to get away from the pits and the factories, all that cloth-capped bullshit

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When the scene was at its most vigorous there was this tremendous search for obscurities, and a lot of great records surfaced as a result. But after a while, the chances of discovering some old masterpiece diminish. I started Northern Soul but I actually found the music very limiting because in the early days I’d play a Charles Mingus record, then I’d play a bluebeat disc followed by a Booker T. tune, then a Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley record. Gradually there was this blanding out to one sort of sound. When I started DJing, I could play what I wanted. But after three years I had to keep to the same tempo.

recording sessions that made those at Fortune seem professional

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Pickett was among the first of the soul stars to play with an integrated live band, and he would later say, “I don’t think Martin Luther King can take all the credit for kind of scraping shit out down there [in the South], ’cos I think the black entertainers of America had a lot to do with it. I tell you man, we opened the doors, ’cos we were traveling down through there all the time. We stopped going to the back doors, and all that shit. We fought our way out the place, we’ve been shot at, all kinds of shit, had glass put in our food, oh yeah.”

Little Richard’s version of hometown hospitality had its kinky edge.

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Phil Walden accompanied Otis on this trip to New York.  As part of his ongoing “education” in African American culture, Phil marveled at the backstage scene at the Apollo. “It was like a shopping center. Slick-looking black guys would pull in clothes racks with merchandise from the best shops in New York. They hired junkies to steal the goods. If you didn’t like what they had on the racks, you could place an order, ‘I want a pair of such and such alligator shoes in a size 9.’ Two hours later you’d have them.” 

“Shout Bamalama can safely be described as the low point of Otis Redding’s recording career.” ?????!!!!!!!?????

Little Richard sang harsh and wild, so I played honkin’, wild sax.

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The Blues Ramblers was about the most popular band in Houston during this time, and the women was pretty crazy about us. There was one night when a policeman caught me over in French Town in Houston. This was after a gig, and I had this girl with me. I always knew how to find me a dark street. Sometimes we’d do it in the front seat, and sometimes I’d get comfortable and get in the back seat. I had this girl in the front seat when the police drove up behind us, got out, and flashed that light on us. He said, “Boy, let me see that hair between your teeth!”

I was just doing what felt good, if that was a sin, then sin on!

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I loved to watch Don Wilkerson attack Fathead on the stand. It brought out the best in both cats. When someone tries to stomp on you, naturally you’re going to respond. And together—blowing out in front of the band—they’d be burning up the place. I like to think I’m a half-ass composer. I ain’t no Duke Ellington. I heard what West Coast cats were doing, and it was good music. But my heart was really with the East Coast dudes. They were harder cats and had a grittier sound. There was more blues in their playing, the approach was tougher. I still hear something different about the way the cats play back East. They’re pushier, more aggressive. They got a certain stink that the guys in L.A. lack. I miss the filth—the East Coast filth—that you hear on the streets and in the recording studios of New York City. When I do a song, I must be able to make it stink in my own way; I want to foul it up so it reeks of my manure and no one else’s.

I had a big booty and a cute face, but I guess that wasn’t enough.

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Solomon loved to be called Daddy. He had dozens of women and hundreds of children. He liked to call me into the bathroom when he was sitting in the tub, naked as a beached whale and nearly as big.

“Bettye,” he said, “I still haven’t gotten you in my church.”

Solomon was a preacher with a mail-order divinity degree. In church, he sat on a throne and wore a crown on his head.
“And you won’t be getting me in that church anytime soon,” I said.
“You don’t think it’s good to praise and worship God?”
“If this God of yours is so perfect, I’m wondering why he needs all this praise and worship. Is he that insecure?”
“He’s not insecure. We are. We need the security we get when we tell him he’s worthy.”
“So that’s the deal—kiss God’s ass and God makes you feel okay.”
“You twisting it around.”
“You’re the one who’s twisting to make sense out of something that’s plain nonsense.”
“How can you live without faith?”
“You need faith, I agree. But faith in what? Faith in the fairy tales you read about in the Bible? I don’t think so, Solomon. Faith in other people, faith in yourself. Oh, Lord, save me from this preacher man!”
Solomon laughed and got out of the tub. I liked our conversation, not because I was about to convert to whatever form of Christianity he was peddling, but because he was a genuinely nice guy.
“How you make love to someone that big?” my cousin Margaret asked me.
“Simple,” I said. “You sit on him.”

a Jew-boy from the Bronx converted to a mambo freak

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Talk about good-time urban corruption! The atmosphere was as thrilling as a James M. Cain novel. Swing was everywhere. And we made the scene, Patty and I, from the Reno Club, where John Hammond had scooped up Count Basie, to Dante’s Inferno, where bottomless topless waitresses held my full attention. Here in the Wild West, the juke joints and blues clubs were in full cry. At the Elks I heard Joe Turner, that magnificent shouter, then a singing bartender, whom twenty-five years later I wound up producing. The big bands were roaring: Bennie Moten’s, led by his accordion-playing brother Bus; Andy Kirk and his Clouds of Joy; Harlan Leonard and the Rockets. In our room at the Puritan Hotel — no lie — Patty and I left the window open so the late-night sounds from the street, the blistering jazz of wide-open Kansas City, would fuel the fire of our lovemaking.

irresponsible, reckless, adolescent shenanigans of rock ‘n’ roll artists

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By 1958, her persona as a smoky, smoldering jazz dame had hardened into cliché. The Lee arrangement of “Fever” is stripped down to just upright bass and drums, but it also involves a husky, heavy breathing vocal, massively overdubbed finger snaps and newly written (by Lee), cutesy lyrics about Captain Smith and Pocahontas. Was she “hipping it up with Beatspeak,” or laying it on a little thick, like a “square” actor gluing on a goatee to play a beatnik on television?

“Peggy Lee couldn’t sing like Little Willie John. Everybody in the (Hotel) Theresa and all over Harlem were talking about how those white producers who came uptown sneaking around the Apollo Theater recording black material and then you’d hear a white singer on the radio singing the same song. That would put anyone on junk.” Faye Pridgon says she laughed when she heard Lee’s version, and she claims Willie did too. “That song had gotten a hell of a play in the ’hood long before that girl came along. When Pat Boone or whoever covered a song, it was a joke to us.”