Before I could even legally drink alcohol, I was playing several sets a night in bars and nightclubs all over Denver. Among music circles they used to say that it didn’t matter how old you were, whether you were black or white, handsome or ugly, skinny or fat . . . as long as you had the chops and could jam on your instrument or sing well, there was a place for you if you wanted to work in the clubs in Denver.
As a young player, at fifteen and sixteen years old, I led a double life. I would perform at the school proms and the talent shows during the daytime. I also played sock hops in an old warehouse converted to a teenage canteen called the Jackson Center. In the evenings I would play five sets a night through the week in the good-time bars and nightclubs in Five Points. There were also a couple of after-hours joints that I would play on the weekends—the Voters Club and a place called Protocrat’s. An ex–basketball player named Wayne Hightower opened a swinging place called 23rd Street East and ran it with his brother. It would later prove to be a very important music venue for me in the Denver area.
Soon I moved from behind the drums and percussion to become a spotlighted lead singer. I formed a local doo-wop harmony band called the Soul Brothers. Clarence Dale Hinton sang with me in the group along with another vocalist, Winston Ford (now deceased). Dale was a funny and clever kid, a year younger than me. He was a fantastic singer with a great ear, and became a positive influence in developing my musical tastes.
Another one of my groups was called the Dynamics. Then I played in an R&B / Top 40–flavored band called the Mystic Moods. Those early shows mainly consisted of my singing R&B cover tunes. My bandmate Dale Hinton would come out and do a James Brown–inspired number, which included throwing off his shirt, much as the Godfather of Soul did with his cape on his famous 1964 T.A.M.I. show appearance. I would follow Dale and sing a sweet doo-wop love ballad called “Rainbow,” made popular by Gene Chandler. That became my signature tune, and it drove the ladies crazy. I loved to sing the hits by The Temptations, Dionne Warwick, and The Supremes and mimic the falsetto of the Tempts’ lead vocalist, Eddie Kendricks.
Throughout my early days I met interesting and talented musicians in Denver, particularly a boyhood friend, Larry Dunn. Larry was two years younger than me, so I was like a big brother to him. Larry started out playing organ and keyboards and became very proficient at re-creating the latest hit sounds from the radio. He could pick up on horn parts from different records, which he would then re-create on whatever keyboard he was playing.
Larry was born in Denver. His mother was Italian and his father was black. When they were married in 1950, they had to get hitched in Mexico because it was illegal in Colorado for a white and black couple to legally marry. As a child prodigy, Larry learned to play Beatles songs on the guitar, took piano lessons, and played the baritone horn and trombone in the school orchestra. As a preteen, Larry never had to be told by his mom to practice; rather, she had to make him stop and go to bed. His first love soon became the organ, and he worshipped at the altar of jazz virtuoso organist Jimmy Smith. Larry learned the great Jimmy Smith organ jams like “The Sermon” and “The Champ” on the Hammond B-3 by playing Smith’s albums at 16 rpms on his turntable so he could imitate the soulful licks and solos.
Larry and I started playing together in the clubs when I was seventeen and he was fifteen. Larry had just gotten permission from his mother to play the over-21 clubs with his band. In the beginning we would show up to club gigs wearing fake mustaches to make ourselves look older. Then we realized that the owners didn’t care if we were underage.
One night we shared the bill with both of our bands. Larry played covers like “Grazing in the Grass” by Hugh Masekela while my band, the Mystic Moods, featured our three frontline singers in seamless harmony. Larry dug us when I sang a sweet, simmering version of a Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions tune called “Moonlight Shadows.” Soon we ended up merging his band of players with my three singers and starting up a brand-new group. One night the veteran R&B group The Whispers came through Denver and saw us play. They were amazed at how young and talented we were. Later when Young-Holt Unlimited, fresh from their 1968 smash hit “Soulful Strut,” came into town and caught one of our shows, they were knocked out, too.
