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Home , Billy Lee Riley, Chips Moman, Howard Tate, Irma Thomas, Jerry Ragovoy, The Box Tops

Moman & Ragavoy 1 Fulmer

HEADLINE: YOU MAY NOT KNOW THEIR NAMES… BUT YOU KNOW THEIR MUSIC

Byline: David Fulmer

Let’s just say they’ve been there. And now they’re here. They being and . There being rock ‘n’ roll’s stratosphere. Here being the state of Georgia. “Legendary” is a pretty heavy sack to tote, but they’ve both earned it, by virtue of the songs they’ve written, the records they’ve produced and the music they’ve played. They are not household names, but they have already done more to make great American music than a busload of Madonnas. Though they traveled different orbits, both thrived in the rare air at the top of the mountain and in the company of royalty: , , , , , , and dozens more. Now there’s a researcher from the Smithsonian knocking on Moman’s door, waiting to interview him for the institution’s archives of American music. And in December, Ragovoy will receive this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Rock & Roll from the ASCAP Foundation. Their backgrounds stand in stark contrast: Moman, a rough-hewn Georgia boy from near the Alabama line who landed in Memphis just in time to catch a new wave of American song-making; Ragovoy, the son of Russian immigrants who was born and raised in and spent all but the past 10 years of his career in the mosh pit of the New York music business. Both are white, yet both scored their highest marks working black idioms. Moman started out in and moved on. If he didn’t actually invent Memphis soul, he wrote some great recipes and was in the kitchen while they were being cooked. Ragovoy, on the other hand, caught his fever at the receiving end of the black exodus to the North, the melange of gospel, and pop that engendered a gritty, urban brand of R&B. They share something else: They’re survivors. With nearly a century of music-making between them, they’ve seen the business rise from tenant shacks and tenement hallways to the fattest corporate boardrooms on the planet. They were players during a golden age, but they also saw the burnouts and the crashes. And they’re still around to talk about it. Actually, they’re more than around. After five decades of working in the coal mine, to paraphrase Lee Dorsey, they both pick up a shovel every morning. Moman is settled in a house on West Point Lake -- five miles west of LaGrange -- building an Internet music business (a label called Chipsmoman.com). Ragovoy, meanwhile, spends his days writing songs and developing CD projects in the custom-built basement studio of his home in Alpharetta. Curiously, for two men of the same vintage (Ragovoy is 66, Moman is 65), in the same business and holding a touching mutual respect for each other, they’ve never met. Yet they are at coincident flash points in their careers, as they both reach back to go forward. Moman is producing artists he worked with in the . He’s also opened a vault of unreleased studio tapes to build an archive. Ragovoy, meanwhile, is writing songs for and will produce a CD by , the Macon-born soul singer with whom he last teamed more than 30 years ago. Moman & Ragavoy 2 Fulmer

Moman’s roots The man who goes by the nickname “Chips” was born Lincoln Moman in LaGrange, 70 miles southwest of downtown , in 1936. He grew up neck-deep in the swampy miasma of Southern music as it seeped toward the creek that would roll into the river that would burst the dam as rock ‘n’ roll. He got a solid drenching. “My mother had six sisters, and they all played piano, so there was always music. When World War II came, and my father and the other men left, all my aunts and my cousins ended up in my grandmother’s place in the milltown.” There were 24 people in that one house at one time, he says. There was also a guitar that got passed around among the male cousins because, as Moman relates it: “Back then, boys didn’t play piano.” He took to the guitar early, though he says it never occurred to him that he would be a musician. “It was hard times, and music was cheap entertainment, but that was all it was.” He loved everything he heard, but when they got electricity on the farm where his father had moved the family after the war, he discovered something magical. “There was this station out of Cincinnati, and real late at night, they’d play black gospel music. My dad always fussed at me because I took the radio under the bedcovers, trying to hear that gospel.” He did not know it would echo for the rest of his life. He just knew he was in love with this soaring, passionate black music. Still, this was the rural South in the 1940s. Desegregation was years down the road, and whites in general had little truck with their black neighbors. But things were different in the Moman household. “I was taught as a child by my grandmother, my mother and all my aunts that all people were equal. I never thought that the color of anyone’s skin made anyone any better.” It became a more sensitive point when he went to school. “Being named Lincoln, I had a lot of trouble.” But that was only for as long as he was there. At fourteen, he quit school and hitchhiked to Texas, he says, “because my dad always talked about it.” But things weren’t any easier there, so he took off again, this time to live with an aunt in Memphis. Call it luck, fate or cosmic plan, but he had landed at the headwaters of rock ‘n’ roll. He still had no plans to become a musician, but that all changed when Warren Smith, the early Sun artist who is best known for the cult classic “Ubangi Stomp,” walked into a Memphis drugstore and heard him wailing away on a borrowed guitar. Smith listened for a few minutes and then asked the teenager if he wanted a job. As Moman recalls, “I said, ‘What kind of job?’ and he said, ‘Playing music.’ I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ I never even asked how much it paid.” He was swept up in the first wave of what would become a pop culture tsunami. It was a time of hot licks and cutting contests, of wild young men from the backwoods and back alleys in fluorescent suits and wild pompadours, howling like banshees and leaving a scorched of 1950s middle-class indignation in their wake. In short order, Moman became a much-in-demand guitar player. He went on the road with , and the Burnette Brothers, progenitors all. He was writing, too, and had his first big seller with “This Time,” a song he had written when he was 14. Asked how he came up with such a killer slice of teenage angst, Moman says simply, “Well, girls can break your heart.” Moman & Ragavoy 3 Fulmer

