IN MY YOUTH I SOUGHT THE TRUTH LIKE STANLEY BOOTH
(1967–69)
I had seen Stanley Booth at Memphis State University, and knew him from an article in the Tiger Rag, the campus newspaper. I knew he held a black belt in karate, a degree in art history, and tended to show up at local art community events. He and I crossed paths one afternoon at Stepherson’s Big Star grocery store in East Memphis. We were both cashing checks. He wore a burgundy leather jacket and tortoise-shell dark glasses with a red bandana nattily knotted around his skinny neck. He looked like he was out of an ad from Gentlemen’s Quarterly magazine and was obviously stoned. We exchanged pleasantries and phone numbers. He was living with my friend, Jan Bradford, the deadpan comedian from Strange Flowers. Soon Mary Lindsay and I were hanging out regularly at Stanley and Jan’s. He had a great stereo jazz collection. He was friends with Charlie Brown, Hunter George, and many local underground art types. We smoked pot and listened to music.
Stanley, a fledgling journalist, had published his first piece in Playboy magazine about Furry Lewis and a piece on Elvis was about to run in Esquire. His information on both pieces came from Charlie Brown. He was trying to sell the Saturday Evening Post an article about a Korean War army deserter just repatriated to Memphis. Instead, the Post assigned him the topic of Memphis music. “Who could possibly be interested in that?” Stanley asked with contempt.
That pissed me off. I listed Memphis music personalities—Chips Moman, Steve Cropper, Dan Penn, Willie Mitchell, Sam Phillips—for him to interview, and told him, “Go talk to these people, and then tell me they aren’t interesting.” Stanley got interested pretty fast. He witnessed the “Dock of the Bay” session, days before the tragic plane crash that killed Otis Redding and all but two of the Bar-Kays. The sad event became the story’s focus, and ran in the last edition of the Saturday Evening Post magazine. The article established Stanley as an up-and-coming rock critic, something he didn’t relish. He was assigned to cover Brian Jones’s (of the Rolling Stones) drug trial in London. Stanley formed a relationship with the Rolling Stones that changed our lives.
Charlie Freeman started working for Stan Kesler at Sounds of Memphis studio, built in an old tobacco warehouse by Sam the Sham’s former manager. Charlie, Tommy McClure, and Arkansas drummer “Slamming” Sammy Creason from the Bill Black Combo touring band reformed Kesler’s rhythm section. Charlie wanted me to record his “big song” if Stan fronted the studio time.
It was an ordeal. The damn song was so long. The recording tape ran off the reel but we worked on it for so long Stan Kesler got used to me. We went for coffee together, a privilege reserved for the inner circle. One afternoon in Dobbs House Coffee Shop, I asked Kesler for an engineering job.
He said, “Man, I just hired B.B. Cunningham as my assistant. I wish I could hire you but I don’t have room.”
“What about as a session musician?” I asked, hopefully.
“I’ve got a blues session coming up on Albert Collins and I’ve already booked Hooker Brown on organ, but if you want to hang out and try to slip in on the date, go for it.”
I showed up with Charlie Freeman. As we walked to the studio, we saw a Kelly green Cadillac convertible with California plates and two fishing poles sticking out the back window on the driver’s side. Charlie said, “If that’s not a blues player’s car, I’ll kiss your ass.”
The session started in chaos. Sammy Creason was wadded up on the studio floor in the throes of a kidney stone attack until an ambulance carried him off. Kesler called Tarp Tarrant, Jerry Lee Lewis’s longtime drummer. Freeman had worked with him when he toured with Jerry Lee’s band, the Memphis Beats.
Bill Hall from Houston produced the session with Leland Rogers and did the heavy lifting. Leland, dubbed “the Silver Fox” due to his white hair, was Kenny Rogers’s older brother and ate up with cool. He wore a safari hat and a white jumpsuit. He produced with an easy style, friendly and smooth. I sat at the Wurlitzer electric piano and played along with the first tune. Leland walked by and told B.B. Cunningham, “Put a mic on that.”
