Traveling Soul

by Todd Mayfield

  Just from the Impressions’ stage clothes, it was obvious how much the world had changed since they bought suits at Maxwell Street Market in 1958. Fred and Sam followed Dad’s lead and ditched the tuxedos they once sported. Instead they wore the hip mod style of the time—colorful leisure suits, black ankle boots, and German coats, as featured on the This Is My Country album cover. Marv made a special point of instructing road manager Robert Cobbins, “Street clothes, no suits or ties. And nobody shows up in a tuxedo.” This represented more than just a stylistic choice. It was a statement of Black Power told through clothing. Black performers didn’t dress up for the Man anymore.

  Finally, show time. Curtis, Fred, and Sam, tired from the press party at Basin Street the night before, took the stage at the Fillmore West alongside Santana and Ike and Tina Turner. They still didn’t feel comfortable performing—losing their road band in the accident meant making do with new guys who only knew the hits, and they were fed up with their current drummer. Regardless, they were seasoned performers and did their best to get over to the crowd. Sweating through their hip getups under the spotlights, they ground out old classics like “Gypsy Woman” and “Keep On Pushing” along with “Choice of Colors” and other new hits. Unfortunately, the largely white rock crowd that packed the Fillmore gave the Impressions a tepid welcome. Despite years of toil, they hadn’t crossed over to the pop market in a meaningful way.

  After the set, a black man with an Afro accosted my father backstage. The lyrics to “Choice of Colors” had him upset.

  If you had a choice of colors

  Which one would you choose, my brothers?

  “We don’t have a choice of colors,” the man said. “We don’t. We don’t have a choice at all.” My father listened patiently and tried to explain his side. “You aren’t listening to the words,” he said. He repeated them, a tinge of annoyance creeping into his soft, measured voice. “You listen to that song again,” he said. “If you still don’t understand it, we can talk about it again tomorrow night.” Few celebrities would have invited a fan to engage in such a deep discussion about lyrics, and though Dad never saw the kid again, it showed how much he wanted people to understand him.

  While “Choice of Colors” hit the top of the R&B chart—the Impressions’ fifth number one—the young man put a fine point on a feeling Dad had sensed for a while. His audience had changed. Lyrics like “How long have you hated your white teacher?” made sense in his head, but perhaps they didn’t make sense to his listeners. Even the term “white teacher” had paternalistic undertones that didn’t fly with the young, militant, urban blacks that had taken over the movement. For these young kids, the white man was the problem. My father often complained about “Whitey” and “crackers,” but he still believed the biggest problem was “ourselves.” “‘Choice of Colors’ isn’t for Whitey, it’s for us,” he said. “We have to get together. If we united behind our leaders we’d be much stronger. Martin Luther King had the biggest following and it was too small. There’s twenty million of us and that’s not enough.” Of course, my father understood the young man’s position. “That doesn’t mean you just lay down all the time,” he said. “You should be pushing, even scaring, sometimes.” Still, he didn’t see Black Power as any more viable in the long run than White Power.

  The young man walked away from the conversation unsatisfied. Dad did, too. He always wrote songs based on what he heard from his community, and now he heard anger like never before. At the same time, his main concern was selling albums, and while conciliatory songs like “Choice of Colors” didn’t sit right with some militant young blacks, songs with harder edges like “This Is My Country” alienated many white listeners. Sam recalled when they played white college dates in the South, they had to stop performing the latter song. “People didn’t like it too much,” he said, “especially down South when you’re talking about ‘whips on your back.’” It put my father in an impossible situation. He couldn’t please every listener, and he had too much integrity to sell out his ideals in trying.

  At eleven o’clock the following morning, Curtis, still in a robe, opened the door of his sixteenth-floor room. He’d come a long way from the days of being chased out of a white hotel because Sam tried to get some ice. In making his living as a traveling performer, he’d seen the worst segregation had to offer. He knew about staying in seedy motels because no hotel would take him, eating in grimy back alleys because no restaurant would seat him. Now in his fancy San Francisco hotel room, he finished a room-service breakfast—steak and fruit cocktail—slipped out of his plush robe, and got dressed.

