Al Jackson Jr

Music:

Member Since: 3/17/2007
Band Members:
Influences: STEVE CROPPER TALKING OF AL JACKSON JR.I don't really remember exactly what day or what session that I met Al Jackson. I saw Al way before I got to meet Al. Al was playing with Willie Mitchell's band at a place called the Manhattan Club. That was one of those places where the band started at ten and got off stage at four in the morning. I had suggested along with several other people that Al Jackson would probably be the drummer for Stax because Willie Mitchell played a lot of dance music.The Manhattan Club was basically a white club where people liked to go to dance, and in those days, in the late '50s early 60s, they liked to dance to rhythm & blues, which is what my band did [The Royal Spades]. Any chance we got to hear Willie Mitchell's band or Ben Branch's band or any of those big R&B bands, we'd kill for the opportunity. We used to sneak across the bridge and listen to black bands over in Arkansas, too. They would let us in because they didn't worry so much about their liquor license. In Memphis it was a little bit trickier.I was told that Al Jackson started playing on stage with his father's band. His father had a very, very large jazz dance band back in the '40s, and Al played with him when he was five years old! That would have been in 1940, so he had all of that experience. Al Jackson begins working at Stax: I wish I could find a way to document Al Jackson's first session at Stax. It may have been Prince Conley's "I'm Goin' Home," or that may have been Howard Grimes, another Memphis drummer. Howard Grimes played on William Bell's "You Don't Miss Your Water" and a bunch of other stuff. I can almost guarantee that that was Howard Grimes because of that big splash cymbal and the way he played that.The first one that Al Jackson played on could have been a Carla Thomas song called "Cause I Love You" which was the same one that Booker T. came in and played baritone sax on. I was not on that session. I was in college or off doing something when they cut that. During school season, of course, I had to go to school. I played with the Mar-Keys at night. Al was about four or five years older than the rest of us. It didn't take but about one or two sessions for everybody to realize the potential of Al Jackson and how good he was-and when I say everybody, I mean the people that called the shots around there, mainly, Jim Stewart, who controlled the company with Estelle Axton. Jim said, "This is the drummer we need." As far as I can remember there was never a falling out with any of the other drummers that we had used. We all loved Howard Grimes and we still love him today, but Al Jackson just had more expertise in playing sessions. He was more well-rounded. Howard was a very young guy. He was trying to learn. He was good, but he was still learning. He knew how good Al Jackson was. When he found out we were trying to get Al on a regular basis, he might have been concerned but he wasn't upset, because he knew that's the way it had to be. The biggest problem was trying to get Al to come over, because Al had been playing with Willie Mitchell at Hi Recording Studio, and there was a lot of loyalty towards Willie. It was a big move for him to say, "Okay, I'm gonna quit Willie's band, I'm not gonna play at night any more, and I'm just gonna come over there and pick up a check and play sessions every day." On overworking: We could not really convince him of that, so for a while he did both things, which was very difficult for everyone, because he did not get home till four or five o'clock in the morning after playing with Willie's band, and we couldn't wake him up.We'd have these sessions booked at Stax and everybody'd be waiting on Al Jackson. He wouldn't show and I'd say, "Oh, oh, he's overslept." I'd jump in the car and head over there. I was about the only guy he'd trust to allow to come over there to wake him up. He knew if I came, then it was serious, and he was probably missing out on some money or something. Al was a real heavy sleeper, and Al was one of those sleepers that came up fighting. You didn't go over to Al and tap him on the back and say, "Al, it's time to get up." If you did, you probably wouldn't wake up till about noon! I used to go in his bedroom. His wife would let me go in there and poke him with a broom handle so I could get him up. And that's a true story. It would take a while, but I'd say, "Al, man, the session is gonna start in ten minutes." Those were really the good times. On Al Green: Everybody was on a roll by the time Al Green came around. Actually, we missed signing Al Green by lessthan five minutes. Al Bell [Stax promotion head who became label president] had listened to a tape of Al Green and said, "Man, this is the guy!" He called back and Al Green had just left to go sign a deal with Willie Mitchell at Hi Records. We came that close to having him. Al Jackson would go to Hi at night sometimes. That was after he finally quit doing gigs. After a while Al realized the potential of steady income, which was better than playing all night long for very little money. And once we got Booker T. & the MGs rolling with royalties coming in and all that, he started devoting full time to producing, writing and playing drums for Stax. Out of loyalty to Willie he would still go over and play on hits at Hi. Howard Grimes played on most of those records