Time Is Tight

by Booker T. Jones

  My father let me return only in the custody of his trusted former student, Floyd Newman. Suave and snazzy with straight black hair, he was the baritone sax player that had glared at me.

  “Gotdamn! Little young motherf—er!” Floyd yelled at me in the car all the way to the Flamingo while I worried about him missing stoplights. He was nonplussed at having been given the job of transporting me to the club and back. Clifford Miller and my father had an agreement that Floyd had to honor.

  Floyd was not the only one.

  Frog got his job and his bass back when Bowlegs added another horn player at the Flamingo—me, playing baritone sax in the band. Once again, I found myself standing in front of Al Jackson Jr. with him shouting expletives at me as I blundered my baritone sax parts in Bowleg’s four-piece horn section. I was positioned on the edge of the six-foot-high stage, in front of Al’s drums on the far right of the horn line. I was always afraid of teetering off the tall stage and onto the floor when we did our steps. The older guys yelled at me, but deep down they were on my side.

  Passionate about music, I was doing what I loved, and in the process, I took on too much.

  I was managing a lot of activities for an adolescent. I had my evening paper route, Christian Youth Fellowship on Wednesday nights at church, piano and organ lessons, and my job at night at the clubs. At Booker Washington High, I was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the National Defense Cadet Corps and was assistant director of the band, where I played first trombone. The band played at the football games and provided music for assemblies and for all other school events, like commencement. We marched in every city holiday parade and provided music for a few charity events. It was at one of these events that my picture was taken as I sat up in a tree playing my trombone—and the photo was published in the Press Scimitar, a local newspaper.

  On top of everything else, I was also a member of the school dance troupe, and we gave concerts downtown at Ellis Auditorium three times a year.

  There were evening and weekend sessions at Satellite Records.

  I kept a full social calendar too, hanging out with my friends, playing sandlot football on Saturdays, basketball in my driveway and at the school gym, and dating regularly.

  Then, on Sundays, I had to start at four thirty in the morning, with my dad’s help, to get the heavy Sunday Commercial delivered on time. Still, it was a fun time for me. I was doing the things I wanted to do.

  By the time I got to Satellite in 1960, music had become a regular second source of income for me, next to my paper route. Out McLemore Avenue to Thomas Street, Thomas Street to the club where I spent so many nights playing bass with Ben Branch, Currie’s Club Tropicana.

  At the time, I was so young my dad made Johnny Currie, the club’s owner, promise to bring me home every night himself. He would begrudgingly pile me into the front seat of his Lincoln, and I could see the big long .45 next to the flashlight and the money from the night’s sales in his glove compartment.

  I got swept up in all of this. The Flamingo Room was open four nights a week, Friday through Monday. Monday nights were called “Blue Monday” and were a popular evening at the club. Also on Mondays my algebra teacher gave out formulas for us to study for the weekly test held at nine the following morning. Mrs. Gloria Callian’s room was next to my dad’s classroom on the mathematics floor at BTW. These Tuesday mornings followed Blue Mondays, the last of my four-night week at the Flamingo.

  One Tuesday I hadn’t paid attention to the homework assignment. Mrs. Callian caught me cheating on the test. Cheating—next door to my dad’s classroom. Mrs. Callian stopped the exam. She had me stand up and fold my paper. She marched me next door and interrupted my dad’s class. We stood there. I don’t remember words being spoken. My parents had tried to raise me with love and integrity. I was devastated. Dad was surprised and embarrassed. My only memory was looking at his immaculate white shirt and tie while his students watched in silence. I couldn’t bring myself to meet his gaze. Mrs. Callian stood at the door behind me.

  All the BTW teachers were so much more than coworkers; they were a society unto themselves. They ate lunch together at the same table, they watched over each other and their families. They socialized apart from work—they shared the same values.

  Time froze. I had really done it this time. There was no way to make it up. In our world, you just didn’t cheat on an exam. With a slight nod, Dad excused Mrs. Callian, his good and trusted friend, and me. He let us know the incident was over and we could leave. My father stuck with me. He saw how the experience shattered me.

