I'm Just Dead, I'm Not Gone

Jim Dickinson, Ernest Suarez

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781496811189
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

I'm Just Dead, I'm Not Gone chronicles Jim Dickinson's extraordinary life in the Memphis music scene of the fifties and sixties and how he went on to play with and produce a rich array of artists, including Aretha Franklin, the Rolling Stones, Ry Cooder, Duane Allman, Arlo Guthrie, and Albert King. With verve and wit, Dickinson (1941–2009) describes his trip to Blind Lemon's grave on the Texas flatlands as a college student and how that encounter inspired his return to Memphis. Back home, he looked up Gus Cannon and Furry Lewis, began staging plays, cofounded what would become the annual Memphis Blues Festival, and started recording. The blues, Elvis, and early rock 'n' roll compelled Dickinson to reject racial barriers and spurred his contributions to the Memphis music and experimental art scene. He explains how the family yardman, WDIA, Dewey Phillips, Furry Lewis, Will Shade, and Howlin' Wolf shaped him and recounts how he went on to learn his craft at Sun, Ardent, American, Muscle Shoals, and Criteria studios from master producers Sam Phillips, John Fry, Chips Moman, and Jerry Wexler. Dickinson is a member of the Mississippi Music Hall of Fame and an inaugural inductee of the Memphis Music Hall of Fame. He has received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Engineering and Production from the Americana Music Association, a Brass Note on the Beale Street Walk of Fame in Memphis, and a Heritage Marker on the Mississippi Blues Trail. This memoir recounts a love affair with Memphis, the blues, and rock 'n' roll through Dickinson's captivating blend of intelligence, humor, and candor.

Part I

THE SEARCH FOR BLIND LEMON
(1941–1971)

Chapter 1

WENT TO SEE THE GYPSY
(1961)

BE STILL AND KNOW THAT THERE IS GOD read the sign in the old woman’s yard. There were cages crowded with chickens and rabbits and a pen with goats. It looked like a gypsy camp. Locals believed she held ritual sacrifices and read the still warm entrails to foretell the future. The sign on the trailer read, OPHELIA HARWOOD—CONSULTANT PSYCHOLOGIST. Framed certificates and diplomas filled the walls inside, every available surface covered with stacks of books and magazines. She sat across from me studying a lunar chart and muttering, “Boy, you don’t know what you want, do ya?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, truthfully.

Spring 1961, Waco, Texas: my failed freshman year of college. Ophelia Harwood’s trailer camp lay at the mouth of Cameron Park, sprawling acres of trees, bushes, and vines, some completely wild and some sculpted into otherworldly grottoes with monolithic stones and strange statues. The meandering Brazos River’s prehistoric canyons and cliffs had been carved with Indian legends of Lovers’ Leap. It was easy to get lost in Cameron Park. Students were warned to stay away after dark with stories of murderous “chain gangs” and the Hook Man. We spent many drunken nights driving the dark tree-tunneled narrow winding roads. I had seen Ophelia Harwood’s camp and read the sign many times that year.

So there I sat:

Flunking out of school

In dread fear of being drafted

Crazed by drink and drugs

Struggling to finish my so-called

novel begun in Memphis long ago

I told her I wanted to be a writer.

She grunted, “You might do some writing later on but you better stick to the music. It comes naturally to you.”

I hadn’t told her I played music!

“You’re in the middle of a fourteen-year slump. Nothin’ you can do about it. Just ride it out. I got Scorpios coming to me worse off than you. One committed suicide. Stick with the music. You might write a couple of books later, but now you’re too confused.”

She told me things about my past and my future. She told me my father was sick and that was the source of our conflict. She told me my grandmother was going to die; my family was going to move. She told me not to get married because I didn’t know what I wanted. She wished me luck. “You’re going to need it,” she said.

I left the gypsy and started drinking. The gypsy had done little to alleviate my anxiety. Ghosts from home called me in the Texas night. What had brought me to the cliff’s edge? Who, where, and what were the people, places, and chain of events that brought me face to face with the terror that comes in the night?

Set the controls on the way-back machine for once upon a time, to the beginning. Out of the primordial ooze comes the Swamp Beast, dripping slime and tadpoles. Sharpen up your razor; pour gin in your glass. Play me some blues, my man, and take it back one night at a time. Run it by again and let me shoot at it.

Chapter 2

“MY FATHER WAS A TRAVELIN’ MAN …”
(1787–1949)

My family tree includes John Dickinson, a signer of the Constitution of the United States; Almeron Dickinson, a defender of the Alamo; and Charles Dickinson, who ended up on the losing end of a duel with Andrew Jackson (a family villain). My Great Uncle Tom, a one-armed railroad lawyer who rolled cigarettes on his starched dress shirt’s empty sleeve, kept the family history. He told it to me in a cracked old voice through tobacco-yellowed snaggleteeth.

