As any showman knows, there’s no better way to hook an audience than by making a spectacular entrance. At a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ show, the singer burst forth from a coffin borne onstage by shuffling pallbearers, starting every performance with a resurrection. Author Mark Binelli begins his novelization of Hawkins’ life, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins All-Time Greatest Hits, with this same signature scene; unfortunately it’s simply the first occasion on which the author fails to exceed his subject.
Screamin’ Jay belonged to the rough and tumble first generation of rock ‘n’ roll. He’s primarily remembered for two things: firstly for his one and only hit, “I Put a Spell on You”, an eerie, unique, supernaturally-inflected dirge that’s since been covered by artists like Nina Simone and CCR, and; secondly, for his outrageous live shows, which included the aforementioned coffin and other outré embellishments that played on racial and religious taboos, like a witch-doctor’s bone through his nose. Binelli vividly evokes various scenes from Hawkins’ life, such as meeting Fats Domino, contemplating the racial dynamics of the crowd while boxing in Alaska, surreptitiously buying a coffin for unusual purposes, and even one scene without Jay, a family “reunion” held for all of Jay’s illegitimate children across the country to meet each other.
Binelli is clearly trying to marry a unique style to his unique subject, allowing the book to constantly reinvent itself, foregoing a consistent narrative to jump from vignette to vignette, often using different styles and framing devices. However, while this style keeps each chapter fresh and interesting, overall, the novel is less than the sum of its parts because the many devices and vignette style serve to keep the reader at arm’s length from truly knowing the subject. Few, if any, secondary characters appear in more than one scene; this is essentially a novel with only one character, one whose inner life remains strangely remote from the reader.
There’s more than a little dissonance in the fact that the novel purports to be about Screamin’ Jay’s life, but really the author seems much less interested in the man himself than in what he represented. Binelli has his finger on the pulse of pop culture in this era (mid-’40s through ’00s), but Jay himself, as presented here, lacks a pulse. Binelli skips from scene to scene, pointing out what’s interesting like a museum docent who discusses the artifacts more than the artists who created. There’s no denying that Jay’s life story is often edifying about racial attitudes and pop culture mythmaking, but in choosing to write a novel on this subject, it’s curious that Binelli didn’t invest more in Jay’s interiority.
Part of this comes from the aforementioned vignette style. Usually, when writing on a subject like Jay about whom only a few facts (or myths) are known, the author endeavors to fill in the gaps, whereas Binelli almost exclusively focuses on embellishing the known while ignoring the unknown (to be fair, he signals this intention in the title).
The narrative jumps wouldn’t be so jarring if not for the first half of the novel, which tells of Jay’s young, pre-fame days in Cleveland and his time in the army in a much more conventional, chronological mode, only to thwart those expectations later. By the end, Binelli seems content to merely catalogue others’ attempts to capture Jay, ceding the floor to those like journalist and author Nick Tosches, who interviewed Hawkins in 1973.
Binelli’s novel is not flattered by the comparison to Tosches, who has written similar works on musicians like Jerry Lee Lewis in Hellfire, which not only manages to be more a far more intimate portrayal of its subject, but also draws out his cultural significance to a much larger degree. Tosches’ interview with Hawkins ends with an embittered lament: “People won’t listen to me as a singer. I’m some kind of monster. I don’t want to be a black Vincent Price. I’m sick of it, I hate it! I wanna do goddamn opera! I wanna sing!”
This outburst contains more emotion than Hawkins ever once displays in Binelli’s novel, and while the novel lightly touches on Hawkins’ feeling that he was trapped by his own creation, mostly it’s guilty of the same reduction — focusing on the monster instead of the man inside.
Despite these qualms, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ All-Time Greatest Hits has more virtues than vices and is consistently entertaining, as any work on such a larger than life figure must be. While there are many missed opportunities to delve deeper into Hawkins’ character or tell a more coherent narrative, the novel does succeed as a tribute to the weirder side of pop culture, from the horror movie magazines Jay cherished as a child to the voodoo stage antics he made famous as an adult. Binelli never really brings forth his subject, but Screamin Jay’s life is an easily interesting enough to read about for 200 pages.
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