You can almost hear the awe in Herbie O'Mell's voice when he talks about Ronnie Milsap. "I've been in the music business all my life, but Ronnie Milsap, man, he might be the most talented person I've ever run into." A longtime Memphis music industry vet, O'Mell began his career promoting dance concerts at the Hotel Chisca featuring a young Elvis Presley, and has managed a host of gifted artists over the years, including Milsap.
As a studio and club owner and industry leader, he's been up-close and personal with everyone from Jerry Lee Lewis to Bob Dylan, but he gushes about Milsap. "As soon as you heard Ronnie you knew what tremendous gifts he had. God .
.. he was just something else.
" For most people, Milsap's name conjures up his three-decade run as a country superstar. Starting in 1973, Milsap cut more than 40 No. 1 hits, a record only surpassed by Conway Twitty and George Strait.
He also won six Grammys and eight CMA awards during that time, including one as Entertainer of Year. On Saturday, Milsap arrives in Memphis with fellow country music legend Strait to perform at FedExForum. For Milsap, it will be a homecoming of sorts.
Just before the start of his unprecedented Nashville success, Milsap was a white-hot rock and roll/R B singer and piano player, who spent several crucial years in Memphis working as a session musician at Chips Moman's American Sound Studio, and starring as the main attraction at Midtown's T.J.'s nightclub.
For a generation of Memphians, Milsap's run at the bar from the late '60s to the early '70s stands out as one of the most memorable live experiences they've ever witnessed. Last year, the Collectables label reissued a pair of CDs documenting Milsap's Memphis days: his 1971 self-titled debut and the 1975 odd-and-sods set A Rose By Any Other Name. Although the albums were not major commercial successes, they were part of a period that set the table for Milsap's rise to stardom.
"Memphis meant everything to my career," says Milsap, from his home in Nashville. "That's really where I found myself and my sound." Call T.
J.'s his home base Milsap was born in Robbinsville, N.C.
, in 1944. He lost his sight at the age of 5, the result of congenital glaucoma. While attending the Governor Morehead School for the Blind in Raleigh, his preternatural musical talents first began to surface.
He studied classical music for nearly a decade, mastering half-a-dozen instruments before turning to rock 'n' roll and forming his first band, the Apparitions. He later attended Young Harris college in Atlanta and, although he was on scholarship studying pre-law, music ultimately beckoned. Milsap quit school and got his professional start as a member of Oklahoma guitar master J.
J. Cale's band before going solo in the mid-'60s, recording a handful of singles and scoring a small R B hit with "Never Had It So Good." By 1967, he was a fixture on the Atlanta club circuit and was signed to New York City-based Scepter Records (home to Dionne Warwick and B.
J. Thomas, among others). The label sent Milsap to Memphis to work with American Sound Studio honcho Chips Moman, and although the sessions didn't yield any hits, Moman was immediately taken by Milsap's prodigious talent and began wooing him.
"Chips came down to Atlanta to see me afterwards, and at the time I had a gig playing at the Playboy Club," says Milsap. "I was playing six sets a night. My first set would be all instrumentals -- Dave Brubeck, Ramsey Lewis or Ahmad Jamal, piano-jazz numbers.
Then I'd start singing, and by the time we got to midnight I was up to Wilson Picket. It was a combination of jazz, pop, R B, country. Chips saw that and he said, 'Boy, you need to move to Memphis.
I can get you all kinds of sessions playing down at my studio. And I can work toward getting you a permanent nightclub gig.'" The nightclub gig came courtesy of Memphis impresario Herbie O'Mell.
In the late '60s O'Mell had re-opened a bankrupt club in Midtown, just off Avalon and Poplar, called T.J.'s.
In the fall of '68 Milsap and his band came up for a trial run of shows. "We played two weeks, and it went over so well that Herbie said, 'This is where you need to play. You guys are the band,'" says Milsap, whose imaginative arrangement of Jimmy Webb's sweeping "MacArthur Park" brought the house down nightly.
On Thanksgiving Day 1968, Milsap packed his things and moved to Memphis with his wife, Joyce, and his backing musicians, beginning what would be a nearly four-year run. With O'Mell signing on as his manager, T.J.
