AN EXCLUSIVE EXTRACT FROM B.C. WILLIAMSON'S MEMOIRS
CHAPTER NINE: TRANSAMERICA 1962
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”– Jack Kerouac
The road. Endless road, stretching on for as far as we can see, maddening yet somehow enthralling all the same. Too many volumes have been written on its subject; it feels nearly futile to describe and detail the exasperating multitude of emotions and trials and sights and encounters along the way. Times have improved by unforeseeable degrees since the days in which we were travelling the road’s eternal expanse. I was used to the world outside my window; had been so for as long as my memory would allow me to bear in mind. When one is born into rigid conditions of such poverty, exploration comes logically as a natural rite of passage. But the intensity of rapid change exposed to me by the world of touring was unheard of in all of my reminiscences; the bizarre, unsettling sentiment of being in a different town, perhaps even state, every day of the week, and the impersonal sensation of playing to a new audience, the polar opposite of the forthcoming, dedicated Memphis crowd who loyally attended each and every one of the engagements in our adopted home town.
We had no tour trucks, no accommodation in any form of luxury. Our means of travel consisted of a small white truck that opened up at the back to contain our instruments and other items of equipment, barely leaving space for us to seat ourselves. One auspicious band member each hour had the opportunity of sitting up at the front next to the incessantly tireless driver and road manager who called himself Milton “Steel-Eye” Abrahams, rewarded with a brief window in which he could sleep or read. If not, one was confined up next to one of his equally drained colleagues at the rear of the vehicle, awaiting arrival at the next venue for a rushed sound check and check-in to a neighbouring hotel. The 100 watt guitar amplifier had not been invented, and no knowledgeable engineers with mixing boards followed us around the country, leaving us with poor sound quality, not helped by the antiquated arrangements of the concert halls, designed for Shakespearean monologues and acoustic jazz groups, not the overdriven electricity of The B.C. Williamson Blues Band.
For all of the token failures in preparing for this cross-national excursion, one strength could not be dismissed. After performing on and off for an approximation of seven years, the central core of the group (its backbeat and its lead guitar, essentially the two key components of any Chicago Blues sound) was undeniably well-practised in its knowledge of live music and the modus operandi that is required for an unbeaten performance. As much as the temporary surrounding musicians were unused to our characteristics and methods, I had moderate skills in playing the bandleader, using as few words as possible, if nothing else. Already inspired by the techniques founded in the early Fatal Discharge sessions, I was cranking up the amplifier – a Fender Twin model renowned for its clean, undistorted tone – to its limits, and playing with more force than ever before, in imitation to Tick Tock’s highly sophisticated drumming technique, building up novel theories and incorporating rhythms inspired by the style of John Coltrane’s drummer Elvin Jones.
The settings of the previous years’ tours were highly different in layout, as we were new entrants to the popular psyche, our record not nearly as commercially successful as those that would go after it. Initially, promoters booked us out primarily as supporting acts to reasonably distinguished white singers, backed by anodyne trad-jazz orchestras, singing their own worn-out versions of the period’s most popular blue-eyed soul music. Only rarely would we support an act that projected anything approaching the soul or blues that the middle-of-the-road artists so feebly tried to imitate in a typically watered-down, politically correct approach. As much as we would ridicule the evident phoniness of their music and rigid on-stage manner, the audiences contrastingly lapped it all up, treating us instead with all the hostility these fakes rightfully deserved. The crowds, despite their lack of sympathy, and the spirit of nastiness they created, taught us many invaluable lessons about performance, and I principally learned how to play the guitar without keeping my eyes fixed on what my hands were doing, permitting me to focus on any incoming threats, among these the possibilities of potentially violent spectators generously taking it upon themselves to throw heavy, often sharp objects onto the stage, where they would ricochet off now-worn guitars and speakers. By the end of an hour-long set, the one we would perform before I had to reluctantly take up the microphone in announcing the grand entrance of the long-awaited main attraction, we were glad to be rid of the duty for one night in any case. On the other hand, we understood that the test – which we had passed, if you could call our uninjured state an achievement in any sense – had been a valuable lesson for learning a trade that never quite allowed its primary producers a well-merited retreat from responsibility. I had a penchant for education of this sort; no matter how difficult it was, I was prepared to stay the course for the amount of time I was required.
