RETURN OF THE PHANTOM
(1970–71)
We stayed with my parents when we returned to Memphis. Memphis! Mary Lindsay trained horses, gave riding lessons on a horse ranch in the country, and we rented a cool old farmhouse behind the stable. After living on Miami Beach, we swore never to live in town again. The ranch had a manmade lake and tenant house, complete with an old black tenant, Chicks, who had stubs for fingers on his right hand and ran the local Saturday night craps game. Our old rental house had a screened-in porch. I strung a hammock and spent many happy hours in it. In Miami I wrote in my journal, “If you want to sing a country song, it would help to live in the country.”
Here I was.
I struggled with the solo artist concept. I had forgotten what I wanted to do. Wexler expected to produce my record in Muscle Shoals. I wanted to record in Miami with Tom Dowd producing. I knew the Flyers would play their guts out.
In an early attempt to mix my ethnic roots, I recorded the blues song “Messing with the Kid,” and a country ballad, “Louise,” with the Flyers in Miami. One blues, one country song, but still no clear direction. Utley and I had written a New Orleans–sounding tune, “The Judgment,” about Nixon and Armageddon. I’d cut it if I could get a handle on it. Jerry Jeff Walker had turned me onto “Louise,” a song about a prostitute’s death by Walker’s teenage bandmate, Paul Siebel. To me it represented the recent suicide of Mike Alexander, the drug-map hustler who first told me about Duane Allman. Facing another stint in a Texas prison, he blew his brains out with a shotgun at the Alamo Plaza on Summer Avenue in Memphis. “Louise” still makes me think about Alexander.
Mary Lindsay and I tried to start a family, but she was having trouble. Her female plumbing reacted to withdrawal from birth control pills. She bled. She was brave. It scared the crap out of me. She bought a horse but was too sick to ride it. I was so worried I had furniture-throwing fits. Her body was attacking her. I felt helpless. Her moron doctor should have been parking cars. Finally, on a day I was scheduled to play a typical festival gig, Mary Lindsay was admitted to the Baptist hospital, where a ruptured cyst was removed along with her right ovary. She had been bleeding to death and had shrunk to little more than a skeleton. After the operation, life returned to her body, the mischievous magic light came back into her dark brown eyes.
In Memphis, performance artist Randall Lyon and Lee Baker, with his re-formed monster blues-rock band Moloch, had come up with a postblues concept festival, the Dream Carnival. We performed at the Peabody Hotel’s Plantation Ballroom, my first public appearance upon my return. Sid Selvidge and I each played solo. Randall put together a pantomime troupe to perform with Moloch and old bluesmen Furry Lewis and Bukka White. Jimmy Crosthwait performed his infamous puppet show, “Iom Dode,” with the melting-face clown and the immolating monk, that he had done at the Electric Circus psychedelic nightclub in New York. After the Market Theatre, Jimmy went to New York, where he entertained Andy Warhol, the Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix. Muddy Waters described the Electric Circus as a lot of “blinkin’ blinkin’ jivin’ jivin’ shit.”
The show featured amoebas swimming in a petri dish, trying to find each other, create life, and erupt into three-dimensional reality. It had started long ago, that rainy night at the Shell when ex-slave children met fledgling flower children and both changed forever, for better or for worse.
After Mary Lindsay’s health crisis, I dove into my album project. In desperation I drew on my Baylor Theatre exercises, and constructed an art object on our dining room table. The table had teeth marks on the legs from my boyhood companion, Doodles. Faint imprints of ancient homework and space cartoons were barely visible on the polished surface. My grandparents had bought it on their honeymoon, just after the turn of the century. At my parents’ home it was my cave, playpen, place of refuge, as well as the scene of nightly conflict. Now, a ridiculous figure constructed from the dried-out stump and root of a long deceased, middle-sized tree sat on it, like one of my mother’s seasonal centerpieces. The object consisted of the body and the neck of a Turkish hookah pipe from a Coral Gables head shop. A horned goat’s skull perched atop the pipe’s bowl, which was inverted on the stump. In front, like a medieval knight’s shield, was a bumper medallion from the Chicago Motor Club. I stood before my nature object’s hollow empty eyes during the long nights I nursed my wife.
