Jim Dickinson, Part Two

In response to a couple of questions, your humble blogger is back to gather you kiddies around the rocking chair to relieve you of your ignorance. (Please remember, ignorance isn't bad unless it's willful. It just means you don't know. And some things, you need to know.)
Jim Dickinson wasn't God, but he certainly was about God's work.
How does a body go about explaining Jim Dickinson?
Jim was one of those rich souls who was born old. Not in the rigid, dead-to-the-world sense, but in the wise, seen-it-all-twice sense. In the "I remember everything" sense. He was a rocker. And a Bluesman. And a crooner. And country and jazz and...well, you get the idea. The music was in his bones. Then again, if it isn't in your bones, what the hell are you doing being from Memphis?
The city cannot be separated from Jim Dickinson. He loved it, just as an awful lot of us do. That would be the ones who don't sit around afraid to go downtown, whining about the former/future Mayor, the City Council, the School Board and whatever else you've got, no matter how much all that deserves to be whined about.
Memphis' sole excuse for existing is the music. You either get that or you don't. God help you if you don't.
Jim got it. He lived it. He preached it. He played it. He produced it. Jim was the music!
When he sat down with Lee Baker, Sid Selvidge and Jimmy Crosthwait and they became Mud Boy and the Neutrons, miracles happened. When he decided to make a solo album, a good 1/3 of the wonder was finding out what songs he had unearthed to include. Dixie Fried, Free Beer Tomorrow, Jungle Jim and the Voodoo Tiger, Killers from Space and Dinosaurs Run in Circles...if you want to get Memphis, get those discs and wear them out as quickly as you can. Then you'll know.
He was a piano player. Like Lincoln was a President. Jim Dickinson at a keyboard could haunt your soul. He did it on The Rolling Stones' Wild Horses. He did it on almost all of the cuts on Dylan's Time Out of Mind. Dylan has been crazy powerful and prolific since crossing paths with Jim in 1997. I'll go to my grave believing that's no accident. That's Dickinson.
On The Bob: there's a line in his song I Feel a Change Coming On from the new album Together Through Life: "Some people say I've got the blood of the land in my voice." Long before Bob had totally blown his voice out, Dickinson had the roar, the earth-shaking, never smooth, instrument of apocalypse that was his voice. Listen to Mud Boy's Shake Your Money Maker or Money Talks, complete with his childhood experience of Rev. Robert G. Lee's Payday Someday sermon, the judgement of God delivered bluntly and as an End Time lecture to a beat you can dance to. Make that, you have to dance to.
Jim nurtured musicians. Look at his boys. Luther and Cody are ridiculously gifted musicians. They paid attention. They learned well. The North Mississippi All Stars are an experience every single time out. I'm getting redundant, but if you're not in the audience whenever the All Stars play the Home Town, you have no soul and you need help. Immediately.
But the sharing was never confined to the family.
Big Star, Calvin Russell, The Radiators, Mudhoney, Beanpole, Alex Chilton, Paul Westerberg and a thousand others, all found their music better after passing it through Jim Dickinson's hands. Not for Jim, the neurotic "Mine is the only" or "Why should I help anyone else" approach to art and life. Never Ever.
Mose Vinson was my point of contact. Jim's work with Mose taught me about the man.
Mose was an old man when I met him. He came to live in one of our retirement homes. He had gotten too well to keep his Medicaid in the nursing home where his niece had dumped him after his stroke. One of God's great saints, Mary Lee Moore, called me to her office to back up her judgement that the old man wasn't capable of living independently. When she asked the standard questions, the old man grunted, monosyllabic at best. Finally, divinely inspired and seeking any response from him, she asked, "What do you like to do?" The head lifted off the chest, the voice became strong, the one good eye fired to life, and the man said, "I play the piano!" Mary Lee being Mary Lee, she challenged him: "You can't play the piano; you're half dead." A smile played across the old man's lips. "You got a piano?" was his question. We led him into the dining room, to the pathetic old excuse for a piano that some Sunday School class had dumped on us when they bought something nice and new. Old hands became young on the keyboard. He ripped into Howlin' Wolf's .44 Blues. When he was done, our mouths were hanging open, and he was claiming to be the real composer of the great Blues standard. Later, Jim Dickinson told me that the Wolf may well have taken the song from Mose at Sun Studios.
Mose had been used his whole musical life. Sam Phillips had hired him at Sun Studios. To be the janitor. That way, any time a piano player was missing, Mr. Sam could have Mose sit in. Ike Turner often wasn't in shape to play when he actually showed up for a recording date at all. That sort of problem wasn't rare in the old days. But the janitor had to be functional. And God only knows how many of those incredible Sun sides actually featured Mose Vinson on piano, regardless of whose name was listed on the label. Mose certainly never got paid for any of that work. Somewhere along the way, Mr. Sam did credit Mose with a few sides, but they were never released until they were included in Bear Family's fabulous box, Sun Blues. Yeah, the Germans know their Blues. Who'd a thought?
Jim Dickinson gave Mose his moment in the sun, no pun intended. Jim produced, for Judy Peiser and the Center for Southern Folklore, the only album that ever carried Mose Vinson's name, Piano Man. Jim talked Mose through the recording. It sounds like two old friends sitting and talking in the parlor, around the piano. They even play some four-hand piano on the cd. Jim and Judy threw a cd release party for Mose. He was a star, if only for that night. Because Jim Dickinson said he was important.
Jim was a real-life Yoda. He spoke his own language. He saw and heard things others couldn't fathom. He lived richly and always saw the possibilities. He told Chuck Prophet, "You can burn out, but you can get lit again. I've seen it happen."
I knew Jim Dickinson just slightly, and that, only because of Mose. But I love him. I pretty much adore him. Jim was pretty much everything I'd love to be when I grow up. On several occasions, he'd spot me at one of his performances, and he'd ask, "Reverend, how's the Good Work going?" I'd say to him, "You ought to know. You're the one doing it."
I believed it when he was alive. I sure believe it now.
There's your lesson on Jim Dickinson.
Now you know something that matters!