In movies sometimes you’ll see young R&B groups making their bones, and in the scenes leading up to their breakthrough all they do is listen to other R&B groups. We weren’t like that at all. Every kind of music flowed down to us, and because of that, every kind of music flowed through us. Our tastes were still rooted in soul, of course, but soul meant many things all at once. We knew all about Burt Bacharach, who was the king at that time, because of his work with Dionne Warwick, who was a local girl. It was heartwarming to see somebody you knew become that big all of a sudden. We knew all about Curtis Mayfield, who was like a one-man Motown—he had that amazingly spiritual Impressions sound and an incredibly strong sense of his own songwriting. “For Your Precious Love” had come out when I was in high school, and then when Jerry Butler left the group and it looked like Curtis might falter without a lead singer, he just turned around and released “Gypsy Woman,” which became their biggest single. Around 1960 or 1961, everyone wanted to be Curtis almost as much as everyone wanted to be Smokey. But the biggest of them all, at least for a little while, was Sam Cooke. He came to the barbershop once or twice, and he was like a cool pimp when you met him, so smooth, with a quiet confidence. Ladies loved him, of course, because he was handsome, and he seemed to always be on top of his game. I admired him for his business sense. Sam was every kind of pioneer: with crossover success, with songwriting, with the way he set up his own label, SAR, where he signed and promoted other groups like the Valentinos and the Simms Twins. Sam was going strong through 1964 with songs like “Good Times” and “That’s Where It’s At,” and then, suddenly, in December 1964, he was dead, shot in a motel office in Los Angeles. He was naked except for his sport jacket. The woman at the motel said that he had pushed his way in and accosted her, asking about a girl he had come with, asking about his clothes, getting more and more belligerent until finally she had to shoot him in self-defense. It didn’t add up to me then and it still doesn’t. It seemed like he was on the brink of something major as an artist and a businessman. Maybe there were people who didn’t want to see that happen. All I know for sure is how it affected us in the barbershop and, for that matter, music fans everywhere. We were numb all day long. It was like John Kennedy’s assassination a year earlier. In both cases, I was on the bus when I heard the news, and I just kind of dropped down beneath it. I blanked out. You can spend your time obsessing about the particulars of a situation, inventing conspiracies, questioning the official version—and I’ve done plenty of that—but in the end you come back to something more fundamental, which is that that kind of sadness, that kind of subtraction, doesn’t really belong in the world.
As the world changed, as we heard it changing, we started to hear the new generation of white rock and rollers, though they weren’t rock and rollers in the sense they had been back in the fifties, where they were updating hillbilly music into rockabilly. In the sixties, they were coming from a number of different directions: from folk, from British blues rock, from more classically trained musicians. Take Bob Dylan, for example. I didn’t like his singing voice very much at first, but I liked his voice in the sense that I saw immediately that he was creating a character for himself, and that he meant to do something with his freedom. That was a liberating idea for a young artist, that you could start at point A and go somewhere other than point B. If you had a passport, you could travel. And travel, mentally and creatively speaking, also meant going beyond the shores of America to the British Invasion groups. They were coming and we had to take notice. I remember just before the first Beatles record came out, and how Murray the K kept teasing it, saying that he was going to play it later that week, then the next day, then that night. Finally he did—it was “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—and I just sat there looking at the radio. I didn’t know what to think about it. I couldn’t tell if it was going to be a big thing or a nothing. It wasn’t that I was unsure of their talent. They had a couple of other records already out on Vee-Jay, and from a songwriter’s perspective you could tell they had a real feel for melody and lyrics. They were like the Beach Boys, in a way, making the Chuck Berry sound more mainstream, but they had these songwriting skills that were unquestionable. What I liked most about them wasn’t the fashion, or the screaming kids. It was the fact that they had a great respect for American rhythm and blues. To me that’s what gave most of the English groups their legitimacy. But when something was hyped the way that was hyped, there was always the danger that it would fall short, that people would close ranks, and that it wouldn’t have another chance to break through. As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry on their behalf. They did fine.
