“YOU GOT TO MOVE”
(1970)
It was hard to keep cool. Jagger loved the recording of “Wild Horses.” He played it over and over on a Wollensak portable. The Stones flew to San Francisco and Altamont. The Summer of Love was gone.
As I drove home, I wondered what would happen next. No one knew about our Atlantic deal, and absolutely no one knew about the Stones. We were screwing Kesler and felt like rats, but the band was jazzed. The Atlantic job was the opportunity of a lifetime. Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd came to town to ink the deal. The cat was out of the bag. Big spread in the local news; lots of speculation. Kesler took it like a man. He had one last session booked at the new studio for Leland Rogers. There was no artist. It was a going away party for us, the deserters. Leland had a fruit jar full of Ambar amphetamines that looked like M&Ms and a case of Cold Duck burgundy. We partied down. As the night went on, Leland called us into the control room. “I don’t mean to put a jinx on you,” he said. “But I’m afraid you boys have already done your best work.”
He predicted the future but we couldn’t hear. My wife gave me a gold sleeve to put over my left canine tooth for a Christmas present, a mark of my getting the Atlantic deal. Before we left town my old teacher, Alec, came to say goodbye. I am lucky to have had good teachers.
Christmas came and went to our little cottage across from the cemetery. I traded in our cars and bought a new canary-yellow Ford Torino with racing stripes, a full race cam, and three on the tree.
I had no idea what to expect in Miami. I envisioned driving a dune buggy over palm-treed beaches. Hawaiian cotton shirts. Cool rum drinks with umbrellas and fruit. New Year’s Day my child bride and I struck out on our biggest adventure so far, a giant step into the total unknown, Atlantic Records. As we drove the new yellow muscle car further south than I had ever been, the Rolling Stones in the old coffin warehouse seemed like a dream. Yet it was not to be undone. The lights were on; the camera was rolling. I had the 7-1/2 ips copy. “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.” It wouldn’t be real to the world until it was released, but it was real to me.
Charlie Brown had moved to Miami a year before, and would help us get settled. He lived in Coconut Grove, a beatnik retirement community full of folk singers and old commies from the fifties. Criteria Studio was on South Beach. Charlie and Carol quickly found a house nearby. Mary Lindsay and I crashed with them and began looking. Rent was so high. We wanted something with at least a swimming pool to represent my newfound status. Mary Lindsay has a talent for real estate and found a great place. The house was blocks from the studio and had a round-bottomed pool that moved with the lunar tides. The former tenant was a high-dollar hooker; cops had battered the door off the hinges. AC vents had been pried off the walls. There was a double king-size bed with zebra-striped sheets, where undoubtedly the dirty deed had been done many times. The place had a strong vibe. We moved in and lived like we were in a movie.
There was a “welcome” party for the band at the studio. Everything was decorated in pastel. The teenage engineer wore a pink dress shirt and flip flop rubber shower shoes. The studio owner wore safari clothes and seemed nervous. We drank. They wanted to hear us play. We did an up-tempo shuffle in A that should have been a piece of cake. It felt funny. The “pocket” was wrong. It wasn’t just Sammy and the drums. It was all of us. It felt forced, phony, by the numbers, more like Stax than we normally sounded. Utley was all over the B3, rumbling mashed pickups from the five. Freeman crackled and honked with bridging feedback and distortion. I hammered at double octaves like Leon Russell on Dexamyl, but something was not right. Only Tommy McClure sounded like he had in the alley at the old tobacco warehouse on the Albert Collins or Billy Lee Riley sessions. I considered geographic significance. We titled our first performance composition “Let Me Put My Condominium in Your Pastel Concrete Box.”
Before we moved to Miami, Albhy Galuten expressed plans to visit Charlie in Memphis again and was surprised to learn of our new jobs, especially my playing piano for Atlantic’s house band. He considered himself a much better player. Albhy was waiting on us when we arrived in Miami. He sat at my feet, rolled joints and made chord charts until he figured out why I got the job and he didn’t. Wexler wondered who the hell he was. He avoided Dowd. Albhy didn’t care. He knew an opportunity when he saw it. He ended up getting more out of Miami South than anybody.
