From the 1950s to the 1970s, Birmingham’s Baker Knight wrote more than a thousand songs. Ricky Nelson recorded 21 of them, placing three in the Top 10 pop charts before 1960. One of those hits, “Lonesome Town,” rode a second wave of popularity when it was included on the soundtrack of the film Pulp Fiction in 1994. Five years later, Paul McCartney recorded the song on his Run Devil Run album, and later sang it as a tribute at his late wife Linda’s memorial.

Knight’s fame and fortune, however, were forced to compete with the clutter of mental illness and alcoholism that dogged his life. Agoraphobia, addiction, and chronic fatigue syndrome were punctuated by panic attacks and drunken episodes.

	The late Birmingham songwriter wrote numerous hits such for the likes of Ricky Nelson, Elves Presley, and Dean Martin.

Knight died in Birmingham in 2005, having published his memoir, A Piece of the Big-Time, earlier that year. He was a better songwriter than storyteller, yet there are plenty of dramatic escapades and erratic behavior; he puts his life on exhibit as a spectacular highway crash, insisting that everyone stick around to view the charred remains.

Knight has had his songs covered by a diverse group of artists. Elvis Presley made “The Wonder of You” a number-one hit on the easy listening charts in 1970. Frank Sinatra took Knight’s “Any Time at All” to number two on the easy listening charts in 1965, the same year Dean Martin scored a number-two hit with the songwriter’s “Somewhere There’s a Someone.” (From 1966 to 1969 Dean Martin recorded 11 Knight tunes.) In 1976, Knight wrote “Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time,” a country music chart-topper for Mickey Gilley. Perry Como, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Eddy Arnold also recorded his songs.

While living in Birmingham during the 1950s, after being discharged from the air force for emotional problems, Knight formed a band called the Knightmares that had a regional hit with “Bring My Cadillac Back.” The band signed with the Decca label after the song sold 40,000 copies in two weeks. However, radio was forced to pull the song after it was deemed a free advertisement for General Motors. The band broke up, and Knight moved to Los Angeles in 1958. He was soon hanging around with Ricky Nelson and Eddie Cochran, but his life remained in turmoil. One of his early suicide attempts involved leaping off a cliff behind the Hollywood Hills home of Ricky and his “Ozzie and Harriet” co-star brother David when he discovered the two were not home. He survived and continued to have great musical success despite his mental problems.

In and out of psychiatric hospitals, Knight finally returned to Birmingham in 1977. After various treatments in psychiatric wards, he went to Nashville in a failed attempt to resurrect his career. When he returned to Birmingham, he got a job rewiring lamps for Goodwill Industries. By 1981, his mental problems were so debilitating that he agreed to undergo a new procedure for agoraphobia. Electrodes were planted in both his chest and the back of his skull. The operation was to be shown on “That’s Incredible,” a popular TV show hosted by John Davidson (who once recorded Knight’s “The Wonder of You”). The operation was a failure, leaving Knight in line for shock treatment, which he received. He finally quit drinking in 1982, but his emotional problems continued to haunt him.

In his book, Knight hides none of the embarrassing, unpredictable behavior that shadowed his problems. He treats suicide attempts as self-deprecating episodes of madness. While in Nashville, after his romantic overtures to singer Naomi Judd were rejected, he grabbed his gun one night and went in search of Judd and her date. He once turned on the gas while talking on the phone to his estranged wife not long after she had given birth to their child. As he started to pass out, he decided he didn’t want to die and turned off the gas. However, he forgot the room was full of fumes and lit a cigarette. The explosion hospitalized him for weeks with severe burns, and his alcohol withdrawal resulted in his suffering the DTs while in the hospital, where he had to be tied to his bed.

Raised by alcoholic parents, one of Knight’s sad childhood memories involved a local landmark restaurant: “Sometimes at night, [my mother and stepfather] would take me with them to a Chinese restaurant called Joy Young’s on 21st street in downtown Birmingham. Now don’t let the ‘Joy’ confuse you . . . They would leave me alone in a booth while they moved a few booths away to talk and drink with their no doubt very together friends. They fed me, I’ll say that for ‘em, but sometimes they stayed until closing time while I sat there waiting alone. The booths were large and very much enclosed so I couldn’t see much of what was going on. I could hear them, though, and the drunker they got, the sicker and weaker I felt inside . . . Going to Joy Young’s was a fairly regular outing for a while; one that I most certainly did not look forward to . . . for I knew they’d be drinking until all hours and there was nothing I could do about it. I was in my own little prison for the evening, like it or not, and the only crime I had committed was that of being a child.” &

Strangers, close friends, and mere acquaintances were continually amazed at Topper’s gregariousness and seemingly endless knowledge about a number of topics. If anyone wondered who pitched the third game of the 1982 World Series, for example, Topper had the answer. Price could tell you what car Mario Andretti was driving the year he won the Formula One world racing championship (a Lotus), then give engine and chassis specifications before reeling off accomplishments by drivers A.J. Foyt, Dan Gurney, or Al Unser—and that was before he got around to discussing music or obscure historical facts about World War II. He rarely shunned an admirer who wanted to talk, and would spend hours at a bar asking strangers questions about their lives, though it usually helped spur conversation if the strangers were buying the drinks.