's became Milsap's home base. "It was the hottest club in Memphis back then," says O'Mell. "We couldn't even serve liquor by the drink back then -- that was before they passed the law letting you do that.
So you had to bring your own bottle, and we'd serve the setups or mix it for you." Amid a boozy and often amphetamine-fueled atmosphere, Milsap's sets became the stuff of legend. He'd play spot-on renditions of songs by everyone from Stevie Wonder to Roy Orbison, even indulging in epic 45-minute renditions of the Beatles' "Come Together.
" Milsap was capable of imitating almost any popular singer, so much so, O'Mell notes, that he hadn't really discovered his own voice. "When Ronnie came here, he thought he was the white Ray Charles -- and he sounded just like him, too. But after a while, we wanted to try and make him find his own style.
So the years in Memphis became his learning period." "Ronnie's sorta like Charlie Rich," says musician Jim Dickinson, who recorded with Milsap. "He's spent literally a career and had a lot of success being only a part of himself.
" T.J.'s soon became a wild and wildly popular hangout for local musicians and a regular post-show spot for touring acts, many of whom would sit in with Milsap.
"I'd come off stage and get me a little scotch and soda or something and sit down and here's John Fogerty, or Leon Russell, or Isaac Hayes," says Milsap. "Sometimes the MGs would come over and sit in, sometimes it'd be Three Dog Night." Sadly, Milsap's electrifying club sets are forever lost to history.
There were no professional recordings made of his T.J. shows -- and the one amateur tape has been lost.
"A friend of mine came in with a two-track recorder and set up some mics," recalls Milsap. "He played the recording for me and it sounded pretty great. But a couple years after I moved to Nashville he was killed in a boating accident in Memphis, and we were never able to get those tapes from his wife.
" By 1969 Milsap had settled into a comfortable life in Memphis, first living on Vollintine Avenue in Midtown, and then buying a house in Whitehaven. His wife, Joyce, gave birth to their first and only child, son Todd. In between his shows, Milsap was doing heavy session work, cutting advertising jingles for Pepper-Tanner ("I'd knock five or six of those out an afternoon, and at $25 a pop that was a great deal for me") and recording at American with a range of artists, most prominently Elvis Presley.
Milsap played and sang on Presley's Moman-produced classics "Kentucky Rain" and "Don't Cry Daddy." After Milsap's Scepter contract ended in 1969, Moman signed him to a production deal. Moman had his own label, Chips Records, that was distributed by Capitol.
They cut a couple songs, including "Loving You Is a Natural Thing," while O'Mell was busy parlaying the rising industry buzz on Milsap into a record deal. "A man by the name of Larry Cohen, he was a V.P.
of Columbia, he came into the club and heard Ronnie and wanted to sign him. So we started negotiating," says O'Mell. "Then next thing I know a guy by the name of Clyde Bakkemo at Warner Brothers called me -- he had heard about Ronnie and wanted to sign him.
Well, you know how show business is: All of a sudden Clive Davis, the head of Columbia, was talking about how he was going to sign Milsap. Then Joe Smith, the head of Warner Brothers, said, 'No I'm going to sign him.' So they got into a battle.
" The bidding war ended with Warner Brothers as the victor. WB head Smith suggested Memphian Dan Penn produce Milsap's debut LP. Penn was just coming off producing a succession of hits for the Box Tops and was developing his singular aesthetic, an almost cosmic cross-pollination of country, soul and pop that would reach its apotheosis on his 1973 solo album, Nobody's Fool.
Milsap and Penn spent the early part of 1971 recording the album with a jaw-dropping cast of session musicians -- James Burton, Reggie Young, Eddie Hinton, Kenny Buttery -- at a series of Southern studios, starting at American in Memphis, then moving briefly to Nashville's Quadraphonic and finally completing the bulk of the album at Muscle Shoals Sound in Alabama. "It was a traveling circus by the time we got to Muscle Shoals," recalls Jim Dickinson, the only musician to appear on all three sets of session. "It was wives and babies and bodyguards and all kinds of stuff.
