CHARLIE RICH

CHARLIE RICH

Lonely Weekends

Peter Guralnick

The following is a chapter from Peter Guralnick’s book, Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues & Rock’n’Roll (a Fusion book, published by Outerbridge & Dienstfrey). In his review last issue, Charlie Gillett said of this chapter, “. . . (it) simultaneously establishes the greatness (of Rich) and explains why (he) has never managed to get as far as several people with substantially less native ability . . . Integrity, the grit that would tear show biz apart if it were allowed to get too deeply into the system. ”

For those not familiar with Rich, his material is available on four labels: Sun, Smash, RCA and Columbia. The albums most often recommended are: Lonely Weekends (Sun 110) a repackage of the early hits, The Many New Sides of Charlie Rich (Smash 67070) which contains “Mohair Sam,” and is generally regarded as the best Rich, and The Fabulous Charlie Rich (Epic 26516) which Peter says is his favorite and includes “Life’s Little Ups and Downs.”

We’re confident that both Guralnick and Rich are worth discovery; you can discover why below.

“You remember him, honey,” Charlie Rich says to his wife Margaret Ann. She shakes her head and squints after the man whose offer to buy her husband a drink she has just politely declined. She’s left her glasses at home tonight and looks very pretty and pleased that someone is at last going to do a story on Charlie. “You remember,” he says again with a sorrowful insistence that expects no response. “We were in the high school band together, God it seems like eight million years ago.”

Charlie Rich was born in Colt, Arkansas, a little town across the river from Memphis just outside of Forrest City, thifty-seven years ago. He started out with Sun like Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, and he and his wife remember when Johnny Cash used to put chewing gum between his teeth to keep himself from whistling through the gap. He speaks of Cash and the others with a mixture of admiration and regret. Surprisingly there is no bitterness, but Margaret Ann is quick to tell me that Charlie can’t get on Cash’s TV show and she hints with a certain ambivalence that John has forgotten his old friends.

Charlie Rich looks older than his thirty-seven years. He is a big distinguished-looking man whose hair started to gray when he was in his early twenties and is now completely white. He has a handsome beefy face, but there is something vulnerable about it, and even with friends, while he always bestows a polite measure of attention, he seems more reticent than not. Occasionally, too, his attention will wander, his gaze will drift out of focus, and a look of pain will come into his eyes. Except in his music he seems to find it difficult to express what he is feeling, and in these moments the carefully maintained facade of casual non-concern seems to crumble, and he looks for a moment like a soul who is going through hell.

“Every gray hair he has on his head, he earned it,” says Margaret Ann, a talented composer herself and Charlie’s principal booster for the last eighteen years. “You see, his people are Missionary Baptist, his mother still plays organ for the church today. It’s a real small fundamentalist type1 church, a bit basic, very narrow in their thinking. I don’t mean to speak harshly of it, but that’s the way they are. There’s no inbetween with them. It’s all yes or no, right or wrong, black or white. Now you take a country boy from a poor family, throw him into a business like this, it just isn’t easy. I imagine he feels guilty all the time.

“When he was a little boy he wanted to be a preacher. His mother and father used to have a gospel quartet, and he would hear them practicing, his mother me he used to hear them practicing

and he’d go in the bedroom and cry. I don’t know why. That’s just the way he would react.

“He’s got two sisters, both of them are in the church, one of them’s married to a Missionary Baptist preacher. His mother — I don’t know how to explain it — she’s worried so much about his drinking she doesn’t even think about the music life anymore. You see, his father was an alcoholic before he reformed. I only knew him after he reformed, and then he was the best man who ever lived. He was a real hpmebody, he had a real musical talent himself. At least, he was musically inclined, but he was too shy to ever be a performer. You see, church was their whole way of life, it was their social life, it was their politics and morality, it was everything. I wish he could learn to com' promise. He’s just not prepared for this. I’m not a city girl myself, but I lived a little closer to town. But it’s the only way he knows to make a living. I hate it.”

