Jack the Cat

Crypto-Rockabilly Genius Speaks from Beyond the Grave

In the supernal order of rock & roll demonology, Jackie Lee Waukeen Cochran ranks in the top degree. Part outlaw, part shaman, Cochran’s chronically intense brand of big bang mid-century rockabilly mixed blast furnace heat with rare emotional depth—a powerhouse combination so appealing that it prompted legendary A&R man Uncle Art Satherly (the man who first recorded Bessie Smith and Bob Wills) to sign as Cochran’s personal manager.

A moonshine-fueled bantam with boundless energy, acute dynamism and kingsize talent, Jack hustled his way in and out of a series of high-profile encounters—coached by legendary stage mother Lillian Stone (Hank Williams Sr.’s bareknuckle mama), signed on the spot by  Decca chieftain Paul Cohen, appearing on screen in Marilyn Monroe swan song Let’s Make Love—his ride through the musical jungle took him from backwoods Georgia to Satherley’s mansion on a (Hollywood) hill, bopping to the very apex of rockabilly éclat before crashing deeply into the abyss.

Cochran was a master of self-propelled personal mythology and one could never be certain if he was entirely on the level (“I was born with a twin brother but the twin passed away when I was two”) but, either way, his was a hell of a bio. Born February 5, 1934 in Dalton, Georgia to Luther and Jean Elaine Cochran, he spent his infancy in the Louisiana swamps and after Luther got 30 years to life following a lethal barroom brawl, Cochran was raised by various aunts and uncles and when it appeared the child was headed to an orphanage, his maternal grandmother, a full blooded Cherokee, brought him to live with her in Gadsden, Alabama—she contributed the ‘Waukeen’ to his name, which Cochran translated as “Son of the Sun.”

He got his first guitar at age six, during a visit with Luther at Alabama’s Speigner Station Reformatory and by eleven he was playing it non-stop. Grandma’s Zenith radio was constantly playing and Cochran came up hanging around the joints in Gadsden’s black neighborhoods and recalled straining to hear T Bone Walker during his performance at the Royal Palms club. Soon he was “getting up and doing a special in the middle of the meeting” at church and as a teen he was playing in dance band at school houses and local auditoriums. They’d earn twenty-five or fifty cents each and “we always had a little homebrew—moonshine—around” as well.

“I was taking off with these musicians, travelin’ all over the state, playin’ everywhere,” Cochran told me in 1989. “We were doing a doing everything, a lot of what they now call bluegrass—we just called it hillbilly music—and a lot of rhythm & blues, rockabilly and rock & roll. A lot of people don’t realize it wasn’t anything that Elvis invented or anything like that—it was always there.”

The Cat’s 1951 enlistment in the Air Force precipitated some significant action. Undergoing basic training in San Antonio, every weekend he’d pawn his watch and ride a bus 250 miles to Abilene, where Slim Willet (“Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes”) emceed a package show. After fast-talking his way onto a guest spot in Hank Snow’s show there, Willet made him a regular attraction. Shortly thereafter, a talent scout from Dallas’ high-profile Big D Jamboree signed him to the show until his re-assignment to an air base near Selma, Alabama. There, Cochran formed his first band, The Flying C Ranch Boys.

“I was on the flight line from six in the mornin’ until 2:30 in the afternoon, and the rest of my time was free,” he said. “So we’d play at night at clubs all around town there and we had a little radio show on WBAM, a `15 minute show, and we’d tape all five shows on Sunday. It aired around noon time and many a day I’d crawl up into the jets, turn on the radio and hear my own show.”

Local bandleader Shorty Sullivan heard the broadcasts and arranged for Cochran to get his own show in Montgomery, where Lilian Stone tuned him in and shortly invited the Cat for a visit. When he asked for directions, she said “Ask any policeman, they’ll be able to tell you.” That’s how he found her, a sort of high-gloss Miss Havisham in a mansion filled with so much memorabilia that insurance policies forbade a match being struck in certain rooms. As controller of Hank’s estate, Stone was a hillbilly shot-caller supreme and she offered to take him to Nashville for a deal with MGM Records but, come the day, blizzard spawned road closures nixed the trip (not long after, the 57 year old Stone’s heart failed in February 1955).

Cochran’s 1955 discharge coincided neatly with the commercial rise of rockabilly but he still toiled in the hillbilly field, working for Hattiesburg, Mississippi bandleader Jimmy Swan, often in some of the lowest joints in the Deep South.