Larry and I played every different genre of music, from rock to jazz to R&B to doo-wop to oldies to Top 40, and everything in between. We performed up and down Colorado together and played in many “groovy” cities and resort towns such as Vail, Aspen, Breckenridge, Fort Collins, Greeley, Boulder, all the way west to Grand Junction. Many of our audiences were predominantly white. The farther away we played from the Five Points district, the more rock and Top 40 material we added to our repertoire. At that time one of my favorite groups was Grand Funk Railroad, the hard-rock power trio from Detroit.
Larry and I explored different styles of music as we regurgitated everything we heard on the radio—from pop bands like Three Dog Night, Santana, and Rare Earth to the hard-core blues bands from Chess Records in Chicago. We also dug some of the R&B doo-wop singing groups, though I was especially influenced in 1969 by the psychedelic soul of The Temptations during their “Ball of Confusion” / “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” Norman Whitfield period. Larry and I also played in a lot of jazz/rock/R&B bands that featured horn sections mimicking Blood, Sweat & Tears and Chicago Transit Authority. By 1970 I had moved toward the more organic singer-songwriter sounds of Carole King and James Taylor.
We regularly played the partying college town of Boulder at a club called the Hornbook and packed the joint every night. The owners loved us. We served up everything from James Brown to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” by The Rolling Stones, as the drunken white crowds stood up on the small round tables and went crazy as we wailed onstage. The Hornbook burned down in 1972 following a sensational two-year run.
As a working, traveling musician, I had to learn early how to keep an audience engaged and how to pack the room in order to satisfy the club owners who smiled as we kept their cash registers ringing throughout the night. I never had problems holding an audience’s attention—and don’t to this day! Whether we were playing for a few hundred or a few thousand people, we tailored the intimacy of each performance to whoever hired us to entertain. I learned a lot playing to tough audiences in those Rocky Mountain taverns and clubs.
Although I was making a decent living as a musician while in my teens, I was country at heart. What I loved most about playing music in Denver was that I didn’t have to deal with the whole racial challenge. The fortunate thing was—and I realize this doesn’t apply to a lot of urban black musicians—Colorado taught me how to deal with people as just, well, people. And that’s how I relate to audiences today; I don’t trip on anyone’s color or race.
Even though my mom worked as a domestic housekeeper, she didn’t come home complaining about racial oppression. She didn’t speak with disdain about white folks as devils. And she never planted those notions in my head. She taught me about good and bad people—of every skin color. Again, I fully realize this may not reflect other people’s racial experiences in the United States. Maybe I was the lucky one. I didn’t suffer the indignity of being profiled and harassed by the police. By the same token, because I wasn’t the lawless type, I wasn’t hassled by “the man” to any great extent.
The one thing I most regret in life is not having grown up in a larger, more traditional household. Today, when I look at my children and grandkids, I see the broad network of support they enjoy from having a mother and father, brothers and sisters, grandmothers and grandfathers plus cousins, uncles, nieces, and nephews encouraging them to accomplish their goals in life. I didn’t get the kind of encouragement, attention, or personal sustenance I needed, having only a mother and a sister. While my mother nurtured me in terms of achieving success, most of the time she wasn’t able to attend my shows or live performances. She was too busy working, putting food on our table. As a result, we rarely shared the glory of my ear
ly musical achievements.
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My early life as a professional musician threw me headfirst into the adult world, and my sexuality came alive. I wasted little time: I fraternized with the older female customers who often hung around in the bars after shows, to the point where my friends began to call me out on my “slutty” behavior. I once got sexually involved with a tall, thin older woman my friends jokingly called Sergeant Sam. There was also a white woman whom I had eyes for and used to see on the side. I found it strange: While the giddy junior high and high school girls I went to school with eyed the cute athletic boys on the football and basketball teams, I was ensconced in the clubs, hanging out and getting it on with horny, freewheeling older women. Although I was part of the public-school social scene at Cole Junior High and Manual High, I wasn’t the type of flashy, colorful dresser that most of the girls were interested in. The cute, curly-headed schoolgirls I fancied wouldn’t pay attention to me because, in their eyes, I was too skinny and dark-skinned, and I dressed down in shades of black and brown.
