R&B good

At Newport, the glories of soul shone in the sun

by Ted Drozdowski

Rhythm & blues stagecraft has always been about largess, excitement -- high jumps and splits, voices soaring to operatic heights of heartache, big bands churning out a tidal wave of ass-shaking funk, clothes so flashy they need to be seen through shades, and songs that plunder every aspect of human experience. Not since the golden decades of Harlem's Apollo Theater has a single show embraced the kind of variety, depth, or largess that paraded across the stage during the Rockport Rhythm & Blues Festival -- Newport last weekend. The second annual staging of what promises to become the most outright enjoyable summer music festival in New England offered spectacular highs: the absolute mastery and charisma of Solomon Burke, the campy flash of Little Richard, the entrancing vocal orchestrations of doo-woppers the Spaniels and the Moonglows, the piano genius and unflappable musical leadership of Allen Toussaint and Dr. John, LaVern Baker's fireball belting (from her wheelchair), the sultry hot-buttered soul of Etta James, Rhode Islanders Roomful of Blues and Duke Robillard in graceful good form, Narada Michael Walton's unexpected blast of unharnessed funk power, and Chuck Berry turning in a preposterously out-of-tune performance that was nonetheless wildly entertaining -- at once confirming his position as a founding father of rock and roll and as the wild-ass great-granddaddy of punk.

There were disappointments, too, but they were slight. Percy Sledge seemed a bit awkward on stage, and his voice is frayed in its high register -- which made his singing fall to a whisper as he reached for the high notes of his moving "When a Man Loves a Woman." But when he dropped to his knees or used his rich low end to draw complex emotional shades from his plainspoken lyrics, he was entrancing. Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald, there to show the connections between traditional R&B and pop, didn't add much with their nondescript blues and glorified cover-tune mini-sets, especially McDonald, whose rigid tool of a voice was, oddly enough, compared to Aretha Franklin's by MC Ed Bradley. Also missing was a down-home component to the festival line-up: no dusty Mississippi or driving Chicago blues. Too bad, because last year's solo stone-blues set by Pops Staples was not only one of the festival's highlights but an unsparing lesson in African-American history and culture, thanks to a guitar-accompanied monologue in which Staples told his story of growing up in Mississippi and -- eventually, after years of scraping together a poor man's wages -- leaving for a brighter future in Chicago.

Nonetheless, what's great is great. And sometimes enigmatic. Sixty-three-year-old Little Richard, resplendent in his purple-and-silver-glittered zebra-striped suit -- with matching shoes -- liked playing some of his hits and favorites so much he played them twice, back to back. Solomon Burke, during his set's final rave-up, started singing "Happy Birthday," pointing to the audience with every "to you." And Berry, who must surely know how to tune a guitar after 50 or so years of playing one, seemed unconcerned as he dropped nasty little sonic bombs all over hits like "Johnny B. Goode" and "Memphis." His solo in "Little Queenie" was especially pandemonious, just south of in-tune and full of licks that ran into dead ends. So much so that it reminded me of the Sex Pistols' famous recorded version of "Johnny B. Goode," in which Johnny Rotten stops mid song, noting: "That's fucking awful."

But Berry played with such zeal, duck-walking for the crowd, swinging his guitar out in front of him, leaning into the microphone to belt out lyrics -- and EQing almost all the high end out of his guitar so it belched great crunchy blasts of low, grumbling sounds when he hit full barre chords -- that it was impossible not to be won over. Call me a romantic, but there's also something beautiful in hearing the man who wrote all those great songs sing them again. And casting Allen Toussaint in the Johnnie Johnson role was inspired; Toussaint grew up hearing those tunes and got a kick out of playing them (even if he good-naturedly rolled his eyes a little when we spoke about the set later), and he played them the same way he plays everything -- beautifully.

If lessons were learned about the vitality of the rhythm-and-blues tradition, and the way the music passes from generation to generation, so be it. But mostly this was one hell of a party -- an orgy of fabulous music in which everybody, audience and performers, got off.