I had weaseled my way onto the session.
We cut for three days; then Stan brought Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love in to do the horns. After the Albert Collins session, Sammy Creason returned and we came together as a rhythm section. Hooker Brown and McClure couldn’t get along, so Creason replaced Hooker with B3 player Mike Utley. We became the Dixie Flyers.
Albert Collins’s album, Trash Talkin’, was nominated for a Grammy as R&B Instrumental of the Year.
Charlie Freeman married Carol Jensen, the girl from my art class. They lived in the midtown ghetto across from the Mid-South Fairgrounds. Money was tight. We held ritual fried chicken and mashed potato dinners—to which we added our pea casserole—at our cottage by the cemetery or their “little house on Inez.” We were brothers in arms.
Charlie knew my musical limitations. On a session, I could count on him to give me the note outside the triad. He did it without the other musicians noticing. He pulled me out of the hole time after time. Charlie said there was “no such thing as a wrong note.” The right note was only a half-step away in either direction.
The Sounds of Memphis studio was temporarily in a warehouse that naturally sounded great. After Albert Collins, we did sessions on Billy Lee Riley for the Sun record label, which Shelby Singleton had purchased. On the Riley session I played the Wurlitzer again. We cut “Kay,” a country song about a Nashville taxi driver (Billy changed it to Memphis). We got a good cut that Sam Phillips himself called the best record Riley ever made.
I was in heaven. Billy Lee Riley was my original inspiration as a kid. I thought “Red Hot” was the best rockabilly record ever made. During our session Riley’s Indian wife got pissed because he was loaded. She departed in a huff, leaving Billy Lee without a ride. I took him home. We rode around northeast Memphis until dawn before he remembered where “home” was.
We recorded Bettye LaVette, a seventeen-year-old black girl from up north, for Leland Rogers. We cut our best track yet, “He Made a Woman Out of Me,” on her. Bettye had a crush on Wayne Jackson from the Memphis Horns. She gave Charlie and me our first hits of cocaine. Charlie said, “Well, there goes a few brain cells.”
The most interesting session we did with Kesler was an R&B pop artist from Japan. Kenichi Hagiwara—known as Shoken—was the lead singer and guitar sideman of the Tempters, a group of pop stars from the Land of the Rising Sun. They had Beatle haircuts and wore hooded zipper-front mink jackets. Very cool. Two older Japanese businessmen, producers from the publishing company, were with them. The producers spoke English; the musicians did not. We cut them like a typical R&B date. The vocalist sang phonetic English and wept bitter tears on the ballads. Kesler overdubbed the Memphis Horns and the Holiday sisters, who sang on Elvis in Memphis. After each take the producers came into the tracking space and bowed to each of us. They had a briefcase full of hundred dollar bills and paid in cash after each session. Freeman asked what musicians’ scale was in Japan. They seemed not to understand. Charlie asked again, “What do you pay musicians in Japan?” “In Japan, not pay musicians,” one replied curtly. Some things are the same wherever you go.
I met Duane Allman the first time I went to Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama. Jan Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone magazine, was producing Boz Scaggs, the “blue eyed soul man.” I had heard stories of Florida guitarist Duane Allman from Mike Ladd, Mike Alexander, and John Hurley. Ladd and Alexander knew him from military school, and Hurley used his band to cut demos in Nashville. Duane looked different from the rest of the good ole boys from Shoals. He had long hippy hair and played bottleneck slide like a demon from Hell. They called him Skydog, reflecting his conscious state.
We talked about Mike Alexander. Mike was a con man who told people he owed money from dope deals to meet him at a certain time and remote location. At the appointed time, he would be boarding a plane elsewhere. He was famous for selling “treasure maps” leading to the motherlode dope stash. Duane laughed, and pulled a Mike Alexander dope map out of his trucker’s wallet. Duane was a kindred spirit and soulmate. I knew we would meet down the road.
