SECTION ONE
sm
COLUMN
107,
JULY 1, 2004
(Copyright © 2004 The Blacklisted Journalist)
RETROPOP SCENE:
THE GREAT RAY CHARLES NEEDED NO JUSTIFYING
Ronald
Reagan arrived at the Pearly Gates this week, and was met by St. Peter.
Reagan was stunned for a moment.
"You
mean, I---I'm in?" he asked.
"That's
right" said St. Peter. "Come
on, man. I'll show you around." He
tossed the keys to a brand new Lincoln Town Car at Reagan, and said, "You
drive. This is your car, for the rest of eternity."
Reagan
was buoyant as they drove along the streets of Heaven, through sunny
neighborhoods. Finally they came to
a fancy part of town, with big lawns and swimming pools.
St. Peter told Reagan that this is where he would be living.
"That's
Franklin Roosevelt's house over there," St. Peter pointed out as they
drove, "And that's where Albert Einstein lives, next to Madame Curie.
Pope John Paul XXIII lives here....and here's your house."
They pulled into the driveway, and got out.
As
Reagan was looking around, he noticed up in the hills a palace made of
shimmering, white granite. He could
see it was enormous, with room after room, and terraces with dozens of gold
fountains. "That must be where the Lord lives," said Reagan. St. Peter
shook his head.
"No,
that's Ray Charles's place," he said. Reagan's smile faltered for a moment.
"Ray
Charles lives there? How come all the presidents, scientists and popes live
here, and Ray Charles lives up in that palace?
I don't get it."
St. Peter chuckled. "Ronnie," he said, "Presidents and
Popes are a dime a dozen. But baby,
there's only one Ray Charles."
---From
an email from Ron Martinetti at Amlegends@aol.com
My
most poignant memory of Ray Charles is my glimpse of him as his valet rolled up
his sleeve in a rear seat of his band bus, which had just pulled up to the stage
door of the Concord Hotel, the most expensive vacation summer paradise in the
Catskills' legendary Borscht Belt. Only Ray and his valet were left aboard the
bus as I started down the steps to the ground. I waited outside the bus until
Ray emerged a short time later. He was happy and smiling as he walked with his
entourage along the corridor to his dressing room while running his hand against
the wall.
"Man!"he said. 'this sure is a fine looking place!"
New
York City's wealthier Jewry was not at all acquainted with Ray's music and
Ray's engagement at the Concord at what was possibly that resort Hotel's
busiest time of the season---the Labor Day Weekend---was entirely experimental.
"If
you don't like me at first, just listen a while.
I'll find you," Ray had told me. We'd see.
"Who
is this blind schvartze?? wondered
the thousand-strong audience, which included many elderly white-haired
vacationers.
Unacquainted
with Ray's magic, the yentas in the audience started leaving the
showroom as soon as Ray began his show. The yentas figured they'd have
a better time social climbing and gossiping in the lobby. During Ray's first four numbers,
the move to the doors turned into an exodus. It was when Ray started singing You Don't Know Me that the rush for the doors suddenly stopped.
Slowly, the outwardly flow turned inwardly. By the time Ray ended his
show with his sexy, rhythmic, What'd I Say? the audience was banging on
tables, standing on chairs, and joining in the shrieks of Ooooh and Ahhhh.
Even the most stubborn of yentas rushed back in from the lobby,
They wanted
to see what all the excitement was all about.
Ray
Charles was one of those giants who furnished the soundtrack for a good part of
America's lives. He certainly furnished the soundtrack for one of most
euphoric turning points of my own life. The Brigitte Bardot look-alike next
door---she said she couldn't get along with her husband---was coming onto me.
I asked my best friend what should I do? My best friend was my wife.
"Go
for it!" my best friend said. Ray's music also fueled the conjugal
fucking enjoyed by my wife and me. I remember telling everybody that What?d
I Say? was nothing but fucking set to music!
Except
that's not the whole What'd I Say? I'm listening to right now. The
back cover of the CD says I'm listening to What'd I Say (Part I). What
a gyp! Is this some kind of censorship? They cut out the Oooohs
and Ahhhhs---the
sexy part. I'd like to talk to Ahmet Ertegun about this, but I haven't seen
much of him since I sank into the Sea of Oblivion. Ahmet is the producer of the
CD, The Best of Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years. Ahmet and his brother
Neshui---the hip, pot-smoking sons of the then-Turkish ambassador---started out
a couple of teenage jazz freaks who ended up founding Atlantic Records.
Neshui
died some years back but he was one of the greatest raconteurs ever to keep me
spellbound. So is Ahmet, whom I watched on TV the other night as he was telling
stories about Ray. I began enjoying a friendship with Ahmet long before I
started writing my POP SCENE column. for The New York Post, but we
haven't seen much of each other the past few years. The
last time I saw Ahmet in person was in L.A. at a dinner held in his honor at the
House of Blues. I said hello, but he didn't even recognize me. Ray performed
at that function in Ahmet's honor also, but I couldn't get backstage to say
hello.
Still,
listening to this CD, The Best of Ray Charles: The Atlantic Years---I?m
struck by the same thunderbolts that electrified me years ago. Especially when (Night
Time Is) The Right Time reaches out from the speakers to grab me with the
delightfully shrill voice of that little keg of dynamite of a singer---Margie
Hendricks---screaming: "Baay-by, Baay-be!" Margie not only was the
leader of the Raelettes---Ray's chick backup singers---but she also overpowered
the other Raelettes. She certainly helped make hanging out with the troupe so much fun
for me. Margie could sing her ass off. She later went on to have a solo career.
