“ONE MORE SILVER DOLLAR”
(1970)
Florida wasn’t all work. We hung out in the Grove whenever we could. Charlie Brown worked for Haas, the famous snake doctor at Serpentarium, his snake ranch in the Everglades, where Haas experimented with poisonous snake venom as a cure for various diseases. The main building’s entrance was through a huge King Cobra. Charlie also had an old smuggler friend, now a celebrity bartender at the Light House, a luxury motel in Key West. We would hide out there with our wives, spending the day drinking Singapore Slings and listening to tall tales of drug running in the Caribbean.
We started to have visitors from home. Lee Baker, fresh out of prison, showed up with Eugene Wilkins, little brother to the screamer from Blue Ridge who had lifted my arrangement for “Money Honey.” They were looking for a record deal. Baker was ready to conquer the world after completing a stint in the Lexington drug rehabilitation facility, in order to avoid hard time in the Federal pen. They hung out for a few days, soaked up the Miami sun and weed supply, and met Wexler. Their band, Moloch, was a little too hard for Jerry. They ended up on Stax.
Charlie and I played off-the-books Fred Neil sessions, recorded in an old church in the Grove with a Scully four-track and a Shure mixer. After each session Fred erased the tape. There was more and more cocaine.
Our next official session was with an old Gulf Coast rocker, Dick Holler, who had been the bandleader for Jimmy Clanton, Ace Records’ star white boy. Holler wrote the novelty hit “Snoopy and the Red Baron,” the garage band classic “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love,” and the last hit for Dion, “Abraham, Martin, and John,” which Wexler had just cut on Wilson Pickett, altering lyrics to emphasize the civil rights movement. In order to change the lyrics, Atlantic signed Holler, the song’s original author. Phil Gernhard, who had worked with the Bellamy Brothers and whose business card read “South Florida’s Most Successful Producer,” was producing. He wanted to make records for grocery-store sack boys instead of twelve-year-old girls. On Wednesday Dion, of Dion and the Belmonts, showed up unheralded, and slam, bam, thank you ma’am, we recorded “Your Own Back Yard,” an anti-drug anthem, for Warner Brothers. When it came out with our name on it, Charlie didn’t remember it and claimed it wasn’t us. Ironically, it was our last chart record.
My listening room was subterranean, literally below sea level. One day, I listened to my treasures after a record-buying orgy in Coral Gables. I discovered Ry Cooder’s debut album. The cover displayed a tall black caped figure leaning against a shining silver Airstream trailer, looking like a young Gary Cooper. Cooder had played on the Dale Hawkins album, Captain Beefheart’s Safe as Milk, and with Taj Mahal in the band Rising Sons. The music was from Mars: backwards reverse suspension, convoluted mountain melody spun together into a soup of folk-oriented space blues sung with a dry, croaking, cartoonish sarcasm. We had finished Aretha Franklin and Sam and Dave. Not bad, but I couldn’t help wishing I was working on this high-end Hollywood art rock.
Wexler pushed for a Dixie Flyers record. We recorded ourselves for a week. To Sammy’s chagrin, I was the band’s de facto vocalist. I pushed Utley to sing but he gave up after one attempt. In Memphis Charlie and I had written blues rock songs for Soldiers of the Cross. One had morphed into a Led Zeppelin–like screamer, “Old Time Used to Be,” a title we got from Duane Allman. It contained a midsection breakdown to guitar and vocal, a classic sing, sing, play, play, Plant and Page extended call and response, where the band fell out for a whole verse leaving just me and Charlie, leading up to a big crescendo explosion where the band kicked in for a final climactic verse. The band broke down with no problem. When we punched in the overdubbed guitar and vocal section, one track was left out of sync. I sang through a Vox guitar amp with heavy vibrato in which one vocal track was heavily affected and one was clean. Charlie’s guitar bled into the amped vocal. When the engineer hit the record button, the out of sync situation created a psychedelic delay factor; the vocal dragged behind the guitar, like a stuck-in-the-mud motif. We heard it and responded intuitively. When it was over, the band failed to kick in, sitting there with their mouths open. It was spectacular. When we played it in the control room, the band listened in silence. Finally Sammy said, “If we put that out on a record, all my friends back in Jonesboro will think I came down here and started taking drugs.”
