Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll
Page 19
-December 7, 1972
Rolling Stone
Santana weathered some difficult personnel changes after their first couple of albums, but Carlos had seen nothing yet. Through the years, the revolving door required plenty of oil. Its only constant was its namesake. In this case, one constant was enough. As the band roared into the nineties, filling concert halls and selling albums old and new, Santana proved more durable than any of the many bands that came out of San Francisco. When, in 1998, Sony Legacy reissued their first three albums, I was asked to provide annotations, and interviewed Carlos and Gregg Rolie. Without being asked to, Rolie addressed both the band's unstable lineup and its long life. "The way the band played, the sum of the parts was greater than any individual, even though there were people who stood out," he said. "You put it together, and it was something unbelievable, and it always seemed to continue on." Carlos remains a mix of humility, spirituality, and unstoppable musical talent. And he still has a penchant for the kinds of similes and metaphors that had former bandmates Mike Carabello and Neal Schon cracking up twenty-six years before. Carlos was talking about how he and Rolie formed the nucleus of the band. "It's kind of like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg," he said. "That was the unity right there. Gregg and I took turns at who's the needle and who's the thread, but we're the ones that were making the quilt." Early on, it was that unity that helped the band to weather the changes. "Drummers came and went; congeros came and went, but his feeling and my feeling.. .we just made a gumbo together."
THE ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW:
hen I'm asked to name my favorite story or subject from Rolling Stone, my answer is Ray Charles. And when I'm asked about the best thing about working at that magazine, the answer is the same. Or, as I wrote on the occasion of Rolling Stone's twenty-fifth anniversary: "The best thing about Rolling Stone was that you could do just about any story you wanted. At an editorial meeting I'd raise my hand and say, 'How about Diane Keaton?' and offer a reason, then be sent off to go get her. Once I mentioned Ray Charles and had to say no more. It didn't matter that he wasn't selling a lot of records and that he wasn't in the news. We all knew he should be in Rolling Stone, and so he was."
In 1972, Charles was 43 and had just completed his twenty-fifth year in the music business. He was busy making records and performing concerts, and he drew well, but he hadn't broken into the rock circuit the way Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and others had. The year before, in fact, he'd appeared at the Fillmore West in San Francisco-as a guest with Aretha. And it was not Ray, but Aretha who'd been on the charts in recent months, with "Spanish Harlem," "Day Dreaming," and her own composition, "Rock Steady."
Charles' last single to chart was "Booty Butt," which had reached number 36 in Billboard a year and a half before. He jumped at the chance to talk with Rolling Stone and, after we met at a concert in San Francisco, he made himself available for two days in a Los Angeles recording studio, and then for an extended visit in Washington, D.C.
After a busy week with Charles, I returned to what was no longer a normal life. In the aftermath of my brother's murder, I moved from one apartment to another, dealt with tumultuous changes in my relationships with women, finished my lengthy feature on Santana, and finally, on a visit to New York City over the Thanksgiving weekend, began work on the transcripts of the sessions with Charles.
I remember my Thanksgiving Day. Josh Feigenbaum, who was selling advertising for Rolling Stone, gave me his apartment in the Village, after warning me about some drop-in roommates of his-namely, rats. What he didn't say was that he had no office supplies-no scissors, no stapler, no paper clips, no blank paper. Just some Scotch tape. As I edited the dozens of pages of the interview, I folded and tore out paragraphs and taped the surviving pieces of paper together, until I had one long, ugly roll of a story to take back to San Francisco to retype.
With Tom Wolfe, 1997.
But I knew that I had gotten the goods. In my research, I had noticed Charles' reticence-no, outright refusal-to talk about his battles with heroin. He wouldn't talk with Playboy about it, nor with Downbeat.
He talked with me. And all it took was patience; waiting for an opening. As it turned out, he opened the door himself when he began critiquing the "blaxploitation" films of the day, and how unrealistic he found their depictions of drug use. "Oh?" I thought. "Then you tell us how it really was." And he did.