I started to see a pattern, if not a prevailing theme, of my record. My working title, “So Ready from the Creeks,” was a line from hipster philosopher-comedian Lord Buckley’s treatment of Robert Service’s “Shooting of Dan McGrew.” His description of an avenging angel fit my impressions of Miami.
I was falling like a rock into our new country lifestyle. I took long walks in the pasture, stared at the sunset’s reflection on our lake, and enjoyed long and fruitful naps in the clover and cool moss by the dam.
Even though you may know that career burnout is real,
You don’t think it will happen to you until it already has.
Fourteen albums in six months
To the unending nightmare
Of Sam the Sham.
Psychodrama,
Drugs,
Betrayal,
Divorce,
Nameless outside presences
Unknown and unknowable.
A game of tug
Of war
With all the pull
On the other side
Of the rope. It’s a simple
Fact of life
You don’t get
Hot without burning.
I was charcoal.
But ever so slowly
The internal embers
Started to smolder.
My chops were pumped. My edge was razor sharp. My creative instincts were at a peak. If I focused, flipped it over, and played the conflict’s negative power to a climax in the studio, I would have a record. One night while my wife slept, fueled by a small handful of Mandrax, I “walked out” my rhythm. As I stumbled around the pasture, literally falling on my face, I saw tiny glowing objects in the grass. I lay on my stomach, and watched little glowing spots start to move; it’s the first and last time I would see tiny glow worms. I watched the creatures crawl slowly through the dewy pasture turf. My brain opened up. I thought of a song I performed in high school, The Nightcaps’ “Wine, Wine, Wine,” a hard-rocking screamer that I could get my teeth into, that would showcase the band’s strength, and give me a chance to use the power of personal style, like I had with Ronnie Hawkins. It was the beginning of a record. There is power in faith and I was a true believer. I had no question about the future. I was locked into the moment. I booked my album session at Criteria with the Dixie Flyers, Albhy, and Mac Rebennack, a.k.a. Dr. John, the Night Tripper (probably the funkiest of white men).
Back in Miami I had a beachside room at the Thunderbird. I ordered a Singapore Sling, kicked back on my private balcony, and watched the almost full moon over Biscayne Bay, anticipating my very own Monday with the Dixie Flyers.
It used to be my job to worry about the band on Monday mornings. I had to wonder if McClure had returned from Memphis and his melodramatic wife; if Charlie had been arrested and/or how hungover he would be; if Slamming Sammy was on a tourist fishing boat, as he had been when Aretha landed at the studio. It was no longer my job to worry about these things. I didn’t give a shit whether the weekly checks were late again. I was the FUCKING ARTIST this time around and Bo Diddley is taking three breaks! I was ready for Freddy and loaded for bear. Move over, Elvis. Little Jimmy is coming through!!!
It was a typical Dixie Flyers Monday. Tom Dowd was super friendly, over the top in his overly optimistic way. Charlie never took his shades off. Mac Rebennack, in a beret and with a rag around his neck, played guitar and puked in a wastebasket. Naturally, McClure was right in the pocket. We tried to record “Sanctified,” the tune Bob McDill and I had written and pitched to Wexler. We didn’t get a cut. I told Dowd, “It’s the full moon fucking with us. We’ll be okay tomorrow.”
Dowd shook his head, not accepting my lunar phase theory. I could not have been more pleased. I had the band on edge, where they were best. Mac Rebennack was a treasure trove of funk and groove. I got serious. “We are obviously vulnerable at sea level,” I added.
Tuesday, in the full moon’s glow over Miami, we cut “Wine, Wine, Wine” and “Strength of Love,” the Elvis-like ballad John Hurley and Ronnie Wilkins had demoed at old Ardent. I stood in the vocal booth in true artist fashion and sang as Albhy played the biggest triads he could manage on Studio B’s grand piano. “Aretha loves that piano, baby,” Wexler said.
I hated that piano. It sucked, always tuned sharp, as if we were cutting orchestral classical music at European pitch. Barefooted, Albhy used his big toe to make the bottom C note after the bridge. In Memphis I replaced his piano (except for the foot note), as well as Utley’s B3. I wanted the sound of Fry’s Chickering baby grand and the Hammond A100 with console speakers Booker T. Jones used on “Green Onions.” No Leslie speaker. Sam Phillips later said, “Listen to that organ talk.”
