BIG BROTHER REMEMBERS

WOMEN WERE SECOND CLASS CITIZENS IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS

An Interview with Mother Earth's Tracy Nelson

By Frank Gutch

Pop Culture Press continues its series of interviews with Bay Area legends with this talk conducted by PCP contributor Frank Gutch with Tracy Nelson, one of the finest singers from the Bay Area scene in the ‘60s. Born in Wisconsin, she migrated to Los Angeles in the early ‘60s, where she was signed and released a solo album. After that failed to ignite, she moved north to the Bay Area and soon formed Mother Earth, with a bunch of noted Texas expats. After a number of years and much critical success, recording both blues and country-oriented material, she returned to her solo career. Among many career highlights was a grammy nomination for a duet with Willie Nelson (no relation), backing Neil Young at Live Aid, and snagging a second grammy nod for a project recorded with blues aces Irma Thomas and Marcia Ball. Nelson is one of the few San Francisco scene members who has always been active in music, and we caught up with her at her home in Nashville on July 26, 2007.

For more information, we recommend her website: www.tracynelson.com/

Pop Culture Press: How did you wind up living in Nashville?
Tracy Nelson: We did a record [here] and I liked it here so I stayed.

PCP: You did a record or the band?
TN: We recorded the second Mother Earth album here. We ended up a tour at Vanderbilt and Harvey Mandel had recorded a record at Bradley's Barn here outside of Nashville. He told me about how cool it was and what a nice place it was to record, and we thought, ‘hell, it's time to make another record.’ Let's end the tour here, stay awhile and make a record. By the time we'd made the record, I just decided I wanted to stay here.

PCP: Where were you from originally?
TN: Wisconsin.

PCP: Why did I think Texas?
TN: Because everybody else in the band was from Texas. Our manager and every single one of our musicians were from Texas. Except me.

PCP: You ran into them...
TN: In San Francisco. I went out there to try to make a career, playing music. I was 21.

PCP: So you were an old person there at that time. Seems to me that in the documentaries I've seen, most of the kids were in their teens.
TN: Exactly. I went to college for two years, stayed another year in Madison and when it was clear to me that I wanted to play music, I went out there because I thought it was the practical thing to do. Which it was. It made getting into the business a lot easier because everybody was looking there at the time.

PCP: How did you meet the guys?
TN: I can tell this story with impunity, now that Doug (Sahm) is gone, God Bless him. He had asked me not to tell the story (laughs) and you'll understand why when I tell you.  Travis Rivers was our manager from the beginning, and all the way through to the end of the band. He was from Texas. I had met Ira Kamin, who was the only member who wasn't from Texas -- he was from Chicago. But he didn't stay with us through the recording of the first record. He and Powell St. John, who was from Texas, had gotten together and ... I think Steve Miller introduced me to Ira Kamin. Well, the three of us got together and were just throwing things around -- you know, we liked the same kind of music. We were looking for a rhythm section and -- Ira played organ, Powell just played harp and I didn't play anything except a little piano. Travis came to us one day -- Travis was already kind of managing the two of them at the time -- I'm sorry.  This is a little convoluted, but it gets linear at a point -- but Travis came to us one day and said, ‘I found a perfect rhythm section.’ Our problem had been that we couldn't find anybody who played blues or R&B. I mean,all of the musicians out there had just started playing -- literally. Pigpen had gone from being a shoe salesman to playing piano. Everyone was just learning their craft and nobody was particularly interested in playing R&B, nor did they have any history in that. But Travis said it was a really good funky R&B section from Texas. And I said, great, where did you find them? And he said, well, it's Doug Sahm's band. Doug, after the Sir Douglas Quintet had done what it was going to do, had put together a band, I think, called -- I want to say the Funky Blues Band or some name like that. Anyway, it was an R&B band and he had brought them up to San Francisco for the same reason that we were all there, which was to get discovered. I said, ‘we can't just take somebody else's rhythm section. Isn't Doug going to be kind of pissed off?’ And Travis said, ‘fuck 'im. He just ran off with my wife.’ We definitely got the better end of that deal.

PCP: So, you go to the guys and say we'd like to try it out and they say fine, or ...
TN: See, Doug had just kind of split and left his rhythm section hanging, really. They were all sitting there with nothing to do, and we just got together and went from there. 

