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 Jerry Ragovoy and Chips Moman. 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: Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin, Janis Joplin, Dusty Springfield, Wilson Pickett, the Rolling Stones, 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 Philadelphia 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 rockabilly 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, blues 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 1950s. 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 Howard Tate, 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 Atlanta, 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 earth 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 Gene Vincent, Bill Black 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 Gold Star studios 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.