TRIP TO LOS ANGELES—1955—1
To visit Gwen one summer, my mother and I boarded a Greyhound bus.
We took the three-day, nonstop ride from Memphis to Los Angeles. The city of El Paso, Texas, has always held a mystic appeal for me, mainly because it was the first rest stop on the long bus ride. At least long for an eleven-year-old. Greyhound buses, unlike Memphis city buses, had just been desegregated by a national commission, and my mother and I were free to sit where we pleased, a freedom we were unaccustomed to.
We took our seats, a little forward on the right side, and I turned, standing up on my knees, craning to discern some reaction from the other passengers about our choice of seats. Mama seemed unconcerned, but I glanced at the back bench, expecting to see black faces. On most of the ride, I was unsettled, anxious, and out of place—as if I were sitting in the wrong class. Finally, in the huge bus terminal at Los Angeles, Gwen’s smiling face and the sight of her fancy green convertible parked nearby put me at ease.
MEMPHIS—1964—5
It was a disruptive time. Kennedy was dead. Johnson was in office, and we were invading the Dominican Republic. People were wondering where our country was headed. “Where are the good times?” The heartfelt, soothing strains of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” were just what was needed on the radio airwaves in black neighborhoods drenched in societal uncertainty and impending hardship. The loss of Kennedy destroyed the sense of upward, forward motion that had begun to take hold in the early sixties and made music more important than ever in our community.
The idea of a love with no end was a theme that sold itself. Otis soaked the vocal with feeling. The recording was one of give and take—where we, the musicians, waited on Otis to express his feelings and supported him with buildups and swells, and diminuendos, or letdowns, in the music. Recording “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” all of us reached the highest highs and the lowest lows, together. The piece was crafted by the best soul crooners of the day, Jerry Butler and Otis Redding, and playing piano on the cut made for one of the most special, emotion-filled moments of my recording career.
I had just enough training in the subtleties and nuances of musical form and structure to play a building progression on piano, twelve notes, starting on low E and ending on A, to push Otis emotionally out onto a soaring high—“You are tired! And you want to be free”—to produce the summit, the culmination, the peak, the climax of the phrase. It was just the right timbre. Just the right sound, resonance, tonality. Unafraid, Otis hit the note squarely on the word tired, with unabashed emotion and sincerity, and with a dose of undeniable honesty. It was a step forward, moving soul music into a realm of its own.
And there I was. All of twenty-one years old. Married three years. Helping give rise to a powerful testament to deep, endless love in my work and all the while harboring a deep, inward need to find such love for myself. I came face to face with what was missing in my life. I wanted a woman who meant everything to me, who made me feel like the guy in the song, someone I loved so much I would beg or do anything for her.
LOS ANGELES—1965—4
Not long after the session with Otis, I found myself once again in Los Angeles. Naively, on the set of the TV show Shindig, I asked Billy Preston how much money he made. “Oh, I guess around fifty thousand.”
My God! I thought. I haven’t made that much since I started working!
Billy smiled. “Go join AFTRA.”
“That will be nine hundred dollars, thank you.” I was standing at the counter in the offices of AFTRA on LaBrea on my last day in LA, and I needed to be a member of that union to collect my check from the TV show. How am I going to get nine hundred dollars before my flight back to Memphis?
It was 1968 before I saved enough cash to join that union. They saved my checks, and I walked out of there with over $3,500 in payments from past TV shows. By that time my dues had grown to $1,800, but it was still profitable for me to join.
I never forgot Billy telling me he made $50,000. I was making $125 a week at Stax. Billy had a Cadillac; I had a Ford Galaxie. Sure enough, first year I moved to California, I made more than $50,000 and bought myself a ranch and a new Mercedes-Benz.
California was starting to look like the Promised Land. Not only for me but many others in the music business, including the promoter that burned me, Ruth Brown, Otis Redding, and Jimmy Reed in New York. He turned out to be the same Los Angeles DJ, the Magnificent Montague, whose slogan had become “Burn, baby, burn!” By the time we made our way to LA’s 5/4 Ballroom for two shows, the shameless hero had driven the phrase into the jargon of South LA, and it sifted into every black neighborhood in America.