Looking back, playing around with older women wasn’t the most ideal situation for me, especially as a young teenager just getting initiated into the world of sex and intimacy. Playing in bars and nightclubs, I was the one who was ripe for the picking, not the women. I learned later that during a young person’s sexual awakening, there needs to be a high level of emotional maturity and intelligence that precedes intimacy and physical attraction.
I guess most guys would say, “Wow! You lucky dog! What’s wrong with all that female action?” But when a young man starts thinking, as they say, with the little head instead of the big one, problems eventually appear on the horizon. Scoring women at such a young age, I was giving up the power of my sexuality—and not the other way around! (Later on, I would write one of my very best songs, “Reasons,” which tackled that very subject.)
As I would learn, my lack of sexual maturity created an emotional imbalance that was difficult—but not impossible—to repair later on in life. I found that sexuality plays such an inestimably strong part in establishing our identities and decision-making processes that you can lose your ability early in life to love and to sustain a proper relationship. Then, without realizing that you’re broken, you live out your “brokenness” over and over again in every relationship that follows. (More on that later.)
When I think about the circumstances of my conception, I have to wonder, what were my parents thinking? Were they chasing the sexual act without the relationship? There was a lot of collateral brokenness, pain, regret, guilt, and shame there that would be passed on to me and to my sister.
I grew up with my mother and sister, and I did have plenty of close female friends. I thought I understood women simply because I was around them so much. I would listen to them talk and foolishly think that I understood them!
What I should have learned as a young man but didn’t, was that the sexual act is a demonstration of love and relationship. Instead I’d be chasing the thrill of the sexual act, mistaking it for true love and a meaningful relationship, when it’s neither. Later on I would come to understand that once you act out sexually before establishing a loving relationship, you end up chasing your tail for a very long time.
Now, somebody say amen!
4
THE FREE SPIRIT
I met my first wife, Janet Don Hooks, way back in the fourth grade when I first played the snare drum in the color guard that brought out the flag at Columbine Elementary School. Janet was a year behind me. I threw newspapers on her block during the winter. She and her sister would run out of the house and empty my papers onto the ground in the snow. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend at the time, but we both went to the same church and shared the same teachers in school. My mother was acquainted with Janet’s mother and father, and Janet and my mother and sister would play a little bingo-type game at our house for pennies and nickels. When my mother worked late, Janet and I would have parties at my house. We ditched school together, much to the ire of Janet’s parents. One night when my mother was out of town, we took the car out during one of our party runs and broke the key inside the ignition. Later we had to scramble to fix it before my mother got home and threw a fit.
Janet liked to be different. She cut and styled my locks and braided my hair. We were good “hanging out” buddies because Janet wasn’t possessive about my fraternizing with the various women I saw in the clubs at night. Later on, when I was in high school, she began dating a handsome saxophone player named John, who was in the school band. I remember telling John to back off because I really liked her and that we were now more than just buddies. So she and I started seeing each other, and soon we had a serious relationship going while I was a senior and Janet was in the eleventh grade.
In 1968 Janet became more outspoken than most of the high school girls I knew. What got me interested in her as a girlfriend was her big Afro and her nice round booty ass. She was one of the first girls in school to wear her hair in a big proud Afro. Janet spoke her mind and followed me and my music instead of hanging out with the usual high school crowd. Janet watched me play tympani and other percussion instruments in the large All-State orchestras and sing in various gospel choirs.
Janet loved to head down to the nightclubs and hang around with me when I played. She was also a good seamstress and sewed crushed-velvet stage costumes for me to perform in. At the end of the night, after the last set, she would help me break down my equipment and load up my car. Janet and Larry Dunn were my two closest pals at the time. We were “the three stair steps”: me the senior in high school, Janet a junior, and Larry the sophomore.
