Houston blues and R&B sax great powered Little Richard’s road band
Grady Gaines’ name may not ring out like those of canonized pioneers of rock ’n’ roll, yet he was present during rock’s infancy and even cut an iconic rock pose that endures years later.
Among images of wild men on piano, guitarists with their instruments slung low and rubber-legged singers, Gaines stands out as the guy standing atop Little Richard’s piano in Alan Freed’s film “Don’t Knock the Rock” — explosively discharging notes from his saxophone.
As a member of Little Richard’s Upsetters, Gaines wrenched from his sax an earthy howl, torrents of twisting sound. He barnstormed the country with Little Richard, playing music for young listeners energized by a thrilling new sound.
“It was the greatest rock ’n’ roll show ever,” Gaines said in the liner notes to Little Richard’s “The Specialty Sessions.” “It was like you ran into a tornado or something.”
A big man who loomed large in Houston’s musical history, Gaines — one of the last remaining legends from the city’s storied music scene in the 1950s — died Friday at age 86. The cause of death has not been released.
Blues great Milton Hopkins, a friend and collaborator, said Gaines reveled in the opportunity to paint his performances with as much energy and color as they could withstand.
“He was always a showman,” Hopkins said. “That was a big part of it for him, he loved dressing up nice and putting on a big show. That was him, just the way he was.”
Gaines found his way into Little Richard’s employ because as a teenager he was already a crucial part of a Houston music scene that sprung from the Peacock and Duke labels, adding his instrument
to blues, R&B and gospel recordings. After retreating from music for years, he returned to become a crucial cornerstone of Houston’s live music scene, gathering toptier players for Sunday night shows at Etta’s and events all over town.
From Peacock to Upsetter
His story started in Waskom, a little town on the Texas-Louisiana border east of Marshall, where he lived until he was a third grader. His family moved to Houston and sank roots in Fifth Ward.
Gaines attended Wheatley High, a school with a formidable history of producing great saxophonists. He started gigging as a teenager in a band called the Blues Ramblers, playing such clubs as Whispering Pines and gradually becoming a fixture in a scene that radiated outward from the storied Club Matinee.
Gaines and His Orchestra — a tight ensemble of local players — naturally found their way into the recording studio for the Peacock and Duke labels, run by Houston record mogul Don Robey, working with such stars as Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and appearing on singles by Big Walter Price (including “Pack Fair and Square”), Dave Dean and Earl Forest between 1954 and 1955.
When Little Richard played Houston, Gaines would back the rising superstar. In 1955, Little Richard called from Maryland asking Gaines to meet him on the road. He wanted Gaines to play sax and serve as bandleader for the Upsetters, Little Richards’ road band.
The pace of Gaines’ life changed instantly: With the Upsetters he’d play scores of shows each year; they’d also frequently enter studios around the country to record demos with Little Richard for songs that would later become hits. Gaines can be heard on several of Little Richard’s singles from 1956, including “Keep a Knockin’,” “Ooh My Soul” and “I’ll Never Let You Go.”
“I remember as a youngster, we’d go hang out with our housekeeper at some destination nightclub where the Grady Gaines Orchestra played quite often,” said
Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. “I don’t think we knew at the time, but found out later that it was Little Richard’s band. But they always played great music. He was a great player.”
Local author Rod Evans captures those years — the gigs, the sessions and the cross-country travels — in great detail in “I’ve Been Out There,” a book he cowrote with Gaines about the life of a barnstorming musician.
In 1958, Little Richard felt called by God to step away from rock ’n’ roll. Gaines and the Upsetters continued working, performing with Little Willie John and playing on sessions in 1958 and 1960 with the young R&B star.
Gaines could also be heard on a clandestine recording credited to the Upsetters released in 1960, with an uncredited Little Richard on vocals covering “Every Night About This Time,” a Fats Domino song.
“Little Richard had thrown his diamond rings into the deep blue sea and turned his back on rock ’n’ roll, but I guess he had a change of heart,” Gibbons said. “That song, it’s just about as good as anything I ever want to hear.”
Sam Cooke took notice of the Upsetters when he caught them backing Little Willie John. In 1960,
he hired the band, which would back him at shows until his death in 1964.
