I know time is gonna take its toll
We have to pay for the love we stole
It’s a sin and we know it’s wrong
Oh, but our love keeps coming on strong
Steal away
To the dark end of the street
It’s one of pop music’s great cheating songs, a full concession to the truth, no justification, just continued intent. Carr’s deep voice is tremulous, conveying the difficulty of pursuing the wrong, and his dedication to doing so.
James Carr is often referred to as the World’s Greatest Soul Singer, though certainly other great soul singers are more renowned. From the mid- to late 1960s, he established himself with sad songs, singing with desperation, like what his life depended on was gone and what was left was these songs.
Like many of his peers, Carr has been influenced by the gospel tradition. Unlike Otis Redding, however, he is not a roller and shaker whose energy reflects the hand-clapping and swaying of the choir. Nor, like Sam and Dave, does he work into a frenzy through call-and-response. Carr has always been a quiet person, and his best work is with slower material, ballads. His father was a Baptist preacher, and one imagines Carr as a youth in church, eyes trained on his father, observing the hysteria but absorbing the solemnity.
Goldwax had just gotten started in 1964 when Claunch met Carr, who had yet to release a record. “About midnight one night, there came a knock on my door,” recalls Claunch. “I opened the door and there stood three black guys. Roosevelt Jamison, James Carr, and O. V. Wright. They said, ‘Man, we got some tapes we’d like for you to hear.’ They didn’t make an appointment or nothing, they just knocked on my door. They had their little tape recorder, portable, and I said come on in, and we sat right down in the middle of my living room floor and, man, we started playing those dang tapes of O. V. Wright and James Carr, and I really got hooked then.” Goldwax released Carr’s first two singles that year.
Carr and Wright had been singing spirituals together in the Redemption Harmonizers, and Jamison was enlisted to help them cross over to the more popular and lucrative soul music; the gospel group’s manager did not truck with the secular world. Jamison is a tall man with a soft voice, and he exudes courtesy. He composed Carr’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is,” which the Rolling Stones also soon covered. Jamison remains devoted to Carr, despite being ousted as his manager in 1966. That’s when they were appearing at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. “I really became conscious of his imbalance right after he started working on the road,” says Jamison. “When we were in New York, James told me he was going to sign with Phil Walden and Larry Uttal [a soul music label head]. Phil managed Otis Redding, and they promised to make him bigger than Otis. Later, I went up to Phil and Larry’s office, and they gave me $3,200 for James’s contract. I came downstairs and gave James $1,600 and told him he better hold on to it, because I didn’t know which way it was going from then on, but I was going back home.”
A couple months passed before he heard from Carr. “After they pushed me out, James got super sick and he came to me. He always kept my number in his mind, and if he was lost at an airport, drifting around the streets, wandering around, he would call and ask me why wasn’t I with him.”
Jamison’s voice becomes hushed as he finishes this story. “He managed to make it to my house one cold morning. There was somebody knocking on the door, and my wife asked about it. When I went to the door, snow was everywhere, and he was sitting down on the steps. He said, ‘Man, I kept looking for you and looking for you, where you been so long?’ ”
When Elliott Clark got involved in revitalizing Goldwax in the mid-1980s, he assumed James Carr was dead. Clark, an avuncular black man in his fifties, is the label’s director; Quinton Claunch, a decade older and white, now serves as president. Put these two in the same room and they will fill it up. Clark laughs like your best friend, and his demeanor says he’s seen it all and knows that laughing is better than crying. “Million seller” dots his conversation, the way veteran music biz people talk. Clark has managed soul artists, produced tours, promoted concerts, and owned labels.
