Tim Boykin has been playing guitar for a living since he was 15. Though Boykin once disdained the “have guitar, will travel” notion of performing whatever was necessary to pay the bills, he eventually discovered that such work wasn’t a bad way to earn his keep. He was born in Birmingham but because his father was in the military, Boykin moved frequently, returning to Alabama as a teen. He became a guitar wizard adept at playing practically any style of music, transforming from a teenage punk rocker to a versatile guitar sideman and respected studio musician over the past three decades.

“At that time [the early 1990s] there was still actually a real blues scene [in town] and Topper Price and the Upsetters were playing at the Nick,” recalls Boykin. “Leif [Bondarenko, legendary local drummer] asked if I would come play some gigs with the Upsetters and my dumb ass was like, ‘Well, man, I don’t know. You guys are a bar band, you’re a cover band. I don’t think I can do that.’ Leif called again and I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do this.’ I went and played a gig with Topper and made like $30 and I was like, ‘Oh wow, I can actually get paid for playing music.’ So that ushered in this era of stability. I was like, ‘Oh wow, I’m playing, I’m doing what I love to do, and it’s like a jobby job.’ The Upsetters weren’t making huge money but it was steady money.”

Boykin knew early on what he wanted to do with his life. His first guitar was an acoustic instrument his mother had brought home for him when he was 12 years old. He soon learned “Psychotic Reaction” by the Count Five. Though he has taken a few lessons, Boykin is mostly self-taught.

	Tim Boykin. (Photo: Scott Johnson) (click for larger version)

“I didn’t know that it was called this but there’s a part of ‘Psychotic Reaction’ where the rhythm guitarist makes what you call ‘ghost notes,’ where he’s just doing a purely rhythmic thing and not really playing notes on the guitar,” Boykin recalls. “And I figured out how to cop that and just thought that was incredibly fine and went crazy with it and broke all the picks I had.”

Boykin quickly latched onto the Ramones and Sex Pistols but also listened to classic rock like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple. “The first two albums I bought on my 13th birthday were Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ Armed Forces and Ted Nugent’s Weekend Warrior at the PX on Fort Bragg.”

Guitar provided him with an identity while growing up in North Carolina. “I had found my niche in my high school social life. It was really different culturally up there,” he says. “People were more interested in what you did than what you had. Word got around that I was a good guitar player. And so within my little group of stoner friends up there, it was like, ‘Kevin’s a good fighter, Steve can fix cars, and Tim can play guitar.’” When he moved back to Birmingham in his mid-teens, however, his new classmates weren’t very impressed that he was a musician. “When I was going to Berry [High School], the rules were all different. It didn’t matter what you could do, it mattered what you had, how much money your parents had, that kind of shit,” he says. “People knew I played guitar but they didn’t care. They were like, ‘Oh yeah? Well, I have a Z28 Camaro.’”

Boykin soon trumped his classmates, however, joining up with local punk outfit the Ether Dogs, and for the first time earning money playing his guitar. “Getting in the Ether Dogs while I was in high school brought me into this whole other social scene with older people and this whole other deal that was going on. So to me that was the real world.”

Boykin embraced the punk credo that stipulated attitude over ability. “I remember reading stuff where [music writer] Lester Bangs was saying, ‘You need to just get a guitar and go do this now. You don’t need to wait around until you’re good enough. You need to get a guitar, learn three chords, get on stage, and be playing now. Worry about the finer points later.’ And I took that to heart,” he says. “By the time I was 15 years old I was playing in bands and clubs and stuff. And I felt like that’s what I was supposed to be doing. So I was hearing the Ramones and going, ‘OK, cool. I can go ahead and be doing this. It was more about energy than finesse.’”

His first band was the Dead End Kids, which played parties at the homes of Mountain Brook teens since the band’s drummer was from that area of town. Boykin then joined the Ether Dogs and played regularly at The Cavern on Morris Avenue in the early 1980s. By 1984 he formed Carnival Season with Brad Quinn playing bass and Mark Reynolds on drums. (Disclosure: Ed Reynolds, author of this story, played guitar with Carnival Season briefly.)

“Tim was the most authentically punk-rock kid I’d ever met,” Quinn says of Boykin, with whom he shared a deep fondness for remedial algebra when the two were in school together. “He was an army brat and had moved around a lot with his family, and he was really steeped in the history of punk and its precursors—The Stooges, MC5, The New York Dolls, The Velvet Underground—all the stuff that everybody nowadays claimed they loved all along, even though they were probably listening to Yes or something. Tim was into Lester Bangs and had read a lot of the seminal rock writers, and so he was really thoughtful about rock ‘n’ roll. He was fairly class-conscious and saw things in a more politicized way than a lot of kids around Birmingham, at least. He was a big influence on me and a lot of other kids at the time. I’m sure he probably felt like a misfit, but that’s partly why it worked.”

