Roe Erister (Rick) Hall, 1932-2018

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photo by Jacob Blickenstaff http://www.33-13.com/

Rick Hall may have been the most determined (some might say stubborn, Rick might even have owned up to bull-headed) man I ever met.

The first time I met him, I almost didn’t meet him at all.

Jimmy Johnson was the vehicle for my initial introduction in 1981. Jimmy was the guitarist with the second rhythm section at Rick’s FAME studios in Muscle Shoals (all of his rhythm sections were brilliant, this one was perhaps his most brilliant), and there had been a falling out when he and fellow members David Hood, Barry Beckett, and Roger Hawkins had decamped in 1969 to set up their own studio, Muscle Shoals Sound, in direct competition with FAME. There had been bad blood for a while, but everyone survived and thrived, and Jimmy, as affable a figure as you’re ever likely to meet in or out of the music business, had long since re-established a good, almost filial relationship with Rick.

I was just starting out on my book, Sweet Soul Music, at the time. Songwriter Donnie Fritts, a Florence native (Florence and Muscle Shoals are two of the area’s Quad-Cities), had introduced me to nearly everyone in Muscle Shoals except for Rick the year before, and now Jimmy took it upon himself to approach Rick on my behalf. Rick, Jimmy reported back to me, would be glad to do it – but when I arrived in town a few weeks later, all of a sudden, don’t ask me why, all bets were off.

This was something I could certainly live with (it was not an uncommon occurrence – very few of the people I was talking with had done interviews before, and, this may come as a shock, but not everyone is thrilled to be interviewed) – I could wait, I told Jimmy, it wasn’t the end of the world. Jimmy, however, was stricken. He saw it as a matter of honor, and he called Rick right away from his office. “I gave the man my word,” he told Rick, while I was sitting there. “You know, we’ve been friends a long time, Rick, but you gave me your word, and I gave Peter my word, and if you don’t stick by it, we’re not going to be friends anymore.”

I was more than a little mortified (and more than a little touched by Jimmy’s loyalty), but after hanging around Muscle Shoals for a few more days without hearing from Rick, I set off for Macon to talk with Phil and Alan Walden, and Otis Redding ‘s brother Rodgers, and his wife, Zelda, along with various friends and associates of Otis’.

That was where I got the call from Rick, on December 2, 1981, a Wednesday. He was, he said, willing to see me. Great! I said. When? Tomorrow, he said. I laughed, I’m going to imagine it was a kind of heh-heh-heh. Well, I’m in Macon, I said, and I’m sure I could make it by – Tomorrow, he said, making it clear by the tone of his voice that any modification was out of the question. At 7AM, he said. At my ranch.

Now Macon is at least a five-hour drive from Muscle Shoals, and it was already late afternoon, but I didn’t hesitate – and I’d like to think I still wouldn’t. (I mean, you do anything at the service of your story, right?)  7 AM tomorrow, great! I said. And I wrote down Rick’s very specific directions to the ranch (“43 South from Littleville, one mile on the right-hand side of the road, Kennedy Road 18”) on my hotel stationery.

I arrived at 7 o’clock sharp the next day, with my notebook and brand-new Sony stereo cassette recorder TCS-310 in hand. I started out, as you often do, by asking some generalized, conversational questions, just to try to establish a little rapport, but I knew immediately I had gotten off on the wrong foot just by the way Rick was shaking his head. This was clearly not the way to begin. “Well, let me start at an earlier point of my life [which turned out to be his birth],” he declared without hesitation, “and tell you what happened to me.” And he did. Four or five hours later he was still telling me, and I was exhausted. I hadn’t gotten into the Holiday Inn in Sheffield until late the previous night, and I left for Rick’s home earlier than I needed to because I knew if I didn’t make that 7 o’clock deadline, the whole thing could be off. Finally I held up my hand for the first and I think only time in my life and said, in effect, No mas. But we would go on talking, in what would eventually turn into a two-way conversation, for the next 35 years.

