MARRIED, RETURN TO WACO, AND GOOD KID—THE ALL-TIME CHAMP
(1964)
One spring afternoon, Newport and I were joy riding in East Memphis and smoking a joint. He was driving. I stared out the window at the upper-middle-class suburb we had been raised in. I saw a five- or six-year-old boy following a black yardman in front of a modern colonial-style house. The yardman walked and hummed; the little white boy ran to keep up. Newport said, “That’s the story of your goddamned life, right there.”
Mary Lindsay and I planned to marry at summer’s end. She would transfer to Memphis State; that’s as much as we had planned. Her mother was still after my ass. It was getting tight. One afternoon my mother started talking about the marriage. I assumed she was trying to convince me to put it off. I blew up.
“Calm down, Jimmy,” she said. “This might not be the right time but it’s the right girl. If you go on and get married this spring, your father and I will pay for summer school at Baylor.” She still had faith in Baylor. I saw a way to get out of town for the first few critical months of our marriage. Mary Lindsay went for it. We had a formal wedding with groomsmen in morning suits. I had my patent-leather opera slippers’ soles polished so I could kneel for the ceremony. Mary Lindsay wore an ancestral lace gown and looked like a storybook princess bride. We married in Mullins Methodist Church’s chapel, where the shrine to Bill Madison, my friend killed by lightning, hung on the wall behind the altar. Charlie Freeman was there with Carol Jensen, the girl from art class, smiling like a fox. They married six months later.
We married the day after school finished, and two days later started summer school at Baylor. We ate our honeymoon dinner at the K.C. Steak House in Carlisle, and were supposed to stay overnight in Little Rock but didn’t make it. We checked into the motel at Lonoke, Arkansas, and let nature take her course. We watched The Defiant Ones on television and had cherry pie from the motel diner. Our honeymoon could not have been better.
Summer school: Jim Berry, my old dorm friend, fixed us up with a one-room apartment—with a kitchenette and a Murphy bed—out by the lake. We spent the summer in bed and ate lots of breakfasts. I associate that summer with seasoned pepper and Tabasco sauce on fried eggs, and Awake from a frozen orange juice mix.
I took the legendary Guy B. Harrison’s famous Texas History class. He tried to talk me into coming back to Waco and doing my Master’s on the local offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan chapter. No dice. Bad as campus had been, it was worse. Baylor Theatre was gone, torn to the foundations with salt sprinkled on the bare earth. A Sunday school teacher had brought a Sunbeam class to see Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, and made a written complaint of the profanity recited by the devilish Paul Baker’s godless drama students. Baker walked out of the theatre spitting on the floor. He refused to be censored or controlled by the Baptist Pharisees, and took most of the theatre to Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
My bride and I took road trips. We went to Houston with Jim Berry, and he took us to the world-famous Cork Club. The owner, Gene McCarthy (the James Dean character, Jett Rink, from Giant), was there in the flesh. Berry’s old man was a big oil rig equipment supplier, well up in the oilman hierarchy. It was a cool weekend.
Courtesy of Tex Campbell, we visited blues guitarist Mance Lipscomb at his ranch in Navasota, Texas. We played music; first me, then him, in the proven white-boy tradition I was used to. We ate a late midday meal. When the women and children ate, he led me away to see his lean, wild-eyed racing dogs. Mance and I stood at his greyhound pen. A storm blew over the escarpment, headed east across the flatlands, and straight for us. We talked about Lightning’ Hopkins. “It’s the difference between me and Lightning. He don’t act right wif folks, ya know. Folks come ’round and dey wants to know. It’s an obligation we has to lead them in the light of days they never known.”
His teenage granddaughter sat on the front porch next to a gut-bucket full of fresh, unslung chitlins. She looked nine months pregnant and stunningly beautiful, like the ancient black queen of the Nile. Mance drove us around and showed us off. He was a local celebrity with a new record on Warner/Reprise. “Frank Sinatra’s label,” Mance pointed out. He told the locals we were from California and had come to kidnap him. We got the evil eye.
At summer’s end we got the hell out of Waco. I may be crazy but I’m not stupid. We both enrolled at Memphis State. The Dean of Men’s wife loved my folk act and got us in Vets Village, twenty long clapboard World War II bunkhouses with three units in each barracks, located on the campus’s north side. Terry Johnson, the Mar-Keys’ drummer, and his family lived at the other end. Rent was $37.50 a month. We moved in with Lassie, the pet monkey Lucia Burch gave us.
