OSO AND DIXIELAND FOLK STYLE
(1963)
My stage act was evolving. I found old gold-rimmed glasses my grandfather had worn and had my prescription put in them. I found dress shirts my father wore in prep school from Phil A. Halle, a men’s store still active in downtown Memphis. I sold Selvidge my Gibson J45 and bought a Martin D28 (one of my dumber moves). I boiled and reshaped my father’s old Chicago fedora and made a poncho out of an old hotel blanket.
I played semi-regularly at the Oso. It was low-key, to say the least. Charlie Brown let me do whatever I wanted. I started each show with a long drawn-out version of Froggie the Gremlin’s “Every Time I Go to Town the Boys Kick My Dog Around,” with an extended abstract kazoo solo in which I fancied myself referencing Sidney Bechet. I tried to establish as much distance between the audience and myself as possible. It was hostile. I spent my set break sitting on the sidewalk outside the front door, wrapped in my blanket/poncho (people crossed the street rather than walk by me). Mary Lindsay hated it. I could see it made her uncomfortable. Some nights she begged off and stayed away. She was having family trouble, some of it surely due to me.
Mary Lindsay was set to attend the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. I told her she wasn’t going and bulldozed her into Southwestern at Memphis with the inside help from an old friend of my mother’s. I think it spooked her. She was feeling manipulated, but I couldn’t help it. We broke up. It was my fault. I hid under the bed and stupidly made my mother answer the telephone.
In the middle of my hibernation, my mother fielded a strange phone call from George Tidwell, the trumpet player from Al Stamps’s old band. He was living in Nashville, working as an arranger for Bill Justis. Justis had seen the publicity about the Folk Festival at the Shell and wanted me to call him.
Justis worked for Mercury/Smash Records making “party records,” instrumental cover versions of hit songs. He wanted to make an album of folk songs with a Dixieland band à la “Midnight in Moscow,” a recent hit. He was looking for singers. “Get two more folkies and come up here next week,” Bill said with his sarcastic, know-it-all hipster twang.
I called Colin Heath and his wife, legitimate folk singers with good voices. They could do the heavy lifting. We flew to Nashville. I hated to fly. Thankfully, it was a short flight. I had a bag of pot in my banjo case. We checked into the King of the Road Hillbilly Heaven next to the Pancake House down from Music Row, and met Justis at Ireland’s Restaurant by Vanderbilt University. The first session was that night after a steak and biscuit dinner.
As Bill Justis and I walked into Columbia Studio “B” for the first Dixieland Folk Style session, Johnny Cash was leaving with his arms around two Carter Family sisters, who were holding him up like bookends. He took one look at me in my sheepherder’s jacket and banjo case with a hidden bag of pot and snarled, “What’s this? Amateur hour?”
Bill grimaced and grumbled as we passed. Bill saw the comment had hurt me. He smiled his hipster smile and said, “The Phantom of the Opry.” Roger Miller was in the john wearing a tux coat and a black Bardahl T-shirt.
It was the real Nashville cats. Bill Purcell on piano, Bob Moore on upright bass, Elvis’s drummer, Buddy Harman, on drums, wearing fingerless black gloves, Boots Randolph on sax, six different guitar players including Grady Martin and Fred Carter from the Hawks, acoustic, electric, baritone, six-string bass, and someone on five-string banjo with a flat pick. I couldn’t play since I was non-union. All Justis wanted me to do was sing. It was like with Ramsey Horton and the K-otics. Hard for me to believe that’s what he wanted. He had the fucking Jordanaires and three members of the Anita Kerr Singers working from five staff scores! My buddy, George, was in the bathroom frantically providing and copying parts. We ran the songs down a couple of times and took a cut. The musicians were fabulous; first-call session players, playing tight minimalist parts that fit like fingers into a glove. After the session I went to Printer’s Alley to the Voodoo Club for a drink with Fred Carter, who got blasted and crashed a police barricade as we left.
I lay awake that night at Hillbilly Heaven, smoking dope and pondering the universe after the first session. This was IT. I had to find a place in the process.
The second day of the session was my twenty-second birthday. At home in the driveway was a new midnight blue Corvair Spider with four on the floor and a supercharger. I hadn’t even driven it but I wasn’t thinking about the car. I was absorbing as much recording magic as possible. We cut some corny folk stuff, “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” “Ten Thousand Miles from Home.” I had a solo on “St. James Infirmary Blues,” the song Vera’s dad sang. Justis played trumpet, a rare occurrence, and the other players applauded.
Halfway through the day’s second session, the big fire doors at the side of the tracking space burst open and a huge redneck dressed in black entered the room, talking fast and paying attention to no one. He walked rapidly toward the background singers, taking off Roy Orbison’s dark glasses, still talking fast, “I’m sorry, baby. Couldn’t make up my mind. Couldn’t choose so I just bought both of them.”
It didn’t make sense to me. I figured someone would throw him out. The session ground to a halt. The stranger centered his attention on the flame-redheaded singer with the Anita Kerr Singers, still talking, “I’m sorry, Baby …”
Everybody followed the couple to the parking lot. He talked fast, pointing to a pair of Jaguar XKEs, a hardtop coupe and a ragtop roadster, both midnight-blue, like my yet un-driven Spider. He had bought them both, like cufflinks. He handed out little brown cigars with gold printing that ran from end to end, and read, “Shelby S. Singleton, Vice President of Mercury/Smash.” “Who is this guy?” I asked my friend, George, standing by me.