My father, Big Jim, liked things in order: columns of numbers, parallel lines, cotton rows, and stacks of cartons in a warehouse. His father was a wholesale grocer in Little Rock. Big Jim ran away from home at age fourteen to escape a cruel, controlling, schoolteaching mother. He went to the Smackover oil fields. The boom was on. He got a job in a grocery store. The store owner knew my grandfather, and contacted him about my runaway dad. My father told my grandfather that if he were taken home, he would run away again. So he was sent to military school. My father loved marching in lines. But he had already developed a problem with authority and was in trouble much of the time. He was caught bootlegging moonshine in his car’s radiator. He said he graduated. I was never sure he did.

He wanted to build bridges. He managed to get into Georgia Tech’s engineering program, which entailed one semester in class and one working on a road gang. He liked the roadwork, but was impatient with school classes. In the spring of ’29, he quit school, and went with a group of friends to get construction jobs on the Grand Coulee Dam. His friends dropped off one by one, leaving my father stranded in Oklahoma. My father liked working and having a job. As a result of seeing his father, “Jimmy Dick,” lose the family money on the Cuban sugar market, financial security was important to him. He liked for his columns of figures to add up.

He got a job as a traveling salesman selling specialty items, wholesale to retail. A career was born. The company teamed him with a crusty old salesman to break him in and show my father the territory. The first day the old man got in the driver’s seat of his Model T Ford, with a pint whiskey bottle and a Colt .44 revolver next to him. They drove dry river beds and gullies as often as roads, going from town to town, through the bleakest part of the Oklahoma territory, jobbing General Foods products to local grocery stores. The old man said nothing to my father all day. The next day my father bought a pint of whiskey and a gun, and laid them down on the seat next to the old man’s. Every time the old man took a drink, my old man took a drink. They got along fine after that. They would stop and shoot their pistols at jackrabbits in the shadows behind the telephone poles along the road.

After his first week my old man was on his own. He opened up the Oklahoma Territory for Jell-O and Sanka coffee (imagine explaining to some half-wit Okie what Jell-O was). My father carried a small test tube full of quinine, and told his customers it was “deadly caffeine, enough to wipe out Oklahoma City”; that’s what Sanka took out of coffee. My old man was a hell of a salesman. He peddled a million dollars of penny matches a year, but that comes later.

Big Jim worked his way up even as the stock market crashed. My father had a good job when most men were struggling. Businesses closed; people lost their jobs. Men who had never considered unemployment looked for work desperately. My father hired men with Master’s degrees to sell Jell-O door to door. He was “cooking with gas,” as he liked to say. He came home to Little Rock a success. He had a job, big city clothes, and a new car with the first car radio in central Arkansas.

He was driving his new car on a snowy winter afternoon by the school where his mother taught when he saw a girl with her head down, walking in the snow. He stopped and offered her a ride. She was Martha Huddleston and became his wife and my mother. A conservatory-trained accompanist, she taught and played piano in the Baptist Church most of her life and never took a nickel for it.

The Traveling Salesman and the Music Teacher were an unlikely couple: my father, a backsliding Methodist who drank and gambled; my mother, a Hard-shell Baptist. They married in Little Rock, went to Memphis for their honeymoon, and headed back to the Oklahoma dust bowl.

My mother must have felt lonely, spending days in hotel rooms while my father earned a living. She learned to put up with his drinking and his rowdy “brothers of the road” salesmen. She heard sordid stories of Big Jim’s checkered past, stories involving monkeys in hotel rooms and card games with Baby Face Nelson. But she “made the adjustment,” as she used to say.

My father went to work for the Diamond Match Company, and was transferred to Memphis, which was not quite home but good enough. I was conceived in a rooming house by the zoo and carried to term. My mother wanted to have her baby in Little Rock, where I was born on November 15, 1941. My mother was not quite five feet tall, so small I put her in danger. Like Caesar I was ripped from the womb. We went home from the Baptist Hospital on December 7, “a date that will live in infamy.”

The company transferred my father to Los Angeles. In Hollywood we lived in an apartment house down the hill from Griffith Observatory, later immortalized by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause. My maternal grandmother, Huddie, came to help my mother take care of me. No small task even then. She took me for long walks in a four-wheel walker stroller. One afternoon, so the story goes, she rolled me down Hollywood Boulevard, and we encountered Mae West, star of stage, screen, and radio, the Dolly Parton of her day. Mae West looked in my stroller and said, “My, what a handsome boy.” My grandmother asked how she knew I was a boy. Mae West replied, “Honey, I have a way with men.”

We had shiny, oilcloth blackout curtains that my parents put over the windows at night. There was talk of Japanese submarines off the California coast, speculation that years later proved to be true. My father hated L.A. He was uncomfortable in the West Coast market. His way of doing business didn’t work there. After six months we moved to Chicago and everything changed.

