Handy Man

Jimmy Jones (1937–2012); Otis Blackwell (1931–2002)

I became disgusted and demoralized at pop music after the multiple catastrophes of 1958 and 1959: Little Richard quits rock ‘n’ roll and joins the church; Chuck Berry gets jailed for bringing an underage girl across a state line; Jerry Lee Lewis is banned from the radio after marrying his 13 year old cousin; Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Richie Valens die in a plane crash; Elvis is drafted. Pop music was done.

I got to New York City in the fall of 1959, coincidentally, at the exact time my soon-to-be compatriots, Steve Weber, Robin Remailey and Michael Hurley, became acquainted with each other in their junior year of high school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I got a job packing foreign car parts for Hoffman Motors. Pop radio, which I had been ignoring, played all day long. That’s where I heard “Handy Man”. An Italian kid that worked there would, every time out paths crossed, sing the “coma coma” part to me. I would never sing it along with him, something I now regret. I always liked the song, the dumb words, the coma coma part, the whistling (which was actually Otis Blackwell himself), the whole pop package. Eventually I worked out a more manic version, which I once played at the Gaslight Café in the Village when Bob Dylan was there. That was the first time he heard the Holy Modal Rounders. When I told him our name, he said, “Holy Modal Rounders!?”, then said he had been thinking about giving himself a group name. He suggested I work out “Midnight Hour”. Then he said, “I just wrote this new weird song”, and got up on stage and sang, “That’s All Right Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”.

I always loved singing the coma coma part in high manic falsetto, but a couple years ago I came down with dysphonia, which means my voice is kind of shot. Its causes are genetics, unwise prolonged improper use of one’s voice, or simply aging. Or more likely, a combination of the three and god knows what else. I am told there’s no cure, but before lockdown I had been seeing a number of professionals about it. We’ll see how it goes. I was able to record the last 30-odd of the 100 songs in October 2019 by taking a several-day, one-time course of steroids. But I was unable to hammer out the coma comas that I had hammered so effortlessly in the past. Paul Lovelace, one of the makers of the Holy Modal Rounders documentary, found a tape of my singing this song on WBIA, obviously very ripped on speed. It’s glorious. I’ll try to get in linked with the online notes.

Otis Blackwell also wrote “Don’t Be Cruel”, “Great Balls Of Fire”, “Breathless”, “Fever”, “Daddy Rolling Stone”, “All Shook Up” and “Return to Sender”.