In Search Of Larry James Hamilton

Due to the fact that he has a lot to say about our old buddy L.J. Hamilton, I’m handing this one over to guest blogger Biscuit:

The wife and I have made a few artistic discoveries in our day. I’m not saying we’ve had any sort of impact on the artists’ careers, but we’ve at least hipped a handful of friends to them. That’s gotta count for something. Sometimes it’s hard for even our most twasted of peeps to see the light. I guess we have some very particular perversions. I mean, any old honky can laugh at a televangelist, but when you make it a point to attend Wieuca Road Baptist Church’s musical review twice a year (because your not-out-to-the-congregation gay neighbor is starring as both Mr. Rogers and Elton John), well…that’s commitment.

One of our most prized discoveries is/was an R&B singer named Larry James Hamilton. I can’t decide on the verb tense because I don’t really know if L.J. is still alive. We lost track of him about 4 years ago, and Katrina didn’t help. Now we can't find him. True New Orleanians are virtually immune to Google searches.

I found L.J. back in 1996. Val was still living in Austin and I was spending a lot of my free time hanging out with Zulie. At the time, “hanging out with Zulie” meant getting stoned, going on power-walks around the Lakefront, drinking steadily and going to bars. While investigating a “Free Crawfish during Happy Hour” banner, Zulie and I found ourselves inside what was essentially a big white tent with Astroturf on the ground. The crawfish were decent, the drinks were dirt-cheap and there was L.J., at the piano, playing the funkiest version of “Tie A Yellow Ribbon” you ever heard, accompanied by a drum machine playing through a crappy guitar amplifier. He followed up with lots of Earth, Wind & Fire, solo Lionel, Marvin Gaye and Al Green (this was before Al’s hits had been played to death, at least to me). Since Zulie talks to everybody, we of course cozied right up to L.J. during his first break. I don’t think he understood the conversation (neither did I), which consisted mostly of Zulie’s clouded memories of the songs he’d just done. Either way, now we were friends and fans. Give me a soul singer with a drum machine in an empty bar any day.

Everyone should have his or her own private R&B star, if only for a day. That’s what I was going for when I hired L.J. to play at my 23rd birthday party a couple months after the discovery. Zulie hosted and provided the piano (and probably all of the food and alcohol for my broke ass; maybe I brought the weed?). Zulie made red beans, I rolled lots of joints and L.J. showed up in a blue velvet blazer. It took all my too-cool-for-school rock’n’roll friends a while to warm up to L.J., but this being New Orleans, soon enough everyone was drunk and dancing (and making-out sloppily). I decided to take a little nap around 11:00pm and woke up the next day at noon. Happy birthday.

We kept up with L.J. and went to see him play regularly until we moved away at the end of ’97. He had a little buzz going on for a minute – he recorded an album with Allen Toussaint producing which, for us at least, was an instant classic. Alan released it on his NYNO record label and L.J. did some classy gigs to support it, but I guess the world wasn’t ready for hits like "Back Rub" and "Love Is A Two Way Thing."

He moved on and started playing with a backup band called Blue Horizon (probably the best backing band name you could ever want). We went to see them at a club deep in the Ninth Ward. Being the only whiteys in the room, we were more than a little uncomfortable when L.J. introduced us from the stage as “my good friends from Metairie” (at the time, Metairie was still a racist stronghold [David Duke ring a bell?]; plus, we didn’t actually live there). L.J. played guitar at that gig, which just added a whole new layer to my obsession with him.

Our last time seeing L.J. was when he played at our wedding in 2002. We had a pretty amazing “meeting” with him about 3 months prior, the intention being to go over the set list & specifics of the event. L.J. showed up looking a lot worse for the wear. He looked pretty thin, his hair was in bad need of some activator and he was eating a little box of ‘Nilla Wafers. I suspected some, oh, let’s just call it rock cocaine, was involved, but who knows; we all have bad days. We gave him our detailed, computer-printed list of song requests. We tried not to be too difficult, staying in his style and even requesting lots of his own tunes. He agreed to everything, gave us a copy of his new self-produced album Love Is and gave us a final piece of marital advice: “There’s 2 people you never listen to – ‘I Heard’ and ‘They Say’”

So, it was in the spirit of not letting meddlesome neighbors and street corner ho’s break-up our relationship that we were married under the eyes of God and a cantor named Seth. L.J. did a great job at the reception, though he completely ignored our song requests. He didn’t even do his own songs that we’d asked for. He did do "Mustang Sally" at least 3 times and let my drunk cousin G-Dogg do his own ramshackle instrumental version of "Great Balls Of Fire." It should be noted that L.J. was performing on a Radio Shack keyboard and that his guitar player was a Japanese dude with red hair.

And that was the last we saw of him. Not surprisingly, I’ve since become obsessed with Love Is (the self-produced cd). I’d love to link to somewhere that people could buy the thing, but L.J. wasn’t exactly hooked up with CDBaby when he ‘released’ it back in 2002. I just think it’s the perfect basement R&B-electro record (if you know of another, hip me to it). L.J. plays all of the instruments, meaning all of the instrument sounds on his Radio Shack keyboard. The drums are from the keyboard’s drum machine, but he plays them live instead of programming them, so the rhythm and timing are all over the place. It sounds like it could fall apart at any moment, but somehow it’s funky. There are some keyboard-sax solos and lots of cheesy bass sounds. The overall sound of the album is dark and metallic, much more like Joy Division than, say, Otis Redding. Ya gotta love an R&B record that’s inadvertently Goth. I kind of wonder if anybody but me will ever love this record like I do. I know that I dig it in a way that L.J. surely never intended.

I really hope that L.J. made it out from Katrina in one piece. I hope he made it back to Brazil or somewhere his talent isn’t taken for granted. And I have to keep hoping that, in spite of the fact that I don’t drink, another happy hour freebie will lead me to my next discovery.

Update:
As we go to press here at Just Yoking, L.J. has suddenly turned up, now going by the name Larry Love Hamilton, complete with his very own ghetto website. I guess this news renders a lot of this post moot, but at least you can all go and buy Love Is from CDBaby immediately.