At first my group’s lineup was me, Charles Davis, Herbie Jenkins, Robert Lambert, Gene Boykins, and Gene Carlos. That was the first group of singers who stood still long enough to have pictures taken. Back then, the first thing you did after you got a group together was to name it. There weren’t endless options, really: vocal groups were, for the most part, named after birds, cars, and cigarettes. I picked cigarettes, even though I didn’t smoke. He caught me smoking cigarettes once when I was about eight, and he made me smoke a whole pack of Camels, which cured my taste for them immediately. The same thing happened with alcohol: I tried it when I was ten or eleven and my father made me drink a pint of Wild Turkey to prove a point, which got me sick enough to require a hospital visit. Still, I thought cigarettes were cool as a symbol, a little dangerous, a little adult, and Parliament was a big brand, so we became the Parliaments. Personnel shifted around a bit in that first year or two—some guys went out, other guys came in—but pretty soon we had a more stable lineup: me, Calvin Simon, Grady Thomas, Fuzzy Haskins, and Ray Davis. Each of us had a distinctive style, sometimes in imitation of people who were famous then, sometimes in anticipation of people who would be famous later. I went for a Smokey Robinson thing, with maybe a little bit of Pookie Hudson thrown in there. Fuzzy, who was second lead, was a soulful tenor with all the bluesy inflections, like Wilson Pickett, real rough. Calvin was like David Ruffin. Grady held down the low-middle notes. And Ray had the deepest voice, the bass baritone.
We started singing more seriously in and around the area, and that attracted the attention of some of the more established groups nearby. One was the Monotones: they’re most famous for “Book of Love,” which would become a huge national hit in 1958. At first they were led by the Patrick brothers, Charles and James, though when James left the group early on, Charles became the leader. This was a few years before “Book of Love,” but people in the neighborhood were already buzzing about them. In 1956, they were on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, where they won first place singing one of the Cadillacs’ songs. The Parliaments, my group, had enough local juice that we were invited to go over to the studio where they recorded and cut a single, with a song called “Poor Willie” on one side and “Party Boys” on the other. I cowrote them both, though by “writing” I only mean that we made them up. There wasn’t any actual recording of songs with a paper and a pen. We didn’t mark up sheet music or even really commit lyrics to paper. We weren’t formally trained that way. It was mostly singing what you knew, making up songs about sex and girls and nonsense comedy chants modeled after bands like the Coasters. We had two-part harmonies because there was only one dude among us who really knew the technique of harmonizing: we were just a bass singer and a bunch of other guys crowding around the same note. But what we lacked in musical sophistication, we made up for in showmanship and enthusiasm. As time went on, we became one of the hot groups in the neighborhood.
Pretty quickly, that spelled an end to high school. I got a few months into twelfth grade, and that was that. Much of the problem was that I was obsessed with music: absolutely positive that I wanted to commit my life to it, and that didn’t leave much room for making sense of schoolbooks and assignments. I could do the schoolwork, but the work wasn’t doing anything for me. I had one teacher who saw that I was bright enough, but she also saw that my determination to be a singer was larger than my interest in anything else. She covered for me for a little while, but by twelfth grade that plan was starting to slip a little bit. Another factor was Carol—not the Chuck Berry song, but Carol Hall. My first day at Clinton Place, the Parliaments were asked to sing over the PA system. We got together in our matching blue sweaters, sang during announcements, and were immediately school-wide celebrities. We had fans, and Carol Hall was one of those fans, a cute high school girl who thought I was cute, too. Soon enough, we were going together pretty seriously, and by the start of my senior year of high school, we had Donna, a daughter. By the end of that year, there would be a son, too, George III. I was a young man but suddenly an old man in some sense, too, starting my life as a father at the same time that I was starting my career in the music business.
Being a neighborhood hotshot was great, but it wasn’t the only thing, at least not with New York City nearby. New York was the epicenter of the world music business: it had the Brill Building sound. Not just the Brill Building itself—which was on Broadway and Forty-Ninth and housed more than 150 music-publishing companies—but the other buildings in midtown, one at Fiftieth and one at Fifty-Third. If a popular song came out, there was a good chance that it started along that stretch of Broadway. Don Kirshner came from that scene; he ran Aldon Music, which had some of the best songwriters in the country, from Carole King to Neil Sedaka to Neil Diamond. One of my other favorites was Leiber and Stoller, who had brought out so many singles with the Coasters. I started traveling into the city in the late fifties to work as a music writer for Colpix, which was the Columbia Pictures–Screen Gems record label—the Col came from Columbia, and the pix from Pictures. One of the groups I worked with was the Jewels, three girls who had been called the Impalas. Later on they were the Four Jewels, and they ended up singing backup for James Brown.