Yeah,
I hung out with Ray and his troupe for about a month back in the early "60s. I
rode on his band bus, sat down with him for interviews, attended his band
rehearsals, traveled with him from gig to gig and even flew on his private plane
with him. I forget whether profiling Ray Charles was my idea or whether it was
the Saturday Evening Post's editors who assigned me to write it. The
point is I once got close enough to Ray to feel especially bereaved by his
death.
As
I reread the manuscript of what I wrote for the Saturday Evening Post,
I'm dismayed by the stiffness forced by the handcuffs the editors put on
me. As a contract writer for the Saturday Evening Post, I had to follow a
strict formula that precluded my use of the first person singular. I was
supposed to be an invisible eye that never intruded itself as an "I? into
the story. I couldn't let the story tell itself. The Saturday Evening
Post formula also tethered my writing in other ways. According to Saturday
Evening Post rules, my second paragraph had to justify the existence of
what the reader was about to read. Ultimately, I found myself spending not only
the second paragraph but the next 19 pages justifying why this black man with a
tiny, unexplained scar engraved high on his forehead and an equally inexplicable
goatee on his face---he always shaved alone in front of a mirror---why he should
be acclaimed by so many record company executives as "the hottest property
in the music business" at the same time he was one of the most unknown.
"?Listen,??
I wrote, "'there's no doubt, about it," a man high in the business of show
business told me, "Frank Sinatra is on the way out.
But do you realize who's replacing him?
Do you realize that the new, emergent sex symbol of this country is a
blind, Negro junkie??"
The
piece I wrote got so bogged down in justifying itself to the reader, it took me too
long to make my case. Obviously, it was the worst piece I ever wrote for the
Saturday Evening Post. And so I'm going to edit it for you. I entitled
it Ray Charles: The Man Behind The Shades and this is how it started out:
In the secret imagery
of jazz, the word for sunglasses is shades.
They are worn not to look out on the world but rather to keep the world
from looking in. On Ray Charles,
the shades are always drawn."
Drugs have always been an occupational hazard for
musicians?and for artists in general. Ray's friends say that a part of the
secret torture behind his shades has been his almost lifelong effort to avoid a
drug habit.
"You don't take drugs, drugs take you," one of
them told me. "When you lose
an arm, they give you morphine, don't they?
But what do they give you when you got a big open wound in your soul?
For Ray, there's no relief for the kind of pain that Ray has had to live
through."
Whether
narcotics have eased or added to that pain, Ray denies that he was ever
addicted.
"As
far as I'm concerned." he says, "any amount of drugs that I might have
taken at any time was just a case of a kid wantin' to try somethin' for the
first time, and that's about the size of it.
The only thing is that if people find you use drugs, they want to shame
you and say you're the worst person that ever lived, regardless of how it
happened to you."
How
it happened to Charles is something that he is reluctant to talk about, but the
evidence of it remains on both his arms.
"He
had some of the worst tracks I've ever seen," says Narcotics Bureau, Sergeant
Robert Keithly, who arrested Charles in Indianapolis in the early '60s.
Charles, in fact, always wears long-sleeved shirts.
One
of the first persons to see Charles after his Indianapolis arrest was Rick
Johnson, a police reporter for the Indianapolis Times.
"He
appeared very disturbed and lonely," Johnson told me.
"I then identified myself to him and asked him if he cared to talk
to me. Charles said, 'Yes, I want
to talk to someone." He sat down on a bench in city jail and began to cry
softly and then lost all control of himself.
I waited until he regained control and offered him a cigarette.
The tears had rolled down both of his cheeks and could not be concealed
by the dark glasses he always wears. I
asked him how he got started on narcotics.
'I started using stuff when I was sixteen and first started in show
business.' he told me. 'Then I had
to have more and more. . .'
"Charles broke off and began to cry again and sobbed out the words, 'I don't know what to do about my wife and kids. I've got a month's work to do and I have to do it. I really need help. Charles then took several drags from the cigarette and said profoundly, 'No one can lick 'this thing by himself.' I asked him, 'Have you ever thought of going to the federal hospital at Lexington?' Charles tossed the cigarette away and pointed his head my way. 'Yes,' he said, "I've thought of it. A lot of times. But do you know what that would mean? The world would have. . ."
"He didn't finish his statement and
he stopped talking for several minutes. Then
he said, 'I've never taken the cure, But I'd like to go to Lexington now.
It might do me some good. I guess I've always wanted to go but it was
easier the other way. A guy like me has to have something to keep going.'
Forlornly, Charles raised his voice. 'The grind is just too much."'
In
Indianapolis, the charges against Charles were dismissed on the grounds that the
police posing as Western Union messengers, had entered his hotel room without a
warrant. Charles has been in other
unhappy encounters with various narcotics squads, but he has never been
convicted. In 1955, for example,
similar charges against him were dismissed by a Philadelphia court after he
testified that he thought he had been receiving anti-flu shots.
"Really,
how can you blame Ray?" says the Reverend Henry Griffin, the blind pastor
of the Convent Baptist Church in Harlem and a man who knew Charles in Seattle.
"This guy is a blind man. He
can't get it by himself and he can't stick it into his arm by himself."
Columnist George Pitts of the
Pittsburgh Courier, a widely read Negro newspaper was even more emphatic.
"To
me," wrote Pitts, "it seems that, after numerous arrests for being a
narcotics user, Ray Charles is more of a medical problem than a criminal case.
Many in the trade are asking why don't those around him, such as the Shaw
Agency, which handles his bookings, or his many aides such as road manager, personal manager
and so on try to help him.