Lucia, Mary Lindsay’s childhood friend, was the youngest daughter of social activist attorney Lucius Burch, who had been brought in to break Boss Crump’s political machine. I had followed his liberal exploits in local politics with interest for years. He had taken his daughter, Mary Lindsay, and Fred Smith (the man who would invent Fed Ex) to Ireland for a summer. I got to know Lucius through Mary Lindsay. He was one of the smartest men I have ever known. We ate many excellent quail dinners in his antebellum mansion in Collierville, Tennessee, where suits of Spanish armor stood in the entrance hall. He flew his private plane to Memphis daily. Oft’ we sat in the front yard, smoking pot with Charlie Brown, while Lucius recited “The Stag at Eve.”
Lucia was a truly unique individual. She and my wife were total opposites and dear friends. She was always up for a good time. She dated Newport, and later became Bill Eggleston’s longtime mistress and companion.
We prospered at Vets Village. While we were in Waco, Charlie Brown had opened yet another coffeehouse. The Bitter Lemon, located just east of the Poplar Viaduct over Binghampton, was across the street from Melody Music, where I had seen Dishrag that second and final time. Charlie had partnered with artist/sculptor John McIntire from Memphis Art Academy. John owned a big rooming house in Midtown that everybody called Beatnik Manor.
The Bitter Lemon was Charlie’s best effort. During the summer the finger-picking duo of John Fahey and Bill Barth showed up looking for old blues musicians. These two carpetbagging Yankees hornswoggled the local audience. The first time I saw them, I told hometown boy Gimmer Nicholson, “You play better than that.” He looked at me like I was crazy. I took it as a challenge. I struck a deal with Charlie Brown and started playing regularly at the Lemon. I sold him my old light board from the Market Theatre. The audience was mostly kids. There was no liquor but plenty of pot in the parking lot. On weekends, Charlie booked Furry Lewis or Bukka White. Fahey drifted off but Bill Barth dug in his heels and stayed.
One of Lucia Burch’s older sisters had married a New York television producer, who was coming to Memphis as the line producer for Anatomy of Pop, an ABC documentary about popular music. I would act as liaison to local industry members. I saw an opportunity to showcase old blues players at the Bitter Lemon but the television people wanted Elvis.
“Nobody gets to Elvis,” I told the Yankee security over the telephone. “I’ll take you out there but you won’t get in.”
The woman grumbled and complained in a nasal whine about the power of the press.
“Why don’t you talk to Sam Phillips, the owner of Sun Records, the man who discovered Elvis?”
She lightened up. They could “fill in” with local color and maybe “some of the old blues guys.” I tried to tell them about Stax and Hi Records, but they didn’t get it. They had shot in New York and L.A., Detroit and Nashville. They were passing through Memphis, hoping to get an audience with The King. That was not about to happen. Their crew consisted of Lucia’s sister’s husband, a grizzly old cameraman, and a soundman, who was black and very uptight from the jump. They insisted on going to Graceland first, certain their ABC status would get them to Elvis. When we pulled up to Graceland, the gates were closed, signifying Elvis was home. Old Uncle Vester, Elvis’s mother’s brother, stepped out of his guardhouse in a blue and white guard uniform with a big EP on the front pocket and TCB (taking care of business) embroidered across the back shoulders. He shook his head. “What you folks want?” he crackled. His head kept shaking. “You got to understand,” Old Uncle Vester explained earnestly. “Even I seldom enter his presence.”
The New York crew returned to their motel in defeat. I told them an interview with Sam Phillips was set the next evening. In excitement, I fell off my Spanish boots high heels and badly sprained my ankle that night, which put me on crutches for the remainder of the shoot. It slowed me but wasn’t about to stop me.
Charlie Brown rounded up the usual suspects: Furry Lewis, Gus Cannon, “Little Bit” Laura Dukes (a near dwarf novelty singer from the old Beale Street days), with Memphis Willie B, filling out a makeshift jug band. Charlie found Good Kid, the washboard player I had seen in Whiskey Chute as a boy. But Charlie Brown assured me the percussionist was way too fucked up to perform. “He was so drunk he didn’t know his name,” Charlie told me. Too bad.
