by Bob Stanley
His best ‘solo’ single was ‘Forever’ (UK no. 8 ’73), on which he sounds like the 1968 Beach Boys on the first verse, then 1959 Neil Sedaka on the second. You have to concentrate to see the join. In Wizzard, Wood buried himself under garish make-up and frightful hair. Their hits sounded awesome and opulent, heavy on the Spector percussion, all bells and whistles. They also had some beautiful lyrics, delving into pop’s past, asking the serious questions: ‘Will Dion still be so important to you on your wedding day?’ The very best was ‘Angel Fingers’, a number one in 1973, which combined pre-rock innocence with back-seat fumbling. It also included possibly my favourite line ever: ‘If I could get a job with that cool rockin’ band, you’d notice me with that red guitar in my hand.’ There it is. The entire pop myth in one couplet.
‘I always feel that you should keep singles as commercial as possible so that people can walk down the road and whistle a song,’ he said in 1973. ‘But on albums I think you can afford to show people what you can do.’ If glam was about snubbing rock’s post-Monterey seriousness, then Roy Wood was the shapeshifting king. Was he the Wizzard, or a rock ’n’ roll revivalist? Which was his real voice?
It’s easy to see why he wasn’t taken to heart by The Old Grey Whistle Test or the NME (‘Shut up Roy, that’s not rock ’n’ roll!’), but it was also pretty obvious that neither Robert Plant nor Mick Jagger sang in their real voice. The best glam caused an uncomfortable itch in the increasingly cosy and fast-hardening music industry5 by flying in the face of rock orthodoxy, whether it was Mud invading a transport cafe or thirty-something Gary Glitter, bouffant and pop-eyed, bulging out of his sequinned suit.
And it all evaporated very quickly. Nothing usurped glam, people just woke up one day in early 1975 and realised it was over. So Sweet went heavier, Mud turned to disco, Gary Glitter became a pantomime villain. Marc Bolan, its creator, was still cherubic but chubby, a spurned cupid, doomed to endlessly revisit the sound of ’72. It’s too bad that, as its originator, he alone missed the point – glam wasn’t considered, or classy, or built to last. The trip from ‘Ride a White Swan’ to Sweet’s false new dawn ‘Fox on the Run’ (UK no. 2 ’75) took five years, as Bowie had predicted. Glam was constantly aware of its own mortality, and that is what made it so enjoyable.
1 New Zealand provided Bowie-alike Alastair Riddell’s band Space Waltz, briefly a sensation with their NZ-only number one ‘Out on the Street’; Britain only had Casino (one blinding single called ‘Crazy’), Roderick Falconer (two albums of brave new world paranoia) and Steve Harley’s Cockney Rebel, who dumped the glam shtick early on. Their single ‘Sebastian’ – a flop in Britain but number one in the Netherlands – was a preposterous, cake-out-in-the-rain moment. I still can’t work out if it’s actually good.
2 This, it should be noted, is a name he gave himself, not the one he was given at birth. His dad worked for the Post Office.
3 America also had the ill-fated Jobriath, whose music sounded more like Elton John’s campest moments, and the New York Dolls, who looked like Exile on Main Street-era Stones and played a rough, sloppy glam variant that intrigued London clothes-shop operator Malcolm McLaren enough for him to become their manager. The raggedness of single ‘Jet Boy’ excited a few, but their records sold poorly and they had dissolved into drug chaos by the time glam started to fade. Their one antagonistic Old Grey Whistle Test performance lingered in the memory, though, and despite the paucity of their catalogue they became a touchstone for British punk.
4 His mates knew him as Pete Watts, but his full name was Peter Overend Watts. So it wasn’t exactly a nickname – it just sounded like one.
5 It was notable how many of glam’s big names were on smaller labels – Bell, RAK and Polydor in particular. The grande dame EMI signed T. Rex (from the independent Fly label in ’71, when they were already the biggest pop group in Britain) and album-based, serio-glam acts Cockney Rebel and Queen; CBS had Mott the Hoople. At the same time as glam was breaking, a new label called K-Tel was licensing hit singles on the cheap from EMI and CBS to create 20 Dynamic Hits, which became the biggest-selling British album of 1972. It seemed like the majors were embarrassed by chart pop.
32
THE SOUND OF PHILADELPHIA: SOFT SOUL
With pre-rock harmony and doo wop as its precursors, disco and house as its offspring, Philadelphia soul is the fulcrum of modern pop.