Boykin’s ability to write catchy melodies and sing his own songs became evident when he joined Carnival Season at 18, right after graduating from high school. This was also his introduction to making records, with the band recording demo sessions for MCA Records before signing with U.K. indie label What Goes On. (Arena Rock Records reissued much of Carnival Season’s catalog on CD in 2010.) Underground pop phenomenon Tommy Keene produced the sessions that led to Carnival Season’s lone full-length album.

“That was the first album I’d done with anybody. It was very stressful,” Boykin recalls of those sessions. “We were young and everybody felt that there was a lot at stake. There was a lot of tension and conflict . . . some about creative decisions and stuff . . . Tommy kinda had this ’60s rootsy thing, which we had kinda moved away from. We had become more of a hard-rocking band. I had this little solid state Marshall half-stack that wasn’t real versatile but it was this sound [Tim loved]. That was my sound. That was kinda where my head was at, at that point, a lot of that early ’70s British rock kind of stuff. And Tommy was like, ‘Well, man, I have some perfectly nice amplifiers here. We can get you a good guitar sound. Here’s this lovely Fender Deluxe amp—which is a bitchin’ amp, a great amp—but it was like, ‘Yeah, that’s fine because I’ll just pack up my shit and go home.’ And I’m glad now that I held my ground about that stuff, but then on the other end of things I learned a lot of stuff and had some real first-time experiences. Tommy was real good at getting vocal performances. He made us work real hard. And you didn’t have any kind of [vocal enhancement] toys at that point [in time]. You couldn’t make a bad singer sound good, you really couldn’t. When you hear the Go Go’s and Belinda Carlisle singing on pitch? It’s because they made that poor child do take after take. A couple of vocal performances from me were like, ‘Yeah, we did that by the sweat of our brows.’ And I didn’t know before that that’s how you did that.”

The band lasted five years.

“After Carnival Season, it was kind of a learning process. I was still really young. When I quit Carnival Season, I was 23,” Boykin says. “At that point I felt like I had really been around the block. Initially, I thought that I had to be in a band that has a record deal. So I ended up being in the Barking Tribe—they had a record deal and got out on the road and worked real hard and made zero dollars. It kind of helped me assess more what my goals were and what I wanted to be doing.”

After a couple of years with Barking Tribe, Boykin began writing music again, forming Pinky the Stabber and then the Shame Idols, which caught the ear of Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows and REM. McCaughey hooked the Shame Idols up with Frontier Records, where the band recorded two critically-acclaimed albums. Boykin figured he had the best of both worlds, making money with one band and finding a creative outlet for his songwriting talents with his own group.

“I was making money playing with Topper [Price],” he says. “Then I’d tell him the Shame Idols were flying out to L.A. to play and that I’d be gone for a couple of dates. My spot [with the Upsetters] was secure. I’d either line up a sub or they’d get somebody to sub. I’d go play rock star and then come back home and get back to work. It was great.”

By 1998, Frontier Records no longer existed so Boykin decided to record a third Shame Idols album at his own expense.

“The Shame Idols always had a real strong pop sensibility. But the first couple of albums are really heavy guitar things, to me,” he explains. “At the time Frontier folded I was listening to a lot of more kind of power pop–oriented stuff like the Flamin’ Groovies, that kind of thing. I was getting more of a ’60s kind of vibe.”

The band broke up in the process of recording and Boykin decided to record the new material as the Lolas—his dog’s name. Around this time he also started the Tim Boykin Blues Band.

“It was me basically trying to still do what I had been doing when I was playing with Topper and doing the Shame Idols,” he explains—using one band to make a living and the other for his songwriting talents. “Boy, I was just trying to book my own life at that point. I was booking the blues band all over the place and at a lot of the same clubs I was actually booking the Lolas in there, too. And man, at some of those clubs the Lolas were a hard sell. We were doing covers but we weren’t doing the bullshit covers that they liked to hear down there. We were doing the Flamin’ Groovies and shit and they were like, ‘What the hell is that?’”

Boykin currently plays with Birmingham blues singer Shar Baby, recording her album Shar-Baby’s 11 O’Clock Blues at Boykin’s home recording studio, Bushido Sound.

“I think Tim’s one of the greatest guitar players here in the state of Alabama,” says Shar Baby. “That boy is somethin’ else. That guy is true. He’s over the top—off the chain, as they say.”

