Turning left on Mason from McEwen meant passing by Mason Temple. It was on this route that I first heard the Staple Singers through the double-wide church doors, open to the street. I slowed down to see them filling the pulpit in colorful robes. Their father was playing an electric guitar, and their voices were surging. What a sight. What a sound. Guitar in church. What an outrage. God in church.
With only thirty-five customers, my Tri-State Defender route wasn’t very profitable.
I put in a second application to throw the Press Scimitar. I was eleven years old. My new route consisted of seventy customers. I was glad to get it—twice as many customers as my first. The route encompassed a squalid quarter, but it was on the way home from school.
My papers were dropped off at 4:30 p.m. on the lawn of a big church on the corner of Mississippi and Alston. I strapped one bag over each shoulder, folding the papers as I walked. The cloth bags were enormous. I looked like a pregnant boy. When I’d get distracted, I’d stop at the first house on Alston, the home of Memphis jazz pianist Phineas Newborn—I could hear him practicing piano with the screen door open. If I stopped, I would be late delivering the whole route…dallying at Phineas’s front yard to fold my papers and listen to him play. Phineas Newborn was a Memphis jazz institution. I didn’t know that then, of course.
After a few weeks, I started to solicit customers farther up on Lauderdale Street, off my route, on the way home. I started soliciting all the way to Lauderdale and Walker and added customers to my route, to a total of 120 customers.
To handle this additional volume, I went home after school and got my Western Flyer bicycle with its rack over the back tire. I folded the papers, stuffing them into bags hung on the sides of the rack before I left the pick-up point, and stood up while riding to throw the papers on the run. This system worked well—except my aim was not as good as it was when I was walking. I tried to land the papers just above the front step—right in front of the door.
It wasn’t unusual for me to walk up the steps to a porch on my routine Friday collection trip and find a little girl answering the door, saying, “My mama say she not here.”
It was typical for my customers to avoid paying me for a week or two, whether they had the money or not. I would continue throwing to them for a few weeks, trying to collect every week, until too many weeks of nonpayment accumulated for me to keep the customer.
There were numerous challenges. Some houses were up on hills…some had hedges to throw over. Some had fences or dogs to bark at you while you tried to perfectly place those papers on the porch. There were mishaps. I broke windows, overturned statues, threw papers in bushes and puddles.
Parts of my paper route were so poor and squalid that the city would have kept them secret if it could have. (As if there were anyone to keep the secret from.) One gangly old man huddled in a single-room shack by a woodstove and waited for his evening paper. All he had in the hovel was the stove and a bed, as far as I could make out. It was dark in there save the dim light of a kerosene lamp. Built on stilts, the lean-to was higher than others on the alley and reeked of burned kerosene and body odor. The smell was so bad, I could never bear to go in.
But I could not avoid going up the rickety steps to the shanty because the old man could barely walk. He was pleasant and greeted me with, “Hello, paperboy!” He had little money and paid me in pennies and nickels from an old worn-out change purse. Never knew his name and never forgot him, even if the welfare system did. (My customers existed only as house numbers on streets in my journals.) I had to go between houses and through mud to get to his back-alley shack. I gave him every extra paper I had, and it hurt to collect from him.
Others were sex workers, people with disabilities, addicts, homeless people, and church faithful. One afternoon I stood on the front porch, knocking at the door of a woman who had a few men lined up waiting in her living room on chairs and a couch. Through the screen door, I could see and hear her telling a man, “Wait a minute,” as he tugged impatiently at her skirt. It was a lesson in life and survival…without hope.
Another such case was the man who never spoke—who, from the days I was a very young boy, sat at the corner of McLemore and Mississippi. He was missing some fingers, and he wore no expression on his face. His pullover cap and clothes were dirty. He never moved. He just sat there on the corner as if it were the only home he knew. If you looked at him, he turned his head away. If you stood near, he left. You would look around, and he would just have disappeared.
Years later, I saw this man. He looked at me briefly. He acted as if he had been caught being alive. I know he remembered me because he knew me as a child. He had seen me thousands of times.
