I'm good. I'm at the Kenilworth Hotel in London.
Can you remember your first visit to
the UK?
It would
have been for the Stax-Volt tour, with Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd
and Carla Thomas.
Donald "Duck" Dunn of your
group the M.G.'s described the tour as "the most impressive thing I've
ever done in my life". What made it so good?
Like me,
he was a southern boy from a not so well-to-do neighbourhood in Memphis,
Tennessee, and to come to London at all was a feat. The tour itself turned out
to be extraordinary, everything about it.
Who was your most surprising fan?
Carla
said the Beatles were there in a club we hung out in. I don't remember meeting
them - those guys looked the same to me.
Could you not tell John Lennon from
Ringo?
I wasn't
looking for them, actually.
You recreated the whole of side two
of Abbey Road, didn't you?
I did,
out of absolute admiration.
When was the last time you had to
Sound the Alarm?
[Mildly
irritated] It's Sound the Alarm because Booker T has been simmering for years
and now Booker T is hot, boiling over: sound the alarm, I'm on fire.
Ah, OK. And you're back on Stax. Is
it based in the same building, with the same staff?
It means
the world to me. It's my home. Coming full circle and being on a label that I
helped start. I used to live two blocks away and it defined my life. Now it's
in Beverly Hills, with different people, but they still have the Stax feeling.
Is anybody left from the 60s?
Booker
T.
Is it true you were at school in
Memphis with Isaac Hayes and Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire?
Maurice
was my classmate and Isaac and I were friends. Isaac picked up a lot of his
piano [ideas] from standing behind me. Maurice was my first drummer at high
school. My mom used to make sandwiches for him. David Porter [later Hayes's
writing partner] also went to school there. It was a fertile ground.
The M.G.'s were the Stax house band.
How did they compare with the other house bands – Motown's Funk Brothers,
Philly's MFSB and the Muscle Shoals sessioneers – in terms of proficiency and
funkiness?
Weeell …
We were never mistaken for the Motown group and they were never mistaken for
us. We were a lot simpler than them; they had strings and were more
pop-sounding. The Muscle Shoals group we were mistaken for a couple of times
because our sound was so close.
To bring up Wilson Pickett, did you
spend much time with him in the midnight hour?
[Humouring
the interviewer] He [Pickett] wrote that with Steve [Cropper, guitarist] and
Steve pretty much produced it with Wilson and established a new sound there.
It was 50 years ago this month that
you reached the top three for the first time with Green Onions. How did you
celebrate?
I don't
remember celebrating. I was at Indiana University at the time (4), which was a
challenge. The Green Onions thing didn't seem real, and it could have been a
fluke as far as we knew.
How often do you find yourself in a
bar and they ask you to play the keyboard riff on the piano?
Pretty
much every time. How often do I oblige? Most every time! [Laughs]
How instrumental – no pun intended –
was the track in the birth of funk?
That's a
good question. It was such an original sound. I think it was very instrumental
in the birth of the Memphis sound. I think funk music would have happened
without it, though.
In the 80s it seemed as though every
American movie featured a Stax or Motown track. Which provided the fattest
royalty cheque?
Probably
Green Onions in American Graffiti.
Is it true that you wrote Time Is
Tight while watching Paris burn during the 1968 student riots?
No. It
happened before the riots. I was in northern Paris, writing music for the movie
Uptight. The Sorbonne uprising was a complete surprise to me and everyone else.
I had trouble getting back to my hotel.
Did you join in?
No. I
was completely disabled (5). I had a cast from my upper hip down to my toes and
all the time I was in Paris I couldn't walk. I had crutches and a wheelchair.
Besides, I wasn't that much of a maverick. I would be now, probably, but not
then.
Were the M.G.'s the first racially
integrated band, and as such an influence on Sly and the Family Stone?
As far
as I know, we were, although I don't know if we had any influence on Sly.
Did it cause problems with booking
gigs?
Not with
booking gigs, but it caused problems with travel. The hotels and restaurants
were segregated so we had to be creative when it came to getting food, and
staying overnight we had to sneak in the back door of hotels. Either that or
not stay.
So one half of the band would have
been in a different hotel to the other half?
No, all
the hotels were segregated, so either we [Booker T and drummer Al Jackson Jr]
would be staying illegally in a white hotel or they [guitarist Cropper and
bassist Lewie Steinberg] would be surreptitiously staying in a black hotel.
Was that annoying, or did you just
accept it?
We just
accepted it. It was the 60s, although it was about to change pretty soon.
At the 1967 Monterey Pop festival,
is it true you wore matching chartreuse suits?
Yeah
[laughs]. That was a carry-over from our UK tour where we wore mohair suits.
Did you feel estranged from the
counterculture?