Margaret Ann says all this not at all as if she were making some personal revelation but almost with an air of casual conversation. She is devoted to Charlie, but at the same time she is very ambitious for him and apparently anxious that his story get told. Charlie, of course, has long since excused himself from the conversation, and is conferring with the club manager or having his picture taken with a friend just back from Vietnam. He has a habit of withdrawing whenever the talk gets around to him, and perhaps in his quietness or, more likely, from the deep brooding melancholy which seems to haunt him, he gives the impression of some fierce latent power held in check. When I spoke with her over the phone in the afternoon Margaret Ann was particulary anxious that I come out to see Charlie that night, not only because I would get a chance to see him perform but also because she would be there.

“I can tell you more about Charlie than he’s ever going to tell yoq,” she admitted quite openly. And, too, of course, the Vapors was a pretty club. “Not like some of the places he plays. Oh, some of those places are real dives. You just about have to get stoned to play in them.”

It is a nice enough club, a dining room and a panoramic dance floor, with a three dollar cover charge and jacket and necktie required for gentlemen. There are two other acts on the bill— Norval Phelps and Ace Cannon and his honky-tonk sax — and every day there is a tea dance from three to six. The MC keeps things moving so there are four hours of continuous entertainment, and 1 even though there is no place for the musicians to relax and talk quietly backstage the atmosphere is convivial enough so that it doesn’t much matter. Old friends stop by the bandstand, or else it’s friends of old friends. Everyone knows everyone else, it seems, and Charlie Rich engages in the expected bantering in a courtly diffident way. “Of course I remember you,” he says almost convincingly, “Sure, howya doing?”

Margaret Ann stands out among all the bouffant hairdos and lacquered nails with her quiet presence and delicate beauty. Although she is herself a smalltown girl who graduated with Charlie from the Consolidated High School in Forrest City some twenty years ago, she looks in her Pucci-styled pantsuit like some exotic species set among the backslapping middle-aged couples and gawky young marrieds who frequent the Vapors. Indeed there is no question, without her ever coming out and saying so, that she finds her surroundings dull, her neighbors provincial and that from the time she first wrote away and subscribed to downbeat in high school she has always considered herself different.

Charlie Rich is no less different. “Back in high school,” says Margaret Ann, “they used to call him Charlie Kenton, he loved -Stan Kenton that much. That was his idol. I can remember'one time, they had a concert with June Christie (that was my idol) and Stan Kenton both. Oh, that, was great. Well, you know, they’re trying to call Charlie a country singer now, but he isn’t really. I would say he borders on being a jazz performer primarily. That’s what he listens to. Brubeck, Miles Davis, Count Basie — you know, that sort of thing. I think in a way that’s, one of the reasons he’s had such a difficult time of it. They just don’t know where to place him, they don’t know where he fits in.”

Up on the stage the MC bounds to the microphone and joins in a scattering of applause for Ace Cannon, who has just finished a loud uninspiring set. Charlie Rich’s ears hurt (they have been bothering him for several months now), he is tired from a flight in from Dallas just that afternoon, and he suffers, he says, from emphysema from smoking too much. He sighs as the MQ announces his name and wearily makes his way up to the stage as Narvel Felts’ band — kids who might must as well be playing rock ‘n’ roll, dressed up in tuxedoes — gets set up to play. All the musicians know each other apparently, and the crowd knows Charlie from appearing for so many years around Memphis. So he gets a nice round of applause and sitting behind the big grand piano — pushed into a corner and almost hidden from sight — he struck the familiar opening chords of “Lonely Weekends,” the song by which he has come to be known, his first and biggest hit.

Charlie Rich cut “Lonely Weekends” for Phillips, a Sun subsidiary, in 1958 just about the time of Jerry Lee Lewis’ fall from grace, after Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins had left the company and Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison were about to. He played piano on sides by Cash and Ray Smith and even Jerry Lee, whose own pumping paino wasn’t able to make the adjustment to Charlie’s composition, “I’ll Make It All Up to You.” In addition to Jerry Lee, he wrote songs for a number of Sun artists, and he generally served as a house musician and composer for Phillips’ rapidly diminishing stable until “Lonely Weekends” established him as a i performer in his own right. Of all his discoveries, Sam Phillips said at one time, Charlie Rich alone had the raw talent to rival Elvis. The statement may well be true, but it is one of the few instances in which Phillips’ aesthetic judgment differed radically from commercial reality.