PCP: Was it good right off the bat?
TN: Oh, absolutely. I mean, George Raines on drums. An absolutely magnificent keyboard player named Wayne Talbert, who had some serious heroin problems and couldn't maintain, really, but God, he was just a magnificent musician. The guitar player was less wonderful, but just having these guys who were steeped in the music that we loved was something that we really didn't think we were ever going to find. We thought we were going to have to start importing people. So, yeah, it worked right from the git-go. 

PCP: Your first album was on Mercury?
TN: Yeah.

PCP: How did that deal come about?
TN: Well, all the labels were there. Big Brother and the Jefferson Airplane had already been contracted and had put out records, so every label was looking for their version of that. And the fact that we had a girl singer who was a strong singer made them think they had the next Janis Joplin. Really, it was relatively easy. By the time we started playing gigs, we had record company people sniffing around. It was just a matter of picking the best deal.

PCP: So, Mercury offered you more money?
TN: Well, I didn't handle that end of it. You might want to talk to Travis, as a matter of fact. I'll give you his number. He's a fountain of information. Just give yourself plenty of time. You know, he brought Janis up from Texas and was there from the very beginning. He was managing editor of the underground newspaper, The Oracle. The deal with Mercury, I am sure, was the best terms all the way around. I didn't pay too much attention to it at the time. Like I say, it was fairly easy to get it done.

PCP: Was it like a whirlwind of everything going on around you? Kind of not seeing the forest for the trees?
TN: I was a musician. I didn't handle the business. Our manager and our lawyer handled the business. My assumption is that, yes, that deal was better than any of the others offered or that would not have been what we decided on. That was just something I wasn't paying too much attention to at the time. We had other people dealing with that and we were just dealing with the music. 

PCP: So you got together and thought, hey, this is going to work? How did the name come about?
TN: That's exactly it. We played together and thought it was going to work. Everybody was looking to get into the scene because the scene was wide open and quite lucrative. Bill Graham really was responsible for my being able to stay out there and being able to get anything done. I met him early on, before I had even put a band together. We just kind of hit it off. He liked the fact that I liked all these different kinds of music -- jazz and blues and gospel and R&B.  He loved almost every kind of music, but he was particularly into R&B and blues and what they now call Latin Music -- Willie Bobo and Tito Puente and stuff like that -- he just loved it and wanted to bring it all into his hall in addition to the local psychedelic bands. Because he wanted to spoon feed that kind of music to all of the people who were coming to see like the Jefferson Airplane. He was real conscientious about that and he liked us because we were a little different than other people and we had our roots more in roots music. From the time we got the band together, he was hiring us. 

PCP: Was he easily accessible?
TN: Bill? No. He was one of the few people I've known in this business, or in my life, who I was completely intimidated by. But he was always very good to us. It's not like I'd call him up or hang out with him. But he liked us and gave us work. And, truly, we weren't within the mainstream of what was going on then. We were playing blues and R&B. And Powell was totally unique. Do you know of Powell? Are you aware of his stuff? He just released a record, as a matter of fact. He just kind of retired for 40 years and just put out a record recently. He was a brilliant, brilliant songwriter. His lyrics -- you have to hear him to understand just how brilliant he is. His songs were so deep and so complicated and his lyrics were just brilliant. But he wasn't temperamentally very suited to be in the music business. In fact, when he told me he was going to retire, he said ‘I just really don't like crowds.’ (laughs) But Powell was the part of the band that was in the kind of psychedelic realm. The rest of us were just playing blues and R&B. 
            At the time, I remember early on, somebody said ‘hey, you like the blues, go see the Grateful Dead’ and I went to hear them and said, ‘fuck, this isn't blues.’ (laughs) I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin and went to Chicago every weekend and heard Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf an those folks and that, to me, was blues. So what the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service were playing was not, to me, blues. When we started playing, we were trying to stay as authentic and true to the roots as possible, with us being all white people. So we just weren't in the mainstream with the rest of the groups, but because we played at the Fillmore, people accepted us because that's all it took. If you were on stage at the Fillmore, you'd arrived.

PCP: Did Bill Graham ever go through one of his tirades while you were onstage?
TN: Never. I've seen him do it, but I never was the recipient of it.

