Mr G: Thinking About Don

We used to talk about Don Covay – me and Joe (Mr. C to you), Peter Wolf, and Freddy Blue.

He was the shadow king – not because he was any less of a talent than any of the other great soul singers, he was just different in that his talent was expressed primarily through his pen. Well, through his writing, through his

scheming and dreaming.

We used to kid around – was it Don or was it Mick? They sounded so much alike, particularly, of course, on “Have  Mercy” (“Have mercy, baby – have mercy on…ME”). Which one of them took his style from the other?

Peter was the one who knew him best, who shared adventures and eventually songwriting credits with him. (Someday the world will beg loud and sweetly enough to persuade Peter to write about those adventures –whether with Don, or Alfred Hitchcock, or Tennessee Williams, or Van, or Bob, in an elegant, Christopher Isherwood-styled memoir.)

I think it was Solomon who first introduced me to Don. He said in that inarguably (I mean, who was going to argue with Solomon) persuasive voice of his, “Pete, you got to meet the guy. I mean, come on. ‘You’re Good for Me.’ ‘Tonight’s the Night.'” And he reeled off a string of Don’s hits – and some I’d never heard of – as if he were sharing the secret of the universe with me. Which of course, he was, in his own deeply allegorical Solomonic way.

Don was truly a free spirit. The Soul Clan, in all its permutations, both real and highly imagined, was perhaps the fullest extension of that freedom. With Solomon he was forever the warm, witty, irrepressible younger brother (even though I think he was in fact older). Each got such a kick out of the other’s eccentricities and foibles – but there was never any question who was in charge.

Sadly, Don’s warm, antic spirit never fully translated on stage – maybe it just couldn’t be harnessed. For all of his discipline as a songwriter and a recording artist, Don simply didn’t seem to possess the ability to pace himself. “He never,” said Solomon sorrowfully (but I’ve got to say, mirthfully, too), “knows when to stop.” But his music, of course, will unquestionably live on – and on – and on – well, just listen to it, and tell me he didn’t hit an eternity note.

The last time I spoke to Don, Peter and I called him up at the care facility outside Washington D.C., where he had been living since his stroke of eleven years before. Not every day was a good day, Don said, but this one was, and while his speech had been affected, his spirit shone thorough. He talked a little about his breakthrough as a songwriter, how after talking to his idol, Sam Cooke, he finally came to embrace his vocation. “Write about what you know, write about what you’ve experienced, write about what you observe,” Sam told him. “Write about natural things – you’ve got to come out of the future and get back to the past, to what you knew when you were a little kid.” Most important of all, Sam said, “All you got to do is be yourself.”

And that’s what Don became in his writing, his own pure, pluperfect and incontrovertible self. It was in that realization that he wrote “Have Mercy,” his first real Don Covay song. And after that he never looked back – his goal was, simply, to express himself, following whatever path his muse took him, never feeling the need to explain, just to express – himself.

Guest Blogger: Mr C on Don Covay

It’s In The Wind

by Joe McEwen (aka Mr. C)

Don Covay wrote “It’s in the Wind” after the plane crash that killed his friend Otis Redding.  Today this wistful, melancholy ode sadly serves as Don Covay’s own epitaph.

Born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Don migrated to Washington D.C. and 

joined some doo-woper friends in The Rainbows.  Somehow he latched on to Little Richard, who briefly took Don under his wing, nicknaming him Pretty Boy and producing his first solo record, “Bip Bop Bip,” backed by the Upsetters.  After several years as a Richard wannabee and a bunch of boogity shop singles, Covay found his footing in the emergence of ‘60s soul.  After advice from his singing and songwriting idol, Sam Cooke, he developed a keen, narrative songwriting style that found early success with Gladys Knight (“Letter Full of Tears”) and particularly Solomon Burke (“Tonight’s the Night,” “I’m Hanging Up My Heart for You” and “You’re Good for Me”), who became a buddy and partner in mischief.

His own records, first on Rosemary/Atlantic as Don Covay and the Goodtimers, were extraordinary,  idiosyncratic gems. They were passionately sung tales framed with trademark choppy, guitar-led syncopation and highlighted by the oft-covered smash “Mercy, Mercy.”  Covay seemed to thrive in Jerry Wexler’s Atlantic universe, despite only achieving two subsequent hits of his own: “See Saw” (recorded with Booker T and the MG’s at Stax) and “Sookie Sookie.”

 His singles were singular in style, rich in storytelling drama, and delivered with absolute conviction: “Take This Hurt Off Me,” “Temptation Was Too Strong,” Watching the Late, Late Show,“ House on the Corner” I Stole Some Love" and The Soul Clan (Solomon Burke, Arthur Conley, Ben E. King, Joe Tex and Don) opus “That’s How It Feels.”  He delivered perfectly calibrated, classic songs for Wilson Pickett (“Three Time Loser,” “I’m Gonna Cry”), Little Richard (the epic wrenching, recitation “I Don’t Know What You Got (But it’s Got Me),” Otis Redding (another beautifully crafted, “begging” classic,“Think About It,” which was only released posthumously), and Aretha Franklin (“Chain of Fools).  Later, in 1973, at Mercury, Covay clicked with the half-whispered, half-sung infidelity tale "I Was Checkin’ Out (While She Was Checkin’ In).”

Before his debilitating 1992 Stroke, Don Covay was an irrepressible force, never lacking for a song, an idea, a plan, a scheme (the Soul Clan was one of his best) or a bright new day.  On a personal note, our paths happily crossed often in 1974 and '75, and I hosted him on my WBCN radio show where he proudly premiered the glorious, Dixie Hummingbirds style rave-up, “It’s Better to Have and Don’t Need (Than Need and Don’t Have).”   Today, Don Covay is in the wind.

Talkin’ About Live Soul

This post originally ran on www.okayplayer.com here. It was intended as a list of some favorite soul tracks released on live albums (kind of an abbreviated soundtrack to the new enhanced eBook edition of Sweet Soul Music). Okayplayer used youtube audios, with one alternative Ray Charles video performance thrown in for good measure. (Now, that might be the start of a future great-live-soul-videos list!) For those of you without Spotify, we’ve included the youtube versions here, too.

There’s nothing like live music.

I don’t know what it is. Many record producers and engineers see it as an illusion – it looks better than it sounds – but for me it’s the essence of all music.  From the first time I saw Lightnin’ Hopkins when I was sixteen years old to catching James Brown and Solomon Burke in person (not to mention Howlin’ Wolf and Jerry Lee Lewis) when I wasn’t much older, I’ve never found anything to match it.  With the soul and gospel shows it’s more of the incantatory nature of the experience – I don’t know of anything that can equal the wildness and out-of-control control of a groove that draws you in even as it keeps you at a tantalizing remove. Often the live versions of familiar songs are slower, more drawn-out, they deepen the emotional resonance of lyrics you thought you knew by heart – but not always. It’s the unexpectedness, the spontaneity of the moment that makes it different (same as jazz), whatever expression that hypnotic moment  may take. 

So little of this music has been recorded the way it actually sounds – in the clubs, on-stage, with an audience that is as much a part of the experience as the performer him or herself. Here are just a few, a very few, live recordings that suggest some of that untrammeled freedom. In answer to the Desert Island Disc question (what’s the one record you would take with you to that mythical desert island, assuming all obstacles of technology could be overcome and records still existed?), I’ve always said that I would gladly give away all my records, CDs, recorded music, just to see Howlin’ Wolf shatter reality one more time. He was one of so many who was never recorded properly in his own milieu. In fact, apart from B.B. King Live at the Regal, I can’t think of any of the great blues singers who were recorded live in a manner that reflected the unparalleled range of moods and emotions that you could take from their in-person performance – unless you count the history-before-it-happened Alan Lomax Library of Congress recordings of Muddy Waters and Son House. Or the Harry Oster field recordings collected in the electrifying Country Negro Jam Sessions on Arhoolie, featuring the fiddle-guitar duo of Butch Cage and Willie Thomas. From my perspective – and I know this is heresy – I would argue that neither Aretha nor Otis Redding nor Al Green, say, was ever adequately captured in the full flowering of an unvarnished live performance.

But then personal preference is always a matter of personal taste. So without begging the question, and without seeking in any way to invite invidious comparison, here is a select selection of live soul(ful) performances,  with directions toward a few more. But, seriously, don’t stay home pondering my list or anyone else’s – or even dwelling on memories. Go out and hear some live music – right now!

 RAY CHARLES – DROWN IN MY OWN TEARS

Slow, slower, slowest. There is no one who can tease out a feeling – the feeling – better than Ray, even as he continues to keep the pulse of the music going, keeps the listener on the edge of his/her feet.  Listen to the way he uses the horns to permit his voice to weave sinuously in and out of the arrangement, to delay and deliver the message until finally, toward the end, the Raelettes come in for the first time and Ray plays off of them instead, in a warm human interchange that culminates in a searing falsetto inspired to begin with by Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Only to followed, after many professions of faith have already been elicited from the audience, by the reassuring repetition: “I want to know, don’t it make you feel, all right?” And it DOES.

[Note: the audio of this performance was recorded  in 1959 and can be found on the album Ray Charles in Person, the clip above is the same song performed live at Newport Jazz Festival. – ed.]

James Brown – LOST SOMEONE

Much the same could be said of James Brown’s historic 1962 live album (recorded at his own expense because his record company had so little faith in its potential). Listen to the way James draws out the tension with his mastery of repetition and homespun advice. (“Don’t go to strangers /Come on home to me…. You know, we all make mistakes sometimes. And the only way we can correct our mistakes/We got to try one more time.”) Listen to the way he draws in the audience (us), listen to the way he teases and tantalizes in much the same way that Alfred Hitchcock moment by moment intensifies the suspense in his films. (Suspense, as Hitchcock defines it, is not the same as surprise – everyone knows what’s coming, we just don’t know when.) And then the audience explodes as first James, after a suitable tease (“I feel like I want to scream.” “Scream!” comes back at him) lets loose with his own apocalyptic version of the Archie Brownlee-inspired scream, then takes it one step further by getting the audience to scream, too. Then, and only then, as James declares after nearly ten minutes of apocalyptic drama, “I believe my work will be done.” And so it is – until the next time, the next show, the next moment of revelation. 