The other big band, obviously, was the Rolling Stones, and though they had a great love for American blues, I didn’t see that at first. What I saw was a skinny English kid trying to do a James Brown impression. Later on, of course, that changed. I came around. I started to see that these groups across the ocean were absolutely sincere in their love for black American music, and that they were treating it both reverently and irreverently, and in the process making something new. A few years after that, I was listening to the radio and I heard Eric Clapton talking about Robert Johnson, and I was ashamed to admit that though I knew most of those songs—“Crossroads Blues,” “Sweet Home Chicago”—I didn’t know Johnson’s name or anything about his life. How’s that going to happen to a black man in America, to learn about blues music from a white man thousands of miles away? But that’s the way it was. There was productive interpenetration—they took our music, remade it, brought it back to us, and we did the same thing to theirs. One of the people who was heavily involved in the early days of British rock, in fact, was a living example of that principle. His name was Jimmy Miller, and he was a Brooklyn kid who had briefly been a writing partner of mine in the early days in New York. Jimmy and I produced a record together in 1959, but the label that released it took credit away from both of us, so there’s no official trace of that. I absorbed the blow and went on, but Jimmy was so hurt that he went to London, where he ended up doing some of the earliest Spencer Davis records, songs like “Gimme Some Lovin’ ” and “I’m a Man.” He moved along with Steve Winwood to Traffic, where he produced their first two albums. I kept track of his career, and in the late sixties was amazed to find that he was working with the Rolling Stones. He ended up overseeing what many people think of as their golden period: he did everything from Beggars Banquet to Goats Head Soup, a stretch that includes Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street. When I knew him, he had been a drummer, and he contributed percussion to the Stones records, too—that’s him doing the cowbell at the beginning of “Honky Tonk Women.” I was happy to see that Jimmy was working with them, but it also changed my perception of the Stones. It proved to me, as much as anything else, that they were serious about rooting their music in American sounds.
In those early days, music was anything but simple entertainment. I loved it, but in the complicated way you might love another person. I was trying to strike a balance between being a fan who heard his favorite music on the radio, an aspiring songwriter who wanted to hear his own work on those same stations, and a group leader who was trying to keep those same aspirations alive in others. Maybe it was temperament and maybe it was delusion, but I always thought that we were going to take over the world. I always convinced myself that things were going somewhere good, and as a result, I kept moving all the time. You had to believe in the ultimate destination. Not everyone around me agreed. Billy “Billy Bass” Nelson, for example, got very down on things quick. When they didn’t happen right away, he went slack and you could see the disappointment in his expression. Again, temperament was a factor, and also drugs. For some musicians, heroin had a way of making people depressed and pitiful, and making the idea of giving up romantic, somehow. But many of the other singers in the group, who were closer to my age, took the same stance I did.
The barbershop was a big help in maintaining perspective. The other barbers were a little older even than
the Parliaments singers—Grimes was in his early thirties, and Wolfgang was in his mid-forties. That doesn’t seem old now, of course, but back then it seemed ancient, and the shit they used to say made me see the world in focus. You’d be in there complaining, acting the brat, and they wouldn’t even look at you. They would look at each other through the mirror, as if to say, “Why should we be happy?” It made you almost embarrassed. When they weren’t cutting you with that look, they were telling you to your face that you were making too much of your own problems. Then they had a way of just cutting through all the nonsense and the bullshit. Once I went in there to worry about Ernie and the distance that was opening up between us. I knew that I wanted to keep going to New York to get more interviews and auditions, but I wasn’t sure that Ernie was willing to do what was needed. Wolfgang looked at me levelly for a little while. Then he opened his mouth a little bit and said, “Let me put it like this. Some people will and some people won’t.” He didn’t have to elaborate, to explain that Ernie, despite his talent, didn’t have the temperament to suffer through the lower levels of the business, learn his way to the middle, and then find his way to the top. He didn’t have to prop me up by telling me too much about myself. Some people will and some people won’t. Later on in the sixties, there was lots of wordy philosophy about getting in touch with your feelings, hippie decoration on top of Eastern religion, but the barbershop was a purer version of it, and the sense of the world that it instilled in me colored most of the decisions I made, even in the darkest of times.