Though it slowly becomes a worryingly regular feature of the touring existence, your first automobile crash is the one that scares you the most. Since the first large-scale tour, I estimate that I have gone through almost fifteen of them, to varying levels of damage, whether in cars or trucks or even full-sized coaches. It wasn’t even particularly that I had a poor driver. Steel-Eye was no race car veteran, but he drove safely and within the Highway Code’s limits. There was no reason for me to take the wheel at any point; I did not officially receive my licence until the early Sixties, and even then, health and safety prevented me from entering into that hazardous position. We had a trusted friend, who also played rudimentary bass guitar if we ever ran into troubles in the rhythm section, in addition to his vital work in repairing broken speakers and PA systems, and his unrivalled ability to spontaneously fix broken guitar strings without missing more than a few beats of the song. I remember not, but he could possibly have been drinking the night the truck turned over. We all were, as tomorrow was Sunday, and this being the Deep South, we had no commitments to play. But in hindsight it was a foolish idea to allow the shared bottle of whisky to reach Steel-Eye’s location. We saw none of the incident ensuing in front of the driver’s eyes, as we were celebrating the week’s conclusion with what little space we had to use, smoking and drinking and laughing like band mates often do at the end of an unkindly long week in this most taxing of offices. Rusty “Cool” Katz, the greatest blind bassist I had ever played with, was the lucky man up front this time, and I was charted to be the next one in line, just as soon as we had stopped at the next resting point, so Steel-Eye shouted through the small opening that connected the driver and passengers’ seats to the storage section behind.
At around eight o’clock that evening (I was able to illuminate my knock-off Rolex watch with a cigarette lighter every five minutes) we heard what I can only describe as the sound of two elephants colliding with one another, combined with the inhumane sound of metal upon metal, grinding and crushing our under-serviced vehicle into a wretched mess of broken steel. I woke to shouting from a faceless law enforcement man, my torso for the most part weighed down by a Marshall bass cabinet. Turning my near-motionless head to the right, I painfully noted that my Gibson ES-335 – its hollow body state now the cause of its sad fate – had been reduced to a variety of splintered pieces of wood, connected loosely by twisted metal strings and wires. Aside from my immediate surroundings, I could make out no other significant shapes or monuments around me, caused partially by the shock of the whole situation, and the fact that deep night was steadfastly approaching. My ears told me that many of the others were fine, if hurt, for I heard movement, interspersed with groans and an assortment of other sounds of hushed pain.
And then, while I would only realise this fact later, I faded gradually back into unconsciousness once more, awoken only by a welcoming strike in the face from Tick Tock. “Christ, we thought you weren’t gonna get up,” he whispered, talking to me like I was a patient recovering from a long stay in a hospital. But we were not in a hospital. In fact, we had hardly moved at all. The section of the road, and that section only – safety procedures then were far more flexible – was taped off in an elementary fashion, encapsulating the still smoking remains of the truck, with its entire front section crumpled irreparably like a crushed drinks can in a garbage dump. Around five personnel in different uniforms, and the other musicians, all intact if I saw correctly, stood blank-faced, staring at the bleak wreckage, presumably wondering what came next. I asked where we were to whoever was next to me, and I was told that we were on an obscure highway, just off Route 66 on the borders of Oklahoma. The police had the facilities to get us to the capital by morning, if we so desired.
“It’s good news. How we all love Oklahoma,” I said, my dazed condition taking some of the edge off of the disdain of the comment. Feeling fortunate to be alive, I started to walk the circumference of the area we were confined to, talking with my equally propitious associates. Steel-Eye, as I figured, was the luckiest son-of-a-bitch who ever walked this earth, when looking at the madness of the site before me. He was uninjured, in his own words, as he had turned the wheel violently, considering the impending collision. The cars had connected at the point at which Rusty was seated. Though his blindness thankfully prevented him from viewing the crash, he was hit most badly, with the anaemic paramedic team determining that he had suffered multiple fractures to his leg. Bassists never did have to make use of their legs excessively; God was smiling upon us from somewhere. Not taking his misfortune into account, the remainder of the group had escaped with undeserved providence; the doors mercifully opening to discharge the van’s contents, freeing the privileged from the rubble in plentiful time.
Surveying the site again, I attempted to salvage what equipment was left unharmed. As observed previously, the electric guitar’s distressing condition was beyond the point of restoration, but the three amplifiers seemed to have bypassed the apocalyptic horror of the collision’s consequential damage. The bass amplifier and the Vox AC-30 cabinet were both undamaged, owing to their relatively protected position at the vehicle’s doors. My personal amp had fallen more awkwardly, with its front landing directly on the road, causing the speaker cone to be broken, ostensibly without the hope of repair. As we would ascertain at the following night’s concert, the damage was not essentially a negative factor, because the dented speaker only increased the distortion of the electric signal. Mirroring Sam Phillip’s notoriously accidental discovery of the distortion sound, the broken element drastically altered the guitar’s tone, therefore moving the band’s sound further into the uncharted waters of creation.