Charlie Rich never made it anywhere near as big as his fellow Sun artists. He was a victim of Phillips’ increasing indifference to the record business. After 1958 Sun Records seems to have become little more than a hobby among Phillips’ diversified financial interests, and there is no question that artists like Charlie Rich suffered from lack of promotion. There seems to have been a certain reluctance on Charlie’s^ part, too, though, which contributed as much as anything else to his lack of striking success. He got out of the Air Force in 1955 after serving three years in Oklahoma, where he had a small jazz group that played local dances, officers’ and enlisted men’s clubs, and had a weekly TV spot. He came back to Arkansas after his discharge and for a couple of years tried working his uncle’s farm in West Memphis (“As a farmer,” says Margaret Ann, “he made a pretty good piano player.”), and he kept up his music on weekends, picking up ten dollars at the Sharecropper Club where he worked off and on for more than four years. He did a little singing, too, but it was mostly, he say, quartet stuff, scat singing with the band. It was not his idea to go to Sun. It was Margaret Ann, working almostsurreptitiously, who approached Bill Justis, then serving as an A&R man for Sam Phillips.

“I knew, at least I thought I knew, that he’d be happier doing this. So I called the Sun Record Company, and I talked with Bill Justis (I’d met Bill one time before at a party), and he was his usual cool hip self. He said, What are you calling me for if you’re already Rich? Well, I almost never talked that man into going over there. .First I took some tapes in, and Bill was interested. Then Sam signed him, he did give Charlie a contract, I guess I can thank him for that’.”

Charlie stayed with Sun until 1963 when the company virtually folded. He went to Smash then and with his first Continued on page 77. release enjoyed a second national hit in “Mohair Sam.’’ He looks back on his stay there as one of the happiest periods in his musical life (both he and his wife regard Jerry Kennedy, his producer and Jerry Lee’s current doyen, as a “ray of sunshine in a den of iniquity”), and he emphasizes that this was the only time in his musical career that he was allowed to do what he really wanted to do. After “Mohair Sam,” though the records didn’t sell, bookings — which have never been plentiful — fell off, and after two years he signed with RGA, then a Memphis label, Hi, and finally Epic, a subdivision of Columbia, where he is at present and for whom he has had a mild string of hits in the country market.

I got loaded last night on a bottle of gin And I had a fight with my best girl friend But when I’m drinkin’

I am nobody’s friend But, please, baby, wait for me until they let me out again.

If you weren’t familiar with the song the words would probably be lost, with Charlie hidden behind the big piano, Narvel Felts’ band a little loud, and the voice mike lost in the instruments’ amplification. Charlie isn’t very engaged in his performance anyway. Mostly he runs through songs both he and the audience are going to be familiar with. By the end of the evening he will have done “Lonely Weekends” and “Mohair Sam” three times each, he sings his wife’s “Field of Yellow Daisies” which, she says, Tom Jones has recorded, though she doesn’t seem to think much of his version. “Life’s Little Ups and Downs,” she tells me proudly, has been povered by artists as diverse as Wayne Cochran, Brook Benton, and Jerry Lee Lewis, and she refers throughout our conversation to the publishing company which she started with Charlie’s manager’s wife (“It’s called Makamillion” she says, making a face. “Don’t you dare print that, it’s so awful.”).

I spend a whole lot of time Sittin’and thinkin’

Sittin’ and just thinkin’ about you Well, if I didn’t spend so much time Sittin’ and drinkin’

We’d still have the love that we once knew.