but on the singles, like "Let's Stay Together," it was usually Al Jackson. Willie knew the difference between a song that would be a filler for an album and one that was a really hot song. When they knew that, they'd call Al Jackson to come play on it.Al was the guy who played that tom tom on the backbeats that everybody used to copy. In those days Al didn't change heads and we didn't have techs. We'd get on a gig, he'd bust a snare head and just play the rest of the night on the small tom. It didn't have any snares going for it but it was a large backbeat-a big crack. He would hit the rim and the head at the same time. He was the best drummer I ever worked with at reading a crowd and knowing what their mood was. When we played live with the MGs he could just tell by one song. When a bunch of couples would jump up on the dance floor, he'd go, "Ah, now I know what to play next when this song's over." Al could really get you in a groove. The way he played shuffles used to impress me. Other guys seemed to kinda have it but not quite. Al Jackson had it down so good, it just rocked the whole house. Other guys would have this ta tat, ta tat, but Al had this goon, che ga, che goon, che ga. It was a whole different approach, technically, the way he played it. He never shuffled the ride cymbal. Some guys shuffle their whole body-their hands would be shuffling and their feet would be shuffling. Al had a way of putting the shuffle feel on the kick drum while playing the ride cymbal straight. The kick drum would do something that complemented the shuffle on the snare but didn't go with it, and neither did the ride cymbal. Technically speaking, part of that idea is in the beat to "Green Onions." The ride cymbal is playing straight fours, the kick is going doom, doom, da, doom, doom. It's sort of a half shuffle thing in the foot. I'll sit in with a band and they'll say, "Cropper's here. Cropper come up and play `Green Onions,' we play that song every night." And I get up there and the drummer's doing a straight shuffle and I say, "What are you doin'? That's not `Green Onions.' Did you listen to the record?" And the organ player is doubling the bass line. We already had the bass and the guitar doing that. They don't learn Booker's part and they don't learn Al's part, but they got Duck and my part down big.Al's contribution in the studio: Everybody sort of pinned on Al. As writers and producers we all had our ideas, and we all woke up in the morning knowing what we wanted to hear that day. We'd have a few arguments about it sometimes, but when it all came down, we usually keyed on what Al thought. I remember something with Sam & Dave's "Hold On I'm Comin'." It was a good song with a good lyric and all that, but we worked on that thing for about three hours, and just as we were about to say, "Well guys, we better try this again tomorrow," Al looked at me and I looked at him and he said, "Let's go out there and put a pocket on this thing." That was his phrase, "Let's put a pocket on it." So we went out there by ourselves and sat down and basically came up with a new feel-that kind of funky thing in the chorus. And they came out and said, "That's it! That's it!" Two or three takes later, you had your record. We used to do that a lot. He contributed a bunch to the way things turned out. A lot of the writers had great songs and great melodies, but they didn't know what pocket to put them in to really make good dance records. It usually took Al to do that. But he wasn't that stubborn. He would let guys try whatever the hell they wanted to try and then, when they wore it out, he would say, "Hey, wait a minute, you're not gonna keep me here all day doing this. Let's do it this way." And usually that's what would turn out to be the hit.On the Stax sound: A lot of the drum sound was, I think, accidental. You know, bring the drums in and put a mike on 'em. Move the mike around till it sounds good. What a lot of people probably don't understand is that the drums Al played, stayed there 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with the same microphones on them. It was that way for a long time, when we were cutting all the mono records, "Green Onions," the Rufus Thomas stuff and all of that. Once they were there, it never changed, they never moved around any. Later, when we got into multi-track machines and overdubbing, some things changed. The other thing is that Al Jackson never changed his heads, unless he broke one. The same thing with the bass and guitar. If we broke a string we changed it, if we didn't, it never got changed. Al never changed those drums. I think he had a Ludwig and Rogers combination, kind of a mix 'n' match. He had a medium size kick drum, 20-inch I believe, and he had a Rogers floor tom, grey pearl, and then a little 12-inch tom over head. It was a little black drum. The other thing that Al used to do that was different-he wasn't the only drummer that ever did it- but when he came down to do a session, the first thing he did was reach in his back pocket, and pull out this big fat billfold and plop it on the snare. Other guys used tape or a muffler. Al just plopped a billfold down there. The old records didn't have a lot of decay time, the snares didn't ring too much and there's not a lot of cymbals, because we didn't mike the cymbals. Where were the mikes placed? We had an RCA capsule mike, a 44 or a 77, that looked