Boykin’s old bands rarely completely die; rather they seem to be in a temporary cryogenic state, ready for thawing out every few years to record a new CD or play a show. Carnival Season has done recent reunion gigs and there has been chatter among band members about a new record. The Lolas and Shame Idols rear their heads from time to time as well. When the Lolas “started to fizzle out” a few years ago, Boykin sought a different direction.

“I was starting to repeat myself and I was wanting to do something kind of different,” he says. “I initially got excited about what was going on with stoner rock, desert rock, doom metal, that kind of stuff. I was partly attracted to it because it was more of a grassroots, death metal scene that seemed analogous to the way the whole punk scene was. It seemed like indie rock had become this whole status quo. So I was really looking for something that kind of seemed counter culture.”

Moving in a metal band direction, Boykin worked with Annexed Asylum before forming Throng of Shaggoths with former GNP [Grossest National Product] guitarist Chris Hendrix on drums. “Annexed Asylum was a lot of fast stuff, showing off chops with various degrees of success,” he says, laughing. “Throng of Shoggoths is a slower, heavier band with weird time signatures. The songs are based in H.P. Lovecraft. It’s very weird stuff.”

There is a misperception that musicians must move away from Birmingham to truly be successful, Boykin says. However, he has found that living here has certain advantages, especially financially.

“I’m traveling so much. San Francisco is a beautiful city but people who live there will tell you that it’s absolutely brutal to live there. You have to work three jobs and you’re still almost living on skid row. There are other places that are a lot more laid back, like Seattle, Indianapolis. And those places are kind of like Birmingham. . . . There are big cities that I like but I’m not necessarily pissed off that I don’t live in them.” &

To contact Tim Boykin for guitar lessons and to access his performance schedule, go to http://timmehworld.com.

	(click for larger version)

Rick Kurtz, considered one of the top guitarists to emerge from Birmingham (Nashville has been his home for the past several years), has impressed audiences for decades playing with Delbert McClinton, T. Graham Brown, the Amazing Rhythm Aces, and a couple of shows sitting in with the Allman Brothers, as well as dozens of local bands. In the past year, Kurtz suffered a stroke that left him unable to play the guitar. He continues physical therapy but faces daunting financial bills as he works toward resuming his musical career.

The Second Annual Wooden Nickel Reunion, which will be held at Old Car Heaven on November 27 at 7 p.m., will be a benefit for Kurtz. The evening will feature performers from the 1970s and 1980s that played at the old Wooden Nickel bar (now called The Nick), including the Nickelettes (Lolly, Louise, Beverly, Alice, and Suzan), the Gate Band, Dogwood featuring Don Tinsley, and the Broken Hearts. Tickets are $25. Old Car Heaven, 115 South 35th Street. Details: 324-4545 or www.oldcarheaven.com.

Life

By Keith Richards with James Fox

Little, Brown, 564 pages, $29.99

After suffering through three decades of lousy new Rolling Stones records, nothing could be finer than falling in love with Keith Richards and his merry minstrels all over again. But it’s not the music that attracts; rather, it’s Richards’ irresistible writing voice in his memoir Life that will mesmerize as he eloquently and hilariously recounts his rock ‘n’ roll fairy tale existence. Keith (guitarist for the band since its inception 48 years ago) is quite the charmer, relating tales of outlandish rock excess with a brutally honest, hold-no-punches delivery that defines the swagger of guitar-slinging outlaws. One occasionally wonders where the truth ends and embellishment begins. But who cares? It’s all showbiz.

God bless him, Keith wastes no time giving fans what they want: drug stories! He opens with a bang, recounting his and fellow Rolling Stone Ron Wood’s arrest in Fordyce, Arkansas, in 1975. The pair unwisely chose to drive from Memphis to Dallas for their next show instead of flying with the rest of the band. Keith is quick to acknowledge his occasional stupidity and lackadaisical attitude regarding drugs: “So we drove and Ronnie and I had been particularly stupid. We pulled into this roadhouse called the 4-Dice, where we sat down and ordered and then Ronnie and I went to the john. You know, just start me up. We got high. We didn’t fancy the clientele out there, or the food, and so we hung in the john, laughing and carrying on. We sat there for forty minutes. And down there you don’t do that. Not then.”