August 11, 1965, the day we opened at the 5/4 Ballroom, was the day LA’s finest chose to cross the thin blue line once again by beating up a pregnant black woman on the street, igniting an already too-short fuse and ensuring the city would “burn, baby, burn” for certain. Fittingly, we played Phil Upchurch’s “You Can’t Sit Down” and “Soul Twist,” written by King Curtis.
Ahmet Ertegun called my sister, Gwen. Wanted me up on Sunset Boulevard at ten the next morning for a recording session. The artist was Bobby Darin. It’s a mystery how he got her number. Gwen let me take her car and told me how to take Arlington and how it turns into Wilton to Western and to drop down to Sunset to avoid traffic and the freeway. The studio was Sunset Sound. The charts were done by Gene Page, and they were stacked up on the organ when I walked into the studio. These guys were sight-reading the arrangements!
The studio was full of people. I could see the Blossoms in their own private vocal booth. I spotted Ahmet in the control room. I never got my bearings because I had barely parked Gwen’s green Buick convertible, walked in, and sat down before Gene looked over at me, counted one-two, one-two-three-four, and the red light went on over the control room. We were recording. The song had started. I spotted Al Jackson over by the wall next to Hal Blaine. They were both on drums.
I scrambled to find my chart and the place on the music. It was baptism by fire. My first Hollywood session. The pianist looked over at me with a congenial smile. I found the place on the music. I don’t know how. I followed the chart. I didn’t usually come in until the second verse on songs anyway. Thank God. I played. The music was exhilarating. Bobby was rock’s Frank Sinatra. Did I turn the car off?
On the break, I ran to the parking lot and checked. Ignition off. Whew!
After the session, we walked outside to see smoke in the skies. Los Angeles was under siege.
I called Gwen.
“Booker, stay over there! Don’t come over here! Bye, baby!”
Word came that the California National Guard wasn’t allowing any autos south of Wilshire. I was in a war zone, and I feared for my life. The sky was black with smoke.
One of the Blossoms, Jean King, saw me standing by the phone booth out back of the studio as she was pulling out. She rolled down her window. “Get in!” I squeezed into Jean’s little sports car and spent the night on the couch at her apartment in the Hollywood Hills. Jean was concerned but stayed calm. The next afternoon, we heard on the radio the curfew was lifted. I was still scared to death. I felt I owed her my life.
Montague, meanwhile, struck again. This time in a way I never suspected. He went into a partnership called Pure Soul Records with Packy Axton’s mom, Estelle, for whom we all would do anything, and persuaded us to go into an LA studio. There was no music; we were told just to jam. Al was on drums, Johnny Keyes on congas, and Leon Haywood on Hammond B-3. I happily provided the first lead verse on piano, which was repeated for the third verse, and Packy played a sax solo in between. Johnny put a conga break in the middle section. “Hole in the Wall,” the instrumental by the Packers, was a massive hit. We got writer’s credit but no royalties and no publishing. Pure Soul went out of business before it paid any bills. Houdini could have learned a thing or two from Montague.
GARY, IN—1966—4
Bloomington was starting to feel like home, b
ut it was already time to choose a place to do student teaching. Roosevelt High School in Gary was the obvious choice. Gigi and I were spending part of our last semester on campus in married housing, after which we moved to Gary and rented her parents’ upstairs apartment on Pennsylvania for the final half of the school year. It seemed like a perfect situation. Mr. Williams, Roosevelt’s band director, was happy to have me do student teaching under him. He was a smart, well-dressed, experienced teacher in his forties and regularly left me in charge of the band and the daily classes as well. The students were well behaved and cooperative. It was a student teacher’s dream come true.
Willette wasn’t thrilled about moving back into her parents’ building. She had visions of us living far away from her folks. The rent, however, was affordable, and I needed to student teach at a school in Indiana. It was our only reasonable choice.
