“Yeah, boy! We’ve got some material, man!” When Rev. Charles Hodges, organist with the Hi Rhythm Section, says that, you’d best give the material a listen. “I’m telling you: Gary’s a great writer.” High praise indeed from a keyboard virtuoso who worked so closely with Willie Mitchell, one of the greatest writers and producers in the history of popular music. The man Hodges speaks of is one Gary Bolen, not exactly a household name. And yet, though he’s in his golden years, there’s a good chance he could be before long, due to a project happening at Royal Studios now. Bolen’s songs are coming to life in a way he never could have imagined.
The songs Bolen has crafted over the years have prompted the formation of a supergroup of sorts, now in the final stages of recording three albums’ worth of material. The rhythm section features Steve Potts on drums and Jackie Clark on bass; the keyboards are handled by Rev. Hodges and longtime Hi Records arranger Lester Snell; and the guitarist is Bolen himself, with an assist from Memphis great Michael Toles III. The singers include Bobby Rush, Charlie Musselwhite, Wendy Moten, Jim Lauderdale, and Tower of Power’s Marcus Scott. And in the control room are Boo Mitchell and Gary’s older brother, Richard.
Richard had the organizational skill to make it all come together. Though he had a successful career in film production and marketing, music was always a great love of his. As he puts it, “It started when my brother was in his early twenties, and he started writing some of his first songs.” This would have been in the early ’70s. “I realized that my brother had some real talent. Even his first songs touched me, they had significant meaning. That caused me to stop everything and get ready for him, so I went out and bought a copy of This Business of Music. In 1975, I put a band together around my brother’s songs. Arista almost signed us, but it fell apart.”
Still, even as he took other work to survive, Gary kept writing. And the two brothers stayed close. “We both lived in Lake Tahoe — I could see out of my house into my brother’s — but we had to move to Clarksdale, Mississippi, because of our parents’ age. Now, because we were military kids, I left Clarksdale when I was 5 [years old], but my extended family has always lived here. The house I was born in has had four generations of my mother’s side of the family in it since my great grandparents. So that was always home.”
Gary, for his part, set up a studio in the old family home, and soon they were putting it to use, having recruited the old band from Austin to make demos. Still, the brothers were thinking bigger than that. A few years earlier, Richard had seen the musical documentary Take Me to the River, shot primarily at Royal Studios, and now those impressions fired his imagination.
“I really wanted to go to Royal to get this done. I even talked about it when we were doing the demos. Some of these guys from Austin just don’t play well enough for us to say we did the best we possibly could with this record,” Richard says. “Early on, we realized we needed another bass player and another drummer. So I interviewed Jackie Clark first, then Steve Potts. They heard those demos, and two stanzas into ‘Bad Alligator,’ they both said, ‘I’m in!’ They were very passionate.”
The new rhythm section in turn led the Bolen brothers to Royal Studios’ Boo Mitchell, and work has progressed steadily on making their dreams a reality ever since. The band, now called the Royal Brothers, is a songwriter’s dream team. “You get the right folks,” Gary says, “and you go, ‘Wow! Did I have anything to do with that? That sure sounds good!’”
“Once the nucleus of the band formed a year and a half ago,” Richard says, “the lineup hasn’t changed. There’s nobody there that’s wrong. And all of the people are basically Boo Mitchell’s extended musical family. Lifelong friends of Boo and his father. Gary and I can’t believe we’ve been invited into that family.”