Time Is Tight

by Booker T. Jones

  MEMPHIS—1968—3

  When the soundtrack album came out with my name listed as sole songwriter, I noted that as a first. The MGs had come over to Paris and played on the song with me for the recording at an old dark and cavernous soundstage in Paris for inclusion in the film. The high-ceilinged property with its ornate windows and vast floor had a prestigious air, as though it was a bastion of the French film industry. The old stage was likely used to score many vintage French films, but the recording equipment and the acoustics were antiquated.

  The sound on that version, recorded onto 33-mm film, was of lesser quality than our previous recordings in Memphis, and it was decided to rerecord the song back in Memphis at the Stax studios.

  The Stax studio version appears on the single 45, and the Paris soundstage recording appears on the album. Much to my dismay, these later releases listed three additional songwriters in the credits.

  By this time, I was numbed to the ways of the record business and show business. I was truly serving a different master—that of my creative muse.

  After being in California and France with Jules and his family, meeting the big film producers, and working on the huge old soundstages in Paris, the trip back to Memphis for the “Private Number” session was more like an afterthought. The sound and smell of the surf was still in my ears and nose, and the taste of French wine was still in my mouth.

  With the purchase of our new Scully eight-track recorder, the hits began to come.

  Eddie Floyd migrated from Montgomery, Alabama, to Detroit and became the third wheel along with Mack Rice and Wilson Pickett, of the Falcons, whose hits included “I Found a Love.” When the Falcons moved to DC, they met Al Bell, who brought them to Memphis.

  By the time I wrote the arrangement for Eddie Floyd’s “Never Found a Girl,” I had transcribed a Bach fugue for orchestra at Indiana and, for the first time, really understood how to write for strings. More specifically, I learned the mark for pizzicato. Why couldn’t the technique be used in soul music? I used it to have the strings answer my guitar line in the solo.

  Writing songs with Eddie Floyd was a straightforward process. He was a lyricist who knew what he wanted once he discovered, or stumbled on, what that was. Usually, the first words to come out of his mouth ended up being a lyric that made it into the song or was the general idea of the song. And invariably, he sat quietly until I played a chord or some notes that sparked his interest. So our writing sessions started with me strumming a guitar or playing a chord sequence on piano, which morphed very quickly into a finished, or nearly finished, tune.

  Very often, Eddie used our physical location at the time of writing or some incident in his recent life experience as a starting point for the subject of the song.

  Hearing recordings made by Andrés Segovia affected my life and psyche so much that I would have loved to have been born in southern Spain myself. It appears Chicago guitarist Curtis Mayfield was struck with Segovia’s magic wand.

  William Bell and Judy Clay’s “Private Number” finds me once again playing my Curtis Mayfield–influenced Spanish-style guitar. By this time, I had figured out how to write glissandos in harmony for strings. With a good-sized string session, and horns for the long, contrasting legato lines, the glissandos—which we put before each section—were like colorful flowers complementing the vocal events.

  The soundtrack needed to be tied in with current events, namely, the assassination of Dr. King, by a moving rendition of “Children, Don’t Get Weary.” There was only one voice capable of handling the task—the third voice of the Drinkard Singers, along with Cissy Houston and Dionne Warwick—Judy Clay. When I called she gave me a resounding yes!

  I was in love with Judy Clay’s voice. She had flown over to Paris when I was scoring Uptight and sang “Children, Don’t Get Weary,” bringing the small studio audience nearly to tears with her purposeful, emotional delivery. She, too, had reminded me of my experience with Mahalia Jackson when I was a boy. Al had brought her down from Washington, and there was extra time after her session. William and I quickly revamped an idea we had for him to include a female point of view, and we tacked William onto Judy’s session to record the duet.

  MEMPHIS—1968—4

  On my return to Memphis from Paris, doing something he had never, ever done before, Al Jackson told me I should go out to a club or to a studio and check out this leggy white blonde singer, so I did.

