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5 2   C h ap t e r 5 Grabbing the Pie and Biting the Apple Politically and socially, early 1967 was not an experimental time. The country was still basically in support of the Vietnam war; mainstream public opinion did not tip in the opposite direction until the Tet offensive one year later. Integration in the Deep South was progressing slowly due to white resistance, while up north the issue was evolving from a matter of basic civil rights to Congressman Adam Clayton Powell’s cynical but accurate term, “the gut issue of who gets the money.” In San Francisco, college students, local musicians, and disaffected dreamers had begun to cobble together an alternative society, but the hippie movement and what it represented had not yet gone national. But the music business is a world unto itself , and in this world it was a time for experiments . In Los Angeles and San Francisco, the Byrds, the Doors, the Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother, and the songwriters John Phillips, Brian Wilson, and James Hendricks (Mama Cass’s husband, who wrote many of the middle -period Johnny Rivers hits) were creating a new kind of rock music. In Detroit, Norman Whitfield and Holland-Dozier-Holland guided the output at Motown, placing strings, synthesizers , oscillators, and anything else unusual they could find over the jazz-based Motown backbeat. In London, the Beatles were still on the cutting edge; their albums Rubber Soul and Revolver had people from every field of music listening, and rumor had it that they were working on an album that would surpass anything they had previously done. In Nashville, Chet Atkins updated the smoothness of his trademark production sound to embrace a style he called “folkcountry ,” signing up Bobby Bare and Waylon Jennings to deliver music with realistic lyrics and slightly more aggressive playing. Within a year, folk troubadours flocked to Nashville in droves. Even easy-listening music was not just for elevators anymore. Herb Alpert and the Brazilian-born Sergio Mendes in Los Angeles, Burt Bacharach in New York, and Paul Mauriat and Raymond Lefevre in Paris were all rewriting the rules for music’s softer sounds, with a livelier beat and more intricate instrumentation ; soon Ray Conniff and Percy Faith would have to follow, filling their albums with songs like “Sounds of Silence,” material that was in some cases ill-suited to their style. And in the middle of all this experimentation was Memphis. With its sparse production and gritty-voiced singers, Stax seemed to be leading the way, but the success of the records on which Chips Moman and Tommy Cogbill played had alerted the powers that be, particularly at Atlantic, to the fact that Memphis was worth further investigation. With Chips in the process of upgrading his studio, it looked as if he was going to have a permanent base of operations when the work was done—a fact that also did not escape the notice of the people in New York. Goldwax and Hi still paid most of the bills, and with American under renovation many of the sessions done for Quinton Claunch at this time were recorded at Phillips with the engineering usually handled by Stan Kesler. A photo taken around this time, which shows Stan seated at a control board with Quinton leaning on the console beaming benignly and Doc Russell listening intently, is credited by many to have been taken at American, but was identified by both Quinton Claunch and Stan Kesler as having been taken at the console in the Phillips studio. James Carr did a few sessions there and so did Spencer Wiggins, Goldwax’s other long-running success at that time. “My first memory/impression of Stan was that he was very patient, methodical, unassuming . . . He listened to ideas carefully, considered a lot of G r abb i n g t h e p i e a n d b i t i n g t h e app l e    5 3 them. Was always open to suggestions, a good sense of humor,” remembered Mike Leech, fondly looking back at those sessions. The Goldwax recordings done at Phillips were augmented by players from Stan Kesler ’s stable of musicians, among them Bobby Wood. Reggie Young, Bobby Emmons, Tommy Cogbill, and Mike Leech could not help but notice how well Bobby’s sound fit in with what they were doing. They noted his gift for finding the perfect opener to a song—“I was the Intro King...

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