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Chubby Jackson in "The Psychedelic Priest"


sgcim

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I tried to put this in miscellaneous music, but one of my old posts keeps coming up for some reason.

Anyway, we were watching a 1971 B movie called "The Psychedelic Priest, and in the opening credits I see Chubby Jackson's name. I figure they're going to have a jazz scene in the movie with Chubby playing bass, so we watch the whole movie, and there's only rock music (featuring Mitch Mitchell singing some nice bossa rock tunes), and no Chubby Jackson playing bass.

Then I do a little research on the flick, and find out there was no screenplay to the film; it was all improvised. I then watch an interview with Chubby Jackson, and realize he played a hippie hating guy in a bar scene that was so funny, the 'actors' sitting at the bar are breaking up ;laughing their heads off at Chubby's improvised hate speech about the hippie priest in the bar!

It was supposed to be a serious scene, but since there weren't any actors in the movie except the two leads, the extras at the bar couldn't hold in their laughter, and they filmed it that way

The scene occurs at about one hour and two minutes plus some odd seconds into the movie. I found it on you tube and tried to cue it up to the bar scene:

 

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I lost the trace how all those different groups of youngsters call themself nowadays. 

During my youth in the 70´s it was the hippies, that´s sure. 

Here in Austria, if someone had long hair, the older people got angry and called them "Hippies"  or "Beatles":D

During those days (1970´s) I had long, long, curled hair and got some names from "hippie hating guys" like maybe the line Chubby Jackson had in the film. 

But I wasn´t a hippie, since I didn´t smoke hașiș or reefer or what you call it, didn´t live in communes and have sex in group and so on. 

The only purpose was to look a bit older than I was. 

Sometimes, girls from that hippie scene would think I might be a good friend but my "dream woman" would be neatly dressed, with mini skirt, heels and hosierie, girls I didn´t have success with because with my long hair and the slight begin of some beard and ragged jeans would scream over other sorts of guys....

Later in the early  80´s it was all over and I heard about a group of youngsters who called themself "mods", but I didn´t really know what it is. It was the time when everybody was wearing those "La Coste" shirts with the crocodile on it, and I learned to play tennis which I didn´t dig really but thought it might be an entrance to meet some nice girls....

Now, I lost the trance, some are all in black, some have dread look, some are neatly dressed....., 

That´s how it goes, everything get´s faster. During my youth, a certain fashion would last for about a decade and so (50´s look, 60´s look, 70´s look....)

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As we're now talking youth styles, in my youth (around 1960) there were two tribes in this country: 1) traddies who did something called skip jive to dixieland jazz and wore baggy sweaters and ill-fitting jeans and 2) modernists who dug "modern" jazz, had a cool demeanour and dressed like this:

R-3382197-1328208092.jpeg.jpg

I was, of course, a "modernist".

Edited by BillF
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I don´t know about his personality, I only heard him on record on the "Saturday Night Session 1947" with that mixed group of swingers and boppers including Fats, and I think I have one of those gold cover Xanadu-LPs with a "bop Group" around the era when Woody Herman did some boppish lines like "Lemon Dropper", and also played "Dee Dee´s Dance", I think Conte Candoli was in that group, it might have been one of those "Bop Revisited"......
On "High On an Open Mike" on the 1947 Broadcast he does some "bass solo" alternating with Buddy Rich, but as a soloist he cannot be compared to Pettiford, Ray Brown or even Tommy Potter who sometimes did short but wonderful solos like on "Out of Nowhere" ....

In my youth, I heard from other guys, that Buddy Rich was quite a tough leader and did not tolerate guys with long hair in his band. I had very long hair and they said to me "you coudn´t look like that if you had to play with Buddy Rich":lol:

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"Ebullient" was how he was often described in the jazz press - apparently had a vaudeville family background. Lennie Tristano was pianist in "The Chubby Jackson Quartet" when he (Lennie) arrived from Chicago in 1946, but there were personality problems, as you might imagine. I always thought he was the guy who shouted out "Here comes Charlie Parker!" on that "Your Father's Moustache" track by the Harris-Jackson Herd broadcast from Birdland in '53 but on checking (Losin) it seems it was drummer Morey Feld :huh:.  Anyway, wild band, wild track and great Bird ...

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20 hours ago, JSngry said:

I've always found him a little too wired as a personality.

