Most music writers
confine themselves to a genre in which they specialise but Fletcher recognises
no such boundaries. He opened his account with indie (Echo & The Bunneyman
and R.E.M.), slipped back into the mythical golden age (Moon), moved on to punk
(The Clash) and even disco (a novel, Hedonism).
Then he wrote a history of musical New York and an autobiographical memoir
before reverting to type with The Smiths. I must therefore declare an interest:
at Omnibus Press I was responsible for publishing the first five of these books
and acquiring the UK rights to the sixth, and in the course of all this
developed a professional relationship and close friendship with the author. So
it follows that I am sympathetic towards his work; then again, in the unlikely
event that he’d written a stinker, I’d have said so.
That said, soul and
black music generally isn’t an area where Fletcher has previously shown an
interest, at least not in the books he writes. However, I happen to know that
he’s the proud owner of a Hammond organ, the keyboard that Booker T used to
supply those shimmering chords on Otis Redding’s records, as was his late
friend and Face Ian McLagan, Small or otherwise, another soulman to his bones.
So I guess it was only a matter of time before Fletcher flexed his marathon-toned
muscles in this genre.
As he demonstrated in
his history of New York’s musical past, Fletcher likes to dip into the history
of America too, and in the opening chapters of In The Midnight Hour we learn about Pickett’s breadline childhood
in central Alabama, where families are big and dinner portions small, and about
the legacy of slavery that mutated into institutional racism buoyed up by the
state legislature and redneck cops. Pickett, a name handed down from a slave
owner, was one of 11 children and like the rest of them was expected to work in
the cotton fields for a pittance. Fat chance. Wilson was a man of talent and
ambition with a chip on his shoulder the size of a baked potato, so woe betide
anyone who stands in his way. Then again, it might have been the ‘whuppins’ he
received from his ma that drove him on. As Fletcher points out these were
administered regularly for minor infringements, not just as punishment but as a
warning not to get uppity with white folks. To say the wrong thing to a white
woman, Ma Picket knew, could result in retribution much worse than a sore
backside.
May 5, 1966: Wilson Pickett on stage with Jimi Hendrix
at an Atlantic Records party is New York.
Like his hero Sam Cooke, Pickett learned to sing in church and, though untroubled by the jump to secular, ‘Lord have mercy’ would litter his lyrics to the last. From Alabama he moves north, to Detroit where he is recruited into The Falcons (alongside Eddie Floyd), and thence to recording in his own right, often with Bobby Womack whose presence is crucial to this story. Fletcher is especially good at tracing Pickett’s path through the murky waters of the sixties music industry wherein producers, managers and agents are all out for what they can get and to hell with morals or ethics. Everyone knew that his lifetime manager, Jimmy Evans, was mafia. “They do no nonsense management,” Pickett’s brother Maxwell tells Fletcher. “When something needs taking care of, they just take care of it.”
On the road music was a
cash industry where being handy with a gun was useful, and Pickett didn’t trust
banks. He was wary of record companies too and soon cottoned on to the benefits
of music publishing. He wasn’t called Wicked Pickett for nothing and it’s a
credit to his ‘meanness’ – in Southern black speak read ‘unyielding’ – that he
ends up with a nice house, a Rolls-Royce and the wherewithal to move his mother
away from rural Alabama and buy her a home of her own, in cash from the wads of
bills he stored in his wardrobe.
All of which makes for a
lively and entertaining read. In the acknowledgements Fetcher lists no fewer
than 67 interviewees, family members, romantic partners, fellow singers and
musical accomplices, be they producers or studio hands, or members of bands that
backed him on the road, of which there are dozens. In this respect the attention
to detail is top-notch, most of them happy to recall the ways in which
Pickett’s records were made and his bravura showmanship. All offer evidence
that Pickett was a hard taskmaster but a virtuoso singer blessed not only with
an extraordinary vocal talent but a musical brain that could weed out any tiny
flaws in a track. So can Fletcher, who examines Pickett’s work in an almost
scholarly fashion: ‘Every chord required of the song is announced in the
opening two bars and one beat,’ he writes of ‘In The Midnight Hour’, Pickett’s
masterpiece, ‘a descending pattern that, like a guitar beginner’s tutorial,
follows the dotted marks of the fret-board from a high D major to an open E
major…. Trumpets blaze those initial descending chords, on the last of which
one of them breaks off to play a root note an octave higher, emphasizing the
incoming E major.’ That’s but a sample – Fletcher devotes an entire page to his
analysis of the song – and his assessments of other Pickett classics –
‘634-5789’, ‘Land Of 1,000 Dances’ and ‘Mustang Sally’ among them – are equally
incisive. I particularly enjoyed the passage about the recording of ‘Hey Jude’,
recorded in one take with Duane Allman on guitar, ‘the two locked into a
musical communication that took on a life of its own’.
Pickett’s unpleasant
side is never far away, however. He is perpetually violent towards the women in
his life, perhaps a legacy of his upbringing but still inexcusable,
unnecessarily aggressive when he drinks too much and more or less addicted to
cocaine, which serves only to exacerbate his temper and his tantrums; the
cliché ‘his own worst enemy’ is a common refrain. The eighties and nineties
weren’t particularly kind to Pickett or any of his fellow soul men and when his
career takes a dive after leaving Atlantic for RCA, there to succumb to the
lure of inappropriate disco music, and thence to recording limbo, the wheels really
start to come off. He winds up in jail, twice, on a variety of charges –
assault, driving under the influence, firearms, drugs. “His life was chaotic,”
producer Robert Margouleff tells Fletcher. “He was an alcoholic… not in
control. That’s the reason he didn’t make records for years.” Other witnesses
say much the same thing but almost all make the point that throughout it all he
maintained his musical standards. “[Despite it all] he never really sang badly,
and he never really sang out of tune,” adds Margouleff.
Pickett’s strong work
ethic prevents him from going broke, and although salvation of sorts was offered
by his impressive 1999 album It’s Harder
Now, Pickett was unwilling to promote it, preferring instead to rely on the
steady income accrued from cabaret-style shows staged to exploit his
‘legendary’ status, many of them in casinos. Sooner or later, though, even this
proves too much and, his body devastated by drink, he finally comes off the
road. In the end he collapses at home, alone, to be found three days later,
only to die shortly afterwards in hospital, aged 64, from a heart attack
brought on by a raft of health problems. There’s an unseemly squabble over his
assets but Fletcher ends his book on a high, recounting how the pastor at his
funeral service, a ‘Land Of 1000 Dances’ devotee, ‘had the whole church
chanting a joyous last hurrah: Na, na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na’, and how a week later Pickett was
honoured at the Grammys in Los Angeles. “This is for the Wicked Pickett,”
roared Bruce Springsteen as an all-star band broke out into a glorious ‘In The
Midnight Hour’. ‘He was doing so not just on behalf of the musicians on stage,
but on behalf of every soul fan who had ever been touched by one of the
greatest voices and, yes, one of the most volatile personalities of the last
fifty years,’ concludes Fletcher.
One of the greatest
songs too, he might have added.
No comments:
Post a Comment