Thirty years on, he looked the same. He was sorry I had seen him. He was sorry anybody had. He looked away again. Just like before. I turned the car around to try and find him, but he was gone. Disappeared, just like thirty years ago. Only this time I was sad he had left. I had more compassion than before.
He was the only thing in Memphis that was the same as it was when I was a child. I wish I knew his name. He had not aged a minute, like he was in a time machine. I loved him more than felt sorry for him. I think about his mother. He must have had a mother, and she must have loved him.
No Name, that’s what I’ll call him.
MEMPHIS—Spring 1954—11
In time I grew stronger, developed a good arm and decent aim, and made enough money to buy school clothes and pay for clarinet lessons and piano lessons at Mrs. Cole’s.
In addition to the Press Scimitar in the afternoons, I started throwing the Commercial Appeal in the mornings. I found myself getting up at 3:30 a.m. on Sunday and completing my route with the help of my dad and his car to transport the heavy Sunday paper.
With the extra funds, I could now afford organ lessons in addition to the piano and clarinet lessons I was already taking. I returned to Mrs. Cole. Best thing I ever did in my entire life.
My Lord! She had a Hammond B-3 organ in her dining room! It was a handsome piece of furniture, as were all her dining room pieces. She explained that the organ was reserved for a few special students and that the lessons were expensive.
The first time I saw it, a powerful, irresistible urge to sit at that Hammond organ overtook me. Looking back over my shoulder as I was led to the living room for my piano lesson, I was transported by the sight of the instrument. I played my piano lesson that day rapt with desire and fascination for that entity in the next room.
This was before I heard Ray Charles playing “One Mint Julep”; before I heard Brother Jack McDuff at the Flamingo Room, with only three pieces and playing bass with his left hand; before I heard Jimmy Smith doing “The Sermon” or Bill Doggett doing “Honky Tonk”; or any of the other Hammond B-3 organ masterpieces of the time.
Mrs. Cole and her husband—who would often stand next to the table to watch the students, as if he were standing guard—probably paid more for the Hammond B-3 organ and Leslie speaker in their dining room than they did for their house. In 1955, Hammonds retailed for around $4,000. In 1954, my father paid $6,000 for our modest two-bedroom home.
I told my mother about my discovery. She reminded me that there was an organ at our church and that I could get her friend Merle Glover, the church organist, to give me a lesson for less money than Mrs. Cole would charge. I wasn’t excited about taking lessons from the persnickety Merle Glover. During church services, she couldn’t make it through an entire service without leaving to go out for a smoke. However proficient at the pipe organ, she was fussy and impatient. I had only one lesson with Mrs. Glover at her home, during which she showed me how to take my shoes off and feel the pedals with my toes and how to push the stops.
One night I went down to the church with my dad when he had a treasury board meeting, and I waited for him at the huge pipe organ in the sanctuary. Staring at the stops in the darkened, scary room, I knew I had to discover where the electric box was in that section of the large church and how to turn the ligh
ts on in the huge room as well illuminate the organ riser itself. Where was the key to turn on the behemoth, and was it safe for a small boy to be alone in a room as large as this at night, even with the lights on?
But the sound was different from the instrument at Mrs. Cole’s house. It was a pipe organ, and the notes spoke so slowly because of the time it took for the air to go through the big pipes. For a while, I would practice alone at night in the sanctuary when my dad was downstairs in the finance room. But I had to go back to Mrs. Cole’s organ. It was so much more accessible musically than the big pipes that extended up into the walls of the church, with all their reverberation and majesty.
I devoured every morsel of training Mrs. Cole had to offer during our short half-hour sessions and ran home happy, looking forward to the next lesson in two weeks. I was enamored with the sound of the Hammond and the Leslie speaker; I had been shown my destiny.