We were cutting here and there. But I think the more successful part of the record, the heart and feel of it came from Muscle Shoals." The resulting record was a mix of material that reflected Milsap's live set.
A combination of classic rock covers (Chuck Berry's "Sweet Little Rock 'n' Roller; Roy Orbison's "Crying"), dramatic country narratives (Kris Kristofferson's "Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends"), ornate pop songs (Mark James' "Sunday Rain") and Southern delights like Cajun tunesmith Huey P. Meaux's "Dedicate the Blues to Me" and a Jim Dickinson-Bob McDill holy-roller number called "Sanctified." While the song selection was decent, Milsap's performances don't quite shine with the same power he'd later evince as a country artist.
Penn, perhaps used to working with less naturally gifted musicians, like the teenaged Box Tops, had Milsap focus on cutting multiple vocal takes. "The way Dan produces, you play the song a lot," says Dickinson. "And Milsap, being blind, is sitting there singing into the darkness.
He was nailing it the first or second take, but by the time we got to take four or five, he started to get bored and he couldn't help it, he stopped doing all his really amazing vocal stuff. "I don't think Dan even noticed," adds Dickinson, "because he was working on the kick drum sound. And that's taking nothing away from Dan, who was pretty much at his peak right then.
But Ronnie was very sensitive to his environment." Ultimately, as Dickinson observes, the Ronnie Milsap LP was "neither fish nor fowl. It's not rock or country, it's really more Dan's record.
It's almost part of a continuum of this kind of 'space cowboy' thing that Dan was doing, with the Box Tops and his own stuff." While the record does bear Penn's distinctive stamp, in listening to the recent reissue of the album -- as well as the additional tracks cut with Penn and Moman that were repacked as A Rose By Any Other Name -- Milsap's vocal performances simply can't be denied. His rendition of Nat Foster's "Not For The Love of a Woman" for example, or his version of Mickey Newbury's "She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye" (remarkably, a demo cut with Moman) rank among the finest of his career.
Released in late 1971, Milsap's self-titled debut did make it to the lower reaches of the Billboard Top 100, but never lived up to the enormous expectations that everyone had. "We believed we were close to something down there in Memphis," says Milsap. "And I think we really were.
Maybe if we'd had a little more time, or a chance to get songs that were a little stronger. I don't know." The failure of the record shook Milsap's confidence.
Having struggled for nearly a decade to gain a foothold as a recording artist, he'd developed doubts about the music business and was contemplating moving back to Atlanta to finish his law degree. "I was talking with my wife, Joyce, saying I don't think this music thing is going to work out," recalls Milsap. "She said, 'Let's go to Nashville and give that a shot before you give up on music.
' And that was a wonderful suggestion." O'Mell hooked Milsap up with Charlie Pride's manager, Jack D. Johnson, and publisher Tom Collins, and the singer moved with his family to Nashville in late 1972.
The most crucial thing Milsap brought from Memphis was a new Dan Penn song called "I Hate You" that he was sure could be a hit. Milsap changed the song's time signature from a 3/4 waltz to a 4/4 country weeper and cut it among his first batch of Music City demos. Resistance to the idea of Milsap as a country artist was strong in Nashville at the outset.
Jack Johnson approached RCA, whose country division had just been taken over by Jerry Bradley. "Bradley said, 'I know Ronnie Milsap -- we go over to Memphis to see him all the time. He's a rock 'n' roll singer, he's not a country singer and I don't want to hear anything from him,'" says Milsap.
"But Johnson played him the demos with 'I Hate You' and Jerry listened and said, 'You know what? That (S.O.
B.) can sing country!'"RCA signed Milsap to a six-month trial contract -- "and I ended up having a 20-plus year run with them," he says.
"I Hate You" would prove to be the first of several dozens country hits for Milsap, sparking a two-decade reign at the top of the charts. Milsap's been in Nashville ever since, but he says his Memphis experience has never left him. "I really learned to create my own music and develop my style in Memphis," observes Milsap.
"That's a special thing for an artist. So I always look back fondly on those years. And I always carry a little bit of Memphis with me.
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