Willie Mitchell: 1928-2010
Willie Mitchell slipped away this January 5 just past. Trumpet player, bandleader, songwriter, he was foremost a producer. Not a celebrity producer, he was better than that.
Throughout the 60s, he made records under his own name. they were mostly instrumentals, in a Junior Walker-ish style. The title of one collection, That Driving Beat, is an accurate description. That would change. He almost never featured his own trumpet playing.[1] That self-effacement wouldn’t.
Easily his best solo record was “Soul Serenade.” It featured one great descending guitar riff (Teenie Hodges) and a brief guitar solo, which, more even than Steve Cropper’s break on “Green Onions,” is the great Memphis guitar solo.
It also featured a sax solo by Charlie Chalmers, who was to remain an essential part of the Willie Mitchell’s sound, as the male voice in Rhodes Chalmers and Rhodes. The song has been covered by a lot of people, but most memorably by Aretha Franklin, on I Never Loved a Man. The challenge there was to avoid repeating the guitar break – what would be the point? The solution was to answer Aretha’s singing the title with three descending horn chords. And anchoring those chords is, a small world away from Memphis, Charlie Chalmers, on baritone sax. It is a high point of an album that was a high point of its time (and works as well as ever today).
Mitchell left solo work for the Hi Records, Royal Studios, and producing lots of people, but above all others, Al Green. It’s easy to think of Mitchell’s career at Hi Records as a continuation of Stax. He was recording in a converted movie house in Memphis, doing – more or less – 60s type soul, at a time when most black popular musicians had, for better and worse, moved on; he was using mostly the same instrumental lineup as Stax, even including one of Stax’s key players, Al Jackson Jr., but the differences are important: Mitchell’s style is, initially, classicist. The beat is much less central to his records. He started out using two drummers, Jackson, and Howard Grimes. The object was not to double the impact: neither drummer played a full kit. The snare drum was no longer the driving beat. The different parts of the kit, lovingly recorded, became more equal coloristic devices. (The intro to “So Glad You’re Mine” is the best illustration.) And where Steve Cropper typically played chords on the beat, or doubled the bass line one octave up, Teenie Hodges mostly played arpeggios, floating over the beat. Stax defined a sound; Hi teased it out. The “sweetening” was different, too. Technology was a factor. A Southern record label in the 60s, like Stax, would have to make records that would come through on transistor and car radios. Horn charts that were too complex would likely get lost. Mitchell, in the 70s, when much better sound systems were the norm, could use a fuller horn section, to articulate jazzier, more elaborate harmonies.[2]
But more important to the Hi sound was the regular use of a vocal chorus (Rhodes Chalmers and Rhodes) and a string section, where Stax used them sparingly. The string sections tended to get the most adventurous writing. The strings pop up in the most unexpected places. “Simply Beautiful,” possibly the loveliest song in American popular music, is acoustic guitar, plus a very spare organ, horns, and drums – and the string section from a symphony orchestra. Al Green’s Higher Plane, not a Mitchell album, but the product of his influence, has no horn section, but there is a string section on every track.
Green’s memoir, Take Me to the River, tells of his early years with Mitchell, who brought him along and developed him. On one early record, there’s a some studio back-and-forth before the song starts. “Shut Up, Al Green,” says Mitchell, even as he brought out his voice. In an interview on National Public Radio ten years ago; talking about “Let’s Stay Together,” Green said:
I’m in here trying to blow the studio top off, and Willie kept saying, “No, just say it,” I’m going, .like “I think I need to muscle up and sing it.” He said, “Don’t try to handle the song, Al. Just let the song happen. Just let it happen. Just let it ooze out and let it – that’s right.”
And Mitchell said:
I wanted this golden voice on it, and he kept giving me somebody else’s voice. And that’s why we just kept going over and over and over and over again. Yeah. When he nailed it, I said, “That’s the one.”
Mitchell fostered Al Green’s idiosyncrasies. And the more Green went his own way, the collaboration grew closer. Their first records together had only a few songs co-written by Green and Mitchell. Mitchell’s compositions were noticeably jazzier. “Let’s Stay Together,” for example, opens with a minor ninth chord, something Green would normally stay away from. Their last few albums featured songs written together. Mitchell followed Green to some strange places. If Green started out as the next big soul man, a natural successor to Sam Cooke, the mature Green is a very different thing. He has filleted the convention out of his performances. Look at the video of his duet with Lyle Lovett on “Funny (How Time Slips Away).” He mostly laughs and smiles his way through the song. It is pure Al Green, and you’re not cheated. He loves long vamps, where he can minimize the constraints of a song. And he shows little interest in showing off his instrument. He can sing high without resorting to the falsetto, and his falsetto is strong, but he prefers to press it past audibility. (Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the hearts of men the things which God has prepared for them that love Him.) There is a hint of career suicide in all this – and aesthetic triumph. Willie Mitchell has been by his side, his truest support.
Beyond the records themselves, Willie Mitchell leaves a legacy of the greatest artistic selflessness. “Full of Fire,” is a song he wrote with Green and Teenie Hodges:
I can dance with the fire burnin, burnin low I can stay till the party is all overI can dance
dance
dance
dancc
I understand
there’s some things that I know
but I want the horns to blow
Notes
1 Mickey Gregory, Isaac Hayes’ lead trumpeter, once said that when Mitchell played, you didn’t hear him, but you felt him.
2 Where Stax could get hit records out of its rhythm section, Booker T and the MGs, and could even produce hits for two horn sections, the Mar-Keys and the Bar-Kays, the music put out under the Hi Rhythm name you’d have to go looking for. The label “eccentric” has been placed on both Mitchell and Green. In their case, it means integrity and indifference to fashion. None of their records needs an apology.
“One Woman,” released in 1969, starts off as a song very much of its time, in the “Little Green Apples” vein. But at the end, as the chorus repeats, “One woman making my home, while the other one is making me do wrong,” Al Green cuts loose:
Sometimes I get so mixed up inside I wish I could find a place to hide
and
I didn’t mean to let it get this strong…
No?
and ending with
Baby, baby, baby
But which one? and the falsetto off into the stratosphere. Here, out of nowhere was the style to come.