It’s the first of dozens of lurid drug stories. At the Arkansas bust, the Chevrolet Impala they were driving had “coke and grass, peyote and mescaline” hidden inside the door panels. Richards seems to be shaking his head at himself when he writes, “And I could have just put all that stuff on the plane. To this day I cannot understand why I bothered to carry all that crap around and take that chance.” In his denim cap, Keith kept a virtual pharmacy stuffed with hash, Tuinal, and more cocaine. But, of course, Keith and his bandmate escaped another brush with the law thanks to their attorney and an allegedly intoxicated judge.

There are quite a few revelations about facts of which even the most rabid Stones fan may be unaware. Richard Nixon proclaimed them to be “the most dangerous rock-and-roll band in the world” and said that they would not be allowed to tour the United States again while he was president (they did, however). Richards tells of rubbing shoulders with other stars: Marlon Brando put the make on Anita, Richards’ common-law wife, and when she ignored him, Brando tried to pick up Keith, too. When Richards met Allen Ginsberg, his assessment is that the poet is “nothing but an old gasbag pontificating on everything.”

Keith is anything but politically correct. He refers to women as “bitches,” and gays as “poofsters” and “fags.” If he had to rough up a promoter who owed the band money, so be it. Keith and Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones, had been on tour with one of promoter Robert Stigwood’s bands (Stigwood managed Cream and the Bee Gees and produced the movie Saturday Night Fever.) He owed the Stones $16,000. Stigwood was walking down a staircase backstage at a club, and Oldham and Richards were walking up when they suddenly blocked the staircase so that Keith could “extract payment” by kicking Stigwood 16 times, “one for each grand he owed us.” Oldham holds a special place in Richards’ heart. He credits him with making him a songwriter when the manager locked Jagger and Richards in a kitchen until they wrote a song (“As Tears Go By”):

“We sat there in the kitchen and I started to pick away at these chords . . . ‘It is the evening of the day.’ I might have written that. ‘I sit and watch the children play,’ I certainly wouldn’t have come up with that,” says Richards. “Andrew created the most amazing thing in my life. I had never thought about songwriting. He made me learn the craft, and at the same time I realized, yes, I’m good at it . . . [Learning to write songs] was almost like a bolt of lightning.”

No band member’s wife or girlfriend was sacred. Mick Jagger slept with Brian Jones’ girlfriend while Jones was living with her; Keith slept with Marianne Faithfull, who was Jagger’s girlfriend at the time; Keith began dating actress Anita Pallenberg while she was still with Brian Jones. Pallenberg eventually had an affair with Jagger while she was Keith’s common-law wife. Keith recalls: “I didn’t find out for ages about Mick and Anita, but I smelled it. Mostly from Mick, who didn’t give any sign of it, which is why I smelled it. . . . I never expected anything from Anita. I mean, hey, I’d stolen her from Brian. So you’ve [Anita] had Mick now; what do you fancy, that or this? It was like Peyton Place back then, lot of wife swapping or girlfriend swapping.”

Richards does not hesitate to share the upside of heroin. “For all of its downsides—I’d never recommend it to anybody—heroin does have its uses. Junk really is a great leveler in many ways,” he admits, acknowledging that heroin allowed him to focus when there was nothing but chaos around him.

Life is long but a fun read, with a new Richards adventure on every page. His candid style and sense of humor do not disappoint, and even those not particularly infatuated with the Stones will be intrigued and amused by this unique life story. His off-the cuff, fragmented delivery may sometimes be confusing, forcing the reader to go back over a paragraph or two, but it’s all part of Keith’s charm. &

When Earl Williams is amused, his low-key laughter eerily resonates through the room; he sounds like a chuckling Lou Rawls. Williams, a local guitarist and owner/operator of Intensive Care Beauty Salon in Bessemer, laughs when he explains the shop’s name. “I felt like a hair doctor. Everybody that was coming to me had problems. I think I started out that way; I was trying to save my own hair. So, if I could save myself, I could save others, too.”

Thirty years ago, Williams moved to Dallas, Texas, to play guitar with renowned rhythm & blues singer Johnnie Taylor, known for hits such as “Who’s Making Love? (To Your Old Lady),” “Cheaper to Keep Her,” and “Disco Lady.” By the mid-1980s, he was traveling with chitlin’ circuit legend Latimore, a popular singer on “party blues and oldies” radio stations. He quit the road life to open Intensive Care salon 23 years ago, but he still joins Latimore on stage whenever the singer plays in the area.

