An Appreciation by Don Harrison
"Charlie Rich is probably as fine a vocalist,
musician and writer as I ever heard. He has a natural instinct.
His music just knocks me out."
--Sam Phillips (to Martin Hawkins, 1985)
When Charlie Rich died on July 25th, 1995, from a blood clot
in his lung-- his beloved, devoted wife Margaret Ann by his
side-- it was all our culture could do to even remember him, much
less celebrate him.
In the months following the singer-songwriter-pianist's death, I
went diving in the magazine racks searching for tributes, for
acknowledgements, of this man's remarkable 40-year popular music
career. I went through jazz magazines, blues magazines,
"Performing Songwriter," piano monthlies, R&B
fanzines, country music magazines, country LINE DANCING
magazines. . . nothing, or next to nothing. I had a pal access
Charlie's name in the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame databank at the
time and... Zilch.
When mentioned and eulogized at all, in wire service obits or
brief capsules, it was the latter day Charlie Rich, the man who
sung the banal countrypolitian hits in the mid-70's, that was
remembered.
But it says a lot about Charlie Rich (born 1932 in Colt,
Arkansas) and his whole musical range-- this was a Sun Records
pioneer, for gosh sakes-- that he could've been remembered, and
celebrated, in every place that I looked. And it says something
about our (de-segregated?) culture that he wasn't anywhere to be
found. Over a sometimes dazzling career, spanning blues, jazz,
country, gospel and rockabilly, Charlie Rich had something to say
to almost everyone, and now everyone-- segmented off into their
little niches and subcultures-- suddenly had very little to say
about him.
Rich was many things to many people in his show biz career: he
released one killer rockabilly 45 in 1959 ("Lonely
Weekends" b/w "Everything I Do is Wrong") on
Phillips (a Sun Subsidiary), he scored a novelty R&B hit with
"Mohair Sam" on Smash in the early '60's, and he
finished up the decade with country chartbusters for labels like
RCA ("There Won't Be Anymore") before settling into the
Nashville Music Machine. For most of those years, his music
effortlessly flowed from the same interracial gene pool that
birthed all manner of great rock-soul-jazz-county-blues in those
early days of free-for-all.
Make no mistake about it, million-dollar dreck like "Behind
Closed Doors"-- representative of a compromised
"pop-country" crossover that STILL casts a shadow over
country music-- was far from what Charlie Rich was really all
about.
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"I don't mean to take anything away from Elvis or
Jerry Lee, but I don't think I ever recorded anybody that was
ever better as a singer, writer and player than Charlie
Rich."
-- Sam Phillips (to Martin Hawkins, 1985)
The legendary Mr. Sam Phillips has said some pretty outrageous
things in his life, and he deserves to say them, but he's always
been a believer in Charlie Rich. Rich made his recording debut on
a doomed Sun offshoot label in the late '50's, and made Sam look
like a visionary all over again. Phillips could smell a million
dollars-- even if his nose was off about fifteen years.
You can start Charlie Rich's story, like so many talented
performers from the South during that era, in Memphis and at Sun
Records. The legend goes: sleepy-eyed, 34-year-old Charlie Rich
walks into Sun, plays them some of his material, and is told that
he is "too good" for them. He needs to go home, studio
arranger Bill Justis says, and listen to some Jerry Lee records.
"Get bad," he tells Rich. True or not, this story is
symbolic; Charlie would often hear this call from his employers.
There's no doubt that Phillips International was trying to get
another Elvis back into the stable. Leaving aside the obvious
physical differences-- a chain-smoking fundamentalist Baptist
ex-cotton farmer heading into middle age wasn't going to make any
teenage girl forget Elvis-- there was Charlie's striking songs,
Charlie's fluttering piano and, most of all, that voice!!
The warm and soft mooning of Charlie Rich's voice, quavering into
falsetto, into pathos, into sudden bursts of anger, transformed
by that trademark Sun slapback into something approximating,
what? Why it was the floaty otherworldliness of Elvis. . .no,
something else. You could hear it in the music: Charlie was an
introvert, a juicehead who dug jazz bars. . a redneck Beatnik who
felt guilty for leaving the church folk in Arkansas for the
secular life. Raised by a musical family, Fundamental Baptists,
Charlie was a pianist one parts Errol Garner to two parts
Professor Longhair and at least three parts church, a jazz fan
who did country in a bluesy gospel, a singer who (if he wanted,
unfortunately) could sound more like Elvis than Elvis and could
change his style enough to write hits for Jerry Lee Lewis and
Johnny Cash. Still there was always a sense that there was
something more with Charlie. . . an untapped resource, a splendid
motor idled too low for too long.
"Rich is an artist who often suffered for his own
versatility," annotator Hank Davis writes in the liner notes
of an essential compilation of Rich's output at Phillips,
"Original Hits and Midnight Demos": "He could move
effortlessly and impressively in too many directions."
Charlie got "bad" enough at Sun-Phillips but he also
enjoyed a freedom at the legendary studio that was special, a
nurturing elbow-room between natural expression and commercial
reality that he never really had in his professional career until
"Pictures and Paintings in 1991.
Rich hit with Phillips on the pop-flavored "Lonely
Weekends" and so the company wasn't above putting the
pre-Silver Fox through a whole lotta crappy genre settings;
teenage love fantasies (from a 34-year old, silver-tipped jazzbo)
like "Philadelphia Baby" and "Rebound," tunes
that resembled nothing more than ironic imitations of Elvis' RCA
hits. Still, a lot of Charlie's Sun-Phillips work is
exhilarating, career-making stuff, a wide merge of blues, jazz
and gospel-based colors.