Wexler wanted to name the rhythm section. They had fired the “Cold Grits.” We kicked names around. New Year’s Eve before we left Memphis, Mary Lindsay and I had seen The Reivers, a movie based William Faulkner’s last novel. I bought the book on the day of Faulkner’s death, my last summer in Waco at the Sin Inn. Eudora Welty claimed that with Faulkner, “You got to clear the tracks for the Dixie Flyer.” I didn’t think they would like the name but Wexler loved it. Sammy thought it sounded like a hockey team.
The Dixie Flyers got off to a slow start. Wexler wanted to sign Tony Joe White. Tommy McClure and Mike Utley had played on his hit, “Polk Salad Annie,” his first album, and toured with him. Wexler was heavily courting Tony Joe for an artist contract and arranged for Mr. Poke Salad to produce some kid band he was interested in. Eric Quincy Tate sang with a guitar player who looked like fish out of water. They were over their heads. The songs were amateurish. Tony Joe produced at the level of “B” team Nashville assembly line. No Wexler, no Dowd. We worked with Criteria house engineers who thought we were hillbillies. If this was the big time, it sucked.
Our second victim, Jerry Jeff Walker, was a big improvement. Jerry Jeff was methodical but laid back, smart enough to work the band with loose reins. Donnie Brooks, a noted harmonica player with a real grip on Jeff’s material, was with him. Jerry Jeff had experienced unexpected mainstream success with “Mr. Bojangles,” cut at Sam Phillips’s studio. He felt a kinship with us Memphis boys.
Jerry Jeff lived in Coconut Grove, one of several old folkies under the enormous artistic shadow of Fred Neil, the de facto Great Kahuna of the Grove. Neil had an engineer they called Bob “The Fox.” The two seldom cut music, and if they did, Freddy erased it before his New York manager could get it. The Fox was paid not to record, the perfect gig. An elaborate underground of smugglers and pleasure boat captains hung out at the Gaslight, a famous old-school folk music venue. Vince Martin and a kid named Jimmy Buffett also hung around. Charlie Brown was respected by musicians and smugglers alike, as he had been in Memphis. He hooked us up. We could buy a grocery bag full of un-pressed Colombian gold for $300, which was great.
Jerry Jeff’s recording went well and the music was good, but there was no sign of Wexler or Dowd in the studio. Mary Lindsay and I would see Wexler socially. We went to Jerry’s for sit-down dinners. He liked my wife and hired her as his executive assistant. We were in what he called his “brain trust,” and memoed on all the goings-on. But Wexler had been conspicuously absent from the studio.
Wexler had a yacht, a deep-sea fishing vessel with a two-man crew, aptly named The Big A. He took me out when he wanted me to agree on a deal that otherwise would have resulted in conflict. I’m subject to motion sickness. Add to that, Wexler was taking us into the Bermuda Triangle. Great. Although I did the typical fishing of a Southern boy, I had long since struck a deal with all God’s creatures, be they fish or fowl. They leave me alone. I leave them alone. Deep-sea fishing was a compromise, to say the least.
Claudia Creason, Sammy’s redheaded wife, hated the personal relationship developing between my wife, Wexler, and me. Claudia had a bogus publishing company and her own agenda. She had moved two pet songwriters to Miami. Wexler didn’t like them. Her favorite songwriter sang in falsetto, which Wexler particularly hated and associated with Motown, a word one couldn’t speak in his presence. Seeds of unrest were planted.
Our next scheduled session was weird. It was with Warner Brothers artist Taj Mahal with his guitarist Jesse “Ed the Indian” Davis, whom Charlie and I both knew from Hollywood. Taj Mahal’s first record had the real shit. There was that magic guitarist again, an unforgettable name, Ry Cooder, the guy from crazy Dale Hawkins’s record who had showed up in Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band on the classic California art rock recording Safe as Milk (containing “Autumn’s Child,” a rare ballad and my favorite piece by the good Captain).