Without thinking, I replied, “Well, Sammy, you did.” McClure didn’t talk to Charlie or me for three days before deciding it was cool. Not Sammy. Never. It drove the band apart.
To make it worse, Dowd loved it. Tension eased between Tom and me. He had a stepson from his first marriage with a drug problem. They were having trouble getting him into a rehab program. My old friend from Baylor, Tommy Rodman, was in New York working at Phoenix House, a Synanon-based addiction treatment center specializing in an experimental program treating drug addiction as a disease. I called and got the kid accepted. Dowd was grateful and warmed up to me, despite the space between his cold, hard, logical physics background and my voodoo-centric, Baylor Theatre–style creativity. We still argued about the relative importance of moon phases and elevation above sea level as applied to recording, but it was friendlier.
The Allman Brothers were in Studio A, working on their second Atlantic/Capricorn album. It was really good. They recorded live instrumental tracks and overdubbed lead guitars and vocals. I remembered one of their two drummers, Butch Trucks, from his first session at Ardent on National. I don’t think he remembered me. Duane was super friendly, as usual. It was the first time I met his little brother Gregg, whose voice still held traces of the great John Hurley, who had trained them in Nashville. I wondered if John had used the mic cord technique I witnessed on Gregg. Duane ran a tight operation, keeping his band on a short leash.
One morning I walked into the studio, and Dowd was behind the receptionist’s desk. “Dickinson,” he called out. “Just the man I need.” What was he up to? “We’re doing vocals and we need a falsetto on high harmony. You’ve got a falsetto. Come in here and help us out.”
I played along. I knew he didn’t really want me to sing but didn’t know what he actually wanted. I followed him into Studio A. Gregg and their guest harmonica player, Ace, gathered around the microphone behind a windowed baffle. They looked nervous. Dowd started the tape. I got my first taste of “Midnight Rider.” It got to the release before the hook; the melody went up a full octave. Gregg wasn’t quite getting up to the note on “One more silver dollar.” I hemmed and hawed but clearly could not get close to the note. Then I realized what Dowd wanted. I pulled out a joint, lit it up, and handed it to Gregg. He grinned and looked relieved. Soon he sang the now-familiar high note, like a lonesome coyote in the Georgia piney woods on a dark night. When he sings the note today, he stays in the lower register of the lower octave. Dowd, the master of compromise, had triumphed again.
Since Dylan’s no-show, Wexler had pulled back from the Dixie Flyers. We started working with the salt-and-pepper “B” team, Dave Crawford and Brad Shapiro. Brad was funny and later enjoyed success with Millie Jackson, but Crawford, a bitter black man who got drunk during sessions, wanted to play piano. We didn’t like each other. We recorded with Dee Dee Warwick (Dionne’s sister) and “Little” Esther Phillips, who both had good moments, but neither record was particularly good. One Saturday morning we did an industrial film for Dowd, his first venture into film. It was not an Atlantic project. It was for the Playboy Club, showing Bunnies shooting pool with lots of phallic pool cue imagery and balls rolling in slow motion on green felt. We also did demos for Toni Wine, who performed the black girl’s voice in the Archies. Her song “Groovy Kind of Love” (recorded by Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders) had reached #1 on the charts. She played Wexler like a cheap guitar. It was cool to watch this super sharp lady manipulate the old master. She was cold as ice and worked the rhythm section like a consummate pro. We were doing “busy” work, obviously marking time, moving ever lower on Wexler’s priority list.
One day out on the Big A, Wexler asked me the question that would drive the final nail in the coffin of my time with the Dixie Flyers: “Baby, do you think Sam the Sham has another hit in him?”
Sam the fucking Sham! I told Jerry, “Yes.” I truthfully figured he probably had another one in him, but lived to regret it.