The inconvenience had effectively denied any hopes of trying to settle down on the Sunday, and we had various tasks to complete as an outcome. First and foremost, a ride was desperately needed for the remnants of the tour, noting still the many months of obligations outstanding. We were required to contact Roseman when we hit Oklahoma City, waking him from unperturbed rest back in his comfortable Memphis home, so to request his wiring of emergency money to us; we could not hope to afford a new vehicle with the brown paper bag cash we had earned so far from the various concert promoters and venue owners. There was also the small matter of the transport of our remaining pieces of equipment, which would not be able to travel with us in the police-organised journey. Thus, as it was unanimously decided, Roseman was forced to pay a far greater amount to have the items couriered to our next venue, while we were to locate a car in the interim. The entirety of the detour had cost us upwards of $6,000 by the following day. We had successfully managed to attend the week’s opening concert, after a trivial deviation into the city, a visit like many that we had been forced to undergo during the year, unmarked by any events of particular importance. We were shaken up, a little hurt, and stripped of half a year’s worth of work, because of one drunken redneck’s mistake. And yet we kept on driving into the sunset, in search of the next town we were headed to. The road is like this. It isn’t so much the destination that is the focal point here, for the road does not have an objective of its own. It merely stretches on ceaselessly, and you are set a clear purpose from the very start: either you subserviently allow the road to enslave you, or you fall off early. It could make a man of considerable strength turn stone crazy. Beneficially, my friends and I were not disposed towards complaining behaviour; after all, no-one ever told us that the job wasn’t tough.
On the pathway that year, I seem to remember that we were progressing beyond the status of being a functional band. Changing associates by habitual routine makes one a better musician personally, as I have said. But it creates issues for those searching for a band that has played together for an extended period of time, to the point where admirable music will be formed by instinct, in the stead of sheet music or previously arranged charts. On a parallel topic, I believe many mistake notated scores as representing the music itself; this judgement could not be further from the truth, the sheet means nothing until one is educated to comprehend it. I never learned to read music, and though I’m in no doubt that I could have taken my compositional skills far further with the schooling, I don’t regret the choice. Returning to the band in the fall of 1962, we had been working since late 1959 when I had re-assembled the band after a brief disappearance, so it was nature’s course that strengthened us as a working unit by that peak. Since 1951 – a protracted course of time in immediate terms – Tick Tock Turner had played in my group, and if a psychic relationship existed between two musicians, it was amid the both of us. But credit must be presented also to the other, less fortunate band members, who had climbed aboard only lately in our small history. Though it took time, and though preliminary dates had the tendency to be ill at ease when judging the interaction between musicians, we had built up a working relationship that would last up until the end of 1964, when we had moved onto far greater things. It is a great tragedy that no associates considered filming or recording any of the performances, which could extend to two or three hours on most nights. Though the concerts stand lost to all but those present at their occurrence, I can still evoke fragmented memories from time to time: the sweat dripping off Tick Tock’s brow during the last encore, the numerous cigarette stains on the portable organ, the way I would play face to face against the rhythm guitarist and the heavy, feedback-laden numbers (we didn’t understand what feedback was and how it was created, but we relished in the magnificent roar it would produce). The audiences, brought in – according to the grapevine, by the ample sales of the album in South – were enthralled, and we jointly fed off those vibrations as any other able entertainers would. Two well-selling works behind us, the world was a new place, with audiences who were watching you not because they were waiting for Snow White and His Seven Dwarfs, but because they were, to whatever extent appropriate, interested in you and your music. That honour in mind, we had no alternative but to impress. And impress we did.
One benefit, and hamper, also, of the adventure, is the variety in the people one meets along the way. After a show, we were not always free to leave the premises with immediacy, on the grounds that someone had to collect the money before we travelled away. Without the presence of expert businessmen like Roseman and Ackhamann, we were confronted often, in our naïve states, by the crookery of certain employers who aimed to give us as little a cut of the promised fee as possible. By act of favour, however, JJ Smith was a fearsome (though gentle by nature) figure who would scare the life out of the toughest of Southern gentlemen. While we were waiting for the money’s collection, time was spent characteristically waiting in comfortable chairs behind the stage, shattered after a long gig. That feeling of exhaustion is bad enough, but it is proliferated additionally by the dreads that precedes it, in the knowledge that six of the next seven days will be spent carrying out that same unforeseeable task. One is expected to perform like a trained animal night after night for little to no reward, and this is why I have such undying respect for those who take their very souls out onto the road, refusing to be broken in by a world that is both thrilling and unbearable. Yes, some are broken in, and some never recover. But the thankful majority are gifted with more strength, and while the negative points outweigh those that are positive, we are drawn to this world because it prolongs the state of being an operational musician. While some abstained from live performance in favour of exploring the ever-complicated studio, like The Beatles and a small set of others, the musician is surely born to play out this reality, and I learned my trade on that hard road, not within a soundproofed building’s easy comforts.