“I hate that song,” Margaret Ann bursts out suddenly, turning away from the stage. “I can’t stand it. You know, it really hits home. That’s Charlie Rich, that’s his life. That’s the real Charlie sure as life.” It’s a beautiful song, I say, moved both by the song and the revelation, but Margaret Ann shakes her head as if to say that for her it’s not just a song. “Well, it’s tough on Charlie being on the road. He’s a natural-born loner, he’s getting older, too, and it’s hard on him. Because it’s rough, it’s abnormal to have to get out and show yourself, to relate to people you’ve never met. You know, I think if every musician were, exactly honest they’d tell you nobody can live like that. I never met a musician that wasn’t a little bit odd, that didn’t use a crutch of some kind. You just about have to have something. The life they lead is bizzare.”

I know the same thing has happened before

And every time it does I hate it more and more

But when I’m drinkin’

I am nobody’s friend So, please, baby, wait for me until they let me out again.

In the course of the evening people continually stop by our table — men and women whom Charlie has known for a long time or just fans who would like to speak with him or get an autograph. Charlie greets them all with the same gracious deference, he is never rude or abrupt with any of them, but at the same time he is never enthusiastic either. “You know my wife, Margaret Ann,” he says to Narvel Felts, a tired middle-aged man with a strained booster’s manner, whom Margaret Ann has denied knowing all evening. They exchange some trade gossip. Both were just in Texas, and they talk about fishing in Texarkana. The MC waves to him from the stage and announces jovially, “I’ll see you later.” “I can’t wait,” says Charlie glumly. The kids in Narvel Felts’ band stop by towards the end of the evening. “One more set,” Charlie tells them. “Just fifteen minutes.” They groan, and Charlie, too, seems to be shouldering a burden that he never meant to undertake.

The Vietnam veteran at his table is getting drunker and drunker. He has the colored boy taking photographs snap one picture after another of him and Charlie Rich. “You really ought to do something with that ‘Lonely Weekends’,” he says over and over half jokingly. “I think you really got something there boy.” Charlie smiles obligingly every time, but just what their relationship is is not clear.

Everyone offers to buy him a drink, but Margaret Ann firmly limits him to beer, and he is not even drinking much of that. A lady at the table — sitting there with an older woman who might be her mother — asks me if I might do a story on a group she manages; they sing countrypolitan with a lot of original material, and if I’ll only stay in town until Friday I’ll get a chance to talk with them and see them. She looks disappointed when I tell her I’m leaving next morning, but she doesn’t say another word for the rest of the evening. A husky crewcut comes up and asks me if she is with anyone — she is a big striking-looking girl with petticoats which flare out her striped dress — but I don’t know and he’s too drunk to really listen. By the end of the night Charlie is really distressed at the constant flow of people and the continual demands from every quarter. He remains gracious, but every questibn I ask is interrupted by a drinking buddy or autograph seeker and at last he breaks away with a cry of pain. “I gotta get out of here.. These people are driving me nuts.” I’m finished with the interview and I start to gather up my material. “I don’t mean you, man,” Charlie offers half apologetically. “It’s just — all these people. ” I nod at him, I don’t know what to say, but I appreciate his consideration.

II

“Piano players have a helluva rough life,” says Charlie Rich with wry detachment. He is annoyed when he comes off stage after the first set because the piano, although it is, surprisingly enough, in tune, cannot be moved towards the front of the stage. He goes and speaks to the manager and arranges to have an electric piano substituted. At his wife’s urging he sits down next to me, and we shout back and forth over Narvel Felts’ tired pastiche of country hits and double entendre novelty songs and Ace Cannon’s yacketty sax. Margaret Ann is right about his reserve, although it seems as if it is not so much that he is shy, perhaps, as that he finds it inappropriate to speculate on his musical talents. The story he tells is virtually the same as Margaret Ann’s, only it omits the psychological terms and for that reason, while it loses a great deal of color, it gains considerably in complexity.

“I was raised up as a churchgoer. Or course I don’t swing with that anymore cause for one thing you’re working all night Saturday night, you’re working such odd hours, really, you don’t have time for that sort of thing. My mother and father, though, they used to be in a quartet. When I was a little bitty kid just coming on up I used to hear ’em around the house all the time. My mother gave me piano lessons, I guess the whole family was musical, myself and two sisters, it was pretty much of a musical family.

