If you were a young, aspiring musician in Memphis in the late fifties, it was assumed that you would play jazz. There were no other options. Classical music and blues were there, but classical offered no future. A little money could be made in blues, but it didn’t present the intellectual challenges of jazz or classical.
Memphis’s young musicians were to unwaveringly follow the footsteps of Frank Strozier or Charles Lloyd or Joe Dukes in dedicating their lives to the pursuit of excellence. Memphis had produced Booker Little, Hank Crawford, and Phineas Newborn. Joe Dukes was the standard bearer. He left Memphis and was sought out by great jazz musicians in New York and Detroit.
My crew was no different. My high school music buddies Maurice White and Richard Shann and I yearned to become jazz proficient on our instruments.
Aside from the five-piece Booker T. Washington Combo, some of us formed our own group: Richard Shann on piano, Maurice White on drums, Frank Easley on bass, and me on guitar and tenor saxophone. I was a sixth-grader practicing in the band room one day when Maurice, an eighth-grader, walked in and said, “Hello, I’m Maurice White.” We discovered we lived not far away from one another and started hanging out at his small LeMoyne Gardens apartment or in the den at my house, usually listening to music.
When we met Richard Shann from South Memphis and began playing sax, piano, and drums together in my den, we became a threesome. I left school with other friends or my girlfriend but somehow always ended up with Maurice and Shann before the day was over. When I wasn’t around, Maurice created another trinity of close friends with Shann and singer David Porter.
Maurice was the first person of my age group I’d met who was really committed to making music and had the skill to become a virtuoso. We ended up playing live or practicing together nearly every day for what seemed like years. He was usually on drums, and I was on piano or some other instrument. As a result, we became like soul brothers, neither of us having a natural brother our own age.
One sweltering summer Saturday night, our first paid gig ever, my dad packed his car with my musician friends and instruments and drove us across town, across the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge and into the Arkansas country for a gig at a broken-down, ramshackle, one-room club on a back road; the job paid a pittance, barely gas money. Frank’s upright bass hardly fit in my father’s 1949 Ford. All the instruments were sticking out the windows and the trunk. During the gig, my dad sat in the car and waited to drive us home. The sight of us all piled in there, Maurice laughing at the sound of my mother shouting, “Booker, you forgot your peanut butter and jelly sandwiches!” as we were pulling out of the driveway, the broken wooden planks on the floor of the dilapidated backwoods club, made the entire experience feel like a trip into the future.
Because he cosigned the loan for the drums, loaned us his car, and believed in us, Maurice and I were both deeply indebted to Mr. Walter Martin, the band director. You could hear a reverence in his voice when he spoke Maurice’s name. Maurice and David Porter were always running around town in Mr. Martin’s fast 1957 Plymouth two-door with the 127 engine.
With Mr. Martin’s help, Maurice’s grandmother managed to get money for him to buy a small set of drums. We loved that set. My dad brought it home in his car, from the music store downtown to Maurice’s apartment. It was gold, and the drums were small, but they sounded great. Maurice was so proud. Many times we carried those drums on foot down Mississippi Avenue, all the way from the Elks Club on Beale to Maurice’s apartment, a little more than a mile and a half. Frank Easley didn’t have a bass, but since I was student assistant band director by tenth grade and kept a key to the band room, we borrowed the school’s upright bass.
Playing for peanuts became the order of the day. We couldn’t have been happier. We were performing music like our heroes. Maurice loved Max Roach (drums), I loved Hank Crawford and Leroy Cooper (saxes), and Shann loved Bobby Timmons (piano). Each of us favored the respective instrument(s) of his hero.
Shann was our leader. He was the jazz aficionado. Lazy, elegant bebop lingo poured from his thin lips like warm, creamy soup. His beige face was stuck high up on a frame supported by lanky stilts. He sat sideways and picked at the keys as though taking notes on a pad.
From our perspective in Memphis, Shann was the bohemian who could have been from New York. As committed as he was, he could have hung out with Monk or smoked dope with Miles. But he was there with us, attending Carver High School, where my mom was a secretary. Thin as a pole, Shann walked everywhere—he had no money for bus fare. It was an hour’s walk from his house through unsafe Lauderdale Sub to my place.
