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   3 7 marriage was their kind of renegade; they all agreed that they would like to work with him in the studio during some future road trip. It was a foregone conclusion that there would be another one. C h ap t e r 4 Walking Through an Open Doorway When Tommy Cogbill returned from Muscle Shoals and resumed work at Hi in the early summer of 1966, it was increasingly more of the same old thing. Ray Harris and Joe Cuoghi had hit upon a successful formula for the label , with lots of help from Willie Mitchell. “I always liked his horn lines and ideas,” Mike Leech said of Mitchell in those pre–Al Green days. “He was a funny, interesting man to work with in the studio. Plus, he had a regular gig at the Manhattan Club where Reggie and I would haunt quite often, and usually sit in.” “Willie was a very nice man. He was always together,” said Reggie Young admiringly, speaking of those days when he, newly married and starting his family, worked extensively on records with Mitchell. “I had an apartment over in East Memphis, and he helped me move my furniture . I learned a lot from Willie, especially in the R&B world. He would find that little magic spot and he would not go to the left or the right of it.” Willie Mitchell was universally respected and trusted by the Hi musicians, but there were a few slight reservations about Ray Harris . “Ray was a very country person, a rural person,” Reggie Young observed. “He was like a horse trader. He would work us to death. I liked Ray, but he was always trying to get something for nothing.” “He was boisterous,” remembered Mike Leech, who also noted that Harris didn’t have “a good command of the language. He was buck-toothed, with gaps. Very ‘rednecky.’ But funny, and fun, at times. Terms he used with an artist; ‘Crowd that mike, boy!’ To Reggie, ‘Clean that guitar up, boy!’ . . . 3 8   Wa l k i n g T h r o u g h a n Op e n D o o r w ay Ray could hear a hit, which was a plus, him being a simple carpenter.” “Although Ray Harris and Willie Mitchell had different styles of communication with you during a session, both were fine to work for as far as I was concerned,” said Bobby Emmons equivocally. “I can’t really draw any hard lines except to say I think Willie gave me a little more freedom in finding something on my own than Ray did, although Willie was cool in letting you know he didn’t like what you were doing. Ray would describe his suggestions with comparisons to familiar sounds or images (waterfalls, beautiful, shots, strong, light) and Willie would refer to musical landmarks (players, songs, styles, era).” Album sales at Hi, the label already billing itself as “The Memphis Sound,” were steady and respectable, and the results were always musical , even if listeners did not notice that on every Hi cut, one could hear the same dominant lead guitar. “Gosh, back then . . . Ray would cut, it would be kinda dry,” Reggie Young said about one of the most notable aspects of the Hi sound. “I can’t say it was bad because it was good for what it was. You didn’t get any reverb, everything would be real flat.” The flatness came from the layout of the studio, said Hayward Bishop, who visited the place around 1969. “Hi had a very dead sound.” Bobby Emmons recalled that the walls were covered with Celotex and that “they used portable baffles for isolation.” He remembered the slanted floor: “Royal Recording was carpeted (beige, I think), slanting uphill from the front door to the control room. I wondered if somehow the entrance wasn’t once at the control room since you didn’t go into theaters at the screen end back then, and the front as we knew it was on South Lauderdale, same as the address.” The recording space was known as “the killing floor” to all the regulars at Hi. Bobby Emmons described it as “one big room with the high ceiling except for later on, two very small booths in the far right corner from the front.” “I remember Hi as, walking in the front door to an entrance area with some chairs, then through another door to the main studio. I remember it...

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