  Priscilla seemed shy and withdrawn, and Rita was outgoing and friendly. I couldn’t have guessed there was a rivalry between them because they sang so well together, like one voice. These were (white) sisters who would have done anything to make it in the music business. And they would have done anything for each other, or to each other, to make it happen.

  Sam Samudio of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs didn’t like me seeing his girl but kept his contagious smile whenever he was around me. Priscilla had been his for a long time, and they had been a notorious couple around Memphis, riding around on his big bike. But Sam wasn’t a staff producer at Stax Records, so I got Priscilla.

  Nobody, though, wanted me to marry Priscilla. I had people taking me for rides, trying to talk some sense into me. My first divorce attorney (Seymour Rosenberg) took the case only if I promised not to get married. Al Jackson accompanied Priscilla and me on a trip to LA, and every time she turned her back, he said, “Jones, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

  My mother stopped speaking to me for a time. A friend of Priscilla’s had been calling my mother, giving my mom the blow-by-blow on our relationship, unbeknownst to me, and my mother was getting sicker with each phone call. My wife, who had accepted my philandering until now, called my hotel room in New York, where I was staying with Priscilla, and said, “This is your wife calling, and you’d better come home now!”

  Mickey Gregory, a trumpet player friend from downtown at the Flamingo Room, said, “Well, I see Priscilla finally found a way out.”

  I replied, “A way out of what?”

  “Poverty,” Mickey answered, looking into my eyes.

  The only person who related to what I was doing was Isaac Hayes. He was as crazy as I was in those days. We were wearing long coats and boots and couldn’t get our fill of women. In ’67 we ran into Priscilla and her sister, Rita, at the Rosewood on Trigg one night in South Memphis, and he just looked at me and said, “Man, man, man,” and shook his head. At the time Isaac was divorcing his first wife, living with his fiancée, and going with about six women that I knew of, and I know he didn’t tell me everything. Two of the women he was going with were roommates.

  Priscilla, however, was irresistible to me. She was such a beautiful person in so many ways, searching, looking for love and trying to find herself, trying to find others…and at the same time devouring people like oysters, large and small. Now I know she herself was afraid of being devoured, but it was also what she wanted most. She steered her own ship, just didn’t know where to direct it.

  During those years, my problem was that I was afraid to steer my own ship. I was so innocent that I needed someone to hold on to. When I met Priscilla, I was just a boy. Still a boy. She would say, “I can’t believe how innocent you are.” And I was like, Innocent? What is she talking about, innocent? What does she mean by innocent?

  I had spent my entire childhood and adolescence learning about music—and I knew nothing of life. Priscilla appeared to know everything about it. She had a copy of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which I picked up and glanced at. It was my first exposure to anything metaphysical, and it opened the door to questions about human existence. The essays sparked a rebirth of my awareness, and I became a spiritual infant determined to grow.

  In the summer of ’68, Gigi took T back to Bloomington for a week’s visit with our neighbor across the hall during my senior year at Indiana, Becky. Becky and her husband had separated. In the house alone while they were gone, I came to terms with myself. I was miserable in my domestic life—lying to my wife and myself. Denying truths t
hat were staring me in the face. I married her out of duty as a southern gentleman because she was pregnant and I considered it the honorable thing to do, which was fine, but I was not in love with her, and I didn’t think she was in love with me.

  MEMPHIS, Holiday Inn—1968—4

  In the fall of 1968, I packed my belongings into my Oldsmobile and moved from my house with Gigi at 670 Edith Avenue into a room at the Holiday Inn at the Memphis Airport. After a few days, I leased an apartment at the Lowenstein Towers apartment building on Main Street.

  In a short time, Gigi served me with divorce papers at the Lowenstein Towers, having engaged William B. Ingram, former mayor of Memphis and the mastermind of the devastating situation facing the city’s sanitation workers that caused Dr. King to come to Memphis.

