The end of 1967 was a mixed bag for my father. His first two independent labels, Windy C and Mayfield, collapsed. The Impressions neared the end of their contract with ABC, and my parents’ relationship continued to erupt in fits of infidelity and anger, even though my mother was pregnant with my sister Sharon. All the while, my father lived in anxious fear he’d never see his brother again.
At the same time, he’d proven his worth to the world. He was more than a ghetto child, more than another faceless black man withering under American racism—he was a genius, a businessman, a celebrity, and a messenger. To prove it yet again, he dipped his pen back into movement ink and wrote an excellent new song called “We’re a Winner.”
“That song came to me in a dream,” Dad said. “I ran down in the basement and put enough down that I would remember; that was one of the few times I knew I had a smash. Maybe not a charted smash that would earn more money, but the lyrical content of equality and freedom needed for somebody to ‘Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.’ We needed to come from crying the blues to standing tall.” The Impressions recorded the song with a live audience in the studio, and it begins with Eddie’s first wife, Audrey, saying almost inaudibly, “Have you seen Diane? Hey!” then shouting, “All right now, sock it to me baby!” as the song kicks in. It was the funkiest, and frankly, the blackest song the Impressions had ever recorded. The bass drum booms like the makeshift bombs exploding in riot zones across America, and my father’s singing is more rhythmic and nuanced than ever before.
“We’re a Winner” spoke to Black Power in a way pop music had never done. My father had been absorbing the world around him even during his years of silence on the movement, intuiting the shift from the gospel foundation represented by King and the SCLC to the secular, inner-city vibe of Carmichael and the Black Panthers. “We’re a Winner” is the result of that absorption.
With his fourth movement anthem, my father made an important lyrical shift away from the dual-voiced poetry of Dunbar. “We’re a Winner” was his boldest attempt yet at speaking to a black audience in a single voice. As he said, it was “a message to all, and yet basically to the black masses of people. It is an inspiring song. I believe everybody once in a while should sing in terms of trying to keep the movements going, even though sometimes things are tough. Things move slowly sometimes, but with the movement we truly are a winner.”
In explaining the lyrics, he showed his growing awareness of all sides of the movement. “I was listening to all my preachers and the different leaders of the time,” he said. “You had your Rap Browns and your Stokely Carmichaels and Martin Luther Kings, all of those people right within that same era.”
There was another side to the lyrics that his audience wouldn’t know about for a few years. Sam recalled, “Curtis had written some real tough lyrics on this song. One portion says, ‘The black boy done dried his eyes,’ and then it said, ‘There’ll be no more Uncle Tom, at last that blessed day has come, and we’re a winner.’ We started fooling around in the studio with Johnny, and we start singing it that way, and Johnny jumped up and said, ‘Cut! Cut! Cut! Cut!’ He leaned out the door and said, ‘Curtis, come here a minute.’ Curtis was laughing, and Johnny said, ‘You can’t use those words. That’s too harsh.’” They all knew ABC wouldn’t put out a song with such heavy lyrics, so my father softened the words, singing, “We have finally dried our eyes,” and “At last that blessed day has come, and I don’t care where you come from.”
It came as a surprise when several radio stations across the country banned “We’re a Winner” anyway, including the top station in Chicago, WLS. “They thought that we had become militant,” Sam said. “All we were doing was telling it like it was. They picked out a couple of lines in the song to say why they wouldn’t play it. They said, ‘Like your leaders tell you to,’ but we got white leaders and black leaders. That’s what the song was about. Everybody can be a winner. All you have to do is stand up and be counted.”
My father felt angry about the censorship. “I’ve run into frustrating obstacles, such as will a certain radio station play my records,” he said years later. “But that is his or her choice, as to whether they want to mix in or take on new music such as ‘We’re a Winner’ and put it in with the typecast of the old R&B or rock & roll music. I knew where I was going.”
The refusal was even more surprising because my father had never written a more immaculately constructed song. It was a supreme blend of ear candy and message music, and it was so strong, the radio ban didn’t hurt it. The single stayed on the charts through the beginning of 1968, and it reached number one R&B and number fourteen pop by the beginning of March, just days after Sharon’s birth.
It seemed 1968 would bring Dad great things. He had his first baby girl and a number-one single. He also formed a new label with Eddie called Curtom, distributed by Buddah Records. “I wasn’t a quitter,” he said of his decision to start a new label. “Sometimes these things are like marriages. You don’t give up wanting to be in love and having the best you can expect, just because your marriage fails.”
His influence was still growing a decade into his career, something few musicians ever achieve. My father’s success, especially with “We’re a Winner,” helped open a niche within pop music where blacks could succeed on a significant financial level while remaining true to their people, using their rhythms, their slang, and their ideas. Soon after, James Brown released “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” Sly Stone released “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey,” and it seemed everyone wanted in on the game.
