THE
STORY OF CARGOE
Beautiful
Sounds and Memphis Blues
CHAPTER THREE: The Things We Dream Today...
"So
they were vulnerable to takeover," Peters went on. "Leon
Russell was looking at buying the studio in a hostile takeover, if
need be. He wanted to make a fortune in property and,
essentially, he bought ghetto property in Tulsa with money from
his early hits. He bought the Church Studio, for instance,
and put equipment in it. He was also looking at Beautiful
Sounds in Memphis.
"Leon came into
Beautiful one day with a group of Shelter people -- four or five
of them -- and, man, you could just feel the negative electricity
coming off of them. We didn't know at the time what was going
on.
"To be honest, twenty-five grand would
probably have saved Penn's studio in the long run, whereas 50
grand was needed to save it immediately. That twenty-five
grand would have put Cargoe on the radio, and on the radio the
tale would have been told. Because by that time, progressive
radio was beginning on FM and the rest of the album would have fit
that format beautifully, while Feel Alright was the lead on
AM.
"You, know, Dan Penn's a beautiful guy. He's
one of the best guys in the music business and I think he just
badly wanted to save his place. At least, that's my latest
working hypothesis."
Penn, in interviews
subsequent to the folding of Beautiful Sounds, tells a slightly
different story, saying that he traded the mixing board to Chips
Moman which allowed him to keep the building, which he then leased
to an outfit which did ad jingles. He then moved to
Nashville, where he has been since.
"Anyway,"
Peters went on, "when we got back from L.A., Cargoe picked us
up at the airport and asked what had happened. We told them
that we had received an offer from a company which offered no
money and they were only interested in the single. That we'd
gotten three or four offers of small money and that we'd had the
offer from Epic. But when we told them we couldn't take it because
it wasn't 50 grand, their hopes were dashed. In the car, on
the way home, everything was silent. It was just a terrible
moment for them."
As if that wasn't bad
enough, they soon discovered that the session master tape from
Beautiful was out-of-phase.
"The studio
engineer," explained Peters, "not the guy who ran the
board, but the guy who built the studio, didn't align the heads of
the mixdown machine properly. We didn't know that because
when you're playing a tape back on the machine you used to mix it,
it is in phase with itself. But when you put it on another
machine, it can be out-of-phase. It gives you a muddy
sound. You don't pick up the highs and it just sounds bad.
"(The way we found out was) we tried to put the
band on Stax Records. We went over and talked with Jim
Stewart, co-owner of Stax at the time. He said that he would
be interested in the group, but he wouldn't be able to use the
tape that we had done at Beautiful because it was
out-of-phase.
"We didn't know how to fix
it. What? Remix the whole album? Well, there was
something you could do. You could adjust the heads on the
two-track you're on to be in-phase with the tape. Of course,
you can only do that once. Had we taken the deal with Epic,
that's probably what would have been done.
"I
think it would have been great to have been a white group on
Stax. It would have been unusual. (Note: A year later,
Stax would release a rock album by a white group: Skin
Alley's Two Quid Deal) Of course, it would
have been difficult, because everything feeds into everything. We
talked about it with Stewart. Stax distribution was primarily
toward the urban stations, which were their own little world, but
Stax was expert at distributing to stations that played R&B
and soul. We figured out some solutions to that with him, but
he said, first, you're going to have to fix that phasing
problem.
"You see, all that Stax wanted was for
you to hand them the tape. They would pay you for the tape
and send it down to Jackson, Mississippi to the record plant down
there. They didn't want to mess with re-phasing a tape. I
don't even think they knew how to do it."
While
all of this was going on, Cargoe kept themselves in the dark, by
design.
"I had no idea what was going on,"
admitted Phillips. "All that mattered to us was that
nothing was happening."
Wisley agreed, but
elaborated. "It was one of those funny deals where the
band members were disengaged, business-wise. We wanted to be
into the music and to play. We were the artists and we
weren't thinking about handling the business side of it. We
thought that the people around us were going to handle that
because that's what they did. And I/they thought that if they
could make it happen, they'd make a little money out of it,
too."
"One thing was certain," said
Peters. "Cargoe was helpless without us in that
situation because nothing was happening in Memphis. Stax had
turned the album down and Ardent was just, as you well know, a
small studio operation at that time.
"It
happened that part of the band's personality was that they were
easily influenced by the people around them at the moment, which
in some situations can be good, and that's the way they looked at
it. But in some situations, it can be bad, and that's what
really happened. They were taking the advice of people they
didn't know over that of people they'd worked with for months and
even years. That's partially why I gave in. They were
listening to people telling them things that I knew would not help
them in the music business and I could not change their minds. It
was band politics, you know. If you can't keep that under
control, you can't keep the band together.