like a big Tylenol. We had one of those on a small stand and we just brought it right straight up under the hi-hat, as high as we could to still be comfortable. It was a ribbon mike and it picked up everything around it and got the snare and the hi-hat. Then we had the old, big, black and chrome RCA microphone. It had big holes in it and they used them back in the old days in the radio shows. Sort of a giant shaver microphone about four inches wide. We used that for a long time on the kick drum. That's all we had, two mikes. Was there a front head on the kick drum? Yes, there was. Way later, when Ronnie Capone and some of those guys came over we may have taken it off. They grew up doing jingles and they turned us on to some new techniques. We had two Ampex mixers. We had eight channels but one of them we used as an echo return, so we only had seven to cut all those songs with. Two mikes on the drums, one on the vocal, one on the horns, one on the bass, one on the guitar and one on the piano.The studio was a theater, as you know, and we used one of the tile bathrooms for the echo. The ceiling was 12 to 13 feet high near the box office entrance and went up to 20-something feet down near the front of the stage where the instruments were set up. The floor was slanted but it started levelling off about half way down, right about where we had the drum riser. I know that Al had a lot to do with the Albert King stuff. Yes. He had a better rapport with Albert than the rest of us. Albert didn't like anybody, really. Al was the designated producer for Albert King. I was the producer with Otis Redding and Eddie Floyd and somebody else had Carla Thomas and I think Al had the Mad Lads and Albert King. Isaac Hayes and David Porter had Sam & Dave and the Soul Children.Drum rhythm concepts: I remember two songs that I thought had the most creative drum beats that were also very simple, and one of them came out of a thing he was trying to teach me. He took time to show me a couple of little things and how to go from the snare to the tom. I sat there once and kind of half put this beat together that Al later took-bop, un, chic, un, boom, boom bop, un, chic, un, bop, bop. That became "Soul Dressing" by Booker T. & the MGs. The other beat, probably one of the funkiest I ever heard, was the one Al used on "Crosscut Saw" by Albert King. It was kind of like a Latin thing with cross sticks.What about "Try A Little Tenderness" by Otis Redding? The doubling of the beat? Yeah, that kind of took everybody by storm. As far as I remember, that wasn't worked up. Al just started doing that and everybody said, "Yeah, Al. Yeah!" and fell right in. That's how creative he was. I don't think that was the only take of that. We did it for a while till we got it. We had to work a lot on that end, all those kicks. On Otis Redding's album "Live At The Fillmore West," that's Al playing drums with Otis's band. We flew Al out there to kind of oversee that. Of course it was Al on all the Stax/Volt Tour stuff from 1967, "Live In Paris" and all of that. We only went out behind Otis for that one tour, which was about 12 or 15 dates over a period of 20 days-it seemed like a year. The only other thing we did was the Monterey Pop Festival. We didn't do any local shows, we didn't fly anywhere, we didn't even do any TV shows with Otis. He wanted us but we were too busy in the studio. There was no way he could get us. That's why the Bar-Kays started going out with him. He decided after that Stax/Volt tour and Monterey that he had to have a Stax band, because that was his sound. I guess he had arm wrestled with a bunch of different musicians, even though he probably had some great ones. I didn't really get to hear too many of his shows. I played with him live in the studio. He brought his band in one time in a bus and put them up at the Holiday Inn while we cut for two or three days. We didn't use any of his guys. He just had them hanging on because they were still on tour. We needed a couple more songs to finish his album, so they came through Memphis. Al grew up in his Dad's swing band. He had all those jazz chops in him. I mean, he was the greatest single stroke player I ever heard in my life. He was great at that. And he did that a lot on the snare. He could do that in his sleep. He didn't do it a lot, but he'd just throw something in there every now and then and you'd go, "Wow!" Or he'd do some little tom thing that would come out of nowhere. Al had that thing of just touching the ride cymbal, just hitting it like a half shuffle, with a loose wrist kind of fanning it back and forth. I don't ever see drummers do that any more. He didn't record a lot of stuff like that but he had all those chops. He could cut all the riffs with the horns, too. He could have been anybody's drummer. And he wasn't impressed by a lot of other drummers. They didn't do it for him. He was so economical and so tasteful. Al Jackson went for the meat of the groove. He knew how to study that song, and he could do it very quickly. He hated to rehearse on something, too, which used to wear us out, because we felt like we really needed a drummer to find the groove so we could be creative. But Al would say, "Yeah, y'all work it up and then I'll come in there." We'd say, "Man, we need a drummer!" [laughs] Basically, we'd just sit in there and learn changes and then, when Al got there, we'd start trying to arrange