Featuring the jazzy piano and guitar, “Over Easy” is Booker T. & the MGs uptown, with a touch of Latin conga for tang. It’s me and my cohorts at our most pretentious. Despite our efforts to relax when we were recording, “Over Easy” came off as an upscale, ritzy tune, marked with, and enduring, an underlying tension.
The offering from my Ramsey Lewis–, Young-Holt Trio–, freedom-fighter–tinged period, “Over Easy” purports to be the type that might be appreciated by a hip, educated, cautiously religious, intellectual, sophisticated wine lover. The song is so un-Memphis-like, so un-MGs-like. It sounds as if it was recorded at some swank Chicago nightclub on the south side, mere steps away from the church, and the gents wore the same suit to either.
LOS ANGELES—1968—5
After “Soul Limbo” became popular, a Latin theme took hold of the day, and instrumental groups from Chicago, New Orleans, and New York gravitated toward California. Herbie Hancock recorded “Watermelon Man” in New York, then moved to LA. Los Angeles was “the happening place.”
On one of my first trips to California as a young musician, I had the unfortunate experience of having my right leg fall out from under me during a photo shoot for the album Soul Limbo. We had been playing football at Venice Beach in the warm spring California sun, and suddenly, my right knee collapsed. “Get up, Jones, you missed that pass!” Al Jackson barked as I lay writhing in the hot, dry sand. I would not “get up” for another four months, and I would not walk on that leg for another year.
It turns out that the previous eight years of playing the Hammond B-3 organ had been an occupational hazard. The wooden bar just below the keyboard had deteriorated the bone just below my right knee from all my physical abandon when I was sitting there playing the instrument.
I ended up in the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in East Hollywood because Mark Lindsay, a new friend I made on the set of Shindig, the TV show, had heard about my unfortunate dilemma and called his family physician, Dr. Gerald Leve, who quickly gathered a team of doctors for a meeting and initiated the early-morning surgery for me. Bone was to be taken from my hip, pulverized, and implanted in my leg.
Mark Lindsay, who founded the group Paul Revere and the Raiders, is one of those special people who take care of other people without being asked. I will be forever grateful to Mark. He dealt with everything by phone from the set of the TV show and never asked for any thanks.
The surgery, though innovative for its time, was successful, and the young surgeon came to pay me a visit early in my recovery. He lit a cigarette as he greeted me with a smile, and when I asked for one, he advised me against smoking during and after my recovery, saying, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Of course, I proceeded to smoke cigarettes for another ten years.
Only a day before, they shot enough photos before I became crippled to get the timeless cover for the Soul Limbo LP, which shows the four of us flirting with a pretty girl.
HOLLYWOOD—1968—7
In 1960, the Academy Award for Best Song went to “Never on Sunday,” also nominated for five other awards, including Best Writer and Director. The handsome, charming, smiling, happy-go-lucky Greek sailor in Never on Sunday, the guy who got the girl (Melina Mercouri) in the movie, also in real life, was Jules Dassin. He was also the successful Hollywood producer and director who walked into my hospital room to offer me my dream job: composing the score for a major Hollywood feature film.
“Hello, Booker T. I’m Jules. Jules Dassin.”
“I know who you are.”
“I’m here to tell you I’d like you to do the score for my new film, Uptight. It’s starring Ruby Dee and Frank Silvera, and we have a wonderful rising young star, Julian Mayfield.” He took my head in his hands.
I was won over, but I said, “Mr. Dassin—”
“Call me Jules.”
“Jules, look at me! I don’t—”
He put his finger over my lips.
“When do I start?”
“Right away. I’ve arranged an office for you on a lot in Culver City, near your sister’s house. You can start as soon as you start to feel better.” Smiles all around.
This, even though I was fully incapacitated, was the express intention of one, Jules, who not only insisted I was the right person for the job but who also pledged all manner of personal assistance, wheelchairs, limousines, offices, and the like to my disposal in order to complete the score. And then, having said his bit, he said nothing, just standing there with his staff and smiling at me.
