My Cross to Bear (9 page)

We went from the Stork Club to the Sahara Club in Pensacola, where we were booked for a few weeks. At the Sahara Club, they had a big old floodlight, pointed straight at us, but it was recessed into the wall, so we were the only ones who could see it. If we got too loud, or played too many slow ones, they would flash that light. Once for loud, twice for slow. One Sunday we had an off day, and this guy asked us to come over to Dauphin Island, Alabama, down the way from Mobile. I’ll always remember the room—it was exactly the size of the original Fillmore West. It looked like it, it felt like it, same ceiling height, and there were a lot of people there, man.

I can remember saying to the crowd, “Boy, we got something for your ass!” And we lit into “Paperback Writer,” and them people went crazy. We’d slip a good rocker on them, and we had them going.

That was an amazing day. It’s the first time I’d ever seen wall-to-wall people, what they now call “festival seating.” You talk about scared—I had some serious stage fright, but once I got up there I was fine. We mesmerized those people. Something deep inside me told me, “Man, everything is going to be all right. You don’t have to worry about going back to school.” For the first time, I believed it. I felt it.

Pensacola was a real turning point in my life, because I realized that if we did things right, we could grab people with the first eight bars of a song, and we wouldn’t have to worry about the rest of the night. The key was getting them right away. You can’t pussy around up there, as scared as you might be. I learned to ignore hecklers, because we had a couple of those there. They didn’t like it because their girlfriends came to see us, so these guys came to the hotel once and they wanted to kill us. I learned about dealing with that kind of thing as well.

In Pensacola, we were staying at one of those no-tell motels, with little bungalows by the week. Pine Haven or Pine Hurst or something. I had this song written. I was lonely, again, and there was a woman that I had really wished was there, to bring me some happiness and companionship and all that goes with it. I had the song, but I didn’t have the title. I’d go, “But back home you’ll always run / With sweet … Bar-bar-a.” It had to have three syllables in it, it just had to. I had tried every damn name. I had almost settled on “Delilah,” but I knew inside me that wasn’t what I wanted.

It was my turn to get the coffee and juice for everyone, and I went to this twenty-four-hour grocery store, one of the few in town. There were two people at the cash registers, but only one other customer besides myself. She was an older Spanish lady, wearing the colorful shawls, with her hair all stacked up on her head. And she had what seemed to be her granddaughter with her, who was at the age when kids discover they have legs that will run. She was jumping and dancing; she looked like a little puppet.

I went around getting my stuff, and at one point she was the next aisle over, and I heard her little feet run all the way down the aisle. And the woman said, “No, wait, Melissa. Come back—don’t run away, Melissa!” I went, “Sweet Melissa.” I could’ve gone over there and kissed that woman.

As a matter of fact, we came down and met each other at the end of the aisle, and I looked at her and said, “Thank you so much.” She probably went straight home and said, “I met a crazy man at the fucking grocery.” So that’s how “Melissa” got finished.

From Pensacola we went on to Savannah, then on to Nashville, at the Briar Patch, where we met John Loudermilk, who wrote “Tobacco Road” and songs for the Everly Brothers and Eddie Cochran and a bunch of other people. He wrote “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye,” which we later recorded. We met John when we were staying at the Anchor Hotel. Right next door to the Anchor was a place called Mario’s, a really fine Italian restaurant. John and George Hamilton IV and their two ladies were over there having dinner. The rooms at the Anchor were laid out in such a way that we could actually set up and play, so we’re in there, just blowing away, and there’s a knock on the door. It’s John Loudermilk, and he said, “I’d like you to come out to my house tomorrow, guys.”

We had the good fortune of spending a whole summer with Loudermilk, just watching him write. His wife went off to Europe, the three kids went off to camp, so for a month I got to live in his house. He had forty-five gold 45s on the wall. That was impressive, man.

Loudermilk was a generous host and an even better person. Somehow, my brother had acquired a Triumph motorcycle, a T110, and I was having a fit for one. I’d always loved them. I’ll be damned if I didn’t find one in the paper, a used Triumph Bonneville, but they wanted $1,700 for it. Loudermilk saw how bad I needed it and bought me that bike. When that man looked at you, he looked at all of you.