We jumped in bed with Taj Mahal. He played the crap out of an old green-gray National Steel-Bodied Standard guitar. He shucked and jived in his African robes, “dancing out the beat” when Sammy had trouble coming in on the “up,” not the “down” beat, a weakness that reared its ugly head in the future. Jesse and Charlie bonded in the brotherhood of guitar. Charlie was inordinately proud of his Indian blood. If he was high enough, he turned red. We cut half a dozen good tracks. The record never came out. Soon afterward, Taj disappeared for a while somewhere on the Continent.
We waited for the other shoe to fall. Rumors of working with Bob Dylan circulated but we had yet to really work with Wexler or Dowd. We floundered in the new stereo earphones, feeling like we were floating in space. Then things got real serious in a hurry.
We were booked to record with Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul, arguably Wexler’s most significant artist. Her recordings at Muscle Shoals resulted in big hits, but the situation had been volatile, replete with racism and sexual harassment. The story wasn’t told and certain names were spoken in only whispers. She had supposedly sworn never to record in the South with redneck soul musicians again. We worried Aretha wouldn’t show if she found out we were white boys.
We were out on the damned boat. I hooked a hammerhead shark when the radiophone brought word Aretha had landed. Everyone panicked. After much hurry and many phone calls, we convened at Criteria, ready as we would ever be for Lady Soul. Aretha traveled with a thirty-person entourage in a caravan of limousines. It looked like a funeral. They parked on the grass in front of the studio, kept the motors running, the doors open, and the lights on.
At that time in the R&B community, it was hip to associate with Sam Cooke’s relatives. Aretha had two, including a twelve-year-old boy who sat beside her on the custom piano bench, swinging his feet which failed to reach the floor. It was quite a show. She played the huge studio piano with a tray of little prepackaged tin can gin drinks, Orange Tommies, in front of her on the music rack.
It took a while to get started, but once she heard us play, she was all smiles. Wexler was pleased and relieved. Wexler and Dowd added Arif Mardin, an over-trained Turkish jazz producer who spoke like Bela Lugosi doing Dracula, to the production gumbo. They buzzed around, trying to accommodate the Aretha situation. All we musicians really had to do was follow her lead.
Aretha Franklin is a force of nature. Her pure gospel voice, trained from childhood by her famous pastor father, and her unbelievable mastery of the piano keyboard are devastating to experience firsthand. Her chubby fingers are capable of making fourteen-note chord patterns, two notes with each thumb and little finger. I was as useless as tits on a mule. But Aretha reacted to my gold tooth and Moroccan floor length robe. I played Wurlitzer and Fender Rhodes. Utley hid behind his B3 and silently prayed for help.
On the first song, as our luck would have it, we hit the old upbeat intro problem we had with Taj Mahal. Over and over, Sammy missed the pickup. Finally Aretha said something about “trouble with the drummer.” Sammy turned red as a fire engine. He sucked it up and nailed the tune. Spirit in the Dark became our biggest chart hit.
Charlie and I had developed a code. If we ran up on jazz chords beyond my normal triad, Charlie gave me the outside note on the sly. If Charlie put on his sunglasses, I knew to look out; if he said he wanted to play “acoustic” in the vocal booth, it meant I should play electric guitar so Charlie could nap. When I saw him put on his shades during the Aretha session, I couldn’t believe it. Sure enough, he said, “I’m going into the vocal booth and play acoustic.” O.K., I thought. Aretha had a black guitarist with her, but I figured I had better follow Charlie’s lead, so I strapped on my new Gibson 335. I pulled it off, moving seventh chords up and down the neck of the hollow-bodied jazz guitar like I knew what I was doing. The result was “Don’t Play That Song,” which won Aretha the Grammy for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance.
To get the track and live vocal for “The Thrill is Gone,” we cut down to piano, bass, and drums. Wexler kept talking about the solo, anticipating Freeman’s contribution. Duane Allman had recently done an over-the-top outro for Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude.” Wexler went on and on about it. Whatever Charlie was going to do, I knew it would be far from Duane. By the time they got the track and were ready to overdub, Charlie already had his shades on. Charlie had a childhood injury of cut tendons in his left arm that put a twist in his grip resulting in a funny tension on his guitar strings. He had to tune his instrument into the pressure put on his strings by his slightly turned left hand. When he drank a little too much, the muscles in his forearm relaxed and his guitar went out of tune. Charlie said his guitar was “getting drunk.” This was already the case.
