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Big Little Teenie

 
Let's face it. I've made a lot of money. Like most people in the big city, I had to discover a niche that wasn't being plundered. I was a kid lawyer just out of law school. Working about 90 hours a week for a downtown firm, Isham Lincoln and Beale, making a nice paycheck I didn't have time to spend. It was one of those nights. I was sitting in a precursor to Starbucks (this is back when coffee houses shopped for their furniture at garage sales).

I began to figure that I could make it on my own and still live where you could open your window and listen to the cheers of Cubs fans, however seldom that was. They didn't cheer much until about '69. I still wanted the Summer in the City feeling, the heat radiating from concrete at midnight when you were standing outside a jazz club watching the parade of jiggly girls.

My practice would be like a jazz solo. Lots of jazz clubs then. Lots. And some joints that were so musically ambiguous they seemed to shift from one night to the next, but they always had good music. Black music. I had been initiated to Chicago Southside clubs way back in the late 50s when my friend Willie used to take me around. We had backed into a friendship in the dorms at the U of I, living across the hall from each other. Brisket with white bread and rye; a strange sandwich with German mustard and barbecue sauce. I guess I was naive to think I was somehow safe in those Southside venues because I was with Willie. Hell, he wasn't safe, either. Nobody was, really.

But the worst that ever happened was I got panhandled and occasionally offered a great deal on some pot, which I never took advantage of. My immigrant grandfather and salesman dad had worked too hard for me to let my law license go up in marijuana smoke. One of the best places was McKie's Disc Jockey Club at 63rd and Cottage. Sonny Stitt played there. Gene Ammons sitting in once in a while. Rumors that Coltrane might show up. Cooking. Blowing the people away with Selmer tenors. Hard runs, cutting each other, the brass flashing in the stage lighting, sweat running. Music defeating the chatter in the room.

Then along 63rd to the Crown Propeller Lounge, where it was going to be jazz or R&B from the pre-rock era, or some mix that refused to be pigeon-holed. Sometimes Miles would play at Budland. That was heaven! Kitty Kat, Basin Street, the Pershing Hotel. Lots of places on and around 63rd, which was a kind of international border between black and white Chicago back then.

The shuffle included hookers, music, grass, and sometimes smack. It was like a circus, the colors. Black everywhere, the streets, the sky, the faces, the alleys. Black Caddies and Buicks driving slowly, all shiny for the weekend. Neon signs painted racing stripes in every Kool-Aid shade. Whitewalls and Continental kits. Drivers slowing to discuss the evening with single women who pretended to ignore them. The people on the stroll were outlandish, creative, flaunting clothes that spoke defiance. Reds with yellow, tan and white. Buff shoes, grandiose hats saying too much. The smell of ribs and second-hand booze barfed on the sidewalk. Broken bottles smelling of Ripple and Johnny Walker. Empty Camel packages, butts of big White Owl stogies. Laughter and language woven with creative profanity and a cadence that said more than the words. A little hostility, a little resignation. All of it playing over the sounds spilling out of the clubs.

I didn't realize it then, but I was sowing the seeds of my later success. There had been record labels in the Southside 50s that didn't survive long, some with offices in somebody's kitchen, feeding the craving the Southside had for its music. Club 51 was one of those forgotten labels. It had the Prince Cooper Trio, Prince having been married to Dinah Washington for a while. A blues guitarist with the elegant name of Rudolph Spencer Greene. Red Holloway did studio sessions for Club 51, as well as bigger labels like Vee-Jay and Chess before hitting the road with Lloyd Price, Bill Doggett and Jack McDuff. Lots more guys passed through Club 51 records in its short life. I would get to know one of the days of that life much better almost two decades after it passed.

One guitar player never had a record released with his name on it, not that he wasn't good, but he had reasons not to be found. What were they? Who knows? The name he gave me was “Slats Brown.” He used “Larry Black” as well. He was one helluva guitar player. Slats used to tell fascinating stories that went on and on. Should have been a writer if he could have found an editor to shorten them. Stories about the mob in New York and riding a freight to Chicago to escape from a contract he signed to save his right index finger.

