part to make Fats’ wrong-ass chords sound not wrong. “I’m not knocking Antoine—he had a real Lower Ninth Ward thing going on, so his songs were very country oriented. When I was a kid, the Ninth was way country—they didn’t even have run- ning water or streetlights. People out there listened to Hank Wil- liams as much as they did Champion Jack Dupree. Country music had a big influence on Fats’ songs, but Dave was able to make some- thing out of it that appealed to more people. And that’s what made them the most popular songwriting duo until Paul McCartney and John Lennon.” According to Ron Bartholomew, “Blue Monday” was written on a piece of toilet paper. “We were in Kansas City,” his father remem- bers. “Everybody was having fun, but I didn’t have no money, which was why I wrote it.” Never mind that Bartholomew gave the song to Smiley Lewis first. When Domino recorded “Blue Monday” a few years later, he got co-credit on the number, one of the earliest R&B singles to cross over to Billboard ’s pop charts. “My partner Antoine Domino got his name on it too,” Bartholomew says, adding: “People don’t give a damn who wrote the song anyways. I made millions, though, because I was writing crossover music where everybody could buy the record.” “People don’t realize that, back in the day, an A&R man wasn’t just a guy who found the artists and the repertoire,” explains Re- bennack. “They was the guy that put the right artist with the right repertoire.”
Orleans alone. The new song “jettisoned the despair of the original junker lyric,” writes Rick Coleman in his 2006 biography, Blue Monday: Fats Domino and the Lost Dawn of Rock ’N’ Roll . “Fats didn’t care about artifice, he was crowing to wake the world. ‘The Fat Man’ contained radically puzzling and pulsating sounds—the raucous musical ca- dence, emotion, and distortion that would echo through popular music for the rest of the century as ‘rock ’n’ roll.’ ” “I don’t believe that rock and roll was one thing that got created,” maintains New Orleans–born session musician Mac Rebennack, who, decades after Domino’s mainstream success, would metamor- phose into psych-rock star Dr. John the Night Tripper. “All the musicians knew each other, whether they were from Don Robey’s studio in Houston, at places in Memphis or Nashville, or here in New Orleans. In California, you had Lew Chudd, you had [Aladdin Records head] Eddie Messner, and you had [Specialty Re- cords founder] Art Rupe. You had the Chess brothers in Chicago and Syd Nathan in Cincinnati. The shit all overlapped. Some songs got classified under different names because of the artist, but what’s the difference? It’s all fucking music! What New Orleans turned the world onto was the backbeat—Earl Palmer was playing eighth notes, and every other place in the world simplified it. “Dave has always had that thing,” Rebennack continues. “He knew how to take Fats’ country kinda blues and polish ’em up and twist ’em around to make something the kids could listen to on a bigger scale. Being a slick motherfucker, he could also make up a
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Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images.
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