Read Rick’s book, Rick Hall: My Journey from Shame to Fame. Or try Sweet Soul Music for an abbreviated version of the story of a boy who grew up in the “deep sprawling, isolated woods of the Freedom Hills with the whiskey makers and whiskey runners and saw millers,” raised by a father who could barely eke out a living (“he was a pauper”), after his mother left, when he was four, to become a prostitute in his Aunt Es’s house of ill fame in the city. In all the years I’ve known Rick and his wife, Linda (the home that I visited has since become the FAME Girls Ranch, dedicated to help victims of abuse and neglect “overcome the adversity they have endured”), the conversation has never changed. In fact, it was renewed and deepened in the ten years that he worked on the book, first with Florence TimesDaily reporter Terry Pace, then with Robert Gordon.  He wanted it to be raw, he said, something like a cross between Tobacco Road and Harry Crews, whose work he (like many of us) was introduced to by Atlantic Records head Jerry Wexler, a genuine polymath whom Rick alternately resented (their business relationship came to an end with Aretha Franklin’s disastrous 1967 Muscle Shoals session, and Jerry was the one who encouraged the second rhythm section to leave) and, more often than not admired.

The last time I saw Rick (though we always continued to speak on the phone) was about a year ago, when Rick was awarded an honorary degree by the University of North Alabama in Florence, and I was scheduled to give the commencement speech. He was already sick, although he wasn’t publicly acknowledging it, but he was in buoyant spirits, with an undiminished determination to continue to make his mark. There was a dinner the night before graduation at the president’s house, next to the lions’ cage (“Go lions,” is the university motto), where Rick exchanged fond reminiscences with old friends, none more fond than with State Representative Johnny Mack Morrow, whose father, Grover, taught Rick agriculture at Phil Campbell High School and gave Rick his first instrument, a mandolin. Rick always kept a picture of Mr. Morrow on his desk, on which he had written, “To the man who believed in me and my music when nobody did.”

The next day, in Rick’s name, and in the name of Sam Phillips, Rick’s original role model (and a native Florentine), I urged the graduates of the Colleges of Nursing and Arts and Sciences and Business and Education to hold on to their individuality, to identify and seize upon their dreams, not to let themselves get pushed around by disappointment or others’ expectations of them. And I cited how Rick, after a particularly devastating blow to his ego early on (he was fired by his partners from the musical enterprise that became FAME – it’s a long story, you’ll just have to read about it elsewhere), never gave up, barely even wavered.  “I thought it was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” Rick said. “It was like they’d put the roller skates under me and pushed me out the door.” But, I told the graduates, he was determined not to be left on the shelf for long. As he described it, “I just went home to Phil Campbell to lick my wounds – but then after a few months I took kind of an arrogant attitude and dug in for the kill.” And the next time twenty-year-old songwriter Dan Penn, who was part of the firing cabal, saw him, Dan said, “He was standing on this concrete slab he’d just poured for the studio that now stands, and he said, ‘Hey Penn, why don’t you come over here and go to work for me.’”

That was Rick, to the end. It didn’t always make for smooth sailing – and there were, unquestionably, lots of ruffled feelings along the way – but you never had any doubt about where Rick stood. And you never had any doubt that he had a good heart.

He was the furthest thing from the back-slapping, easy-going caricature of a good ol’ boy – I mean, Rick was driven from the start. “I was so very aggressive and fired up at the beginning,” he told me, trying to explain why he got ousted by his friends. “I was the guy who was beating and banging and slinging sweat over everybody else, and it got to the point where they thought, This guy’s crazy! Because, you know, IT WAS LIFE TO ME.”  It was not lost on him that the ferocity of his determination could overwhelm everyone around him sometimes, but in the end, I think, it was the lingering self-doubt, the crippling insecurity of a young boy who grew up lonely, impoverished, motherless in the Freedom Hills of rural Mississippi and Alabama, that proved to be his saving grace. As much as anything else, I would imagine, that was the innate quality that allowed him to focus on the improbable hopes and dreams of all those artists and musicians, black and white, who found their way to the studio he built with his own hands in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

The enhanced e-book of Sweet Soul Music includes this short video piece with Rick. Available at iBooks: http://bit.ly/ssmusicee  or Amazon: http://a.co/iwiMZC9

REUNITE THE SOUL CLAN IN THE ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME

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This is an act of pure advocacy.

Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Joe Tex – what do these four all have in common? Well, they were all charter members of the near-mythic (no, I mean really mythic, as in “some mythic creature”) Soul Clan, who recorded just one side of one picture-sleeve 45 – without Otis, who had died, without Pickett, who had had an emotional flare-up – but were conceived by Solomon, in typical Solomonic fashion, as a force that might have changed the world. Well, they did – with their music. And three of them are enshrined in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Only Joe Tex, who is on the ballot this year for what well may be the last time, remains excluded.

