I play the same I think the same

By admin
Ballet Shoes Center.com

Published: July 29, 2010

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I play the same, I think the same.”What had really changed for us was that there were no longer black artists standing in white studios,” adds Penn. “It seemed as if a year went by, without anybody hardly being there, of any race.”It changed my life,” he continues. “Suddenly, whatever it was that we had with the black people was gone. I mean, we were basically, if you want to take off the clothes, hillbillies, country boys, cutting black records That’s what made it sound like it did.

I lost my studio – stayed pretty intoxicated for eight years I learnt, though… things that still keep me alive.”Even before this collapse, the glory days for Penn and Oldham were almost done. It was Martin Luther King’s 1968 assassination, and the black riots and militancy it sparked, which laid them low. The unlikely bond between races that had forged Southern Soul bent and broke. “It was nothing you could write down, or see in a paper,” Oldham says sadly “It was just in the air I was the last one to understand it I wondered why it was, because I’m the same. He was “saved” in 1981 after extreme behaviour in the wake of his hit- making almost dragged him under “I was ’saved’ as a child,” he says.

“But I went as far as I could, and I just about died, before I found a way back to the church house. In 1969, I’d gone out on my own, left American, and built my own studio I figured I had it made. I had a lot to learn.”In the Seventies, there were a lot of parties, but not a lot of songs Whole lot of first lines, and no verses. When they wrote a No 1 for the future Big Star singer Alex Chilton’s Box Tops, a second chart-topper was demanded – and delivered.”I was tuned into Top 40 radio, and I was tuned into R’n'B radio,” says Penn. “I had ‘em both in my sights, just like a kid sitting there with a gun. And I would try to think, wherever they are, go somewhere else.

That’s always been my philosophy for producing or songwriting, because it just ain’t much fun running with a bunch. You get trampled.”Like other Southern musicians of his generation Penn has had to wrestle with the mixture of godly and godless in R’n'B, with its Gospel roots. “I thought, I haven’t had this much money since I picked cotton. So I stayed in bands.” He met Penn in a studio in Florence, Alabama in 1965 They wrote together day and night and success was swift They became a hit factory. After Ray Charles, I didn’t care about white music for a long time.


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