"So
the single is dropping off the charts and the guys are arguing and
complaining so much to each other, about each other, and I was in
the middle of everything, and I finally said I just can't do this
anymore. They're off-center and I can't get them back on.
"It
was really terrible. There was a time that Tim knocked on my
door and asked me to stay with them, he thought they could
make me some money, and I said no. I was infuriated and hurt
that they weren't giving me credit or listening to what I was
saying or stopping the arguing or making forward progress.
"They
couldn't get along, which was the reason I stopped managing them
in the first place. And the girls made it worse. They
always do. They have their own viewpoint of how things should
be and they influence the individual musician they're attached to
and the musician then changes his relationship toward the other
members of the band. A lot of the trouble started with Susan
saying this and Sandy saying that and Sharon saying this, you
know.
"We had a dart board in the kitchen where
we would toss a few darts to pass the time. The more
frustration that was felt, the more darts were thrown. By the
time we left 1972 Cowden, the whole wall was covered with dart
holes. It was chewed to ribbons."
Walker felt the tension
as well. Tired of butting his head against the corporate
vinyl wall, he decided to pack up and head south.
"By
the end of '70," he said, "when I was offered a job in
Miami radio, I was ready to go. The band and Peters remained
in Memphis. Ardent owner John Fry had lent us money to buy
amps and stuff, so that relationship developed into the Ardent
recordings. That was the end of my involvement with
Cargoe."
It should be noted here that while
Walker exited for Miami, his part in the Cargoe story is
treasured.
"We did some remarkable writing and
recording," he wrote recently. "I am very proud of
what we did accomplish and I will always be grateful to Dan Penn
for the doors he opened to me (and thus, the band) on sheer
faith. I will always be grateful to Bill, Max, Tim, and Tommy
for letting me into the band as a producer. And Jim Peters is
among my very best friends, to this day."
Peters
stuck around for awhile, but it finally became too
uncomfortable. The band met with Fry and Manning at Ardent
and agreed to record for the resurgent Ardent label (Fry had
released a handful of 45s on that label earlier, but not as
seriously as what he would when the Cargoe and Big Star projects
were completed).
"By the time they went to
Ardent," Peters remembers, "I was no longer managing
them. Those were volatile times.
"I saw
Penn sometime later and spent the night at his house, and he asked
if I was still Cargoe's manager. I said not really, so he
asked who their manager was and I had to say that I didn't think
they had one." The subject was dropped. Thus ended
Jim Peters' working relationship with Dan Penn, the man who had
carried Cargoe not only to Memphis, but to Ardent.
At
1972 Cowden, the tension had reached a critical point. "We
had been at Beautiful long enough to see that they weren't going
to do anything for us. It is great to have an album
(recorded), but if it's not distributed, you're still at square
one. You're still just a garage band trying to find
gigs."
Those words describe another critical
point in the band's existence, toward the end of their attachment
to Ardent. But at that time, Ardent had supplied a lifeline
and, anyway, there was no other direction available.
All
Together Now, One More Time...
"We were all
trying to be The Beatles. That's what we were trying to do
with Big Star and, in a very 
similar
way, that's what we were trying to do with Cargoe."
--
Terry Manning, Record Producer, Recording Engineer, Co-owner of
Ardent Records (1970-1974), Owner, Lucky Seven Records
By
the time Cargoe signed with Ardent, Terry Manning had been a force
on the Memphis recording scene for years. He had started at
Ardent as a recording engineer and after proving himself on
numerous projects, had elevated himself to part-time producer and
recording consultant. Among his credits were projects with
the Staple Singers, Booker T and the MGs, and Al Green. He
worked with Steve Cropper mixing Dock of the Bay shortly
after the tragic death of Otis Redding and had his fingers in
multiple pieces of the Stax/Volt/Hi R&B pie for which Memphis
was known. Between such duties, it was natural that he would
take his propensity to play music seriously as well.
"By the sixties and
seventies," he said in an interview with Pseu Braun on
WFMU-FM, "Memphis was a player's place. Unlike Nashville
and Austin, which were known as havens for great lead guitarists,
Memphis had every kind of players: great keyboard players,
tremendous bass players, all different kinds of guitar players
(not the lead guitar as much as a very cool chunky rhythm
style). If you were in a band in Memphis at that time, you
needed to be able to play. Maybe you weren't the greatest
musician in the world, but you knew music.