The first time I saw Joe Tex he was on the same bill with Solomon and Otis (Solomon was the headliner) in a 1964 Soul Summer Shower of Stars, and he more than held his own. As an entertainer, who took great delight in his ability to give pleasure to his audience and in their evident delight with him.  As a songwriter and exemplar of mother wit, dispensing healthy dollops of good humor mixed in with sharp shards of his own earthy philosophy. (Check out songs like “Anything You Wanna Know” or “Grandma Mary” on his brilliant, entirely self-penned album, Buying a Book.) As an effortless performer, endlessly enchanting his audience with his easy onstage manner, lithe dancing, and microphone manipulations. Not for nothing was he known as the Dapper Rapper.

But in the end, what made Joe Tex an intrinsic member of the Soul Clan, dues paid up in full and in perpetuity, was his dedication to Deep Soul (think James Brown’s “Lost Someone,” Solomon’s “The Price,” Otis’s “These Arms of Mine”). Just listen to his breakthrough hit, “Hold What You’ve Got” or, for that matter, “The Love You Save,” self-written like nearly every one of his hits and much of his album material, and see if you can resist the pathos and deep-seated feeling at the heart of his music.

So I’m asking for your vote, the last vote left to us in this Year of Jeremiah (I wonder what Solomon would have to say about that): VOTE JOE TEX FOR THE ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME.

And now I’ll turn over the lectern to Brother Joe.


Mr. C Speaks:

I second that emotion.

And just to reinforce the point: there’s a three-part, black-and-white YouTube clip of the full Joe Tex Show, live in Sweden 1969 and complete with explosive sound, that provides a rare visual glimpse of the stage mastery of Joe Tex. Part 3 opens with an original take on Henson Cargill’s #1 country hit, “Skip A Rope,” and ends with a burning version of Joe’s signature “Skinny Legs and All,” a highly eccentric Top 10 pop hit in 1968. Joe and his band, led by ferocious drummer Clyde Williams, turn “Skip a Rope,” a socially aware composition with a nursery rhyme structure, into a Sam Cooke kind of rave-up, complete with horn voicings lifted from any number of late Cooke uptempos. It’s that same odd mix of sass and soul that made Joe Tex so different from any other soul singer, while at the same time declaring his commonality, that same utterly unique talent which was on display night after night, whether in Sweden or on the endless string of clubs and stages that Joe Tex inhabited.  “Original,” like “genius,” is a much-abused appellation, but Joe Tex fully deserves both titles. VOTE JOE TEX

The Voices of Solomon Burke

I’m going to be showing Paul Spencer’s wonderful documentary about Solomon Burke, “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” at the Country Music Hall of Fame on February 9, and I’m going to be talking about Solomon, too. Which led to this piece.

Some day I’m going to write an epic narrative (maybe it should be an epic

narrative poem) about My Travels with Solomon Burke. The thing about it is, you wouldn’t have to travel far. In fact, you would only have to spend a day or two with Solomon – maybe just a few hours – to have enough material for a film, book, or life-changing experience.

If I were to say that life with Solomon was a three-ring circus, it would be selling his circus short. There’s no telling the number of rings that he could keep going at the same time – or the number of voices. You could be sitting with Solomon, and he might call someone up, someone with whom, let’s say, he might be having certain problems of a fiduciary nature, and he would take on the mien, the manner, the voice of a Dr. Stein, Dr. Burke’s comptroller, explaining that there had been an unanticipated problem with the transfer of funds, or the conversion of foreign currencies, but he could provide full assurance that it had been taken care of. Or under certain exigent circumstances he might become Dr. Burke the brain surgeon, as he did when long-time club owner/manager/booking agent Jimmy Evans had in fact had brain surgery and was incommunicado except to his medical team in Intensive Care. Occasionally he was Solomon Berkowitz (this was more of a joke between friends), confidently throwing in a wide range of Yiddish expressions that he said he had learned from the kosher butcher that his father worked for when he was a kid. Or, on the other hand, he might be a Muslim brother (I can’t remember what name he went by), if the occasion so demanded – you just could never tell.