We got the two cuts. Dowd was so pleased he pushed on, starting to arrange Dylan’s “John Brown.” We broke before recording it in order to keep it in our brains overnight. On a session like this, where tension was high, dream work was critical.
I wanted to cut “The Judgment,” the song Utley and I had written about Nixon, but I could only barely play the song in the key of C, which was too high for me to sing. Showering at the Thunderbird, I wondered who I was kidding. Dr. John was capable of killing the song in B flat, making it considerably easier for me to sing. It was a decision beyond ego. Mac Rebennack chewed it up and spit it out, playing how the piano sounded in my dreams.
On the original demo, cut in the key of C, Charlie hit one single solitary note in the outro so sweet and so sad the band stopped playing. With the key lowered, Charlie missed the transposition, and bent the string in tune on every note. He never captured the magic note, but he made a valiant effort. Again Dowd was happy.
We recorded the Bob Dylan antiwar song “John Brown.” McClure composed a truly remarkable bass pattern, sliding up and down. Dowd plugged him into a Leslie cabinet and mic-ed it in stereo. It was brilliant. Freeman played a swamp guitar pattern that sounded like Dr. John, forcing Mac to play something even farther out. I did the song as a recitation, like Tex Ritter’s “The Phantom White Stallion of Skull Valley.” Tom wanted me to recite across the bar lines. I didn’t understand what he meant until years later.
Wednesday we cut “Wild Bill Jones,” taken from traditional sources by Bob Frank, my old buddy at the Market Theatre. I really got a piece of it, giving it a Jerry Lee Lewis/Gene Autry feel. Charlie passed out in the booth with his acoustic guitar. Dr. John played electric. You can hear his amp in the process of dying. The next day it didn’t turn on. I got my best piano performance on “John Brown,” since I was following Mac on “The Judgment.”
The next day we cut “Lady from Baltimore” and Blind Willie’s “If I Had My Way,” with another spectacular performance by T. Tommy at his best. I was done and more than happy. I gave the band Friday off, and returned to Memphis to finish up at Ardent.
Dowd was not crazy about my taking the master tapes to overdub unchaperoned, but gave in. I cut several experimental tracks at Ardent with Teddy Paige and Jimmy Crosthwait. “Oh, How She Dances” came from my old folk act. Finally, I cut Furry Lewis’s “Casey Jones” with Tarp Tarrant on drums, the brilliant Travis picker Gimmer Nicholson on electric guitar, and a younger musician, Ken Woodley, playing Fender keyboard bass. Richard Rosebrough engineered. Several prominent drug dealers seldom seen in public were hanging out. As we finished the first and only cut, Ricky Ireland walked into the control room, hit the talkback, and said, “That’s the closest thing to real music you’ve played in years.” Compliments from Ricky are rare.
I returned to Miami for my vocal overdubs with Dowd, and to fill him in on the new tracks. I had done background vocals with Mary Unobsky, Ginger Holliday, and the one-of-a-kind Jeanie Green, girls who had sung on Elvis in Memphis. I love to overdub professional background vocals, male or female, black or white. It’s like doing horn parts. Black males, white females, that’s my favorite; Elvis’s choir in reverse. The girls dress and get their hair done for the session. They gossip, pop bubble gum, and pretend to “really like” the songs, moving in and out on the microphone like they’re making love. They hold out their vibrato, throbbing like Bo Diddley’s tremolo, like angels in a strip joint. Mary wore a black lace brassiere under her see-through brown gauze shirt, one of the sexiest things I ever witnessed.
Terry Manning played Moog synthesizer gas bombs on “John Brown” and ghostly wind on “Wild Bill Jones.” Terry turned me on to a steel player from Nashville. The fiddle player had played with Governor Jimmie Davis back in the day. Dowd liked the overdubs, and admitted I improved the record.
Eric Clapton showed up with Bobby Whitlock, Carl Radle, and Jim Gordon. They were in America for Jimi Hendrix’s funeral. During my absence at Criteria they had recorded Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs as Derek and the Dominoes, with Duane Allman on guitar and Tom Dowd producing. Clapton was unhappy with Dowd’s mix of the record, and Dowd asked me to give up my studio time for the remix. I agreed and hung around. The rest of the band went to the funeral but Eric stayed. Soon Duane Allman showed up. It was hardcore. We did some heavy hanging out. After the second night, I careened from wall to wall, right to left, down the corridor from the elevator, trying to get back to my hotel room. I hid my gold tooth slide-over and my golden frog pinky ring from imaginary interlopers before passing out, unsure if I’d wake up. I woke, but never found my gold tooth or my ring.