PCP: I got a story from Bill Pillmore of Cowboy about people throwing stuff at Cowboy, screaming for the Allman Brothers and Graham came out and grabbed a microphone and tore into the crowd, saying they would listen to Cowboy or they weren't getting anybody.
TN: Well, he was a hardass, no two ways about it, but I have great respect and admiration for him because he, I would say singlehandedly, made the white youth of America aware of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Otis Redding, Manitas de Plata, Willie Bobo -- I mean, he force fed this really great music to people who otherwise would really have been only interested in hearing the San Francisco sound. And he did that because he loved that music. He promoted music because he liked to make good money and was very good at it. But he also truly loved music. And I've heard him get an extremely bad rap from a lot of people who I think are just bitter and ...

PCP: I often wondered because I've read a lot about that. Bob Segarini has nothing but good to say about him. I was talking with him yesterday and he said what a really amazing guy he was.
TN: Yes, he was.

PCP: And a lot of what he called positive had to do with Graham promoting the Latin music and different genres.
TN: So I'm not alone in that impression of him? I mean, in the day he used to get -- and I still hear it today -- a lot of stupid criticism. Number one, for making money. Well, sue me. Early on, it was that he was a crass materialist and all that bullshit. Even today, from people who were there in the day, I hear stupid negative things about him that just don't ring true on any level. It sounds like so much carping and bitterness, which musicians frequently indulge in. He was a brilliant and very significant man in terms of modern popular music.

PCP: Would Mother Earth have done much without Bill Graham? Would you have had much of a chance?
TN: I don't think anybody out there would have without Bill Graham.

PCP: Did you work with Chet Helms at all?
TN: Some, yeah. We probably played more at the Fillmore, but some at the Avalon, and I would say all the same about Chet Helms, just that he wasn't as good at it as Bill was. But he had the same impetus, I think. And I didn't know him, at all. He just wasn't as successful as Bill, but he certainly did all the same things and should be credited with a lot of the same things.

PCP: Did you ever play the Family Dog?
TN: Yeah.

PCP: So you played the three major venues: the Avalon, the Fillmore and the Family Dog?
TN: No. The Family Dog was the Avalon. Family Dog was the production company that put on the shows at the Avalon.

PCP: Well, later on, Family Dog put on some things that were done outside of the area, up around North Beach.
TN: Yeah, like I said, it was a production company, and it was Chet's company, but when you see those posters of the Family Dog, most of those shows were at the Avalon.

PCP: Did Graham book the Avalon at all or was that all Chet Helms?
TN: No. It was all Chet Helms.

PCP: It's hard to get the information because there are so many stories out there.
TN: Because everybody was stoned and nobody knew what the fuck was going on.  (laughs)

PCP: Were you stoned, Tracy?
TN: Not very much. I didn't go there for that whole cultural thing that was going on. I went there because I was trying to make a living playing music. I did drugs, but I wasn't particularly a part of the drug culture, and I didn't embrace most of what the people out there were into. Not culturally and not biochemically. So I was kind of observing more than participating when I was there. And in the late sixties, it had really become quite dark. Way too many drugs. A lot of very bad energy. Musicians were starting to get ripped off. I think it was that the drug culture had become what any drug culture becomes, as people become desperate and destitute and start stealing from one another.  And there were the riots. We were in Tennessee and Travis had gone back to Berkeley and he said the National Guard was camped on my front lawn. I had a house in South Berkeley. That's when I told him to pack everything up and bring it to Tennessee. So the whole scene, as far as I was concerned, had started degenerating about that time. It was inevitable, mainly because of the amount of drugs in the culture.

PCP: So Travis packed up everything and the band worked out of Tennessee?
TN: He packed up all my stuff. We lived together at the time so it's not like I just made him go do my work. And my dogs and he brought the stuff to Tennessee. Then I called the guys. We had all been in Tennessee when we were making the record, but they'd all gone back to California, and I'd stayed because we had another month on the lease of this lovely big old farmhouse that we were renting. In fact, that's when I did my country record -- during that month. I called the guys and said, ‘I'm moving here, so you guys can either go out on your own or we'll keep the band together and work out of Nashville.’ Which we thought as practical, as well as the fact that I liked Nashville better than San Francisco. It was more centrally located. It was easier to get to different parts of the country. All of the guys were totally for it, except for the two black musicians in the band. They said ‘no fucking way we're moving to Crib Death, Tennessee.’ In 1969.  I didn't blame them at all. But the rest of the guys came down here and that's when we started working out of Nashville. It wasn't a smart business move.

