Notes
The Washington DC Area has always had great guitar players for as long as I can remember. We have been spoiled, really, to be able to walk around the block to the local Legion Hall, teen club, or bar and have our minds blown by Danny Gatton, Roy Buchanon, Bobby Parker, Bill Kirchen, Bo Diddley, Link Wray, Roy Clark or Chick Hall (both Senior and Junior). More than just great players, they were/are stylists, innovators and risk takers. Some of them shaped and changed popular music way, way beyond whatever compensation and credit they received. Most of them were stay-at-home family men who watched, passively, as younger, flashier looking musicians latched on to their ideas and ran to the bank with them. It's an old story. This is Chick Hall Jr.'s first album under his own name, and yet he has been playing guitar for fifty years. Like his dad he can play in many different styles of music and burns on jazz, rock, country and blues. On this CD he is backed by, essentially, an R&B band. His father played and arranged for country combos for more than fifty years but never had a commercial recording to his name. When DC native Jimmy Dean asked him to come to New York in 1962 to lead the band on his weekly TV network music show, Chick, Sr turned him down to tend to his own night club he had opened in 1955. "Chick Hall's Surf Club" is still open to this day. In 1960, after being bested in a guitar jam session, jazz/bossa guitarist Charlie Byrd asked him, "Why are you wasting your time playing country?" Hall's response: "Well, I'm working steadier than you." So, to my mind, Chick Hall Sr started the tradition of great guitarists from the DC Area. He also taught his son a thing or two. Chick Hall Jr joined his first rock group at age 13, went on to form the "Magestic Neons" and played the usual teen clubs, parties and rock bars. The Neons actually yielded a 45 RPM on the Unicorn label for Elliot Ryan, but, like his dad, Hall Jr eventually gravitated to country music under the employ of Ronnie Dove, Johnny Lee, Lori Morgan and Ace Cannon. For the past twenty years Chick has led his own trio or quartet in the Rock or Country genre, usually at the Surf Club. But, also like his dad, he loves to really let loose on a fiery jazz solo if the song calls for it. A Chick off the old block? Us old-timers grew up with the juke box. We knew where the good ones were and spent a small fortune in nickels, dimes, and quarters to keep them playing. I actually found one that played for free in Ritchie Coliseum at the University of Maryland in 1960. The only problem was, it was during a rally for John F. Kennedy and the campaign workers kept playing "High Hopes", the Kennedy theme song, over and over. Kennedy was late and I, at 13 years old, had heard enough of "High Hopes". So I quickly punched up a few other songs and hot-footed it. Lo and behold, Chuck Berry's "Little Queenie" boomed out next, people cheered and the campaign workers went nuts trying to get the Kennedy theme back on with no luck at all. At the opening beats of Fats Domino's "I'm Gonna be a Wheel Someday", in walked John F. Kennedy, making the long walk up to the podium with Fats wailing with his every step. It's still my favorite Fats song and my favorite juke box memory. But the juke box hits CD you hold is different from the original hits; thus the "Nuke" in the title. For example, Merle Haggard's redneck country anthem "Working Man's Blues" takes a left hand turn into town with Barbara Malone's vocal tribute to the working girl with "Working Girl Blues". Next up is Willie Mitchell's soul juke box hit of 1964, "20 - 75", a horn laden R&B march. Chick and his rhythm section stomp and scream and ... wait a minute ... what's James Brown doing here? Skeeter Davis's blubbering hit "End of the World" pretty much made her career in 1963. But Chick doesn't need lyrics. Guitars weep, too. "Poinciana" was a bona fide jazz juke box hit for both Ben Webster in the 40's and Ahmad Jamal in t
