The Great Speckled Bird 9/28/70 vol 3 #38 p11

NOTHING BUT THE BLUES

(an interview with JOHNNY JENKINS)

Ton Ton Macoute! was recorded in Macon, Georgia at Capricorn Records, at an 8-track studio built "in memory of Otis Redding” by Phil Walden, manager of Johnny Jenkins and countless black Rhythm & Blues artists, and owner of Redwal Music, Inc. Walden also manages the Allman Brothers Band, and because the Bird has from the first turned on to the music of the Allman Bros., we were sent a preview copy of Ton Ton Macoute! by Johnny Jenkins a couple of months back. It flipped us out. Unlike so many albums that you really dig on first hearing, this one just gets better and better the more you listen to it.

So Charlie, Ron and I set up a trip to the Macon studio and Redwal offices, and an interview with Johnny Jenkins. We thought we'd devote some space in the Bird to Jenkins, tell folks just how good a bluesman he is, and maybe generate some support for bringing him to Atlanta for a live performance. The first thing we found out is that Johnny Jenkins definitely does not think of himself as a rock & roll singer: he is blues people, has been playing blues for almost fifteen years, and doesn't even like Ton Ton Macoute!, not so much for what it is but rather because he had so little to do with it. Why Johnny Jenkins is turned off to the album that bears his name and face has a lot to do with the fact that he is a black musician working in a white-controlled industry. The name of the game is capitalism; the dynamic to watch is how well record selling gets along with white racism.

We assumed that the situation that produced Ton Ton Macoute! was simple--a fantastic, but unknown vocalist had put together some unbelievably heavy arrangements of a Dr. John song, "I Walk On Gilded Splinters"; 3 strong blues associated with other per- formers, "Leaving Trunk" (Sleepy John Estes), "Rollin' Stone" (Muddy Waters), "Dimples" (John Lee Hooker), done up in lighter, more rock than blues, arrangements; "Sick and Tired" by Chris Kenner, one of my very favorite rock & roll hits of the fifties; "Bad News" by John D. Loudermilk, reformulated to hold its own in a sound as different from Johnny Cash as you can get; a remarkable version of Dylan's "Down Along the Cove" (Duane Allman's slide guitar on this one is so good it hurts!); and a couple of 'Cajun' or 'voodoo'-sounding (whatever that means) songs, "Blind Bats and Swamp Rats" and "Voodoo in You" by Jackie Avery, a musician local to the Macon music scene which produced Ton Ton Macoute!,

By the time the "official" version of the album had come out, including printed credits inside the double fold, we had realized that the "sound" of the record was definitely Allman Brothers--not just Duane (whose slide work will stand your hair on end throughout both sides), Berry Oakley and Butch Trucks who play on the album--but the whole thing: arrangements, instrumental details, the process of bringing black originated blues riffs way over the hill to the rock & roll end of the spectrum. Sweat and grease become an Allman Bros. blues grace and polish. Johnny Jenkins, on the other hand, has one of the blackest vocal deliveries you'll ever hear. We wondered just how the thing came together.

When we got to Macon, we sought out Redwal Music, Inc. Roger Cowles, our host, showed us through their offices--walls covered with gold records and certificates of Phil Walden's successful management and promotion of such soul artists as Sam & Dave, Otis Redding, Joe Simon, etc. We heard some of Capricorn Records' new unreleased material on tape (most of it, except for some Allman Bros. we got just a taste of very white, very commercial, and very bad). Cowles asked two black secretaries to accompany us to Johnny Jenkins' apartment in order to serve as "translators" or "interpreters" for what Cowles called Jenkins' "stoned funk" speech. Finally we were off and headed for the housing project where Johnny lives with his wife and two younger children, Calvin and Junior.

When we arrived, we found Johnny Jenkins into a child care thing. One of his kids is a baby, only a few months old, and on this very hot day in Georgia, he had to interrupt our rap several times to see to Calvin’s bad temper. Jenkins' warmth and humor put us at ease right away, and as soon as we all realized that there would be no heavy communications barrier, the two women split, laughing and more than a little embarrassed (as we all were). With the aid of a tape recorder, we began rapping with Johnny Jenkins--getting into his background as a blues musician.

"Well, it was back 12 or 13 years ago, before that. An old fellow I knew then was playing guitar--played a blues type thing. I used to stand around a lot, listening to what he was playing. I liked the sound of his guitar, what he was doing with it, but I’d never played one, and I didn't have one of my own at the time. But I became so interested that the old man gave me one of 'em, and that's how I came about owning my first guitar.

