My father became a true producer through his experience at OKeh. He wrote the music, melodies, and lyrics, coached the artists on how to deliver them, and often presided over the sessions as they cut his songs—dozens of them, including Walter Jackson’s “That’s What Mama Say” and “It’s All Over,” and Major Lance’s “You’ll Want Me Back” and “Think Nothing About It.” He’d always wanted control over all things in his life. Now, he had more of it than ever. He still felt insecure about his looks, his teeth, his stature, but with each new success, the sting of “Smut” momentarily faded.
He had no shortage of songs to keep success coming, either. Gerald Sims, one of Davis’s partners at OKeh, said, “I used to go out to Curtis’ house a lot of times, and Curtis would have a shopping bag full of tapes, and a lot of them were songs that he would only have six or eight bars to. Because when Curtis used to get an idea he would go to a tape recorder and put the idea down. Then he would go off into something else, and he would come back to it later on. A lot of times you’d pick up a tape and play it, and you’d get off into it, and then it would stop! You’d have to go back and ask him to finish this tune or finish that tune. So he would do it; he was very obliging about it and would go write you a complete tune.”
Near the end of 1962, Major went through Dad’s bag of songs again and cut one called “Delilah” for OKeh. It didn’t chart, but it made enough noise for people to start paying attention. At the same time, Gene Chandler recorded a slow burner of my father’s called “Rainbow.” The song came out as the B-side to “You Threw a Lucky Punch,” which Davis wrote as a response to Mary Wells’s Motown smash “You Beat Me to the Punch.” “Rainbow” ended up a surprise hit that rose fourteen places higher on the R&B chart than the A-side.
In rapid succession, Chandler hit again with another sultry Curtis tune called “Man’s Temptation,” which features revealing lyrics such as “This woman won’t leave me alone / She’s going to ruin my happy home with a man’s temptation.” The song reads as a deeply personal one, considering what my father was going through with Helen. The lyrics show a man in the painful position of having to choose between two women, and while Dad often wrote songs like this from his imagination, he had indeed begun courting another woman.
Earlier that year, a beautiful young girl named Diane had taken three of her girlfriends to see the Impressions at the Apollo. Even though she preferred the Miracles—after all, the Impressions just stood there on stage—Diane loved “Gypsy Woman.” In fact, she knew most of the Impressions’ music, though she didn’t know Curtis by name. He wasn’t quite famous enough yet, and although he sang lead, he didn’t seem an obvious choice for the group’s leader. He didn’t have Sam’s handsome facial features, and standing a squat five-foot-seven, he seemed diminutive next to Fred’s heft and height. Anyone close to the group knew he held the power, though. Diane would soon find that out for herself.
Leaving the Apollo, the Impressions slipped into a limo and their road manager Eddie Suitor gunned the engine toward the hotel. At the same time, Diane and her friends crossed the street to get to the subway. As the limo bore down on them, Suitor slammed on the brakes, just missing the girls. Fred and Sam got out, apologized, and offered them tickets to the show the next night in Brooklyn. Curtis, ever the loner, sulked in his plush seat without saying a word.
After the show in Brooklyn, Diane and her friends went backstage where a gaggle of hangers-on milled about, everyone dressed to the nines. The Impressions still wore suits or tuxedos, while many other men sported the Mod look—bright, colorful suits with frills and cravats, wide ties, trouser straps, leather boots, and collarless jackets popularized by the Beatles. Diana Ross led the way for Negro women, with classic wigs, knee-length flared dresses, and fake eyelashes. For the adventurous, the miniskirt had just been invented; for those wanting to project chic airs, Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hat became iconic.
Curtis, Fred, and Sam mingled with the stylishly garbed crowd, but they were men set apart. Youth culture was exploding, and they stood at its vanguard. Beautiful women cast flirting looks at them. Men gave them soul-brother handshakes. The whole place crackled with postperformance energy and the manic hum of a bunch of young guys trying to get laid. My father wasn’t the only one cheating—Fred and Sam already had New York girlfriends.
