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   7 7 C h ap t e r 7 New Voices, New Visions, Wayne’s World, and a Letter The summer of 1967 depended on your perspective . If you were a soldier in Vietnam, particularly a grunt, you were just praying you would get home alive. If you were a hippie, especially in San Francisco, you would have felt validated; 1967 was the Summer of Love, the pinnacle of the movement. Monterey Pop, the music festival of that spring, had focused worldwide attention on the psychedelic sound and had pioneered a new style of rock concert. Hippie music was all over the airwaves that summer; the Jefferson Airplane had scored a huge success with “Somebody to Love” and the album Surrealistic Pillow, and beginning in June, the drones and blares of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band seemed, temporarily at least, to have united the world. The Beatles made the theme of unity even more explicit with their call for peace and harmony, “All You Need Is Love.” For African Americans, especially in the cities, it was the year of the long hot summer. Detroit went up and so did Newark, Roxbury, Portland, Wilmington, and Toledo, among other places. Lyndon Johnson authorized a commission chaired by the Illinois governor Otto Kerner to investigate why these riots were happening; the report was written, suggestions were made as to the causes (an increasingly two-tiered society, based on race and economic class); the recommendations were noted and promptly forgotten. It was back to business as usual. In Memphis, “business as usual” meant cutting hit records. It was turning out to be one of Stax’s best years, but American was gaining ground. The musicians at these studios had no idea of the impact their records were having; Stax was an assembly line, and if American was not quite that yet, it was evolving from the ragtag operation it had been several months before . Some of that was due to the business sense of Don Crews, now the office manager who scheduled sessions. The success of the records done that spring under Papa Don Schroeder ’s direction attracted more accounts. “We were cuttin’ a lot of rhythm and blues for different people,” Crews remembered. Quinton Claunch continued to bring in Goldwax artists on a regular basis and Fred Foster in Nashville was becoming more and more of a patron and booster. But much of the success American enjoyed that summer was due to a concept Chips Moman had held from the beginning: the notion of the recording studio as an experimental laboratory where anyone who had an idea and wished to put it on tape was free to try it out. “The deal was, I gave everybody in the band a chance,” Chips explained. “They could use the studio free. Tommy was the only one who seemed to want to do that. . . . I encouraged everyone to get involved.” This was almost unheard of in an industry that regarded pickers as the low men on the totem pole, but to Chips it was a matter of treating them fairly. “I was a session man before I got that deal and I would have loved to have had something like that.” He thought he had found it at Stax, but circumstances had intervened; now he was planning to play benevolent patriarch to a new generation of musicians, a role that he obviously felt suited him. The idea applied to songwriters, too. Dan Penn had been interested in production from the moment he got there; his whole impetus for leaving Muscle Shoals had been to produce records . He had crafted his own demos for years, finding out through trial and error what sounded good; now he had taken the next step by way of his co-productions with Chips. The 7 8   N e w V o i c e s , N e w V i s i o n s , Way n e ’ s W o r l d , a L e t t e r results were invariably excellent, but the collaborations heightened the differences between the two. “Dan was gonna do it his way, Chips would do it his way,” observed Reggie Young. “The difference between me and Chips is, I like funk and he doesn’t,” noted Dan. There were other differences as well; Dan’s solid grounding in R&B and traditional country (all those square dances he’d played as a teenager) made him seek a sparer sound than some of the...

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