Episode 440 - Booker T. Jones
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:Alright, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what-the-fuckers?
Marc:What-the-fuck buddies?
Marc:What-the-fuckineers?
Marc:What-the-fucksters?
Marc:This is Marc Maron.
Marc:This is WTF.
Marc:Thank you for joining me.
Marc:Packed show.
Marc:Packed show.
Marc:A couple of things I want to say right up front.
Marc:One, I love you.
Marc:Two, are we good?
Marc:Three, well, two is enough.
Marc:I got nothing.
Marc:I do want to say this, though.
Marc:If you're in the Los Angeles area...
Marc:uh myself and the um the uh the infamous and uh an amazing jerry stall are going to be at the last bookstore tonight doing a reading i believe at 7 30 i'll be reading from attempting normal jerry will be reading from his new book happy mutant baby pills and i'm going to talk to jerry in a minute
Marc:He came by.
Marc:We're doing some work on some other things, writing a thing about some stuff for a thing.
Marc:And I was like, dude, let's get on the mics, man.
Marc:Let's let's hash it out for a second about the new book.
Marc:Jerry's one of those cats who I met years ago.
Marc:And I don't know who's like me or, you know, if you're like me or I guess some of you relate to me.
Marc:But, you know, you meet a dude and you're like, damn, I want to know that guy.
Marc:How do I get to know that guy?
Marc:And I wasn't stalking him or nothing.
Marc:But obviously, there's a lot of people that feel that way about Jerry.
Marc:It's like that guy's got to have some stories.
Marc:And he's a relatively quiet cat when you meet him.
Marc:But he just had this intensity.
Marc:and uh i was like man how do i how do i talk to that guy how do i get to know that guy you know and it wasn't a bromance situation i just looked up to him and i i knew that he had some dark wisdom that i needed and over the years we became friends and uh now we just laugh a lot see what happens see you think it's all darkness it's not all darkness have some laughs then a little darkness but jerry will be uh be here on the show in just a second also on the show booker t
Marc:You may be familiar with him on almost all of the Stacks records or perhaps on, you know, on the Booker T and the MG records.
Marc:Being a born again vinyl person, it was a pretty big thrill to talk to Booker T.
Marc:And I learned a lot, as will you.
Marc:Got some good Otis Redding stories.
Marc:Got some good Stax Records stories.
Marc:Just the, you know, that whole world of Stax Records, it sort of gets overshadowed by Motown sometimes.
Marc:But, you know, Stax Records was essential and extremely important in the history of American music, certainly.
Marc:And I don't know how you came about that stuff.
Marc:Okay, so I'm 50.
Marc:There you have it.
Marc:I'm 50.
Marc:You knew that, though.
Marc:I'm 50.
Marc:We covered that.
Marc:I'm not complaining.
Marc:Everything is OK.
Marc:I'm dealing with the loneliness, but I'm dealing with it with music because there's nothing better for loneliness in the long term or heartache for that matter than fucking music.
Marc:Look, I want to get my friend Jerry Stahl on the mic, and let's talk about his new book, Happy Mutant Baby Pills, for a couple of minutes, and also talk about the event we're doing tonight, Friday, the 8th.
Marc:I think it's at 7.30 at the last bookstore here in L.A., Jerry Stahl and myself, engaging in the witty dark things.
Marc:But let's be honest, he's a little darker than me.
Marc:A little bit darker.
Marc:A little bit darker.
Marc:So Jerry, Jerry Stahl is here.
Marc:We're working on some other things.
Marc:I want to, first of all, thank you for writing an episode of the new season of Marin, which is exciting.
Marc:It's exciting for me.
Marc:It was exciting to work with you since we've been friends.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Well, we actually did work together.
Marc:That worked out.
Marc:beautifully yeah the HBO yeah that yeah that was a classic story where we put a year into a script that was interrupted by the writer's strike right and then you know during that strike we couldn't work so you decided to almost kill yourself writing an opus painkillers right I wrote a just a massively up upbeat novel about it was sort of a comic romp with Joseph Mengele
Marc:What was the angle?
Marc:He was alive and well and living in my neighborhood.
Guest:He was alive and well and living in Reseda and he wasn't happy about it.
Guest:And he was very upset because essentially the Nazis won.
Guest:You know, Nazis didn't permit smoking.
Guest:Hitler was into health food.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And Germany's doing great and we're dying.
Guest:And a private detective had to go to San Quentin and find out if it was really him.
Guest:And then they ended up bonding up.
Marc:Yeah, and this book, I remember, almost killed you.
Marc:It literally almost killed you.
Guest:I spent a lot of time in the genocide zone at four in the morning, and it makes you a lot of things, but festive and upbeat aren't two of them.
Marc:Just like, oh, my God.
Marc:And then we came back, we finished the script, and we delivered it to HBO on the day the head of HBO left.
Guest:You can't really argue with timing like that.
Guest:It's just a gift from the show business gods, really.
Marc:It was fucking ridiculous.
Guest:Thank you for the script.
Guest:By the way, I'm leaving.
Marc:Yeah, so I don't know what they're going to do with it.
Marc:Well, I know what they did with it.
Guest:Holding open a door.
Marc:Shelved it.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:Over.
Guest:It's under a shelf.
Marc:But now we have the new book, Happy Mutant Baby Pills.
Marc:Which is, how do you feel about that?
Marc:How much did this take out of your life?
Marc:This gave back.
Marc:Oh, good.
Marc:Thank God.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:I had a void and it filled it.
Guest:This was a great book to write because a lot of it is about the chemical toxins, the drugs that we don't volunteer to take.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:Oh, like, say, in human breast milk now has paint thinner and benzene and lead and lithium.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which, you know, if you're my kid, you might need some lithium, so it's not all bad.
Guest:Some of it's good.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:It's just in there?
Guest:Silver lining.
Guest:Yes, it's all in there.
Guest:How is paint thinner in breast milk?
Guest:It's because in our water supply, Mark, all these things get dumped.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So everything you've ever flushed, sprayed, consumed, it's all there.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Everything from Rust-Oleum to antidepressants.
Marc:And this is like the through line of the novel?
Guest:It's a through line.
Guest:It's a through line because he meets the character who is himself a failed writer, oddly enough.
Guest:That's weird.
Guest:It was a reach.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know where you got that guy.
Guest:He's the guy who read the backs of cereal boxes as a kid.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Grew up and wrote the backs of cereal boxes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was his gig?
Guest:That was his gig, among others.
Guest:Well, he wrote the side effects on pharmaceutical products, so he came up with anal leakage.
Guest:That was his big thing?
Guest:Well, it seemed so much more homey than seepage, because in houses, stuff leaks.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:I have a leak.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's fine, but seepage, not so much.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:No, dampness.
Guest:Yeah, it's not good.
Guest:So, he was great at that.
Marc:A leak can be plugged.
Marc:Seepage can't be solved.
Guest:I couldn't have put it better.
Guest:You should have written the book.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he meets a woman who decides to protest capitalism and all its involuntary effects, basically the way we're all being poisoned by GMOs, the fact that Obama puts Monsanto veterans on his cabinet, et cetera, et cetera.
Guest:And so she decides to consume every over, under, and beyond the counter substance that she can find by way of giving way to the most deformed, mutant people
Guest:extremo baby she can as her protest to capitalism.
Guest:And the idea for this came by the fact that right when my girlfriend at the time got pregnant, I started an experimental treatment at Cedars-Sinai for hepatitis C, which is the ex-junkies parting gift.
Marc:There you go.
Marc:A little souvenir from hell.
Guest:Put it in the bag and go home with it.
Guest:Just don't try to sell it on eBay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, you know, it's what took Lou Reed out.
Guest:It's why he ended up getting the bad liver and the liver transplant.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not to brag.
Guest:And they told me once I was on these pills.
Guest:Oh, by the way.
Guest:If your girlfriend who is pregnant so much as touches the sweat you produce on a sheet on the bed you share, that baby will be born purple with wheels and two Ron Perlman heads.
Guest:So you can fuck in a hazmat suit, but otherwise...
Guest:so how'd you manage that she went to austin and she left there was no other way it wasn't was it worth you know it was romance bigger than deformity it's the eternal question for the duration of the pregnancy she just went away i'm not proud of that but it no it beats uh what could have happened then you know i actually got cured of the hep c and i wrote this book while on the
Guest:And you have a beautiful, healthy baby.
Guest:I have a beautiful, healthy baby, and I am permanently deranged from the medication, which was essentially like six months of doing bad acid every day with your post-toasties.
Marc:But when the kid came, your brain's back for the most part, right?
Marc:It's as back as it's getting.
Yeah.
Marc:So that was the incentive.
Marc:That was the inspiration for the mutant baby.
Guest:It was the twin threads, yes.
Guest:There was me as that writer guy, and then there was her as the mistress of all things chemical and mutilizing.
Marc:So this baby in the book, it does come out.
Marc:How does it come out?
Marc:You didn't bring me a book.
Marc:I didn't read the book.
Marc:So you need to tell me about your book.
Guest:And yet you blurbed it.
Guest:These are the ironies.
Guest:But I forgot to bring a book today because I was so excited about coming over.
Marc:Now I feel bad.
Guest:don't feel bad feel good okay because you read the parts that had to be read i did yes you did yeah i i said my blurb was based on my love for you and my belief in what you do that's the best kind of blurb it's the only kind of blurb i get nobody actually reads the things stop it i'm more than happy to read it i've started all of your books it's all gonna work out um
Guest:You know, it's a beautiful thing.
Guest:Giving a book is in itself like childbirth.
Guest:You don't remember writing them.
Guest:You know, somehow they're just there and your vagina hurts for a while.
Guest:I don't know how else to explain it.
Marc:But people love the books like, you know, Permanent Midnight.
Marc:I'm familiar with and read.
Marc:I Fatty.
Marc:I loved and read the the the gumshoe one.
Marc:Which one was that called?
Guest:There were two gumshoes, Plain Clothes Naked and Painkillers.