If this only whets your appetite for more (and how could it not?), check out Live at the Apollo Volume 2, from 1967, just five years later, for an entirely different (but no less satisfying) experience, when everything has become rhythm and James dances madly on the precipice of funk. Or try “Oh Baby Don’t You Weep” from the faux-Live at the Royal (with faked audience applause), which in its own way is just as apocalyptic in its studio recreation as it ever was on stage. . And don’t under any circumstances miss Alex Gibney’s brand-new documentary, Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown. You won’t believe your eyes (and ears) – but, on the other hand, I know you will.

WILSON PICKETT – IF YOU NEED ME (don’t be put off by the mistitling; it really is “If You Need Me”)

This is the song that Solomon Burke popularized after Jerry Wexler bought the publishing but forgot to lock up the record. So both artists had hits with it, on different labels. Solomon always sang the hell out of the song in his warm, pleading style, but I don’t know if anyone ever beat Wilson’s version, recorded here at Philadelphia’s Uptown Theatre with all the harsh intensity of Pickett’s imperiously scoured voice. After a long, exhortatory introduction (it goes on for almost half the length of the song itself) Pickett offers up the same sermon that Solomon interjected into his version virtually word for word (“People have always said that I didn’t mean you no good….But one thing I know, way deep down in the bottom of my heart I’ve done the best I could”) – but with an entirely different tonal meaning. And, of course, as befits a song of such sturdy melodic construction, you get full audience participation, underlining the sense that what is being shared here is a particular experience, but universalized in such a way that it can evoke both an inner core  of aloneness and a spirit of community at one and the same time. This is what Sam Phillips sought in the studio, music that is at once real (“R-E-A-L,” Sam always said) and fully aware of how hard it is to create a convincing simulacrum of reality. Not unlike a Bruce Springsteen concert.  Can I get a witness?

SAM COOKE – BRING IT ON HOME TO ME

This, of course, is not just one song – it’s a symphony of Sam, arranged as a kind of showcase (in much the same way that Solomon Burke or James Brown, but not Ray Charles, arranged their medleys) for his various songs, moods and styles. It was conceived very consciously as a reaction to the way that he and his friend and business partner, J.W. Alexander, felt he had been upstaged by Little Richard, by all the explosive energy that Richard put into every performance, on a tour of England in the fall of 1962. Sam came home and constructed an act of his own to match that energy, and this January 1963 date at the Harlem Square Club was one of its earliest unveilings. Not only that – spurred on by the news that James Brown had recorded his show at the Apollo three months earlier (James Brown Live at the Apollo would not come out for another few months), Sam persuaded RCA to record his Harlem Square Club performance in Miami for an album that was to be titled One Night Stand. It might just as well have been titled Another Night on the Chitlin Circuit as far as RCA was concerned, because it was almost immediately set aside – and was not in fact released until 1984, twenty years after Sam’s death. What is most notable about it, apart from the immediacy of the musical experience is that it really was another night on the chitlin circuit, one of the very few club dates of this sort that was ever recorded. But more to the point, Sam is singing in that hard-edged gospel style that he seemed to have abandoned altogether with his departure from the Soul Stirrers in 1957. It stands as solitary, secular testament to the intensity of that style – and to the way in which Sam was loved by his audience, something which you can hear over and over again in an audience response that turns almost into a singalong. I can’t think of an album with greater charm, or greater intensity. It continually arrives at a point where it seems both singer and audience are about to lose control, only to be deflected by the saving grace of Sam’s polished showmanship, as, much in the manner of one of his most accomplished students, Solomon Burke, he declares, “I better leave that one alone,” every time the temperature in the room threatens to get too hot.

One time when he didn’t leave anything alone was on the Specialty album, The Great 1955 Shrine Concert, which presents the Soul Stirrers and half a dozen other Specialty Records gospel acts, live at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Sam’s “Nearer to Thee,” perhaps his greatest gospel composition, goes on for over eight-and-one-half minutes, with Sam and second lead Paul Foster trading leads until the tension becomes almost unbearable and then in the end, just as in the secular world of soul, finally finds release.  

GENE CHANDLER – RAINBOW ‘65

An epic tale of doomed romance, recorded at the Regal Theatre in Chicago, the furthest point of the chitlin circuit theater tour that also included the Apollo and the Uptown, along with the Howard and the Royal in DC and Baltimore. Once again we are drawn in by the incantatory pulse – at one point it seems almost as if the needle has gotten stuck in the groove, as the singer repeats, “I’m asking you baby I’m asking you baby” over and over again, until finally he breaks into an extended, wailing, squealing  falsetto “Pleasssse.” And then, after playing with words and sounds and clicks and gasps (words at this point no longer have meaning – or at least that is not their primary purpose) finally arrives at his cataclysmic conclusion: “I just want to ask you one thing [three times, four times] I want you to stop, stop THIS RAINBOW….IN MY HEART.” 

ETTA JAMES – SOMETHING’S GOT A HOLD ON ME

This could probably be better called rock ‘n’ soul, of which, if Solomon was the king, Etta would surely make a fitting queen. (There is, of course, only one Queen of Soul.) It’s the only uptempo number in the group – I think most people would agree that deep soul, in order to get deep, generally takes a more measured pace – but here Etta adopts another mode and loses nothing in the process. The raw power of her voice alone, particularly in the extended intro, with its straight-out evocation of the church, would be enough in itself, along with the pumping gospel piano and lyrics that could just as easily be applied to the sacred (and unquestionably have) as the profane. A sense of transport fills the New Era Club in Nashville – here, once again, it need hardly be said, it’s not the song, it’s the feeling.

SOLOMON BURKE – SILENT NIGHT

Listen to the laughter. That says it all, expressing the sense of delight that not just soul music but gospel music, too (hell, all kinds of music) is able so effortlessly to convey. In the end it’s the sound of surprise, the exultation of discovery, the sense on the part of both audience and performer that – hey, (s)he/I didn’t just do that, did we? In Solomon’s case, it is, of course, amplified by one of the most glorious voices you are ever likely to hear –along with the most astonishing talent for improvisation, verbal, musical and, not entirely irrelevantly, comical, too. In this case the listener doesn’t really have to know that the number was recorded in a Macon church on a steaming July day (“It was at least 105 degrees, Pete!” Solomon told me with that sense of conspiratorial wonder that always made you kind of…wonder) to appreciate the anomaly of the situation. Nor is it necessary to put your full, literal faith in Solomon’s pronouncement to producer Fred Mendelsohn as he pointed out the church window, “Look, Fred, it’s snowing!” to recognize the extent to which music can take you away from the literal, the diurnal, your everyday cares and woes. If you put your faith in music, Solomon says over and over again in his songs, both sacred and secular, you can move mountains, you can change the world. (Don’t forget, it was Solomon who announced without irony in one of his early hits, “There’s a song that I sing, and I believe if everyone was to sing this song, it would save the whole world.”)

Now – if you want to get a dose of Solomon at his most gloriously secular (and at his most alive), you can’t by any lassitude of the spirit allow yourself to overlook his Rounder album Soul Alive! Captured with wall-to-wall verisimilitude and fervor at a Washington D.C. club in 1981, it’s like Sam Cooke’s live album, a true symphony of soul. But the thing about it is, as Solomon would be the first to tell you, when the feeling’s right, whether it’s at a little church in Georgia, a bedraggled club that hasn’t bothered to remove its Christmas tinsel in years, or a command performance for the Pope, it really doesn’t matter – when the feeling is right, that’s when a true miracle is achieved.

Guest Blogger: Mr C on Designer Records

By Mr. C.

The artists on the recently released set, The Soul of Designer Records, are true voices in the shadows.  They’re the “little people,” in the phrase that Boston record store entrepreneur Skippy White (“Mass. Records: Home of the Blues”) once used to describe the underheralded underclass of ‘60s soul singers.  The “little people” who recorded for the Memphis, Tennessee, Designer label, were church singers, locals from the Memphis area or pilgrims from Cincinnati, Detroit or South Carolina, who came to one-time Jerry Lee Lewis guitarist Roland Janes’ Sonic Studio to record a 45 rpm record, something to sell on the weekend programs that they played in churches, auditoriums, wherever they might find a venue for their music.

“New talent needed all the time!” read the opening of a Designer Records ad, and new talent was the thirst for Designer owner Jesse Corbett Graham, who opened shop in 1964, fishing for hits in the rockabilly and country pond. He christened himself J.C. Wooten first, and spontaneously nicknamed himself “Style”….Style Wooten, a jack of all trades who soon, with the help of Roland Janes, found his calling in black gospel music.

Style’s concept was cash and carry.  For $469 (or less depending on circumstances), a custom record was pressed, usually 25 or 50 copies, with Janes providing the studio and as often as not most of the musicians.  As the ad stated, “We furnish our recording staff…"  Once word got out, Sonic Studio became a hotbed of Designer gospel sessions.  As Janes is quoted in the liner notes, "See, these gospel guys, man, were doing it for the love of what they were doing. They used to get in their cars – maybe two or three carloads of them, say, from Detroit – and they’d come down south and work down here all Friday night and Saturday and Sunday, they might miss a day’s work, probably two days. They were doing it ‘cause they loved it, man.” As for Style: "He felt that he was performing a service, and he was…He didn’t cheat nobody, he treated everybody right.”

The Soul of Designer Records is four CDs of custom 45s, 101 songs, packaged in a record-album gatefold.  Some of the artists, like the Soul Superiors of Detroit or the Shaw Singers, used Designer as a springboard for other records and further career advancement.  Most of these artists disappeared back home to the local church, with a box or two of records as a physical document of faith, a moment of glory for the parish to hear.

