Great Depression,” and what everyone else called “Wednesday.” Born in the log cabin he helped his father to build, he first learned the art of gibberish from his grandfather Eugene, who was kicked in the head by a petting zoo mule.

“Grandpa Eugene came up to me one day singing ‘boo-diddy boo-diddy heidy-ho doo-dah,’” he said. “Most folks ran when they saw Grandpa, but I thought, this makes sense to me.” Soon after, Stubbs was featured in choirs as “the boy who sings in tongues.” He was about to bring his special brand of looby-dooby hoo hah to Motown.

  Illustration by JENNY YURSHANSKY/Daily Bruin Thankfully, some of real rhythm and blues is left in the genre that bears its initials, R&B, but when the singer who seems to have the best handle on it is a rat-faced 3-foot-tall waif named Christina Aguilera, we’re in trouble. After all, Aretha Franklin is 10 times the singer Aguilera is, literally. Rock ’n’roll should be reclaimed by the black people who invented it, or at the very least loaned to very talented British people.

The rest of rock ’n’roll, however, could use a lesson from guys like Clarence Stubbs. What we’re left with now is a bunch of bands who are kind of sort of pseudo-posers for punk bands, minus the anger and social relevance. Take that away and all you’re left with is a privileged suburbanite who only knows three chords. I miss blues lyrics. We need stuff like, “My ice-skatin’ lady she done up and left me, she said I ruined her triple-lutz. Ooooh my lady she done up and skedaddled, ’cause I done fouled up her triple-lutz. Now I’m sittin’ in a fetal position, drinkin’ cheap gin and cigarette butts.”

As Stubbs once said, “Back in the day it didn’t matter if you only knew three chords, because back then rock ’n’ roll wasn’t just about music, it was about the institution of cool.” He was fairly nonchalant about his rock revolution.

“Me, Otis Redding and Phil Spector were in a restaurant jammin’ one day, and we were trying to come up with some scat lyrics,” he reminisced. “Otis’ best effort was ‘squippity menkin debbie’ and there was no way that was gonna fly. Then, I put my elbow in the ranch dressing and said ‘dip dip dip dip dip dip.’” It was as though Stubbs had touched the face of God, held His tongue in his hands and unfurled it into a cloak of unbridled genius.

After that, Motown couldn’t get enough of that gibberish sound. Stubbs sang back-up bass scat with several bands including The Perfections, The Reasonables, The Acceptables, The Average Brothers and finally The Flunktones. Unfortunately, some truck driver beat them up with his gyrating hips backstage at the Ed Sullivan Show and took their place, forever denying them rock superstardom.

This tradition of standing on someone else’s shoulders to get ahead continues into music even today. Puff Daddy, or as he is now known, “P. Diddy” or Sean “You’re Not Fooling Anybody” Combs, has made it his milieu to rob at gunpoint, or as he would say, “sample,” the works of people who actually know how to write music well.

Where is the dippity dipping hoo dah in today’s music? It seems the rollicking joy of real rock ’n’ roll has been lost. Currently we’re in the midst of what has been dubbed “The Latin Explosion.” The explosion consists of one-hit-wonders Ricky Martin and Marc Anthony, singer/actress/posterior J-Lo, and Carlos Santana, a virtual unknown who just recently burst onto the pop music scene over 30 years ago. Four people do not an explosion make.

This would be like calling the emergence of Eminem and Kid Rock an “Annoying Explosion.” I think the addition of a Latin sound to the music scene is great, but let’s get back to basics. At this point I’ll take a hair band over what we’ve got now. We can just take existing pieces of Quiet Riot, Iron Maiden, and Guns ‘N’ Roses and fuse them into Quiet Maiden of Roses. Pierced through the cockles of mine heart, and thou art to blame, thou dost givest unto love a disgraceful nomenclature!

There is no comparison between today’s sludge and real rock ’n’ roll, and nowhere was this more apparent than the 2001 induction ceremony into the Rock ’N’ Roll Hall of Fame. Michael Jackson and Steely Dan aside, two acts got up and brought the house down. Aerosmith almost had a perfect performance of “Sweet Emotion” except somebody invited Kid Rock along to embarrass our generation yet again. Joe Perry wailed out an unbelievable and rock-’n’-roll-hall-of-fame-skill-level guitar solo, while Kid Rock moved a vinyl record back and forth a few times. It was like a duet between Yo Yo Ma on cello and Ralph Wiggum with a flute up his nose.

Rock ’n’ roll may be dying a slow death, but Clarence Stubbs went peacefully. He is survived by his three children, Weeeeooooo, Bumba, and Speedoo. At the funeral, comedian Adam Sandler took the stage for an unusually poignant moment. He said, “Clarence’s life and music has touched us all. After all, without words like ‘flibbity floo’ I wouldn’t have a career.”

I don’t mean to say that there aren’t some talented and innovative people out there (Lauryn Hill, Elliot Smith, Bernie “Polkamon Master”Grabowski). Every generation has complained that the newer generation’s music is incomprehensibly awful. This time around they may actually be right. There can be only one B.B. King, and we don’t need to find others.

What we need is a reinvigoration of rock ’n’ roll from the ground up, not a reinvention. Let us not allow our most cherished American art form to die. We need another Johnny B. Goode more than another Justin Timberlake.