  Mayor Ingram’s power in the city of Memphis was unchallenged and undisputed. To represent myself, I chose the only attorney I knew, Seymour Rosenberg, who was the in-house counsel for Stax Records and was a local trumpet player known as Sy Rosenberg. He was no match for the ex-mayor, who had inherited the power-rich endowment of the E. H. Crump dynasty in Memphis.

  There was no judge in the Mid-South that the mayor didn’t have in his pocket. This certified racist bureaucrat reveled in taking Willette’s case. I can only imagine the look on his face when she came to his office and told him I had left her for a white woman. In the city so graphically depicted in the movie The Blind Side, my goose was cooked. I was young, brash, outspoken, defiant, and financially done for. Gigi repeated over and over that she would “take me to the cleaners,” and she did.

  Priscilla was furious because I paid Gigi $900 a month, in addition to the house note, the car notes, and other incidentals, with no court order. Willette was uninterested in royalties, not believing in my future as a musician. She declined royalties and opted for a cash settlement of $50,000 plus all the property we owned, which was the Edith Street house, a duplex on Regent Street, and a six-unit apartment building on Crump Boulevard in Memphis.

  When the settlement was due, I could only pay half—$25,000—and the rest had to be made in monthly installments until I was able to borrow the rest. Screaming at me every time I went to pick up my son, Willette would yell, “I want my motherf—ing money!” She never had to work a single day and was never homeless or hungry. She never lacked a car or adequate clothing or spending money as a result of my support.

  Gwen would say, “Don’t marry Priscilla ’cause she know so much more than you,” and I would think, What is she talking about?

  With illusion, one can make anything happen—a relationship seems to be love, or a myriad of other situations appear tolerant or beautiful.

  MEMPHIS, Stax—1968—7

  With all the disruptions, changes, challenges, and turmoil in my private personal life, my work was the only constant—dependable and comforting. My muse played hide-and-seek with me, forcing me to hone my skills for recognizing musical possibilities in random places. “Hang ’Em High” didn’t take much searching.

  It came in a white package in the mail, addressed to me on McLemore Avenue from Dominic Frontiere in Los Angeles. The box of cassette tapes had begun to get fuller and fuller since the company began having hits, and the custom was to ignore unsolicited tapes. People from all over wanted our artists to record their songs or to become an artist on our label. Our staff began to view the box as a waste of time since it seemed no one ever got a hit out of it, but I opened this one and popped it into the cassette player on my desk. Dominic’s demo had the logo of a movie company on it, and the music immediately struck me as serious business.

  The opening chords were ominous enough, but when I heard the first low guitar lick—answering nothing but a portent of impending doom—I couldn’t hit the stop button. I kept the guitar lick in the MGs’ song, but the rest of the arrangement came to me right there, sitting at the desk after hearing Dominic’s demo. The tension, the buildup, would come via successive modulations of one half step at a time. Halfway through, I would halve the melodic line to make it twice as long, but in a new key. The tension would build so much that even with no lyrics, you would know something grave was about to take place.

  The ominous, somber music produced a picture in my mind of a man standing on the gallows between two others who would soon lose their lives. His tousled hair hung off the front of his bowed head, and he slumped at his knees. The progression would be from E minor to F minor to F sharp minor and finally to G minor. At G minor, the rope would snap; a body would fall. People watching would condone the tragedy. The music would verify the fact. And then it would happen again. The rope would snap; another body would fall limp. By the time we reached G minor at the end, as many as six men would have been hung. The music would fade, and you would feel strangely exhilarated by the drama.

  I couldn’t wait. I wanted to record it immediately. Before I forgot the arrangement. Maybe we made phone calls and got everyone to the studio right away. I was caught up in the moment.

