Bob Dylan's Brother from Mississippi: The Jim Dickinson Series, Chapter 3 of 3: "Famous Animals I Have Known"
Adventures with The Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Ry Cooder, and The Replacements
JERRY WEXLER, WHO CO-PRODUCED Aretha Franklin’s Spirit in the Dark (1970), remembered Aretha as "radiant" when she arrived at Criteria Studios in Miami. Jim Dickinson, on the other hand, who was playing piano with The Dixie Flyers, Criteria’s house session band, characterized the Spirit in the Dark sessions as "nightmarish," the singer’s ego, though painfully fragile, having assumed massive proportions. Aretha was carrying a bag of pigs' feet through the lobby of the Hotel Fontainebleu when it burst, spilling pigs' feet all over the expensive carpet. Without breaking stride, she headed straight for the elevator and up to her Presidential Suite.
The sessions were "truly bizarre,” Dickinson told me. “The level of her whole operation was pitched so high. When she arrived, it was the jivest thing; she had an entourage of what must have been thirty people.” As Dickinson saw things, the absence from the scene of Franklin’s ex-husband Ted White (from whom she had obtained a divorce in 1969) may have been a blessing, but it was also problematic. "Though he was obviously a very abusive man, he was necessary to her.
“But ‘Don’t Play That Song’ won us a Grammy [Best Female R&B Vocal Performance). I played guitar on the song because Charlie Freeman passed out.”1
If Dickinson is correct about having played guitar on “Don’t Play That Song,” the Atlantic Records Discography compiled by the online Jazz Discography Project (www.jazzdisco.org) is in error. It has Charlie Freeman playing guitar and Jim Dickinson keyboards on “Don’t Play That Song” and eight others recorded at Criteria Studios on January 10, 1970.
“COODER AND I WERE ACTUALLY RECORDING ‘Cross Roads Blues’ the day the photograph came out. I walked to the liquor store and bought a copy. Cooder’s saying, ‘That’s not him, goddamnit, that’s not him!” and I say, “Ry, look at the hands. The fingers, so long and beautiful, the extra skin between ‘em. You know it’s somebody. If it ain’t Robert Johnson it’s damn sure somebody.”2
I love Cooder; he’s got the strangest way of looking at things. He’s not like anybody, in any way. He doesn’t eat what other people eat. Everything he does is just different. He doesn’t call himself a guitarist, he calls himself a multi-instrumentalist. He’ll say, ‘Oh, fuck that guy, guitar players are all crazy.”
TS: His big thing, like yours, is the space between the notes. Is that his influence on you?
JD: It may be mine on him. I may have verbalized it first. It’s certainly the part that both our musics emphasize.
TS: What’s his special gift?
JD: Acuity of hearing. Cooder hears things dogs can’t. He gets frustrated with engineers about things they can’t hear but he can; because they can’t hear ‘em, they assume they’re not there. But Cooder can hear the millisecond delay between his fingers playing a note and the same note in his earphones, and I know he can.”
Please don’t say this, he’s real sensitive about it, but I think his brain has compensated for the loss of his eye. As much as he and I talk, we’ve never talked about it, Cooder’s loss of his eye. I’ve never talked about it, frankly, with anyone. 3
Chops-wise, I’ve seen guitar players devastated by Cooder, and he’s not even aware of it. They’ll play a lick, he’ll play a lick, and it ruins them! I mean, it’s a catastrophe for any guitar player to meet Ry Cooder and hear him play! I’ve seen guitar players get up and leave the room! Cooder doesn’t practice at all, by the way. He goes months without picking up his instrument.
I think Cooder brought me out to Hollywood to make mistakes. [Dickinson has collaborated with Cooder on a number of movie scores.] Real Hollywood players wouldn’t do the things that I do. They’d be afraid they’d never work again. One day we were working on Paris, Texas [a 1984 Wim Wenders movie which Cooder scored]. I’m trying to tape down some of the piano keys with duct tape.This European documentary crew is roaming around, shooting randomly; they don’t have a fucking idea what they’re shooting. One of these guys says to Cooder, “Vut is that man do-ink?” and Cooder snaps at him, “He’s playing his goddamned instrument!”
“Teardrops Will Fall,” from Ry Cooder’s second album, Into the Purple Valley (released in January 1972), Jim Dickinson and Lenny Waronker, co-producers. Dickinson calls Cooder’s “Teardrops Will Fall” “my best band track ever,” ie. he considers the instrumental bed over which Cooder sings the best that he, Dickinson, ever constructed.
