Jim Dickinson is a legend. You may know his sons more readily – Luther and Cody from the North Mississippi Allstars – but you’ve probably encountered their father more times then you’ve realized. As a sought-after producer (Big Star, The Replacements), session musician (Stones, Dylan) and sideman (Ry Cooder, Dixie Flyers), the elder Dickinson has seen it all and, most likely, done it, too. Recently completing production on a new Allstars album due out early next year, Dickinson, as always, had a few stories to share.

You’ve recorded several times with your sons, most recently for the live release Hill Country Review. You also produced their much-lauded Phantom 51. Is it harder or easier dealing with family in the studio?

Much harder. They know all my tricks. Much harder. The whole psycho-dynamic is different of course because I’m daddy and sometimes it’s harder and sometimes it’s not. It is definitely harder for me, I don’t know about them because they’ve never been produced by anyone else which I’ve tried to get ‘em to work with other people which is why I came back. I tried to get them to do Polaris with another producer and when they produced it themselves, I thought, “well hell, anything is better than that” because self-production is a myth. I thought my children knew better than that. You can’t be on both sides of the glass at once. When I produce myself, it’s a mistake.

Critics loved Phantom 51 and were a little taken aback by the slickness of the follow up Polaris.

They simply didn’t finish it. Believe me it was a sore topic. And you know, they moved to town [Memphis] and they left here [40 miles away in rural Mississippi] and they were experimenting with lifestyle and whatever and they simply didn’t finish the record. They got in over their heads and didn’t finish it. The mix doesn’t exist; it wasn’t mixed. Obviously I have some issues with it. You know, it was an attempt to do pop music which I advised them against.

What do you mean exactly that they left town?

Well they left here and moved into Memphis per say. We live about 40 miles south of Memphis in very much rural Mississippi and they lived in a trailer in front of my studio for years. They moved to town and made a record in town at the same time. Sounds like it. It was an experimental thing. I don’t know; so much of their music is about who they are and where they are from that Polaris was more of a fantasy. Frankly, it’s a two-headed monster and the first two – or three if you can actually count the other record – were Luther’s vision and Polaris was more of a shared vision, more of Cody’s vision. Cody’s the one with the pop sensibility. And it was more of his vision. You know, the drummers don’t have to finish, they just have to track!

You’ve said that your son Luther’s first word was “studio” and he slept with a guitar like a teddy bear when was four-years old.

[laughter] I tried to stop them at first and when I realized I couldn’t then I encouraged them. It just seemed, especially with Luther, a compulsion. He had to work for everything he’s got. He taught himself. He came to me and said, “teach me” and I said, “if I teach you, you’ll play like me.” And he taught himself. But Cody… he just started playing. He sat down at 12-years old and started playing like man. Damndest thing I ever saw. Jazz stuff. Stuff that I don’t even know where he heard it, much less learned it.

Just sort of in the bones.

Yeah. He said he would stay up at night and watch Anton Fig but it don’t sound like Anton Fig to me! [laughter]

You’ve said rock ‘n’ roll is self-taught. Why are you so adamant about that?

Everybody would play alike otherwise. I really do think it’s something you grow out of yourself and your environment; at least rock and roll is. It’s folk music. It comes up from the street. At least the good stuff does. It’s not that he learned without teachers. They both started out with John Evans from the original Box Tops and he was a very sympathetic, philosophic kind of teacher. Luther has studied with Shawn Lane who was a monster of the instrument. And a local jazz musician named Ed Finney who doesn’t even play in the Western scale. So I mean, it wasn’t that they weren’t taught, they just weren’t part of any teaching system. You know when I started playing, I got the Mel Bay chord book and never got off the third page. I still don’t know what the damn notes are and I’ve been playing the guitar for 55 years. I look at my hands and I tell what I’m doing which kept me honest.

When do you remember first creating music with Luther and Cody as musical peers?

