Never Say No To A Rock Star

by Berger, Glenn

  The band they were using was the World’s Most Dangerous Band, the cats that Shaffer was playing with on the David Letterman show. I knew all these studio musicians from the old days. They were the best in the biz and, to top it off, nothing could beat being in the presence of Cropper. He not only wrote some of the greatest songs ever, but he had been the guitarist in Booker T. & The MGs. That legendary rhythm section had made many of my favorite records from the classic age.

  We cut the basic track real easy, and that was that. I would have liked to have worked on the rest of the overdubs and stuff, but Shaffer was cagey about it, and I didn’t push. Weeks passed. I figured that was it. Then Shaffer booked time to come back into Krypton.

  What happened was this. Shaffer and his crew tried to recut the song at a real studio, but the thing they cut at the Hit Factory, or wherever, just didn’t have the down-home, natural, funky spunk of the track I’d cut in that humble basement room. Truth was, this little ol’ schlepper might’ve had a little bit of something you couldn’t buy with more money. I may not have been in NYC for a while, but that didn’t mean I’d completely lost it. And an old school soul track was right in my pocket. So Shaffer, Cropper and Covay had come to their senses and decided to do the rest of the song with me.

  Covay was this cool, nutty black dude who sounded a lot like Mick Jagger. In fact, the Stones recorded his song, “Mercy, Mercy,” in 1965. Actually, it may have been that Jagger had modeled his sound on Covay.

  Covay would come into the studio, put his hands on my shoulders, look me in the eyes, and say, “Glenn? Are we gonna make history today?”

  And I’d say, “We’re gonna make history!”

  And Don would say, “All right! Let’s make a hit reckit!”

  Now, that is the way I like to start every day.

  Despite Cropper’s legendary status, being more of a sideman than a star, he was totally cool — open, friendly, laid-back. Listening to him reminisce the legendary tales in his warm Southern tone was heaven.

  Shaffer and I went way back. We’d worked together on one of his early New York recording gigs, the soundtrack for a hit Broadway show called The Magic Show, written by Stephen Schwartz, who was famous for Godspell and Pippin and has subsequently won a zillion awards for things like his music for Wicked. Shaffer is an amazing musician, which is why he always ends up as bandleader. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of every pop song ever done, and can cop the groove no prob. He is also a leader because he is so easy to like. As two bald Jews with a love of the hits he and I had an easy vibe between us. Sure, he is a bit ironic, and maybe was a touch high on the weed back in those days, but he is always the real deal.

  The three cats had bigger ambitions for this tune than to just cop a style. As mentioned, in the early 1960s, Atlantic Records had been making the hottest soul records in the nation. A group of the extraordinary singing and writing talents from that label got together in 1968 and cut one single. They called themselves the Soul Clan. Circumstances led to the almost immediate dissolution of this Holy Grail of supergroups. Aficionados of soul tried for decades to reunite these players to no avail.

  Shaffer, Cropper and Covay had almost managed to do it. On this one record they got nearly all the original surviving members to sing. There was Covay, Ben E. King of “Stand By Me” fame, the aforementioned Wilson Pickett who, with Cropper had written, and had a hit with, “In the Midnight Hour,” among other timeless tunes, and Bobby Womack, who wrote the first Stones hit single “It’s All Over Now.”

  King was smooth when he came in to do his vocal and did his verse one-two-three.

  Covay, on the other hand, was a different story. He strangely kept putting off recording his vocal. Finally, Shaffer corralled him into going out to the studio to sing his part. I set him up as I would any singer. I checked his mic and had a sweet mix in his cans for inspiration. I escorted him into the recording room and adjusted the mic in front of him. I went back into the control room and, over the talkback, asked if he was ready. He sang melismatically to us that he was. The tape was cued a few bars before his entrance. I hit the red button.

  At his cue, Covay began to twist and turn his body, and his mouth opened wide as if he was singing his ass off. But the needle didn’t move. It looked like he was singing, but I couldn’t hear anything. I was sure I had just checked the mike. This was weird. Shaffer and Cropper looked at me, as if I was doing something wrong. I twisted my nose and perused the board to see if I had forgotten anything, but it all looked right to me. I turned to the two producers and shrugged my shoulders, as if to say, I have no fucking idea what is going on.

