Harry The Hipster
Harry Hipster Gibson
|
|
 |
Gather 'round all you hipsters. Dig what I'm putting down.
Male
94 years old
Brooklyn, New York
United States
Last Login: 12/9/2009
|
Mood:
high
|
|
View My:
Pics
| Gifts
|
|
|
Harry The Hipster's Interests
|
|
|
|
Harry The Hipster's Details
|
| Status: | Swinger | | Here for: | Friends | | Orientation: | Straight | | Hometown: | Harlem, NY | | Ethnicity: | Other | | Zodiac Sign: | Cancer | | Children: | Proud parent | | Education: | College graduate | | Occupation: | 1. musician 2. entertainer | | Income: | Less than $30,000 |
|
|
Harry The Hipster's Schools
|
Juilliard School
New York, NY
Graduated: 1950
Student status: Alumni
Degree: Professional
Major: boogie woogie
Clubs: actually went there early 1940's but Myspace doesn't list that far back
|
1950 to 1950 |
The Juilliard School
New York, NY
Graduated: N/A
Student status: Alumni
Degree: Professional
Major: 1940-43
|
1950 to 1950 |
|
|
Harry The Hipster's Networking
|
|
|
|
![]() |
Harry The Hipster rocking the boogie Posted at 2:34 AM Nov 26
view more
|
|
Harry The Hipster's Latest Blog Entry
[Subscribe to this Blog]
|
| [View All Blog Entries] |
|
Harry The Hipster's Blurbs |
About me:
I was rocking and rolling 15 years before Elvis. My wild singing and rocking piano playing were so far ahead of my time, people couldn't believe the jive I was putting down. My 15 minutes of fame were during the mid-1940's, but I made a comeback during the 1970's, 80's, and now.
I'm a genius at the piano, I blow great boogie woogie, Dixieland, bop, blues, classical, rock, childrens songs, ragtime, stride, Bach, and styles which I invented. I sing of subjects that got my records banned from radio stations in the 1940's...drugs, adultery, drinking, murder, and frantic freaks, so I only hit the big time for a very short while, but even still I have a cult of devout followers. All of my recordings were my own compositions, and they were mostly unusual songs.
I was born in 1915 and started playing piano when I was 3. I grew up in the South Bronx, New York City, and got my first job as a professional piano player in Dixieland Jazz bands in Harlem, in the 1920's, and was soon playing boogie piano and talking jive. During prohibition I already knew most of the songs of my favorite jazz pianists, and was invited into black speakeasies in Harlem as a teenager to play piano. After repeal, which was in 1933, I was playing every night at Harlem nightclubs. Word got around, and in 1939 Fats Waller saw me there, and I was playing so many Waller songs that he took me as his intermission pianist on Swing Street, (52nd St between 5th and 7th Ave's, also known as the Apple). Billed as Harry Raab before then, on Swing Street I took my show-biz name "Gibson" off a gin bottle. But I still needed a nickname. At the time, jazz musicians stopped using the words "hep" and "hepcat" (too many squares were using those words) and started saying "hip" instead. So I coined the word "hipster" and started addressing my audience that way. "Gather 'round, all you hipsters," I would say from the piano. Fellow musicians picked up on the new word and began to kid me about it, calling me the Hipster. The name stuck, especially after I wrote the song "Handsome Harry, The Hipster," in the early 40's, and recorded it in 1944.