Topper Price on stage with the Subdudes. (Photo by Chris Baker.) (click for larger version)

 

 

In a 1999 documentary by Birmingham filmmaker Chris Holmes, Topper explained how he started in show business: “I played my harmonica everywhere I went, at wildly inappropriate times. Wrong keys, wrong bands. Walked up to people I didn’t even know and started playing for them. I was the prototype of a really enthusiastic, horrible harmonica player who drove everybody around him nuts. Finally people started giving me lessons just to get me to be a little better, because they knew they were going to have to listen to me anyway . . . So I was bad for a long time and then all of a sudden one day I was pretty good. People started asking me to play instead of asking me to leave. I guess that was my big commercial break.”

Price eventually met Wet Willie singer Jimmy Hall, who gave Topper his most useful harmonica lesson. “Just blow as hard as you can and you’ll figure out the rest,” Hall said. Price’s masterful touch of country and blues literally defined Dickey Betts’ early solo work after Price was invited to play on the former Allman Brothers Band member’s first solo record. Topper’s late buddy Rick Danko invited him onstage with The Band from time to time. “Hey, pal. That was j-u-u-u-st right,” drummer Levon Helm told Price one night in Atlanta after Topper played with The Band on “Mystery Train.”

Topper was known to call friends on the anniversary of their parents’ deaths, and he’d drop by the hospital to visit those whom he knew only peripherally. He often phoned friends unexpectedly simply to tell them that he loved them and was thinking about them.

Tim Boykin was Topper’s guitar player for a decade. “Topper was leading the band, and he would do stuff to try to scuttle the band performance, trying to screw up the band on purpose. Sometimes I would stand behind him, if we had new guys playing that night, and cue the band to what was supposed to happen. Topper would get pissed off at me because I would give the band the right cues,” Boykin said, laughing. “But I sure did love Topper and I miss the hell out of him.”

Price’s ability to play while extremely intoxicated was legendary. Boykin remembered Topper would get pretty drunk and forget who he was playing with. “He’d turn to me and call me ‘Rick’ [Kurtz, who often swapped out guitar duties with Boykin], but he could still play his ass off and not even know where he was.”

Once, his backing band The Upsetters were playing in Florida. “God, he almost burned down a condo we were staying at in Destin,” said Boykin. “He put a TV dinner in the oven without taking it out of the cardboard box and went to bed. Smoked up the damn condo.”

Don Tinsley, who played bass with Topper in The Upsetters for 20 years, recalled Topper’s swagger whenever he entered a room, his head tilted at a cocky angle. “If it wasn’t his gig he would wander up with that swagger and lean on the stage, as if to say, ‘you’re going to get me up to play, right?’ The first time I met him was at a club in the late ’70s or early ’80s when he walked up and did that to the Amazing Rhythm Aces. They didn’t even know him.”

Tinsley’s favorite story involved a dead opossum. “We were coming back from an out-of-town gig up over the hill by Vulcan. We started down and there was a car coming up the hill. All of sudden, from out of nowhere, the biggest opossum I’d ever seen in my life was slowly ambling across the road. We slowed up a little and it kept on walking, but the other car didn’t see it. Topper stuck his head out of the window of our van and shouted “Heeeey!” as loud as he could, and he sounded exactly like James Brown. And the guy in the oncoming car looked at Topper and the opossum stopped and looked at Topper, and the other car squashed the opossum flat. That was Topper, trying to do the right thing.”

Price in the recording studio with Robert Moore. (click for larger version)

 

 

“I’ve seen him light a cigarette on a stove and then turn the flame up instead of off, and then walk away, oblivious. He wasn’t looking at the stove, he was on autopilot, just taking care of business,” Tinsley said. “I think that was in Florida, just like the TV dinner incident. For some reason, Topper and the coast just didn’t get along.”

The day Upsetters guitarist Rick Kurtz learned that Topper had died, he found a baseball glove that Topper had given him in 1988. “We played catch in the backyard all the time when I lived with him for a while . . . About a year after that he gave me [Minnesota Twins slugger] Rod Carew’s instruction book on hitting a baseball. Here I was, 38 years old, and that’s something you give a Little League kid. It was beautiful. He even signed it for me: ‘Kurtzy, I want you to have this.’”

Highland Music owner Don Murdoch said that his wife always insisted that Topper be invited to Murdoch’s Christmas parties. “Everybody would be standing around, making small talk, with things not too lively. Then Topper would show up, pull out his harp, and start doing Christmas carols. He saved my Christmas party every year,” Murdoch said.

