EXCELSIOR 536; JANUARY 1949

 

Most of those who came of age well past rock’s actual 1947 birth have been indoctrinated to think of the guitar as rock’s defining instrument, at least until hip-hop became rock’s dominant style and rendered the guitar slightly anachronistic, at least in terms of how prevalent it remains today.

This will no doubt change as well, trends come and go, new styles of rock are created to appeal to new generations of listeners, and usually those who prefer one particular era or style are prone to railing against the validity of everything outside that narrow scope.

But for most of rock’s evolution, now seventy years and counting, the guitar DID play a very prominent role in the instrumental makeup of the music and of the image associated with that music. Certain styles utilized it more than others of course but the guitar’s versatility, adaptability and portability all made it a preferred means of conveying the music to the masses.

It had to start somewhere though… for as we know the foundation of rock wasn’t built on the guitar at all, but rather tenor saxes and pianos, drums and bass, while guitar was (with a few exceptions) usually little more than an anonymous, often barely noticeable, part of the rhythm section.

But that’s about to change with this record. While not “first” in any sense in terms of prominent one-off appearance of the guitar in rock ‘n’ roll, it WAS the first to emphatically declare that the instrument was throwing its hat into the ring and expected to be taken seriously from this point forward.
 

Rising In The Dead Of Night
You wonder if the idea to re-issue Excelsior 536 a month after its original release in order to swap out a holiday themed song now past its expiration date, was really done because this track was burning a hole in the company’s storage facility and they feared if they kept it around it might spontaneously combust. You almost have to believe that somebody at Excelsior must’ve wanted to get it off their hands before it burned the flesh clean off.

But let’s backtrack a minute here to properly introduce the man about to unleash the apocalypse on the music world. On record he was usually billed as Pete “Guitar” Lewis after this, which leaves no doubt as to what he specialized in. Virtually everything else about him however was far more murky.

Lewis was born in 1913, somewhere in the South according to Johnny Otis’s lone mention of him in his book Upside Your Head. Most reports you’ll find online having him being discovered at the Barrelhouse Club in 1947… except the Barrelhouse Club wasn’t around until after that.

In other words it’s all guesswork and fabrications based on threads of information so small they can’t be expected to weave together a coherent biographical sketch. And so the life story of Pete “Guitar” Lewis boils down to his recordings made over about an eight year period before alcoholism led to his dismissal from Otis’s band, his subsequent homelessness the next decade and his mysterious death soon after that, just another wino according to whatever coroner who was assigned with tying the tag to Lewis’s big toe before moving on to the next case.

I don’t know if that coroner was a music fan, or if music is even allowed to be played in a morgue while work is in session, but if so the music that particular cold stiff wino had made while alive years earlier could wake the dead… maybe if they’d simply played Midnight In The Barrelhouse while performing the autopsy Lewis’s corpse would have risen from the cold slab and been able to answer some questions we as a society never thought to ask while he was around.

Like how the hell did he learn to play like a messiah of the instrument?
 

 
 

The Sun Shines Brightest At Midnight
It starts off with a startling tone, full-bodied and harsh… almost violent by its very nature and warning of imminent destruction before suddenly it fades and the piano enters light and discreet just for a moment by itself, the calm before the next storm. When Lewis returns to the fold he’s now playing an edgy lead as if the guitar was strung with barbed wire as the horns softly moan in response, surely replicating the sound of whatever wounded animal was now caught in that guitar’s fierce jaws.

Ten seconds in and you’ve already been knocked on your ass, kicked in the head and thrashed around by an instrument which prior to this, no matter how much of a rock fan you were, you hardly even noticed was on the stage. Yet on Midnight In The Barrelhouse it’s at center stage, the spotlight fully on it as all of the patrons alternately edge closer to hear the licks he’s dishing out, while at the same time keeping on their heels so they can quickly turn tail and run should he unleash something else as frightening as what he kicked it off with.

