Excerpts from:

In My Wildest Dreams

A Collection of Rock & Roll Tales
Volume One

The house band at Stax Records...

   "We were somehow chosen by fate to be the ONES. The ones of our time to make an impact on popular music, seldom done in history.

   I was day walking through my wildest dream.

   Duck and I were born on the same day in the same hospital and are both left-handed. Moreover, we both started off playing guitar. Andrew and David Porter were born two days before us. Steve, one month earlier. Coincidence?

   I began to consider astrology."

The Stax/Volt Tour of 1967...

   "I spied Sam and Dave over by the curtain ready to go on. They weren’t so calm now. They looked like 'Man ‘o War' and 'Seabiscuit' in the starting gate at Churchill Downs race track, prancing around with nostrils flared and skin jerking from eagerness. Their eyes flashed as they sensed the crowd waiting. They didn’t have to wait long.

   The guy out front had a hard time being heard as he tried to hawk the duo on stage. But hell, they didn’t need hawking! They needed unleashing! Finally, he just threw up his hands and cried, "SO HERE THEY ARE, SAM AND DAVE!!"

   We started into "You Don’t Know Like I Know," and Sam and Dave flew onto center stage like two balls of St. Elmo’s Fire, dancing the New York soul dance while holding their pant legs up in front so the crowd could see the foot action!  Bedlam broke out!"

Elvis' Return to Memphis - 1969...

   "Otis and Dr. King may have been gone, but we knew we had to continue. Musicians are cousins by music anyway, and white and black knew we had to get along to live. And hell, we were simply having too much fun.

   But still, change was afoot. It was even rattling its way into music.

   And that certainly was the case over in the ghetto at American Studio, where Elvis Presley was about to alter the course of his career.

   The electricity in the air was such that you could have cut the main power supply to the studio, and the machines would have kept running on their own. Elvis’ personal magnetism had the paper clips flying off the receptionist’s desk out front and sticking to the interior walls. Chips Moman was producing Elvis’ first Memphis recording session since his days at Sun, and although we had been working on some pretty impressive artists, like Aretha Franklin and B. J. Thomas, everybody was sitting around with fixed grins or walking too much and bumping into furniture."