PCP: Did you care?
TN: No. I thought it was [a good idea]. I didn't understand why it wouldn't be. I didn't see why there would be any difference no matter where we were. But that's how little I understood about the business. We were in Nashville, we recorded our records here, people didn't know what to do with us. People don't know which slot to put you into. Both the business people and the buying public become confused with you. It affected my/our career to a degree, but not to the degree that it gave me any serious pause. 

PCP: But your direction is tied to that move. It seems that your move into the indie market started then.
TN: Yeah, but when we first came here, we were still a band, still Mother Earth, and it made it a little more difficult to get people to understand who and what we were and it also made the record companies -- they didn't know where to put us. They got confused and didn't know how to promote us. I think if we had stayed in San Francisco, we probably could have built on our momentum better. At least in relation to Nashville. It's kind of ephemeral and hard to state anything categorically about how things work in this business, but it just seems in retrospect that that was probably the case. But again, it wasn't a huge issue for me. We were making a living and I was living somewhere that I liked a lot better than where I was living before. And I'm still alive. 

PCP: You are. And you're still there. You must have liked it fine.
TN: I liked it for several years. I'm kind of over it now. I'm ready to move somewhere else. I'm ready for a change. The Mid-South is still the South. The degree of racism in this area is just appalling to me. It's just appalling.

PCP: Do you think it would be much different anywhere else, though?
TN: I would hope so. I do a lot of traveling and, yes, I think it's different in other places.

PCP: I've wondered because I have lived in Oregon and Washington for so many years and it's always been fairly loose. But ever since this whole Bush thing happened, my concept of what America is has taken a real beating.
TN: I understand what you're saying, however I find that in certain parts of the country, there are a lot more people who think like we do than here in Tennessee. I mean, Nashville was supposed to have gotten so hip and all of these people from L.A. moved here ... well, the people from L.A. who moved here are mostly racist and they moved here so they could be comfortable in their racism.  've lived here since 1969 and it has gotten progressively more out there, more prevalent every single year. Because people are becoming more and more comfortable with it. They don't try to hide it anymore. And I just find it appalling.

PCP: Well, what was it like in San Francisco? Did you find the racial thing...
TN: The racial thing was cool in San Francisco. What wasn't cool was the male/female thing. Women were really second class citizens in this whole hippie scene. They would argue that it wasn't so much second class, but women were expected to be traditional, old-timey, take care of the kids, make tea, cook organic food...

PCP: Really? The media sure got that wrong, then.
TN: I don't know that the media ever addressed that. Did they? A lot of people have fantasies about how it was but they weren't there, but...

PCP: Well, the alternative press did. The ones considered underground. The Berkeley Barb and press like that.
TN: The Berkeley Barb. You see, there were two different factions in San Francisco in those days. There was the flower child/hippie/psychedelic faction, completely apolitical, very traditional in the way they looked at things, and as I say, particularly women. And then there were the radical politics people. And they were not particularly connected. Even within the radical faction, and I was not really connected to that, the women's issues did not really arrive, at least during that era, that I could see. If it did, it was probably more on the East Coast and in places where it was more of a well-entrenched and active political scene. The San Francisco scene was, you know, people staying stoned, laying around and playing music.

PCP: Did you feel that you were looked upon as a second class citizen, personally?
TN: Yes. Absolutely.

PCP: Even though you were with a band? I always thought that the bands...
TN: My band wasn't like that. I picked people that I could get along with.

