The Temptation of Charlie Rich

....every soul that sins brings it's own punishment upon itself.
-St. Augustine Confessions

Charlie Rich had it all. No one at Sun records had more sheer talent. In his early records, imitating Elvis, he captured something that all the other guys missed--a mature, throaty growl that Elvis himself didn't discover until the '68 Comeback Special. And only Ray Charles could concoct a better gospel waltz than Charlie Rich--his "Who Will the Next Fool Be," recorded for Sun in 1961 is as good as it gets (covered by everyone from Bobby Blue Bland to Tom Jones).

Rich had decent enough looks, a strong sweeping voice, a love and knowledge of modern harmony (in High School they called him Charlie Kenton Rich). But Charlie was a werewolf alcoholic. The lunar vacillation between sobriety and animal need became the secular rhythm of his life.

It showed up in his music almost from the start. "Sittin' and Thinkin'" is a worthy nomination for country's greatest drunkard's lament (and that's the stiffest category in pop).

A jailed boozer pours out his guts to a girl he hopes will wait for him even though he's humiliated her again. "I got drunk last night on a bottle of gin...." He makes heart-felt promises he means to keep but finally admits, "I can't promise the same thing won't happen again." Rich captures the cycle of doomed recidivism, the tumble from spree to self-loathing to guilty repentance to spree again, better than anyone I've heard. "When I'm drinkin' I am nobody's friend/Please baby wait for me until they let me out again." It was a caged werewolf's howl bottled in a smooth pour of Old Granddad.

I went to Carthage, where I found myself in the midst of a hissing cauldron of lust.
-St. Augustine Confessions

In the years between rockabilly and the Beatles, Rich cut a series of rumbling, blue-eyed soul records and country jazz tunes for Groove and RCA that were strong, but largely unheard. In 1965 he signed with country label Smash. It was the year of Highway 61 Revisited, Rubber Soul, "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag."

Rich eked out a minor hit with a very backward-looking style of song, "Mohair Sam," that still went to #21 on the pop charts. But the album (The Many New Sides of Charlie Rich) was rangy and ambitious, running from blusey rock to epic stylized ballad. At the record's emotional center was "I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water," a much-recorded, churning outlaw blues written by Joe Babcock, a Nashville pro who sang high harmony on Marty Robbins' hits.

"I washed my hands in muddy water/I washed my hands but they didn't come clean...."

If "Sittin' and Thinkin'" was Rich's version of "What is this dagger I see before me," "Muddy Water" was his "Out damned spot." It's a crushing, thunderous performance. A preacher taking up Satan's serpent, not in front of a tranfixed congregation but later in the muddy dark behind the tent alone with his need. "I must have washed my hands in a muddy stream."

Rich was barely heard from again until 1969 when a song called "Life's Little Ups and Downs" cracked the country charts. The song was written by Rich's on-again, off-again wife, childhood sweetheart and constant companion of more than 40 years, Margaret Ann. (They were the only two kids in high school at Forest City, Arkansas in the 1940s who read Downbeat.) It was far from the only song she wrote for him to sing over the years. Words from the girl who waited put into the boozer's mouth. So began Rich's final climb to stardom.

...the higher part of our nature aspires after eternal bliss while our lower self is held back by the love of temporal pleasure. It is the same soul that wills both.... So it is wrenched in two and suffers great trials, because while truth teaches it to prefer one course, habit prevents if from relinquishing the other.
-St. Augustine Confessions

In the early 1970s Rich wound up in the hands of 'countrypolitan' hitmaker Billy Sherrill, who had a career building lushly produced pop country records in the Chet Atkins/Owen Bradley manner and who would later record some mid-career masterpieces with George Jones. Sherrill didn't hit with Rich right away. But when he did hit, he hit it big. "Behind Closed Doors" somehow managed to capture both a dream of domestic bliss and the Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, middle-brow sexual openness of the early 1970s. And then "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World" exploded, going #1 pop, a crossover smash in 1973. After a reluctant lifetime in music, when all he wanted was to write songs and play blues piano, at 41 years of age, Charlie was a pop star.  His shaggy Vegas mane of white hair had earned him the sobriquet Silver Fox and he was visible nightly under the shock-white mop, paunchy and bulging ridiculously from his Nudie suit, singing "The Most Beautiful Girl..." everywhere from Johnny Carson to the Glenn Campbell show to Gilley's.

