NEWSCENE NOVEMBER AUTHOR ’ S CORNER. . . Time Is Tight: My Life, Note by Note Hardcover – October 29, 2019 By Booker T. Jones The long-awaited memoir of Booker T. Jones, leader of the famed Stax Records house band, architect of the Memphis soul sound, and one of the most legendary figures in music. PURCHASE YOUR COPY ONL INE AT AMAZON. COM TODAY ! Support DI’MANS, Inc. dba NEWSCENE https://smile.amazon.com/Time-Tight-My-Life-Note/dp/0316485608/ ref=smi_www_rco2_go_smi_g3905707922?_encoding=UTF8&%2AVersion% 2A=1&%2Aentries%2A=0&ie=UTF8 HARDCOVER - $27.00 AUDIO - $19.72 KINDLE - $15.99 Booker T. & The MG’s leader Booker T. Jones hosts a book signing for his memoir Time Is Tight: My Life Note By Note, Friday, November 1st, 7 p.m., at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music, 926 E. McLemore Avenue to bring back to the remarkable music career that began with him and David Porter running errands in their band teacher’s car when students together at Booker T. Washington High School, where Jones’s father was also a math instructor. Now 74 years old, the Memphis music icon takes the reader on an easy ride that often makes you pause to realize what you just read. The most subtle punch is when he outlines his formative years from his family’s home on Edith Street. Reading it makes you sigh in reverence, with a trickle of empathy and exhaustion for his parents, as you are drawn into the tight knit neighborhood support bolstering the foundations his father and gifted vocalist mother built for him. Through his story you come to realize how remarkably young was the talent that created Stax’s legacy. Jones’s parents made the decision that he should give up his long-standing paper route, spring-boarding him as the baby boy centerpiece of the label’s house band, Booker T. & The MG’s. In the time of new vistas for Black America, from the corner of College and McLemore his career took flight all over the world. Jones’s far-reaching success lie in his skills as an arranger. He credits a dual education as a teenage prodigy doing playing live around town and session work at the studio, from whence he would drive 400 miles to Indiana University Music School to earn his bachelor’s degree. A good way to enjoy Time Is Tight is to have your favorite internet accessible device close at hand. One second you want to Google musical references such as “contrapuntal” and other deep-seated musical devices you’d never associate with the earthy R & B Stax produced, and then the next sentence might push you to grab up the beat on “Hiphugger”, “Soul Limbo”, and of course, “Green Onions”, among the many hits that fall naturally into the book’s narrative. Well indexed, it’s fun to look up the famous and obscure influences he notes, or even “chateaubriand avec frittes”, the gourmet French steak preparation he came to love while working in France composing the soundtrack for the 70’s movie Youngblood, his first of several. And groovy enough, perhaps the best cut you will find online is a live video of Booker T. & the MG’s putting down a scorching performance of Time Is Tight stamping why the group’s power commanded southern soul in so few quick years. Ultimately, like the tense beginning of his soundtrack hit for Clint Eastwood’s film Hang ‘Em High, Time Is Tight is not a sugar-coated rendition of a life’s greatest hits. Jones left well before Stax’s demise, and made very significant contributions throughout the pop music spectrum, from Bill Withers to Willie Nelson to Earl Klugh and further. He confronts intrigue behind Stax’s door, including purloined publishing rights, the death of Otis Redding, his musical rock Al Jackson Jr., and the original Bar Kays, his pain at MG mate Steve Cropper’s quoted blaming of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memphis’s racial strife in Memphis, his sad first marriages, house fires, and more. A must for Memphis music buffs, a fun read for those who enjoy more than virtual reality. (NEWSCENE contributor Tony Jones, INK! is a Memphis based independent writer & publicist.) 16
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