The shows out on the road were less disastrous. We played ski lodges and teenage fairs and those kinds of venues, American Bandstand stuff, mostly in the Midwest. The record company made sure that we had a few thousand dollars to get us from one gig to the next, and that was the extent of the tour support. Mitch Ryder was on one bill with us. Ted Nugent was on another, with the Amboy Dukes. When we did those teen shows, we mostly just played the hit. When we had a second song, we knew better than to try for “7-Rooms of Gloom.” We moved on to Eddie Floyd’s “Knock on Wood,” which had the same kind of pocket as “Testify.” Stax was moving into a pop area that coincided with a new European brand of R&B. It was another shift in the landscape, but one where we could stand where we wanted without losing our balance.
After six hard months of package tours with a motley combination of backing players, I realized it was time to put together a real touring band. Luckily, we had the beginnings of one right in the barbershop.
Billy was the nucleus, but only in the sense that he was central to the overall project. He wasn’t much of a musician back then. He could play “Testify” and he could play “Knock on Wood” and nothing much else: he wasn’t a guitar player, really, and he hadn’t started playing bass at all. But he started to have ideas about who we might add to the band. He had a friend who he mentioned with some regularity; as it turned out, one of the older barbers also knew him, because he was a boarder in the boy’s mother’s house. “Yeah,” the barber said. “Eddie Hazel.” Both of them kept telling me that Eddie was something on guitar, and that I needed to check him out, but I was always traveling, or in town and too busy. Finally, after “Testify,” the demand was there, and so I supplied the time. One afternoon a shy teenager came by the barbershop and took his guitar out of the case carefully. We asked him to play, because it seemed like that’s what he wanted to do. And he played. Man, did he ever play. When he was done, Ernie Harris flicked his glance over to me and said, “This is the guy.” For rhythm guitar, we got another local teenager, Lucius Ross, who everyone called Tawl. We passed through a series of drummers before settling on Tiki Fulwood, the pride of Philadelphia, who also came in through Billy and Eddie.
Revilot wanted a follow-up to “Testify” almost immediately, and so we started kicking around ideas. We used to clown popular sayings, things from advertisements, and there was a big campaign then by Hertz, the rental car company: Let Hertz put you in the driver’s seat. We were driving once, and we heard that ad on the radio, and Fuzzy turned to me and said, “Let hurt put you in the loser’s seat.” He said it offhandedly, but it sank in, and the next day I went and wrote out lyrics. I had the Smokey role, playing on words until the play was the thing. And so that was the next song, “All Your Goodies Are Gone (The Loser’s Seat).” We cut it in Detroit, in United Sound, and again it split the difference between the Motown sound and Dylanesque vocals. Billy played on that, along with Eddie, who made the trip out, and there were session musicians, too. I wrote a B-side with Pat Lewis and Grady Thomas called “Don’t Be Sore at Me,” a song that years later became a Northern Soul favorite. Revilot rushed out the “Goodies” single and waited for the charts to embrace us once again.
We waited, and waited some more. Regionally, “Goodies” did fine. But the thrill was, if not gone, muted. CKLW didn’t add the song as quickly—LeBaron had lost some of his juice with the station—and nothing else came as easily, either. Part of the problem, maybe, was the song itself. It had a little more R&B flavor in it than “Testify,” which had appealed to black and white audiences equally. The racial neutrality of “Testify” was in the tradition of Motown: if you don’t pick a side, you can go anywhere. “Goodies” traveled less easily. But part of it was just the cosmic comedy of it all. When you first get a hit record, you think that it’s going to happen all the time. You never think in any deep way about the chemistry—or the chaos theory—of what makes a record move. “Testify” combined certain things that had never been combined before, in perfect proportions. Everyone was in the right place to get it played. A spark appeared and caught fire. It happened because it happened. “Goodies,” while not a failure, didn’t repeat the performance. On the other hand, it got added into the set list for our concerts immediately. We had two songs, which was at least twice as good as one. I was watching us make a name for ourselves. I was hearing our songs on the radio. But I was still listening to the Parliament in my head, and still realizing that the radio version of the band was stuck in a slightly different place, that it sounded like the past rather than the future.
Around that time, after one of our New York shows, a woman we knew named Judy came backstage to talk to us. Judy was the girlfriend and future wife of Bernie Worrell, and she wanted us to know that she had decided that our band was the best place for him. Bernie was from Plainfield, like the rest of us, and in his youth we had heard about him constantly, from almost everyone: how he was a local Mozart who wrote his first symphony before he was in junior high school, how he could do anything from Ray Charles to classical music. Once, he had played a show with us over at the Washington Street School. We sang doo-wop and he sat in. He was amazing, but my memory of his participation in that show is overshadowed a little bit by my memory of how Ron Ford, one of my best friends, started throwing change at the stage, priming the pump, and then everyone started pitching dimes and quarters. We must have made an extra ten dollars in change.
