Wilson Pickett, 1941-2006

In 1965, backed by a studio band of magnificent mongrels, black and white, that Atlantic Records producer Jerry Wexler assembled in Memphis and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Wilson Pickett declared all-out war on inertia. With hits that included "Mustang Sally," "In the Midnight Hour," "Funky Broadway" and "Land of 1,000 Dances," Pickett's trademark soul scream moved many millions, from the projects to the frat parties, to get up offa that thing.

Pickett, a.k.a. the Midnight Mover, a.k.a. Soul Man-and-a-Half, died of a heart attack at age sixty-four on January 19th in Virginia, where he had settled, he told me, "to enjoy the hell out of life" hunting, fishing and "messing with my cars." Despite -- or because of -- his strict Southern Baptist raising, Pickett was all about pleasure, whether it was caressing a woman or the fender of his favorite car, a Stutz Bearcat. His moniker, "The Wicked," according to Wexler, was bestowed by an Atlantic secretary named Lurleen who, bearing up under the star's attentions, squealed, "Ooooh, you're wicked!" Wexler shot out of his office yelling, "That's it, you're the Wicked!"

Pickett, after all, was no courtly Motown swain. This was a guy given to little love poems such as "Lay Me Like You Hate Me." Watching the man eat an oyster was not family fare. In fact, if it were up to me to chisel a few words in granite, I'd crib from "I'm a Midnight Mover," the grand bit of braggadocio Pickett wrote with his friend and collaborator Bobby Womack:

Midnight teaser.
Real soul pleaser.

Night after night, in the studio and onstage, Pickett made good on his claims. His music -- soul music -- as practiced from the mid-to late Sixties, drew its power from the live moment. He marauded a stage like a panther, clawing the air, slinking in and out of the light, screaming, gold lame leather melded to his thighs, shirt hanging open, sweat pouring down his chest. The brassy flash of horns backlit Pickett's charges to the footlights, bumping, pleading, straddling a bass line -- ungh! -- until women screamed and their dates kicked the dance floor and huffed, "Damn."

His cool was glacial: vintage cars, bespoke suits and shirts, and diamonds too classy to call bling. Offstage, mercurial hardly begins to describe a complicated, easily detonated individual who offered, by way of explanation, "I came up hard. Damn hard." Pickett's later-life brushes with the law -- everything from driving over the mayor's lawn in his New Jersey town to shooting off his motel-room lock in the Adirondacks (the Isley Brothers had locked it as a joke on a hunting trip) -- made minor headlines and police dockets.

He never meant harm and almost always apologized. But he scared the hell out of me at our first, early-Eighties meeting three floors above funky Broadway at a Times Square club. I'm not even sure I got out a question before he was on his feet and aroar, yelling anti-disco diatribes, conspiracy theories ("The Mafia done killed soul!") -- until I fled, heart pounding, into a stairwell. Days later he apologized over the blue flames of a pu-pu platter. His mea culpa was a terse character sketch of an archetype traceable back to the mythic Stagger Lee, Muddy Waters' "Mannish Boy," Marvin Gaye's "Trouble Man" on up through any number of current gangstas. Our waitress jumped as Pickett intoned:

"Baby, I am a mean motherfucker. Don't you be writing nothin' nice, 'cause you'd be jivin' people. I am the Wicked. Dig? I am named the Wicked, I got to be the Wicked."

Then he giggled at his bluster. And in conversations that stretched over a few years, Pickett offered up the contents of what might seem a standard soul man's dossier: poverty, cotton fields and a desperate flight north. Born the youngest of eleven children in 1941 in tiny Prattville, Alabama, whapped upside the head with a Bible by his preacher grandfather for singing the devil's music, young Wilson gave his mother good reason to fear for his life. Picking cotton, he sassed the Man. And when a white field boss who -- by standard practice -- walked unbidden into their home, Wilson piped, "Don't you know how to knock on a door?" With great haste, his mother shipped him to his father in Detroit.