  Now if Covay would have been singing, and the mic would not have been working, he would not have heard himself in the headphones, and he would’ve stopped and complained. So, I looked closely. I could see that Covay was shuckin’ and jivin’. He was movin’ and groovin’ but nothing was coming out of his mouth! The guy was acting like he was singing, but he wasn’t!

  The three of us sat there stunned, not having the least clue what to do. The verse came to an end, and I hit the stop button. Shaffer hit the talk-back, and said, in his nasal, Canadian show-biz twang, “Uhhhhhhh …” and then, like all producers everywhere since the beginning of recorded time, “That was great, Don. Let’s do one more and see if we can top it.”

  It was certainly the greatest vocal performance I’d ever not heard.

  When Pickett came in to sing, that was another thing entirely. Pickett’s nickname of the “wicked Mr. Pickett” was no joke. Rumor had it that one time he didn’t like something his bass player had said and plucked his eyeball out with a fireplace poker. Eesh!

  He did a take or two, and then Shaffer got on the talkback and said, “Wilson, that was really good, but, I think we can get a better performance on the second line, so we’ll punch in, ok?”

  Pickett wasn’t the kind of performer who had a lot of patience for working a part over and over. He threw down his headphones and stormed into the control room, his entire body shaking. He ran right up to me and grabbed me by the shirt. I noticed his skin had this plastic sheen. These stars always had an artificial look to them – probably too much Botox to make them look eternally young. His sparkly curls glistened in my face. His eyes were bulging out of their sockets. His lips quivered. His nostrils flared. His gums were purple. He screamed, in that rough soul voice that had sold a billion records, “You pluckin’ now! You chicken pluckin’!”

  I realized he had mistaken this balding Jewish engineer for that balding Jewish producer. Seeing my life pass before my eyes, without a thought, I quickly threw Shaffer under the bus. I pointed to Shaffer and said, “It wasn’t me, Wilson! That’s Paul Shaffer! I’m just the engineer! He’s the one who told you to do it again! It sounded just fine to me!”

  Wilson let go of my shirt and glared at Shaffer like King Kong. Shaffer quickly said, tremblingly, “That’s fine, Wilson, I’m sure what we have is just fine. You don’t have to sing anymore.”

  We got Pickett out of there as quickly as we could. And it did sound just fine.

  Now, all that was missing was a guy named Solomon Burke. (Otis Redding, who sang “Dock of the Bay,” and Joe Tex, of “Skinny Legs and All” fame, were dead.)

  I had the blessed fortune of having worked with King Solomon Haile Selassie Burke, as he was formally known in 1983, remixing a live album of his for Rounder Records in Cambridge, Mass. where I worked for a short while after I’d left New York. The disc was called Soul Alive. Of all the unique characters I got to work with in my years in the biz, Mr. Burke was one of my favorites. Solomon told me that he had a Cadillac, a girlfriend, a child, and a church in every city of America. He would land at the airport in, say, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and his long tall Sally and a longer car would be waiting for him.

  Solomon’s gigs were made up of endless medleys interspersed with his personal brand of sermon. The King’s philosophy, at its heart, could be summed up in one word. He told us that the word love was overused
these days, as he purred in his rich baritone, “I love you. I love you. I LOVE you.” You could feel the women in the audience perspire. But though the King truly walked his talk by siring at least 21 children, he was something of a feminist.

  “And if he doesn’t love the child you had with another man, don’t give him none!” he would shout to the hot squeals of the women in the audience. “You don’t need a man to sign your welfare check for you!”

  The big guy and I had lots of fun together in the studio. He had a great sense of humor. But I learned on this Shaffer gig that it was not a good idea to mess with the King.

  Shaffer got Burke on the phone. We were psyched. But after the call, Shaffer came back in the control room downtrodden. Burke told Paul that not only would he not sing on the song, but that he had written it, (He hadn’t. Shaffer, Cropper, and Covay had.) and if Shaffer insisted on putting it out, he would sue! The reunion of these icons, second only to the Beatles’, was not to be.

