Leon Russell

Chapter 1

Killer Education

ONE NIGHT IN THE DEAD of winter in Cheyenne, Wyoming, 1960, Russell Bridges stood on the side of the stage watching a riot unfold.

Bridges had just warmed up the crowd of about four hundred with his band, the rest of whom were at that moment blazing onstage with Jerry Lee Lewis now at the piano. The truth is, this crowd had not needed any warming up. Despite the icy conditions outside, these cowboys and cowgirls were primed and pumped to see The Killer, no matter that Lewis was now at the nadir of a career that had taken off like a rocket, only to crash down to earth. Only three years earlier, the news of his marriage—already his third, at the age of twenty-two—to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Myra, daughter of his bandmate and cousin, J. W. Brown, had caused an uproar.

Old Jerry Lee was determined to get back on top, but for now, he would drive his Cadillac to wherever he could collect a few hundred bucks, performing solo or with a local pickup band. Or, as on this cold night in Cheyenne, with whatever musicians he could afford to take along.

Like Russell Bridges, who had been playing the clubs and bars of Tulsa since he was fourteen. Oklahoma was a dry state, with liquor sales prohibited. So, being an “underage” performer at nightclubs was not a pressing issue. In the postwar years, Tulsa was the “Oil Capital of the World,” even weathering the Great Depression pretty well (unlike the rest of the Dust Bowl state), with a flourishing Art Deco building boom through the 1930s. Bridges’s own Will Rogers High School is a prime example of the architectural style. Although ostensibly “dry,” the clubs were filled with beer and illegal hard booze, and young performers had no trouble getting a drink at these gigs.

“I worked a beer joint club from six till eleven and then a private club from midnight to five a.m. I barely had time to sober up for school,” Bridges recalled later. “One club I played at quite a lot paid ten dollars a night and all you could drink, and I drank all of it. By the time I finished high school, I was drinking at least a pint of hard liquor a day.”

It was at a gig at Tulsa’s legendary Cain’s Ballroom where Bridges and his band, the Starlighters, had first met and performed with Jerry Lee Lewis. The place had been put on the map by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, who broadcast their unique brand of western swing on KVOO from 1934 to 1942.

The Starlighters were a top band in Tulsa, too. “We were mostly an instrumental band,” sax player Johnny Williams said. And they would back national acts who came through. “Anybody that would come into town, whether it was Frogman Henry or really anybody, it didn’t matter.”

Bridges was already commonly regarded as the best pianist in Tulsa, and the first on the scene to mic his instrument and run it through an amplifier. At some of the clubs the Starlighters played, they would be lucky to show up and the piano was playable, never mind in tune. But Bridges could make an old box sound like a Steinway.

As fans, the band was understandably thrilled to back Jerry Lee Lewis for his Cain’s Ballroom show. By the time he’d reached Tulsa, Jerry Lee was exasperated, battling the bottle, and at his lowest ebb, having done a stretch of about ten shows with ten different bands. When he heard the Starlighters, his mood swung to exuberance.

Bridges had made sure the band knew all of Jerry Lee’s material in the correct keys by showtime. After their first warm-up set, Lewis came up onto the bandstand and, indicating Bridges, declared, “I’m not gonna set down at that piano. He plays a lot better piano than I do!”

The Starlighters had ripped through one song after another that first performance together; when they were done, a sweaty and spent Jerry Lee said, “Well, shit. You guys have got to come on the road with me.” Lewis was not sure how, economically, he’d be able to take the band out. The boys would have gone for nothing, and that’s not much less than what they ultimately got. Bridges had just completed three days of entrance exams for the University of Tulsa but quickly decided college and ROTC were not as compelling as a chance to hit the road with one of his heroes.

Bridges changed the oil in his ’51 Chrysler Imperial limousine, hitched a trailer to it, threw the instruments in, and the Starlighters hit the road. “We didn’t know about cases, drove about fifty miles, looked in back—all our instruments were in pieces,” he said later.

