“Garage band.” I didn’t see that combination of words until the 1980’s. It brought back memories, good and bad, reminding me that I don’t always like music played badly and out of tune.
I joined my first rock band in the mid 1960’s. Other kids joined sports teams and spent hours studying playbooks and learning the concept of teamwork from coaches with crew cuts—men with whistles around their necks and packs of Marlboros in their desk drawers, men who exuded pearls of wisdom such as “when we ‘assume,’ we make an ASS outta U and ME.”
My types holed up in our bedrooms with our guitars and drum sets, trying with little success to make rock songs give up their secrets; our coaches had long hair and their aphorisms were along the lines of “Hey, you, get offa my cloud.” Our teams were small, made up primarily of introverts uncomfortable in large crowds and unable to feel connected to tribes larger than four or five. We honed our craft not in gyms but rather in garages, where we painstakingly tried to assemble the bits we had learned into something coherent and musical.
It sounded awful. Playing badly with the Rolling Stones on my home stereo was tolerable, but murdering great music with others of my own ability was excruciating. It took faith to keep coming back to practice—faith that we could turn noise into music, that we would eventually be able to not only stand to hear ourselves, but would even be good enough to play in public and get girls. Music was our only chance at the latter, given our collective athletic ability.
Amazingly, we got better. The sounds coming out of the garage coalesced into songs, replacing un-tuned guitars, unsteady drumbeats, and vocals that had resembled someone stapling two cats together. It wasn’t great music, but it fit the dictionary’s definition of music, and it became its own reward once we’d discovered the joy of hearing a group creating something larger that its individual parts.
We’d play “A Hard Day’s Night” for example, and just hearing the song spring into existence and dying when we finished made us feel like gods. Looking at each other, we’d say “Again!” and make it live for another two minutes 55 seconds. We owned that song, and in our minds we weren’t Mickey Mantle pounding a ball out of Yankee Stadium or Johnny Unitas fading back for a Hail-Mary pass; we were the Beatles, rehearsing for the Big Concert. This wasn’t just listening to music. It was conjuring it up out of the air. This was magic.
The Big Concert became, in reality, the various teen dances and neighborhood parties we began playing when we’d worked up enough songs to play an entire set. It wasn’t until the 70’s that I began playing professionally, beginning with a ten-piece show band that played everything from Chicago to the Allman Brothers. This morphed into various rock bands, and one of the ways we made money was by playing pick-up jobs.
It worked like this: a band or artist would travel from city to city and use local talent to back them up. We’d get a call from our booking agent who’d send us to a club to play behind the Clovers or the Drifters or some other act with a string of hits. The artist would usually have a music arranger, who’d have sheet music or who would teach us the songs by rote on the afternoon of the show.
Sometimes there was no arranger: We’d have to learn from records sent by the artist, or (worst of all) off the jukebox in the club. I remember Major Lance feeding quarters into the jukebox at a lounge in Charlotte while we worked feverishly to learn “Monkey Time” and ten other tunes in real time. “You boys better get quicker,” the Major said. “I’m runnin’ outta quarters.” Of all the pickup jobs I had, though, the most memorable was with Percy Sledge.
It was on the cinderblock circuit, named for the crude buildings that sprang up like chickweed on the outskirts of small towns in the Southeast. This particular club was in eastern NC, and as we pulled the van and trailer into the sandy parking lot, we heard the unmistakable sound of small arms fire. Around back, Percy and a few others were taking target practice at the concert poster on the back wall: “Tonight only, Percy ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ Sledge, 9 PM til ?” Both the .22 caliber pistol and the “?” gave me cause for concern, but Percy’s toothy smile and “Hey, here’s mah BAND” gave me temporary assurance.
We loaded our equipment into the lounge, which like all nightclubs possessed no charm at all during the day. Last night’s stale cigarette smoke and beer smell clung to the shabby orange shag carpet, and the bright lights ruined any thoughts of romance or musical magic.
We began rehearsal. There was some talk about his guitar player, who had been missing for days and probably wouldn’t make the gig, but the sax player knew the arrangements. Percy’s big hit had to be padded into a set, and he had the usual soul music selection— ‘Knock on Wood,” “The Midnight Hour” and others that we performed in a less-than-soulful, Caucasian way that he didn’t complain about. Then came The Song.
Usually, performers don’t sing in full voice for the rehearsal (if at all); they hold back and save their vocal cords for the audience. Not so with Percy.
