A Year of Blind Spots: This Is Fats

Joe is working through a list of albums that he considers "blind spots," i.e. albums that he's never heard but feels like he should.

This Is Fats

Fats Domino

1957

This year, half of the 100 Blind Spots featured in this space are going to be pulled from the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. I won't be picking them randomly out of the book, but I won't be going in any sort of order either. I will be guided in my listening by how I feel that week and what looks pleasing to the ears. The blog post itself will include the blurb from the book (don't tell anyone about the infringement of copyright law), and then my brief reaction to both the album and that blurb. If I can keep up the pace, this is how we'll spend most Saturday mornings here at Puke on Your Birthday.

What 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die has to say about This Is Fats by Fats Domino:

Six years before Bill Haley recorded "Rock Around the Clock," 21-year-old Antoine "Fats" Domino wrote the blueprint for early rock 'n' roll with 1949's "The Fat Man." From that million-selling debut single, the New Orleans-born vocalist/pianist would produce more hits than any other 1950s-era rocker besides Elvis Presley, including a staggering run of 39 straight singles that charted between 1954 and 1962.

While selling some 65 million records in the decade, Domino was arguably the man most responsible for bridging the gap between R&B and rock—although Little Richard might dispute that claim. What is beyond debate is the influence of the singer's 1950s work, which has run and spread through popular music and influenced everyone from Pat Boone to the Beatles.

This Is Fats, the singer's third full-length album on Imperial, was released at the height of Domino's career and remains the most powerful portrait of his artistry thanks to such boogie-woogie beasts as "Blue Monday" and "Honey Chile" and such mournful masterpieces as "So Long" and "Poor, Poor Me."

Triumphant opener "Blueberry Hill" had been a hit for Glenn Miller in 1940, but despite its characteristic charm and warmth, the track proved surprisingly difficult to record. No one could find the sheet music that day in the studio and Domino kept forgetting his lines. No complete take was ever recorded and the studio had to splice the song together out of aborted efforts. The resulting single would top the U.S. R&B charts and hit No. 2 on the pop charts—the highest Domino would ever reach in pop.

What Joe has to say about This Is Fats by Fats Domino:

You know what's really fucked up? I listened to a different album than the one described in the book. That doesn't bode well for this blog project, does it? Here's the thing, though: the book is wrong, not me. There are two different albums, one called This Is Fats, and one called This Is Fats Domino!, and they each have completely different album covers and tracklists. The book told me to listen to This Is Fats, and I even matched up the album covers to make sure I got the right one. But the description of the album is undeniably for This Is Fats Domino!

That's frustrating as hell, but I doubt it ultimately changes my reaction to Fats Domino in general (and we usually traffic in "the general" during these Blind Spot drive-bys anyway). That reaction: primitive, nice, lame. Anything pre-Beatles is going to elicit this reaction for me. At least I have no reason to hate Fats Domino personally, unlike, say, Elvis Presley. Yes, this bridged R&B and rock, and yes, there's ample room to appreciate this music as immensely influential. I also think that it sounds generic, just due to it being 70 years old, and processed into a fine pulp in that time. (He's old enough, for instance, that an equally old artist Chubby Checker was so influenced by Fats Domino at the time that his stage name is literally a pun on "Fats Domino.")

It's a shame "Blueberry Hill" isn't on the album I have, since I for some reason have a memory of a line of dialogue in the hit TV sitcom Happy Days in which some other characters are making fun of Richie Cunningham for liking that song, ostensibly because it was lame compared to whatever was young and hip at the time. Though maybe the mockery was directed toward the Glenn Miller version, which makes more sense in their timeline, a song from 1940 being lame by the '50s, and the 1956 Fats Domino version coming out after whenever that episode was supposed to take place (and well before Ralph Malph loses his virginity). Still, my point remains! It's been a long time since Fats Domino was considered cool.

But that's why it's important to know this album before I die, and be forced to know it because a book says I should. I wouldn't have bothered anyway. A mid-tempo love ballad like "Thinking of You" or a ridiculous metaphor-for-sex rock song like "The Rooster Song" are songs that I would have never taken seriously, and yet here I am, forced to do so, and I find... it's not that bad. Kinda catchy. Goes by quickly. Fats clearly has some pipes and some charisma to him.

It's just that, at a certain point, you don't have to go back that far. If I'm considering myself a rock historian in this column (I'm not, but let's say I am), then at a certain point, I have all the info I need. It would be like a geologist trying to examine rocks from before the Big Bang—after the big event, everything changed, and the old info is long outdated because of that. I like knowing This Is Fats, but I feel like it would've sufficed to know about it instead.

Still, good times, if you like this kind of shit. Just make sure you get the right album.