  The moral of the story is, you can’t go back. In Cropper’s day, you’d write a song in a few hours at night, cut the A side from ten in the morning till lunch, take a break, do a little blues jam for a B side that might turn into “Green Onions,” press the record, stick a $20 dollar bill in the sleeve, bring it over to the local radio station, and in twenty-four hours you’d know if you had a hit.

  Things were different by 1988. Shaffer’s record was ruined by the taste-deaf record company execs who kept demanding changes to make it “marketable.” Over-produced, we worked on it way past the expiration date. After cutting all the parts, I didn’t get to mix the record, because they wanted some hot shot at the Hit Factory to make it sound “current.” Chicken pluckin’ indeed. The track, and the album, bombed.

  You can’t go back. Isn’t that what the sweet pain in art is all about? The King is dead (Solomon Burke died on October 10, 2010) and the soul clan will never be reunited. This moment in American musical history is no more.

  For me, having made that momentary connection with Cropper and Shaffer, I then got to record “Land of 1000 Dances” live when they got the gig to contribute to the movie. Covay came to my thirty-fifth birthday party, and we had a great time getting drunk together. You can’t go back, but I get to hold onto these memories.

  And King Solomon Burke, with songs like “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” (and in Solomon’s case, it should have had the subtitle, “And I’m Available”) and his 21 children, 90 grandchildren and 19 great-grandchildren, truly leaves behind a legacy that will long endure.

  TRACK FIFTEEN

  The Time Mick Jagger Sang “Honky Tonk Women” Just For Me

  I waited for my friend Duke on 7th Avenue, outside Madison Square Garden. A throng, astir with mounting anticipation, flowed into the arena to await the arrival of the Rolling Stones. It was September 13, 2005.

  Duke had been my best friend from the time were both in an experimental high school together in Brooklyn 35 years before. Back then, he had a crazy Jew-fro, wore blue work-shirts and reeked of patchouli oil, and bounded into a room like he owned the place. The first time I saw him in our 11th grade class, with his clever energy and social élan, I knew he was the friend I had been searching for. I wanted to spend every day with him.

  Now, we only saw each other once a year. He was on the road 300 days a year traveling to places like Tajikistan to help people with the treatment and prevention of AIDS. I lived in the suburbs with my wife and kids. Each day, I commuted in my Façonnable suit to my psychotherapy office on Park Avenue. We got together near our birthdays to celebrate the ridiculousness of how long we’d known each other.

  In the last few years, our meetings had taken on a strange, melancholy distance. Things hadn’t been the same since AIDS hit. He seemed to have retreated unreachably into his gay world. Maybe he was depressed. I imagined that Duke judged me harshly. He certainly had witnessed my worst choices through life. Angry at the world during my late teens, I treated him like shit. Perhaps he had never forgiven me. His urbane cynicism still led me to long for his approval, which I felt I never received. So, I was thrilled that he came up with this idea to celebrate our 50th birthdays together by seeing the Stones.

  The Stones meant something special to us. I was indifferent to the band until Duke had dragged me to see them at this same venue of Madison Square Garden in 1972, when we were sixteen.

  When we were kids together, going to concerts was our reason for living. We’d gotten tickets for that classic ’72 show from Binky Phillips, the absolutely coolest person we knew. Later, Binky realized his legendary status by fronting a punk band called The Planets and running a record store called Sounds in the East Village. I still have the ticket stubs from that concert, and the envelope with Binky’s writing on it.

  In those days, apotheosis came by getting as close to the stage as we could. The $4.50 seats placed us about halfway up the Garden’s side. Duke, my girlfriend Debbie, and I knew how to get past the guards. Implacably, we pushed our way down to the floor and advanced up to the front. We ended up in the fourth row center. I stood on the back of seats held up by the moshing crowd for the entire show.

  The band, at the peak of their powers, held me enraptured, filling my body with the energy of the cosmos. No dervish ever had an ecstatic experience to match mine. The image of the young god-like Mick in his white studded jumpsuit, on his knees, whipping the stage with his belt to the crash of Charlie and Keith during “Midnight Rambler,” will be forever cherished as a singular golden memory.