I TOLD PAUL WESTERBERG I CONSIDERED it a privilege to work with him, he’s that good a writer. I’ve got a problem with music video. I think illustrated music’s a horrible idea. Music makes pictures of its own and I see pictures for every chord Westerberg plays.
Just when you think The Replacements are a silly joke, they jump up and scare the shit out of you. [Conspiratorially: They don’t like it when I talk about ‘em. Because I understand them.] Every time Westerberg writes a song, he’s commenting on a musical genre. He’s a satirist, a real one. The Replacements are a specifically post-rock band. They’re spectators, commentators. And yet they really do embody rock & roll. More than any kids I’ve worked with, they’re musicians in the classic sense of the word. It gave me hope to meet real musicians that young.
TS: In what sense are they “real musicians?”
JD: They have the philosophy of it, the whole life pattern. They might as well be black junkies in Harlem. It’s the same kind of survival camaraderie that got us all into it—into making music in the first place. And it’s aaalmost gone. If I hadn’t discovered that The Replacements were part of that tradition, I wouldn’t have wanted to work with them. But I also wouldn’t have known what to do with them if it wasn’t for my kids’ listening habits. What gives me faith in rock & roll is that my kids can find music that’s repulsive to me. They’re into this—ugh, it’s fuckin’ awful—this skate-punk thrash music.
And me? I still listen to the same songs I listened to in 1958.
“The Ledge” is The Replacements’ most harrowing song, one of the most harrowing in ‘80s rock & roll. Standing on a narrow ledge high above a city sidewalk, a potential jumper watches the crowd that’s gathered below. “I’m the boy they can’t ignore/For the first time in my life I’m sure,” Westerberg sings. The song ends inconclusively, although the echo with which Dickinson surrounds Westerberg’s final yelp implies that the protagonist is either about to jump or has.
The Replacements’ label, Sire, had high commercial hopes for “The Ledge” (given its subject matter, were they that clueless?), releasing it as Pleased To Meet Me’s first single and shooting a video for it. Although the video is innocuous, a random series of scenes with no reference to suicide, MTV refused to play it because of the lyrics. When radio became aware of MTV’s decision, DJs stopped playing “The Ledge” and it lost whatever small traction it was building. Replacements’ fans insisted that the band had been on the verge of a commercial breakthrough. “This song had radio potential,” insists the blog power.pop. But The Replacements were simply too raw for the big time. Nirvana, which came together as The Replacements were breaking up, did have commercial potential, and vigorously propelled alt/rock into the mainstream in the early ‘90s. The Replacements had stopped making albums in 1990.
STANLEY BOOTH CALLS AND SAYS, “MEET ME in Muscle Shoals on Thursday; the Stones’ll be there at 3.” 45
“Me and the engineer [Jimmy Johnson, who doubled as the Muscle Shoals house band’s rhythm guitarist] were the only ones allowed in. What’s his name, ‘Take a Letter, Maria’—R.B. Greaves—was recording during the day, with Ahmet Ertegun producing. The Stones recorded at night. The Maysles were there, shooting the whole time. The Stones cut three songs in three days—’You Got to Move,’ ‘Brown Sugar,” and “Wild Horses’ and split for Altamont.
At ease: Keith Richards and Jim Dickinson at the December 1969 Rolling Stones recording session at Muscle Shoals Studio, Sheffield, AL. This shot appeared in the Maysles Brothers’ film Gimme Shelter, which, along with Dickinson’s performance on the Stones song “Wild Horses,” “is what absolutely jumpstarted what I laughingly refer to as my career,” Dickinson said years later.
“The reason I’m on ‘Wild Horses’ is that Ian Stewart had some weird aversion to minor chords. They weren’t in the blues or something. Hell, I don’t know, he just wouldn’t play ‘em. [See note 5 below]. Well, ‘Wild Horses’ starts with a big fat B-minor, so Stu gets up and starts packing equipment. Jagger looks at me and says, “Aren’t you a piano player?” He knew damn well I was [Dickinson and Keith Richards had spent the afternoon jamming together], but he had to play mind games.6
“Wild Horses.” Dickinson, on piano, drops in a few notes as the song begins but enters at 1:10 to stay. Ten years later, over drinks at the Plaza Hotel in New York, Dickinson finally confirmed with Stewart why the latter had refused to play on the song. “It’s the minor chords, mate,” Stewart said, “I’m a boojie-woojie piano player and I do not play minor chords. When I’m performing onstage with the lads and a minor chord occurs, I lifts me hands in protest.”