PCP: Sure, but among the people who followed the music, I always thought that if anybody was attached to a band, they had special status.
TN: You think connection to a band gave you special status? Yes, that's true, but that was business. I'm not sure that this will make the point that I am trying to make, but when I first got to San Francisco and I met Bill Graham, he gave me the telephone numbers of all the managers of all the working bands that he knew of in the area. He gave me their numbers and said you can use my name. Just call them up and see if they want to hire a girl singer. I called every one of them and every one of them said, ‘absolutely not!’ They did not want a girl in their group. They were afraid that they would lose their status, that a woman would get all the attention. And that was true. They were right to be concerned about that, because everybody was looking for the next Grace or the next Janis. So the fact that women were in bands -- think about it. How many were there? But the fact that there were some women who were obviously out there in that time had strictly to do with -- I personally would say that I admired Grace Slick more than Janis because, in retrospect, I must say that I really respect Janis in terms of what she was able to do, but because we were doing basically the same kind of music. I didn't really like the way she did my kind of music.  As a singer, I didn't think she was that great. And we were so directly competitive that it was difficult for me to really look at her as she was. Grace was completely different, but I thought the stuff she did was amazing, especially with The Great Society. That band and the music they did was really extraordinary. Very musical, very deep, kind of jazz oriented. I thought they were great.

PCP: What made Grace split?
TN: You'd have to ask her that. I know that she had the band with her husband and generally there's a built in potential there, so I really don't know what made them split. I don't think she split because she went with Jefferson Airplane. Jefferson Airplane had another singer initially, and Grace and Great Society were working at the same time, so when Great Society split up, she hooked up with Jefferson Airplane. There were two women quite prevalently out there, but that was all business. As far as their being able to ... I have absolutely no knowledge of how it was for those women. I've never met Grace, much to my disappointment. I have always wanted to meet her. I met Janis several times, but I know nothing about how the inner workings of the band were for her. I just know what the culture was. I do know that one of Janis's musicians once walked into my dressing room at the Fillmore -- I think we were both on the bill -- I was sitting there with my roommate's daughter and he said ‘is that your daughter’ and I said ‘no,’ and he asked if I had any children and I said ‘hell, no,’ and he kind of went off on me. He didn't understand why women would want to be in the business, and he really respected that his wife stayed home and took care of their children and blah blah blah. He thought women were crazy to try and be in the music business. Steve Miller told me the same thing.

PCP: Was this a standard attitude that guys in the business seemed to have at the time?
TN: It was the standard attitude that everybody had at the time. Not just guys in the business. But it was no less so because they were in the music business. And I daresay that the guys who worked with me would have preferred not working with a woman, but pragmatically they realized that it was a plus in terms of the viability of the group. 

PCP: Did you overcome that attitude? Was that something mainly at the beginning?
TN: Yes. If I had the sense of an overt hostility or resistance and, in fact, with a couple of people I did, and we parted ways, early on. The band that recorded the first record was -- I don't think there was a person left besides Powell and me. And George Raines. Myself and Powell and George Raines were the only people from the original Mother Earth that recorded the first record. And they went their own ways, to a large degree, because they didn't like working with a woman. And the fact that they were idiots and assholes, too. 

PCP: My view of how it was is so far off...
TN: Well, you have to remember that you're only talking to one person. 

PCP: But when I grew up, it seemed that it was all about the music. I never even considered that San Francisco was involved with social castes and the like.
TN: But it's life. It's a segment of life. It doesn't exist in a vacuum in any way. 

PCP: Well, maybe what I thought at the time was that San Francisco broke the bubble. That things were changing.
TN: What do we know about how the media presents things? I mean, why would it have been any more true than it is now. I'm sure there was some truth that filtered through, but generally it was hype and a self-perpetuating myth. 

PCP: Were there times that you saw the media present untruths or skewed views of you and your band?
TN: No, I don't think so. When we moved to Nashville, we rented and I ended up staying in this big old farmhouse on 600 acres outside of Mount Juliet. We all lived together when we were making the record. Then, when we decided we were all going to move there, I kept the house and the guys all found their own places. But somehow people had gotten the impression that it was a commune. It was out in the country so of course we didn't lock our doors or anything. I would get up and come out of my room into the kitchen in the morning and there would be people sleeping on my floor in the dining room. They had just gotten directions to the house, driven up in the middle of the night, walked in and put down their bedrolls and gone to sleep. They thought it was a commune. And the people, because the name of the band was Mother Earth, kind of looked at me like I was Mother Earth. So there was this whole impression that people had which they created themselves.
            The same was true of how the media created what was going on. There was a lot of intellectualizing and critical analysis of the social mores and blah blah blah. I didn't pay that much attention to it, but I doubt that it had much to do with reality.