it a little bit.It's a sad thing but what do you know about his death? (Oct. 1, 1975, aged 39.) We had basically retired the band from around the late '70s. We hadn't really done anything since we opened for Creedence Clearwater Revival on a tour and did the "Melting Pot" album in 1971. After that, Al and Duck got a couple of guys in Memphis, Bobby Manuel and Carson Whitsett, to replace Booker and me, and Al and Duck tried to make a record. There's one out there called "The MGs" with their pictures on it. It didn't do anything. Anyway, I had moved out to Los Angeles and so had Booker. After a while we talked Al and Duck into coming out to have a meeting-they used to come out there and do some sessions, too. They played on some Bill Withers stuff and other things. So, we had this meeting and we said, "Okay, guys, we're gonna get this back together, but let's don't jump right into it, let's really concentrate on it. Let's give everybody three months to wrap up all of their productions, and we'll devote three years to Booker T. & the MGs. We'll start touring again, make records, get visible and really try to do it." Right after that is when Al got murdered. I can't document it. I only know what I've been told and maybe someone else could dispute it, but I know that Al was supposed to be out of town. I think he was getting ready to go to Detroit to produce a session on Major Lance. He was headed for the airport and he was listening to the radio when one of the disc jockeys said, "Hey, don't forget about the Muhammad Ali fight, tonight." So he did a U-turn, called the people in Detroit and said, "Hey, I forgot about that fight. I'll come up there tomorrow." He wanted to stay in town and go down to the Auditorium to watch the fight on the big screen. When it was over he went home and found people in his house. I was told by a guy who was on the investigating team that the guy who shot Al knew somebody who was over at Al's house. He had robbed a bank in Florida, called somebody and said, "Meet me over at Al Jackson's house." When the police got there, they found Al dead on the floor, face down. He had been shot at close range in the back. Everyone else was tied up. His wife, Barbara, had worked herself loose by around three o'clock in the morning. Somebody who was going to work early, or maybe a cab driver or someone, saw her out in the middle of the street, screaming "Help!" The rest is history. The guy who shot Al was killed in a bank robbery in Seattle three days later. They traced his route from Florida all the way through Memphis and up into Washington. An FBI agent wasted him.
Sounds Like: BLACK MUSIC, October 1977, Vol. 4, Issue 47‘He didn’t do anything, you see. He just played’Two years ago this month, Stax' legendary drummer, Al Jackson, was shot dead at his Memphis home. On this anniversary of his tragic and untimely death, Valerie Wilmer profiles the man and examines his influenceThe news that Booker T and the MG’s have started touring again in America will be greeted with some anticipation by all those who ad mired their exclusive brand of tight funk. Whether the group's new drum mer, Willie Hall, formerly with the Isaac Hayes band, will live up to the standards set by his predecessor, Al Jackson Jr., remains to be seen.However, now is a good time to examine the contribution made by the former Stax house drummer whose death, when he was shot dead at his Memphis home in September 1975, left the music world stunned. Jackson played on countless significant records by artists such as Otis Redding, Johnnie Taylor, Al Green and Wilson Pickett -not to mention Rod Stewart and Aretha Franklin- and his impeccable taste, metronomic ability and funky down home beat were a fore gone conclusion in the business. His death left a gap that no-one could fill. BBC Radio London dee jay Charlie Gillett's reaction was to devote an entire programme to the art of this, the finest )f all rock drummers. As Charlie said, there is not a single drummer out there who has escaped Jackson's influence. The official story was that the Memphis-born drummer had disturbed raiders at his home, but those around him had other ideas. His death came the day before he was allegedly due to testify at a court hearing concerning Stax Records' bankruptcy, and that was more than something of a coincidence to some people. There was, however, no truth in the rumour that Jackson planned to testify against Stax, despite the fact hat they owed him, a substantial sum in royalties. In fact, he was not even supposed to have been in Memphis on the day of the shooting. However, to this day, no further light has been shed on he incident, despite extensive police investigations. It is a mystery that remains unsolved.Because of the complications that followed the actions of one of Stax' main creditors, a Memphis bank, who backed a truck up to the studios and loaded it with any tapes they could lay their hands on, people have been reluctant to talk in Memphis concerning the situation at the once prosperous recording company as well as the matter of Jackson's untimely death. People want to keep their jobs in this once booming music town. One of my informants even tried to change the direction of my enquiries with the suggestion that Jackson's death might have been brought about by his habit of flashing a large wad of notes -anything other than the possibility that the drummer's killers were, in fact, known to him.Lips may have been sealed regarding the whys and wherefores of the tragedy, but there was no mistaking the horror and pain felt by Al's associates and by those who loved him. MG’s bassist Duck Dunn, probably his closest friend by virtue of the similarity of their natures, put the general feeling into words: "All f these years you play with somebody and you never appreciate them. It's like a woman. You take 'em for granted and you never realise how good they were. 