Criminal Behavior
Sunday. 6 AM, the first of May. It was cold and the wind was blowing 20 knots. Ah yes, early Spring in Poland. I’m standing outside Spatif in Sopot chatting with the inimitable, Huey Morgan, a fun lovin’ criminal if ever I saw one.
Huey is cool. There! I said it. But then that’s what everyone says. And you know what? They are right. Shit!. Even Barry White thought Huey was cool. He wrote in his autobiography that he used to play FLC’s Love Unlimited, before he went on stage just to tweak his mood.
Now Huey—that’s what everyone calls him—was talking in his rocky Brooklyn accent about his encounter with the man from Atlanta who invented funk. “So we had just come off the stage at this festival and James Brown walks up to and says, I don’t know what it was but it was funk! Then he just turned and walked away.”
“That was it?” I said.
“Yeah, and our manager at the time hurries over and goes, What happened with James? What did he say? He thought James was pissed off. I said: he told me we were funky.”
“Hey, man you have to tell me something about your music,” he says.
“You remember that scene at the end of Casablanca?”
“Yeah. Bogart and the French police guy, Louis.”
“Huey, I think this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship. By the way what happened to Fast and Frank?”I say.
“They stayed at the hotel. They asked me to bring some girls back. Would I do that for them?”
“Nah,”we both say at the same time.
***
Love Unlimited
Barry White, saved my life/And if Barry White, saved your life/Or got you back with your ex-wife/Sing Barry White, Barry White, it's alright. . .
Friday. It started innocently enough. We sped to the coast up Route 7 from the capital in a Smart car. JB was my driver. We checked into the Radisson in Gdansk at 11PM. Then we went to Karl’s place, Absinthe, in Old Town. My bodyguard, PG, who had been commentating on the Royal Wedding in Warsaw early in the day arrived at midnight.
Absinthe was jumping as usual. The Deejay, a local singer called Anna, was spinning love. Then we got a call from FLC’s manager to come hang out in Sopot. Too late. The wine was already in the glass.
Late that night after many more glasses—my driver, JB, is a big drinker—there was a minor scuffle ending with some huge bald guy getting me in a choke hold from behind. Rock and roll.
PG, who holds a black belt in Tao, pulled the guy off of me.
The guy must have decided we were ok. Right away he pressed a beer into our hands and made up by kissing me Soviet-style on the mouth. Not bad. Affection demands respect.
We rolled into the hotel at 5AM. We were ready to meet the Criminals.
***
We Have All The Time in the World
We have all the time in the world/Time enough for life/To unfold/All the precious things
Saturday. Everything is set. 5PM soundcheck. 6PM meet the band and talk. 10PM concert.
We walk in. FLC is onstage checking sound. Huey Morgan working over his guitar. Fast doing his thing. Frank banging the drum slowly and loudly.
“Huey’s wearing Aviators, too,” said PG as he offered me a fine tobacco product.
“Obviously a man of taste,” I said. A good omen.
Huey Morgan (guitar/vocal), Brian Leiser (bass/keyboards/harmonica,trumpet) and their present drummer, Frank Benbini, are the British-based musicians who invented their special brand of alternative fusion employing rock, blues and funk and hip hop lyric line that is still—especially live—as irresistible as it is unique. Huey and Brian a.k.a. “Fast” are New Yorkers who live in London. Frank’s a Brit from the Midlands.
While FLC went through the motions, we retreated upstairs to drink some of the band’s tequila in order to better interrogate the Criminals. Soon they joined us around a big table full of various snacks, none of them Scoobies. Everyone helped themselves to drinks.
The Criminals have a history in Poland. They have played here a couple of dozen times and Huey makes forays as a deejay from time to time. They played one of their first Polish gig at a prison in Krakow in ’96.
How did that gig happen?
Huey: “I always thought it was cool how Johnny Cash played (San) Quentin and basically we wanted to do a promo for our record and asked are there any prisons we could play in. So they said, we can get you one in Poland . . . (all laugh). We thought it would be cool because a lot of people are in jail not for violence but for drug offences. We just went and played in the prison yard . . . Everyone was cool but there was this one guy at the front who gave us the finger so I shouted at him, When you get back in the there everyone is going to sodomize you and the place went crazy. Yeah, everyone else was cool. All the high security guys were up in their cells but it was cool because a lot of the guys were like English dudes who had got caught smuggling or whatever, so they knew the music and also people in jail have radios . . . It was kind of strange having criminals cheering for criminal songs. We were playing “Scooby Snacks” and they were singing along.”
Fast: “The Polish audience is cool. We’ve played here so many times I’ve lost track.”
