Are there any contemporary bands that you like at the moment? Did you like Nick Cave’s cover of ‘I Put A Spell On You’?
JAY HAWKINS – “I can’t stand Nick Cave! I worked with Nick Cave in Australia in 1985. They had the AUDACITY to tell ME I was going to be the opening band for Nick Cave. I said, ’Just a minute… back up… my records sold here before Nick Cave was born. Before he was a twinkle in his daddy’s eye. Before his daddy knew how to get an erection! ‘ But I said, ‘I tell you what, just for one night, I’ll open the show for Nick Cave, but you’ll be sorry I did it.’ And I used every trick in the bag. Nick Cave could not get on the stage. So the promoters got wise and they separated us. I said, ‘You should have done that in the beginning.’
Nobody can get on the stage after me. You know who paid e that compliment? It was Nat King Cole who told me that when I was still a youngster learning the business. He said, ‘You’ve got too much energy, if I was on a show with you I would want to go on before you. I would never follow you.’ Now I shook his hand you know, it almost brought tears to my eyes, for Nat King Cole, one of the greatest singers in the world, to give me a compliment like that…… OHHH! I stuck my chest out and I felt GOOD! Stan Kenton said to me, ‘I play unusual music, but YOU are one of the most unusual big mouthed black man I have ever seen in my LIFE!’ Well, when you get compliments like that from the masters, from people that heavy, that deep…. You’ve got to be on the right track, it’s just a matter of time.
The guys then who were running show business, they’re nearly all dead, I’ve outlived them! Now you get the young kids taking over, they want more Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and I (he reaches out and grabs my hand)…. Thank God for ‘um! Cos it’s given me a new lease of life. However, I’m getting older. I have reached the point where I’m tired but nobody will know it tonight….. You’ll know it, the audience will know it when they read whatever you write, but when you’re watching me on stage you won’t see it.”
I can believe that.
JAY HAWKINS – “You won’t see it! When I go on that stage I’ll be there until they close that club. They’re going to have to drag me off. I told the band. I don’t want to hear no shit cos I pay you good money and I’ll work the hell out of you. I’ll work you to death.”
Do you have any plans to make any new records?
JAY HAWKINS – “I will always make records! But I will concentrate more on movies. Every two or three years I may do a personal appearance. But my goal is to OWN a nightclub, connected to a motel and an all-night restaurant where I can cook, cos I love to cook! I’ve learnt the Far Eastern cuisine, the European cuisine, the Caribbean cuisine, American cuisine I love to cook. So I’m going to be behind the stove. If I want to sing, in my own club, I can go up there and belt out an hour’s worth of music. Then I can come down and walk behind the bar, go to the cash register and pay myself. Then I can turn round and serve some drinks or go around and be a bouncer. I’m going to have music playing, only 50’s and 40’s, and I mean the original artists. That kind of music… there’ll be no juke box in there but there’ll be one hell of a record player in my office. There’ll be speakers all over the place. Even in the motel into the restaurant, as well as the nightclub. There’ll be continuous music 24 hours around the clock. Music that people can relate to whether they’re old, like me, or the younger generation. I’m going to pick that kind of music.”
That music is so popular because it’s so timeless. The feeling and emotion, particularly in your own records, just can’t be…..
JAY HAWKINS – “ The best part of it is the blues. It’s the beginning. And that’s what I play. And when you hear what this band and I do, you will know that I did not lie to you at this moment in this room. See the show tonight and tell me I was wrong. (Puts his large hand on my shoulder) I don’t think you will, no sir, I don’t think you will.”
How did your stage act develop? I know about the Alan Freed connection, but did it all come together at the same time? The skull, called Henry and…
JAY HAWKINS – “No, no, no, no, no, Freed only had the idea for the coffin. There was a guy called Bob Hall, a black electrician, who put the fuse box into my act. But Henry was my idea. I found a stick in a grocery store and I had the skull. What I have done is take the skull off the stick and found me a palm tree branch and run the sucker right through his head. I’ve painted him over the years; now he’s so gruesome looking it’s horrible. He’s aged just like me, you know. You wouldn’t recognize him now, but it’s the same skull. HE’S WERID LOOKING NOW! In my act I look more like a witch doctor than ever. I’ve gone back to the old primitive ways and wear a bone through my nose and stuff. I’ve got a hand crawling across the piano, fire coming from my fingertips and I blow the place up. Then me and my sax player get together and walk among the people….. We do EVERYTHING most bands don’t do! We do all kinds of music but we stick to the roots. When I do ‘I Love Paris’ I leave out the strings and the voices, but they just want to hear me anyhow and that’s what I’m doin’ and what I don’t leave out I have my band singing in background. So you’re really going to think you’re looking at a group up there. A vocal background group cos that’s the way I train ‘um.”