Philadelphia soft soul and Glitter Band glam shared a loved of spangly suits, but while the genres and the primary audiences (glam was for white kids, soft soul was for black adults) were musically poles apart, there was another connection between the two – a professional showbiz overlap. Both genres rewarded hard-working acts who had struggled in the sixties but finally made it in the seventies.
The one time I went to Philadelphia was in search of a record shop that I’d heard about with aisle upon aisle of 45s, catalogued and ripe for the picking – it was a collector’s paradise. We drove out from New York with the O’Jays’ ‘Back Stabbers’ and Blue Magic’s ‘Sideshow’ on the stereo and eventually we found the shop. But the owner was a jerk, he wouldn’t let us browse, and it turned out to be a wasted journey (one great discovery: ‘Tell Him’ by the Drew-Vels). More shocking than the cantankerous record-store owner was the state of the city: Philadelphia – home to the Delfonics, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, the birthplace of luxuriant, soft soul – was a mess. There was street upon street of semi-derelict clapboard houses, their occupants sat bored stiff on the porch, and the neighbourhoods got incrementally poorer until we found the holy grail record shop – which was itself protected by metal doors and Fort Knox-like security grilles. The music and the environment just didn’t tally.
It wasn’t until I was back in New York that I worked it out. The Sound of Philadelphia is all about aspiration. James Brown had spoken to working-class black America in the sixties, but not everyone in that constituency wanted to hear songs about black power or the ghetto any more than white working-class Britain wanted every Kinks song to sound like ‘Dead End Street’. Philadelphia, more than any other American city, liked a lot of spangle in its suits, a lot of sugar in its tea, and the acme of this came with what producer Thom Bell called the ‘beat concerto’ sound.
This brand of soul’s constituent parts wasn’t unique to Philadelphia. Leiber and Stoller had created the strings- and baion-beat-based ‘There Goes My Baby’ for the Drifters in 1958; this had been expanded on in a more ornate style by Italian American Teddy Randazzo in the mid-sixties (notably with Little Anthony and the Imperials’ ‘Goin’ out of My Head’ – US no. 6 ’64 – and the Royalettes’ ‘It’s Gonna Take a Miracle’) and then by Charles Stepney, more darkly, more intriguingly, at the end of the decade with the Dells and the Rotary Connection at Chess.1
Yet, unlike other cities, Philadelphia never regarded this sound as a passing trend. The city absorbed the atmosphere of these records, and thrived on the warm hues that vocal harmony and orchestration brought to soul; it was hooked on melancholy, but was no less heartfelt than its electrified cousin.
Soft soul’s opulence and depth stood out in the early seventies. This was an era of twenty-four-track, heavily carpeted studios, when every instrument was recorded separately and deliberately cut flat, waiting for the producer to work his magic. The sound that sprang from Philadelphia was sonically much closer to studios like Gold Star in LA, where Phil Spector, Jack Nitzsche and Brian Wilson had created their finest work; the secret was to record large numbers of musicians playing together. The Philly producers liked orchestration, but they liked it with an R&B feel. They wanted a groove just as much as James Brown did. Listen to the Delfonics’ ‘Ready or Not (Here I Come)’ or the Stylistics’ ‘You Are Everything’ – these songs occupy the space in which they were recorded. Played alongside Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush, or even There’s a Riot Goin’ On, they sounded impossibly lush and heartbreakingly pure, richer than anything that had gone before.
You would never have thought
this likely in 1959, when Philadelphia made its first impression on modern pop with Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, the nation’s top TV show. A local independent label called Cameo Parkway took advantage of the TV studio on their doorstep; while they connived to force Bobby Rydell onto the world, Cameo also discovered Chubby Checker, and he started a whole new wave of post-rock ’n’ roll pop with ‘The Twist’, a US number one in 1960. The dance tore off like a bushfire in pop’s most parched year, and Chubby became a short-term superstar, the King of the Twist.
Chubby and Cameo Parkway had followed one of pop’s golden rules – make it as simple as possible. Jiving was hard work but the twist was a piece of cake, and you didn’t even need a partner – you could do it all by yourself. All you had to do was follow Chub’s simple instructions: pretend to dry your back with a towel while stamping out a cigarette with both feet. By the end of 1962 everyone around the world from Petula Clark (‘Ya Ya Twist’, UK no. 14) to Frank Sinatra (‘Everybody’s Twistin’’, UK no. 22) to the Isley Brothers (‘Twist and Shout’, US no. 17) was reading from Chubby Checker’s instruction manual.