Guest:Same guy.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:Plain Clothes Naked, I read most of.
Marc:More of a crack noir.
Marc:Yeah, and Painkillers was a big book.
Marc:And it looked like it was going to take me a lot of time.
Guest:It was a festival of Mengele.
Guest:Not everybody wants that.
Guest:That was like 400 pages, though.
Guest:And it's getting bigger.
Guest:That's the irony.
Guest:It's now 800 pages.
Guest:It's metastasizing on the shelf.
Guest:I don't know how that works.
Marc:So without ruining the story of happy mutant babies, outside of it seeming darkly hysterical, how can it not be?
Marc:What happens?
Marc:So the baby is born.
Guest:Let's put it this way, as it's described in the book.
Guest:They look at the baby, and it was perfect.
Marc:That's all we're going to get.
Guest:That could cover many, many results.
Marc:So I want to tell people tonight, it's Friday.
Marc:And if you're listening to this on Friday, then you'll know this.
Marc:If you're listening to it later than Friday, then I don't know what to tell you.
Marc:But Jerry and I are going to be reading from our books.
Marc:He will be reading from Happy Mutant Baby.
Marc:and I'll be reading from Attempting Normal at the last bookstore in downtown Los Angeles, probably at 8 o'clock, and I think we're going to talk and probably do a Q&A.
Marc:So that's the weird thing.
Marc:We should do a Q&A, don't you think?
Marc:Absolutely, yeah.
Marc:And then, well, that always makes me feel weird because people will be asking you questions and be like, why am I here?
Marc:Maybe I'll go out into the audience with a microphone.
Marc:Do you have a question for Jerry?
Guest:I think you should go out in the audience with a microphone and then ask the questions.
Marc:Just take a question and go like, that's no good.
Marc:Jerry, let's do it this way.
Guest:I don't want to see you in the audience.
Guest:I want you right next to me up there on a couple of benches and we'll just shoot the shit.
Marc:No, I'm down for that.
Guest:That'd be great.
Marc:So I imagine you can get the book on Amazon and all the outlets where books are gotten.
Marc:do you know all those outlets yeah jerry stall is also indie and non-indie yeah and full-on corporate and jerry is now on twitter he's nervous about it uh what's the twitter name uh what's your twitter name some jerry stall at some jerry stall we gotta get you verified i gotta figure out how to do that i used to know a guy at twitter i think i still know someone at twitter i'm not sure what verified means means you get the blue v
Marc:wow like if you look at people like that have their name and then next to it there's a blue v that means they've been they've been uh verified by twitter they've been what do you uh when you do the sword what is that called coronated uh yes is that what it is yes did you have a coronation ceremony when you got your blue v
Marc:It was an exciting day because that makes... Did you know it was coming or was like, oh, my God.
Marc:I tracked it down.
Marc:I knew a guy at Twitter.
Marc:You went and actively sought coronation.
Marc:I did.
Marc:I did because when people set up fake accounts, people don't know.
Guest:I have all these fake Facebook accounts.
Guest:Funny you should say that.
Guest:There's all this crazy shit out there attesting to be me.
Guest:Fan pages.
Guest:But if there are fan pages... But even on Twitter, there's photos in this little photo section.
Guest:There's a photo of like a gym teacher and children.
Guest:It wasn't even me.
Guest:I don't know how that happened.
Guest:And there's photos of me that I don't even recognize.
Marc:I'm horrifying.
Marc:So as a new guy on Twitter, what are your fears?
Guest:I'm not going to lie.
Guest:There's some size shame.
Guest:There's some tiny number shame.
Guest:I fucking felt it.
Guest:You got a little Twitter dick.
Guest:Well, I got like 267.
Guest:All right.
Guest:Try and jack it up, man.
Guest:And then there's the, you know, the self-promotion rash.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, it's like, oh, gee, this is so uncomfortable.
Guest:I'm literally break.
Guest:I'm going to spend more on Loterman every day than I used to on heroin to get rid of the self-promotion rash.
Marc:The shame rash of.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like I just became a writer so I could pretend I didn't care what people think.
Guest:And now apparently I'm publicly obsessing.
Guest:Well, that's part of the process.
Guest:When I first started my podcast.
Guest:You're the one who talked me.
Guest:You were my Twitter guide.
Guest:My Twitter Eskimo.
Guest:Oh, boy.
Guest:You said, Jerry, just put the shit out there and it'll get retweeted.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:That's my belief.
Marc:I mean, I started with a very small Twitter dick and I made a public appeal.
Marc:I can barely fit in the room now.
Guest:I mean, there's nothing but Twitter cock in here.
Marc:I know, man.
Marc:I know.
Marc:I just broke 300,000.
Marc:It was a big day.
Guest:That is huge.
Guest:I'm in like the low three figures, man.
Guest:I mean, my voice should be higher.
Marc:Yeah, but you're still- It's day three.
Guest:It's day three of Twitter for me.
Marc:But you're also the guy that says that's about all the fans you have, so we've got to bring you new people.
Marc:Well, call me a cockeyed optimist.
Guest:I don't know.
Marc:We're going to get you new people, man.
Marc:But I'm excited about the book.
Marc:I've got the right people.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's important that you have the right people following.
Guest:I was almost about to drop names and I thought that's just fucking lightweight.
Guest:So I'm not going to go there.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, you don't have to.
Marc:People can go find out for themselves.
Marc:What is it again?
Marc:That Jerry Stoller?
Marc:It could be.
Guest:That will be the one that begins and will now have more people following than I do.
Guest:Wait, what is it?
Guest:It's some Jerry's stuff.
Marc:Some Jerry's stuff.
Guest:I had a media, I was up in San Francisco for this lit quake thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And somebody, a media professional come up to me and said, you know, there are dead war criminals who tweet more than you.
Guest:You've just got to get on it.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And I just thought that is one of the most cryptic things a perfect stranger has ever said to me.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, not everybody takes to the to the Twitter.
Marc:See, you know what I mean?
Marc:It's like you'll see a lot of people out there that start and then they kind of trail off.
Guest:You got to get it.
Guest:I'm squirming just the way you're looking at me when you're saying I feel myself leaving a slime trail.
Marc:There's got to be a way that you can get addicted to it.
Marc:There's got to be a way if I am.
Guest:I am kind of strung out.
Guest:I'm putting it out there.
Guest:But, you know, then I think, well, that's great.
Guest:I just shouted to a room full of 200 people who are busy doing other things.
Guest:200 is not nothing.
Guest:We're going to get it up there.
Guest:We'll get it up there.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:Well, day three, maybe I'll crack 300.
Marc:All right.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So come see us tonight if you're listening to this on Friday.
Marc:If you're either way, go pick up Happy Mutant Baby Pills by Jerry Stahl.
Marc:This is part of an ongoing opus.
Marc:Of Jerry documenting every dark and powerful facet of the human spirit.
Guest:Well, you know, if you've done the research, however involuntary, you might as well write about it.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:But do you do that research if you're not writing?
Guest:Well, you just don't know it's research.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, if an accountant had lived the life I'd led, what the fuck's he going to do with the pain?
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, lucky me, I get to put up between the covers of a book.
Marc:But would you have sussed about that shit anyways?
Marc:If I were an accountant?
Marc:No, if you were just you.
Marc:Yeah, if you were an accountant, would you get hung up on the drinking water?
Marc:Are you that kind of guy?
Guest:I would be more hung up on the lawsuits from fucking up people's personal fortunes.
Marc:Yeah, right.
Marc:Okay, but you as you, were these things that you were just interested in?
Guest:Forget VHS, Betamax.
Guest:Go there.
Marc:Go way back.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Analog tape.
Guest:Put your money in that.
Marc:Coming back.
Marc:Were you looking at that shit anyways, or did you just do it for research?
Guest:I've always been obsessed by that, but somehow when you know there is a baby coming in, the shit that you figure, oh, it's just me.
Guest:What do I care?
Guest:I'm 106.
Guest:I'm going to be dead anyway.
Guest:What do I care if I take GMOs?
Guest:Suddenly I realize you're bringing a baby into this toilet of a planet.
Guest:And the way I handled my complete fear of defects and chemical fallout and lead and the rest of it was to just dive in to the worst possible.
Guest:I was looking at websites.
Guest:There's a deformity out there called the cri du chat syndrome where your baby, it's French for cry like a cat.
Guest:You would like to have a child.
Guest:You would love this actually.
Guest:You could have one on your porch where they cry like a cat and their brains don't develop.
Guest:Oh, my God.
Guest:And, you know, that's how I... You know, I was alone because I was too toxic to be around the woman I loved who was having my child.
Guest:And wasn't she a lucky gal, you know?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Explaining to her friends.
Guest:It's not that he dumped me while I was pregnant and sent me to Austin.
Guest:No, he...
Guest:His fluids are so toxic.
Guest:He's very toxic right now.
Guest:And not the usual way.
Guest:I don't mean emotional.
Guest:That's what it is.
Guest:But this is actually verifiable, as you would say, in a chemical laboratory.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:So to sort of deal with that fear, you just buttressed it with more information than anyone could possibly know about the possibilities.
Marc:I went dark and I went deep.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Well, that is the best pitch for this book I've heard.
Marc:And funny.
Marc:Dark, deep, and funny, right?
Guest:I like to think those are the big three.
Guest:All right, man.
Guest:Thanks, Jerry.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:Well, that was a nice chat with my friend Jerry.
Marc:Come see us tonight at the last bookstore.
Marc:Pick up Jerry's book, Happy Mutant Baby Pills.
Marc:It's always out there.
Marc:You can always depend on Jerry for being a little out there.
Marc:I was turned on to Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, some Motown, some Stax people.
Marc:I was I had a very and I've talked about this experience before when I was a kid, when I was 14, 15 years old, 15 years old.
Marc:I walked I worked at a bagel shop across from the University of New Mexico.
Marc:And next door to that shop was a record store called Budget Tapes and Records.
Marc:There were two guys that worked there that helped define me as a human being.
Marc:Steve LaRue was one and Jim Regan was another.