PCP: But isn't that the reality being presented now? The whole flower power and summer of love thing?
TN: Uh huh. 

PCP: That's interesting, because a few people out there are saying that the media's view of the whole flower power thing was not the way it was, that it is a skewed view of the past.
TN: A lot of people will say ‘oh yes, it was,’ but most of them weren't there. Some people say ‘no, it wasn't that way.’ But some people fully embrace it. Like I say, I didn't, so my perception is markedly different than someone who embraced the whole philosophy. In fact, whatever it was initially, or whatever people hoped it would be, it deteriorated rather rapidly into a pretty unseemly scene. And there was a big dark side to it. And drugs were the catalyst. Drugs were the catalyst for the whole fantasy and drugs were the catalyst for the reality being less than people thought it was. I wasn't particularly friendly with the people who were firmly entrenched in it, and I don't know any of those people now, so I can't speak for them. 

PCP: Tell us about the Revolution soundtrack. Were those tracks that were recorded specifically for that soundtrack or were they tracks that were just picked up?
TN: Two of the songs, “Without Love” and what did Powell do? “Stranger”? There were four bands. It was us, Steve Miller, Quicksilver ... maybe it was just the three --  there may have been a fourth -- that contributed music to the soundtrack of the movie. They gave us the title track, “Revolution.” The other two songs were songs that we had been doing in our show. This was before we'd ever recorded. I remember, they played us this song, and it's really a hokey song and the lyrics are kind of stupid and self-serving peace and love crap. It wasn't an awful song. It wasn't anything I'd be particularly embarrassed doing. It just wasn't very interesting. I had been really turned on by The Beatles' “All You Need Is Love” -- it was an unusual meter, like 7/8 or something like that. So we just put “Revolution” into 7/4 time, just to kind of screw with it, to make it more interesting. That's how that song came about and, as I said, the other two were just songs that we'd been doing.

PCP: And they had special sessions just for those?
TN: Yeah. We went down to L.A. and recorded down there. I actually lived there before I lived in San Francisco.

PCP: So you went to the hub of the record industry, hoping to make it?
TN: Well, this is probably not in the framework of what you're interested in, but I started out as a folksinger, as a young girl and did a record for Prestige of folk blues when I was 19. Then I started sitting in with an R&B band and got really hooked on working with a full band. We had three singers -- two black singers and myself, a full horn section, two keyboards, guitars. We essentially did the fraternity circuit. We did ‘60s R&B covers which were current at the time. But I needed money and there was a contest -- a folk contest that Randy Sparks who used to have the New Christy Minstrels was putting on. It turned out, I discovered later, that he did this all over the country and called people from these contests to put together all these groups -- kind of Up With People, Back Porch Majority, New Christy Minstrel types of groups. He had like several of these touring groups that he had put together that way. Anyway, there was a folk contest and I entered and won. I entered for the $300 prize, but part of the prize was a two week gig at his club in L.A. I took him up on that -- he flew me up there and I did two weeks in his club doing my folk act. As soon as that was done and I had a little money in my pocket, I went up to San Francisco. 

PCP: Why did you go to San Francisco?
TN: I didn't like L.A., to begin with, but also it just seemed like  more interesting scene to me. L.A. was so huge and kind of glitzy and San Francisco was where all of the new bands were being discovered. I thought that was a better shot.
            (The Prestige album) is out of print. I've made about 24 records over the years and that's the only one that isn't available on CD, except in Japan. If you want to pay about 40 or 50 bucks, you can get a Japanese import. 

PCP: How many CDs do you have available through your website?
TN: Probably close to 20. There are two MCA albums and one we did on Columbia that have been reissued and then unissued -- they were reissued briefly.

PCP: Have you ever tried to get the rights to them yourself?
TN: Yes. And I've tried to get the rights to the Prestige record and they won't give them up. They periodically release them, and they have all been reissued overseas. Prestige kept saying they were going to reissue it, but they didn't want to give it up to me, but they never did. It's not a high priority for me. That record -- it's like a different person who did that record. It's not like I have a vested interest in having it out there, but just in point of fact, I would like to have everything available.

