Down Home On The Zebra Ranch - Hernando, Mississippi (2008)
Many people who knew James Luther Dickinson far better than I did have created their own tributes to him in the weeks since Jim’s untimely death from heart failure, at age 67, on August 15, 2009 — one year to the day after the passing of his dear friend and patron Jerry Wexler. Nonetheless, I couldn’t let the occasion pass without adding a few thoughts and recollections of my own.
Jim Dickinson was important both for who he was and what he did. I only met him on a few occasions but these were memorable enough to make me wish I’d spent a lot more time in his company. He had a generous spirit, a supreme sense of life’s absurdities both tragic and hilarious (often simultaneously), and a thousand great stories — “some of which were true,” in the words of my old friend (and former Replacements manager) Peter Jesperson.
Dickinson also possessed a strong streak of home-grown radical politics: anti-racist, anti-war, pro-working class, pro-humanity. These convictions were made manifest when Jim helped to resurrect the careers of forgotten bluesmen like Gus Cannon and Furry Lewis; when he cut Bob Dylan’s “John Brown” for his first solo album Dixie Fried, and when he sang songs like “Red Neck, Blue Collar” and “One Big Family” (the latter a paean to organized labor).
Jim was a living link between successive eras in Memphis music history: His life spanned an incredibly rich and diverse period in one of America’s most culturally significant cities, from the last fading echoes of the Swing Era, through Sun rockabilly and Stax soul, to punk rock, jam band, and whatever was coming next. At least as important as any music he ever made is that his loving marriage to Mary Lindsay endured for over 40 years, and that he was a kind father and a matchless musical mentor to his sons Luther and Cody Dickinson.
The Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses” and Big Star’s Third a/k/a Sister Lovers are among Jim’s best-known recording credits; my own personal favorites include Boomer’s Story by Ry Cooder (Reprise, 1972); and Carmen McRae’s Just A Little Lovin’ and Aretha Franklin’s Spirit In The Dark (both Atlantic, 1970), with JLD as a member of the Dixie Flyers rhythm section assembled by Jerry Wexler. Jim Marshall a/k/a The Hound has posted the most comprehensive tribute to JLD that I’ve found thus far, with links to streams of many rare recordings. Pete Hoppula, president of the Finnish Blues Society, has created a seriously detailed JLD discography on his Web site Wang Dang Dula. [Click on "'50s/'60s R&R," scroll down through the alphabet to Dickinson, Jim, click on...and I'll see you when you get back, five or six weeks from now.]
I met both Jim and his dear friend, the writer Stanley Booth, for the first time on the same night in the same place: backstage at the venerable Orpheum Theater in Memphis in the early summer of 1978. I’d flown in to report on the Cramps‘ progress in recording their first LP for I.R.S. Records with producer Alex Chilton and to witness their headlining show at the Orpheum, with support from Tav Falco’s Panther Burns and The Klitz. (This all-female punk band’s version of the Bell Notes’ “I’ve Had It” — with front woman Lesa Aldridge screaming “I’ve had it — I’ve had it with you butt-fuckers!” — remains a thing of sacred memory.) I remember nothing about my brief interaction with Dickinson and Booth, although decades later Stanley recalled that I’d asked him, “Are you an attorney?”
![JLD at leisure in '65 [The Hound asks: "Is this a Wm. Eggleston photo?']](http://www.nyrocker.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/jimd-1965.jpg "jimd-1965")
JLD at leisure in '65.
On April 6, 2007, Jim gave his last NYC performance — a solo acoustic set performed as support to the NMAS in a benefit for Housing Works at the organization’s bookstore and cafe in Soho. Dickinson was terribly overweight, sometimes short of breath, in obvious physical discomfort, and he sang the hell out of “John Brown.”
Luther Dickinson: An Acoustic Tribute to Jim Dickinson [from www.NMAllStars.com]
Quotations from ‘East Memphis Slim’
In remarks to the audience at a 2009 gig in Austin, the Texas musician Jon Dee Graham remembered Dickinson once telling him: “Giving synthesizers to the British was like giving whiskey to the Indians – ruined their whole culture!”