The summer he was 14, I can’t remember what project I was working on day in and day out, and he had some songs he wanted to demo. We had done some things together, just playing around with the four-track. So I gave him the four-track, well probably the eight-track by then, and said demo these up and play them for me. It was four or five songs one of which was just so good I realized that, ok, I gotta stop and pay attention. And we went in the studio, the Sam Phillips studio with Roland Janes, which is where we started the new album – it’s like the way you begin, a classic process – and as we were cuttin’ these demos I saw some weaknesses in both of them that they both needed to work on and I figured the best way to do it was to play with them. So we started the family band which we called The Hardly Can Playboys. Started doing festivals when Cody was 12. He was so little, you couldn’t see him over the cymbals. We had a sax player that we still use and a bass player that had been playin’ with me. We played the first of the Memphis Folk and Heritage Festival which was where Luther met Otha Turner for the first time. That was how it all started. I always swore that I would never play with my kids because it’s such a redneck thing to do but it just turned in the way to do it. And then, hell they’re so good, they got to be better than my band and then got to be part of my band. The last three or four Mudboy & the Neutrons gigs we played my boys were the rhythm section. That was a fruition of a dream for both me and them. That’s largely what this new record is about, it’s about the guitar player from Mudboy & the Neutrons who was murdered who was a big influence on Luther.

You’ve said the people make records out of a primal urge, that it’s a fear of death. You’ve also said the movement – the desire to capture a moment – compels us to record.

The thing about movement… it’s like Thomas Wolfe talking about the back of the train. You stand on the back of the train, you see everything focusing at the horizon away from you. That’s the desire to recapture. What recording really does, though it’s not as true when you’re using computers of course, but if you think about tape recording, you’re literally making time into space. I think people understand that, intuitively, when they record, especially primitive people. There’s something that they grasp instantly that’s appealing about it. Of course, the artistic concept is to seaze the moment and repeat it but the producer manipulates the moment and it makes it almost diabolical. And it’s why you need one.

You said it was more evident in primitive recordings…
Not that it’s more evident, it’s just that I think primitive people understand the unnatural process intuitively more readily than a sophisticated, urban person who would accept it as kind of an everyday thing. It’s utterly unnatural. What you’re doing is sitting in the control room and listening to music played back. Ok, it’s an illusion. There’s no music there. Plus, it’s coming out of two black boxes and you’re hearing it all over the room. You hear a stereo signal which itself is an illusion. You are manufacturing an illusion that is what you’re doing. You do it by a series of tricks. You can certainly make a documentary recording but that’s not what a producer does.

You’ve produced everyone from Big Star to The Replacements to Mudhoney to Toots Hibbert. They’re all pretty divergent but is there an underlying philosophy you bring to all your productions? Or is each a separate case?

I like to say everything from rockabilly to reggae. Yeah, they ask what part of it is mine and I’ll them the space between the notes which I fight for. The music has to talk to me. It’s not just a scattershot. I’ll do anything that talks to me and the songs, individually, literally speak to me. Some of ‘em say a lot, some of ‘em don’t say very much. But if I see a door, if I see a way in, if I think I can improve it, if I think I can lead it a little bit. Loosen up the groove, lean it to the left, that’s what I do. I get accused of going for the quirks. Yeah, that’s what I do. That’s exactly what I do. I also get accused of doing dark material. What I think it is, is that people bring me their dark material because I don’t really seek it out. It seeks me out. But it is the space between the notes that is the similarity. If you listen to enough of my stuff, it is sort of there. Things kind of appeared to leak out of my mixes. I think good music shoots sparks and I try and put a magnifying glass on the sparks. I’m not trying to make a documentary, I’m not trying to take a picture. I’m trying to draw a cartoon.

You were part of the famous Muscle Shoals studio musicians group who worked with Aretha Franklin and countless others in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

I would just show up down there. I was never one of them. But when things dried up in Memphis there’s always something happening in Shoals. I’ve spent some years driving back and forth kind of pursuing the studio scene. As a studio musician, frankly that’s what I enjoy the most. I don’t get to do as much anymore ‘cause that kind of situation has sort of dried up and blown away. But the old school Southern rhythm section technique of recording is what I understand best. What I frankly enjoy the most. But you know, to do what I do, for as long as I’ve done it, you got to do it all. I engineered, I wrote, I played, I did whatever they asked me. If I could do it, I said yes. I’m like a two-dollar whore on Saturday night; the phone rings and I just say “yes.”

What was a typical day or week like back then?

[laughter] None of them were typical! Once I went to work for Atlantic, it was. In Miami, we made 14 albums in six months and I went completely crazy at that point. And that was like an assembly line. It was also like a master’s degree, you know: open the bun, insert the artist; one a week kind of deal. But for my experience with the Rolling Stones, that’s where I would have left it. That kind of Nashville/Detroit assembly line, Stax records process. But watching the Stones for three days, it just dawned on me: somebody is right and somebody is wrong here and I’m kinda thinking I’m the one that’s wrong. So that’s when I started going for the spontaneity. They literally took the first cut they got through without making a major mistake. And nobody ever said the words, “should we do that again, can we do it better?” Those words weren’t spoken. I was coming from the assembly line school where you play it over and over till you got it right which is clearly not what they do. It’s what for what I learned from them I wouldn’t have known what do to with Alex Chilton [Big Star] or certainly not The Replacements. Because it is… boredom from a road player… from anybody but a studio pro, after about the third pass you start to hear the boredom. And nobody wants to listen to that. And the musician can’t help it. It just comes on your unless you teach yourself otherwise. And especially working with groups, that’s the big secret – catching it before it gets boring.