  That day, the Impressions planned to find some hip West Coast clothes before another late night at the Fillmore. As my father dressed, Marv entered the room. “Are you doing any writing?” he asked. “I haven’t had any time,” my father said. “All this moving around, trying to get the band into shape. There’s no time to write.” That represented another major change from years past—years when Dad could knock out chart-busting songs in between sets on tour, or in the car speeding from gig to gig. It frustrated him. Writing was like breathing, and the road felt increasingly suffocating.

  Touring wasn’t all a grind, though. As the Impressions drove to the fashionable stores on Polk Street, they talked about the Playboy Club, where they had dined after the Basin Street press party two nights before. They still couldn’t quite believe it. Bunnies brought them gourmet food, and the manager personally welcomed them. It seemed like everyone in the place tried to make them feel pampered, including a bevy of beautiful women. Just think of it, that whole production for three guys from the South Side of Chicago.

  At the store, they browsed the racks with my father complaining, “I can’t get into anything. It’s my ass, sticks out and throws everything out of whack.” He still didn’t feel comfortable with his body. He picked out a few things, stuck a Napoleon hat on Marv for giggles, paid with a hundred dollar bill, and the band headed back to the Hilton to prepare for the second show and the week ahead.

  The day after the second show, the Impressions had a spot on KDIA, a local R&B station, where the interviewer leveled a serious accusation: “You try to present yourselves as ordinary people, but you’re not ordinary,” he said. My father replied, “Well, we’re just simple people. Just down to earth.” The interviewer pressed to find the big ego somewhere. He asked the Impressions about making themselves spokesmen for their people. “I like to call these songs of inspiration, songs of faith,” Dad answered, deflecting the question. “We don’t try to be spokesmen, although we speak our minds. We’re entertainers. We’re complimented that they look on us as spokesmen, but we just think we’re singing what all the brothers feel.” Sam added, “The black performer isn’t a shuffler anymore.” Fred picked up on the theme and said, “James Brown wouldn’t sing about pride three years ago.” What Fred tactfully left in the subtext of that statement was that the Impressions had played a major role in creating a world where Brown could sing about pride.

  They had precious little time to pause and reflect on these things. The week after the last show at the Fillmore, the Impressions appeared on a local television show and played four nights at Basin Street. The next week, they traveled to Los Angeles, where Marv had booked a radio spot, five television guest appearances including American Bandstand and The Joey Bishop Show, three nights at the Troubadour, and a Saturday night concert at the Hollywood Palladium. Dad always found the road exhausting, but with the extra weight of Curtom on his back, he couldn’t bear it much longer.

  Despite the increased demands on his time, the Impressions were freer than ever. They could dress how they wanted, sing what they wanted, and express unabashed pride in their blackness. Most of that freedom came from my father’s songs and his decision to start Curtom, which allowed the Impressions to call their own shots in ways that were impossible at ABC. Marv also added to their freedom, booking slots on TV shows they’d never played before and giving them a stronger connection than ever to
the white pop market. The freedom also hurt the group, though. It moved Dad further into his own world—a world where he saw himself standing on his own, free from the monotonous slog of touring.

  During the Impressions’ run at the Fillmore, the Four Tops had an engagement just down the street in the Crown Room at the Fairmont Hotel. The Tops played to a white supper-club audience and made a killing. One night after their show, they dropped by the Impressions’ dressing room. Even though it was two in the morning, even though they were all exhausted, even though the road had ground them down physically, mentally, spiritually, the room exploded with, “How you doin’ brother?” and hands shaking, hands slapping, everyone laughing, exchanging their newest road stories, talking about whose band was hot, who had the tightest rhythm section.

  Dad got the scoop from the Tops on playing the white supper-club scene and how much money he could make there. Then, Levi Stubbs of the Tops asked about the audience at the Fillmore, and the Impressions—who just moments before onstage had been three men with one voice—all began talking at the same time. “You wouldn’t be-lieve that smoke when you walk out there it’s like to knock you over. There’s cops standing right there next to it and I think they’s high too.”