Sitting behind the stage, all variations of the populace would approach you, with appropriately shifting levels of confidence. JJ Smith, as well as being an indispensable rhythm guitarist, was our de facto bodyguard and protector throughout the Sixties; even when he left the band he offered to do some occasional work. Accordingly, most of the people attempting to get in - freaks, Stalinists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, junkies, college newspaper journalists, aspirant collaborators - were coolly but effectively ejected in due course. Even so, I was met by differing people over ten times each night. Some were sincere admirers who had liked the concert, and I was happy to talk briefly, and to sign autographs, in spite of my lamentably awkward approach amid people so alien to my world. Others would come up to you speaking in their own incomprehensible dialect of the Southern drawl, advertising some kind of deal they wanted you to be a part of. One night, a thin man dressed like a wandering hobo approached with assured confidence, before asking me if I would like to discuss some business in another room. It was far too late for this, and I was no businessman, as I told him in a polite tone. Already other band members and contacts were assembling around us in tight formation, as if foreseeing a quarrel beginning shortly. I was undoubting, if to some extent apathetic to this man and his offers. “I’m not going anywhere, especially if I don’t know who you are, my friend,” I spoke firmly, turning to other distractions for a second time. Undeterred by the now packed cluster of people around him, he pulled out a small flick-knife, to my horror. But his moment was short-lived; within seconds he was pulled away and thrown out. Life went on, people moved onto erstwhile pastimes and I ordered a stiff drink. That story alone was simply a small, trivial paradigm of what could go on each night. You get used to the constant level of bewilderment, and then, without explanation, you feel markedly more uncomfortable when returning to the now unfamiliar land of reality.
As stated before, health and safety laws have progressed by great leaps since the Sixties, as have the technical limitations of concert halls. The typical preparation for a concert would on most days consist of very undemanding courses of action. Steel-Eye Abrahams started by transporting the drum set up onto the stage, where he would assemble it with notorious precision. On completing this, he would carry my two guitars (acoustic and electric for the unplugged and electric sets of the night), laying them upon stands with the third rhythm guitar. The Hammond B3 organ, which Roseman had taken out a mortgage to afford, in its heavily padded flight case, was painstakingly rolled out (often up stairs, as well) onto mid-stage. The amplifiers would be placed on the stage in the correct positions, and he would organize the PA system, making sure that we could be heard well enough with a small sound check. Conversely, we did not have the expertise of soundmen travelling with our party, and sound was more often than not muddy and unmixed. Without playback speakers, listening to our own music proved a complex task amidst the heightened applause and/or taunts. It lacked the exactitude of professional systems like the revolutionary portable Wall of Sound set-up the Grateful Dead created in the late years of the decade, but we made up for the inequalities by condensing our disorganized noise into one focused line of attack.
In its quintessence, the theory aimed to remove all objects of dubious necessity. So unwanted guitar hooks and organ turnarounds were jettisoned, leaving a stripped-down, yet undeniably loud roaring beast of an aural experience. It is superficial to make speculative comments as to whether this concept was one that would lead to the formation of the punk movement (I have always spurned upon phrases like proto-punk, and its other synonyms), as new developments in music are always informed by hundreds of different resources. However, there was a common sense of immediacy and economy that affected the atmosphere at those gigs, which would carry with us for years to come, and I doubt not that we could have influenced a select group within that moment in time.
In those days, all that separated us from the stage was a thin boundary of wires otherwise used for power supply. JJ Smith being busy playing guitar, no guards stood between the ever-frightening audience and the band. Even when we had reached stadium-filling fame, this did not alter. Who was going to hurt a musician? It seemed ridiculous. In these post-JFK and post-Lennon years, the world has changed by unforeseen degrees. In the early Sixties, Smith remained our only protector in the face of adversity, and it was solitary luck that no psychopath ever tried to kill me to an effective outcome. There were ill-advised fools from time to time, like the hobo mentioned earlier, but no serious threats managed to scare me until many years later. Though I say that with relative truthfulness, 1962 was marked by one unfortunate event that would injure me to a moderate degree, which would force the cancellation of a week’s worth of concerts, to my vexation.