“We played the blind pigs, and rough ain’t the word to describe them,” Cochran said. “We’d play the on the weekends, for the stump haulers. That’s all they did, doiwn in the Mississippi swamps, use mules to pull them cypress stumps out of the ground and take ‘em to the Hercules Gun Powder Company.”

“You always knew when they’d be there, because you’d pull up in front of a joint and see all them beat up old flat bed trucks with a shirt hangin’ on the steering wheel. They knew they’d be getting’ into a big ol’ fight and their shirt’d get all tore up so they’d just leave ‘em draped over the steering wheel, so you were warned right then, before you even went in.”

“All the tables and chairs had removeable legs so you could stack ‘em up,” he said, “The juke boxes had little fences built around them, cause they’d just destroy them. When things started, guys in the band got hit a lot of times, a lot of bodies got  kncokde into the bandstand, things got broken up. It was a big riot scene and it went on all night, from beginning to end. You just played through it.”

Inevitably, Swan was booked on a bill with Elvis, Scotty and Bill in New Orleans; it was February 4, 1955, the day before Cochran’s 21^st birthday, and for Cochran the experience was akin to breaking out of jail. Jack the Cat was born. He went into big beat overdrive. He split for Dallas, returning to the Big D and was soon playing Fort Worth’s Cowtown Hoedown, along with multiple sock hops at the Will Rogers Auditorium and the Majestic Theater on bills with Roy Orbison, Mac Curtis, Groovy Joe Poovey and Johnny Horton. They were genuinely crummy punks: when Horton was signing autographs his bandmates would sneak up behind the singer, jerk the toupee from his dome and take off running; at the Louisiana Hayride, they’d sneak under the bandshell to peer up between the stage slats hoping to catch a peek at Wanda Jackson’s muff.

Cochran was operating at frenzy pitch: “We never slept because we had speed,” Cochran said. “We took speed, man, and we didn’t even know what sleep was. It was all day and all night and it was all music, music, music—except for the girls and we always had a lot of them to boot.”

“Everybody’d hang at these little drive-ins, even Elvis, and we’d sit in those booths all night long, talk about what we were gonna do, write songs, scrawl ‘em on whatever was handy. I wrote ‘Hip Shakin’ Mama’ and ‘Ruby Pearl’ on those little white paper napkins, wrote both in the same drive-in.”

Those two numbers defined the Cat’s style—vivid, raw, emotion-charged fusillades as distinctive as they were irresistible—and it wasn’t long before he committed both to wax. He signed a management deal with Big D hillbilly/wrestling promoter Pat O’Donnell, a slick operator who promptly defined the Cat’s image in iconographic terms—constructing an oversized prop black cat.

“They’d tie it on top of the car stuff it in the trunk, it had hinges on it, had these red lights for eyes and they’d roll it this thing out on stage,” he said. “I hated the damn thing, but it sure was effective, when I’d come out in front of it. Nowadays people think it was really something. I just wanted to play and sing, didn’t want no corny messin’ around.”

Along with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ casket, it was one of rock & roll’s earliest set pieces and a thoroughly brilliant gimmick. Cochran, with cheers ringing in his ears and his central nervous system lip up with amphetamines, failed to grasp just how deeply the O’Donnell paper would affect his professional future.

“Well, I was signed to these, quote, managers in Dallas and they were busting their asses trying to get me a recording contract, because I was supposed to be the next Elvis and all this crap,” he said. “Along comes Russell Sims (head of his eponymously named Sun Valley CA indie imprint), man, and I sang him ‘Hip Shakin’ Mama’ and he signed me right ways and we went into Jim Beck’s studio and cut the damn thing.”

Contrary to the Nashville mythos, Beck’s Dallas studio was fast becoming the national epicenter for country recording and post-Lefty Frizell Columbia was preparing to relocate it’s entire hillbilly division there—until Beck’s sudden death in early ’56, the result of carbon tetrachloride poisoning (he was cleaning his tape heads with al the windows shut).

“Jim Beck was a very quiet man, he didn’t have much to say, just did his busines. Lefty was in there, Ray Price, everybody used it,” he said. “That was one hell of a studio, let me tell you. Go in, he’d say ‘you ready?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘Let it roll!’ No bullshit, man, just rockin’ on that bandstand.”