Touching a bit more on your Stones’ experience. You’re a pretty even keeled guy, no matter who you’re dealing with, seemingly always cool and collected. But, at this time – 1969 – you’re 28-years old and you’re recording for the Sticky Fingers album, playing keys on “Wild Horses” and you tell Mick Jagger to keep the little hook of “just around midnight” in “Brown Sugar.” Was this a big deal for you or were you typically low key about the whole affair?

Well, yeah [I knew it was big deal]. People do ask me, “what do you feel like when you sit down and play with The Rolling Stones?” That part of it seemed very natural. It was like playing with my band from high school. They could barely play; it wasn’t intimidating musically at all. I fit right in because I’m a very limited musician. What I do is very simple. And by the time I had to actually sit down and play, I had been hanging with them for a couple of days so it wasn’t like prove yourself though there was a moment I’ll tell you about.

The way they did the sessions is Jagger would stay on the floor with a handheld microphone and sing the songs until the band learned it, right? Then he’d go in the control room with Jimmy Johnson the engineer and get the sounds together and then he’d come back out and go into the vocal booth and they’d cut. I’d watched them do that on “You Got To Move” and “Brown Sugar” and now we’re in the middle of “Wild Horses.” And I’m out there plinking away, my little pitiful Floyd Kramer licks, we’re running the song down and Jagger is in the control room and he hits the talk back button and I hear the words I’ve been dreading for 45-minutes. He says, [donning a British accent], “Hey Keith, what do you think about the piano?” And Keith says, god bless his soul, he says, “It’s the only thing I like.” At that point I figured I was safe. After I recorded with The Stones, it wasn’t that I felt like I could do anything like Superman or something, but I felt like, “I just recorded with The Rolling Stones, anything can happen.” Who’s gonna come next? And it’s been like that. Certainly Dylan was a huge ambition for me but even that, you just sit down and do what you do. [Dickinson played on Dylan’s Time Out of Mind]. I’ve been lucky enough to make it work.

It’s my understanding that you took Jimmy Page to Sun Studios to meet Sam Phillips for the first time.

No, no. no. Boy you do know a lot. I think he thinks he was at Sun Studios. But we took him to Arden. Me, Terry Manning and Don Nicks. We went up to Kentucky to see a Dick Clark package show. Scary Louis and The Playboys were playing on the show and Nicks knew all of them and I’d met [Jim] Keltner and we were just going up there to hang and bang. Terry Manning, who at that point was a member of the group called The Goat Dancers who I was a producing, kind of an early psychedelic freak out group, was fascinated by Page. We went up there to see The Yardbirds but it was the night after [Jeff] Beck had broken his guitar onstage in Atlanta and walked off. So we literally saw them play as a trio for the first time. And they had a day off and Page wanted to come to Memphis. So he rode back in our station wagon, we brought him back to Memphis and we took him to Arden. I honestly think, at that point, that he thought he was at Sun Studios.

So did he get to meet Sam?

No, not until they… well, Page wasn’t with them with they recorded “I’m a Man.” That’s what they did with Sam which I guess was… maybe a year later. Maybe not quite that long. By that time, I was working for Chips Moman at American. And Chips was going to cut the session, they were coming through town on some kind of tour. Reggie Young, they all knew Reggie Young, and he had set it up for them to come to the studio and record. And American, at that point, was really primitive; mono, old Ampex mixers really, really haywire. It just wasn’t working and Chips was furious, man. So we called over to Sam Phillips studio and Chips was hoping Sam wouldn’t be there and that he could just get in and record. But Sam was there and about three days drunk and just took over. And the proceedings began to commence as they say. But I know Page wasn’t with them. I don’t know that Page ever met Sam.

I was reading a recent interview where you were ripping apart the Rolling Stones current keyboard player.

I’m sorry I did that. [laugh]
You said at certain point, “Jagger has used me as a club to the band with a couple of times so I don’t blame the keyboard player for being paranoid.” What exactly do you mean, ‘used you as a club’?