Williams learned guitar as a nine-year-old while hanging out at Gip’s Place, a Bessemer backyard juke joint that has been around since the 1950s (see “The Juke Joint,” August 7, 2008, at http://tinyurl.com/gips1). “I had started picking around, going to different friends’ houses who had a guitar,” he recalls. “And I chased the guitar around. One friend of mine, he had a guitar and he sold it and I started hanging out with the guy he sold it to. I learned how to play it. None of them ever learned to play it, but I kept following them around. And I’d go to Banks Pawn Shop down there and I’d just pick it up, go down there every other day. Some of the bluegrass guys showed me how to make chords.”

“I got my first job playing with a band when I was 13 when I played a Johnnie Taylor song, ‘I Got to Love Somebody’s Baby.’ So Johnnie Taylor’s kind of been in my past all the way. . . . We were called The Corruptors. We were doing blues, a lot of Johnnie Taylor. We had a female vocalist; we did the Supremes, Martha and the Vandellas, a lot of Motown stuff,” Williams says of his first band. “We played for all grown people. A bunch of old people who would be there, wouldn’t be nobody our age or nothing. We couldn’t go out and mingle, we always had to stay in the dressing room. It was kind of like in the Michael Jackson era when it was okay for kids to play.”

Williams was a bit of a renegade. “I listened to Jimi Hendrix a whole lot. I would have parties and I’d be the only musician playing Jimi Hendrix,” he remembers fondly. “Playing Hendrix, man, and drinking Boone’s Farm wine. Had the nets hanging out of the ceiling. I even had the Confederate flag in there. One of my friends was like, ‘Why you got that Confederate flag, man, what’s wrong with you?’”

	“I found myself making more money fixing hair in the hotel than I was making playing my guitar . . . you could make $500 for a haircut.”

The guitarist eventually formed the Afro Blues Band, which became the group Kalu. The band’s lead singer, Greg Miller (brother of former Birmingham City Councilor Bert Miller, according to Williams), left briefly to sing with Parliament. Soon Kalu saxophonist Lee Charles Mitchell moved to Texas to play with Johnnie Taylor, eventually inviting Williams to Dallas, where the guitarist joined Taylor’s band, Justice of the Peace, in the late 1970s.

Earl Williams worked at U.S. Steel for nearly 20 years before the Latimore job came along. There, he was a guitarist in a company bluegrass band. “We played parties for the superintendent of our plant. And the superintendent heard I’d written a song about a reprimand from him called a ’74.’ I wrote a song called the ’74 Blues.’ He caught me sleeping I don’t know how many times,” Williams remembers, laughing. “So this time I was thinking I was getting fired. I had to go to his office to play it for him. I got all those guys playing that bluegrass, banjos, and fiddles and everything, and he liked it so much he started throwing parties [with the band as the entertainment]. He created that group and called it the Swinging Sinners. So we just played for him all the time.”

After taking a leave of absence to go to Texas to play with Taylor, Williams was in for a shock. “Johnnie Taylor didn’t do a lot of playing when I was with him. He kind of went into a little refuge period there where he’d drink pretty heavy. . . . He’d go and start drinking before he’d get to the show. And most of the time he’d come with his eyes all red—he’d be loaded. And sometimes he couldn’t do more than two or three songs, too.”

Williams returned to Birmingham and U.S. Steel to work several more years before being laid off. Two weeks after losing his job, Latimore called to offer work to Williams and his blues band. “We had to be one of the only groups carrying our own equipment. We had our own sound system, and that’s part of why Latimore really wanted my band,” he admits. “Latimore was really what you would call a chitlin’-type circuit player to survive. His pay was always at the bottom of the totem pole,” the guitarist explains. “Latimore would lower his pay just to keep a job all the time. He always had a philosophy. He said, ‘I’d rather lower my price and play five nights than to have a high price and don’t play but one or two nights. I want to play, whether I’m getting the money or not. I gotta stay sharp.’”

Jheri Curl Days
Williams soon added band leader and management chores to his Latimore guitar duties. His biggest break, however, was when he began to style the singer’s hair. “I was just kinda launching me a new career when they came out with this new hairstyle, the Jheri curl,” recalls Williams. “Do you remember when whites were wearing their hair curly like—what’s that guy . . . “Welcome Back, Kotter”—was wearing his hair? Well, that curl was discovered by Jheri Redding, who was a white guy. And the blacks caught on to it and started wearing their hair real curly. That brought a lot of money into the hair industry. That’s when I joined up!”

Because the band stayed at the same hotels as other acts when appearing on big shows, B.B. King soon enlisted Williams’ hair-styling talents. “When we’d be backstage, they’d see Latimore’s hair and they’d say, ‘Hey, you got you a built-in beautician, huh?’ because I’d be following him around and be fixing on his hair. That’s how it all got started and word just kinda got around, and then one told another about it. . . . I found myself making more money fixing hair in the hotel than I was making playing my guitar. They paid on a celebrity level. On a celebrity level, you could make $500 for a haircut.”