What was I to say? “Sorry, Mr. Dassin, I have only been waiting for this moment since I was a young boy, but now because I’m hurt I must turn you down?” The film was Paramount Pictures’ Uptight, and in the opinion of some, the first of Hollywood’s “Blaxploitation” movies, but to my mind it was the film swan song of black America’s underground resistance movement.
My sister, Gwen, gave me the back bedroom at her Crenshaw District duplex for my recovery. Paramount sent over a Moviola and reels of film and reams of soundtrack that I had to manipulate from my wheelchair. She brought the piano from the living room to the back bedroom for me to write on. Quincy Jones sent over a large click book that reconciled music beats per minutes with film frames per second so I would know how to sync the score.
CULVER CITY—1968—5
The lot at Culver City was a behemoth. It was a whole city unto itself, with streets and neighborhoods within its perimeters replicating various cities of the world. The movie company sent a car for me, but Gwen’s husband, Floyd, insisted on driving me. “Yes, but I know how to get there!” And he did that every day while I worked in Culver City. Floyd was familiar with LA because he had been all over the city as a photographer. He knew how to slip around Jefferson Boulevard to National, and he dropped me off right at my door on the side street, Ince Boulevard, on the east side of the Culver City lot, avoiding traffic while the limo sat in front of Floyd’s duplex.
At the Ince Boulevard entrance, carpenters had installed a ramp so I could get into my wheelchair on the street and “drive” myself directly up into my office. It was a small bungalow with dark green wooden siding, an older building, quite comfortable, with ivy growing up the walls. A small sitting room with a couch and a window, a bathroom, a workroom with a window, a piano, and a Moviola, my reels of film—I was home. From the window, I could see Ince Boulevard with its rows of cars and buckled sidewalks with no pedestrians.
No sooner had I settled in than a meeting was called, summoning everyone to come to the production office. The night before, Melina had gone on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Melina told the world that her uncle—the mayor of Athens, Greece—had been deposed by a military junta. His assigns—including her father, minister of the interior—had been forced, at gunpoint, to leave their offices all over the city. Her citizenship and property were taken as well. Greece was occupied!
Melina, Jules’s wife, was a high-profile movie star. The heartbroken actress innocently conveyed the tragic news to Carson’s large US TV audience. In so doing, she became a prime target for the aggressive military faction, along with her coworkers and loved ones. Protection was in order, and France was a country we could disappear in, not so visible as Hollywood. The small, quaint town of Quai Carnot was the last place the violent junta would look for a movie postproduction company such as ours.
Everything changed. My breathing became faster…I noticed Bob, my friend, the editor, fidgeting and jiggling his keys. There were suited guards at our gates. They just stood and looked blank-faced at us. We had to move. Quickly. The company had already relocated once, from Cleveland to Hollywood, before I came aboard. Now everyone and everything had to be packed up and moved overseas, to France—Paris—a city Jules knew well and was comfortable in, and a city that knew him well also. We moved into a vacant, nondescript building on the west bank of the River Seine.
FRANCE—1968—1
I fell in love with Paris on that trip. During those weeks, I learned to drink Beaujolais, order cha
teaubriand avec frites, and argue in French—the people seemed enamored of short, quick fights and prompt makeups. Many times on the side streets, I saw Frenchmen break off into fistfights only to walk off together seconds later as if nothing had happened. My chauffeur had a habit of borrowing a few francs from me when he picked me up in the morning with the promise of paying me back that evening, all in French of course. Naturally, the first word of French I learned was maintenant (now) in an attempt to get Claude to pay me back. He was always able to persuade me to loan him more money and of course never paid me back. Not one franc. Every day Claude showed up faithfully and drove me with my great casted leg out of Paris to the neighborhood called Quai Carnot across the river. I found the patience to walk up and down steps on my crutches and to navigate cobblestone sidewalks even as the rubber tips on the ends slid into cracks between the rocks.