James Carr. (Courtesy of Tav Falco)
James Carr is a priority for the new Goldwax. Claunch and Clark need a hit and, like forty-niners, they believe there’s still gold in them hills. Claunch knows better than others how mental illness has dogged Carr’s career, so he’s approached the prospect of new work with care. “In 1990,” says Claunch, “I decided to do a demonstration thing with him, see if he could still sing. Rather than spend a lot of money, I figured I’d go to a little studio down in Iuka, Mississippi. So I picked James up every Saturday morning for eight weeks. If I’d known he was going to sound that good, I would have used real musicians.” The result was Take Me to the Limit, not a great record—synthesizer backing tracks—but it proves that Carr still has a voice, and that, after twenty years, he can even create feeling from a lifeless keyboard program. The new Goldwax is ready to invest further in Carr. They have pulled master tapes from older, previously released songs on other artists; the band tracks are strong but the vocals aren’t, so they’re going to replace the old vocals with new ones by James Carr, inexpensively creating a new album.
Claunch is working at Easley-McCain Recording, which is the first structure in Memphis built from the ground up to be a recording studio. It was designed for hitmaker Chips Moman—he produced Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds,” King Curtis’s “Memphis Soul Stew,” and hits by Wilson Pickett, Neil Diamond, and dozens of others—and he co-wrote and engineered Carr’s “The Dark End of the Street.” The Bar-Kays, when they filled 1980s dance floors, owned the studio for several years after Moman; under Doug Easley and Davis McCain, it has been the site for albums by Lydia Lunch, Alex Chilton, and other perverse underground characters. The studio maintains a somewhat obsolete 16-track tape machine and that’s the format of Goldwax’s tapes from the 1970s and ’80s. When I walk in, the equipment is being properly dusted off. James Carr is sitting behind a cloud of tobacco smoke in the corner.
The oxides on the old tapes have deteriorated, and while the engineers are threading the machine, Claunch launches into an explanation of how he’s baked the tapes with a light bulb for seventy-two hours to make them playable. The control room is not small, but between the number of people and the frenetic explanation that nobody quite understands, it’s getting claustrophobic.
The first baked tape is loaded. It plays fine, and a soft hum wafts from the smoky corner of the control room. By the second verse, the hum has assumed more definite characteristics, and by the next chorus, James Carr is belting out the words like he’s about to audition for the New York Metropolitan Opera. In the half hour of setup time, the music has focused him.
Carr, fifty, is handsome in his sports jacket, though he is a wisp of a man. He has high cheekbones, thinning hair, and extremely long fingernails. In the corner with cap and sunglasses, he looks like a movie star.
Ready to record, Claunch sends Carr out onto the studio floor. Except for a spotlight over the one microphone, the room is dimmed. Carr puts on headphones and stands in place—there’s no music yet, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s Carr there or just his shadow. When the tape rolls, he nods his head, coming in on cue and singing the entire song in one take. Claunch tells him that it was good, but he wants to do it again. Carr sings it several more times, usually all the way through, and the improvement is the difference in how a car runs if it’s driven on a cold engine or has a chance to warm up.
The overdubs go quickly. Claunch occasionally pushes Carr, waving his arms from the control room and telling him to give it more punch. The spoken direction he gives is “Put more James Carr in it” or “Give me some more of that preacher.” When the track is done, Claunch asks, “Think you can do any better?” Carr declines; he’s done singing that one.
Everyone is pleased. If Carr’s voice is legendary, so are his depressions. At the last of the original Goldwax sessions in 1969, Claunch had him recording in
Muscle Shoals, Alabama. “We had four good songs lined up, including ‘To Love Somebody.’ And that’s the only damn song we got on the session. He just sat up there and looked. Man, I wanted to take a bottle and knock him off that stool. Time was going, we got all them high-priced musicians, and we finally got that one song. I don’t see how he ended up singing as good as he did, but, man, he sang the whole thing through, didn’t have to overdub or nothing. And we didn’t get anything else, didn’t get nothing.”
While they are cuing up the next song, Carr intently smokes Kools in the control room, pulling drags that leave half-inch coals glowing. So far, the session’s been a piece of cake. If the first track was not a hit, it was suitable filler, which is all Claunch and Clark intend it for. They are anticipating a James Carr series, fleshing it out with more of these old masters. Their series will mix the good with the not as good, keeping Carr visible for some time to come, and generating steady income for the company.