'You just go along, you play with them day after day, and they do things that are just daily things. That's the way Al was when he played –maybe that's the way I was with him. And you never know it till they've gone and you miss ‘em. Then you want 'em back."Oh, there's plenty of great drummers, but playing with Al was just like getting up on time. Like every day you have your daily routine -you get up at 8.30 and you have your coffee, or you get up at 10.30 and you have your coffee. Well, when Al made times and things, he made times. He made you make times with him. It just got to be that way."Talking to people who had been close to Al Jackson, a picture gradually emerged of a simple man who loved life, uncomplicated but firm in his resolve whenever he put his mind to some thing. Despite his universal recognition as a master drummer, especially for his imperturbable time-keeping, he never considered himself as great as did his admirers. Possibly this self-criticism stemmed from having grown up in a jazz-and-blues milieu, though there was no doubt that he related more to the relatively lucrative world of the studios than to jazz. "Al Jackson was a good drummer but he was a money drummer," said saxophonist George Coleman who grew up in Memphis a few years earlier than Jackson.The drummer's father, Al Jackson Sr., was a bassist who led a formidable big band for many years and, at some time or another, the younger man played with the city's leading jazz lights, among them saxophonist Charles Lloyd, pianist Phineas Newborn and bassist George Joyner. His idols were people like Philly Joe Jones and Elvin Jones. On one occasion he sat in with the Max Roach group. Nevertheless, he was happy in his chosen field and had no desire to be playing jazz.The point was that in his own estima tion, he made it too big too fast. Prob ably he knew so many gifted drummers who were never able to make the transi tion from bebop to the particular Stax kind of sound, best described as "down home contemporary." One man he par ticularly admired was Joe Dukes who had played in Willie Mitchell's band before Al. Jackson once described him as "the damnest" drummer he had ever met. Yet it was Dukes who told him "You got to be lucky! You're not playing shit but you've gotten over." Dukes' reaction may have been sour grapes or he may have been joking, but Jackson was reportedly hurt by his comments. He felt that compared to Dukes, well known in jazz circles, what he was doing was nothing special.Willie Mitchell used Al Jackson on several of the Al Green dates he pro duced for Stax. He described him as "basically a Memphis drummer, he wasn't a rock drummer. By that I mean that his drumming had what we call `The Memphis Sound'. He was a down beat drummer. Al played with lots of rhythm, heavy. He'd really swing -you know, that kind of drummer."The MG’s -it stood for Memphis Group -were unique in that they were an integrated band playing what was essentially black music and doing it in the South. Steve Cropper, who wrote and produced all the Otis Redding classics, came from the Ozark Mountains in Missouri. Like him, bassist Duck Dunn was white. Booker T. Jones, the youngest member of the group, was black like Jackson."Some people might be startled that guys like Steve and Duck can play real soul music," Jackson once told Phyl Gar land of Ebony magazine. "But when it comes to this soul thing, people have to remember that whites, particularly in this area, have their own kind of roots in country and western music, while we as blacks have ours in blues, gospel, R&B or whatever you want to call it. When you get a white guy who is flexible enough to blend the feelings from those two different kinds of music and to come up with his own thing, then you have something that is really formidable."On the recordings made at Stax, Jack son is always unavoidably outfront although he was recorded in the back ground. "He comes out as the reverse of what he was doing," said Steve Cropper. "His drums in the mix came out on top of everything. When, in reality, he was playing under the song to complement it, on tape he came through like gangbusters!" Jackson played as an equal part of a group that was egalitarian in its structure and methods. Whoever came up with an idea on a session, it would be tried out before being rejected. The drummer meshed effortlessly with Booker T's clean, driving organ and Cropper's funky, blues drenched guitar. He held the time rock steady while Duck Dunn played his bass like another drum, the one the people danced to. "I'd like to say that I created all those basslines but I didn't," said Dunn. "I had plenty of help from Booker and Steve." And all three of them had plenty of help from Jackson, an older man who brought his considerable ex pertise and common sense to the music and was always prepared to sit down and talk to the others when things went wrong. Where so many