Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  Even though he risked his life for America, Uncle Kenny didn’t feel he had a country. Like many black soldiers, he followed the tragedies in America as news trickled into Vietnam, and he knew his prospects would be bleak upon returning home. “Here I am over [in Vietnam] fighting for somebody else’s freedom that I didn’t even have, but with what was going on in the country here, I didn’t want to come back,” he says. “I didn’t know where I was going, but I just didn’t want to come back.”

  He still faced racism, even in Vietnam. “I’ll never forget it, I got off the boat in Danang, loaded down, had an M-14 automatic weapon, and this little Vietnamese guy come up to me and called me a nigger,” he says. “I took the butt of the weapon and I hit him with it.” His feelings fit perfectly with the movement’s direction back home, both nonviolent and otherwise.

  Around the time Uncle Kenny enlisted, the Defense Department had launched Project 100,000, which lowered standards for draft requirements, making one hundred thousand former rejects acceptable for induction. As a result, a disproportionate number of black soldiers ended up on the front lines. Black soldiers served as cannon fodder, suffering a casualty rate roughly twice that of white soldiers.

  King had spoken against the war before his death, but SNCC, CORE, and the Panthers now made the war a major part of their rebellion. Carmichael and others trolled college campuses passing out flyers playing on army recruitment propaganda. “Uncle Sam wants YOU nigger,” the flyers read. “Become a member of the world’s highest paid black mercenary army! Support White Power—travel to Viet Nam, you might get a medal! Fight for Freedom … (in Viet Nam). Receive valuable training in the skills of killing off other oppressed people! (Die Nigger Die—you can’t die fast enough in the ghettos).”

  Even the Viet Cong exploited American racism. At least one sign posted in Vietnam read, “U.S. Negro armymen! You are committing the same ignominious crimes in South Vietnam that the KKK clique is perpetuating against your family at home.” Perhaps no one summed up the situation better than Muhammad Ali, who put an exclamation mark on the black resistance to the draft when he issued his heartfelt but incendiary reason for his refusal. In an often misquoted statement, he said, “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father…. Shoot them for what? … How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”

  My father noticed all these developments. He and Ali were friends—my mother remembers the bombastic boxer visiting them at home—and Uncle Kenny still fought the war Ali resisted. Dad had never written an antiwar song before, and he wasn’t ready to yet. The idea germinated in his mind, though. Perhaps he wanted to wait until his brother came home.

  In 1969, Curtis celebrated a decade in the music business. Within those years, he’d gone from being Jerry Butler’s sideman to one of the most powerful voices in popular music. He now stood on the cusp of even greater success, as he continued adding acts to the Curtom roster, including Baby Huey and the Babysitters. Baby Huey, real name James Ramey, was a hulking 350-pound man with a hell of a voice and one of the most popular live bands in Chicago. By the late ’60s, he’d taken Sly Stone’s lead and turned the Babysitters into a psychedelic soul act, electrifying audiences with R&B freak-outs amplified by his ample Afro and the trippy African robes he wore to cover his heft. In early 1969, the Babysitters’ manager, Marv Heiman—also known as Marv Stuart—invited Donny Hathaway to watch the band at the Thumbs Up club in Chicago. Donny left so impressed that he had my father come with him the following night. Dad saw a star in Ramey and signed the band that night. Not long after, Baby Huey and the Babysitters released their first single on Curtom, a cover of the Impressions’ “Mighty Mighty (Spade & Whitey),” renamed “‘Mighty’ ‘Mighty’ Children (Unite Yourself This Hour).”

  Signing the Babysitters changed my father’s life and career in major, unforeseen ways. Their manager, Marv Stuart, became a fulcrum that pushed Dad into the next phase of his career. Marv was a hustler in every sense of the word. He’d already booked Baby Huey on Della Reese’s talk show, Della, as well as The Merv Griffin Show, which even the Impressions couldn’t get. He also booked them at the Whisky a Go Go and several other major clubs across the country. All this without a hit to their name.

  Marv hadn’t spent as much time in the music business as my father and Eddie, but his track record was so impressive that when the Impressions released their second album on Curtom, The Young Mods’ Forgotten Story, Dad asked Marv to act as the group’s manager. Dad liked Marv, frankly, because he was white and Jewish. As much as he believed in solidarity among black people, he also said, “My face during those years would not allow doors to open for me. As a black man, you don’t get an invitation.” He thought Marv’s face would open those doors, so he put his trust in a man who hadn’t earned it.

  Marv began booking the Impressions on television shows to coincide with an upcoming California tour. According to Marv, when he asked the producers why they never had the Impressions on the shows before, they said no one ever asked. He also took a hard look at Curtom’s books. “There was one guy in charge of all the accounting, royalty collecting, bookkeeping,” Marv says. “According to the books, Curtom was broke and they weren’t receiving the royalties they were due. Curtis said, ‘Is someone stealing from me?’ I said I didn’t think so—they just weren’t able to handle the volume of work.” Marv hired an accounting firm to handle the books and Curtom quickly raked in roughly $600,000 in unclaimed royalties. From that point on, he was in.

