Fattening Frogs For Snakes
Volume One: The Delta Sound

By John Sinclair

I began writing Fattening Frogs For Snakes in Detroit in 1982, inspired by the words of the great blues men Robert Palmer had interviewed for his masterful book titled Deep Blues. Fattening Frogs For Snakes was conceived as a text that could be set to music which would illuminate my verses, and I first performed some of these poems with the original Motor City Blues Scholars at Paul Lichter’s Maximus & Co. bookstore on January 2, 1983. I’ve been working on the composition of this elongated work in verse ever since, and the text will finally be published by the Surregional Press this year in conjunction with the release of this album.

Recording the complete text of Fattening Frogs For Snakes will be a four-CD project, of which this album, sub-titled The Delta Sound, is Volume One. It represents the culmination of 20 years of composition and performance, and — while one hopes the text pretty much speaks for itself — I’d like to add a few words about the music and the production of this album.

This project starts with Bill Lynn, my guitarist and musical director, who joined the Blues Scholars in New Orleans in the Winter of 1994-95 and has worked with me since then to realize this album. The music Bill has composed to fit my verses has evolved through dozens of rehearsals and hundreds of performances over the past seven years and has in every case succeeded in making my poems sound even better than I’d ever thought possible. Bill also had the brilliant idea of inviting Andre Williams to produce the album, made the initial arrangements to bring him to New Orleans to do the work, then housed and fed him and worked countless hours with him to prepare for these recording sessions.

My drummer, Michael Voelker, is a founding member of the New Orleans Blues Scholars and has been a constant joy and inspiration, both musically and personally, since 1994. Mike’s enormous ears and unfailing rhythmic intelligence have helped bring my concept to life and made it really swing, again, far beyond anything I could ever have imagined. Working with him is such a blessing, and I hope our collaboration may continue to prosper and grow “until the end of time.”

It was a real joy recording this album with Andre Williams and my band at Mike West’s house in the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans just before Mardi Gras 2001. I was really happy that I could get both Everette Eglin, musical director for Brother Tyrone & The Mindbenders, and Jeff “Baby” Grand, my bandleader in Detroit, to play guitar for us, and special thanks to Everette for bringing the great Richard “Tricky Dick” Dixon to play bass on the sessions. My homeboy, Marc Adams — the only fellow native of Davison, Michigan I’ve ever encountered since I left there in 1961 — brought his customized Hammond B-3 and also added piano to our salute to Sunnyland Slim. Rockin’ Jake, who was on the first Blues Scholars album in 1994, came in to add his harmonica to “Chicago Bound.” And I’d like to thank James Andrews for his friendship and support for this project.

Our producer, Andre Williams, “Mr. Rhythm,” “The Black Godfather,” was one of my earliest idols from the day when, at 14, I saw him on WXYZ-TV in Detroit while I was visiting my grandmother. She had a little 9” TV that brought in all the Motor City channels, and I was tuned in to Ed McKenzie’s Dance Party when suddenly I was confronted with the brain-sizzling pyrotechics of Andre’s incredible performance of his Fortune Records single, “Going Down to Tiajuana.”

Perfectly attired in a zebra-striped zoot suit, high-drape trousers and the most exotic of turbans wrapped around his head, Andre delivered the slightly salacious lyrics with dramatic glee, and when the chorus came around with its “goin’ down, down, down, down, down, down, down” refrain chanted by the dapper members of the Don Juans, Andre began to bend over backwards and jacked himself down until his turban touched the ground! This thrilling vision fried my tiny adolescent brain to a crisp and led me down the path in life I have followed ever since.

As a teenaged rhythm & blues fanatic and deranged collector of 45 rpm singles, I followed Andre’s career with great diligence, picking up copies of “Bacon Fat,” “Jail Bait” and his other early masterpieces as soon as they were released. When I was in college, I copped a Bobby “Blue” Bland album and noted with pleasant surprise that Andre had produced “Rockin’ in the Same Old Boat” and the rest of the LP for Duke Records. I found out later that he’d been a producer at Motown, Stax and Merccury Records, wrote and produced “Shake a Tail Feather” for the 5 Du-Tones and “Twine Time” for Alvin Cash & the Registers, was a staff producer at Duke Records and worked with Ike Turner at his Bolic Studios in Los Angeles.

But the associations that led to this project began in Ann Arbor in the mid-’70s when Bill Lynn was working with the Mojo Boogie Band and Andre heard through the Detroit grapevine that this hippie blues band was playing “Jail Bait,” “Cadillac Jack” and some other of his tunes. He turned up at a Mojo Boogie show in some little bar in Ann Arbor one night to check out the rumors and fell in love with the band. Andre and Bill became fast friends and running partners for a couple of years until the band broke up and Bill moved to Ft. Lauderdale.

Sixteen years later, in 1994, Bill ran into me at the WWOZ broadcast booth at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and within six months had moved to the Crescent City. I had just formed the New Orleans edition of the Blues Scholars and soon drafted Bill into the band’s ranks. He and Mike Voelker and I and a succession of collaborators began the process of crafting music to accompany my verses, concentrating for the past several years on developing my work in blues, Fattening Frogs For Snakes.

We recorded the material in this album in 1997 and again in 1999 but scrapped both sessions. Then Andre Williams made his first appearance in New Orleans, and Bill and Andre and I hooked up again. In the Fall of 2000 my manager, Peter Gold, and his colleague Ricky Kosow agreed to underwrite the project, and Bill proposed that we bring Andre down to produce the album. Andre came in two weeks before Mardi Gras and worked ceaselessly for the next ten days: arranging the music with Bill, conducting rehearsals with the band and the backing singers, writing vocal parts and studying the text of the poems, directing the sessions and getting everything the way he wanted it to sound.

