The Michael Shrieve Interview Set IV

Like an Oreo Cookie

By Michael Shrieve 

Gene Ammons did an album called Brother Jug! and on it there was a tune called “Jungle Strut,” with Bernard Purdie playing on it. I was being influenced by David Garibaldi, who studied with Purdie. I thought “Jungle Strut” would be good for the Santana band, so we recorded that song and put it out. The record was very successful.
Gene was playing The Both/And club in San Francisco. I went to see him and I tried to go back stage and tell him that I was the one that brought the song to the band. He wouldn’t even let me in the dressing room. It was old-school prejudice. I was thinking, “Wow, man, aside from me being just an out-and-out fan of your music and your sound, I made you a lot of money. You’re not going to let me in the room ’cause I’m white?”
I was hanging out with Ike Turner in Accra, Ghana doing a film called Soul to Soul. I was hanging around with Ike and we went to Wilson Pickett’s room, and Pickett wouldn’t let me in.
I know this is old-school stuff and I understand it, but it’s painful that they have to feel that way. Even then it was old-school, because people were opening up to all kinds of music at that time, and I think it’s that way now.
On the flight back from Africa, I sat in between Mavis Staples and Roberta Flack listening to my tape of female vocalists that I just adored. They were both on there, so we had long discussions about female singers.
Later on when they made a DVD of Soul to Soul, there were “extras,” in which Mavis even said, “Yep, there we were, Roberta and me, with Mike Shrieve sitting right in between us like an Oreo cookie, talking about female singers.”
I grew up in the suburbs (Redwood City), but a lot of the musicians I played with were African American. I was the only white kid in a club in East Palo Alto in the house band, so it wasn’t like I was unfamiliar with African Americans. It was that I was beyond that thinking, and most African Americans were, too. Yet I realized Ammons and Pickett were holding a resentment that they had every right to hold.