The next morning at the studio, while Clapton was waiting for a limo to take him to the airport, we recorded a version of “Mean Old World,” with Clapton and Duane playing double slide and me on piano. It appeared years later in a box set with my piano credited to someone else.
As payback for the unused studio time, Atlantic flew Mary Lindsay in and put us in Clapton’s suite at the Thunderbird. We had a ball. The first afternoon in the studio, I stood at the mic ready to sing. Dowd said over the talkback, “Dickinson, there’s somebody on the phone who wants to talk to you. Some friend of yours.”
It seemed odd, but I walked into the control room, and took the telephone from Dowd, who grinned like a ’possum.
“Yeah?” I said.
“’Ello, Jim. This is Mick Jagger.” He had called the studio, and Dowd didn’t know what to do so he called in “The Kid!”
We made dinner plans for Wexler, Dr. John, Jagger, and his not-so-secret paramour, a South American goddess, Bianca. A limo picked up wife and me at the Thunderbird, and took us to the Marco Polo. We met Wexler and Dr. John in the lobby. Mick walked up, all smiles. I introduced him to Mary Lindsay. He bowed deeply and introduced his soon-to-be bride Bianca, exotic as a silent movie siren, thin to the point of being hollow-cheeked. Dark skin and raven hair, she looked like a gypsy princess or the Queen of the Nile. Her mouth was huge.
We walked toward the Hump Room’s roped-off door, and heard blind Clarence Carter and his band doing “Dark End of the Street,” the Dan Penn/Chips Moman song James Carr made famous. Jagger said, “Oooooh, that’s my favorite song. Hope he does it second set.”
We got celebrity seating down front. Bianca sat across from me with Mick next to her. We ordered margaritas and Singapore Slings. Clarence Carter was led to our table after his set. He genuflected and kowtowed to Wexler and Dowd, displaying snowy white teeth in a blind man’s insincere grin. Bianca ate a double order of French fries, on which she squeezed fresh lime juice. I tried it later. It’s pretty good.
We stayed through the late show and left around two a.m. Jagger prowled the lobby like a kid looking for mischief. Two plump, overdressed, bejeweled, blue-haired women looked at us in disapproval. Jagger gave them the evil eye and commented, “These women look like hookers to me. Say, Dickinson, you want a couple of hookers?” I declined. As we passed the mortified matrons, Mick bowed and tipped an imaginary bonnet. We slipped into the Miami night.
Mary Lindsay wrote an account of the evening, which Rolling Stone published verbatim in “Random Notes.” Wexler was pissed; the Stones deal with Atlantic was not official yet. I shifted the blame to Charlie Brown, who willingly took the heat. Wexler didn’t buy it. He said, “Baby, you seem to be developing a flair for publicity.” It was about to backfire.
I did an unforgettable interview in a local underground newspaper published by a friend from my creative writing class at Memphis State. I committed the unforgivable sin of talking money and telling a heretofore-unspoken story about Aretha Franklin and a bottle of pickled pigs’ feet in the Fontainebleau Hotel’s lobby. A local enemy or coward with an ancient ax to grind made it appear on Wexler’s desk in New York.
Jerry went ballistic. “Baby,” he screamed into the telephone like a furious Elmer Fudd. “Awetha will be vewy upset.” It took time and Bob Dylan’s intervention to get him over it. I limped along on the shit list. Things went downhill fast. At Atlantic I received the “Jessie Davis treatment,” named after the guitar player I had met in Hollywood and with whom I later recorded on a never-released Taj Mahal session. He was the most hated artist at Atlantic. I was a close second. I had never dealt with anyone lower on the totem pole than vice presidents. Now I was talking to the maintenance man. I had dug a deep hole I needed to fill.
