Millie Jackson had already scored hits with the singles Child Of God (It’s Hard To Believe)‚ My Man, A Sweet Man‚ and Ask Me What You Want‚ from her 1972 eponymous debut LP, and It Hurts So Good‚ from its 1973 follow-up of the same name. But no-one could have predicted the fuss caused by the release of her third long- player, the following year’s Caught Up.
Recording what Spring Records thought would be her next single, Millie went into Muscle Shoals studio with producer Brad Shapiro to cut a version of Luther Ingram’s hit, (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right. With its spoken intro and rap, Millie inadvertently helped kickstart a musical revolution.
“I didn’t realise that at the time,” she says. “The main reason I talked in my songs was because I couldn’t sing very well.”
Clocking in at 10 minutes, the song was too long to release as a single so rather than recut a shorter version Millie decided to record a whole album’s worth of material. As her honest exposé of a love triangle unfolded, from the mistress’s perspective on side one and then from the point of view of the cheated wife on side two, so Millie’s unmistakable talent shone through. Her monologues were mostly ad-libbed, her choice of covers impeccable: both Bobby Womack’s I’m Through Trying To Prove My Love To You‚ and Bobby Goldsboro’s Summer (The First Time)‚ could have been written specifically for the project, while her own songs were spot-on: All I Want Is A Fighting Chance‚ and It’s All Over But The Shouting‚ showcasing her penchant for strident, emotive country-inflected ballads.
“Spring didn’t want to release the LP, they didn’t think they’d get airplay. But DJ Frankie Crocker on WBLS New York took the acetate and played it on his show. After that they couldn’t print the damn thing up quick enough. The show’s phone lines were jammed with complaints. People were picketing the station. It was fantastic publicity.”
Released in October 74, Caught Up reached No. 23 in the US, became her first gold record and remains her biggest-selling LP to date. Since then she has cussed her way through a further 21 albums, praised Isaac Hayes for his head-giving ability on their collaboration Royal Rappin’ and sat on a toilet with her pants down for her Back To The S**t album sleeve. Yet behind the smut, an extraordinary, insightful singer/songwriter resides — as her last LP, 2001’s Not For Church Folk, testifies.
What was it like growing up in the Jackson household?
It was interesting. My real mother passed away when I was almost three, so I never got to know her. Daddy got remarried a couple of months later. He got married five times in quick succession. It drove me mad. It was only when I had my own kid that I realised he was just trying to find a new mother for me. My mother’s parents wanted to raise me: daddy wouldn’t give me to them, but I ended up with them for 13 months until I ran away.
This was in Georgia and my dad had moved to New Jersey by this time. I was such a tomboy, an only child and my grandfather was a preacher. We argued, I went back to my dad, we argued and I found someone going south and sneaked off with them to visit my aunt and uncle there for 10 days. My dad came down to get me and me and my uncle plotted. He gave me some money and told me to go to New York. He said I’d have so much fun that if I got a beating on my return it wouldn’t matter. It would be worth it. He took my dad for a drink while I made my escape. I was 15.
Your first brush with fame came as a teenage model.
I was living with my mother’s sister in New York. I was studying at night school and working at Kimberley Knitwear’s shipping office in the day. When I graduated I was hired to do some photo modelling for magazines. I dressed in a baby doll pyjamas set and sat on a bed with an old man holding my knee. The caption read, ‘My dad made me marry this old man!’. I had a magazine cover where I wore a swimsuit and a baseball hat and I was swinging a bat and the slogan said, ‘I had to fight for my man’. I did that for six months off and on. It was good money.
You first sang publicly as a dare in 1964.
Yes, my friends and I used to hang out on a Thursday night at Palms Café in Harlem where the locals would go and sing. One person was so dreadful so I was heckling and one of my friends challenged me to go up and be better, so I went up on stage having never sung before and belted out Ben E King’s Don’t Play That Song. One of the diners there loved me and hired me to play Club Zanzibar in Hoboken and 521 Club on Brooklyn. Then I landed a two- week residency at a bar in New Jersey. I’d play anywhere. My set consisted of the Ben E King number, Maxine Brown’s All In My Mind‚ and BB King’s Rock Me Baby.
This guy who used to watch me said I should add something in, he said sing ‘1 and 1 is 2/2 and 2 is 4/Whip it on me baby/I want a little bit more/Rock me baby’. That’s how the rapping started. My influences at this time were Gladys Knight and Otis Redding. Later on I really got into the O’Jays.
How did you land your first record deal with MGM?
Billy Nicholls, the songwriter, was head of the Crystal Ballroom where I’d been working and he took me to MGM where I recorded my debut, A Little Bit Of Something‚ in 1969. I only got the single, because MGM wanted me to sign a management deal and I wouldn’t so they gave my LP contract to a singer on Broadway instead. I managed to get out of the contract I had signed with them over the next year and once free went to Spring.
Your debut for Spring, the self-penned A Child Of God‚ made No. 22 in the US but was banned from TV.
I was booked to sing it on NBC. They heard the lyric ‘She kicks her kids out on the street, puts another man under their father’s sheets’ and said it was too risqué. They told me to sing another song so I did Gladys Knight’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine. Six months later they asked me back to sing the single again. I got to the studio, explained what they had said to me the first time, they said it didn’t matter, there was nothing wrong with the lyric. I started to run through the song for them and suddenly they stopped me. ‘You can’t sing that’, the guy cried, ‘you can’t say God on NBC’. So I sang I Heard It Through The Grapevine‚ again! I’d given up working in the shipping office by this time. I was making two times the money singing in one night that I made in a whole week at Kimberley Knitwear.
