Local Treasures: Robert A. Johnson

He’s not the one who sold his soul at the crossroads, but the “Frayser Flash” has worked with legends of music in America and abroad.

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Most people have heard of a singer and phenomenal guitarist named Robert Johnson, but not necessarily the one featured in this story. Google the name and you’ll be overwhelmed with links to the virtuosic bluesman of the 1930s; traces of any other guitar-slinging Robert Johnsons are harder to find. And while Spotify does carry the punchy 1978 debut album, Close Personal Friend, by the modern rock singer of the same name, that too is incongruously listed under the classic bluesman’s discography — and you can’t even play the tracks. It’s the curse, perhaps, of having a moniker identical to that of an American musical icon.

Not that this guitarist, singer, songwriter, and producer, Robert Alan Johnson, a.k.a. The Frayser Flash, has had a particularly cursed life, having collaborated with some true legends of rock and soul music over his career of 60 years and counting.

Frayser: Center of the Musical Universe?

Johnson was surrounded by musical giants even before he picked up a guitar, simply by virtue of growing up in Frayser. It was in the heyday of that North Memphis neighborhood, when major employers like Firestone, International Harvester, and other industries enabled working- and middle-class families to own homes and pursue the American dream.

The young man’s home life attested to Frayser’s relative prosperity at the time. Father Robert E. Johnson worked at Humko, located on Thomas Street and known for its vegetable shortenings, while his mother, Darthy, worked at Sears Crosstown. Meanwhile, their neighborhood was abuzz with pivotal figures in local and national music.

Bill Black, Elvis Presley’s erstwhile bassist and bandleader for Hi Records, lived there with his wife, Evelyn. Roland Janes, the Sun Records, Phillips Recording, and Sonic Studio engineer and guitarist, was also a neighbor, as was Sam Phillips’ nephew, Johnny, whose father had founded the Select-O-Hits record distribution company. Other Frayser residents, Malcolm Yelvington and Edwin Bruce, were Sun recording artists, even as neighbors B.J. Thomas, Ace Cannon, and Dan Penn were forging a new Memphis sound at other studios. In the Frayser of the late ’50s and ’60s, music was everywhere.

“Right behind our school was Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland,” Johnson recalls today. “We would just go over to his house, take our guitars, and he would sing and play and show us stuff. And then Bill Black was my fondest memory, because he was just so energetic and such a great musician. He had Lyn-Lou Studios right on the outskirts of Frayser, at Watkins and Chelsea, and that building is still there.

Bill Black died from a brain-tumor operation in October 1965. “That previous summer, I was at his house a lot, because I was playing with the Miller brothers, who had a band called The Castels, and Bill was producing us,” says Johnson. “The Bill Black Combo was the number-one instrumental combo in America for two or three years, and so he had three different Bill Black Combos that he would send out on tour. He had tons of equipment in his house.”

Johnson first picked up the guitar at around age 8, taking to it with such intensity that he earned his union card at 14. And he was not only playing, he was getting out into the world, working in the mail room at Stax Records, not to mention “Warren Radio, where you could get tape machines and recording equipment,” he says. “It was across the street from Sam Phillips Recording, and I used to work there after school. They had Neuman microphones and Fairchild compressors — it was just like a big mountain of candy, you know?”

Already playing gigs as a teenager, he was also getting comfortable working in studios. Memphis was a hive of music-industry activity at the time. Players were in demand, and Johnson was steeped in the cutting-edge sounds of the city’s hottest guitarists. His uncle, drummer Barry Johnson, with whom he eventually formed a band, had even gone to Messick High School with Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn. And all of the above, from Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland to Bill Black and beyond, had deeply influenced Johnson’s playing.

I Want This Guy in My Band

One day, as fate would have it, Isaac Hayes was looking for a guitarist. “I worked down at Stax and cut some demo sessions with the songwriters,” recalls Johnson, referring to the backroom, informal recordings composers made to document new songs in order to pitch them to artists. “So I’d been in and out of Stax, and I knew my way around. Isaac heard me playing in there one day, and said, ‘I want this guy in my band.’ And so Jerry [Norris], Isaac’s bandleader and drummer, said, ‘Well, we’re ready to play right now!’ One rehearsal and that was it!”

Hayes’ Hot Buttered Soul, which featured heavy rock guitar mixed into its languid soul grooves, had been released in June of that year and had become a surprise hit album. Now, just like that, Johnson’s first performance with Hayes’ band was opening for Led Zeppelin at Bill Graham’s Winterland in San Francisco on November 6, 1969, followed by playing Elvis Presley’s 1969 New Year’s Eve party at TJ’s Club in Memphis. Heady times for a 17-year-old.