  Fred and Sam shied away from drugs, but my father had begun experimenting with marijuana. “I wasn’t dropping acid, but I guess it’s safe for me to say that I too smoked herb,” he said later. “It was no big deal. I didn’t do nothing until I was twenty-seven years old, and smoking herb didn’t seem like a heavy cost to pay to cure my curiosity.” Still, he never performed high, and even he felt surprised at the level of drug use in the audience. By 1969, it seemed few remained immune to the siren song of mind expansion.

  The next night at Basin Street, a young drummer named André Fischer—who would go on to play in the band Rufus with Chaka Khan—caught the Impressions’ set. André had met my father a few times before, so he stepped backstage after the show and said hello. “What are you doing here?” my father asked, a little surprised. Every time the two had met, it had been in a different city. André explained he was drumming for Big Time Buck White, a Black Power play down the street. Then, he started talking with organ player Melvin Jones. “Man, we can’t stand this drummer,” Jones said. “We’re looking for another one.”

  The next day, André stopped by the Impressions’ sound check at Basin Street. The Impressions didn’t invite their current drummer in order to give André a shot. Turned out the kid had big ears. He knew their records and had seen the show the night before, so he could play all the parts. No one wanted him to leave. He didn’t.

  Upon learning the band made $250 a week with no per diem, he asked for $300 and a per diem. He got it. It pissed off the band, so André made them see it as an opportunity to increase their own pay. My father grudgingly agreed to the raise. If he had trouble sharing stakes in Curtom with Fred and Sam, he certainly didn’t want to give away money to his backing band, even though he needed them, too.

  Hiring André proved fateful, leading my father to a musician who would influence his direction in coming years. When the Impressions sought a second guitarist, André called his friend Craig McMullen, who was fluent in jazz, psychedelia, soul, and R&B. At the time, Dad was searching for new textures to add to his sound. Craig, with his guitar effects pedals and jazzy chord changes, helped point the way forward.

  The new members locked in with Lucky as their leader. My father loved Lucky—everyone did—but he learned Lucky was a peculiar man. On stage, he’d wear a Nehru jacket long after that style had passed, along with black dress pants that had been pressed so often they were shiny as glass, and he’d pull them up too high, leaving the cuff several inches above his shoes. He wore fake silk socks and Stacy Adams dress shoes. While he played, a Marlboro cigarette dangled from his lips, and he bit the filter, shooting a steady stream of smoke into his face. He’d squint his eyes through the smoke and violently thrust his hips, appearing to hump his bass guitar.

  Lucky’s idiosyncrasies went beyond dress and stage presence. He carried a briefcase on tour, and everyone assumed he had gear or sheet music in it—until he opened it. His briefcase was custom designed to hold a liquor bottle and shot glasses. Next to a bottle of J&B scotch, he kept a bottle of hot sauce, a Polaroid camera, and a huge picture collection bound by rubber bands. Each picture showed an overweight old woman wearing skimpy lingerie, striking a sensual pose. Lucky liked older women and often joked, “If you see me with a younger woman, I’m holding her for the police.” But the man could play a bass into submission, and that was enough for my father.

  In an era with few television outlets, performing on a late-night network talk show gave them precious exposure to the pop market. So in 1969 the Impressions were fortunate to book an episode of ABC’s The Joey Bishop Show. As with radio, however, television came with its share of racism and conservatism. While the Impressions rehearsed “Choice of Colors,” Bishop’s producer loomed nearby. “You won’t be able to do that song on this television show,” he said. “It isn’t right for the format, and it won’t work on a national televised audience.” Tense moments passed as my father considered leaving the show rather than submitting to unfair censorship. Bishop noticed the problem and walked over to discuss it. “What’s going on?” he asked. My father explained the situation. Bishop thought for a second and said, “Hey, if this is your hit record, go ahead and do it.”