Our engineer of choice, Mark Bingham, who also helped produce the album, was between studios and suggested that we take his gear into Mike West’s home recording set-up in the Lower 9th Ward, and we cut everything “live” in the front room, with Elaine, Lois & Smiley of ELS lined up next to me and the four of us facing the band. Andre thought of the singers as indispensable to the project, and he gave them their parts and conducted them as the music unfolded in front of us. They did an incredible job of interpreting his vision and enhancing my verses like they’ve never been heard before.

A year later, at Mark Bingham’s new studio at Piety and Dauphine in the Upper 9th, Bingham edited and mixed the music into the fully-realized work you now hold in your hand. I couldn’t be happier with the results, because after 20 years Fattening Frogs For Snakes finally sounds just the way I want it to, and it’s my extreme pleasure to pass it on to you now. Thanks for listening!

—New Orleans
April 12, 2002

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John Sinclair & His Blues Scholars
Fattening Frogs for Snakes
Okra-Tone Records

By David Kunian

John Sinclair has been and done a great many things in his long and checkered career. Right now, however, he is in New Orleans running his own show — dropping knowledge, intoning poetry, and kicking cultural history onstage with his Blues Scholars. But this is not the history you learned in school: This is an alternate history of the 20th century — the history of the people who usually fade away without their stories getting told.

No matter that out of their rough existence they created a music that moves people the world over, illiterate folks playing the blues in Mississippi juke houses or out of the gruesome tenements on the South Side of Chicago don’t have a history as far as the power structure is concerned. Giving voice to the stories behind the blues music that these people loved, lived, and crafted is Sinclair’s raison d’etre here.

Fattening Frogs For Snakes, Sinclair’s elongated work in verse set to the musical sounds of the Mississippi Delta, tells these people’s stories, utterly essential to an understanding of our culture, He draws on the research of essential blues scholars like Amiri Baraka, Robert Palmer and his Deep Blues, Alan Lomax and David Evans to relate how Tommy Johnson sold his soul to the Devil or Robert Lockwood and Rice Miller made more money in jail than out of it during their 21-day sentence or simply how life was for a certain historically ignored sector of the populace.

There are lessons to be learned and laughed over in Sinclair’s poem songs. Without Sinclair and the other poets and roots music workers this country over, these people’s lives would be nothing more than where the power structure that runs this country want them, “Fattening Frogs For Snakes.”

Sinclair knows all about that, and his poetry reflects that, whether in his own life or in the lives of his friends and his heroes. You know, the guitarists and harmonica players and others whose piercing lyrics and bent notes show a world of pain and joy, kicks and blues. Like the music he exclaims, Sinclair’s poetry is simple. And, like the music he exclaims, such simplicity leads to great depths of meaning, whole continuums of human emotion and experience. You always know what Sinclair is talking about, but when you probe it, it can become an entire world of people’s lives with the requisite meaning and interpretation. It may be simple, but it is heavy stuff.

And then there’s the music. It’s not that laid-back beat poetry with the cool jazz. It’s not Bach or Beethoven or Handel. The music is the blues, the music blown on and written by the people who are the subjects of the songs. Sinclair’s killer band is tight and on it with this music. Listen to Bill Lynn’s rhythm guitar as its relentless riffs lay down endless, fascinating variations of the Pea Vine or the Southern or the Yazoo Delta trains, sounds so essential to the lives being described. Mike Voelker’s drums catch accents and syncopations like dance steps with a great sensitivity to the dynamics of each piece. Everette Eglin and Jeff “Baby” Grand’s guitars moan and plead like the wind and whistle of a dark Mississippi night.

It all comes together under the brilliant mind and aesthetic of Mr. Rhythm himself, the Black Godfather, the legendary Andre Williams. Andre has had his own share of classic cuts, from “Bacon Fat” and “Jail Bait” to “Humpin’, Bumpin’, and Thumpin’,” “Shake a Tail Feather” and “Agile, Mobile, and Hostile.” The Dre’s long and admirable career has included producing records for Fortune, Motown, Mercury, Duke/Peacock and In The Red Records. He’s worked with Ike Turner, Stevie Wonder, Nolan Strong, The Meditation Singers, and others too numerous to name.

This is the first time Andre’s been responsible for someone else’s recording in many a moon, and he’s still got it. He’s created a sound for Sinclair’s Delta blues suite that no other poetry record has. It sounds like an old Chess record, but with background singers. Who would put background singers on a poetry record? That’s just one example of the genius of Andre Williams.

So listen and welcome an art that portrays a world that is not that far away, but in some ways is in another galaxy. Get down and shake your thing to a poetry of heroes who aren’t in all the history books and have only recently appeared on a stamp. Let Sinclair’s voice and words take you there and make you want to stay.

Kunian Outtakes:

Who is John Sinclair? Is he the monster that was destroying the morals of young men and women in the late 1960s with his radical writings and beliefs? Is he the wily manager of the maybe the best band ever, the MC-5? Is he the head honcho of the White Panther Party with their platform of “rock & roll, dope, & fucking in the streets!”? Is he the poster boy for marijuana legalization with his 1969 jail sentence of 10 years for 2 joints?

History is written by the winners and people who can write.

© 2002 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.