In Quai Carnot, I would walk down to the river and lunch on one of the boats, and every day Claude picked me up to drive me through the traffic back to Paris. Claude was even available in the evenings for my roustabouts until all hours of the morning.
Paris grew on me. Something in the art, in the wine, in the language. The architecture, the excess, the passion. Something made the artist in me feel comfortable. Statues of African American jazz artists in the parks. Restaurants refusing to charge my lunch to my credit card—a message from the chef: “Booker T. Jones doesn’t pay here.” I was walking the streets of the city Europe patterned itself after. It all spoke to me.
At the Madeleine Palace, I savored chateaubriand avec frites. French steak and potatoes, with wine—and a certain chambermaid named Pierette. Tall, with dark hair, and very French, Pierette was the epitome of courtesy and beauty, serving petit dejuner and many other aspects of my suite’s requirements.
Jules was father to the famous and handsome French singer Joe Dassin. Joe and I became friends. Joe’s sisters, Julie and Rickie, were two of Paris’s most enticing and striking young women. The beauty of Jules’s daughter Rickie was not lost on me.
One evening, even though my right leg was cast from my foot to my hip, I had Claude take me to Rickie’s home, knowing full well the impropriety. Rickie was still living with her mother, Jules’s ex-wife.
Next morning, at work, Jules took my face in the palms of his two hands and smiled broadly. He gave me a smack as he recalled the young man he had once been. We continued work on the film, and I never saw Rickie again.
And then there was Melina, who savored the role of a prostitute and nearly won an Oscar in the process. Best Actress at Cannes the year I was born. I sensed her presence behind me as I sat in her husband’s director’s chair.
Because she believed it would bring good luck to run one’s hands through a black man’s hair, Melina would slip up behind me. I would feel her long fingers running through my hair and smell her perfume. Melina Mercouri, the famous Greek actress, was massaging my scalp. A seductress, she was attractive with her dark, low voice, and she called me darling. The boss’s wife!
All of Melina’s charms couldn’t keep Jules’s eyes off a certain French film editor, smitten as he was with Melina. You would think he would have had more sympathy for my inability to resist his daughter.
Even on my days off, I had Pierre pick me up and take me to Quai Carnot, in St. Cloud, because I loved it there so much. I loved to walk up to the ornate house, built years ago by a rich family from Lyon, and walk past the garden on the street.
One Sunday, on our trip back to Paris, there was more traffic than usual, and then French soldiers appeared just before we approached the Sorbonne University. It appeared there was a big uprising at the school, and I was stuck in town and didn’t get to go back to work for a week or so. Back home, Stephen Stills, under the influence of outrage and Joni Mitchell, wrote and sang “For What It’s Worth,” and the French, as well as much of the world, turned their backs. Now it had reverberated around the world to the exact spot where I was. The French students revolted! They closed the Champs-Élysées! We couldn’t get back across the bridge to St. Cloud for days.
During our time off, Jules took me around Paris like I was his son. He introduced me to this important director and showed me that famous studio with that infamous smile and a great sense of comfort and pride. We ate at his favorite restaurants and visited his children. I pretended to know all the important people and their films, and all was good.
Being there in the old European city was having a profound effect on me. All the French composers I had studied while underneath the music building at Indiana and all the theories and lectures about long musical motifs and themes began to take root and make sense as I soaked in the foreign yet not so foreign culture.
Jules was powerfully attached to the central character of his film, Tank, and his attachment translated to me as well as the rest of the crew. The film became our life. Soon, Tank must die, and I must write music to accompany that transition from life to death. At some point, the theme came. But it was not an ode to death but one of life, clearly a melody that allowed death to take place in all its sorrow and tragedy but in the context of life and hope. The music seemed to give eternity its due importance and yet reconcile the loss with the gain of equality (racial equality) that was sure to be one of the payoffs.
In the parlance of late sixties’ black hip culture, a man could call another man “baby” or say “I love you” to him without sexual implications or overtones.