I paid attention to the songs I was writing, but I also paid attention to the songs other people were writing, and not just as melodies and lyrics. I was also fascinated by the way the songs were marketed. You can say that’s a P. T. Barnum thing, that it’s in the tradition of great showmen and promoters, but to me it was a music thing, also. Take Phil Spector, for instance. He did this trick where he would buy up full-page ads in the music magazines, Billboard and Cashbox. That was $2,000 a page, or something like that, which was big money then, so you knew that any record man who bought a full-page ad was serious about his records. But it was what he did with the pages that knocked me out. He left them blank, except for a tiny dot in the middle. That’s all there was one week: the tiny dot and then his Philles Records logo at the bottom. Then the next week the dot would get bigger, and the week after that, bigger again: same time, same station, like the slowest cartoon in the world. Eventually it would reveal itself as the new record he was releasing. That took foresight and it took money and it took a huge amount of self-confidence, creativity, and balls. To me the marketing concept was as important as the music itself. Later on, I would hear things about him that cemented his legend, like how he would find ten drummers for one song, use them all, pay them all, and then go back and listen to the tapes and figure out who sounded the best that day. I was also a huge fan of Richard Barrett, who was one of the original black music impresarios. He started out as a singer, Richie Barrett, and his biggest hit, which he wrote with Leiber and Stoller, was “Some Other Guy.” The song was a trailblazer, in a way, because he put electric piano on it about three years before anyone else did. The Beatles used to play it live. Barrett discovered everyone from Frankie Lymon to Little Anthony and the Imperials to the Valentines. In the late fifties, he went on to work with the Chantels. They were one of the first black girl groups—they did songs like “She’s Gone” and “Maybe”—and as a producer, he got a certain sound with them that was unbelievable. My ears perked right up when I heard his records. I knew he was doing something unique.
Another big influence on me, at least in terms of understanding how people responded to music, was mambo, both the music and the dance. Back in the fifties, mambo was like our disco. Everybody got dressed up, really suited, for the mambo scene. Just like on the dance competitions they have on television now, ordinary people became celebrities by showing how they could move on the floor. Mambo was the universal language. Mambo would stop a gang fight. A hot girl who could dance could go across gang lines to get herself a dance partner. The gangs would call a temporary truce, letting this kind of thing happen, when they went to the gym to dance mambo. One of my unrealized ambitions, in fact, is to record Tito Puente’s “Coco Seco,” a great song by one of the giants of the genre. I wouldn’t do anything strange or experimental w
ith it. I’d do it in straightforward-cover style, just sing the hell out of it.
Watching the city, listening to everything, showing up at the Brill Building: that was my university education. At one point in the early sixties, there was a rumor that Elvis was coming in to pick a new song. He was back from the army and looking for a hit. Otis Blackwell was around the building. Already famous for “Fever,” which Peggy Lee recorded, he had also written some huge songs for Elvis, “Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up.” By the time Elvis was coming back from the army, though, Otis Blackwell wasn’t in the best shape. He was known to drink a bit. He was down and out and then some. Someone close to him, maybe Winfield Scott, his songwriting partner, got him all cleaned up, poured him into a new suit, and got him to the conference room where all the songwriting teams were lined up, waiting to present to Elvis. Otis went first, and he sang a little bit of the song he had brought: “I gave a letter to the postman, he put it in his sack / Bright and early next morning, he brought my letter back.” That was “Return to Sender,” and Elvis or Colonel Tom Parker nodded, and all the other songwriting teams just closed up their folders and went home.
I liked that idea, making songs that would make everyone else put their folders away. And I was watching with keen interest what was happening out at Motown in Detroit. That’s when I made the switch in my mind from singer to songwriter. Through the late fifties and early sixties, I was still trying everything I could: writing for others, trying to put out singles myself, learning my craft. We had songs like “Lonely Island” and “Cry.” At that time I was trying all kinds of stuff. I was singing bass and baritone. I thought “Poor Willie” might have been a hit, because it’s the kind of thing the Coasters were doing so successfully at the time. And one of the sessions we did was with the Elegants, who recorded “Little Star,” which ended up being a huge success. But as close as we came back then, we missed every time. I wonder sometimes what would have happened if we had recorded a song that really took off back in the early sixties. Would I have kept learning the things I did, staying at the edges of the music business, soaking up all I could and trying to subvert the formula? Or would I have just rested on those early laurels? It’s hard to say. I was pretty persistent and stubborn about making my way through the music world. It might not have made a difference. But I know for certain that the way things went kept me focused on a goal that was always a little bit out of my reach.
Music may have been my passion then, but passion wasn’t paying, especially since I had a young family to support. I already felt like it was make or break, and I was mostly broke. I had holes in the holes in my shoes. Then the hula-hoop factory came to town.