They toured on and off with Lewis over the last half of 1959 into 1960, going out for runs of twenty to thirty days, sometimes just opening the shows and sometimes backing Lewis, who occasionally had with him the rest of his three-piece combo, J. W. Brown and Russell Smith. “We were on the road with him when he was down and out and married the little cousin, you know,” said Williams. “Russell [Bridges], a lot of times, would stay on the bandstand and play.… Lewis was not bashful about having him play. They got along good. I’m not sure that Russell didn’t give him a pointer or two on the piano!”

But there were times when the young band struggled to get paid by Lewis’s booking agent; once, they had to file charges against his manager to get him to pay up. Several times they slept in the car outside a gas station, out of fuel, waiting for it to open so they could get back on the road. These were sobering lessons in the business of music.

Thus, the Starlighters found themselves in Cheyenne that wintry night in early 1960. After the band finished their set, Bridges watched from the side of the stage as The Killer brought the crowd to a boil. Jerry Lee might have fallen from his pinnacle, but he could still whip an audience into a frenzy, glaring at the crowd like a cornered and wounded wild beast, kicking back the bench and playing with his feet.

The atmosphere was combustible. Cheyenne “turned into a complete riot,” recalled drummer Chuck Blackwell. “It was unbelievable. People just fighting and crashing and breaking bottles across the bar. It looked like something out of the movies. Then they turned on the band and started throwing things at us.” The band kept cooking and Jerry Lee stood on the piano bench singing with a gun in his hand as the melee continued.

“When the fighting started to spill over onto the stage, we thought, ‘Oh shit, we’re not gonna make it out of here alive,’” Blackwell recalled. “Then all of a sudden [bassist] Lucky Clark recognized a guy he’d been in prison with.” Lucky had done time for “some kind of robbery,” Williams recalled. “He was a little wild and was apt to jump on to someone.” Lucky’s jailhouse friend “got us, and our instruments, through that mass riot and out the exit to the parking lot,” said Blackwell. But not before Jerry Lee himself escaped. Instructing his band of teenagers to keep vamping, he slipped off the stage with his gun in hand, snuck out the stage entrance, and split in his Caddy, leaving the kids to fend for themselves.

The tour with Lewis gave Bridges a glimpse of what it felt like to be the star of the show. Before they had left Tulsa, the Starlighters sometimes featured guest vocalists like local legends Jumpin’ Jack Dunham or Jimmy “Junior” Markham. Sometimes Lucky sang. Fellow Tulsa musicians always discouraged Bridges from singing, telling him his voice was “too nasal.” But at a packed Vets Memorial Hall in Kiowa, Kansas, on November 5, 1959, Russell Bridges had changed a few minds, perhaps even his own, about his ability to be a front man.

The showbill portentously announced:

The Killer had begged off this particular show, claiming appendicitis, though the musicians speculated that it was more likely related to rotgut moonshine and amphetamines. Rightfully fearing another riot, the promoter had a local doctor announce the bad news and offered to return patrons’ money if they decided to leave. “Well, the crowd did not like that,” Blackwell recalled. “So Russell got up and did the whole Jerry Lee show. He just rocked the house, even kicked the piano bench back a couple of times.”

In retrospect, that was the night Russell Bridges began transforming into Leon Russell. Nobody asked for their money back.

Chapter 2

Okies

CLAUDE RUSSELL BRIDGES WAS BORN on April 2, 1942, at Southwestern Hospital in Lawton, Oklahoma. But his family—his mother, Hester; father, John; and brother, Jerry—lived in Apache, about twenty miles away. Hester and John had married in 1935.

Apache, in southwestern Oklahoma, was the last town in the territories settled during the land runs that began in 1889, with white settlers arriving chaotically via wagons, often killing each other and Native Americans who legally owned the land. The discovery of oil under the Oklahoma red dirt fueled bamboozling and bloodbaths. The run on Apache occurred on August 6, 1901, and according to the Oklahoma Historical Society, “within hours there were five lumberyards and six saloons.”

Apache’s population in 1940 was only around 1,100, about a quarter of which was Native American. John Bridges had registered for the draft at age twenty-seven, listing “Farmer’s Union Coop” as his occupation. Two years later, John and Hester’s second son, Claude, was born. They called him by his middle name, Russell, after one of his mother’s brothers, Russell Claude Whaley. (For clarity, we will refer to him henceforth by his stage name, Leon.)

