Ray Charles once had a guitar player called Eugene Ross. Also known as Big Bubba, Eugene was a 400-pound Texan bluesman with a wooden leg. It wasn't easy being Brother Ray's guitarist and finally, one night in The Sahara Hotel Las Vegas, it all went badly wrong. They were half-way through Busted and Charles decided that Bubba's guitar was sounding a little too loud. He shouted at him to cut it out and Bubba suddenly flipped. He stood up in an absolute rage and did something you really didn't do. He shouted "f**k you!" at the High Priest.
Such mutiny had no precedent in the Charles organisation and the stunned band stuttered to a stop. The audience too fell silent and sat in absolute shock as Brother Ray demanded that somebody get Bubba off the stage. But Bubba wasn't finished and, on something of a roll, he proceeded to call his boss "a dog" - just one more name for the man more usually known simply as The Genius. And those much bootlegged words "You're a dog !" were the last words Bubba ever said as a member of the Ray Charles Orchestra.
Just one of the many stories contained in Michael Lydon's book, Ray Charles - Man and his Music - an unblinking and relentlessly thorough account of the life of a genuine legend. It's the story of a poor, black and blind musician who grew up in 1930s America and became one of the most influential and creatively independent musicians of the century. Alarm bells immediately ring for any fan, but the cover endorsement from writer Peter Guralnick is a reassuring sign - a fair indicator that this is a book about a musician, and not just a book about a musician with too many girlfriends and a 20-year long heroin habit.
I say alarm bells, because the music fan must be wary of the star biography. Love, respect and admiration for a performer may well amount to three different things, but books such as this one sometimes serve to undermine all three at once. To Lydon's considerable credit, it doesn't happen here. Yes, there is a fair amount of detail on Charles's allegedly cold heart, his apparently superhuman sexual appetite and his indisputably unpleasant addiction, but the man's achievement and his very survival redeems both the book and the reader. Respect and admiration remain intact. As for love, I'll keep it for Bubba. I've heard the tape.
There seems little doubt that, when it came to doing the business, Ray Charles was a tough and single-minded individual. Of course it will come as no surprise to a musician to read that a bandleader can be a bit of a tyrant, but most bandleaders will tell you that it goes with the job. And, as far as Ray Charles was concerned, it was his career that was on the line every night, and it was his very serious business to make sure that he stayed, with perfection, at the top.
In describing Charles's approach, Lydon refers to chess - a favourite game of Brother Ray because, as he said himself, it didn't involve luck. According to Lydon, Charles viewed the world as a place where he had to "attack and retreat, hide and dare, plan five moves ahead." As he puts it: "Ray Charles had been playing chess long before he knew a pawn from a bishop." And, while his detractors might consider him tactical, cold and ruthless (or simply "a dog") there's no doubt that what he managed to do was operate successfully and with great skill against some very heavy odds indeed. Poor, black and blind was just for starters.
His achievement, too, is easy to assess. With just one song called I Got a Woman, Ray Charles changed everything. In doing so, he unleashed both himself and something they would call Soul. What he had done was this. He had taken a gospel number and turned it into an r'n'b number - and it had worked. He put secular lyrics to a religious song, and then jumped back to perform it with all the passion of its gospel original - simple enough on paper but a quite outrageous thing to actually pull off. It was his first stroke of genius and nothing was ever the same again.
But that particular Ray Charles had taken quite a while to arrive. The early years saw the young R.C. Robinson play with a Basie-type big band, a jumpin' jive combo and a hillbilly outfit called The Florida Playboys. It wasn't until 1949 that he became Ray Charles as part of The Maxim Trio - a group based on the successful Nat King Cole Trio. This was a time when he wanted to sound as much as possible like Nat Cole, or another of his heroes, Charles Brown, both sophisticated jazz and blues singers far removed from the style he would later invent. His recordings from those days were enough to get him signed to Atlantic Records - a label which had been waiting rather vaguely for someone just like Ray Charles to show.
At Atlantic, Charles started into much harder r'n'b material with songs like Mess Around, but it wasn't until a 1953 session in New Orleans that he finally broke through. He was in the Crescent City for a Guitar Slim session and, whatever about the facts of it, Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic were there too - in town to record Joe Turner at Cosimo Matassa's famous studio in the French Quarter. A session with Charles was also arranged, but with one crucial difference. This, for the first time, was a Ray Charles original, a Ray Charles band and a Ray Charles arrangement. The song was I Got a Woman and soul music had begun.
IN the early 1960s, he did it again. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Volumes 1 and 2 seemed like a very unlikely move indeed - but it worked. The albums yielded several big hits, including the multi-million selling I Can't Stop Loving You. It wasn't the first time a black soul singer had sung country - indeed Solomon Burke had been there first - but not quite with the all-embracing, all-American success enjoyed by Brother Ray. Charles, it seemed, could do no wrong. The authorities thought differently, however. The very public drug busts began in 1958 and only ended with Charles kicking the habit in 1965. At times, he seemed broken and, to Ray Charles fans, the busts themselves were seen as no more than crude attempts to finish off an extraordinarily successful black man. Sam Cooke, the only black artist who had come even close to Charles in terms of financial and artistic independence, was now dead - shot in circumstances that reeked, to many, of a set-up. It looked, for a time, as if the reign of Ray Charles might be over too. But, if the drug busts really had been efforts to silence another black voice, they had failed. The High Priest survived.
In fact, Ray Charles survived everything life threw at him. From the glaucoma which blinded him at the age of seven, through 20 years of heroin, to the many indignities which were heaped on black performers night after night, he kept on pushing. And he's still doing it - still playing and still probably making life difficult for the Bubbas of this world. And, much as I love Bubba for losing it at the Sahara Hotel, perhaps we ought to cut his boss a certain amount of slack - the Genius, after all.
Ray Charles - Man and Music, by Michael Lydon is published by Payback Press.
This biography has a fair amount of detail on Charles's allegedly cold heart, his apparently superhuman sexual appetite and his indisputably unpleasant addiction - but the man's achievement and his very survival redeem both the book and the reader