My favorite moments here come out of unexpected borrowings from radio hits of the day: James Brown, Dyke and the Blazers, Ollie and the Nightingales are each annexed, as are Tyrone Davis (the Foster Brothers crib the unmistakable guitar line from “Can I Change My Mind”) and Little Junior Parker (the Dynamic Hughes Gospel Singers neatly graft the opening guitar notes of “Mystery Train” as the hook for “Beautiful City”). There’s an emotional, uptempo cover of the Staple Singers’ “Why Am I Treated So Bad” by the Spiritual Harmonizers of Senatobia, Mississippi, and even a crude but highly compelling Jimi Hendrix guitar nod by Elgie Brown.  The real standout for me, though, is a pair of songs by Joe Townsend, recorded with solo guitar, and, it seems, live in church. Townsend, who must be from Mississippi, with a few changes in words, could very well be taken for an early label mate of Muddy Waters at Aristocrat Records. The guitar is thick, the voice empowered, and the line between gospel and blues blurred.

The Soul of Designer Records is the music of Skippy White’s “little people.”  But the power of voice, soul  and inspiration, recorded by Roland Janes and given a home by Style Wooten on Designer, is as big as it gets: a heart full of love and a forever shout through the universe.

Peter Guralnick's Top 7 Moments of Live Soul →

On OkayPlayer.com Peter digs into the essentials of live soul for his Throwback Thursday post of Top 7 moments in live soul.

Congratulations, L.C.!

It’s not often you get to congratulate someone on the release of an album that’s been held up for fifty years.

But that is the case with 81-year-old L.C. Cooke’s Complete SAR Recordings (plus three). Originally scheduled to come out in 1964, it was initially postponed – and then, with Sam’s death, shelved – until its release just a week or two ago.

Even for me, for all my familiarity with both L.C.’s recordings and L.C. himself, it came as a real revelation.

You sang higher, I said to L.C. You sang harder. “I know it,” L.C. said. “Because if I sung in my natural voice I’d sound too much like Sam. Sam said, ‘I hear you, man, and I swear to God, if I didn’t know different, I’d think it was me.’ So that’s when I started singing in a higher pitch.”

He does sound like Sam – a lot like Sam. No one who gave L.C’s recordings even a cursory listen could deny it. But that’s because they both shared the Cooke sound, L.C. says – that’s what their father sounded like when he was preaching, that’s what their brother Charles, who sang lead with their brother-and-sister family group, the Singing Children, and retired from singing forever the day he turned twenty-one, sounded like, too.

I don’t doubt it. If L.C. tells you something, you can believe him. “I’ll tell you something, Pete,” he told me, not long after we met, over twenty years ago, “some people tell you different things different times, but my stories never change. Because I’m gonna tell you the truth, no matter where it fall.”

Early on, he told me matter-of-factly about the time he met Elvis. He was singing with the Magnificent Montague’s group, the Magnificents, performing their hit, “Up on the Mountain,” at the WDIA Goodwill Revue. This was the famous occasion in 1956 when Elvis unexpectedly showed up and the all-black audience went crazy. “I’ve got all of your hits – ‘Up On the Mountain’ and the other side,” Elvis told the group with disarming good humor, but once he heard L.C.’s last name, the Soul Stirrers were all he could talk about, as he offered up titles and verses from their gospel songs. Like all of L.C.’s stories, it is a tale not of glorification but of recognition.

Sometimes L.C. can get in trouble with his penchant for the truth. “What you tell that man all those things for?” his sister Agnes demanded of him after my biography of Sam came out. Both Agnes and L.C. told me the story – Agnes simply thought he had gone too far in his frankness, not just with regard to Sam but with respect to himself. But L.C. had no second thoughts – just as he does not entertain any regrets. “I just told the truth.”

I was reminded of this when I went out to Chicago with Teri Landi and Jody Klein to talk with L.C. last year. I was writing the liner notes for his album, and we were talking about his memories of the various sessions (“Sometimes he remembers things he shouldn’t remember,” said his wife, Marjorie, an ordained minister, laughingly), and L.C. was talking about one of the ten songs on the album that Sam wrote, the previously unreleased “Gonna Have a Good Time,” a carefully crafted number made to sound, L.C. said, “like it’s from long ago” and yet at the same time remain resolutely contemporary. It was one of the few times, L.C. said, that his brother offered him advice in the studio. “He never told me how to sing,” L.C. said unprompted as we listened to the tracks on the album, just before “Have a Good Time” came up. “The one thing he ever said – when I said ‘before’ he said, ‘Don’t say before, say ‘fore. Remember our heritage!’ In other words, I was singing too correct.” And then sure enough, there it was on the tape, which L.C. had not previously heard, just as he remembered it from fifty years before.

There are some wonderful songs on the album – “Let Me Down Easy” could take its place in any collection of soul or r&b – but not just the songs Sam wrote. L.C.’s favorite is one he wrote himself. “’If I Could Only Hear’ was probably the best song I ever did in my life. To me. You know, sometimes you cut a song and you listen. You say, ‘I could have done that better.’ But ‘If I Could Only Hear’ – if I had sung that song for 100 years, I couldn’t have done that song no better than what I did. That’s always been my favorite song. And I think you all will agree.”

Well, you be the judge. But I think this eminently listenable album offers something for everyone. And how great is it to have L.C.’s debut SAR album come out after 50 years sounding as fresh and new as if it were recorded yesterday.

Mr. G Remembers Little Jimmy Scott

Little Jimmy Scott: “Someone to Watch Over Me”

by Peter Guralnick

The first time I saw Little Jimmy Scott was at a memorial for Big Joe Turner that Doc Pomus had organized in December 1985. I had been hearing about Jimmy from Doc for years – “the best ballad singer I ever heard,” Doc wrote. “He sang behind the beat further than anyone else ever could and every time I thought he was too far back he returned somehow with impeccable meter. He had a sob in his voice that always had me close to tears.” They were tight in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, Doc said, hung out, did gigs together. Not only that, Doc was going with Jimmy’s cousin Aida, who “loved me fiercely and poetically, [but] I was cool with my feelings. That was the style in those days.”

But for all of Doc’s paeans to his singing I never got to see Jimmy in person, and Doc didn’t either, because in the aftermath of a career that never brought much in the way of material rewards, Jimmy had returned to his hometown of Cleveland, where he worked as an elevator operator at the Sheraton downtown, and despite all his efforts Doc was unable to re-establish contact.

Jimmy returned to the New York area in 1985, and Doc reconnected with him in Newark just before the Big Joe Turner Memorial, where he was a late addition to the bill. It was, as Doc might have said, kind of a crazy night, with all kinds of big names filling the club and emotions running wild. Without the benefit of rehearsal, Jimmy’s performance was a little ragged, lacking the kind of broken-hearted, slow-drag assurance that you hear on his classic records, from the earliest sides to the wonderful 1963 album produced by Ray Charles for his own label, Tangerine, that went unreleased for forty years because of a “lifetime” contract with Savoy. It was thrilling to see him, though, thrilling to hear him, and it seemed like things were finally bound to start happening.

They didn’t, though, despite all of the efforts of Doc and other friends of long standing like Joel Dorn. In September 1987 Doc wrote an impassioned plea to the music industry. He ran down a list of all the singers Jimmy had influenced, including Frankie Valli, Nancy Wilson and Stevie Wonder, and all the music moguls he had tried to contact on Jimmy’s behalf. “What’s everyone waiting for?” Doc’s words practically screamed. “He’s sixty-two years old, he’ll die, and there’ll be a hot funeral. Everybody will show up in hip mourning clothes and talk about how great he was….I’m getting good and pissed at the affluent members of the music community who sit around and pontificate and let those kind of tragedies happen again and again….Let’s do something now.”

But it wasn’t until he sang at Doc’s funeral three-and-a half years later, as Joe McEwen writes in his accompanying tribute, that Jimmy finally got his break. Joe and Bill Bentley had been advocating for him for years, but it was only after his performance at the funeral that he was offered a recording contract and finally became known to the world at large. And the song that he sang, George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” like Mac Rebennack’s equally heartbreaking, just as unashamedly sentimental tribute to his friend, “My Buddy,” spoke volumes about the spirit not just of the man but of the music.

 One final note, just to give an idea of the celebratory nature of the occasion: Doc, the music, the moment, got a standing ovation as the casket was rolled up the aisle.

Mr. C Remembers Little Jimmy Scott

Jimmy Scott. The singer.
by Joe McEwen

This was original published on http://www.caughtbytheriver.net

Jimmy Scott was a singer. Though his musical support was mostly jazz-powered, he was not your typical jazz singer but instead sang ballads and sang them as if the delivery of each syllable was an extraction of precious metal. Scott sang sad songs from the the songbooks favored by Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, two artists who shared his deep, mature and naked emotional investment. On stage, Jimmy Scott bled for his audience and, more likely, himself. Motherless at 13 and afflicted with Kallmann Syndrome (a condition that prevented him from reaching puberty), Scott inhabited an often harrowing, unwelcoming universe. Jimmy Scott always stood on the outside looking in.

My own connection with Jimmy Scott began in college with an album on Atlantic Records called The Source (1969). The Source was produced by Philadelphia jazz DJ turned record man Joel Dorn. It was jazz but it wasn’t quite, featuring stalwarts Jr. Mance, Ron Carter and David Newman as support. The music was otherworldly to a college freshman; a raw, bittersweet emotion that was soul music of the deepest kind but buttressed by a fragrant unit of NYC jazz players. And the voice pouring into each song was hypnotic, the fragile cry of a lonely spirit calling out hauntingly in “On Broadway” and “Our Day Will Come,” among others. It was not quite male, but then not female (although close your eyes and he sounds a little like Nancy Wilson, to me anyway).

Our paths crossed remarkably enough at Sire Records in 1991. Over a period of five years Scott recorded a trilogy of albums for us, All The Way (Tommy LiPuma), Dream (Mitchell Froom) and Heaven (Craig Street), that remain very personal to me. But this not my story. These three projects would certainly not have happened without Seymour Stein and Bill Bentley, and probably not without the death of Jimmy’s friend and champion Doc Pomus, whose funeral service occasioned Scott’s solo delivery of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” a riveting moment that stunned the assembled, including Seymour and myself. The Sire albums, each its own uniquely conceived masterpiece, enabled Jimmy Scott to perform regularly for the rest of his life.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to listen to a Jimmy Scott album all the way through, much as it was seeing him live. One song is often so draining, requiring an undivided emotional investment. I think Jimmy Scott was a genius, a very mortal man who gave everything for the cause. He was born on July 17, 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio and died on June 12, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Jimmy Scott was indeed a singer.