Or is it a case of too many people depending on the loot that Charles'
voice brings in to help support themselves?"
Narcotics, in fact, is one
of the reasons why Charles has tried to so desperately' to avoid the fame
to which his artistry has brought. His insularity behind what jazz critic
Nat Hentoff has described as "concentric circles of isolation" has
been a retreat to the security of friends he needs. Charles' inner circle is
largely one of persons to whom Charles was a leader long before he had a purse
that could buy any leadership.
"The best thing that
could happen to Ray," Quincy Jones once said, "is to get rid of everybody
around him on the road." But on the other hand, Jones also told me:
"Ray is a dictator. I guess he
has weak people around him because he wants it that way."
"Did he ever hit on you
for bread to buy junk?? I asked Quincy.
"Man!" Quincy replied.
"If I had to lay out bread for every junkie that hit on me, I'd have to have
me a National Debt!"
Charles
himself says that his narcotics problem is his own business.
"Now,
as far as any bout that I might have had with the police as far as drugs are
concerned," he told me, "my theory is that whatever I did or didn't
do was a matter that actually concerned me. And as far as the public is
concerned, I feel that I do not, at any time, advocate or recommend that anybody
should go out into the world using drugs. I think that drugs is --- I don't know any word to describe
it, except to say it's one of the worst things that anybody could ever attempt
to do. . . It's nothin? to be
proud of and nothin? to feel great over and it's not goin' to make you
intelligent or make you a genius.
"In
fact, since it's against the law, the only thing you can do is get
yourself in a lot of unnecessary trouble. But even so I
still feel that as far as myself is concerned, I feel that whatever
I've done, I did it only to me and I didn't hurt anybody but myself.
Everything I did, I did to me. I
didn't harm anybody. I didn't go
out and hold up nobody. I didn't
hijack anybody, didn't take nothin' from nobody, so I didn't harm anybody but
myself. And it's strictly my own
problem."
Both
Charles' record and reputation 'nevertheless, have left him vulnerable to
shakedowns, When he was arrested in Indianapolis, for example, the story he told
police was that narcotics had been delivered to his room by a man he didn't
know.
"He said he had received a telephone call from a man who told him, 'I believe I have something you'd be interested in,?? says the aforementioned Indianapolis Police Sergeant Robert Keithly.
Ray's
significance in America's culture has transcended
any drug stigma
"Then he said this fellow came up to his room, but he said he had no
way of knowing who this fellow was."
A
short time later Indianapolis Police Captain Anthony Watkins received a tip from
a paid informant instructing him to raid Charles' room.
Charles'
friends say that his Indianapolis arrest was, for Charles, one of the most
unbearable ordeals of his life.
"I
saw him right after it happened," one of his associates told me.
"He talked to me about going up to Canada and getting rid of it,
once and for all. I don't think Ray has been near anything since then."
Whether
Charles is on or off narcotics, part of his significance in American culture is
that it has allowed his artistry to transcend any societal stigma.
"Oh,
that arrest in Indianapolis hurt for a while," says Hal Zeiger, the
concert manager who has promoted all of Charles' major tours. "The
immediate effect was to drive his grosses down to four or five thousand a night.
Nowadays, he will gross as much as thirty thousand or forty thousand a
night. And then, too, Ed Sullivan
canceled Ray off of his TV show. But
it wasn't long before Ray started coming back again.
I think this. I think the audience understood.
They take Ray Charles on his own terms.
Aside from any other consideration, the fact remains that he is truly one
of the great musical giants of our time, and people know it."
Some
promoters consider Charles more addicted to lateness than anything else.
He has many times kept both the audience and his band waiting an hour or
more and on a number of occasions theater managers were on the verge of
refunding tickets when Charles finally put in his appearance.
At a recent date in New Jersey's Asbury Park, he conducted a recording
session in Los Angeles in the morning and was still aboard a jet bound for New
York when the concert was supposed to begin.
Another time the owners of the Music Inn in Lenox Massachusetts, filed
suit against him for missing totally missing his engagement.
In
1963,
Charles, demanding a four-thousand-dollar guarantee against fifty per cent of
the gross, averaged thirty thousand dollars a week from his concerts alone. He
had an apartment in New York and a house in Los Angeles, where his wife, Della
Antwine, a former member of Cecil Shaw's Union Spiritualist Singers, lived with
their three children.
"They're
his only love," said Duke Wade. "Nightlife?
Ray's got no nightlife, He's an entertainer. He's a part of somebody else's
nightlife. And when he finishes, he goes home.
That's all he's got to do is get two days off in a row, and he'll grab a
taxi for the airport and take a jet to L.A."
Ray's
organization includes two full-time pilots, a manager, a valet, three production
men, a bus driver his band and the Raelettes---who, many critics think, could be
a headline act themselves but who have turned down repeated offers of separate
bookings.
"If
I had to leave Ray," says Darlene McCrea, the contralto of the group,
"I'd quit show business."
Well
aware of his blackness, Ray refused to play before segregated audiences and made the South accept his conditions. He
owned a record company, a music publishing firm,
a travel agency, several apartment houses
and---when I interviewed him in 1963---was thinking of building a chain of motels.
He also had the reputation of being a businessman with a sharp sense for
fine print---although he never practiced business at the expense of his musical
integrity. In 1963, Ahmet and other officials at Atlantic Records
were at a loss to explain
how he slipped through their fingers and negotiated a contract to put him
within the more commercial embrace of ABC-Paramount.