“When a Man Loves a Woman” is a tough song to sing—it’s in the key of C and most people drop it down a few keys and even then don’t nail it. Percy not only sang it in C, but did it four times as we learned it, each time singing it as though a thousand people were watching. We finished practicing, broke for dinner and made plans to meet at 9:00.
It was right before show time that we discovered this was a black nightclub—we were the only white people there. The plan was for us to play a short set of our own music and bring Percy on at 9:45.
The band launched into our usual opening number, “Brown Sugar” by the Rolling Stones. I didn’t sing it, but I knew the words: “Gold Coast slave ship bound for cotton fields/sold in a market down in New Orleans…” The lyrics got worse from there, and I realized how bad a choice I’d made when I saw indifference, then disbelief, then anger on the faces of the customers who had bothered to try to listen to the words, which the singer thankfully slurred in true Mick Jagger form. The song ended, and total silence began. I tried desperately to think of a tune that would erase the memory of the last one. The band stood, waiting. A beer bottle broke into a trash can. I realized the only songs that the audience would remotely enjoy were 45 minutes away. So, we then began plowing through our set list, which quickly bored the crowd, who began drinking heavily and ignoring us.
Percy was in the dressing room on one side of the stage. The door was a shower curtain, which blew open from time to time and gave us and the crowd stop-action pictures of him changing into his stage clothes—flannel jumpsuits of various colors that he lifted from a scotch-plaid, zippered suitcase. The jumpsuits hadn’t been cleaned in quite some time, and the plastic suitcase had perfumed them into a fragrance that stung my nose, even from the stage. They also hadn’t been ironed, but Percy’s pudgy frame smoothed every wrinkle. It was like watching sausages being made, and the young girls in the audience squealed “Perrccyyy!!” each time the curtain opened a bit.
Percy’s first set was hot. The audience focused on Percy, who sweated and worked the crowd like a master. Midway through the set, a young boy about 16—a local drummer—was shoved to the front and asked to sit in. Percy smiled, the kid got behind the drums, and the music jumped up a notch with an authentic soul beat.
The crowd was friendlier during the first break; I got lots of soul handshakes (elbows bent, hands up, clasp, release, four fingers in a “U” shape, hook, pull, unlock). I went outside to the parking lot and jumped out of the path of a Buick convertible driven by Jimi Hendrix. Or rather, someone who sort of looked like Jimi Hendrix—the afro was a little ragged, the bandana was tilted a bit, and the guitar was not a Fender Stratocaster but rather a cheap Japanese copy. He caught me looking at the guitar. “I used to have a Les Paul git-tar” he said, “but it flew away. Where’s Percy?”
I allowed that Mr. Sledge was in the nightclub. He snatched the guitar from the back seat and sailed his way across the parking lot with the smooth, careful gait of someone on a boatload of assorted pharmaceuticals.
The second set consisted (after Percy’s bit) of one very long, disjointed song in which the mystery guitarist demonstrated a variety of styles, blending soul music, psychedelia, and country music into a musical bed for a vocal rap that indicated his displeasure with a recent experience involving a member of the opposite sex—an unnamed woman whose inability to recognize his superior physical qualities mystified him beyond belief. He carried this musical marathon mostly by himself, relying on us only for periodic downbeats for emphasis, which left us plenty of time to marvel at what is still for me the longest stream-of-consciousness act I’ve ever seen.
That’s about all I remember about that night, but the memory resurfaces whenever I hear “When a Man Loves a Woman” on the radio. There have been a few remakes, most notably by Michael Bolton who had a hit in the 90’s with the song. Bolton’s version is flawless—totally in tune, superbly recorded—and several key changes jack the tune up to a fever pitch. What I hear, however, is Bolton saying “Listen to this voice. Isn’t this the best voice you’ve ever heard?”
Percy’s version is low-fi: The horns are out of tune, and the recording is primitive. But Percy is saying “Listen to this song. Is this a great tune? Have you ever felt this way?” You feel, you know Percy has felt this way.
And I’ve just made a liar out of myself. I said at the beginning of this story that one, I prefer music in tune, and two, that I owned a song once I learned it.
Given a choice between hearing true depth of emotion with out-of-tune horns, or superb musicianship backing up pitch-perfect but soul-less wailing, I’ll take the former. And only one person can own a tune: the one who does what the song demands.
So, when the radio plays ‘When a Man Loves a Woman,” I stop what I’m doing, turn off my brain’s pitch analyzer, let the voice wash over me, and visualize a tubby guy in a flannel jumpsuit, sweating in front of a hot crowd over 60 years ago—Percy Sledge, the man who will always own that song.