Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) by Donald Fagen

player, was the vocalist that day). A lot of music critics seem to think it was the first record to make the leap from R&B to rock and roll, probably because the busted amp that guitarist Willie Kizart was using added some serendipitous distortion to his sound. But it’s Ike’s stomping piano that drives the tune. “Rocket 88” went to number one on the R&B charts and, no doubt, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were listening.
    The next year, the Bihari brothers sent him to Memphis to find bluesman Rosco Gordon. Ike liked Gordon’s tune “No More Doggin’” and had Rosco bring in his band for a session. In fact, Ike liked the tune so much, he secretly had the band come back and record it again with himself singing. (Fortunately, Rosco heard what was going on and broke up Ike’s game.) “No More Doggin’” made it to number two on the charts that year. Rosco Gordon’s piano style—particularly on that record—was a quirky sort of boogie with a deep shuffle and a heavy accent on the upbeats. If it sounds almost like ska music when you hear it, it’s no accident: the record is often cited as the template for Jamaican ska rhythm—whence came rock steady, whence came reggae. No wonder Ike tried to steal it.
    When Papa Legba, the Crossroads Devil, steered Anna Mae Bullock into his path, Ike found his muse. I love all those early singles Ike worked up for Tina and the Ikettes: “A Fool in Love,” “I Idolize You,” “I Think It’s Gonna Work Out Fine” and so on. Ike’s concept (really a more raw and countrified version of Ray Charles’s act) was simple: the band plays tight; Tina goesberserk. My favorite from this period, though, is “I’m Blue (The Gong-Gong Song)” by the Ikettes, with Dolores Johnson singing the lead vocal, a performance that actually justifies the overused term “kick-ass.” A static sequence of stylized, transparent cells, this piece is Ike’s overarching masterpiece (most people might be familiar with it as the sample used by Salt-N-Pepa in their 1993 hit “Shoop”). In 1965, Ike hired young Jimi Hendrix as a second guitarist for the Revue, but he was a big show-off, and Ike had to let him go: Jimi wouldn’t stay inside the lines.
    Papa Legba started to work overtime on Ike’s behalf in the late sixties. Ike and Tina opened for the Stones and crossed over big-time by covering rock tunes like “Proud Mary” and “Honky Tonk Woman.” Now they were superstars and the greenbacks were flowing. As is usual in these cases, Legba closed in to collect the vig. By all accounts, Ike got higher every year, and meaner, too. It’s really hard to focus when there’s a Hellhound on your trail. From Ike’s point of view, squinting through the harsh fallout from all that booze and goofy dust, he may have figured that forceful action needed to be taken to ensure that everything in his world was up to his rigidly high standards of organization. He may have determined that, with the Hound so close and all, he’d better at least have his ducks in a row. Chaos had to be fended off, and the ends justified the means. Or something like that.
    Or was it that Legba had given Ike exactly what he’d wished for—a schoolboy’s dream of a girl who could be both a soul mate and a creature he could mold into the perfect lover and musical partner—knowing that Ike would never have the empathetic chops to see what he actually had? Ike had been programmed to blow it with Tina from the git-go.
    After Tina finally left in 1976, Ike, already way shredded from the whole sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll thing, totally came apart. Years of continued heavy drug use and run-ins with the law ensued, culminating in his serving seventeen months in a California state prison. He was still in jail when he got the news that he and Tina had been inducted into the