I was over in Europe with Cooder and the Stones were rehearsing to go on the road.

And this is roughly when?

This… phew…. ‘83? ‘84? It was Chuck’s [Leavell] first tour with the Stones, I’ll put it that way. We went out, me, Keltner and the bodyguard went out to the old Hammer film studios to watch The Stones rehearse in the middle of the night. Jagger just made a big fuss over me and I couldn’t understand it because I mean, I know him, we’re semi-friends but it wasn’t that big a deal. And he just ran up and hugged me and made this big commotion. And then I saw Chuck sittin’ over in the corner. Oh ok, I get it. And it’s happened a couple of times since. It’s kind of funny.

It’s always the keyboard player though, huh?
Yeah, well it’s always Chuck! It was never anybody else. I don’t know, I shouldn’t have said what I said about him but the idea, the gall of counting off Charlie Watts is so offensive to me… he plays like he came out of a Shakey’s Pizza Parlor. It’s not just him, it’s the bass the player. I don’t care, I know he played with Miles, blah blah blah blah, but those fuckin’ bass parts are compositional and who ever is playing with the Stones oughta fucking play them. You know what I mean?

But wouldn’t somebody argue that if Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie are putting up with it, that it’s ok?

It’s not ok with me! [laughter] The fans in the stands man. You go see them now, it’s not The Stones, it sounds like a cover band.

Yeah, I saw them a couple of years ago out here in the New York area.

It took me a while to accept Ronnie though he did get to the point where he played the shit out of the set. He’s a great musician. I don’t know. I didn’t even meet The Stones, I never ever even met Brian [Jones]. It was his band. But [Bill] Wyman, I’m sorry, Wyman is absolutely key to what they do. There have been many keyboard players of course – [Ian Stuart] Stu was the one, Stew was their keyboardist – but Nicky Hopkins did the best playing of his career with the Stones.

*You said “Pop music is like American democracy, it’s a sponge, and it’s sucked up every musical form that’s come along.” *

God, man! Where have you read all this shit? [laughter] They did an article on me years ago about smoking spider webs, did you find that one? That’s one of the better ones! [laughter] Written by a guy who I met in a whorehouse, truly! [more laughter]

I didn’t see that one sadly. But anyway, some would say that pop music just plain sucks nowadays.

Well, I think it’s a barometer of culture. I mean it’s the culture that sucks, it’s not the music’s fault. And the door to the street has been closed. It’s the corporate structure that’s doing it. My god, go eat a salad at Denny’s. You know? It’s the same thing: chop it up, spit it out. In the ‘70s, which is now described as the “golden age” era, we called them “pukes.” That’s what they were – they’d just gobble up a bunch of culture and puke it out. And they’ve always been with us. And I know this is immoral to say, but I think Buddy Holly was the first rock-n-roll puke, not to speak ill of the dead. But he was just gobbling it up and puking it out. The danger of pop culture, as it touches things and absorbs them, it diffuses them. Now rap is, so far, has been able to withstand it. It’s the strongest thing that’s come along since initial rock-n-roll, certainly stronger than punk rock which folded to the corporate structure. But rap, amazingly enough, black culture is strong enough to produce something that is both still appealing to white youth and repulsive to their parents. That’s rock-n-roll but as you see now, if you turned on MTV, by being absorbed by the pop culture, it is of course diluted and diffused and eventually goes with away. It’s an utter miracle that there’s any wrong music left. It’s only because it’s strong. It’s like Elvis said, “Whatever replaces it is going to have to be pretty damn good.”

You said that Sam Phillips, when he was recording Elvis Presley, was recording an idea. That would seem to be the antithesis of a puker.

Yeah. Oh yeah. What Sam wanted, what he said over and over to all his artists, was he wanted something different, he wanted something unique. He was trying to make progress, as he saw progress. The thing that I think is really unique about what Sam did, was the people he did it with. Because, to a man, everybody he worked with, who he treated as artists, most of whom never even thought of themselves that way until afterwards, he encouraged these people. Not only did he encourage them, he encouraged them to be themselves. These are people that had never been told anything but sit down and shut-up. In their lives; people who had been put down, brushed aside and dismissed. And Sam Phillips taught them to be individuals which is what Memphis is about. Johnny Cash is, even more so than Elvis, the glowing example. And Sam said, I heard him say it twice so I think he probably meant it, Sam said that he thought his discovery of Howlin’ Wolf was more significant than Elvis. That’s heavy.