All That Jazz: Interesting Stories VI
- jamesgeraghty
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
I have finally gathered together another selection of stories with a musical connection, which, as the title suggests, you might hopefully find at least a little interesting. There are a few sporting links in this one, some copycats and a brush with tragedy.
If you have missed past installments, you can always catch up:
Part 1: Shooting Pigeons here
Part 2: Punch Drunk here
Part 3: Die Another Day here
Part 4: On The Skids here
Part 5: Christmas Edition here
The Jazz Footballer
Gil Scott Heron was a well known player on the jazz scene, as a poet, singer, musician and writer. He is remembered for his spoken word content and for his collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Brian Jackson, where they devised a fusion of jazz, blues and soul, coupled with socially conscious lyrics. He considered himself to be a ‘bluesologist’, reflecting his deep love and understanding of the blues. He is also a key figure in the hip-hop world; his poem The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (1971), spoken over a jazz-soul riff, has been hugely influential on that genre (Kendrick Lamar references it in his 2025 Superbowl show).
But what about before all that, before attending Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, before meeting Brian Jackson and writing influential music and poetry. Well, he was born in Chicago in 1949, and there was musicality in his blood - his mother, Bobbie Scott, originally from Mississippi, had sung opera with the Oratorio Society of New York. She split from Gil’s dad when he was still young, forcing him to live with his maternal grandmother in Tennessee until she died when he was 12, and he ended up in the Bronx with his mother.
Gil Scott Heron: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (audio only)
But what about his dad? Gil Heron had been born in Jamaica in 1922, into a relatively wealthy family, attending the prestigious St Georges College in Kingston. He was a talented footballer, but moved to Canada as a young man, enlisting in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was a decent track athlete and boxer, but it was football that would change him. He was signed as a forward for Detroit Corinthians and then Detroit Wolverines, becoming the top player of the 1946 North American Soccer League (NASL) season. He then played in Chicago for several different teams over the next few years. It was there that he met that certain opera singer, Bobbie Scott, and Gil junior came on the scene.
But Gil senior focused on his career more than his son. He was part of an all-star team put together to face the touring England team in 1950. Then he was spotted by a scout from the touring Scottish giants, Glasgow Celtic, and they signed him in 1951. He became the first ever black player at Celtic and one of the first black professionals to play in Scotland, earning the nickname ‘the Black Arrow’. He scored on debut, in a 2-0 League Cup win over Morton. He would only play five times, scoring twice, as he was competing against a Celtic legend in John McPhail for the position. He played for several other teams in Scotland and England, before moving back to Canada in the mid-50s.
Euro Football Daily: Why This Forgotten Celtic Hero Deserves Your Respect! (great potted history of Gil Heron's football career)
So, a player that pushed some footballing boundaries in Scotland, turned out to be the father of a poet and musician who pushed boundaries in American music a few decades later. He left when Gil Scott Heron was only about two, and they didn’t meet again until he was 26. Heron senior also became a published poet - the two men ended up dying only a few years apart (senior in 2008, aged 86 - and junior in 2011, aged 62).
A moment away from tragedy
There was an immense tragedy over the skies of Scotland in 1988, and one legendary four piece act from Detroit was very nearly a part of it.
The Four Tops were one of the most successful American musical acts of the 1960s, and firmly at the heart of the Motown label's success. They fused together soul, R&B, jazz and disco, and lit up charts around the world with their fellow Motown acts like Martha Reeves, the Temptations and the Supremes.
Their success hinged on a few factors. They had behind them the songwriting powerhouse of Holland-Dozier-Holland, penning some memorable hits for them like I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch), Reach Out I’ll Be There and Standing In The Shadows Of Love. Then, there was the interest of having a baritone lead singer in Levi Stubbs, when most other vocal groups of the time had a tenor up front. And of course, Stubbs was backed up by three more excellent tops in Duke Fakir, Obie Benson and Lawrence Payton - this line up remained incredibly unchanged from 1953 to 1997!
The Four Tops: Standing In The Shadows Of Love (live in Paris, 1967)
Pan Am 103 had started out in Frankfurt on 21 December 1988, on its way to Detroit via London Heathrow. The Boeing 747 Clipper Maid of the Seas took off from London that evening, turning north before it would start its arc over the Atlantic towards the States. But shortly after 7p.m. that evening, a bomb detonated in the hold whilst it was travelling over Lockerbie in southern Scotland. All 243 passengers and 16 crew were killed, as were 11 locals on the ground, hit by the large falling aircraft sections.
The Four Tops had just completed their European tour and were preparing to return to the U.S. in time for Christmas. But at the last minute, they were invited to stay in the UK to record two performances for the Top of the Pops tv show. Instead of recording the two together (one was for the New Year’s Eve special), the producer insisted they record them separately, meaning they would change their booking to a later British Airways flight.
The Four Tops: Reach Out I'll Be There (live in Paris, 1967)
Apparently, John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) was also supposed to be on that flight, but missed it because his wife spent too long packing….