Because the organ has the capability of sustaining notes indefinitely and of getting louder or softer with the expression pedal, it’s possible to simulate a singing, melodic effect—and, with the use of the Leslie rotator, a vibrato much like the human voice can be produced. Also, it’s possible to simulate nearly any orchestral sound or combination of instruments with a Hammond B-3.
MEMPHIS—Spring 1956—3
I added organ lessons to my list of chores. It seemed natural, and Mama had retrieved Grandma’s old piano and put it back in the living room, so I was able to at least practice the piano lessons and simulate the organ exercises. I practiced on a real organ wherever I could—at church or anyplace that might have one. Mrs. Cole was a practical, methodical teacher, attentive and old-fashioned. She practiced the technique of tapping a student’s finger with her baton, which was more like a dowel. She was very good and could hit your knuckle anytime she wished, so I practiced very hard.
Mrs. Cole demonstrated technique frequently and emphasized straight posture, chin up, and raising the knuckles high above the keyboard. I still try to emulate her figure at the keyboard.
As I matured musically, I considered Memphis to be the headquarters for southern blues and gospel, since so many influential artists headed there from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. But if Memphis was the headquarters, then Chicago was the capital. The great Mahalia Jackson originated there, but I didn’t know her importance on the day I was called on to accompany her.
By twelve, I started to play afternoon teas on Sundays to pick up some extra change. Most often they were Sunday-afternoon affairs attended by church ladies, held in the large dining room at Universal Life Insurance Company on Vance, a few doors down from my church, Mt. Olive. At such occasions, ample-bosomed churchwomen pulled my young head into their chests after I played a song. This particular tea was held at a private home out on South Parkway West. Upper middle-class Memphis African Americans kept meticulous dining rooms and living rooms for church benefits and meetings. Folding chairs surrounded the ornate, flower-filled centerpiece on the dining room table where Mahalia Jackson stood just inches from me at the piano. Beads of sweat poured from her forehead, and I caught a whiff of the familiar combination of perfume, perspiration, and soiled percale.
The song was “Precious Lord,” made famous at Ebenezer Baptist in Chicago and Martin Luther King’s last request in Memphis. Mama dug out her old Gospel Pearls hymnal, showed me the chords, and helped me learn to play it in all keys. I rehearsed it over and over for days without Ms. Jackson, who would be the first church lady I played for professionally. I brought the raggedy old hymnal along with me for emotional support, although I still didn’t read music that well.
It was a beautiful, warm Sunday afternoon, and the home was decorated with flowers. The room was buzzing with intense competition between the hues of all the various rouges and the scents of all the perfumes.
Very soon after the performance began, I realized what a musical giant Ms. Jackson was, due to the immediate onset of emotion and purpose initiated by her commanding, soulful voice and powerful presence. She meant what she was singing. Completely swept into the strong feeling Mahalia created with every phrase, I focused on playing the chords and let her energy guide me through the song. At the end, I wondered what had really happened.
The applause was warm and enthusiastic. Mahalia was gracious, used to that kind of thing. She smiled at me, thanked the women, and moved into the room. I sat motionless at the piano, unsure what to do, like an orphan who had found a home. My hand had been taken.
Chapter 4
Havana Moon
HOLLYWOOD—Summer 2017—12
It was good to get back together with my old friend Carlos. It had been twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years of weirdness. Years ago, at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Festival in Dallas, we had avoided one another. We had even sat in the same movie theater in Marin for two hours and not spoken.
Time passed.
Carlos invited me to play a show with him at the Hollywood Bowl. Like he did so many times in the ’70s.
We saw each other in the hallway backstage, and a long, warm hug erased all the years of imagined animosity. We pushed away, still holding arms, and smiled at each other. Neither could find the appropriate words, so we headed off to our respective dressing rooms, each feeling so much better.
Carlos’s first words were to my son, Ted. “I want you to play like you don’t know how to play,” he told him.