"We
didn't even know about it until we asked him to sign,"' said Ahmet.
"And yet I'm not even mad at him."
Ray's
record royalties from ABC-Paramount totaled four hundred thousand dollars for
the first eight months of 1962 and three years after he left Atlantic he
still received a hundred thousand dollars a year in royalties from that
firm. In 1963, when Ray booked concert tours of Europe, other parts of
the world were bidding furiously for his personal appearance. But despite all
this, Ray Charles was essentially doing what he'd done ten years earlier---one
night stands. The best offer he received for a television booking was
sixty-five hundred dollars. Elvis Presley had been offered as much as one
hundred thousand. The most anyone in Las Vegas was willing to pay Ray in 1963
was
seventeen thousand dollars a week. Eddie
Fisher got forty thousand.
"Ray,"
said his road manager, Jeff Brown, "has to work five times as hard as Frank
Sinatra to make his first million. Why?
You tell me why."
To
Charles, the money he earned was "just addin' a dollar on top of the pile
every day."
"I don't want to make as much money as Frank Sinatra," he once said. When I interviewed him, he told me he simply wanted to sing as well as Sinatra, an ambition that many critics thought he already had achieved, if not surpassed. In any event, Charles in 1963 was still without a press agent and still without the feeling that he lacked one. As his fame overtook the barriers he built about him, he retreated behind new ones. His final barrier, of course, was his blindness.
"A
vast amount of people say I'm a genius," he told me as we sat one evening
in the office of the Ocean Beach Amusement Park at New London, Connecticut.
"They may say it, but I don't believe I'm in that category.; I
believe a genius is a higher category."
He was waiting to perform
at what had been advertised as a dance but which, by the time some two thousand
persons had bought their tickets, had crashed the gate or had stormed in through
a fire exit, left little room for anything else in the hall but frenzied
vertical motion. Another eight hundred persons were trying to listen through the
windows outside. When the Glen
Miller orchestra played at the same hall several weeks previous, the audience
numbered only five hundred.
"Do
you believe a poor man with no education can become a genius?" Ray said.
"Do you believe a humble man who can't read or write can become a
genius? Do you believe a blind man
can become a
He
was smoking the remains of a mentholated cigarette and he reached down and
carefully placed it on the floor beneath his foot and stepped on it.
Then he took out another. I
quickly fished into my pocket for matches, but he just as quickly produced a
lighter and snapped it to life. Then,
holding the cigarette in his mouth with his other hand, he raised the flame
until he could feel the heat on his fingers.
I watched them---short, stubby, gnarled, almost arthritic-looking---and,
as he drew in his first puffs, I wondered how many times he had burned them.
II.
As
I continue editing what I wrote about Ray Charles for the Saturday Evening
Post more than 40 years ago, it becomes clear to me how inconsequential
Ray's romance with heroin was in the construction of his shimmering, white
granite palace in heaven. Junk left not a stain on Ray's career but actually
enhanced his legacy by filling him with the euphoria he implanted in his music.
Which transmitted the euphoria to listeners like me. Artists use mind-expanders
to reach for epiphanies that would otherwise escape their grasps. But they pay
dearly for their use of such substances and so do those around them. With every
higher high comes a lower low. The point is that to reach the heights they seek,
artists are willing to pay literally with their lives. Or their freedom. It's
only people with the mentality of the pope that made Galileo eat his
words---it's only dumb fucks like that---who put artists in jail for the crime
of reaching for greater dazzle to thrill the rest of us.
As
his hair grew whiter, Ray grew more venerable. With perhaps the most diversified
audience ever to be captivated by a singer; he was claimed as exclusive property
by fans from every music genre. Ahmet Ertegun at first claimed him for the
avant-garde because Ray's music was a cutting edge that sliced open the
envelope. Jazz musicians considered him to be one of their own. Fans of the blues
said he's theirs. And, in 1963, Ray became the first Negro to be named among
the top ten performers by the Country and Western Association, a polite name for
the proponents of what detractors considered hillbilly twang.
But
to Ray, what he produced was always "soul music." Ray's stature
imposed on others an acceptance that soul music essentially differed from black
rhythm-and-blues. And from R&B's white commercial counterpart,
rock-and-roll. In soul music,
Charles took R&B and endowed it with the revivalist spirit of Negro Baptist
gospel music, complete with shouts, chants and exhortations. Ray's lyrics, of
course, are something less than liturgical.
A number of gospel singers, in fact, considered such Charles classics as
I Got A Woman and What'd I Say to be exercises in blasphemy.
And the late Big Bill Broonsy, a preacher before he became a blues
singer, once complained:
"He's
got the blues, he's cryin' sanctified. He's
mixin' the blues with the spirituals. I
know that's wrong. He should be
singin' in a church."
"That's
all right," answered Charles with some sarcasm.
"You know when I sing, 'Baby, shake that thing," and "It makes me feel so good,' I figured it would
fit most people---even the ones that say it shouldn't be played on the air. The
people in this country, there's only two things they do, and that's kiss and
hug---accordin' to all the songs that are written here. Now, you don't have to
have to say a word in the flesh, but I don't feel there's anythin? wrong
with implyin? somethin? natural."
I
remember the torrents of sweat that poured from Ray's rough, blemished face as
he performed to exhaustion, slapping the outside of his thigh in synapses of
rhythm, stamping on the floor in the up-tempo of his life and times,
commandeering
the piano keys as if they were extensions of his fingers, shouting into the
microphone with a hoarse, happy, melancholy voice that was to cut through to the
very soul of a billion listeners. And he became very rich.