Scooby Snacks from their first album, Come Find Yourself (1996), is the seminal FLC song with its anthem chorus about robbing banks while high on valium. (Their biggest hit to date is Loco which reached #5 on the British charts in 2001.)The record flopped in the US, but went to number seven in the UK and FLC, like Bill Hicks, the great American comedian, became instant stars in Britain and Ireland, while being ignored back home.
They released their latest of their six albums, Classic Fantastic in 2010 on their own label funded by private investors. The release followed a five-year legal battle with their former manager. The album is a blast from the past with a contemporary spin implementing multiple instruments including brass and strings with a modernized 70s groove, all packaged with the patented FLC bravado, which still says: “Stick em up punk. We’re the Fun Lovin’ Criminals.” We the Three from the same record might be termed the band’s update of their eponymous Fun Lovin’ Criminals song from the first album.
Surprising perhaps for other bands, this is a perfect summer party record without a hint of angst following their half-decade in the recording wilderness.
Huey is sitting on my left. PG sits opposite looking like a white-man version of a bling-bling bouncer. Daddy got style. Fast and Frank are sitting way down at the end of the table and the tour manager, Pete Dempsey wanders up and down while we talk.
“What are you doing between now and the concert?” I ask.
“I like to chill before gigs and meditate,” says Frank
“Frank’s into heavy meditation,” says Huey. “So we’ll go back to the hotel and chill and put our suits on.”
“Well, that famous guru died this week didn’t he?” I said “Baba Raba Ding Dong.
The one with the crazy hair. Guru to the stars. Produced jewelry from his mouth. Do you know who I mean?”
Frank says: “Oh yeah, yeah. I heard that. But I’m not a nutcase about it all.”
“How do you like London?”
“London’s a cool place to live,” says Huey. “How did you get from London to here?”
“How did you get started playing guitar?”
“Good question,” says Huey. “People don’t ask me that much. . . It started out in school. I was in seventh grade and there were some kids older than us who had instruments. Some guy started playing Jumpin’ Jack Flash and every little hair on my body stood up and I said I’ve got to be able to do that . . . It was the first time I actually wanted to do something other than what I had to do. You have to go to school. You have to do your chores. That was a key moment. Also, I listened to my mother’s records. She had really good taste. She had some really good records at home. She had Ray Charles and BB King. All of that stuff.”
“Didn’t B. B. King play on one of your records?”
Huey: “He played with us on Mini Bar blues when we were recording 100% Columbian. He was really cool. I play a guitar called a Chet Atkins, a Gibson Chet Atkins and BB King waved me over in the studio and said “Lemme see that guitar boy.” And so I went over and he just hands me Lucille. That’s like the crown jewels. He looked at the way I was holding it and said, “Son, hold it like a woman.” It was like “What’s the matter with you boy, hold that thing like a woman.” So I was holding Lucille like a woman, and he was strumming my guitar. And he said he’d like to play with us. So we said sure we’ll send you a track, and if you like it lay something down for us. So he gave us a couple of solos.”
“How did you and Fast get together. You were working at Limelight right?”
“He was answering phones and I was clearing tables. You know when we got together Fast was into a lot of electronic music like Depeche Mode and stuff I didn’t really know. And I think that’s how we got our sound. He was making basic electronic music that gave us our beat. He was messing around at the apartment because we lived together, worked together. For example, he turned me on to electronic music and I turned him onto Tom Petty. Then he turned me onto J. J. Cale later and I turned him onto some hip hop. It’s cool because we all like different types of music. We listened to a lot of the classics. Our style always confused music journalists.”
I say: “You are preaching to the choir with me.”
Fast says, “People who like our music like ten different styles all at once. Hip hop, rock blues, love songs. We blend it together. That’s what we do.”
WRR: “That’s cool. By the way, are you going to play the Louis Armstrong tonight?”
Huey: “Are we playing All the time in the World? It always goes kind of how the crowd likes. We play not to the crowd but for the crowd. We try to feel the crowd out and see what they want and give them what they need. If we play a mellow song and see they aren’t into it, then we say, ok. They aren’t into that shit. They want to rock out. So then we play the heavier stuff. We must play the Louis Armstrong song because, that is one of our favorite songs.”
Frankie: “I just put it into the list!”
WRR: “Thanks, I really would enjoy that.”
Fast is looking over the set list.
HM: Let me see that. I’m old man. I need to see that shit. There is a tape going round in my brain and I have to access those files. . . . hey (looking over the list) this is a rocking show. This is a pretty ass-kicking show man. We the Three is a new track from Plastic Fantastic. Here’s All the Time in the World. I guess you like that because it sounds kind of like a David Lynch soundtrack. . . Fast and his trumpet. You’ll hear it tonight. . . I didn’t even know that Fast played trumpet until we already had a record deal. We were sitting around as we are now and he says I can play trumpet.
Fast: I enjoy the trumpet.
