Prologue:

Good Evening. You are in a musical dimension beyond that which is known to AOR, MOR, and Adult Contemporary radio formats. It a dimension of bizarre sights, and even stranger sounds that lies somewhere between a man’s worst fears and his highest aspirations. Welcome to the Mau Mau Zone.

Meet Mr. Jalacy J. Hawkins, an opera singer whose rich tenor breathes life into librettos from Siegfried, Don Giovanni and Otello. His is a voice well suited to myths and legends, bringing him world renown from Bayreuth to the stage of the New York Met. Having just dined in a Paris rotisserie, Mr. Hawkins is suddenly seized by terrible pain and is rushed to the hospital where he hovers near death. Deep in the throes of agony, he is seized by something else, a vision of a life that might have been. He realizes that he is a special man in a special place and time…an extraordinary man who has an extraordinary gift…the kind of gift that measures men against their myth, the kind of gift most of us might ask for first and possibly regret to the last, if we, like Mr. Jalacy J. Hawkins, were about to plunge head-first and unaware into our own personal nightmare…in the Mau Mau Zone.

July 18, 1929:

Another Jalacy J. Hawkins is born in Cleveland to a woman with four children, all by different fathers. Although he spends much of his early years in and out of various foster homes, he claims to have been taken from an orphanage at 18 months of age by a tribe of Blackfoot Indians who raise him to be a witch doctor. He shows an early interest in music by studying piano, saxophone, and opera but pursues a career as a boxer, winning an amateur Golden Gloves contest in 1943.

He enjoys middling success as a middleweight, even winning a championship in Alaska after entering the army, but Hawkins quits the ring after a brutal walloping and decides to get walloped overseas by exotic strangers instead. After taking singing lessons in 1950, he entertains the troops in Europe and Asia…locales to which he is to return many times over the course of his life…but his military career is cut short during the Korean War by an untimely grenade that makes its way into our hero’s foxhole. Taken with the singing of Mario Lanza, Enrico Caruso, and Paul Robeson, he decides to pursue a career in the opera after being discharged from the military, but the operatic world seems unready for a genuine Moor in the role of Otello, preferring white tenors in blackface instead. Desperate to pay the bills, he turns to R&B and hooks up with guitarist Tiny Grimes and His Rockin’ Highlanders - a kilted novelty jazz combo – to earn his livelihood as Tiny’s valet, chauffeur, vocalist, and pianist. He records his first single with the ersatz Scotsmen in 1952, “Why Did You Waste My Time.”

After leaving the Highlanders in 1951and landing a steady gig in Atlantic City, Hawkins is taken under the wing of blues howler Wynonie Harris who shows him how to turn that sonorous operatic baritone-tenor into a holy vessel of the Blues. During this period he briefly tours with Fats Domino, but already showing a penchant for the flamboyance that will become his hallmark, Jalacy J. is fired for upstaging the boss with his leopardskin suit. He also records a number of singles. Although these early sides include future anthems of deranged vocal and lyrical dementia like “(She Put The) Wamee (On Me)”, “Baptize Me In Wine”, and even a sad little ditty to love gone bad done in a smooth balladic style called “I Put A Spell On You,” something is missing.

In 1956 his manager sells his contract for $50 and Jay finds himself on the legendary OKeh R&B label. They send him back to the studio to recut “Spell” as a novelty tune and suddenly, the missing ingredient to his fame is discovered…Italian Swiss Colony Muscatel…and lots of it. Let’s let Mr. Hawkins tell us of its lugubrious effect: “We partied and we partied and somewhere along the road I blanked out. Everybody was going crazy. Mickey ‘Guitar’ Baker was stoned out of his head. Sam ‘The Man’ Taylor, on tenor sax, couldn’t put his lips on his own mouthpiece.” Under the spell of Muscatel, Jay lets go with a howling, haunting, hexing vocal channeling 1,000 horny little demons through a reverb spring and onto a 7-inch vinyl platter. Ten days later, Jay is left with no recollection of singing the song that’s now running like a hellhound up the charts. “Spell” is a hit, but its undercurrent of sexual possession and voodoo hoodoo does not amuse the Ozzie and Harriet crowd. Despite their disapproval and the song’s subsequent banning in many cities, it goes on to sell over a million copies.

