The Basin Street Sheik Bio Pages

Chap 2: Jerry Grette
violin, fiddle, bowed psaltery, reorder, womandolin, khaen, khaen't, caterwauling

A former child, prodigious Jerry Grette was indulging an equally prodigious appetite somewhere around 1929 with what would turn out to be future bandmates when a tiny man in a kilt suddenly appeared on a flaming beetle and said in a distinct brogue, "from now on ye are Sheiks, wi' an Aye!".  They paid scant attention, squashing the bug repeatedly with a Scotch^® tape dispenser, but then they sat and soul-searched the situation: Jerry had just been drafted into their new skiffle band as violinist.  Never one to retreat from a little violince (nor, to be fair, to scuffle with skiffle), Grette found himself willing to take the plunge, but the band had as yet no real definition, ambition, repertoire, instruments, purpose, talent or name...

So they accepted the name "Sheiks", tagging "Basin Street" on since none of them lived there, and the Sheiks were spawned.  Or were they?  There remains some controversy about the origin of the Sheik name.  One story circulates that Whisperin' Lu, the juggist, came up with it during their aimless wandering.  "I could swear he said 'Basin Street Reeks' ", observes Grette.  "And it sure did, there were bugs everywhere, not like today where they have DDT trucks pampering everybody.  You kids today don't know what it was like.  But man, this one bug talked, real high-pitched.  He said 'Sheiks'.  Now, I don't hear everything everybody else does, I'm on my own.  I hear things other people don't.  But we weren't gonna be told what to do by no bug.  So I squashed him real good with my walking stick.   I play the violin the same way.  Swat 'em before they know what hit 'em!" 

Music had always been around the redoubtable Jerry Grette without a doubt.  Jerry (née Jèré) had spent enough time with his brother Vinny in the old Tin Pan Alley to learn which tin pans had the good stuff.  After acquiring one particularly bombastic tin, he took it to a park pond where, whilst watching sea birds cavorting in a light fog, he wrote a classic naturalist ballad he dubbed "Mist o'er Egrets".  Before the original Nature Boy knew what hit him, a young songwriter had taken the song, music and all, and rearranged it with a new title, Miss Otis Regrets.  Cole Porter never compensated Jerry, and in fact continued his blatant intellectual property theft, next appropriating Jerry's composition Sheik to Sheik.  But it was to become an old story; in the sixties pop era, while he was off  talent-scouting for TV's Gong Show (where among his discoveries was a young and budding Michelle Sheiked), more Grette stuff was ignominiously plagiarized, notably his composition You Sheik Me by the dreaded English cover band Led Zeppelin.  The Grette expectations were fading.  "Sheekit" griped Grette, "That ain't no way to get along."  He turned on, dropped out and drove back to the old hometown of  Kangiqsualujjuaq to become an upstanding Priapist monk, minister to the sinister and "really get Inuit" (Jerry was already an amateur linguist of cunning dexterity).

The monastery didn't hold up long ("the place was nuts" is all he'll say) and, Kangiqsualujjuaq being more Intuitive than sinister, Jerry set out for a new challenge, hitching a ride with Tom Waits to New Orleans where he worked in the Tragic Dust record shop jamming with Professor Longhair on dustpan just before Fess' rediscovery in 1970.  Doubtlessly it was there in the act of endlessly sweeping vinyl dust that Grette developed his unique bowing style that would become the modern Sheiks' trademark violin sound- a style that aficionados have described as "reminiscent of a Civil War field amputation"; a sound that has been approximated only on blackboards and Jerry's car brakes.

Capitalising on Fess' coattails, Jerry released a solo album, "True Grette", which sold some thirty copies in the store, but only because it was labeled as a sound effects record.  The Sheiks soon came calling, having bought five copies of the record and wanting their money back.  But they soon found, after getting together in the Grette big flat, that they still had something.  Airing out the old tunes like In the Alehouse Now, Repairing to Succumb, Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister's Car* and Juan- a Bee like You, they needed only a slight Sheik Tweak to bring them up to date for a 21st-century audience.  And thus the old violin was pulled out, wiped of dust and grit, Grette was back in the saddle and the Sheiks were backing up the camels.  The rest is about to be history.

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