In the Midnight Hour

So did

you like their cover of in the midnight hour?

loved their cover of In the Midnight Hour.

It

was so good.

And in the autumn of the year they formed, a young band called the Warlocks was booked here for six weeks, five sets a night, fifty minutes each, five nights a week, think about what that does to a band by the time they walked out of the inn room the warlocks had played something like a hundred and fifty sets in that one dark room they went in as a handful of folkies and a classical bass player and a high school kid on rhythm guitar They came out as something that worked together, without having to look up, and the music that carried them through all those sets was not the music they would be famous for, it was rhythm and blues, dance numbers, bar songs, the things a room like this expected.

Much of it came in through Pigpen, standing at his organ, the one member of the band who had grown up inside that music and did not have to learn it from a record, one of the songs was in the midnight hour it was wilson pickett's song brand new that year and the original has a rolling majestic feel one writer traced that feel to a tiny delay on the second and fourth beats the back beat landing just a hair late so the whole song seems to lean back in its chair the warlocks did not lean back not then But the dead would carry the song for years, and in their hands it became a long loose vehicle, the band sitting on a single chord for minutes at a time, Pigpen calling out lines, and the band answering him, his harmonica slipping in between.

One chord, no hurry, a song that could last as long as the room wanted it to.

here's the part that makes no sense for the first week of that booking the warlocks were not the headliners at all they were the backing band each night for a set they played behind the coasters the vocal group with a string of famous rhythm and blues hits behind them a group of palo alto beatniks who had been a jug band months earlier standing behind one of the great vocal groups of the era in a bar with no windows playing somebody else's arrangements it was a first week and then it was over and the warlocks were on their own for the rest of the run people have been arguing about this for a long time and they are no closer where exactly was the inn room one careful chronicler of the band's early clubs puts it at six hundred and thirty-five old county road a bar attached to a steak-house called the swiss chalet another working from a long-time Belmont resident who said he had been a bouncer there after getting out of the service, puts it farther along at 1048 Old County Road, a few lots north of the old ice rink, Both are confident, both have their reasons.

Yeah.

So for two points, name the American soul legend whose mid-'60s classics include In The Midnight Hour, Land Of A Thousand Dances and Mustang Sally.

Gosh.

Percy Sledge? Wilson Pickett.

The set is said to have opened with the golden road to unlimited devotion.

the bright little single from their new album and moved through dancin' in the streets in the midnight hour a quick jessie fuller blues the band had just recorded good morning little schoolgirl cold rain and snow morning dew a long viola lee blues and alligator and then out on turn on your love light A news film of that afternoon, one careful researcher notes, confirms at least two of them.

The rest is memory and good faith.

Not everyone in the park was charmed.

Garcia said Pigpen was deathly afraid to play in front of anybody.

He had practiced harmonica in secret for a long time.

then one night at a folk club he finally got up with garcia behind him on guitar and sang like lightnin hopkins and it blew everybody's mind by the time the dead flew to new york pigpen had a small choice set of numbers that were his alone Wilson Pickett's In the Midnight Hour, Junior Parker's Next Time You See Me, Slim Harpo's King B, Good Morning Little School Girl, the old Sonny Boy Williamson Blues, which the dead seem to have learned from a Junior Wells arrangement.

Blair Jackson points out that apart from Midnight Hour, almost none of these had been hits outside the rhythm and blues charts.