  Dad didn’t demand that I quit playing at the club. His support for my music continued, but he insisted I carve out adequate time for schoolwork. The three of us sat down in the living room. We never sat in the living room. It was an intervention.

  “Booker, I know you’ve worked hard for a long time to build up your paper route, and it means a lot to you, but it’s just too demanding,” Mama said. “You need to make time to do your homework and practice and get enough sleep for school.”

  I interrupted, “Mama, but I—”

  “You’ve got too many responsibilities,” she said, “working for Chips at Stax, the Flamingo Room. You’re doing too much, son.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I know,” I answered. “It’s just that I—”

  “Your father and I worry about you. You’re going to have to give up the paper route.”

  Only a person with day-to-day knowledge of the situation, someone like my mother, who loved me as much as my mother, could see that I was overbooked. I was so relieved that she was my advocate. Relieved that she approved of letting go of my paper route—a job I had started at age seven and worked so hard to build up. I had to let it go. At the paperboy meeting, sitting on the top ledge with my feet between the two boys on the bench below me, I raised my hand. “Mr. Sullivan, as much as I love my route, I’m going to have to let it go. I have two other jobs as a musician.”

  “Booker, I hate to see you go,” he said. “You waited so long for this route, and you built it up.”

  The money I was making was also crucial for our family. My income rivaled the $392 a month my dad made as a teacher. I bought my clothes and my lunches and gave my parents a little money.

  But the way Blind Oscar put his hands on a Hammond B-3 was the way my parents put their hands on me. They had faith in Providence, in me, and in my gift. Along with the Memphis community, they trusted me and granted me freedoms.

  I was admitted into nightclubs even though I was years under the legal age, as if I were unusually mature.

  I was permitted into studios to record music of my own design, as if I had exceptional musical aptness.

  I was allowed to follow my passion at a tender age, like getting an early driver’s license.

  My folks and the community worked hard and went to great lengths to provide these opportunities, never doubting my abilities. I seized the moment at every occasion and ran with it for all it was worth.

  Chapter 6

  Green Onions

  NEW YORK—Fall 1965—7

  Quincy called. It was as if God was on the phone. “Yeah, man, come to New York. I want you to hear something.” I rushed home, packed a few things, and went to the airport. I flew in.

  That night Q met me in the hallway. I tried to peek into his dark, luxurious suite. Ulla came right to the door. They were dressed to the nines. I was out of my league. Ulla smiled graciously at my suit. She was in an expensive black sequined dress, and she looked like—well, she looked like Ulla Jones, Quincy’s wife. “Let’s go right downstairs; the car is waiting!” Q said. I followed them down the hall, feeling like a southern country hick. I squeezed into the back seat of the black stretch between Quincy Jones and his beautiful wife! How lucky could a young twenty-one-year-old man be? Damn!

  The car pulled up to a club with a brightly lit marquee. Everything had become like in a dream. The doorman grabbed the handle, looking past me. “Mr. Jones! Welcome to the Vanguard!�
� I looked up, but I wasn’t the Mr. Jones he was referring to. The marquee flashed “The Village Vanguard.” Way upscale. The dream continued. I stayed on my feet. We were led to our table, heads turning as we pushed through the crowd. Drinks came. Q smiled at me. “Just wait.”

  The Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra was revealed to applause when the curtains parted, and Q whispered, “Now this, Booker, is music.”

  It was bebop. The jazz precursor/equivalent of rap, which I hadn’t heard before. It swang. Made you move your body with the chords. Fine art.

  Then it was over. I hardly remember the drive back to the hotel, saying goodbye, the flight home. I was a changed young man. The music had transformed me. I had to learn how to do that. My new teacher had taught me a lesson without saying a word. Five years before, at Booker Washington, I was the only student in Mr. E. L. Pender’s after-school music theory classroom, and I went from there to Quincy Jones in New York City. Damn!