Soon after the Washington Street School show, Bernie came in to the shop to get his hair done. It’s a good thing he did, because he needed something for it, bad. You know how a baby elephant has a little tuft on the top of his head? Bernie was like that, and that’s what we called him: Baby Elephant. We straightened his hair for him, with extreme effort, and he went off happy. It wasn’t but a day before his mama whipped his ass, though, and it wasn’t but another day that she came down to the shop to whip mine. She was sixty years old at the absolute very least, and she couldn’t walk too good, but she got up on those old pins of hers and tried to beat me down for fucking with her son’s hair. I think there was an issue, too, of pulling him away from the music that she wanted for him. Bernie was a musical genius. Everyone could tell that within seconds. And since his mama had spent all that money on formal training, she was going to be damned before she would let her beautiful talented boy end up with us: lowlifes, ne’er-do-wells, no-accounts. Also, she didn’t like me because her husband’s name was George and he wasn’t a person for whom she had the fondest feeling. In fact, it was Bernie’s name, too: he was George Bernard, but he only ever went by Bernie. Years after his mama tried to beat me, Bernie left Plainfield for advanced education, including at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, and as soon as he graduated from there he went out on the road with the R&B singer Maxine Brown and also with a band called Chubby and the Turnpikes. They went on to be the soul and disco band Tavares, though their drummer, Joey Kramer, went on to play in Aerosmith.
At the Apollo, Bernie expressed interest in joining up, which was enough of an audition for me. His arrival changed the whole mix, musically. Though his mother may have been unhappy to see him squander his talents, his piano teacher, a German lady, was thrilled that he was playing with us. She saw clear to a way where he could incorporate his formal training into something more contemporary—it was already a vibrant idea in Europe, to reintroduce elements of classical and jazz music into rock and roll. Our first rehearsals with Bernie confirmed her suspicions, and mine. We were the funkiest thing around, in ways that no one had ever really heard before.
We took the band around the country, playing our handful of originals along with some covers. With Bernie we could paint with more colors, mix together soul and rock and even a little bit of gospel. And we were starting to develop a stage presence that reflected that eclectic, edge-of-the-world sound. We used to laugh at Calvin, who wouldn’t do anything but stand in the corner—he had been to Vietnam and was a little shell-shocked, though even without that he wasn’t the kind of
person to court attention—but even that became part of the act.
We were in Kansas City, in St. Louis, in Cleveland, in Chicago, in Toronto. The label bought us two Cadillac Eldorados and we tried to cram into them. At one point, we let Hertz put us in the driver’s seat, and we rented a station wagon that we never exactly returned. We just kept it for six months until it stopped working. There were no credit cards, no deposits. What were they going to do? The second time around the circuit, we saw new faces along with the old, a sure mark of success. You’re either adding audience or you’re losing audience.
In movies about music groups on the rise, they’re always held together by a common objective, brothers united against the impersonal world. We had that, but we had the other scenes, too, the ones of petty annoyances and road squabbling. Mostly they were because of Billy, who was a huge pain in the ass in the car. I never drove—I still don’t have a license—so most of the time I was in charge of reading the map and planning the route. I’d do that down to the last little state highway, and then I’d go to sleep and wake up on a road that I was damn sure had not been part of my original schematic. Slowly I’d become aware of Billy lecturing the driver about this shortcut or that one. He always thought he had found a quicker way, never mind if it was a road that had been shut down for construction or a dirt road that ran through the property of Pentecostal snake handlers. Once we were in Pennsylvania and he thought he had a shortcut through to Ohio. We ran a roadblock, went about a mile along the road, and came out into a small town where we saw all these fucking creatures walking around, zombies or mummies, hands up in the air and dead looks on their faces. We were scared out of our fucking minds until we saw the movie lights. We didn’t know what movie until about a year later, when Night of the Living Dead showed up in theaters. Not every shortcut was that memorable. Sometimes we’d just get lost. Billy was brilliant, always brilliant, but he had a hell of a time learning to use his brains responsibly: he had short-man attitude plus a big fucking mouth to go along with his big brain. Fuzzy and Grady just couldn’t take it. They were about ready to kick his ass at any time of day or night.
If Billy occupied one end of the pain-in-the-ass spectrum, Eddie was at the other extreme. He had been sheltered by his mother, and he was real sensitive and shy. You could misuse him so easily, but he could misuse you as well. He would try to play you with his sweetness, usually to pull your girls away from you on the road—if you were bringing a girl from a show back to the hotel, you couldn’t go near his room, or he’d steal them right out from under you. He was only sixteen when he started, but girls of all ages would just fall out the windows for him. They loved him, and once he picked up the guitar, guys did, too. My mother used to call him Old Crying Eddie; when he put his hands on his instrument, he was able to produce a deeply sad and introspective tone. He had learned that from his grandmother, who played an acoustic with three or four strings but could still make it sound like it had six. Those early touring days were like high school on the road. I took it upon myself to expose the band to all the new records that were changing the way that I thought about things. That was the first flowering of psychedelic rock, from the pop of the Beatles up to the molten lava of Cream, and though we weren’t there quite yet as a band, I knew that was the direction we were heading.