I
remember the look of pain and the look of joy that shared his face---and his
music?as he sang. He
was a giant who seemed to go out of his way to keep from being
noticed. He
was a jazz pianist who sold half a million records in a single day, a blues
singer who played to standing-room-only crowds in concert halls around the
world, a balladeer whose voice became a paradigm, a composer who became an
inspiration to music making.
To
Ray Charles, blind at seven, an orphan at fifteen, a narcotics addict at
sixteen, a millionaire at thirty-two, the world was an enigma, Behind his
shades, Ray Charles was more of an enigma to the world.
I
remember my good friend Amiri Baraka telling me---this was when Amiri was still LeRoi
Jones---that Ray was an artist:
"He's an artist,"
Amiri insisted, "just the same as Van Gogh was an artist or Beethoven
was an artist or, for that matter, Frank Sinatra was an artist. But he has even
other dimensions. For one thing,
he's already one of the greatest Negro folk figures in American history. For
another thing, and what is even more significant, he's the first Negro
folk figure to cross over and become a hero, a true hero, of white society."
This was in the "60s, an
age of Fabians, the Monster Mash and other mass-produced sensations. The
fact that Ray accomplished this crossing without ever having had so much as a
press agent was, to jazz critic Ralph Gleason, something like Moses' crossing
the Red Sea.
"Ray is symbolically
something," said Gleason. "I mean not just in the way he does religious
songs with secular lyrics, not just in the way he talks about 'soul' and sings
it, but in the way that, no matter where he goes, the crowd rushes up to touch
him, the laying on of the hands as if he is giving miracles.
And I suppose that, symbolically, there is something religious to
him. Maybe it's because he has so successfully transgressed all the bounds of
white society and survived. Maybe it's because there's a trinity to him---his
narcotics, his blindness---and the fact that he's a Negro. That's his
crucifixion."
The
only visible scars of Ray Charles' crucifixion, of course, were on his arms.
His other hurts could only be heard.
A prerequisite to singing the blues is living them, and if Ray drew the
shades on the torture within him, his audience had only to stand outside and
listen to the sounds. Part of the
gift of being able to convey deep emotions to other people is the curse of having
to feel them so deeply first.
"Ray
has the kindness and the gentleness of a saint," one of his closest
friends told me. "He can laugh
and sing and knock you apart with his jokes.
But inside he's a haunted man. Haunted,
that's the only word for it."
Success
came neither as a great surprise nor a great comfort to Charles.
In 1963, he commanded the best contract in the record business, with a
royalty of about twelve and a half cents a single, some three times more than
that paid the usual performer. But he still talked with a stammer that haltered
his speech since he was a child. In
1963, the orders for his most recent album, Volume II of Modern Sounds in
Country and Western Music, amounted to the staggering total of three
hundred and seventy-one thousand two weeks before its release.
He?d
sold out Paris? Olympia Theater on ten successive nights, a feat never before
accomplished by an American entertainer, but he still chain-smoked a daily,
deadly cloud of mentholated nervousness. In
1963, he stood to earn a gross income well over two million dollars, but I found
he still jiggled when he sat and paced when he stood, shifting his weight from
one foot to the other as if keeping some distant time.
He
could sit for hours splitting the sides of his companions with blow after blow
of iron humor or he could spend those same hours in a deep, distraught silence,
ignoring everyone around him. He
could damn an associate with a sour outburst of sarcasm, but then he'd toss
and turn in his sleep with unspoken remorse. He
could sit reading passages from a Braille Bible that he carried with him
everywhere, or he could just as easily ask someone to read him a pornographic
tract that might be circulating among his band members.
He could dun a friend unmercifully for the return of a ten-dollar loan
and then lend him another hundred out of feeling that he needs it. He could earn thirty thousand dollars in a single night and
afterwards sit down to a breakfast of salted tomatoes.
"What's
so great about Ray Charles?" he told an associate one day in 1963.
"Why does everybody say, 'That's Pay Charles!' I'm goin' to
change my name to John Kinsey."
To
the eighteen men in his band, he was a tyrant of perfection, calling seven-hour
rehearsals on what might have been days off, memorizing all eighteen parts with
an indelible ear, shouting acid counterpoints in response to wrong notes,
requiring instant recognition of arrangements he invented on the spot,
demanding a musical mastery equal to his own. Ray was gifted with perfect pitch.
"Ray's
a leader," John Hunt said when I interviewed him in 1963. John'd been
Ray's second trumpeter since 1954. "Ray's
always been a leader. Sometimes
we'll be playing and that's all he's got to do is look up at us and smile and
say, 'All right, children," and wow!"---and Hunt touched his
chest---"you feel it right here."
"Ray
has a fantastic ear," according to Sid Feller, head of artists and repertoire
at ABC-Paramount Records, "What God has taken away from Ray on one side, He
has given back tenfold on another side."
Ray
would hire the highest-priced arrangers in the music business and then he turn
them into mere secretaries. When Ray finished telling them what he wanted, it
was already arranged..
"Then
you bring it back to him," Gerald
Wilson, then one of the best-known of popular arrangers, told me in 1963. "And he rearranges it
again."
Once,
while recording I Believe To My Soul, Ray became so dissatisfied with the
sound of his choral group, the Raelettes, that he sent them home.
"Then
he sat down with earphones," said Jerry Wexler, executive vice president of
Atlantic Records "and proceeded to dub in each of the four girl's parts,
one at a time, in his own falsetto. He
didn't even listen to the harmony, just the master track. When he finished, it was perfectly tight four-part harmony,
it was amazing, it sounded just like a sensational girl's group."