The year Janet graduated from high school, I got her pregnant. Her mom didn’t like the fact that I was a working musician, and hated that Janet and I were so close. One day she took me aside and said, “Philip, you either have to marry Janet or stay away from her.” In my heart I felt I owed it to Janet because she had been loyal to me. So I asked her father for her hand in marriage, and he approved.
I was initially attracted to Janet’s free spirit. She was into going out to the clubs at night, sneaking out and misbehaving along with me and the other musicians. She had a bohemian streak about her, though neither she nor I knew at the time what the heck that word meant. She was content in her role as my high school girlfriend, and in having the fella that the other nightclub girls coveted. Yet she also longed one day to be married, have children, and live in a big house with a nice white picket fence out front, just like any traditional young woman at that time.
Janet and I were wed on June 19, 1970—Juneteenth, which was also Larry Dunn’s birthday. (Juneteenth is also known as Freedom Day, an American holiday celebrated by African Americans in more than forty states, commemorating the abolition of slavery in Texas in 1865.) I was nineteen when we tied the marriage knot. I admit that I married Janet with only halfhearted intentions of being faithful. Why? Because fidelity and faithfulness were not major components of my upbringing, and weren’t the norm where I grew up. My mother had several men, and most of her girlfriends enjoyed numerous casual relationships with guys, too. By nineteen, I was already well initiated into casual sex.
The year after I graduated from high school I was accepted to Metropolitan State College to study classical music. I started classes there in the fall of 1969 while moonlighting as a musician. At one point I tried to contact my father, Eddie Bailey, to see if he could help me qualify for student financial aid based on the fact that he had served so long in the military, but my attempts to reunite and communicate with him were unsuccessful.
Janet graduated from high school on June 12, 1970—the week before we were married—and received a scholarship to attend the University of Colorado in Boulder. When she showed up that summer to register for fall classes, they placed her in the married family housing section. As a result, I spent more and more time at her school in Boulder until I briefly transferred there to star
t my second year of college. During that time my band, the Mystic Moods, played a slew of dates at the Hornbook, as we booked more gigs outside of Denver in order to be close to the Boulder area.
But Janet and I lasted less than one year at the University of Colorado. I left college after four semesters; I realized I no longer had ambitions to become a full-time classical musician. Although I loved classical music, I didn’t see myself playing it exclusively. Soon I was offered a job to play in Kansas City, Kansas, at a brand-new nightclub called the Fifty-Yard Line—so named because the owner was a former NFL star who had played with the Kansas City Chiefs. My good buddy Larry had recently married his girlfriend, Debbie, so the four of us decided to relocate to Kansas City together.
Our time away from Colorado would last only about a year. We moved back to the Denver area in 1970 after Janet’s uncle hired us to work at his cleaning service, which renovated old houses and turned them into office spaces. We took the job because it would allow us to work around my busy music schedule.
My last band in Colorado was a mixed group called Friends & Love. We had originally called ourselves Electric Black and performed mostly cover material but when we changed our name to Friends & Love, we played less R&B and added more of a contemporary Sly Stone/rock/pop feel to our repertoire. Friends & Love was a large ensemble with three frontline vocalists, including me on vocals and percussion. The other singers were Carl Carwell and Winston Ford. Larry played organ alongside a smoking rhythm section, and we later hired two white guys to play saxophone and guitar. In addition to R&B and jazz, we were influenced by the acid rock of the day as well as by progressive black musicians like bluesman Taj Mahal and contemporary jazz singer and poet Gil Scott-Heron. While I didn’t consider myself to be the leader of Friends & Love, I was in charge of making sure the band rehearsed often. Janet liked it that I could put an interesting spin on our song arrangements so that they wouldn’t sound like the original recordings, but more like our own material.
Shining Star: Braving the Elements of Earth, Wind & Fire Page 4