Then a month later he told a lurid story about a string of women he took over in Kansas City from a pimp who put out the word that Slats better find himself a travel agent. Stories from Slats. One good one about trading his soul at the crossroads down in the Mississippi Delta to get his talents. Maybe it was just recycled Robert Johnson lore, maybe he came to believe it. But it could have been true, from the creativity he sweated on the stand. He had the eccentricity of a bat at night, and the same instinct to hide during the day. Slats was one fantastic guitar player. His stuff was as dark blue as you ever heard. It'd make you sad on the best day of your life. His lyrics were clean and fresh and avoided the clichés of woke up this mornin' and some gal leavin'. His lyrics were droll, like “This blues' too long, it got an extra verse” and ending with “Better end it now because it gettin' worse.” His chords were unpredictable, his rhythm contrapuntal.

I met him about '58, playing a one-niter at the Savoy 51 Skating Rink. He was a charming guy. We talked out on the sidewalk during breaks while he chain-smoked. He was witty and urbane and could drop his accent when it seemed convenient. I remember him in those days as being tall and slim, with sunken, angular cheekbones, hair cut short, almost shaved. He looked maybe a little downhill from 40 at the time. I was impressed by his easy manner and natural friendliness to a college kid from a rust belt small town. We talked about baseball, women and blues. I can see us standing in the alley, leaning against the back of a pink and gray Olds 88, twenty minutes going by like a sixteen bar break.

The next thing I knew, it was 1971. At that time I was renting space across the street from the new Civic Center, later named for Daley the First. The new Picasso statue was 15 stories below my office window. The guys I officed with used to come in for coffee and wisecracks about you-name-it, like whether the statue was Picasso's dog, squatting to take a dump in front of Chicago's courtrooms in the Civic Center.

My secretary interrupted one of those scratch-and-bitch sessions and told me there was somebody to see me named “Slats.” At first I drew a blank, after all, it had been 15 years or more. Then the image of Slats Brown clicked into place. I wondered if he had a personal injury case or an eviction or whatever. Maybe he needed a favor or a handout. But by then I had an extra twenty if he needed it. I knew about musicians. When he sat down, he must have sight-read the question mark over my head. We riffed the hello stuff quickly. He got right to it.

For the next fifteen minutes, Slats rolled out a story he had obviously told many times. It started back at the Park City Bowl, a venue that varied from skating to R&B and jazz. Originally called White City in the 30s, by the 40s the name alone could have closed it. The new owners Jimmie Davis and his wife, Lillian, turned it into an incubator for Chicago music. Slats told me about playing as a sideman there and at some other places Davis owned, then getting solo gigs. He played here and there, even up on the North side, at a place on West Lawrence, called Club Laurel. He got a reputation for being good but a little different, maybe not as colorful as the guys who made faces when they played. He used to read books, some decent titles, stuff like Native Son and Kerouac when Peyton Place was the norm. He said he had been on and off the road for several years, but came back in the late 50's to live just off South Park, near 79th, when he ran into Jimmie Davis one night at McKie's, having a drink with Red Holloway, the tenor man I told you about, who should have made it big. Red did some unbelievable backup with the Five Buddies and for Honey Brown and others.

One thing led to another, according to Slats. They got talking about the new Rock ‘n Roll stuff that was taking off. There was grudging admiration for Presley and Orbison and a couple more white guys who werre ripping off black music and making all that money. Slats told them he had a tune that could break through into pop, like Chuck Berry and Fats. Bill Doggett and several guys from Memphis and some great bands from New Orleans were doing Rock ‘n Roll tunes.

                                              Davis said, “Let's hear it.”

Slats told me he thought Davis was bullshitting him, but then Davis downed his double shot of Crown Royal, threw some bills into the puddle on the table, and headed for the door. Slats went along. They walked down 63rd and Davis opened up his record store, the Savoy Record Mart. In the back of the store was the recording studio for his label, Club 51. It only lasted for a couple of years, but man, was it busy! Some great stuff! Davis turned on the amps, the mikes, the cutting lathe and turntable, using whatever settings there were, and said

Slats had me, just like fifteen-twenty years ago when he told those long stories. He was good at it. I didn't know if it was bullshit, but lawyers appreciate a good bullshitter. Slats went on.