Record producer and author Joe Boyd once found himself seated with Dickinson on a producers panel discussion at South X Southwest: ”I will always love him for saying that the only conditions under which he would produce a new band was ‘if I didn’t have to go see them play’ and ‘if the first time I met them was in the studio for the session.’”
Andy Schwartz saw JLD backed by DDT (Dickinson/Dickinson/Taylor) at SXSW. When Luther Dickinson began tuning his guitar between numbers, his father admonished him: “Now son, I’ve told you many times before that tuning is decadent, European, and homosexual.” (Naturally, this was on stage at Chances — at that time, the premier lesbian bar in Austin.)
Jean Caffeine was with A.S. at that SXSW gig and remembers that JLD introduced his beautiful ballad “Across the Borderline” (written with Ry Cooder and John Hiatt) as “the song that paved my driveway.”
From JLD’s “Production Manifesto,” posted at ZebraRanch.com: “From the first hand-print cave painting to the most modern computer art, it is the human condition to seek immortality. Life is fleeting. Art is long. A record is a ‘totem,’ a document of a unique, unrepeatable event worthy of preservation and able to sustain historic life. The essence of the event is its soul.”
Last Words
Never To Be Forgotten!
“I refuse to celebrate death. My life has been a miracle of more than I ever expected or deserved. I have gone farther and done more than I had any right to expect. I leave behind a beautiful family and many beloved friends. Take reassurance in the glory of the moment and the forever promise of tomorrow. Surely there is light beyond the darkness as there is dawn after the night.
“I will not be gone as long as the music lingers. I have gladly given my life to Memphis music and it has given me back a hundredfold. It has been my fortune to know truly great men and hear the music of the spheres. May we all meet again at the end of the trail. May God bless and keep you.” — World boogie is coming, James Luther Dickinson
I never knew him. I never saw him play. Only within the past few years did I become aware of his existence. But James Black has cast a spell on me.
I am haunted by the unexpected shifts in his compositions and arrangements, the restless creativity of his unquiet spirit, the unfinished business of hit-and-run sessions long unissued. As I listen to these songs, my mind combs through the fragments of his story, through the rare interviews and stray anecdotes, as I try to piece together an image of the man and a picture of his volatile and truncated life.
James Black: Who, according to legend, once set up his kit on a New Orleans sidewalk and played “duets” with a utility worker’s jackhammer. Who walked off the bandstand and into the New Orleans night when pianist Harry Connick Jr. couldn’t cut it on Black’s own “Magnolia Triangle,” the very first tune of the set.
(“The bass player and I just couldn’t keep up with him,” Harry told his audience before playing the song during a 1999 concert in Richmond, Virginia.)
James Black: Who wrote four out of seven tunes for Ellis Marsalis’ classic 1963 album Monkey Puzzle—intricate, harmonically rich songs like “Whistle Stop,” “Dee Wee,” “Monkey Puzzle,” and “Magnolia Triangle.” The band is Black, Marsalis (piano), Nat Perrilliat (tenor), and Marshall Smith (bass). The CD reissue (AFO, 1991) closes with a ten-minute live version of “Night in Tunisia” that burns as hot as any mainstream jazz performance I’ve ever heard on record. Black drives the group so hard that the stage seems in danger of collapse; on the explosive solo that ends the track, he sounds like at least two drummers.
“James…is probably the most aggressive and dynamic personality of the group. His playing reflects his personality very accurately. He is constantly bored with the present because the future is unexplored, and in his mind is in the unexplored future…” – Harold Battiste (circa 1963)
James Black was born February 1, 1940. His musically inclined family lived at 1215 St. Peter Street in the French Quarter, later moving to 1218 Ursulines Avenue. He received his first musical training as a student in Joseph A. Craig Elementary School.
“[The school band director] ask me what I wanted to play and I told him I wanted to play the drums. And this motherfucker told me he had 50,000 drummers already, so what else did I want? He ask me did I want to play the flute, and I told him no ‘cause the flute was for bitches. And I ain’t no bitch…”
(Above and all other James Black quotes are excerpted from the liner notes for the out-of-print box set New Orleans Heritage/Jazz: 1956-66.)