I hadn’t seen Carlos’s son since he was in swaddling clothes at Stinson Beach. What would I say to him when I saw him? Back in the ’70s, his father had had the best band in rock. Armando Peraza, Chepito Areas, Raul Rekow, Greg Rolie, Neal Schon, Michael Shreve, Coke Escovedo—all award winners—the best rock band ever assembled in the history of time. And I got to hear it all from backstage. One stellar performance after another. Night after night. I took photos of Carlos sleeping on his rickety old airplane. We were brothers.
The best was one night in San Juan, Puerto Rico. A crowd of fifty thousand watched my little brother soar into the heavens and play like the angel he was. He threw his head back, closed his eyes, and scrunched his body until the notes came out of his guitar. From Carlos’s guitar came the loud, high, painful moans of relief and deliverance that filled the night air and cleansed the audience. No one, not Hendrix, not even bandmate Neal Schon, could play with such heartfelt urgency, agony, simplicity, and beauty.
Stax and the MGs limited my contributions, but Carlos was open to my other musical interests, including singing.
SAN FRANCISCO—1981—3
I had just finished the two-week control of smoking course at Westwood’s Schick Center when Carlos asked me to come to San Francisco to work on his solo LP. The professional help was necessary—I hadn’t been able to quit on my own. My car, my clothes, my house, everything made me sick because they smelled of cigarette smoke.
I flew up and checked into the Holiday Inn on Eighth Street. Carlos was outraged that I was staying there and had his people check me into the Fairmont.
I had dinner every night with Carlos, Jerry Wexler, and Barry Beckett—the other producers on the project. We ate at San Francisco’s finest restaurants. Jerry, who was staying at the Clift Hotel, would pull out a fat roll of one-hundred-dollar bills to pay for dinner, which made me very nervous that he was walking around so close to Turk and Eddy Streets with that kind of money in his pocket. The danger didn’t seem to bother him, though. Jerry kept a perpetual smile on his face. Sometimes Barry and I would even hitch a ride in Jerry’s limo.
We were working at David Rubinson’s Automat down on Folsom, in an area of big studios west of Market Street. It had a great reputation. There had been a big buzz in the early ’70s when David was building the place, and I had always wanted to see if the result was worth the hype. It was at these sessions that I witnessed Jerry doing his famous heebie-jeebie dance. His legs anchored and spread wide, his hands grabbing his hips, his thighs, his head, wherever, his whole body jerking and twitching, eyes closed in rapture. Guaranteed the fu
nniest thing ever in rock history.
The session marked the beginning of a period of creative freedom for me. “One with You,” the song I composed in the studio with Carlos and the musicians, flowed freely. A first take. A piano credenza, conga flams, more congas, then rhythm, intoxicating, into the open mikes and back again through our headphones, like splashing out onto an open sea.
I swooned when the rhythm fell in, lost my bearings, hypnotized by the Latin-ness of the thing, but kept my hands on the keys.
The congas followed lazily along, like children straggling on a mountain path, but solid, and so right. Jerry was in the control room minding the knobs, and all was well. Everyone in the band stayed silent until they felt it was time to play, and all went as planned, without a plan.
Then, words surfaced. They danced off my tongue.
“Angel, I want to be one with you. Spread your wings and let me in.”
After the verse, the music flowed. Then Carlos spoke. Congas responded. He spoke again. The whole band responded. Barry Becket was on electric piano. He created a warm, dark, purple hall for the music to abide in. A strong, quiet background presence. His essence was similar to the electric piano part Spooner Oldham created for Aretha Franklin when she sang “I Never Loved a Man.” So soulful. So simple.
Fran Christina on drums. Carlos knew how to put a band together. Kim Wilson on harmonica. Usually loud and aggressive, Kim was subdued and melancholy, playing everywhere, never in the way. Jimmie Vaughan on guitar. Who plays guitar on a Carlos Santana solo album? The unassuming Jimmie Vaughan, that’s who. It was all about Mexico, and love.
Carlos is one of the most independent, creative musical souls I have ever known. Not unlike the spirit of Maurice White, with whom I set out on my first musical journeys in Memphis.
MEMPHIS—Fall 1958—1
Time Is Tight Page 4