Back on stage
By the 1970s, work grew scarce, and Gaines disappeared from the stage. He worked as a skycap at Houston Intercontinental Airport (now Bush Intercontinental) and at some area hotels for years before Milton Hopkins coaxed him out of retirement.
In the mid-1980s, Gaines sat in
on one of Hopkins’ regular Sunday night gigs at Etta’s Lounge on Scott Street, playing his horn for the first time in years. Hopkins urged Gaines to return, and they played together for several months before Hopkins talked Gaines into taking over the residency. Gaines put together his own band, the Texas Upsetters, and played Etta’s for two decades.
“It was a big show,” said blues historian Roger Wood, author of “Down in Houston: Bayou City
Blues.” “He’d have the basic rhythm parts, multiple horns, keyboards and several featured singers who’d do these songs with some jumping instrumentals in between. His appeal reached a broad audience. He could do blues, R&B, pop. And by staying in Houston, he kept a lot of musicians employed for a long time.”
Gaines’ work expanded from Etta’s to other venues around the city. He celebrated his birthday with an annual show at the Big Easy. And befitting a living legend, he landed private function shows that paid well.
Coinciding with his return to the stage, Gaines also resumed his recording career. The New Orleans-based Black Top label put out “Full Gain” in 1988, the first full album credited to Grady Gaines and the Texas Upsetters. The album was part culmination and part celebration, with Gaines surrounded by brilliant players from Houston’s storied past, a deep talent pool that included his guitar-playing brother Roy Gaines, guitarist Clarence Hollimon, keyboardist Teddy Reynolds and trumpeter Calvin Owens.
Old friends and collaborators such as Big Robert Smith and Joe Medwick provided some of the vocals, and Medwick also wrote some of the songs, including “I’ve Been Out There” that featuring a rare vocal by Gaines, who tells the story of his career playing with Little Richard and Sam Cooke. “People,” Gaines speak-sings, “I tell you, I’ve been out there …”
He released a second album, “Horn of Plenty,” in 1992. Gaines conceived the recording as a representation of the vibrant Gulf Coast sound he helped form decades earlier.
Though the “Texas tenor” sound is often affixed to such jazz greats as Arnett Cobb and Illinois Jacquet, Gaines clearly brought that heavy and hale sound to blues and R&B, like his Fort Worth counterpart King Curtis.
“I don’t know if he could quite play everything, but he had a grip on a lot of music,” Hopkins said. “If he didn’t like something, he wasn’t going to play it. So musically, he loved everything he played. He loved what he was doing. He loved music as much as anything.”
In mid-2019, a Reddit user — known as “Roaring Kitty” on some social media accounts — posted a picture on an online forum depicting a single $53,000 investment in the video game retailer GameStop.
The post attracted little attention, except from a few people who mocked the bet on the struggling company.
“This dude should sell now,” a Reddit user named cmcewen wrote at the time.
But Roaring Kitty was not deterred. Over the next year, he began tweeting frequently about GameStop and making YouTube and TikTok videos about his investment. He also started livestreaming his financial ideas. Other Reddit users with moni
kers such as Ackilles and Bowlerguy92 began following his every move and piling into GameStop.
“IF HE IS IN WE ARE IN,” one user wrote on a Reddit board called WallStreetBets on Tuesday.
Roaring Kitty — who is Keith Gill, 34, a former financial educator for an insurance firm in Massachusetts — has now become a central figure in this week’s stock market frenzy. Inspired by him and a small crew of individual investors who gathered around him, hordes of young online traders took GameStop’s stock on a wild ride, pitting themselves against sophisticated hedge funds and upending Wall Street’s norms in the process.
Their actions — pushing up GameStop’s price by buying socalled options contracts that offer a cheap way to bet on a stock’s direction — have shocked established investors because Gill and his online comrades are the antithesis of the Wall Street titans who have long ruled the stock market.
Working far from well-heeled financial offices, Gill and his fans socialized on Reddit and YouTube and used no-fee online trading platforms such as Robinhood and WeBull. Many were so devoted to their GameStop investment that they spent hours each week chatting in the comments section of
Gill’s videos, delving into the company’s financial filings and arcane details about free-cash flow and video game consoles.
