As spring turned to summer, Eddie got Curtom running at full speed using everything he’d learned in a decade turning Curtis’s songs into hits. “One thing you knew, you knew the DJs,” he says.
You knew the record stores—the Mom-and-Pop as we called them, they’re the ones that report to Billboard, they report to Cashbox. You knew the distributor for the record itself. Between maybe three distributors in Chicago, they together had all the product coming in. So now you got to pick a company that is strong enough to distribute your record. Curtis and I shopped around and went with Buddah Records. Whatever door they had open, we were going through the same door. They had the Village People, they had Casablanca, which was a big, big label back in those days. They were smokin’. We had a free ride.
The more Curtom gained its footing, though, the further my father grew from Fred and Sam. When they learned he wasn’t going to give them shares in the label, they questioned the wisdom of passing up half a million dollars at ABC. My father harbored no such apprehensions. With each new success, he became more self-assured. He was only twenty-six years old and had already led one of the most successful careers in popular music history. With Curtom, he stood at the helm of his own emerging empire. More than ever, he was master of his fate. As he told Jet magazine, “With my own label, I control myself.” He used his control to help his family again, moving his mother out of Cabrini. Within a few years he’d provide housing for her, Grandma Sadie, and Judy.
He felt proud of these accomplishments, and that pride began to eclipse his insecurities. At the same time, he remained a complex man occasionally haunted by his past. He went to a dentist to get his teeth fixed, but that didn’t fix his mind. He still remembered the taunts of Smut and the poverty he’d escaped. Sometimes these issues drove him in positive ways, helping him achieve great things. Other times, they hurt him and those he cared about. Nowhere did they cause more trouble than in his relationship with my mother. He felt himself losing her, and it scared him. He could write about it movingly, as he did on We’re a Winner’s “I Loved and I Lost”—“She was so beautiful like flowers full bloom in May / Her kiss was like the roaring wind, it left me speechless, with nothing to say / I loved and I lost.” He couldn’t do the one thing that might have kept her—remain faithful.
The temptations he faced only grew as he gained more power, confidence, and influence. His songs had already made him an icon; Curtom made him a titan. He’d done what a black man in America wasn’t supposed to do—snatched control from a system designed to subjugate him. As a result, more people wanted a piece of him than ever.
Running Curtom put him under incredible pressure, and deciding whom to trust became an issue of dire importance. He and Eddie now had to handle business concerns they knew little about—accounting, office management, record pressing. For months, they had no hits, which worked well since they didn’t have the capability to print enough records to meet the demands of one. My father struggled in a situation that didn’t play to his strengths. He never had a mind for mundane day-to-day tasks. Big-picture ideas, like starting his own label, he could handle. When it came time to run the label, he needed help.
Rather than folding under the pressure, he did what he’d always done—relied on his guitar. While Eddie arranged distribution with Buddah, Dad began cutting Curtom’s first full-length albums for the Impressions and the Stairsteps. His confidence soared.
At the same time, the 1968 presidential race heated up. Three days before King’s assassination, Johnson announced he would not seek another term, and Robert Kennedy became the frontrunner to win the Democratic nomination and the presidency. Republicans threw their fate in with Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s vice president, who had lost to JFK in 1960. Nixon showed no signs of sympathy for the movement.
While JFK had aligned with the movement in the early ’60s, RFK’s speeches on the campaign trail made him look even more exciting and progressive. It seemed he could take the scattered ashes of a once great coalition and gather them around the mantle of his slain brother in the wake of King’s death.
The script was all but written—RFK was young, good looking, popular, and sympathetic to the issues of the moment. On June 4, he won Democratic primaries in California and South Dakota, and just after midnight, he celebrated his victories in a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The Democratic National Convention was scheduled for Chicago in two months; “On to Chicago,” he said. As he walked through the crowd, shaking hands with his supporters, a man approached with a gun and opened fire. Kennedy collapsed on the floor with a bullet in his head and several more scattered throughout his body. He died the next day.
While the years of success and fame changed my father emotionally, making him more confident in the present and less concerned with the hardships of the past, the years of assassinations and violence changed him creatively. For the first time, anger seeped into his lyrics—the anger of seeing his childhood home destroyed, his heroes murdered, and his hope trampled as the brutal deaths of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK effectively ended the movement. As Robert Kennedy’s slaying played out on the news, Dad wrote “This Is My Country,” which shares a title with a patriotic folk song from the 1940s. Unlike that old folk song, my father’s lyrics seethe with sadness and militancy:
I’ve paid three hundred years or more
Of slave driving, sweat, and welts on my back
This is my country
Too many have died in protecting my pride
For me to go second class
We’ve survived a hard blow and I want you to know
That you’ll face us at last
And I know you will give consideration
Shall we perish unjust or live equal as a nation?
This is my country.
