It was going on to Easter of 1967. By now I had established, I was country cou-, city cousin to the country boys down in Memphis. The Stax tour was inevitable. Most of the people who were on Stax had not played more than a 500-mile radius of Memphis. And the thought of them going to Europe was like, wow. Most of them were scared of the thought of flying across the ocean. They'd never -- they flied from Memphis to Atlanta, but that was over ground, never mind flying over an ocean, that was terrifying. Okay. The clamor was that the people on the Continent, not just Great Britain, but the people on the entire Continent were dying to see them. They had never seen or been in touch with a variety of seven or eight artists. They'd seen one artist here do a show and this and that, but they'd never seen a whole review come to them of all these historic American artists. When the Stax Revue arrived in Europe, the ones to greet them were the Beatles. Because they wanted to meet them and touch them and shake their hands. I mean they were guests of the Beatles for dinner and for reception and a press party. And the English press of course loved it. Because here they are with their favorite money making product for Great Britain at the time and here they are welcoming the great American soul artists, the Stax Revue. They were there, the Stax Revue, was in London, if I'm not mistaken for at least four, maybe as many as five days before the first show. Uh, the first show was scheduled for -- there were two shows in London, scheduled for a theater called Finnsbury Park. You now know it as the Rainbow. But it was scheduled for Finnsbury, and Finnsbury had been used sparingly since World War II, maybe once a year or something like that. And when the Stax show was booked for these two nights in Finnsbury, it was sold out like in ten minutes time. It was gone, full, and I guess it might have held 1500, 2000 people something like that, and it was a typical old music house type theater with a balcony across the back. And I was there and asked to record them at Finnsbury and then follow them into Paris and record them, as well as being like the big brother for them, because I'd been to England many times and I could front for them. The same thing in Paris, I could speak French and I could introduce them to people in Paris so that they wouldn't be scared. Because they were very reserved and very shy. I started recording in Finnsbury Park, and all of a sudden something went wrong with the drums and I came running upstairs to look on stage to see had a microphone fallen or what had happened? And I looked, and here's Al Jackson, and when I'm looking at him from the wings and, and trying to motion to him, he points to his drum and there's a hole in the snare drum this big. He, the first time he hit the doggone thing, the stick went through the head, so now he's playing the backbeat -- on the tom-tom, the whole show, okay? And I just looked and I gaped, and while I'm looking at Al, all of a sudden I look at Duck, and Duck, who's usually so cool, Duck is standing there, and he's creeping over to Steve as he's playing, and Steve is playing with his eyes closed, and Duck is going, everything but kick Steve, and he's saying, Steve -- and I wonder what the hell is he doing? Finally, he gets Steve's attention, and Steve looks, and all of a sudden the two of them are staring like out into the audience, but they're not looking into the audience, they're like looking up here, and Steve is going towards stage left, and Duck is going towards stage right, and I'm wondering what's going on? And I look out and I got scared. From the time of the downbeat and they hadn't finished going into -- the show never stopped. When one band, when the band would finish a number, they would vamp for like ten or 15 seconds, the horns would come on and do a number, then on would come the next artist. The band never stopped the entire show. Here they are finishing the first number and Steve and Duck are looking in the audience, and here's the balcony undulating, literally, I'm telling you, you could see it with the naked eye, it was moving ten to 15 inches up and down, with the people up there pounding, and here's this cloud of dust because this place hadn't been vacuumed since World War II, and here's this cloud of dust and you were waiting for the plaster and the balcony to come down in a crash and the two of them are looking for stage left and right -- get me outta here.

I was called into Memphis on short notice for a weekend. Uh, the band and the people in Stax Records had put out albums heretofore assembling cuts from various recording sessions. They had Otis Redding, a major hit artist on their label now, who had two days, and they wanted to make an album in two days time. So they asked if I would come down and assist them, because I could expedite things, my communication with the band, my communication with Otis, etc., etc. I flew in from a Friday, we recorded, excuse me, I flew in on a Thursday night. We recorded all day Friday, we recorded all day Saturday. Sunday, we could only try to repair one or two things or make another cut on one of the songs we'd already recorded, because Otis had to leave like at one or two o'clock. He had a gig that afternoon or earlier in that evening in another city. So we did the album literally in two days and a couple of hours. It was the first time I ever met Phil Walden, who was Otis's manager, who had just been discharged from three years in the military, serving as a lieutenant and as a military police officer in Germany. And he came in, because Otis had become a hit while Phil was gone. He came in and he said, man, I love the way you handle that man, I love the way the recording went, and Otis and Phil, everybody was happy. And Phil said, man, I just, have you ever had anything like this before? And I remember saying to Phil, and Phil reminded me of it years later, I said to Phil, I've had this experience, this man is in charge of what he's doing, he knows what he's doing, he knows what he wants done around him. It's reminiscent of Ray Charles and Bobby Darrin, who were two of the most take-charge people that I knew in the studio. And he's right in that category.