“I was doing everybody’s ‘curl.’ I did B.B. King’s hair, I did Latimore’s hair, Johnnie Taylor, Tyrone Davis. I give them their very first [Jheri curl], because nobody really knew about it like I did,” says Williams. “See, they didn’t know what type rolls to use. I used to hang around white [barber] shops a lot—kind of grew up in a white shop, too—because I used to be a shoeshine guy in a white shop. I’d sit there and watch and learn how to cut Caucasian hair. So I was always a barber, and cosmetology, I’ve had that since I was a little kid.”

The Chitlin’ Circuit
“It used to be that they were letting the blues die. And B.B. King went on national TV and said that they were letting the blues die, and he was wondering why we’re not holding on to our heritage, why we don’t value our heritage and why are we letting the history go to nothing,” Williams recalls. “When he was interviewed about that, the whites embraced B.B. King, because at the time B.B. King was losing his slot as being the number one blues player. Z.Z. Hill was knocking him out of his number one spot. In ’83 and ’84, I used to do bookings, I used to put shows together myself. B.B. King was making $15,000 a night, and Z.Z. Hill was at $10,000.”

When asked to elaborate about the “chitlin’ circuit,” Williams laughs. “Chitlins have always been described as the ultimate soul food. If you can get the pig or not, you’ll take whatever you can get out there. You just kinda have to get out there and go for it. The thing is, you need a regular paycheck, ’cause if you don’t get out there for the chitlins, you won’t eat—’cause steak ain’t gonna be available but every once in a while. So you got to pick the chitlins up until you can get to [the steak], and keep yourself in shape. ‘Cause if you just sit down and get all out of shape, you can get forgotten about.”

When pressed for anecdotes from his days with Latimore, Williams picks up his cell phone and makes a call. “Hey Lat! I’m doing this interview and this guy wants to hear some phenomenal stories about the chitlin’ circuit,” Williams says as the distinctly deep-timbered chuckle of Benny Latimore comes from the speakerphone. Latimore is in Mississippi prepping for a cross-country trek to California, happy to oblige a request from his occasional guitarist. The pair laugh about a bass player who could sleep and play at the same time, and the night they played a run-down army barracks in Greenville, Mississippi, where the wiring was so poor that the band had to stop after every three songs to let the electrical circuit “cool back down” before they could resume playing. They chuckle about another former band member who, during tours, would go into housing projects in search of weed. “That was part of his diet,” adds Latimore over the phone, laughing while speculating that the musician was eating marijuana.

“Hey Lat, you gonna eat you some of that boudin while you down there in Louisiana? They make it out of cow blood, don’t they, Lat?” Williams asks. Latimore responds: “Yeah, some of it has got blood in it. You know, cooked blood! [laughs] Some of them places we played in, they had all kinds of things. They had ‘coon’ sandwiches. I don’t know if it was real raccoon or they just called it that or what. But I don’t think I even wanted to deal with that at all.” &

Sounds like I’m hearing myself three different ways,” complained Mavis Staples to the audience, gasping for breath before adding with a smile, “Guess I should have made it to soundcheck.” Staples ushered in Birmingham’s Juneteenth celebration at the Alys Stephens Center on Saturday, June 3 with her family’s trademark blend of the gospel and the secular. That the stout, 66-year-old Staples should gasp for breath after each song only added to the drama. Gospel testifying is her strong point, which leaves plenty of time for improvisation. She performed only a half dozen songs during the evening, but with a hot-shot trio of guitar, bass, and drums—along with sister Yvonne on backing vocals—it didn’t really matter. Mavis told the small crowd how her father, Pops Staples, gathered his four children around him one night to teach them “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Pops’ real name was Roebuck. Mavis swore that he had a brother named Sears. When she sang “Respect Yourself,” she told the audience that a record producer recently called her “old school,” to which Mavis added, “Like I don’t know that . . . I used to be a Beyonce . . . If Beyonce keeps on living, she’ll be a Mavis!” She told the band’s drummer to “bring it down, Brian,” then warned, “If he wants to get paid, he better bring it down.” During “Respect Yourself,’ Mavis threw in an Aretha Franklin reference by singing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” but stopped with a snicker, “I ain’t gonna mess with Aretha . . . But I’ll pick on that little ol’ Beyonce.”

In a telephone conversation two days before her performance, “Respect Yourself” came up.

