Bob Bell: Remembering Grady Gaines
Texan tenor titan Grady Gaines died Friday, January 29th, 2021, aged 86.
He led Little Richard’s road band The Upsetters during the fifties, and when Richard quit the business in 1957, Grady kept the band going, first hiring Dee Clark, and then going to lead the band accompanying Sam Cooke, Little Willie John, Jackie Wilson, Joe Tex and a host of others. The Upsetters were the go-to band for touring acts during the sixties, and after Sam Cooke died, became the main band for Universal Attractions, backing artists such as Bo Diddley, Etta James, Ruth Brown, The Supremes, Gladys Knight and The Pips, The Crystals and Patti LaBelle.
As a kid growing up in England I didn’t get to hear of The Upsetters until 1960, when American writer Nat Hentof wrote in his weekly column for the New Musical Express about a session The Upsetters had cut for Little Star, a label run by H. B. Barnum, and that Little Richard was the vocalist. It was just a line or two and didn’t mention Grady’s name. I was a big Little Richard fan and had all the records released on Decca’s London label, which was the UK outlet for Specialty Records, Richard’s US label. London credited all the tunes as by ‘Little Richard and his Band’, no mention of The Upsetters. Playing those 78s and 45s over and over, it became obvious that there were two bands involved - the sound on tunes like ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ was different from that on ‘Keep A Knockin’’ and ‘Ooh! My Soul’, and I learned that the former were recorded in New Orleans with the crack studio band that also backed up Fats Domino, Lloyd Price and a whole raft of singers, and that the band on the latter was his road band, The Upsetters. It was around 1961 or’62, through a fellow fan and pen-pal, Paddy Wray, who had a fat scrapbook of stories on Little Richard, that I first heard Grady’s name.
Mike Vernon’s brave little magazine, ‘R & B Monthly’ published a discography on Little Richard around 1964 or ’65, and I first saw The Upsetters listed on a session.
I arrived in the States in 1980, and started working with Rhode Island-based Roomful of Blues the following year. In 1986 the band was in Houston - Ron Levy was playing piano and organ with us then, and he introduced us to John Browning, who had played trumpet for B. B. King when Levy was in B. B.s band - they had been roommates. Hearing we had the next day - Sunday - off, John suggested we all go to Etta’s Lounge, to hear Grady Gaines.
Walking through the door, we were greeted by a slow and sensually shimmering blues riff, over which soared Grady’s tenor, the centre of all attention in the room, which was absolutely understandable because Grady was standing on a table in the middle of the room, wearing a bright yellow suit, blowing the blues in the sweetest yet most melancholic way, while his band The Blues Ramblers, on the stand at the end of the room, hammered out the riff over and over and over. I knew the tune, it was ‘There Is Something On Your Mind’, a record we had released when I was with Island back in the mid-sixties, by the mythic saxophone madman Big Jay McNeely, with vocals by Little Sonny Warner. Grady played the haunting melody over and over, dissecting it, stretching it, getting down real quiet and soulful, his reed vibrating and buzzing, and then coming up on the melody again, pushing, blowing, hitting a squeal, holding it, and then relaxing back into the riff, blowing slow, sad and sexy, and the ladies in the room, mostly middle-aged, fanning their faces, grinning and ecstatic, shouting ‘Oooh, play it for me Grady!’
And he continued, clambering down from the table and walking the floor, stopping by each table, giving them a chorus of forlorn Texas blues, lost and dolorous, then moving on to the next table, and all the while the band laid down that shimmering riff, and the entire room was a maelstrom of sound, now mellow then raucous, buttered with feeling and soul, a greasy Sunday Houston night, and outside the stars hid behind dashing clouds and a big old Texas moon played peekaboo, and Houston’s streets rumbled with the sounds of endless automobiles, and inside Etta’s, oblivious to all of that old Grady blew and blew and blew. The tune ended, and bowing, Grady put his horn on its stand on the stage and disappeared. The band sailed into a new number and moments later Grady re-appeared, now wearing a sharp red suit, and launched into a Junior Walker tune, and so it went on … hours of sweaty intense playing, changes of clothes, playing to the crowd of perhaps seventy-five at Etta’s as if he were at Madison Square Gardens playing to thousands.
We were due back at Rockefeller’s in Houston a few months later, and asked Grady to open for us. I called Hammond and Nauman Scott, the two brothers who ran the very hip New Orleans’ Black Top Records, and suggested they make it over to Houston for the show.
And so it was that Grady met the Black Top guys, and saw his career get kicked up a few notches, working Black Top sessions both as a leader and a sideman, putting out LPs under his name Grady Gaines and The Texas Upsetters, and touring the US and abroad. He played one of the Inauguration Balls for President Clinton in 1993, tore it up at festivals and made a whole lot of people glad and happy.
Grady was a Rock ’n Roll original, playing behind and alongside the originals with fire, passion and intensity. He was a gentleman, a kind man, and a musician’s musician. I count myself very fortunate to have known him and to have heard him blow.