rock drummers instil their playing with frantic urgency in the mistaken belief that this is synony mous with excitement, playing loud and hitting hard for the sake of it, Al Jack son knew how to make love to his drums. He always held back till the right moment. "He had such a delayed back beat that when he came down on a beat it felt like it wasn't going to get there," said Duck Dunn. "And when it got there, it just … ooh!"With Al you just had to kind of wait on him and wait till he'd come down on the beat to catch him. And, that, to me, was his secret. I mean, when you played with Al, you played with Al. Al could make you look bad because if you ran off and left him, he didn't care. A lot of drummers, if you start rushing, they'll go on and pick up the time, but Al wouldn't do that. He'd just keep it right where he thought it should be and he'd make you look like a fool. But he was right ninety per cent of the time."In actual fact, some of the MG’s tunes were intended to be played harder with more of a so-called rock beat, but Jack son changed them by insisting that they be played his way. Sometimes the others would have preferred the music to be a little more rock oriented, but Jackson was firm in his resolve to do things his way, which meant more straightforward. At the time, the others were unhappy about it. Later, playing the records to himself, Duck Dunn was to realise just how exceptional their music had been. "I used to listen to other albums and wonder why our sound wasn't as good as theirs. Then after the band broke up, you could hear everything each of us did. Al played to the point where he didn't clutter up anything. He played like a singer. He had a part and he did it. They do that nowadays, too, but back in those days it was kind of new."In the studios where gallons of beer were consumed during the course of a session, it was always Jackson who would count off the time. The others looked to him to do that because of his incredible, metronomic sense of time. He has been described as dominating and argumenta tive yet he could take control without being egotistical. "He played very com plementary drums," said Steve Cropper. "He played for the people he was playing behind where a lot of drummers play for the drummer -you know, `I want to be the baddest drummer in town and I'm gonna play my best licks'. And that's their whole life's attitude, to be the best drummer. Al's attitude was not like that at all. He didn't care about, being the best drummer, he wanted to play some thing that would make the song happen."According to a former Stax em ployee who was very close to Jackson, he never believed in the drummer being the "showpiece". "The reason so many producers would call him was because he had such a terrific sense of timing. He would never run off with the songs, he could always pocket it."Steve Cropper confirmed this : "If you didn't change tempo in the course of a day, you could just edit the first track of the day with the last one and the tempo would not move," he said. "He was impeccable and he knew it. I mean you could go out and have lunch, you could go take an hour, and you come back and you say `OK, count it, Al'. and it would be the same exact tempo as when you left it an hour ago. I've never worked with anybody else that did that dead on time."Cropper paid tribute to Jackson's simplicity and the fact that he always knew what song he was playing. This was in keeping with the Stax dictum that every song should have a meaning. "We like for the artists to be able to feel the lyrics of a song, to live them," vice- president Al Bell once said. It was the innovative saxophonist Lester Young who once said that the improvising musician should always know the words of any song he used as a vehicle and Al Jackson was no exception.Cropper said : "A lot of drummers, even though they have music in their head and everything, are not really aware of what the song is, what it's about and why it's being done in the first place. Al always had the insight of what the song vas . trying to say. And he knew the melody. He would hear it a couple of times and the melody would lock in his head. He could almost sing you the song, he'd listen to the singer's approach and what he thought they were trying to get out of it, and he played the drums to complement either the pulse or the beat of it, the excitement or the emotion. That's the way he played, but he played it real tasty and real simple."Duck Dunn summed it up : "Al played drums like a guitar player played guitar. Al played drums like a singer sang. He had moods -you listen to the Al Green records, the ones he did, and the lift on those records! He went soft, he kept it down, and when it needed to move, he moved it."Jackson was also notable for his ability to shift effortlessly from pattern to pat tern, a skill that came naturally to him yet was nurtured through playing with his father's big band where accenting the brass and so on were necessary functions. Such virtues added to his over all competence and made hire an all rounder. His versatility expanded in the small groups and trios of the jazz world. "He had fast hands, a good foot, he knew rhythm well." said Willie Mitchell. "He was a very sensible drummer."Today, with the spotlight focused on flamboyant set-ups and sar torial idiosyncrasies in the drum mer's camp, such attributes often take a back seat. Yet one wonders