I could imagine those three guys full of booze sitting in the back room of a Southside record store at midnight, making a demo. But what was the point Slats was trying to get across, sitting in my law office 15 years later, across the street from a statue that nobody could figure out? I figured he was gonna hit me up to invest in getting it recorded. Slats surprised me.

        “You ever hear of one of them English rock groups called ‘The Brits'?”

Hell, everybody in the world had heard of the Brits. Huge group. They had a half-dozen chart-toppers in the late ‘60s and were still hauling down big bucks touring in the ‘70s. Not as big as the Stones or the Beatles, but only one notch down. They did all the stuff, breaking guitars, kicking holes in bass drums, taking off vests and lighting them on fire. And they actually sounded pretty good. They did a decent job of taking blues riffs and beefing them up with lots of electronic glitz. Slats saw my look of recognition and said,

“You know one of their big tunes, Daddy's Girl?”

“Sure. Last summer it was on every station in the world, maybe outer space. Big tune. And pretty good. I kind of got into it.”

“Well, that's Big Little Teenie.

He said it as if he couldn't decide whether to be proud or pissed.

“You're shitting me!”

 He just said, “Nope.”

“You mean they used the chords?”

“Nope. The whole thing. Intro riff, melody, words, bridge, all three choruses. They swiped the whole thing!”

“Are you sure?”

“Want to hear it?”

I said “Yeah,” thinking I'd call his bluff.

He reached into his overcoat pocket and pulled out a cassette player, one of the new real small ones. Slats said,

“This my demo on this tape, but I still got the original 78.”

He flipped the switch and I could hear a hollow voice off-mike saying

“Demo, take one.”
 Another voice,
“What's it called?”
Slats' voice on-mike said,
“Mmmmm. Call it…Big Little Teenie…Copyright 1956, Slats Brown.”

Then Slats on that Gibson did the tune that went platinum, but sounding like it was out of a time-warp from the Twilight Zone. It was thin, but in my head I could add the Brits' enhancement and the electronic effects. It was Daddy's Girl for sure. The intro, the lead, the words and phrasing. No doubt about it. The same tune.

I said, “I don't have to hear the Brits. You've got ‘em by the balls.”

We cut a deal and I began to represent Slats. I took a third, just like in a personal injury case. Later I found out Slats had shopped his case around the city and had gotten a cold shoulder from big firms that wouldn't pay their own mother's parking tickets without a major retainer up front. I'm not gonna bore you with all the details, but I got some professors of music, analyzed the two tunes, filed complaints with ASCAP and BMI. But what got their attention was suing in Federal Court for copyright infringement. Lanham Act.

The Brits and their record company hired a New York silk stocking law firm that will remain nameless, and they hired one in Chicago that could have been its twin. They tried everything. They hired experts to say that the original was a fake, that all black music sounded alike, that Slats had assigned his rights, all a bunch of bogus. You can tell when they're in trouble when they start flinging poo at the wall to see which chunks will stick.

Things were going well until one night Slats had a visit from some large guys after he finished a gig. It was outside a club, in an alley off Rush Street, and if a squad car hadn't pulled into the alley so the cops could take a leak, Slats' case might have been over. As it was, he decided to take a vacation to Louisiana until the litigation was ripe.

I remember taking the City of New Orleans from Union Station to see Slats. Arriving in Memphis in the limbo of pre-dawn. I got off the train, laying over a day, to catch the next City 24 hours later. I took a cab over to the Peabody Hotel, where ducks swim in a little pond right in the lobby and take the elevator to and from their pad up on the roof. They say the Delta, birthplace of the blues, starts in that lobby.

I had a strange feeling standing there, kind of like a pilgrimage or something, getting my mind right for Slats' battle with the Brits over the blues.

After a little sleep, a Memphis afternoon and evening. Sun Record studios. Barbecue in a basement off an alley. It was like heaven. Then another couple of blocks south of the hotel to Beale Street.

That night I heard Junior Walker, Isaac Hayes, and BB King. By the next day my batteries were charged and I was ready. When I got to New Orleans, I looked around the station platform and he wasn't there. Now that was far from unusual. I was just thinking of what to do when one of the best looking women I had ever seen walked right up to me and kind of attached herself to my side, chocolate melting against my arm, so smooth it didn't look like skin. I was about to tell her I couldn't afford such an exciting welcome, but before I could say anything she said,

                 “You the man. Slats say be nice to you. Treat you right.”