New dance crazes spread across the country from Philadelphia on a weekly basis (froog, frug, snake, monkey, jerk, lurch). Cameo Parkway, meanwhile, was building a whole empire from the trend. Chubby himself scored with less viable dance moves on ‘Pony Time’ (US no. 1 61) and ‘The Fly’ (US no. 7 ’61), before ‘Let’s Twist Again’ (US no. 8 ’61, UK no. 2 ’62) made the beat go international. Cameo Parkway’s other acts were fed variants that were derivative but catchy, and milked that cow as fast as they could: Dee Dee Sharp (‘Mashed Potato Time’), the Orlons (‘The Wah-Watusi’) and the Dovells (‘Bristol Stomp’) all reached number two with their debut hits. As Motown would a little later, Cameo Parkway had found a hit formula and dominated the American chart. Unlike Motown, the brains behind Cameo Parkway – in 1962 America’s most successful pop label – were Bernie Lowe, who had played piano on Paul Whiteman’s TV Teen Club in the forties, and Kal Mann; their industry breakthroughs had been writing ‘Toyland’ for Nat King Cole and ‘Teddy Bear’ for Elvis Presley. While Berry Gordy had his weekly panel meetings to decide which singles would be received, Cameo Parkway’s Bernie Lowe played acetates to his teenage daughter Lynne. Hats off to Lynne Lowe, then, for her impressive strike rate from 1961 to 1963 – seventeen Top 10 hits, including three number ones.
When the British Invasion hit in ’64, Cameo Parkway, stranded in mashed-potato land, began to back-pedal frantically, signing random British acts (including the Kinks, but only for their first two singles) and dipping into the emergent soul scene. In mid-sixties Philadelphia there were local, non-Cameo hits bubbling through, like Barbara Mason’s ‘Yes I’m Ready’ (US no. 5 ’65) and Brenda and the Tabulations’ ‘Dry Your Eyes’ (US no. 20 ’67). They had a distinct feel: orchestrated, almost hymnal in their hushed intensity, and clearly connected to the doo-wop and girl-group sounds that most of the US was now shunning in favour of Anglo beat and folk. Cameo Parkway already had the acts (Checker, Sharp, the Orlons), and soon the backroom at Cameo included a trio of boys who had a better long-term grasp on what the kids wanted than Kal Mann, Bernie Lowe or even Lynne Lowe.
While they didn’t land any major hits, writer/producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, and arranger Thom Bell – all former members of a Cameo Parkway house band called the Romeos – used their time at the label as an apprenticeship for building the definitive Philadelphia sound. Bell, twenty-three when he arrived at Cameo, was middle-class (‘We didn’t eat steak all the time, but we didn’t eat beans all the time either’) and something of a prodigy – he could play drums, piano and the flugelhorn by the time he was eight. The new Philly sound he concocted with Gamble and Huff included French horns, harps and tympani, and it worked best when there was an expressive falsetto (Eddie Holman’s ‘This Can’t Be True’) or a female voice of poise and piercing power (Dee Dee Sharp’s ‘I Really Love You’) to carry the emotion. If the label had been smart they’d have got the trio’s names in blood – but the label wasn’t smart.
When Cameo Parkway went bust in 1968, engineer Joe Tarsia bought one of their old studios and changed its name to Sigma Sound. Gamble and Huff – who had both been supplementing their pay from Cameo Parkway by working at the local hospital – moved right in, striking gold fast with the Intruders’ novelty soul ‘Cowboys to Girls’ (US no. 6 ’68) and reviving former Impression Jerry Butler’s career with ‘Only the Strong Survive’ (US no. 4 ’68); as Curtis Mayfield went further into black politics, mounting the barricades with ‘Choice of Colors’ and ‘We’re a Winner’ in ’69, his former teammate Butler was rebranded with homely wisdom and silky strings. Philadelphia DJ George Woods knew Butler had a penchant for ice sculpting and dubbed him the Ice Man. The moniker suited his sonorous, adult voice just as surely as earlier, eye-of-the-storm hits like ‘Make It Easy on Yourself’ (US no. 20 ’62) and ‘Need to Belong’ (US no. 31 ’63).