Yes, we
were estranged from it. That was a new scene and the question that night [at
Monterey] was, would they accept us? And they did.
Can you remember the first time you
met Otis Redding?
Uh-huh.
The beginning of the meeting was commonplace because it was just a cursory
"hello" – he was carrying in luggage for the band he was working for,
just a gopher, really. Then afterwards he asked to sing and once he started to
sing our relationship changed.
Was he up there with Elvis and
Sinatra?
I would
have to say, in terms of being a unique individual, yes. He was striking. But
he was a very unassuming person.
What was it like recording Otis Blue
in 36 hours? Intense?
It was,
but he [Redding] seemed to be possessed at that time. Nobody was quite sure what
was going on with him. He just seemed to be in a hurry. Not a hurry – obsessed.
And we didn't understand why. We just went along with it. If he wanted to go
for 24 hours we just did it.
Were those sessions coffee-fuelled,
or anything more illegal?
Oh no,
Otis wasn't doing drugs. I never saw him smoke marijuana, nothing. He didn't do
it around me, anyway.
How about the M.G.'s? Did you
indulge? Or were you clean cut?
I was,
yeah. Until I moved to California [laughs].
Did you join the love-in crowd?
A little
bit. To some extent. Not too much. I couldn't have the health I have now if I
had done what everybody else was doing.
How deeply were you affected by the
murder of Al Jackson, in 1975? I
was in Los Angeles and I walked up to my father's house at maybe four or five
in the afternoon. He normally on a warm summer day would keep the front door
open and the screen door closed. The TV was situated so that you could see it
from the street. And as I was walking up to his door I saw my name on the TV screen,
and of course I continued to walk. And that's how the story was revealed to me.
I opened the screen door and my mom was watching it on TV. That's when I
learned of his death.
It must have been quite a shock.
It was
amazing, unbelievable, a strange sequence of events. When he came to California
previous to the shooting that killed him he'd also been shot. He showed me the
bullet wound on his chest, which he survived.
Courtesy his estranged wife,
Barbara?
Yeah.
And you'd only just reformed the
M.G.'s?
It
seemed like it had just been a couple of weeks that he had been shot by her
before this happened. It wasn't long.
Do you think the M.G.'s' history was
marred by tragedy?
Oh,
absolutely. Otis's death, Al's death – they couldn't have taken more main characters
than those.
If they hadn't died, would the
M.G.'s and Stax have prospered throughout the 70s and 80s?
Looking
back I can say that there would have been hiccups, even with them. In terms of
the music business interfering in Stax's progress. I don't think it would have
been as smooth as it looks like it might have been.
You've worked with everyone from
Willie Nelson to Bob Dylan and Neil Young. What were they like?
Each
situation was different. Bob was my neighbour in Malibu and he would come to my
studio. Willie was a neighbour, too – he had the apartment underneath mine –
and we'd hang out. But Neil and I met working on the Bob Dylan tribute concert
at Madison Square Garden. He was a Booker T and Stax fan, he liked funk, so it
was a good marriage.
You don't normally associate Neil
Young with funk. Folk, yes.
Yeah,
but he started in funk bands up in Toronto.
Did you ever have to reprimand them
for getting out of line in the studio?
Wow. Let
me think about that. Of course if that happened I wouldn't reprimand anybody.
That's not my nature. I guess I've been fortunate in that the people I've
worked with haven't had egos and the situations haven't gotten out of hand.
Did Stax really turn down Aretha but
agree to do an album with Lena Zavaroni?
Who's
Lena Zavaroni?
She was an 11-year-old
X-Factor-style TV pop contest winner with a big voice.
Either
that's something I've blocked out of my memory or I wasn't involved. I can't
tell you.
Have you blocked many things out of
your memory over the years?
It
wouldn't be blocked out of my memory if I could tell you, would it?
You once admitted you "suffer
bouts of prolixity". How come?
I'm
fascinated with language, especially English. I'm a nerd when it comes to
words.
Do you have a favourite?
No, but
one of my father's favourites was "auspicious".
You've also said: "Without art,
life is meaningless." Surely even the greatest Van Gogh isn't worth a
slap-up meal when you're starving.
You say
Van Gogh, but it could be any piece of beautiful art: people just stand there
and stare at it. Why are they lingering? Even a song played at a wedding is a
piece of art. It colours our lives.
What's your greatest artistic
achievement?
I would
have to say Time is Tight.
Because of the memories?
Because
of the simplicity of the melody. It's one of the hardest things to do, to write
a melody that people don't forget.
Is it worth hanging on a gallery
wall?
Well,
that would be egotistical to say that. I'm just gratified I had something to do
with creating it.
No comments:
Post a Comment