Guest Blogger Mr C on The Five Royales

The “5” Royales were always at the heart of the discography of my book, Sweet Soul Music. As one of their album titles proclaimed, their music represented “the roots of soul.” Long before the internet made it possible to have the world at your fingertips, Joe and I discussed such matters long into the night. There was never any question in our minds that the “5” Royales should have been one of the first groups inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame – if there were any justice (if James Brown had truly ruled the world, as it seemed for a while he might), they would have been voted in by acclamation. It wasn’t so much the vast influence of their performances and compositions, for which Joe makes so eloquent a case, as the striking originality, the still-startling “presentness” of their music. But let Joe tell you about it – and then just give yourself over to the music. (But don’t forget “The Slummer the Slum,” and “It’s Hard But It’s Fair,” and “Monkey Hips and Rice,” and…oh, once you start, you’re never going to stop.

– PG

Mr C:

“Soul and Swagger” is a bold and declarative title for the new Rockbeat five-CD set, The Complete “5” Royales (1951-67).  It’s also cool and entirely appropriate.  Soul and Swagger is pink-tinged and packaged in a user-friendly, 45-sleeve-size bound book, a design model used in the gorgeous The Complete Motown Singles series.  To even a casual fan, it looks like something to own.  

And of course it is, if only as an absorbing history of a group that had hits in the ‘50s hardscrabble rhythm and blues world but who also remained vital “voices in the shadows” (a 1963 single by the group is appropriately called “I’m Standing in the Shadows”), their remarkable talent and influence unduly unheralded.  

For, ironically, some of the “5” Royales’ greatest songs (composed by the group’s all-everything, linchpin guitarist Lowman Pauling), are best known through the interpretations of others:  "Dedicated to the One I Love" (a massive pop hit for both the Shirelles and The Mamas and Papas), “Think” (a hit twice, in two different versions by Royales’ acolyte James Brown), and “Tell the Truth”, plucked by Atlantic-period Ray Charles.

 But now, with “soul and swagger”, the “5” Royales themselves are back…bad as they want to be!

 A thumbnail sketch of the group has them planted in their hometown of Winston Salem, N.C., a regional gospel favorite originally known as the Royal Sons. A demo made its way to New York City’s Apollo Records, an independent with tentacles in black gospel music.  Two Royal Sons’ singles were released, but Apollo was looking for rhythm and blues (think of the teenage Solomon Burke).  The Sons, seemingly without protest, made the switch.  Thus were the “5” Royales (changed from mere “Royals”) born.  Within a year, the group had a smash, Pauling’s catchy, stop/start, jump blues “Baby Don’t Do It.”  And off they went.

Singles followed, hits were bunched at the beginning, and a sound evolved, kicked off in the session following up the first hit. The song is a Lowman Pauling original, “Help Me Somebody,” the singer is the Royales’ formidable tenor, Johnny Tanner, a treasure of a vocalist who puts his heart and burrows his soul into the gospel-drenched, world-weary plea, with the group draped around him in support.  It’s a seminal soul moment, you can hear the voice-to-come of the Atlantic Ray Charles right there.  Of course there is no real birth-of-soul sunburst necessarily, it came in bits and pieces from all over.  But the “5” Royales became a cornerstone, their minor-key, intense laments a big jumping-off point for James Brown and a cast of millions.

In 1954, with their career cruising along at a steady hum, the “5” Royales switched labels, moving to r&b powerhouse King Records.  It’s a move that should have catapulted the band to even loftier heights.  But here the story oddly stumbles.

 The hits didn’t come.  New York sessions with session ace Mickey Baker replacing Pauling on guitar didn’t click.  And a steady output of singles yielded little magic.

That changed in February of 1957, when bang, Lowman Pauling re-emerged, his guitar suddenly thrust forward emphatically, with thick, rich bursts of obbligatos and penetrating solo blasts that became the core of the new “5” Royales sound. “Think” was recorded that day, as well as doo-wop delight “Tears of Joy”.  In the months to follow, “Dedicated (to the One I Love)”, “Say It”, “Tell the Truth”, “Slummer the Slum” and so many more tumbled out. Yet with all of this creative flowering and signature music being created, outside of “Think” the music was scarcely on the radio.  By 1960, even with such transformative songs as “I’m With You” and “Wonder When You’re Coming Home,” the “5” Royales were slipping off the charts, and it was the Shirelles and James Brown who were recasting Lowman’s music.  In a last-ditch effort, Sam Cooke gave them a song, “Why,” a generous gesture but one that yielded no commercial result.

The 1960s saw the “5” Royales slide from record company to record company: Home of the Blues, Vee Jay, Smash, Todd, Hi, and others. Even the inspired production efforts of Willie Mitchell and James Brown came up bare.  With soul music exploding (and Steve Cropper using Pauling’s licks to shape an entirely new tributary of Memphis R&B), the band inexplicably could find no beachhead. Finally Tanner left.  Pauling soldiered on, mostly with longtime group pianist Royal Abbit by his side. But by the end of 1967, this foundational ensemble was no more.  On December 26, 1973, working as a janitor at a Brooklyn synagogue, Lowman Pauling passed away, no doubt having heard JB’s third resurrection of “Think” on the radio that year.

One wonders if after all the years on the road, all the songs and all the shows, the words to one of his signature songs might have passed through Lowman’s thoughts:

       Think about the sacrifices, that I made for you

       Think of all the times, that I spent with you

       Think of all the good things, that I done for you…

Pictures from Life’s Other Side

Ever since attending the “Celebration for Young Americans,” Lee Atwater’s Rhythm and Blues Presidential Ball, in 1989, I have been meaning to write about it. I kept extensive notes at the time (I mean, it was such an amazing experience!), and I always thought I would include it, under the title “My Adventures Among the Republicans,” in the anthology I’m still planning to put together

Well, circumstances change, and Rhythm and Blues Foundation founder Howell Begle, who produced the original concert and then saved the film footage from 1000 deaths, was finally able to put it out, first as an hour-long PBS special earlier this year, now as a two-hour DVD released by Shout!Factory.

I wrote this as my contribution to the liner notes for the DVD.

Maybe someday I’ll release my own untruncated version. But I think this represents the essence of the experience in all its glorious confusion and beauty.

In any case watch the concert in either format (check out the link at the end) and dig the music. And be thankful that Howell Begle rescued it from the literal dustbin of history.

The phone calls must have started coming in December. Would I be Lee Atwater’s guest at the “Celebration of Rhythm and Blues” that was being planned for the inauguration of the first President Bush?

At the beginning it was all pretty low-key, as I deflected each request politely but without hesitation. The caller was a friend of a friend, a low-level operative in the Republican Party, evidently – and while I had no interest in parading my self-righteousness, I knew there was no way in hell I was ever going to attend.

Gradually the calls became more insistent, but if anything, that only reinforced my sense of – well, I would be pussyfooting around the subject if I were to simply call it “resolve.” This was one of those rare moments when I had no question that I was Doing the Right Thing, however insignificant, however ineffectual in the greater scheme of things my refusal might be.

Then Lee called himself. I tried to be equally deflective, if no less disingenuous. Maybe we could meet in Harvard Square some time for a cup of coffee if he happened to be coming to Boston. Had he read my novel, Nighthawk Blues? Well, that turned out to be something of a miscalculation. I mean, what were the chances that he would turn out to be among the 2000 or so readers (tops) who had found their way to my single published novel? He appeared to be genuinely affronted.

Read it? he said. He then proceeded to recite a brief précis before delivering an enthusiastic appreciation of its principal character, a cantankerous old bluesman who, like Howlin’ Wolf or Big Joe Williams, for me represented the Life Force.

“Come on, are you kidding?” Lee said with indignant enthusiasm. “I’ve read everything you’ve ever written.” And then proceeded to prove it as he reeled off a list of publications even I might have forgotten, including a 1967 interview with Buddy Guy that had appeared in Crawdaddy. “You know,” he said, without so much as figurative wink, “the two of us are a lot alike. We’re just two white guys trying to make it in a black world.”

Well, all right. I very much doubted that I could fully subscribe to that. But I must admit, he got my attention. That was when I began to reconsider my position and, after checking with my father to make sure he didn’t feel I would become part of the Republican Big Propaganda Machine by agreeing to attend (“I mean, Pete, they don’t even know who you are,” my father said cheerfully), I finally relented. And that was how I came to be a guest at the “Celebration for Young Americans” (its proper title), put on almost under cover of night by the Committee for the American Bicentennial Presidential Inaugural, at the Washington Convention Center in honor of the inauguration of President George H.W. Bush.

It would be impossible to describe just how surreal all of this really was. Wandering around the cavernous Convention Center the afternoon of the concert, encountering old friends and acquaintances like Delbert McClinton, Mac Rebennack, Carla Thomas, William Bell, and Willie Dixon, each wearing an expression of incredulity on his or her face that as much as said, What are you doing here? In Willie Dixon’s case the incredulity was underscored by a big Jesse Jackson for President button that required no further elucidation. Over the course of the afternoon and evening I encountered figures like Roger Ailes, Strom Thurmond, and ultra-conservative direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie – now, please don’t imagine I’m claiming any real acquaintance here, but I did get to meet and observe them in their native habitat. I even got to meet the newly elected President. I was sitting in a box with Miss National Teenager and her parents, who in my mind’s eye (and very likely in real life, too) were eyeing me with thinly veiled contempt, when Lee came over and said, “Would you like to meet the President?” What could I say to an invitation offered so graciously? I had met Jimmy Carter in passing at his inauguration in company with James Talley (James had given a wonderful Woody Guthrie-esque performance), and President Carter had started talking to James about John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This wasn’t that kind of meeting, but it was, as I say, very gracious, and I chalked it up to one more element of my education, it was all part of My Adventures Among the Republicans.

Throughout it all there were two constants. The first was Lee’s unfailing enthusiasm, which I saw overcome even the most intransigent resistance of the most skeptical of the musicians – well, it wasn’t just his enthusiasm, it was his courtesy, his graciousness, his respect, and (just as with his expressed regard for my writing) the genuine deference he paid to both their person and their art.