Marc:Steve LaRue turned me on to the residents, David Bowie, John Hassel, Brian Eno, Robert Fripp.
Marc:He turned me on to Fred Frith, an entire world of experimental music and possibilities that blew my fucking mind.
Marc:He was the dude.
Marc:Jim Regan, on the other hand, was an old timer, a little older than Steve, definitely older than me, old school music guy.
Marc:And so there was a little battle for my soul at Budget Tapes and Records on Central.
Marc:Little battle for my soul.
Marc:Could Jim Regan be there?
Marc:LaRue would be there.
Marc:LaRue was, you know, taking me out into the wild with experimental music, art rock and all that.
Marc:And Jim Regan was like, hey, man, you know, that stuff's all well and good.
Marc:But you got to ground yourself in the classics.
Marc:You know, you got to know what real soul is.
Marc:Because that stuff is abstract.
Marc:You got to know what real soul is.
Marc:And I'm like, what are you talking about, Buddha?
Marc:What are you saying, Jim?
Marc:And he said, you got to come over to my house, bring some blank cassettes, and I'll load you up.
Marc:And I'm like, I didn't know what that meant.
Marc:I didn't know Jim that well.
Marc:I knew I was married.
Marc:Wasn't scared, really.
Marc:But it's always weird when you go over to the older guy's house with the blank tapes.
Marc:Well, I went over there and he had this massive record collection.
Marc:We sat there for like a half a day, if not more, just going song for song on all his Motown records and all his stack records.
Marc:I left with two or three CDs loaded up with all this stuff.
Marc:some Booker T, some, you know, some Otis, some Smokey, some James Brown.
Marc:I mean, all the shit, basically, you know, black music of that time.
Marc:And I had heard some of it, you know, on classic hits or here or there.
Marc:But man, I played those tapes until they wore out.
Marc:If it weren't for Jim Regan, I don't know if I would have known fucking anything.
Marc:About about real soul music.
Marc:So for me to actually have the opportunity, you know, it just came out of nowhere.
Marc:You know, Booker T Jones wants to, you know, he's out and he's talking.
Marc:I'm like, fuck it.
Marc:Let's I want to talk to Booker T. So I was in awe of this guy.
Marc:And he's a very humble guy.
Marc:You know, what was interesting to me, and I don't know if you can see it, he still sees himself.
Marc:You know, he's a guy in the band.
Marc:But he had a profound impact on American music.
Marc:So enjoy this conversation with Booker T. Jones.
Marc:Too much me in the head is never a good thing.
Marc:I live with it all the time.
Marc:So, you know, it's one of these situations where I get a genius artist come in here that's been around for as long as you have, and it's hard to figure out where the hell to start.
Guest:Well, I wanted to tell you one thing that was on my mind when we walked in.
Guest:Because we were talking about John Fogarty.
Guest:And the thing that popped into my head was going back to 1969, 1970, when we met those guys out in Oakland.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My guys, my guys being Steve Cropper and Al Jackson Jr.
Guest:and Doug Dunn, would always seem to play better when we were hanging out with Fogarty and Doug.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And evidence of that is on this show that we played, and it was filmed at Oakland Coliseum.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Have you ever heard Booker T and EMGs play Time is Tight like that?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Really.
Guest:That was the best one.
Guest:Check it out.
Guest:Check Steve Cropper's intro of the song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:His purpose, the way he played it, the groove.
Guest:Check out Al Jackson standing up on the set.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Now, Credence was standing side stage, all four of them.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:Watching.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's why my band played like it did.
Guest:It seemed like those guys inspired them.
Guest:And they wanted to impress them.
Guest:And I didn't realize that until you mentioned that we were walking in.
Guest:I was thinking about John and his guys and the type of group they were.
Guest:And that group, I guess my guys had thought maybe they had influenced them in some way.
Marc:Did you record with him in the studio as well, at all?
Guest:Yeah, they had a Cosmos factory over there in Oakland, and we went over there and played, and they had a little studio in there.
Guest:And did you jam, or was that recorded?
Guest:It was mostly jamming.
Guest:It was mostly just sitting down, playing, having fun.
Guest:But we were supposed to have been getting ready for this concert coming up.
Guest:I don't know how much getting ready we did for the concert.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We just jammed all night.
Marc:Well, he's a fairly kind of a very intense and furious artist in a way.
Marc:Not furious angrily, but Fogarty had an intensity and a drive to him.
Guest:Fogarty has purpose.
Guest:Purpose.
Guest:I'll put it that way.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'll put it.
Marc:So, you know, in going in, like, I literally just tweeted that I was going to talk to you, and then all of a sudden I enter this, you know, the Booker T. Jones rabbit hole.
Marc:You know, some guy immediately out of nowhere goes, ask him about Ray Stinnett.
Marc:And I don't even know who Ray Stinnett is.
Marc:Ray Stinnett.
Guest:Ray Stinnett.
Guest:We call him Ray Stinnett.
Guest:was the guitar player for Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.
Guest:Wooly Bully.
Guest:Wooly Bully.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I met him in Memphis.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was probably one of the few people in Memphis at that time who had been out to California and seen the scene.
Guest:And he comes back talking about
Guest:Peace and love.
Guest:So, mid-60s?
Guest:Late 60s?
Guest:Mid-60s.
Guest:And then Memphis, you know.
Guest:Memphis?
Guest:No peace and love in Memphis.
Guest:So, naturally, you start hanging out with them, you know, because I'm over at Stacks, and this is all, you know, different.
Guest:So that's how I met him.
Guest:And he actually- You produced a record?
Guest:Produced a record.
Guest:I had come out here and made a deal with Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, and they gave me a production company.
Guest:And Ray was one of the records I put on that production company.
Marc:Well, let's go back then to the beginning because the stack sound is something that I think you're largely responsible for, correct?
Marc:I was by accident, yes.
Marc:So when you started out, you were one of these guys who could play a lot of different instruments naturally.
Right.
Guest:When I started out, I was trying to reach the piano with two fingers on my tippy toes.
Guest:And then I was asking for a drum and a ukulele.
Guest:And my father finally reciprocated when I was 10 and bought me a clarinet.
Guest:And I had the key to the band room because I was young, but I became an assistant band director and I had the key.
Guest:So I could teach myself the alto sax, baritone sax, baritone horn trombone, all those things I could slip in there after school.
Guest:In high school?
Guest:In junior high school.
Guest:In junior high.
Guest:And before junior high school.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And practice on them.
Marc:And you grew up in Memphis?
Marc:Grew up in Memphis.
Marc:And what kind of, you got a big family?
Marc:What's the old man do?
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:My father was the school teacher, the math teacher, across the street from Porter Junior High.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And his friend was a band director.
Uh-huh.
Guest:No, just I was the only child.
Guest:I have an older sister here in Los Angeles, but she's 20 years older than me.
Guest:I have an older brother 22 years older than me.
Guest:Wow, a lot older.
Guest:And they're both still around.
Marc:Oh, they're here, yeah.
Marc:That's amazing.
Marc:Yeah, they're great.
Marc:Still kicking.
Marc:So, all right, so back in Memphis then, what kind of music were you taking in at that time?
Marc:I mean, we're talking about, what are we, early 50s are we talking, when he started playing clarinet and that kind of stuff?
Guest:The first music I heard was my mother on piano, playing WC, Litz, Chopin.
Guest:on the piano, on her mother's upright piano, and gospel music, classical music, Handel in church, Handel in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Guest:Across the street, of course, was the Sanctified Church, which was more gospel-type music.
Guest:I could hear that from the street.
Guest:So that's what I was hearing.
Guest:So you can stand in the middle of the street and get both sides.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:One's got a little bit of a groove, one's a little heavier.
Guest:You got it.
Guest:You got it, Mark.
Guest:That was exactly it.
Guest:That was the Mount Olive Cathedral, and directly across the street was the Pentecostal Temple, directly across the street.
Guest:And so that was before I turned on the radio.
Guest:I turned on the radio, and I'd get John R. from Nashville, and I'm hearing Hank Williams and Kitty Wells.
Guest:That was all that was on?
Guest:That was it.
Guest:That was it.
Marc:But it was amazing because it was such soulful country music.
Marc:Jack White started reissuing some of those Sun recordings, and it's amazing how stripped down that stuff was.
Marc:I mean, there was almost nothing to it.
Marc:It was raw.
Marc:It was right there.
Marc:You could hear the instruments perfectly.
Marc:Patsy Cline.
Marc:Patsy Cline.
Guest:And it was like blues almost to me.
Guest:Did you hear blues?
Guest:Oh, man, blues, yes.
Guest:I was just going to get to Johnny Ace.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:B.B.
Guest:King.
Guest:Right.
Guest:B.B.
Guest:King in person.
Guest:Where did you see him at?
Guest:On blues.
Guest:Right.
Guest:On Beale Street waiting for my mother.
Guest:You know, my dad would pick her up after school, and she went to Union Protective with Professor Whalen down there, and she was the secretary there, and I'd sit in the back seat, and I could hear those guys right there.
Guest:They were standing right there.
Guest:On the street.
Guest:They were playing for money right there.
Guest:B.B.
Marc:King was playing for money on the street when you first saw him.
Guest:B.B.
Guest:King came up, all of them came up from Mississippi like B.B.
Guest:too, because Memphis was the city, was the biggest city, and that's where they could make some money.
Guest:Right.
Guest:In the clubs.
Guest:They'd play in the afternoon before they played the clubs.
Guest:Oh, I see.
Marc:And they just pull a crowd?
Guest:They played right there on the corner.
Guest:With the band?
Guest:It was like a Walgreens type store.
Guest:No, no, no, no.
Guest:Just the chair, the guitar, and the shady spot at 4th and Hernando, Bill and Hernando.
Guest:And that's where you were taken in?
Guest:Then after I got the bicycle and the first paper route.
Guest:How old were you there?
Guest:This is nine, ten years old.
Guest:That's the one that got me up to Macklemore Avenue.
Guest:And that's when I discovered the jazz.