Shann spoke in the slowest possible deliberate southern drawl. He sounded more white than black, save for what he was saying: “Seh, Boogah Tee, may’n—U’m comin’ over yo’ house—’round seven—play some tunes, hear? I’ll be over there, may’n.” He would show up, and so would Maurice, with bundles of LPs to play on my turntable for hours.
Shann sat sideways with his legs crossed, tinkling the keys on my mother’s piano with one hand, trying to imitate Bobby Timmons. Shann and Maurice and I listened and tried to play what we heard. They regularly listened with me to the albums I brought home from the Satellite Record Shop but seemed to harbor some disdain for the studio. To my knowledge, Maurice and Shann never entered the building—maybe because they considered themselves jazz musicians and not R & B session players.
Shann’s parents were more permissive than ours; he would stay as long as he wanted and wear whatever he wanted, his head often topped by a maroon beret. He was always polite to my parents, but he seemed on course for destruction. He never used drugs, but he gave the impression of being a likely candidate because of his nonconformity. I wondered if Richard could achieve the high standards he dreamed of. Nonconformity was such a rare thing in Memphis in the late 1950s. Maurice and I joined Shann in his other world as he doodled at the keys and compared himself to Bobby Timmons or McCoy Tyner. He was the most original, authentic, and uncompromising dreamer of dreams I knew.
Richard Shann, the jazz piano player from South Memphis.
I was in a similar position. Could I approach the level of Jimmy Smith or Brother Jack McDuff, my idols on the organ? The answer, at least at the time, was no.
MEMPHIS—Winter 1961—6
One night early in 1961, we saw our guiding light. Jack McDuff was playing at the Flamingo Room in Memphis with one of our contemporaries, Joe Dukes, on drums. Joe Dukes had been Maurice’s idol. McDuff had come to Memphis, heard Joe, and pulled him out of high school to go on the road with him. That must have been Maurice’s dream at the time.
At the Flamingo Room that night, Brother Jack McDuff was on fire, as he was prone to be. He played his own bass on the lower keyboard like Jimmy Smith, or with his feet on the foot pedals, and he was very much in charge. And charge he did. With Joe on drums, the music had an energy that was unforgettable. A challenge that was undeniable. An excitement that was irresistible.
The three of us sat there in the audience listening. We were imagining ourselves on that stage, immersed in music and in a moment that would change our lives forever. Inspired and motivated, we started booking gigs.
Ramsey Lewis heard Maurice play when he was on a visit to Chicago to see his father, and Maurice left his grandmother, us, and Memphis to play drums in the Ramsey Lewis Trio.
Maurice’s departure when I was in the eleventh grade took the vitals out of our little trio. This was a new kind of feeling in my heart, one I’d never had before. I drove slowly to the train station with Maurice and DeLois (his girlfriend) crying in the back seat. Maurice’s big old wooden trunk was about one inch too tall for my dad’s Buick, and Dad found some rope to tie it down. It bounced annoyingly on the ride. Illinois Central’s train, The City of New Orleans, perched up high on the tracks in brown-steel splendor, blew steam like a dragon from both sides of its guts. The City, as we called it, was the major means of escape for blacks fleeing the South.
I didn’t say much. I ju
st stood there watching the lovers part—pushing and kissing and pulling like a cell dividing.
“All aboard!” a man in a red cap screamed.
Maurice pulled himself away from DeLois and reached out his hand to me. The handshake turned into a quick hug, and he walked up the car’s shiny metal steps. DeLois and I were quiet on the ride home. She lived a few doors away on Edith.
I wouldn’t be seeing Maurice’s adopted mama anymore; she’d “done the work the good Lord wanted her to do.” His “Mother Dear,” his real mother, dropped him off at “Mama’s” as a newborn, and he hadn’t known her. His father was also in Chicago. Maurice had to go. It was 1961, an early introduction to emptiness.
Maurice later went to LA and formed Earth, Wind, and Fire. It was the first significant separation in my life.
That we were truly brothers became glaringly apparent in 1976 when I first heard “That’s the Way of the World,” by EWF. The song struck me deeply, like no other had before. I realized our separation had been necessary. Neither of us would have reached our full potential had we stayed together because just as we supported each other, we limited each other. The Supreme was at work, as always, setting things as they should be, even if not apparent to us. Maurice was doing the work of his life, as was intended.
