The Mobile Days (narration)

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 Flowers