GRANNY’S SEWING ROOM
(1965)
Ray Brown was booking a Mar-Keys tour of Europe. Charlie Freeman tried to talk me into it. I could go or stay married, but didn’t see how I could do both. The choice was easy. Word spread I wouldn’t go on the road. I was surprised when Larry Raspberry called me. Raspberry and his band, the Gentrys, had won the nationally televised Ted Mack Amateur Hour and made a record for Chips Moman at his new American Studio. The first thing he cut was the Gentrys’ “Keep on Dancing,” an old song by the Avantis, one of well-known Memphis lawyer and producer Seymour Rosenberg’s black groups. It became a regional hit, Chips leased it to MGM for national distribution, and it was hot on the charts when Raspberry called. “Hey, Dickinson,” he said. “I got a problem. Maybe you can help me.”
It was nine o’clock at night. Wife and I were settled in our Vets Village cubbyhole, feeding nightly crickets to Lassie, our marmoset, who ate nothing but live insects. “What can I do for you, Larry?” I asked.
“Well, my record is #15 with a bullet and MGM wants an album, and half my band just quit to go to high school. Chips won’t start cutting the album until I’ve got a band to go on the road. Will you go on the road with the Gentrys?”
“Hell, no, Larry,” I said.
“Well … will you come down to the studio and tell Chips you will?”
That sounded like fun. Mary Lindsay and I drove downtown to American, launching one of our most meaningful adventures.
Lincoln Wayne Moman was called “Chips” due to his talent for gambling. His career began in Georgia with Bill Lowery. His first hit was as a songwriter. He wrote “This Time,” a medium-sized national hit for Elvis clone Troy Shondell. Chips did time for tax evasion and moved to Memphis. He went to the West Coast with the Brenda Lee tour and replaced James Burton in Ricky Nelson’s backup band, joining Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, who were also opening for Nelson. Old Memphis rockabillies stick together. Chips and Charlie Freeman lived together in Nashville while Chips did session work and Charlie toured with Eddie Cash’s show band. Charlie played a Gibson Birdland and Chips liked to borrow it. When Chips came back to Memphis, he briefly hooked up with Jim Stewart in Satellite/Stax’s early days. When that fell apart, he partnered with Arkansas soybean farmer Don Crews at American Studio, located at Chelsea and Thomas, in the heart of a North Memphis ghetto.
Chips was wiry and moved like a cat. He had a winning, good-natured grin, and flashing blue eyes. He could hypnotize a roomful of musicians in two minutes flat, and manipulate tumbling dice like no other white man.
My wife and I walked into the studio that night. Our lives were about to change. Larry Raspberry said, “Chips, you know Jim Dickinson.” Chips looked at me and nodded. “He’s going on the road with the Gentrys.”
“Okay,” he said and walked away. I talked to the other musicians, refocused, and realized Chips had locked the doors, ready to record at 10:45 p.m. He didn’t unlock the doors until noon the next day. We recorded the Gentrys’ whole first album and part of the second one. Chip’s took me aside and said, “You’re too good to go on the road with the Gentrys.”
I agreed. We went next door to the Townhouse for breakfast, and made a deal. I had my first real job in the music business.
Chips, with a world-famous house band rhythm section, became the most successful record producer in Memphis music history. “Keep on Dancing” was the first of many hits. The American rhythm section began with the great Tommy Cogbill, Chips’s bass-playing partner, and Clarence Nelson, a legendary black guitarist who swept and chased rats out of the echo chamber, and me. “Car-te-tur,” a black would-be songwriter who slept on the couch in the front as a bodyguard, was there, too.
Mary Lindsay loved it and hung out whenever she could. Chips liked her, and sent her to get egg sandwiches in the middle of the night in the heart of the ghetto. I was proud she knew no fear. Chips’s receptionist, Sandy Posey, was a high school senior with sad gray eyes. When no one recorded, Sandy went to the piano and sang songs she had written. She was not very subtle, but it ended up working.
We did sessions with the Gentrys, the Guilloteens, Ivory Joe Hunter, Pete and Repeat (a Sam and Dave clone), and produced song demos for various songwriters, including Joe South. Chips didn’t want me to play full piano. Tommy Cogbill was a reluctant bass player and refused to buy an instrument. Chips’s cheap Hagstrom bass sounded like crap. He had me double the bass part with my left hand on the piano. I was used to playing the bass part that way since my old band never had a bass player. Tommy had the only earphones, so he sat beside me at my left hand. He would add a convoluted bass part to every song to fuck with me; it became a signature. Those sessions tied my left hand in a knot. If the cut went well, and Chips’s pill kicked in, he’d say in the talkback, “Jim, if you want to, you can chord on the bridge.”
It made my wife mad he didn’t let me play, but I learned what to leave out, the real beginning of my education. Play it over until it is right. I still hear Chips’s voice on the talkback speakers: “Take it again.”
Chips hated the telephone. I saw him rip the control room phone out of the wall and throw it out the door. He taught me an important rule: Never answer the phone in the studio. The client’s record company might be telling you to stop. My calls are still screened when I’m recording.