how many of today's overnight wonders with their snakeskin boots and dozen or so tom-toms reaching halfway round the stage could sustain the disaster of a stick going through a snare drum in the middle of a concert and carry on without missing a beat. This happened on stage while the MG's were backing Otis Red ding and recording the `Live In Europe' album. Redding launches into "Respect" and the snare head goes, but Jackson keeps on going, catching his rimshots off the tom-toms as though nothing had happened.Jackson once outlined his feelings re garding the unnecessary accoutrements of show business. "What do they buy - the clothes or the individual? Have you got to dress everything up for it to be accepted? Can't it be accepted in the raw? If it can't be accepted in the raw, then it's not worth being accepted any way. Then you're making it all phony. You're taking away the true identity. But some of us started out with one gift in life that we should be proud of and that is being black, because the day we were born into this world the truth was slapped into our faces!"Jackson was not even fussy about the make of drums he used or how the kit was set up. His only preference was for a Rogers' foot-pedal. He would sit down and play however his drums were tuned, and even let other people tune them for him. Stax engineer Ron Capone, himself a drummer, would tell him, "Al, that drum needs tuning," and he would reply, "Hey, Bonnie, come out here and tune it.""He believed in me as a drummer," said Capone. "And he would not touch the drums. I had to go out there and do everything for him, then go back into the control room and he'd go on playing." And whenever he did tune his own drums, he would do it with the engineer in mind rather than his own ear, the mark of a self-effacing professional who knew where his priorities lay.Sometimes in the studio Jackson would play standing up, one foot on the bass drum-pedal, the other keeping the hi hat closed while he played on it with the sticks. From this vantage point he would build an intense rhythm and inspire the MGs, or anyone else in the studio, to greater heights. He and Ron Capone also established a routine that is still used by the young drummers in Memphis today. When the musicians prepared to cut the master tape, Capone would shout out, "Hey, Al, how are we going to cut this?" Jackson's reply, pre served on the original tape in front of a million Stax singles was always the same : "We're gonna cut the shit out of it!"Al Jackson played the shit out of everything he did. Listen to "Green Onions", the MGs' first hit. The reason for its phenomenal success was that Jackson just cooked away from start to finish. However tired he was, and that band frequently worked from ten in the morning till well past midnight, six or even seven days a week, Al Jackson never let up until the music was finished. He was, as they say, good to the last drop.Jackson worked in his father's band and with trumpeter Gene "Bow legs" Miller before he joined Willie Mitchell, then an important local bandleader, in 1959. This gig lasted for nearly nine years and was so highly re garded by Jackson that if a Mitchell date coincided with a record session in the early days at Stax, he would let Ron Capone take his place in the studio rather than miss out on the "proper" job. This continued even when the MGs' first hit "Green Onions" was riding high. Capone went on the road with the group while Jackson played with Mitchell.Gradually, though, his attitude towards session work changed in common with the others involved at Stax, and Jackson started working daily in the studios. Because he was fractionally older than the other musicians, Jackson always acted as though he had a sense of res ponsibility towards them. In particular he took care of Booker T, relating to him in a paternal fashion as the organist was the youngest in the group and, furthermore, both of them were black. "In that group, Booker was the only one that needed a spanking now and then," said a close friend. "That was because he was a baby and Al was the one who did it. I feel that he pretty much kept all of them in line. because he was the older one and a lot more settled. His whole objective was to establish some thing viable, something he could bank. It's as simple as that."Although it was Cropper who produced Otis Redding's records and Booker T. who produced other artists, someone close to Jackson suggested that he, in fact, pro duced any band he worked with.As a result of his superior years and reputation, young drummers would flock to Jackson's side for pointers and advice. One of them was Carl Cunningham who went on to play with the. Bar-kays, the group that toured with Otis Redding when the MGs had to stay in the studio. Cunningham, who was killed in the plane crash with Redding, started off by shining shoes in the barbershop next door to Stax. He would come into the studio and watch Jackson play, then when the drummer went into the control room to listen to a playback, Cunningham would sit down at the drums and play the beat he had just been playing. He did 'that for three years, then ended up backing Redding himself.The other drummer who followed Jackson's every move was his new replacement, Willie Hall. Where Jackson had actually taught Carl Cunningham, Hall listened. "He studied AI like a clock," said Cropper. Hall made his debut in the new