It was some life for a kid from the sticks of Georgia, but it took a trip to California and L.A.’s famed for him to find his life’s work. “When I got into that studio, I realized that that’s all I ever wanted to do.” It would take another stroke of fate to make the dream come true. Ragovoy’s Leap At this same time, 3,000 miles away, Jerry Ragovoy was making his first leap into the music business. And, like Moman, he took a step down a path that began when he was a child. He remembers when he composed his first song. “I heard the ‘Nutcracker Suite’ and sat down at the piano and made up a song based on it,” he says. “I was 6 years old.” Ragovoy came from a musical family, Russian immigrants who had settled in North Philadelphia. His first love was classical. “Debussy, Ravel, Rachmaninoff,” he says. “I would listen to them for hours and just be mesmerized.” The early 1950s brought him to jazz. Later came R&B and gospel music. “I fell in love with gospel because for me it had the same emotional power as classical music.” It was a journey taken by others, from the European immigrant experience to the heart of black music. For Ragovoy, it began with a job in a record store. “I worked in a store in a black section of Philadelphia for five years. So for 10 hours a day, six days a week, I listened to the latest jazz and blues and R&B and gospel. It was a matter of osmosis. I absorbed the idiom without trying. Ten years later, I could sit down and write R&B as if I’d been born to it because of the time I spent there.” From the music store, he landed a job with Chancellor Records, home to teen idols like Frankie Avalon and Fabian. He got his first taste of arranging and producing and then began writing in earnest. His first recorded song, “This Silver Ring,” was cut by a local group called the Castells. But by the turn of the decade, the Philadelphia scene began to drift away from its traditions of solid street music toward pre-bubblegum pop. Ragovoy wanted to move, and there was only one place to go. “The first time I went to New York,” he recalls, “I said, ‘This is it.’ “ It was, indeed. Ragovoy saw in Greenwich Village “before he was Bob Dylan,” as he recalls. There was jazz -- as in Miles -- and hip comedy downtown, too. Ragovoy remembers catching a wild Jonathan Winters and a wilder Lenny Bruce. Most of all, there was music. He worked as an arranger and producer and began cranking out R&B that was simmered in gospel, wrapped in the blues and then served up in adult portions. In this period he produced “Cry, Baby,” “” and “. All went to black artists -- from to Aretha Franklin -- who did them proud. But there was no stopping the British invasion, and in a matter of months, the black artists that Ragovoy wrote for found themselves rudely blindsided, ripped off and shoved aside. Looking back, Irma Thomas’ rendition of “Time Is on My Side” blows the Stones’ version right out of the water, but that didn’t matter to millions of white kids in 1964. Jagger and the boys looked like them. Well, sort of. Ragovoy kept writing, arranging, producing and playing. He got another rocket blast later in the ‘60s, when Janis Joplin did her thrash on “Piece of My Heart.” But that flurry went by, too, and it was always another day, another song, another record. Moman & Ragavoy 4 Fulmer

