May 28, 1977 review: Big Joe Turner at the Tralfamadore Cafe

 

The man who gave us “Shake, Rattle and Roll” in the twilight of a career that began in the speakeasies of Kansas City.

May 28, 1977

Blues Man Big Joe Turner

Makes a Legend Come Alive

          Big Joe Turner, the legendary blues shouter, wears a coat and a satiny shirt and he sits at a table by the stage, a red drink in his hand. Bloody Marys. It’s about his fifth.

          Big Joe Turner doesn’t so much sit at the table as lean. His right elbow is down and he’s planted at an angle, massive in his chair. Big Joe Turner is big, all right.

          It’s his first night of three at the Tralfamadore Café, 2610½ Main at Fillmore. His first night in at least 10 years in Buffalo. WBFO-FM, the publicly supported radio station, brought him back Friday for a benefit. He’s on again tonight and tomorrow at 9:30.

          With him is a man who hasn’t been in Buffalo in 41 years. One of the guys in C. Q. Price’s Big Band remembered him. Played the old Vendome on Clinton Street in 1936. Pianist Lloyd Glenn.

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GLENN GOES first. With him are three neighborhood recruits – drummer Larry Owens, Greg Mullar from Birthright on guitar and bassist Sabu Adeyola from the Buffalo Jazz Ensemble.

          Big Joe Turner sits at his table by the stage as the band warms up first with a foxtrot, then “Satin Doll.” They know it well and take a handsome round of solos.

          It’s time. Big Joe Turner pushes off from the table and chair and onto his polished wooden cane. With help he ascends the step onto the stage. It took five men to accompany him down the steep stairs to the Tralfamadore.

          Big Joe Turner sits again to sing, but first he talks:

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“A FEW short summers ago, I was able to jump around. Lately it ain’t so easy. After 45 years ridin’ in an automobile – turned over 20 times – I shouldn’t be here.

          “It mess up my legs. Good thing I was drunk (he laughs), would’ve broke my neck if I had’ve been sober. I said: ‘I thought you were on the freeway.’ He says: ‘Yeah, but I lost it.’”

          Big Joe Turner is a caution and then some. His pleasures are the pleasures of the night time. His pains are the pains of love. He’s as outrageous as his band is straight. Except for Glenn, they seem like spectators.

          “Give me one hour in your garden, baby,” he sings, “and I’ll show you how to plant a rose …”

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BIG JOE TURNER sings four or five songs a set and then retires to his table and his Bloody Marys. He usually sits out the last tune, letting Lloyd Glenn finish things out. Glenn is like a musical table he leans on.

          Glenn possesses some of the sweetest blues and boogie-woogie licks known to man. Sackville Records in Toronto, charmed by his numbers on WBFO Friday, called the station and said they wanted to sign him to a contract. That’s how good he is.

          One high point is the beginning of the second set, when a sound adjustment (a silent piano mike was turned on) coincides with a sequence of “In the Evenin’,” “Every Day I Have the Blues” and “Corinna, Corinna.”

          Another comes when they reach “Stormy Monday.” Glenn recreates the piano part he played on the original T-Bone Walker recording and the place goes wild. It’s a shame the place is only two-thirds full.

          But it doesn’t make a difference to Big Joe Turner.

          “Drink hearty and stay with the party,” he says as they go into a break. “Ain’t nobody gonna bring you down. Gonna have a GOOD time tonight.”

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IN THE PHOTO: Big Joe Turner performing in 1977 at the Palms Cafe in San Francisco. 

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FOOTNOTE: How big was Big Joe Turner? Better than six feet tall, around 400 pounds, and still bigger than this little gig in the Tralf. He was featured in the Kansas City jazz reunion movie, “The Last of the Blue Devils,” in 1979, and at European jazz festivals in the early 1980s. He died in November 1985 at the age of 74 and was in the second class to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. Songwriter Doc Pomus told Rolling Stone magazine, “Rock ‘n roll would never have happened without him.”

          A legend in his own right, Lloyd Glenn was a couple years older than Turner and came up with jazz bands in Dallas and San Antonio. Along with that famous piano solo on T-Bone Walker’s 1947 hit version of “Stormy Monday,” he had some R&B hits of his own in the early 1950s. By this point, he was playing clubs in L.A. and touring with Turner and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. He died in May 1985.