A Nightcat’s turf

Why was his hero “Iron Jaw” Wilson, the entertainer who picked furniture up with his teeth? And why would a 10-year-old San Francisco kid, in 1962, turn in a carefully written school report of “a glossary of beatnik words” culled from his intrepid solo visit to North Beach, where he walked around talking to the locals? Why The Redd Foxx Variety Show instead of Barnaby Jones?

“I had to get out of where I was, it was square ass,” says this coiffed, sunglassed man. “I always wanted to go down to Market Street. Check out all those people. I was 10, trying to feel like I was cool. I remember this guy on the corner, obviously he had been in jail, cause he was doing all these toasts. Like ‘The Signifying Monkey’ and ‘The Dance of the Freaks.’ Toasts are jailhouse poems, a precursor of rap. This is one I use when I [sound]check the mikes, ’cause it don’t have too much profanity:

“Good Doing Wheeler, the big time dope dealer / Came from up on Boston Road / See ya never seen a man so clean / His clothes was uncommonly sewed / Now the ties that he wore / Did not come from no store / But they was knitted with meticulous care / And his socks were boss / And Good God did they cost / For they were woven of a young girl’s hair.”

Welcome to the colorful world of Rick Estrin, the principle songwriter, singer and harmonica player of Little Charlie & the Nightcats, “the job we invented” with his musical partner of nearly 30 years, guitarist Charlie Baty. And while Baty’s fluid musical mastery of 1940s jump blues and swing and 1950s bebop and rockabilly are universally applauded, Estrin’s unique persona—as embodied in his written lyrics, his looks and his vocal style—is a more complex and sometimes even a controversial matter. Estrin truly does walk it like he talks it, from his flamboyant Dick Tracy sharkskin suits and William Powell pencil mustache to his way with words—his hipster lyrics fly straight out of Cab Calloway, Louis Jordan and Slim Gaillard. His songs, in a better (read: older) world, would be radio hits.

Estrin is resolutely honest about his own past. “I’ve always been drawn to that scene. In junior high, I was in a school that was 50/50 black/white. There was something so appealing in the way black people talked and acted. They seemed to have so much more flair for life. They dressed with style and personalized statement. Even in their walk—at that time, limping was the thing. They had these personalized limps! I just loved that shit. Somehow I just wanted to be a part of it. So through music … and drugs,” he notes wryly, “I was able to have legitimacy, a reason for being there in the ghetto.”

With nine albums in their 15 years of recording together, these guys have nearly single-handedly brought a new audience to an older style of blues entertainment that Estrin was schooled in by his father-figure mentor, Bay Area soul singer Rodger Collins. Their brand-new album, That’s Big! (Alligator Records), shows off their trademark rollicking rhythms, the muscular Chicago skyscraper tones of Estrin’s harmonica, his imaginative satirical wordplay and the brilliantly inventive, unpredictable guitar licks of Baty. One rather unlikely song however, a mournful dirge that Billie Holiday could have sung the hell out of, made the whole album for Estrin. “ ‘I Bet I Never Cross Your Mind’ is a song I’m really proud of,” he reveals. “It’s a song I could not have written when I was younger. I wrote it from inside myself for Percy Mayfield. Because he encouraged my writing when I was just starting out. His songs were so pitiful and literate. … If it wouldn’t have been for this one song, which I really wanted to get out there, I would have said, fuck it, I don’t care about making a record. And Charlie does play such a perfect solo.”