As he explained it, "Me and a million other dudes said 'Later' to pickin' cotton." Using the metaphors of Motortown's main industry, Pickett explained how he went from singing in the Violinaires, a gospel group, to whipping lead vocals across gospel-schooled harmonies in an R&B group called the Falcons:

"First you harmonize, then you customize. Now what kid don't want to own the latest model? And . . . what black kid in some city project can afford it . . . music lessons, arrangers . . . backup bands. No nothin.' So you look around for a good, solid used chassis. This be your twelve-bar blues. . . . Then you look around for what else you got. And if you come up like most of us, that would be gospel."

The Falcons' 1962 hit "I Found a Love" would send them to New York's Apollo Theater, Pickett as lead singer. Wexler, who signed Pickett away from Lloyd Price's label to Atlantic in 1964, admits they couldn't find the groove at first: "Taking him to Memphis helped. But I really think things clicked when Wilson brought his friend Bobby Womack into the sessions. It gave him a rudder of sorts." Womack wrote "I'm in Love," the closest his friend would get to sounding vulnerable on vinyl. Collaborating on "I'm a Midnight Mover," they tailored the perfect soul strut -- a howling self-portrait in two minutes and change.

Which brings us to that scream. Pickett was a talented and judicious wailer who schooled himself on the rapier stylings of his gospel idol, the Rev. Julius Cheeks, lead singer for the Sensational Nightingales. What fine singers like Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson did with melisma -- the art of stretching a note up, down and sideways along a scale -- Pickett did with a scream. "He did scream musical notes," Wexler says now. "It wasn't gratuitous or random. He used screams and rasps as punctuation."

But here's Pickett himself on the forging of his imprimatur:

"When the other guys are down singing tight together, almost a hum, you whip a scream across the top. Eeeeoooowwww. It just come out. You can feel it comin', but you don't let go until the moment is exactly right."

Pickett could have been describing soul's advent in Sixties America just as easily. We were done with the tight white harmonies of the Eisenhower years and poised to hear something uplifting but less polite. Soul's moment, like the reign of any popular genre, was short, shining and exactly right. But its legacy -- Pickett's -- is still deeply felt. Radio formats exploded, civil-rights and anti-war marches were joined, repressive foundation garments were cast aside at the exhortations of soul royalty James Brown, Aretha Franklin and the rest of their shark-skinned, side-vented, flame-sequined and 'fro'd courtiers.

Like so many of his number, Pickett was touchy and sometimes bewildered about outliving his own revolution. It was an awful moment, in 1991, when Bobby Brown squandered the honor of introducing the Wicked at his induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, mumbling that he thought he'd heard Pickett music "around the house." Maniacal Pickett worship, albeit by white guys, was at the heart of the 1991 movie The Commitments. And the essential Pickett -- funny, wiseass and in fine voice -- was a vivid presence in the 2003 soul documentary Only the Strong Survive. His 1999 album with the unrepentant title It's Harder Now, an unabashed R&B turn, earned him a Grammy nomination. And up until last year he was gigging everywhere from Calgary to Europe, until his health began to fail. When I last spoke with him by phone, he told me his spread in Virginia was so country, "I see Davy Crockett's ghost." He still had the love of his life -- the Stutz. "But I got her a new paint job."

A final glimpse into the heart of this soul man, from one of Pickett's oldest friends, the Rev. Solomon Burke, who described a birthday party for the Wicked held with all his siblings at the home he'd bought his mother in Kentucky. All eleven grown children and grandbabies held hands for Burke's blessing, and the mother started to cry.

"For joy," says Burke. "Because she had never let herself dream it could turn out well for them and her big baby: Wilson. She brought him up hard because she had to. Sent him away from her when he got too bold to stay down South, and it broke her heart. But she would have driven him off with a shotgun. Wilson is a great, great singer. And I am sorry to tell you this, but it comes from a long acquaintance with pain."

He will be buried beside his mother, Lena, in Louisville, Kentucky.