Sam showed up on a green Harley Hog with a white girl and three ounces of cocaine. Just what we needed. He was way too focused and chomping at the bit. The session was a nightmare. Sam’s bullshit didn’t go over with Dowd, and Wexler backed further away from the project. Duane Allman was called in to put more muscle in the session. With Sky Dog came the heroin. Duane and Charlie brought out the worst in each other.
First, we cut a single, a Tex-Mex version of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” I turned Charlie on to Kristofferson’s first album with Donny Fritts, Billy Swan, and the guitarist from the Lovin’ Spoonful. Charlie loved it. He said, “This is the best rock ’n’ roll band in America.”
“Charlie,” I said. “They don’t even have a drummer.”
“They don’t need a drummer.”
Our Sam the Sham version of “Bobby McGee” came out only weeks before Janis Joplin’s hit. Once again, a day late and a fucking dollar short. The Dixie Flyers were on the downbound train. Added to the psychodrama of this seemingly endless session from hell, we had other problems: two redheaded women. Claudia and her nothing-happening publishing company were bad, but McClure’s wife was also a fiery redhead ready to boil over. She hated Miami. Tommy had a great job and was making more money than ever, but she was hell-bent on returning to Memphis and finally did. Tommy drove two thousand miles weekly to be with her until it finally exploded. One Friday night at Freeman’s house, Tommy slammed his right fist into a cast iron drainpipe and shattered his knuckles.
Wife and I had enjoyed a little purple mescaline the night before, and were wrapped in Morpheus’s sweet arms when Freeman and McClure’s clatter arose on the lawn. T. Tommy McClure is a tall, thin, country-fried version of Victor Mature, replete with iron-gray hair, a youthful face, a serial killer’s cold grey eyes, and is the best Fender bass player with whom it has ever been my privilege to work. He wept like a child and held his right hand, bandaged in a wet T-shirt. Charley said, “We’ve got to get Tommy to the emergency room. He broke his hand.” I stood wrapped in a zebra-striped sheet.
“Shit,” I replied, looking around for my jeans. McClure sobbed on the sectional couch. The bottled water deliveryman came to the door. Tommy pointed his broken hand at the man carrying the huge plastic watercooler bottle and screamed, “That’s the only happy man in this house.” Charlie restrained him one-handed. “The only God damned happy man!” Tommy bellowed. The water deliveryman disappeared. We never saw him again. He didn’t even come back for the empty.
We put Tommy up in the yellow sled’s back seat and headed for the hospital, whose whereabouts was vague if not unknown. I was still tripping. Our first stop was at the Veteran’s Hospital. Tommy said, “I knew we were in trouble when I seen the footprints painted on the floor!”
When we arrived at Miami General Hospital’s emergency room, we discovered a gateway to Hell from an Elmore Leonard novel: bright, incandescent lighting, a human cattle call with bodies everywhere. Like my grandmother’s butcher shop, you took a number and waited your turn. Snot-nosed babies crawled unattended around ancient retiree mummies huddled in inhuman positions on the plastic seats. People writhed in pain. A man on the telephone held a bloody towel to his throat, which was cut from ear to ear. We waited with the other lost souls. Tommy moaned, increasingly upset. Charlie sat silently, chewing on his mustache, his emotions a mystery behind his black sunglasses. I shivered in the air-conditioned, freezing cold, Miami fashion. I had dressed quickly in jeans, sandals, and a purple wife beater undershirt. We looked like hard cases, even here. We moved to a private space behind sliding curtains. Finally a nurse with a clipboard and stethoscope asked, “Which one is the patient?” A good question. We pointed to Tommy.
She took Tommy to the examination room. He returned with a white plaster cast halfway up his right arm and a big bottle of pain pills. His hypnotic, medicated daze was the calmest I had seen him in weeks. He must have felt a great need to be off the unending Sam the Sham session. Luckily, Butch Boehm and Freddy Hester, a jazz upright bass player, were visiting from Memphis. Freddy played out the date, and Sam the Sham finally split after an unfortunate incident with Dowd and a handgun in the studio. Typically, Sam had taken it too far and had to be treated like a child. He made himself scarce, leaving his Harley-Davidson with Charlie. Great idea.