We’re Not Playing The Old Ones - but we know a band who will…
Are you a band that was a key part of developing the UK’s post-punk movement, with an artistic flair for experimentation and sound evolution - but don’t really want to play those early crowd pleasing songs that many in the crowd really want to hear you play live?
Then welcome to the world of Wire; a London band that formed at the height of punk in late 1976, quickly forging a reputation for writing punk that was a little outside the box. AllMusic describe debut album Pink Flag as, “perhaps the most original debut album to come out of the first wave of British punk.” But from a record label perspective, by the time of third record, 154, in 1979, their experimentation levels were already getting too much for EMI’s commercially sensitive palette - and dropped them, believing them “simply being intransigent.”
Wire: Ex Lion Tamer (audio only)
They disbanded for a while, focusing on solo and side projects, reforming in 1985. If they had been ‘intransigent’ before, they were positively obdurate, adamantine and contumacious (thank you AI) this time out. When they set out to tour the U.S. in 1987, they announced that they would be playing none of their older material live. To placate any fans that might have balked at this, they hired Hoboken, New Jersey’s Ex-Lion Tamers to act as their support. This is the name of a song from Pink Flag - and they were a tribute band who played all of that older material, leaving Wire to focus on the new stuff.
They were formed by Jim DeRogatis, a music critic who has contributed to Rolling Stone, Spin, Guitar World and Modern Drummer magazines over the years. He had interviewed them for their latest album, The Ideal Copy, and after going for a few drinks with Colin Newman and Graham Lewis, revealed that he was in a band that played Pink Flag from beginning to end. That planted a seed with them. Out of the blue, DeRogatis got a call from Mute Records publicist (Wire’s label), asking for a demo to be sent to London. Of course they had no demo, they’d only ever played college parties, but he obviously told the caller that they had a demo. Problem was, the label wanted it sent over to England the next day… He frantically called the band, it was already into the evening - then he called Hoboken’s Water Music and got them to allow them to come in overnight to record some stuff - and he did manage to get that tape in the mail, as the sun rose the next day. A few weeks later, he was in Europe with his friends in the band Mod Fun, and Wire’s manager somehow managed to track him down to Berlin - “The band is all set and they’d love for you guys to open and do you want to do all 22 shows?”
Newman would recall, “The idea was that we would have a band who would play Pink Flag, which was our best known record from the seventies and the record that had influenced the hardcore movement… that was like, yeah, let’s do that.” Was it something the audience would like? “The whole concept… this is quite a British way of looking at the world. Audience pleasing is not the number one thing on your list.”
The Revival in Philadelphia, the first night of the tour, was of course the first time that the original Wire had seen the ‘new’ Wire play. There was all kinds of feelings on the tour; it seems many were not sure if they were Wire or some imposters, some clearly thought they weren’t very good (or was it Wire), while Peter Prescott of Mission of Burma apparently glared at them at the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. seemingly miffed that his band hadn’t gotten the support gig! DeRogatis’s favourite memory though? At one gig, “Colin [Newman] is standing there with his jaw wide open, cuz he’s meeting Joey Ramone. I’m standing there with my jaw wide open cuz I’m standing next to Colin Newman meeting Joey Ramone.”
Wire: Ahead (official music video - from The Ideal Copy)
The Olympics or Rock Stardom?
Brody Dalle (Bree Robinson), despite being best known for her American punk rock band The Distillers, was actually born in Melbourne. Her family seems to have had a few strange twists and turns in it; her maternal grandfather, Giacoma Costa (known as Al Costello), was an Italian-Australian pro wrestler; and through her dad’s second marriage she is the half-sister of British actress Morganna Robinson; not to mention her own exploits, getting expelled from not one, but two Catholic schools in a year!
She was always into music. First there was Cyndi Lauper and the Beatles, then the grunge thing hit, and so it was Nirvana and some of the female fronted bands like Hole and Babes in Toyland. That then led to more hardcore punk like the U.S.’s Black Flag and England’s Discharge. Her first band, Sourpuss, played a set at the Summersault Festival just as she was turning 16, along with American punks, Rancid. Despite her tender years, she struck a romance with Rancid’s much older lead singer Tim Armstrong, and eventually followed him to L.A. where they were engaged.
That is where The DIstillers were born, and they would forge a reputation over the next eight years and three albums, before breaking up in 2005. There were side projects, collaborations and some solo stuff, before The DIstillers returned in 2018. As well as marrying Armstrong (which ended in bitter divorce), she has also been wed to Josh Homme, with whom she has three children - and that too ended in bitter divorce and recriminations.
The Distillers: Drain The Blood (official music video)
But that is fairly standard rock stuff, and that is not the story here. Perhaps more interesting is the story of her other teenage passion… swimming.
The remarkable thing about this female punk icon, is that as a youngster, Robinson (Dalle) trained seriously as a swimmer, it seems at the time with an ultimate ambition to make the Olympics. She later recalled to Clash magazine, “Freestyle was my stroke. I always came first - I was training to become an Olympic swimmer, but then I discovered pot.” The ultimate transition, from the pool to the stage, with the commonality that she appears to have always been a very driven person.
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