With the initial success of 'Behind Closed Doors,' Charlie fell apart completely and drank himself virtually comatose at the taping of a Burt Reynolds special at the Tennessee governor's mansion. After hospitalization and hypnosis treatment, he stopped drinking altogether, but then in the fall of 1975 he brought further scandal upon himself on the nationally televised Country Music Association Awards show. Slated to present the award for Entertainer of the Year (which he had himself won the previous year), he appeared visibly unsteady and his speech was slurred. When John Denver turned out to be the winner, Charlie took out his lighter and burned the slip of paper.
-Peter Guralnick, Lost Highway

Rich had never been more successful. Charlie Rich Enterprises had money in real estate, fast food franchises, cattle ranches, pro football. But his music had never been less engaging. He recorded fewer of his own songs and more schlock churned out by writers contracted to Sherrill's publishing company. Rarely did the songs connect with the emotions Rich had to express. There was the self-penned, defiant epitaph blues "Don't Put No Headstone on My Grave," and the album of gospel-inspired songs, Silver Linnings. (Sherrill's father had been a circuit riding Baptist preacher. Rich, decently well off, spent the Depression years on his father's 3000 acre farm in Colt, Arkansas, 30 miles from Memphis, learning to play piano from a sharecropper named C.J. who worked his father's land.) But Rich seemed more estranged from his art than ever.

The nights went like the nights always did. Sometimes well, sometimes not so well. Boston music writer Peter Guarlnick, Rich's greatest champion, recounts the story of two nights in 1973 at his commercial zenith when Rich came to New York for an incongruous pair of gigs at Max's Kansas City--then home of bridge-and-tunnel, gender-bending, protopunk, glam kids. Opening night Rich cooked, but Rich spent the next day drinking, and the mood was sour come showtime.

On the bandstand everyone is depressed, Guralnick reported, and it shows in the performance. The beat lags, little mistakes creep in, Charlie's voice, roughened with drinking cracks on the high notes, and seemingly this only causes him to drink some more. 'It was bound to happen,' says Margaret Ann, almost in tears. 'That's just the way he is. It just had to happen.' As for Charlie, as he drinks he becomes more and more withdrawn; he sings with great expressiveness and feeling, but he becomes almost resentful at the presence of an audience, at the intrusion of strangers.

Rich hung on after the Country Music Awards fiasco, charting now and then with indifferent records until 1981. But eventually the work dried up. He only cut one album after 1980, Pictures and Paintings, a jazzy self portrait in song, lovingly midwived by Guralnick three years before Rich's death. It was a fine album, and the only one that ever allowed Rich to explore is range of interests and talents. But it sold little and is sadly out of print.

The final track on Paintings and Pictures remains one of pop music's most haunting and mournful songs. "Feel Like Going Home" is a gospel waltz taken a slow, death-tempo right out of Ray Charles' book.

Lord I feel like going home
I tried and I failed
and I'm tired and weary
and everything I done was wrong
And I feel like going home

"Everything I've done was wrong.... " It's a relentless, unforgiving sentiment, hopelessly burdened with infinite regret. But Rich doesn't sing it with self-pity or fatalistic self-absorption. Rich sings the line as a simple declaration of plain spoken submission.

Rich's song is straight out of the old tradition. Not the tradition that gave us Muddy Waters' "Feel Like Going Home" (a raunchy blues rocker full of stock couplets), but the tradition that gave us the Monroe Brother's "The World is Not My Home" or the old spiritual "Trampin'" ("trying to make heaven my home") where home is out beyond a distant, final horizon.

The definitive recording of "Feel Like Going Home" (available on a luminous 2-disk retrospective complied after Rich's death in 1995), comes from 1973--a demo of Rich alone at the piano. The studio recording from nearly 20 years later is better technically, but the song cries out for the "man alone" treatment found on the demo. Here is Rich, at the height of his commercial fame, pouring out the most painful, obsessive, self-excoriation and doomed resignation I've ever heard.

...how I burned with longing to have wings to carry me back to you, away from all earthly things.
-St Augustine Confessions

Sometimes I imagine the young Charlie Rich, not yet clunky or flabby, but tall and maybe awkward at 16, hair slicked into a hipster's swirled pomadour already streaked with premature gray, at a party at the house of some kid whose folks were gone, sitting alone in the tumult, the only kid there whose Dad had 3000 acres, the only kid there who had horses to ride, willing himself into near invisibility behind a piano, drinking beer after beer alone while quietly fingering the newest gospel blues licks that CJ had showed him, searching at the piano for something--not so much a lick or a tune, there would be plenty of those, but something else, something that maybe he never found--a way to make peace with himself.

Lord I've tried to see it through
but it was too much for me
And now I'm coming home to you.
I feel like going home

Comments

[Steve Pick]

Jason,

This is beautiful stuff. Charlie Rich as a failed St. Augistine? Interesting.

Man, you're right about "Feel Like Going Home." That solo version is one of the most powerful recordings ever made.