There's the jaunty revenge fantasy, "Who Will the Next Fool
Be?," an exciting slice of interstellar supper soul that
should've made him a huge star. Ditto "There's Another Place
I Can't Go," a swingin' jazz song with a chorus ready made
for the ages. Backed with Memphis and Nashville session cats like
Billy "Red Hot" Riley (bass), Roland James, Hank
Garland (guitar), Buddy Harman, J.M. Eaton (drums) and Boots
Randolph and Jerry Tuttle (sax), Charlie's early Phillips work is
powerful stuff from the period, even when the material and sound
sometimes veered into Elvis territory, and obviousness.
There is recorded proof that Charlie resented being "the
next Elvis," on one Sun outtake. Before recording a great,
long-unreleased song called "Little Woman Friend of
Mine," he admonishes some hoverers to leave the studio.
"Ah, we are tryin' to RECARD in here, what's with you
cats!?" he says in a surprisingly reedy little hepcat's
voice.
Then he hears that signature echo being applied to the mic.
"Ah. . .," he vamps out, "Ahma. . ah. . .ah. . .
(he's having fun now) ". . .goin' a telluh YEWW. . hic-cup,
yeh, muttahfucka."" He's mimicking Elvis, of course,
and it sounds just like Elvis. . . or some Stan Freberg parody of
him, expertly rendered.
Backing up, Rich laughs. "Yeah, it's gonna be SOFT like
that. Alright, ready?" Then he starts the tune, a rollicking
solo boogie, and it sounds nothing like Elvis.
It sounds like Charlie Rich.
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"(Rich) has a voice of remarkable range and feeling
which he uses to great emotional effect. The material that he
does is very much his own personal brand of soul, encompassing
almost the entire spectrum of popular music"
--Peter Guralnick (in "Feel Like Going
Home")
To so many people, Rich's sole contribution to American music
was wearing muttonchops, being a marketing scheme called the
Silver Fox and singing slop like "Behind Closed Doors"
over hackneyed, MOR-ish backing tracks.
Leaving Phillips when it went under, he hopped to RCA, then to
Smash, then to Hi, and finally to Epic. Producers and labels big
and small tried to exploit and market him into whatever bag was
big at whatever time, placing his voice in badly conceived genre
trappings, swashing his original songs in inappropriate vocal
choruses, you name it. His talent was large enough that this
didn't totally destroy him-- in fact, the struggle against the
commercial qualities of his songs (like "Mohair Sam"
and, certainly, "Behind Closed Doors") sometimes
created fascinating aural marriages. An artist, pure and soulful,
versus his material, trendy and shallow. Sound familiar?
Like Elvis, rock and teenage music wasn't Charlie's thing-- he
was more hung up on tinkling jazzy thirteenths and mooning
minor-key jazz ballads than club-footing th' boogie out but--
hey-- "if you want the boogie, or the rockabilly, or the
teenage ballad or (ugh!) if you want me to sing over sugary
country tracks, what ever you want, man. . ." Accommodating.
. . just like Elvis. Charlie's talent, too, was his curse. Too
versatile-- even a casual glance at his whole career output shows
that. . .and he's lucky he wasn't purty too, or he might've had
to star in some bad beach party movies and go Vegas a lot sooner
than he actually did. In the excellent book, "Feel Like
Going Home," author Peter Guralnick makes a wild claim:
"If anyone fulfilled the artistic promise which Elvis
originally showed it is probably Charlie Rich." The personal
parallels couldn't be more polar opposite (Charlie had his
beloved Margaret Ann, a muse who also wrote great songs herself;
Elvis ultimately only had the cornel), but the talent was from a
similar, unreachable place.
No understatement, even if-- again, like the Big E-- you have to
wade through a lot of shit to get to all of Charlie's good stuff,
to see it all, to put it all in focus. Through a career of
Wagnerian soul-jazz like "I Can't Go On" to unbridled
blues like "Don't Put No Headstone on My Grave" to
country laments like "Sittin' and Thinkin'," right down
to the blatantly commercial period surrounding "The Most
Beautiful Girl in the World," Charlie was often undenable in
his willingness to cross boundaries, mix blood; he was sometimes
willfully subserviant, many times brilliant and all-inclusive,
always just a little TOO accommodating (except on those fiesty
"Midnight Demos" unearthed in the '70's).
Charlie finally signed his Faustian deal with Epic in 1970, and
was ultimately rewarded (like Elvis) with millions of dollars and
great fame for music that had little to do with his own personal
tastes and sensibilities. This could really depress an artist,
and Charlie was already melancholy, low-key; a bit of a poet and
balladeer. How unfortunate that the trend that would eventually
hit it big for him was sleek, commercial countrypolitan jingles,
and how absurd that the excitingly inventive Rich would have to
give the piano stool over to Nashville session players (who knew
"the formula") in order to collect his millions?
But there is justice in the fact that Charlie Rich's last
release (after years of seclusion) was a creative high point.
Pictures and Paintings, was the man's very own creation and,
although the release made little commercial noise-- who needed
money?-- it was a total labor of love, with a song set (for once)
straight from Charlie's heart: "Juicehead Baby," a
smoldering title track courtesy of Doc Pomus and Mac Rebenack,
his wife Margaret Ann's "Go Ahead and Cry," a handful
of funky Rich originals, a retreading of "Don't Put No
Headstone on My Grave". . . wonderful stuff. Not rockabilly,
not country, not R&B exactly. Certainly no producer's
creation.
It was Charlie Rich-- finally-- just being Charlie and it was
long overdue.
(This article was originally published in Original
Cool)