Eventually, Curtis found Diane. He didn’t say much that night, but as the evening wore on, people disappeared until it was just the two of them. At that point, he warmed up a bit. They exchanged numbers and arranged middlemen and middle-women, since Diane was married and had a young son named Tracy, and the two parted company.
Diane found Curtis to be attractive in his sincerity; he seemed to deeply believe whatever he said. She also didn’t mind that he had a little bit of money, since she came from the same low-income background he did. The Impressions pulled in about $100,000 a year, and my father’s work with OKeh also poured in royalties—quite a sum for 1962.
No matter how much money he made, Dad always lived a modest life. He appreciated fancy things, like a sleek new Jaguar bought with the proceeds from “Gypsy Woman,” but that’s not why he wanted money. He wanted it because it gave him the power and control no one in his family had growing up, except Annie Bell. Money made him the man, which meant he could buy his family new furniture and food. It meant he could afford a nice home. It also meant he could attract women.
In the furtive early days of their relationship, he’d call Diane and say, “What did you do today?” to which she might answer, “Well I was just window shopping,” and he’d reply, “Was there something you saw? Because I’ll send you the money for it.” In such a way, the relationship deepened. It reinforced the message Curtis had learned from Annie Bell—music made him special. It brought him everything he wanted, including beautiful women who might not have looked at him twice if not for his money and fame. He and Diane rarely saw each other—he was either on tour or in Chicago, and she lived in New York—but she’d make a point to see him whenever the Impressions swung through her region. The rest of the time, they’d write letters or talk on the phone.
As 1963 dawned, Davis offered my father a job as associate producer, and the two presided over OKeh’s renaissance as a soul label. My father faced incredible pressure, like a juggler with too many balls in the air, but somehow he managed it all without losing his cool aloofness. He continued adding to his fame, fortune, reputation, and, most important, control.
He’d spend all week producing and recording in the studio. On weekends, he’d shoot around the country on tours with the Impressions, only to come back for more writing, rehearsing, and recording. Somehow he also kept up relationships with Helen, who was now pregnant, and Diane, who left her husband (and would become pregnant with me two years later).
Curtis received the news he’d be a father at roughly the same age as his father, and his first son would be born into a house just as fraught with marital tensions. If nothing else, his son wouldn’t face the same financial hardship. Dad knew the more he wrote, the more he’d earn, and after he penned a minor hit called “We Girls” for Jan Bradley, Chess Records wanted to hire him as a writer. He would have taken the job, but Chess wanted a piece of the publishing, and he wouldn’t give it up. That was his business sense—owning himself meant more than anything, more even than working for one of the nation’s biggest labels.
He didn’t need the gig anyway. While Fred and Sam grumbled about doing background work, ABC grew restless watching them score hits for OKeh. After almost a year of silence, the Impressions cut a slow ballad called “Sad, Sad Girl and Boy.” It didn’t fare well on the charts, but it did hint at the Impressions’ new direction.
During their hiatus, my father, Fred, and Sam pushed themselves to create a new sound as a trio. Fred and Sam lived next to each other in Chicago, and Curtis would drive out to them from his house in Markham, a small suburb south of the city. They’d sit in Fred or Sam’s basement, working all night. Curtis would pick out the
ir vocal notes on guitar, and they’d sing them over and over until they figured out how to make three voices do the same work five used to do. Their bond became unbreakable in that basement—just three kids camped around a guitar with everything to prove and one goal in mind.
Other than Eddie, Dad would never have closer friends than Fred and Sam. For a decade, they spent more time with each other than they did with their families. Dad grew to trust and love them. He looked at them as brothers. But brothers or not, they’d eventually learn my father could easily separate friendship from business. It was one of many areas where his dual nature as a Gemini came into play. He could cherish a filial bond; he could be kindhearted and generous—but, as Miles Davis often said, geniuses are selfish. My father was a genius, and when it came to money, power, and control, he wanted all of it. If he had to harm or end a close relationship in the process, he would.