Instead, Black took up the trumpet and later studied piano. Said to have excelled on both instruments, he never recorded on either one. He began playing drums in junior high school.
“I was about two or three years behind [John] Boudreaux and Smokey [Johnson] and them cats…I had to play the trumpet to be in the school band, so I went on and played the shit they wanted me to play. But shit, I knew I was a drummer so I went on and played the drums anyhow.”
Upon graduation from Joseph S. Clark HS, James received a band scholarship (on trumpet) to Southern University in Baton Rouge where he majored in composition and music education. He also played r&b in a band with Nat Perilliat and guitarist Roy Montrell and was influenced by the playing of the great Ed Blackwell, best known for his work with Ornette Coleman.
“That was some interesting shit, the way [Blackwell] was playing…I asked him to let me sit in, ‘cos I’m a cheeky, bold black motherfucker!”
Just six months before graduation, James dropped out to take a gig with Ellis Marsalis and Marshall Smith at the New Orleans Playboy Club. (He later expressed regret over the loss of his diploma: “I’d rather have it and don’t need it than to need it and don’t have it.”) Six months later, the group moved to Ellis’ own club, The Music Haven—at that time, the only modern jazz venue in New Orleans.
In 1962, Black, Marsalis, and Nat Perilliat joined brothers Nat and Cannonball Adderley on the New Orleans recording sessions for Nat Adderley’s Jazzland LP In The Bag. James contributed his original compositions “Sister Wilson” and “New Arrival” to the repertoire, but poor sound quality renders his drumming nearly inaudible for much of the date.
On the last two tracks of the Fantasy CD reissue, “The Popeye” and “The Gospel Truth,” Black is suddenly and startlingly present. He plays pure second-line rhythms with joyful abandon, never consecutively repeating a single phrase or accent for the duration of the performances. His percussion is easily the most striking element of these pleasant r&b instrumentals, which were paired on a Riverside single and issued under the pseudonym of Spider Johnson & His Popeye Band. But Black’s playing is so free, so far beyond the rhythmic requirements of the dance floor, that—as one contemporary listener put it—“he effectively destroyed any chance of the record ever becoming a hit.”
In 1964, under the aegis of singer/pianist Joe Jones (“You Talk Too Much”), Black moved to New York as part of a group of Crescent City journeymen that also included guitarist/vocalist Alvin “Shine” Robinson. After falling out with Jones, the drummer played a few nights at Birdland with Horace Silver before successfully auditioning for Lionel Hampton.
“I worked for this motherfucker for a year and a half. I had a run-in with Gladys, his old lady [and also Hampton’s business manager] …I was on my two weeks’ notice because I wouldn’t play 4/4 on the bass drums, when I got a call from Yusef [Lateef]. So when my two weeks was up, I met Yusef in Washington, D.C. at the Bohemian Caverns. I stayed with him for a couple of years.”
Black recorded several excellent albums with Lateef for Impulse, although only the first volume of Live At Pep’s (originally released in June 1964) is in print at this writing. Lateef and trumpeter Richard Williams are in excellent form on these dates, as Black’s impeccable support allows both men to give their best. James Black also performs on Yusef Lateef’s Psychicemotus (Impulse, 1965), a studio date reissued by Verve in 2005.
“Yusef was another one of them cats who wanted you to be good. You know, like he was always trying to save you…Shit, I don’t need to be saved—I’m already saved.”
In 1967, James Black came home to New Orleans to live for the rest of his life. In the preface to a 1974 CODA interview, writer Val Wilmer noted that since his return, James had played “with saxophonist James Rivers, and with Fats Domino and Professor Longhair for a while although he never recorded with either performer. He did, however, record with Lee Dorsey, Irma Thomas, and the Meters, and for some time made all of Allen Toussaint’s sessions.”
An aura of mystery surrounds the music of (I NEED) ALTITUDE. The specific recording dates and exact personnel are unknown. But we know that in 1969, Black drummed on (one might say detonated) a session for Al Scramuzza’s Scram Records that brought forth one of the all-time New Orleans funk classics, Eddie Bo’s “Hook and Sling (Parts 1 & 2).” Towards the end of the allotted hours, the label owner was called away from the session and the musicians hastily recorded two of Black’s own songs, “Mist” and “Tune #6”—both included here. When interviewed decades later, Al Scramuzza stated that the ensemble included Eddie Bo (piano), Walter Payton (bass), Walter “Wolfman” Washington (guitar), and saxophonists Fred Kemp and “Shemp.”
