Dark End of the Street

I’d known Loretta and JoJo since I’d come to New Orleans as a skinny teenager from Alabama. After my parents died, the Jacksons kind of adopted me. Their apartment on Royal and the blues bar on Conti became my homes. JoJo taught me how to play nasty licks on my harp and Loretta taught me how to cook some mighty fine soul food. She also gave me a place to do my laundry and hang out while other kids were going home during Christmas and summer vacation. They attended every home game that I played at Tulane and with the Saints, and my graduation ceremonies with even more satisfaction.

JoJo also introduced me into the network of old players and gave me an access into the blues that I would’ve never known. And during a few instances where I’d stumbled a little too far into the life of a blues player, they’d yanked my ass out of self-pity and Jack Daniels and made sure they set me straight.

I’m a curious person, I thought, loosening the last nut off the tire and sliding off the flat, and I believed I’d found out everything about the Jacksons. After all, I was an oral historian and prided myself as a listener. But although I knew the connection, Loretta seldom spoke about her brother Clyde.

A few times, especially some research I was doing into the connection between Civil Rights and ‘sixties soul, I asked a few questions about her days in Memphis and her brother being one of Southern soul’s headliners, among Otis Redding, Percy Sledge, and Wilson Pickett.

But she always found a way to change the subject. And I didn’t want to push. After what I’d read about Clyde going crazy and taking to the street, I knew it only caused her pain.

Before I left New Orleans, I’d spent almost all night in the archives searching for articles about Clyde. I found a lot about the music – with a cursory mention of him – about how soul began to find roots after Ray Charles matched gospel structure with secular lyrics. Basically how oh, baby replaced oh, Lord. This was the time of Sam Cooke and Solomon Burke, an exciting period in black music that replaced blues in popular culture. But Southern soul was something else entirely. This was not Motown. Motown was black music for white teens. Southern soul, Memphis soul, was black music for blacks. This was grit. Funky, marinated, and deep-fried in gospel roots with the intensity of a church revival. Although he sang mainly about love, Otis Redding wasn’t far removed from a preacher. Wilson Pickett was a shouter who could’ve been telling the world about Jesus, but instead chose “Mustang Sally.”

I loved the music. It was Memphis.

But most people, even feverish fans, didn’t know Clyde. Still he managed to be a cult figure in Britain and some critics believed he was the best soul singer who ever lived. Desperate. Almost operatic. One critic said, “Clyde sang sad songs not like his life depended on them, but like what his life depended on was gone and these songs were what was left.”

It was pretty close to the truth. Just as James was getting national attention, his haunting version of “Dark End of the Street” topping the charts, James started suffering from some deep mental problems. His wife and a member of his band had been killed in south Memphis, and in the time that followed, articles said James had suffered more emotional problems. Sometimes he even climbed onto the roof of the old movie theater that served as a recording studio and dared anyone to pull him down.

I read that there were rumors James ended up in a mental institution and that his new record company tried to keep it quiet. He reappeared briefly in the early ‘seventies and did an unreleased album for Willie Mitchell at Hi. Then he was gone again. Some say a prison in Florida. Others say they saw him singing in the early ‘eighties in Germany.

About the best thing ever written on James was in a four-year-old issue of a British music magazine called Mojo. The writer threw out a lot of theories from James’s contemporaries about what happened. The accepted story was that he killed himself about a decade ago. Broke. Forgotten. The man who could’ve been the next Otis, still a shadow.

I replaced the tire and tossed the dirty flat and oily jack into the back of the truck. No cars passed. The cotton stretched all around me in silence.

I started the truck and headed north to Memphis.

I could do this quickly. No bars this time. No jukes were needed to find the answers. I would treat this like an academic exercise and return back to NOLA.

That’s what I told myself as I saw the loose outline of Memphis just over the Tennessee border, already tasting a sandwich from Payne’s and a cold forty on Beale. My heart began to pound in my chest like a child first seeing the rides of an amusement park form in the distance.

Chapter 5