She didn’t get on with her father. Our apartment was messier than her room had been, and she and her parents fought about that and other things. The mess was disturbing to me. You had to step on, or over, all the clothes that were strewn all over the floor in a large pile, and it was impossible to walk around the room. Is this an indication of Gigi’s inner turmoil or just the basic absence of a need for neatness? Her mother and father weren’t much involved with our child, Booker III, and he was often sick when we were in Gary.
I couldn’t afford to pay too much attention to the situation at the Armstrongs’ duplex, as I was in my last semester of college and had to make a go of my student teaching assignment at Roosevelt High School. Mr. Williams, my supervisor, decided to retire and started leaving school early, entrusting entire days to my instruction.
The band decided to give Mr. Williams a trophy as a sendoff on his retirement. Along with the band president, who was an attractive, mature, senior girl who played clarinet and sat in the front row, I was elected to go downtown and purchase the trophy. We went shopping for it at recess in my car and obviously were spotted by one of Gigi’s friends, who assumed we were having an affair. Soon after, I drove the band president home and stopped short of getting involved with her.
That evening Willette confronted me with what she felt sure was my infidelity. I couldn’t convince her otherwise, and the truth was, I did find the young lady attractive even though we weren’t involved. My relationship with T’s mom was in trouble.
Our first big argument came after Gigi took me to a club to introduce me to her friends, and I ended up feeling like she was showing me off like a trophy she had won. By ourselves, in our quiet moments, I wondered if Gigi was aware of me. We didn’t customarily exchange words of affection or exhibit fondness. There were no smooches or warm embraces. She looked forward, however, to the takeout food I fetched every night and to the moola from the gigs and the checks I brought in from Stax. What have I gotten myself into?
Instead of Bloomington to Memphis, my trips became Gary to Memphis.
MEMPHIS—1966—3
For the Carla Thomas session, I left Gigi in Gary with her parents and the baby, and I stayed with my parents in Memphis.
Everyone at Stax was having affairs. Some were more elegantly veiled than others. The innuendos came out in the music, through the songwriting and the vocal deliveries. Betty Crutcher stayed out of the fray, as far as I knew, but she was one of the best at exposing this nuance in her songs. She and her partners wrote “Who’s Making Love” and “Somebody’s Sleeping in My Bed” for Johnny Taylor.
One of the best examples of this tendency, and one of the sexiest songs ever recorded at Stax, was Carla Thomas’s “Let Me Be Good to You.” It’s hard to imagine Carla wasn’t singing the song to someone in particular. As with a lot of Carla’s songs, I found myself at the piano on this one. The arrangement took on a whimsical, playful feeling and became (in my opinion) a novelty due to its 3/4 shuffle rhythm.
This was a period of artistic change for Stax artists that coincided with political nuances and advances brought about by the new popularity of rock. Most Stax artists embraced the new music from America’s hippy culture and Europe.
Otis and the Stones admired each other. I loved the Stones just as much but found playing piano on “Satisfaction” felt odd to me. Any way you cut it, “Satisfaction” is a guitar song, and a keyboard player has to dumb it down either with quarter notes or Jerry Lee Lewis–style eighth notes. I knew this because I was a closet rock guitar player. And even though my guitar playing was openly discouraged in the studio, I sometimes played anyway, with Otis, William, and Eddie and when Cropper wasn’t around.
The electric guitar was given a new authority in the music industry by rock. A clout that blues couldn’t muster on its own. Like the rock David threw to slay Goliath, the Rolling Stones’ opening guitar to “Satisfaction” claimed undisputed, uncharted musical territory for rock and roll till the end of time.
There was no getting around “Satisfaction.” It was an anthem. We cut it in the same key, but with nowhere near the clarity of tone on the guitar as on the Stones’ cut. Our weapons were the horns, tight rhythm, and Otis’s ability to preach rock and roll. Where the Stones left space, we put keys. Maybe nobody had the guts to tell me to lay out. The Stones’ record bounced and danced along. Ours stomped, left, right, left, right, and smashed you in the face. Who covers the Rolling Stones, anyway? The self-assured or the dense. I like to think we fell into the first category.
