The message I heard from our church, loudly, was simple. “The Baptists don’t dance, son.”
That’s pretty much all I remember hearing from my church for several years, actually all the way through my high school years. But it was the sixties and I was bent to be all about it in every way—good or bad. I was sold. I found my destiny.
Later on that year our band hit a road bump and proceeded to drive off a cliff. We started playing out fairly frequently. It seemed it was always for a dance at a skating rink, a church, or swimming pool party. One day the whole band met with me and told me they were going to kick out our drummer and get a kid who played better and owned better drums. But the drummer and I were tight as ticks so I quit the band out of loyalty. It turned out to be divine intervention.
Not long after, Larry’s band played at a senior graduation house party where the parents were gone and the kids got up into some heavy drinking. Later that evening my folks found my brother passed out in our old, funky, nasty fishing boat in the carport. The band left him out there, totally fractured by the alcohol. I guess they were too afraid to knock on the door. He was crazy drunk and a complete mess. He probably could have died out there. My parents and I found him by his moaning and dragged him into the house and into his bed.
In the morning, all hell broke loose as my parents handed out Larry’s sentence. He was banned from his rock band forever and grounded from any activities completely for the three very long summer months. That’s pretty hard medicine for a kid just about to graduate high school. My folks further humiliated him by cutting his hair close to the scalp while he was still drunk and passed out. I know they were just handing out what they thought was tough love. We never questioned their motive. But it was really tough.
After that Larry gave up on music and went to work at a local grocery store. Many years later he still felt he was judged too harshly by our parents and that one mistake took him away from the music he was so good at playing.
“Maybe that messed my career calling up,” he once told me.
For me it was just the beginning. Music wasn’t just a hobby for me. I was completely “ate up with it.” Larry’s tragedy sidelined him, but I kept on keeping on. That kind of passion can be a good thing, like a cool drink of water, or it can be bad—like a disease you can’t control. For some of us music gets deep into our souls and roots itself in there. There was no stopping me.
Dana Key and I formed our first band in the sixth grade. We named ourselves “The Sound Corporation.” We were a four piece: Dana on guitar, me on keys, Andy Owens on bass, and Donnie O’Neal playing drums. Around the time Christmas came Larry showed up at one of our band practices.
“You guys need a manager,” he said. “Someone just like me.”
He then began to tell us if we were going to be a band we had to look like a band. It was time to dress accordingly and get some real threads. He was right about that. Years later as a record executive, I said to my artists, “If you can walk through the mall without people suspecting you are an artist, singer, or in a band by the way you dress and carry yourselves, you’ve missed the mark.” Image is important.
Then my brother, our new manager, also said there was a battle of the bands at the Mid-South Fair and he thought we should enter. We had a few months to get ready. Over that span we practiced as much as possible and played every possible gig. My dad was a real estate agent at that point and sometimes we set our amplifiers up and played on the driveway at his open houses. It was then I first really experienced how music could draw a crowd. People stopped their cars in the street, got out, stood, and listened. My dad was a pretty good marketer.
I’ve discovered through the years that performing live is where the rubber meets the road for an artist. It changes everything about how you sing, play, look, and smile. You’ve heard “Strike a pose.” Well, that actually happens when you perform in front of a crowd. Everything gets much more intense, focused, and refined.
Later in life when I was a music executive, my first question to young artists was, “Where have you been performing?” Too many times I heard excuses. “Well, I have to work here or there to make money and I haven’t had as much time to sing and play as I would prefer. But, if you could help me with a deal and support I could do it more.”
To that I replied, “But, you said you are a singer,” or “You said you are a guitar player. Singers sing and guitar players play. I didn’t ask you if you were getting paid for it. That’s not the important matter for now.”
Many times artists gave me a puzzled and discouraged look after that exchange. I would then say, “You know, you have to want it more than me. It never works out in the end if you don’t.”
It was the beginning of the seventh grade when the band competition rolled around for Dana, the guys and me the next September at the Mid-South Fair. We were rock solid tight. We also had our knee-high black suede Beatle boots, white pants, light blue turtleneck sweaters, and love beads around our necks. We probably looked like a commercial for the TV show Laugh In. But hey, it was 1967. We were scared to death when we performed that Saturday afternoon at the fairgrounds. It was probably 95 degrees in the place and we were wearing sweaters. I have to say though, we killed it.
There were several dozen bands competing from all over the mid-south. When it was our turn to perform, we played “Mustang Sally” by Wilson Pickett, “You Keep Me Hanging On” by Vanilla Fudge, and “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield. Every group got to play three songs. Ours weren’t necessarily the happiest pop songs of the day. We were way too hippie-psychodrama for that fluff and we wanted everyone to know it. We were cool.
The band that came on behind us was much better at playing the socially accommodating game than we were. When they started playing, all but the drummer had their backs to the crowd and one by one they were introduced over the music. “Danny on bass”—then he would turn around to face the crowd very quickly with a huge smile. “Jimmy on guitar,” and so on. They were all wearing blazer jackets and ties. I have to admit, even back then Dana and I laughed and thought it was extremely cheesy. That band went on to win the competition based on their showmanship. We came in second place. We won in every other category—musicianship, performance, etc. But those guys had a show and we didn’t. I learned a hard lesson that day.