I was going to ask you about Ray Charles. You told us that you learned a lot from him. And I'd like you to tell us that again, how significant Ray Charles was to the whole soul move.

Early in my career, dealing with a variety of artists, some jazz, some rhythm and blues, I dealt with some handicapped people, they were blind. I thought I had good ears and I thought I had fast hands. Dealing with somebody like a, uh, Roland Kirk, or dealing with somebody like a Stevie Wonder, dealing with somebody like a Ray Charles, you find out how inadequate you are very quickly. They have a dexterity it would do you well to learn, to emulate. Because they're much better organized than you are. But it's not just in their hands. Their minds are more organized. And if you speak to them, and you speak to them in the way that you're accustomed to speaking to somebody else who can see, all of a sudden they pick you apart but they're not doing it maliciously. It is that they are so fine-tuned and so focused that they're listening to what you're saying and you don't even know what you're saying and when they feed it back to you it's embarrassing. And I learned from that. Ray Charles and I to this day are good friends, good, good friends, but I can't tell you some of the things and exchanges verbally that we had, or musically, he'd play me something and I'd say you mean this? And he would, say, oh no, this is what I mean. It's like what am I doing here, dummy, shut up, listen to the, man, he said it right the first time, you know what I mean? But you learn from people like that. And they're so focused and they're so together that it's embarrassing when you realize how inept you are.

Speaking on the topic of Ray Charles for a minute, when you started working with him musically, what was he doing that was different, that really set precedent for a lot of this gospel flavored soul.

When Atlantic first signed Ray Charles, Ray Charles was trying to emulate King Cole. Uh, it was Ahmet and Jerry, their influence and their dialogue with Ray that put him back into a facility that he had that was natural to him. There was a tape circulating around of an interview, not an interview, a dialogue between Ahmet Ertegun and Ray Charles when Ray was preparing to record one day, and I immediately put the tape machine on just to record the dialogue. And Ray was saying, well, first time I played, I played in this kind of band, and then Ahmet would say, oh man, you know this song and Ahmet would sing the song and Ray would start playing, and here's this whole dialogue. Lloyd Glenn was the pianist in a country band out of the Atlanta, Georgia area that Ray aspired to play with, or in that band or a band like that, he started out country. But he was also fluent in gospel music, because he was from that northern part of Florida, southern part of Georgia where they were doing the church thing.

Ray Charles was capable of playing country music, jazz , gospel music. He was a fluent and accomplished pianist. His ambition was to play in Lloyd Glenn's orchestra and replace Lloyd Glenn or play with Lloyd Glenn, I mean that was his dying ambition at the time. When he came with Atlantic, he was trying to emulate King Cole and at that time there was a transition from groups like the Golden Gate Quartet and the Inkspots and those kinds of gospel groups, including the Midnighters and so forth, into more pop music. But most of the people who were doing the lead singing were the falsettos and the tenors, like Deke Watson, like Clyde McPhatter, like those kind of people. And Ahmet and Jerry tried to get Ray to sing in more of a gospel tradition and not try and emulate King Cole, but try and capture the mood of the gospel type feeling. And Ray was more powerful than those people vocally and taste-wise. And when he sat down and played the blues with a gospel feeling or when he say down and told a story and it didn't have to be blues, it dripped, it was just dangerous. No matter what the man did, he, he just had this gift for pulling everything together, whether it was a tearjerker story, like "A Gambler's Prayer" or uh, or he was telling a story like "Greenback Dollar Bill" or "Do the Mess Around" -- it didn't matter. He was just together, and could put that unique feeling in that was a mix of the Coasters. It was part blues, it was part church, it was expression. Only Ray Charles could do it and be a catalyst for other people to learn how.

