“It’s hard for black musicians here, that’s all. It’s double hard here i should say. You can’t even get…Like, I did an audition at More Downstairs. Got killed there. Didn’t hear no more from him after. I called him in a couple days and that was it, ya know?”
Maurice McKinnies stretched to his full six feet and then some, raising his arms until his slender fingers nearly brushed the ceiling.
“Less than six months ago i was downtown at the Poodle, trying to get a job. I might as well stayed home, you know?”
He let out a sigh, dropping his arms as he slouched down onto the sofa. “I gave up on that, goin’ around to them places trying to get booked”
Maurice McKinnies sounded disgusted as he reeled off a string of stories about the bullshit screen confronting any local black musician who wants to play a “white” club in downtown Toonerville.
After 11 years in Minneapolis he’s talking about getting out of here and making it – or breaking it. When he says he’s heading for Muscle Shoals in the spring, you can dig it. After all, you know the alternative might be playing the (three) black clubs in Minneapolis, with a wedding here and an Air Force base there for whatever obtains for a hellofa long time.
If Mckinnies does make and it and earns a national audience – even a black national audience – (The difference between Solomon Burke and Wilson Pickett, for one example) it will be the first time it has ever happened.
No black musician from Minneapolis (or Cowtown across the river) has ever made that “Big Time” they talk about in Rolling Stone and other teeny-bopper rock mags. Maybe Maurice McKinnies will. And maybe he won’t.
It would be nice if he does get lucky and lays a monster the size of “Mustang Sally” on us, though. He’s paid a shitload of them dues people are all jivin’ about nowadays.
And he’s a pretty easy dude to like too. Here he is, talkin’ about working all night at the New Brighton Arsenal because he couldn’t pay the rent with his guitar right then. So he started going down to the Mermaid Lounge (at eight o’clock in the morning for Christ sakes) to sit in with the hillbilly band there and run off some twanging Hank Garland riffs on “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” (or some other super-honkey shitkicker) all just because crazy Maurice has Got to get up and play that guitar of his in order to make the rest of the everyday crap bearable.
Shit! He tops that yarn with the news that he even sang at the Launching Pad back in 1966, when Charley Pride was a long way from being a household word.
When he gets into talking about all the shitty day jobs he’s had to take and all the clubs where he couldn’t even get an audition you wonder if making music really compensates for all that other garbage. Is he going to keep on pickin’ that guitar and singing until he’s old and bald?
“How long am i going to keep on doing this? Well i guess until they be puttin’ me in the ground. I know i couldn’t be happy with anybody’s everyday job. The first time I’d go in a club, that’d kill it.
You have to like a man who says things like that.
Besides, if he does get a big hit Maurice will finally be able to afford tapes of all those old Hank Ballard songs he digs so much.
Maybe here we should shift this story into reverse and explain what’s going on. I originally planned this as a sort of roundup story about the R’ n B – styled black music scene in Minneapolis. But i saw Maurice McKinnies and the Blazers when they were laying down some fine Rhythm and Blues music at the late-lamented King Solomon’s Mines. So this wound up as a story about Maurice.
Which is fair enough. He sums up that local scene over the past decade as well as anyone. Better, in fact, than anyone else you might name. (So name someone. See?)
Mckinnies has also come closer to making a career out of black music ( with the accent on R&B) than anyone else in town. (Of course there’s Danny Stevens, but he played More Downstairs a lot didn’t he? And they seem to hire just white musicians.)
His home is a spacious duplex just off the corner of Plymouth and Vincent, his wife and kids look healthy, the rent gets paid and their ain’t no holes in his shoes.
“I’m not stavin or nothin’ – but that’s about it. I’m walking. Got no car. But I ain’t had to take a job in five years.”
There’s never really been anything else for Maurice except music ever since high school in Pensacola, Florida, in the late 1950’s.
In school he played drums, but before long it was a guitar. “Cal Green, who played lead for Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, that was who i wanted to play like at first. I have always liked Ballard and the sound he made. Still do a lot.”