Thom Bell went further with the Delfonics’ ‘La La Means I Love You’, a US number four in ’68 that opened with the softest tympani, seemingly struck with marshmallow beaters, and the sound of weeping bouzoukis; his Delfonics productions took the sweet soul of Barbara Mason into an ethereal new world – a combination of the childlike (‘la la la la la’, ‘ready or not, here I come’), the celestial and the sensual. If Brian Wilson was set to abandon his sonic adventures with the stripped-back Wild Honey and Friends, Bell was happy to pick up the magic wand and apply it to street-corner vocal groups. The ‘Eleanor Rigby’-like jagged intro of ‘Ready or Not’ (US no. 35 ’69), the slow-motion waterfall of ‘Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind)’ (US no. 10 ’70) and the lush, extraordinary adaptation of Barry Mann’s ‘When You Get Right Down to It’ were all breathtaking, gauzy like a David Hamilton photo, florid as Bell’s classical training would allow. Blues & Soul magazine dubbed the Delfonics ‘America’s No. 1 sophisticated soul group’, but once they parted ways with Bell in ’72 the hits seized up. Direct beneficiaries were the Stylistics, another Philly act for Bell to toy with whose singer, Russell Thompkins Jr, had an extraordinary falsetto and a look of genuine surprise whenever he hit the high notes.
As Roy Wood’s productions and Chinn and Chapman’s vignettes understood and revived the spirit of true, daffy rock ’n’ roll, Thom Bell’s work could be considered mature doo wop. It was opulent, yes, but it was never showy. He was thoughtful, followed no rules, loved Burt Bacharach and Shep and the Limelites equally. Working in the seventies with Dionne Warwick, he told Blues & Soul that he ‘had this constant feeling that there was a connection between her and a cat. Just take a look at her: she has a feline grace, she’s slinky. Even her facial features – those eyes, the cheekbones. So for about three weeks, I studied all the books I could find on cats and their behaviour and saw how it related to Dionne.’
Kenny Gamble was always the businessman of the ex-Cameo Parkway three. He also married Cameo’s prize catch, the fierce-eyed Dee Dee Sharp. He set up his own label, Gamble Records, and scored a few hits with the Intruders, though the label’s best 45 – the Baby Dolls’ shy, keening ‘Please Don’t Rush Me’ – was a flop; they had no staff and hits slipped through their fingers. Working for Atlantic they cut a whole album with Dusty Springfield, a sweet, crisp collection called From Dusty with Love, from which ‘Brand New Me’ was a Top 30 hit in the US in ’69, and gave Archie Bell and the Drells irresistible dancefloor fillers with ‘Here I Go Again’ and ‘(There’s Gonna Be) A Showdown’, the former fired by a sitar-guitar that would soon become a Philly staple. Gamble started another label, Neptune, this time with major distribution through Chess, but again it died. He began to get frustrated, and set his mind to finding a way out. ‘We’d been really brought down by the Neptune situation,’ Gamble told Blues & Soul in ’73. ‘But when we recovered we thought “hell man, they’re the ones who’ve blown it, not us.” We know the music’s good, we know it’s what people want. So we began talks with another company, a big corporation
, who had the resources to get the sound we’d nurtured and nursed and developed to the mass public.’
Soul, as a black art form, had held onto its independence, without labels being co-opted by the corporations, for a long time, much longer than rock ’n’ roll had managed. But, just as mom-and-pop shops were closing in black districts of Philadelphia and all over America, so the independent labels started to disappear, and fast, in the early seventies. Chess was swallowed up in 1969 by GRT, passed on to All Platinum in 1975, MCA in the eighties, and is now part of the omnipotent Universal; Stax, over a barrel thanks to an obscure clause in their contract with distributors Atlantic, failed in 1975, despite having number-one hits with the Staple Singers’ ‘I’ll Take You There’ and Isaac Hayes’s ‘Shaft’ just a couple of years earlier. Kenny Gamble’s deal with Columbia, a label with a tiny proportion of black pop artists in 1970 (the most prominent were Sly and the Family Stone and Santana, the biggest seller was Johnny Mathis), was prophetic. The freshly minted label was called Philadelphia International Records; the time for humility was over – this really was the sound of their city. Over the next three years PIR became the best-selling soul label in the world. ‘We have tried to follow the Motown pattern of establishing a home away from home for writers,’ explained Gamble. ‘We have fifteen writers’ rooms. We have guys who, like I did, come in here after school and write for two or three hours a day. We write, produce, and above all we teach.’
Who were the label’s superstars? The O’Jays struck gold first with the astonishing ‘Back Stabbers’ (US no. 3, UK no. 14 ’72). It had the sleek guitar, the congas, the strings that had already become Philly ingredients, but it added the urban paranoia of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Inner City Blues’, black mistrust of black and the agony of love previously dealt with by the Four Tops’ ‘Bernadette’. On top of all this, it had an outrageous piano intro, part Brazilian, part Rachmaninov, which stopped you in your tracks before the brass burst in – ‘Ba! Ba! Ba! Ba-ba … BAAH!’ – like James Bond. Then things calmed down, just a little. It was majestic.