Trouble starts when the second song rolls. Carr can’t remember the words, and after several tries, Claunch is getting steamed. “I gave him these two songs to learn a month ago,” he says, “and I told him we wouldn’t go in ’til he was ready. He told me he knew ’em, but he don’t know this one.”
Carr sings words out of order, repeats lines already sung, and the song lacks not only feeling but also sense. Take after take, the producer hears his artist almost get it. After nearly an hour, I’m sent out on the floor to feed him lyrics, saying them aloud during the musical break that precedes each line. But the lyrics I’ve accumulated are from the jumbled mess Carr’s been singing. He misses the cue for the first line, one he’d previously gotten every time. Communication between the control room and the floor gets mangled by the frustration, and James and I are not always sure what verse they’re playing. For two hours, Claunch plows ahead, line by line, and finally a finished take is pieced together. Whatever merits the first song had, even as filler, this one lacks.
On a break in the lobby, Carr is calm, though I may be projecting my own sense of relief. The cloud of smoke, the sunglasses, the reticence, even his kidding about the role I’ve just played—somehow it seems he knows everything that’s happened, even orchestrated it. Claunch and Clark have had enough and they shuttle him out the door. The sudden silence that fills the studio is broken by our nervous laughter.
After another difficult recording session, I arrive at the Goldwax office with mixed feelings. I’ve been bothered by an impression of small-time graft, of men in the know trying to squeeze one last hit from someone out of the know. Something to retire on. Their conversation doesn’t clarify their intentions.
“I dare to say, if he got a hit record right now, he couldn’t handle it,” says Claunch. “If he had a million dollars today, a month from now he wouldn’t have a nickel.”
“So why,” I ask, “are y’all trying to help him have a hit?”
Clark answers. “We thought that we could help him. Most of the reasons for people being in a bad environment is because they don’t have the finances to support anything other than that. But if you got him in the right environment, I really believe he could come back.”
“I’ve been knowing him since he was nineteen years old,” says Claunch. “Thirty years. And I just think where he could be—in [the wealthy suburb of] Germantown in a mansion. Rather than skid row. He’s got talent.”
Clark: “But I just don’t think he could handle it. Naw, naw.”
For the past eighteen months, Claunch and Carr had been in almost daily contact, culminating, last April, with Carr’s first New York engagement in perhaps two decades. Claunch drove him up, got him to the rehearsal on time, kept him away from the bar before the gig, and didn’t let him get sidetracked with women during the evening. His performance at Tramps—a live band, familiar songs, an appreciative audience—was a personal and professional triumph.
Returning to Memphis, Claunch sat in Carr’s kitchen and paid him, heard Carr say he was going to help his sister cover some bills. Then Carr vanished. Three weeks later when he called, he was broke: “He didn’t even have no money to buy no cigarettes,” Claunch says. “From now on, we’re giving the money to his sister.”
“Before 1990, he was gone, nobody knew about James,” says Clark, “but we’ve got him notoriety. They’re calling from all over the world. We put James in all the major magazines, bought ads, journalists wrote good articles on him, gave him good reviews. Here’s a man who could make a half a million dollars a year right now.”
“I think it’s a physical problem,” says Claunch. “He’s on medication, and man he goes off somewhere for three or four days and don’t take his medicine, he starts sliding back.”
“If he stays on his medicine,” says Clark, “he’s just A1. What’s so frustrating is, when we’ve got him set to come back, all it takes is a good record and the man is set for life. We maybe can get another good song, but he can’t make that transition back to reality. When you’re playing with the big boys, you can’t screw around. When I was a kid growing up in the country, they’d shoot you for going in the watermelon patch.”
James Carr. (Courtesy of Tav Falco)
Claunch: “One of my neighbors caught a couple guys in the watermelon patch; he brought the double-barrel out there, made them eat two watermelons, rind and all.”
Clark: “So if you didn’t plant it, don’t pick it.”
Claunch: “ ‘There’s the watermelons, just have at it. When you done eatin’ that one, you’re gonna get that ’un too.’ ”
Clark: “That’s business. A lot of people don’t understand that. This is the music business, and the ones that’s making it, they do business. It’s not so much talent as it was back then. It’s hype. Like those Billboard charts. Half of those records are hyped to number thirty anyway. Ninety percent of ’em. You get above there, then you got a record. All those forties—” Elliott Clark laughs hard. “When you start getting up in those twenties—” again, laughter.
