RIO o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2003-01-16 published
Bluesman made his mark
Canadian harpist's brush with greatness was frustrated by his
battle with the bottle
By Bruce Farley
MOWAT
Special to The Globe and Mail Thursday,
January 16, 2003, Page R9
He will be remembered for creating some of the high water marks
in the history of popular music in Canada. Blues harpist Richard
NEWELL, also known as King Biscuit Boy, has died. He was found
dead at his house in Hamilton on January 5.
Richard NEWELL's story is the stuff of legend, but not legendary.
The Oxford Canadian Dictionary defines legend as "a traditional
story sometimes popularly regarded as historical, but unauthenticated."
Nearly all the career anecdotes surrounding King Biscuit Boy
have been verified. Yes, he really was recruited for the Allman
Brothers in 1969, for Janis
JOPLIN's Full Tilt Boogie Band in
1970 and for a mid-seventies session with Aretha
FRANKLIN.
The
stellar Houston blues guitarist, Albert
COLLINS was recording
a version of Mr.
NEWELL's
Mean
Old
Lady, before he died in 1994.
Mr. NEWELL, though, would rarely volunteer to offer up such information,
unless you prodded him for it. He didn't think it was important.
He was born the
son of Lily and Walter (Dick)
NEWELL, an Royal
Air Force airman stationed in Canada during the Second World
War. Richard
NEWELL developed an early interest in music, from
the country of Hank
WILLIAMS
Sr. to the jump blues of Louis
JORDAN,
to the frenetic sounds of such original rock 'n' rollers as Little
Richard. At age 12, he purchased his first harmonica after discovering
the blues via late-night AM radio.
Mr. NEWELL spent seven years rehearsing his ever-expanding collection
of blues 45s, which he purchased on regular hitchhiking forays
to Buffalo. Few of his Friends at the time were even aware that
he played harmonica and guitar.
In 1963, Ronnie
COPPLE's sock-hop rock 'n' roll group, the Barons,
recruited Mr.
NEWELL as its lead singer. Mr.
NEWELL had heard
a recording of their instrumental original, Bottleneck, and came
by with an record by the prototypical American electric blues
slide guitarist, Elmore
JAMES.
Within weeks of his joining, the group was transfigured into
the flat-out, deep blues band, The Chessmen Featuring son Richard.
The sound was guitar driven and harmonica-heavy, certainly not
the type of thing you'd find at the average mid-sixties Southern
Ontario teen dance. The band made it to Europe the following
summer, playing successful shows at U.S. Army bases to predominantly
black audiences.
Back in Canada, Mr.
NEWELL would go on to become the lead singer
of Richie Knight and The Mid Knights in 1966. He also made his
debut professional recording at this time, as a session harmonica
player on a recording by country singer, Dallas
HARMS, best known
for writing such hits as Paper Rosie for American country singer
Gene WATSON.
When ex-Mid Knight and future Full Tilt Boogie band member Rick
BELL was recruited for the Ronnie
HAWKINS band in 1968, Mr.
NEWELL's
name came up. After one audition, he was hired on the spot and
rechristened with the royal King Biscuit Boy moniker, a title
he was never totally comfortable with.
Back in his native Arkansas,
HAWKINS had rehearsed in the basement
of the old
KFFA radio station where blues harpist, Sonny Boy
Williamson 2nd (Rice
MILLER,) did his King Biscuit Flour Hour
broadcasts. To
HAWKINS,
Mr.
NEWELL must have sounded like a letter
from home.
When JOPLIN scooped
BELL and guitarist John
TILL from
HAWKINS's
band early in 1970, Mr.
NEWELL and drummer Larry
ATAMANUIK were
left with the task of re-assembling the band. That group would
become the first King Biscuit Boy-led outfit, Crowbar. In a fit
of pique, HAWKINS had inadvertently given the band its name in
an exchange of parting shots at the Grange Tavern in Hamilton.
"You guys are so dumb," he yelled, "you could fuck up the moving
parts of a crowbar."
As the bandleader, singer, harmonica player and guitarist on
Official
Music,
Mr.
NEWELL was responsible for building a razor-sharp
and singularly intense sound. The rehearsals for these sessions
were apparently tension-laden affairs, but the payoff came when
the album muscled its way on to the Canadian charts, (without
the benefit of Canadian-content regulations), the fastest-selling
domestic release to date.
Mr. NEWELL and the band would part ways after King Biscuit Boy
and Crowbar had scored on the singles chart with the traditional
piece, Corrina, Corrina. In 1971, Crowbar (without King Biscuit
Boy) earned a place on the bestseller charts with a song that
was to become a perennial Canuck rock anthem. Oh, What a Feeling
was the first domestic single to take advantage of the newly
legislated Canadian-content rules for broadcasting.
Fate intervened throughout the following years to rob Mr.
NEWELL
of his career momentum. The backing band he assembled to promote
Good 'Uns, the 1971 followup to Official Music, was beginning
to work on a third album, when the funding for it ran out.
With the momentum lost, that unit disintegrated, with guitarist
Earl JOHNSON leaving to form the hard-rock outfit, Moxy.
In 1974, sessions produced by Allen
TOUSSAINT, the architect
of many a New Orleans Rhythm and Blues classic, would culminate
in the Epic label release of a self-titled recording. Mr.
NEWELL
would tour the United States the following year with The Meters
(featuring future members of the Neville Brothers) as his backup
band. When the Epic label cleaned house later that year, though,
he was one of the acts dropped.
In 1972, Mr.
NEWELL wed Jacqueline
WILLETTS but found that married
life did not curb his increasingly frequent drinking binges.
The couple divorced in 1979. Alcoholism was also the source of
most of his professional woes for the better part of his life,
as key shows were either cancelled, or worse, rendered into shambles.
Musicians who worked with him tended to admire him, but found
it incredibly frustrating that such an enormous talent was being
squandered.
At several junctures in his career, Mr.
NEWELL managed to quit
drinking. Of the three albums he recorded and released in the
eighties and nineties, two were the direct dividends of his abstinence.
Those recordings earned him Juno nominations, in 1988 for Richard
NEWELL aka King Biscuit Boy,and in 1996 for Urban Blues Re:
NEWELL.
The latter is still in print on Holger Peterson's Stony Plain
label. Official Music, along with Good'Uns and Badly Bent, a
best-of compilation, are available on the Unidisc label (http://www.unidisc.com).
The rest of the King Biscuit Boy catalogue, including the 1980
Mouth of Steel album, is out of print.
In 2000, Mr.
NEWELL's mother died and he left regular stage work,
preferring the seclusion of his home in the central Mountain
neighbourhood of Hamilton. His last recordings include a version
of Blue Christmas, available on the Hamilton Hometown Christmas
Compact Disk compilation assembled by saxophonist and long-time
friend, Sonny
DEL
RIO. An original composition, Two Hound Blues,
along with material recorded by
DEL
RIO and Mr.
NEWELL in the late
seventies (the Biscuit With Gravy sessions) is planned for release
this year.
Mr. NEWELL, who leaves his father Dick, brother Walter (Randy,)
and son Richard James Oddie, made his last public performance
in a cameo appearance with The Little Red Blues Gang on September
12, 2002, at Mermaids Lounge in Hamilton. The 60 or so audience
members present were treated to a version of his hit, Corrina,
Corrina, which is strange, because he never particularly cared
for that song.
Richard Alfred
NEWELL, musician; born March 9, 1944, in Hamilton
died in Hamilton, January 5, 2003.
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