Junior Walker
    

DeWalt at the Wheel. Also made several return visits Extract from the book "The Manchester Wheelers" by Dave “Eventually, by pushing and squeezing and upsetting a lot of people, I got to the back of the crowd watching in the far stage room, just as Junior Walker and the All Stars played ‘Shake and Fingerpop’. I had missed them starting up with a great live version of ‘Tune Up’, and they’d moved seamlessly from a slow ‘Hip-Hug-Her’, which they used as an interval tune between their planned set. This was the start of probably the best live act I had ever remembered seeing at the Wheel. They were so polished, so professional and sounding exactly like their records. There was Junior: large as life on the Wheel stage! I had found out from DL that his real name was Autry DeWalt! He was there with a huge saxophone and three guys – The All Stars - with him on keyboard, guitar and drums. Junior was wildly energetic swinging around that sax and all of the group were dressed alike with grey black and white suite style jackets. Droplets of condensation from all the sweat of the crowd were coalescing on the black ceiling above, dropping on my head and then running down my neck. It was refreshing as I was hot and packed in tight. I couldn’t maneuver out of the path of the droplets. But what the heck, this was warm rain, and far more acceptable than the stuff I had been dodging outside. Each droplet seemed to hit with each changing rhythm; Mr DeWalt was doing a great job with ‘Shake and Fingerpop’. The rhythmic drops changed then to match the beat of ‘Roadru­nner’… ‘Shoot Your Shot’… ‘Cleo’s Mood’… drop, drop, drop accompanied Junior’s sax, and each track was interspersed with a slow ‘Hip Hug-Her’, and sure enough the droplets became slow, very slow drops when the tempo changed. On and on in a timeless bubble went Junior’s saxophone. I was chewing gum till my mouth blistered, my lips stuck together. I clicked my fingers so much they started blistering too. I could feel my eyes, wild and sticking out like stalks, my eyelids rolled back and forth to the saxophone rhythms. Junior too, he was in a sort of dream, becoming exhausted, playing his sax like that; pumping up his cheeks so much they became balloons that I thought would burst open. He was visibly forcing air into his saxophone, then swinging his sax around behind him, spinning back around and shouting into the microphone. I watched transfixed as several streams of cigarette smoke from the standing front row audience were curling up and around Junior – his breath then sucked the smoke into the sax and blew it out. Fantastic. Fucking fantastic, and the most fantastic of all was when he almost blew the roof off doing the intro to ‘Do The Boomerang’”.