“Mack Rice wrote that. Luther Ingram’s name is on there. Luther said, ‘Man, we black people need to start respecting ourselves.’ That was the most Luther did on the song . . . Mack said, ‘I’m gonna write a song,’ but he gave Luther Ingram half of it for that title . . . Mack did some good stuff with Wilson Pickett. He wrote ‘Mustang Sally.’”

The unforgettable line “Take the sheet off your face, it’s a brand new day” from “Respect Yourself” prompted memories of traveling in the South during segregation. Racial showdowns were a way of life. Mavis remembered a white service station owner who accused the Staples family of stealing gasoline, prompting Pops to use his fists. “Oh yeah, we had our time. Actually we went to jail in West Memphis, Arkansas,” recalled Mavis from her Chicago home. “We beat up a white man. Well, (laughs) actually Pops beat him up. [The gas station attendant] ran into his office to get a gun. We knew what he was going to get . . . Well, the guy was just nasty. And when my father went in to get the receipt, I saw him shake his finger in Pops’ face. He said something about me because I was driving. I asked him to wash the windshield, and he wanted his money. I had driven from Jackson, Mississippi, to Memphis. All these bugs were on the windshield. He went on and washed the windshield . . . I asked him for a receipt and he said, ‘If you want a receipt you come over to the office.’

 

	A record producer recently called her “old school,” to which Mavis added, “ Like I don’t know that . . . I used to be a Beyonce . . . If Beyonce keeps on living, she’ll be a Mavis!”

“So Pops told me to pull over and he went in to get the receipt. And [the attendant] said something about me and shook his finger in Pops’s face. Next thing I know, Pops had walloped him. He beat him up real good and got in the car. And Daddy got the receipt, and actually that receipt is what saved us. Because when [the attendant] called the police, he told them that we didn’t pay for our gas and we robbed him. So the police caught up with me, had us standing out on the highway with shotguns on us and dogs barking. Oh, it was spooky. But the best part of it is I’ve never been so glad to see a police station. They took us to jail. The chief asked Pops what happened. The chief told them, ‘Get them handcuffs off them people.’ He said, ‘These young bucks always trying to keep this mess going. We’re trying to clean up down here.’ They found our money in the trunk and he asked Pops, ‘Well, this is what we’re looking for. This is the money you took from the service station.’ And Daddy said, ‘No, we sang for that money tonight.’ And he said, ‘Well, I got to hear what kind of singing you do to make this kind of money.’ And the money did look like [we] had robbed somebody because the people in Jackson, Mississippi, had it in a cigar box (laughs).”

At the Alys Stephens Center, Mavis led the band into “The Weight,” calling out: “Levon Helm . . . Robbie Robertson . . . Danko . . . and dear Garth.” She asked the small audience if they’d seen The Last Waltz. When few responded, she admonished, “I knew y’all hadn’t seen it.” The Staples had been featured in the film, as they had pioneered the introduction of gospel to rock ‘n’ roll audiences. During the interview, she remembered the varied shows they played. “Our sound was so unique that the people would call us to sing. And we were singing strictly gospel. But they called us for folk festivals, bluegrass festivals, blues festivals, and jazz festivals. . . . We toured with people like The Who, The Bee Gees, Jimi Hendrix. They really liked the Staple Singers’ sound. And a lot of those white guys have recorded some of our songs.”

One of those “white guys” who no doubt influenced the Staples more than any other was Bob Dylan. “Bobby would be on most of those folk festivals. So we would run into each other a lot, quite a bit,” said Mavis. She and Dylan shared a Grammy nomination in 2003 for their duet “Gotta Change My Way of Livin.’” Mavis said the two had known each other for a long time. “We met Dylan when he and I were teenagers. And when we met him—someone introduced us to him—and he said ‘Well, I know the Staple Singers, I’ve heard the Staple Singers since I was 12 years old.’ And Pops said, ‘Well, where you hear us at?’ He said he heard us on that station that comes out of Nashville, WLAC, I think it was. And he even quoted some lyrics from one of our songs, ‘Sit Down Servant.’ And he described Pops’ voice, he’d say, ‘Pops, you have a really smooth, silky voice, and Mavis has a gravelly, heavy voice.’ And then we heard Dylan sing that day. We were on the same concert, a folk festival. And Pops asked us, ‘Listen do you hear what that kid is saying? We can sing that, that’s a message song. That’s a positive song.’ And it was ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ And we recorded it.”