There is no song in my recollection, Stax or otherwise, that I put more effort into, in terms of trying to come up with an arrangement, than Carla Thomas’s “B-A-B-Y.” I tried everything. Every rhythm, every tempo, so much trial and error that I got sick of the thing before playing the high piano chords that finally began the song. Carla was done with it. Finished. She didn’t want any more of David and Isaac’s song, “B-A-B-Y.” I didn’t give up on it, though. I know my persistent nature has driven people mad, but David and Isaac were our proven best songwriters, if not arrangers, and there was something in this tune. Somewhere. Maybe a more Motown feel. Motown? At Stax? Nah. Nah. Maybe? Yeah! Why not? Finally, I came up with a Motown-style bass line.
Next morning, I tried my idea out on the band with Carla in the vocal booth. It worked! It worked! People were dancing in the control room! Carla had a big grin on her face when she was singing. She loved me for changing the arrangement! It was a big accomplishment for me! All the elements—the changes, the melody, the structure, and the lyrics—were there from the beginning. I just rearranged them.
STAX’S WRITING TEAM—1966—12
A few weeks later, I was in my office working on an idea, or at least trying out an idea, when I heard some chords coming from the office next door, David and Isaac’s. I tried to focus but found myself standing in the hall, listening. “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby” came wafting through the crack underneath the door. This was something different. I lost concentration on what I was working on. Right next door to me, a true song was being written, and I could not take my attention away from it. A picture formed in my mind of a man committed to his woman to the extent depicted in the song. This was why we were here. This was why I studied music and what we were dedicated to. Depicting life and love in its most beautiful state. This was one of the greatest purposes of music.
The song was delegated to Sam & Dave, of Miami, Florida. On the day of the session, Isaac sat down at the piano, which meant I would play organ. We worked the arrangement up at the piano and took places for the recording. Cropper played the four simple opening chords. Leading chords, suspended on A flat, after which Duck played three grace notes leading to the first down beat—the canvas was set. “When Something Is Wrong with My Baby,” accompanied by traditional rhythm and blues piano triplets, and Isaac and David’s dream became a reality. In the second eight of each verse, I played a counter-melody on the Hammond B-3, a longing, wistful line that threads its way into the song’s fabric from the inside. The organ tones shone golden in color and mixed with the gospel church piano chords, soulful Lowman Pauling–sty
le guitar, and honest vocal testimonials and harmonies. All this held together by a faithful 6/8-time signature that swayed from side to side. Dave laid down the first verse with support from Sam in the background.
There was a respite after the first verse, a quieting, where all the elements settled down for the second verse, as if the song’s mood and place was established, and now it could relax for this next part. Beginning the second verse, Sam appeared determined to take his time. And this is where Duck Dunn played his famous “falling” bass line, from B flat to G flat. With the vocal, Sam sang his heart out, and when the chorus arrived, it came as a relief, and a release, deliverance in the power of love. That feeling was experienced by all involved in the recording and never forgotten.
BLOOMINGTON, IN—1966—2
Time came for me to choose pieces to play on trombone for my senior recital. It dawned on me these would be the last days I would come to this little room in the music building for my weekly applied lessons with Buddy Baker, my teacher, who, over the past four years, had gradually become more than an instructor, a mentor and guru. So much had changed since I first entered this room at age seventeen. Most important, Buddy had lost his young daughter in an accident in his home swimming pool. No one who knew him will ever get over that. Especially not his students. First, he was second-rank trombone professor at IU. Professor Thomas Beversdorf was department head, and his roster was more than full. Buddy’s office went vacant during the tragedy, and Buddy’s students had to walk past going to class; it was always a reminder.
The recital day arrived, and Mama was able to make it to Bloomington, even though she was recovering from neck surgery. I muddled through the difficult program, having spent more time studying business or biology than practicing music, but such was the nature of graduation with a liberal arts degree as opposed to an applied music degree. Music education wasn’t available as an applied music course at Indiana University, and I wanted to learn to teach as well as play, so I had to go for the bachelor of music education degree. I marched with my class in June, and my parents were so, so proud, and I was so happy and tired.
Time Is Tight Page 11