We were at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dinner, the year Billy Joel was inducted (I know, you’re asking: Why?, but whatever…), and the thing about Joel getting in was that he asked Ray Charles to be his inductor. Ray Charles accepted (again: Why?), and he came out to do his presentation, and in the midst of it, I turned to my colleague and said/asked: “He’s the greatest living American musician, isn’t he?” While Joel was giving his acceptance speech, we mulled it over and agreed that, yes, we were in the room with the Greatest Living American Musician, and we had another glass of wine.
The last time I saw Mr. Charles was at the Songwriters Hall of Fame dinner, honoring Van Morrison. Charles and Morrison did a duet on “Crazy Love,” and it didn’t matter that Ray’s voice was kind of shaky. This was mind-blowing.
I’m not sure why we were so narrow that earlier night. American? Maybe we just didn’t want to deal with that whole slate of U.K. contenders, or split hairs about Canadians, or wrestle with the idea of Joao Gilberto, or maybe we were drunk. Really, who even came close at that point? Ray Charles could pretty much do anything: R&B (he practically invented it), jazz, pop, country, standards. I mean, genius, right?
My office window looks out on 56th Street between Broadway and 8th. Right across the street, I can see Patsy’s, the famous Italian joint, and right above Patsy’s was Atlantic Records. So I can pretty much look right into the windows where all those classic records were made, except there isn’t anything there now. I’m thinking about this because the other day I was in the Virgin Megastore. Virgin is going out of business, and everything is On Sale, so I finally bought that 7-CD, 1 DVD boxed set of everything that Ray Charles recorded for Atlantic in the ’50s. It was like $112. It’s a monumental thing.
It’s all here, the classic singles, the collaborations with Milt Jackson and David ‘Fathead’ Newman, the live concert at Newport, the essential “Genius of Ray Charles” album, a whole disc of Charles working out arrangements on piano and other rarities.
I don’t know, exactly, how I came to own the Atlantic 45 of “Come Rain or Come Shine,” why a nine-year old white kid would even want to possess this, where I heard it (my parents had a Belafonte album with a batch of Ray Charles songs, but it wasn’t on that, and they had no Charles LPs), what radio station might have played it. It wasn’t rock & roll as I was beginning to know it, and it wasn’t like my parents’ adult-pop (Sinatra, etc.), it was something deeper, there was something in his voice that moved me. That was my first exposure to Ray Charles, and I worked backwards to “I Got A Woman,” “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” and What’d I Say.”
All I wanted to do as an A&R guy was a simple jazz-trio album of Ray Charles doing standards. Like the Nat King Cole ‘After Midnight’ album. In the ’90s, I reached out to his management with the concept, and some song ideas, and never heard back. Later on, he did that duets album that won all those posthumous awards, and that had some ok tracks on it, but it wasn’t the last act I’d have preferred.
I don’t customarily recommend spending more than a hundred bucks on a collection of music, but if you’ve gotten a tax refund, go ahead and splurge. Worth every dime.
11 Responses to genius in a box
Those snarky comments about Billy Joel are unfortunate. Ray Charles admired Joel’s music and his duet on ‘Baby Grand’ with Joel and his desire to induct Joel into the Rock and Roll Hall of fame are testimony to his affection for him.
yeah, I know some people don’t like the snark, and if they want to post pro-Billy Joel testimonials, they should go right ahead. rock writers are opinionated. it’s just so funny that the Joel fans come charging to the rescue at the slightest provocation (or, in this case, an editorial aside in a post that isn’t even about him). After 30 years of critics taking him on, they should be used to it by now. Ray Charles dug Billy Joel; I don’t. I’m sure Billy Joel couldn’t care less about what critics think, and his fans shouldn’t care either.
Hey – I dig them both and I don’t care for the snark either. Why is it necessary ? Does it prove anything? Does it give any of us any more insight into Ray Charles? Other than some kind of self-indulgent attempt at ‘indie cred’, it’s meaningless. So lay off – unless you’ve got a point.
As Ray said of himself in relation to Art Tatum, Billy Joel ain’t fit to carry Ray Charles’ shit bucket. Ray was a genius (and it didn’t stop when he left Atlantic) whilst Billy Joel is a light entertainer somewhere between Elton John and Barry Manilow.
What have you gone and kicked off here, Cohen??
Those Joelites are a defensive crowd, aren’t they? I mean, compared to some of the critical lashings he’s gotten, my confused shrug about his Hall of Fame credentials is practically a five-star review.
“Kicked off,” for sure!
I’ll have to give a two-part answer here. Around 1965, a couple of my friends who were in our small Ohio town’s premier garage band, The Cavaliers, went to a Ray Charles concert in Columbus, and came back raving about what a fantastic show it had been. Made me wish I’d gone too. Finally got my chance when Ray Charles played the Belterra casino in Indiana in 2002. That show started a bit rough, Ray’s vocal tentative, the band not quite coordinated, and I thought, “Well, he’s 72 years old, he’s a Living Legend, at least I got to see him . . . ” But then, in the second number, Ray really got into The Groove, and stayed in it all night, fine vocals and keyboards both, and the band and the Raelettes rose to the occasion. It was one of the greatest concerts I’ve ever caught anywhere. And Mitch Cohen is right on the money about the pricelessness of any of Ray’s Atlantic sides.
As for Billy Joel, I’ve enjoyed the back & forth about “snark” directed at him — I wrote for Creem after all, where we tended to ridicule EVERYBODY, even the artists we liked, sooner or later. Personally I never minded Billy Joel myself. He wasn’t one of my favorite musicians necessarily, but in his adult-pop genre, I’d take him over most of his competitors any day, as his songs always had a lot of definition and texture, and real melodies. He’s never been as relentlessly bland as say Elton John, to my ears. And Joel’s always been something of a “punk” in his own non-critically-correct way — he can snark with the best of them if you challenge him. I always recall my phone argument with editor Billy Altman over a negative review of a Fleetwood Mac album I’d done for Creem in the early ’80s, when Billy said, “A lot of people here [NYC] feel the same way about Billy Joel you do about Fleetwood Mac.” That concept’s stuck with me over the years, that sometimes we critics form prejudices against certain artists for extramusical reasons — in the case of the Stevie Nicks-imaged Fleetwood Mac, I didn’t like how they’d become The Great White Blonde Rich Posthippies Hope for old-money FM outlets like Cincinnati’s WEBN. So maybe some of the NYC crits saw Billy Joel as an uncouth Hicksville hick compared to the N.Y. Dolls and Television and other hip bands happening in Manhattan in the ’70s.
I don’t know, but in the meantime, people should say whatever they want about Billy Joel, it’s all good with me, as long as they don’t miss out on apprehending the sublime greatness of Ray Charles’s music.
Like Richard, I am a Creem alumnus, so the idea of being accused of snarkiness is hilarious to me, almost as much as being accused of wanting “indie cred” (anyone who’s read my stuff knows that 1. I have none, and 2. I’ve been known to say kind things about music as square as The Sandpipers). But to make amends, I will say something nice about Billy Joel: he’s not as consistently awful as Harry Chapin and Jim Croce were. Happy?
At least you Yanks didn’t have to put up with the ghastly Leo Sayer (much). He made Billy Joel seem a near-genius.
John Miles, anyone?
I remain perplexed that the word ‘why’ can be construed as a ‘gratuitous swipe,’ especially as applied to Mr. Joel. How touchy can people be?