Buried Treasure, The Mobile Days Hi this is Jimmy and welcome to Buried Treasure there's a reason why we're calling this collection of songs and stories Buried Treasure Because they were literally buried in a closet in a recording studio in Nashville for decades They were discovered by an old friend Travis Turk who actually recorded these tracks in Moblle, Alabama in 1969 and more in Nashville in the years following When we both wound up moving there Travis eventually recorded the first two albums I recorded in Nashville as well
The actual buried treasure was discovered in Buzz Cason's Creative Workshop studio about ten years ago Buzz is a legendary producer in Nashville and was the first person to sign me to a recording contract Well the universe must have been working because as fate would have it, Travis had been hired
by Buzz as the sound engineer and in-house producer
When Buzz sold Creative Workshop to John and Martina McBride There was some cleaning up to do and Buzz asked Travis to go through the storage room and see if anything was worth saving before he ordered the dumpster bin That's when I got a call from Travis that he had found a sizeable collection of quarter inch tapes that were
the demos of songs that I had written and recorded for Buzz when I was writing for his publishing company
It turned out that there were over 125 songs in that pile of tape boxes
Also discovered were the original first recordings Travis had engineered in Mobile And that is where the whole story of Buried Treasure starts
It was in 1969 when I returned to Mobile from my coming-of-age years, living in the French Quarter in New Orleans
As a 20-year-old and playing in a band in Bourbon Street Driving East on Highway 90, the first song, light of my life in my 1963 Ford Falcon, WTIX the mighty 690 was playing the soundtrack of my exodus from New Orleans
Elvis was caught in a trap, the Beatles were coming together Sly was having a hot time in the summertime and Paul Simon was in a clear ring with a boxer
I sang along, I knew all these songs by heart Hell we'd play them every night at our gig on Bourbon Street that long hot summer when the showbiz bug bit me for the first time And I never recovered
I knew that the stage was where I belonged But staying beneath the brightly coloured lights proved harder than I thought More about this later but the simple fact was that jobs in my newly chosen profession had become scare that fall
In one of the most musical places on earth The only work i could find was playing drums, Something I hadn't done since I was in the St, Catherine's school marching band, when I was 12 It did not take that club manager long to figure out that he had
not hired the next Ringo Starr
It was the first and only job ever was fired from and he was right Trying to sort out my future, I looked to the past I headed back to Eastern shore to try to sort things out Yep, the prodigal son was going home
Before I knew it was back at the shipyard working days as an electrician helper And looking for gigs in the waterfront bars around Royal Street at night Then one morning I spot an ad in the Press Register announcing
Bob Cooke at the Admiral Corner bar at the Admiral Sims hotel Bob had been the leader of a great group in New Orleans He was a one-of-a-kind frontman I studied him from far early that summer and then we became friends when we wound up on the same bill at the Bayou Room I was the sorcerer's apprentice observing him from a barstool doing his magic He more than anyone, taught me how to work a crowd
I popped in on his show one night, at the Admiral's Corner and we caught up on his break He had left the group and was doing solo gigs now and happy to be a one-man show again He invited me up that night to sit-in The hometown boy was finally performing in his hometown I became a regular guest performer and when the cocktail hour piano player moved on, the manager at the hotel offered me that spot
When Bob's month was up, I got an offer to headline It could not have come at a better time The backdrop to all this was the grim shadow to the Vietnam War, If you're interested you can read about those days in a story entitled Vietnam, Mississippi in my first book As it turned out I graduated from college along with solo'ing an airplane for the first time If I was going to Vietnam, I sure as hell was gonna see it from a plane
As it worked out, the war passed me by but the student loans coming due, did not I was happy to have a steady job and steady income Even if I was still in Mobile, It took a while but I became a bit of a local attraction Packing the animals corner to fire marshall capacity at weekends 75 people max Of course with that kind of a following, I started dreaming of the big time again and hearing myself on the radio
Only thing was, you have to have a record in order to get played on the radio Well there were no major talent scouts hanging around the Animal's Corner in those days so If I wanted to make a record to sell at the gig and try to get on local radio, I had to find a studio and of course pay for the recording session myself So way back then before Social Media had sent us to space and back for instant information, I let my fingers do the walking through the yellow pages Until I came across an ad for Production Sound Studio's Sounded pretty professional to me. I called the studio asked about the rates and times and booked myself a session To make a two-sided, 45 rpm record, I've always thought that being born on Christmas entitled me to a few lucky breaks and Travis Turk that day in the studio sure seemed to be one of those
Travis was a DJ on the local country station and an engineer It was there that Travis introduced me to Milton Brown who owned a studio and supposedly had Nashville connections It turned out that indeed he did and it was MIlton who gave me my first real break
Looking back it's funny the way things turned out Going back home was one of the best and luckiest moves I ever made My luck didn't stop there though, Travis moved to Nashville, where he recorded song demos and produced my first album But i'm getting a little ahead of myself Speeding down the road to success here, which certainly was not how it all came about so we'll just stick to the Mobile recording's for now
A lot of the tape boxes Travis found, contained a good number of songs I remember recording But also quite a few that had slipped my memory But these first two songs I could never forget Don't bring me candy and Abandoned on Tuesday were the first two songs I wrote and recorded, My first time in a real studio
Damn I sound young That's because I was, needless to say Hearing these songs for the first time in 40 years was a trip It's amazing how they immediately conjured up memories of that first experience, of where and how the songs were written Who played on the sessions, who was just hanging around the studio What was going on in the music world beyond Mobile and how in the hell can we get there
I think that's why it's so easy to compare this collection with a hidden treasure But the value of this discovery would be determined more by listeners than by treasure hunters The example that comes to mind for me is Ry Cooder's classic Buena Vista Social Club album It was never supposed to happen The original idea of having great musicians from Mali travel to Cuba and validate the Afro Cuban roots of Carribean music Turned into a tropical trainwreck, it is all wonderfully documented in the film by the same name When It was finished and had reached amazing critical and financial success Ry says in the opening segment of the film, quote, you never know what the public is gonna buy
I certainly din't even know if the public would ever hear anything that came out of Project Sound Well thanks to a lot of luck, we have dug it up, dusted it off and are about to find out
So as the story goes, I made and paid for my record It came out on the AudioMobile label That first record did not get me through any doors of any radio stations in my old hometown But, it definitely was a career move Though I didn't know it at the time. Milton provided the launchpad from which my rocket blasted off To where no Mobilean had ever gone before So as they say in nautical terms Product Sound Studio was the port from which I embarked on this musical journey Which has been a wonderful, amazing and lucky voyage that continues to this day So to the crew, that great first crew that helped me cast off the lines, from the Port of Mobile back in 1969, To Travis, to Milton, Nick, Johnny and Ricky and I'm sure people I've forgotten, Thank You For sending me on this lovely cruise And this is the song that started the whole thing, it's called Don't Bring me FlowersTeksty umieszczone na naszej stronie są własnością wytwórni, wykonawców, osób mających do nich prawa.
