New York Times: 'The Big Beat’ Celebrates Fats Domino, Rock’s Reclusive Giant

Best known for classics including “Ain’t That a Shame,” “I’m Walkin’” and “Blueberry Hill,” Antoine Domino Jr., known as Fats, has put up staggering statistics: He has sold more than 60 million records and, between 1950 and 1963, he made Billboard’s pop chart 63 times and its R&B chart 59 times — more hit records than Mr. Berry, Little Richard and Buddy Holly combined.

Yet he generally shied away from the spotlight. “The planet missed out on certain things that Antoine was about,” said the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Dr. John in a recent phone conversation. “He’s the one who brought everything to fruition.”

Joe Lauro, a filmmaker and archivist, set out to address this gap with a new documentary he directed and produced, “The Big Beat: Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock ’n’ Roll.” The film’s broadcast premiere will be on the PBS “American Masters” series this Friday, Mr. Domino’s 88th birthday. (A longer version of the documentary will be released as a DVD the same day.)

Mr. Lauro, who has produced documentaries on the blues giant Howlin’ Wolf and on gospel music, said this project began about 10 years ago, when a woman approached him at the premiere of his film “The Wildest!,” about the hard-swinging big band musician Louis Prima, saying that she was a friend of Mr. Domino’s and she wanted to introduce the two men.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Lauro described entering the “parallel universe” of Mr. Domino’s double-shotgun house in the Ninth Ward neighborhood of New Orleans where he grew up. Mr. Domino’s first response when they met, Mr. Lauro recalled, was, “I don’t want to be documented by nobody!” For five years, the producer would visit the singer and they would talk and listen to music.

Still, the story faced some significant challenges. Mr. Domino, who has not performed since 2007, is painfully shy and very reluctant to speak in public. In addition, most of the performance footage that exists — clips from teen shows and early rock ’n’ roll movies — isn’t particularly dynamic.

But then Mr. Lauro unearthed a film of a complete 1962 concert by Mr. Domino and his original band at the Antibes Jazz Festival in France. “That inspired me to get over the other hurdles,” Mr. Lauro said. “Everything I needed was in that concert — they lead a second line through the audience, there’s great piano playing. Then I knew I needed to make the film.” (Though he did record new interviews with Mr. Domino, most of the time that the singer is heard speaking came from an archive of conversations with the biographer Rick Coleman, who also appears in the film.)

“The Big Beat” focuses on Mr. Domino’s early years, in an area so poor it still had dirt roads, before he became entranced by the piano and eventually joined forces with the bandleader-arranger Dave Bartholomew. Together, they helped create rock ’n’ roll before it had a name; Mr. Domino’s breakthrough hit, “The Fat Man,” was recorded in 1949 (five years before Presley’s first recording session) and was just inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

“Dave and Fats had the magnetism of opposites,” Mr. Lauro said. “Fats would come up with a simple melody, and Dave would give it an edge or write a bridge. Or Dave brought in a song like ‘Blue Monday’ and Fats would give it a more accessible approach. The combination is where the magic is.”

Don Bartholomew, Dave’s son and a musician in New Orleans who has appeared in the HBO series “Treme,” said that although he grew up thinking of Mr. Domino as a family member, the movie helped him understand the relationship between the two men. “That chemistry was just magical, like hand in glove, a perfect match,” he said. “It was a local sound my dad was producing, but Fats took it to the world.”

Though Mr. Domino and Mr. Bartholomew (at age 95) are still alive, other luminaries who appear in “The Big Beat” — like the musician/songwriter Allen Toussaint and the producer Cosimo Matassa — died while the film was is production. “When you’re dealing with subjects in their 80s and 90s, you really don’t want delays,” Mr. Lauro said, stressing the urgency of capturing this history before it’s too late.

Don Bartholomew underlined the importance of bringing Mr. Domino’s story to light: “He put New Orleans on the map, but even people in New Orleans today don’t know who Fats Domino is,” he said. “It’s been lost — nobody really knows what he did in terms of the music, the beginning of rock ’n’ roll, and breaking segregation.”

Dr. John, one of Fats Domino’s greatest disciples, put it in more sweeping terms. “He was always ahead of the times, and spiritually off the hook,” he said. “And when Antoine and Dave got together, they made this city reverberate.”

Correction: March 8, 2016 

An article on Feb. 24 about the new documentary “The Big Beat: Fats Domino and the Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” using information from its producer and director, Joe Lauro, referred incorrectly to time Mr. Lauro spent with Mr. Domino and the circumstances surrounding Mr. Domino’s approval of the project. Mr. Lauro now says that in fact he never played pool with Mr. Domino and that Mr. Domino did not sign a deal for the film in order to pay off a pool wager.

from theNew York Times