The second time I went to Muscle Shoals I met Jerry Wexler. Wexler was recording the Arkansas-transplanted-to-Canada rockabilly legend Ronnie “The Hawk” Hawkins, a man among men. Hawkins got off the plane in Muscle Shoals with a cardboard box full of liquor bottles and a woman who looked like a cross between a Playboy bunny and a serial killer. The expression on her face could curdle milk. She looked like she was smuggling the front bumpers of a ’49 Cadillac in her sweater. She had the old familiar Ann Moss rocketship tits up. She was a former Miss Toronto, a hardcore lesbian, ex–roller derby star who Hawkins would sic on eager groupies and road whores. A large man in a beat-up cowboy hat, Hawkins told Wexler, “I got the pills, pot, and pussy. I’m ready to rock ’n’ roll.”
“Cool it, baby. This is a dry county,” Wexler warned.
I drove to Shoals with a songwriter, Bob McDill, from Bill Hall’s operation with Dickey Lee and Allen Reynolds. McDill and I had written a song, “Sanctified.” Kesler set it up for us to pitch Hawkins the song. I didn’t think he would cut it but I wanted to meet Wexler. Chips and Kesler put the idea in my head that all you needed for success was the Atlantic Records production account, like Stax had. I would discover the fallacy of this concept.
We met Wexler at guitarist Eddie Hinton’s house by the lake. I said, “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Wexler.”
He said, “Call me Jerry, baby.” I often wondered what would have happened if I had said, “Okay, Jerry baby.”
Wexler liked the song, which was full of Ronnie Wilkins’s gospel licks. Ronnie Milsap finally cut it. Wexler and I got along right away. He loved southern musicians, but I don’t think he had met one with whom he could discuss William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. We stayed up all night, telling lies and drinking Jack Daniels, each trying to impress the other. When Bob McDill and I drove back to Memphis, the world was different. I had met Jerry Wexler.
Our next session was a doubleheader. Leland Rogers brought Bettye LaVette. Hank Ballard came too. Hank sang a shuffle no matter what groove we played. BB Cunningham was full-time tracking engineer. I knew BB from childhood Sunday school class at Bellevue Baptist Church. He had made guitar instrumental records as a teenager, had been the organ player in the Hombres, and the vocalist on the big hit, “Let It All Hang Out.” We did okay with Bettye LaVette, but never beat “He Made a Woman Out of Me” from the first session. We re-cut “Thrill on the Hill.” Leland never worked us hard and always let us off early.
The Memphis Country Blues Festival had grown to be a three-day event. Bill Barth pulled together more real bluesmen than had ever been assembled: all the regulars, Furry Lewis, Bukka White, Mississippi Fred McDowell, the fabulous Reverend Robert Wilkins and family, plus Joe Callicott. Lee Baker was out of prison, having done time in Lexington, like Tim Leary. Baker formed Moloch with Eugene Wilkins, the little brother of the screamer from my Blue Ridge vocal group. They were loaded for bear. Barth scheduled our Sounds of Memphis rhythm section to back up Albert Collins. Collins did not show up, so we took the set. Ringers like Johnny Winter, the albino white boy from Beaumont, Texas, who had nothing to do with area music, showed up.
The festival was being filmed by national television for Steve Allen’s series, Sounds of Summer. Gene Rosenthal of Adelphi Records and public TV reps with clipboards and clearance contracts negotiated with the bluesmen backstage at rehearsal. Rosenthal spoke heatedly to Marvin, lead man and protector of blues mummy Nathan Beauregard. Suddenly, Marvin produced a .45 automatic from his suit pants and stuck it in Rosenthal’s face. Negotiations halted. Later I complimented the ex-gravedigger, now keeper of a blues legend, on the smartness of his move with his piece. He said, “Thank ya, suh. Weren’t nothin.”’ I shook his huge brown paw of a hand and started to introduce myself. “Oh, I knows you,” he stated in no uncertain terms. “You is Mista Dick’son’s boy. You live out there by the graaaave ya’d.”
