Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  My father spent a lot of time hanging out near the Turf while in the city, and he heard the songwriters gripe about their travails. Race didn’t seem to matter there; black or white, they all got the same lousy deal—twenty-five dollars a song. For writers on a hot streak, like Ellie Greenwich, who cowrote early ’60s blockbusters like “Chapel of Love” and “Leader of the Pack,” the Brill Building publishers might raise the price to fifty or one hundred dollars—a pittance compared to the millions they raked in.

  From his experiences near the Brill Building, my father learned that having a hit record meant little without owning the publishing rights. With publishing, Dad saw another way to gain the control over his life and finances his mother never had. “I believed very early in life that it was important to own as much of yourself as possible,” he said. “I think that came from my insecurities as a child, coming up as a poor young student from a family that was poor.” He’d repeat that phrase like a refrain throughout his life—own yourself, own yourself, own yourself. It was perhaps the most important lesson his childhood and his experience in the music business had taught him. If you owned yourself, you could control your fate. If not, all the hits in the world couldn’t stop some record company from taking your money and leaving you in the lurch when your career dried up.

  After fighting with Carter and Abner at Vee-Jay and learning how the music business scammed naive artists, my father knew he’d rather have fifty percent of something than one hundred percent of nothing. He said, “Publishers were hitting the lottery off of people’s material. Of course, what was considered black money was a Cadillac and $2,500 in fives, tens, and twenties. Nigger rich. When I started recording, I saw very few people who owned themselves.” In fact, when my father started recording in 1958, no Negro artist did. Sam Cooke became among the first to change that, starting his own label, SAR, in 1961. Though he used SAR exclusively to record other artists, he also founded a publishing company to control royalties from his work on RCA Victor.

  Already one of Dad’s heroes in music, Cooke became his hero in business, too. At eighteen years old, Dad followed in Cooke’s footsteps and founded his own publishing company. He called it Curtom, underscoring how close he and Eddie had become. He always called Eddie “Tom,” a shortening of Eddie’s last name, and Eddie called him “Curt.” Curtom seemed a natural fit.

  At the same time, my father diversified his interests, buying into Queen Booking with Jerry. Queen booked some of the biggest acts around—they’d eventually work with Gladys Knight, the O’Jays, and Aretha Franklin, among many others—and they made gobs of money. Gobs of money meant Mob involvement in Chicago. Soon, a mobster named Gaetano “Big Guy” Vastola snatched control of the agency and ran it on Mafia principles. Jerry said, “My friends were being intimidated into signing contracts with personal managers and agencies that openly cheated them, and black newcomers were being channeled onto the same chitlin’ circuit treadmill that the older artists had fought so hard to either expand or upgrade.” Once they saw the way things were going down at Queen, my father and Jerry got out almost as fast as they had bought in.

  Queen wasn’t the only factor forcing Negro performers onto the chitlin’ circuit, though. Even with the past decade’s advances, the circuit was still the only consistent gig open to them. They needed it to sustain their careers. My father knew that. He sought to get back to it with “Gypsy Woman.” As Eddie promoted the single on local radio, Curtis called the Impressions to New York to cut a gorgeous ballad called “As Long as You Love Me” for the flip side. The two songs together showed his growing prowess as a writer, singer, and guitarist.

  “As Long as You Love Me” opens with a devastating guitar lick, the kind of lyrical hammer-on and pull-off lick that became my father’s signature sound. That sound accomplishes in a few notes what most guitarists couldn’t with an entire album. Then, the Impressions chime in with soaring five-part harmony, and the song becomes almost as enchanting as “Gypsy Woman.” The chorus repeats the phrase “for your precious love,” perhaps to remind people who the Impressions were in the first place.

  By the time the Impressions finished “As Long as You Love Me,” Eddie had already helped make “Gypsy Woman” a regional smash. ABC had to press thousands of copies to meet the demand, and, as Eddie says, “Once they saw that, they released it on a national level, and ‘Gypsy Woman’ was just solid as a rock.” The single rose to number two on the R&B charts and number twenty pop, roughly equaling the relative positions of “For Your Precious Love.” The Impressions were back.