Mavis can still scream like a barely constrained Wilson Pickett as she remembered Pickett’s unpredictable manner: “Oh, Lord, yeah! Wilson Pickett was just as crazy as he could be. He was crazy, but he was beautiful. All the guys would respect us, they wouldn’t curse around us. Nothin’ like that. Oh yeah, Pickett had a temper. Pickett would shoot at different ones. He shot his brother in the limousine. Pickett kept saying, ‘I’m gonna shoot you, man.’ And his brother kept saying, ‘Aw man, put the gun down, put the gun down.’ And all of a sudden Pickett shot him right through the shoulder. Pickett was in the backseat and his brother was in the front seat with the limo driver . . . We were sitting in the Howard Theater watching the show, and all of a sudden you saw Eddie Levert with the O’Jays run across the stage. And the emcee was up there talking, and all of a sudden here comes Pickett behind him with a gun. People were laughing. Somebody caught Pickett and took the gun away from him. Yeah, he was crazy.” &

 

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The Listening Booth

The Staple Singers went from post-World War II straight gospel to soulful folk music in the 1960s to “message” music in the 1970s. Blessed with a distinctive, irresistible rhythm that secular music once claimed as its own, the Staples’ unique gospel style, stamped with patriarch Pop Staples’ wicked, tremolo-marinated blues guitar, offered up black spirituals to a white audience primed for temptation.

Stax Records signed the Staples to their roster in 1968, and “message” music was born. Message music was essentially a spiritual message told in secular language. Songs such as “Long Walk to D.C.” and a cover of Sly Stone’s “Everyday People” were recorded in Memphis with Booker T. and the MGs’ guitarist Steve Cropper producing. The family ventured south to record with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section on the hits “Respect Yourself” and “I’ll Take You There” at the insistence of Stax musical director Al Bell. Lead vocalist Mavis Staples praised the Muscle Shoals musicians in the liner notes of The Staple Singers: Stax Profiles: “The Muscle Shoals guys were a rhythm section that a singer would just die for . . . They were bad back then! [At Stax] Booker T. and the MGs would mostly put the tracks down before we’d be in the there. [At Muscle Shoals] we would all be in the studio together. We were feeding off of each other. That made a difference.”

 

The band’s pre-stax Gospel era (1953-1967), which still managed to feature plenty of electric guitar and hip-shaking rhythms, is best represented on Columbia’s Freedom Highway collection. Like artists such as John Lee Hooker, multiple recordings of many of the Staples’ most famous songs exist, some far better than others. Freedom Highway is the source for definitive versions of many classics such as “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “Wade in the Water”—in addition to lesser-known gems as “Why (Am I Treated So Bad)?” and a cover of Stephen Stills’ “For What It’s Worth.”

	Soul singer Clarence Carter appears Thursday, July 12 at Spanky’s on Valley.

Southern rhythm and blues strutted with mischievous swagger on backroads between Memphis and Muscle Shoals in the ’60s and early ’70s. Frequently touted as “soul music” before disco steered the term soul straight into a mirror ball-lit ditch, rhythm and blues slowly lost its sense of direction along those feel-good blacktops once the neon was shut off outside sleazy motels, chitlin’ shacks, and juke joints. Clarence Carter, however, has never detoured from those little-known backroads. He continues to entertain hidden nightspots with his resonant baritone, lecherous chuckle, and sweet, bare-bones guitar picking. Lewd as ever, Carter still sings of loving other men’s wives, relishing his bawdy role as the Devil tempting women beyond all restraints of self-control.

In the mid-’60s, Clarence Carter hooked up with Rick Hall at Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, where renowned soul producer Jerry Wexler signed Carter to Atlantic Records’ stable of R&B acts. Carter jumped onto the Top Ten charts with “Slip Away” in 1968, followed by “Patches” in 1970, his biggest pop hit. Blind since birth, Carter built a career narrating “cheatin’ and sneakin’” songs laced with sexual obsession and lascivious infidelity. Titles such as “Dark End of the Street,” “Back Door Santa,” “Doin’ Our Thing,” and “Take It Off Him and Put It On Me” suggest a lifetime of romantic pleasures. He scored his last major hit in 1993 with the overtly nasty “Strokin’.”

It’s been said that the beginning of the end for soul music began when Otis Redding’s plane crashed in 1967. While Redding’s death was a blow R&B never quite shook off, soul singers hung in the ring many more years with champs like Wilson Pickett, Solomon Burke, Arthur Alexander, and Joe Tex belting out timeless R&B in obscure clubs across America. Bruised and aging, soul music is still a powerful and beautiful thing to behold. And Clarence Carter is still standing.

 Clarence Carter will perform at Spanky’s on Valley on Thursday, July 12. Tickets are $25. Call 945-1414 for details.