Charlie wrecked Sam the Sham’s Hog on a midnight run down the Keys. The incident involved an encounter with a homosexual truck driver, culminating in the unforgettable line, “If there’s anything I like better than butt-fucking, it’s bare knuckles man-to-man.” Charlie escaped virtually intact. Sam’s motorcycle lay in a heap in Freeman’s driveway. He buried what was left of the cocaine in his backyard. His house had belonged to a rich Peruvian living in exile. Lavishly landscaped, with exotic fauna that had gone to seed, it looked like a haunted fairyland, a drug-induced dream world set apart from reality.
Adding to the chaos, Stanley Booth came to visit. Stanley was working on his Rolling Stones biography, as he would for the next decade. He wrote of his trip to Miami: “I’ve seen a wild man eat a snake, watched a monkey fuck a football. I’ve been on the road with the Rolling Stones, but I’ve never seen anything crazier than Charlie Freeman’s house in Miami.”
Wexler brought the Memphis Horns to do Sam the Sham overdubs. In Memphis, the Horns were Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love, with an occasional baritone sax. Dowd preferred to work with a four-piece section. Wayne added trombonist Jack Hale, an old-school jazz cat who played in Elvis’s stage band, and Ed Logan, a redneck tenor sax man. Logan and Charlie hated each other. Ed called Charlie a communist, which he wasn’t. Charlie called Logan a Nazi, which he was. The Horns were too much for Sam’s low rent, Tex-Mex, beer joint music. Like a tuxedo on a hog, it just didn’t fit.
The horn session gave us time to work on the McClure problem. Tommy’s wife was back in Memphis, and Tommy was living in a codeine daze at Charlie’s house. We called the old bass player from Cold Grits. He took one look, and wisely declined. We called Duck Dunn. We were desperate; the Hawk was coming. Ronnie Hawkins was a god to Freeman, who saw him with the Hawks when the great Fred Carter played guitar, before Robbie Robertson took over and they became The Band.
Hawkins showed up early, wisely giving himself time to acclimatize. Atlantic housed their artists at the Thunderbird Inn on the beach. Hawkins got a suite. I picked him up. On the way to Freeman’s jungle house, Ronnie bought a cardboard crate full of booze, including a red-satin-boxed decanter of Metaxa brandy, his personal favorite. Charlie and Hawkins got on like gangbusters. Thus began one of my last adventures with the Dixie Flyers.
Ed Kollis and Donald Crews were in town. Don was Chips Moman’s bean farming partner in American Studio, and Kollis, one of the greatest harmonica players I ever heard, was Chips’s engineer on Elvis in Memphis. He truly transcended his instrument. His superbly musical phrases sounded like songs sung in Hell. I told Ed about the Hawkins session, and hired him without thinking to ask permission. Ed showed up at Charlie’s that night. McClure was zoned out on pain pills, his gray eyes unfocused like a zombie from a forties B movie. He sat and stared.
For all his bravado, Hawkins was notorious for a no-drugs policy with his musicians. Even at Muscle Shoals, there was plenty of nightly drinking but substance abuse was strictly on the sly. Ronnie realized this was a different deal. When in Rome … We drank Metaxa brandy. Around midnight we were standing in Charlie’s exotically landscaped backyard, using Sam the Sham’s crippled motorcycle’s headlights to look for the buried cocaine. I remember an illustration from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” wherein lanterns light the culprits digging beneath the sign of the skull. It was a great night.