  Then, Fred got hit with a scare courtesy of the US Army. Since the mid-’50s, the army had been quietly amassing troops in Vietnam to stanch the tide of communism flowing through the Far East. As President Kennedy escalated troop deployment, a few attentive citizens guessed how serious the affair had become. Fred, like many others, did not. In 1961, he received papers to report for an army physical, but he couldn’t have predicted the bloody war brewing or how it would brutalize his generation within a few short years. For the time being, he only worried what the call to duty would mean for his career. “I was scared to death,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to miss out on [the Impressions] again.’” Luckily, the recruiters only chose every other man for active duty, and Fred wound up the odd one out.

  With that scare over, the Impressions watched from Chicago as “Gypsy Woman” sold half a million copies. ABC president Sam Clark offered Eddie a job as a national promotional manager. Now, in addition to the Impressions, Eddie promoted everything from Ray Charles’s Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, to the Tams’ “What Kind of Fool (Do You Think I Am),” to releases by B. B. King, Tommy Roe, and others. ABC also offered the Impressions a five-year contract, which they gladly signed. After years of hustling, grinding out one-nighters, and swallowing their pride, they had a solid footing in the music business for the first time.

  Curtis had little time to spend at home with Helen before leaving on another hectic sprawl across the country. The tour for “Gypsy Woman” played out like any other: more one-nighters, more miles piled in the green wagon, more girls after each show making it easy to forget the wife back home. “Girls were there by the fortress,” Eddie said. “I mean, dozens, and dozens, and dozens, specifically on Curtis.” My father found it impossible to say no, as he would for most of his life.

  On tour they hit the usual places—the Apollo in New York, the Regal in Chicago, the Uptown in Philly, the Howard in DC, the Royal in Baltimore—and Dick Clark featured them twice on American Bandstand. At the Apollo, they performed alongside B. B. King as he made his debut at the hallowed venue. King was so nervous before going on stage, he turned to Fred and said, “Man, you think the people are gonna like me?” Fred replied, “B.B., people are gonna love you here.” The Impressions had seen enough to know the real thing. They were old pros.

  Touring took a lot out of my father. “The country was our neighborhood,” he said. “We were putting on 150,000 miles a year. It was a grind.” Making matters worse, traveling through the South was still dangerous for Negroes, even famous ones. After a show in Jackson, Mississippi, the Impressions steered the green wagon toward a Negro boarding house. Though the speed limit on the road was thirty-five miles per hour, they went a bit slower just to be safe. Soon, lights flashed in their rearview mirror, and a cop pulled them over. “You’re driving too slow. Where are you going, where are you from, and what are doing here?” he demanded. He gave the Impressions a ticket, and the next day, as Eddie recalled, “We went downtown to pay the ticket. Guess how much the ticket was? A dollar! I can’t forget that. All these little petty things they’d do, just things to interrupt you.”

  The Impressions did everything possible to avoid trouble. They registered the green wagon under the company name to forestall white cops from wondering how a bunch of Negroes got such a nice ride. They also learned to fill up on gas early in the day to avoid stopping in dangerous towns after sundown. Nighttime
was long in the South. The Klan burned crosses at night; King’s house was firebombed at night; Emmett Till was murdered at night. It seemed racists found violent courage when the moon was the only witness.

  Even with those precautions, the Impressions crawled cautiously as sheep in a wolf’s den through places like Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. “Oh Lord, it was rough,” Fred said. “We were just scared to death a lot of times.”

  If they managed to avoid trouble with cops, they often ran into it at gigs. “A lot of auditoriums that we played, the people that were running the sound would just be so nasty,” Fred said. “They’d say you got to be out by a certain time. You couldn’t go a minute over that time, because they’d turn the mics off, they’d turn the lights off. I don’t care if you’re in the middle of your song or what.”