From $53K to $48M value
Their show of force this week underlines how the financial markets have changed by merging with the world of social media and a younger generation of traders who have been empowered by online platforms. It has also made some in this new generation wildly wealthy.
On Tuesday, Gill posted a picture on Reddit that showed his $53,000 bet on GameStop had soared in value to $48 million. (His holdings could not be independently verified.) The post was “upvoted” — the equivalent of being liked — more than 140,000 times by other users. GameStop, which traded at $4 a year ago, closed Thursday at $193 after reaching more than $480 earlier in the day.
“Your example has literally changed the lives of thousands of ordinary normal people,” a Reddit user named reality_czech wrote this week to Gill. “Seriously thank you.”
Larry Tabb, the head of market structure research at Bloomberg Intelligence, said the rise of traders like Gill “would have been impossible even a few years ago” because every trade came with a fee and there was less focus on the markets on social media. But with people now stuck at home in the pandemic with easy access to free trading at online brokerages, “these guys saw an opportunity and they took it,” he said.
Gill did not respond to requests for comment. His online accounts and email addresses were tied to his old office in New Hampshire and his Massachusetts home. Gill’s mother, Elaine, confirmed in a brief phone call that her son was Roaring Kitty.
“I’m proud,” she said, before hanging up.
Gill’s first posts on WallStreetBets showed the screenshot of his E-Trade portfolio with the options trades he had made on GameStop, all of them betting the stock would go up. In the comments, he explained that Wall Street did not appreciate how much GameStop would benefit as new video game consoles were released.
Shortly after Gill placed his trades, Michael Burry, an investor made famous by the Michael Lewis book “The Big Short,” also expressed interest in GameStop. On Reddit, Gill pointed to Burry’s post as validation. When others questioned the investment, Gill held firm.
“Dude everyone thinks I’m crazy, and I think everyone else is crazy,” he responded to a commenter when GameStop announced sales had dropped 30 percent in late 2019.
Last summer, Gill started a Roaring Kitty channel on YouTube where he talked for hours about GameStop. He had 418 YouTube subscribers through November, according to web tracking firm SocialBlade.
The comments section of his videos soon became a gathering place for a small group of other GameStop fans. One YouTube follower, Joe Fonicello, known as Toast on Twitter, said he tuned in from an old van that he was traveling across the country in with his girlfriend.
“She thought I was crazy until she heard the thesis” for what GameStop could be worth, said Fonicello, 21, who said he and his girlfriend’s investment in the stock has grown to over $250,000 this week from less than $10,000 originally.
Fonicello said chatting with Gill and others online was not just about money.
“What went from a great few hours of stock analysis turned into a few hours of just spreading positivity,” he said.
‘Fighting the man’
In August, Ryan Cohen, founder of the pet food site Chewy.com, announced that he had taken a big stake in GameStop. A few weeks later, Gill’s investment hit $1 million, according to pictures he posted of his portfolio.
Through financial filings, Gill’s crew also discovered that hedge funds such as Point72 and Citron Capital were betting that GameStop’s price would fall, in a maneuver known as short-selling. That angered them.
“That’s your ignition switch. A common enemy, so to speak,” said Rod Alzmann, 31, a corporate strategist in Florida who has bet on GameStop for even longer than Gill and posted online as Uberkikz11. “The speculation is a rush, plus fighting the man.”
Earlier this month, Cohen joined GameStop’s board. That caused the company’s stock to rise, enriching Gill and others. When Gill showed another picture of his investment Jan. 13, some of the 44,200 people who looked at the post said his decision not to cash out even a penny of GameStop kept them going.
“Daddy’s still in!” said a Reddit user named freehouse_throwaway. “Feels so good.”
Late last week, 190,000 viewers tuned in to the Roaring Kitty YouTube channel, which now has more than 74,000 subscribers, as Gill, in a red bandanna and sunglasses, said he would be stepping away “for a bit.” That day, he livestreamed for seven hours while watching a chart of GameStop’s surging stock, laughing and calling out to longtime comrades in the comments.
On Thursday, several online brokerages shut down trading in GameStop, causing the company’s price to plunge by almost two-thirds before steadying. Even ardent supporters wondered if Gill had finally caved and sold.
Gill then posted another picture on Reddit showing he had stayed firm — and had lost $15 million. His fans cheered.