"All these stories you hear about Ray being led around by the nose because he's blind, they're just not true," Larry Newton, vice president of ABC-Paramount Records, told me. "Nobody tells Ray what to do. For instance, when he wanted to record his first Country and Western album, we said to him, 'Don't do it.' Even when the distributors got it, they said, 'What is this? A joke?' They didn't know what to make of it. But do I have to tell you what happened? It was fantastic. The album itself sold over a million, the first million-album our company ever had. One of the songs from the album, You Don't-Know Me, as a single, it sold eight hundred and fifty thousand. And another song, I Can't Stop Loving You---?Listen, do you want to hear something fantastic?
"One day before the album was released, Sam Clark, the president of the company, he's going on vacation and he calls me up from the airport and tells me he had a dream. He dreamed that somebody covered I Can't Stop Loving You. So I spend the whole day checking and sure
Ray's
death almost ranked
with that of Reagan
as TV news
enough, at 11 o'clock that night, I find out there's a single out by Tab Hunter, same song, same arrangement. So right away, I call Ray at his home in L.A., I call him from New York and I tell him we've got to release I Can't Stop Loving You as a single. But he says no, it would ruin the album sales. So we argued.
"I'm telling you, we had a shouting, screaming argument on the
telephone for two and a half hours. The
phone bill alone came to more than two hundred dollars.
Finally he said, 'OK, do what you want.' So that next day, we worked
twenty-four hours, we worked around the clock. we got the factory to work around
the clock. The next day we started
shipping. We shipped initial
orders, in one day---they totaled five hundred thousand records.
By now, the record has sold way over two million.
I'm telling you, with this record, Ray single-?handedly revived the
record business. It was at a time
when you couldn't sell a thing, nobody was buying records, and then Ray, with
this record, started bringing them into the stores.
People from other record companies started calling me up to thank me."
Dish-jockey
housewives stop their work for sweet moments of daydreams when his songs came on
the radio. Back in 1963, sometimes those housewives didn't even know who he
was. Today, Ray Charles? voice is unmistakable. He didn't get a state
funeral but his death almost ranked with that of Ronnie Reagan as TV news.
Yes,
I remember White Southerners sitting
shoulder-to-shoulder with blacks in municipal auditoriums to witness a Ray
Charles concert. I remember jailed sit-in students mixing Ray's songs with the
spirituals they sang behind their bars. Yes, in 1963, I knew Ray Charles was
here to stay.
"Let
me tell you about Ray," said C. B. Atkins, then Sarah Vaughn's husband
and a friend of Charles. "One
day I went to see him at his home in L.A., and his wife told me he was outside
in front of the house. I went
outside, but there was nobody there. Then
all of a sudden, in the twilight, I heard a noise up the street, and here comes
two motor scooters, one after the other. It
was Ray riding alone on a motor scooter following the one in front of him by
the sound of its muffler. When he
got to his house, he hollered good night to the guy in front of him and then he
turned up onto his driveway. There
was a car parked in the driveway, and I started to yell, 'Look out, Ray!' but
before I could get the words out of my mouth, he had turned off the driveway,
ridden onto the lawn, passed the car, turned back onto the driveway, and pulled
the motor scooter into the garage. Then
he got off the motor scooter, kicked the kick'stand, closed the garage door,
walked to his back door, stuck the key right in the lock and opened the door.
I said 'Hello Ray," and he said, "Hi, C. B. Come on into the house.'
I tell you, when you're with Ray, it's as if you're blind and he can see.
When
I was hanging out with Ray in 1963, he played whist, dice and dominoes and he
was most times a winner. He could
also take apart his tape recorder and put it back together again, and when his
television set broke down,, he fixed that, too. He got a new Cadillac every year and test drove it with
someone tapping him on the shoulders to tell him which way to turn.
He owned two aircraft, one a twin-engine Cessna T-10 for his personal use
and the other a forty-four-passenger Martin 404 to transport his band on concert
dates. And he knew how to fly both planes.
"Once,
last August, the big plane was forced down with engine trouble in Marysville,
California," his valet, Roy Duke Wade told me. "The mechanics worked all night trying to fix it, trying
to fit a new part in the manifold, but they just couldn't get it right.
So finally, Ray got impatient, he said, 'Let me try it." They thought
he was crazy, but they let him. I'm
not exaggerating. Ray took the part
and put it in place inside of five minutes."
Wade
said his predecessor as Ray's valet quit after having had to sit behind Ray on
a motorcycle, guiding him on a two-wheeled roar through the streets of New
Orleans.
"He
had me doing the same thing," says Wade.
"Then one day, the damn machine had two blowouts in both tires at
the same time. Ray jumped off. He
was all right, but there I was sitting alone on it and it turned over.
I got a big gash in my leg. We
don't do it any more."
Quincy
Jones, a longtime friend of Ray, told me:
"Ray
never wanted to act like he was blind. He'd
meet a girl, like, and then he'd tell you, 'Man, you shoulda seen that
fine-looking chick I met today."'
Ray
was born on September twenty-third, 1930, in Albany, Georgia, a city that since
has become a landmark for other reasons. Out
of a poverty that even the Depression couldn't worsen, his parents moved two
weeks later to Greenville, Florida, a lumber town with a population that Ray
said "wouldn't fill a good-sized dance hall."
Ray's
father, Bailey Robinson, worked as a mechanic and handyman.
His mother, Reather Robinson, worked stacking boards in a sawmill.
"I
had a pretty normal childhood, I guess," Ray told me. "Except I was
considered sort of an oddball because I was the only child in the whole city who
was blind."