Bar-kays, reformed after the tragic accident, but Ron Capone had his doubts about the young man's abilities. "I said `Willie Hall will never make a drummer'. I even told Willie that, he was that bad. But he was deter mined he was going to make it. He used to come on that drum stand that we had in the studio and sit behind Al Jack son and just watch his hands, his feet, and just watch him. And from out of nowhere, and even working with him every day, I walked in the studio and there was Willie Hall, an incredible drummer."In fact he was so incredible that I could get a better sound on him than I could on Al. He turned out to be the best recording drummer I have ever recorded. He plays perfect balance. You know, some drummers have heavy hands and light feet, some of them have heavy feet, and some of them are equally balanced and can play everything just right so that it comes out evenly recorded. Willie Hall was like that, but he learned from Al Jackson."The collapse of the Stax empire in 1975 came as a shock to the music world, yet those close to the company already knew that all was not well. Cropper had already left to set up his own TMI Studios in Memphis and Capone had gone with him. Despite Jackson's en treaties and reasoning, Jones had gone out to the West Coast. Only Dunn and Jackson remained. Both of them stayed with Stax right up to the end but, for tunately for the drummer, new vistas opened up for him at Hi with his colla borations with Willie Mitchell on the Al Green productions.For a long time, it was assumed that Jackson was the drummer on all the Al Green tracks, for Howard Grimes is so similar to him in feeling and his im peccable timekeeping. On `Simply Beauti ful, where the drummer uses only his feet on bass drum and hi-hat, right up till the last chorus, it could well have been Jackson, the master of the subtle approach. But it was not, and this points to the possibility of a Memphis school of drumming being not as remote as some would make out. What is more, Howard Grimes is also responsible for the delicate conga beat introduced in "Let's Stay Together" which has been copied from coast to coast ever since. Later on, after Jackson's death, how­ever, Duck - Dunn listened to the Al Green records to try to make an objec tive assessment of what Jackson had been trying to say each time he stopped the bassist from rushing the tempo. "All you had to do was listen," he said. "The ups and the lifts and the feelings he played on those records. I got what Al was trying to do out of those records. It's just a shame he's not here now."At the time of his death, Jackson was working on a Major Lance production and his own album. Two weeks pre viously, the MG’s had got together for the first time in four years to discuss the possibility of getting together again. It was ironic that the tragedy should have occurred when it did.Almost alone amongst the Stax session men and other employees, Jackson invested his money wisely. Ron Capone reckoned that the drummer was probably better off than anyone else in the company, co-presi dents Jim Stewart and Al Bell included. His main source of revenue outside of the recording industry were the eight or so oil wells that he had invested in. Others, including Cropper and Capone, had also invested, but it was Jackson whose gamble paid off. In addition to this, the drummer owned a large filling station (formerly his father's property). Money was not one of his problems.Some people are dubious that Jack son's killers will ever be brought to trial although rumour has long been rife as to their identity. As one friend pointed out, "This is also the South. AI was worth a million dollars alive, but dead, cash assets, he was worth around 250,000 dollars. Now I may be wrong, but experience and just plain vibes lead me to believe that the average white attorney involved in the situation would consider it an opportunity to rip off.. Their attitude would be `He was a black man and he didn't have any business with that kind of money, anyway!'."Al Jackson was essentially an honest, straightforward drummer, just as he was an honest, straightforward person. The only thing he disliked about the record industry was the dishonesty that prevails. "If he had , been able to express his talent in a business that was much less corrupt, he would have been an even happier person," said someone who was close to him. "He didn't like having to play games in order to be' fairly compensated for the work he had done.""Al, personally, was super," said Steve Cropper. "He was a good guy and a good friend. Al was set in his ways. He knew what he wanted out of life and what he wanted to do, and he sort of followed that trend and did it. He didn't mind saying something. Al was not the kind of guy that would lay back and wait on everybody else. If he felt like something was wrong, or felt like he had a feasible idea, he would come out with it right 'in front. No, Al was super, he was a nice guy. We lost a real good friend there and a good musician."It was left to Duck Dunn to come out with the most fitting epitaph. "I'd go out and I'd play with other drummers, jam, and they'd always ask me `How does Al do this?' and `How does Al do that?' They wanted to know how he tuned his drums. Other drummers tuned their drums better than Al ever hoped to tune 'em."He didn't do anything, you see. He just played."Valerie Wilmer
Type of Label: Major