“Why do you think Crest sells so much toothpaste,” asks Claunch. “Ain’t no better than Pepsodent.”
“Look at Coca-Cola,” says Clark. “Got to promote, got to promote.”
“I really feel sorry for him,” says Claunch. “What he could have done. He can’t hardly write his name, but he done it.”
James Carr is waiting for me outside his apartment, ready for our lunch appointment at a nearby greasy spoon. His eyes are focused. I can imagine what he was like appearing at Claunch’s home in the middle of the night. You might just think he was quiet.
At CK’s Kitchen, he chooses a booth next to the large picture window, our images reflecting. He discusses his New York gig, and he’s pleased. He tells me that he and Claunch recently wrote a song together; he can’t remember what it’s about, but, “I know Quinton can think of it; he’ll never forget.” And he laughs.
“I’ve been learning songs and recording them,” he continues. “I really like sentimental songs, I can really feel sentimental songs. But I’ve been recording all types, country-western, blues, rock and roll. Sometimes the band puts the tracks down when I’m not there. I like for the band to be there. You can get together more of it, knowing what everybody is gonna do and knowing what you gonna do too. But if it’s already done, you just have to catch ahold to it and go on and do it.”
“Dark End of the Street,” he says, was cut live with a band. I wonder aloud what makes that song so good. “It’s really simple,” he says. “It’s really a simple song. Just sing it the way you talk.” And then James Carr sings the whole first verse and chorus of his biggest hit, with plates clattering in the background, silverware falling on the floor, and conversations at nearby tables uninterrupted. With each line, he makes our presence in the diner more ridiculous; this voice should be on big stages. When I think he’s through, he continues, and I imagine that the whole diner will be suddenly still, then burst into applause. I’ll look at the newspaper on the counter and the headline will read, JAMES CA
RR IS BACK. People will know.
He finishes singing and waits a beat. “It’s just easy,” he says, “and I arranged it by the way I read it, the way I read the words.” Our food plates clatter onto the table.
Carr makes eyes at a girl seated in a booth across from us, and also at our waitress. “If I had a hit and made a lot of money,” he says, “I’d put it in the bank. I don’t know if I need a house, but I know I need a place of my own. Can’t have no privacy living with my sister. Whenever I get ready to do something, I have to go to a hotel. So I might get me an apartment, but I think I’d rather stay at the hotel where them womens be at.”
In the course of our conversation, I ask him about a notorious 1979 Japanese tour, a comeback event that, despite several good performances, is notorious for the one gig where he stood on stage catatonic, unable to perform. “I really wasn’t ready,” he answers, and his tone is definite. “We didn’t have nothing really right, me and the band. We just thought about some songs we could do, but I don’t think it was what they were playing. I sung my heart out, but it wasn’t that good.”
Roosevelt Jamison remembers the Japan tour. “I’ve got the tape, and it’s not as bad as they said. One of the shows he couldn’t finish, but he finished the others. He was sick as a dog over there, mentally and physically. He had a fever and was stopped up in his chest, his throat was sore.” When he continues, he is hushed, reverential, slowly building back up to a fatherly bluster. “I saw James on that stage being whupped, but he was too much of a champion to give up. I could feel his agony and pain out there. His temperature was sky high, his chest was clogged up. But he stayed there and he took the beating, and I was proud of him. It made him a champion, made him realize that all the good that the stage had been to him, he also owed the stage something.”
Jamison’s story reminds me of an earlier conversation, from the day after I first met Carr. I’d expressed concern about his condition and Jamison told me that Carr was fine, he’d just been doing a little drinking earlier that night and was quiet. This deflection made it seem like Jamison felt himself responsible for Carr, like he was a coach refusing to admit his champion’s weakness. Having invested his life in the singer’s career, maybe Jamison needs Carr every bit as much as Carr needs his longtime friend.
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