Guest:And they're the jazz messengers.
Guest:Because I went in there at Satellite Records with Steve Cropper, who was the clerk.
Guest:And he allowed me to hear the Ray Charles and the Hank Crawford and the
Guest:The Fathead Newman playing jazz in Ray Charles' band.
Marc:What was Ray playing?
Marc:What year was it?
Guest:Ray was playing saxophone.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Ray played alto saxophone and Hank Crawford played baritone sax.
Guest:He just had an amazing band.
Guest:That was my first exposure to real jazz.
Guest:So this is before Ray got his groove too then?
Marc:Like before he became Ray Charo?
Guest:Quincy Jones was his arranger back then.
Guest:And there was one song in particular that I heard play.
Guest:He played Hammond M3 organ.
Guest:And I'm specific to say that because it's different from a B3.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:How is it different?
Guest:Because you've used both.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The M3 is the spinet model.
Guest:It was the model that Ray had.
Guest:It's got the kind of the smaller sound.
Guest:It's got the funkier little kind of electric sound.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And there's only one speaker in between the knees.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And that's the one Ray played on One Minute Julep.
Guest:I heard that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it changed my life.
Guest:Yeah, that was the moment?
Guest:That was the moment.
Guest:The clouds opened?
Guest:I said, that's the sound I want to make in my life.
Guest:And I must have been really young.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:But I'll never forget it.
Guest:And David Porter told him, well, I know a guy that can play.
Guest:And he came and got me out of my class.
Guest:At school?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And it's just like, yeah, the clouds did open up.
Guest:How old were you?
Guest:And I told him, I was 14, I think.
Marc:14, and the guy from the record company said, I got a kid.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He can handle this.
Guest:And I played on that song, Cause I Love You, the baritone sax.
Guest:And then I told him when I left, I told Cropper, I can play piano.
Guest:And I think Floyd Newman, the baritone sax player, told him I could play piano.
Guest:And this was a satellite, not at Stax.
Guest:It was still called Satellite.
Guest:It wasn't named Stax by then.
Guest:They were still selling records out of the front.
Guest:But it was the same guy.
Guest:Yeah, they were trying to establish a country record company, and it wasn't working, and Rufus Thomas, the DJ, convinced them to record a song on him.
Guest:It was the best thing they ever did, because it sold.
Guest:And that was the one you played sax on.
Guest:That was the one I played sax on.
Guest:And then they went on from there to get William Bell in there, and he became a songwriter, singer for them.
Guest:But anyway, I told them I could play keyboards.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So they tried me out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they had a little piano there, and I went in there, and next to the piano was sitting a Hammond M3 organ.
Guest:So.
Marc:You're just calling your name.
Marc:You just sat there, and you sat down at that thing for the first time, and what did you play?
Guest:Well, it was two years later.
Guest:There was a little riff.
Guest:That I'd been playing in the clubs.
Guest:I had my own little kind of combo band playing the clubs, because I started making pretty good money playing after school at nightclubs.
Guest:And I was playing blues in F. And I played this blues in F, and we ended up calling it Behavior Self.
Guest:They loved it.
Guest:They thought it was good enough to put it out as a record, as a single.
Guest:And this was one Sunday afternoon.
Guest:So that's when Green Onions came in.
Guest:That's when the little piano riff came in on the M3 this time instead of the piano.
Guest:And that turned out to be Green Onions.
Guest:And we just thought it was okay.
Guest:Put it on the B-side, Volt Records.
Guest:A-side, behave yourself, B-side, Green Onions.
Guest:Steve took it down to the WLOK and asked them to play it.
Guest:They played it.
Guest:Played it, played it, played it, behave yourself.
Guest:And what kind of station was that?
Guest:R&B station.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:A little station downtown.
Guest:And this guy, Reuben Washington, just fooling around, flipped the record over.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Played the other side.
Guest:People started...
Guest:calling about it uh-huh they were like what is that yeah yeah so they ended up yeah they ended up repressing the record uh with green onions as the a side yeah and behave yourself as a b side and it was their number one hit it was number one hit yeah and you were what 16 i turned 18 that next year yeah
Marc:So you're just this kid.
Marc:They must have been amazed that you had this talent.
Marc:I mean, I don't know what it must have felt like to be like a guy your age in this world.
Marc:I mean, it must have been just thrilling.
Marc:Or did you not think about it much?
Guest:I didn't think about it much.
Guest:I thought I was pretty lucky to live that close to a record shop that I could get to in a couple of minutes on my bike.
Marc:Which was satellite records.
Guest:Yeah, the nearest records.
Guest:Otherwise, I had to convince my dad to get in the car and go out to Sears.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Crosstown.
Guest:That was a good ride.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Didn't think about it too much, just pretty much fascinated with music and how it worked and just trying to learn scales and learn harmony.
Guest:So you knew how to read and everything else?
Guest:I wasn't nearly as good as I wanted to be.
Guest:It's one of the reasons I went to college.
Guest:Where did you go to college?
Guest:Indiana University.
Guest:How far is that from Memphis?
Guest:That was 400 miles.
Guest:So that's a schlep.
Guest:That's a long haul.
Guest:It was a drive back and forth Friday afternoon at Indiana out of class and then 400 miles, get to Memphis maybe at 11, 12 o'clock at night.
Marc:That's like a 10-hour drive, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:So you were doing gigs on the weekend and doing recording on the weekend coming in from school.
Marc:Were you able to finish school?
Marc:Finished school.
Marc:No, the road like the back of my hand still.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you majored in, what was it, music then?
Marc:Music education, I did.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And what was your primary instrument when you were in college?
Guest:Trombone.
Guest:I played my senior recital on trombone.
Guest:Do you still play all these instruments?
Guest:I did until about 10 years, until the flood in New Orleans.
Guest:When the flood happened and all those kids lost their instruments and all those musicians, I found every good instrument I could and sent it down there.
Guest:That you had?
Guest:I sent my trombone, sent my flute, sent my clarinet, sent my tenor saxophone.
Guest:All those instruments, I sent them to the Dirty Dozen Brass Band in New Orleans.
Guest:To give to the kids?
Guest:Yeah, because they lost all their stuff.
Guest:It was a horrible thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't have them now anymore, though.
Marc:But you could get new instruments if you wanted to.
Guest:Yeah, but it takes all my time now just to practice piano and guitar, and I sing a little bit.
Guest:It takes all my time just doing that.
Marc:Well, this is an interesting thing about your sound and about the evolution of who you are is that you became so identified with this stack sound and then your own music with the Booker T and the MGs.
Marc:But I mean, like I was looking at your career and there was a lot of stuff you did solo.
Marc:There was someone singing, someone without singing.
Marc:Then you produced other people.
Marc:And it's pretty fascinating to me.
Marc:Do you feel like you seem very broad?
Marc:You seem like you can do anything.
Marc:And do you feel like, what would you say is your specific sound?
Marc:Would you call it that organ sound?
Marc:Would you say that that's a Brooklyn sound?
Guest:Yeah, I think that's the instrument that I express myself best on, is the Hammond.
Guest:I feel most comfortable and natural on it.
Guest:Sometimes I'll jump up from the Hammond, though, and grab a guitar when I'm on stage.
Guest:What kind do you play?
Guest:Well, I have got a lot of guitars.
Guest:Which one do you like playing the most?
Guest:I've got an even-ass Booker T. Jones model that I leave at home that I really should take with me.
Guest:Got your name on it.
Guest:Yeah, they made that beautiful guitar.
Guest:I've got a Baxendale guitar that they made for me that's beautiful.
Guest:The guitars are like, or the organs are like that, too.
Guest:Each one's different.
Guest:And they sing differently.
Guest:They play differently.
Guest:Really, there's organs too, huh?
Guest:Yes, each one.
Guest:Same model.
Guest:Same model, same electronics.
Guest:Sounds different.
Marc:What is it that makes the Hammond sound?
Marc:Because it's not a digital thing.
Marc:It's an electric piano.
Marc:But what spins it?
Marc:Are there tubes in there?
Marc:Is there something, an oscillator?
Marc:Do you know how it works?
Marc:I've stayed away from that side of it.
Guest:I do have a digital one that sounds great, but it's the ability to sustain a note and hold it and then have the note move air with the Leslie speaker.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:It's the ability to do that, so then you get the still, straight sound, and then you get the movement.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And the movement kind of affects emotion.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Each organ's got its own groove almost.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And some of them go faster than others.
Guest:Some of them go slower.
Guest:And it's the combination of the hammer with the Leslie.
Guest:Except at first on Green Onions, there was no Leslie.
Guest:There was just a straight organ sound.
Marc:So you just mic'd the organ direct.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:So do you have organs where you're like, that one's a little faster than that one.
Marc:We've got to play this one.
Marc:It's a little slower.
Guest:Well, I've gotten rid of them because I've started renting them, and they're all different, and they're 475 pounds, and now with the airlines, I don't fly with them anymore.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:You just have them meet you there?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I'll meet the organ at the gig.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So now when did you start?
Marc:When did Stacks change and when did you sort of become the guys there, the house band there?
Marc:What was the change?
Guest:Mark, Stacks started to change actually from outside itself.
Guest:It started to change when American business started to change.
Guest:When one company realized that it could buy another company and make more money, stacks began to change.
Guest:Because that's when Gulf and Western Industries was born.
Guest:And they realized they could buy Paramount Pictures and they could do better, even though it was on the other side of the country.
Guest:and then paramount bought stacks yeah you know and and when the other element came in and the um the principals realized we can make a lot more money right if we if we sell and we have bigger distribution sure i think the focus changed from oh isn't this exciting to do this little song like this and
Guest:What about this kid over there?
Guest:I wonder what he can do.
Guest:And so we stopped taking people off the street, and we started doing it the corporate way.
Guest:The original thing was almost like a regional thing, correct?
Guest:It was.
Guest:It was completely regional.
Guest:And she had mortgaged her house, and she was experimenting.
Guest:She being Estelle Axton, sort of like the mama of the boys, Jim Stewart's older sister.