From 1939 to 1945 I worked full-time on "Swing Street." At the same time I studied at Juilliard, the prestigious music school, and became a fellow in their graduate school and a teacher there, but I quit that scene and stuck to jazz. One night in April 1944, I was gigging a show at The Deuces and some square record producers caught my act. They came up to me during the show and asked if I could do a recording session the next day for their record company. I got two guys out of Ben Webster's band and we rehearsed all night and by 10 AM we were in the studio and cut 8 songs that I wrote. We did the whole session in about 2 hours, only took 8 takes, not a clinker in the bunch. The album was called "Boogie Woogie in Blue." Back then an album was an album, a book of 4 records (8 sides). This album made me a star overnight. It got me invited to Hollywood, where I recorded 4 more sides for Musicraft, in 1946. I was always on the radio during the war, and made some V-Discs for the soldiers. In 1946 I did the movie "Junior Prom," and a play with Mae West. I screwed Mae West all over her apartment one night, she said I was the greatest entertainer in the world other than her. In 1947 I recorded 6 sides for the Diamond label, and then sort of disappeared from the limelight for many years until popping up in the 1970's as the leader in a rock and roll band called "The Rock Boogie Blues Jammers," playing with musicians 40 years younger than I was. In the 50's when rock and roll came in, I was washed up because nobody wanted to hear jazz musicians, so I became a recluse, and eventually wound up in a trailer in the desert in Southern California.
My big comeback came in the late 1970's, in California. People dug me there, the hippies liked me because I was an eccentric white-haired gentleman who could rock the 88's better than anybody they ever heard before. I was a gravel-voiced man by then, lost my voice you know, and playing hard rock, boogie woogie, and ragtime. I found myself playing in modern rock bands, the two albums I recorded in the late 80's are great, I'm really proud of that shit. I sang comical songs about different kinds of dope, blowing any chance that my records will ever be sold in Walmart. For example, a song I recorded in 1989 about a little grass shack in Hawaii made of Maui Wowie, that can be smoked as needed, replanted from the seeds, and rebuilt from the stems and leaves. Unlike my fellow musicians from the 1940's, I changed my music to fit the times in the 1980's. I believe I was the only person to ever do that. I played ragtime as a kid in the 1910's, dixieland in the 20's, swing music and stride piano in the 30's, bebop and boogie woogie in the 40's and hard rock in the 70's and 80's. Nobody else in history ever did that. I also play classical music, my favorite is Bach, and I can play pretty songs too. I cover all the bases.
But most impressive are my videos, the "soundies" I did while in NYC in 1944. You see, I was the first white guy to ever play rock and roll. I was doing it in the early 40's, I was playing all black music in black clubs with black bands to black audiences, and those cats all dug me because I was such a wild character and played such wild piano. Back in the early 40's, I had slicked back hair, frantic singing, rocking the 88's and tearing up the joint...and all of this 15 years before Elvis ever set foot in a record studio. I was the first white guy to do all that, and I was the first guy, black OR white, to put on the whole rocking act with frantic singing on the boogie piano. Before me, even the hard-rocking boogie piano pioneers like Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons, were sitting upright and playing like gentlemen. But these "soundies" clips from 1944 show me stomping at the piano and standing on the bench to rock the 88's, years before Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis. As you watch the videos, you have to keep reminding yourself that this is really 1944 footage and that this is not rock and roll of the 1950's. The only thing different, if this were the 1950's, is that I would be wearing blue jeans and a white tee shirt instead of a zoot suit, and singing about cars and sock hops. And I was good too, I came out of the slick jazz world, where you had to be good at your craft, so my piano playing was much better than the clumsy and unskilled piano smashing of rock and rollers in the 50's, but I rocked just as hard if not harder. My high level of musicianship shows that my teachers were the greats such as Fats Waller and many of the other top Harlem pianists. My best video is called Opus 12EEE, you can see it on this page. Look at how I rocked like somebody from the 50's. If you want to see me sing, watch 4F Ferdinand the Frantic Freak. For those of you too young to remember WWII, 4F was the code they gave to guys who were too messed up to be drafted. If you were 4F in the draft, it meant you had flat feet, were fat as a hog, messed up in the head, or addicted to dope. Ferdinand was all of those things, what a frantic freak he was! That was the first rock video ever made.
|
Who I'd like to meet:
|
|
| Harry The Hipster's Friend Space (Top 15) |
|
Harry The Hipster has 250 friends.
|
|
|
|
|
![]()
|
Online Now!