Fate has its way If Chips Moman had stayed in California, his would be a much different story, but a car accident changed that. To recuperate, he headed back to Memphis, where he decided to make records with a sound that he had begun to foment in L.A. “I had worked with a lot of black musicians out there. When I got back to Memphis, I was already doing R&B.” He was intent on building a studio that would re-create the sound he was hearing in his head -- the mysterious, devastating chemical reaction that would come to define a golden vein of . He was one of the founders of and, later, American Studios, and so began a decade of legendary music-making. From Rufus Thomas on one end to Elvis Presley on the other, Moman ran a hit machine that was -- and is -- unrivaled in the annals of the recording industry. Downplaying his own talent, Moman says he was simply fortunate to be a part of the amazing wellspring of musical talent that was Memphis. Often, as he recalls, he didn’t have to do much to gather talent. “They would just walk in the door,” he says. “We weren’t very busy at first, so we’d talk to anybody. Booker T. Jones came in his high school ROTC uniform. It happened all the time.” The cadre of studio musicians, black and white, that he assembled are still held in awe. He produced his magic for Stax and other labels. He worked in Memphis and he carried his act down to Muscle Shoals, AL., too. There was Wilson Pickett, , Arthur Conley, Aretha Franklin, , and too many others to remember. A much-vaunted session with Elvis Presley that produced “” and “” came in 1968. It was a signpost that seemed to mark the end of a run. He had been working night and day for almost 10 years. “I wanted to come back home,” he says. He closed up shop in Memphis and set up a studio on Faulkner Road in Atlanta, but that lasted only six months. Moman now admits he was exhausted and depressed, and what he really wanted was out. He went into seclusion in LaGrange. But then he followed musician friends to Nashville and, in short order, was talked into building another American Studio. There he worked with the outlaws, Waylon and Willie and the boys, and another string of hits followed. After several years, though, the blush came off that rose, too. In 1994, right about the time Ragovoy was settling in Atlanta, Moman packed up and headed back to LaGrange. However, unlike Ragovoy, he stopped working. “I wouldn’t even let anyone play the radio around me,” he says. “I didn’t want any part of hearing any music.” It was a new kind of burnout, one that has become all too common of late, a result of trying to make music according to the dictates of MBAs with profit-and-loss statements in their hands. “The guitar stayed in the case. But then it started coming back. I realized I still loved it. But I didn’t want any part of the business. I started picking up the guitar once in a while.” Deciding to approach the business of music from a different direction, he founded his Web site and built a studio in a secret location in the LaGrange area. The master is back at work. “After I came back, I realized that it wasn’t music that I was finished with, it was the music business,” he says. “I’m not going to do it that way anymore.” He will make and sell CDs by artists like Georgia’s Billy Joe Royal and Memphis rockabilly vet Billy Lee Riley (remember “Flying Saucers ”?). He says he also will avoid the money- Moman & Ragavoy 5 Fulmer grubbing and fickle politics of the industry that he led -- at least in terms of quality -- for decades. He hopes it’s the wave of the future, and he may be right. He’s been ahead of the curve before.

New York in heart Jerry Ragovoy toiled as songsmith, arranger and producer through the 1970s and 1980s. His compositions were recorded by dozens of artists. But in time, the business changed for him, too. He found that all the gold records on his walls didn’t mean that much in the current marketplace. He had to pitch records like he did when he was starting out. “Corporate America has this thing that anyone over 21 is past their prime,” he says. But it was corporate America that brought him to Alpharetta. In the early 1990s, when his girlfriend was promoted, he relocated with her. Now, in the house at the end of the cul-de- sac, the writer of such classics as “Piece of My Heart” is working away. Most of Ragovoy’s baby boomer neighbors don’t have a clue that the man who created songs that they once treated as, well, gospel, is performing his particular brand of musical magic just down the street. By now so many of those songs are familiar to anyone with ears and a radio. On two- thirds of his catalog, Ragovoy wrote both music and lyrics; on the rest he collaborated. He arranged and produced and played piano. He has heard his songs interpreted by the top names in the business for more than 30 years. But, like Moman, he still has to work at his craft every day. “None of us knows why or how we do this,” he says. “Where did it come from? We didn’t learn it in school. I don’t know where I get it from. It’s either a God-given gift or genetic fallout.” A hint of superstition creeps into his voice, as if talking about it might diminish the magic. But magic or no, he says, it rarely comes easily. “From the last song I wrote to the next song I’m trying to write, I feel I’m starting all over again, like I never wrote a song in my life,” he says. Once a new song is written, he turns to production, the other dimension of his world. When it comes time to make the actual recording, he will return to his old stomping grounds. “I worked in New York for 30 years and I’m used to my New York players,” he says. As productive as he’s been in Atlanta, he never wanders far from the soul of New York. “I grew up and lived most of my adult life in those Northern urban areas,” he says. “You carry that with you anywhere you go. But I could write these same songs on the moon.” Like Chips Moman, Jerry Ragovoy is not comfortable sitting still. The two of them have logged thousands of notes, thousands of hours, miles of tape. They’ve made our lives richer, and they both deserve a rest. But they’ve got more music to make. “Yesterday is gone,” Ragovoy says. “Of course, I’m flattered by the kind things people say. But today is what matters. And I will never, ever rest on my laurels. I’m only as good as my last song.”

© 2003 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution