Consumer Guide Album

Fats Domino: Live From Austin TX [New West, 2006]
Back in its release year of 2006, I figured no one needed a verbatim live version of one of his greatest-hits records, plentiful then and impossible to keep track of now. Me, I A-shelf both 1996's The Fat Man: 25 Classic Performances and 1990's 25-track My Blue Heaven: The Best of Fats Domino because they share only 11 songs, and keep the entire 100-track Legendary Imperial Sessions on my iPod because it don't stop. Aided and spurred by bandleader-producer Dave Bartholomew, who played trumpet at this gig decades before he died at 100 in 2019, Domino's songbook was bigger if less wordly-wise than Chuck Berry's. So you don't quite need this 1986 set, recorded when Fats was 58 with a band that also included saxophone titans Lee Allen and Herbert Hardesty. But first of all it's not verbatim. The tempos are less speedy and the vocals deeper--not just because Fats is older but because his hits were mastered faster so he'd sound more like a kid. Moreover, it documents the hardest-touring of the '50s titans in a habitat every bit as natural as New Orleans itself: a nightclub. That's one reason he put down an extra set of roots in Vegas, where it took him years to learn not to gamble away his paychecks and throw in his cufflinks. So in order to support his eight kids and buy more jewelry, this shy guy stayed on the road until 1995. "Over a million records sold," brags the hype man. Make that 50 million, actually. A-