The year wound down in a surrealistic blur. I wrote the introduction to the Ray Charles interview and began work, along with the late Larry Lee, a newscaster on KSAN, on an article about the Nixon Administration's plans to deregulate the broadcasting industry. I saw Bette Midler perform at a favorite local club, The Boarding House, where she was accompanied by a gangly pianist and music arranger, Barry Manilow. We were going to press on December 26th. Two days before-on a Saturday, I was at Rolling Stone when Jann Wenner began ask ing for changes in the layouts of the music section, then asked if I could spend a few hours hosting an out-of-town visitor: Tom Wolfe. The conclusion of his two-part opus on the NASA astronauts was our cover story. I had to beg off. I still had to finish the Nixon piece, which I would just minutes before my Sunday radio show began. On Monday-Christmas Day-I was back at Rolling Stone, with fellow staff members, and Wolfe, putting the finishing touches on the issue.
Wolfe richly deserved the cover for a feature that would become a book and, later, a movie. Ray Charles settled for a headline along the top of the cover, for a huge photo on page one, and for a chance, after years of silence and neglect, to have his say.
RAY CHARLES I S ONE OF THE GREAT ONES, a genius, as he's been called for some thirteen years, or, as Sinatra put it, "the only genius in the business." He is the major influence on dozens of blues, jazz, R&B, pop, and rock and roll musicians. Joe Cocker idolized him, from faraway England, to the point of imitation. So did Billy Preston, who would show up at Ray's doorstep in L.A. to audition. Aretha Franklin called him "the Right Reverend," and Georgia legislator Julian Bond picked up the beat, in a poem called "the Bishop of Atlanta: Ray Charles."
Ray Charles' twenty-six years in the business are represented by some forty albums. He got his first gold record with "What'd I Say" for Atlantic Records in the summer of 1959, seven years after he'd joined that label. Charles then switched to ABC and began a streak with "Georgia on My Mind," "Ruby," and "Hit the Road Jack." He topped them all with a country and western album that gave him a three million-selling single, "I Can't Stop Loving You," along with criticism from fans who didn't want to hear the Genius kicking shit. Others, like Gladys Knight, listened: "Ray Charles," she said, "hipped a lot of the black people to country and western bands... we was kind of listening before, but he made it even more down-to-earth where you could dig it." And Quincy Jones, longtime friend and arranger with Charles, appreciated his pioneer sense of eclecticism: "Ray Charles was responsible," he said, "for us opening our ears to all kinds of music."
Born September 23rd, 1930, in Albany, Georgia, Ray first jumped onto a piano bench, for fun, at age 5 in Greensville, Florida. Over the next two years, he lost his sight (he had been stricken with glaucoma, doctors determined years later); his parents, Bailey and Araetha, were laborers who couldn't afford medical help. "When I woke up in the mornings," Charles recalled, "I'd have to pry my eyes open." Blinded, he learned to work to help out, washing clothes, scrubbing floors, even chopping wood, until he went to a school for the blind in Orlando, Florida. He studied music there-he'd begun to pick out tunes on a neighbor's piano by age 7-and by 15 was writing arrangements for big bands he heard in his imagination. Then his mother died, following his father by five years, and Charles left school to play in combos around Georgia and Florida. He was "crawling," he said, until he split to Seattle and got a record contract from Swing Time, a small label. He cut "Confession Blues," and then had his first success, "Baby, Let Me Hold Your Hand," done in the style of one of his main influences-or, as Johnny Otis put it, "It was a wonderful thing, but he definitely was aping Charles Brown."
And all the time, he was on junk. He'd been using heroin since 1948, when he was 18, and he'd been busted before, around 1956, but it had all been kept hushed. Then, in 1965, Charles was arrested in Boston, reportedly in possession of a planeload of heroin, and entered a hospital in Lynwood, California. According to published stories, he spent three months undergoing medical and psychiatric help, followed by a year off He saw a Viennese psychoanalyst regularly.
Charles has his own version of his involvement with drugs, but over the years he has refused to discuss it. When Playboy asked him, in 1970, how he started, he begged off the question. "I'm fed up with talking about that aspect of my life. Jesus Christ couldn't get me to say another word on the subject to anybody."