”I started playing with a group when I was around fourteen or fifteen. Just local stuff around <my hometown, in Colt and Forrest City, like that. I did a lot of jazz things while I was in the service — Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, things like that, After I got out I came back here and picked up more of a blues feel. See, I was raised up on a farm, plantation, what have you. Naturally we had a lot of colored people working for us, and naturally they sang their music — blues, so to speak in the cottonfields. I’m not prejudiced, never have been, I think in a way musicians are. the least prejudiced people around because they appreciate each other for their talent, not their color. Well, I don’t really know how to explain it. I understand it, but it’s, hard to explain. It was the music we heard. I think I just feel it, man, because blues is a feel.

“Well anyway I came back here and I farmed a couple of years over in West Memphis. I was playing clubs over here, mostly weekends. I was doing some solo stuff, piano-bar type of material, and I was playing with a five-piece group, Sid Menken — he was the guitar player on ‘Raunchy’ — he really dug that music, he was a great jazz buff. And we used to play at a place called the Rivermont Club, at the Sharecropper, too, oh for a number of years.

“At the time that Elvis came out I was still interested in my jazz favorites. Oh hell, he influenced a helluva lot of people. He was the guy who really go the ball rolling, who got people interested in rock ‘n’ roll, in the good type stuff. As a matter of fact, ‘Lonely Weekends’ reminded a lot of people of Elvis. Which is good if he done it, but not especially good if it’s someone else trying to sound like him.

“I came to Sun, actually my wife took some tapes over to Bill Justis — you’ve heard of him? — he liked ’em pretty good, he asked me to come in arid I actually started off as a writer and session man. Sam? Well, you see, Sam knew what he liked. Sam, you might say, yeah, he changed me from so much of a jazz feel to a feel of rock ‘n’ roll. It was due to the type of material we did and the type of writing that he wanted at that time. That was the reason why I switched from playing primarily jazz to going into the rock field. “No, we never actually made a tour. We played some of the package shows, we played some of the shows on certain tours, , but we didn’t actually made a tour ourself. I played all over Memphis, we used the same group out of Memphis, but I never got a regular group, because to do that you got to be working all the time, and I don’t want to work all the time.

“It’s funny, you work a twenty-five or thirty-minute thing in a dance type situation, believe it or not I have trouble remembering my own songs. People come up to me and ask me to play this or that, and I’ll give it a try, but a lot of time I just won’t remember the thing. I don’t want to make a list, ’cause if I do I won’t follow it. I don’t like being in a set pattern of doing things. I don’t write like that either. I don’t really go in with a program, to write about. I may get a melody, and that’s what’s the toughest. After I get a nice melody the words come along pretty much by themselves.

I don’t try to write like a computer. I have to feel it and think it. I don’t write with a message in mind. I just try to tell a good story.

“I think the stuff we did on Smash, I think I was probably more satisfied with the way those things came out, the type of music we did, I mean as far as the overall production was concerned. We worked with Jerry Kennedy and a whole groovy bunch of people who could get the feel I want. You don’t always get that kind of scene. Most of the time you’ve got to suit yourself to them. Now, see, I don’t like to be rushed, but I’m going into Nashville and I’ve got to do a whole album in two days. I wanted to do it last month when I didn’t have anything on, but somehow these things never work out. That last record we made, I was set up way in the back in Studio B at Columbia. We had the horns blowing in through a wall. The drummer was way off at a distance. It was a beautiful idea, man, I thought it was a beautiful idea at the time. But I wasn’t satisfied with the way it worked out,

. “Oh, there’s so many things involved in getting a hit. There’s the producer, there’s the musicians, you need the right song. It’s overwhelming, really, the odds that you face. And even if you have a real great song it still may not hit for ten years.”

