Being blind forced my father to develop acutely sensitive hearing, and he never took his hearing for granted. My dad had great respect for Helen Keller. Once he took me by my arms and said, “Can you imagine being in total darkness without light or sound?” He would talk about her genius and the genius of Beethoven, whom he admired greatly, and who could use vibration to compose his music. At one point my dad had an ear infection, and I believe he thought his hearing might be in jeopardy. He said that if he lost his music, he wouldn’t know what to do with his life.
During those early years, he was confronted with the question of his blindness head-on. He was in Paris for his European tour and Herbert Miller was with him. They were sitting in my father’s dressing room while my dad chatted with the promoter and a writer from the magazine Paris Match. They asked, “Mr. Charles, what if you had an opportunity to have an eye to replace the one you lost? What if you had an opportunity to see? Would you seize the opportunity if there was a possibility that surgeons could give your eyesight back to you?”
It was not an idle question. Swiss surgeons were performing a new type of procedure that had restored sight to several blind people. My father went to the College of Surgeons in Zurich to get a diagnosis. They examined my father’s remaining eye and told him, “If you had a donor eye, we believe that if the retinas matched, we might be able to restore sight in one eye.” So Paris Match published an article saying Ray Charles needed an eye. Within days, offers started pouring in. Thousands of people were willing to sell, or even donate, an eye for my father.
My father was shocked and energized by the possibility of seeing. He thought continually of what it could mean to his life. He kept thinking of new things. He would say to Herbert, “You know I don’t—I wouldn’t even be able to read. It would impact on everything I have learned. Everything that I know, I’ve learned being blind.” It was conflicting. After a lifetime of blindness, the possibility of regaining his sight was overwhelming. He could be blind better than anyone. Ultimately, he decided against the surgery.
When I think about it now, I believe that God took my father’s eyesight for a reason. I think perhaps God didn’t want him to see the poverty all around him, the hell of the world for a poor black child in the South. My father heard about what was happening, but he never had to watch people being lynched, hosed, or shot as so many African Americans of his generation did. He didn’t have to see this horror. Maybe God wanted my father’s faith to be complete because he had to depend totally on Him. My father did walk by faith. His path was determined, his road paved by God. Perhaps my father’s blindness was his greatest blessing. He was given a special vision to navigate through life with, and it was that vision that gave him his music.
THE YEAR MY CHILDHOOD drew to an end and I prepared to enter high school, two things happened. Robert Kennedy followed his brother in death. I was thirteen years old and in my last year at the Linfield School when he was assassinated. The shooting brought back all the pain of President Kennedy’s assassination. The fact that he was killed in my own city made it even worse. Like the riots in Watts, Robert Kennedy’s assassination took place too close to home.
Another devastating loss earlier that year was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. All my life I had heard my parents speak of Dr. King. He was a friend of my father’s. My mother had always spoken of him as a symbol of hope. At church and at school we were taught about Dr. King’s struggle for human rights and equality for African Americans—for everyone. It was a time of such turmoil in America. It seemed like there was something in the news every day. The riots in Detroit. The Black Panther movement. I saw pictures of Huey Newton wearing a black tam and holding a rifle. Even in California, the Ku Klux Klan was burning crosses on lawns. In the midst of the chaos and hatred stood Dr. King with the promise of a better day. The March on Washington had brought together more than 250,000 Americans of all colors, united in one common cause. It was Dr. King’s charisma and compelling plea to America to allow its black citizens genuine freedom that at last turned his followers into a thinking force, not just a working force. God had truly anointed him. But like so many of that generation who stood up for human rights, he was cut down in his prime. The Bible tells us there is no greater love than for one man to lay down his life for another. Dr. King laid down his life for millions of us.
At thirteen years old, I had already seen President Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy shot down in front of our nation. I didn’t know what to think. It was difficult to process, and I tried to understand the magnitude of those events. Our country was in great turmoil, with the African American still fighting for equality. The assassinations frightened me and served as a reminder to keep civil rights and being black in America in proper perspective. All three of these great men put their lives on the line to bring Americans together under the law. In the midst of all of his prosperity I worried about my father and the threats he continued to receive. When my dad insisted African Americans be allowed to sit in the front by the orchestra pit along with white concertgoers, he was banned from performing in the South. Some fans embraced his music, but they rejected his race. His music was colorless. If they could see past the color boundaries in the music, why couldn’t they see past the color of our skin?
My parents took Dr. King’s death very hard. At the forefront of our pursuit of human rights and equality in America stood Dr. King. Dr. King brought the promise of a better day, but he would not live to see it. My father went East for the funeral, and I sought refuge in the music once again—my father, Curtis Mayfield, Sam Cooke, Sly and the Family Stone, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, and the sounds of Motown. The music always lifted my soul. It transcended the boundaries of color and of hatred, creating one world inside the music.
CHAPTER 11
A Song in My Soul
And I’ll get along as
long as a song, strong in
my soul.