Let me ask you now --

For example, Ray Charles doing "I Got A Women." Uh, everybody thinks it's a thing in a very fast tempo, it's a buck dance, it's up here, I've got a woman, way across town, that's good for me, woo, wo-wo. If you take it in a quarter of that time, take it in a 12/8, very slow, it's really a gospel song. And where he's doing the ad libs with wo-wos and so forth, that would be where there would be a response from somebody in the church to the preacher saying, and the Lord said, and I got this, and I got that. So they yell out -- wooooo, well, Ray's doing all of the parts and he's telescoping it all together. Ray was so well organized that when he conceived of doing these things and doing them like this, he new exactly where he was going to sing and what he was going to play on piano, and where the horns should play. And between David Fathead Newman and, oh, the baritone player, good Lord I forget his name, it's embarrassing, because I recorded him, oh, I am embarrassed. Anyway between the two of them -- Hank, Hank Crawford, the two of them would notate exactly what Ray wanted them and any other horns to do, and if they hired new horns and the new horns couldn't read, all they had to do was listen to Ray's piano playing, because in addition to accompanying himself and doing [sings] "I got a woman wo-wo, good to me" -- doing all of this, he's prompting the horns like two beats ahead of where they're supposed to come in -- [sings] And Hank and David look around and go -- [sings, laughs]. He'd be playing the parts that they couldn't read for them, before they were supposed to play them, so they'd remember what they looked like.

The first time I had the experience was perhaps in 1953 I think was the year. Atlantic Records was still using their office as a studio in the off hours. And we were recording Joe Turner. And Jesse Stone had come up with a song which was an accumulation of lyrics from several songs that he had written, that he put together, and the song was called "Shake, Rattle and Roll." And when we were making the record, when Jesse was standing behind Joe feeding him the lyrics because Joe could not read, and he couldn't remember the lyrics because they were so complex, and so that Jesse was prompting him, and then when it came time to sing the chorus, Jesse was singing with him and Ahmet and Jerry said, oh we got to have a better chorus than that. They went off to sing . So I have the illustrious, I am the engineer to record Joe Turner, Jesse Stone, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler singing quartet part on "Shake, Rattle and Roll." The record went on to be a monstrous hit in the R and B category. I'd say perhaps 68, as many as 90 days later, a country artist named Bill Haley, who coincidentally had a record out on Atlantic in 1948 on the green Atlantic label, which was a country label -- we were dabbling in everything back in those days. We had Bill Haley on a record. Bill Haley covers the record. When I say Bill Haley covers the record, "Shake, Rattle and Roll" became a crossover country, pop, whatever you want hit in any way, shape or form you want to call it, but it no more resembled the original record than a hole in the head except for singing "shake, rattle and roll." Because the lyrics were so suggestive on our record -- no profanity, no four letter words, but to come up to people, you wouldn't say, when you wear those dresses and the sun comes shining through, you wouldn't sing that, that's nasty. So they changed all the lyrics, but they used the same chords. Bill Haley went on to have a career on the strength of a bogus version of "Shake, Rattle and Roll," and God rest his soul, he was not a thief, and he was a nice man, and I'm glad he had this success. It made Joe Turner more successful too. But it was not the same record. And if anybody thinks they know "Shake, Rattle and Roll," listen to the Joe Turner record, you'll find out what it's really about.

What about Elvis, I know he covered that too, but when he first came on the scene and you first started hearing him, what was your take on Presley?

Elvis, what Elvis had this unique quality, remember I described the sensation of people in that geographic location of the United States at that particular time being a mixed culture artistically. They're playing country, they're playing gospel, they're playing jazz, they're playing blue and you don't know black or white who's playing what, because you're not looking at a tube, all you're doing is listening to a radio, and they are so good at emulating each other's style that you don't know what's happening. Elvis blotted up as close as any white man could the black culture. And he was sensitive to the black culture. If he heard something that he fancied doing and it was white, he didn't make it sound black. If it was black, he didn't make it sound white. He kept it in its tradition. That was one of this unique facilities.

The first time I recorded "Respect" was in the "Otis Blue" album. And it was one of the songs that Otis had written. He was under the influence of Sam Cooke and a lot of traditional blues artists and the gospel blues artists. But Otis had this song "Respect," which was his expression of a hard-working, then Southern black man, coming home after a week at work and saying, we're going to dance, and I don't want to hear nothing about this and that, and didn't want those pin curls and telling me you don't feel well and they -- we're going to dance, we're going to party, give me my dues, give me my pride, give me my respect. That was the significance of Otis's song, and it was a male, macho, work with me Annie, let's dance tonight song. Okay? Three, four years later, as we're doing the Aretha album, Aretha comes up with her version of the same song. But we're talking a transition period of three years, and we're all of a sudden, with Aretha being such a powerful -- now, Otis was powerful as a man. Aretha was powerful as a woman. But times were changing. And here is an embryo women's lib, black women's lib song where here comes this chick on strong, instead of being the shrinking violet in the -- no, don't hit me no more -- c'mon, give me my propers when I get home -- R-E-S-- and she tears the pants off the song. It was the same song. It was a hit both times, but it just depended on which world you were living in, and which one you liked, but damn, it was a hot song.