Sometime that year, two guys out in California, Richard Knerr and Arthur Melin, had an idea. Well, they weren’t just two guys. They were the founders of the Wham-O company, which had launched back in the late forties making slingshots out of ash wood. The company got its name from the slingshots, from the sound of the shot hitting the target. Anyway, after about ten years, slingshots no longer paid the bills, and they began looking for a new product. One night, at a dinner party, a man from Australia told Knerr, or maybe Melin, about an Australian game where kids twirled bamboo hoops around their waists for exercise. That sounded to the Wham-O guys like something that might work well for American kids, also. The company had recently started using a new plastic called Marlex, and soon enough they had figured out a way to make these big, brightly colored hoops. Kids would stand inside the hoops and keep them up by swinging their hips. It doesn’t sound like much, but it took off like a rocket. More than four million hoops were sold in four months. The toy became a bona fide phenomenon, a bigger deal, for a little while, than anything else, even rock and roll. Wham-O needed factories to make these hoops, and they needed them quick, and so in 1959, a manufacturing facility went up near me in Jersey almost overnight.
A little earlier I had been in a gang called the Outlaws—when I say “gang,” I mean a group of guys to run with and not much more than that—and all of us went to the factory and got jobs. But the company was so far behind in meeting the demand for this craze, and so out of its depth, that it didn’t organize the labor force to make new hoops. As luck would have it, the Outlaws discovered a way to make the hoops, and to make them fast. We figured out that the process of putting the hoops together would be great fun for kids who were six, eight years old, and we employed them. The hoops were fashioned from these long strips of plastic. You took one end and then the other, and then you made them meet in the middle, and voilà! A hoop! The kids had so much fun making the hoops that the Outlaws would just punch in for our shifts, leave the kids alone to do the work, and come back later. We had so many kids out at the factory that we started to overproduce hoops. We needed to rent a second warehouse just to capture what we were doing. At that point, the union caught wind of what we were doing and came around to shut down our Children’s Crusade. We chased the union out, too. We weren’t interested in being regulated. A few older union guys stayed behind to do the staples on the hoops, which they thought were unsafe for the kids, but otherwise the Outlaw children’s hula-hoop factory worked like a charm.
Hula hoops saved me for a while, at least financially, but then they ran their course, like any other fad. Soon enough Wham-O shipped that shit off to Frankfurt, Germany, and then I needed work again. Someone from the factory found me another job unpacking tools, and I tried that for a minute, but that was about fifty-five seconds too long. That job wasn’t going to work. I needed a new source of income quick, and so I started spending more of my time doing what I had been doing a little bit of already: barbershop work. And not the quartet-harmony version, either. This was the sweeping-the-floor, locking-up-for-the-boss, learning-a-little-of-the-trade version. The shop was called the Uptown Tonsorial Palace, which was a fancy name for a not-very-fancy place in Newark. I could make three or four hundred a week, which was more than you could make at most other kinds of jobs. I was good on a couple of hairstyles. The Quo Vadis was one of my specialties—close, high, and tight.
In 1960, I decided that I’d had enough of Newark. I was married at that point, with three kids, and I needed every bit of money I could get my hands on. There was more opportunity in Plainfield, about a half hour southwest, so that’s where I went to work. The barbershop had a mix of older barbers who had lots of experience and younger barbers who were hungry to make the business work. About the only thing wrong with it was the owner, George White, who was dumb with money and made no sense in general. He used to chase younger girls and had several other nasty behaviors.
I was very industrious—I hit the ground in Plainfield running—and soon after I got there, Mr. White died. Since I had the most customers, I found a way to take over a share of the shop. The rest of the barbers paid me to use their chairs and I took twenty-five cents from every dollar they made. I renamed it the Silk Palace, made it a nice place with drapes and an elegant feel. We had a real running barbershop, chairs going all the time, shelves with product: Wildroot Cream Oil, Dixie Peach, all other kinds of hair grease. Later on, in a Parliament song called “New Doo Review,” I mentioned Brylcreem, but that isn’t something we would have had too much call for. That’s a product that white kids would have used, not us.
Everybody who came to our barbershop wanted their hair straightened. We did a great deal of processing, which was the big thing for black hair in those days. Singers wanted processes, and also pimps and preachers. The older barbers tended to customers who wanted normal haircuts, while the younger barbers did pumps to get pumped up. Nobody around Plainfield kept their hair natural. I remember the first time I ever saw real natural hair. It was a little later, maybe 1960. My friend Ernie Harris and I were going to a meeting in New York City, and we were walking around midtown. On the sidewalk, we saw a woman with her hair all nappy and natural. We started laughing at her. Ernie probably said something. I don’t know if we were coming from a barber’s point of view or if that was just a
natural reaction given the styles of the times. We had never seen anybody sporting hair like that, and certainly nobody doing so and feeling proud about it. And then damned if we didn’t end up in the same office with that woman at CBS later that day, and damned if it wasn’t Miriam Makeba, the South African singer, who had just had a hit with “The Click Song.” Ernie almost never got embarrassed, but that time he did. She was real cool, though, real articulate about her choices, and clear about the differences between Africans and Americans, especially when it came to hairstyles.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 2
