Preston on his friendship with Howard Grimes

Euology

Maybe it’s strange to feel like an eighty-year-old died young. I never saw Howard Grimes as old. He felt eternal. There’s a part of Howard’s message that I hope can live on. It’s that his hope for tomorrow came from his love of yesterday.

He enjoyed the elegance and dignity of the past. He saw people dress sharp, behave well, and conduct themselves with respect to others.

He liked for his musicians to be able to play instruments and play well. He felt connectivity in the culture, art, and manners of the past. He felt that these things had been lost but could be regained and would go a long way towards solving the trouble he saw.

Howard had a fan’s love of his own music and the world that made it. He fully understood the magic of Memphis in the late 1950s and early ’60s. He appreciated it while he was there and felt blessed to have been part of it. “I didn’t know things were gonna change,” he said. “I wanted it to last forever.”

More than once, I pulled up in Howard’s driveway, unannounced, and caught him with a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of coke, a cup of ice and his boom box, listening to his Hi Records boxset. I don’t know anyone else who so joyfully embraced their past work. But hey, it was the perfect reaction to perfection.

Growing up in California, I did not hear much about God. But being around Howard, I felt like God was whispering in his ear.

Sometimes God gave him some funny advice. Two or three Christmases ago, someone gave Howard a bottle of nice merlot. He drank it and called me in a fantastic mood. He said, “God told me, ‘don’t drink no more water, for I turned it to wine.’”

This relationship with God also gave him a beautiful way of speaking. He didn’t just say, “I thought about you,” he said, “God put you on my heart.”

When I heard that Howard had gone, God put it on my heart to turn on WDIA. Of course the song they were playing was one of his, and for the moment it was the perfect title: “Trying to Live My Life Without You.”

As I was sitting there wondering about these things, I realized, we don’t have to live our lives without Howard. Listening to his drumbeat I realized that he’s going to live forever.

Preston Lauterbach, February 2022

Obituary

It might seem strange to feel that someone who lived for eighty years died young, but Howard Grimes never got old. He felt eternal. The drummer’s music spanned worlds in the entertainment universe. Around 1961, he gigged with Isaac Hayes inWest Memphis, Arkansas at the Plantation Inn. According to a 2021 Rolling Stone feature on Howard, a beat he recorded for an Al Green song had been sampled 184 times. The pennies he earned with Hayes amounted to more money than he ever saw from hip-hop residuals.

Howard epitomized the Memphis sound. His steady beat and steady manner were foundational to some of the greatest music ever made in one of the country’s greatest music cities. “I always felt drawn to the beat in music and the rhythm in life,” Howard wrote in his autobiography. “Willie Mitchell told me, ‘I put the clock on you. I wanted to see if you were on time. You were perfect. Right with the second hand.’”

Born at home in North Memphis on August 22, 1941, Grimes recalled that the city looked more like the country, with telegraph poles along unpaved streets. As a boy, he would follow the white truck that serviced jukeboxes for the local record distributor and sit outside the little taverns where the truck stopped to hear the newest records. The sounds of feet stomping on the wooden floor at the local church and his mother snapping her fingers to her jazz and blues records put rhythm on Howard’s mind.

As a 12-year-old, he joined the band at Manassas High School, a music factory where Jimmie Lunceford had once taught and future jazz luminaries Charles Lloyd, George Coleman, Frank Strozier, and Booker Little were upperclassmen. In the city’s intense high school band competitions, Howard ran up against Maurice White, a Booker T. Washington High student who would found Earth, Wind, and Fire.

Howard’s school band director Emerson Able, Jr., a future member of the Isaac Hayes Movement, brought Howard along on gigs in the city’s fertile nightclub scene, where the drummer was soon in demand for his perfect time. Howard played with Ben Branch and the Largos at Currie’s Club Tropicana in North Memphis, and around neighborhood joints in Orange Mound with local disc jockey, emcee, and as yet one-hit wonder, Rufus Thomas.

With Thomas, Howard first entered the recording studio, for a then unknown concern called Satellite Records. Rufus cut “Cause I Love You,” it became a hit, and Satellite became Stax. Howard recorded many of the iconic label’s early classics backing Carla Thomas, William Bell, the Mad Lads, and Eddie Floyd. He missed the call that went to Al Jackson Jr. to play the session that resulted in “Green Onions,” and would often be mentioned as Jackson’s runner-up. Really, Howard loved Jackson as a person and convincingly made a claim equal to Jackson’s as the city’s top drummer during its renaissance of soul in the 1960s and ’70s.

Howard found his place a mile or so down the road from Stax with the label’s nearest local competitor, Hi Records, at Royal Recording Studios. Working with producer Willie Mitchell and the three Hodges brothers, Howard provided the heartbeat of the formidable Hi Rhythm section. Their body of work virtually boggles the mind, recording chart hits over a ten-year period for Mitchell, O.V. Wright, Ann Peebles, Denise LaSalle, the Detroit Emeralds, Syl Johnson, and, of course, Al Green, with whom Howard can be heard on movie soundtracks, car commercials, and sampled within the hit songs of Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Kanye West.

Howard’s autobiography Timekeeper came out in 2021. In it, he explained, “I don’t know exactly how many records that I played on have sold, but it’s well into the millions with plenty gone gold and plenty of Grammys handed out to other artists. As the drummer, it wasn’t my job to be out front, I needed to hang back. The world don’t have to see me. People bought the records. They already feel me.”

Publishing the book encapsulated a lifelong mission for Howard. Elder musicians had observed his keen listening and intense quietness in his youth. They entrusted him to pay attention, listen to their stories, and share them with history. He lived up to their trust.

Working with Memphis soul stalwarts the Bo-Keys over the last decade of his life, Howard recorded with Cyndi Lauper and on the 2021 Grammy-nominated album of his old Hi Records colleague Don Bryant, among others.

Howard felt deeply connected to the glory days of Memphis music. A part of him remained there. He cherished his work with white artists, like producer Chips Moman, feeling that music had the ability to bring people together. He’d seen it and lamented its loss. “I didn’t know things were going to change,” he remarked of the heyday of Memphis music. “I wanted them to stay that way forever.”

In relation to his impeccable rhythm and excellent ear, Howard had an uncanny ability to channel people he’d known, to bring them back to life in voice and manner.

He could break into a Rufus Thomas routine or an impression of Sunbeam Mitchell that absorbed his posture, facial expression, and the sound of his voice. He remembered people’s catchphrases and the nicknames they gave him.

Howard also had the unique ability to find joy in what he’d done. In later years, he loved few things more than sitting on his front porch with a beer, rocking out to his Hi Records box set. He didn’t need another soul.

Howard Grimes died on February 12, 2022, in his hometown. He leaves behind a loving wife, many devoted family members, dear friends, and a life’s work that will last forever. Willie Mitchell’s clock got it right—Howard was perfect.

Preston Lauterbach, February, 2022