(I NEED) ALTITUDE culls music from two other James Black sessions. Around 1976, four tracks from an aborted album project for the Sound of New Orleans label featured bassist Jim Singleton, pianist David Torkanowsky, and Earl Turbinton on saxophone. Approximately six years later, Allen Toussaint gave Black two days of “spec” recording time at the former’s Sea-Saint Studios. (As the Crescent City’s premier producer/arranger, Toussaint has said that he frequently called on James to play parts that other drummers couldn’t handle.)
At Sea-Saint, Black shared lead vocals with his long-time companion and stage singer “Sister” Mary Bonette. Today, she recalls the supporting presence of Torkanowsky, Singleton, saxophonist Tony Dagradi, and trumpeter Clyde Kerr—all of who gigged with “The James Black Ensemble featuring Sister Mary” at various times in the Seventies and Eighties.
“James wanted musicians that could read. He had everything written out for those sessions.” — Mary Bonette.
James Black died of an overdose in 1988, without ever seeing a record released under his own name. His last recording session, with singer Germaine Bazzle, was released the following year on The New New Orleans Music: Vocal Jazz (Rounder).
On February 1, 2002, a quartet led by pianist Eric Reed performed James Black’s compositions as part of a “Jazz Composer Portraits” series at Columbia University. “This concert,” wrote Ben Ratliff in the New York Times, “should be a fascinating attempt to highlight a musician whom we should have known better.”
“Everybody knew James was great. He just never got a break.” – Mary Bonette.
Readers of these notes will draw their own conclusions about the music herein. Suffice to say that “(I Need) Altitude” and “Storm In The Gulf,” to cite two examples, are unlike any funk, jazz, or jazz-funk you’ve ever heard before—from New Orleans or anywhere else. Yet this music could have come only from New Orleans…and only from the mind and soul of James Black.
From the liner notes to CHARLIE CHRISTIAN – GENIUS OF THE ELECTRIC GUITAR (Sony Legacy box set, 2002)
Charlie Christian (1916-1942)
The year was 1938. I was living in New York and playing on the NBC radio network, five nights a week. It was the coast-to-coast broadcast of “The Chesterfield Hour” with Fred Waring & His Pennsylvanians, featuring the Les Paul Trio. So three times a week, I’d get to play the guitar on the show and I became enormously well known in radio in those days.
One day, my bass player Ernie Newton says to me: “We’ve been working hard, knocking our brains out. Let’s go to Chicago. Let’s go out to Wisconsin, see your mom, take a couple weeks off.”
So we went up there to Waukesha. And to my surprise, my mother was not too enthused that I’m featured on the biggest radio program in the United States. I thought she’d be beaming with pride! But she says, “You know, Lester, that show is too classy.” She was always a lover of country and bluegrass. That’s why I started out in my career as Rhubarb Red, influenced by my mother’s love of that type of music.
“You stick around,” she says. “I’ll make you some chili, and I’ll dial this radio station. I want you to hear this music.”
So she tunes in KVOO in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I hear Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys. “They got drums and everything in there,” my mother says to me. “Lester, that’s where you should go!”
Here I am in New York, on network radio with Fred Waring and jamming with the greatest players in the world: Art Tatum, Benny Goodman, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins. But all my mother can say is: “Lester, think about it.”
Then Ernie Newton says to me: “We’re not doing anything. Why the hell don’t we go out to Oklahoma and see what it’s all about?” So we drove from Waukesha to Tulsa. And when we get there, we hunt up these guys, Bob Wills & the Texas Playboys.
Les Paul On Stage
The place they were playing was like an airplane hanger, a big cavernous ballroom. A real cowboy saloon, but huge. And pretty soon we’re jamming with them, having a helluva good time, when I notice this young black fellow standing down below and looking up at me.