John Bridges’s father was Irish with some Cherokee blood. A DNA test on Leon’s brother’s family indicated that Leon and his brother, Jerry, were one-sixteenth Cherokee, and the balance of their lineage was primarily Irish.

Hester said Leon didn’t speak for his first few years, starting later than most kids. Years later, she told Leon’s wife, Jan Bridges, that the first thing he said was, “What’s the matter, little birdie, you cry?” Jan recalled the conversation with her mother-in-law: “He was watching the birds, and something was going on with the birds. And she [Hester] said she was just shocked because he never spoke.”

At around four years old, Leon started to show interest in the family piano. Both of his parents played. “My dad and mom had a duo,” Leon told filmmaker Denny Tedesco. “He played the bass on the piano, she played the top end, and so I saw that from an early age. All my aunts, actually I think on both sides of the family, played piano. One, in particular, Aunt Bertha, I stole a lot of stuff from her. She was great.” Hester was amazed to hear four-year-old Leon picking out the melody of “Trust and Obey,” a hymn he had heard in church. Hester, noting that neither she nor John pushed the piano on either of their sons, said she thought Leon was a prodigy. “He just sat down one day and started playing by ear,” Hester said. She drove him to nearby Anadarko, to the best piano teacher in the area, Dora Popejoy. “I don’t want many four-year-olds, but I want Leon,” Popejoy had said to Leon’s mother.

One of Leon’s first memories was a scarring and formative one. “I have always experienced severe stage fright, not only on stages, but in crowded rooms, lines for movies, and just about any place there’s a lot of people who can be, by any stretch of the imagination, considered an audience,” he recalled. “The psychologists call this ‘agoraphobia.’… I have to give credit for this paralyzing condition to one of my aunts on my father’s side. At the age of four, I had discovered my sexual organs, and shortly thereafter, discovered that my female cousin had a completely different set.”

At a family gathering in Duncan, just to the east of Lawton, Leon found the opportunity to explore this discovery in greater depth with his cousin in a secluded playhouse. His “rather severe Aries aunt” arrived just as Leon was taking off his cousin’s underwear. “She promptly paraded me in front of each individual adult family member and disclosed the nature of my research with scorching charges and descriptions.

“That incident has affected me for my entire life. It has had an immeasurable detrimental effect on my career in show business in that I tend to freeze up around any situation that involves people watching me, even in an audition or interview. I’ve always harbored the suspicion that my audiences come to watch me deal with my secret phobia onstage.”

When Leon was five, the family moved to Maysville for about a year, and he continued lessons with two more teachers. When they settled in Tulsa, he was around twelve, and Leon started lessons with Margaret Freeze.

Hester observed that he was favoring his left hand, as he would all his life. She had discovered when he was around eighteen months old what Leon would later describe as a birth injury that had damaged his second and third vertebrae, causing a slight paralysis on his right side. “I was born with spastic paralysis,” he said, “now called cerebral palsy.” He suspected the doctor delivered him with forceps, causing the injury. This paralysis to his right side resulted in “very limited neurological connections. I had to devise ways to play that I could sort of get around that limitation. I kind of play a little bit of a thing with my left hand… like Chet Atkins or Merle Travis, just an octave thing. But the way I use it is some sort of bass things on my left hand and more of a rhythmic horn-like parts [on the right]. I am a left-handed piano player for sure.”

The condition made him “very aware of the duality involved in our plane of existence here.” He later explained, with his hallmark self-deprecation, “My chops have always been sort of weak, because the right side of my body was paralyzed a little bit. I have damaged nerve endings on the right side, so my piano style comes from designing stuff I can play with my right hand.”

“I know that sounds like an excuse,” he said. “But you play the hand that you got. I know I sound like Mahatma Gandhi. I don’t mean to.”

Leon had the drive to overcome any limitations, imagining himself strapped to the front of a train that would run straight into the face of a cliff if he made a mistake during practicing. Playing the piano “helped his three fingers on his right hand,” Hester said. Fairly early on, he developed the ability to identify the notes as he heard them—a skill that was at least relative pitch, but not perfect pitch. “They had this one tuner who meant to be doing something good,” he said. “It was an upright, an old upright piano, so he tuned the piano down one step because he said it would stay in tune better, and I suppose it would stay in tune better except it was one step flat. So my pitch has always been off plus or minus one step for my whole life. Otherwise, I would have had perfect pitch, but you can’t have everything, I guess.”

