Hi Records great Howard Grimes looks back at his life and career in 'Timekeeper'

Howard Grimes knows his life has been the product of divine intervention. 

“I asked God to be exactly who I am… and that’s a drummer,” the 79-year-old Grimes says, sitting in the living room of his South Memphis home. “You know, I didn’t ask to be the best drummer. I just wanted to be a part of His family of drummers.”   

Grimes is not just any drummer, of course. For a decade starting in the late-‘60s, he was the anchor of the Hi Rhythm section, one of the greatest house bands of all time. Led by producer Willie Mitchell, the group also included the three Hodges brothers — guitarist Mabon "Teenie," bassist Leroy and organist Charles — and keyboardist Archie Turner. Their work on classic Hi albums by Al Green, Ann Peebles, Otis Clay and O.V. Wright would help carry the torch for Memphis soul music throughout the '70s. 

In the early-'80s, in the years after the Hi label was sold, Grimes began to struggle professionally and personally, falling into a tailspin that eventually found him divorced, homeless and near death. It was then that God spoke to him and granted him a second chance. 

“I was dying and I had this out-of-body experience, man,” Grimes recalls. “I got up and I was in a dark cave and I saw a light through this tunnel. And I heard a voice say, ‘Walk to the light.’ It was so bright I couldn’t see. When I got all the way down, I saw this figure standing with a white robe and he had his arms out. I couldn’t see his face. It was like the sun giving a light out. But I walked up into his arms. He said, ‘You have obeyed me well. I am sending you back.’” 

The story has been part of Grimes' personal testimony for decades. But earlier this month, the man affectionately known as “The Bulldog” has published a remarkable memoir of his experiences in and out of music, fittingly titled, “Timekeeper: My Life in Rhythm” (co-written with Memphis music historian Preston Lauterbach). 

Grimes will celebrate the release of the book with an event at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music at 7 p.m. Wednesday. The event is at capacity, but it will be streamed live here.

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A North Memphis kid influenced by Gene Krupa and Cozy Cole

Grimes spent his early years growing up in North Memphis, in a house where a sense of rhythm was almost drilled into him. “My first big influence was my mother, and listening to her music which was jazz, Duke Ellington, Cannonball Adderley,” he says. “She used to pop her fingers to the music. She popped them so loud, I always said she was putting the beat in my ear.” 

Music of all varieties filled the Grimes household. “My grandaddy he was listening to that [country station] WREC — Minnie Pearl, Red Foley, that was one his favorites, Ernest Tubb and all of them. But also at that time, I was hearing the blues, and hearing rock and roll, from Dewey Phillips. He was the first disc jockey I saw on TV. He had a show and I would never move from the TV when he came on at 4 o’clock. He was playing Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry, and all of that was great music to me.”

It was also in front of the TV set where Grimes saw his life path revealed. “One evening I got home and watched what they called the early movie on channel three and they showed [drummer biopic] ‘The Gene Krupa Story.’ It wasn’t actually Gene Krupa, but it was Sal Mineo playing Krupa — I didn’t know that at the time,” he says.

“But I was just so influenced and excited over Gene Krupa. I didn’t think a man could play drums like that. Later on I saw Cozy Cole playing with Louis Armstrong. He was the first African American drummer I saw. I took those two drummers as my inspiration and started playing.” 

As a teenager, Grimes began gigging in and around the clubs of North Memphis. “I was actually too young to be in night clubs. The vice squad — the police department detectives — they would come and check to make sure I was backstage or in the kitchen and not in the [bar] unless I was on stage,” Grimes says. “Being so young, I didn’t know it, but my name was getting around.”  

In 1959, at the urging of singer and entertainer Rufus Thomas, Grimes came to an old converted South Memphis movie theater for his first recording session.  The session — a date backing Rufus and Carla Thomas on the song "‘Cause I Love You” — would alter the history of Memphis music and launch Satellite Records, soon to be renamed Stax. Grimes would become a key figure in the label’s early years, one of its first Black musicians, along with Floyd Newman and a teenaged Booker T. Jones.  

Grimes observes he was given the ultimate Memphis music education through a series of mentors, including musicians like Rufus Thomas and pianist Robert Talley, Stax producer Chips Moman, band teachers like Emerson Able, and bandleaders he worked for, including Ben Branch and Gene “Bowlegs” Miller. 

“When I got to playing, the band leaders they were always showing me,” says Grimes. “They taught me about timing. I used to hear them say, ‘Start on time. Quit on time. Don’t be busy. Don’t overplay. Just get in the pocket and sit there.’ They trained me how to do that.” 

