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2 3 6   C h ap t e r 1 9 Tommy Cogbill’s Year By the time of the Goldwax dissolution, many of the records the group had made the previous fall were either on the charts or about to be released, so that to the listening public American was entering a golden commercial period, although in actuality the musicians had left that phase behind in favor of experimental recordings. Memphis Underground was now on the jazz charts, and American continued that style with the Hubert Laws album Crying Game, engineered by Tommy Cogbill, who was also credited with the musical direction—to no one’s surprise, since he remained the group’s resident jazzman. American’s jazz and pop credentials increased when they recorded several singles with Buddy Greco, who had worked with Benny Goodman in the late forties but was now more of a lounge singer. Reggie Young remembered that “he was cool, he was like a Vegas kind of act, he was kinda taken with us.” Greco brought in a demo of the Beatles’ “Let It Be” that he wanted to do; the musicians had not heard the song before and Mike Leech remembered the band listening to it for the first time and running it down. The singer’s preference for recording in the prearranged style common to New York or Los Angeles may have been a factor in the session’s commercial failure. “I think Greco shot himself in the foot when he came down,” Mike Leech reflected. “Most artists , when they came down, laid back and waited for the magic to arrive . . . but Buddy was so accustomed to running the show, so to speak, in the studio, that all we were allowed to do was what he wanted. And that was his selection of songs, to be recorded his way. Labels such as Atlantic had to lean toward whatever these types of artists wanted. All the label could do was . . . cut a track or two, take it back to New York, mix it, release it, and move on to something else. They knew they didn’t have a hit, but their hands were tied, probably by an agent.” Dusty Springfield now had the second hit from her album with “Windmills of Your Mind,” featuring Reggie Young’s contemplative acoustic guitar. “In the Ghetto” and “Don’t Cry Daddy” put Elvis back in the front rank, and “It’s Only Love” and the revamped version of “I Shall Be Released” by the Box Tops had been on the radio all spring. “Soul Deep” became a hit in September. Bell Records was so delighted that Larry Uttal personally offered the musicians and their families an all-expenses-paid vacation in Acapulco as a thank-you gift. With the exception of Mark James and Glen Spreen, both of them Houston boys for whom a trip to Mexico was commonplace, the group declined . “I could kick myself for not taking [it],” Mike Leech said later. Reggie Young added, “It sounded good, but to think about having to pack up and go was just too overwhelming. I just thought it would be more trouble than it was worth.” But why shouldn’t everyone have had a holiday to enjoy their success? It was apparently a year of vacations; Chips Moman, Tommy Cogbill , and Bobby Wood with their trips to Disney World in Orlando, Mark James and Glen Spreen to Acapulco. Probably the most unusual holiday was taken by Wayne Carson and Dan Penn, who with their wives also took a trip to Mexico in early August 1969. The vacation itself was uneventful. They fished and drove, rode the motorcycles they had taken along, and souvenir hunted (Reggie Young cherished forever a hand-tooled leather wallet Wayne brought back for him). It was only on their return to the States that they ran into trouble. “That was quite a deal,” Wayne chuckled ruefully. “We’d been down to Mexico a couple of weeks. We come back to the border and our car was full up, the border guard said, ‘You’ll have to unload it.’ Dan was tired, he said, ‘If you wanna unload this SOB, do it yourself; I’ve unloaded it all up and down Mexico.’ I talked to t o m m y c o g b i l l’ s y e a r    2 3 7 the guy then, I said, ‘Look, we just came back from a vacation; we don’t have any...

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