By
the time he was five, Ray had developed glaucoma, an eye disease which for him
proved incurable. By the time he
was seven, his right eye had to be removed. A short time later, he had lost his
sight completely.
"I
think I took it in stride," he told me, "I don't think it bothered me
too much because it was a gradual thing. It
wasn't like today I'm seein' and then---boom!---tomorrow I'm blind."
He
has said that as a child he remembered spending long moments in his backyard
looking up at the moon. He remembered having a red wagon and he remembered the yellow
of flowers and he remembered the greenness of trees. He remembered attending regular evening services in a
clapboard Baptist church and he remembered the programs of the Baptist Young
Peoples' Union and he remembered chanting in a tiny, lost voice among the
shrieks at revival meetings. He
remembered a fist fight with an adversary he knew only by voice.
He remembered his mother baking corn pudding on a wood stove.
He remembered the call of the iceman---"I-i-i-iceman,
i-i-i-iceman," and he sang it out of his memory.
He remembered neighbors handing him down clothes that had been handed
down to them by other neighbors and he remembered making his own toys out of tin
cans.
"My mother," he told me, "she saw the handwritin' on the wall, God rest her soul. Before I lost my sight, she started teaching me how to do a lot of things without seeing. She wanted me to be as independent as anybody else, and I think I am."
She taught him, among other necessities, to cook his meals, to
wash his clothes, to scrub his floor and to take the bus to town and back, a
problem that he solved by counting the bumps in the road, She even taught him to
chop wood, despite the howls of neighbors.
"She
told them," Ray said, 'she told them, 'Well, look, he only lost his
eyesight, he didn't lose his mind.' In fact, the only time I got hit by a car
was when somebody offered to help me cross a street.
That was when I was a boy in Saint Augustine."
It
was in Saint Augustine, at a Florida state school for the blind, that he learned
how to read Braille, took up the piano and the clarinet and began the
tedious, note-by-note task of studying music by touch.
"As
far back as I can remember, I was interested in music," Ray told me.
"Music was always my first love.
When I was four, five years old, we lived back of a fellow named Wiley
Pittman who had a little cafe with a piano in it. And I would go to listen to him play boogie-woogie and little
popular songs. He'd play them just for me.
And then he would help me get up on the piano stool and tell me to play,
and of course I wasn't doin' nothin but just hittin' the keys, but he'd call in
his friends and say, 'Come on and hear what my boy is doin'," and they would
applaud me."
When
Ray was ten years old his father died. His
mother died when he was fifteen.
"She
was only thirty-one, thirty-two at the time," he told me.
"I was in school in Saint Augustine and a neighbor sent a telegram
and they read it to me the next morning. It's
very hard to explain how I felt unless a person loved their mother the way I
loved my mother. After they buried
her, I couldn't eat and I had to go to the hospital for about six days.
They had to feed me through my veins because I never was able to cry, you
know it hurt me so bad. And they kept sayin' if I could just cry I would be all
right, if I could just break down and cry, but I couldn't, it was all up in my
throat. . ."
An
only child,' Charles refused to return to a tin-cup existence among his
neighbors in Greenville.
"My
mother might pass," he told me, "and so I figured I had to take care of
Ray."
Armed
with a high school diploma, a pocketful of change and the reputation of being
able to play any piece of music after hearing it only once, the sixteen-year-old
Charles headed for Jacksonville to try to get a job with a band.
Even then, one of the measures of his self-confidence was his decision
to drop his last name---Robinson---just to avoid any confusion between him and another
celebrity of the time, a professional boxer named Sugar Ray.
He
played with hillbilly combos, he played singles and he played as a sideman to
Charlie Brantley in a group called the Honeydippers, imitating the style bf
Louis Jordan.
"Ray
knew the worst kind of despair," one of his associates told me.
"He said once he was paid with a tin of jam and when he tried to
open it in his little hotel room, he was so hungry that he opened it in too much
of a hurry and everything fell on the floor."
But
with all his discouragement, Ray never lost his drive.
He never lost his sense of humor, either.
Once, he told me, he was on a beach, paddling in the ocean on a
tire tube, when all of a sudden his friends started calling, 'Come back, Ray,
hurry up, come back.' He paddled back for all he was worth, thinking there was a
shark out there or something, and his friends told him, "Wow., Ray, we caught
you in the nick of time. You nearly
passed that For Whites Only sign."
By the time he was eighteen, he had saved up almost nine hundred dollars, and he decided to buy a bus ticket.
"I was in Tampa," he explained, "and I wanted to go to some town that wasn't a small town but still wasn't a huge town, you know, like New York. And I wanted to get as far away from Florida as I could get, not because I had anything against Florida, but I figured I needed to go someplace where I stood a chance of gettin' a break. So I took a bus and rode alone all the way from Tampa to Seattle."
In
Seattle, a city which presumed itself to be shut down tight but which actually
was wide open, Ray worked at many of the best and worst known Negro speakeasies.
"He
called his act R.C. and the Maxim Trio," remembered Quincy Jones, a native of
Seattle who has achieved no little fame himself.
"Nobody called him Ray in those days. It was just R.C. After a
while, he worked out a system where he gave everybody numbers.
You know, it got to be a drag when you were with a bunch "of people
and you had to try to identify yourself every time you wanted to talk to Ray.
He was Number Six-Nine. I
was Number Seven-Oh. Even when I
see him now, I holler out, 'Six-Nine!' And he comes right back,
'Seven-oh!'