That wouldn’t happen to Fred and Sam for a few years, though. Practicing in the basement, they became three parts of the same voice. The trio left no room for ego—Dad had to learn to fall into backing harmony as he traded leads with Fred and Sam. Sam also had to adjust, as the new arrangements forced him to sing uncomfortable notes. “They were taking me out of my range,” he said. “When the whole group was together, I was doing a lot of bass singing. After the Brooks brothers left, they started raising me up.”
Sam stretched himself to hit those notes because he understood the power of singing in a range where few other male singers could compete: “We were trying to establish something that nobody else had, so we said we’ll sing higher than anybody else.”
With their new format, the Impressions found something unique in R&B music, although that sort of interplay among voices—trading parts of the lead back and forth, singing in unison and then breaking off into harmony—was nothing new. As Curtis said, “In gospel, you knew how to sing lead and also how to incorporate yourself into the group, how to blend in. Sometimes everyone would come out and sing harmony with a portion of the lead. It made us [as] a three-man group stronger than we were as a five-man group. It locks everybody in; you really know where the voices are. When you have four or five men, if one moves up, the other doesn’t know where to go.” Many artists had drawn from gospel’s deep, holy well to make great secular music, but none had done it in the harmonic way of the Impressions.
“Sad, Sad Girl and Boy” represented an important step leading the Impressions forward as a trio. It also marked five consecutive failed singles. Even worse, despite all his success for other artists, Curtis still had not written a real blockbuster. He knew to reach that level, he needed to come up with something truly inspired.
Back on the chitlin’ circuit at the Top Hat in Nashville, Tennessee, the Impressions hired Bob Fisher and the Bonnevilles (sometimes referred to as the Barnevilles) to open for them. The Bonnevilles featured a young guitarist named Jimmy Hendrix, who had kicked around the circuit playing for the likes of the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, and even Jerry Butler. Hendrix looked like he could use a good meal, but he could play the hell out of his guitar, and he revered my father, copying his lyrical style of playing. Four years later, Jimmy would become Jimi and change the course of music history. For the time being, he was just a kid playing alongside one of his idols (according to one story of that tour, Hendrix borrowed Dad’s amplifier without asking and turned it up so loud, it broke).
During that stop, my father wrote two of the most important songs of his life. One was a catchy tune called “The Monkey Time,” written to go along with a new dance craze called the monkey. The Impressions didn’t do dance numbers, so Dad put it in the bag to await another artist, as he always did when he wrote a song Fred and Sam didn’t want.
The other song came to him after the first set at the Top Hat. Sitting in the green wagon with Fred and Sam waiting for the next show to begin, Dad “got to talking and running off at the mouth and just dreaming about ideas and things that might happen to us in the future,” Sam recalled. “Fred kept answering back … ‘Well, all right, well, that’s all right,’ you know. Before I knew it, it rang in my head. We had a real hook line, ‘It’s All Right,’ so I said, ‘Say it’s all right.’ Before we knew it, we had actually written two-thirds of that tune right there in the car! We could have gone on stage for the next show and sung it.”
They often worked that way, constantly rehearsing and tightening their sound anywhere and everywhere. Between sets, while other artists might take a break or chase girls, the Impressions worked on their harmonies. Even jostling from town to town in the cramped wagon, my father always had his guitar slung across his body. “I drove most of the time,” Fred said, “and Curtis would be in the back, playing the guitar, Sam sitting on the passenger’s side. And he’d be writing and playing songs for us to kind of bounce them off of us.”
When they returned to Chicago, Major Lance had nothing to work on, and Davis couldn’t wait to get him back in the studio for several reasons. Chief among them, Major was hard to deal with when not busy. Davis said, “He knew that I liked coffee, so he’d run out and get me cups of coffee. Every five minutes, he would run out and get me another cup. It got to the point where either I had to keep him busy in the studio, or have a stroke from a caffeine overdose.”
To find Major a song, Davis paid a visit to Curtis’s house in Markham. He couldn’t believe the number of songs my father had in the works. After playing the potential songs, my father said, “Which one do you like?” Davis replied, “I like all of ’em! What ones are you not going to do on the group?”