PCP: The CDs that you have available on your website, those are albums that you bought the rights to?
TN: No. We just buy the CDs at cost and sell them at retail. There is only one record on my site that I own and that's Ebony and Irony. Everything else is still owned by the people who originally issued them. But they've reissued the records as CDs, so they are available to us. I bought up a lot of old stock. When the MCA albums were reissued, at one point they were cut out and I bought a bunch of them then. As a matter of fact, I am trying to get whoever has MCA now to do that again. 

PCP: Who knows what's going on with the major labels? You have three major labels now -- what a mess.
TN: It is a mess. My favorite record that I've ever done in my life, I own and that's what I am really happy about.

PCP: Which is Ebony and Irony?
TN: Yeah. And the two I've done for Memphis International I don't own, but I know those guys and I like them. We're all friends, so that's fine. The Mother Earth stuff is out there. People can get it if they want it. That's also good, but I don't have any real need to own them.

PCP: Do you see much in terms of royalties off of those albums?
TN: Yeah. 

PCP: I've talked with a number of artists who have never seen a dime from reissues.
TN: Well, I'm sure I only see a fraction of what's owed me. But every three months, I get some sort of little check. That's all through Warner Brothers. Because Warner Brothers bought the Mercury stuff.

PCP: What about your publishing rights?
TN: I own my publishing.

PCP: Do you see a lot of royalties there too?
TN: Not a lot, but enough. I've never given up my publishing and that's a whole separate entity. It's also to a degree dependent upon the bookkeeping of the label. So, again, you probably never get what you're supposed to. 

PCP: Did it ever frustrate you that you couldn't break through as an artist?  To be appreciated on a mass scale?
TN: Probably more, early on. But I had great optimism early on. But no, because the more I stayed in the business, the more I understood it and I understood the choices I was making and what they would mean. I never expected anything bigger than what my career has been. 

PCP: At what point did the optimism start to fade?
TN: Within the second or third year. When I started understanding the music business. When I started paying attention to it. Let's put it that way.

PCP: Did you always have a manager?
TN: I had a manager up through Mother Earth and then after that, no.

PCP: Was that when it started to fade? When you didn't have anyone to cushion you from the real world?
TN: That's when I started paying attention to it, yeah. But even before that I knew that either you have to do this or you're not going to be able to do that. I never could take the kind of direction which would be required of me to get that kind of support and success that I might have had. But who knows? I could have done everything right and still not have done any better.

PCP: Were there a lot of false promises?
TN: No. I mean, labels would say we love you and we're really going to promote your record and then they wouldn't, but that's just the way it is. (laughs) But I didn't believe anything anybody told me anyway, so ... I was rarely disappointed.

PCP: Were you that way by the time you got to San Francisco? Outside of the optimism, were you leery of what came out of people's mouths from the beginning?
TN: I don;t think I thought about it very much at the beginning. Like I say, initially I had very little to do with the business of it. I would want to know how much money we were getting and how much autonomy would we have. Those were the only two concerns I had in terms of the business.

PCP: Autonomy was an important part.
TN: It was primary. How much money will they give us and will they leave us alone.

PCP: Did they leave you alone?
TN: Yeah. You know, up until the late ‘70s, the labels were totally in awe of the artist. There was that brief little period from about '65 to '75 when there were still independent radio and groups and artists were recording whatever they wanted and it didn't have to fit into certain formats, which before and after was the case. There was that brief little window where that was the way it was, and the labels accepted it. And then I'm not sure what made it change, but I guess when they started losing money instead of making money, they went back to the old format. I was completely ruined by starting my career during that period of time because there was no way I was ever going back. Having had total control and total autonomy, there was no way I was ever going to give that up.

PCP: Did you ever hear of any groups having problems with lack of autonomy?
TN: Not groups so much as individual artists. Sort of apocryphally. I would hear about someone getting leaned on in the studio by the label to do this or that, but it was more the case with female artists. Certainly, most of the women I knew who were singers found it almost impossible to control their studio situations. That only happened to me once and that person is getting killed in one of my books. It was out of my control. He was the producer and he had the purse strings, and he acted in a way that I found completely unacceptable, but I got the job done and then never spoke to him again.