  Of Marv, my father said, “As green as he was, he was very ambitious. I taught him the record business and how to relate to people. Through his own know-how and his own go-gettingness, he learned. He was able to find weak spots in Curtom, and he turned them around.” Fred, Sam, and Eddie didn’t share Dad’s excitement, and the Impressions grew further apart.

  Marv came onboard as Curtom took its biggest step toward legitimacy. The leadoff single from The Young Mods’ Forgotten Story, another message song called “Choice of Colors,” shot to number one R&B. No stranger to the top of the chart, my father had now done it with his own label for the first time. With “Choice of Colors,” he retreated a bit from the edge of “This Is My Country” and offered a song more in the mold of his positive, food-for-thought, mid-’60s message songs. One main difference—“Choice of Colors” took on the issue of race directly. He sang, “If you had a choice of colors / Which one would you choose, my brothers? / If there was no day or night / Which would you prefer to be right?”

  Dad held out hope for America longer than many black people around him did. “Choice of Colors” contained lyrics such as “People must prove to the people / A better day is coming,” and “With just a little bit more education / And love for our nation / Would make a better society.” But those sentiments, which once helped give the old movement direction, now put him at odds with the new movement’s goals and mindset.

  The Young Mods’ Forgotten Story also contained a second message song, though, and it showed that even my father’s hope for America had begun to erode. Tucked at the end of the album, “Mighty Mighty (Spade & Whitey)” warned about the dangers of “black and white power,” and it was clear when he sang, “We’re killing up our leaders,” that King’s death still weighed heavily on his mind. Unlike any song he’d yet written, this one played like a conversation about his feelings on where the country stood:

  Everybody’s talking about this country’s state

  We give a new power every hour, just about with every Christian fate

  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

  And mighty, mighty Spade and Whitey

  Your black a
nd white power is gonna be a crumbling tower

  And we who stand divided, so damn undecided

  Give this some thought: in stupidness we’ve all been caught.

  It was his most honest song yet. It wasn’t about hope; it was about reality. It seemed he couldn’t write about hope when no one around him felt any. He knew he had to start speaking a different truth—a harder truth—but he didn’t know if the Impressions were the right group to deliver the message.

  While “Choice of Colors” rode high on the charts, the Impressions stayed just as high in demand. They began another sprawl across a country in terrible turmoil, and although my father grew tired of touring, saying, “The road wears a man down after twelve years,” he also knew the road made him who he was. “There’s nothing else I want to do,” he said. “There’s nothing else I could do anyway, but if I could do something else I wouldn’t want to do it because this life, if you live it in such manners, can be beautiful for you.” It was beautiful for Curtis. The road gave him an escape from the poverty of his childhood. Since he had become a traveling musician, Dad was too busy, too free—and eventually too rich and famous—to be backed into the ghetto’s corners anymore.

  Like much about the late ’60s, though, what once seemed beautiful turned tragic. During a show with Jackie Wilson in Grenville, South Carolina, a switch broke on the Impressions’ sound system, and they had to go to Atlanta to get it fixed. My father’s quiet voice made the special sound system necessary for the tour to continue. In the studio, they could rely on studio tricks to pump up his volume, but on tour they’d bring their own speakers—four for Fred and Sam, and four just for Curtis. Otherwise, Fred and Sam would drown him out.

  They had time before the next show, so the backing band threw the broken gear in the trailer and took off to Atlanta, as Dad, Fred, and Sam sped away in their sports cars. The next morning, Fred called home and heard the news. The band was dead. “They were coming down a big double highway to a bridge,” Fred said. “The bridge had this curve in it and it went over this river. They must have been doing ninety or a hundred miles an hour and they just never got across that bridge. They just went through that rail and they went two hundred and ten feet in the air clear across the river and hit the bank on the other side. A farmer found them about eight o’clock the next morning.”

  The tour couldn’t go on. My father drove to the morgue with Fred and Sam to identify the bodies, and when they finally summoned the courage to go in, a gruesome scene awaited them—the guitarist and drummer lay mangled on the floor while the bass player was stretched flat on the embalming table. “They was messed up,” Fred said. “The guitar player had his arm all twisted … The Lord must have been telling us something. We all used to have sports cars. In ’63 Curt had a Jag and Sam and me had Corvettes and that Jag wasn’t fast enough, we used to run away from it. So Curt got a 427 Cobra, and then we got 427 Corvettes. We used to run 150 miles an hour every day. We used to drive a lot, especially during the summer. Drive, drive, drive. None of us liked to fly, and we’d drive to concerts all over the Midwest and the South. After that accident we sold the Corvettes right then.”

  Around that same time, my father wrecked his Cobra. After the wreck, my mother recalls, “He had the guy at the body shop to fix it, and you know, Curtis was gone, and it had something to do with money, and Curtis didn’t want to pay the guy for storage or something, and the guy kept the car. I’d say, ‘Why aren’t you going to get the car?’ ‘Well, they want money.’ ‘Well then, pay him!’ You know that car cost a lot of money. And the man ended up keeping that car.”

