Inside Rock Legend Fats Domino’s World: Crawfish, Cards, Boogie-Woogie
When a friend of Fats Domino‘s invited filmmaker Joe Lauro to hang out at Domino’s New Orleans house in the early 2000s, he knew he had to make a film about the rock & roll architect. More than a decade later, Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll will air tonight, on Domino’s 88th birthday. The film captures how the New Orleans pianist cut what many believe is the first rock & roll record, 1949’s The Fat Man, and went onto sell 65 million records, making the Billboard pop chart 63 times between 1950 and 1963, thanks in part to his songwriting partnership with bandleader/producer Dave Bartholomew. “Everybody started calling my music rock and roll,” Domino said in 1991, “But it wasn’t anything but the same rhythm and blues I’d been playin’ down in New Orleans.”
But even as he sold more records than any Fifties-era rocker except Elvis Presley, Domino and his band dealt with discrimination and turmoil on the road. Lauro touches on the issues, but he mostly focuses on the music, using footage from a recently unearthed 1962 Paris concert that shows Domino at the top of his game.
Of all the Fifties rock & roll pioneers, Fats is one of the most mysterious. Can you tell me about why you wanted to make a film about him?
I’d been going down to New Orleans working on other films just as a friend, visitor and lover for many years, and Fats in that town, to this day, is like a god. But for the rest of the world, he’s relegated to some jolly old oldies act, and that really gnawed at me. When I got to know him a little, I realized that, unlike his contemporaries – like Elvis, Jerry Lee, Chuck Berry – there was no high drama. There was no great tragedy. But he sold more records than all of them combined, not counting Elvis. And he was just being forgotten because of his shyness and the fact that he lived a very private, un-crazy life.
The man was on the road for 40 years, but he’s not flamboyant with lipstick and screaming, lighting the piano on fire. He’s not marrying his cousin that’s 13. So in a sense, we all gravitate to that sort of sensationalism. Of course his extreme shyness is the reason why he was forgotten. I said, “Man, we gotta try to change that.” For my money, he was the most influential. He was recording before all those guys. His first million-selling hit was 1949. He never changed his music. The music just became rock & roll because it came out of the blues and that’s what he played and it was always hard-edged anyway. He had an amazing talent as a songwriter with Dave Bartholomew. Before Lennon and McCartney, it was Fats and Dave. There was no other team that worked on each other’s differences to work on amazing songs, and it was a story that was really never told.
If there was no high drama – like Little Richard going to the church or Chuck Berry going to jail – how did you approach making an interesting film about him?
I knew that Fats was private. And when I finally gained his trust – and that took several years – there was no way I was going to let him down. The man sold 60 million records before 1962. The music alone is all I needed to talk about. If anyone wants to read a tell-all on Fats Domino, they can go somewhere else – because this is about great American music. It’s a hybrid of New Orleans, all these beats and rhythms that he just used naturally. People from Iowa didn’t know that. They’d just heard great songs, but if you listen to the music, more than his other contemporaries, it’s traceable to a local rootsy sound. I don’t know if you could say that Elvis’ sound was a Memphis sound. Fats Domino’s sound is 100 percent New Orleans.