He said this last with a finality born of resignation. “You see how bashful he is,” said Margaret Ann, when she saw that he wasn’t talking anymore. “He won’t tell you anything.” “What do you mean?” said Charlie indignantly. “I’ve been talking my head off.” He glanced up at the stage and stood up wearily. “Well, I guess I better go see if I can tame this electronic monster.” He gave us a wry smile. “That’s the reason I say piano players go through hell.”

Charlie Rich doesn’t seem to have the temperament to be a star. Whether it’s, lack of ambition or his drinking or some other more arcane reason he has never achieved the success which he deserves or fulfilled in any but an artistic way the promise which Sam Phillips saw in 1958. Margaret Ann thinks it’s the diversity of his talents, and certainly of all the rock ‘n’ roll stars — more than Elvis or Jerry Lee or Carl Perkins or Little Richard or Chuck Berry || he shows a breadth and musical enterprise which does not admit categorization. He is being packaged today as a country singer, but while it seems to be working out pretty well commercially it would be wrong, as Margaret Ann points out, to limit him to a field in which he is no more at home than blues or pop or jazz or even gospel. He is a musician in fact of extraordinary eclecticism, someone in whom a variety of musical elements have fused to create an artist who functions with all the necessity of a country or blues performer but with considerably greater complexity.

He has a voice of remarkable range and feeling which he uses to great emotional effect. The material he does is very much his own personal brand of soul, encompassing almost the entire spectrum of American popular music. He has written distinctive compositions in every mode, and in fact his most successful songs cannot be confined to any one category but run the gamut from country “weepers” like “Sittin’ and Thinkin’ ” to rock standards like “Lonely Weekends” and adaptations of material by Little Esther and Joe Tex. On his first records, it’s true, he sounded very much like Elvis Presley, but if anyone fulfilled the artistic promise which Elvis originally showed it is probably Charlie Rich. The music that he does, his approach to the music, his ability to make each song , a unique and personal vehicle Tor individual expression is something which in a way is lost to the star who is as much concerned with panoply as performance, who is forced by his image to be something he is not. Where Elvis is stiff and forced into a mold which is not entirely of his making, Charlie Rich is free to be whatever he likes. He feels none of the terrible constraints of stardom.

He has gained none of its rewards either. He has been not so much underrated as underexposed. He has been taken advantage of, his wife seems to think, almost because of his musical ability. “To me Charlie is a musicians’s musician. He can play just about anything and it takes him a very short time to pick it up. With most of the musicians you’ve got to spend a whole lot of time with ’em. But Charlie’s thought of as a kind of an afterthought.”

His musical background alone would seem to bear Margaret Ann out. First of all, of course, there are very few artists in the country or the blues field who are exposed to the same breadth of music. In addition he has had some training in music theory from his brief stay at the University of Arkansas where, Margaret Ann says, he got A’s in music and F’s in English. Most of all his scorings and compositions ai;e mdrked by a fluency ‘and a natural absorption of influences which is the product as much of native intelligence as of any musical technique. He just seems, as he says, to feel the music and he manages without strain to incorporate all his borrowings into one cohesive whole.

Except for “Sittin’ and Thinkin’ ” (which could itself be a bar-room ballad of the standard variety) the lyrics of his songs frequently seem incidental to the music itself. “Lonely Weekends,” of course, served as an archetypal cry of the fifties (“Well, I make it all right/ From Monday morning to Friday night/ Oh, those lonely weekends”), a good corollary to Fats Domino’s “Blue Monday,” and “Who Will the Next Fool Be?” — a minor classic which has been recorded by Bobby Bland, Bobby Vinton and Jerry Lee Lewis among others — utilizes the long lines and stretched-out phrasing to which Charlie Rich seems drawn. His lyrics at times seem if anything a little too sophisticated, employing abrupt metrical ohanges, or internal rhymes along the lines of “Stay,” a beautiful soulful ballad which pleads:

I don’t know

what to say

But I pray

that you’ll stay with me now.

It’s the music, though, the voice, the feeling, the piano, which compel attention and, while he will occasionally phrase like Sinatra or rock as good as Jerry Lee, it is the soulful ballads which he and his wife write that are his specialty.