The repeated lyric, “This is my country,” was a subtle rephrasing of Black Power. My father was saying black people had built America with their sweat and blood, with each lash of the slave driver’s whip, with hundreds of years of forced labor; that they’d battled titanic forces to receive the benefits America offered everyone but them; that they’d been tortured, lynched, assassinated, humiliated, and rejected every step of the way, and yet they never stopped fighting for what was theirs. He’d never written more straightforward lyrics. Ditching the dual voices of Dunbar for good, he sang in the single voice of a people who had been owed something for a long time and now demanded payment in full.
The song marked a major shift in his thinking and reflected the militant shift in the movement. Yet, as personal as these lyrics were, he still never took credit for his messages. “I only look upon my writings as interpretations of how the majority of people around me feel,” he said. “I would only take credit for being able to put what they think into lyric form … I’m not singing protest; I’m only singing happenings; the actual reality of what’s going on around us, whether we’ll admit it or not—it’s there.” These songs were more than messages. They were a kind of therapy for people who had just experienced the latest in a long parade of traumas.
My father experienced other changes as he wrote the new album. He latched onto the fashion of Black Power. He couldn’t wait to get rid of the suits and ties the Impressions had always worn and slip into something hipper. “The style, the clothes, the wide pants, and the long German coats,” he said. “Everything sort of fell in, and it hit a real nice fashion. To be fly was to be.” These changes led him somewhere the Impressions had never been—and might not be able to go.
On top of those changes, he was responsible for running a business. Working for OKeh and ABC simultaneously seemed easy compared to the toil of running Curtom, where he was head writer, producer, A&R man, CEO, president, and leader of the most important act on the roster. Once again, he demanded more of himself than one man could accomplish.
He wanted Curtom to succeed on Motown’s level, but an insurmountable obstacle stood in the way of that dream. Motown had a stable of talent—Lamont Dozier, the brothers Eddie
and Brian Holland, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, and half a dozen more who could write, arrange, and produce. Curtom had one horse. Of the twenty songs on Curtom’s first two album releases, my father wrote sixteen of them outright and collaborated with Donny on one. He found himself under more creative pressure than ever. Unlike ABC, Curtom couldn’t survive if Curtis didn’t write hits.
Soon, his recording habits changed. He spent more time as a producer in the control room, mirroring his work with OKeh in the early ’60s, and less on the floor cutting with the musicians. “It’s hard work running between the studio and the control room,” he said, “and now that over the years I have found musicians who can constantly create the sound I want, I spend most of my time in the control room where I can get a better idea of what the song will sound like when it’s been recorded.”
As Dad cut the new Impressions album, one of the most infamous moments in American political history unfolded just a few miles away. On August 28, 1968, ten thousand protesters held a rally outside the Democratic National Convention in Grant Park. A disturbance erupted when a young boy lowered the American flag and cops began beating him. The crowd retaliated, hurling rocks and chunks of concrete at the cops while chanting, “Pigs are whores.” The cops doused the crowd with noxious billows of tear gas, and when it was over, a huge tear-gas cloud crept down the street to the Hilton Hotel, where it reportedly disturbed Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the shower. For seventeen minutes, live television broadcasted the whole gory thing. The protestors shouted, “The whole world is watching.”
While the whole world indeed watched, so did conservative white America, and it had finally had enough of youth movements, riots, and radical social makeovers. Come November 4, Richard Nixon celebrated a decisive victory over Hubert Humphrey. That same November, Curtom released This Is My Country.
After the release, Eddie hustled to make the album a hit. “When you get your record on the radio station, that’s first,” he says. “That’s when you really gotta start running. You got to go to the stores, give the guy four or five copies, and say, ‘I got this new record out, here’s the name of it, order it for me or push it for me.’ You got to do all of those little stops. You burn up a lot of rubber. You got to go to the nightclubs where the DJs are spinning the records. It never ends to get it going.”
His hard work soon paid dividends. This Is My Country hit number five R&B, and the eponymous single went to number eight R&B. It was the Impressions’ best work in three years, and it put Curtom on the map. Curtis and Eddie could relax. “Half a million start selling,” Eddie says, “then you can sit back in your chair a little bit and say, ‘Man, we did it. We got a $90,000 check coming in from the publisher, our royalties.’”
It came at the right time too—1968 had been another momentous year for music. Just one month before This Is My Country, Hendrix released his most successful album, Electric Ladyland. The title track featured Hendrix singing in a warbly falsetto, playing lyrical guitar licks he nicked from my father’s style.
Put alongside songs like “Gypsy Eyes” and “Long Hot Summer Night”—cross referenced with the Impressions’ “Gypsy Woman” and “Long Long Winter”—it is hard to miss my father’s thumbprint on Electric Ladyland. Hendrix never tried to hide it, either. In fact, he often performed a cover of the Impressions’ “Sometimes I Wonder” in concert.
On Electric Ladyland, Hendrix recorded his only message song, “House Burning Down,” which dealt poetically with the recent riots. In fact, it seemed everyone felt the need to address the bloodshed of the past few years. Even the Beatles—who just the year before sang “All You Need Is Love”—now sang about revolution. On their self-titled double album, released at the same time as This Is My Country, John Lennon captured the ambivalence many felt about the use of violence, singing, “When you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out and in?”
