Someone I know says “longhair music!” with a humph when the wrong sort of classical music comes on the car radio.
There is another sort. I was thinking – as I am thinking too much – of the flooding down south and I remembered that I used to have a live double lp of Professor Longhair, the New Orleans blues pianist, probably on Atlantic records. I probably sold it in the great purge of ’92 when I sold my worldly goods to travel west. I recall the guy who bought it at the flea market saying “why are you selling this” – just like the person did who bought my They Might Be Giants CDs and like the kids did who I let pay less for my KISS comic book by Marvel (with real blood from the band members in the red ink!)…except they worked “woa” and “dude” into the question a few times.
There was something bouncy dancing about the piano played by Professor Longhair that I figured today I needed to get back – especially on “Big Chief”. I only found one cut, “Tipitana”, on a mixed discount CD of generic blues piano. Not good enough. I know I bought it in the 80s and I know I sold it over 13 years ago. It appears though that his albums were all live and pretty much all had a version of “Big Chief” [clip of version #37] and “Tipitana” [clip of version #841]. I would have thought the internets would have figured this stuff out by now.
Now it is all memory work, playing each 30 second cut from “Big Chief” from each CD – the concert in Germany (too fast), the concert in London (too slow) – over and over at Amazon to figure out which one it was. Thank God I held on to all my punk lps. That is all I can say. Thank God.