Ray Charles “True to Life”
No recording artist was more successful across styles and environments than Ray Charles was in the 1960s. And it may not even be close. Between 1957 and 1970, Charles creatively and commercially mastered Rhythm and Blues, Big Band Jazz, Country, Soul and Gospel. His life and achievements have been obsessively covered, to the point of deification. And yet, the brilliance and complexity of his life and his music is practically bottomless. Behind the sunglasses and under the dinner jacket were undoubtedly genius and suffering. He was a pioneer of so many forms. But he was also a man, who fought, spoke out, held his tongue, was incredibly generous, was petty as hell, elevated others, controlled others, got sick, got clean, succeeded wildly and, for most of the 1970s, struggled to find his artistic voice.
This period -- the 1970s -- which precisely frames Charles’ forties, saw his sales figures dwindle, his chart success regress and his critical adoration fade. Many of the albums from this decade are out of print. In 1974, Charles left his lucrative deal with ABC to release music on his own label, Crossover Records only to then make an anticlimactic return, in 1977, to Atlantic Records, the label he put on the map twenty years earlier. In the seventies, Charles was sober, divorced his wife of twenty two years (on paper more than in monogamy) and mostly released live albums, Jazz albums and Big Band albums.
Perhaps most notably, Ray Charles had stopped writing his own songs by the 1970s. He had settled into the very capable, if not comfortable, role of master vocalist and meticulous bandleader. By many accounts, he would labor over song selections and arrangements for years on end. After all, he was not just the singer and pianist. He wrote and arranged the horns, the strings and produced the records. Ray Charles was Prince a decade and a half before Prince. So, twenty years in, his slower pace and song selection hand-wringing seems forgivable.
Although the Ray Charles who signed with Atlantic Records in 1977 was not the same one who signed with the label twenty five years earlier, those who were still paying attention were hoping Ray would find a fountain of youth, or inspiration or...something new. These hopes would be largely dashed. Because, while 1977s “True to Life” is a perfectly decent album, like most of the Charles albums from the 70s, it reveals a restlessness much more than a breakthrough.
It’s hard to know what was really going on with Ray in the studio at this time. Long out of print, “True to Life,” never included proper credits to begin with. Ray ran his band like a factory. The players were mostly uncredited numbers. If they screwed up once, they were fined. The second time they were fired. He credits the “Ray Charles Orchestra” and the “Raelettes,” but no names are given. From oral histories, we know that Cliff Hugo, of Supertramp, played a lot of bass on the album. This is notable because of the funky 70s bottom on about half of the record. The bass, along with the trumpets and (of course) Hammond and occasional Moog shine on “True to Life.”
Although there is little public documentation of the making of the album, there is an epic Rolling Stone interview from several years earlier wherein the writer seems especially interested in Charles’ commercial decline and the simultaneous success of Joe Cocker, who simply would not exist without Ray Charles. Ray mostly deflects and partially lies about his album sales but, unsurprisingly, reveals a very deep and complex set of ideas at the intersection of race and business. The day before the interview, Ray had met with President Nixon in the White House to talk about his work supporting sickle cell anemia research. Ray’s perspective on race, music and marketing was both proud and pragmatic. On the one hand he was outspoken and sympathetic to active and aggressive responses to racism. He said to Ben Fong Torres:
“Well, I kind of think that what I meant was is that it seems that out of all the pleading that a people can do, all the crying out and all the conversations, you know, we’ve had than for years and years and years, and nothin’ really happened. They said, well, those people are happy, and they’re smiling and dancing, and so they must be cool. And nobody paid them the mind, until the people began to do wrong things. And, of course, what I was really saying is not that this was anything to be proud about. I was saying that it’s something to be ashamed of, that you got to do wrong before a country as rich as we are – we’re the richest country in the world. We got more money and we got more of everything. And it’s a shame that in order for our leaders to really pay us some attention, we gotta go and burn this down, and we gotta go and break into this, and we gotta go and picket this, and we gotta go and stand on this lawn – that’s pitiful.”
