Memphis Boys: The Story of American Studios

Introduction

   x i I n t r o d u c t i o n They were a band without a name for a long time. In the late sixties, when they began an unprecedented streak of hit records, no one called the band anything at first. In 1968 they released a few instrumental recordings as the American Group. After that they were occasionally billed as the 827 Thomas Street Band, after the address of the Memphis studio where they worked. By 1972 they began the second phase of their careers, as freelance session players in Nashville, and established musicians in town would say of them, “Oh, you know . . . that’s some of those Memphis boys.” With the release of a 1991 album produced by Allen Reynolds, they made that phrase the title, and the Memphis Boys they officially became. This book is the culmination of a forty-year journey, for them and for me. In April 1969 I was the typical rebellious fourteen-year-old of the time. I wore wirerimmed glasses, denounced the Vietnam War at every opportunity, and was in the process of being expelled from my West Virginia junior high school for “insubordination” and “failure to show proper respect to school officials.” At my hearing before the county board of education , I was declared an “unreachable child” and told I could not attend school anywhere in West Virginia. My family would have to move, and at the time, we did not know where. All of us were going to suffer because of the stand I had taken. I was out of school for most of that year, which allowed me to pursue a better kind of education. The radio was always on and I was developing a passion for all kinds of music. My family was slightly concerned that I spent so much time listening to the radio and seemingly caring about nothing else—in those days such things just were not done—but they sensed I needed it and more or less left me alone. I stayed in my room and did not bother them with my music. And that was how, one Saturday morning, I heard a song that literally changed my life. Drifting out of my speakers was Alex Chilton , at the time one of the Box Tops but whose recordings were solo performances with session players accompanying him, singing something called “I Shall Be Released.” It was a Dylan tune, but I did not know that then. I could certainly relate to the words, about a man in the lonely crowd who remembered “every face of every man who put me here” and swore that he was not to blame. But even more than the song itself, what got me was the music. It opened with a resonant grand piano, then continued quietly with the piano and an acoustic guitar underlining the verses. But the anguish implied in the lyrics burst forth in the choruses, with a horn arrangement building and building to screams of bewilderment and pain. Bob Dylan may have been writing about a literal prison, but these musicians, these producers and arrangers—whoever had gotten that sound—had built and woven around Dylan’s words to describe a prison of the spirit . These people knew something about agony and loss and bleak empty roads stretching endlessly before them. It was the most musically creative thing I had ever heard; the production embellished the song to create a completely personal statement. There was nothing else on the air to compare with it. My family made our weekly trip that afternoon to Montgomery, the largest town near us, and there in the old wooden record bin at G.C. Murphy I found that single. Along with it I bought an album, Merrilee Rush’s Angel of the Morning, because I loved that song and her sweet, hurt-sounding voice. I took the records home and looked at the credits, because I was especially interested in who had gotten that particular sound on the single. The production credit on the single, I discovered to my surprise, was the same as that for the album: Tommy Cogbill and Chips Moman. I had never heard of either of them before, but I knew they were on to something. I absolutely had to hear more. That day I began my life as a record collector. There was a lot of work from the American x i i    i n t r o d u c t...