Chapter 5
C Jam Blues
NEW YORK CITY—Fall 1962—9
If you listen to “Baby, What You Want Me to Do,” by Jimmy Reed, you would think the song was by a rational, heartbroken man, but that was not the Jimmy Reed I found myself with at New York’s Roseland Ballroom one night in 1962. The MGs were opening for Jimmy and backing Otis Redding and Ruth Brown.
After Otis’s set, there was a long delay in the show, and someone in the crowd threw a bottle onto the stage. After we played, a rumor started in the crowd that the show would not continue. Scheduled to go on next, Jimmy grabbed a pistol out of his guitar amplifier backstage and started waving it onstage.
I panicked. “Jimmy, what you doin’ with that gun?”
“I’m gon’ shoot!”
“Shoot where?”
“Out there!” He pointed to the audience.
“Why?”
“That’s where the bottle come from, ain’t it?”
The crowd got more upset. Everyone was upset. Jimmy and Ruth were threatening not to go on. The promoter, LA’s Magnificent Montague, was nowhere to be found. Had he left the premises with all the money? Would any of the artists be paid? The night drew on, and we all waited backstage for Montague to show up. He never did. Montague had surreptitiously vanished with the box office cash. No one got paid.
Chagrined and down in the dumps, we walked back to our hotel carrying our drums and amps. The next morning, we used gasoline cards to pay our hotel bills.
Montague, who was powerful enough a DJ to have his way, set an example and made a statement. “If you want your records played, you have to go through me.”
Welcome to the big time.
MEMPHIS—Fall 1959—1
When I was a tenth-grade student, just starting to play bass around Memphis, I hung around the clubs near Beale Street.
A carnival atmosphere prevailed. Jazz and blues music, gambling, drinking, grills, pickpockets, thugs, theaters, voodoo. All lit up to entice customers into this other world.
One sultry night, I wandered over to the corner of Beale and Hernando, where I heard music coming out of an upstairs window. I was standing on the sidewalk below Club Handy, listening to the blazing Hammond B-3 organ sounds of “Blind Oscar.” I got a glimpse of him as he was led from the club. Thin and tall, he looked like a blind Malcolm X in his black suit and bow tie.
The club’s entrance consisted of a forbidding set of wide, dark stairs whose ascent was guarded by a well-dressed bouncer standing at the top. The Godfather of Beale Street, Andrew “Sunbeam” Mitchell, granted entry to the stairwell and ultimately to the club. His perch was an open window where he kept watch on the street below his club. Most nights the staircase was filled with people pushing to get in.
I hesitated until the steps emptied to go up, but permission was denied me because I was only fifteen, underage. The Handy was Memphis’s most frequented black nightclub, and Blind Oscar became a major influence on my organ playing. His chords rushed through the second-story window and down onto the street where I stood, filling the night air with such furious gusts of wind and fire that I wondered if the music might burst into flames.
On Beale Street, the bandleaders were kings, but there was one queen, Evelyn Young. Slight, owl-eyed, in long-sleeved shirts and suspenders, Evelyn played alto sax and remained the lone, undisputed bandleader at Club Handy.
Club Handy was gritty. I got inside once, during an afternoon rehearsal of Evelyn Young’s band. I was promptly kicked out (one look pegged me as too innocent to stay). But I got the picture. Club Handy—named for composer W. C. Handy, the father of Memphis black nightclubs…no white faces…undiluted blues and rhythm…black life chord changes…red dirt country…pleasure and pain. Dark, loud, and wild—suits and neckties…promiscuity.
Across the street, at the Flamingo Room on Gayoso, a younger, dapper club owner, Clifford Miller, came down to the street. “How you doin’, young fellow?” Clifford asked, and led me up the steps to his club. His bass player, Frog, was sick. Cliff Miller put me onstage at the Flamingo despite my age.
I strapped Frog’s bass—a beautiful, heavy Gibson with a bright red finish—onto my shoulder and found myself in the throes of a hot set, standing less than two feet in front of Memphis’s foremost drummer, Al Jackson Jr., and about to play four hours of tunes I did not know. Baritone sax player Floyd Newman and bandleader Bowlegs Miller glared at me. Tenor saxophonist Gilbert Caples looked the other way, refusing to condone or condemn my harassment.