“Johnny, I Love You” is a song of affection and betrayal between two militant revolutionary brothers in the black resistance movement in Cleveland. Although I wrote it in France, it was recorded in Hollywood with A-team musicians Herb Ellis on guitar, the inimitable Ray Brown on upright bass, and Fats Domino’s drummer, Earl Palmer. There was no risk of having to split songwriter credits if I recorded in Hollywood on Paramount’s dime instead of Memphis, and since Paramount was willing to cough up the money, I went for it.
I took the liberty to both sing and use the best available session musicians as if I would never get the chance to do either again.
The tune started with regular blues changes, and I took my usual liberty of defecting away from traditional changes at bar five or nine, by going to the flatted five chord (F flat), and walked the changes back down chromatically to the tonic, twice, ending on B flat. The turnaround used the traditional two chord to the five chord to get back to the chorus.
Lyrically, Cleveland was depicted as a city that was socially and morally broken because of its racial intolerances, and that disrepair was the reason Tank and Johnny needed to arm the brothers. Tank guarantees Johnny he “has his back” in the heat of battle and will be his support when times get rough. Based on The Informer, the song makes no reference to Tank’s weakness, being mainly a paean to the dissidents’ loyalty to each other.
The sound was warm and bluesy, in the comfortable key of B flat. Ray’s bass filled up the studio with warmth, there were smiles all around, and the session was a joy. I was thrilled to have recorded my first vocal track.
QUAI CARNOT, FRANCE—1968—2
The contrast between the well-appointed, acoustically sophisticated LA recording studio and the rickety narrow steps leading up to my third-floor work space in France was stark.
In that small room in Quai Carnot on the River Seine in St. Cloud, not far from Paris, I laid the theme for “Time Is Tight” into the temp track for the movie Uptight.
I used the old piano in an upstairs room in the quaint French town. “Time Is Tight” was the culmination of my composition studies at Indiana University converging with the cultivation of the musical exploits in Memphis that became the Stax sound, including my explorations into jazz and blues and my gospel roots.
When the melody to “Time Is Tight” came to me, I knew nothing of the concept of the golden ratio. However, the phrase is an example of the golden mean; its pattern is an eight-bar phrase followed by a fourteen-bar phrase, a representation of the golden ratio—a reflection of the divine in its uniq
ue properties of proportion. Other examples include a rose, a sunflower, spirals, galaxies, and paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and other Renaissance artists.
The melody is the simplest I have ever composed. I hold the first G six whole beats. A whole note for four beats and a half note for two more beats into the next bar before I move up to C and B in eighth notes, right back to G again for four more beats. A child could easily play it. The pattern is repeated in a shorter form starting with a C note, which is held for a full eight beats at the end of the phrase. At its core “Time Is Tight” is the essence of simplicity, only three notes. However, while holding those notes, I try to exude the character of my heart each time I play the song, and much is left to the imagination of the listener.
“Time Is Tight” encapsulated an era of struggle and exploration, a period of my life in a piece of music.
Tank’s death scene at the bridge, when time was truly tight and Tank was most weak, was the vessel for the musical tome of my life and career.
Tiringly, with the power to change the world, Hollywood abstained in the sixties, leaving only director Gordon Parks to keep the token black producer chair warm.
It took a white man to take this film to Hollywood, and Hollywood spit it out, as well as the man, as it tends to do. Hollywood, however, not to mention its conservative bent, could not also kill my melody, and it still lives, reminding us of the tenacity of the human spirit and what any man can set out to accomplish, whether large or small, white or black, strong or weak.
For that opportunity, I will always be grateful to Jules Dassin, who passed away in 2008 in Athens. It was a sad day for me. He was a man of the world. As sophisticated and uncompromising as he was, you would have thought he was born in Paris or Greece, but he was a child of New York City. Like Ahmet Ertegun, Dick Clark, or Harry Belafonte, he knew where to be, what to wear, what to say, and how to carry himself. For his influence and his contribution to my career and welfare, I am profoundly grateful.
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