[chervokas]

Steve-

Thanks. It's a darn shame that people only think of "Most Beautiful Girl" when they hear the name Charlie Rich. The guy was a real talent who made some great records with real feeling.

[a-train]

"... and that's it"

(Charlie Rich says at the end of the demo of Feel Like Going Home ... I don't even think you can argue that the later version is better technically, that first version is a stand the hair up life changer)

What a great post on the a great subject ... Charlie Rich is the man, although I have to say the Sherrill stuff just never moved me like the early recordings. Philadelphia Baby, On My Knees, Everything I Do Is Wrong, There Won't Be Anymore ... Jesus the guy was amazing.

Next up: The Louvin Brothers?

[chervokas]

a-train, thanks for the note.

The Louvin Brothers, hmm....I do love the Louvin Brothers. Maybe. I'm thinking, tho', about Waylon Jennings or Dock Boggs.

I think Rich's pitch is a little flat in places on the demo of "Going Home," that's the area of technical superiority to which I was referring.

[a-train]

A little flat! I don't know if Charlie Rich can sing a bum note.

I will have to go back and check it out, I don't recall any bum notes ...

[chervokas]

The 'intonation' seems a little off during the first verse, but maybe it's just me. Anyway, it's a great performance.

[daveminnj]

just found this charlie rich post when i was looking for the ray davies post-
OH MY GOD.
charlie rich has been the man for me ever since i first heard the fabulous charlie rich back in the 70s!
actually, i was listening to davies' things are gonna change (the morning after)
yesterday and thought this is the first suc-
cessful rewriting of sitting and thinking
in 40 years.
i don't know about st augustine, but definitely a lost angel(which is completely different from a fallen angel).
charlie rich did this jimmie reed medley, 4-5 songs in three minutes and it was so wonderful-elvis WISHED he could sing like that! if only he had done a whole jimmie reed tribute record.

[Alcohol Rehab Insight]

Based on Rich’s life, his song entitled “Sittin’ and Thinkin’” should have really been called “Sittin’ and Thinkin’ and Drinkin.’” Charlie was obviously good looking, intelligent, relatively successful, and had a nice voice. He also had the exposure needed to make it in the music business. What demons were hidden inside him that dictated his self-destructive lifestyle? His “rags to riches” story never took hold because he always saw himself with the “rags” mentality. What a sad story!

[krazy north karolina gurl]

i think that charlie rich was a good looking guy when he was younger he was one of those guys that was on the fence of good looking and cute

[samuel smith]

I hear a lot of Mose Allison and sometimes Errol Garner and Eddie Heywood Jr. in Charlie's piano playing, particularly on tunes like "I've Got You Under My Skin" and Old Man River." I've had his version of "Apple Blossom Time" on my mind for several weeks now. I regret not seeing him in concert in Evansville, Indiana circa 1974 on the same program with Jim Stafford. My mother and sister went, and enjoyed only Stafford. No offense, but Jim couldn't carry Rich's abilities as a musician anywhere; and that even includes the times when Charlie was bombed out of his mind.

[Ron Brackney]

Thanks for this article and I am glad to see others have "discovered" Charlie. Why the "Rock and Roll HOF" hasn't is a disgrace. Although he is my favorite singer/musician, I never saw, met or even had heard of him until the early 80s or so when I heard this song titled "You Never Really Wanted Me" on my car radio and it blew me away - I wondered who is this guy singing this great emotional, bluesy song. I almost had to pull over it was so affecting. Your posting is great as I have always wondered what made him tick - was it losing an older brother at age 12, knowing he smoked too much and had emphysema as early as 1970 or just being a "born loner" as his wife said. His oldest son said he loved music but hated the music business. Perhaps all these affected his decision to basically retire around 1979-80 - even though he just had a # 3 country hit with "I'll Wake You Up When I Get Home."

A great article was published in a "Memphis Magazine" cover story on Charlie in March, 1981 if you can find it. Charlie was set financially, was not going back on the road and basically said he had other things he wanted to do. He continued to write songs with Margaret Ann and record in his own studio (rumors persist some of these will be released one day but don't hold your breath). Not many fans know Charlie was an excellent jazz pianist his favorite tune being "Tenderly." In the above mentioned article, he says his favorite gig ever was sitting in with the "Les Brown Band" in California at a benefit.