"I was born in Swift Creek, Georgia, and before I came to Macon, the city limits of Macon, I used to play at the filling stations, and most of the people around there was white. I was playing hillbilly then, nobody was paying me, you know, and I was playing hillbilly. Shoot, I got to where I could sing just about anything Hank Williams ever put out! Hank Williams, Red Foley--just me and a guitar. Man, I used to hang around those filling stations and play hillbilly!

"Later I got involved with Pat T. Cake; we were making a small amount of money, you know, cigarette fare. I started doing jobs in fraternities, small clubs here and there, but we still hadn't got established, at least not the way we wanted to be. From then, it was one thing and another. After a while, we cut this song called "Love Twist," and that's when Otis (Redding) started doing regular work, so we got better equipment, transportation. We began to understand ourselves, get a lot more self confidence. One thing--the gigs began to start getting kinda heavy, the distances started getting pretty far, you know, and I didn't care too much about flying in an airplane. And that kinda messed up our trio, you know. So Phil (Walden) had trouble booking me for gigs, so he started booking me places not more than a few hundred miles away. Otis started getting on the road, and he wanted me to go on the road and play behind him, and this still called for airplane flying, and I just couldn't see no end to it. I feel that there is always an end to every beginning, but you don’t have to press it, man. I don’t believe in pressing it.”

When we told Johnny how fantastic we thought Ton Ton Macoute! was. We were surprised to hear him express only a grudging acceptance of that praise.

"Well, actually, "he said, "at the time we set up this album thing, I was all tied up, and the guys were free in the studio, so I’d just overdub my voice, and they would already have the rest of the sound down. They’d retrack it, you see? It was already set up for me when I went to the studio."

We began to understand just how strongly influenced the music was by the Allman Bros. and other musicians at Capricorn.

"I wasn't there with the guys when they were making the rest of it, you know. More blues would be my style if I had been there. Actually it would be ALL BLUES because that's my feeling, you know--the blues. This psychedelic idea came through the guys at the studio, you know--it goes along with what's happening in the world today, you know? But really, you can't make a person what he's not, you know. A fellow has to give out what's inside him."

We were, frankly, not expecting this view of what we thought was an outasight album of his music. "So you have mixed feelings about the album?"

"I feel more at home with the blues, strictly blues. That's me. I don't know how you'd classify the blues, how you'd talk about the blues. It's a mixed thing, man. It's about the hardship of a man, I feel, the past of a man. He never had a million dollars and wasn't born with a silver spoon in his hand. Like a guy who's never owned that jive, man, it's hard for him."

"When you hear a group like the Allman Bros., do you think their music is blues?"

"I don't criticize those people. I think that the stuff they're doing in their way is tops, it's their thing. Because that's what they feel, they know what they feel, and they do what they know, you know?"

We talked about Jenkins' new audience--he played the Atlanta Pop Festival at 6 o'clock in the morning with three drummers, a vocal chorus and a large band backing him up--and we discovered that even "success" can be a mixed bag when you have little control over the "product." Now that Ton Ton Macoute! is out in the record stores and picking up airplay and generating some excitement, the music of Johnny Jenkins is defined once and for all, and when he plays live performances, he is expected to reproduce the sound of the album.

"Another thing I don't think is wise is trying to get the same sound live you got on the album. You make a record with 20 or 30 pieces, you know, and when you put in an appearance, you're playing with 25 pieces, and I just don't think that's right. There's things in the record sound that people will be looking for, not just the vocal, not just the saxophone, but little things that might be hidden back in the album, so you try to get that whole sound--it's all gotta be there just like you cut it."

We asked him what he thought about playing "I Walk On Gilded Splinters," "Down Along the Cove," "Leaving Trunk," and the other numbers on the record when he plays live.

"Well, I don't really want to agree to it, I don't feel it, man, I just don't feel it. Cause it ain't me. We mix it up, usually, things from the album, and things I really want to do. I have to keep myself together, you know? It's hard, you know, to keep yourself concentrating on something you know you're not involved in. Every now and then, you can dig into one of your own things, and really get it up!"

Jenkins often referred to his "next" album, how it would be "all blues," his own material, but we wondered how such an album could happen when, once an artist is introduced, his audience comes to expect more of the same--and so much of Ton Ton Macoute! isn't Johnny Jenkins at all but instead Duane Allman and the Capricorn studio musicians. We asked him if he thought his own music, all blues, would be marketable, given the demands of the music industry today. He was optimistic.

"I think that all the music that comes to me should be able to do something for me now, you know? It's all that I can put into it, it's more than I can express, and there's a whole lot in there."

"Why do you think young white kids are beginning to listen to, and even play, blues music?"

