Short reviews by Michael Lydon author of "The Return of Ray Charles, Man and Music"

Aretha at the Fillmore, 1971 (from Boogie Lightning)

It was a night of nights. Tower of Power set the mood: "You got to funkify," and then King Curtis and his Kingpins and the Memphis Horns and Billy Preston, and after that, Aretha Franklin for an hour and a half, and then if your soul can stand it, Ray Charles and Aretha, and all of the above on one stage gathered, rocking, reeling, rolling, and tumbling with the dark spirit of music. It was Sunday, March 7, 1971, the excited eve of the Ali-Frazier fight, at the Fillmore West in San Francisco. The moment was recorded forever on inch-wide magnetic tape and is available on disc and tape as Aretha/Live at Fillmore West. It happened simply.

Aretha was closing her third and final show, leading out of "Dr. Feelgood," as she had on the previous two nights, into a long "yeah"-saying call and response with the crowd; then slowly, as if she were building a sermon, she began "Spirit in the Dark." This song Aretha made the title tune of a record; it suggests that a good cure for whatever ails you is to cover your eyes with one hand, cock the other hand on your hip, and wait until the spirit in the dark comes pulsing inside you and you are dancing and feeling good again. Try it sometime. This night she spread the song out forever, then walked off the stage, but came back with Ray Charles on her arm. She led him carefully to the microphone, sat down at the piano, and the song went on. Ray stood beaming, then, encouraged by Aretha, started to sing. The band soul-stewed as never before, the whole crowd boogied, and Ray and Aretha traded shouts, licks, breaks, jumps, and howls, suggesting that everybody get, keep, feel, figure, and cherish that spirit.

It didn't stop. We danced, clapped, hugged, kissed, and finally wept, sweating, eyes open and closed, arms above our heads- and they sang. Aretha found Tower of Power's lead singer and danced with him. She got Ray to sit down and play. Play he did, dazzlingly. In perfect duet, each seemed more individual than ever: Ray a more weathered and older spirit, Aretha a brown blossom, unquenchably feminine youth. Ray's heavy head is touched with grey, Aretha's skin is as clear as a Polynesian's. She was a girl beside him. Their selves seemed commingled.

Finally Ray went off waving to the crowd, leaving Aretha to close her own show. She sang a soft song about reaching out your hand to a friend--"making this a better world if you can." She bowed to all sides, spoke thanks to the band and to the crowd. She said goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. "I love you, I love you." She was gone. The lights went up.

Carl Perkins Tells About His Youth (from Rock Folk)

I was the poorest white boy in my school. There's a story from that time that still bothers me. (Y'know, some things happen you never forget and then you realize why people have bad dreams and hatreds deep inside. So you can't let 'em happen to your own kids.) I was in the fourth grade. One day there was a big pasteboard box by Miss Lee's desk. Kids were putting clothes in it. At close of school she called me to stay behind. I was afraid I had hone something wrong. (See, I tried to be a good boy. I would have stole, but mom's faith brought us through trouble. In my mom I figure I have something some boys don't never get.)

Miss Lee said, "I don't want to make you feel bad, but it's a hard winter and your clothes are thin and the other boys gave you this." I looked through the box and saw these corduroy pants. I had never had any. I was wearing them a week later playing football with a kid. He came at me and it was my job to tackle him. I threw him pretty hard. He said, "You tackle me like that again, and I'll take back those britches." That stuck with me, and I said to myself, "With health and the good Lord's help, I'll never be like that again, to have to be good to somebody so he won't take his britches back."

Went barefoot in the summer, we had to. No electricity. We had a radio and every fall we'd get a battery--we bought everything in the fall. I'd listen to the Grand Ole Opry; Saturday's we'd stay up to nine o'clock and listen. I remember how sad I'd get when the battery started to fade; it would last about three months, so then I'd stay over with friends to hear the radio. White music, I liked Bill Monroe, his fast stuff; for colored, I liked John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, their electric stuff. Even back then I liked to do Hooker songs Bill Monroe style, blues with a country beat. Colored man's rhythm--it's unbeatable; I can't do it. It's a soul type thing. They can make music on bucket lids; if a man broke a string, he'd just tie it back. High class instruments didn't mean a thing to them.

