The Rolling Stone Interview: Ray Charles

Charles has his own version of his involvement with drugs, but over the years, he has refused to discuss it. When Playboy asked him, in 1970, how he started, he begged off the question. Asked if he might not be an influence to stop potential drug-users, he replied: "Bullshit. Everybody's aware that cigarettes probably cause cancer, but how many people do you think would give them up just because Ray Charles stopped smoking?" And, he continued, "I'm fed up with talking about that aspect of my life. Jesus Christ couldn't get me to say another word on the subject to anybody." Downbeat, in fact, must have had the devil on retainer; an article on Charles in the jazz publication took the form of an apologetic memo to future interviewers of Ray Charles, warning them not to ask him about narcotics. Instead, they were advised, accentuate the positive! Write about him knowing how to produce his own records! In his own studios! For his own label! How he plays chess and repairs radios and TVs! How he could even fly his own plane if he had to! How he helps fight Sickle Cell Anemia! How he's gotten all these Grammies and awards! Let the good times roll!

But when you call him the epitome of the American Dream, as Whitney Balliett did in the New Yorker, that's pretty positive. And yet, you've got to know that there were some nightmares along the way.

In two short sessions with Ray Charles, in a dressing room in San Francisco and in his recording studio in Los Angeles, I found him an articulate man, sometimes volatile in defense of his pride, deep-steeped to the point of repetition in telling what to him was the truth, and seemingly inclined to halve that "truth" sometimes, in discussing the beatdown aspects of his life. Example: He says, in the interview, he has maintained sales figures between 300,000 and 800,000 per album through the years. Fact, from ABC, which distributes his Tangerine Records: His best record in recent years, Message From the People, sold 250,000. Volcanic Action of My Soul, released in 1971, sold about 200,000. And the three albums before Volcanic "did even less." His most recent pop chart single, said the ABC executive, was "Don't Change on Me," in June, 1970.

Example: The sudden shift from Atlantic to ABC. Charles says it was for a big money deal, and that he gave Atlantic a chance to match the offer. Sources at Atlantic insist that Charles had people around him who got him to sign the ABC deal before Atlantic even learned about it.

So when we got the conversation around to dope, to his 19-year addiction to heroin, it was a surprise to hear Ray plunge into his hooking and kicking, and it was no surprise that the stories sometimes seemed, in at least two definitions of that word, fantastic. Example: Ray says he took that year off the road, after his bust in '65, to make the courts happy (he continued to produce records, including "Crying Time" and "Let's Go Get Stoned"). He'd kicked even before the bust, he hinted in our talk. But Ron Granger, who was director of Tangerine for three years and knew Charles from long ago, told us: "He took that year off to kick it. It took a year."

But the man is clean, a nonstop worker, a perfectionist/taskmaster devoted to his music. He moves around his office building with ease, with no cane, still missing a stairstep now and then as he moves between control room and main studio, instructing musicians, running the console, re-doing his vocals. He is a gentleman as I toss in questions over an 11-hour mixing session. Sometimes, ego challenged, there's volcanic action, as he stands up, all dressed in black, and shouts a reply, punctuating it with a "Hel-lo!" before he sits again. In his hotel room, with milk in the refrigerator and coffee and toast on the table, he writhes on the couch, sits forward pensively, falls almost onto his knee to find another restful position. He's just returned from a visit to President Nixon at the White House, where he accepted praise for his work as honorary chairman of the sickle cell foundation. ("It was a gas!" he would tell reporters; to me, he said he might even vote for Nixon, given his record of hiring Negroes and given McGovern's strange changes.)

We accentuated the positive for a bit, talked about how he plays chess with a specially carved set, how he admired Bobby Fischer for insisting on championship playing conditions, how he "saw" baseball games by going to the stadium with a transistor at his ear, how he chose the songs for the new album, Through the Eyes of Love.

We began by asking him to recall himself as a five year-old, when his eyes began to run, to hurt.

It didn't happen like one day I could see 100 miles and the next day I couldn't see an inch. It was, each day for two years my sight was less and less. My mother was always real with me, and bein' poor, you got to pretty much be honest with your children. We couldn't afford no specialists. I was lucky I could get a doctor — that's a specialist.