The New York Times
November 29, 2012
Mickey Baker, Guitarist, Is Dead at 87
By BRUCE WEBER
Mickey Baker, whose prickly, piercing guitar riffs were featured on dozens if not hundreds of recordings and helped propel the evolution of rhythm and blues into rock ’n’ roll, died on Tuesday at his home in Montastruc-la-Conseillčre, near Toulouse in southwestern France. He was 87.
The cause was heart and kidney failure, his wife, Marie, said.
Mr. Baker is probably best known for a single song, “Love Is Strange,” a sexy pop tune that he and Sylvia Vanderpool Robinson recorded in 1956 as Mickey & Sylvia. It sold more than a million copies and reached No. 1 on Billboard’s rhythm-and-blues chart and No. 11 on the pop chart.
The recording was featured in the 1987 film “Dirty Dancing,” and the rapper Pitbull sampled it — including Mr. Baker’s signature keening guitar riff, which is said to have influenced a young Jimi Hendrix — in the song “Back in Time,” featured in the 2012 film “Men in Black 3.”
He also had an important career away from the spotlight. In the 1950s, few studio musicians were more in demand than Mr. Baker, who took part in sessions for Atlantic, King, RCA, Savoy, Decca and other labels, often as many as four a day. And few guitarists were more influential.
His well-known recordings included “Money Honey” and “Such a Night” by the Drifters, Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” Ruth Brown’s “Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean” and Big Maybelle’s “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Known for his aggressively bluesy chords and attention-grabbing solos, he is often cited by connoisseurs as a signature force, along with the likes of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, in the development of rock ’n’ roll and an antecedent of Hendrix, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend and many others.
McHouston Baker was born in Louisville, Ky., on Oct. 15, 1925. Little can be confirmed about his childhood other than that it was difficult. Both Ms. Baker and one of his former wives, Barbara Castellano, to whom he was married from the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s, said in interviews that he believed his father, whom he never met, was a white piano player who was passing through Louisville and that his mother, Lillian, who was black, was just 12 years old when he was born.
His mother was unable to care for him and was subsequently in and out of jail. Young Mickey spent several years in an orphanage, where, his wife said, he ate regularly for the first time and played musical instruments — “the tuba, whatever was available” — but where, after having lived on the street, he felt constrained. He ran away often, riding the rails to St. Louis, to Chicago and several times to New York City, where he finally landed permanently when he was 15.
“He took a bath in the Hudson River,” Ms. Baker said. “I remember him saying he wanted to start there clean, and the train was dirty.”
New York was where he had always wanted to be, Ms. Castellano said. He worked odd jobs there, not all of them legal, before deciding to pursue music.
His first wish was to play the trumpet, but when he visited a the pawnshop to buy one, he didn’t have enough money; a beat-up guitar was all he could afford. A quick study who was largely self-taught, he did take lessons from the guitarist Rector Bailey. “He said, ‘I stole everything I could from him and made my honey from it,’ ” his wife said. In his early 20s he was playing in a jazz band called the Incomparables. By 1950, however, he had realized he couldn’t make a living playing jazz, and he turned to rhythm and blues and began getting studio work.
“Sometimes Mickey would lead the band or the combo that played on the date; other times he would merely be a sideman,” Bob Rolontz, who produced R&B records for RCA, wrote in the liner notes for Mr. Baker’s 1959 album, “The Wildest Guitar.” “But sideman or leader, the musical ideas Mickey constantly contributed to these recording dates accounted for many hit records.”
Mr. Baker supplemented his studio work with teaching, and he wrote a series of instruction books for jazz guitar, recapitulating his own idiosyncratic method, that are available today. In the early 1960s, he moved to France, first to Paris and later to Toulouse, and he rarely returned to the United States.
He studied composition and theory with the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, among other teachers, and experimented on his own, playing and writing in a variety of forms, including classical music; he wrote a series of fugues and inventions for guitar and a concerto, “The Blues Suite,” for guitar and orchestra.
Mr. Baker was married six times. His survivors include his wife, the former Marie France-Drai, a singer he met in the early 1980s with whom he toured Europe in a variety of bands; a son, McHouston Jr.; and a daughter, Bonita Lee.
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