Meanwhile, Johnson continued doing session work in the crackling music economy of Memphis, doing stints in such bands as Country Funk, the Hot Dogs, and others. And he was expanding his skill set beyond simply playing music.

“I got my recording engineer degree because Ardent taught recording classes for a brief period in ’72,” says Johnson. “I think the first group I did was Wishbone Ash from England. Another one I did was me and Richard Roseborough engineering Lynyrd Skynyrd, doing it live. You had to have four hands [mixing] to make it work back then with Skynyrd.” This was a legendary set the band played at Ardent Studios in 1973, broadcast in real time on WMC-FM, which included the first-ever recorded version of “Sweet Home Alabama.”

His skills with tape machines also occasionally took him to Steve Cropper’s studio, Trans Maximus, Inc. (TMI), where he happened to be when British guitar legend Jeff Beck came to town, in preparation for recording “The Orange Album,” aka Jeff Beck Group. “I was the tape operator for two days because the other guy was sick,” Johnson recalls. “That’s when I connected with Jeff.”

The Oxblood

Not long after, a 1953 Les Paul Goldtop guitar Johnson had modified struck a nerve with Beck — and would go on to make history. “It was an old Les Paul. It was kind of beat up, and I had the thing stripped and wanted to paint it oxblood, like my oxblood penny loafers. I took one of my shoes down to Strings & Things, and I told Tom Keckler to match the paint. Of course, over the years, it just naturally turned darker because the lacquer yellows. But the neck was too thin once they sanded it all down and I said, ‘This thing sucks!’ So I hung it on the wall for sale.”

That’s where it was when Johnson encountered Beck again. Billy Gibbons (of ZZ Top) was opening up for Beck, Bogert & Appice (a group Beck had formed with bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice) in Little Rock. “I was already tight with Gibbons,” says Johnson. “We’d known each other for at least a year and a half, and we just hit it off immediately. So I was following them around like a cat looking for food, just hanging out with them. They liked me being around. About that time, Beck walks into the dressing room and says, ‘Man, you know, I really need a Les Paul.’ And Gibbons goes, ‘Well, I’ve got one in Texas, but I’m not going to be there.’ And then I said, ‘Well, I’ve got one on the wall at Strings & Things, and you’re going to be there tomorrow.’”

The rest was history, once Beck shelled out for the axe. “I guess he loved the sound of it,” says Johnson. “He kept using it all those years. It’s on the cover of [Beck’s 1975 album] Blow By Blow. It had all the mojo.” Indeed, it’s been called “the most significant modified Goldtop in history” in the book Goldtop Believers: The Les Paul Golden Years, and that was only confirmed after Beck’s death in 2023, when “The Oxblood,” as it was known, sold at a Christie’s auction of Beck’s gear for $1,315,708.

London Calling

Only a few years later, Johnson would see The Oxblood and Beck once again, in some very auspicious company. But before that could happen, he had to cross an ocean.

“I first went to England in January of 1972, to do some sessions,” Johnson recalls. “While I was there, a friend of Jeff Beck’s told Marc Bolan about me. He was big in ’72.” Indeed, Bolan’s group T. Rex was in the middle of a three-year run of 11 Top 10 singles at the time. But even a star of his caliber was curious to hear some of that Frayser magic.

Johnson remembers every detail: “He sent his driver over in a Rolls-Royce, who took me to his apartment on Clarendon Place. The driver stepped out and pushed the button that said ‘Feld,’ which was his real last name. I went on up with my guitars, a couple of Les Pauls. And there he was, at one o’clock in the afternoon, all dressed up in a glam outfit. He would wake up and dress up for the day. He had the glitter jacket on. Clothes were laying all around on the floor. He didn’t have a bed, just a mattress on the floor. And there must have been 200 kids in the street, just hanging out, trying to get to him.”

Johnson and Bolan jammed and cut some demos at Trident Studios, but not much came of it. Still, Johnson’s reputation across the pond was growing. In September of 1974, he was asked to audition for bassist John Entwistle’s solo project when “The Ox” wasn’t playing with The Who. At the appointed hour, the rehearsal hall had several other guitarists vying for the spot. Johnson walked in and addressed them, saying, “Guys, y’all better go home, because I’m getting this job.” He did.