W-i-r-e-d  or  W-e-i-r-d? ;)

I think "ebullient" describes Chubby Jackson rather well. And comparisons of his solo (or not) ability with the likes of Ray Brown or the much-lkamented Oscar Pettiford are FAR beside the point if you want to get the gist of person(alitie)s like him IMO. Apart from the fact that jazz of that era always needed solid bassists as "purveyors of the poulse" (or swing - to use a much nicer phrase than just plain "timekeepper"), Chubby Jackson was more of an "enabler" in the music he got together and got going. Which I think is no mean feat either.
And given his ebullience I find that bar scene in that B movie not all that out of tune (and his laughter at the end of his rant - when he is pulled away from the other guy at the bar - somehow sounds familiar ... almost like some of his recorded exhortations ...)

Edited by Big Beat Steve
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i dont understand this.  was this guy always a 'personality' was speaking and or comedy part of his show. he was a leader of a big band?    i have yr fathers mustache on bootleg bird lp, thats the only thing i know him from, and i think ive seen a columbia 6-eye from the 50s of him and thats it

Edited by chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez
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2 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

Wired for ...? Something about his attitude? (When? Where?)

Please define. ;)

Wired, like, say, over caffeinated.

That Uptown issue is full of that. Great record, but Chubby as  cheerleader...on a par with Jarrett's moaning, imo.

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6 hours ago, Teasing the Korean said:

This film looks like essential viewing, precisely the kind of thing that Ms. TTK an I will enjoy on a Friday night.

Yeah, the film was a pisser. It was released on Something Weird in 2001, after being made in 1971 by Psychotronic "B" film director Willam Grefe` They didn't release it, because they didn't think it would be a commercial success. Grefe was was hired by the producer and flown to LA and then told by the producer, 'Oh, by the way, we don't have a screenplay(!). Every bit of dialogue was improvised, and real hippies, homeless alcoholics, Jesus Freaks, etc... just said whatever popped into their head.

The plot is about a priest who's teaching at a private school who realizes he's not relating to his hippie students well enough, decides to drop in on a few of them who just cut his class to smoke pot. The students reward him for his concern by spiking his paper cup of coca cola with LSD. He has a trip which makes him lose his faith, and decides to leave the church.

A big surprise was Mitch Mitchell (the drummer in The Jimi Hendrix Experience) singing a very hip bossa nova, and a nice jazzy/bluesy rock tune, both written by some guy named Abe Newman(?).

BTW, Chubby was the bass player in Woody's band when they played The Ebony Concerto by Stravinsky. He has some great stories about it in this interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlHE2RAvvPE

 

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10 minutes ago, sgcim said:

Yeah, the film was a pisser. It was released on Something Weird in 2001, after being made in 1971 by Psychotronic "B" film director Willam Grefe` They didn't release it, because they didn't think it would be a commercial success. Grefe was was hired by the producer and flown to LA and then told by the producer, 'Oh, by the way, we don't have a screenplay(!). Every bit of dialogue was improvised, and real hippies, homeless alcoholics, Jesus Freaks, etc... just said whatever popped into their head.

The plot is about a priest who's teaching at a private school who realizes he's not relating to his hippie students well enough, decides to drop in on a few of them who just cut his class to smoke pot. The students reward him for his concern by spiking his paper cup of coca cola with LSD. He has a trip which makes him lose his faith, and decides to leave the church.

A big surprise was Mitch Mitchell (the drummer in The Jimi Hendrix Experience) singing a very hip bossa nova, and a nice jazzy/bluesy rock tune, both written by some guy named Abe Newman(?).

BTW, Chubby was the bass player in Woody's band when they played The Ebony Concerto by Stravinsky. He has some great stories about it in this interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlHE2RAvvPE

Very cool.

Do you know about the 1970 B-film The Cross and the Switchblade, in which Pat Boone plays an inner city priest?  Ralph Carmichael did the score.  This is the money cut, very big with DJs because of the breaks:

 

Edited by Teasing the Korean
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7 minutes ago, sgcim said:

Yeah, we read the book in JHS English class, and then I saw the movie It was the life story of David Wilkerson, the priest who converted Nicky Cruz, the leader of a tough Puerto -Rican gang in Williamsburg called the Mau Maus.

