september 3rd excerpt

Marvin Rainwater-Hot and Cold     

“Give me some of that rock and roll, I’m hot and cold.” So runs the chorus of this tune by Marvin Rainwater. This rockabilly song is one that I could well imagine The Fall covering, if they haven’t done so already. It’s the sort of spikey, sparse rockabilly that would be right up Mark E Smith’s street (or alley, I guess.) think that if it hasn’t appeared on a live Fall CD or as a bonus track on a single then it’s only really a matter of time. It’s such an archetypal rockabilly tune that all the boxes are ticked within the two minutes 10 seconds it lasts. There’s that slappy double bass, with strings so loose it sounds as if they may fall off without any prompting. There’s that tight, one drum sound-there should be a rule that for any rockabilly song, the drummer has to a be a rake-thin, gangly, pasty looking kid standing behind a single snare drum, just knocking the shit out of it. (The standing is the important factor-no drum stools allowed.) Additionally, there’s whoops and hollers (that’s the word-hollers) at random intervals throughout the song. The best whooping and hollering in rock and roll (in fact in any song) occurs in Gene Vincent’s “Be Bop A Lula” though Marvin’s band in “Hot and Cold” run it pretty close.

Best of all is Marvin’s singing, which is so fast that I can’t really make out what on earth he’s going on about. There’s the title of the song and references to rock and roll and rolling rock but little else is readily decipherable. (There is a tale that Rolling Rock beer took its name from Marvin’s references to it in this song; it’s a good story but not one that holds up. The beer was first brewed in 1933 and this tune came out in the mid-fifties. It does sound as if Marvin had consumed more than one bottle of Rolling Rock prior to recording; and possibly the odd one whist the tape was running as well.)

Marvin Rainwater (his real name-he is one quarter Native American and Cherokee) was born in 1925 in Wichita, Kansas. Isn’t the idea of having Rainwater as a real name rather than some stage name pretty cool? Rock and roll wasn’t Marvin’s chosen route into music; he actually trained professionally as a classical pianist until that career was closed off to him due to an accident which resulted in the loss of his right thumb. He then trained as a vet but after serving in the Second World War, he must have decided that dealing with cattle wasn’t his forte and took up the guitar. He became fascinated with country music and before long was making a living out it, appearing on stage wearing a headband and buckskin jacket. His song “Gonna Find Me A Blue Bird” was a million-selling hit in 1957. As good as that and “Hot and Cold” are, I wonder if Marvin still had a hankering after piano concertos; did he listen to Brahms at home whilst wearing rhinestone jackets and dreaming what might have been?