I think it was Les Paul who said, “People hear with their eyes.” Les Paul invented the electric guitar way back when. When he first presented it to the public it was just a board, kind of like a two by four with strings on it, and it didn’t go over well. In fact, it bombed. He went back to the drawing board and came back out with a version that looked similar to the acoustic guitar form. It was a hit and it caught on big.
“People hear with their eyes.” If you think about it, Les Paul is completely right. It is certainly true when it comes to live performances of all kinds of popular music. Most of our concert memories are visual. Try it out. What do you remember most about your favorite concert? More times than not, we remember what we see more than what we hear.
After that surprising defeat Dana and I spent a lot more time thinking about how we looked and moved on stage.
FOUR
Too Far Too Long
Things started to get serious in the music business for me during the latter half of ninth grade. I met a fellow in high school by the name of Dunk Carter. He was a rhythm guitar player who just moved to town. Dunk wore a jacket with a threadbare American flag sewn on the back with red, white, and blue peace symbols on each arm. This meant to me he couldn’t be half-bad. He knew a man who had a recording studio in the poor and funky part of downtown Memphis. His name was Lewis Willis. Dunk was old enough to drive and invited me to go to the studio with him one Saturday to meet the owner. I’m not sure how long it took me to say yes, but it couldn’t have been more than half a second.
Dunk and his brother picked me up that Saturday morning and we drove a little north of downtown Memphis to a seedy part of town where 2
nd and Looney cross. All I saw was an old furniture store with a neon sign blinking the name “Willis Furniture.” There was also a big pelican painted on the plate glass window along with the words, “Pay a little down on a big bill.”
I laughed and asked Dunk, “What is this strange place?”
He assured me the studio was in the back and we proceeded inside. I noticed a small hewn stone African American church across the street, and an old dilapidated little grocery store at the corner I later discovered made the best bologna sandwiches in town. As we entered the building we passed by several pieces of new and used furniture for sale in the showroom on our way to the back.
There sat Lewis Willis, smoking a cigarette. He rose and walked to me, extending his hand and introducing himself. Lewis had a debonair look to him in his turtleneck and blue cardigan sweater adorned with the customary suede elbow patches. He respected me as an equal, even though he was an adult white man in his late thirties and I was a fourteen-year-old punk kid. That meant something to me. He began by showing me around the tiny control room of the studio. He had a two-track recorder and a modest mixing board. He asked me all sorts of questions about the music I liked. Then we walked back out through the furniture to the room where the musicians played while recording. It was pretty dark in there. Dim red and blue lights highlighted the walls and ceiling. In the middle of the room, in front of a microphone, was a lanky, tall, black man who was also smoking a cigarette.
He walked over to me and stuck out his hand. “Hey there,” he said. “I’m L. H. I sing lead in this here band.”
Despite the darkness L. H. was wearing sunglasses. I also noticed he had a goatee. He was older than Dunk and me; old enough to have chin whiskers. As my eyes began to focus in the dim light, I saw a couple more musicians sitting in isolation recording booths positioned around the corners of the room.
That afternoon I joined L. H. and the Memphis Sound. We were a seven-piece soul band with a rhythm section, a trumpet, and a sax. Over the course of a rehearsal or two, we realized we needed a lead guitar player and I suggested to Dunk he call my friend Dana Key. Dana joined us shortly after that, playing lead guitar as our eighth member.
That was my first experience playing in an inter-racial band. For that matter, it was the first time I had a meaningful relationship of any kind with black kids. It was a blast and opened my eyes in a thousand different ways. We got to know each other quite well over the next few months as I was baptized into the world of soul music, Lewis Willis, and Allied Recording Studio. It was wonderful. It seemed back then music transcended all the racial barriers in Memphis.
My dad was a real estate man. Before that he was a Buick man. When he was discharged from the Army and went to Detroit in search of work he ended up going to work for one of the Buick dealerships in town. He started as a mechanic and worked himself up to service manager over a few years. One day, a mechanic showed up on the job drunk and Dad got into his face about it. I guess the ole boy was of a pretty good size. Anyway, he ended up taking a swing at my father, caught him on the jaw, and sent him tumbling across the floor. Dad got up and chased him out of the place with a big monkey wrench. He’s lucky the guy took off running because Dad would have taken his head off with that monkey wrench had he caught him. He’d probably still be in jail.
Dad got pretty rough and ready growing up in Arkansas and Texas during the Depression. He’d fight a buzz saw if he thought it had it coming. He ended up going to the hospital after the mechanic ran off. He lost a few teeth in the process and had his jaw wired shut for a while until it healed up. He carried a bit of a scar there for the rest of his life After that incident, my father decided he wanted a more peaceful job so he went into selling real estate and building houses.