  They couldn’t stay in white hotels, so Negro rooming houses became their only oases. Negro artists worked out an impressive network for finding these houses. Backstage on the chitlin’ circuit became gossip central, and groups hung around exhausted from the work but exhilarated from the cheering crowds, talking about money, and girls, and life on the road. When the Impressions heard from their peers of a rooming house with good Southern cooking—greens, black-eyed peas, smothered steak, and all the fixings—they’d check it out and pass the word to the next group they met. In such a way, an entire economy grew in the Negro community based upon housing traveling musicians.

  The rooming houses were often nothing more than spacious private homes. “You had your room, but everybody shared a bathroom,” Fred said. “And it was like your mom cooking in the kitchen, everybody go in there and eat, sit down at the table.” Dinnertime at those houses was quite a scene. Since most artists toured together in package shows and crossed paths with others doing the same thing, it is possible to imagine the Impressions huddled around a table breaking bread and dishing gossip with the Four Tops, Jackie Wilson, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Patti LaBelle, Martha Reeves, James Brown, and others.

  In these boarding houses, Curtis usually stayed to himself in his room—a habit he inherited from his mother and grandmother. “When the fellows would go out to have fun and maybe there’d be parties after the set, they would leave all their wallets with me,” he said, “and I’d sit in my room and live through my own fantasies and write.” He liked to write late at night, sitting on the edge of his bed. Sometimes he’d come up with something special, pad down to Fred or Sam’s room, knock gently on the door and say, “Hey, come listen to this.” Fred would soon hear one of the most important songs the Impressions ever recorded that way.

  Even at home, my father spent a good deal of time alone with his music, either in his den playing guitar or holed up in the studio trying to score another hit. “During those times of my life I was sleeping with my guitar and writing every feeling,” he said.

  Anger, love, everything in my life would come out on paper…. It was even an escape if I was hurt too bad or if something wasn’t going right. I could always retire to writing my sentiments and my personal feelings. A lot of times those songs were mostly for me. I was the one trying to learn the first lesson because I didn’t have the answers. My fights and arguments, even with God, went down on paper. Why, when, what—well, this is how I feel about it.

  As a child, he used to ask those questions of his mother. Now, he asked his guitar.

  Unfortunately, the next songs Curtis wrote for the Impressions failed to even sniff success. The first attempt, a doo-wop-flavored number called “Grow Closer Together,” had a similar rhythmic feel to “Gypsy Woman.” While it featured some choice guitar licks and a warm blanket of backing vocals, it wasn’t perceived to have the brilliance of its predecessor melodically or rhythmically.

  The next effort, 1962’s “Little Young Lover,” failed to impress the pop charts, despite opening with a swinging, driving beat and ending with one of my father’s most breathtaking guitar licks. It peaked at number ninety-nine. Curtis did write two songs that achieved minor success—“Find Another Girl” and “I’m A Telling You”—but he wrote them for Jerry, not the Impressions.

  During this dry streak, the Brooks brothers grew antsy. “Our style was so different than what was really going on,” my father said. “My music and my own personal creations were so dominant. They being from the South, Chattanooga, the people they loved were the Five Royales, the Midnighters, James Brown. [The Impressions] just wasn’t their music.” For the Brooks brothers, the Impressions seemed stuck in the doo-wop age while Brown inched toward funk with songs like “Night Train.” At the same time, Motown blazed a new path of rhythmic pop, releasing smashes like Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike,” the Miracles’ “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” the Marvelettes’ “Beechwood 4-5789,” and dozens of other songs by artists like Little Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, and Eddie Holland (the same Eddie Holland who performed Jackie Wilson’s routine with the Impressions three years before). To Arthur and Richard, it seemed Curtis didn’t have his finger on the pulse of hit music.

  As 1962 wore down, the Impressions cut “I’m the One Who Loves You,” an up-tempo, doo-wop-tinged song. When it disappeared without notice, the Brooks brothers snapped. “They were wanting to do stuff like Little Richard was doing,” Fred said, “whereas we kept telling them that we needed to have our own identity and that we couldn’t just be doing what everyone else was doing. So they got really mad, took the record, threw it in the garbage, and said ‘We’re quitting! We’re gonna sign to End Records instead!’—because at the time Little Anthony & The Imperials were really hot on End Records.” The Brooks brothers left the group in Chicago and went to New York to create their own short-lived version of the Impressions.

