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Interview with Cowboy Jack Clement - Excerpt

I’d like to start by asking where and when you were born.

I was born in Downtown Memphis, Tennessee, Sunday April 5th, 1931 in St. Joseph’s Hospital, a Catholic institution. Well of course I was a Baptist at the time. My name is not John it’s Jack, Jack Henderson Clement. Therefore, I’m not being irreverent when I call myself Jack the Baptist.

I have to ask how the name ‘Cowboy’ Jack Clement came about.

Me and a couple of buddies were hanging out one night and we just started calling each other ‘Cowboy’. I was ‘Cowboy’ so and so, Allen Reynolds was Cowboy so and so and Dickie Lee, as I recall, was ‘Cowboy’ Red River Sylvester. I was a New Jersey cowboy named ‘Cowboy’ Wallyaskey (spelling?) and the name just kinda stuck, mine did. We called each other ‘Cowboy’ for a while after that but somehow mine stuck, and I guess I let it.

And how did you get into the music business.

Well I organised a band and played at the local schoolhouse when I was about thirteen or fourteen, so I was in the music business from then on. Anytime you played the local schoolhouse they gave us a little money as I recall, so then you’re in the music business. Well that was back when I was about thirteen or fourteen and now I am seventy three and I am still doing the same thing I was then, getting up a band and playing at the local schoolhouse which is now known as the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. I’ve got this really fine band and we go down there and play once in a while and folks round here kinda like it, maybe we’ll be coming to your town one of these days.

Who were your early musical influences.

Eddy Arnold stands out more than anybody else because that’s when I really started to appreciate the singing part of it. I always liked the instrumental part of music too but Eddy Arnold is the voice that sticks out in my mind. I was singing his songs when I was thirteen or fourteen. I always liked Burl Ives, Roy Acuff of course, and his whole show. He had a great stage show, Roy Acuff and the Smokey Mountain Boys. They did all of this comedy stuff, they had props and they were great. The Delmore Brothers, they were on radio in Memphis, WMC, Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby. My father liked both of them, he would take me to the movies that had both of them guys in. Earl Scruggs, Spike Jones of course and, later in life, George Jones.

At this time did you intend to go into engineering and producing.

I never intended to go into engineering. Producing was something that came natural to me. Like I say I organised bands when I was thirteen and I still organise bands. To me that’s producing, I mean we would organise bands so we can go put on a show somewhere. I really think of an album as a show and so I am particularly attentive to sequencing and so on. I’ve always been into producing. As far as producing for record, I got interested in that after I got out of the Marine Corps in 1952. I went in when I was seventeen, 1948, and spent my last twenty-six months in Washington, DC which was a wonderful place to be. There were little nightclubs right across the street from where I was stationed, a special place called Marine Barracks. I was on the drill team and I got to hear that great big Marine Corps band all the time, that’s something I miss. That band rehearsed right there where I was stationed. Right across the street from the gate was a nightclub called the Band Box and up and down that street were little joints that I could go and play in and pick up some extra money. We had a little dance job on Saturday night and I was doing pretty well, so I was in the music business all the time I was in the Marine Corps, at least the last twenty-six months. After I got out I heard about Dot Records, an independent label in Galatin, Tennessee, and they had a bunch of big hit records and my favourite was the Mac Wiseman records. I found out that there’s a thing called record labels and you could go somewhere and have somebody press one up, put your name on it and put it out. So I got to thinking about that pretty early while we were trying to get something going with the band I had in Washington after I got out of the Marine Corps. When I got to Memphis I woke up one morning and Sleepy Eyed John, a morning disc jokey, said ‘here’s that record everybody’s been talking about, raving about’, and he played Elvis and of course that was a wonderous thing for me. I was hooked on Elvis right off the bat, because that was something really different. Then I found out that it was on a label here in town. Memphis had a record label called Sun Records and they press ‘em up and get ‘em out. So I started getting interested in what Sam Phillips was doing. Maybe I could do that and I started thinking about putting together a record label. Along with my buddy Slim Wallace, who had a nightclub in Arkansas, we almost did. I had been sort of working my way through college and playing in his band every Friday and Saturday night. Slim had this garage and I said why don’t we get into the record business. We can buy this tape recorder from Sleepy Eyed John for four hundred and fifty bucks and build a little studio in your garage. So we did that and used it to practice in. We never got it to the point where we could actually cut a master in there but it was a place where we could make demos, as they call them nowadays. Worktapes, that’s a good name for them. When we actually got ready to make a record we rented a radio studio Downtown at WMPS and took Billy Lee Riley and two or three other people into the studio and I produced my first record which was called Rock With Me Baby and the back-side was Trouble Bound by Billy Lee Riley. Well I needed to get somebody to master it so we could have it pressed. At that time Sam Phillips was the guy in town who was known for doing that even though he was doing very well, he had sold Elvis by this time and was making a lot of money. He had a big hit on Blue Suede Shoes but you could still hire Sam Phillips for fifteen dollars a side to master something. So I started off with Sam by hiring him. I got him to make this master for me and when I went in to pick it up he said he really liked it and would like to put it on Sun Records. I said I’d have to ask my partner Slim. Sam asked me what I was doing and I said I was working at a building supply place but I didn’t like it very much and he said ‘maybe you should come and work for me.’ I said ‘maybe I should,’ and two weeks later, June 15 1956, I went to work for Sun Records.