“Well, I know we’re not gonna do ‘The Monkey Time,’” Curtis said, “because that’s a dance tune, and Fred and Sam don’t want to do dance tunes.” Of course, that was the song Davis wanted in the first place. “You had to learn to work around Curtis,” Davis said wryly. He took the song to Johnny Pate, who wrote the arrangement, and Major cut it.
The song charted at number eight pop and number two R&B, making Major a bona fide star. It also propelled the fad dance to the height of pop culture, along with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ “Mickey’s Monkey.” After the song’s success, Major even bought a monkey, causing my father to have a little fun at his expense.
One day, Major made one of his regular visits to Grandma Sadie’s house—as Uncle Kenny says, “A lot of [Curtis’s] entertainment friends would hang out at Grandma’s house, because Grandma loved to cook rolls, and when Grandma cooked rolls, the whole neighborhood lined up.” When Major arrived with the monkey on a leash, Uncle Kenny recalls, “We were peeking in the car and [Curtis] was saying, ‘Which one is Major?’”
“The Monkey Time” also featured Fred and Sam on backing vocals, making it the first session where all three Impressions worked with Johnny Pate. “That was my first introduction to arranging,” Dad said. “Everything prior to that, we’d just try to nail the rhythm and get it through. But Johnny gave me my first encounter with real arranging…. He was the love of my life as far as real arrangers go.” After the session with Major, my father approached Johnny and said, “My group’s the Impressions, and we’re with ABC/Paramount. We got a session coming up, and we’d like to have you do the arrangement on it.” Johnny agreed.
Working with Johnny changed their lives. Sam said, “He started putting brass, and he put funky rhythm in our track, and he would enhance the vocal. Man, it just made you sing.” For his part, Johnny approached the gig philosophically, saying, “I never tried to cover what Curtis was doing, because Curtis was the artist. He was the star, and the Impressions were the star. I was merely background.”
From the first session, something special happened when Johnny and the Impressions came together. Usually the group ripped through three or four songs in one day—a pace Dad kept up most of his career. But when they recorded “It’s All Right” in August 1963, the song stopped them dead. “We didn’t record anything else that day,” Fred recalled. “We just kept on playing that song over and over again, and we were just wonder
ing if this was a hit. Then Gene Chandler said, ‘Let me tell you something—if y’all don’t want that song, give it to me. This is a hit.’”
My father left that day with the only acetate, but Fred and Sam were so intoxicated by the song, they drove all the way out to Markham from Chicago just to hear it. They knew Chandler was right. “When we recorded that song, I discovered what it meant to make the magic,” my father said.
“It’s All Right” was Curtis’s first great party song. Shedding the mystical, lovelorn overtones that colored much of his previous work, his lyrics simply invite the listener to have a good time. A finger-snapping shuffle drives the song, punctuated by Johnny’s horn blasts. It cruises on that groove as Curtis trades the call-and-response chorus with Fred and Sam. It is deceptively simple, though. A close listen shows how tight and intricate the Impressions’ vocal arrangements had become, trading between lead and background, harmony and unison with expertly timed precision.
“It’s All Right” shot to the top spot on the R&B chart. My father finally had a single digit beside one of his songs. In fact, the Impressions would never record a more successful song. As Fred recalled, “That song bought Sam’s home, Curtis’ home, and my home; we all bought homes off that song. By twenty-one, twenty-two years old, we all had our own homes and Cadillacs in the doggone garage.”
It came just in time. While Motown continued pushing R&B music onto the pop charts with Marvin Gaye’s “Pride and Joy” and the gospel-drenched “Can I Get a Witness,” as well as Little Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips (Part 1),” and Martha and the Vandellas’ “(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave,” Stax began flowering with Booker T. and the M.G.’s, Rufus Thomas, and Otis Redding. On top of that, in February, Vee-Jay released “Please Please Me” by the Beatles, a group of guys about my father’s age from Liverpool, England. Even though the song wouldn’t hit in America for a year or so, it was a portent of things to come.
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