Cissy Houston sang backing on the single.
Yes, that was the record company’s idea. She was with the Sweet Inspirations at the time. If Cissy was working on your song you knew you were kicking on it. I was really intimidated by Cissy though. I just watched her and learned. Cissy was in charge.
What was it like recording your debut LP, Millie Jackson?
It was a relief to actually be singing something of mine after recording so many demos. I’d worked at Juggy Murray’s Sue label just before. I didn’t get paid, just hung around and helped out. It was a good apprenticeship. We recorded this in Media Sounds in New York and Track Studio, Washington with producer Raeford Gerald. Everything he did had that Motown feel to it.
I had always written. I was writing poems when I was growing up as a kid in Georgia. I didn’t write whole songs, but would sing the hook and verse into a tape then when it was time to record I’d remind myself by listening to the tape and finish the song off live. Ask Me What You Want and My Man, A Sweet Man were both written that way.”
On your second LP, It Hurts So Good, you teamed with producer Brad Shapiro.
If he can put up with Wilson Pickett he can put up with me, I thought, so I headed to Muscle Shoals. He gave me a bunch of songs he liked and asked me to pick one. That’s how I did the title track, Phillip Mitchell’s It Hurts So Good. I Cry‚ I wrote with Gary Byrd. It was taken from a direct life experience. I went to a club in Queens in New York and as I was getting out of my car, this guy shot someone and ran off down the street. I had never seen anyone shot or dying before. I called 911 from a telephone booth and waited and waited, people gathered round, I got blankets from my car, covered him and looked after him and the police came and still we waited for an ambulance. When the ambulance finally came, the driver jumped out, took off his glasses, put his head near the guy’s mouth to check his breathing, said ‘He’s gone’‚ and put him in a bag and threw him into a truck. Just like that! I heard the body hit the floor. I thought it was the most unfeeling thing I had ever seen in my life. I cried and I wrote about it then I cried the whole time I was recording it.
The Caught Up Trilogy was a revolutionary concept both lyrically and musically.
It was also the first record I produced and they never gave me a credit. I gave them hell, for just giving me the album concept. They were sorry! They sent Brad down to see my show, which was based around my 10 minute version of Luther Ingram’s If Loving You Is Wrong. He was baffled. He said, ‘I don’t know how to produce this, I don’t know how to do this in the studio’. So I had to go down to Muscle Shoals again to direct everyone. When DJ Frankie Crocker played it on air it caused a riot. They couldn’t press them up fast enough. The second day it was released it sold 62,000 copies. I didn’t realise at the beginning that it was going to last for three albums. But my fans kept asking for it. The second part, Still Caught Up (1975) kept it going, but by the third part I was sick of it. Free And In Love (1976) wasn’t really a part of the concept. It was just to say I’ve finished with this now.
1979’s Royal Rappin’s saw you collaborate with Isaac Hayes.
I was supposed to record the album with Joe Simon as he was on the same label, but he didn’t want to do it with me so I said, to hell with him! I looked down the label, I thought I can’t do it with Fatback, then I saw Isaac was a part of Polydor, the distributors, and he jumped at the chance. He was fabulous to work with. I wasn’t great on background vocals, I could hold a note but I didn’t know what note I was singing, so he said I’ll sing around you. We recorded all the vocals in just two days. I tried to get Isaac to say, ‘I’m famous for my head’. But he wouldn’t say it so when I went in to mix the LP on my own, I said, So you know Isaac, you’re famous for your head… I mean your bald head! When the LP came out he couldn’t believe I’d done that to him.
How representative of your live act was Live And Uncensored from the same year?
It was very representative. Only the Phuck U Symphony and my cover of Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) were added and the only reason I did the symphony was because I had run out of things to say. I had never used the F word before but I thought, this is a live LP so I’ve got to go all the way. But I wasn’t going to say it, I was going to direct the audience to say it. Randy Klein put the music to the cut and I directed it.
You dabbled with country on 1981’s Just A Lil’ Bit Country.
Each of my albums always had a country song on it because I love country, but I wanted to do a whole LP of the stuff like Ray Charles had. Polydor liked the idea, promised to send me to the Grand Ol’ Opry but two weeks before I was due to record the album Polydor’s president changed. The new guy didn’t like the album idea so I never got to go. I did, however, collaborate at the Opry with BB King two years later. That made up for it!
As the years went by, so your LP covers got more outrageous.
The LP sleeves were not my idea. ESP, my last album for Spring, had terrible artwork. The company were closing the doors, because Polydor didn’t renew their contract. I was on the road at the time. They arranged a photo shoot. I was supposed to be looking into a crystal ball and inside the ball was supposed to be me and a guy. I told them this and they ignored me. I hit the roof when they put it out without my OK. They didn’t care because it was my last LP for them. I was furious. They screwed me.
You are also a playwright.
It was 1992. I wanted to do something special for my homecoming show in Atlanta so I expanded my song, Young Man, Older Woman‚ and turned it into a play. We ended up touring it for four years adding in old numbers like I Still Love You (You Still Love Me)‚ and All The Way Lover. The title says it all. I was going with an older guy, he was treating me like dirt. I went crazy so he sent me to see a psychiatrist. He was a nerd, he cured my insanity, I seduced him, he became more confident and outgoing and we ended up living happily ever after. My daughter played a nightclub singer in the performance.
You are now a radio DJ.
I love it. I DJ for three hours every afternoon for a local Dallas station. I have a free rein. For the first hour I play oldies and blues, the second hour we have a 20-minute slot where we exercise to records. I get my listeners all hot and sweaty. It’s great.
