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SAM THE SHAM
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AS IT WAS...
My favorite garage-rock band, bar none, has always been Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs. They hit their commercial stride in the post-Beatles era, invading the Top 40 with the likes of "Little Red Riding Hood," "Ring Dang Doo," "Ju Ju Hand," and their all-time monster from 1965, "Wooly Bully." Sam was part of what he called "the American Retaliation," (as opposed to the British Invasion), which also included not only the Byrds, the Lovin' Spoonful, and Bob Dylan, but also such deserving talents as the Bobby Fuller Four, the Sir Douglas Quintet, and Paul Revere & the Raiders. With the exception of the Byrds and the Spoonful, the artists named (along with Sam the Sham, of course) were around in the pre-Beatle era, but didn't really blow up until all the foreign bands started hijacking the charts. What was good about Sam was that he actually remembered life before the Beatles, and that pre-1964 rock wasn't confined to Bobby Rydell. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and all the rest had nothing on Sam‹he used to hang out with Freddy King and John Lee Hooker, and his albums contained covers of Blues gems like Johnny "Guitar" Watson's "Gangster Of Love" and Billy "The Kid" Emerson's "Red Hot." Sam and his Pharaohs also led a one-band Rockabilly revival, after that sound faded but long before anybody had anything to look back to (like "Ain't Gonna Move," which was the flip of "Wooly Bully," and "I Wish It Were Me," heard on The Best Of Sam The Sham & The Pharaohs on MGM). Plain and simple, Sam and company got over the hump playing greaser music when almost everybody else left it for dead (although Sir Douglas made considerable inroads doing the same kind of thing). Although he stresses that he has nothing against the Beatles and their kind, "I didn't sit in the back of the bus for nobody. When the Beatles hit, everybody was goin' British - except Sam. I was holdin' what I had."
However, at the time I interviewed Sam in issue #12 (1995), most of the reference material I had seen on Sam up to that time concentrated on the Arabian get-up the band wore, the hearse they drove to gigs, and the novelty songs like "Little Red Riding Hood." If you listen to the early albums with the original lineup (Wooly Bully, Their Second Album, On Tour), although several songs were humorous streak, very few were out-and-out nutty‹this was a howling Tex-Mex bar band at work. After "Little Red Riding Hood," the label played up the cartoon angle, to the point where Sam was reduced to doing dreadfully unfunny numbers like "Old McDonald Had A Boogaloo Farm." I've nothing against the shuck- and-jive aspect, but to label Sam as a straight-up novelty/parody singer is to sell the man short. My original interview was intended to set the record straight.
LIKE IT IS...
Sam the Sham is now involved with the church, doing the Lord's work by putting on shows for prisoners and homeless people, as I discussed in issue #12. He's since gone back to his Blues roots, recording a Blues album in his home studio that he hopes to release on his own label, Loosahatchie. As he puts it, he's just "layin' back, watchin' everything go by." He currently has a few other completed albums in the can, but as he says, "I wanna finish the Blues collection, so when I do meet someone (from a label), it'll be like tryin' to sell a watch in an alley!," he cracks in his booming Tex-Mex voice. "If you don't like one, you can buy another." Oddly enough, he's starting to get belated attention from blues circles--Rhino released a revised edition of Pharaohization!, their old 1985 vinyl best-of, beefed up with extra cuts that spotlight Sam as an all-around rocker and not a shallow court jester. This CD edition actually got raves from Living Blues and Blues Revue, two major genre magazines, and he even briefly hosted Beale St. Blues Caravan, a syndicated radio show showcasing live Blues concerts. Sam has an interesting viewpoint on the Blues market, particularly younger artists who flaunt their hardships like a cheap tattoo. Riffing on that old cliche, "I paid my dues," Sam says that, "when John Lee Hooker says 'I paid my dues,' you can believe he wasn't lookin' to pay Śem! These new guys are trying to create dues to pay! Like what, they maxed out their credit card? Somebody bumped into their van? If you dedicate yourself to your craft, there'll be enough dues to pay." Being a pioneering Mexican-American in Rock & Roll, Sam just caught the last years of color-coded bathrooms and Southern prejudice. "I'm from the old school, man, you go to the bathroom, you take a drink of water, if you gon' get hungry, you pack you a sandwich and don't stop till you get there! I guess it's that mentality...I still, now, when I'm goin' on a trip, I ask everybody, 'ya'll take care of business?' Ain't no stoppin'! Unless we're stoppin' for gas..."