That track I posted is killer, easily the best thing Pat Boone ever did, even if he didn't know his voice would be overdubbed onto a funk beat!!!

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15 hours ago, chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez said:

    i have yr fathers mustache on bootleg bird lp, thats the only thing i know him from, 

I forgot I have this one too. It was a strange Bootleg label "Queen Disc" obviously with Boris Rose tape recordings. 
So I have Chubby Jackson on this and on the second side of the LP "Saturday Night Swing Session" which I bought because it has Fats Navarro. 
And as I read your posts, he probably was more a showman and a guy who got bands together. So in the history of bass from now looking back maybe his role is not the biggest. 

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First of all, thanks to JSangrey for the explanation of THIS meaning of "wired". As if he was on some sort of speed, then.

Next, I am a bit baffled by some of this discussion of Chubby Jackson.

I am certainly no Chubby Jackson completist or expert and had not really been aware of his presence in the entertainment media outside music but so what? Clearly he was ... for a long time ... Cf. the 1957 Down Beat review of his "Chubby's Back" LP on Argo which was given a 4 1/2 star rating (and it IS a fine and enjoyable record), and referring to the leader, reviewer Dom Cerulli said "Leader-bassist-TV personality Chubby sounds as big and moving as ever. It's a welcome return, and more of same would be welcomed, too."
So his talking role in that Psychedelic Priest cult B-movie fits the picture (regardless of whether people find his rant all that funny or not, the scene needs to be viewed in the context of its times anyway). Nothing totally strange about that, then, once you look at his activities ... And his slightly unhinged laughter at the end of his rant did remind me, for one, of his frenzied yell at the end of his scatting in "Mom Jackson" (one of the tracks on the Prestige reissue of his 1947 and 1949 recordings for MGM and New Jazz - anybody else listened in to THOSE?) Don't minute details like that make it sound like we're dealing with the same Chubby all the time after all ...?
;)
So ... Gheorghe, don't you think you are narrowing down things a bit too much in what makes someone "big" or not in the history of an instrument? Soloing isn't everything as a yardstick. Jazz at all times needed its competent "keepers of the pulse", and Chubby Jackson did have his merits there. In addition to his qualities as an "enabler". Not every musician (way beyond what a full-time bandleader does) was able to get things up and going for his fellow musicians. Like Howard Rumsey who certainly would not have considered himself one of the heavyweights among bassists of 50s jazz either. But as a vital part of the rhythm section AND organizer of matters jazz at the Lighthouse he did make things happen. Like Chubby Jackson did in his realm - e.g. with the 1947 European tour that gave vital exposure to the "new" jazz from America in Europe (and to the musicians - both ways). Though according to period reports Chubby Jackson's stage personality even then did leave unprepared European listeners somewhat puzzled at first. (A cultural clash between ebullience/extrovertness and lofty high-art expectations, maybe? ^_^)
After all, tours like that could just as easily have turned sour. As with the 1956 Swedish tour by Rolf Ericson with a group of U.S. jazzmen who, except for poor Ernestine Anderson, 
turned out to be undisciplined, unreliable, uncontrollable dopeheads to the extent of having to be sent home halfway through the tour (names withheld to protect the not so innocent but easily searchable) and having to be replaced by more reliable U.S. jazzmen who completed the tour without further fuss.
So some credit to jazzmen who provided the foundation that also allowed those to fly who for all their artistry might evenl have been essentially dysfunctional in everyday off-stage life isn't totally amiss, I feel ... 

 

 

Edited by Big Beat Steve
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Nobody has mentioned that Chubby Jackson was bassist in one of the greatest big bands in the music - the Woody Herman First Herd of 1944-6, which of course explains the 1957 title Chubby's Back, which has been mentioned.

Whether he was still there for the Four Brothers Band of 1947-8 I don't know. Someone can research this for me.

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He is on recordings with Woody Herman's Herd up to May, 1946, and then again in August and October, 1948 (which matches the details in his bio entry in John Chilton's Who's Who of Jazz). He also played and recorded with Woody Herman for several monthse during his "Mars" period in 1952/53 and is on the "The Herd Rides Again" album for Everest in 1958.

John Chilton's bio also says (referring to the mid-50s) he "was a resident compere on a childrens' TV programme". That should be something to watch too ... ;) (anyone seen anything on Youtube?).

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