“I ended up playing on three tracks and the single “Cell Number 7“ [from 1975’s Mad Dog],” says Johnson. “By December, we were on the road, going everywhere in England, all the town halls, selling them out, getting great reviews. Then we started the American tour, did some more dates and more recordings.”

But as all that was brewing, something else was afoot. At a recording studio in December, Johnson happened to be working with Nicky Hopkins, the legendary session keyboardist who played on classic tracks by the Beatles, the Kinks, and countless others. During a break in recording, Hopkins approached Johnson. “He says, ‘Hey, Robert, Mick Taylor just quit the Rolling Stones. I gave your phone number to Mick Jagger — do you mind?’”

New Musical Express, Melody Maker, and Sounds, was, ‘Who’s going to be in the Stones?’” Finally, while he was in London, the phone rang and the voice on the line said, “Hey, Robby, it’s Mick. We want to know if you want to come over and have a play with us.” As Johnson recalls, “I was going, ‘Who is this?’ I thought somebody was playing a joke on me.”

But, as it turned out, it really was Mick Jagger, and by the next morning Johnson was on the first flight to Rotterdam, Holland, where the Stones were holding their auditions. “I get to the hotel,” Johnson explains, “it’s about 8:30 in the morning, and I buzz the room, and Jagger answers and says, ‘Hey, did you make it okay? How’s your room? Did you bring your guitar?’ Yeah, yeah, of course I brought my guitar. And then he says, ‘Okay, so we’re going to bed now. I’ll call you about five or six o’clock in the afternoon.’”

That evening, Johnson, the band, and their entourage headed to the city auditorium. “They had rented this sort of side room off this huge auditorium, like a banquet room,” he says. “And it took me about an hour to find an amp that worked. Of course, they were, you know, ‘partaking’ a little bit. Finally, we got down to a little bit of jamming, and then I look at the back of the room and there’s Jeff Beck standing with a road guy holding two guitars. He’s got a big cigar in his mouth.”

One of those guitars was The Oxblood, and, as the evening wore on, all of them jammed. Some tracks were recorded with a mobile studio run by Glyn Johns, the famed producer/engineer who worked with the biggest names in England, and then everyone “went back to the hotel and proceeded to take over the bar and drink till the wee hours of the morning,” Johnson recalls. “I was told that night that they’d already chosen Ronnie Wood. They were just trying to get tracks cut, play the field, and play with the newspapers and spread rumors, but really they were just trying to get Ronnie out of his contract with the Faces.”

While nothing that Johnson played on ended up on the Stones’ Black and Blue album, he’s seen and heard tapes of the outtakes from those sessions, and they’re reportedly available on bootlegs. At any rate, it was more of a detour for Johnson: He was still committed to playing with The Ox, and went on to continue touring with that group.

“I Just Got Down to Business”

As career detours go, it wasn’t bad. Yet all of these true adventures have been but signposts on a road that, for Johnson, leads ever onward. More than chasing any celebrity, he’s remained committed to the work, fueling his creativity and continuing to produce great music. That’s especially apparent on his solo debut album, Close Personal Friend, released in 1978 and still considered a milestone in the “power pop” genre, re-released by Burger Records in 2018. To Johnson’s credit, it bears little resemblance to the classic rock gods with whom he worked in the early part of that decade, instead offering up short, sharp songwriting and riffs that are harbingers of what came to be called New Wave.

Since then, all of his time in the big leagues, as a sideman or a bandleader, has added up to a formidable career that has included some notable work as a producer and as a musical director for high-profile events. He’s the CEO of Regent Sound Records, originally founded in New York by Bob Liftin, now based in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, and divides his time among there, New York, London, and Memphis. His latest passion project is finalizing work on the 1971 masters of an unfinished album by Albert King, recorded with the legendary Swampers band of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, then stored away for decades. Stepping up to fill the blank tracks that King never got to? None other than Johnson’s old friend, Billy Gibbons, playing King’s own Flying V guitar.

When we spoke recently, he also mentioned his recent productions of Ann Wilson of Heart and Tanya Tucker, adding that he would soon be catching a flight to London. “I want to go back to Abbey Road and tweak the mixes of the Albert King/Billy Gibbons record.” And he’s still working on his own material, having released another solo album, I’m Alive, in 2019. In a full-circle moment, one of the guest players on the album was none other than Mick Taylor, whose Rolling Stones slot Johnson once sought to fill. And Johnson’s chops are still formidable, though he finds his local handle, “The Frayser Flash,” a bit hard to fathom. “I was never a flash monster at all,” he says. “I just got down to business.”