  MEMPHIS—Late fall 1961—11

  In addition to exploring the musical world around me, I was still keeping up with my educational priorities. After deciding against a full scholarship to Beloit College and determining that UCLA was too far away and too expensive, I applied to Indiana University Music School in Bloomington. Hoagy Carmichael, one of my musical heroes and the composer of “Stardust,” “Georgia on My Mind,” and “The Nearness of You,” some of my favorite ballads, had attended Indiana.

  In order to increase my chances of being admitted, I took music theory classes after school. Professor Pender was the choral director at Booker Washington, and like the generous band directors, Mr. Pender made an invaluable contribution to my musical understanding. The very act of experimenting and exploring with my newfound knowledge led me to change one note of the scale from a major third to a minor third, which ultimately led to the second chord change in “Green Onions.”

  The theory lessons taught me the rules established by the masters. Knowing the laws and operating principles of chords and melodies gave me the confidence and tools to experiment and forge new ground in jazz, R & B, and classical. Once I understood the rules, I felt free to change them, and that unleashed a flow of ideas in my head.

  Late in the fall of 1961, I arrived at Memphis’s Christian Brothers College to take the entrance exam for Indiana University. Leaving my father in the car, I crossed the sidewalk and stepped onto a long, adobe brick archway lined with apses and niches.

  My dad was also intimidated by the building. Black people didn’t go into buildings like that. Memphis, the most segregated of southern cities, had no black students at Christian Brothers College at the time. Dad sat in the car outside. Countless times my dad waited patiently in the car—whether I was studying at the library or playing a gig at a club in the Arkansas back country. Dad was there for me.

  Walking alone, I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other and finally arrived at the door of a cavernous hall. The room was one and the same as the hall in the movie The Blind Side. Not only was I the only student; I was literally the only person in the room, except for the person administering the exam.

  After a terse exchange with the administrator, I was seated and handed the exam materials. I looked at my answer sheet and felt that my shirt was too tight. The plaid button-up that I had worn a thousand times was pulling at the middle. Why, of all times, am I now concerned with my shirt? I lost my focus. Suddenly, unexpectedly, all the knowledge from my weeks of preparation on various subjects went missing. Vanished. So did my ability to recall. I panicked. I spent fifteen minutes of time I did not have just pulling myself together. This was not a music test. The subjects were the stuff of college exams that I had practiced in study hall when nothing mattered. It became a test of my will. The bell rang. I submitted the answer sheet and walked quickly to Dad’s car. Knowingly, lovingly, Dad never said, “How’d you do?”

  I had no sense of the likelihood of my passing such a test. I had done some preexam study—generic, comprehensive college entrance exam–type drills, but they had done nothing for my confidence. I don’t remember any single aspect of the exam, just being in that huge room all alone.

  Around the time I completed my entrance exam for IU, I began working in the Satellite house band, playing sessions nearly every evening after school.

  MEMPHIS—1961—2

  In November 1961, I had been called over to Satellite to play organ on a song by William Bell called “You Don’t Miss Your Water.” Chips Moman was at the console, and he was also the producer. Rufus Thomas’s son Marvell played piano, Ron Capone from Pepper Tanner Studios played drums, and Lewie Steinberg was on bass.

  Nervous and uncomfortable for the session, I sat at Satellite’s Hammond M-3 organ, isolated in the deep, dark room. The organ was beyond the piano on the slanted theater floor, in front of where the screen would be and visible from the control room window. The sounds from the instrument were pumped to the men’s restroom, to a speaker that was placed on the floor next to the latrine. Heavily tiled, the room’s echo was miked and sent back to the control room, where it was mixed into the recording, giving the organ a reverberant sound.

  Marvell started the song. There was no printed music, but his self-assured lead was easy to follow. The song was in an easy key for the organ, F major. I sat out the first verse but came in on the second, answering William’s entry phrases, which seemed to need repeating, in a call-and-response between the two of us. “I kept you crying”—organ refrain—“Sad and blue”—organ refrain—and so forth until the song ended, “You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.”

