I passed a twenty-something woman in the grocery store wearing a shirt that said John Lennon and under his name Rock n’ Roll. I thought there’s no way she knows that album, one of my all time favourite records, at least my favourite recording Lennon ever made. I could easily go on and on about the horn arrangements, the percussion, the guitar sounds and the stamp of his humour on those tracks. I loved John’s scream. I like Paul’s too but once someone points out the Little Richard affectation you can’t unhear it, whereas with John’s scream there is something else going on. I thought of asking that woman if she knew the record but decided I already knew the answer and the shirt is a kitschy thing. Not that long ago on the subway I asked someone next to me about their Ramones t-shirt and they said whats a Ramones? Out of all his screams it’s the way he sings Just Because that knocks me out most, written by Lloyd Price who died last week in his mid eighties. In the obits I found a ton of amazing info about Mr. Price from the origins of Lawdy Miss Claudy to getting Little Richard positioned to surf the wave that became the rest of his his life career. I liked what I read about his book and I put in a call to the music library at Western because sometimes they buy books for their music collection just because I ask. I found an interview online with many amazing parts, here’s one that amused me much about him and Cassius Clay.

So he saw how I lived and you know he just latched on to me like rice on beans. We got to be good friends, and when Don King went into jail, he and I became friends because he had a club in Cleveland and I would work it all the time for him. When he got out of prison he said “I don’t ever wanna go back to jail.” So I was at his house and I called Cassius and got Cassius to sing happy birthday to his daughter, and from there Don got the boxing fire. It came to a point where George Foreman had won down in Mexico, but he was living in Philly with no money. I was in Philly and Don came into Philly with a bag full of that ‘number money,’ you know, thousands. He put it on the bed there and George signed a blank contract, and that’s how the Rumble in the Jungle came about. So Cassius becomes Ali, Ali’s now a Muslim. Don King told them we gonna give you five million a-piece. Where that number came from is because when Joe Frazier and Ali fought at The Garden. Jack Kent Cooke, who at that time was the owner of The Lakers gave them 2 million a-piece, so us being black guys, we knew we had to double it. We knew they weren’t gonna take us serious anyway, so let’s double it. With no money! But we got both of them to sign and had to give them so much money a month. So with two signed contracts by these two great warriors, we didn’t think it was gonna be a problem, but it was a problem, until John Daly, the guy managing David Frost and Englebert Humperdinck and Tom Jones bought the ancillary rights for a million and a half. Luckily enough Don ran into some guy in Paris who thought he was some guy he knew in Cleveland and this guy was an assistant to Mobutu, in the Belgian Congo, who had just changed the country’s name to Zaire. He took Don straight to Kinshasa, Zaire to meet Mobutu, and in 45 minutes to an hour Mobutu said he would take the fight in Zaire and put up $14 million. That’s how that happened. Couldn’t get a dime in America or nowhere else because that was insane back then to give an athlete 5 million dollars. For what? Well right after that you notice what happened with sports and entertainment. All because of what we paid those two warriors. Now you can hardly buy a ticket for to go see Lady Gaga.