There are so many unknown but great Charlie Rich songs such as "I Can't Go On," "The Best Years," "Let Me Go My Merry Way," "Another Place I Can't
Go" - actually, there are whole "albums/cds" of gems that people are unaware of: "The Complete Smash Sessions" cd, "The Complete Charlie Rich on Hi Records" cd, the three early Epic cds ("Boss Man," "Fabulous Charlie Rich," "Set Me Free"), "Groove Recordings"/"Big Boss Man" cds and the Grammy nominated gospel cd "Silver Linings." His last cd "Pictures and Paintings" isn't to be missed -standards, blues, the beautiful "Anywhere You Are" and the Doc Pomus/Dr. John title track. Charlie "plays" the piano on this cd - something he did not do on many of his later 70s albums. If you haven't explored this great singer/songwriter/musician's whole catalog from Sun to his last album, you are missing, as critic/reviewer Dave Marsh says in the "Smash Sessions" cd liner notes, "I slipped needle into groove and entered a new world."

[Ron Brackney]

Just one more album I forgot to mention: 1980's "Once A Drifter"
on Elektra which his oldest son
said is one of his favorites and he feels Charlie's voice is in great shape on this record. Includes a fine version of "Wonderful Tonight," "Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues" and "Are We Dreamin' the Same Dream."

[Ron Brackney]

A little more information:

-If you are looking for a great color photo of Charlie, the Elektra 1980 LP has a great one.
-The Bear Family Box set has three
CDs including Demos, Alternate Takes and Unreleased tracks of Sun material. Also a 12" by 12" 44 page book with many comments by Sun
comtempories, complete Sun track documentation and commentary on many tracks. This box set came out after Charlie's death in July, 1995.
-Finally, "Rolling Stone" magazine in its 12/28/1995 issue characterized Charlie as "the
reclusive and eclectic virtuoso."

[James Governor]

Hey Jason I thought you might enjoy these 5 rules for creating a great box set - from Ken Charmer, the dad of a friend of mine, a mine of information on motown: http://movementbureau.blogs.com/chameleon/2007/04/charles_alexand.html

[Sean]

Charlie Rich--I probably enjoy listening to his music more than any other artist in the world. I've tried to emulate his piano playing, but it's not easy. I met him once and my mother knew him. We almost made it to his concert in 1995, but it was cancelled due to illness. My hat's off to that kind of talent.

well i have listened to most of charlie's stuuf and he certainly aint sang a bum note obviously there was a few song that just wasn't right for charlie but some songs that i liked were "love is after me" "have a heart" "big time operator" and not forgetting "go ahead and cry" that being from his last masterpiece pictures and paintings.

dave b

[JW]

Great article, thanks for posting it.

I believe that Charlie Rich in life & in death for the most part is an underground sensation that only ears for true talent can hear. I still have 8 wax records of his and have bought every CD I can find available.

I am desperately trying to find cd's for these albums: I Still Believe in Love, Nobody But You & Once A Drifter

I can only assume there is no such beasts.
Anyone help?

Thanks
jawasley@yahoo.com

[Ron Brackney]

For "jawasley," I am sure he knows Charlie Rich did a third album for United Artists titled "The Fool Strikes Again." There is a compilation CD of the United Artists material that has twenty songs on a British label, as I recall, which I have but not at home now. I will post the info at a later date. Also if you don't have "The Notting Hillbillies" lone album, it has a beautiful version of "Feel Like Going Home" sung and played by Mark Knopfler. His singing is very good and his guitar work pierces your heart. Not to be missed.

[Ron Brackney]

For "jawasley": The United Artists compilation CD is: "Charlie Rich - 20 Country Classics," 1999, EMI Records Ltd., Made in the EU. CD # is -
7243 4 99425 2 3. Since you may have all three LPs or can get the "tracks" on "Allmusic" or elsewhere on the web, I will list only the "omitted tracks." There are 30 songs total but for some reason "Life Goes On" was on two of the albums - so only 29 different songs. Omitted are: Born to Love Me, I Still Believe in Love, Let the Little Bird Fly, Who's Gonna Love Me Now, The Heart, Nobody But You,
Love Is A Cold Wind, All You Ever Have To Do Is Touch Me, 'Til You Come Back Again. Sorry but I can't recall where I obtained the CD but hope this is of some help. As far as I know, "Once A Drifter" is not on CD but is an excellent album.

[Ron Brackney]

For: "jawasley" - I just found
the Charlie Rich United Artists
compilation 20 track CD noted above at musicstack.com for
$ 9.63 plus shipping. Under Charlie Rich and "20 Country Classics" - item 193305. The track listing is same as CD I have. Good luck!

[JW]

Thanks guys!
Just ordered it.

Also, I found the LPs to the 3 titles I was looking for (up in the attic) and I found an online service that converts LPs to CDs! If the albums have survived being stored (they look good) & once I have those CDs made I can die happy :-)

Has anyone had a good experience with a co. that converts records to cds?