—VINCENT YOUMANS, BILLY ROSE,
AND EDWARD ELISCU
WHILE THE HOUSE ON SOUTHRIDGE WAS BEING BUILT AS a home for our family, my father was also building a home for his music at 2107 West Washington Boulevard, a state-of-the-art studio with everything he needed to create music and rehearse his band. My first tour of the studio and offices was in 1965, about the same time we moved into our new house. My father and his manager, Joe Adams, showed us the office layout. The building had two floors. The first floor was rented out to the Urban League; the studio was on the second floor. My father’s studio was a beautiful space with a minimalist layout and a simple, elegant design. The walls were plain and muted, and there were no windows. There was no art on the walls of the hallway, no furniture or decorative items to get in my father’s way as he walked. He moved freely around the building, showing us everything. There were a conference room, small offices for assistants, a kitchen, and bathrooms. Joe Adams’s office was on the right.
My father’s office, the same size and basic design as Mr. Adams’s, was across the hall on the left. It was very large, with a marble table and a piano. The walls were covered with his plaques and awards. There were private bathrooms and a room to store his tuxedos, travel bags, and Ampex tape recorders. My dad always took his Ampex recorders on the road with him when he wanted to work on some music while he was traveling. He had them built into a custom-made canvas case that looked like a suitcase. He could unfold it and use the Ampexes without having to take them out. When we lived on Hepburn, he kept the recorder in the closet, but now it was stored in his office at the studio.
My father was intensely proud of the recording studio. Everything was designed to meet his high standards. Tom Dowd, the sound engineer who recorded and mixed my father’s early masters during the Atlantic days, built the original sound board for the studio. My father hadn’t seen Tom since leaving Atlantic, but at the end of 1964, while the studio was being finished, Tom was in LA and called Dad to say hello. My father invited him to th
e new studio and showed him the partly assembled sound board. Tom finished building the three-track control board and taught my dad how to work it. The primary purpose for the third track was for my father’s vocals.
Four years later, when David Braithwaite became my father’s sound engineer, he rebuilt the board. Like Tom, Dave came from Atlantic and Motown, where they used eight-tracks. Dave totally upgraded the studio, gutting the old board and rebuilding it with eight tracks. In the years that followed, Dave redesigned the board several times, eventually building twenty-four tracks. He set the studio up with new tape machines, microphones, speakers, and headphones. Everything was the best, top of the line, with two echo chambers and four different equalizers. All of the components were built by hand like they were at Motown, even the tape machines. My father’s studio had the best, most complex system on the West Coast. David’s genius was what made it priceless.
Because my father loved electronics, he was interested in knowing everything about the studio’s sound system. He drove the engineers crazy trying to do everything himself. Dave says he would get to the studio and find a pile of chopped-up tape from the night before where my father had stayed late or all night editing alone. There were some things an editor just could not do well if he could not see. It would take Dave half the day to put everything back together. It was like the bike my father put together for me when I was six. Sometimes the seat was adjusted wrong no matter how hard he tried. For the most part, though, the guys who did the technical work in the studio were amazed by my father’s ability. He could remember exactly where everything was. He would plug jacks into the complicated board, adjust the controls, and locate components in a closet filled with hundreds of items.
From the time he first walked in the door, to the end of his life, the studio at 2107 was my father’s refuge. After he came out of rehab, the studio was recovery. He had his toys, his sweets, and his special brew of coffee, gin, and sugar in his own private sanctuary. Most important, he had his music. He didn’t have to hear anything he didn’t want to hear while he was alone in the studio. There were no tears, no pain, no voices in his head. There was only the sound of music filling the room. He would sit at the console, puffing on a cigarette, listening to the sounds that only he could hear. Gradually the studio absorbed his scent, just as his office had at home on Hepburn, and Kool cigarettes and Cannon aftershave permeated the walls.
This studio also became his way of having a relationship with me. It was his comfort zone, the place where he was most himself. As I moved into my teens, he began inviting me to come down to the studio to visit him. He would tell me, “I’ll be at the office. You can come down and hang out with the old man if you want to.” At first Vernon would drop me off. Later, I drove myself. It was the beginning of a new kind of relationship with my father, his attempt to give me quality time. In the studio with me, he tried to become the father that I needed.
He moved confidently around the room. Sometimes he would find a mike and cord and plug it in himself. If he needed a tape from the closet, he could pull it out unaided. I would sit there for hours and watch him work. The side bar of the studio console was my seat. I would sit to the left, and he would be at the board with his tapes stacked next to him. I watched him work on the tapes, sitting at the board with tape in his mouth, trying to find the levels of the horns, snare, hi-hat, and vocals. I watched him splice the tape the way Dave had taught him. He would listen intently to the tape, stop it, then bring it back. I couldn’t figure out how the heck he did it. I watched his whole process as he went about making music and it was fascinating. The studio was his domain.