  My father, Fred, and Sam had felt the split coming for a while. They’d even begun rehearsing as a threesome whenever Richard and Arthur went out to eat between shows. “Sam, Curtis, and I had become really tight,” Fred said. “When the time came and they threw the record in the garbage can, we didn’t make no big fuss about it. We just kept on going and rehearsing. It was a lot of work perfecting that sound that we had with just the three of us.”

  Before they could perfect their sound, my father was called away on other business. Just after the Brooks brothers left, Carl Davis hired him as a staff writer for OKeh Records—a great break for him but tough for Fred and Sam, since they now took a backseat to his new job. He had to take the offer, though. Davis was one of the hottest record producers on the planet, having scored an enormous hit with Gene Chandler’s “Duke of Earl,” released on Vee-Jay in January 1962. “Duke of Earl” hit number one on both the R&B and pop charts and held the number-one slot on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks. Chandler became a household name, and Davis soon joined Columbia Records as producer and head A&R man for the subsidiary OKeh label.

  Davis, another son of Louisiana migrants who settled in Chicago, felt a strong connection to my father. “I wanted Curtis more for his guitar playing than his singing,” he said. “He was a true innovator like T-Bone Walker and B. B. King. He was a songwriting genius, and his guitar style has done more for rhythm and blues than anyone’s.”

  For nine months, Fred and Sam were relegated to singing backup on other people’s records while Curtis helped create what became known as the Chicago Sound. Three basic elements form the Chicago Sound—my father’s guitar, Davis’s production, and the arrangements of jazz-bassist-turned-arranger Johnny Pate.

  Unlike the bass-heavy gutbucket soul coming out of Stax and Muscle Shoals, the backbone of the Chicago Sound is Curtis’s guitar. “Because I play with my fingers and play a chord along with the melody, my style suggests two guitars,” Dad said of his playing. “I [felt like I should try standard tuning] when I was around fifteen or sixteen, but by then, I was writing hit records and it was working. I felt proud because I had finally developed something that was totally mine.”

  Of course, he couldn’t help but invent something unique. Tuning a guitar the way he did changes the tension of the
strings, which changes the way they relate to the body of the guitar. In essence, it changes the dialect of the guitar. Curtis could play the same notes as another player and have them sound completely different because his guitar had an accent, his accent.

  He went further in depth about his guitar style, saying:

  My voicings are different compared to the standard. And even my favorite keys are unorthodox. For instance, F# or A, or B instead of B flat. When I first started, I played flat, like a steel guitar. And I was fretting with my thumb. You can play a lot of grooves that way. Eventually, I turned the guitar upright. Still, I thought, “My left thumb is closer to the bass string, why not use it?” So I carry the bass line with my thumb, where the average guitarist doesn’t. That’s not in the book. In the beginning, I used a clamp [capo]; that’s how I changed keys. But after a while, I outgrew that. I’ve never taught myself to use a pick. That’s why there are many things I can’t do. When you can’t do something, you find a way not to need it anyway. I pluck the strings very gentle. Almost the way I sing. I don’t do nothin’ hard. Rather than do a single-note lead part, I use chord movement … If it wasn’t guitar, it would be piano. If it wasn’t piano, it would be harp. It would have to be something that would give me a full chord movement. To sing a melody, I need a chord to ride upon.

  If Curtis’s guitar provides the backbone of the Chicago Sound, Johnny Pate’s arrangements form the musculature. Davis said, “I chose to use Johnny in particular with the OKeh records because I wanted to develop what I thought was indicative of the Chicago kind of things. I always felt we were a bit of the South and a bit of the North combined. So I liked the syncopated rhythm and I liked the fact that he did the things with horns.” Johnny’s string and horn lines are particularly interesting when considering Chicago’s history of big band and swing. In a way, he provided a link between Nat King Cole and soul.