“The Stones changed my whole way of working. I was just about to get too slick. But these guys worked like a band off the street. It was awe-inspiring. Jagger works the floor with a hand-held mike, teaching a song to the band. Then he goes into the control room and Richards tightens it up while Jagger works on the sounds at the board, one instrument at a time.
“Jagger writes the lyrics while he’s singing. When he had three verses of ‘Wild Horses,’ they started to record. That’s how they did ‘Brown Sugar,’ too. And I thought, “If they can do it this way, then there is no right or wrong.” You do it however it works.
Shortly before his death in 2009, Jim Dickinson sat down to tell the story of the Rolling Stones’ three-day session (December 2-4, 1969) at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama. After cutting three songs, the band left for the disastrous December 6th Altamont Festival. Dickinson’s observations and insights into how “The World’s Greatest Rock Band” conducted a recording session are a rich source of information and insight, delivered with Dickinson’s characteristic self-deprecation.
Charlie Freeman, one of Memphis’s top session guitarists and a member of the Dixie Flyers was, Dickinson told me, Jim’s best friend, mentor and biggest musical influence. A lifelong alcohol and drug abuser, Freeman fatally overdosed in 1973.
The “Cross Roads Blues” that Dickinson is referring to here is a remake of Robert Johnson’s “Cross Roads Blues” for the soundtrack, produced by Ry Cooder, for the awful 1986 movie Crossroads, starring Ralph Macchio. Crossroads was directed by Walter Hill, for whom Cooder wrote many soundtracks. The photograph that Dickinson refers to is the first photograph of Robert Johnson made available to the public. It appeared in Rolling Stone in January, 1986 on the occasion of Johnson’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the “Early Influences” category.
In an accident that occurred when he was three years old, Cooder was playing with a knife and poked out his left eye. He has worn a prosthetic eye since. In a 2009 interview, I asked him, “Do you think that losing your eye had to do with your becoming a musician?”
“Oh, of course,” he said. “It’s what did it. You talk about fate saying, ‘I think this kid needs to go here, so I’m going to fix it that way….’ Because that’s why a friend of my father’s gave me a guitar. I couldn’t do anything. I think he thought the guitar would comfort me, which it did. That it would give me something to do, which it did.”
The world of recording studios is as fashion-crazy as that of haute couture, and in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Muscle Shoals Sound in tiny Sheffield, AL was the place to record. Towards the end of their 1969 US tour, the Rolling Stones stopped here to see if they could come up with some songs for what would become their 1971 Sticky Fingers album.]
The music journalist Stanley Booth, one of the subgenre’s most gifted practitioners, embedded himself with the Rolling Stones during the ‘69 tour to write arguably the best book ever written about rock. It took Booth 15 years to finish. He suffered from years-long writers’ blocks, due to frequent drug abuse, lifelong polar disorder, and overweening perfectionism. The book was published in 1984, first as Dance With the Devil: The Rolling Stones and Their Times and republished a year later as The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. On its publication, The New York Times’s Robert Palmer wrote that “Booth’s book gets closer to the essence of the Rolling Stones than any previous author.” Or subsequent.
A native of Waycross, GA, Booth attended Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) while Jim Dickinson was in attendance there, and the two formed a friendship that lasted until Dickinson’s death. Dickinson never explains why Booth tipped him off that the Stones were on their way to Muscle Shoals Sound; it may simply have been that he wanted his old friend to have the rare opportunity to watch the Stones at work. Dickinson, as we know, ended up doing more than that. Booth died in 2024.
The Scotsman Ian Stewart was the Rolling Stones’ road manager and sometime pianist. A founding member of the band in 1962, Stewart was forced out in 1963 by the Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham; to Oldham, Stewart’s blue-collar, jut-jawed appearance was out of synch with the stylish image that Oldham was trying to shape for the band. So Stewart, whom all the Stones were fond of, remained as road manager and frequent session pianist until his death in 1985.
I completely understand.
Cooder and I share the left-eye-blind thing (I still have mine, but I've never been able to see out of it, so a lot of good it does me). Although he suffers no fools, he's one of the coolest, most straightforward, no BS artists I've ever interviewed.
Another priceless post.