I learned a lot from that man, really. He and I would sit down to write songs, and I would absolutely film him with my eyes. I guess he saw in me someone who could flat-out pay attention, keep their mouth shut, and watch how the process is done. I will be forever grateful for what he did for my songwriting. John Loudermilk taught me to let the song come to me, not to force it, not to put down a word just because it might rhyme or fit. He taught me to let the feeling come from your heart and go to your head.

You know, it’s all been said before. How many different ways are there for people to say “I love you” in a song? Yet every day, they’re still coming out with love songs. A long time ago, I was reading this thing about Lauren Bacall, and they asked her what it was like when Humphrey Bogart died, and she said, “Well, one day, I noticed I didn’t go up the steps so fast.” I thought that was a really good answer—kind of vague, kind of poetic—and it would be a great line for a song.

After Nashville, we headed to St. Louis to play at Gaslight Square, because the money was better. We started going back and forth from St. Louis to Nashville on a regular basis. While were on the road, we would share a room with two double beds, push them together and then sleep on them crossways. When you woke up in the morning, if the beds had rolled, your ass would be on the floor, your head would be on one bed, and your feet on the other bed! We slept like the Three Stooges, man. The first time I got my own room, I was lonely as shit.

We were out on what we called back then the “Chitlin’ Circuit.” We played in the old roadhouses, places that have chicken wire in front of the band so they won’t get hit by the bottles. We’d have Sweaty Betty and her sister dancing like go-go girls. Some of ’em were super fine, until they started talking.

We played five sets a night, forty-five minutes a set, six nights a week. We didn’t have any drinks unless somebody bought ’em for us. Every now and then, some dude would waltz up to the stage with his honey, and I don’t know who he was trying to impress, but he’d hand us a hundred-dollar bill and say, “Would you play ‘Wipe Out’ or ‘Ticket to Ride’ or whatever?” One guy came up and said, “Do you know ‘na, nana nana, nana nana’?”

I said, “You mean ‘Land of 1,000 Dances’ by Wilson Pickett?”

“Oh, is that the name of it?”

Everybody would request whatever was real hot on the charts, and you’d better know how to play that son of a bitch, and if not, you better learn it tomorrow afternoon.

At those shows, it was all people that wanted to unwind from the day’s work. There were some nights where we’d be playing to like fourteen people, and that doesn’t feel too good. But the places were just jammed on Friday and Saturday nights, and there was always one of the other days of the week that every town had—girls’ night out or whatever. I don’t know if they had a dudes’ night out. But pretty soon, it started being full every night.

After that first run, the station wagon was shot, so damn if my mother didn’t up and buy us a 327 Chevy 108, one of them long vans. We met this guy in Birmingham who sold us some Vox equipment and let us pay on it as we could, though I don’t think we ever fully paid him for it. When we’d been in Pensacola on that first tour, a dear friend of mine named Barbara Trouncy and her mother had bought me a Vox organ. She cared about me and wanted me to have it.

At first, there wasn’t a lot I could do on it. For a while, it sat there on stage left, as I was still playing my Gretsch. People would come by and ask, “What’s the matter? Keyboard player sick?” When it came time to play “Wooly Bully,” I could do it on the Vox. “When a Man Loves a Woman,” no problem—I had it. The organ came with a plastic card that was laminated, and it went A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and major, minor, augmented, third, ninth, fifth, and there was a little picture in each block, with little red dots showing where your fingers go. That’s how I learned to play keyboard.

As time went by, I got more and more tunes down with the Vox, and by the time we were in Birmingham the guy there had a used Leslie 147 amp that he sold to me. I hooked it up and ran it through a Beatle Top amp, and that son of bitch sounded real close to a Hammond, which added so many dynamics to the band. Let me tell you, the guys were going, “Jesus, that’s a Hammond!”

I saw my first Hammond organ at the Martinique Club in Daytona. A guy named Johnny Ford, who’d died before we hit the road in ’65, had played one. He drank himself to death. He was from Knoxville, and he played in this little trio with a guy named William Sauls, who everyone called Sweet William, this big fat white bass player, and another guy named Stallsworth on drums, who played a gorgeous set of black drums. He had his cymbals real high—he was the first real drummer I ever saw.

