Delta Lady by Rita Coolidge

Author:Rita Coolidge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Layla

One afternoon in 1970 a few months before the Mad Dogs tour, Jim came over to the Garfield house in Hollywood, sat down at my piano, and played for me a chord progression he’d just composed. Most people know Jim as a drummer but he was also a capable pianist, and because he was exposed to so many styles of music as LA’s top session drummer, he had a well-developed sense of melody and structure. I’d started writing songs in college—I wrote the B side to my first hit, “Turn Around and Love You”—and Priscilla and I wrote when we lived in Memphis. The chords Jim played for me were in the key of C sharp and built to an eight-note refrain before the progression repeated. There was some-thing haunting about it, especially when the bright major chords suddenly dipped to B-flat 7th for the refrain. It also seemed deeply familiar—like when you meet someone you’re immediately attracted to who seems at once exotic and approachable.

I loved Jim’s progression, but at the moment that’s all it was—a stunning riff, not a song. As we played with it, a second progression suddenly came to me, a countermelody in the key of G that “answered” and resolved the tension of Jim’s chords and built to a dramatic crescendo that bridged the song’s beginning and ending. I wrote lyrics that reflected the melody’s sense of fatalism and hope (“my darling believe me, don’t ever leave me, we’ve got a million years to show them that our love is real”). Jim and I ended up calling it “Time (Don’t Let the World Get In Our Way)” and taped a demo. We played the song for Eric when we were in England with Delaney & Bonnie—I remember clearly sitting at the piano at Olympic Studios while Eric listened to me play it all the way through (so does Bobby Whitlock, Delaney’s and Bonnie’s ace piano player, who was on the session). Jim and I left a tape cassette of the demo with Eric, hoping of course that he might cover it. Nothing came of it, and I largely forgot about it because the Mad Dogs tour came along and then I was busy recording my own album in the summer of 1970 with David Anderle, who’d kept his promise from before the Cocker tour to produce my first record. But our song, with Jim’s wistful melody and my sweet countermelody, would come to haunt me the rest of my life.

In the meantime I was thrilled to be recording my own album, though I still absolutely loved working as a background singer. In 20 Feet from Stardom they talk about people trying to get to the front of the stage and all the hard times singers go through now, especially with everything getting looped and dubbed and the human element being lost. But there was a time—fortunately for me, right around the moment I hit LA—when being a background singer was the best job in town.

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