One night Mary Lindsay and I were at the studio waiting for Chips to cut me a session check. We sat on the big black leather couch at the back of the control room. Football giant Roosevelt Greer sat beside us, waiting for Chips to do a horn overdub on his project. The backdoor flew open and in rushed Laurie, Chips’s wife, wearing sunglasses, her hair up in curlers, spewing profanity, and leading a huge black German shepherd. Apparently she called to talk to Chips; whoever answered the phone put it down and left her hanging. She screamed, “Which one of you fucking idiots answered that phone?” Nobody replied. She shook her finger at Chips. The huge black dog sat on the couch beside me. I was flanked by the growling beast and Rosie Greer, who was deeply pissed. Laurie finished her hissy fit and left as quickly as she had arrived. Chips said, “Can’t that woman understand that all I want to do is make rock ’n’ roll records?”
I have always been glad my wife heard that statement and truly got it. We worked a session the night Cogbill’s wife gave birth. Prioritizing is crucial in the recording process. It takes a special kind of woman to understand.
After the first Gentrys session, I got another fortuitous phone call. Bob Fisher, a high school friend, asked, “Can you write a song like the Kinks?”
“Sure,” I said. Fisher worked as a salesman at Berl Olswanger’s music store. I had dealt with him for years.
“Can you write one in the next forty-five minutes?”
I dug out my old Webcor reel-to-reel and went to work. When Fisher came to the apartment an hour later, I had a song demoed and ready.
“What’s this for, Fisher?” I asked.
“I found this band. They are all fifteen and they play great. I’m going to take them into John Fry’s studio and I need material.”
Fry had recording equipment in his family’s home. I had been there once. He and a few friends started a record label, Ardent, and put out a couple of local recordings. Fisher could have the song if I could go with him to Fry’s studio. Fry had better equipment in his home than Chips had at American. Chips’s setup was two mono machines with one pass overdub with a homemade console put together from Ampex mixers and guitar capacitor tone control EQs, all run through a Gates Level Devil limiter amplifier. Fry’s studio was stereo with an Altec three-channel 250 SU board with Altec compression and graphic equalizers. The control room was in the family house, had an office/reception area with desks and phones, and a full wet bar. The tracking space was behind the house. We called it Granny’s Sewing Room, alluding to its former function.
Fry remembered me and was cautious. I met the band, Bobby and the Originals, and got along with them right away. They were eager for help or advice. I played my song; they liked it. Before they knew what was happening, we recorded “Back for More.” They were green as grass. Singer Bobby Lawson had a disarming Huckleberry Finn charm and good relaxed stage presence. He sang chronically flat. If a melody note went to a third Lawson was so flat that he took the chord to a full minor.
Fry’s house was a great place to hang, less than a mile from Vets Village. I could hop the fence, walk down a drainage ditch, and come out in John’s backyard. Fry had two partners in Ardent Records, Mary Lindsay’s old friend Fred Smith, now attending Yale University, and John King, whose real interest was radio. King taught me a lot about the music business. He turned me on to Motown, told me about Huey Meaux in Texas and Cosimo Matassa and Johnny Vincent at Ace Records in New Orleans. I had never thought of regionalism and our role in Memphis in the tapestry of American music. King told me about Phil Spector.
This was it! Record production. The man behind the curtain. The phantom creative power of the recording session. Like Chips Moman, but far away in Los Angeles or Detroit, shrouded in mystery and arcane knowledge.
Fry considered himself retired from the record business. I was determined to drag him back. More semi-professional musicians started to hang out at Fry’s. Some were mutual acquaintances and shadier friends of mine: Charlie Hull, Horace’s little brother, Mike Alexander, a truly talented bass player, and his partner guitarist, Lee Baker.
I wrote Bobby and the Originals another song, “If You Want Me, You Can Find Me,” which we cut with Charlie Hull on guitar, Mike Alexander on bass, and Jimmy Crosthwait beating on a box with a pair of maracas, a trick I learned from Justis. Granny’s Sewing Room was an enclosed garage behind the house. You could not see what was going on from the control room. Once, as Crosthwait was overdubbing, Fry said, “Jim, is he smoking marijuana out there?”
“Well yes, John, I believe he is,” I said.
“I was just curious,” Fry commented.
Things opened up in Memphis when Sam the Sham cut “Wooly Bully” at Sam Phillips’s studio. After the national hit with “Keep On Dancing,” companies took Memphis seriously. The Bill Black Combo and Ace Cannon turned out instrumental hits. Stax had a red-hot deal with Atlantic Records, and scored hit after hit on the R&B chart. Sam the Sham was different, so off the wall local promoters started to take over-the-top acts a little more seriously. Professional attitudes toward those of us far left of center dramatically changed. I played on a couple of Don Nix sessions during this period. Engineer Stan Kesler, who produced “Wooly Bully,” took an interest in me.
I wrote a few songs I thought Sam the Sham could use and demoed them at Fry’s. We did the whole “Wooly Bully” riff thing: do-do, da-da over and over on drums, portable organ replete with slap back, the same Hully Gully hypnotic groove that made the Pharaohs famous. Kesler liked the songs “Black Cat Bone” and “Mojo Man,” both steeped in voodoo references and magic hoo-doo, Sam the Sham’s calling card. When we played the songs for Sam, he freaked out and accused me of trying to rip him off, beginning what would become a lifelong weirdness between us.