I didn’t cat around in Detroit, exactly—like I said, Mr. Wingate frowned on that kind of thing—but that doesn’t mean that I was an ideal husband. When I was back in New Jersey, I couldn’t concentrate on home, and I was starting to go with other girls. Vivian Lewis, who was my singing and writing partner at Jobete, was just a teenager when I met her, but we got together after that, and she and I had a son named Tracey. Then there was Gwendolyn, who wasn’t in the business at all. She was just a cute little girl, and I was just a horny little young boy. She got pregnant and had a boy named Stefon. I don’t know if they ever told him that I was his father. For that matter, I don’t think they told him that Gwenny was his mother—he was played off as a much younger brother in the family, like they sometimes did back then.
Being with other women was kind of like trying to break into the music business: a labor of love that took a whole lot of hustle to pull off. I don’t know how the hell I did it sometimes, going from one house to another in the middle of the night, but that’s the life I made for myself. I remember one night in particular when I came back to the house after spending a few hours with one girl and a few with another. When I got home, my wife had a dress laid out on the bed like she was heading out to dinner. I started yelling at her: “Where are you going? What do you think you’re doing?” For a second, blinded by rage, I left the room. Out in the kitchen, I caught a glimpse of myself reflected on the inside of a window, and it all seemed ridiculous. What the fuck was my problem, yelling at her when my life was the way it was? Who was I to deny her a little freedom, or any at all? I think it was maybe a little of the wisdom of the barbershop leaking through. You can’t make a young man less jealous but you can make him into a slightly older man who sees things more clearly. Live and learn, they say, but if you do it right, one is the same as the other.
FRIENDS, INQUISITIVE FRIENDS, ARE ASKING WHAT’S COME OVER ME
Where does an idea come from? In my experience, it comes from an afternoon in the barbershop with the other guys, shooting the shit, and Billy Bass Nelson banging on the guitar. He was still a kid, and he didn’t know a thing about the fucking thing. He couldn’t even change strings. So he was just strumming simple chords, and I was singing a lyric that had been stuck in my head for a while: “I just want to testify what your love has done for me.” Billy and I sang that and let the words settle around us. That’s how it is sometimes for hooks. You have to make sure that you hear them the way an audience might hear them if they’re hits, over and over again, and whether they bear up under scrutiny.
The more we played this new song, the more I knew it would work, not only on the radio but also live. It was so infectious, and even there in the barbershop I could tell that there were so many turnarounds you could do once you got to vamping. Remember, this was all happening at a time in music before people understood the idea of a jam band. We came out of a Motown tradition that was strictly melodic, with tight hooks, but when that intersected with rock and roll we started to see there was the possibility of stretching out that feel to great length, not diluting the song but extending it. You could play it for five minutes or you could play it for a half hour, and it would have the same appeal. That was funk, in an early form. To me, Ray Charles was one of the funkiest people I knew, because he could take any song and make it work, for as long as he pleased, without any reduction in power.
The next day I wrote lyrics to go along with the chorus. “Friends, inquisitive friends / are asking me what’s come over me / A change, there’s been a change / And it’s oh so plain to see.” The lyrics were guided by the same principles as the music. I was trying to build on top of Motown, or rather what Motown had become. My main influence in writing the verses was the Four Tops, songs like “Standing in the Shadows” or “Reach Out,” which themselves were a kind of soul imitation of Bob Dylan—verses that drew the vocals out, in a kind of monotone, until they bloomed into a big chorus.
Over the next few days, we worked it out: me, Grady, Fuzzy, Calvin, Ray, and Billy. The song got tighter and tighter. We were calling it “Testify,” or “(I Wanna) Testify,” and there was something glowing in it. You can’t always tell when a song is going to be a hit, but you can tell when it makes the grade, and this one did. I decided to cut the record in Detroit, which meant that I’d have to go without the rest of the guys. They had to stay and work. Broke don’t travel. It was hard for me to make the trip, even: I got a friend of mine named Deron Taylor to pay for my ticket out there, and I gave him half the songwriting credit in return. So I went out West—or Midwest—to cut the track, where I recorded it with Ron Banks from the Dramatics, who was about fifteen years old at the time. Pat Lewis did the backup vocals. Even though I had imagined the song as progressing slightly beyond the Motown sound—even though I could hear the louder, longer, liver version in my head—what we recorded was still very much part of that rigorous pop-soul world. It’s something that James Jamerson and the Funk Brothers would have done. The B-side was a song called “I Can Feel the Ice Melting.”