"We
had a group of people hanging around Ardent in those days who were
not only players, but who were rebelling against the previous
Memphis sound in deciding that the English invasion -- The
Beatles, The Yardbirds, The Animals, things like that -- were just
so cool that we really wanted to be like that. We didn't want
to be playing In the Midnight Hour at a club down the
street, because everybody was doing that. We wanted to play
things like The Yardbirds' I'm a Man. So we all,
without knowing it or thinking it, banded together into this power
pop thing. We didn't think of it like that at the time. We
were just doing what we wanted to do. We were playing the
kind of music we wanted to play and we were all trying to be The
Beatles.
"That's where Rock City
happened, a band in which I played with Christopher Bell, Jody
Stephens, and Thomas Dean Eubanks. We went in and
recorded this album. John Fry and I tried to get it to the
major labels. We would make trips to L.A. and New York and go
see the heads of the labels and the A&R people and take them
the tapes we had done. And we weren't getting anywhere. A&M
did give a call back. They were interested, but not enough to
sign us. We finally said, you know what, we're going to have
to do this ourselves. John had had a few things out, some
early rockabilly things, a few years before. So we decided to
have a rock/pop label called Ardent and we would just put our own
groups on our own label. Then we knew we could get it
released.
"Of course, by that time, Chris (Bell)
had gotten together with Alex Chilton and some more recordings
were going on which later became the Big Star recordings, so I
shelved the Rock City project. Chris took two or three of the
Rock City songs and they recorded a couple of guitar and vocal
tracks which they overlaid onto them and actually put them on the
Big Star album as Big Star tracks. They became part of Big
Star and part of the Big Star lore. And I basically went on
to producing other things.
"(As far as studio
and production work), I was engineering a lot of the stuff at Stax
Records, such as the Staple Singers. I was co-producer along with
a great friend, Al Bell, on many of the Staples Singers records. I
did a lot of the engineering and mixing and played some of the
parts on things by Booker T and the MGs. A lot of the great
things that were around Stax, I engineered, or actually, mixed a
lot of things by Al Green, such as Tired of Being Alone and
Let's Stay Together. All of that era of things,
alongside Willie Mitchell. I got into the pop and rock things
later and worked with Led Zeppelin and Joe Cocker, among
others. But then, it revolved around Stax, Volt, and
Hi.
"I'd had my solo album out and didn't want
to go touring or doing much of that. I liked the studio side
of it. So I would play occasionally play things on some
peoples' records, but mainly stayed in the studio with groups such
as Cargoe."
Cargoe's move to Ardent was almost a
given at that point. "Ardent owner John Fry had loaned
us money to buy amps and stuff," Walker remembered, "so
that relationship developed into the Ardent recordings."
Richard
Rosebrough remembered Cargoe's first session. "I cut the
original Cargoe demo at Ardent -- three songs. And I think
two ended up on the album.." A drummer himself, it was
not surprising that he ended the note with: "Tim was a
favorite drummer of mine."
"We needed more
than just one or two groups we could put together from these guys
who were hanging around. I happened to hear a local record of
Feel Alright by Cargoe. I checked it out, found out
that they'd come to Memphis from Tulsa. To be honest, I thought
the song was awesome, the group was awesome, the singing was
great, but I didn't think the record -- perhaps every producer
thinks this, but I thought that record could be produced so much
better. So we checked them out and found out that they were
free to sign with Ardent and we signed them. Subsequently, we
recorded an entire album which actually became the first one
released on the Ardent label."
It took the band
a year to put the LP together, even though it consisted mainly of
the same tracks recorded for Beautiful. But it wasn't exactly
the same, according to Peters.
For one thing, the
band had a better idea of what they wanted, partially due to the
fact that they were recording much of the same material. A
close listen to the first side showed a concerted effort to
structure the side so that the tracks flowed.
"I
think part of that was Terry and part of it was that we had been
playing and trying to refine those same songs in Tulsa before we
even got to Beautiful," Phillips explained. "By the time
we got to Ardent, two or three years later, I was saying, shit,
are we going to have to record this stuff again? I was
getting a little burned on it, really. I mean, okay, play it in
this same structure. And the more we played it, the more the
interludes between songs and how the end of one song went into the
beginning of another song and so on. It was that living with
this stuff for so long that helped it seem like the side had an
order or that there was some kind of plan. It did all fit
together. Terry saw it, too, and he was into trying to make
the parts fit together into a cohesive album, I think.