"I
met Ray when I was about fifteen and he was about eighteen, and even then he was
always so damn positive, like he could listen to a record of Billy Eckstine's Blowin'
The Blues Away, and he could tell you what everybody in the band was doing. We had a little bunch of musicians, professional musicians,
in fact a lot of them are pretty well known today, and we used to meet over at
Bumps Blackwell's apartment, and Ray was somewhat the leader of the bunch.
Ray used to analyze the functions of a band, like the orchestration, and
he was doing some pretty advanced arrangements himself, even at that time.
It was Ray that taught me how to voice brass, and after he showed me how,
man, I was wasted. From then on I
was hooked, I mean with writing music."
Charles
by this time was a practitioner of the alto saxophone as well as the piano, and
he was entertaining himself and his companions by playing bebop. For the
customers, however, he was singing in blatant imitation of Nat King Cole.
"I
was just in my teens," Ray explained, "At the time Nat King Cole was
hot and I was tryin' to make some money, so I figured if I could sing like him,
that would help keep me workin',"
For
a while he toured as a member of the group accompanying blues singer Ruth Brown.
For another while, he traveled the Southwest with Lowell Fulson's blues
band. Finally, he decided to go it alone, journeying as a single through a
timetable of Northern and Southern cities carrying his own portable electric
organ, playing a circuit of Negro clubs, and earning up to a hundred and fifty
dollars a night on the nights that his booking agency could find him a job.
"Ray
doesn't like to act like he's blind but other people didn't overlook it."
another of his friends told me. "The
leeches were hanging on to him even then. They
took him every chance they got. I mean there were girls--- well, I would call
them tramps---but the trouble is that Ray, once he gets past the natural
suspicion of a blind man, he gives his heart so freely.
I mean he's so sensitive. And
when he was on the road., many's the time that Ray was stranded in some
godforsaken town without even a dime for a cup of coffee, and when he'd wire the
agency for a train ticket, just a train ticket, he'd have to wait for them to
mail it to him. I tell you, Ray's
really paid his dues. The trouble
is, he's not through paying them."
It
wasn't until 1952, when Atlantic Records purchased his contract from a fading
West Coast label called Swingtime, that Ray's fortune took a turn.
Atlantic's catalogue was so varied it included Bobby Darin, John
Coltrane and Mr. Acker Bilk. At
Atlantic, Ahmet Ertegun and his executive vice president, Jerry Wexler, quickly realized that they had a potential giant on
their hands. Despite the fact that Ray was still singing like Nat King Cole.
But King Cole's reign was about to end.
"It was just a case," Ray told me, "of one
day I heard somebody say to me, 'Ray, you sound just like Nat King Cole." And
I said, 'Thanks." I thought that was a great compliment, But then I went home
and I started thinkin' to myself, and I said, 'Well, now, that's a great
compliment, he said I sound just like Nat King Cole, but then the name of Ray
Charles was not mentioned at all, so this is not really helpin' me, this
is betterin' him.'
"And then I thought, 'Well, why can't I develop my
own style and let somebody sound like me instead of me tryin' to sound like
somebody else?' That may seem a little arrogant but that was the way I felt
about it. So I started thinkin'
that way and I said, 'Well, from now on win, lose or draw, when I
record, whatever company I'm with, they're goin' to have to accept me the way I
sound myself,' and then a strange thing happened to me.
"I
remember when I first went over to Atlantic, one of the fellows over there said
to me, 'Ray, why don't you play like Fats Domino?'---because Fats Domino was
real hot at the time and he was sellin' a lot.6f records. And I, in turn, said,
'We'll, I think you have the wrong contract because from this day forward
whatever way I sound, If I can't sound like myself then l just give up,
because there's no point in me tryin' to be like somebody else. I've
done enough of that already and I don't care to do that any more."
Since
then, Ray's musical declaration of independence has remained inviolate, and
soon there were more singers trying to sound like him than ever tried to sound
like Nat King Cole.
When Twentieth-Century-Fox
offered him twenty thousand dollars to record a three-minute song as background
for a movie, he turned the offer down. The
picture was A Walk On The Wild Side," recalled C. B. Atkins. "Ray
listened to a tape of the music for a week straight,
then he said 'No, man, I can't do it. I just don't feel the
music.' Fox hired Brooke Benton and the song was a hit."
"Whatever
I say or whatever I play, I do it natural," Ray told me. "It's just
natural. Whatever way I feel the song, that's the way I sing it. When
I'm sittin' playin' a song, I play the notes the way that they come to me in my
head. It's never a case of puttin?
on or tryin? to make anything the way somebody else does it or wants it
done."
At the time of his death, Ray's impact on America is self-evident. He'd become one of those eternals that rule the history of music, entertainment, art and culture. In other words, he was one of the rulers of our dreams. At this late date, there's no need to justify anything about Ray Charles. ##
FOR
AS LONG AS PEOPLE KEEP
IN THIS 615-PAGE PAPERBACK, AL ARONOWITZ, ACCLAIMED AS THE "GODFATHER OF ROCK JOURNALISM", TELLS YOU MORE ABOUT BOB DYLAN AND THE BEATLES THAN ANY OTHER WRITER CAN TELL YOU BECAUSE NO OTHER WRITER WAS THERE AT THE TIME. AS THE MAN WHO INTRODUCED ALLEN GINSBERG TO BOB DYLAN, BOB DYLAN TO THE BEATLES AND THE BEATLES TO MARIJUANA, ARONOWITZ BOASTS, "THE '60S WOULDN'T HAVE BEEN THE SAME WITHOUT ME."
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