Huey: He has a signature sound. Every time we add the trumpet in the studio Fast says it sounds like Ben Hur.
Fast: Ba ba ba ba! Ba da da da da da!
WRR: I hear Romans in that.
***
I Can’t Get With That
They try to move us/to use us/like Judas did to Jesus
Hugh Thomas Angel Diaz Morgan is a serious guy. Half Puerto Rican, half Irish, his father died in Vietnam in 1972. He followed his father into the military at 18 when the law like a tough godfather made him “an offer he couldn’t refuse.” Go to jail or join up. He chose the Marines where he became an underwater demolition frogman. Translate SEAL, the same guys who got Bin Laden. He’s an award-winning radio deejay: his show called Huey After Midnight runs on BB2 on Fridays.
Huey: It’s easier for me to talk to a musician because I am a musician so that might be responsible for my success. I play music that’s fun to play. I can play anything: hip hop, jazz, some obscure blues thing that nobody ever heard before. I can play classics and old disco shit and people like it. They like the eclecticism of it all. It’s like what we were talking about downstairs. To be in this band is great too, because we get to play all kind of music. We are playing jazz, hip-hop, rock, thrash. For a musician that’s fun. That nice big old Marshall amp helps too.”
Huey also is an occasional TV performer and movie actor. He was in 2007’s Headrush which Variety called “brash breezy and irreverently funny . . . including Fun Lovin’ Criminals singer Huey Morgan as a Tarantino-esque mobster.”
“I played a transvestite,” says Huey. “So I had to learn to walk and run in high heels. If the director had told me more about the part before I flew in, I might have punched him.” He laughs.
WRR: What about the state of the music industry these days?
Huey: “The record companies are still called record companies but no one buys records. These days fans come and go at the blink of an eye, so we’ve learned to please ourselves. That’s why we self-released our last album. We are aware that music can be downloaded for free, so it’s not a matter of selling records any more. It’s about making new music and trying it out on people. If they like it, then they can catch us live . . . because that’s what we like best.”
WRR: “Um . . . I have to ask you. Do you have any Scooby snacks in your possession?”
Huey: “No I do not.”
Fast: “That has a lot of different meanings.”
Will: “This is funny. I was thinking what is this Scooby snack thing? I knew it wasn’t what Scooby Doo chows down on, so I looked it up.”
Huey: “What did you come up with?”
Me: “It said valium. But I prefer xanax, by prescription only of course, if I’m going down that road.”
Fast: “I prefer animal tranquilizers.”
Huey: “He takes dog medicine.”
Fast: “Nah, nah.”
WRR: “No. Do you really use that?”
Huey: “He does.”
Fast: “I took one on a long trip once.”
Huey: “On long trips scoobies are good. I took a couple on a long flight and woke up in Sydney.”
WRR: By the way, I happen to have some xanax as a present for you guys. You won’t have to deprive a dog tonight, Fast!”
Huey: “I’ll take one of those, for when I go to sleep. That is nice of you man. Very cool bro.”
Fast: “Scooby snacks have been exchanged.”
Everyone laughs.
WRR: “You have a great solo on I Can’t Get With That . . .”
Huey: Thanks, man. That was the first time I actually wrote a solo. Usually we do an improv thing and keep a solo if it’s good. But with that one I actually set out to do it that way as a key part of the song. When we play that song I always play the solo that way.”
WRR: What about Big Night Out?
Huey: That was a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers thing I actually wrote a handwritten letter to Tom Petty to get permission to use stuff in that song. Tom wrote us a letter back and said he ripped that riff off a disco song!
WRR: “Who’s making the best music now? Britain or America?
Huey: “I think the place is America because it’s so wide open. In England it’s all chart stuff and there’s so much turnover with bands because the record company are getting desperate . . . they take a chunk of everything, the touring, the merchandising. They sign a whole bunch of bands and if the single doesn’t hit the charts, ‘Next’. There’s always another band.”
WRR: That’s the problem with all these music contest shows. You get people who have no management. It’s free entertainment. It’s disposable. You pick a winner. The other thing is that everything sounds the same.
Huey: Yeah if you’re watching something like Pop Idol or American idol the guy who is the least eccentric and more white bread and homogenized is the guy or girl who is going to win because that’s who they think they can sell to a wider fan base.
* * *
Big Night Out
Axamillion morals, difference in opinion/I was with him/he had 7 Jack and cokes in him . . .
Tequilla was my poison, but I think Huey was on Jack and Coke. The concert was great. Huey said: “I thought it was off the hook.” There was even a mosh pit for a couple of songs. FLC has a super model on their ‘D,’ for sure. They remain one of the best live acts around. The after party moved from Fabrika to Absinthe and then about 3AM Huey and Pete said, “Come with us to Sopot.” I did. The rest is history.