Around that same time, Mr. Wingate got out of the record business. Music had been a toy for him to start with, and he wasn’t interested anymore. He couldn’t get soulfully into it, not in the way he would have had to if he wanted to continue. Plus, the landscape was getting a little crowded. Motown was starting to feel pressure from the other Detroit artists and was eager to eliminate the competition. The result was that they bought most of Golden World from him. The Motown agreement didn’t include my team, which included Sidney Barnes and Mike Terry—the group that Mr. Wingate said he wanted to become his version of Holland-Dozier-Holland. Sidney, Mike, and I had just done a record by Darrell Banks, “Open the Door to Your Heart,” that had as its B-side “Our Love Is in the Pocket.” LeBaron Taylor, who was the program director at a local radio station and also had a label called Revilot, was in business with Darrell, and Mr. Wingate let me and Pat Lewis—and with us our Parliament record—go with LeBaron over to Revilot. It’s a good thing he did. Pat would have been lost in the shuffle over at Motown, and Parliament would have been crushed by the politics and the internal competition.
So there we were, perched on the precipice of something either major or minor, standing on the verge of either success or obscurity. I went back to New Jersey, and Revilot put the song out, at which point it became an instant smash. LeBaron’s connections helped the song get onto CKLW, which was a fifty-thousand-watt station based in Windsor, Ontario, that he
ld sway over much of the upper Midwest. Many stations cut off at night, and the big stations that were broadcasting with that kind of power got heard anywhere and everywhere. Once a song got onto CKLW, it pretty much guaranteed that it was going to move up the ladder, market followed by bigger market, until it reached stations like WABC in New York. It was also number one on WWRL, which was an R&B station, and it hit the first week that Frankie Crocker was at the station. He presented us at a big block party in Harlem, which further cemented the idea that we had something hot on our hands.
All of a sudden, everything was different. We weren’t a longtime doo-wop band struggling to make it in a climate where Motown was entering middle age and soul had replaced R&B. We were America’s newest hit makers. The song took off so fast that we didn’t have time to do anything in the way of understanding or processing. In fact, almost immediately we were on the road. If you were a band with one hit, you got invited to play in these radio-sponsored showcases, where you’d go out and play a song or two, and then you’d get off the stage and another band with one hit would come out and do the same thing. In those days, we didn’t really even have a band yet. We had singers and we had songs and we had Billy Bass Nelson, who was thrust into the position of musical director. One of the first shows on that first tour was at the Apollo Theater, and it was disorienting in the extreme. For starters, we were headlining over the O’Jays, which made no sense except that we were the band riding a recent wave. The Peps, who later became the Undisputed Truth, were also on the bill. We knew we had to play “Testify,” and for our second song, we planned to play “7-Rooms of Gloom,” which was the current Four Tops hit, because that was still how we thought of ourselves—the band that Motown should have signed but didn’t. “7-Rooms of Gloom” was a towering Holland-Dozier-Holland production with a painful howl of a lyric: “I see a house, a house of stone / A lonely house, ’cause now you’re gone.” It would have been nice to go out there and just tear the roof off of the song, send a message to the world that we were the equal of the Tops. But we didn’t take into account how unprepared we were. We didn’t realize that the Apollo was a union house, and that we would have to use the union musicians. As a result, we didn’t get our charts written until late. And you couldn’t travel that way with Motown material: that shit was sophisticated, with complicated time signatures and tight turns. The result was legendarily bad. It sounded like a bunch of drunk bagpipe players. People thought we were joking. At the end, we rolled into “Testify,” stormed through that, and that righted the ship. We never tried to do that again.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 5