Lewis’s playing is the embodiment of musical tension, strung out over the more familiar backing which retains a semblance of order and discretion. He rips off some single-string solos that warp your sense of balance, the sound being so otherworldly compared to the usual fare of the day in rock that you aren’t quite sure whether to duck for cover or groove along with it, especially as it gives no hint of what’s to follow.

Normally records, especially instrumentals, have a more predictable progression built upon well-established musical boundaries all instruments must adhere to. True, those basic ground rules were recently upended by the increasingly frantic tenor sax workouts, but even in those cases, while the resulting passages they featured were completely unhinged, even maniacal in their intent, they STILL followed a pattern that was easy to discern from a distance. Start off slow and then gradually build up the pace until you were sent into a frenzy. Anyone watching a drag race or seeing an airplane take off could understand the basic concept of that.

Not so here, where Lewis changes tactics throughout, unleashing every trick in his arsenal… laying back and playing cool and easy, then abruptly striking the strings as if they owed him money before easing off and playing a lick so sublime before the bridge that you might not even notice it if you are too shaken by what preceded it.

The bridge does return us to some sense of normalcy for awhile, as the trumpet gets a weary solo that grounds things momentarily. We’ve railed against the out-of-date sound and approach of that particular horn since the beginning in rock ‘n’ roll, as nobody had yet figured out how to use the trumpet in an effective manner by reining in its tendency to overwhelm the arrangement with its squawking. But on Midnight In The Barrelhouse they come relatively close to finding an appropriate niche for it, letting it act as the respite from the heat the guitar has built up, its slow pace and shrill metallic echo reorienting us to the more established musical benchmarks.

Even now though the spotlight remains on Lewis who cleverly shifts gears, offering up a prancing progression on guitar that sounds more hospitable than his earlier assaults on the senses.

Of course it doesn’t last as he soon reappears with the same ferocity that he began with, but at least by this point the listener is aware of his brass knuckles approach and have their guard up for the little good that will do them.
 

Jazz Noon
By the close you are as wrung out as the strings he bent, twisted and abused during the course of the song, left feeling positively brutalized sonically by what you’ve just heard. But despite the ferocity itself and the alien sounding technique used to achieve that sound what stands out upon closer inspection is how effectively it was all put together.

Even back then, when it was SO outrageous compared to the average rock ensemble’s output, there had to be an appreciation of the skill set involved, in particular the layering of the sounds as each stage builds upon the previous mood just completed, a masterful sense of how to heighten the drama by the arrangement.

The end result is haunting, menacing and yet strangely intoxicating all the same. It’s a tour de force of musicianship, but also of musical concept, knowing just what they were working towards from the very start. Compared to many of the sax-led instrumentals that had no sense of direction and just told you to hang on for dear life as they took you for a wild ride, this had its destination in mind from the beginning and methodically, yet no less excitingly, took you into the atmosphere that existed each and every Midnight In The Barrelhouse.

That was the hour when the couples, already worked up and worn down from a night of high living, would slow dance in the crowded club amidst a one-of-a-kind milieu created by the heat from the bodies, the scent of the ladies perfume and the men’s sweat mixing into its own distinct odor with the lights down low and the clock all but irrelevant.

There was a term for hour this among nightclub performers, Jazz Noon, as that was when musicians had to be at their most wide awake and alert. With their unusual schedules that found them sleeping during the daylight hours, having breakfast in the evening and going to bed as the sun came up, the midnight was their midday and places like The Barrelhouse were their entire universe – a workplace, a home, a way of life, something this record magically captures and transports us all back to that world each time it’s played after dark.

It’s no wonder that when Lewis was removed from that environment his own life ceased to have meaning and came to an all-too inglorious end in the harsh glare of the sunlight.
 
 
SPONTANEOUS LUNACY VERDICT:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
(Visit the Artist page of Johnny Otis for the complete archive of his records reviewed to date)