The first time I had any contact with Solomon was in 1980, just as I was beginning my book, Sweet Soul Music. I had pursued a bunch of false leads, run down a lot of out-of-service telephone numbers, and spoken to any number of people who professed to have no knowledge of Solomon or his current whereabouts. Then J.W. Alexander gave me the name of a man who he thought was still Solomon’s lawyer. (J.W., Sam Cooke’s friend and business partner, had managed Solomon for a minute in the late ‘60s, and still chuckled fondly over their misadventures, all precipitated by Solomon’s penchant for real-life “spontaneity” over any kind of long-range planning.) Anyway. I called the lawyer’s office, didn’t get any further, I thought, than I had with anyone else, and was going out to play tennis one day when Alexandra came rushing out after me, saying, “Peter, there’s someone on the phone who I think has something to do with Solomon Burke. I think he said it was Solomon Burke,” she said as we walked back to the house, “but I think I must have misunderstood.”

Once I got on the phone, it wasn’t hard to understand her confusion. I had seen Solomon perform in little clubs and headlining all-star Supersonic Soul revues – but the voice I heard on the phone didn’t bear any resemblance to the commanding voice I thought I knew so well from records and personal appearances. This voice was the voice of a mild-mannered (for that you can read “white,” if you like) insurance salesman. Maybe an accountant – or a very cautious lawyer. Maybe, it occurred to me, this was a different Solomon Burke altogether.

This Solomon Burke carefully went over the pronunciation of my name, which he had already established with Alexandra. Then he inquired in an exceedingly circumspect and mild-mannered way about the purpose of my call. Still thinking that this must be some kind of a joke, I started to explain that I was writing a book, it was a book about soul music, it was about Southern soul music. “Of course, of course,” interrupted the voice at the other end of the line, suddenly warming to the conversation and abandoning all pretense of polite neutrality. “And how,” said the man who bore the title of “King of Rock ‘n’ Soul” in a newly commanding voice, “could you write a book on soul music without speaking to the King?”

Well, that was it. That was the beginning of my journey. I went down to New York a few weeks later when he was playing Tramps. I met him in the dressing room upstairs, surrounded by a small coterie of friends, family, and long-time acquaintances, and he welcomed me into his world. After the show, which was as inspired as virtually every show I would see over the next twenty-five years (including the one whose second set consisted entirely of a spur-of-the-moment wedding ceremony – remember, Solomon was a bishop in his grandmother Eleanora A. Moore’s Daddy Grace-inspired church, the House of God for All People, which he insisted needed to be rechristened The House of God for All People, Let It All Hang Out), Solomon wanted to cap the evening with a visit to the famous Stage Delicatessen, so we drove uptown – but it was closed. As was every other familiar landmark that he wanted to introduce me to. So, undaunted, we ended up at an all-night diner in Times Square, where Solomon interviewed the hookers who had ducked in out of the cold, asking them with great good humor about their life and work as he used a salt cellar for a microphone and told them they were being filmed by hidden cameras.

It was a great beginning – and it never stopped. I’ve never had more fun – with anyone – than I did with Solomon, even though early in our acquaintance I had to tell him, “I don’t play,” as he sought to draw me into one or another of his intricately imagined schemes. (That’s a word that might perhaps be better spelled another way, one more example of Solomon’s dedication to the improvisational moment – but that’s another story.)

I wish Solomon were here right now. Everyone who ever knew him – well, almost everyone – wishes he were here. Jerry Wexler said of him that he was “the best soul singer of all time, hands-down – with a borrowed band.” But I wouldn’t even put that qualification on it. He was without question the greatest singer of any kind that I’ve ever seen (remember, there’s a lot of singers that I haven’t seen – including, for example, Sam Cooke), one of the most inventive showmen (one of these days I’ll have to tell you about that second-set wedding at Tramps – with pictures, and I hope the participation of Red Kelly and his wife) – also one of the most brilliant, profound, and certainly the funniest person I’ve ever met, onstage or off – which tended to cost him in the pulpit. (“I couldn’t resist the joke, Pete,” he said to me one time after bringing his congregation to a point of mass hysteria, then throwing it all away with a dubious punch line.)

But all of this was secondary to the Experience of Solomon, just being around him, trying to keep up with his brilliant inventions and limitless imagination, just as prevalent in real life as they were in his music. He was a person of the most capacious mind and spirit – and for me, except for one or two unavoidable semantic stand-offs, nothing ever really changed from the moment I first met him and set off on what turned out to be one of the greatest – hell, why not just say it, the greatest adventure of my life.

For more information on the Country Music Hall of Fame event: click here

For more information on Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom: click here