Time Is Tight Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Booker T. Jones

  Cover design by Gregg Kulick

  Cover art © Walter Iooss Jr. / Getty Images

  Author photograph by Piper Ferguson

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  Lyrics from “Ole Man Trouble” reprinted with permission of Downtown Music Publishing

  eISBN 978-0-316-48557-9

  E3-20190917-DANF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: Prologue

  Chapter 1: His Eye Is on the Sparrow

  Chapter 2: ’Cause I Love You

  Chapter 3: Precious Lord

  Chapter 4: Havana Moon

  Chapter 5: C Jam Blues

  Chapter 6: Green Onions

  Chapter 7: These Arms of Mine

  Chapter 8: Higher and Higher

  Chapter 9: Bootleg

  Chapter 10: B-A-B-Y

  Chapter 11: Born Under a Bad Sign

  Chapter 12: Time Is Tight

  Chapter 13: Melting Pot

  Chapter 14: Stardust

  Chapter 15: Don’t Stop Your Love

  Chapter 16: The Cool Dude

  Chapter 17: I Believe in You

  Chapter 18: Representin’ Memphis

  Musical Phrases

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Photographs

  To Nan Jones, my California girl

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  Author’s Note

  Time doesn’t always move straight forward. I followed my thematic impulses to guide me to connect events from different periods of my life. I wanted you, the reader, to sense the flow of time—not only from the early beginnings to now but jumping forward and circling back when moments were joined more by truth than minutes.

  It’s a song that returns again and again to choruses that are different and somehow the same. I encourage you to let your mind open and free yourself of constraints. Time is open, and yet time is tight.

  I have recalled the events depicted in this book to the best of my recollection. While all the stories are true, some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.

  Throughout the text, just after the subheadings, are eighth notes followed by numbers that refer to various musical phrases I have composed for this book. Each phrase is a musical representation of a feeling or temperament that matches or resembles the scene that follows, note by note.

  Prologue

  Acapulco Gold—like dinner at a fine restaurant some have described it.

  On the morning of February 9, 1971, I had a saddlebag full of it, which tumbled down when I pulled the saddle off my horse. On the trail riding Skeeter, my polo pony, I shared the weed with my riding friend, Glyn Turman, who was never without a generous flask of expensive southern whiskey in his saddlebag. Glyn waved goodbye at my gate and trotted off to his ranch, just north of mine in the Malibu Hills.

  I put my horse away and hung the saddle and gear in the tack house. Then I laid a blanket on the ground a few yards away to rest and enjoy the beautiful morning on my Acapulco high. The sky was clear, and the crisp morning air felt good to my lungs as I stretched out and recognized an acute sharpness in my perception that I had not experienced before. I felt I could see, hear, taste, smell, and think better.

  My mind eased into reflection as I lay on the ground and appreciated how the mountains and surf gave me a sense of peacefulness and safety. My adventurous, curious nature had led me from Memphis to this exotic locale just steps from the Pacific, where I fell into loving the smell of sweaty horses and musty hay. I met new people who stimulated my musical sensitivities—Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Bob Dylan, Stephen Stills, Bill Withers. These Malibu natives were my new family. Life was different here, and I felt deep appreciation for the steady, loving, unwavering support from my parents, teachers, and neighbors in Memphis. I felt secure and stable enough to wander. I loved my new home.

  Then the horses started whinnying in the barn. The dogs began barking at the sky.

  I became aware of a faint reverberation, way down deep on the other side of the earth. Paranoia set in. I’m not sure this is the best time to experience my first earthquake.

  The rumble quickly became a bass drum roll, then expanded and condensed into a violent jolt that shook the ground. The whole ranch seemed to move about a foot. Not getting up with the earth moving around like flapjacks in a pan was a no-brainer, so I stayed put, stoned out of my mind. Only later did I learn it was the great San Fernando earthquake, strongest in California’s history, about to do more damage than you could imagine in less time than you could comprehend.

  Unaware of the destruction being unfurled around me, I lay frozen on the blanket and took the ride. When the rumbling stopped, I was thankful to be in one piece, still on the earth’s crust, and not swallowed up into its belly. I took my time rolling over onto my knees. After taking my time to get back on two feet, I realized the old ranch house was still intact, a veteran of many earthquakes.

  Billie Nichols, the agent at Louis Busch’s Malibu Realty, was thrilled with our $89,000 offer for Lana Turner’s 4.89-acre ranch at the end of Winding Way. With $40,000 down there was no bank involved, and Lana carried the $49,000 balance herself. She made a few surprise visits to collect mortgage payments and survey her investment. The small print in the contract specified Malibu’s age-old stigma that no land could be sold to a black.

  The deed transferred to me anyway, and I stayed in shape by loading my own hay bales at the Malibu Feed Bin, using bailing pins and heaving the big bales off the dock onto the bed of my ’71 F150. When I got home, I loaded and stacked them in the barn, which held thirty tons of hay.

