What A Price
Fats Domino has sold over 65 million records and yet, it seems, he gets no respect. I think it's difficult to truly understand the impact he had on the development of Rock & Roll from our vantage point here some 53 years after he cut his first hit for Imperial and changed the course of history in the process. He would chart
fifty five more times for the label before he moved on to ABC-Paramount in 1963 - a number which includes some
thirty-eight top ten R&B hits, nine of which climbed to number one. This buttery bowl of pure Creole Gumbo we have here today would hit #7 R&B in early 1961, and is as good an example of a 'non-coded'
Cosimo 45 as you are likely to get.
Rick Coleman has written the definitive biography on Fats,
Blue Monday: Fats Domino and The Lost Dawn of Rock 'N' Roll, and has been working with archivist
Joe Lauro on creating a film version of his life and times for almost ten years. As Lauro told
John Broven and I last week,
"You'd think in this case, with a guy who was such a big star and sold so many records, that there would be some kind of corporate interest in backing the project but, sadly, there isn't." Joe runs a company called
Historic Films (which is headquartered right here on Long Island), and when he recently acquired the rights to some French footage of a full 1962 Fats performance with
Dave Bartholomew leading the band, he knew the time was ripe to move the project forward.
Please join me in my support of
THE BIG BEAT: The Story of Fats Domino & His Band on
Kickstarter... with Fats turning 85 and Dave Bartholomew 93, it certainly feels like it's time we got this story told:
Thank You.