"You
have to realize that we just came from Beautiful, where it was
like this party time, totally loose atmosphere. Ardent was
kind of like, you need your shit together to record here. And,
do you have a plan. Later, we learned that anything weird we
did, anything outside the bulb, Terry was all over it. There
was this time we were playing around in the studio with coke
bottles filled with water or coke and we were trying to make a
riverboat sound by blowing into them three at a time. Well,
Terry was all over recording stuff like that. We had no idea
he was catching all this other stuff we were doing."
"You
know," Wisley added, "the coke bottles, that's the
beginning of I Love
You Anyway. We
were always doing little harmonies and weird whistles and coke
bottle things. At the end of Time
where there is this explosion
kind of thing, that's a belt. We had really thick belts like
the kids were wearing then. We went into the echo chamber
and, you know when you pop a belt? That was the boom. That
was the explosion."
"When we started at
Ardent," Wisley said, "I had no idea that Terry was
working with the Staple Singers and had all of this stuff going on
around him. He was just a guy, a killer engineer, who enjoyed
our stuff. I've since heard stories that when he listened to
us when we were performing, his mouth was open. He thought we
were unbelievable. He was really just one of our biggest
fans, to us."
Pseu Braun, during the WFMU
interview, asked about the lyrics, about the references toward the
religious side.
"A lot of
references in the songs that I wrote did mention the word
'Jesus.' Outside of trying to be The Beatles or The Monkees
or the Buffalo Springfield or whoever we thought was great in
those days, one of the things we were trying to attain in our
songwriting was kind of a search for enlightenment,
nirvana. Trying to find the ultimate way or something like
that. Back in the old hippie days, it was just a big search
for enlightenment. What is the answer? What makes it all
work? Why is this good and why is this not good? These
days, I probably would not use the words 'Jesus' or 'Lord' or
'God' or anything like that. It would hopefully be a little
more complicated than that. But I was seventeen when I wrote
those songs and that was close enough to what I was trying to say
to get the meaning across."
"In the late
sixties," added Wisley, "it happened that we'd been
turned on to sitar music and other things and we were probably
smoking a little bit. We were out there trying to reach some
meaning and touch base. I think that it was kind of
subconscious."
Not all of the
tracks were carryovers. Wisley remembers a few new
songs. Thousand Peoples Song was new," he said,
"and one of my songs was new -- Scenes. And that
intro thing, you know, 'This is real...' The intro to Feeling
Mighty Poorly. I wrote that on four strings of the guitar
when we lived at Cowden.
Rock City and the early
tracks by Big Star were laid down at Ardent's original studio on
National Avenue. Cargoe's recordings spanned that studio and
a new quad studio being built on Madison, where Ardent Studios are
today.
"We had to work in between paid studio
time and the building of the new studio," the guys remember.
"We even had some workers drilling in the studio while we
were trying to record. You could hear the drill on one of the
tracks."
"The Ardent album was really
different," Wisley said. "It wasn't like a studio
album. We were more of a live band, so it wasn't like a
'studio' album. And we always kind of wanted to really do
that."
"We had a good time
at Beautiful Sounds," said Phillips, "but it was pretty
non state-of-the-art." (Wisley compared it to somebody's
home studio in today's world.) "It was a new studio at
the time, but comparing it to Ardent ... I mean, I love Dan Penn
all to pieces, but when we moved to Ardent, the fidelity factor
increased 200%. Even at the studio on National, John Fry had
state-of-the-art equipment and guys who knew how to make it work.
Of course, when the studio on Madison was built, I liked that even
better."
"It had its own feel," Wisley
hedged, "but there was an aura about National. Across
the street from National was the Big Star supermarket. You
could look out this window and see the Big Star sign. I
remember when Big Star came and said they were going to name the
band Big Star. We all thought that was so hokey.
"And
I remember when Terry brought in this tape and said this is the
greatest rock and roll song ever. It wasn't out yet, and it
turned out to be Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven. He
threw it on and ran it through the monitors there and we said,
'what is this?'"
While Manning worked with
Cargoe, John Fry stopped by the Big Star sessions to make sure
that everything there was on track. Chris Bell had taken over
much of the responsibility for the production, though Fry would
get final credit [ed. note: it was Bell's idea to give Fry the
credit].
CHAPTER
ONE: Living On Tulsa Time...
CHAPTER
TWO: Into the Mystic...
CHAPTER
FOUR: Delusion and Dissolution...
CHAPTER
FIVE: The Painful Look Back and...
CHAPTER
SIX: Such Is the Power of Music...
Supporting the Indies Since 1969
