NAKED CITY: BIG JAY’S BIG BANG!
The cancellation of the recent Rewind Festival proved that nostalgia can be a fickle game. Assembling a bunch of dare we say slightly hasbeen pop stars from the 70s and 80s is no guarantee that punters will part with their cold hard cash. Nevertheless, with so little innovation in today’s popular music, attention is often focused on the rambunctious glory of the past and its surviving heritage performers in an attempt to rekindle that rock’n’roll madness. Even this year’s Homebake is turning back time with its special “Classic Edition.”
Over at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, scientists are getting devilishly close to recreating the elusive Big Bang but has anybody ever attempted to chart that similar moment in the infinitely shorter history of modern music. LA’s Big Jay McNeely is one artist who can well lay claim to being there right at the moment of genesis when black jump blues and r’n’b gatecrashed the white bobby soxers party and created total havoc.
It was a time when black musicians rebelled against the smooth, sometimes bland sounds of Glenn Miller style swing and began to honk, scream and shout, pushing their instruments to new limits and upsetting the cultural status quo. The new sound of r’n’b and jump blues was soon embraced by young college kids and hip white audiences at large and Big Jay was often accused of corrupting youth with his outrageous stage shows and eccentric habit of leaving a venue whilst still performing. On one memorable occasion in LA he walked from the club whilst still playing, boarding a bus outside, and not returning until the full journey had been completed.
Big Jay first toured Australia in the late 1980s and mesmerised audiences with his wild stage act, jivecat vocals and propensity to roam. During a show at what was then Klub Kakadu in Oxford Street he left the stage whilst still blowing and played the Pied Piper as he led a group of punters down the stairs and out onto bustling Oxford Street. He almost boarded a passing bus (again!) but quickly detoured into a nearby sex shop where he sparked near chaos as his blasting sax echoed throughout the clandestine world of peep shows and smutty mags. Cubicle doors suddenly flew open as embarrassed patrons scurried for the door, hotly followed by an extremely irate owner who almost had to psychically remove the crazed honking hepcat.
Now as he enters his eighth decade Cecil ‘Big Jay’ McNeely is still playing like the Big Bang has only just happened, refusing to lower his energy rating and still roaming throughout the venue every time he plays. As the classic photo from above shows, white kids back in the 1950s went absolutely ape for Big Jay. Slightly older white kids today are doing just the same!
Big Jay McNeely plays the Basement on Friday 4 November along with Western Australia’s Adam Hall Band and local DJ’s Limpin’ Jimmy and the Swingin’ Kitten. Be there to witness the true birth of rock’n’roll and r’n’b!