Eager to capitalize on the single’s success, he quickly embarks on a US tour and takes on the outrageous trappings and ghoulish shtick that define the rest of his career. After being baptized in wine, he is christened by a fan in Nitro, West Virginia: “There was this big, big, huge fat lady there…just allow your mind to roam free when I say fat. Glutton, beast, obese. The woman made the average elephant look like a pencil that’s how fat she was. And she was so happy! She was downin’ Black and White scotch and Jack Daniels at the same time, and she kept lookin’ at me. She says, ‘Scream baby! Scream, Jay.’ I said to myself, ‘you want a name?’ There it is!” Never one to dress modestly, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins adopts even louder raiment to complement his newfound moniker: kaleidoscopic suits and capes, Technicolor turbans, and zebra striped shoes. He rounds off his ensemble with a macabre scepter…a cigarette-smoking skull on a stick named Henry…yet one piece of the puzzle still remains.

In 1957, seminal rock and roll DJ Alan Freed visits Screamin’ Jay backstage and plunks down $300 simoleons to convince our protagonist to leap out of a coffin at the beginning of the show to provide an extra kick to the evening festivities. Jay complies, but the experience of facing his own mortality every night forces him even farther down the bottle’s neck. In a scene that would be repeated at every performance for the next 22 years and ripped off wholesale by rockers like Screaming Lord Sutch, Jay’s coffin is carried onstage by six pallbearers and he bursts forth with a bloodcurdling howl that sends the weaker members of the audience screaming for the exits. Paid accomplices in the balcony bombard the fleeing cowards with rubber bands, which in the darkness, cannot be distinguished from writhing worms. The rest of his wild performance is supplemented with a hearty supply of fireworks, fuse boxes, snakes, and shrunken heads.

After the unexpected success of “Spell”, Jay is signed to a longer contract and follows up his signature tune with a string of similarly themed releases like the Lieber/Stoller-penned recipe for “Alligator Wine” and a rockabilly paean to nervous arousal, “Frenzy”. The former tune reveals a penchant for bizarre ingredients that becomes a recurring lyrical motif:

Take the blood out of an alligator
Take the left eye out of a fish
Take the skin off of a frog
And mix it all up in a dish

Add a cup of green swamp water
And then count from one to nine
Throw it over your left shoulder
You got alligator wine

In 1958 he hears the beckoning of his operatic muse once again, yet is unable to parlay his newfound fame into a ticket to the classical stage. He settles instead for recording the occasional standard, which he gleefully butchers, decomposing pop tunes like Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris” into a pile of jumbled yet strangely lovable vocal compost.

As the hits stop coming and the moral guardians of the nation conspire against him, going so far as to insist that his scene in the film “Mister. Rock and Roll” be cut due to excessively unwholesome moaning and groaning, Jay relies more and more on his unhinged stage act to keep Henry the Skull supplied with Kools. He also outrages the adherents of the incipient civil rights movement by appearing onstage with a bone through his nose and wearing a loincloth with his hair brushed straight up a la Buckwheat. He receives severe burns from his onstage pyrotechnics and is even locked in his own coffin by prankish members of the Drifters. He manages to break free after rocking the casket back and forth until it falls off its stand, and then chases the Drifters offstage with a stream of profanity that most of the audience believes is part of the act.

Already hitting the bottle heavily in order to face his nightly claustrophobic ritual of being entombed alive, he becomes more and more despondent until finally deciding to leave the music biz altogether and open a restaurant in Hawaii. His retirement is thankfully short-lived though, as “Spell” hits the charts once again in 1965 courtesy of Nina Simone, and he is sought out by a new generation of hex-rock aficionados. Drawn out to tour by his rabid European fans, he experiences a musical renaissance of sorts that produces some of his most memorable music. Recorded in 1969, “Feast of the Mau Mau” is yet another lyrical recipe, which, lays out a multicourse menu of fabulously disgusting fare, that includes:

Fat off the back of a baboon
Eyes from a fly flying backwards
Jaws and the paws of a ‘coon
Fleas from the knees of a demon

Washed down with a glass of  “wine from the spine of a bulldog”.