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Joining Willie Mitchell's band

One of Memphis’ busiest drummers throughout the 1960s, Grimes would work the club circuit with Branch and Miller, back a slew of legends-to-be at the WDIA Starlight Revues — including Marvin Gaye, and the Temptations — and eventually go on the road with white garage rock band Flash and the Board of Directors during the midst of the turbulent civil right era (which accounts for one of the most memorable chapters in “Timekeeper”).  

But the real turning point for Grimes came when he joined trumpeter Willie Mitchell’s band in 1968. “When I was playing clubs, we’d play from 9 at night  to 4 in the morning. Afterwards I’d stop at the Harlem House and eat breakfast,” he recalls. “They had jukeboxes in there and I’d hear all these great instrumentals. I didn’t know it was Willie Mitchell then. I just knew this was great music I was hearing, and I wished I could play with this band one day.”  

Not long after, that wish came true as Grimes was approached by Mitchell’s guitarist Teenie Hodges, who told him Al Jackson Sr. — who’d been working for Mitchell — was leaving to devote himself to Stax and Booker T. and the MGs. “Teenie said Willie was in trouble with drummers cause Al Jackson had left,” says Grimes. “He said, ‘I think Willie would love you.’” 

When Grimes speaks of Mitchell, it is with a deep reverence and love. “Willie Mitchell was on another planet, man. And I knew as soon as I met him,” Grimes says. “I remember when I tried out for his band. Willie counted a song off and I went to running [playing too fast]. He stopped me, and said, 'Woah, woah, woah — wait a minute. What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I was just trying to make your band.’ 

“Willie said, ‘Well, look, you need to just slow it down. Slow. It. Down. Remember: we gonna all get there at the same time.’ And when he said that… I felt it. I felt the inspiration off of him. I got so relaxed through him. It grew inside of me of what Willie taught me about not being busy, about not rushing. He showed me more and more, till it got to where he put it in all my hands. And I was setting the time. That’s what’s on all the [Hi] records you hear.” 

Those records would include, crucially, the first 10 albums by Al Green, including stone classics like “Let’s Stay Together,” “I’m Still in Love with You” and “Call Me.”  In “Timekeeper,” Grimes tells more than a few funny and illuminating stories about the mercurial Green, whom he had a sometimes-contentious relationship with. But even so, Grimes still rates him as the greatest singer he’s worked with.  

“I got connected with a lot of people we worked with like Otis Clay, O.V. Wright, Syl Johnson. But when Al came to Hi everything fell into sync,” he says. “That feel, that soul he had — when I heard him I said, ‘This is it.’ I mean, I knew this was it.” 

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An all-time Memphis drumming great

With Green creating a run of massive hits and selling millions of records, and Ann Peebles following not far behind, Hi was firing on all cylinders by the early 1970s. In the hands of Mitchell and his men, the melding of jazz chords and R&B beats marked a shift in the sound and feel of soul as it entered the "Me Decade" as they moved the music from the dance floor to the boudoir. 

Although Al Jackson would continue to play (and get co-write credit) on certain Green tracks, it was Grimes who appeared on the majority of his records. Over time, Grimes’ work for Hi and his status an all-time Memphis drumming great has perhaps been a bit overlooked by some music fans and scholars due to  Jackson’s long shadow and his tragic ending (Jackson was killed in a still-unsolved murder in 1975). 

But it was Mitchell who gave Grimes the ultimate validation just before his passing in 2010. 

“I didn’t know he was going to pass,” recalls Grimes of his final visit with Mitchell. “He said, ‘Howard, I want to share something with you. I may not get another chance to tell you, and I want to say it now. In the music business, people have different picks and they put different musicians on pedestals. I ain’t taking nothing from Al Jackson. Al was a great drummer. But you had more influence on the drums, the way you played them. That’s what made Hi Records be what it was, was the way you played.’

“He said, 'I wanted to let you know that it was always Howard Grimes,'” he says, his voice full of emotion. “I took that as such a compliment. It touched my heart. Because I never realized that.” 

Over the past decade, Grimes work has become revered by a whole new generation of Memphis musicians and music fans who’ve seen him play with retro R&B band, The Bo-Keys. Grimes’ presence helped revive the group led by bassist/producer Scott Bomar. With Grimes on the kit, the Bo-Keys has backed an array of singers in the studio and on the road, from pop hitmaker Cyndi Lauper to Hi veteran Don Bryant.  

“They accepted me, man,” says Grimes of the Bo-Keys, noting he is currently working with Bomar and the group on what will be his own solo record, where he will revisit the key songs from his life and career. 

Although he looks about 20 years younger, Grimes will turn 80 next month and plans to celebrate the same way he’s lived, enjoying his view of the world behind the kit.  

“Like I say, all I wanted was to be a drummer, and play this music," he says. "I’ve gotten everything I wanted. I can’t ask for anything more.”