The other constant was the magic of the music. Now this was not, as you might imagine, the most responsive of audiences. If there was clapping, it came – unintentionally – on the off (the “proper” one and three) beat. If there was applause it was generally tepid, even after the most passionate performances. But for whatever reason — and Howell Begle, whom I met for the first time that night, has always theorized it was the respect with which they were treated (not excluding either pay or amenities) and the ceremoniousness of the occasion – the musicians almost to a person seemed to rise to the occasion, and the performances almost without exception were inspired and self-contained in a manner that transcended their surroundings. (“I’ve never felt so much a part of things,” said one artist, referring specifically to the thrill of sharing an experience like this with so many of his peers.) But you can be the judge of that for yourself.

     I continued to see and hear from Lee over the next eighteen months or so, even after he got sick with a brain tumor that would kill him at forty, just two years after the Inauguration. I saw him on Beale Street in Memphis with Rufus, Carla and Marvell Thomas and Polly Walker, who with her husband, Cato, was an integral part of the B.B. King story from the beginning. It was the evening of the Republicans’ Lincoln Day Dinner, for which he had hired Marvell to provide the entertainment, and while I’m sure Lee enjoyed himself among his fellow pols, on Beale Street he was truly in his element. He called me when he was forced to resign from the Board of Trustees of Howard University and said what I’m sure he said publicly many times, “You know being on that Board was the greatest honor that could ever happen to me. I understand why those kids protested my appointment – hell, I would have been out there on the protest line if I had been them – but I wish they could have understood how much I could have brought to the school.”

He was nearly as proud when he put out his album, Red Hot and Blue, named for both the Dewey Phillips radio show that announced the birth of rock ‘n’ roll and the barbecue chain in which he was a principal investor and which was the site of the late-hours after-party following the Inaugural Ball. The album was an all-star affair featuring lead guitar by Lee and B.B. King, and guest vocals by Carla Thomas, Chuck Jackson, Isaac Hayes, Billy Preston, and Sam Moore, with profits assigned to various charities explicitly benefiting black youth. “Rhythm and blues is all-American music,” Lee wrote. “It’s the best music this country has ever produced, the most totally American music there is….and we are committed to ensuring that our children and future generations will have a chance to enjoy it as much as we have.”

How to explain it? I can’t. I have been challenged over the years with respect to both my own hypocrisy and Lee’s. There was no way, said one acquaintance, a well-known cultural critic, that Lee could really have appreciated the blues, given not only his political beliefs – which in the end I think were negligible – but his political actions, which were not. Think Willie Horton and the whole Dukakis campaign, which Lee himself recanted for its apparent racism and “naked cruelty” in a public apology in Life magazine shortly before he died.

 When I think of Lee, I think of his intensity and enthusiasm, the inexcusable glee with which he cut down opponents and the undeniable love and respect he showed the musicians and the music. Don’t ask me to square the two – all you’re going to get from me is an inconclusive meditation on the multifariousness of the human experience. “I don’t think anything is more helpful to the body politic or to the people in general than music,” Lee wrote in the liner notes to the album. “Music is harmony and harmony is what we are seeking in politics and in life.”

“It’s a dream come true,” he said on the night of the Inauguration.

PG on NPR: Sam Cooke & A Change is Gonna Come

Guest Blogger: Eli 'Paperboy' Reed on Roscoe Robinson

photo by George Korval

PETER GURALNICK:

The first time I heard Eli play, he was doing impassioned versions of Elmore James songs, with wild slide guitar and heartfelt (but very young – he was only 18 or 19) vocals.

The next time I saw him, his playing was just as impassioned, but his singing was of an entirely different order. He explained how it had happened. After serving an apprenticeship in the Chicago church (various Chicago churches), he had come under the influence of Roscoe Robinson. 

I had known Roscoe for almost a decade at that point. I had met him when I first started working on my Sam Cooke biography. He and Sam had been fast friends and rivals in competing teen gospel quartets, and Roscoe was as full of pep nearly fifty years later as I imagined he and Sam must have been when they first met. Today, at 85, I don’t think Roscoe has lost a step, and Roscoe and Eli have been performing together off and on for the last five or six years. Well, look, let Eli tell you about it. But don’t miss the incredible performance at the end – Roscoe singing, Eli playing, and the whole world spinning on its axis.

Just remember one thing: ROSCOE ROBINSON BELONGS IN THE ALABAMA MUSIC HALL OF FAME. Vote early and often.

ELI REED:

Roscoe Robinson is sitting on my living room couch in Allston, Massachusetts. He has been there for a few hours and it isn’t getting any more comfortable for me, or for him. The night before, we played our first show together at the club Johnny D’s Uptown, in Somerville, Massachusetts, and it went remarkably well. Now we are supposed to be on our way to Brooklyn for the next show; the only problem, my band is late. Very late. One hour goes by, then two, then three, and the band has still not arrived. I am nervous, and he can tell. Roscoe takes this time, not to be frustrated with me (though it’s clear that he is) but to impart some wisdom on my young mind: “You got to learn to control your people, otherwise they’ll never respect you,” he says, and I try to take it in, but really I just want to get the hell out of there.

    The previous day, I had met Roscoe Robinson for the first time. There aren’t too many singers out there who have his sort of pedigree. He’s sung with both sets of Blind Boys (Alabama and Mississippi), recorded for Trumpet, Chess, Wand and Sound Stage Seven just to name a few of the legendary labels, and has been making records for more than SIXTY years. He was the hand-picked successor to Archie Brownlee, perhaps the greatest Gospel shouter in history. He’s a legend in the world of both Gospel and Soul. I was a little nervous.

    At the time, I was barely 23 years old, and I fancied myself a Soul singer. I had done my time in some juke joints in Mississippi and some churches in Chicago, but I thought I knew a whole lot more about singing than I actually did. A friend had arranged for me and my band, The True Loves,  to back up Roscoe at some shows he had put together, first in Boston and New York and then in Chicago the following week. I decided to build a tour around these shows; we would play the first two shows with Roscoe, then tour our way out to Chicago and meet Roscoe there for the final show. This would be the first time that we would play outside of the northeast.

    After thinking long and hard about what music I should play in the car (I settled on the Swanee Quintet), I went to pick up Roscoe at the airport. He was dressed immaculately in a bright blue, double-breasted suit (I learned later on to expect that) and, at 79, he carried his own bag and had no one helping him.

    Hearing the Gospel music playing in the car surprised him; he seemed slightly incredulous of me, this young white kid, and how I might know about this music. Roscoe is a keen observer, and he’s certainly not one to show all of his cards right away. It took me a while to realize that he liked me from the start. Later that day he led a rehearsal with my band, carefully correcting everyone’s parts and making sure they did things the way he wanted. He was all business, and because of that, the show went well.

    The next day, while we were STILL waiting for the band to arrive, I decided to sit at the piano and sing some Gospel tunes, and that’s when we really started to get along. He laughed and shouted and joined in as I fumbled my way through Alex Bradford and James Cleveland tunes, and after a few minutes, we both forgot about how late the band was and we got the spirit. It was the beginning of a friendship that I cherish to this day.

    The show in Brooklyn was great (though the drive was harrowing, with Roscoe critiquing my driving the whole way), and so was the one a few days later in Chicago. Each time we performed with Roscoe, I learned more about how to work a crowd, how to create dynamics within a song and how to build to a climax, only to bring it down to a whisper seconds later. Roscoe’s singing ranged from powerful Gospel fire (“Leave You in the Arms of Another Man”) to smooth R&B crooning (“A Thousand Rivers”) to stomping Soul-for-the-dance-floor (“That’s Enough”), his status as an elder statesmen shining through it all.

    I may have learned more, though, just sitting and talking with him in the dressing rooms. We talked about music, of course, but also about how to be a good manager, how to maintain a relationship while on the road, how to keep your voice healthy and how to keep your shoes from getting scuffed in your suitcase (put them inside your socks!)

    After we finished that tour, Roscoe and I kept in touch, speaking over the phone regularly and continuing our conversations about music, life, and love. I brought him up to Brooklyn again for our first annual Brooklyn Soul Festival (he killed as usual), and when the band and I were traveling through Birmingham we brought him on stage as a special guest and he brought the house down. The morning after that show he picked me up in his own car (still driving at 83) and took me out to breakfast.

    In the summer of 2012, I asked my longtime girlfriend to marry me and, unbelievably, she said yes. One of my first calls was to Roscoe to tell him the good news. He immediately said, “I’m coming!” and I certainly couldn’t refuse him. While planning the wedding, we got the idea to have Roscoe sing a song during the ceremony.

    When the big day came in September of 2013, Roscoe arrived, dressed as sharp as ever (upstaging me as usual). The song we chose for him to sing was one he had written during his time with The Blind Boys of Mississippi, “Sending up My Timber.”

photo by Clean Plate Pictures

    There’s a dream that I dream
    Of my heavenly home
    And I know, that I’m going there some day
    That’s why I’m sending up my timber, everyday.
    
    The song is about how you need to live a good life to “send up your timber” and build yourself a home in heaven, but my wife and I felt that it could be applied to how to build a successful marriage and a “heavenly” home together.

    It meant the world to me that Roscoe, the man who taught me so much, not just about my craft but about how to be a better man, was the one singing those words on the happiest day of my life. After the ceremony was over, Roscoe found my wife and me in a quiet moment and attempted to thank us for having him there, but I stopped him. Before he could thank us, I had to thank him, for everything that he had done for me and for being a part of such a momentous occasion. I am proud to call Roscoe Robinson my mentor and my friend, and I can’t wait for the next time we sing together.

http://www.elipaperboyreed.com/

Waylon, Willie and the Boys

http://youtu.be/Zt-b7B3gK7I

I’m giving a talk – well, it’s a conversation, really – on “How Waylon Jennings Changed My World” at the Country Music Hall of Fame on January 25.

This video shows some of the reasons why.