There was no dressing room. There was a big parking lot out back and below the club. Musicians had to walk up a long fire escape to the back door that led to the stage. That rear parking lot was where all the activity was. All the drug deals, whiskey sales, equipment loading, patron parking, employee parking—with a big floodlight exposing every bit of it.
In front of the club, at the curb, there were only a few parking spaces. They were taken by the better-looking, later-model cars—convertibles and so forth. The jalopies were parked out back. I drove my dad’s Buick, parked the car in front, and walked up the steps of the front entrance like a respectable patron.
Clifford instructed his brother Jasper to pay me the standard seven dollars a night. At four in the morning, Jasper handed me the crumpled bills with orders to come back the following night at 9:30 sharp. I had taken Frog’s job.
The resident pianist at the Flamingo Room was a pudgy African American woman named Mamie Dell Meriwether. She was charged with calling out the names and keys of the songs the band would play each night. Because of her short, stocky, and bespectacled appearance, her piano was positioned nearly out of sight at the back of the stage. Whichever band played there was obliged to use her on piano. The talented Mamie Dell was the true bandleader—not Gene “Bowlegs” Miller, who took the credit.
Mamie Dell barked the chord changes at me from the side of her mouth through a cigarette, so precisely timed that I had only a fraction of a second to react. She would say, “‘C Jam Blues,’ F sharp!” She chose weird keys and called out changes at the last second for her own amusement, not wishing to play in certain keys. I wondered if she ever played “C Jam Blues” in C. You had to know the song, originally written in C, but you had to transpose it on the spot into the key of F sharp, or whatever key she chose, which was no problem for her. She took great delight from knowing the musicians had to squirm and scramble to decipher notes, missing the count-off.
Mamie Dell taught me by challenging me. She liked to provoke musicians by calling out numbers in this devious way—especially if there was a young new whippersnapper on stage. There were no fake books, no music. You had to learn songs by ear and remember them from night to night.
Before I knew it, a few bars of the complicated jazz piece in the awkward key had already passed me by. Mamie Dell grinned and showed the wide gap between her front teeth before she took off playing. You would have thought Mamie Dell had had four years of music theory classes.
MILLINGTON AIR FORCE BASE, FRAYSER, TN—Spring 1960—4
Driving north on Highway 51, you could easily miss Frayser at night, even with the sign. I made a U-turn more than once to get to the club in the country north of Memphis, a joint on a long dirt road off Highway 51 near Millington Air Force Base. On this windy spring night, I was onstage playing the usual set of hot, sexy blues. Late into the gig, the white sheriff walked in, in full uniform, picked out a voluptuous black woman, and started dancing with her in the middle of the floor. This being business as usual, the other patrons continued to dance surrounding the couple. This all went on to a slow-boiling blues rhythm that never skipped a beat; we played an extended version. After a while, the sheriff and the woman slipped into the night.
This was an example of the arrogance displayed by white authorities before black musicians at nearly every gig on any given night. Memphis whites were so insulated and convinced of their “goodness” to the Negroes that it never occurred to the majority of them that it might be an imposition to take a black woman against her will—in front of a black man, or men. By 1960, the white mentality in Frayser, where the incident occurred, was “How much, how very much, we’ve done for the Negro.” The music played on.
MEMPHIS—Fall 1960—9
Al Jackson Jr. was the drummer on all my early stints at clubs in professional bands. He was there when I sat in on bass for Willie Mitchell at The Manhattan Club on Bellevue. He was there when I borrowed Frog’s bass to fill in for him at the Flamingo Room.
“Get on the goddamn beat! Young motherf—er!” Al yelled. “Can’t play shit! Get off the goddamn stage!” The taunting was so insistent—from so many people—it was like water beating down on a rock. That taunting caused a tenacious strain to form in me, which has helped me survive the music business. Like Floyd, Al was well dressed, with cuff links and loafers. I wore a yellow seersucker suit from the Dollar Store, but I had managed to buy a pair of quality leather shoes with the money from my paper route.
Time Is Tight Page 5