He admitted that his unique style “effectively mimicked classical stuff.” Leon said he “studied classical music, and thought some of those guys were incredible. I also thought Harpo Marx was pretty great—that comedy versus great harp playing going on.” And he was struck early by religious music. He recalled being at his grandmother’s house. “She was a very elegant lady, and she was doing her hair in the bathroom,” he said. “It came down and hit the floor and went over about six or seven feet, and she wore it in a bun. So while she was messing with her hair, I went into her bedroom, and she had a little phonograph record by her bed, and it had a little record on there called ‘Blood on Your Hands.’ I said, ‘Lord, Grandma’s listening to murder songs?’ I played that record… that was my first knowledge of what the family music background was.”

Don Copeland, a classmate, remembered young Leon as bright, quiet, introspective, and well liked. Leon found out that Don sang, and they bonded over music. Don recalled that the Bridges, like most in Maysville, lived in a small house, but he was struck by the presence of a piano on his first visit when he and Leon were both around nine or ten years old. Leon performed Debussy’s masterpiece, “Clair de Lune,” for his friend. Leon’s mother would hear the two boys singing together and showed them how to harmonize.

Leon also played the cornet in the elementary school band, then picked up the alto sax and became good enough to gain membership in the high school marching band when he was nine. The town’s music director, Joe Reed, a tremendous influence on Leon, promoted him.

But Leon had a chip on his shoulder, feeling more than challenged by his paralysis, which resulted in a lifelong limp, mistaken by most of his friends as an aftereffect of polio. “I felt like the world cheated me big time,” he said. “I took piano lessons for ten years and there’s girls taking piano lessons for three years and they were playing at Carnegie Hall. And I was still trying to figure out how to play.”

He added: “If I hadn’t had the problem, I probably wouldn’t have gotten into music at all and would have been an ex-football player today, selling insurance in Des Moines.”

Chapter 3

Tulsa Time

AFTER LEON’S SIXTH-GRADE YEAR, IN August 1953, the Russell family relocated to Tulsa, following his father John’s career move to the Texas Company, soon to be known as Texaco. But John Bridges had been having an affair, and four years later, when Leon was fifteen, his parents started a divorce that took several years to complete. “It went on, and apparently that house, I think, must have been just a powder keg,” said Leon’s first child, his daughter Baby Blueagle Bridges-Fox, who goes by Blue. “And, you know, those are pretty formative years. I don’t think my grandpa really had much to do with the boys at that time.” Hester would remarry in 1963 to Eugene Fulbright. By then, Leon was well established in California.

“I’ve never had a great deal of family involvement,” Leon said. “The deep involvements I’ve had with people have been through musical relationships rather than blood.” We see this in action later in his life when he formed musical “families” in communal situations at his home studio and on the road, with Mad Dogs & Englishmen and his own Shelter People band.

His widow, Jan Bridges, said that Leon always liked going to other people’s houses as a kid because his was too quiet. His parents were on the stern side. “When we got together,” Jan said, talking about 1979 or so, “first he took me to meet his mom, and then he took me to meet his dad, who had remarried. I only saw his father one more time before he passed, when I had taken our daughter, Sugaree, to meet him. But they weren’t close. He really wasn’t close to either of his parents.”

Leon’s brother, Jerry, was seven years older. “They weren’t close at all,” Jan said. Later in life, when Leon was successful, “I think [Jerry] really wanted to be a part of Leon’s life. But I think it was the same as anybody who might be a fan. But Leon didn’t have fond memories of his brother. He really didn’t have any love for him because evidently, he did mean things to Leon when Leon was a kid… [Jerry] sort of picked on him.” Jerry joined the Air Force out of high school and went to work for a prosthetics company in Texas.