A Okay! About the middle of the next afternoon, she and I were sitting in the Court of Two Sisters, doing a late brunch, listening to a piano that spoke jazz in a modern voice. She was rearranging a huge house salad. I guess she was used to eating light because the sinuous body she played like an instrument needed very little nourishment. On the contrary, I was doubling up on the appetizers. Gumbo, oysters three ways, turtle soup with sherry.

                                          "Do it twice, please, waiter."

Just as the waiter finished taking the order, I heard a chair scrape and Slats was there, sitting beside me. I started to get up and give him a hug, but he waved me off. He looked around at the diners, at the wait staff, and across the street through the wrought iron fence.

I never had thought about my profession exposing me to a physical risk and began to see danger where a minute earlier I had just seen waiters and people enjoying a piano solo in the middle of a beautiful New Orleans garden.

          “You see anything I don't?” He said,

           “Not yet.” I said, “Is this thing getting to you?”

He paused for a long time, flicked his Bic, lit up a Kool, leaned back in his chair. He exhaled and the smoke drifted away. As he sat staring, his cigarette made squiggles in the air, looking like Arab script. The waiter came up and Slats said,

“Just coffee.”

The chicory-coffee aroma helped dissolve the menace I was sensing.

“Look, Slats, we're in this together. I can't promise that you're safe…or that I am, either. If it's getting to you, we can always drop it.”

I waited, hoping he wouldn't take me up on that. He didn't.

His jaw was set and his eyes were blazing. We sat there and talked until he relaxed. It took better than an hour and a shift from chicory coffee to Jax beer. The rest of the evening we spent in the real New Orleans. We discussed how I would contact him about the case. We made careful plans for him to lay low in New Orleans.

The next afternoon, I was back on the train, waiting for it to leave, with Big Little Teenie looping in my head. I was staring out the window when I saw him walking across the platform. Slats, with his guitar case. He stepped up on the little metal stool, got aboard, then walked down the aisle until he found me and sat down without a word. He should have been submerged in the Big Easy by now. Hard to find. Instead he was sitting next to me on the City of New Orleans. Not a word of explanation. Not a hello. Just there. All right, I'll play that game. I just went back to reading some cases on copyright from my briefcase. We pulled out of the station, still not a word between us. We rode through tired neighborhoods passing for quaint. Then it was levees, lakes, rivers, piney woods, old cars and shotgun shacks. This was the South of the early 70s. I was glad that Slats and I were relatively safe inside the train, rolling through segregation and old-time religion and country music. He was sitting there with his eyes closed, his guitar case clenched between his legs.

After a couple of hours, I thought this has gone on long enough.

“Slats, what the hell is this all about?”

 He gave me a sleepy little smile.

“What?”

“You know damn good and well what. "

“Cain't a man take a ride without there bein' no special reason?”

“Guess he can unless guys looking for him in alleys and maybe trains.”

He smiled. “They ain't no safe place in life. Trouble rise up no matter where you be.”

“Well, that sure answers a lot of questions. Ever think of putting that to music?”

As soon as I said that it bounced around in my head and sounded a little severe.

“I'm sorry, Slats. It's just that I came all the way down here to try to keep you safe. Now you're headed back to Chicago. What's going to happen when you get there? I don't see how I can protect you.”

He said nothing, but he didn't have to. I could read his thoughts: how can this white boy protect anybody? We talked about nothing much for an hour, then headed for the club car, Slats with his guitar case under his arm. Killed a few beers. Music. Chicago. Music. Baseball. Finally Slats and I ran out of things to say. We rolled through the cloudy Mississippi evening, gently rocking with the imperfections in the roadbed. We ate in the dining car, Slats keeping his guitar case close by. Railroad chicken, not bad, but the potatoes were cold. Slats said very little. Around 8 p. m. we were back in our seats along the left side of the darkened car, sitting silently, watching the tiny lights go by. The car was empty. I guess the passengers were enjoying a late snack or a few pops in the club car. It was a strange, lonely scene in that railroad car rolling north.