Black performers were stepping off the tightrope my father first discovered during his debut at the Apollo. Acceptance by the white world no longer meant as much as staying true to one’s blackness, and Dad’s music played a huge role in that shift.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t get out of his own way long enough to enjoy it, as infidelity clouded the happiness he’d earned. First, my mother learned he’d impregnated someone else. Then, she came home and caught him in the act with yet another woman. Then, the pregnant woman called saying she’d lost the baby. Many times my mother knew these women. Sometimes she confronted them. Tracy recalls one such moment. “Mom would take us to some lady’s house that I think Dad was messing around with,” he said, “and I remember Mom picking up one of her friends, and her friend confronted the lady. I remember looking out the back window to see what was going on. I did know there was some turmoil.”
Despite marital difficulties, Dad had terrific momentum as the Impressions finished their contract. ABC offered them $500,000 to stay with the label, no small sum for a poor kid from Cabrini-Green. The guys had many serious discussions about what to do—Dad always dreamed of running an enterprise like Motown, and he had a chance with Curtom. Still, leaving a heavyweight like ABC to make it on his own represented a great risk. That risk extended not only to his livelihood and career, but also to Fred and Sam.
Ultimately, Dad felt the risk was worth it. He wanted to own himself more than he wanted half a million dollars. After some back and forth, he convinced Fred and Sam to turn down the money and jump ship for the new label. According to Fred, that decision came with the understanding they’d each own a share of the Curtom label. They knew my father well enough to know he didn’t share when it came to business. Perhaps they thought he’d treat them differently.
As the Impressions left ABC, my father knew he could make it on his own. Over the past seven years, he’d scored twenty-two hit singles on the pop and R&B charts with the Impressions, including four R&B number ones, and a dozen charting albums. He’d written more than forty hits for other artists, toured the world, and become a major voice of his generation. He had fought and clawed his way to something only a handful of black musicians had ever attained in the business—autonomy. He felt strong, important, and optimistic. Self-assurance and confidence began to replace the insecurities that once plagued him.
Even as King’s nonviolence fell out of vogue, Dad
still believed in him. Despite three consecutive brutal summers, he did not succumb to the ghetto rioter’s despair. He still believed the key to success for black people was to “keep on pushing, like your leaders tell you to.” He hadn’t lost hope in America or the movement.
The coming bloodshed would take care of that.
7
Curtom
“We’re killing up our leaders,
It don’t matter none black or white,
And we all know it’s wrong,
But we’re gonna fight to make it right.”
—“MIGHTY MIGHTY (SPADE AND WHITEY)”
April 4, 1968, Lorraine Motel, Memphis, Tennessee—Martin Luther King walked onto the balcony outside his room to get some air. He’d just finished a pillow fight with Andrew Young and several other top SCLC aides, a rare moment of levity for a man engulfed by despair. Seconds later, a loud crack shattered the silence. King fell flat on his back, blood gushing from a wound in his jaw. Abernathy rushed over to him. “Martin! Martin! This is Ralph,” he said, panicked. “Do you hear me? This is Ralph.” King’s friends watched in agonizing impotence as he met the violent end he had so often predicted.
King’s assassination crumpled the movement. His tactics might have fallen out of fashion with the younger, militant crowd that had taken the reins over the last three years, but for the majority of black people—and whites who felt sympathy with the movement—King still represented the best hope. The bullet that ended his life also ended his dream, at least for the foreseeable future.
The news hit my father hard. He knew the Lorraine Motel well. It was a safe haven for black performers on the chitlin’ circuit, and the Impressions had stayed there many times. As Eddie says, “That’s one place that anybody could find you if you were playing Memphis. They knew you were going to be staying at the Lorraine Motel. We heard about King, and we were just totally dismayed. It hurt everybody.”
For the moment there seemed little reason for hope. As my father said years later, “How are young people supposed to feel when they see that many of the respected leaders were destroyed, and many who weren’t respected got rich? Seeing your political leaders making dramatic mistakes, people being rewarded for stealing billions, while you go to jail for stealing an apple. You look around you and it’s easy to think, ‘I’m living, I’d better get mine now,’ because all your values may come to nothing, and there’s too many people to fight.” That statement reflected his deep understanding of the angry forces that had taken over the movement.
He wasn’t ready to give up, though. With a broken heart, Dad wrote a poem with instructions for the path forward and a message of healing for what had passed:
Another friend has gone and I feel so insecure
Brothers, if you feel this way, you’re not by yourself
We have lost another leader, Lord, how much must we endure?
If you feel this way, you’re not by yourself
But if they think we have no one to lead us
That then we’ve lost the fight and every night no one can breed us
They don’t know every brother is a leader
And they don’t know every sister is a breeder
And our love, you see, is gonna help the world be free
We’re going to move at a scarlet pace
Keep every brother on the case
They don’t know, to help a sister help themselves
We cannot let our people be until we’re all out of poverty.
He molded those words to a melody as the news of King’s death shot around the country. Stokely Carmichael said, “Now that they’ve taken Dr. King off, it’s time to end this nonviolence bullshit,” but after the past three summers of riots, no one in the ghetto needed instructions on what to do. They razed Baltimore, DC, Louisville, Kansas City, and Wilmington, Delaware. They also set buildings ablaze in Cabrini-Green and Lawndale.