I enlisted Herbie O’Mell to straighten out my artist contract and legal situation with Atlantic. Herbie went to high school with Elvis, who had performed at sock-hop dance parties put on by Herbie and DJ Dewey Phillips, dispelling the longtime myth Dewey did not know who Elvis was the first time he played “That’s All Right, Mama” on WHBQ. Herbie had been a nightclub entrepreneur and professional manager of Chips Moman and Jerry Lee Lewis. Now he ran TJ’s, a popular nightclub and after-hours hangout, and ran gambling junkets for area high rollers, taking groups to Vegas, Monaco, and hot spots around the world. Herbie probably had the fullest knowledge of show business of anyone in Memphis. His hands were full with my situation.
Herbie shared a small office/demo studio with Dan Penn, the producer/songwriter from Muscle Shoals who moved to Memphis after successfully producing the Box Tops’ “The Letter” at American Studio. Penn was fascinating. Born one day after I was snatched from the womb, we were nearly astrological twins. He had one of the best white-boy country soul voices around. I believe his second Box Tops album, Cry Like a Baby, was Memphis pop production at its best, on a par with the great Dusty in Memphis, recorded by the same cast of characters in the same time period. Those two records are as good as it gets.
Our friend, writer Lisa Robinson, set me up with a New York session so I could mend fences. Her then husband, Richard Robinson, produced a San Francisco group for Buddha Records. The Flamin’ Groovies, a roots band with a little rockabilly and a little Detroit garage mixed in, wanted me to do keyboards. Lisa also booked interviews for me, including one with Esquire magazine. Mike Golden, my friend from a Nashville whorehouse, had moved to New York City and was driving a cab. I could crash with him.
I bought a white sheepskin rock-star knee-length coat at the local high-end hippie shop. With my “lizard king” black leather pants and steel-toed work boots, I went to New York to, in Jimmy Reed’s immortal words, “try and rescue my wounded career.” New York was in the middle of a garbage strike. Mountains of multi-substance frozen grunt lined every street. I thought of the spring thaw. I did damage control at Atlantic’s New York office. Danny Fields gave me the best advice: “Spend as much money as you can. Don’t turn the record in until you have to. Re-mix, re-master. The more expense the company puts forward, the more work the record gets at release. The deal you have is golden. Work it if for all you can get.”
The Flamin’ Groovies session entailed two parties, one in the control room with Richard Robinson, the producers, Lou Reed, a midget, and many other near-greats and ingrates hanging on and hanging out. I befriended the band, and we held our own party in the tracking space. I overdubbed on tracks that ended up on Teenage Head. But an interesting thing happened when everybody was too drunk to have an agenda. We jammed on fifties hot instrumentals like “Rawhide” and “Rumble.” I think I sang “Red Hot.” I’m not sure. At one point the guitarist (either Cyril Jordan or Tim Lynch), who had spoken not a word all night, rolled a studio mic out of the piano and delivered a sizzling version of “Ubangi Stomp” that would have tickled Warren Smith’s black heart.
When the smoke cleared, I went to Michael’s apartment and slept under the sink in my White Mountain goatskin coat and steel-tipped work boots. I did my best interview with Esquire’s Lenny Kaye, who went on to fame with Patti Smith. He liked the story of Dishrag and was musician enough to understand the genius of the codes. The story was never written. He was mugged on the way home. The mugger grabbed the tape recorder. Lenny chased the guy hollering, “Give me the tape!”
My Atlantic record was frozen in time. Dowd sent me an unbelievably bad mix. Atlantic refused to pay for a color photo of me on horseback in the pasture by the spirit pond in front of our place. I changed the name to Dixie Fried, after a track I cut on which Lee Baker and I played everything, and Memphis songbird Brenda Patterson did background vocals.
I put on my father’s white linen wedding suit and took my grandfather’s gold-tipped cane in hand. Jere Cunningham, my high school friend and now Stax’s official photographer, shot a two-click black-and-white picture of me standing on my ancient family carriage stone, which read DICKINSON. I love the photo. It represents an idea from Homer Price, a children’s book from my morbid past.
Out of money, I took the acetate of the mastered Dowd mix to John Fry. I had nothing left to count on but my fingers. I had done what I could do with what I had to do with, as Larry Raspberry once told me. Fry listened to my acetate. He avoided commenting on Dowd’s miserable mix but got his point across: “I believe that’s the worst tape-to-disc transfer I’ve ever heard.”
John did his best. His mix captures perfectly the music’s feeling and spirit, the image, the original concept twisted into a new and revealing shape. But Dixie Fried entered suspended animation.