Midnight Plane to Houston

By 1973 I had a red Panasonic ball radio parked in the darkened little hutch that was built into the headboard of my bed, and was discovering both the inchoate power of music, and words like ‘inchoate’. I’d bought my first LP with my own money, Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, played McCartneys’ RAM album till the grooves wore off, and would trance out to The Carpenters’ version of Leon Russell’s doomed groupie hymn Superstar while holding hands with my neighbor Cathy under the transfixing influence of my black light – which turned her skin to velvet and her teeth into phosphorescent chiclets. At bedtime I would lie awake in a fever of imprecise and free-floating ‘feeling’, marinating in the weirdly deep and inexplicable reverie that overtakes certain insomniac, newly minted teens in their early throes.

Gladys Knight & the Pips singing “Midnight Train to Georgia”was a particularly potent intoxicant for me, and every night it would scrape out of the little ball radio just behind my head. “L.A. proved too much for the man,” Gladys would sing, already dolorous in her delivery of the very first line. I couldn’t stop thinking about the song and I couldn’t stop feeling it. Midnight Train’s struggle parable – the pure but vulnerable artist being crushed by both philistines and ‘impersonal forces’ – rang my bell, as did my fevered imaginings of L.A. 

Starry Vault Swept by Klieg Lights

The very idea of ‘L.A.’ (vs Los Angeles) made me swoon. To this wall-starer in Boulder, Colorado, shut up in his room with his St. George and the Dragon poster and shelf of nicely bound Reader’s Digest condensed classics (4 to a volume), L.A. meant darkness and power and brutality and triage and heroism and stardom – and all the other variegated sorrows and glories of big cities; the dank brickwork of the bowery, benighted citizens scrabbling in the pitch-black alleyways beneath a starry vault swept with the announcing klieg lights of a downtown Hollywood premiere. Holy ___! Of course all this proved too much for the man! 

How many artists and lost souls had gone to ‘L.A.’ and been beauteously beaten down on storied Sunset Boulevard, or burned to death embracing the electric surge that ran through the town like a racing subterranean river? My ability to fall straight through to the middle of that song had everything to do with these totemic elements it so powerfully summoned – and my growing awareness, which I can mark to that year, that Earth is a rock swarming with a thrilling and finally incomprehensible cacophony of stories.

For some peculiar reason I’d always assumed the tune was a consoling love song to a beaten man coming home from his failed adventure, sung by his commiserating daughter. I pictured the magisterial Pops Staples on a train platform at night, bathed in flickering incandescence, holding a weathered little suitcase and wearing a too-wide floral tie as he boards the midnight express and heads back home to a forgiving Georgia. I knew both L.A. and the South like the sole of my foot, but the song intoxicated me with its penetrating true story of artistic loss and its obverse, a complex recondite glory. When Gladys & the Pips sang that song through my Panasonic ball radio – my nighttime oracle – pictures resolved out of the dark with a clarity that could bend my spirit like a Uri Geller spoon. To survive and flourish in L.A. you had to be a chiseled demi-god with a dimple like Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch and the son of a poor junk dealer). I resolved to live in L.A. one day. Or near it.

Jim and Farrah

Former football player Jim Weatherly was struggling. His songs were not exactly lighting up the Billboard hot 100. He’d had some success with one of them, “Neither One of Us (Wants to Be the First to Say Goodbye),” which had scurried up the charts to the delight of Atlanta’s Gladys Knight & the Pips, who had covered the song. Now as Weatherly labored to augment that happy accident with some solid gold, nothing was happening. Nothing.

Sitting alone one night in his demure little apartment in L.A., Weatherly telephoned his old college football buddy (and fellow struggling artist) Lee Majors. He and Majors were in a flag football league in the city; a league comprised in part of disaffected, struggling show-biz hopefuls from all over the country. Majors had just come off four years on The Big Valley, a popular TV western. Soon he’d be a bionic prime-time heavyweight, lifting cars with one arm while both rescuing and terrifying children – but for now he was between gigs. Lee Majors had recently begun dating another transplanted hopeful, a model from Texas named Farrah Fawcett. Weatherly knew Fawcett and got her on the phone when he called, asking if Lee were home.

“No, he’s out,” Fawcett said, sounding impatient, and after some polite chit-chat she confessed she was in something of a hurry. “Look, Jim, I’m sorry, I need to get going. When you called, I was just throwing stuff into a suitcase. I’m taking the midnight plane to Houston to go visit my folks.”

“A little bell went off when she said ‘midnight plane to Houston,’” Weatherly recalled later. “It sounded like a song title to me.” He got off the phone, grabbed his guitar and let fly, writing the song in 45 minutes or so. He called it Midnight Plane to Houston. “The line ‘I’d rather live in her world than live without her in mine’ locked the whole song. I used a descending bass pattern, which was the song’s natural movement. Then I filed away the song.”

Weatherly’s publisher urged him to record an album of his own tunes, as a way to get more attention from the industry, and from artists looking for songs. He did just that and in short order Cissy Houston and then Gladys Knight wanted to record Midnight Plane. It was Cissy Houston (Whitney’s mother) who wanted to personalize the song a bit. “Jim, do you mind if I change the title to ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’?” She was from Georgia, like Gladys. “Where I come from we don’t take planes anywhere. We take trains.” Weatherly readily agreed, just ecstatic the song was going to be picked up and stood a small chance of some airtime in a backwater radio market somewhere. Cissy Houston’s record got no support from her label and the track vanished. Gladys Knight heard it and had a different idea for the song.

“I thought the song should sort of ride,” she said. “Like Al Green or something.” Her new label boss, Tony Camillo, gave it a new arrangement. Here’s hoping, they thought.

It’s not known if Gladys Knight & the Pips knew they were singing a soon-to-be classic anthem of artistic surrender and loss – or that the future, star-crossed Farrah Fawcett-Majors was a balding Black man in a floral tie waiting for a train.