  No sooner had it started than it was over. The recording seemed to take no time at all. What happened in so short a time? Riding on the music, we drifted to another world. The three-quarter-time track was our ship, the chord changes and melodies were our sails, and William’s testimony was our purpose.

  When we returned, we filed into the control room for the playback. The smiles on Jim Stewart’s and William’s faces said it all. We had recorded a hit—on the first take, no less. So much chance, work, and talent had converged in a magic moment. “You Don’t Miss Your Water” became Stax’s first southern soul classic song, and the first indication there might be substantially more “water” in Stax Records’ “well.”

  BLOOMINGTON, IN—Spring 1962—1

  In the spring of 1962, my dad drove my mother and me from Memphis to IU in Bloomington, Indiana, in our 1955 Buick and checked us into the Van Orman Hotel with an Esso gas credit card. It was the first time any of us had ever checked into a hotel. We slept and ate next to wealthy white folks for the first time.

  Growing up black in the Deep South ensures your awareness of your inequality. What you cannot do, who you cannot be, how successful you cannot become. You take on a smallness of stature, an unwillingness to overcome obstacles. Worse than fear, because you can’t justify your existence, death bears little consequence. As soon as you are treated as an equal, however, the sky turns a brighter shade of blue. That gnawing feeling of lethargy disappears, an unfamiliar sense of well-being takes hold. A new energy is found.

  The next day, I went to audition for the jury that would decide if I could enter the school. My music sight-reading skills were lacking, short of acceptable. For years, I had fooled people with my ability to play and re-create something I had heard only once. Now I had to look at the page and read by sight. My entire previous experience consisted of writing out a few lead sheets for Stax Records to get copyrights. But my jurors saw potential and took a chance on me. For that, I am grateful to them.

  In Memphis, the producer of “Fool in Love” was a white, rockabilly-influenced guitarist named Lincoln Wayne “Chips” Moman. The owner of the record company was a bank teller named Jim Stewart. A country fiddler based in Brunswick, Tennessee, Stewart’s ambition was to record and release records. Chips was turning the bank teller on to a few of the local groups around Memphis.

  At sixteen, I found myself alone with Chips in a thrown-t
ogether recording studio. He held his guitar, and I sat at the Hammond M-3 organ. The M-3 was the smaller, lesser version of Hammond organs. The studio had yet to obtain a Hammond B-3. “Play something for me,” Chips said. I played “Slumpety Slump,” a tune I’d learned onstage with Ben Branch at Currie’s Club Tropicana. On the organ, I played the same guitar line that Ben’s guitarist, Clarence, used to get everybody up on their feet for our first song every night.

  Chips watched me from the corner of his eye, his lit cigarette hanging loosely from his lip. He played a few choice licks on his guitar, a cross between rockabilly and blues—clean, sharp toned, the notes of an experienced master. Real southern riverboat guitar. Chips was one of those people who moved up in the world, by hook or by crook—mostly the latter. He wasn’t lacking in talent or style. Something about him said there was a derringer in his bag. In the end, he got the best of me.

  MEMPHIS—1961—9

  I was just a wet-behind-the-ears kid, in a room with the equivalent of an experienced boxer who had won championships. Chips was seven years older than me, and he got his nickname from his penchant for gambling. He would become the producer for Carla Thomas, Rufus Thomas, the Box Tops, B. J. Thomas, Aretha Franklin, James Carr, Waylon Jennings, Bobby Womack, Merrilee Rush, Willie Nelson, and Elvis Presley.

  Chips’s uncanny survival instincts included the ability to sense what cards a man might be holding on the other side of the table. I was too naïve to understand that I was going into a business situation. My concern was with making music. Had I understood songwriting, publishing, and copyright, or known that Chips was recording the performance for commercial release, I would never have shown him the tune.