For Margaret Ann Rich, a self-admitted frustrated artist, country music is a little “common” (“Don’t you dare call Charlie country. Oh^he may be rural, but you can’t label him. He just isn’t a country artist.”), but she does value its honesty. Like Charlie she has a tendency to get a little high-flown. For his cocktail-hours piano she may write lyrics that are “poetic” in a flowery sort of way. At her best, though, there is an incisiveness and a degree of emotional toughness which would do credit to any poet, and perhaps it is only appropriate that it is she in fact who has written the song which best sums up Charlie Rich and their special relationship after eighteen years of marriage. It is the song with which he made his bow on the country charts last and one which he sings several times this evening, with special feeling, it seems.

I don’t know how to tell her that I didn’t get that raise in pay today And I know how much she wanted the dress in Baker’s window And it breaks my heart to see her have to wait And cancel all the plans she made to delebrate But I can count on her to take it with a smile And not a frown She knows that life has its little ups and downs Like ponies on a merry-go-round And no one grabs the brass ring every time But she don’t mind She wears a gold ring on her finger And it’s mine.

Every time 'he sings it Margaret Ann is particularly attentive, and she is pleased when I tell her what a beautiful song I think it is. But a distracted look comes over her face. “You know, when he’s drinking he reverts to the other music,” she says softly. “That’s his first love, jazz. It’s pathetic, isn’t it? He’s capable of so much more, biit he just can’t find anyone who’ll turn him loose and let him do what he’s capable of doing. I thought this was our year. I really did. I said to myself this has got to be our year. Because it was the revival year for rock ‘n’ roll. I told everybody, I told all our friends. It’s just that it’s a little hard to take. Charlie’s a very talented man, he has a unique talent.” Her voice rises, and an almost desperate insistence comes into her words. “I don’t know. You pull for someone eighteen years and ...” She never finishes her thought.

III

His performance improves as the night wears on. He can’t really improvise much because of the nature of the band, and his voice is a little ragged compared with the records — “Life’s Little Ups and Downs” is not as flawless in the live version as it is on record — but by the last set he is singing with unmistakable passion and intensity and the shy, reticent, rather inarticulate man of our conversation is transformed into a commanding figure. He isn’t really a performer like Jerry Lee Lewis or Carl Perkins or Chuck Berry. To call him a rock ‘n’ roll singer in the first place may have been a kind of misnomer, because he has never had any kind of an act. He just sits behind the piano almost sedately and when he feels the music you can hear it in his voice, you can feel it through the emotional sparks he gives off. By the last set even “Lonely Weekends” has become a kind of cry of pain. He is if anything a soul singer.

Don’t lay no flowers on my grave Cause before I be a slave ...

Margaret Ann is up at the railing just smiling and nodding to the music. All her calculations have vanished now, and when she looks up at Charlie you can see the feeling which has sustained them through frustration and a lot of hard times.

Oh, I won’t promise the same thing won’t happen again But I can promise it’ll be a long, long time till then Cause when I’m drinking I am nobody’s friend Please, baby, wait for me until they let me out again.

At the end of the set Margaret Ann goes off to join friends, and Charlie and I sit at the table alone. He is drained, and he submits to this interview meekly, just as he has submitted to all the other inalterable conditions of his life. A fan comes up to him and he signs the autograph wearily. “You know, I ain’t seen you smile once all night,” she says, folding the paper and putting it in her purse. He gives her a wan smile and hands me back the pen. A few minutes later he has to tear himself away, but by then there isn’t any more to ask anyway.

Out in the packing lot a comfortable middle-aged man says to his wife, “Well, it looks like the underdog came out on top tonight.” He says it with an air of smug self-satisfaction, as if it were a cockfight they had just watched or an entertainment devised especially for their own amusement. Charlie Rich will go up to Nashville with his lawyer/ manager some time tomorrow to pick out material for his new album. This time, he hopes, he will really get that hit.

©1971, by Peter Guralnick: All rights reserved.