Plumes of black smoke towered so high over the ghettos in Chicago that people could see them from the Loop a couple of miles away. Dad watched those dark clouds threaten the horizon. He now lived far from the carnage, in a Hyde Park townhouse with my mother, Tracy, Sharon, and me. Hyde Park was an integrated neighborhood of middle and upper-middle class families near the University of Chicago. In terms of social status, he’d moved far from the riots. But in terms of his heart and spirit, he couldn’t separate himself from the despair roiling Chicago’s black community. One day, he and my mother traveled to the West Side to witness the destruction there. They saw a hellish scene. This was no mere disturbance; it was a war zone.
Many of my father’s acquaintances still lived in the West Side and Cabrini ghettos. They were trapped in the violence. A woman named Lillian Swope, who used to let Curtis practice in her row house on Hudson, said, “A truck came through here—right down Oak Street … The young men actually pulled the driver out of the truck, and emptied the truck and just took all the man’s stuff out and they was beating him so bad that they almost killed him.”
Rioters destroyed the stores on Oak Street, close to where Grandma Sadie lived, and they wrecked Del Farms and Pioneers grocery stores. They beat random white people with bricks. A melee erupted in the cafeteria of Curtis’s old high school as black students threw food and smashed their plates.
The National Guard stormed Cabrini to restore order by any means necessary. Soldiers in tanks plowed down the small streets. Others drove in Jeeps, clutching rifles with bayonets affixed to the barrels. The Guard set a curfew and patrolled the streets at night, sweeping the neighborhood with piercing lights. Meanwhile, all day and night police traded gunfire with roving gangs that were trying to impose their own sort of order. Shootouts, broken windows, crumbling structures, fires, violent deaths—these now defined the project. It would never again be the idyllic place my father once knew with gardens, parades, and doo-wop groups on the corner.
Cabrini resident Zora Washington recalled the hopelessness she felt when at last the violence and destruction subsided. “Black people had torn it up and the powers that be were not going to fix it up,” she said. “You knew that. It was a scary time. It gave you a scary feeling. How could you help not being depressed? It was like we lost hope. The person that could do it for us was gone. It was a terrible time.”
Watching his city burn, Curtis kept on pushing. He bought a small brick building at 8543 Stony Island Boulevard in South Chicago and opened the Curtom studio and offices. He began auditioning and signing acts with Eddie, including June Conquest, who had released a single on Windy C. Her single “What’s This I See” was Curtom’s first release. It became a hit in Chicago as the riot’s flames died down, although it didn’t make noise nationally.
The Five Stairsteps also joined Curtom, as did the Symphonics, a band from Philadelphia. Eddie recalled auditioning the Jackson 5, but my father passed because Curtom already had a family band. Needless to say, that wasn’t his best business decision.
He was right to have high hopes for the Stairsteps, though. They’d prove that in 1970 with the smash single, “O-o-h Child,” which rose to number eight on the pop chart, and has since inspired more than twenty covers and earned a ranking on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Unfortunately, they recorded the song for Buddah, not Curtom. They switched labels after my father’s workload became too much for him to give them the attention they needed.
Dad made another good choice in signing Donny Hathaway, but he couldn’t make that work either. “Donny could do everything,” Eddie said. “Sing, arrange, produce, play keyboards, write songs—many talents. But, he butted heads with Curtis a lot. Both men had equal skills yet had very strong and stubborn personalities. Curtis wouldn’t do things Donny’s way and vice versa.”
My father’s need for control didn’t allow Donny the space he needed to create, so Donny asked to get out of his contract, saying he no longer wanted to make music. When he later began talks with Atco Records, Dad cut all ties with Donny and forced my mother to do the same with his w
ife, Eulaulah. Curtom suffered as a result. In the end, Donny did his most important work with other labels, including two gold albums with Roberta Flack for Atlantic.
Rounding out Curtom’s first lineup—and providing another frustrating missed opportunity—was the Impressions’ old road band, the Winstons. They cut only one single on Curtom before changing labels and releasing the Grammy Award—winning “Color Him Father” on Metromedia Records.
The Winstons hold an extraordinary place in music history. The B-side to “Color Him Father” was an up-tempo, instrumental version of “Amen” called “Amen, Brother.” It contained a six-second drum-break that became the underpinning of hip-hop. In the 1980s, dozens of artists used the “Amen” break as the basis for their songs. Listen to N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton.” That’s the “Amen” break. It has appeared some thirteen hundred times throughout hip-hop history. Hundreds of artists—from Salt-N-Pepa, to Tupac Shakur, to Jay Z, to Tyler the Creator—have used it.
Its influence goes further still. As hip-hop gained steam in the ’80s, the “Amen” break crossed the Atlantic Ocean where it became the foundation for techno, raga, jungle, and drum-and-bass music in the United Kingdom. An entire culture formed around six seconds of a drumbeat from a group my father lifted to fame, playing their version of a song the Impressions made popular.
Curtom missed all these opportunities. It is hard not to imagine the possibilities had my father signed the Jackson 5, kept the Stairsteps and the Winstons, and given Donny free rein. Music history itself would be different, and Curtom might very well have reached Motown-like heights. But for better or worse, Curtom’s fate rested in my father’s hands.
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