In Tulsa, the Bridges settled into a two-bedroom ranch home at 1958 North Marion Avenue, on the city’s northeast side, but soon it was Leon and Hester alone there after his father left and Jerry moved on. “The first night we moved to Tulsa, I laid in my lonely bed, and I heard all those sirens going by outside, and it just chilled me to the bone,” Leon said. “I thought, ‘I’m in the big city!’” And like most rock ’n’ rollers, he had lain in bed listening to the radio. Specifically, he recalled R&B disc jockey Frank Berry on KAKC, which later became Tulsa’s first full-time rock ’n’ roll radio station. “I was probably about twelve or thirteen, and his show was like from midnight till six,” he recalled. “He played blues all night. It was an unusual show. Of course, in the South, there were a lot of stations that had that blues format, but it was kind of a bonus in Tulsa.”

The music of Tulsa would have a profound impact on the trajectory of Leon Russell’s life. The city had been home to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, the leader of western swing, since the 1930s. Wills married jazz and blues with country music, adding dashes of the mariachi music that was filtering over the border and polka that was popular with Czech settlers in Texas. He was one of the first country artists to bring a drummer into his band. The resulting music was almost always ebullient, even when the lyric was melancholy.

“Bob Wills was on the radio… every day on KVOO,” recalled future star J. J. Cale, who was part of Leon’s scene of high school musicians. “And you know, I don’t think I liked it or disliked it. It was just what you heard. The only thing that raised my attention span was when rock ’n’ roll started coming in.”

Western swing was waning in popularity as rock ’n’ roll gained traction. Texas Playboy Leon McAuliffe went on to open his own club, the Cimarron Ballroom, and form his Cimarron Boys. The Cimarron would later play host to rock ’n’ roll acts, including Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, which included a teenaged Levon Helm.

“Tulsa has always had that energy for me that has come from the ground,” said Jim Halsey, who booked McAuliffe, his first promotion, in 1949, on his way to becoming the biggest agent in country music. Halsey started booking Leon Russell in the 1970s. “And a lot of that comes from native people who were here and are still here and the sacred earth we live on. Now, that produces a certain energy.” Tulsa sits geographically, psychologically, and spiritually at the crossroads of the South, the West, and the Midwest. Route 66, “America’s Highway,” ran through it.

When he entered Will Rogers High School, Leon was still intimidated by Tulsa’s “big city” aspects. “This was just about the time that Blackboard Jungle came out, and I used to slide along the lockers and keep ’em all shined up trying to get out of the way of all those boys with those motorcycles and chains and switchblades. It was really terrifying.” His fellow students at Will Rogers High included musician David Gates and singer Anita Bryant, Miss Oklahoma 1958—probably not quite the hoodlums Leon described. Leon and Gates, who was two years older, played together in the Accents, mostly playing high school hops. Gates had formed the Accents with drummer Don Kimmel, bassist Gerald Goodwin, and Leon. Their first publicity photo from 1957 (Leon at fifteen or sixteen) shows them dressed in white tuxes sporting crew cuts, except for Leon, whose proud pompadour soars above his horn-rim-bespectacled smiling face.

Leon played in a few different bands. Some played high school parties and dances, and some played clubs. “I got a little bit of an education playing those joints,” said Leon’s bandmate Starlighters drummer Chuck Blackwell. “I remember them being packed. People packed into a booth, and the women would be carrying on. Ah, smoke. Fights.”

“Even though we were not famous,” Johnny Williams, another bandmate in the Starlighters, said, “we were stars of the bars.”

Some of these clubs were in or near the Greenwood Avenue district, which historically had been an economic powerhouse in North Tulsa. Once known as Black Wall Street, so named by Booker T. Washington, the area is now remembered for one of the worst race massacres in the country’s history. Credible estimates range from fifty to three hundred Black people died in the massacre in 1921.

Despite the massacre and subsequent efforts of white people to forcibly relocate the survivors, many of them remained and rebuilt. By the 1930s, the neighborhood was hopping again. Cain’s Ballroom was only a few blocks away from the border of Greenwood and remains today, though the neighborhood has long since been divided by the I-244 expressway. In his country standard “Take Me Back to Tulsa,” Wills gives a shout-out to Greenwood: “Would I like to go to Tulsa, boy I sure would / Let me off at Archer and I’ll walk down to Greenwood.” The Gap Band, whom Leon later signed to his Shelter Records label, named themselves in tribute to their hometown neighborhood, with “Gap” standing for Greenwood, Archer, and Pine Streets.