  Though they won the showdown with Bishop’s producer, it seemed the country’s problems followed the Impressions wherever they went, all the more so because Dad bravely put himself and the group in the middle of those problems. Racism, revolution, and riots hung heavy in the air. Everyone had to deal with them. Some, like Bishop’s producer, tried to ignore them until they went away. Others, like the Impressions, confronted them fearlessly. Yet, the more fearless my father became with his songs, the more he worried for Fred and Sam. He didn’t mind taking chances by himself—chances that could end in radio bans or worse—but he didn’t feel comfortable putting Fred and Sam and their livelihoods on the line. Dad wanted to confront society’s ills more powerfully than ever before. He also wanted to stop touring. Somewhere deep within, he knew he couldn’t achieve those desires with the Impressions.

  After finishing their work in California, the Impressions drove back to Chicago’s stinging cold, and Curtis found his grandmother in the hospital. Annie Bell died on March 13, 1969, of pneumonia and congestive heart failure brought on by diabetes. The next day, Uncle Kenny returned safely from Vietnam. Annie Bell told Uncle Kenny she’d wait for him to get home. She almost made it.

  Of all the tragedies over the past few years, losing Annie Bell hurt Dad the most. He’d already put his brother Kirby in the ground, and he’d seen five of America’s greatest leaders slain. Now, he said goodbye to the woman who had done more to shape, guide, and inspire him than anyone but his mother. Annie Bell helped lead him to music. Her voice echoed in his lyrics. Her sermons gave his songs direction. Because of her, he met Jerry Butler. Because of her, he joined his first vocal group. Because of her, he fell in love with the life of a traveling musician. Without her, nothing else he’d achieved would have been possible.

  Amidst this emotional upheaval, Dad struggled with a romantic relationship on the brink of failure. My mother’s patience for his cheating wore thin, but he couldn’t stop. He set up a mistress in an apartment on the North Side, and he lived two lives, splitting time between our home and her apartment.

  It’s amazing he found time for a mistress. He had four children, his own label to run, a successful album to promote, and a fiery partner at home who inched closer to leaving him. On top of all that, after the tour ended, my father booked time in the studio to recut most of the Impressions’ catalog because ABC-Paramount owned his old masters. In shrewd businessman style, he wanted to record the songs again so whenever anyone wanted to license them, they would license his masters, and all the money would go to Curtom. André, Craig, Lucky, and Me
lvin remained close during this period because my father, unlike many artists, recorded with his road band whenever possible. Lucky stayed with André in a motel on Stony Island Avenue, sharing a room about five minutes from Curtom’s offices.

  After a long day of recording old Impressions material, Lucky would return to the hotel and eat barbecue ribs or pizza for dinner. He’d ruffle through the briefcase, pour a nip of J&B scotch, douse his food with hot sauce, and wash it down with red soda. After a few weeks, his fingertips began to turn yellow. He thought he had jaundice, so he and André hopped in a cab and found an emergency room. The doctor said Lucky had elevated blood pressure and asked if he ate large amounts of canned-tomato products. As it turned out, between the acid from the hot sauce and the trash he ate, his hands had become discolored. The doctor told him his lips would turn yellow too if he didn’t lay off the hot sauce and pizza.

  Lucky would have little choice but to diversify his diet on the road as they set out for ninety days of one-nighters through places like Mississippi, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Georgia. As the Impressions toured, Young Mods threw “Seven Years” high on the R&B chart to keep “Choice of Colors” company. The new single continued the album’s success and kept Curtom moving forward.

  Success or not, touring continued to drain my father physically and mentally. “Sometimes we’d drive five or six hundred miles,” André says, “and sometimes a couple of the gigs would be canceled and we’d have to drive all the way back.” It also exhausted Dad emotionally, especially because integration remained a sore subject in the South. At a show in Natchez, Mississippi, the Impressions were escorted to their dressing room and weren’t allowed to leave until showtime. As soon as they finished performing, a group of white highway patrolmen told my father they couldn’t stay the night. Weary as usual, the band piled into the bus and set off for the next stop. It stung, but at least in the South they’d let you know why. The same thing would happen in the North, but they’d do it with a smile, never admitting the real reason. “Your services were welcome, but you as a person were not welcome,” André says.