Guest:And she was giving us ideas and trying to promote her son, you know, Paki.
Guest:And she loved the music, though.
Guest:She just got a
Guest:thrill when we made a song.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Who was her son?
Guest:Her son was Paki Axton.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:He was the sax player with the marquees.
Guest:What was the music?
Guest:Was it just straight up R&B or blues?
Guest:The music was blues.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The music was blues and a lot of it was standards.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:That's why I ended up getting together with Willie Nelson because we had done standards to make a living back then.
Marc:Well, for Stardust.
Guest:You produced Stardust.
Marc:Blue Moon, Blue Moon, Stardust, all the songs on Stardust.
Marc:Those were the ones I'd done as a kid.
Marc:Beautiful, yeah.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:And, okay, so this is what's going on.
Guest:So those were the two camps.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:The two camps met because the whites were moving out of South Memphis, basically Macklemore Avenue and College Avenue, moving out east, and blacks started to move in and buy those homes.
Guest:And for some reason, Jim Stewart, his studio didn't make it out there in East Memphis, and he decided to go and get a theater, an old theater.
Guest:A movie theater.
Guest:That we could redo, and the cheapest one was over there in that part of town.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:So he's trying to make country music over there in South Memphis.
Guest:In South Memphis, okay.
Guest:Yeah, all right.
Guest:With fiddles and everything.
Guest:It's like the Alamo.
Guest:He's the only white guy in town.
Guest:Right, and people like me are outside, you know, buying Ray Charles records from his sister's record shop.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:So that was it.
Marc:We just kind of bumped shoulders there.
Marc:So she moved in, though.
Marc:She supported the music.
Marc:She supported the music with the record sales.
Marc:And she finally said, look, you've got to start recording these guys.
Marc:They're right here.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was at the bank, making his living at the bank.
Marc:and she was her husband had a steady job and she was you know convincing him to remortgage and remortgage their house right to get money to finance right right right so there you are in a record in a in a movie theater and Estelle you know you guys start recording and how do you and Duck Dunn and and Cropper get together because
Guest:All these white kids come out there and they do the work.
Guest:They rip out the seats.
Guest:They put up the foam on the walls.
Guest:Cropper, done.
Guest:They just want to play music.
Guest:They just want to be a band.
Guest:So they'll do anything.
Guest:They're doing this for Jim.
Guest:Because his sister, you know.
Guest:And they're doing this for their friend, Paki.
Guest:So they build this recording studio there.
Guest:And I'm going in there.
Guest:I'm listening to...
Guest:you know the jazz messages but i'm hearing music coming through the curtain there's a something going on back there i can hear sounds you know i can hear there's a band playing back there you're in the record store i'm in the record i'm in the lobby okay where they sell popcorn but that's been turned into a record right but there's a curtain right right just a curtain yeah yeah and but i can hear this full band playing back there and i'm like wait a minute that's
Guest:That's what I want to do.
Guest:But you can't just walk through there.
Guest:So that became my purpose in life, was to get through that curtain.
Guest:Where the sounds are coming from.
Guest:Every day I'd go there with my ROT9 NDCC uniform on, riding my bike, and listen there.
Guest:It turned into the fact that I was just pretending to listen to records.
Guest:I really wanted to get back there.
Guest:And you were what, 16, 15?
Guest:I wasn't 16.
Guest:I was 13, 14 when that was happening.
Guest:And what kind of uniform were you wearing?
Guest:National Defense Cadet Corps.
Guest:They were training me to be a lieutenant in the Army.
Marc:So that was like ROTC.
Marc:It was like the same thing, ROTC.
Guest:They were getting ready to invade Vietnam.
Marc:Oh, right.
Marc:And they were already getting kids prepped at 13.
Marc:I could break down an M1 rifle blindfolded.
Marc:Really?
Marc:At 13?
Marc:At that point.
Guest:Really?
Guest:At that point.
Marc:Now, did you have anything invested in that or was it just something you had to do?
Marc:It was part of my school course.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:It was like algebra.
Guest:Right, right.
Marc:You just go and do it.
Marc:Put on the uniform.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Okay, so there you are, 13, 14 years old, hanging out at the record store, hearing this sound.
Marc:Duck Dunn and those guys are back there.
Guest:I don't think it was Duck at that point.
Guest:I think it was some other people, but it was there.
Guest:But it was Cropper.
Guest:Yeah, it was definitely Cropper.
Guest:And his Telecaster.
Guest:And it was Chip Smallman, Jim's partner.
Guest:Jim wanted to partner with Chips.
Marc:Well, he went on to be a big guy, right?
Marc:He did the box tops.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:Produced it, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that was the original partner with Jim Stewart.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And his sister wanted him to partner with her, but he wants to hang out with people like Chips, who's not really the people you really want to hang out with, because I'm not sure they might have been doing some substances or something.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I don't know, you know.
Guest:Hitch was a bad influence.
Guest:Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Guest:But he could play guitar and he was hip.
Guest:He had a nice sports car.
Guest:Yeah, so when was the moment where you stepped behind that curtain then?
Guest:David Porter walks into my algebra classroom.
Guest:The teacher looks to the right.
Guest:He's got a hall pass in his hand and he looks over at me and he says something like, the band director wants to see him.
Marc:Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Was he telling the truth?
Guest:Hell no.
Guest:He's just going to run you downtown.
Guest:He's got the band director's keys.
Guest:And we run down to the band room.
Guest:And he says, just get the baritone sax.
Guest:We're going down the sax.
Guest:Throws it in the back of this Plymouth.
Guest:I will never forget this 1967 Plymouth.
Guest:And he scoots over there and run through the door.
Guest:And then they play this little song for me.
Guest:And they said, do you have an idea for the intro?
Guest:And I go, and then Rufus starts singing, and we got a song.
Guest:Yeah, that's good.
Guest:That was the moment.
Guest:That must have been like, boom.
Guest:That was the moment.
Guest:I got my mouthpiece on, and I thought it was something to play.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And I made seven bucks.
Marc:Seven bucks.
Marc:I wonder how much that record made.
Marc:I don't know.
Guest:It probably made a little more than seven bucks, huh?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:They paid me, but seven bucks was, Mark, that was, for a kid my age, seven bucks.
Guest:Yeah, unbelievable.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then you started doing, so, all right, so once, now bring us up to speed on, like, so once you get, when you graduate college, or you graduate high school and you go do the, I mean, there seems to be a lot of years in there.
Marc:What are you doing with stacks during those years?
Marc:So you play the sacks and you're still in two years.
Guest:now as a piano player there okay so that's it i go throw my papers right after school and then i run over the stacks yeah and i try to catch up with whatever song they've been working right every day and i'm the evening session player for the next two years and who actually the next eight years really so from from age like 14 to 21 yeah and
Marc:And Green Onions happened in the middle of that, but you stayed there and you were still working.
Marc:Now, who were the guys coming through?
Marc:The guys, the first one was Prince Conley.
Guest:Jim kind of caught the bug with the blues.
Guest:And he says, well, maybe we should try some blues.
Guest:And he's a blues guy from Beale Street.
Guest:And then the next guy is...
Guest:And William Bell with, not exactly blues, but R&B.
Guest:And William's writing songs with a band, with a vocal group in high school.
Guest:And he's leading The Girls Are Loving, The Girls Are Falling Out Over It.
Guest:yeah and so jim brings him in yeah and we're doing uh you don't miss your water till you're well when it's dry right right and they said well can you play the organ on this and that was the first time yes i can play the organ and that's when i played the m3 the first time over there and i got this kind of little watery sound yeah yeah and i'm answering william and they they're piping it through the bathroom right and that's like 11th grade right and that was the first time that you had that sound come out and
Marc:And that was part of that.
Marc:That's sort of the beginning of the establishing of that groove.
Marc:It is.
Marc:And then that became, and that's how, like, through that organ and through, I guess, Cropper, too, and the way you guys played together, that developed that Stax groove, right?
Guest:And it was my life because I had seen this guy with this girl.
Guest:He's trying to get this girl in the schoolyard.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:Trying to kiss her, trying to hold her.
Guest:And it's William Bell trying to get his wife.
Guest:And they've been together for probably, how long has that been?
Guest:That's 50 years.
Guest:That's how long they've been together.
Guest:And it's my life.
Guest:It's what I was seeing.
Guest:And he's singing songs to her.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm playing in the studio with him.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then when did the other artists, I know that Isaac Hayes was involved in stuff, and then I know that Otis was there.
Marc:When did that start?
Guest:Isaac came later.
Guest:Isaac kind of ended up kind of standing behind and looking.
Guest:Some people just kind of came in and hung out.
Guest:Like who?
Guest:There was a group of young kids that came and hung out, like Carl Cunningham, Roy Cunningham.
Guest:Carl was younger.
Guest:Jimmy King, James Alexander.
Guest:They'd kind of come and stand in a different specific car.
Guest:Carl would kind of stand near the drums, and Roy... Al just took him under his wing as a protege.
Guest:And I think Duck took James Alexander and...
Guest:And Jimmy King, and they would actually sometimes actually step in.
Guest:Jimmy King could, you know, step in and play Cropper's part, you know.
Guest:Oh, yeah, just like on a break or just for... And then there were other people that wanted to get in that couldn't get in, Homer Banks.
Guest:The neighborhood, the African-American neighborhood and part of the white neighborhood became aware that if you were a songwriter or a musician, you might have a chance at this place over here on Macklemore.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But this was after Sun Records had already kind of had its arc, right?
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And that was another part of town, but not too far away, was it?
Guest:Not too far away.
Guest:Rufus knew those people.
Guest:But the Phillips family, they had this wild card, Dewey Phillips, and he would come over and hang out with us.
Guest:He was crazy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He had a show, he had a TV show called, a radio show called Red Hot and Blue.
Guest:And I'm sure some of the white people may have thought he was black.
Guest:But he would yell and holler and hoop on that thing.
Guest:And he'd come over and hang on.
Guest:And so, and it was his brother, Sam, that had the record coming.
