REVEREND HORTON HEAT
BIG SANDY & HIS FLY-RITE BOYS
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Clean it up or reduce it to kitsch–this sort of revisionist, antiseptic swabbing is rampant. In a television interview a while back, a middle-aged Dion DiMucci spoke bitterly about the current perception of doo-wop. The former golden-boy lead vocalist of Dion and the Belmonts in the late 50s and early 60s, DiMucci bristled over the fact that doo-wop–a genre that in many ways represents the height of vocal prowess by both black and white groups of the era–had been reduced in the public’s mind to that most loathsome embodiment of crass, commercial nostalgia, Sha-Na-Na. “Bowser!” spat DiMucci, angrily referring to the mugging greaser at the helm of that cartoonish group.
Poor Dion. He is not alone. If doo-wop has been reduced to Bowser, rockabilly has been reduced to reruns of Potsie and the Fonz hanging out at Arnold’s. The poodle skirts and pomade, the tail fins and tattoos–they are all images that obscure the raw, elemental blast of revolution that was rockabilly. In Peter Guralnick’s Lost Highway, Elvis’s original guitarist Scotty Moore described it as “boogie music for dancing with a country-orientated beat and instrumentation.” Those apt and simple words tried to explain the murky marriage of country and blues, the music that erupted from the south and let the north know that this was indeed a country divided.
For sheer intensity of heart and the will to endure in the face of relative obscurity, Ronnie Dawson is a sight to behold. At Schubas, old-guard Dawson played a frenetic, genuinely inspired set that incorporated blistering Chuck Berry guitar riffing with jagged slashes of souped-up Texas blues. Backed by three-quarters of Nashville’s outstanding Planet Rockers, Dawson jerked and jumped, laughed and preened, all while firing through bracing rockers like “Action Packed” and “Rockin’ Bones.” When he broke from the stage and ran through the crowd, his grinning face a craggy map, the crowd that pushed up to the stage closed around him. Jimmy Sutton, bass player for local opener the Moondogs, hoisted Dawson onto his shoulders and carried him aloft through the dancing crowd. The moment wasn’t colored in pastel; it was heroic. Lifted above the adoring crowd, Dawson did what real heroes always do: he pointed his ax and fired away, and for one more night defiantly held off all the airbrushes poised to erase him.