After this repast of unearthly culinary delights, a bit of tummy trouble should come as no surprise, and Jay finds himself in a Honolulu hospital with, in what will turn out to be ominous foreshadowing in our little tale, an obstructed colon. However, he turns this intestinal tragedy into artistic triumph by pushing out his magnum opus, a monumental ode to true suffering, “Constipation Blues.” With hideous grunts and groans performed to a shuffling 12-bar beat, Jay screams like a Lovecraftian abomination trying to drop an interdimensional dukey filled with bits of pure evil and chunks of undigested lyrical corn. It doesn’t make the charts, but a toilet replaces the coffin as the centerpiece of his stage show, and the song becomes and a staple of underground radio. The late sixties and early seventies also see a host of imitators like Ozzie Osbourne and Alice Cooper pick up his skull-topped baton and run with it.

The 70s arrive and Jay’s luck goes downhill once again. He sees the Jackson 5 strike it rich with their cover of his song “Itty Bitty Pretty One” while his own rendition of Paul McCartney’s “Monkberry Moon Delight” and a disco version of “Spell” go nowhere. Ongoing stage mishaps with his pyrotechnics result in a brush with blindness and yet another film appearance, this time in “American Hot Wax” as Alan Freed’s personal witch doctor, is cut from six scenes down to three.

He continues to tour and record into the 80s without much success, and finds himself still struggling with his little operatic demon. Perhaps it is a faint echo of another life that calls him from beyond. In Nick Tosches’ 1984 book “The Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll: Horror and the Foot Shaped Ashtray” Hawkins laments what he sees as a life lived on the flipside of his own true desires, “I’ve got a voice, so why can’t people take me as a regular singer without makin’ a bogeyman of me…I’m some kinda monster. I don’t wanna be a black Vincent Price, I wanna do goddamn opera. I wanna sing ‘Figaro,’ I wanna do ‘Ave Maria.’”

As the decade comes to a close, Jay finally scores cinematic paydirt when he appears as a laconic desk clerk in a fleabag Memphis hotel for Jim Jarmusch’s minimalist cult classic “Mystery Train.” The film leads to a musical association with co-star Tom Waits and a version of Waits’ “Heartattack and Vine” appears on his 1991 LP “Black Music For White People.” The song re-ignites Mr. Hawkins’ career in Europe after it is featured in a Levi’s commercial. The LP cover shows Screamin’ Jay (bone through the nose still intact) and Henry leering threateningly over an unconscious blond who lies slumped in his arms. The album also contains yet another dance version of “I Put A Spell On You” (a move that many consider to be the absolute low point of his career) as well as one of his most brilliant raps, “Ignant and Shit”. The record is also interspersed with amusing audio segues of Jay ranting about his wife’s fundamentalist religious convictions.

The rest of the 90s finds his music featured in an ever-growing compendium of television and movie soundtracks from the “X-files” to Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers”. Even Marilyn Manson, one of Jay’s many illegitimate musical offspring (albeit one totally lacking in his natural humor and style) covers “Spell” on his album “Smells Like Children.” Approaching 70 now, Jay still appears on stage with an old man’s best friends, his toilet and coffin, but more often than not they go unused during his increasingly sedate sets and alas, poor Henry is noticeably absent as well.

February 12, 2000:

Jalacy “Screamin’” J. Hawkins dies near Paris in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. After undergoing emergency surgery to repair an aneurysm he dies several days later of massive organ failure, at least that’s what the papers say. Upon closer examination, it appears that it was his old nemesis, an intestinal blockage that got the better of him, in other words, death by constipation.  The irony, already deep, gets even deeper; the man who had so often said, "When I go, I don't want to be buried. I've been in too many damn coffins already," is now six feet under for keeps. The R&B shouter with operatic dreams now rides to Valhalla with Wagner’s Valkyries. Somewhere, another Jalacy J., an operatic singer who dreams of Rhythm and Blues, dies too and comes screamin' to the feast with the beast of the Mau Mau nipping at his heels.

Epilogue:

We know that dreams can be real, but have we ever thought that reality could be a dream? We exist, of course, but how, in what way? As flesh-and-blood human beings, or are we simply parts of someone's feverish, complicated nightmare? Think about it and then ask yourself, do you live here in this world, or do you live instead on a stage appearing every night lying in a coffin or sitting on a toilet…somewhere…in the Mau Mau Zone?

©2000