Guest:They were doing Elvis Presley and they were doing... Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:So we were sort of related through this crazy cousin of theirs.
Marc:But you never really mingled with...
Guest:Some of us mingled.
Guest:They mingled with Cropper.
Guest:Cropper could go over there and get masters made.
Guest:I'm not sure exactly what the connections were.
Marc:But was there still sort of, you know, the rift?
Marc:I mean, was it still pretty deep?
Guest:It was segregated.
Guest:It was completely segregated.
Guest:It was segregated except for some people.
Marc:Right.
Marc:What were some of the biggest hits that you played on early on?
Marc:I know you did the one with Rufus, but you were involved with a lot of big songs, whether either regionally or nationally.
Marc:Right.
Guest:I didn't play on a hit record over there probably until William Bell's You Don't Miss Your Water.
Guest:How many years was that?
Guest:Maybe a year or so later.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:And then when did Sam and Dave come in the picture?
Guest:That's way later.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:That's after Stax had affiliated with Atlantic, the big record company in New York.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:Jerry Wexler went down to Miami and found them and thought that we would be better suited to produce them than his folks up there in New York.
Marc:So you were producing.
Marc:So not only were you playing, you were producing the music by that point?
Guest:By producing, I mean coming up with the songs.
Guest:With the riffs?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Part of our team, Isaac Hayes and David Porter, formulated Sam and Dave.
Marc:They made the sound.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You had these two guys there.
Guest:I'm sitting in an office and I'm hearing these songs next door so I can't concentrate because they're over there doing Hold On, I'm Coming and When Something Is Wrong with My Baby.
Guest:This is what I'm hearing coming through the door.
Guest:So I can't even concentrate on what I'm doing because they're doing this music.
Marc:Well, what's your job at that time?
Guest:To try to do what they're doing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So I just go to the door and stand there and listen.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But this is 60.
Guest:I'm a senior in high school by this time.
Guest:I mean, college.
Guest:I'm a junior, and I'm about to graduate when all this started to happen.
Guest:And Otis, too?
Guest:Otis was late, too.
Guest:Yeah, he came 63, 64.
Guest:He was a driver for Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers.
Guest:A driver.
Guest:Yeah, he was the guy to go get the hot dogs and to carry the luggage.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:I saw him, he got out of the car, and the first thing he does is go to the trunk and get all the stuff out and start bringing it in.
Guest:For which band?
Guest:Johnny Jenkins and the Pine Topper.
Guest:No kidding.
Guest:That's how he got the stacks.
Guest:Isn't that unbelievable?
Guest:And he does his work, and he does it good, and then he comes over and he sits down and says, can I sing a song?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No.
No.
Guest:And he sits down, and we said yes, because actually Johnny's manager really wanted us to hear Otis.
Guest:He didn't say that, but I think he planned.
Guest:And then he became Otis's financier.
Marc:When you first heard Otis, what was your reaction?
Guest:He was sitting right next door.
Guest:He didn't have any music or anything.
Guest:He started singing, These arms are mine.
Guest:And you were playing?
Guest:Well, I started playing.
Guest:Once he started singing, I started playing, yeah.
Guest:And that was the first time you heard him sing?
Guest:I started playing hang on organ.
Guest:That was the first time I heard him sing.
Marc:But when he sang, did you know that he was a guy?
Guest:When he started singing, I think some people had left for the day because we had tried to do a demo on Johnny Pound.
Guest:But when he started singing, I think Cropper was a few feet away.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the chemistry changed.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And I started playing on the organ.
Guest:And I think Cropper walked over and sat down to the piano and started playing triplets.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:It just, it just, we just kind of, like a storm comes up, you know, like.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We just, we just, wait a minute.
Guest:I think we want to do this.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think we just went right into it.
Guest:And I think we just forgot about Johnny and the Pinetoppers and started working right on it right then, I believe.
Guest:On which song track?
Guest:These Arms of Mine.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And I think we just went right on into it.
Guest:Maybe that's just, you know, memory is not ever really accurate, but this is the way it feels to me.
Guest:Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Marc:But you could tell by that guy singing that he was a transcendent talent.
Marc:Yeah, we didn't start asking questions or anything.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:We just started working on that one particular song.
Guest:And I think because it was unlike Cropper to go sit down at a piano.
Guest:You know, he wasn't a piano player.
Guest:But I'm pretty sure that's what he did.
Guest:He went over there.
Guest:He ended up on guitar, of course.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I think someone else maybe played guitar on that too.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and which song that was it these arms that's the one that got me right he was sitting right next to me yeah and he starts singing this with all this feeling and uh and you know he was the type of person that he wasn't trying to impress you you know he was just doing it really he was just he's real he's right in the moment he's doing it yeah right from there on out too sweet guy
Guest:yeah he was a good friend yeah he never did anything to hurt anybody yeah uh-huh yeah and and which songs of his did you guys back him on uh in in total the the highest moments were uh try a little tenderness satisfaction uh-huh i've been loving you too long oh my god respect yeah you did all those yeah and you did you you toured with him as well one time one time one tour
Marc:He wasn't around that long, was he?
Guest:He toured, but he toured with the Barquays.
Guest:You know, I told you these kids that started hanging around, he heard them and loved them and liked them and took them as his band.
Marc:But you did the records.
Marc:We did the records.
Marc:Those were big records.
Marc:They were.
Marc:Now, when you guys started touring as Booker T and the MGs, you started touring right after Green Onions or what?
Marc:There was no touring for us.
Marc:No?
Guest:They wanted us to be a house stacks band.
Guest:Did that bother you?
Guest:Well, it did after a while, after we realized that we could be artists, too.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Not at first.
Guest:Right.
Marc:And when did that sort of, how did that shake out?
Guest:It didn't really work out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We did one tour, one Stacks tour, and as a band, Booker Teen and the MGs reached about probably 10% of its potential.
Marc:and are you bitter about that no no i had a great career there yeah i mean i was a kid in memphis that had that got a career in the music business and you influenced you created a sound i mean you were part of the architecture of a sound i mean because when i talk to people you know especially people who are real music nerds you know that the sound that came out of stacks that you know you were part of uh you know really defined you know groove driven rmb
Guest:We were building it from within.
Guest:We had no idea what we were doing.
Guest:But we did have these tenets, these principles, and some of them were established by different people.
Guest:Al Jackson would always say, keep it simple, keep it funky, not too many notes.
Guest:And we stuck to it like a...
Guest:Like a code.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:And how, in your mind, like, you know, because, I mean, some of the growth was simultaneous to the R&B that was coming out of Detroit.
Marc:And in your mind, you know, because there's such a profound difference in sound.
Marc:And when you think about it, you know, what is, you know, they were sort of hook-driven and hit-driven in a different way than Stax was.
Marc:And what do you see as the difference in those sounds?
Guest:Hmm.
Hmm.
Guest:Ours, I believe, was a little more basic to the... A little more accessible, a little more immediate.
Marc:Raw.
Marc:Because it was simpler.
Marc:And because it was a groove-driven thing.
Marc:There was...
Marc:It seemed that the Detroit sound was trying to make pop music in the old model, and what Stax was doing was something uniquely, a unique style of R&B that wasn't completely driven by, I think, white music to a certain degree.
Guest:It was.
Guest:There was some rock and some rockabilly in it, and there was some blues.
Guest:There was a little country at times, and there was definitely some jazz.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But it was just a different groove.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Because it seems that funk comes directly out of what you were doing.
Guest:It does.
Guest:And a part of it happened because of our limitations, because of the sound.
Guest:We only had one speaker, one track, one bathroom for the echo.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:So you used a bathroom then.
Guest:We couldn't go to the bathroom because we had the echo mic in there.
Marc:What does that mean, an echo mic?
Marc:It means you have to wait until somebody's not recording something to go to the bathroom.
Marc:But I mean, what did the bathroom, how did that work?
Guest:They set it right in the middle and they put a speaker up towards the wall.
Guest:So you get that reverb.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So part of your sound is the bathroom at Staxx.
Guest:But if you think about the movie theaters of the 1950s and the tile that they put in there, they're made as perfect echo chambers.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, why not?
Marc:They didn't know that.
Marc:So let me move up a little bit.
Marc:Now, I'm kind of fascinated with Albert King.
Marc:What was your role in working with him?
Guest:Well, after we realized we could start making records, they started assigning different artists to different people.
Guest:both to produce and to come up with material for.
Guest:We didn't do that much covering of songs by other people.
Guest:So we found out, and of course Jim's focus was to get original songs that he could publish.
Guest:That's the way he figured he was going to make his money because he wasn't so sure he could sell a whole bunch of records, but if he could publish them, and they were good songs, he figured he could make money.
Guest:So the emphasis was on songwriting.
Guest:So we developed songwriting teams.
Guest:And my team consisted of me and William Bell.
Guest:And we got the assignment to write a song for Albert King.
Guest:And, of course, it waited until the last minute.
Guest:And the day before he came in, the night before, William came over to my house.
Guest:And we wrote this song, Born Under a Bad Sign.
Guest:Oh, that's a great song.
Guest:And that's the first time I was actually consciously in the studio with Albert King.
Marc:But that's a great song.
Marc:I mean, you know, that was not only his signature song, but a few people have covered it.
Marc:I think Cream covered it.
Marc:And, you know, it's like a seminal minor blues song.
Marc:And how did the lyrics unfold with that?
Guest:William is a genius.
Guest:And I started playing this thing on the piano.
Guest:Da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
Guest:That was your groove.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:And we just sat there, and he just sang this story to that.
Guest:That's unbelievable.
Guest:And what was Albert like?
Guest:Oh, that's when it came alive.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, his flying beat.
Guest:David's job was always to teach the lyrics to the singer.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And, of course, Albert, he's got to play a little guitar before he starts singing to get in the mood.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he starts this thing, man, and it was just electric, so...
Guest:That was one of the best moments of my life.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:It was when we started playing that song in the studio.
Guest:And I just got excited when I heard him play.
