Timing is Everything
by Philip Van Vleck
Book Binder will be 58 years old this October, and those years sit well on him. He remains a slightly built man with an excellent, dark moustache and a sly glint in his eye that will surely never dim. He's been a hog for country blues for over 30 years, and he continues to lead the life of a road warrior, plying the blue highways of America, headed for the next gig. When he encounters a lapse in his concert schedule, he points the camper toward Florida. He owns a house there that's more of an R&R destination than a home-sweet-home.
The late, great, highwire artist Karl Wallenda was quoted as observing: "Life is on the wire. The rest is waiting." And so it is with Roy Book Binder, an artist whose highwire is a venue stage,a guitar, and a microphone.
Book Binder was not at MerleFest, however, simply to do his solo blues thing. He's been booking the blues performers for this festival for years, bringing together MerleFest audiences and acoustic blues artists. It's a task he's performed willingly, and faithfully, because it's another way for Book Binder to spread the gospel of acoustic blues, whether it be Texas country blues, Piedmont blues, the famed Delta style, or anything in between.
Book Binder came to the blues via rock 'n' roll, and that process got underway during his youth in Jamaica, Queens, just beyond the Van Wyck Expressway. "I went to P.S. 131 in Jamaica," Book Binder recalled with a smile.
"I grew up in a middle-class family, you know. My father was in business. He was a typographer, worked with hot lead. He did foreign languages, and he did pretty good. We were comfortable. We had a big old house, and we had the grandmothers living with us, so it was a little tight. I have two brothers, as well. It was all pretty cool."
Book Binder may not have been living Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, but he was close. And then one day in the late 1950s he turned into a hipster. "Coming home from junior high school one afternoon," he explained, "one of the hipper crowd — a crowd which I was not really a member of — was walking with me, and he says, 'What are you doing Saturday night?' I was 14; I wasn't doing anything. He said, 'We're going to a rock 'n' roll show at the Brooklyn Paramount. Wanna go?' I said, 'Yeah.' He said we were gonna go Friday to get the tickets for Saturday. I asked my mother and she told me to get matinee tickets. So I get on the subway with the hipsters, but when we get there the matinee tickets are sold out, so we get the night-time tickets. When I get home, I tell my mother, and she says, 'Well, okay, but try to be home by midnight.' In those days everything was a lot safer."
The big Saturday night arrived, and Book Binder got on the subway headed for the Brooklyn Paramount. "I'll never forget it," he said. "The curtain opens up, and we hear the deejay Alan Freed announce, 'Welcome to the Caravan of Stars Christmas rock 'n' roll extravaganza.' Stan the Man Keller's band is honkin', and the stage lifts up from underneath. It was awesome! Chills all over. I mean, we were 14 years old, it was 1957, no drugs, no drink — we're pure little white boys. And then Thurston Harris comes out and sings 'Do What You Did When You Did What You Done When the Lights Went Low,' and we were never the same.
"He did two hits, then another one came out," he continued, "then we got Fats Domino, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Chuck Berry. We didn't get outa there till one in the morning, and then we went backstage and got autographs. Everybody was accessible. Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry were standing in front of their Cadillacs out back, '57 Eldorado coupes with venetian blinds in the back. We went up to them and got their autographs, talked with them. It wasn't a mob scene at all. After that we were music nuts. We went to every Alan Freed show, and got to meet him."
Book Binder and his pals were gone daddies after that. They were sporting flat-top haircuts with Detroit sides and listening to devil rock 'n' roll.
"First time I saw Buddy Holly, that was it," he noted. "He had weird lookin' glasses like me, so I could identify with him. But it was always the jungle rhythms that really caught me. I realized years later that it was the blues."
This is an excerpt from issue #96.