Duane Allman showed up the next day. He was also at the Thunderbird. Charlie and I went to welcome him. Duane had the smack. I found cocaine boring. Heroin is a different story. It’s like going to the moon with Jesus, at least the first time. Within minutes, Freeman and I were on our lunar journey. After I couldn’t tell how much time, Hawkins knocked on the door. I was momentarily confused about his reaction to the dope: “Where is it? What is it? How do you do it?” Within seconds, Hawkins crossed the room, knelt at the nightstand, and inhaled heroin. We entered a warm and friendly realm of junkie brotherhood. Duane called room service and ordered Singapore Slings. He said, “Honey, I don’t care how many it is. Just fill up the tray.”
Hawkins realized this was his moment. His backup band, now working with Dylan, had gone into historic rock stardom. This was his last record for Atlantic. He was living larger than life in Canada, expatriated from the very thing that he represented.
We cut the session in studio A, where the Allman Brothers had recorded. Playing with Duck was different. He played fully in front of the beat, pulling the drums behind him. Duane was on fire. He loved playing with Charlie. They were kindred souls. Hawkins was a senior member of the old school. Duane had nothing but respect for him. Ed Kollis was brilliant as usual, playing a classic solo on “Lonely Weekends.” We got an enormous piece of “Red Rooster Blues” at light speed. I hammered the eighth notes like a jackhammer. Freeman destroyed the solo back and forth with Duane. My favorite cut was “Treasure of Love,” with Freeman on acoustic and Allman playing his best Lowman Pauling doowop fills. Hawkins sang like his heart was breaking.
On the way to the studio one afternoon, I picked up Charlie at the jungle house and Duane at the Thunderbird. We discussed the conflict Charlie and I created with our Led Zeppelin experiment, and how Miami sucked. Duane was behind me in my yellow muscle car. He leaned forward close, and said, “You know, man, you ought to go to Wexler. Do what I did when I was playing in Muscle Shoals. Go to Wexler and tell him you can’t play with these rednecks anymore.” Charlie sat silent behind his sunglasses. “Tell him you want your own band,” he added.
“That’s the trouble,” I said. “This is my band.”
Last night of the session, Hawkins told a great story. Ronnie described moving to Toronto: “I came to live in a rooming house and let me tell you, boys, it was rank. The landlady’s old man was a wino. He’d go off on a binge, and stay gone for days. When he finally came back, they’d prop him up in a rocking chair in the front room. He’d sit there not rockin’ or nothing. Just sat there with a shawl over his shoulders and shake. He had the D.T.’s so bad you had to watch what you said around him. Grease, for instance. The word ‘grease.’ If you said ‘grease,’ he’d commence to heave.
“On top of that, the old lady had a puking dog. Had to stay on the porch ’cause the old man couldn’t stand the sight of him. So the dog is on the porch spitting up and the old man sitting in the front room, shaking and twitching. Finally I saved up enough money to move. I go down to the front room real quiet, the old man is sitting there, vibrating. I poured a jar of apple sauce on the rug where he couldn’t see and said, ‘Looky here, Henry, the dog has done puked up on the rug.’ Henry looked around and started to heave. ‘I believe I’ll eat it,’ and I fell down on my knees and start rubbing it in my beard.”
As a child you read fairy tales about giants. Your parents and teachers tell you all of that is not real. If you are lucky, you meet a man who proves your parents and teachers wrong.
The scene was crazy. The drugs became more exotic. Charlie got some opium but was disappointed it didn’t give him visions of tigers. He gave it to me. I liked it. Dowd had sent me to a doctor who gave me five hundred yellow jackets, Tuinal, perhaps my favorite sedative, always capable of getting forty-five minutes of hot guitar out of Charlie before he went into a coma. I would take a couple at night after the session, and sink to the bottom of our tide pool, the best escape from the goddamned no-see-ums, the tiny sandflies permeating the false turf of Miami Beach, a manmade landfill. I started to truly hate Miami, the elephants’ graveyard where old Yankees came to die. Old people jumped into traffic trying to commit suicide at your expense. We lived so close to the 163rd Street mall that high crime lights illuminated our home with an unceasing orange glow. The seasons never changed. Spring? Nothing. The leaves didn’t fall. All you had to look forward to was hurricane season, which I found hard to anticipate with great joy. The place sucked. Drugs and death surrounded us. Next to the studio, on the so-called Dixie Highway, was a funeral home, which emitted a faint foul aroma. Between the studio and my house was a huge cemetery with a section for dead circus performers who wintered in Miami. There were statues of elephants, giraffes, lions, and tigers standing as silent mourners. It gave me the creeps. I passed it every day.