It was the second set of a concert that I think, had it came to its close, would have stood out as one of the notable performances of the year. We had stormed through the first set in double-time, playing once slow titles like Fatal Discharge and Shotgun Blues with newly supercharged vitality, to the point that it was like an early Ramones record out there.
My guitar, which had been replaced in Oklahoma City after the crash with a brand new red ES-335, was on fine form, piercing into the hidden core of the song and injecting a soul that had only been heard rarely before. The Hammond B3 took more of a centre-stage this night, with Joseph Joneson taking much motivation from his similarly named contemporary, the MG’s Booker T. He played solo parts that lasted for minutes at a time in the gig’s looser moments, and he always operated far beyond the usually mechanical style of the conventional majority when playing accompaniment for the rest of the ensemble. JJ Smith, a guitarist who used the heaviest steel strings I had ever seen on his black and white Fender Stratocaster. And well, Tick Tock is Tick Tock. He cannot hope to fail you. Guitarists and horn sections and arrangers can come and go, but I will never replace Tick Tock, and the day that he stops playing the drums will be the day I retire to the country. Gladly, he shows no indicator that he will ever do this, so I worry not for such future days.
We were at the midpoint of a spacey re-envisioning of Ray Charles’ What’d I Say. Since hearing that song by way of the large stereo radio in Roseman’s house, I had taken on board many of the stylish creations the song helped to usher in upon its release. The samba feel, the Fender Rhodes keyboard timbre, the improvised lyrics, and its use of dynamics were all incorporated into later B.C. Williamson creations, including this ongoing performance, which was already by this time at the seven-minute mark, with Tick Tock coming in for his own unaccompanied part. He was never a showy person, and he was embarrassed at the prospect of recording solo pieces, which is why you never heard anything of the like on one of my own albums. But there he was, playing in his trademark style, at one time loud, at another gentle, rapid and then leisurely, in an invigorating display that impressed the bulk of the standing audience.
All, ostensibly, but the drunken man in the first row who announced his entrance onto the stage with a reverberating crash, as he careered into a row of speakers. Anyone who has once upon a time knocked over a live concert amplifier will know the resulting sound for its monstrous tone. We were all breaking to watch Tick Tock as he played his solo unremittingly, and I did not have my eyes on the audience as this occurred. As soon as the amplifiers had crashed down on the stage, fortunately undamaged by his disregard, I turned to look at the disturbance, but I was too late. Already he was walking blindly in my direction. A man with a knife again? A real loaded gun this time? JJ was making his way towards me, hoping to expel the intruder. The man was too fast for Smith’s slow pace, and I was knocked backwards of the stage, where I landed in a pit built for orchestra use, upon the hard wooden floor whereupon I was knocked out straight away. We were on a stage ten feet high that evening, prevented from injury only by our judgement and avoidance of the perilous edge of the stage.
What happened after that moment is unclear to me, being unconscious and all, but I am told that Tick Tock, same as ever, kept on playing and playing, so concentrated that he had not witnessed the assault. JJ Smith had picked up the fool and called the police, eventually passing over the man by hand to a worried officer a few minutes later. The concert was cancelled that night, with my poor state raising deserved worries within the band and our support base. After the police incarcerated the man who did the deed, I was taken to the local hospital in Clarksdale, Mississippi, awaking the following day with bad concussion and a broken set of ribs. The assailant was put in a cell for the night, and was let out, fined $100, the next day. Not one assault charge or anything close to that sort of conviction. I was too unaware to worry, and though I discovered this fact later on with much anger, I had to concentrate on my own problems.
The next few gigs were off, that was a certainty that Tick Tock had broken to me. I hated to miss a concert of any description; by putting my tickets on sale and inviting spectators to come and see my I was making an unwritten contract to repay their generosity with as much enthusiasm as I could possibly give. No matter what my state was, I would try to make a gig, if that meant securing an army helicopter to carry me to an unreachable concert hall, or sitting through an eight hour plane trip to play support for someone. I had braved influenza, laryngitis and other ailments before to attend concerts, but this was something else. The physician kindly told me that I wouldn’t have the capability to play a guitar for the next few weeks. This in itself was unfortunate, but we knew other session guitarists who could fill in for me. I was forced also by the injury to sit down while singing, and I would not return to the standing position for a year.