Guest:And, you know, he's played kind of like Jimi Hendrix, right-handed, you know.
Guest:Left-handed?
Guest:Or whatever.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:That way, you know, you can pull the strings.
Guest:You don't have to push the strings.
Marc:Right, because he didn't restring it.
Marc:He had the bass strings on the bottom.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So if you're right-handed, and you're going to, I mean, rather, if you're left-handed, you don't have to push up to the end of the note.
Guest:You pull it.
Guest:Right, so he'd go way up.
Guest:Oh, man.
Guest:So it just created this incredible sound.
Marc:And he was just doing those fills in between your groove, and that was it.
Marc:Just took off.
Marc:that's a beautiful song now were you around when they when stacks uh sort of broke open and started doing some comedy records and stuff like that i had left by then oh yeah now let's talk about okay so they did richard pryer was gone but they did some great great great records though so now booker t and the mgs you know i was listening to some of those other records uh i've got i got the one you did in 72 that i was just listening to today melting pot yeah it's a great record thank you yeah
Marc:And then I started poking around a little bit, and I didn't realize that.
Marc:What did it feel like when you started to realize that you had fans in Lennon and McCartney and that the sound that you guys were doing was a profound influence on guys that were taking music into a completely other direction?
Guest:Well, Mark, that didn't make much difference, actually.
Guest:I didn't think much about it.
Guest:No?
Guest:I mean, I appreciate all the people that love the music.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I appreciate it, but I didn't try to change anything anymore.
Marc:Oh, no, no, but was it flattering?
Marc:Oh, absolutely.
Marc:Oh, yeah, it was great.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:And unbelievable and never imagined.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:And you were able to meet the Beatles, right?
Marc:And they reach out to you or no?
Guest:Well, they said the Beatles came down to the Bag of Nails.
Guest:We were hanging out at this club in London.
Guest:and I never did if they were the Beatles a lot of people in London looked like that and who were you playing with at that time I don't think I recognized them I was playing with the MGs okay so you did tour England yeah okay yeah I didn't meet one of the Beatles till New York I met George Harrison in New York at Bob Dylan's concert and we went to lunch but that's the only time I remember ever hanging out with one of the Beatles yeah I met Ringo Starr on the street here in LA a couple of times yeah
Guest:that was the only time but you did record a bunch of their tunes right I did you did a whole album of happy road music that was 1971 or 72 and what inspired that just the fact I was trying to pay tribute to them they had been a rock and roll band that had been trailblazing they had become the top band in the world and they were the real thing as far as I was concerned they never did stop striving to make better music because they had made it and
Guest:when they came out with abbey road with all this new oh yeah with all its new melodies and all its um just this dedication just you know just they were real real entertainers and i just wanted to pay tribute to them for for for being so real and so good and those you did beautiful versions of that stuff and they were they were like you did the full runs of the the putting the songs together and that was that fun it was great it was great
Marc:Was it because of Green Onions that you chose to go specifically instrumental for so long?
Guest:No.
Guest:That was pretty much dictated by the record.
Guest:Once we'd have found some success there, they wanted us to continue there.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Of course, I wanted to branch out into all types of other things, vocals and country music and jazz and jazz.
Marc:Well, you did do that in a solo record, right?
Marc:73 or so?
Guest:I did, after I left Stax.
Marc:What was the name of that record again?
Guest:Oh, I did three of them.
Guest:One was called Try and Love Again.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Another one was called The Best of You.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Another one's called I Got You.
Marc:And you mix up all the sounds.
Marc:I mean, there's country stuff on there.
Marc:There's some blue stuff on there.
Marc:There's some R&B stuff on there.
Marc:And you're doing a lot of singing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And do you feel...
Marc:Do you feel that you were able really to find your way with that as a performer?
Marc:Did you feel like, because being known for Booker T and the MGs, were you satisfied with how the vocals and stuff went on your own?
Guest:Well, the process for me, you know, Mark, I have found satisfaction in just doing it.
Guest:And I'm happy with just that.
Guest:Oh, that's great.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, no expectation.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You just do the work.
Guest:Yeah, and it's just, you know, there's so much gratification right there.
Marc:And now, like, what's amazing is that you've lived long enough, and you're a young man.
Marc:That's a fortunate thing that you started when you were 13.
Marc:So, you know, not only did you help define a sound, but now you constantly have new artists that are like, you know, want to be part of the Booker T sound.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:right you know like i saw neil young with you back in neil young back in what was that in the 90s right the early 90s i was like we started playing together right i was like how the hell is booker t and the mg's gonna play with neil young i didn't even understand it but how did that relationship start oh that was organic uh you know neil neil plays that that that rock and roll guitar and uh he writes these
Guest:heartfelt songs and yeah uh i i knew everything he'd done by the time we got to got on stage i didn't have to rehearse that much uh-huh um but he just like he was able to like his he's like you too in that you know his sound is very timeless i mean it's not it's not really hinged to a time okay so he wrote i believe in you yeah yeah and he and and with uh the stuff that he did with graham and david and i don't know steven
Guest:I knew all the songs.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it was just easy.
Guest:We just went on stage and played them.
Marc:And not a lot of rehearsing?
Marc:Didn't need too much rehearsing.
Marc:And Cropper's solid.
Marc:He can play anything, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And Duck Dunn, those guys.
Guest:Cropper didn't go with us on that, too.
Guest:It was just me and Duck with David and Stephen.
Guest:Because Stephen still is a consummate guitar player.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Guest:So he and David were the only guitars on stage.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:And Neil.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:I don't know why I decided that Steve was with you.
Guest:Well, we actually did a tour with Booker T and the MGs and Neil Young also.
Marc:Well, that must have been what I saw, because I would have remembered if Stills was there.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And then you- That was mostly Neil Young songs.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It was Neil Young songs.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And some MG songs.
Marc:But that's a rare thing that you have a complete comfort level with being a support band.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Well, that's what we were trained to do at Stax.
Guest:That's what we did for years.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Marc:And when you set in to do that, is there a thought process that goes on?
Marc:How do you sort of service the front guy?
Marc:I mean, is it just a matter of following or just creating a bed of sound?
Marc:Both.
Guest:Both is according to who's out front.
Guest:Sometimes we set the pace.
Marc:And it just depends on how it feels at that moment with the guy?
Guest:With somebody like Fogarty, you're not going to be setting the pace.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:You're going to follow John.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:What about with Neil?
Guest:Same with Neil.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Neil's songs are all, unless it's a new song, completely original.
Marc:And what are some of the guys that needed a little more, you know, sort of, instead of them setting the pace, where you knew you had to set the pace?
Marc:Who were some of those guys?
Marc:We did that with Sam and Dave.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:We did that with...
Guest:Oh, it varies.
Guest:Yeah, but Otis, he drove his own.
Guest:Otis knew what he wanted to do.
Guest:He wasn't always able to play it for you, but he had it in his mind.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:So he could either sing it to you.
Marc:How would you characterize what, it's just interesting to me that, you know, what has been known as, you know, really a pure soul sound, you know, had Duck in the rhythm section and had Steve on that guitar.
Marc:And that really defined, you know, a pure soul sound.
Mm-hmm.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Guest:and and it's just interesting that it was really uh you know it was a a a balanced you know black and white man and they made a conscious effort at a young age and in high school to uh study black music and they loved it from the heart uh steve loved um oh uh the guitar player with the five or l steve
Guest:Oh, yeah, I don't know who that is.
Guest:Steve Cropper did.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he came out playing like that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Duck, even in his job, distributed all the records from King Records in Cincinnati, all the James Brown.
Guest:Duck is a walking- Freddie King?
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:I think it was on King Records, too, was he?
Guest:No?
Guest:Yeah, well-
Guest:But Duck was a walking R&B encyclopedia.
Guest:Early on.
Guest:He knew all the songs from Elmore James.
Guest:I mean, he knew all of them.
Guest:So it was in his blood.
Guest:He's a white man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so was Steve.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But they weren't, and I guess they listened to it in their families.
Guest:They listened to country music.
Guest:But that wasn't the music that they took to heart.
Guest:That moved them.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And was it when you guys were playing together, was there ever tension publicly?
Yeah.
Marc:Not between us.
Marc:No, no, no, I know.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, people, well, they couldn't believe it.
Marc:And who did that fall on?
Marc:Did they take flack for it?
Marc:It's according to what neighborhood we were in.
Marc:Yeah, right, right, right.
Marc:Yeah, and what was the kind of reaction?
Marc:If they were negative, what would happen?
Marc:I mean, who would get the flack?
Guest:Would it be Doug and Steve?
Guest:We didn't get the negative reactions.
Guest:Um...
Guest:Very much.
Guest:We weren't on the road very much.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the only time we ended up in those situations were when we needed food or when we needed to go to a hotel.
Guest:And we were very adept at checking in for Steve and Doug and then giving them their keys.
Guest:And they would do the same for us.
Guest:We'd do the same with the food.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Just go in and buy a double amount and bring it out.
Marc:And that was what you just worked around it.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Yes, I guess.
Marc:I mean, I don't know.
Marc:It's hard to imagine, because obviously it's still tense in some places now, but not as much, but that it was really sort of institutionalized like that.
Guest:It was, and we were breaking the rule.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, you're not breaking this rule.
Guest:People didn't believe it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:that we were actually breaking that rule.
Marc:It didn't make sense to them.
Marc:No, no.
Marc:It doesn't even register.
Marc:You guys are not playing together.
Marc:It's so hard for me to understand that level of ignorance.
Marc:Now, let's talk a little bit before we, I don't want to rush anything, but now Otis, he died at 27.
Mm-hmm.
Marc:And were you guys pretty tight when that happened?
Guest:I was personally close with him.
Guest:He was personally close with everybody that I can remember.
Guest:Duff and Steve, everybody, yeah.
Guest:Everybody had a relationship with him, yeah.
Guest:And it just must have shattered the whole community.
Guest:Well, it did.
Guest:It was completely unexpected.
Guest:Never expected that.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Do you pay any credence to the conspiracy theories that it was intentional on behalf of the label or anything?
