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D ave Bartholomew and Fats had been experimenting for a year or so with stop-time, two-beat, pop hooks, and country tunes. Their next record, released in March 1956 along with Fats' first album 'Rock And Rollin' with Fats Domino,' set the pattern for many of their recordings to come. With I'm In Love Again , Fats and Dave finally hit on the perfect formula for their brand of rock 'n' roll: tight, concise songs – faintly coun- try, faintly pop – with a heavy beat and simple lyrics. Throw in a raw tenor solo by Lee Allen and they couldn't lose. It crushed a cover version by the Fontane Sisters on its way to topping the 'Billboard' R&B charts for nine weeks beginning in May and an im- pressive #3 in the pop charts. On the very popular B-side Fats turned the tables on the pop music establishment by covering a standard. Adding a big beat and wild horns as a parody of pop standards had been part of the original concept of New Orleans jazz. Fats followed that tradition in his own unique way when he did My Blue Heaven in December 1955. Instead of 'jazzing' the pop songs, he would 'rock' them. "Harrison Verrett had a little black book," stated Billy Diamond. "He taught Fats all of them (standards)… See, Harrison used to sing all them kinda tunes with Papa Celestin." "He (Verrett) used to tell me always to play some of those standard old songs because they never die," recalled Fats, "You know, like 'My Blue Heaven' or 'When My Dreamboat Comes Home.'" In later years, a long procession of standards would be detrimen- tal to Fat's career, but early on the colorful old-time lyrics added a warm visual imagery to Fat's thick Creole drawl ( "Mah Bleuuu Ha-vawwnn" ), making the records ooze with personality. Disc jockeys complained to Lew Chudd, "He doesn't talk English!" He replied, "It's New Orleans English! What the hell! Haven't we taken the country down there yet?" The song was already known by the parents of the rock 'n' roll generation, so Fats broadened his popularity. The record was a huge, double-sided hit for Fats, his first overseas in Britain, as 13-year-old George Harrison discovered, amazed to hear Fats' booming I'm In Love Again playing in a Liverpool street. After an R&B package tour that included Little Richard among the opening acts, Fats headed to West Coast, where in July 1956 he was caught up in a massive rock 'n' roll riot in San Jose that nearly got rock 'n' roll banned in the state of California. It was one of several riots and brawls in the '50s that garnered Domino a lot of unwanted publicity and show cancellations. It is a major irony that Domino is considered the least threatening of rock 'n' roll's found- ing fathers, considering that far more havoc was wreaked at his shows than at anyone else's. Bass player Lawrence Guyton toured with Fats in 1956 until he was severely injured in a riot in which North Carolina police used tear gas. "You see, it was a free-for-all fight, everybody was fightin'. I seen women get cut, people layin' on the floor, all cut up. So at that particular time people thought that when they see us on the bandstand we didn't go through it, but every night a row would start out there. That was every night!" When My Dreamboat Comes Home , cut in a May session at Cosimo's new studio on Governor Nicholls Avenue, was driven along by Herb Hardesty's two thrilling solos. It was coupled with the fine blues ballad So Long for another pop/R&B hit, released in August 1956 with his second album, 'Fats Domino Rock And Rollin'.' The follow- ing month, Domino and his full band including Bartholomew thrillingly performed Dreamboat and I'm In Love Again live on 'The Steve Allen Show.' Around this time 'Jet' magazine reported with interest on the first black rock 'n' roll star, and the trappings of his success that he seemed eminently qualified to handle: "In a single evening, Domino sometimes grosses nearly $2,000… Money has brought Fats no pain. It has, instead, equipped him with a fire-engine red El Dorado trimmed in gold, a shocking pink Fleetwood Cadillac, a Chrysler station wagon, 50 suits and 200 pairs of shoes. It also has brought a goodly measure of the finer things of life to his wife, Rosemary, and their six children..." 35