As Wexler churned with anticipation, the tape started. During the first verse, he didn’t even touch his instrument; it buzzed, un-grounded in his lap. Top of the second verse, he answered the vocal with slightly out-of-tune Wes Montgomery octaves. I thought Wexler was going to have a heart attack. When it played back, Wexler said, “Baby, believe me, I have worked with the finest guitarists of two generations. Charlie Freeman is the only one who can take a true solo.” Everybody in the room thought, “What about Reggie Young?” As if reading our minds, Wexler said, “And that includes Reggie.”
Charlie soloed like a saxophone player. I think that was what Wexler thought. Charlie was the man.
The Dixie Flyers did a five-day week with each artist, with a possible sixth day if needed. Aretha didn’t want to stop, but we were booked with jazz artist Carmen McRae the next week. Aretha moved into the larger “A” studio, and brought in Cornell Dupree and a hodgepodge rhythm section to keep her going. We had held our own and survived the Aretha-meets-the-white-boys test.
Carmen McRae was great: dressed to the teeth, multi-shaded, theatrical lipstick, full makeup replete with false eyelashes, and lacquered wig with huge golden gypsy earrings. She worked from sheet music, a five-staff orchestral score. We made chord charts from demo tapes, as always. She was puzzled. “Hey, Arif?” she asked. “What are they doing?” referring to our primitive practice.
“They are making chord charts,” he replied in perfect Turkish vampire.
Still puzzled, Carmen said, “Won’t it sound funny if all they play are chords?”
“Wait and see,” replied the Lord of Darkness.
We got the first cut right away and went to the second song. Carmen McRae said to Arif, by then safely in the control room, “Hey Arif? Is this how Aretha does it?”
“Yes,” he answered over the talkback.
“Shiii-iiit,” she said. “This is easy.”
That first night, out of respect, Charlie and I smoked a joint in the parking lot, rather than firing it up in our “recovery room.” We noticed we were not alone. Someone was at the other end of the parking lot, also smoking. Carmen McRae! She had a brother in Jamaica who sent her the good ganja. She relaxed right away.
Second day she showed up with her head in a rag and wearing house shoes. She told us stories about being backstage with Billie Holliday and tying her arm off so she could shoot up.
It was my favorite session, though they had us cut two or three Tony Joe White songs (incredibly inappropriate for the artist), and despite Arif Mardin’s mindless, condescending attitude and obvious contempt for us. It pissed Mardin off that our process was primitive and ignorant, but efficient.
There are two cuts on the album Just a Little Lovin’ that remain my favorite work for Atlantic. On “Live the Life I Love” and the Beatles’ “Something,” my piano intro to the solo turns into King Curtis with the New York Symphony strings.
Our next record was our first full-on production of an official Atlantic artist, Lulu, a former child star from England who recently had been #1 on the U.S. pop charts with the movie theme “To Sir with Love.” We got along great with Lulu, who was a redneck at heart. She killed the country songs. We made an interesting album titled Melody Fair. “Hum a Song (From Your Heart)” by Lulu and the Dixie Flyers topped out at thirty on Billboard’s Hot 100 pop chart. We were on our way.
Let me add that when Dowd moved to Miami full-time, and Wexler started splitting his time between Treasure Isle and the Hamptons, Atlantic South seemed like a good idea to them. But not to Wexler’s partner Ahmet Ertegun, to whom it was already a failure. It was tough. Wexler told us one thing and Dowd told us another. Most of the time, it didn’t make sense. We used different terminology. Wexler repeatedly talked about the “channel” and the “middle 8” when we worked in twelve-bar patterns. I never did find out what a “channel” was.
Wexler and I had begun to get tight at the Stones session. He was another giant among men, like Sam Phillips. However, our friendship put me in the position of speaking for the band. The band was freaked out. Every time the weekly paychecks were late, the band called me. I had to call the company. If the earphones were shit, which they were, the band bitched and moaned to me. I had to complain to Tom Dowd, whose job it was to solve problems. It put an early strain on my relationship with Dowd, whom I admired tremendously.