One of a series of five segments from a 1984 TV special called “The Door Is Always Open,” it exhibits all of the qualities of raffish good humor, self-deprecating charm, soulful expression, and plain-spoken truth that first drew me to country music – and it is curated by Waylon, who provided me with a personal introduction a decade earlier. It’s all in tribute to Sue Brewer, den mother to several generations of Nashville singer/songwriters, who managed George Jones’ club, Possum Holler,  but whose home served as both creative exchange and refuge for every one of the performers featured here, up until her death in 1981.

Waylon proves to be the most sardonic (make that “most genuine”) of genial hosts, introducing a beardless and thoroughly engaging Willie Nelson (“We used to go by Sue Brewer’s house,” Waylon says, “and listen to Willie smile”) who opens with a vibrant “I Gotta Get Drunk,” then seconds just about everyone else on guitar, including Faron Young on “Hello Walls,” Willie’s first #1 country songwriting hit. In addition, you get Roger Miller’s irrepressible energy, contagious good humor, and inimitable sound effects (Roger Miller is one of the few artists who could be accurately described as having arrived, purposefully, from another planet), all accompanied by the appreciative laughter and encouragement of every country music legend in the room.

This is what I encountered when I first met Waylon Jennings in 1974 – well, not so much the irrepressible humor but the individualism, the embrace of life (the embrace of the future), the appreciation of eccentricity, the denial of category that has marked every great American artist from August Wilson to Merle Haggard, from Howlin’ Wolf to Mark Twain. It was the beginning of the so-called “Outlaw Movement” – but that wasn’t what drew me to Waylon or the music. It was, rather, his existential embrace of the moment so perfectly exemplified in his collection of Billy Joe Shaver songs, Honky Tonk Heroes. It was that same celebration of everyday reality, without any need  for adornment or prettification, that I had first found in the blues.

I remember seeing Willie Nelson at Fan Fair around this same time, just after Red Headed Stranger came out (not long after his other great “concept album,” Phases and Stages) and being just as mesmerized. Neither Waylon nor Willie was selling anything but the truth. “Country music is just as serious as any other kind of music,” Waylon told me then, speaking of a proposed national television appearance. “They wanted me to do ‘We Had It All’ sitting on a horse. I couldn’t do that shit. I told them to fuck themselves. To them [country music] ain’t nothing but a goddamn joke.”

This was the new world I sought entry to. It seemed like everything was possible. (“I think right now that the country’s in the best shape for the future that it’s ever been,” said Waylon, “because the kids are thinking and worrying about things that never even occurred to me when I was a kid.”) If you want a quick run-down on some of that raw, undiluted feeling, check out this video series. You’ll get everything from Hank Williams Jr.’s witty take-off on his own renunciation of respectability, “All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down” to the painful beauty of Mickey Newbury’s “Sweet Memory” to Webb Pierce’s shattering “There Stands the Glass,” branded by his peers as “The National Anthem.”

Traditional country, folk country, outlaw country, classic compositions by Harlan Howard (“Busted”) and Kris Kristofferson (“Sunday Morning Coming Down”) – just set aside any preconceptions, these are performances and performers that defy categorization or idealization. They are simply proudly, defiantly, and irremediably themselves. Just like they should be.

Saturday, January 25, 2014 : 1:30pm

Special Program: Peter Guralnick in Conversation with Robert Gordon

Museum admission or Museum membership required for program admittance. Due to limited seating, a program pass is required for your complimentary seat. Passes will be available for pick-up at the Museum two hours prior to the start of the program, on a first-come, first-served basis. Your pass does not guarantee you a seat after the program begins.

MEMBERS ONLY:Call 615.416.2050 or email Reservations@CountryMusicHallofFame.org to reserve your program pass in advance. Reservations will be accepted until 48 hours before the program, or until the program is at capacity. Your pass does not guarantee you a seat after the program begins.

Read more: http://countrymusichalloffame.org/calendar/view/2383?month=01&day=25&year=2014#ixzz2r85QUt60

Jan 15, 2014: PG at The Grammy Museum

A Conversation With Peter Guralnick

Doors: 7 PM

Admission is free; reservations required. Members receive priority seating. To reserve your seats, please e-mail programs@grammymuseum.org

Peter Guralnick has been called “a national resource” by critic Nat Hentoff for work that has argued passionately and persuasively for the vitality of this country’s intertwined black and white musical traditions.  Books by Guralnick include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love. Of the first Bob Dylan wrote, “Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe. This book cancels out all others.” He won a GRAMMY Award for his liner notes for Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club and wrote and coproduced the documentary Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll as well as writing the scripts for the GRAMMY-winning documentary Sam Cooke/Legend and Martin Scorsese’s blues documentary Feel Like Going Home. He is also a recent inductee in the Blues Hall of Fame. Other books include an acclaimed trilogy on American roots music, Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going Home; the biographical inquiry Searching for Robert Johnson; and the novel, Nighthawk Blues. His latest book, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, has been hailed as “monumental, panoramic, an epic tale told against a backdrop of brilliant, shimmering music, intense personal melodrama, and vast social changes.” He is currently working on a biography of Sam Phillips.  Please join us in the Clive Davis Theater as we help celebrate the release of two enhanced e-books, Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway. Guralnick will speak about his writing career and will take questions from the audience.

Guest Blogger: Mr. C on Al Green

I met Joe McEwen (a/k/a Mr. C) in 1970 when Jake and Alexandra and I were selling tickets to a Lightnin’ Hopkins concert at the door. Jake was 2, and Joe was 18 or 19. “Did you mean what you said in that Solomon Burke article you wrote in Rolling Stone?” Joe said, without bothering to introduce himself. “Yes,” I said. We’ve been friends ever since.

Recently Joe came across this amazing Al Green clip and dropped by to tell us about it.

– PG 

Mr C:

Al Green didn’t share peanut butter sandwiches with his grade school classmates.  “I’ve always been a loner,” he tells interviewer Ellis Haizlip. 

“I was always the fellow that was alone, by myself.”  

 This little bit of revelation is spoken without irony or pretense. In this remarkable performance/interview on the Soul! TV show aired on January 3, 1973, Al Green seems unburdened by the crush of success that has suddenly thrust this once lonely schoolboy into the guy that now everybody wants to know. He talks, but mostly sings, with full band and by himself, guitar in hand. Despite his owndisclaimer, Al is in great voice and fully engaged, seeming to enjoy Soul!’s inviting setting. For an hour, we’re absorbed by the full flowering of the mercurial Al Green.

Soul! was a PBS black culture hour, the brain child of Manhattan sophisticate Haizlip. It aired from September of 1968 to March of 1973, a Thursday night show that originally featured King Curtis as house bandleader. Guests ranged from Apollo stars like Joe Tex, Jerry Butler, and the Manhattans, to an array of such political and literary lights of the era as James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Shirley Chisholm, and Julius Lester among others.  It was ambitious and understated, a television show that succeeded without the flash of the moment.  A small audience sat, café-style, at small tables, while Ellis Haizlip directed our attention. Looking at Soul! 40 years later, it’s wondrous that something as special and well-crafted as this managed to exist.

 Like a future album title, Al Green Explores Your Mind, on this January evening it was more a case of Al Green Exploring His Own Mind.  And we get to ride along.

http://www.thirteen.org/soul/jan-3-1973/#.UsqKtvbLf4R

Remembering Johnny Shines

An audio excerpt from my 1970 interview with Johnny Shines is included in the new enhanced e-book of Feel Like Going Home. Here’s a brief clip, with Johnny playing guitar as we talk, at the Hotel Diplomat in Boston’s South End.

Once you got past the brilliance of his music, the  first thing that struck you about Johnny Shines was his resolve, his resolve and and a kind of invincible optimism that he could, that he would accomplish anything that he set out to do.

Sometimes he was inclined to dismiss this quality as just plain stubbornness – he would say with a grin that he was like an old mule, but you knew that wasn’t it. A mule never had Johnny’s sense of adventure, a mule never possessed Johnny’s wonderful sense of humor, and stubbornness certainly couldn’t explain John’s unquenchable thirst for knowledge, his determination even in his mid-70s, to explore new worlds. Don’t forget: This was a man who ended up in Chicago strictly by accident; he was on his way to Africa, in 1941, because he wanted to find out what it was really like over there. “They teach you in school that Africa’s full of cannibals and savages,” he said, “but so many important things have come from there that I wanted to find out the truth for myself.”

That was the second thing that struck you about Johnny: his passion for the truth and his almost contagious enthusiasm for any subject he was interested in. I don’t know anyone who could have been less of a salesman: Johnny never had any kind of a line – he was always straight with you to the point where he could make a stranger uncomfortable with his honesty, but even so he sold you on anything that captured his imagination just on the strength of his own enthusiasm for it. With some musicians this curiosity and enthusiasm is confined to their music, sometimes not even to that. But John’s took in the whole world.

I was 25 when I first met John, probably a very young 25, and I was in awe of him strictly because of his music. He was out on tour with Willie Dixon and the Chicago Blues All Stars, and I had written a story about the group, but it was Johnny I wanted to interview because I was so knocked out by his singing and playing. I had listened to “Brutal Hearted Woman” and “Evening Sun” and “Joliet Blues” and “Dynaflow” over and over, and I was a true believer, but Johnny wasn’t interested in that. He was 53 years old, and he was like a kid let loose in the world: he wasn’t looking for disciples, he was just interested in everything. Talking about the past, I asked him about hard times, and he responded by speaking about what it was like to live in what he called an “exploratory world.”

“It’s very exciting,” he said, recalling his travels with Robert Johnson in the ‘30s and looking forward to his own new-found career in the late ‘60s. “Say, for an instance you leave here, you go maybe four or five hundred miles, and you don’t know nobody, everything is new to you. It’s really, I mean, if a person lives in an exploratory world, then this is the best thing that ever happened to him.”

That was the world that Johnny lived in right up to the moment he died. He was interested in people. He was interested in how things worked. He loved to read. He loved to fish and hunt. He prized the past, and he looked forward to the future – always. When I first met John over 40 years ago now, I never dreamt that we could actually become friends, this was Johnny Shines after all, Johnny Shines, one of my idols – but because he was Johnny Shines we became friends right away. With John it was friendship or nothing. He could readily accept differences of background and personality, politics, philosophy – he actually appreciated the differences – but if you wanted to be a friend of John’s, you had to bring something to the party.