We were doing fine, in the sense that we could get on stages and people would yell for our songs, or more specifically, our song, but I knew that we were in a narrow window of success, and that it was only a matter of time before it shut. It had taken us ten years to get our first record out, a full decade to get a hit, and the music world was evolving faster than anyone knew. At one show, I was outside the club, waiting for the rest of the band to arrive, and I heard an older woman talking to her husband. “There ain’t nothing but a guitarist, a drummer, and an old fool,” she said, “but they’re pretty good.” An old fool? We needed an infusion of new energy, a reinvention, and soon.
Part of the new blood came from north of the border. CKLW, the radio station that initially broke “Testify,” was in Canada, and so we had a pretty strong following up there. We played clubs like the Hawk’s Nest, which was co-owned by Ronnie Hawkins, the rockabilly singer who had been the original front man for the Hawks, who backed Bob Dylan on his first electric tour and went on to become the Band. Ronnie’s partner in the place was a guy named Ron Scribner, who ran a local agency that managed the Guess Who, the Stoned Soul Children, and various session players who would become part of the Detroit rock scene, whether with the MC5 or Alice Cooper. We met Ron one of the first times we played up in Canada and developed a strong relationship with him.
At that time, there was a second wave of Plainfield musicians, Garry Shider and Cordell Mosson, that I wanted to launch as a spinoff band. We called them United Soul, which was a play on United Sound, the studio in Detroit where we did some of our recording. Garry was a great guitarist and singer, one of the most solidly spectacular figures in the whole organization, and Cordell, whose nickname was Boogie, was a hell of a bassist. We cut some tracks with them, but we needed a fertile place for them to play and evolve—and, just as important, a safe place for them to escape a drug and crime scene in Plainfield that was getting worse by the minute. So during one of those early tours, we took Garry and Boogie up there and set them up as United Soul. We got them the same gigs we had. They looked just like us, sounded just like us. It was like a franchise. And Toronto was right on it. They were one of the first cities to buy into the idea entirely. It was a whole other world up there, and one that I really liked. The racial relationship was cooler. They were more relaxed, not just in terms of black and white issues, but in general. There were lots of hippies, lots of open thinking. In fact, the draw was so strong that within a few years I decided to move up there myself.
That first stretch with the band was exhilarating, but it was difficult, and the difficulty was compounded by the fact that some of them were on smack. The older guys never touched the stuff. We associated it with jazz music and the writer Nelson Algren, with that period in Plainfield’s history when the track team nodded off at the starting blocks. To us, it was corny shit. We smoked weed and if anyone had the money we might do a line of coke. But the young musicians had a different context for it. They saw soldiers coming back from Vietnam with needles in their arms. It was part of their generation and they participated fully.
Though the older guys weren’t doing junk, they took advantage of younger thinking in other ways. When we toured, we took full advantage of the blossoming of free love, and some of the drugs that went along with it. The intensity of the experience varied from place to place, but Boston was one of my favorites in those days. It turned us out. We always had girls riding with us, and they always brought along every class of freak. We called those shows “Pimps, hos, and hippies,” because that’s what they were, and the groups converged in these wild after-show parties, orgies up the yin-yang. The girls took us out to Cape Cod, where people fucked on the beach and got high. But Boston wasn’t all debauchery. Another time, we did a kids’ performance on a flatbed truck: little kids, three years old and younger, watching Parliament in all its glory.
Boston was also our introduction to three important letters: L-S-D. At the time Timothy Leary was big on the scene, preaching his tune-in, turn-on, drop-out gospel, and at first acid was just a spectator sport for us. Then, once in Boston, I saw Billy Bass drop acid. He was always a mean little ass, severely severe in every way possible. So when I saw him with a tab of acid and then, a few minutes later, smiling and having fun, I couldn’t believe it. Fuzzy was beaming also, which was almost as rare—he was a clown but he never let himself relax. Acid seemed like a miracle mood modifier, easy travel to other regions of your personality. The next day we went over to Harvard Square and all of us took some. That was a Noah’s Ark day, rain so hard you couldn’t even see your hand in front of your face, and the gutters were filling up with water, making little rivers in the street. We dropped acid and
stood looking at the rain: sometimes it seemed to slow down, sometimes each individual drop came into perfect, sharp focus. And then, all of a sudden, everyone started taking off their clothes and wading in the rivers the streets had become. There were students, but there were faculty members, too. There were couples and there were single girls. There were fat people and skinny people and every other kind: older white women naked there in the water, with polka-dot freckles on their titties, and dozens of cute little girls getting bare-ass naked. Everyone was in the water, flopping around like fish, just feeling it.
Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir Page 6