The resulting Sims 45, “Hip Shakin’ Mama”/ “Riverside Jump,” gained traction in California resulting in an invitation to tour the Golden State with Jim Reeves and Freddie Hart and also won him a spot on KTLA’s The Spade Cooley Show (broadcast from fabled Los Feliz dancehall the Riverside Rancho). Naturally, Cochran “just up and left Dallas in the middle of the night” but finally telephoned O’Donnell, who ordered him to return within the week.

“I was out here on Cooley’s show, and Spade wanted me to stay and do another, so I did,” he said. “Lo and behold, Uncle Art—it all lines up—Uncle Art Satherley, well, he decided to take me under his wing, he and his wife. They took me up to their home in the hills above Silver Lake,”

Satherley was already a legend, having discovered Gene Autry, Bessie Smith and Bob Wills, and under his aegis Cochran had it made, working at the Riverside Rancho, the Squeakin’ Deacon radio show, Cooley’s show and on KTTV’s 3 hour long Town Hall Party television show. When Nashville powerhouse and Decca prexy Paul Cohen was the Cat rock the Rancho, a contract was immediately offered. And signed.

In November 1957, Cochran cut “Ruby Pearl,” one of his “little white paper napkin songs” for the label—with blind pianist Jimmy Pruett and Kentucky finger picking genius Merle Travis on the date (Cochran recalled Travis polishing off one brown paper bagged bottle of hooch and sending out for another). A pulsating jolt of pure sexual tension inspired by a true-life thwarted romance, “Ruby Pearl” is one of his best performances and backed with “Mama Don’t You Think I Know” (an accusatory sneer he wrote at Uncle Art's suggestion), Cohen knew he had a winner. The disk began to get a good deal of airplay and all involved seemed sure that Jack was indeed poised to become “the next Elvis and all this crap.”

“’Ruby Pearl had come out and it was tearin’ up the countryside,” Cochran said. “Oh, man, everything was just happening and then BAM everything was destroyed. Those guys in Dallas said, ‘Come back here or we’re gonna ruin everything for you,” and I just said ‘Fuck you’ that’s the words I said to ‘em over the phone and boy oh boy, they fucked me.”

Unbeknownst to Jack, O’Donnell’s contract had a two-year option clause. Decca and Satherley immediately dropped him. The Cat was left to wander, disconsolate, in Los Angeles’ very shadowy wilderness. After some fitful attempts at additional recording, he only found himself further ensnared in a thicket of second and third party double dealing flim-flam, and he subsequently spent over 18 months as a civilian, working for Douglas Aircraft.

He eventually returned to the clubs, the Gaslite (his late in life mainstay gig, where he’d once met Audrey Williams: “She wore so much jewelry it looked like her hands were on fire”) and the Horn in Santa Monica, the Rag Doll in the valley, wherever he could, but the psychic toll of his meteoric plummet into the trash heap was not inconsiderable.

It was precisely those oozing welts and tender bruises which enabled Cochran to create his genre-defying, career-defining masterpiece, 1962’s utterly otherworldly incantation “Georgia Lee Brown.”

“We cut that thing down in South Central L.A.,” he said. “The producer, Mr. Bennett, had a garage studio where he cut mainly black groups. The Shields recorded there then, they had a hit four years earlier with ‘You Cheated,’ and we brought them in to sing back up in this old garage.”

“Georgia Lee Brown” remains an unprecedented achievement, for its decidedly left-handed lyrics (credit Hafner-Zinn), its swirling vermillion atmospherics, its gloriously miscegenate union of doo wop mysticism and dank rock & roll weltschmerz. Fraught with menace and portent, the song plumbs an anguished pathology, one clearly defeated yet which refuses to give up hope and it does so on an almost psychedelic scale.

Jack didn’t write it but he owned it, creating an immortal slab of ‘exactly what the hell is this?’ crypto-rockabilly genius: “An old streetlight was painting mystical circles / On the pavement out in front of the bar / While inside a band was playin' magical music / To the strings of a blue melancholy guitar…” Indestructibly weird, and it was, of course, covered by the Cramps decades later, vouchsafing a reintroduction which sealed its status as an enduring rock & roll  achievement.

Jack never included it in his live show, but he played on with hair raising verve and oft-terrifying vigor right up until his sudden and very untimely 1998 death. He also made a series of incredible albums for Rollin’ Rock Records during the 70s and 80s and remains the consummate don’t-give-a-damn rockabilly iconoclast.

Listen up.