Most of all when I think of Johnny, I hear his voice: singing, talking, just chuckling quietly to himself, booming out in that way that could always get you to sit up and take notice. “You think I can sing now?” Johnny said to me one time. “You should have heard me back in the '30s. Back then I could scream like a panther.” But, of course, he could just as easily whisper, too. Sometimes I think he would drop his voice just to make sure his audience – whether it was a single individual or a concert-hall full of people – was really listening. It didn’t matter whether he whispered or he screamed, John was always going to be heard, and his message was always going to get through.

“I’m a Christian man,” he said one time, “but I play the blues. I don’t feel that the blues is dirty. Society decided for us that the blues was dirty. That’s why I almost feel like I got to carry it on. I want to remind people, black people especially, because if you forget your beginnings you can’t do much with the future.” John Shines never forgot his beginnings, and he never lost sight of the future. That was his mark as a musician and as a man.

Muddy Waters audio clip from enhanced Feel Like Going Home e-book

Rollingstone.com premiered an audio clip (from Peter’s 1970 interview with Muddy Waters) that will be included in the enhanced e-book edition of Feel Like Going Home.

Lost Highway and Feel like Going Home will be released in this enhanced format in December.. more details here.

I Still Miss Someone: Roland Janes 1933-2013

Roland, Robert and me

I really loved Roland.

But then so did everyone else who really knew him.

I could try to be clever and say it was for his virtuosity (Roland, a master of mischievous word play, would undoubtedly frown on that), because he was indeed a brilliant guitarist, who provided all those carefully calibrated, arrestingly spontaneous solos and rhythm patterns on so many of the Sun Records classics.

But that, of course, is not what I am speaking of here.

I’m speaking, really, of a virtuosity of spirit, which no one who ever encountered the man could miss. A virtuosity – a generosity of soul that is universally praised, often sought after, but rarely attained. And in Roland’s case, like his guitar playing, it was achieved without visible effort, scarcely ever calling attention to itself.

If you ever visited the Sam C. Phillips Recording Studio at 639 Madison Avenue in Memphis, you would know Roland Janes. He was there managing the studio, engineering sessions, greeting the world, every day more or less for the last thirty years, working with everyone from Charlie Rich to Memphis rappers Three 6 Mafia and Al Kapone to Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, and anyone who might wander in off the street looking to cut a “personal” record, the same way Elvis once did at Sam’s original studio at 706 Union around the corner.

At that original Sun studio Roland played on just about every hit (and, he would be quick to point out with a dry chuckle, on even more misses) that came out on the label from mid-1956 on. He arrived with Jack Clement and Billy Lee Riley that summer, going on to play the blazing double-whammy solo on Riley’s “Flyin’ Saucers Rock ‘n’ Roll.” But it was, really, with Jerry Lee Lewis’ arrival at the tag end of the year that he would cement his place in rock ‘n’ roll history. How many times have you heard Jerry Lee’s exuberant shout, “Ro’ Boy,” as he exhorts the otherwise nameless guitarist to take yet another perfectly conceived, perfectly concise solo? It’s for his musicianship most of all, of course (along with his own short-lived but influential Rita label and his Sonic Recording Studio, one of the principal progenitors of the Memphis garage-band explosion of the ‘60s), that Roland was named to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame just last month.

But forget that. I mean, don’t forget the music – don’t ever forget the music. But forget the brilliant solos, and forget the accolades (as Roland said about fame, “I never really cared about any of that”) if you want to try to understand the spirit of the man.

Anyone who stopped by the studio, I don’t care for how long, could not miss that spirit. He was such a kind man. He was such a smart man. He was such a decent and committed man – and by “committed” I don’t mean to suggest anything like the quality that politicians often cite when referring to their own inflexibility. I mean, he was committed in the same way that Sam Phillips proved himself to be over and over again in the studio, committed to bringing out the best in you, committed to exploring the you of you, whoever you were, however you presented yourself, however sophisticated or unsophisticated your tastes. Not that Roland was above kidding around with you. Sometimes after a particularly bad pun, Roland might simply engage you with a quizzical look, as if to say, I hope you got that, it wasn’t really that hard. But mostly he was in the business of encouraging you to be the best “you” you could possibly be.

I’m not sure when I first met Roland – it must have been over thirty years ago - in the studio, of course – but there was no end to our meetings and, given Roland’s nature, I’m sure there will be no end. I remember when we were recording the Charlie Rich album, Pictures and Paintings, in 1991, it was Roland, who was second engineer on the session, who  was, really, the key to its success. It wasn’t that Charlie didn’t have a lot to say; as Sam Phillips always said, it was almost as if he had too much to say, but given his deeply introspective nature too often it stayed bottled up inside. It was hard for Charlie – he had an intrinsic fear of letting go (he would tell you it was “anxiety panic disorder”), but even though Sam’s sons, Knox and Jerry, were present most of the time, and Scott Billington did a wonderfully sympathetic job of producing, it was only Roland who had the capacity to make Charlie feel – I’m not going to say at ease, but at home. And not just because they were old friends and colleagues. And not because of anything special that Roland said. It was just – Roland.

Just like Sam, whom he thought the world of (if Roland was everybody else’s mentor, Sam Phillips was his) he was a teacher – without all the big words that Sam used maybe but with the same sure sense of purpose. Every year his Christmas story provided an illuminating lesson. These were not conventional Christmas greetings – they were not just the usual well-intentioned summaries of family events over the last calendar year. They were more like real-life short stories with a strong moral underpinning. One of my favorites was 2011’s “House of Broken Dreams,” which began, “In my younger days I fancied myself to be a fine guitar player and singer” and then went on to paint a picture of the pawnshop owner who had given him a boost back in those early days. With another aspiring young musician, Roland (or the unnamed protagonist) had rented a room over the pawnshop, which was called “The House of Broken Dreams.” As Roland tells it, the name was something of a misnomer, if only because of the kindness of its owner, Mr. Oscar, a Holocaust survivor. Well, I’m not going to tell you the whole story, it’s more of a meditation, really, but it led Roland to his usual Christmas conclusion: “Let me wish a Merry Christmas to one and all – and to all A GREAT LIFE.”

We shot video interviews for the enhanced digital editions of my books in the studio this past spring. One of the highlights was a conversation with Roland – not an interview exactly, the intention was always conversation. But as we were talking about Jerry Lee Lewis, whom Roland has always cherished not just for his genius but for his fundamentally good-hearted character, Roland evidently decided it was time to turn the tables on me. If this was really a conversation, then he wanted to ask me some questions, too. “Well, how’d you get started, Peter?” he said. “How did you first get into this music?” And while we were at it, he wondered how I had come to write my first book. He imagined I must get quite a bit of satisfaction out of the writing, he said. And then we started talking about the satisfactions to be derived not just from writing or music but from any form of creative engagement.

The last conversation I had with Roland, when he first got sick last month, he wanted to know how the video project was going. I told him it was going great – it was really fun to work with my son, Jake, and Memphis writer and filmmaker Robert Gordon, and it was always great to work on any project with him. “So you feel good about it, Peter?” he said. I told him that I did. “That’s good,“ Roland said. “That’s good.”

Magic & Flying: Doc Pomus

That was the original title that Sharyn Felder gave to the documentary she wanted to make about her father, the legendary songwriter Doc Pomus. The 10-minute trailer that she made consisted of brief snippets of conversation with some of the people he loved, worked with, and influenced: Lou Reed, Little Jimmy Scott, B.B. King, and Doctor John. It could just as easily have included conversations with dozens more – because, as Jerry Wexler frequently said, Doc was the heart and soul, the

conscience,

of the music industry.

 Doc would have eschewed such labels, but AKA Doc Pomus, the wonderful documentary that was eventually made by Peter Miller and Will Hechter (with Sharyn’s full participation) and is just now making its way to a theater near you if you happen to live in New York or Los Angeles, makes the same essential point.

He was born Jerome Solon Felder in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn in 1925 and stricken with polio at the age of six, compelled to spend the rest of his life in braces and crutches, or in a wheelchair. At fifteen he discovered the blues through the message imbedded in Big Joe Turner’s “Piney Brown Blues”; as Doc frequently said, “It was the transformation of my life.”

He started hanging out in Greenwich Village, listening to Frankie Newton’s band at George’s Tavern, and when the proprietor wanted to throw him out one night for nursing a single beer the whole evening, Doc came up with the perfect alibi. “I’m a blues singer,” he said. “I’m here to do a song.” The song he sang, without any further ado or preparation, was, naturally, “Piney Brown Blues.”

He started singing regularly – in the Village, in Brooklyn, “college student by day, professional blues singer by night.” To hide his new avocation from his family he needed a name. That was how he became Doc Pomus, which served as both an identity and a disguise.

He became a songwriter by the same sort of fortuitous accident that he had become a blues singer: he wrote songs for himself, and then Gatemouth Moore recorded one of his numbers for National in 1946 on a session produced by Herb Abramson and engineered by Tommy Dowd. When Abramson co-founded Atlantic with Ahmet Ertegun the following year, and Dowd became the new label’s chief engineer, Doc became an Atlantic songwriter. A couple of years later his idol, Joe Turner, recorded one of his songs for the label.

 His breakthrough came with rock ‘n’ roll: Ray Charles (“Lonely Avenue”), the Coasters (“Young Blood”), the Drifters “This Magic Moment,” “Save the Last Dance For Me”), Dion “"A Teenager in Love”), Big Joe Turner (“Still in Love”), and Elvis Presley (“Little Sister,” “His Latest Flame,” “Viva Las Vegas”) all recorded songs written by Doc, some by himself, some with a variety of occasional collaborators, but most with his principal songwriting partner of the decade, Mort Shuman. The song for which they are best known, “Save the Last Dance For Me,” remains one of the enduring monuments of the era, and indeed one of the most enduring standards of our time.