  My wardrobe shifted from the fancy clothes I wore with the MGs in Memphis to blue jeans, plaid shirts, cowboy hats, and beige Frye boots that went up to my knees. Everyone who had a ranch was wearing Fryes. They offered some level of protection from the rattlers that haunted Malibu’s trails with such abundance. Skeeter was not spooked by the snakes and would just speed up when he saw one of the fat females spread out over the road. Not that I was lucky enough to be on the horse for every encounter. There were many times when I was in the brush and a rattler may have been close, so the boots became part of my daily attire.

  Though I rode Skeeter western, he was a good jumper since
some of the young girls who used him did it English style. I had a deal with my neighbor, Egon Merz, an old German who trained Hollywood starlets to ride, that he could borrow my horses in return for riding and tack lessons. “Yess, I trayyned Elizabeth Taylor to ride for National Velvet! I did!” he claimed in his broken English.

  Many mornings I heard my horses trot past my bedroom window. They left the ranch early because Egon had sent a pair of young girls to fetch a quarter horse or my Shetland pony. I never minded. The exercise was good for the horses, and Egon always walked and brushed them afterward, not to mention cleaning and replacing all the tack by nightfall.

  One day, Egon’s daughter, Gina, led us to a trail that sidled past homes in Ramirez Canyon before proceeding under the Pacific Coast Highway into a dark, narrow tunnel that gave access to Malibu Beach. When our horses caught eye of that smooth sand, they couldn’t hold back. No pulling on the reins. We let them go, bending our knees, pressing our heels into the stirrups, and hanging on for dear life.

  Just like in the movies, trots became gallops, and gallops turned into flying leaps with front hooves meeting back hooves. Skeeter bared his teeth, opened his mouth, and put his head down a little, pumping his neck front to back. Beach houses flew by. Our hats fell off. We gripped the horses’ bellies with our thighs. Sweat flew everywhere. The only sounds were four hooves pounding the sand, wind howling, and my pony’s lungs whining for air.

  The ride home was a victory march. Our horses pulled up and stopped at a huge gully with imposing rocks on a beach too wide to cross. On the left, the gully gave way to a majestic ravine whose water fed the Pacific. I didn’t know the beach well enough to recognize where we were. But it didn’t matter. The horses knew the way home and picked up speed gradually as we got back to Malibu.

  Skeeter was absolutely soaked, so I put a light blanket on his back. He was dripping as I walked him a bit so he didn’t cool off too fast before watering. After I brushed him, he galloped off to his stall. Welcome to California!

  The year was 1968, and I was embarking on my spiritual journey. In the library of Rabbi Max Vorspan, whose Beverly Hills home I rented while he took his sabbatical, I discovered Ghani yoga, raja yoga, and hatha yoga. I studied graphology, took up astrology, and, before computers showed up and simplified the process, taught myself to do astrological sidereal charts using Greenwich Mean Time. The intricate math was difficult, involving converting birth times geographically from hours and minutes according to a person’s birthplace to latitude and longitude. The professional astrologers would do charts, and after I peered at one long enough, the answers to unanswerable questions would “jump off the page.” It happened once when a Malibu friend asked me to read his chart. He sat with me and waited. After a while, it told me he had webbed feet. I asked him if it was true. He took off his shoes and showed me his webbed toes. I stopped doing charts for others after that.

  Even with all the reading and study, my quest to find meaning and discover my true self was stymied because I didn’t know how to meditate. The process was long and tedious, with many side trips that seemed to have no purpose. But eventually, Transcendental Meditation produced results, most importantly by helping me realize the precision my guardian angels had employed when they led me through the door at Satellite/Stax Records.

  What a lost soul I would have been without my Memphis music beginnings. What could have taken the place of the security the Stax family provided? And yet, I was unable to resist the temptations to leave. First to Indiana, to study music, and now, trading a solid musical legacy to move to California for the freedom to live on a small horse ranch.

  For the longest time, Stax meant nothing to the city of Memphis. Jim Stewart was an insignificant bank teller with the dream of making a fortune publishing country songs. Sorrowfully flawed for the job, he became the nucleus of a musical cooperation of unlikely bedfellows. That slight, frail, country fiddler created a sanctuary, a fortress in enemy territory, where the rules of segregation remained a feeble shadow and where whites and blacks created music together on a daily basis. In that atmosphere of safety, my spirit soared and my heart barely stayed in my chest during recording sessions with Otis Redding and Booker T. & the MGs.

  The truth is I was never in it for the money. I loved the people and the music. And the people and the music loved me, and we flew together—on a daily basis. The best-kept secret in the Mid-South, right under the nose of the Crump dynasty. On the same plots of earth where our forefathers maimed each other, we experienced exalted moments together. This is not to say Jim Crow didn’t poke his head above ground. Like working on “Maggie’s Farm,” there were periods when the only pay was the rapturous experience gleaned from the music.