(Ballard had his last hit with “Finger Poppin’ Time” in 1960, the same year he wrote a song called the “The Twist” which a fat kid with no talent from Philadelphia also recorded you may recall. This was the story of Ballard’s life, But at least Earnest Evans (Chubby Checker) is black. In 1955 Ballard’s “Work With Me Annie” was a smash hit for Georgia Gibbs when she recorded a whitewashed version of the song titled “Dance With Me Henry.” (Georgia Gibbs’ [white] version of the song was a rip-off of the black (and ballsy) single released by Etta James earlier that year, a rip-off twice over)
Maurice is more than hip to such stories of how white artists bought Cadillacs by merchandising sexless versions of music created by black men, he’s been making great R&B for a dozen years and he sure hasn’t got an El Dorado.
“I got my first professional job when i was pretty young, about 16.” he said, “I thought i was about the worst in town, but this national group came through town and they needed a guitar player, so I got the job and I toured with them for six months, all over the South, on up to Chicago.”
The national group that picked up the 16-year old Maurice was the late Big Maybelle, a major artist still almost completely unknown to the white community. She was a hefty blues shouter in the tradition of Big Mama Thorton, who wrote “Ball and Chain” for Janis Joplin. He also did a tour with Eugene Church, still a name in black music.
Maurice landed in the Twin Cities ( he’s lived in both towns a couple times) at 17, with a year’s experience playing with two name artists. “My whole family had moved up here then except my daddy, so i came and I’m still here, and…” He shrugs and goes to the kitchen for coffee. He’s already told you twice that he plans to move out of town and try for that big one.
In 1960 the Twin Cities looked like the place to go for the big break, so Maurice got right into the local black music scene.
For a start he joined with two local brothers named Munson in a group called the “Big M’s”. A year later he formed his first group, The Blazers.
“That was my first group, up until i went in the service,” he said. “Maurice McKinnnies and the Blazers”
The Blazers date from 1961, and started with three people: McKinnies on guitar and vocals, bass and drums. Almost at the start he added organ and a tenor sax player. “That gave me five pieces in my first group. Now i’ve got eight people in my group, cause i hired more horns recently.”
The decade between the first time Maurice Mckinnies and the Blazers first played a Prom Ballroom date (in 1961) and the most recent gig at the Cozy as Maurice McKinnies and the Free System can be covered in a half dozen sentences.
Other than the three years spent in the army (1963-1966) and a dry spell now and then between gigs, McKinnies has worked the local scene steadily for 11 of his 28 years.
The name of the group changed from the Blazers to the Champions to the Free System.
Musicians came and went, moving through the small circuit of local black groups, with some former members of Maurice’s groups now active in roles with the Valdons.
The music during these years has touched a lot of popular bases, from Motown Soul to Philadelphia Fads.
But two things have remained constant through the years: Maurice has wailed the hell out of his guitar and sang his righteous ass off every time he has got on a stage because he can’t help but really dig what he’s doing; the bedrock of all his music is still that simple (but demanding) discipline of rhythm and blues which first inspired him to see what he could make a guitar say to people.
He’s also made three records, had two released, has a dub for a third that he hasn’t been able to do anything with. This doesn’t worry him much though since the two that did make it onto vinyl never did a damn thing anyway.
A few other autobiographical facts include three children, a wife who once sang with the group as part of a chorus, and a grim realization that the next decade may be no kinder to him than the last one was, unless he makes his own big break. Giving up and settling into a lunchbucket routine simply isn’t an option yet – Maurice wants to get his own piece of that big-time pie.
Between the barebone facts of his career in the Twin Cities are a lot of anecdotes that do much to explain why all his efforts have brought him to the point where now he makes roughly the same money every week as a 19-year old kid can make with a good job delivering pizza six nights a week.
“My group, the Valdons…Sweetbacks…is the only three groups in town that’s just playing and that’s all. Everybody else playing, they got day jobs, or on the weekend, and they play where they can and if they can and when they can, you know?”
Maurice is proud he hasn’t had to work a day job since 1967, even though he admits a gig at the Cozy with his 8-piece group doesn’t do much but pay the rent and buy groceries. “But you got to consider that the Cozy is a black club too, so $85 or $90 a week for each of us is pretty all right.”
Three black groups making a living solely out of music in a piece of territory pushing 2,000,000 people sounds odd-until Maurice names the black clubs that book live music. “I’m at the Cozy now, and then there’s the Jetaway and Club Malibou. Sometimes they has jazz at the Blue Note.”
Three or four other clubs have existed over the decade Maurice has been here-King Solomon’s Mines (our first and only multi-racial downtown club), the Key Club and St. Paul’s Red Feather are all long gone, and the Peacock even let there disc jockey go a while back. That’s about it. “And I’ve had the best black jobs in town.”
