What’s in a Song? II

music, sex

A Fool for You by Ray Charles

He held the needle above the record, preparing to lower it into the proper groove.  “This song is about fucking,” he said.

My friend Stan Hahn had been telling me for weeks about a huge collection of jazz records his father had, and a Hi Fi system (the year was 1960) that was so good even a warped record sounded okay.  We weren’t using that system—he wasn’t allowed to touch it—but a small record player out beside the swimming pool that Stan’s father had put in the year before.  Stan had stayed around town that summer as the pool’s caretaker.  It was a full-time job.

He placed the needle.  The song was What’d I Say by Ray Charles.

Stan was playing from Ray Charles in Person, a live performance in Atlanta.  A far better version was the original, which appeared on an album by the same name in 1959 and which I think of as the most exciting recording ever made, especially compared to everything else that was around in ’59.  The opening on an electric base, followed by a drummer on his cymbals, was a marvel of rhythm and syncopation, which only got more exciting when Ray’s full-throated voice broke in.  Then there was that strange interlude where the band seems to devolve into anarchy.  Then Part II begins.  Which definitely was, if any song ever was, about fucking.

Stan and I were obsessed with that subject in those days, and any book or record that made reference to it.  We looked forward to actually doing it, which was way into the future for me.  Less so for Stan, I feel sure.

We were twelve years old.

Years later, I read in Ray’s biography that he had composed that song while improvising at the end of a show in Brownsville, PA, not far from Pittsburgh, where we listened to it.

After a while, Stan’s older sister and her friends came out to the pool and played The Genius of Ray Charles.  It was that album, the second side with strings, that captured my attention.  I heard those ballads and thought, That’s the most beautiful voice I’ve ever heard.  A perfect voice for singing.  I became utterly obsessed.

I’ve never lost that obsession.  I still, when I want to come back to basics and ground myself in something great, listen to Ray Charles.

In those days, we bought our records at the National Record Mart, which had stores all over the city.   I frequented the one in Squirrel Hill, about a 30-minute walk from my house (I could also take a bus, but once I could walk I preferred that).  They displayed the records by artist, and it was a total crap shoot what you might find.  One day there might be three Ray Charles albums, the next day fifteen.  But as soon as I heard The Genius, I bought every Ray Charles record I could get my hands on.  Eventually I had them all.  And in doing that, I got an education in popular music.

Ray began with some extremely funky R & B, also some standards, which he sang in imitation of Nat King Cole.  He came into his own when he began writing his own songs.  He was prolific throughout the fifties and early sixties, and recorded not only R&B, but also blues, jazz (which got me into that whole world), standards (in The Genius album, but also many others, like Dedicated to You and The Genius Hits the Road, where he recorded Georgia on My Mind), Country and Western (which he had listened to growing up in northern Florida), just about everything.  Years later, when I listened to Hank Williams, I was stunned by how great he was as both a songwriter and performer—he too was a genius—but I preferred Ray’s versions of his songs.

My obsession, I would say addiction, to Ray was largely a private matter.  Lots of my friends liked him, but I was far gone.  When I finally got a driver’s license, at age 16 (a scant four years after the obsession began, though it seemed like forever), the first thing I did was buy a ticket to a Ray Charles concert at the Syria Mosque in Oakland.  The following year, I went to a Louis Armstrong concert, also in Oakland, and took a date, but I was so wrapped up in Ray that I didn’t want the distraction of being with a girl.  I drove downtown to Kaufmann’s just to get the ticket, then made plans about where to park (I wasn’t yet confident of my parallel parking, and wanted to find a street where I wouldn’t have to do that.  I found one just short of Central Catholic and walked the rest of the way).

By that time I’d read up on Ray and knew that, among other things, he was a heroin addict and was sometimes nodding off (whatever that was) and couldn’t do a concert.  I was scared to death this would be one of those nights.  I dressed, of course, in a jacket and tie—this was 1964—and when I got to the Mosque, with my box seat (which turned out to be at the back of the first floor; the ticket seller said it was in the front), I was petrified that something would interfere with the concert.  I was one of the few white people on the ground floor, and if anything I was way, way, underdressed.  Black people dressed when they went out.  I sat nervously in the back, in agony, actually, while the band took the first set by itself, and the only singing was by a group called the Stylistics (who later became the Fifth Dimension.  If I’d been less nervous I’d have seen how great they were).

In the second half, the band started Swing a Little Taste and again there was still no one at the piano, but partway through Ray came walking out with one of his handlers, sat at the piano and adjusted the mike.  Then they played another instrumental, One Mint Julip, and he sang his first words, “Just a little bit of soul now.”[1]  I was transfixed.

That concert was almost an exact duplicate, as it turned out, of one he game in LA that same year, later released as Ray Charles Live.  Even the apparently improvisational moments, like the last verse of Makin’ Whoopee, were the same.