I was thinking about the rural South's debt to Slats and his ancestors, wondering whether the rest of the 1970s would show any melting of the glacial attitudes toward them. Around 8:30 we were passing through a little town. Slats leaned toward the window glass and said

“Lambert.

I said, “What the hell is Lambert?”

He looked at me like I should be in on the secret.

“Lambert, Mississippi. Played here couple of times.”

He poked his finger at the darkness.

“Twenty two miles right over thataway is Clarksdale.”

With that he slowly took out his guitar, gave it a cursory tuning, paused for a few seconds while he looked out into the dark and then began to play Crossroads.

I knew the tune. Hell, everybody knew the tune. Clapton, Howlin' Wolf, every guitar player did it. Even the Brits. All of a sudden I figured out why he was playing it. Robert Johnson wrote that tune about selling his soul to the Devil at the crossroads to get to play the best blues ever. The crossroads was where route 49 crosses route 61 in Clarksdale, Mississippi.


In that empty railroad car rolling through the ebony night his fingers found notes and phrases and his guitar moaned blues nobody had ever heard. Slats had once told me he sold his soul to the Devil and I just laughed. It seemed a good story, over the top, vintage Slats, maybe just an echo of the Robert Johnson tale. But as he played, I could see lighting over the horizon maybe 20 miles west of where we were splitting the night on that train. A faint peal of thunder found the holes in Slats' blues and added rhythm.

He played for no more than ten minutes. It was the best thing I ever heard. Not even a close second in all the years since. But his fingers on the strings evoked a subtle, strange hisssss that I never remembered from his playing.

When he finished, he looked at me, sweat pouring off his face, dripping on his shirt. It wasn't hot in that train.

He said, “Bought it back.”

With that he gently eased his guitar into the case and snapped it shut. I didn't want to say anything to ruin the memory of what I had heard.

Slats said, “Now I can go home. Chicago home. Go home and face them guys. Go git Big Little Teenie.”

You know what? That's what we did. I overcame my worries. Somehow I knew he was out of the Devil's clutches. One morning, less than a week later, I was reading the Trib while taking the “L” downtown to the office. There was an article on the third page about a mugging outside a blues club on Halsted.

The story was vague, but it reported that a number of young African-American men from a gang from the Cabrini Green projects had intervened and saved an unnamed musician playing at the club. Two guys in the hospital had New York plane tickets in their pockets. It took about 18 months and a lot of work, some borrowed money for experts, including two recording engineers.

The end of the story is 30 million. A nice round number that included a non-disclosure clause that expired in 2001. That was my beginning, if you can call going from a rented space to 10 million a beginning. But it was. I never had to talk to an Allstate adjuster again. Big Little Teenie led to other cases much like it. The monumental greed and prejudice of record companies and people peddling songs ignored the possibility that ordinary black musicians would do something about having their pockets picked. I had a nice career doing what came to be known as “Intellectual Property Law” and I never sold my soul to the Devil that night on the train, 22 miles east of the crossroads.

My firm has its own building Near North, where most of the music is being played these days, at least the music that makes money. We represent musicians, composers and even authors of big novels being ripped off by their agents and publishers. These days I'm the rainmaker. The real work is done by a bunch of star-struck kid lawyers.

Like I said at the beginning, I'm fixed for life. I have all the secret cell phone numbers of the entertainment industry. My walls look like a photo gallery, jammed with pictures with nice tributes and signatures you can't read. You're probably wondering what really happened on that train.

The only answer I can give you is damned if I know. I'm a Midwestern kid and my background is short on voodoo and spooks. Negotiating with the Devil doesn't stand to reason, I agree. But, still, I saw the sweat, heard that subtle hiss from the guitar, listened to the most incredible blues in my life. And I watched a remarkable transformation in courage and confidence and character.



Who knows? Was it supernatural or was it just the mind sorting out its fears and contradictions? But does it matter? Whether the devil is inside us or out there standing at the crossroads when we get there? But I'll have to cut this short. I'm running late for my guitar lesson. Good teacher, but he gets pissed if I'm late. He's very independent because he's got twice the bucks that I do. Some guy named “Slats.”