Guest:Oh, no way.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:No way.
Guest:Our people, Jim Stewart, Estelle Axon, the people that were running Atlantic, the people, they would have kept Otis alive forever if they could have.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:I'm certain of that.
Marc:I just heard some bullshit about the mafia muscling the Atlantic.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Well, that's bullshit.
Marc:That's complete error.
Guest:Good, good.
Guest:Erase it from your mind.
Guest:I will.
Guest:Everybody that was there that was close to him, even if they were making money off of him, fell in love with him and they would have had him live from now on.
Marc:I found it very disturbing that I can't remember.
Marc:I think it's over in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that they had a piece of the plane.
Marc:And I found it very disturbing.
Marc:I felt the same way.
Marc:I didn't want it there.
Guest:Why is it there?
Guest:It's too much sensationalism.
Guest:But you know what, Mark, what happened was it was just negligence.
Guest:It was just they didn't take care of that plane like they should have, and they just got in bad weather up there, and they should have had to put a new battery in that thing, and they just didn't run the instruments correctly up there.
Guest:It was an accident.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, of course.
Guest:Horrible.
Marc:Now, all right, let's talk about the producing, because you still...
Marc:You know, you do it.
Marc:And I guess it just became second nature after being a band for so long and building these songs and building that sound.
Marc:Now, like when you sat down to produce something like Willie Nelson Stardust, I mean, how do you work with that guy?
Guest:my path has just led me to people like that and it's just been amazing it was very very natural with me and Willie it was just like sitting down like we are now it was just talking about songs that we loved and then starting to play them and then just saying well what key here when you want to go to the chorus when you want to go to the verse and
Guest:And after so much of that, just transferring it into the studio.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And just, it was very natural.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:Like, there was no premeditation.
Guest:You're old pros.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:You know your own sounds.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you're coming together.
Guest:And the only thing to put together was the electronics or the logistics of it.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:And you had a technician there and did the two of you stand there and go, what do you want to do here?
Guest:I was pretty much in charge of that part of it.
Guest:And I had two great engineers on it.
Guest:Actually, we were over here in Laurel Canyon when we did the
Guest:was it long candy on beverly hills uh at emily harris's house and her husband had this recording truck this is a great sounding truck with a great sounding stevens tape recorder in there and he just he just pulled it up into the driveway and put the microphones out on the house they had done that many times so they just let us use their house huh and we recorded the album there uh-huh did you work with emily before had not worked with her before no i knew her husband
Marc:Yeah, and he's a producer?
Marc:Brian Ahorn.
Marc:Yeah, Emmylou's got a hell of a voice, huh?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:And now, like, in the last few years, you're doing, I mean, that Grammy-nominated, what was that, the Drive-By Truckers?
Marc:How did you hook up with those guys?
Guest:I met those two, my then manager, Dave Bartlett, and Andy Culkin at Anti Records.
Guest:It seems like a weird match.
Guest:No, no, no, it wasn't.
Guest:They were fans.
Guest:And Patterson's father had played music that was very close to me.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:And I have been a guitar freak all my life.
Guest:And I wrote all those songs on guitar.
Guest:And most of those songs, we ended up with four to six guitars on every track.
Marc:it just became a guitar album potato hole potato hole yeah but the organs there though yeah the organs oh yeah yeah but those guys are crunching it up with a lot of guitars yeah yeah it's great and then uh and then you work with the roots yeah that must have been amazing it was it was it was because they're almost like your children
Marc:Yeah, uh-huh.
Marc:Yeah, they said that.
Marc:Oh, they did?
Marc:Yeah, well, they had listened to everything we'd done.
Marc:Right, because they grew up with it.
Marc:I have to assume that because, like, you know, especially with now, as a guy, you know, who was in a band who was, you know, the backing band for so long, now you got people like the Drive-By Truckers, you got the guys like the Roots who were like, we want to support you.
Marc:They did.
Guest:That's exactly what they did.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:They let me do whatever I wanted to do.
Guest:If I wanted to play guitar, I wanted to play organ.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:It was great in both situations.
Marc:And what was it like playing with, what was the feeling in knowing that you had built the groove that they grew up on and actually made, you are partially responsible for the drive shaft of the music that propels them now.
Guest:It was great.
Guest:It was like I was being paid back for all my hard work.
Guest:I got an open slate with both those bands.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Just to do whatever I wanted to.
Guest:And I think it enabled me to let go and be creative and imaginative and not have any restrictions musically.
Guest:That must be an amazing feeling.
Guest:It was great, yeah.
Marc:Now tell me about the new record, the sound, the alarm record.
Marc:The title is appropriate.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:I actually am on fire, Mark.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah, I don't know what's happening.
Guest:I feel like I'm, in some ways, just starting.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:That's a great feeling.
Guest:And the ideas are there, and I'm so excited about everything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I really feel like I'm beginning to learn the power of music to make me and people feel good and to bring good into the world.
Guest:It's such a powerful thing.
Guest:And now I feel like I'm learning how to do it the right way.
Guest:What does that mean?
Guest:Well, I'm feeling comfortable with it, and I'm feeling comfortable with the path that the music has me on.
Guest:I don't have to worry so much about trying to get the right person to play this part or that part.
Guest:Things are falling into place for me.
Marc:That's a great thing to hear because what I was getting at with some of the other questions and I didn't want you to take any offense was that you evolved as a musician that could really do anything and then by circumstance you were part of a sound that you're personally responsible for.
Marc:And then when I was sort of looking at your work
Marc:You know, I realize that, you know, in my mind, you know, after doing all this time, you know, backing other people and having some hits on your own.
Marc:But mostly, like you were saying, you know, you were trained to be a backing band.
Marc:And then, you know, you tried some solo stuff, which was satisfying and great musically.
Marc:But I always wondered about, you know, in looking at your stuff that, you know, where your identity was with this stuff.
Marc:And from what I'm hearing you say now is that you finally kind of arrived in yourself.
Marc:And you finally feel comfortable with that.
Guest:Yeah, and I really am fortunate to be where I am right now, to have the ideas that I do and the fact that they come and I'm feeling comfortable with it.
Guest:And I'm not worrying about things that I used to worry about, like if the right drummer is going to be there or if the groove is going to be there.
Guest:I'm learning to flow with it.
Guest:And it's like a burning sensation.
Guest:It's great.
Marc:It's creativity, pure creativity.
Guest:Exactly, exactly.
Guest:I think I'm tapping onto it now in a way I never did before.
Guest:That's awesome.
Marc:It is.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also, it happened a while ago, but you were early on inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Marc:That must have been pretty amazing.
Guest:It was.
Guest:I couldn't believe it.
Guest:You couldn't?
Guest:No.
Guest:I never did think at that point that the music we were making was...
Guest:was uh rock and roll and you know i guess i was thrown off by the name uh-huh oh yeah rock and roll yeah yeah it's a broad but i'm so uh flattered and honored to be uh inducted at that time yeah that was 1992 yeah yeah it was just like it was pretty new right that was 1992 and quincy jones was just inducted this year right right albert king was just inducted this year yeah you know and so i was inducted way back then right right so it's such a
Marc:You were on the short list, man.
Marc:Yeah, it's great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, do you, like, on a day-to-day, but do you stay in touch with Cropper?
Marc:Yeah, I'm in touch with Cropper.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you guys are, like, you know, you talk and... Yeah, we've been through a lot of changes.
Guest:He's, you know, somebody called him a homebody the other day.
Guest:I was out in Franklin, Tennessee, and I was trying to get him to come out to the theater, and I couldn't get him to come out there.
Guest:But he...
Guest:You know, we've gained a lot and we've lost a lot.
Guest:You know, we lost Duck, we lost Al Jackson, which was the, you know, big part of what we were doing.
Guest:But we're still together and, you know, he's just better than he ever was.
Guest:That Telecaster, man.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He's the master.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Last week, a week before last, we were playing on a record by Eddie Mitchell, the French guy, and it just turned out great.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And then we played over at a theater over in Phoenix together.
Guest:We don't play that much, but we play some.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:We played at Eric Clapton's about three or four weeks ago at Eric Clapton's Guitar Festival in New York.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Did you play with Eric?
Guest:Eric didn't play.
Guest:No, Crop and I played.
Guest:Just, oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:With my band.
Marc:Oh, great.
Marc:Oh, that must have been great.
Marc:Is it like, do you feel the history?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:It was wonderful.
Marc:Yeah, it was really good.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:Well, it's just a treat to talk to you and a treat that you're alive and well to enjoy all this stuff.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:It's a real honor.
Marc:I appreciate you coming by.
Guest:Thank you.
Guest:My pleasure.
Guest:I enjoy talking to you.
Marc:Thank you, folks.
Marc:I hope you dug that.
Marc:I hope there was some new things in there for you.
Marc:It was certainly an honor for me to listen and to engage with Booker T. Jones.
Marc:And also, like oddly, after I talked to him, I was at a weird... I was at some guy's garage in... Where was that?
Marc:Outside of Buffalo.
Marc:He was selling records, and I got a bunch of Stacks records.
Marc:I got some really sort of great old Booker T. records, some live Stacks stuff, and...
Marc:But anyways, man, it was just one of those situations.
Marc:It was one of those things where, like, I can't believe I'm talking to this cat.
Marc:Can't believe it.
Marc:So that's our show.
Marc:Thank you for listening.
Marc:Go to WTFPod.com for all your WTFPod needs.
Marc:Be nice on the comment board.
Marc:Jesus, I mean, hardly any of you ever comment except for three guys, and they tend to go at each other.
Marc:It's like, whatever.
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Marc:Get the WTF blend, and I get something on the back end.
Marc:Deaf Black Cat looks great.
Marc:He looks really fucking good.
Marc:I've been giving him cooked chicken, and he's digging that, so I'm seeing more of him, obviously.
Marc:Who wouldn't keep coming around for fucking chicken?
Marc:Am I right?
Marc:Oh, shit.
Marc:Boomer lives!