How and when did you first meet Sam Phillips.

At the time Elvis was taking off Sam Phillips was almost as notorious as Elvis. Everybody in town knew who Sam Phillips was, he’s the guy with this record label, right here in town, Sun Records. Sometime around 1955 I called Sam and told him I’d been playing music in Washington, Wheeling, West Virginia and Boston and I’d like to come in and audition for him. So he set it up and I went in and he gave me a really good audition. I guess he spent an hour with me, I sang a whole lot of stuff. At that time I was more into Marty Robbins, Ray Price and bluegrass. I’d played a lot of music by then, played in several bands, lots of different kinds of music and I was pretty good. I think the conclusion was that I may have been too good for him, a little too slick or something. He was more into funk and I hadn’t discovered that wonderful word fully at that time. He told me I was welcome to come back and sing some more. I guess it was about six to nine months later when we had produced this record with Billy Lee and I went in to have it mastered. Going back to the question about engineering. I don’t consider myself an engineer. Engineers are the people that fixed that stuff all I did was operate it. I was one of the first of a breed of musician types running the control board. To me the console was a musical instrument and that echo thing was a musical instrument that’s how I played it, I was playing the board like a musical instrument of some sort.

And when did you start working at Sun Records.

I already answered that a little while ago but I’ll answer it again! I started working for Sun Records on June 15 1956. I remember that day because it was the same day that I entered the Marine Corps and same day I was discharged - June 15 1948 and June 15 1952.

We often read about ‘The Legendary Sun Studio’ and the ‘Sun Sound’ what do you think made the studio so special.

It was magic, that’s what it was, that’s the only way I can describe it. The studio was kinda live to start with and we didn’t have baffles, partial walls you put around the instruments, so everything just bounced off the walls. Problem with that, it just bounced back into the microphones. We put the drums at one end of the room and the vocal at the other. The room wasn’t that large as I recall, only twenty-five feet long, eighteen feet wide and twelve feet high with these v-shaped things on the ceiling to deflect sound so that we wouldn’t have a parallel surface between the ceiling and the floor. There was a lot of leakage, but it was a nice leakage. In studios that are real dead leakage is not so good because it sounds kinda muffled coming back into the mics. I discovered twenty-five or so years later, working with U2 in that same room, what made it so neat. There was no separation it just all went together and you got to blend it right there in the room and bounce it off the walls. More than anything it was the playing that went on in there, the frivolity of it, the whimsy of it. There was young cats in there experimenting, learning how to pick, trying all this stuff and Sam all the while telling us he was looking for something different. We’d just go in the studio pick, sing, have fun, make tapes and then we’d go and eat next door at Taylor’s Restaurant. Sam never had an office there until later on when I built a room at the back but he didn’t use it. All the business took place at Taylor’s Restaurant. Sam and Johnny Cash would go in there and talk. Jerry Lee would drop by. What a great place. Best time I ever had, just a fun thing and I’ll never forget it.

You discovered and recorded Jerry Lee Lewis and worked with people like Roy Orbison. What were those early sessions like.

I already had this record I had produced by Billy Riley so I got him and those guys I had been working with into the studio and we started cutting some more tapes with Billy Lee. And then Roy Orbison came to town and Sam let me start working with him. Roy was just visiting at first but then a few months later he moved there. I spent a lot of time with him. We never cut a really big hit but we cut some nice records. I think my favourite was one called Sweet And Easy Love. Then of course there was Jerry Lee. It was about August 1956 and I’d been there since June. I was tinkering around in the studio and Sally Wilburn came from out front and said ‘there’s this guy who says he plays piano like Chet Atkins’. I said ‘I gotta hear that, send him on back.’ So Jerry came in and sat down at the piano and he played Wildwood Flower and it sounded like Chet Atkins playing the piano. It was nice you know. I said ‘do you sing, then sing me something.’ He started singing a couple of George Jones songs, Seasons Of My Heart and Window Up Above and it sounded wonderful. He was playing the piano and singing and it just sounded great. But it was country and we weren’t looking for country much in those days at Sun. Not the Nashville country, we didn’t have the players or facilities to do that. I told Jerry that I loved that stuff but we needed some rock and roll. He went back home and I played the tape for Sam and he loved it. A month later Jerry comes in, in fact he just showed up and he’d come up with a version of an old Gene Autry song called You’re The Only Star In My Blue Heaven which was a waltz. Then he’d written a song called End Of The Road and that was good. That was on a Monday and I said come back Thursday and I’ll have some guys here and we’ll cut some tapes. So we got in there and recorded his first record which was Crazy Arms.