And on the other hand, he had both exploited and been exploited by the limitations of race and genre. When asked if he was embittered by the success of white imitators, he said:
“What keeps me from being bitter about this – the reason that this happens is because people who are in power tend to lean toward themselves. It’s the same as a guy who is in a house. He has his own house, he’s got his own, whatever it is, his own family. Well, let’s face it, he may love you, but if it’s somethin’ comin’ up, he’s gonna tend to lean towards – if he can get his own kids in there, he tends to go that way, you understand? I think this is basically what happens in the structure of our society. It’s a capitalistic country, and it’s a white society, and they control. They got the money. They got the airplanes, the bombs, every goddamn thing. You name it, they got it. So therefore, naturally you have, what is it? – 15-20 percent black, you got 80-85 percent white. Fine. So, as a result of that, if you’re not careful, you can become very bitter, because you’ll say, well, why in the world – here I am, and here’s a guy who’ll spend millions of dollars to find a white cat just to imitate me, and he’ll do far better than me. Well, the only thing that I can say that sort of helps me a little bit, that keeps me goin’ – I say two things. First of all, in order for that guy to copy me, he gotta wait ’til I do it first. Now [laughter], the second thing I feel, well, if this is the case, if you take this guy over me and he’s just an imitation of me, then that says to me that I must be pretty damn good.”
None of this context helps resolve “True to Life,” of course. The album opens like it was shot from a canon. Ray takes apart Johnny Nash’s lovely, if tepid, AM radio classic, “I Can See Clearly Now” and rebuilds it as a funky 70s hit for The People. This version is an absolute ass shaker. And I’m saying that as a toe tapper, myself. The Hammond organ smokes. The bass is straight Sly Stone. And the lead guitar sounds like it was lifted from Memphis in the later sixties. It was a modest hit, mostly because, like the rest of this album, it genre hops and was made five to ten years too late. None of that minimizes the greatness of this cover.
“The Jealous Kind,” an old Bobby Charles song, previously redone -- not coincidentally -- by Joe Cocker, is tailor made for Ray. It’s a swinging, New Orleans, Country Soul track with a nimble bottom and plenty of space for Ray to show off. In the back half, he opens up his falsetto and even provides some vocal “wah wahs” to confirm that he’s having fun. It’s a joy to hear.
Sadly, the album loses itself starting on track three, as Ray gets nostalgic. His semi-famous version of “Oh What a Beautiful Morning,” alongside "How Long Has This Been Going On?" by the Gershwin brothers and Sammy Cahn’s “Be My Love,” threatens to put the record to sleep. To be clear, the arrangements are intricate and pretty and the singer is Ray Charles. So, the worst it gets is always immaculate and impressive. But the tracks, which hop back and forth from orchestral balladry to Big Band jazz, are drenched in sentiment and have the sound of an artist playing it very safe.
Equally safe, if just slightly more contemporary are “Heavenly Arms” and “Let It Be.” The former is a great Solomon Burke gospel singalong. It’s right up the middle for Ray. He gets cooking and, midway through, asks for handclaps from the band as they break things down. I find myself, in Ray Charles’ church, eagerly joining in, wanting to validate the testimony with my hands, if not an “Amen.” The latter Beatles’ cover is perfectly fine but would not rank as one of his top five Beatles’ interpretations.
Right before “Let It Be,” however, Ray throws us a curveball -- maybe a screwball -- that must have sounded like a novelty in 1977. That song, “Game Number Nine” lives somewhere in between Billy Preston’s 70s space Funk, Sly Stone and really early Hip Hop. Ray tells us a story about how he used his best move (Game Number Nine) to seduce a woman he wants to go to bed with but not commit to. Sure enough, she outplays him and the two end up married. When he wonders how she beat him, she lets him know that she was using “Game Number Ten.” It’s a simple joke, but a good one. It’s also a total outlier among all Ray Charles songs. At forty seven, Ray Charles had lived more and changed more than almost any middle-aged artist. He had the right to settle. A lot of “True to Life” sounds like high end, quality-controlled settling. I deeply admire the artist who made this album. But, “Game Number Nine” -- that’s a different artist. I so want to hear an album from that artist.