Good-Bye King's Speech and Hello Scatman John revival :-)
Born 1942 in El Monte, California, John Paul Larkin suffered from a severe stutter since he started talking, which led to an emotionally traumatic childhood. Even at the peak of his success in 1995, journalists reported that during interviews he hardly finished a sentence without repeating the phrase at least six or seven times. He invented a unique fusion of scat singing and disco, turning his biggest problem into his biggest asset. Scatman John was certified 14x Gold and 18x Platinum and also received the Annie Glenn Award for his outstanding service to the stuttering community. At the age of 12 he began to learn piano, and was introduced to the art of scat singing at the age of fourteen through records by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. John became a professional jazz pianist in the 1970s and '80s, playing many gigs in jazz clubs around Los Angeles. In 1986, he released the self-titled album John Larkin on the Transition label, copies of which are now extremely rare. Around this time, alcoholism and drug addiction were also beginning to take a hold of his life. When fellow musician and friend Joe Farrell, who also had a drug problem, died of bone cancer in 1986, John decided to beat his habits. He eventually did so, largely with the help of his new wife Judy, also a recovering alcoholic. To advance his career in 1990 he moved to Berlin, Germany. His agent Manfred Zähringer from Iceberg Records in Denmark thought of combining scat singing with modern dance music and hip hop sounds. John was resistant at first but BMG in Hamburg was patient. He was mainly scared that listeners would realize he stuttered, so Judy suggested that he talk about it directly in his music. Working with dance producers Ingo Kays and Tony Catania in 1994, he recorded the first single, Scatman (Ski Ba Bop Ba Dop Bop), a song intended to inspire children who stuttered to overcome adversity. I really like the Arena Di Verona remix, sampling a huge audience applauding stadium-like. Goosebumps guaranteed in the beginning and the end of the Mix (unfortunately no dedicated video, but listen to it at the bottom of this post). So John adopted the new name and persona of Scatman John. A year later he was a star worldwide.
In 1998 he was diagnosed with lung cancer and went into intensive treatment. He died in his Los Angeles home on December 3, 1999, at the age of 57. His widow Judy keeps working tirelessly for the stutter community, even running a Facebook profile named Scatman. Respect!
Quote:
'I hope that the kids, while they sing along to my songs or dance to it, feel that life is not that bad at all. Even for just a minute'. - John 'Scatman' Larkin
No comments:
Post a Comment