We take a break, and this fellow says to me: “Mr. Paul, could I get your autograph?” So I give him my autograph. “I play the guitar,” he tells me.
I say, “Well, are ya any good?” He says, “Yes, sir.”
I ask him his name. “Charlie,” he says. “Charlie Christian.”
I handed him the guitar and he played a little. I says, “Jesus, you are good. You want to come up and sit in with us?”
So he got up and played my guitar with the Texas Playboys. I don’t know whether he even had an instrument at that time.
And that was the first night that I met Charlie Christian.
Back in New York, not too long after that, I get a call from Charlie. He’s gotten an offer to come to New York–that was the offer from Benny Goodman–but he doesn’t have a guitar.
I’m about to order a new guitar from Gibson. Would he like one like mine? “I’ll order it for you,” I say, “and we’ll have ‘em both alike”
The next thing I know, Charlie’s in New York. We met at the New York Band & Instrument Company, owned by Eddie Bell, on Sixth Avenue around 46th Street. We’ve got the guitars that Gibson sent to Eddie Bell. I’d had the amplifier casings made of one-inch-thick maple so it wouldn’t vibrate on stage. This son-of-a-bitch had like sixteen tubes in it.
Now Charlie’s got his guitar and I’ve got mine, and we’re excited as hell over these two beautiful blond Gibson guitars. I had to go to work at 53rd and Broadway, in the same building where the David Letterman Theater is now. So we left Eddie Bell’s, carrying our guitars and amps, and walked to 53rd and Broadway. I’m gonna rehearse with Fred Waring, and Charlie’s gonna take the subway to Harlem.
We’re standing there at the subway entrance, and we kinda look at each other. “Charlie,” I say, “my balls are about ready to fall off.”
“Les,” he says, “this thing is so heavy, I can’t even lift it anymore!”
That inch-thick maple casing on the amp was killing both of us. The guitar itself, the top, was another half-inch of solid maple. We turned around and dragged it all back to Eddie Bell. Told him, send it all back to Gibson. And I went back to the old guitar, the same one that Charlie played that night in Tulsa.
Benny Goodman (1909-1986)
Charlie hits with Benny Goodman. He’s all excited, and I’m very excited about how good he’s doing. We’d go up to Minton’s and jam together, swap licks, the whole nine yards. He was living uptown and I was in Queens, at 81st and Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights.
Charlie always was impressed with the fact that I was a technical player, a white technical player. But he was a stomper. “You only play one goddamn note,” I’d tell him, “and you kill me!”
What I’m doing was so much harder than what he’s doing–that’s what I thought back then. But over time, through being with Charlie, I realized how tough it is to come down on that one note in the right place, and how much more of a drive he had. He had that ability, like Lionel Hampton, to take a note, to take one “A,” and just pound it into your head until it was the greatest note you’d ever heard.
He didn’t play beyond himself. He didn’t think, “What the hell, no one’s listening–why don’t I try this?” Charlie wasn’t one to go out over his head. The beat came first. He locked himself into that driving sound.
In 1941, I stuck my hand in the transmitter of an illegal radio station I had made in my basement in Jackson Heights. I was nearly electrocuted. That accident ended my career for a year.
While I’m in the hospital, they tell me that Charlie’s in a hospital on Staten Island. I call him up, and we talk about the good times we had playing together, all the fun we had, how wonderful it was.
“Les,” he says, “I’ve got tuberculosis.”
I knew what that meant. Because in those days, if you had TB, there was really nothing they could do for you.
That phone call was the last I heard from Charlie Christian. I don’t know if he came out of that hospital, don’t know if he survived two or three or five months. I guess that he’d only played professionally for about five years.
I heard Charlie’s influence spread during his lifetime. You could hear him in Barney Kessel, in Herb Ellis, in all the guys who tried to get that big round sound. It ran through Wes Montgomery, and it runs through George Benson today. I was talking with George about Charlie not even six months ago.
With all the technique they have out there, with all these guitar players–-the one that wins is still the fellow that plays that one note I heard that night in Tulsa.
He never lived to fulfill what he could have done, should have done. But I loved that man.
Charlie Christian was my friend.