Did you ever find that the ‘voodoo’ persona was getting to be a problem, having to maintain that image all the time?
JAY HAWKINS – “No, no, now it works even better! I don’t know how this happened but as I sit here and speak to you, it’s the truth. August 1988, Jim Jarmusch and I were out on location filming Mystery Train, they’d already checked the weather bureau and they’d said that it was going to rain five times that day. The crew would wait for the rain to stop. They’d then have 20 brooms sweeping the streets, everybody sweeping the water towards the sewer. Than a sanitary blower would come along and blow the street dry. They’d set up the scene and start shooting and then it would rain and they’d have to stop. After the fourth time it rained Jarmusch said, ‘Jay, roll your bones.’ These are my bones…. (Jay Hawkins produces an old leather pouch from his bag and pours the contents onto the bed. His bones are a bizarre collection of small plastic skeletons, toy skulls and skeletal hands, gums, teeth and pebbles). I was raised by Blackfoot Indians and I do believe in the occult, metaphysics and stuff like that…. And I rolled these bones and IT DID NOT RAIN THE FIFTH TIME. I don’t know how it happened, it just happened. Jarmusch said, ‘I don’t give a damn, when I make a picture I want you there to control the weather.’
But that was September 1988, now I take you to May of 1989. Some of the people who worked on the film (Mystery Train) was now working on another motion picture called Mother Load, in Montana. They called me in California. They said, ’Jay, I know you may think this is a bunch of jive, but would you do us a favour?’ I said, ‘If I can.’ ‘Would you get your bones?’ I says, ‘ hold it, you’re going to ask me about the rain cos I’m looking at the TV and I can see it’s raining in that part of the country.’ They said, ‘Jay, we’re filming, we want you to roll the bones.’ I said, ‘It wouldn’t work. It worked in Memphis last year and I don’t know how. I’m not a witch doctor, a voodoo maker, I act it like a fool on stage. People love it, it sells, I make money. You’re asking me to do the impossible.’ ‘Roll the bones!’ So I rolled the bones (Jay proceeds to recreate the moment by casting the assorted trinkets across the bed). And that hand was pointing downwards twice out of three throws (the plastic skeletal hand has a small skull in its palm and looks remarkably like something you might find on the end of a key ring in a Christmas cracker). When that hand is up, twice out of three rolls, that’s bad luck. When the hand is down twice out of three rolls, everything is beautiful…. There’s something missing, now where is it, gums and teeth, these are supposed to represent demons and goblins…. These are pebbles on the grave of Dracula, supposedly…. There’s a tooth missing, a tooth that was pulled out of my mouth, big wisdom tooth, damn, it’s gone. It was important to me. Anyhow, to end a long story, it stopped raining in Montana. The crew called me and told me they were ready to wrap, they had managed to film the scene. They sent me money, T-shirts, gifts, cigarette lighters and stuff. Everybody pitched in and I got a letter of thanks and I put that in a frame. I still don’t believe that I had the power, but they said I did. Now, I’m not going to argue with them. If I’ve got a power that I don’t know about, I’m going to develop it!
I was talking to the daughter of the woman who raised me, she’s a Blackfoot Indian, and I told her what I’d done. She said, ‘There are powers between heaven and earth that most people do not understand.’ She said, ‘ Mama put powers on you and you don’t know anything about it. You have power, and you don’t know how to use it. ‘ I said, ‘What about this rain stuff?’ She said, ‘That’s part of it. You don’t have to believe it. We don’t care if you don’t believe it, but you have it.’ I said, ‘How come these powers didn’t save my last three marriages?’ She said, ‘That’s the dog in you. You blew your own marriages. You have powers but if you do wrong, it’s gonna come back to you, so you’d better do good.’ I’ve never done nothing bad.” (Jay promptly has a coughing fit).
How long have you had that bag with you?
JAY HAWKINS – “ Fifty –two, fifty-three years… that and Henry have been with me the longest I’ve had anything in my life.” (Coughing continues).
They must have seen you through thick and thin?
JAY HAWKINS – “They’ve been around the scene…”
Why do you think you’ve survived when many of your contemporaries haven’t?
JAY HAWKINS – “Because I kept adding. I kept trying to improve my act. If I look like some weird witch doctor that walked out of Africa… fine! The people who banned me from using a coffin…. I went out and bought a coffin. The people who said I was making fun of the dead, they are dead. And for some reason I’m still alive and I don’t even look my age. I don’t know what forces I’ve been tampering with. I don’t know if God’s going to punish me and I’m afraid, but right now it enables me to go to the bank and that’s all I worry about.”
