Hometown clowns: Huey Smith and The Popeye
Growing up in Youngstown Ohio in the early 1970s was not exactly like growing up in other places at the time. I mean, where else could you come in from a day of playing outside and wash off the shark-skin sheen you acquired from digging mud pits under the invisible industrial flake settling up high on the valley.
Sure we had HBO at some point. Until then it was a basketball hoop on the garage. So what was there to do but escape?
Television was a great escape at the time. Being situated between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and close enough to New York and Canada afforded some good exploring with the TV antennae. Our horizons were expanded from local horror movie hosts to legendary shows like SCTV and Night Flight.
But to me, nothing could compare to the escape of music. The mystery of the sound coming off of a record and the idea that it was a moment in time captured was something that blew my mind. So as young as the age or four I found my daily ritual to include rummaging through my parents record cabinet and putting something on the mono Hi-Fi which held a vase of dried flowers you had to remove any time you wanted to listen to music.
I remember my brother pointing out a record that had the word “Popeye” written on it. At that point we were both drawing cartoons and comics and were fans of the sailor man. To see the name on a record that looked kind of serious, meaning - it didn’t look like it was for children, was a moment burned in my brain. It was a band called Huey “Piano” Smith (And his Clowns) and it was on a beautifully designed label called ACE Records. It looked old to us, ancient, really. A seven inch relic of a recording by a band of clowns, and it was called “Popeye”
So we put the record on and it blasts off - like a party train flying in another dimension it faded in hot:
“Down in New Orleans where we jump and shout, we are gonna show you what the Pop-eye’s all about, so let’s do it, the Popeye the sailor man”
“POP-EYYYYYYYYYEEEE”
“POP-EYYYYYYYYYEEEE”
Needles to say my life would never be the same again. I remember being four or five years old and thinking to myself “I want to be at that party!”
Twenty years later I will be in New York City and handing out at The Lakeside Lounge. They have a Huey Smith CD on the Jukebox and it has Scald Dog and Popeye on it. This is around the same time I’m leaning too late in life that there is such a thing as New Orleans R&B. Within a year or so of this timeframe I will come to understand that nearly everything good about American music comes from New Orleans, including the Popeye.
It was one night I was telling Lakeside Lounge owner and DJ Jim “The Hound” Marshall that my parents owned this record that was Huey “Piano” Smith’s Pop-eye with the other side being what I believe is the A side titled “Scald Dog". This would be the first and only time I saw Jim Marshall dance as he took a moment to show how they used to dance the Pop-eye.
If you take a look around there are many new orleans songs about the Pop-eye.