So when we got the conversation around to dope, it was a surprise to hear Ray plunge into his hooking and kicking, and it was no surprise that the stories sometimes seemed, in at least two definitions of that word, fantastic. Example: Ray says he took that year off the road, after his bust in '65, to make the courts happy (he continued to produce records, including "Crying Time" and "Let's Go Get Stoned"). He'd kicked even before the bust, he hinted in our talk. But Ron Granger, who was director of Tangerine for three years and knew Charles from long ago, told us: "He took that year off to kick it. It took a year."
The man is clean, a nonstop worker, a perfectionist/taskmaster devoted to his music. He moves around his office building with ease, with no cane, still missing a stairstep now and then as he moves between control room and main studio, instructing musicians, running the console, redoing his vocals. He is a gentleman as I toss in questions over an elevenhour mixing session. Sometimes, ego challenged, there's volcanic action, as he stands up, all dressed in black, and shouts a reply, punctuating it with a "Hel-lo!" before he sits again. In his hotel room, with milk in the refrigerator and coffee and toast on the table, he writhes on the couch, sits forward pensively, falls almost onto his knee to find another restful position.
We accentuated the positive for a bit, talked about how he plays chess with a specially carved set, how he admires Bobby Fischer for insisting on championship playing conditions, how he "saw" baseball games by going to the stadium with a transistor radio at his ear, how he chose the songs for the new album, Through the Eyes of Love.
We began by asking him to recall himself as a 5-year-old, when his eyes began to run, to hurt.
IT D I D N ' T HAPPEN like one day I could see a hundred miles and the next day I couldn't see an inch. Each day for two years my sight was less and less. My mother was always real with me, and bein' poor, you got to pretty much be honest with your children. We couldn't afford no specialists.
When you were losing your sight, did you try to take in as much as possible, to remember things?
I guess I was too small to really care that much. I knew there were things I liked to watch. I used to love to look at the sun. That's a bad thing for my eyes, but I liked that. I used to love to look at the moon at night. I would go out in the backyard and stare at it. It just fascinated the hell out of me. And another thing that fascinated me that would scare most people is lightnin'. When I was a kid, I thought that was pretty. Anything like brightness, any kind of lights. I probably would've been a firebug or somethin'.
And there were colors. I was crazy about red. Always thought it was a beautiful color. I remember the basic colors. I don't know nothin' about chartreuse and all-I don't know what the hell that is. But I know the black, green, yellow, brown, and stuff like that. And naturally I remember my mother, who was pretty. God, she was pretty. She was a little woman. She must have been about 4' 11 ", I guess, and when I was 12 or 13, I was taller and bigger than my mother, and she had this long pretty black hair, used to come way down her back. Pretty good-lookin' chick, man [laughter].
A lot of people have asked you to define soul. I'd like to get a definition of beauty.
If you're talkin' about physical beauty, I would have to say that to me beauty is probably about the same thing that it means to most people. You look at them and the structure of their face, the way their skin is, and say like, a woman, the contour of her body, you know what I mean: The same way as I would walk out and feel the car. Put my hands on the lines of a car, and I'd know whether I'd like it or not from the way the designs of the lines are. As I said, I was fortunate enough to see until I was about 7, and I remember the things that I heard people calling beautiful.
How about beauty in music?
I guess you could call me a sentimentalist, man, really. I like Chopin or Sibelius. People who write softness, you know, and although Beethoven to me was quite heavy, he wrote some really touching songs, and I think that Moonlight Sonata-in spite of the fact that it wound up being very popular-it's somethin' about that, man, you could just feel the pain that this man was goin' through. Somethin' had to be happenin' in that man. You know, he was very, very lonesome when he wrote that. From a technical point of view, I think Bach, if you really want to learn technique, that was the cat, 'cause he had all them fugues and things, your hands doin' all kinda different things. Personally, outside of technique, I didn't care for Bach.
