Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.

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The only trouble with talking to Jerry Wexler is that, again, he is a conversationalist of the old school. Which is to say, if as a professor I’m well versed in digression, Jerry is fully capable of following me wherever I so digress. The topic of Dusty in Memphis could have taken us anywhere, and it did. But we’d return to the subject when my own sense of responsibility, sometimes dormant, was awakened—or when Jerry helped me to remember why I’d called in the first place. He did, after all, have other things to do.

As Jerry tells it, the story of Dusty in Memphis started when a lawyer working for Dusty contacted him in New York. Already an outspoken advocate of Dusty, her voice and what she did with it, he was quick to sign Dusty to a contract. Written into the contract was what is called a “key man clause.” In this case, the “key man clause” stated that Dusty’s contract was contingent on Jerry Wexler’s involvement as producer. Were Jerry to be off the project, Dusty could walk, freely and without strings. This in itself says much about Dusty’s attraction to Atlantic Records: a lover of the black music of the 1950s and 1960s, the best of which was often associated with Atlantic, Dusty wanted to draw herself closer to that musical environment and its legacy, which had been Jerry Wexler’s obsession for decades already. Given Jerry’s place in that world, Dusty made the strategic decision to name Jerry her “key man” in order to insure that the music she loved would be the reference point for her latest project.

Warren Zanes: It’s no secret that Dusty loved the black music of the South—do you think part of your kinship with her had to do with a shared love for the music of the South?

Jerry Wexler: She was looking at this one step removed, as a worshiper of this kind of music. I was a promulgator of this music. I was in it.

If it all began in mutual admiration, the scene would grow complicated almost immediately. Jerry describes it thus in an article written for The Oxford American:

And so it was arranged for Dusty to come to New York to begin preparing for the session. I began an intense hunt for songs that I could believe in—and that I prayed would please her. With the help of my assistants, Jerry Greenberg and Mark Myerson, we spent several months amassing a cornucopia of lead sheets, lyric sheets, and acetate demos (cassettes had yet to appear). In my zeal to provide her with the widest possible choice of material, we wound up with seventy or eighty songs.

I thought it would be comfortable for her to come out to Great Neck, where we could work without the distractions of a frantic record office. Dusty showed up at my door, and we went into my living room. We soon found ourselves ass-deep in acetates—on tables, chairs, shelves, the floor. As I played her song after song, I was hoping for a response—would she like this one? If not, how about the next one?

Most of the day, and well into the night, I became first fatigued, and then spastic, as I moved from floor to player, then back to the shelves, the chairs, and the tables, in what turned eventually into a ballet of despair.

After going through my entire inventory, the box score was Wexler 80, Springfield 0. Out of my meticulously assembled treasure trove, the fair lady liked exactly none.

Dusty returned a few months later to hear a new batch of tracks. Jerry, with no fresh material to show her, selected twenty from the original eighty he had played that day in Great Neck. And Dusty loved them unequivocally.

If Dusty in Memphis has the cohesive structure that distinguishes great albums, the lore attached to the project suggests that the actual making of the album sometimes lacked such structure. No matter how one views it, Dusty was a classic high-maintenance pop star, as insecure as any in the history of the pop star phenomenon. After Dusty rejected the original batch of eighty songs, the Muscle Shoals studio sessions that Jerry booked would have to be cancelled. Eventually Chips Moman’s American Studios in Memphis would be home to the tracking sessions. But even then, settled in with an astounding band, Dusty would not sing. The band played without even a scratch vocal to guide them. Which is to say, while in Memphis to record Dusty in Memphis, Dusty recorded nothing.

Arif Mardin: You got the story from Wexler that Dusty was extremely intimidated, right?

The band tracks that were recorded at American Studios, however, were more of what Atlantic had been associated with for years: riveting, in-the-pocket ensemble performances that had both economy and a distinct emotional center. Of course, American, under the supervision of Chips Moman, was known for just this. On some level, the Dusty project was just another day in the mines for the folks at American. And Atlantic looked for just this kind of workaday consistency when they went hunting for production sites in the South.

From some perspectives, Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertugen’s Atlantic Records were in the business of taking advantage, cashing in on the Southern scene and bringing the booty back north. And, indeed, there is no doubt that the label made enormous profits from its associations with Stax, Fame, and the Muscle Shoals scene, among others. In Robert Gordon’s It Came from Memphis, Jim Dickinson, Memphis musician and producer, offers a wry perspective on the subject:

I resented the exploitation aspect of the music business very deeply for a long time, until I started to understand it. A couple of years after I’d worked for Jerry Wexler at Atlantic in 1970, he came to Memphis for some event, and we ended up at this party, quite a party. Wexler, Sam Phillips, Betty Hayes—who’d booked bands with Ray Brown—my wife and I and Stanley Booth. Wexler had just produced an Aretha Franklin gospel record, and he was real proud of it. He had also, not that recently, done a Tony Joe White record. Well, after dinner everybody was kinda laidback and Wexler kept trying to play this Aretha Franklin record, but every time he’d start it, Sam would take it off and put on the Tony Joe White record. Sam kept playing the same cut over and over, “Got a Thing About Ya, Baby,” which was a hit. And finally Wexler says, “Sam! Baby! You know, I’m really hurt that you’re not listening to my Aretha record, baby!” Jerry plays it again and so one more time Sam gets up and takes the record off, puts on “Thing About Ya, Baby” and says, “Goddamn, Jerry, that’s so good it don’t sound paid for.”

I thought, by God, that’s it. They can hear the difference. To somebody at the level of Sam Phillips and Jerry Wexler, that’s what they get off on. Not paying for it! . . . I had always taken it real personally when they didn’t pay me. I’d say, Oh, the bastards didn’t pay me again. Now I understand this sense of larceny as an element of production.