Summer was a pressure cooker. The steamy nights sucked my soul. Going to Texas was a nightmare; Miami was a mistake. I longed to see the river, the bluffs, and the “negro streets at dawn.” This was the most concentrated period of playing music in my life. I was chopped out like a racehorse, playing more and better than ever. Yet I had no control. It would erupt in the middle of a session. It scared me. I went to Tom. “You’ve got some time off coming,” he said. “You and Charlie take your wives and go down to the Keys and do whatever you do. We’ll talk when you get back.”
That’s what we did. Key West is sad. Like Coconut Grove, it must have been like paradise, with bars where Ernest Hemingway drank, when it was a sleepy fishing village. Commercialization and tourist traffic had consumed the community. When we returned to Miami Beach, the ship hit the sand. Carol Freeman told Mary Lindsay that Claudia Creason claimed the rhythm section’s “problem” was that Tom Dowd hated me. As soon as Mary Lindsay told me, I phoned Wexler. “I hear there’s a problem and it’s me.”
Band meeting. We would meet at Jerry’s the next day. I called Dowd. I asked him to show up at the band meeting. He said, “I owe you that.”
Apparently Sammy and good old Duck Dunn had been playing golf with Dowd. I am basically offended by musicians playing golf. It’s a little too Nashville for me. During this alleged game, Sammy and Duck saw it fit to indulge in the old musician game of badmouth the band. Sammy is one thing. I can understand that from his point of view; I was a thorn in his flesh. God only knows what his wife said. But Duck Dunn? I never did anything to Duck Dunn but hire him. At Wexler’s I stated, “If I am the problem, then let me offer the solution. I’m out.”
Jerry jumped up, shook his head, and flapped his hands, “Baby, I refuse to talk about this.”
We converted the remaining six months of my Dixie Flyer employment agreement to an artist contract entailing two separate projects: my solo project, to be recorded wherever I wanted, and the band’s instrumental album as conceived by Sammy to be recorded at Criteria. The company would accept or reject either or both albums. I would be paid out as contracted, and Atlantic would pay for my sessions. I felt a great relief. There is an incredible feeling of freedom associated with quitting, a decision that cannot be undone. Life had changed. Mary Lindsay and I were going back to Memphis.
McClure said, “Let me get this straight. You’re going home and they are paying you to make your own record, and I’m staying here and cutting sessions for the same money. I’d say you made a pretty good deal.”
I played the Petula Clark session for Warm and Tender before I left. Everybody walked on eggshells. Dowd carefully avoided all conflict. Years later, I read it was Clark’s favorite record.
We drove home. On a foggy night, we followed an eighteen-wheeler into Macon, Georgia. The back of the truck read, “Eternity Coffin Company—Satisfaction Guaranteed.” It was good to be going home. Good to have the infighting and politics of the Dixie Flyers behind me, propelling me into an unknown future. Would I have to go to the end of the line? The Atlantic job had come from nowhere. I had no idea what awaited in Memphis. I had a guaranteed income for six months, and a budget for my own album. Before we left, Utley came to me, and tearfully asked me not to go. Sammy was man enough to say, “I don’t know what happened, man. But I’m sorry.” Only Charlie said nothing. I could never know to what extent the whole episode was Dowd “solving problems.” His and mine.
We spent the night in Macon. Duane Allman had set up an appointment for me to meet Phil Walden at Capricorn Records in the morning. We sniffed armpits for a couple of hours and I hit the road. I liked Phil but it didn’t feel right. I have never felt sorry. I had a job, a budget, and a grocery bag full of Colombian pot. Showtime!