Set 'Em Up For The Little Rock Kid - Sat. October 31, 09
What kind of summer was that-’09?! Dave had just spoken to Richie from Lil Feat, who said his doc had told Richie, he’s gotta stay off the road (for his health). We’re on our way to catch the Nantucket ferry and the next thing we know, Jay R., our RADZ Records guy, is telling us he’s heard Jim-The Little Rock Kid-Dickinson has passed away. We get confirmation about this while we’re scarfing down scallops and shrimps at the Shack outside Hyannis Port.
There’s just been talk amongst us about going back into the studio with Jim, who did the production work on TOTAL and BUCKET, oversaw the Epic compilation, ANCIENT FURNACE, and helped us on the mix for NEW DARK AGES.
I remember when Jim and I were getting to know each other during the recording of TOTAL in Memphis, the summer of ’90. I would often get to Three Alarm Studio (an old fire station) an hour or so earlier than the rest of the guys because Jim had stored an old pump-organ in a little alcove by one of the entrances to the station. And I’d pump and wheeze my way on it, filling up a cassette’s worth of tuna on my trusty Walkman. I also spent some time just hanging out with Jim, a fellow early bird. We traded cassettes of various things. JD gave me a compilation of rarities from his life-the yard man at his parents’ house singing a holler and an outtake from Ry Cooder’s BOOMER’S STORY, featuring Sleepy John Estes’ own song, BLIND MAN IN A GAS MASK. I turned Jim on to a Roosevelt Sykes LP on which Roosevelt sings “DON’T TALK ABOUT ME WHEN I’M GONE.” Jim couldn’t get over Roosevelt’s sly, exuberant version of this old chestnut.
And now, Jimmy D., you’re gone, and I’m sitting here talking about you.
In that blues series Martin Scorcese produced for PBS some years back, there’s a segment where Jim relates learning to play guitar from an older black man who told the young Jimmy D., the secret to playing was learning the “codes.” Of course, the man was speaking of “chords,” but it came out sounding like “codes.” And, man, that’s Jim, reaching out to find the secret codes, and find ‘em, he did…. Or, is it better said, they found him?
I wonder about that because Jim truly struck me to be a person called, a person touched, and though he certainly made his own wonderfully crazy music, this “touched” quality was best expressed in how he touched others and brought something out in them when recording them….I don’t know- something hidden? It’s difficult for me to put it into words, but where other producers would prod you or come off as a highpaid babysitter, Jim would somehow do something that would create some kind of opening for you to find the right way to go. There was a sense of adventure and mystery that was rare then, back in ’90, and is rarer still today.
I guess you could say Jim was in his way like a Delta Zen Master. He was nobody’s fool and yet he was a beautiful fooler. He once related to me how he was in the studio with a band whose drummer was just running away with the tunes. So Jim got a big old barrel of an oil drum and placed it in front of the drummer’s bass drum. Jim told the drummer what he was playing was so tremendous, Jim was afraid for the drum, the drum needed to be anchored and better stabilized and this big barrel ought to do the trick.
Jim said the drummer settled down after that.
Well, Jim, man I hate to see you go. Time’s swift engines parted us, but damn, you touched us all here in the group. And whether you like it or not, we’re gonna talk about you plenty till WE’RE gone…