Wexler encouraged us to develop our own group artist project. He envisioned a mix between Booker T and the MGs and The Band. Charlie and I had worked on songs since Soldiers of the Cross. Sammy wanted to be the Bill Black Combo, and his old lady wanted us to cut publishing demos.
Wexler was a big believer in publicity. He brought in New York rock writers to interview the strange new Southern swamp music rhythm section. Lisa Robinson interviewed Charlie and me for Hit Parader. We formed a friendship that carried into the future.
Enter Jake the Snake, who worked for the video production company at Criteria Studio. He was the first person I saw with a gold coke spoon hung around his neck. Previously, I found cocaine boring. It gave me a supernormal feeling I avoided. Charlie loved it. He could stay awake and drink. Boring though it was, I was willing to take my share. I still dream about it. I can taste it in my sleep, but I haven’t done any since a Keith Richards session in Memphis nearly twenty years ago. Charlie said it was the Devil.
Miami had yet to become coke capital of America, as it did with the birth of disco and the arrival of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, but Jake the Snake had plenty. It gave the band an edge. Sammy liked it because it was like speed. There are rare examples of the Flyers-on-coke where we are on the same page and the groove is intense.
After fumbling around, looking for a direction acceptable to one and all, our next company session was with Brook Benton. The Cold Grits’s only hit was Brook Benton’s “Rainy Night in Georgia.” Atlantic wanted to follow it up, but Brook was so happy to be current and pertinent again he couldn’t have given less of a shit. He stood in the middle of the tracking floor, singing into a handheld mic, and drinking Scotch out of a hip flask. The more lubricated he became, the more he turned into Kingfish from Amos and Andy. “Hello dere, brother Andy,” he said into the microphone. “How is you doin’?”
Arif was the producer. I questioned his familiarity with the old black radio/TV show, which my old teacher, Alec, referred to as “that ol’ funny show.” Between Benton’s Kingfish and Arif’s Dracula, the interchange between the control room and artist was hysterical. We bit our tongues. The happier Brook Benton got, the more he would slip into “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” in his Kingfish voice. It was by far the best thing we hit on in the session but too racially offensive for the Turkish producer to tape.
Next came Sam and Dave. We had heard horror stories, tough tales of the Soul Men who ate white boy musicians for lunch. But with the backwards good luck of the Dixie Flyers, we came closest to doing our thing (breaking the prevailing curse of Leland Rogers) on the Sam and Dave date. Unfortunately, the record did not come out for twenty years and then in Japan, which is another story.
Sam and Dave were slumlords in Miami Central, the for-real hood. They feuded notoriously and only tolerated each other’s presence when doing the act. I see nothing wrong with this situation; the Dixie Flyers were not friends. We seldom interacted socially. When we did, it was forced and unpleasant. But when somebody counted to four, we were there. We anticipated every curve and corner. We subdivided the space in a twelve-bar structure without saying a word. Even Sammy, who disliked or mistrusted everything that I represented, told me, “Man, I never had anybody play the turnarounds with me before.” It was true and as close to a compliment as he could get.
We blew Sam and Dave’s socks off. They canceled other work and cut for a second week. On one song, “Knock It out of the Park,” we hit our old Sounds of Memphis syncopated retro groove with the wah-wah Clavinet and machine-gun guitar. Another soul ballad, “When a Woman Needs a Man, She Needs a Soul Man,” had hit written all over it.
Sam and Dave, like Brook Benton, never went into the vocal booth. They worked handheld microphones back to the rhythm section, facing the control room glass like a live nightclub performance. I have never seen another performer do it, yet it seemed so natural. They performed for Wexler and an unseen audience of future listeners. “When a Woman Needs a Man, She Needs a Soul Man” was such a performance that they threw their mics down, and walked out to an imaginary audience’s applause and screams. They walked down the hallway, out the front door, got into their cars, and drove away. Elvis has left the building.
Dave’s car was an XKE roadster with an embossed leather top that read “Soul Man” in print only visible from an overhead helicopter. Dave took more dope than any other human I ever witnessed. Charlie and I followed him into the bathroom and watched him unfold two $100 bills on top of the urinal, one full of coke and the other with glowing blue heroin. Without removing his shades, he bent over and hit each side of his huge nose with controlled substances. He turned, went out of the john, and sang as if he had just brushed his teeth.