When you think of Doc Pomus, though, you don’t just think of a list of songs. Because no matter how extraordinary the songs are, the man compelled no less attention. After being stricken by polio, it was his dream to become the first heavyweight champion of the world on crutches, “a man among men,” as he would always say. This is a perfectly understandable fantasy for a lost, lonely child, but it is in effect what he did become: if he was not the heavyweight champion in boxing, he became a champion of another sort.

He maintained his perspective. He maintained his humanity. He maintained his no-bullshit sense of compassion, his omnivorous interest in everything and everyone that was going on (tell Doc a story, and you’d always get two in return), his commitment to help everyone and anyone who needed it – without forfeiting his right to grumble about it. What was most astonishing about Doc was that he denied no element of his humanness. More than anything else, that may have been the quality that most defined his writing.

What I loved most about Doc – well, I loved everything, really – was his sense of constant engagement. Not just creative engagement either, though that was certainly part of it. I first met Doc the same way that almost everyone else interviewed for the film did: he called me up – in my case, to express his admiration for something I had written. Within moments, it seemed, we were fast friends, within minutes we were off to the races, caught up in a dialogue which for me will go on in my mind’s ear for as long as I live.

I certainly can’t claim any credit. If it had been left to me, I might have just sat there for hours, for days maybe, a timid acolyte in the presence of the legendary songwriter. But Doc didn’t permit that. He quizzed me, he grilled me, he voiced his enthusiasms, he sought out mine – he conveyed this incredible life force, this pure energy and love for people and ideas that I’ve rarely encountered in so undiminished, so undisguised a form. “Peter, you got a minute?” he would say on the phone and then just launch into whatever was on his mind at that particular moment: music, politics, philosophy, friends, it didn’t matter. The dialogue just bubbled along irrepressibly, taking its own natural course but always brought down to earth, and into perspective, by Doc’s inevitable conclusion: “What can I tell you? Just the same old nonsense.” Which, of course, it was and it wasn’t – but it was.

The thing about Doc was that he unfailingly put himself on the line. Not just in his songs but in every aspect of his life. I think that was what I learned most of all from Doc, the notion that you must put yourself on the line, whether for friends or politics or art or merely in expressing your opinions honestly. For Doc there was no holding back. He was passionate – about everything – but he didn’t bullshit himself. And he didn’t bullshit anyone else. Which I think as much as anything else was what sustained his creativity.

In the last ten years of his life Doc wrote some of his very greatest songs, songs that matched, and in some cases surpassed, the quality of his biggest hits. Most were written with Mac Rebennack, AKA Dr. John, his friend, collaborator, sometime lifestyle-debater, above all his “partner.” (“There’s a lot of kind of partners you can have,” says Mac. “Me and Doc was a lot of different kind of partners on some off-the wall level that I hadn’t had with nobody in a long, long time.”)

 With the later songs Doc achieved the kind of profound simplicity that he had been striving for all of his writing life. He knew it, and was proud of it – but he also knew that it wasn’t what went before that mattered, it wasn’t honors or validation (though he liked those, too) that yielded satisfaction: no matter what you have achieved, no matter what recognition may come your way, he would say over and over again – and mean it – it was what came next that mattered, it was the next challenge, creative, personal, it didn’t matter: life was living up to the challenge.

He kept writing almost up to his last breath – on a portable keyboard, with Dr. John, in his hospital room. He kept on reaching out a helping hand to others, too. Towards the end he could honestly say, “I’m doing the same stuff I always did. I’m acting the same way I always acted. The only difference is that now I talk about it. At one time I wouldn’t express my opinions except to maybe my closest friends, because it wasn’t cool to be that animated. Now I don’t hold anything back. I don’t know, maybe it’s just so I’ll get noticed, but I really don’t want to live to see a day where the space that I take up in this world is like some musty closet, some little broom closet somewhere. I want to be able to talk out – even if I’m wrong.”

 Doc did talk out, and he filled an enormous space. He lived and died, as this film clearly shows, surrounded by love.

 AKA Doc Pomus is available on various video and streaming services including Amazon and iTunes

Guest Blog: Young Colin Linden Meets The Wolf

Colin and I would certainly have been friends even if we hadn’t had Howlin’ Wolf to bring us together. From the time we first met, we had so much to share. But as Sam Phillips always pointed out, there’s something uniquely spiritual about music – and there’s something uniquely spiritual about Colin. Listen to his solo albums. Listen to the records he’s produced. Listen to all those wonderful Blackie and the Rodeo Kings albums. Go out and hear him in person, whether he’s playing the Bourbon Street Blues and Boogie Bar in Nashville or on the road with Bob Dylan. Or check him out on the television show, Nashville, both for his cameo appearances and the music that he consistently contributes to the show. Colin always has something soulful to say. Howlin’ Wolf charged him with bringing everything he had to offer, all of his feeling and all of his humanity, to the music, and he has. So much of that feeling comes through in what he has written here about the Wolf – and about himself. Not to mention the picture that his mom took, which has traveled around with him in his wallet all these years.– PG

Meeting Howlin’ Wolf

By Colin Linden

Howlin’ Wolf was already 61 years old and an undeniable legend in the world of music when I first met him. I was an 11-year-old fat, white kid living in Toronto. But I felt, and still feel, that we forged a genuine bond that day. Though he was a hugely influential blues artist, he was, first and foremost, a hard-working, committed, devoted 6-nights-a-week-plus-a matinee-on-Saturday musician. And it was my fate and great fortune to have first met him at one of those Saturday matinees.

I was passionately connected to music–even as a  young child, it was the thing for me. Records took me into a world of mystery. They captured my imagination, and overtook my thoughts. They made me feel connected to another universe, one where I felt I absolutely belonged. I started dreaming about playing and singing and making records. I was always drawn to the blue side of music. When I first heard the Wolf, on Labor Day of 1971, it was a life-changing experience. His voice jumped though the speakers–“ I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I ain’t got no diamonds, I-I-I-I-I-I-I ain’t go no gold, but I do have love to satisfy your soul….cause I’m built for comfort, I ain’t built for speed!” I had already heard many of his songs–the ones performed by rock artists like Cream, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds.  But when I heard the Wolf, it was much more intense and raw and serious. He didn’t sound like a pop star. Even at age 11, I recognized that he was in a different league than his youthful devotees. I could tell that he was the original item.

 And as I began to learn how to play guitar, I knew that it was blues music that I needed to learn.

 When I heard that he was coming to play in Toronto, November 22-27 at the Colonial Tavern on Yonge Street, and that he was in fact playing a matinee on the Saturday, I knew I somehow had to go.

I got the number for the Colonial and called them up to find out if minors could get in. They told me that they had a balcony that was licensed as a restaurant, and yes, minors were welcome if they didn’t drink and didn’t venture downstairs. They assured me that I would be able to see and hear everything, that the show started at 3:30, but that the bar and restaurant opened at noon.

 Then, I had to convince my Mother to take me down to a bar frequented by some of the most low-down characters of the Yonge Street scene. It didn’t take much convincing. My Mom always looked for the best in others, and she thought it would be a fun show to go to. When she realized that the Wolf was an elder statesman in music, she believed it would be good for me to see somebody who had spent their whole life in music.

As the date of the Wolf’s show approached, I must have called the Colonial a dozen times to make sure the show was happening. Finally, it was Saturday, I got my Mom to leave early enough to make sure there would be no problem getting in.

We got there at 12:30 for the 3:30 show.  We walked up the stairs to the balcony and I immediately noticed that, across the room, there was another set of stairs that led down to the stage. In the corner, at the bottom of the stairs, I saw him. The Mighty Wolf!  Just finishing up his lunch, he was planning on hanging around the club until show time. I made a beeline for the stairs, rushed down to the bottom, walked right up to him and said, “Mr. Wolf, you are my hero. I would love to talk with you, but I am only 11 years old, and they won’t let me downstairs. Would you come upstairs and talk with me?”

 "Of course" he answered in the most gentle, rough-hewn voice. And with that, this massive man with the largest feet I had ever seen on a human being, followed me as I ran up the stairs.

 For the next 3 hours, he sat with me, a cup of coffee in one hand and cigarette in the other, as I asked him questions about his past, where and how he learned and from whom. He was very happy to talk and seemed to sense how much it meant for me to know the answers.  He told me that you have to play the same if you are playing for 3 people as you do if you’re playing for 3000.  And treat everyone the same–all audiences– black, white, Puerto Rican, whomever. He told me about Charley Patton, and how good he had been to him when he was young. He said that to learn his music, I needed to listen to the people he had listened to. He was mindful of the fact that I was a kid–warning me to stay away from drugs and trouble–but he talked to me with respect and purpose as if I were already an adult.  And already a musician.

 After we had been sitting for a couple of hours, I went and got my mom, who was patiently sitting at a table across the room, and she took a picture of me and the Wolf. He said to her, “I’m very fond of your son.” That photograph has been traveling with me for the past 42 years.  

 When it was time for the Wolf to play, he took the stage and sat down in a chair. He had been in ill health for awhile, and had to make sure not to overdo it.  Still, at a Saturday matinee in Toronto, he wound up and gave it everything.  He sang “Sitting on Top of the World,”’ “44 Blues,” a great version of the Chuck Willis song, “Don’t Deceive Me,” and a handful of other classics.  He took his time, he let the songs evolve on their own.  He was jovial, joked with the waitresses, sang Happy Birthday to a fan. But the music was dead serious.  He brought with him a gravitas and attention to detail that was evident in the way he led the songs and the band. They had a hushed reverence for him.  He wasn’t fooling.

Afterwards, we spoke for a while longer.  I got to meet Hubert Sumlin, Eddie Shaw, Sunnyland Slim, Andrew “Blueblood” McMahon, and S.P. Leary. I recognized their names from records made a couple of decades earlier.

I could tell that these men, like the Wolf, were in it for life.  They weren’t kids.  Meeting them planted the seed in me that playing music wasn’t something that you had to give up when you grew up. It could be a life-long calling.

Before I left, the Wolf told me, “ I’m an old man now and I won’t be around much longer.  It’s up to you to carry it on.” I took that to mean me personally, and committed to him that day that I would. He may have been talking about my whole generation, I still take it personally. It is still my mission, my honor, and my lifetime goal.