He showed me how the mixing board worked, and sometimes he had me assist him. When he wanted me to get something out of the closet, he would tell me exactly how to find it—go five boxes up, count three to the left, and pull out the red box. I don’t know how he could remember all those numbers and details. Sometimes he had me set up the mike for him so he could sing. He taught me how to punch in for him from the control room to eliminate the sound of breathing. He wanted me to learn the sound board. He would tell me, “Well, this here is the EQ,” and show me how it worked. Or he’d say, “Ray Jr., help me splice this tape.” A few times we would do those things together, over and over. I think he enjoyed teaching me, bringing me into his world. As a father, he had to be excited at having the opportunity to show me the world he had created. I think he loved for me to be around. He couldn’t teach me to throw a football or swing a bat, but in the studio, he was in his element. In his office, sometimes we would just sit and do nothing with the radio tuned to a ball game. He would sit back with his leg over the chair, smoking a cigarette and listening to Vin Scully. Most of the time he would be wearing the jumpsuit my brothers and I had given him for Father’s Day. It was brown, with little gold buckles. He liked to change into it between shows. Terry Howard, a close friend and his music engineer, remembers that jumpsuit well. My father was still wearing it thirty years later. He wore that suit until it fell apart. My father always kept the presents we gave him. Maybe putting on the jumpsuit made him feel close to us, just as wearing my father’s clothes made me feel close to him.
Other times we would sit and listen to tapes of his music together. He would listen to the sound of his own voice with the volume low. He would listen to everything in the arrangements. I sat next to him, following the sound, asking him what he was listening for. And he explained to me. He told me what to listen for, describing the sounds in colors. It was in the studio, alone with my father, that I learned to really listen to music, that I fell in love with the process of making music. It was there in the studio that I began to realize how great my father was. There was no one like him.
A lot of the time, we just sat and talked. Alone in the studio, there was no one to interfere with our time together. We would sit virtually in darkness with just enough amber light coming from the ceiling for me to see. I would talk to him about what I was doing, and he would sit quietly and listen. Every now and then he would respond, “You don’t say.” That was his way of expressing understanding and interest.
Sometimes he would ask me about my brothers, I guess to see if he had missed something important my mother had forgotten to share with him. David and Bobby were taking piano lessons at the same time, and he was interested in their progress. He wanted to know what they were doing, how they were growing. He liked to hear me talk about David and Bobby. It gave him a glimpse into their lives. I knew he talked with my mother about them often, but he also knew that my mother had her own view. She loved us, good, bad, or indifferent. I think he wanted to get a different perspective from me. I believe he began to understand how much he didn’t know about us, about our everyday lives and challenges. It bothered me sometimes that he didn’t seem to get directly involved, that he always heard about things after the fact. Looking back, I don’t think he knew how to be more involved. His own childhood was so different from ours that he couldn’t relate. I believe he just wanted to live in his music twenty-four hours a day.
We would also talk about my mother. He was concerned about her health. He would ask me how she was doing physically, how her stamina was. I realized that even when he was recovering, he was extremely concerned about her health. Sometimes I would complain about her, telling my dad she was too demanding, too strict. Afterward he would talk to my mother about our concerns. I don’t know what they actually spoke about, but he never repeated their conversations. If I continued to complain, he would tell me, “Hey, that is something you’re going to have to discuss with your mother. We’ve spoken about that already. Speak to her.” He always felt that she was doing an amazing job with us, that she was a remarkable woman.
He talked to me about discipline and focus. He was extremely disciplined in his work, and he wanted me to be the same way in mine. I was attracting a lot of attention as a baseball player, and that is when I started to feel that my future was in sports, not in music. I know he wanted me to go into music, but with b
aseball becoming more and more prominent in my life, he thought it was unlikely I would settle on a musical career.
There were certain topics he did not like to discuss. He was very uncomfortable talking about my interest in girls and avoided any discussion of dating or sex. It was up to my mother to deal with those things. It seemed strange to me that he wouldn’t speak with us about it. I knew by then that he had a lot of affairs with other women. My father’s affairs were always at my mother’s expense, and he had several affairs throughout our time on Southridge. He couldn’t very well talk about that with me. I think intimacy was an area he wanted to avoid discussing with me at all costs.
Sex wasn’t the only topic that he tried to avoid. Whenever a conversation got intense or emotionally intimate, he wanted to leave or change the subject. When I would try to talk to him about painful issues, about my struggles and temptations, he would steer the conversation in another direction as quickly as he could.
There were only a few times in all those years of studio talks that he ventured into painful territory. I asked him what it was like when he was in rehab. I wanted to know if there was any pain. I told him how I had felt about seeing him so weak and vulnerable. He didn’t say very much, just that it was mentally tough and physically painful in the beginning. He told me that later on it was hard in other ways. He mentioned that so many things flashed before his eyes, so many people and memories. That was the hardest part, he said, worse than the physical pain. You just have to make up your mind and do it, he told me.
The most painful subject of all, his childhood, was something he mentioned only once during those years. He told me about George, his mother, Mr. Pit, about the dark. He remembered how dark it was at night in the country with only the moon for light, before the darkness of blindness took even that away. He raised his glasses and wiped away tears as he spoke of these things. He told me that he and George were always together when they were little, always. Talking about his brother was almost impossible. “I just don’t know why I couldn’t pull him out of the tub.” His voice broke, and he couldn’t speak. It was clear that he still held himself responsible for George’s death. Unable to say anything else, he stood up and walked out the door.
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