  After the band deaths, he no longer wanted a sports car. Still, it didn’t make sense to abandon an expensive car just because he didn’t want to pay the mechanic’s storage fee. He ended up giving away a collector’s item worth hundreds of thousands of dollars today. That was my father, though. His stubbornness often got the best of him, and his strong Gemini traits meant he could be two people at once—shrewd and blind. As Curtom demanded more of his attention, those tendencies left him open to predators. He remained a man of few friends, and he began trusting the wrong people. Crooked accountants could easily cook books without him knowing it. He also gave Marv more control over his finances than he had allowed anyone in his life.

  These events exacerbated the mounting friction with Fred and Sam. They felt Curtis and Marv were forming a cabal with the intent of pushing them to the side. Fred said, “I think they just didn’t think that Sam and I really mattered at that point, and that’s why it just kind of escalated. Why did he trust [Marv] so much? I don’t know to this day. I’ve had some people that’s very close in his family ask me the same thing and I just don’t know.” Figuring out why my father trusted Marv became a parlor game for family and friends. None of us have come up with a definitive answer.

  Dad never explained it either, but it makes sense looking at his life as a whole. He’d been fighting for control from childhood. It seemed every circumstance tried to keep him down—his skin, his looks, his poverty—but he fought to overcome them all. Though he fought for his family and his friends and even for his people as a whole, ultimately, he fought mostly for himself. He had little choice but to grow up that way. His father refused to look after him, and his mother didn’t have the means to do it properly. He learned at an early age to rely on himself, and he’d proven to himself beyond a doubt that he could meet any challenge. The mere fact that he had risen beyond humble beginnings to run his own label proved he was not a man to be trifled with.

  By looking out for himself, he earned control over his life and power over his circumstances. He didn’t mind sharing that control and power with Fred, Sam, and Eddie as long as doing so aligned with his business interests. But if he saw something that could help him better extend that control and power—a different business partner like Marv, for instance—he’d run with it and not look back.

  He believed Marv could make him more money. More money gave him more power and control. In the end, his trust may have had more to do with that than anything else. He didn’t want money for its own sake. As he said, “Now that I have money I spend it less than I used to.” He wanted it because it made him feel secure, assuring him he’d never suffer again like he did in the White Eagle.

  If Eddie didn’t like it, if Fred and Sam couldn’t take it, too bad for them. They couldn’t change his mind. There again came his duality as a Gemini—he could be deeply in tune with his community and at the same time selfish to the point of hurting his closest friends. Despite Dad’s growing confidence, which became stronger than ever with Curtom’s success, the scars from his childhood ran deep—as deep as the sense of worthlessness society taught him to feel. He had to escape it by any means necessary.

  Tensions within the Impressions remained beneath the surface as they began piecing together a new backing band. They had a hard time continuing in the face of such tragedy. “That was a heavy blow because we all were close,” Curtis said. Fred agreed: “That was one of the hardest and the saddest periods of our life.”

  Still, the show had to go on, so they hired new musicians, including Sam’s nephew Joseph Scott. Everyone called him Lucky, and as Sam said, “He didn’t read music, but he had the best ear you wanted to hear, because he could go into the studio and record anything that you want to record.” My father felt happy with the choice, since he’d known Lucky his entire life. “When we came out in 1958, Lucky and his brother were in diapers,” he said. “Lucky grew up seeing us doing our thing and somehow he picked up a bass and he worked himself to a point where when the time came we had to bring him in.”

  Lucky became the bandleader as the Impressions went on a critical swing through California, taking them to the Fillmore West and Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, among other places. A Rolling Stone reporter followed them on that trip and gave a fascinating insight into life on the road for the Impressions and how Marv’s influence had grown.

  Without knowing it, the reporter was also
witnessing an end for Curtis, Fred, and Sam.

  8

  Now You’re Gone

  “Ain’t no hard feelings,

  I won’t worry my mind with such dealings.”

  —“SO YOU DON’T LOVE ME”

  The San Francisco Hilton, early 1969—Brrrrrrrrrring! went the phone in Fred’s room. “Hello?” Fred mumbled into the phone. Then, exasperation creeping into his soft Chattanooga drawl, “Baby, I’m not going to give you any money, understand? I’m sorry, but no. Good-bye.” He hung up. “It was this girl who tried to see me yesterday,” he told Michael Alexander, the reporter from Rolling Stone who accompanied the group on their California jaunt. “I don’t know how she knew I was here. She says her mother works here. She wants money! Says she has to visit her grandmother or something. We don’t get hustled like that very often. I can count the girls like that on one hand. We don’t hang around with that kind of people.”

  Fred wasn’t being completely honest—like Curtis and Sam, he was no stranger to road affairs. As Eddie says, “The girls would all line up backstage. You’d say, ‘You two come with me, you three come with me.’ That’s the way it was.” With a wife at home, however, Fred couldn’t go trumpeting that news to a major music magazine.

  Preparing for the first Fillmore show, Fred sent out for Leonard’s Hickory Pit barbecue and called room service for a Coke. After eating, he showered and shaved, singing along with an Impressions record on a battery-powered phonograph. Then, he dressed, burning loose threads off his new shirt with a cigarette. Fred couldn’t stand loose threads.