I was on a high for the rest of the evening.  My parents waited up in their bedroom when I got back, probably wondering if I would get back.  I wonder what they thought of their son going off to a concert alone, doing so many things alone.  My father sat in his pajamas, smiling to hear I’d had a good time.  He was dying of leukemia—that whole period is marked by that fact—and would be dead within a few months.

Ray was featured in a book called Jazz Masters of the Fifties by Joe Golden, who mentioned that Ray’s great masterpiece was his performance of “A Fool for You” on Ray Charles at Newport, a much longer version than the original.[2]  Ray slowed way down on his ballads in performance, even Georgia.  One article I read mentioned that, in the elongated version of A Fool for You, the song’s rhythm exactly echoed the act of intercourse, building up to a kind of thump, then retreating back.  I hadn’t noticed that (still hadn’t experienced the act) but found it fascinating.

At the end of the article in Jazz Masters, there was a statement that chilled me.  “His expenses right now are five hundred dollars a day, and he’ll be dead in three years.”[3]

By the time I went off to college in the fall of 1966, I’d seen Ray twice more, maybe three times.  I wasn’t as nervous at that point, and one time went to the Penn Theater with my mother and two brothers, some months after my father had died.  By that time Billy Preston had replaced the Stylistics as the opening act, and he sat at the organ in the second half while Ray played the piano.[4]

I didn’t have a car my first two years in college, but Durham NC was a small city and we could walk from Duke through most of what we thought of as downtown.  At the far end was an excellent store—much better than the Record Marts–called the Record Bar.  In the fall of my sophomore year, I saw a notice there for a Ray Charles concert.

I was with my roommate and closest friend, David Somerville.  He knew of my obsession; all he had to do was look at my record collection.  So when I told him we had to buy tickets for that, he was game.  The only (slight) problem was that the concert was at North Carolina Central, a historically black college.  We had no idea where it was or how to get there.

The doors at Central opened at 6:00 and the concert began at 8:00; all the seats were general admission, and I was sure the place would be packed; I insisted to Somerville that we get there when they opened.  So we ate at 5:00 and called a cab—the only thing I knew to do—and when the driver picked us up, he was, fortunately, black (a white driver might not have taken us). We told him our destination and he said, “You’re going to see Ray.”   He said he had seen Ray some months before, and it was special because, “That night, everybody in the audience was in the groove wit’ Ray.”

The two white boys in the taxi nodded.  I see.

The man dropped us at the auditorium, and when we opened the door—it was indeed open, at 6:00—the room was empty.  There wasn’t even anyone to take our tickets.

There was a very small stage, including music stands and a piano and organ.  It was a kind of huge theater in the round.  We seated ourselves partway up, opposite the piano.

We were the only people there for at least an hour.  No one ever did take our tickets.  Gradually people showed up, dressed to kill.  I don’t remember if we were the only white people in the audience, but we may have been.  At 7:45, members of the band arrived and frantically began rearranging the stage.  Fortunately, they didn’t turn the piano around.  The stage was tiny, and I was afraid that Ray, when he took his bows and stepped away from the piano, would fall off.  He didn’t.  I didn’t see how Billy Preston would do his opening number, but he did.

In the days before the concert, I’d bombarded poor Somerville with every scrap of information I knew about Ray Charles, including that fact that one of his slow blues imitated an act of intercourse.  He was mightily impressed.  I don’t remember a whole lot now about the concert, which largely resembled others I had seen.  But in the middle of the second set, to my astonishment, Ray leaned back and launched into A Fool for You.  The slow version.

I don’t know how many times I finally saw Ray.  Maybe ten.  I once saw him, memorably, at the North Carolina State Fair, on a day when I had gone with my wife and son and hadn’t known he was appearing.  We heard an announcement over the radio while we were looking at the sheep, and immediately changed our plans for the evening.  My son was six.  But of all the concerts I ever saw, I never again heard Ray perform A Fool for You, what I considered the great masterpiece of his career.  But that night he did.  Halfway through, Somerville turned to me and said, “Is this that song you were telling me about?”  I said it was.  “My God,” he said.

I couldn’t believe my luck.

We still didn’t know how the hell were we going to get back to Duke.  We had no idea where we were, where there was a pay phone (our only option), what we would do if we couldn’t find one.  But when we stepped out of the auditorium, the same taxi driver was sitting there in his cab.  He knew a sure fare when he had one.

“How was it?” he said, as we got in.

“It was great,” we said.  “Fantastic.”  I had heard the man’s greatest masterpiece.

“The night I saw him, the whole audience was in the groove wit’ Ray.”

“Yeah,” we said.

We still didn’t know what he meant.  But we also did.

[1] The original lyric was “Just a little pinch of soda.”  But I’ve read that it sounded the other way when Ray sang it, so he just started singing it that way.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7ARN07a7v8&list=RDk7ARN07a7v8&start_radio=1

[3] That wasn’t true, as it turned out.  Ray kicked his heroin habit, and died in 2004, at age 73.

[4] You can see Billy’s opening number here.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBF0SN88WIo&list=RDYBF0SN88WIo&start_radio=1