Unlike previous years, which saw my father lose touch with the continuing social upheaval, with This Is My Country, he reclaimed his role as the movement’s musical conscience. He turned his ode to Martin Luther King into a song called “They Don’t Know,” which married the Chicago Sound to the gut-bucket soul of artists like Aretha Franklin, who had just released Lady Soul, and Otis Redding, who had died in a tragic plane crash the year before but continued to direct the course of soul music from beyond the pale with the posthumously released The Dock of the Bay and The Immortal Otis Redding.
Dad had something Redding and Franklin never had, though—his own label. It wasn’t unheard of for a black man to run a record label at that time. Ray Charles had done it with Tangerine Records, Sam Cooke had SAR, the Isley Brothers had T-Neck, James Brown had Try Me, and of course, Berry Gordy had Motown. However, it was still an anomaly in a country where many black people struggled to eat, let alone start a successful business.
With “They Don’t Know” and “This Is My Country” coming out on his own label, Dad became a symbol of black accomplishment. He had also put two message songs on the same album for the first time, taking a chance few other artists dared take. Even James Brown surrounded his paean to black pride, “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” with unthreatening pop fare. My father had done the same thing on previous albums like Keep On Pushing, People Get Ready, and We’re a Winner. But as he reacted to the recent violence and despair, he knew his audience looked to him to put heavy truths in his songs. He’d given them so much food for thought, they began to expect it from him. They wouldn’t accept it the same way from anyone else.
Though his fans accepted it, Dad took a double risk with those songs. While they maintained a positive outlook, their lyrics held his most pointed critique yet on America’s problems and who was responsible for them. It was a sign of the direction he wanted to go, and the public’s acceptance told him he’d found the right track. Not only could he sustain his fan base with harder messages, he could also grow his business.
As the Impressions toured to support the album, the movement entered its final phase as the forces for and against it moved further toward their respective fringes. Nixon was the emblem of conservative white America, which wanted to take back as much ground in the name of traditional values as possible. Upon assuming the Oval Office, Nixon slowed federal spending for the advancement of black people and poor whites, saying in his first State of the Union address, “It is time for those who make massive demands on society to make minimal demands on themselves.” He tried to placate alienated whites by nominating southern conservatives for the US Supreme Court and keeping black congressmen waiting months for a reply to their requests for an audience.
On the other side, the Black Panthers filled the void left by King’s death. From the beginning, the Panthers were one of the most misunderstood civil rights groups in history. Part of it was their desperate situation. As Huey Newton wrote in the Black Panther, “We’ve been pushed into corners, into ghettos, you dig it?” That cornering left them little choice but to lash out, especially after King, the paragon of nonviolence, was murdered.
Part of it was the Panthers’ fault—they realized the more violent and incendiary they acted in public, the more media coverage they got. Satellite television had just been invented, and the rush of news from around the world roared with the force and noise of a white-water rapid. Amidst that din, the Vietnam War roared loudest. No longer did folks back home read about yesterday’s battle in the newspaper. Now, they watched it on television as they ate dinner. The Panthers shrewdly realized meekness wouldn’t get them featured on the evening broadcast.
Part of it came from Stokely Carmichael, who had just joined forces with the Panthers. He called Black Power “a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created”—a statement incendiary enough to get plenty of news coverage.
Though polls at the time showed only 15 percent of blacks identified as separatists, the Panthers had taken control of the public discourse by making more noise. Still, as Hue
y Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seale pushed the violent side of the Panthers, they also developed another side to the organization, starting community projects including a free healthcare clinic and a free breakfast program for schoolchildren.
My father supported many of the Panthers’ goals, but he couldn’t get behind them the way he got behind King. “They aren’t a national organization,” he said. “They don’t have the muscle.” The Panthers would continue to gain influence, but they’d never reach the level of the SCLC, SNCC, CORE, or other groups that preceded them. Constant confrontations with police, disruptive tactics by the FBI, and vicious infighting made sure they never cohered as a unit.
With so much fighting going on at home, my father still worried about his brother fighting in Vietnam. Uncle Kenny was scheduled to finish his tour at the end of 1968, but he says:
They had a thing going on back then that they could not send two brothers to Vietnam at the same time, and I knew the government was still trying to draft certain people, so I extended another year to make sure that if my brother did get drafted, he wouldn’t come there. So, that’s why I took my extra year in Vietnam. Plus, when I got ready to leave Vietnam, they wanted to send me to Germany, and I refused that because at that time, they were still having racial problems. Any place they were having racial problems, I tried to avoid, because I’m outspoken. It’s hard for me to get mad, but when I do get angry, I’m not in control of myself, so I kind of tried to avoid that, and I guess that’s why I’ve always been a loner.
It’s no surprise Uncle Kenny was a loner, coming from a family of loners, but he found solace hearing his brother’s voice in Vietnam. “A lot of Curtis’s music reached way over there,” he said. “My favorite one was ‘Choice of Colors.’ Then you had ‘We’re a Winner.’ If you sit down and listen to it, it was inspirational, trying to build you up, trying to make you feel like you were somebody, trying to make you feel like this is my country.”
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