Did you try to catch up with high school or college after you left school?
No. When I left school, I had to get out and really tough it, as you know, because my mother passed away when I was 15. I didn't have no brothers or sisters. But my mama always taught me, "Look, you got to learn how to get along by yourself," and she's always tellin' me, "Son, one of these days I'm gonna be dead, and you're gonna need to know how to survive, because even your best friends, although they may want to do things for you; after all, they will have their own lives." So at that point I started tryin' to help myself. So what do I do to help myself? The thing I can do best, or figure I can do best, anyway. And that is sing or play the piano or both.
Music was a meek living for a long time.
Yeah, it was really crawlin'. I became very ill a couple times. I suffered from malnutrition, you know. I was really messed up because I wasn't eatin' nothin', and I wouldn't beg. Two things you don't do, you don't beg, and you don't steal.
What kind of music education did you have in Florida?
They taught you how to read the music, and I had to play Chopin. Beethoven, you know, the normal thing, just music lessons. Not really theory. I don't know what that is. It's just, they taught me how to read music, and naturally how to use correct fingerin', and once you've learned that you go from the exercises into little compositions into things like Chopin. That's the way it went, although I was tryin' to play boogie-woogie, man, 'cause I could always just about play anything I heard. My ear was always pretty good, but I did have a few music teachers, and so I do know music quite well, if you don't mind my saying so. I was never taught to write music, but when I was 12 years old I was writing arrangements for a big band. Hell, if you can read music, you can write it, and I think certainly what helped me is that I'm a piano player, so I know chords. I just studied how to write for horns on my own. Like, understanding that the saxophone is in different keys, and also, when I was goin' to school I took up clarinet. See, I was a great fan of Artie Shaw. I used to think, "Man, ooh, he had the prettiest sound," and he had so much feelin' in his playin'.
Where were you hearing this boogie-woogie?
We lived next door for some years to a little general store in Greensville, Florida, where the kids could come in and buy soda pop and candy and the people could buy kerosene for their lamps, you know. And they had a jukebox in there. And t
he guy who owned it also had a piano. Wylie Pittman is the guy. I was about 5 years old, and on my birthday he had some people there. He said, "RC"-this is what they called me then"look, I want you to get up on the stool, and I want you to play for these people." Now, let's face it. I was 5 years old. They know damn well I wasn't playin'. I'm just bangin' on the keys, you understand. But that was encouragement that got me like that, and I think that the man felt that anytime a child is willin' to stop playin', you know, out in the yard and havin' fun, to come in and hear somebody play the piano, evidently this child has music in his bones, you know.
You were also able to hear `The Grand Ole Opry' when you were a kid?
Yep, yeah, I always-every Saturday night, I never did miss it. I don't know why I liked the music. I really thought that it was somethin' about country music, even as a youngster-I couldn't figure out what it was then, but I know what it is now. But then I don't know why I liked it and I used to just love to hear Minnie Pearl, because I thought she was so funny.
How old were you then?
Oh, I guess I was about 7, 8, and I remember Roy Acuff and Gene Austin. Although I was bred in and around the blues, I always did have interest in other music, and I felt it was the closest music, really, to the blues-they'd make them steel guitars cry and whine, and it really attracted me. I don't know what it is. Gospel and the blues are really, if you break it down, almost the same thing. It's just a question of whether you're talkin' about a woman or God.
Big Bill Broonzy once said that "Ray Charles has got the blues he's cryin' sanctifiied. He's mixin' the blues with the spirituals.... He should be singin' in a church."
I personally feel that it was not a question of mixing gospel with the blues. It was a question of singin' the only way I knew how to sing. This was not a thing where I was tryin' to take the church music and make the blues out of it or vice versa. All I was tryin' to do was sing the only way I knew how, period. I was raised in the church. So singin' in the church and hearin' this good singin' in the church and also hearin' the blues, I guess this was the only way I could sing, outside of loving Nat Cole so well, and I tried to imitate him. When I was starting out, I loved the man so much, that's why I can understand a lot of other artists who come up and try to imitate me.