Sadly, Dave is no longer with us. He was the fast-dancing, funky, low-harmony singing Soul Man, the second best R&B voice I ever experienced, the first being James Carr.
The Sam and Dave session turned out so well, Sam and Dave broke up. They could not face touring. As with Taj Mahal, some of our best work remained unheard. Fate? Destiny? Or just hoodoo?
Bonnie and Delaney Bramlett came and recorded with their own band. Bobby Whitlock from Memphis, the B3 player, sang high harmony. He had been an angel-voiced, teenage Memphis star with several bands when Delaney found him before their first Stax recording. The high voice listeners assumed is Bonnie is, in fact, Bobby. They also carried Jerry Scheff on bass and Ronnie Tutt on drums, who eventually became Elvis’s backup band in Vegas. We knew Tutt as an Ivy League jazz drummer from Memphis who worked on the Pepper-Tanner jingle session assembly line, supercilious and square as a box. I had previously engineered an Eddie Hubbard session, where Tutt played drums in Bermuda shorts watching a football game on a portable TV on his floor tom. This could not be the same guy. But it was. He was Creason’s idol. Sammy’s post-jazzoid idea of how to play rock ’n’ roll drums was to imitate Tutt. He couldn’t believe the new Ron Tutt that showed up. The new model had hair to the middle of his back and a new, teenaged hippie wife. It was too much for Creason to handle. Creason also had a problem with the fact Delaney requested Tommy and me for the session since he knew us from Leon’s house in Hollywood. Delaney was a good old Mississippi boy with incredible drive and ambition. Bonnie was equally dynamic. They could sing their asses off. Add the almost superhuman choirboy top end Whitlock supplied, and you have unequaled southern soul vocal power. Delaney was also a bandleader in the biblical sense of the word.
Wexler produced a studio visit from Little Richard, the Architect of Rock ’n’ Roll. Richard didn’t want to play but Wexler coerced him to the piano. Suddenly, everybody was a guitar player. Engineers, assistants, and random people, all would-be guitar players, wandering the hall appeared to say they had played with Little Richard. We cut “Miss Ann” before Little Richard escaped. Richard did not like Tutt. As good as Ronnie was, he was white as Wonder Bread. He does a multiple-impact, continuous sixteenth-note roll that seems poised on top of the beat, conspicuously un-funky.
Delaney was not happy with Scheff and Tutt, and fired them after the Little Richard incident. He overdubbed Tommy McClure, top to bottom, on every track, while the crew packed the band’s gear. Sammy hated the whole thing, being excluded and seeing his idol with feet of clay. There was an additional piece of bad luck. Delaney’s roadies took Charlie Freeman’s beloved and irreplaceable Gibson 355. Mac Emerson, the studio owner, crawled up his own asshole apologizing and swore to make good. I went with Charlie downtown to Ace Music Store to look for a replacement. Charlie asked if they had a Gibson stereo, like B.B. King played. They showed him a room full of Gibson stereos. He didn’t like any of them. He found a ’58 Les Paul Custom he liked, but it was not for sale. He made Atlantic rent it. It was heavy for Charlie’s light frame, but he liked the way it played. Atlantic shipped guitars in from New York and elsewhere, but Charlie would have none of them. It went from bad to worse.
The Bob Dylan session almost happened. We heard he had looked for us in Memphis but we were already gone. Wexler saw Dylan as the ultimate American artist. He was to record at Criteria. This was our shot. Charlie and I showed up early. Dylan was a Columbia artist and CBS was a tight union house. All Columbia artists were required to use a Columbia house engineer. Two Columbia engineers were in the reception room when we walked in. There were also two bodyguards with what looked like gun cases. Everybody was there but Bob Dylan. His manager, Albert Grossman, the Benjamin Franklin-lookalike godfather/manager of hippieville, had pulled the plug. Grossman and Wexler had negotiated artist rights for the Woodstock album, on which none of Grossman’s artists appeared. As revenge he strung Jerry along and then canceled. That was it for the Dixie Flyers. The handwriting on the wall glowed in the dark.