My mother owned beauty schools and beauty shops. She and Dad started the first one when I was in the fourth grade. My mom started attending beauty school when I was in the first grade, when she had time during the days with me in school. After she graduated, she ran a beauty school for another fellow for a couple of years while learning the business. She and my dad opened the first DeGarmo Beauty School in Whitehaven. It did pretty well, so they opened a second one a few years later and then a string of beauty salons. I feel pretty lucky to have had both my mom and dad be so entrepreneurial as I was growing up. It taught me a thing or two about business just by watching them and living through it. I learned first and foremost that if you are the owner there is not a single job beneath your dignity. If the floor needs sweeping, you sweep it. If the windows need washing, you wash them. Also, you work before and after all the employees leave. That is just the way it is. It’s your business. I swept a lot of hair and mopped a lot of floors in those days when we cleaned all those places on Sunday afternoons.
My mother worked a job when I was one and two years old in Detroit. Then she stayed home with me after the move to Memphis until I started school. When she started back to school and work, my folks hired a maid, and a nanny of sorts, to be with us boys while they worked all the time. They were always black women and they were always great to be around. We sassed them and they chased us and my mother gave them permission to whack us if we needed it. We usually did.
Every morning and evening their men folk would drop them off and pick them up in some sort of jalopy car. I never thought anything about it as a small boy. As I said, my dad contracted houses. He built them and sold them. Many Saturday mornings, he and I would get into his pick up and ride into shantytown. He drove up and down the street talking to the black men, asking whether they wanted to work for a day or two or sometimes more. We picked up four or five men in the back of his pickup and he took them to work on his houses and then took them back home at the end of the day. I never thought twice about it being a kid and all. That was just the way it was.
I remember being with my dad one morning and us seeing a young black man sitting in my father’s favorite coffee shop for the first time. My dad looked my way and said, “Look there, son. Things are a changing!” That was the South in the late fifties and early sixties.
Since our schools and churches were still segregated, the time I spent playing music with black kids was the first time I had ever been around them for any length of time. I found out very soon those kids were exactly like me, other than often being much better musicians than I was. They worked at it harder. Maybe they wanted it more. Music was a way out of poverty for them. Being in an integrated band did raise an eyebrow or two around our schools and the town in general. We thought that was awfully cool.
Sadly, L. H. and The Memphis Sound didn’t last very long. We were a hot band while we were around, though. One important thing that happened was the other underage kids in the band and I had to get our parents to sign work permission papers with the state and city giving us permission to work underage in places and clubs that served alcohol. Our parents signed them after Lewis went and met with them each personally and promised he would look after us. He and my dad were Masons and it turned out they had a common bond of trust on that level. Lewis did try to keep watch over us. He was good that way. The problem, though, was we learned how to sneak around him pretty well.
Slowly, as L. H. and The Memphis Sound dissolved, we reformed by replacing members with kids we knew from our end of town. We changed the name of the band to “Globe.” We became an all-white soul band—which was even more peculiar in Memphis at the time. L. H. introduced me to musical masterpieces I’ll never forget; artists like Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MG’s, The Barkays, Eddie Floyd, and Al Green. I learned how to feel the back side of the beat, which is a different place altogether. It’s greasy back there. You can ask any drummer worth his salt what the difference is.
My favorite keyboard player was Booker T. Jones. I saw him play once with The MG’s, at the YMCA in Whitehaven. He played “Green Onions” for what seemed to be at least fifteen minutes, on his Hammond B3 organ. Later I met the songwriting team of David Porter and Isaac Hayes, the writers behind big hits lik
e “Hold On I’m Coming” and “Soul Man.” It was a new world for me, and a good additional influence from the British Invasion bands so popular at our suburban schools.
Lewis formed an alliance with Willie Mitchell, the legendary producer, and Hi Records. Hi was just beginning to top the charts then with artists like Al Green, Ann Peebles, and Anita Ward. Hi Records operated a studio called Royal Recording just around the corner from Stax Records in Memphis. Hi had some success with The Bill Black Combo and the saxophonist Ace Cannon in the late fifties and early sixties. By the late sixties they had turned to Memphis soul music. Royal Recording Studio is still in operation today with notable artists like Bruno Mars and Paul Rogers recording there recently.
Lewis communicated with Willie that he was managing and recording an all-white soul band named Globe. We were a ten-piece band by then, including two horn players and three singers. The year was 1969. We were playing all over town and around the mid-south three nights a week and were appearing regularly on well-known local TV shows out of Memphis like George Klein’s Talent Party, Swingshift, and others. Those local shows hosted many notable artists in those days. I remember seeing James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Herman’s Hermits, Sam the Sham, and The Pharaohs, (the band behind “Wooly Bully,”) and many others.
Memphis music was on fire with Stax Records and Hi. Stax was arguably one of the largest independently owned record companies in the world and Hi Records had begun a string of dominating global hits with Al Green. Several other major labels had offices in Memphis as well. There was a band on every corner and it was like music was in the water.
Rebel for God Page 4