Jimi Hendrix at Monterey Pop, 1967 (from a report filed to Newsweek, 1967)

Jimi Hendrix is a strangelooking fellow. Very thin, with a big head and a protuberant jaw, Hendrix has a tremendous bush of hair held in place carelessly by an Apache headband. He is both curiously beautiful and as wildly grotesque as the proverbial Wild Man of Borneo. He wore scarlet pants and a scarlet boa, a pink jacket over a yellow and black vest over a white ruffled shirt. He played his guitar left-handed, if in Hendrix' hands, it was still a guitar. It was, in symbolic fact, a weapon which he brandished, his own penis which he paraded before the crowd and masturbated; it was a woman whom he made love to by stradding and by eating it while playing the strings with his teeth, and in the end it was a torch that he destroyed. In a way the heavily erotic feeling of his act was absurd. A guitarist of long experience with Little Richard, Ike and Tina Turner, and the like, he had learned most of his tricks from the masters in endless series of club gigs on the southern chitlin' circuit.

But dressed as he was and playing with a savage wildness--again, how to describe it? I wrote at the time: "total scream...I suppose there are people who enjoy bum trips...end of everything...decay...nothing louder exists, 2000 instruments (in fact there were three: guitar, bass, and drums)...five tons of glass falling over a cliff and landing on dynamite." The act became more than an extension of Elvis' gyrations, it became an extention of that to infinity, an orgy of noise so wound up that I felt that the dynamo that powered it would fail and fission into its primodial atomic state. Hendrix did not only pick the strings, he bashed them with the flat of his hand, he ripped at them, rubbed them against the mike, and pushed them with his groin into his amplifier. And when he knelt before the guitar as if it were a victim to be sacrificed, sprayed it with lighter fluid, and ignited it, it was exactly a sacrifice: the offering of the perfect, most beloved thing, so its destruction could ennoble him further.

Ray Charles: On the Road in 1950 with Lowell Fulson (from Ray Charles: Man and Music)

As a band bus rolls through the big world, it spins itself into a little world all its own. Good-natured Lowell led his world, its population shifting between ten to a dozen fellows and a few girlfriends; Brassfield cracked the whip when it needed cracking. Earl Brown, on the other hand, could always crack everybody up with a silly gag. Drummer Eddie Piper was a steady guy from LA, Billy Brooks a romantic always in love, and Stanley Turrentine the baby of the band; Lowell kept an older brother's eye on him. Through long afternoons Jeff sat up front at the wheel, and the fellows lounged in the seats behind him, their wardrobe bags hanging over the windows. They played cards and dominoes, slept, talked music, smoked cigarettes, gossiped about girls they knew and guys they had played with, told dirty jokes, nipped at gin bottles, and smelled each other farts. When the felows knelt in the center aisle for a noisy crap game, Ray joined in the fun, feeling the dimples on the dice with his finger tips. Yet more often than most noticed, he sat quietly by himself, thinking his own thoughts.

At sunset, when they reached whatever town Brassfield had scratched down from the last phone call with Shaw, Jeff turned the bus to the colored part of town. Near the club or Elks hall where they were booked, there usually stood a small hotel or boarding house, most owned by blacks, some by Jews, that catered to travelling black musicians. Pee Wee Crayton's blues band might be stopping there too or a gospel group like the Pilgrim Travellers. Gigs lasted from 9 to one, divided into an intro set by the band, Lowell, intermission, then a set featuring Ray before Lowell closed the show. After the gig was the time for ladies, serious drinking and/or reefer, a poker game that could last until bus call the next morning and off again.

In towns and cities the band lived in the black world. Travelling the highways put them face-to-face with Jim Crow: colored rest rooms and colored water fountains, buying food to take out from the kitchen door of restaurants, stopping to relieve themelves by the side of the road. Sometimes segregation was so stupid it was almost funny. One afternoon during a swing along the Carolina coast, the band stopped at Myrtle Beach. Ray jumped in swimming with everybody else until he heard the fellows shouting, "Ray, come back, man, come back." He thought they were telling him he had gone out too far and swam in. When he got there, they said they had stopped him just in time before he swam over into the "white side" of the ocean! Sometimes segregation was terrifying. One night out in the country near Natchez, the bus crossed a bridge only one lane wide. The white driver of a car speeding toward the bridge from the other side panicked when he saw the lumbering bus and ran off the road. Jeff pulled over to see if he could help. The driver started yelling that it was Jeff's fault. Minutes the state police arrived

"What you doin' round here, boy?" the cops asked Jeff. "Everybody off the bus!" They forced the fellows, Ray included, to line up, hands above their heads, and shone flashlights in their faces and fired off insulting questions. The older hands knew the only safe response was to say, "Yes, sir, No, sir," as long as necessary, but young Turrentine, from Pittsburgh, left off a few sir's at first. "Don't you know, boy, it's the law in Mississipi a nigger gotta say 'yes, sir' to a white man?" screamed one cop.

"Yes, sir," said Stanley, scared out of his wits. "I learned that night that we put our lives in jeopardy going out to play our music," Turrentine recalled years later. "We clung together tight, because our lives depended on each guy watching out for the other."