When a TV stooge tried to get Reverend Robert Wilkins to sign a release form, Baby Son, the Reverend’s youngest boy and tambourine player extraordinaire, said, “Daddy, these folks ain’t sanctified.”
Our band was booked as Soldiers of the Cross and we were scheduled to perform gospel material. Barth also booked me to play with Sleepy John Estes and Yank Rachell because I played like the guy who recorded with them back in the day. It was great. Sleepy John told me, “Man, you plays jes’ like Knocky Parker.” I took it as a great compliment, until I discovered Parker was a northern white stride player.
When Stanley Booth met Jerry Wexler, I felt them start to click. I figured between the two of us we could get a clean shot at Atlantic. One weekend we did blue mescaline over at Stanley’s house. I had only done psychedelic drugs once since Baylor and the monkey tests. This was a mellow trip. We listened to the first History of Rock ’n’ Roll broadcast on FM 100. With the drug’s aid, I realized the continuity of what I had witnessed firsthand in Memphis of the fifties. I told Mary Lindsay it was time to quit her job. We were on our way to the real thing. I felt it.
Stanley was going on the 1969 world tour with the Rolling Stones as the authorized biographer. Brian Jones was dead. Stanley had what amounted to his suicide note and the beginnings of a detective story involving sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. We were to meet Stanley at a Holiday Inn in southeast Alabama, drive to Auburn University, and attend the Stones concert as guests.
The next part of this story is my wife’s to tell, but this is a thumbnail sketch. Neither Stanley nor the Stones were at the motel. Mary Lindsay talked the motel manager into putting us next to Chuck Berry, who was one of the Stones’ opening acts. We checked in. I took a shower and let my baby work. Mary Lindsay knocked on Chuck Berry’s door.
Chuck wasn’t alone. A tall blond white girl wearing a sundress was sitting on the bed. Chuck said, “Come on in here, sweetness,” and dove into the girl’s crotch. My child bride kept her cool. She claimed she was Stanley Booth’s sister, and desperate to hook up with him before the concert. Chuck Berry chuckled, “Yes, darlin’. I’ve been on this tour for a month now and I done met a couple of Stanley’s sisters.” He agreed to drive us to the gig. Having done hard time for transporting a minor for sex, he welcomed a white couple accompanying him across the state.
At the venue, Berry opened the trunk of his rent-a-car and walked away, leaving me to carry his guitar case. It worked. We sailed by security and found Stanley standing next to Keith Richards.
The show was great: Chuck Berry, Ike and Tina Turner, T. Rex, and finally the Stones. They rocked the house, playing hit after hit. Middle of the set they broke down, and Mick and Keith did Fred McDowell’s “You Got to Move” as a duet. The band returned with “Midnight Rambler” as a theatre piece. Mick, down on his knees in prayer, beat the stage with his silver-studded black leather belt. WHAP! “Talking about the Midnight Rambler.” WHAP! “The one you never seen before.” It was dynamite. Ivan Ryder could not have done better. Part Rudolph Nureyev, part Howlin’ Wolf, part Muddy Waters, and part Stravinsky, staged by Bertolt Brecht. Marat, de Sade in Boystown, Ciudad Acuna. Richards’s guitar churned the rhythm, like a belly dancer’s drummer boy.
Back in Memphis, we could tell the first session we cut at Kesler’s new studio wasn’t right. The tobacco warehouse’s good, natural sound had spoiled us. A new Electrodyne with multicolored fader modules and lighted switches had replaced the old Universal Audio console. It looked cool but sounded flat. Nobody said so, but everyone was disappointed.
We were recording the great James Carr, the best soul voice I ever heard firsthand. James was so out of it that a uniformed nurse was with him at all times. I don’t know what he was on but he was high as a monkey. On one song he would get to the song’s bridge and get lost every time. At one point, we realized James was missing. Panic ensued. Somebody found him on the two-story studio building’s roof, staring down at the parking lot. They talked him away from the edge slowly, and the session, such as it was, continued. It was discouraging. We had waited so long for the new facility. This was a letdown.
One telephone call changed everything.