Charlie was in charge of the phony jug band. I had my hands full explaining to these so-called journalist/experts who Sam Phillips, the man that invented rock ’n’ roll, was. I had been around Sam a few times, but didn’t know him well. I had no idea what to expect. They set up sound and camera upstairs in Sam’s private office, which had a Wurlitzer jukebox, gold 78 records on the wall, and hadn’t changed since 1958, when he moved from the original Sun Studio around the corner at 706 Union and Marshall. Sam was turned out, black business suit, white shirt, banker’s tie, and a white silk square in his top coat pocket. He was “on” completely.
It was so heavy. I sat in the hall and listened through the open door. Sam laid it down, comparing Elvis to Sinatra; to “Big Chief,” the bass singer from the Statesmen gospel group; and to the lead in the Mills Brothers, saying he originally had been attracted to Elvis as a ballad singer. He blew their minds. He talked about primitive rockabilly recordings as if they were high art, nuclear physics, or both. I felt triumphant at having helped him bring information about this music to the world. Hopefully these uninformed experts would recognize the truth when they shot the jug band.
I spent the next day in pain and on Percocets, hobbling like Tiny Tim or Long John Silver, trying to damage control the Bitter Lemon Jug Band shoot. Willie B’s old lady refused to let him go off with crazy white boys and play the devil music, causing a last-minute freak-out. We were one brick shy of a load.
Charlie Brown forcefully recruited a local phony Rasta conga player, Chico Mazaratti, to play zinc tub bass. Charlie held a butcher knife to his throat in the Lemon’s kitchen until he removed his shark tooth earring. We almost had a rhythm section. The decision was made to get Good Kid, no matter what shape he was in. At least he was a warm body. I couldn’t wait.
The second time I saw Good Kid, he was rubber-legging through the Bitter Lemon’s parking lot singing, “You are my sunshine…. I wrote that song, ya know … my ooooooooonnnly sunshine.”
“Little Bit” Laura Dukes was kicking him in the ass. “Get in that door, motherfucker. Get yo’ black ass in that door.”
“I’m going, I’m going,” he mumbled and stumbled, standing two inches from the open door. “Where de do’?” He looked around, helplessly lost. She kicked him and shoved him inside.
He was barely taller than Little Bit, who was four foot something. His clothes may have once been different colors; now they were all dirty gray. His pants’ crotch hung to his knees. He staggered past the table where the black sound technician from the ABC documentary crew sat with his earphone clamped to his head. Furry Lewis and Gus Cannon were sitting at the same table, assuming that was where they were supposed to sit. Good Kid went straight to the stage and sat center stage, behind the microphone. We handed him Crosthwait’s washboard and drumsticks. When he raised the stick to test the instrument, the TV crew hit the shooting lights. Good Kid recoiled, arms flung out like a Ray Bolger doing the scarecrow dance in The Wizard of Oz. “Let’s turn de light down reeeeeeaaaaaalll looooowwww,” he pleaded.
They took Good Kid off the stage. “If I take that back to ABC news, I’ll lose my job,” Lucia’s brother-in-law said, giving me the first taste of the “fear” that cost me dearly in years to come.
As Furry, Gus, Little Bit, and Chico Mazaratti started “Next Week Sometime,” Good Kid took a seat at the table with the black sound engineer, who was becoming more and more uncomfortable. The first time I heard the alien sound, I knew exactly what it was and pretended not to hear it. After a few seconds, the uptight Yankee director turned to me and said, “What’s that funny noise? Do you hear that?” Good Kid was playing his nose. Old-timers call it “nose trumpet.” I told him he had to stop. Good Kid turned to the black sound guy and mournfully said, “They done got me down here and now the white man won’t even let me play my nose.”
Later that night at the wrap party back at the motel, the soundman got drunk. He admitted he was from Atlanta, not New York, and tore open his Ivy League shirt to reveal an old razor scar. He said, “You gotta love the South. People let you know where you stand.”
The documentary aired with no jug band, and sadly, no Sam Phillips. Tony Bennett was the show’s entire second half. Sam was furious. Fortunately he didn’t blame me.
That night at the Bitter Lemon was special and prophetic. All the right people, folks who deserved to see the clash of culture and commerce, were in the audience. Bill Barth laughed so hard I thought he would pass out. Lee Baker soaked it up. We talked about it often in years to come.