Murdoch recalled the day that he and an ex-girlfriend were driving to lunch in his convertible sports car with Topper. Murdoch’s lady friend had a severe case of poison ivy and was complaining constantly as they drove. While at a stop light, Topper suddenly stood up in the back of the tiny convertible and loudly sang the classic “Poison Ivy” while they waited for the light to change. The light turned green, and Topper took a bow as fellow motorists applauded and cheered.

Topper’s former road manager Joey Oliver spoke of the night that Topper played a party at the home of Southern Poverty Law Center director Morris Dees in Montgomery. At the end of the evening, Topper playfully punched Dees in the arm as he often did to others. Dees did not find it funny, and Topper turned to Oliver and said, “Joey, I think I just fu**ed up. I just hit the man who got rid of the Ku Klux Klan.”

Oliver remembered being at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival with Price, who was backstage after playing with The Radiators. Topper spied CBS newsman Ed Bradley and introduced himself. About that time, Price’s girlfriend walked over and asked Bradley, “Do you know Topper?” Bradley smiled and said, “Everybody knows Topper.”

“I’ve often credited Topper with giving me a career,” said Damon Johnson, formerly of Birmingham’s Brother Cane. The band’s 1993 hit “Got No Shame” featured a blistering harmonica intro by Topper. “That harmonica intro is what made our song stand out above everything else on rock radio at the time. . . . We worked with a producer named Jim Mitchell, who was an assistant producer and engineer on the Guns N’ Roses album Use Your Illusion.” Mitchell wanted to use a harmonica player who had worked with Guns N’ Roses but Johnson argued for using Topper. Price, who had never heard the song, came into Airwave Studios in Birmingham where Brother Cane recorded the harmonica overdub, and recorded two takes, the first of which is heard on the song. “The first note that the world heard of Brother Cane was Topper inhaling [to begin] the intro to ‘Got No Shame.’”

Jazz singer and trumpeter Robert Moore, who recently moved from Birmingham to Oregon, spoke at length on Price: “Topper robbed my liquor cabinet constantly. He would put bottles that he’d drained back into my freezer, empty. But Jesus, I loved him. I’ll never forget once asking him about an old Memphis soul tune, to which he instantly recounted the year, the producer, label, musicians on the date, etc. It floored me. Why Google when a phone call to Top would tell you more? And the range of his data bank wasn’t restricted to music. I bought a used Ford pickup a few years ago. Top only looked at it, and said to me, ‘Moore, that’s a 289 right? I think those engines were made in Canada by Ford that year—great vehicle.’ I later opened the truck door to examine the ID plate, and found that every detail he’d ‘guessed’ was exactly accurate.”

One summer while living in Mobile, Topper had a brief fling of sorts with Charles Manson clan member Patricia Krenwinkel before he discovered that she was a fugitive (Krenwinkel participated in the Tate/LaBianca murders in 1969). Topper, who was then about 16 years old, was watching television with some friends when a news bulletin announced that Krenwinkel had been arrested in Mobile (Manson had sent her there to live with her aunt after the murders). Krenwinkel had been apprehended at a favorite Mobile hangout of Topper and his pals. “We’ve got to get out of this house!” said one guy, terrified that the police might raid the home, where Krenwinkel had been hanging around for a week or so. When Topper asked why everyone was so freaked out, one fellow said, “Hey Top. Remember Katie, that girl who’s been giving you back rubs whenever she stops by? That’s Krenwinkel.”

I’ll never forget being at The Nick around 3 a.m. when Topper, usually low on cash and always searching for free drinks, walked outside and spied a dozen plastic cups of half-consumed cocktails on the banister in front of the club. With lightning speed, he grabbed each cup and drank the leftover contents. Before walking back into the club, he stopped long enough to spit a hail of cigarette butts, machine gun-style, against the outside wall. My jaw dropped, just as it had several nights previously when he snatched the cup of water The Nick’s security guard had been using only moments earlier to polish his shoes outside the club. Topper downed the liquid that he must have assumed was bourbon and water.

If only Topper had cared about his own health as much as he did about the well-being of his buddies. I remember once complaining about my problems with gout. “Eddie, what you need to do is go to the grocery store and get a can of Bing cherries. That’s Bing cherries, you got that? It’s a miracle cure,” he growled in his affected Howlin’ Wolf voice. Months later he asked about my gout. I told him the Bing cherries didn’t work. Then I asked how he had been doing, and I’ll never forget his response—the last words I ever heard from him. That his reply referenced chemistry was appropriate. “Eduardo, my friend, I’m a free radical in search of a covalent bond.” &

On Wednesday, June 27, The Nick will host a fundraiser in memory of Price. For more information, call 252-3831.