"The kids have really been wanting to be free for a long period of time. And there's quite a few things happening now that give them the privilege to do what they've been wanting to do . . . such as the way they dress, the music . . . People are gonna look for respect, deep, hard respect that their parents been teaching them at church. They been taught ‘about’ God, but the only God they’ve been taught is about has been a respectable, clean God, and the kids today, they’ve found out what God is really about, the tramps He was involved with, the lepers, the filth He had to go through, how He healed the sores. . . There's just a whole lotta truth the children are finding out their parents were lying about. I'll put it this way: the parents weren't very brilliant about it. They shoulda known there would be a time when kids would be aware of what was happening."

"So this is all coming out in the music?"

"It's coming out all the way, man, in the music, in everything. And there's nothing they can do about it. Cause then the kids' kids come along! And I'll tell you something else, too. Some of the parents are willing to go along with it, too, but they're afraid. They done lied about so many other things, they've lived with that image for so long that it falls over into this thing here now. It'll be a complete downfall; they'll finally have to commit suicide, kill themselves because their minds will be so confused and mixed up. I know back when we were playing a lot of fraternities, we weren't even allowed to associate with the kids, white kids. And in the fraternities I was playing in, the music got so heavy that it really didn't matter, man. You could see it then, but you had to keep your cool, you know? But it was there anytime you could look into a person's eyes. Now, you can look into their eyes, and there's no turning away, you know? You can look deep into a person's face now and see there's something behind it. And it's been hid by a mask, you know?"

"You think that's breaking down now, that wall?"

"Yeah, man, the kids are free to speak, free to act."

Not too long before our trip, the mayor of Macon had stirred up a hornet's nest by issuing a "Shoot to Kill" order directed at black militants organizing in Macon around demands by the black community on the white power structure. We asked Jenkins about the situation there. "Macon's my home," he said. "The leaders here are combined into one whole--the leaders--and they're the ones that are working so hard together to keep things from being taken apart. But like I said, the citizens have a toehold, too! So it'll all take place in the near future."

Roger Cowles had left earlier to get a camera since we had neglected to bring a photographer with us; when he returned, he snapped a roll of film and we wound things up, ending by telling Johnny Jenkins how much we were looking forward to hearing him play in Atlanta.

Cowles took us to a soul food restaurant where black people and white longhaired musicians were taking lunch, and then we paid a visit to Capricorn studios itself, a large, mostly empty building in downtown Macon that Redwal is renovating with expansion of their existing 8 track recording studio in mind. Recording studios are exciting places to go; they must all look alike, evidently--we kept being reminded of Let It Be and Sympathy For The Devil. In addition to members of the Allman Bros. Band, Capricorn has a handful of crack musical technicians who serve as a “studio band” and play on almost every record put out by the Redwal people. While we were there, organist Paul Hornsby was adding another track to a really fine soul tune, and we rapped a bit with the engineers who were trying to get the sound mix just right. We also talked with Roger Cowles about the business end of the music industry, and it's really frightening how totally dependent on profit the whole scene is. A studio like Capricorn costs a shitload of money, and the music of the Allman Bros., tour and record, has accounted for a large part of it. We asked Cowles just what percentage of profit Johnny Jenkins himself would make off an album like Ton Ton Macoute! Cowles replied, "About 2 per cent." Incredible!

Driving back to Atlanta, we thought a lot about that 2 per cent, about Walden & Associates, about musicians like Johnny Jenkins who we might never have heard of had he not been placed pretty much at the mercy and musical discretion of an industry controlled by white capitalists, and about how one's attitude toward Ton Ton Macoute! depends to a large extent on who you are. We wonder if Johnny Jenkins will ever make an album which will satisfy him as much as his first one satisfies his new audience (us) and the studio people who produced it.

"I don't even know music," Jenkins had said. "And so when I'm out there, I'm out there playing solely from feeling, because that's all I have to offer. It can't come from no pattern, no sheet of paper, no teacher, cause I've never been involved with that. Blues is feeling. If you've never had it hard, you don't know what it's like. So that's the way I feel about the music. A cat that's out there, and his voice has never been trained to do things, he's just hollering, but he's hollering with a soulful holler, and he's just got it and it's gonna come out--whoo-oo-oo! If it ain’t in him, it's not gonna come out. Most of the time when I play, I won't be looking the crowd over, I sing with my eyes closed. So I really won't be trying to see the people, I'll be trying to feel the people."

Duane Allman and a lot of talented people at Redwal, Inc. in Macon have produced a beautiful album called Ton Ton Macoute! which makes use of the formidable vocal and harmonica talents of bluesman Johnny Jenkins. But maybe sometime soon Johnny Jenkins will get to make that album he can hear in his head right now--all blues, or maybe he might even sneak in one of those hillbilly songs by Hank Williams.

--miller francis jr.