Have you ever seen a ghost?
JAY HAWKINS – “ Well, I’m not afraid of the dead, the dead can’t hurt you. It’s the living that you’ve got to worry about. But I do believe, and I’m sincere about this, that before this hotel was put up… there was dead people here. There had to be. There were wars, people died on this ground. I believe there are people in this room but they are in another dimension, so they’re invisible. Somebody is always watching, even if we had the curtain closed and the door locked, there is always an eye. Even if it’s only God.”
Was it the Blackfoot Indians who instilled this belief in you?
JAY HAWKINS – “Well listen…. They rushed it down my throat. They took me out of the orphanage when I was 18 months old. All I can remember is them telling me what to do, how to think. Take charge of yourself, have control, remember with patience you can do anything. It may take 10 years but keep your mind on that one goal and work towards it. So my goal is music. When I go on stage I tell myself I’m an amateur so I’ll give the audience everything I’ve got. I can invent while I’m on stage. I’m so unorthodox that… if I was to fart, they’d think it was part of the act. That’s when I do ‘Constipation Blues’. Who else can sing a song like ‘Bite It’ and make it clean? Now I’m trying to come up with a song about throwing up…. BLAH! And I’ve got to come up with a title – ‘You Make Me Sick’ BLAA! Now I’ve just got to put it to music. Cos I want a record better than ‘I Put A Spell On You’. I’m sick of living in the image of ‘Spell’. I’ve got more records out than ‘I Put A Spell On You’, BUT THEY KEEP GOING BACK TO THAT ONE RECORD! People keep using it in motion pictures… Jim Jarmusch broke that habit and made me an actor.”
You’ve got an incredible back catalogue which ….
JAY HAWKINS: “ I’ve been in so many different styles. I’ve done Country and Western! It shook a lot of people up in Honolulu cos I used a steel guitar! They said, ‘Is that the same Jay Hawkins that came out of the coffin?’ They say I’m crazy but I’ll be back in the bank tomorrow morning. (Suddenly Jay Hawkins’ conversation changes track and he takes great delight in telling me about his new fuse box which he uses to create fire during his act). … Since last year they have stepped up security at the airport so they think I’m carrying a bomb when they see that fuse box. THEY GO CRAZY! ‘What’s that?’ Well I don’t help matters any cos I say, ‘It’s Moses and he’s still alive.’ ‘Get security, we’ve got a live one!’
People think I’m weird, there’s nothing wrong with me…. It goes back to the film Mr. Rock ‘N’ Roll which they banned because the NAACP said I was making fun of black people. I said, ‘You didn’t say that when they put out them Tarzan pictures, King Solomon’s Mines and King Kong steppin’ on ‘em and biting the babies in half. Why are you picking on me? I’m a blues singer.’ I chose to out as a black African blues singer and be different like Boy George and Little Richard would be different. I didn’t steal from nobody; this came out of my stupid head. If I’m smart enough to make it pay off, what are you bitching about? They then said, ’Why are you making fun of the death?’ And so they got onto the National Casket Association. ‘Don’t rent him no more coffins.’ Cos every city I went to I would rent a coffin, sometimes they’d take the body out and throw it under a curtain and rent the coffin to me. I’d use it and bring it back. So, when they said, ‘No, we cannot rent you a coffin’, I said,’ well now you think you’re stopping me?’ The next morning I went out and bought a coffin. Went out and bought a hearse. Painted it zebra striped. Instead of white walled tyres, I painted them zebra striped. After I got enough tickets I got rid of the hearse but I kept the coffin. Now I’ve got two hearses in my garage. Beautiful, one pure white and one pure black and either on Hallowe’en or New Year’s I bring them out and drive around.”
Nice. You seem to have the philosophy of the blues singer Leadbelly; “Act like crazy and take the white folk’s money.” Would you agree?
JAY HAWKINS: “Mmmm. Well, I don’t refer to them as white folks, people are people to me. I have no colour distinction. WHAT RILES ME IS PEOPLE WHO WILL CRITICIZE AND RIDICULE ME BECAUSE OF MY IDEAS AND WHAT I DO ON THE STAGE! I’m not stealing another person’s act. I had Black Sabbath saying I was rippin’ off Creedence Clearwater Revival by singing ‘I Put A Spell On You’ (uproarious laughter). And I told Black Sabbath tell you what you do, I took out 100 dollars and said you match this and any record you find of ‘I Put A Spell On You’ that hasn’t got my name underneath as writer than I will give you another 100 and kiss your ass! They came back and apologised. ‘We didn’t know.’ I said, ‘How could you know? YOU’RE YOUNG, DUMB AND STUPID. I was doing this shit before your daddy knew anything about sexual intercourse!’” |