“Hell, I’ve had all kinds of day jobs, one time or another,” he adds, with no need for an explanation. “I’ve worked all the way from Minneapolis Moline to the Arsenal out in New Brighton. I worked nights there so i had to do a morning gig-that was all i had time for.”
For a while he played at a St. Paul Legion club on Saturday mornings, then he began sitting in with country groups at both the Mermaid and Launching Pad. And Maurice knows how to get on the telephone and find one-night gigs too, which is why he’s played everything from the Triangle Bar to wedding dances out in the boonies.
“I guess what really makes me get involved with music like I do is like…uh…I can get to be quite versatile. If you won’t give me a job, well somebody going to hire me, you know? Between country and western, jazz, and whatever have you, somebody goin’ to give me a job. Might not be the job i want to have, but you gonna give me some job until the job I’m lookin’ for opens up.”
Maurice is proud he can play the guitar any way the job requires, country, rock, blues, whatever. “That’s why i can almost always get a job when i go look for one.”
After a while, like six months, all the club jobs get to look the same, he said. With three clubs on the circuit it doesn’t take long to make all the rounds…and make them again…and again.
After doing that so much that he could find his way from job to job with his head in a box, Maurice cut a pair of 45’s. Both were done with the Champions, his 1970 group, for the Black and Proud label, which was the creation of KUXL DJ Jack Harris. The records did not make any charts.
“They didn’t do much at all.” Maurice said. “It’s just about impossible to get a record played in this town. KUXL played it some, of course, and both got on some jukeboxes. But i couldn’t even get WDGY to listen to it.”
It’s the nightclub routine all over, another row of closed doors that just won’t open up for a black musician (unless his name is King, as in BB or Freddie or Albert.)
After you talk with Maurice a while you get the feeling that the stories about closed doors and closed minds have a point to them, and you lay it on him: “How come you stay in this jive-ass town?”
He shakes his head and smooths his hair back for the tenth time in an hour. You notice he still wears a process and you start to phrase a question, but something on the radio gets your attention and the subject changes. You spend 20 minutes wandering through a conversation that ranges from how Hank Ballard got shit on by the music industry to the fact that picking a guitar (as opposed to strumming chords) is still called “nigger-pickin” by a lot of those fast-fingered Nashville cats. Finally you get back to business by repeating the question about how long Maurice intends to keep making the same old rounds on the local black circuit.
“I’m settin’ myself up right now to leave here in the spring, in 73′, and I’m not coming back till i either make it or break it.”
His destination is Memphis. “I’ll just take it as it comes along. I’m going strictly recordings, and that’s it, all the way. I’m goin’ from 45’s to albums, and right on.”
He hopes to redo “Sockapoo 69″ or “The Sweet Smell of Perfume” both of which he wrote for the two records released in 1970.
“I want to record at Muscle Shoals if i can. You talk about a studio! Ooohh! They make you! They can take “Three Blind Mice” and make it sound like…uh…Basie’s playing it, you know?”
But it’s not going to be that simple, and Maurice knows it.
“Well, I’m just going to do what i can. I know some people and i’m goin’ to see can they help get a chance to do a record. I’ll just take it as it comes and see what I can do, you know.”
You nod he shrugs and you grin, wishing him luck and meaning it. After that the talk wanders again, as you get your shit together so you can leave.
He comes downstairs with you. “I hope that mailman came with something for me.” He pulls an envelope from the mailbox, a smile lighting up his face. “I’ve been waitin’ for this for a long time.”
Maurice holds up a check for a road gig last month at an Air Force base in North Dakota and grins. “I got a wedding reception pretty soon. Ain’t no work downtown, so i get on my phone every once in a while and get me some of these.”
Three nights doing Jackson Five numbers in an Air Force quonset on the cold Dakota prairie still beats hell out of a punchpress gig at Minneapolis Moline, and you both know it without having to talk about it. Maybe that’s why you hope Maurice makes it all the way to Muscle Shoals and gets his hit record, the big gold one that makes all the difference.
You can walk from Plymouth Avenue to Hennepin in twenty minutes, but Maurice hasn’t been able to make that move in ten years. Maybe it’s time.
* The above interview ( written by Dave Hill) and photograph (taken by Judy Olausen) originally appeared in the November 1972 issue of the Insider, thanks to Brian Engel for the scans.
Project Soul 