“That’s Shelby Singleton. He’s the producer.”
There it was. This guy hadn’t been there for two-thirds of the session, and he showed up with two new sports cars. The producer. Finally, a job I could do. I watched him closely.
The session had been going pretty well but had gotten harder. More discussions; more nitpicking. Singleton took up a lot of space. He had shifted the air in the room. He was tall and overweight, with long greasy ducktails and mutton-chop sideburns. He never took off his shades. He was producing, I figured. We recorded “Blowing in the Wind.” I asked him why we didn’t cut “Don’t Think Twice.” He blew it off, shaking his head, “You’ll never hear of that Dylan guy again. That one song was a freak accident like the Chipmunks.”
I stayed an extra day after the tracking. The other singers had been dismissed. Justis wanted to do more vocal overdubs. Colin and Kay had been a bad call. He already had plenty of legitimate singers. He needed the edgy authenticity I brought to the party. Bill told me, “Give me some more of the ‘Nig-a-Billy.’”
I returned to Memphis with much to think about. Making that album was like rehearsing for a play and then going into production through the last show. It wasn’t like playing a live gig. I had contributed to something that would endure.
I missed Mary Lindsay. I wanted to talk to her about what just happened.
Barbara Teal came home at Thanksgiving to visit her grandmother. She was driving a new Corvette and had new store-bought tits. I asked her, “Barbara, where did you get the car?”
“My friends tell me what horses to bet on over at the race track.”
Big Sid, no doubt. I didn’t ask any more questions.
One night when Barbara had gone back to Cincinnati I was driving around East Memphis. Driving that little blue car was a pleasure. The Spider would wind out four gears smooth as silk. Maybe it was no XKE but it was a fine set of wheels for Handsome Jimmy. East Memphis was my backyard. I knew the streets by heart, knew how to dodge the stop signs and avoid the speed traps. Memphis opens west to east. All roads lead to God’s Country. It had been cotton fields and truck farms when we arrived in ’49. Now it was filled with subdivisions and shopping centers; suburban squalor swallowed the landscape.
One night I patrolled the streets behind White Station School. If I went left, I would pass Mary Lindsay’s house. If I went right, it would be a different story. I went left. She was walking by the mimosa tree in front of her house, her hair and coat collar blowing in the wind. My car lights caught her full-on for only a moment. I knew.
It wasn’t easy getting back together. Her friends were down on me. Her mother had discovered a letter from one so-called friend providing her with a little too much information about our relationship. I called Mary Lindsay. We had to sneak around. She talked to me in my car out behind the mimosa tree one night before she left on a date with someone else. We were on thin ice and meeting on the sly. She had dates for all the Christmas parties, but promised me New Year’s Eve.
I went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Newport. He stayed with his freshman roommates and I bunked with Tex and his wife. Tex, the friend who turned me on to Dylan in Austin, was doing his Master’s in English lit. He and his wife had an apartment off the Square behind the Harvard Co-op. I attended classes with Tex, including a psychology lecture by B. F. Skinner of Skinner Box fame, and bought paperbacks of the Quatermass Trilogy at the Harvard Co-op.
Wet trees
Naked to the toes
Wave frosty fingers
And reach into space
This night,
As breath is held
And frog fires
Burn.
The white horse moon
Will slip like a pale stone
Slick in the backyard ditch
Down the mudbank of sky.
Crawling Christmas
Will newspaper itself
To every front porch and
Baste itself
To the stomach of the day
Tinsel and candle
Will Christmas tree
The passing possibility
Of the far gone eve
With the package of the morning
And the spirit of the night
Are tissue paper and gone,
Sailing in a ship-ly trinity.
The night is lost to ghosts of all the Christmas past
And we will hunt the coon,
We shall bay the moon
And woods,
Wander wild-eyed
With the spirit of old John,
Balling in the bottoms.
The glass star of childhood
And the red name-tagged stocking
Are sadly silent in the past.
Tonight the goal that I once reached backward to obtain will no longer
Suffice. It’s behind her.
The answer.
Far to the rear of the blinking tree lights
That had no gift for me.
Walking back tonight
From the Harvard Square
In the falling snow
That may spend the strange holiday
For me in Cambridge,
I pass a building
In the basement
There are blue holiday lights
In two windows.
The rest of the building is dark.
Music was everywhere. Jim Kweskin’s Jug Band at Mt. Auburn’s Club 47. Patrick Sky, the Indian activist, Mitch Greenhill, and farthest out of all, the Holy Modal Rounders. Walking the street, I heard Travis picking and harmonica wailing out of a dusty storefront. Young men who looked like me, with long hair, scruffy, Navy pea jackets or fleece-lined sheepherder’s coats, blue jeans, and booted, plodded through the city streets like rugged frontiersmen, carrying Martin D28s in black hard-shell cases.
Before Christmas, I got a recording contract from Justis in the mail. I called him. “Hey man, what is this?” I asked.
“Don’t you want to make a record?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Then sign the contract.”
I showed my old man the contract. He shrugged. I signed it and mailed it from Chicago the day after Christmas.
There had been a big snowstorm, but the blizzard didn’t put a lid on Mary Lindsay’s partying. I later heard stories about her dancing on a table. That’s my girl.