  LOS ANGELES—1969—9

  Memphis had no freeways. Los Angeles had nothing but freeways. I had a knack for going fast on them—west on the Santa Monica Freeway to get to Hollywood when I should have headed east, or south on the 405 to get to the valley when I should have headed north. The drive to Devonshire Downs took forever. How could we still be driving and be in the same city? It was a freeway I would get to know well, although I had no idea of that then. I was still a neophyte at this rock festival thing. It seemed the people were a little jaded and tired. What I hadn’t realized was that this was the third day, and they’d already seen Hendrix, Taj Mahal, Joe Cocker, Albert King, Creedence, Jethro Tull, and others. They were nearly burned out. We got there in time to catch the Chambers Brothers set, psychedelic as all get-out. Newport ’69 at Devonshire was my first glimpse of a rock festival performance.

  I was blown away. The big amps. The big sound. I stood in the crowd for “Time Has Come Today.” The esoteric references in the music. In the lyrics and the music. Had pop music been narrow in perspective before now?

  I had plenty to think about on the drive back. I had played a few of these festivals and begun to wonder about the hippy movement. There had been one in Atlanta, then one in Detroit, and finally Monterey Pop. What was this new philosophy? Need I be affected by it? Did it challenge my strong spiritual background?

  At Stax, I was handed a persona that was limiting—that of an instrumentalist and music arranger exclusively. Day to day, I presented that persona and allowed the singer-songwriter side of me to be overlooked, ignored, in line with the designs of Stax’s people in power.

  Traveling to places outside the confines of Memphis’s narrow social, intellectual environment exposed me to talent and concepts that sparked self-exploration and personal growth. These changes showed in the lyrics I started to write.

  MEMPHIS—June 1969—12

  I was excited about having finished the mix on a new song, “Ole Man Trouble,” and couldn’t wait to play it for Al Bell.

  It was late one night when I left the studio. I got out of the car and walked around back of it, to the dark path leading to the steps to Al Bell’s house. I shouldn’t have been there at that hour. Many times before, the four of us had hung out, and Al and Lydia had invited Gigi and me over for dinner. But this time was special. I walked up the dark steps and knocked on the door. Al was still up.

  A frown, then a smile, a warm welcome. It seemed he was alone in the house. Inscrutable, Al was an enigma to me. I never figured him out. He appeared strong, but his nature seemed delicate. Maybe he was both.

  “Hey, Booker! Man, come on in! What’s goin’ on? Is everything all right? How’s Gigi?”

  “Yeah, man,” I answered. “Everything’s great!” Masking my excitement, I said, “Matter of fact, I just left the studio. We had a session, and I recorded this song!”

  In the preceding days and weeks, I had undergone a complete rebirth. A full-blown spiritual metamorphosis through self-examination and a d
esire for self-discovery and to find the truth in all things as a way out of the mental and physical bondage I was born into.

  I handed Al the quarter-inch rough mix of “Ole Man Trouble,” and we sat down in his den to listen to it.

  Ronnie Capone and Al Jackson had stayed late with me at the studio. Ronnie worked the board, Al played drums, and I played guitar, piano, and bass on the track as well as performing the vocal. I went to great expense to hire a large horn section, as I had license to do in those days, and paid for a late-night, double-overtime session.

  All six feet, four inches of Al overflowed his favorite chair, and he turned the volume up a little, as if to hear a treat, even though it was late. Lydia, I suppose, was still awake. I positioned myself at the end of the couch.

  As with certain soul songs like Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” a delicate, light, ethereal calm encompasses the room just before the song moves from its spiritual expression into the material world. Feeling this force, Al closed his eyes. But unlike Sam’s song, “Ole Man Trouble” started in a minor key, not a major, and Al reached for his already loosened tie.

  There’s a man, O called Trouble,

  And he follows me, everywhere I go

  In this lyric, I was talking about self-denial and negative thoughts. I knew this was a pervasive tendency of mine and in the African American culture.

  Well now, Ole Man Trouble,

  You can’t get me, now I know

  Here I’m talking about conquering and letting go of fear.