My parents loved Chicago. No blackouts and submarine paranoia like on the West Coast. We lived on the North Shore, just a few doors from Lake Michigan. My mother liked the stores and the conveniences of the big city. She walked me on a leash attached to a brown leather harness that strapped under my arms. My father had a job with government priority so he wasn’t drafted. We had an extra car and gas rations all through World War II. We sat in the front room of our lakeside apartment, and listened to news of WWII over the big brown radio. The war was far away.

The stories and music of the radio came from far away, but every afternoon there was a show from Chicago. Two Ton Baker, the Music Maker played piano and sang, presented news, weather, and a sort of running commentary. He never stopped playing the piano under the dialogue. He played differently from my mother. My father said he played jazz. He had a theme song—“There’s just one place for me, near you”—which he played at the beginning and end of his show. My father liked Two Ton Baker. So did my mother. It was something we shared. But the stories on the radio were mine: Bomba the Elephant Boy, The Green Hornet, Sergeant Preston of the Northwest Mounted Police, King the Wonder Dog of the Yukon, Tom Mix, and Captain Midnight. “Pluck your magic Twanger, Froggie!” said Smiling Ed McConnell with his Buster Brown gang. Midnight the Cat would mew “Nice” and Squeaky the Mouse would start the music box. Over the tinkling background, Froggy the Gremlin would sing, “Every time I go to town, the boys start kicking my dog around.” The metallic melody ground to a slow halt, like my grandfather’s record player in Little Rock. Squeaky would say, “Little music box is running down. Kerplunk!” Smilin’ Ed would segue into a commercial for Buster Brown Shoes: “That’s my dog Tige. He lives in a shoe. I’m Buster Brown. Look for me in there, too.”

Next came Captain Midnight, the most artistic and futuristic super hero. He lived in an observatory overlooking the city, and flew a rocket plane armed with high-caliber machine guns. At the end of each episode, before the last commercial break, the announcer would say, “And when we return, Captain Midnight will give you his secret coded message for the day.” In order to understand the secret message, you had to cut out the waxed paper covering your jar of chocolate-flavored Ovaltine, enclose fifty cents, and wait forever for a Captain Midnight secret decoder badge to come in the mail. The gold-colored tin badge had two rows of alphabet letters, one inside the other, on a turning disc. The initials CM (for Captain Midnight) and the current year in relief lettering were at the top. You needed a new one every year.

Gene Autry, “the Singing Cowboy,” was best of all, featuring cowboy music and comic book–style adventure stories. The show came from Melody Ranch. The cowboys were his band. Gene was the boss, and always won, no matter what villain or Nazi agent tried to do him in. He had a horse, a gun, a guitar, a cowboy suit, and a hat—everything I could want. My father—a harsh vocal critic—held his nose and sang “Back in the Saddle Again,” making fun of Gene’s song.

My mother rocked me in her brown wicker chair and sang “Froggie Went a-Courtin’ and he did ride / sword and pistol by his side.”

I had a pistol

Big Jim had a sword in the closet in his room

He wore it when he was in military school

I would wear a sword when I went to school

My father’s sword was too big

I would be big when I went to school

My father’s office was downtown. We went there sometimes and listened to the radio driving home. A liquor store my father liked was off the outer drive that ran along the lakeshore. A larger-than-life man’s head and shoulders were in the window. The face was a concave sculptured mask with eyes that followed you as you passed. I watched it as we drove by. My mother told me God was always watching and could see all, like the eyes in the liquor store window.

Our street ran from Lake Michigan to Sheraton Road. Our area was unkindly known as Kikes’ Peak. We were one of three Protestant families on the street. There were lots of kids my age. We played war; it seemed natural with all the war talk. We divided into sides and pretended to fight. The rivalries were heated, exciting, and lingered in the air after we went inside to our families.

Bobby Zwick, the king of the kids, had a skull and crossbones finger ring. He and his redheaded sister, Brenda, ruled the neighborhood. He had a three-wheel bike, faster than anything else around. I had a red Radio Flyer wagon that I dragged up and down the sidewalk, picking up junk from the gutter: wire, bottle caps, the occasional automobile part, a five-dollar bill. Neighbors told my mother, “Little Jimmy is gonna grow up to be a junkman.”

A black man, also named Jimmy, swept at the neighborhood barbershop. My friend Billy once called him “colored boy.” He replied, “You know my name.”

My mother said the grocery store/Chinese laundry was a bookie joint. Edward’s toy store was my first conception of heaven. My father got black-market electric heaters and other appliances restricted by World War II regulations at Jack’s Fix-It Shop. I saw Snow White, Duel in the Sun, and other films projecting the myths and legends of my youth at the 400 Movie Theater. On Halloween the kids dressed i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About Jim Dickinson …
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Search for Blind Lemon (1941–1971)
• Part II: Epilogue and the Biblical Chapters
• Index