The first time I actually played a Hammond was at the Bali Restaurant, where my mother was the accountant. They had one there, and sometimes I’d sneak in early in the morning, and I knew how to start it. Nobody would be in there yet, and my mother was way back there in the office, and I’m just having a ball playing that thing.

I loved it, but then I didn’t see another Hammond B3 until we played at Gaslight Square in St. Louis. It was this little slice of town, kind of like Bourbon Street. It was just one street, and all the dens of iniquity were there. When we played at Pepe’s a Go Go, which was next door to the Whisky a Go Go, I was talking to a guy named Mike Finnegan who played with a band called Mike Finnegan and the Serfs. I asked him what that big piece of wood was on the stage. He said, “Come on up here. I’ll show you.”

Now, as a rule, nobody let you play their Hammond. “Don’t ride my Harley, don’t mess with my wife, and no, you can’t play my Hammond.” That’s just it, man. But Mike Finnegan let me sit behind his, which was very cool of him. And, man, when I heard that B3, it just melted me. In the next day or two, he turned me on to Jimmy Smith and Groove Holmes. That Hammond just struck me. It was nice, round, kind of dull-ended instead of sharp, and I thought it blended with a guitar just perfect. I’ve always been pretty much surrounded by guitar—even if it was just my brother, there was plenty of guitar. The next time I sat down on a Hammond, I would write “Dreams.”

W
E WENT TO
N
EW
Y
ORK FOR THE FIRST TIME IN
’66,
AND WE PLAYED
a place called Trude Heller’s, which was on 9th Street and Avenue of the Americas. Trude’s son, Joel Heller, owned the club around the corner, which was called the Eighth Wonder. New York was something else. We were only there for about a week, and we had to audition, so I’m glad we got the damn job, because we went all the way up there. If we hadn’t got the gig—shit, I don’t know what would have happened.

Trude’s was a strange place. They had go-go boys dancing, and I didn’t understand it. The son ran a matinee at the Eighth Wonder, and we’d play that, because we got paid double. On Saturdays and Mondays we’d go in and there wouldn’t be a man in sight, not one dude in the place. Then we were like, “Oh, I get it!”

You couldn’t play any slow songs, because if you did, Trude would run out in front of the band and jump up and down, waving her hands. One night, the whole damn Rolling Stones filed in, and my brother, being the ballsy son of a bitch that he was, launched into “19th Nervous Breakdown,” and we just smoked it, man, smoked it. I sang it, and I did my best. They liked it—they were going, “All right, all right.”

We hooked up with the guy who worked as the maître d’, and one night after the gig, we were covering everything up with sheets and he said, “You all want to come over to the house, man, and smoke some?”

My brother offered him a cigarette, and the guy goes, “That’s not what I’m asking.”

Then my brother flat-out said it—and I never thought I’d hear him say this, but he said those magic words: “You mean, ‘mar-a-juan-a’?” I’d give anything for a tape of him saying that. That serious, drawn-out “mar-a-juan-a”—classic, man.

None of us—not my brother, not me, not any of the guys—had ever smoked pot before. None of us. So we told him, “Yeah.”

We were staying at the Chelsea Hotel, and we went to his house from there. It took us a while to find a place to park because we had a trailer hitched to the back of our car. We went upstairs, and he’s got one of those small, cigar-box-sized apartments, but it was full of this good-smelling stuff, and I’m going, “So that’s what it looks like.”

I thought the whole thing was a sham. We smoke some, and I’m sitting there, waiting to feel something. I’m like, “When’s the ball gonna drop?”

The guy was like, “What, you ain’t high? Man, we smoked about half a box of this shit.” He said, “Why don’t you stand up?”

“Okay,” I told him. “I gotta go piss anyway.”

I stood up, and my brother said something, and I started to laugh, man, and I laughed from that time until we got back to the Chelsea. Maniacal laughter. It took us almost an hour to go two and a half blocks.