Can you recall the first time you met Johnny Cash.

I can’t recall exactly, I know it was a couple of weeks after I went to work for Sun. He came in off the road and that’s where I met him. He probably came in to record and Sam was engineering. I remember I liked him right off the bat. I was already a fan because I loved I Walk The Line. His records prior to that I appreciate a lot more now than I did then. But when he came out with I Walk The Line he had me hooked. I was very glad to meet Johnny Cash and we sort of clicked right off the bat and I particularly noticed that he had this great sense of humour. He and I were similar in a lot of ways, around the same age, although I was about ten months older than him. We grew up listening to the same music, mostly out of radio stations around Memphis and some in Arkansas. We were exposed to the same music, all the country music and a lot of black gospel a bit of everything. It wasn’t long before he came in and started singing some of my songs.

You first worked with him, as a producer, in December 1956. Up to that point Sam had been producing him, why the change.

Sam was getting tired of running the board all the time. I was his first full-time assistant. He’d been strapped to that board for years and I came along and he seemed to like what I was doing. We agreed on most things although we didn’t have to agree, he was the boss. I cut tapes and if he liked them he would put them out. I done well, Jerry Lee started off real good. Johnny Cash and I were getting along and so one day he let me start working with John. He was keeping John to himself, he really liked him, liked working with him and admired him. I guess he was busy one day and let me work with him. One of the first things we cut was Home Of The Blues. It wasn’t a big hit but it did well.At that point John’s sales were starting to flag a little, he was still selling good but he wasn’t selling a million or so maybe one hundred or two hundred thousand.

You produced all of his remaining Sun sessions during which he recorded some great material including Big River, Give My Love To Rose and Country Boy. What was he like to work with.

Johnny Cash was wonderful to work with. I guess he is my all-time favourite. He loved music and he had a lot of energy for it, took it very seriously but he had this great sense of humour. An ideal combination. As I said he and I grew up in the same area listening to the same music, we were about the same age and we just liked the same stuff. I’d feel free to play him oddball stuff that nobody else would go for, things like Ballad Of A Teenage Queen, which we’ll get to later. Sam always hated that. Big River, that was the back side of Ballad Of A Teenage Queen, I played guitar on Big River and played bass drum at the same time. With my right foot I was playing the bass drum and I was playing the guitar on another microphone. Country Boy, I am not sure if I did that, Sam might have done that one. Give My Love To Rose I think I did, we did so many, I’m not sure about a couple of them, it’s been fifty years almost.

He also recorded two of your compositions, Guess Things Happen That Way and Ballad Of A Teenage Queen, and they both became major hits reaching #1 on the country charts. Can you tell us about the writing and recording of these two songs.

I wrote Ballad Of A Teenage Queen for me to sing myself and actually did a tape, it was going to be a record and Sam was going to put it out. It was like a Johnny Cash record, it had a vocal group on it and all those answer part. John came in and I played it for him and he loved it and wanted to record it which kinda surprised me. I would play him stuff not necessarily to record just because he might enjoy it. I always did that and he always did it for me and you’d be amazed at the songs Johnny Cash would sing that he never recorded like The Whiffenpoof Song, a bunch of Ink Spots songs, Mills Brothers songs and we’d sing a lot of that stuff together through the years. He liked to be entertained and he liked something funny and Ballad Of A Teenage Queen was kinda funny, it was silly, it was a total fairytale. Sam hated it. He told me one time, a month or so before it was released, the more he listened to that the more he didn’t like it. Everybody around the studio liked it and Miss Taylor next door, and her daughter Rosemary liked it and Sam put it out and of course it was a big hit. But he never did like it. I wanted to do a follow-up but I wasn’t thinking about Johnny Cash again when I wrote Guess Things Happen That Way I was thinking more like Dean Martin or somebody. My role model for that song was Memories Are Made Of This and I heard the song as a sort of rumba rhythm. Anyway Johnny Cash came in and did it his way and I loved it. Then we got a vocal group in there. We had this barbershop quartet named The Confederates and a girl singer. And Wally, the bass singer, started singing ‘ba-do ba-do, ba-do ba-do’’ and I said let’s do that. So we did it and I wasn’t sure if Johnny Cash was gonna like that. So I hurried up and got the record pressed before he got back to town, but I think he liked it. I think Sam even liked that one. When I recorded a new version of it for my new album it was different. It was more like how I wrote the song. But I love the way Johnny Cash did the song and still do.