  Now, three decades on, those memories playing vaguely in the back of my mind, Duke approached me on the New York street with his same old crooked smile. For the first time in our lives, we were showing signs of age. His skin had begun to puff and sag. My hair was long gone, and my beard was turning white.

  As we walked inside, the din increased, and the passel of fans, a little worse for the wear-and-tear, swirled around me. As we got nearer to our seats, like feeling the shock wave of an explosion before seeing the fireball, I began to weep deeply; uncontrollably. The emotion welled from some inscrutable depth.

  When Duke saw my tears, he appeared alarmed. Having become a shrink, I’d become more touchy-feely than he was over the last years. I told him I was fine. The tears actually felt good, but I had no idea what they were about.

  The Stones always knew just how long to keep the audience waiting, building the tension and excitement to an almost unbearable peak. After obediently taking our assigned seats, in time-honored tradition, Duke produced a joint. I wasn’t smoking these days, but I wouldn’t pass up a hit or two for the Stones. The pot wasn’t so great, nor were the seats. I had seen the band a few years before with my wife Sharon. At that show, I scored better weed and seats than Duke had been able to procure. My old friend, who I had always held in such estimable regard when it came to such things, seemed to shrink a bit into humanness.

  As we waited for the band, the pot hitting, my mind began to expand and I hurtled backward through time.

  In my mind’s eye, I was sitting in the control room of studio R-2. It was September of 1974. I had not yet reached my 19th birthday.

  The King Biscuit Flower Hour, a syndicated radio program that broadcast live recordings of the greatest bands of the time, booked studio time with Phil to remix tapes of the Rolling Stones recorded in Brussels during their ’73 European tour. Mick was coming in to supervise the remix. We’d be spending the next several days together.

  Waiting for Mick Jagger to arrive at the studio was agonizing. Having become apprenticed to my master almost a year before, I had already worked with a number of famous people, but none that I loved. My heart beat with tremulous excitement.

  Like a true star, in the same way that the Stones would build excitement by getting on stage at the last possible moment, Jagger waited in the wings till we were all assembled in the control room so he could make his grand entrance.

  The 31-year-old Jagger, in a billowy green silk shirt, a blue ascot with yellow pol
ka-dots, tight black pants and low, black leather boots, blew into the room, affecting shyness. In his deliciously crusty Mockney baritone, he asked, “Am I in the right place?”

  The question was ironic. How could Mick Jagger ever be in the wrong place?

  For once, the reality beat the fantasy. He could shine his charm on a room of 4 or 5 as brilliantly as he could light up a stadium of 50,000. With his moppy hair, crinkly eyes, and toothy smile, he was radiant, spectacular, gorgeous.

  We were all deferential to the future Sir. Even Ramone, whose first record was the Grammy-winning “Girl From Ipanema,” who later recorded Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” and had worked with the scariest artists from Streisand to Paul Simon to McCartney, seemed a little humbled in Jagger’s presence. Usually, Phil was fiercely possessive of his console. But for some unknown reason, without his client saying a word, he yielded the mixing seat to Mick, who sat down and placed his fingers on the red faders. These were the sliding volume controls for the various instruments: Bill’s steady bass, Charlie’s propulsive kick, snare, toms and cymbals, Mick Taylor’s crying lead guitar, Keith’s indomitable, archetypal guitar riffs, assorted horns, keys, and background vocals, and Mick’s own manically-inspired lead vocals.

  We listened to the first song, “Brown Sugar.” Mick adjusted the balance between the instruments, trying to get a blend that would bring you into the middle of the concert.

  I was pulled back to 2005, my reverie disturbed by the explosions, fanfare, and the crowd’s ritual cheer that greeted the band when they finally emerged on stage. It was like seeing some more old friends, also noticeably aged, but still having it. Duke and I sat on the right, Keith’s side. As the memory of Charlie pounding the tom-toms and Keith’s syncopated guitar chops on “Brown Sugar” morphed into the real live opening chords of “Start Me Up,” I was lifted out of my seat and filled with joy. If I didn’t have the same endurance I had in ’72, I had a deeper appreciation of the music. I knew every note by heart now. As I had discovered the limits of my own talent through the years, I knew how impossibly magical it was to create such a transcendent spell.