  Those eight years, and those people—Jim Stewart; his sister, Estelle Axton; Al Jackson Jr.; Lewie Steinberg; Steve Cropper; Duck Dunn; David Porter; William Bell; Sam & Dave; Wilson Pickett; Packy Axton; Andrew Love; Isaac Hayes; Chips Moman; Floyd Newman; Tom Dowd; Ronnie Capone; Rufus Thomas; Carla Thomas; Eddie Floyd; Otis Redding; Albert King; Wayne Jackson; Deanie Parker; and Al Bell—defined my life. In the prism of music, we became reflections of each other, and over time we came to love each other. Even when we fought. And throughout the whole experience, I was always the youngest, working out who I was and what I wanted to do with my life note by note.

  Chapter 1

  His Eye Is on the Sparrow

  MEMPHIS—Summer 1963—3

  Al Jackson sauntered into the studio. Big grin. Eyes sparkling. Peering directly at me.

  “Whatchu got, Jones?”

  That was his way of asking me to show him what music we would be working on that day. I was always ready to accept the duty of being the originator of the song material.

  I returned Al’s gaze with understanding. They needed me to come up with the essence of the song, so, as he always did, he asked, “Whatchu got, Jones?” That plunged me into my musical mind like a deep-sea diver looking for pearls on the ocean floor.

  Sweater sleeves pulled up, Al dampened the sound of his snare by plopping his fat wallet onto the snare drum head and securing it with a few generous strips of masking tape. He then stepped off the riser, walked over to Steve, and took a Winston from Steve’s box. Lighting the cigarette, he looked back at me. “You ready?”

  Having already made a stop at the coffee machine in the foyer, I placed my fingers in “Green Onions” position on the keyboard. When I walked in, I needed an idea, and if I didn’t have anything right away, I’d take another sip of coffee, another drag on a Salem, and then dive in and bring up something to show them. Some musical idea would just pop into my head. Usually a pebble, sometimes a pearl.

  That morning, I pulled out the same stops as “Onions” and started twiddling the first three fingers of my right hand between a triad and a seventh chord. Good. Great sound from the speaker. Ended up using only three fingers for the whole pattern. Today’s song had to be something soulful, and simple. Turned it up so loud, I almost distorted the little JBL speaker.

  Jim Stewart entered the studio. “Hi, Booker.” His eyes hinted at a smile. “Let’s get started.” The swatch of unruly red hair on Jim’s forehead wrested my eyes away from his steady gaze. His infrequent smile was open, but it had to be earned.

  Jim was the founder of the company and the engineer for the day. His nimble, surreptitious shift from country into black music was reflected in his gait, which he often used to amble into the studio late. Sometimes he forgot how hip he had become and went back to the fast shuffle of a white Memphis banker.

  This session, which Jim surprisingly showed up early to, would have been started by Chips Moman (Jim’s first studio foreman) or Steve Cropper (after the first couple years), and Jim would have to play catch-up to learn the song, or songs, for the day.

  He bent over and moved the mike back a little. The banker’s jacket slid off his tiny, swaybacked frame and revealed a neck elongated from years of playing the fiddle.

  Lewie, meanwhile, moved h
is chair closer to my left hand to follow the notes and re-create them as the bass line. “That sounds like something.” Steve put his Winston out. Al went back to his kit, straddled the throne, and picked up his sticks—a funky, subtle backbeat.

  Lewie Steinberg, who picked lightly and faultlessly at his bass, was the daddy of the group. Steve Cropper paid attention to the rhythm. You could depend on Steve for originality and simplicity. You could rely on Al to keep the tempo better than a metronome; he never let songs run away. With this group, you could count on having a great groove no matter what you played.

  “You guys got anything yet?” asked Jim, peering through the glass, listening.

  Steve threw me a glance. Nothing worth working on yet, he said with his eyes. I dug deeper until I finally struck gold with a melody not unlike the ones I concocted on a nightly basis down at the Flamingo. Hours later, after nonstop experimenting and rearranging, Al, Steve, Lewie, and Jim were smiling as we came to the end of the little ditty.

  Another day’s work at Stax.

  At the end of the day, I navigated my way to Jim’s desk to pick up the diminutive but always valid check. We seemed to have a good rapport, Jim and I. He respected my musical abilities, my work ethic. But Jim still wrote the musicians’ checks fast and somewhat begrudgingly, as if it were dirty work to be done quickly. He often looked off as he handed you the money or had Linda (Andrews, the secretary) do the honors.

  Jim was there to acquire ownership of the publishing rights to the songs he recorded. From the beginning, he understood there was small chance of getting rich operating a record company. If he could get country or (later) R & B songs played that were licensed to his company, royalties were paid without deductions from the radio stations. To boot, the annuity lasted for twenty-six years, with a free renewal for another twenty-six years under US law.

  This information was hidden from me. I was unaware of the concept of any profit associated with the writing of a song or that any proceeds were paid to people who wrote songs. At Satellite, I could get upward of five dollars per day to create original music, which I gladly did.