Traveling Soul (14 page)

At that time, Gordy had cowritten another single that began making its way up the charts—“Shop Around.” Released on Gordy's new label, Tamla, it introduced to the world a group called the Miracles with Bill “Smokey” Robinson. “Shop Around” sold one million copies on its first release. Soon, Tamla would become Motown, Smokey Robinson would be a household name, and Gordy would run the most successful Negro-owned business in the country. My father surely heard “Shop Around” on the radio as he flashed from city to city, and he felt the fire to make a hit for himself.

He saved up nearly $1,000 on tour with Jerry, and he had a song he wanted to cut with the Impressions. He'd begun writing it when he was twelve years old after watching a Western movie. Even at such a young age, his imagination could carry him far from the ghetto's claws. He introduced it to Eddie one night in his usual way—“Hey, Tom. What do you think of this?” Then, he played a few licks and began singing about a mysterious gypsy woman dancing around a campfire. “Yeah, that's a hit, I hope,” Eddie said. “But I think we might be starting a new trend because right now it's all doo-wops. We're coming up with something different, and something different might be acceptable. Let's go for it.”

On a stop in Chicago, Eddie called the Impressions to his apartment. That night, Curtis, Fred, Sam, Arthur, and Richard sat around catching up on old times, and then Curtis played them the song—“Gypsy Woman.” They wanted to hear it again and again. Each time he played it, another voice found a harmony to sing. Soon, the air grew full with five voices intertwined. By the end of the evening, the Impressions were a group again.

Before beginning his last leg with Jerry, Dad booked a session at Universal Studios in Chicago to cut “Gypsy Woman.” The recording they made that day creeps from the speakers and settles over the listener like fog on a dark night. Castanets and finger cymbals accent a nasty snare-drum
pattern that splits the difference between funk and a marching beat. The Impressions provide the perfect backing, blending doo-wop and gospel, laying a plush bed for Curtis's trilling falsetto to lie upon. Curtis's guitar is a quintessential lesson in understatement, especially the lick he rips off after the line “She danced around and 'round to a guitar melody”—two notes so perfectly placed and executed they hit like a punch to the gut.

Everyone knew the song had legs; they just needed a break. As luck would have it, Jerry's tour stopped next in Philadelphia, playing for Georgie Woods at the Uptown Theater again. Eddie knew the radio stations in Philly could break “Gypsy Woman,” so he spent ample time at WDAS and at Philly's other major station, WHAT. “I was there with my tin cup begging that guy to play the record,” Eddie says. “I had to see the program director. I sold him a bill of goods, you know, I had my hand crossed behind my back. He said, ‘OK, we'll give you a shot. We'll put it on the extra list, but you're going to have to talk to the jockey personally to get him to play it, because on the extra list, they're not required to play it.' So now I got to go to the jocks one on one, take my time, come back a different time, ask them to plug my record.”

Eddie had one other asset in his favor in Philadelphia: a good promotion man named Manny Singer. “I used to take him out to dinner a couple of times,” Eddie says. “I'd say, ‘Manny, I need your help on this.' So, he would talk to the jocks, too.”

Still, it was Georgie Woods who ultimately held the key to Philadelphia. Eddie told Woods, “This is me, man; this is for me.” Woods put the record in heavy rotation, and it took off in Philly, became bigger than bubble gum. The fire spread to Maxie Waxie in Baltimore and DC, followed by Bill Summers in Louisville and Porky Chedwick in Pittsburgh. Through sheer gumption, Eddie was slowly creating a radio smash.

“Eddie was such a hustler, man,” my father said. “Everywhere we went, anything even looked like an antenna, maybe five or ten miles away, we'd come on and Eddie would hustle ‘Gypsy Woman' to whoever was there…. Country and western, gospel, any kind of station, didn't matter what the format was. Eddie would pull over and take us into the
station. People just appreciated you coming in and making the stop, so they'd give you a play. So that's how we began to build up ‘Gypsy Woman.'”

Even Jerry helped promote the song. As “Gypsy Woman” picked up steam on local radio, the Impressions received an invitation to perform on television. The rest of the group couldn't make it in time, so as Curtis pantomimed the song for the cameras, Jerry and Eddie stood in the background, just close enough to the lights so the crowd could tell they were there, but far enough in the shadows so no one could see who they were.

With television and radio promotion going strong, “Gypsy Woman” continued gaining traction. Meanwhile, Jerry returned to the Apollo as Eddie scoured New York for a new record deal. It seemed just days ago he was begging around Record Row in Chicago trying to sell the original Impressions, but even after so much hard work, he had to begin from the bottom again.

Eddie went to Laurie Records first, which had Dion and the Belmonts and the Chiffons. They passed. Next, he went to Scepter Records, home of the Shirelles and Tammy Montgomery, who would later score massive hits as Tammi Terrell, singing with Marvin Gaye for Motown. Scepter passed. Then, Eddie went to RCA Records on Fifth Avenue and played the demo for A&R man Ray Harris, who thought my father looked like a rabbit with his front teeth sticking out. Harris said, “No, I can't see this group singing about a gypsy woman and the kids getting into it.”

Undaunted, Eddie kept on his dogged way to ABC/Paramount Records on Broadway. ABC existed in another stratum from the labels that had already rejected “Gypsy Woman.” When Eddie plucked up his nerve and walked into the building, he stood in the house of B. B. King, Fats Domino, Lloyd Price, and perhaps biggest of all, Ray Charles. Charles had signed with ABC the year before and negotiated a contract virtually unheard of for a Negro at the time, with a $50,000 annual advance, high royalties, and eventual ownership of his masters. That last part did not go unnoticed by my father.

At ABC, Eddie met A&R man Clarence Avant, and played him “Gypsy Woman.” It didn't knock Avant out, but for some reason he decided to help. “He was black, and I'm black, and I guess we had to stick together,” Eddie says. “And he knew it wouldn't cost them anything to put it out because they were known for being cheapskates, which meant that they would only give you enough advance money to put in your pocket.” Eddie showed how much hustle he had, telling Avant, “Being with Jerry Butler, I know a lot of DJs across the country. I got their home phone numbers and everything. I think I can support this record. If you guys will distribute it, I can get the airplay to get it started.”

Avant played “Gypsy Woman” for ABC president Samuel Clark and told him it was a great record, although he didn't quite believe it himself. True to form, Clark signed the Impressions with no advance money offered. ABC would only release the song regionally in Philadelphia, Baltimore, DC, and New York, and the label passed off most, if not all, promotional responsibilities to Eddie and the group. If the song hit—and the odds were stacked against it—ABC would release “Gypsy Woman” nationally. If the song missed, which was much more likely, the Impressions were out of the business. Eddie said, “Man, we're going to have to roll our sleeves up and hustle the best we can,” but my father already knew that.

After the last Apollo show, Dad told Jerry he wouldn't be playing guitar for him anymore. Jerry said later, “I could see it coming, but I didn't know it would come that soon. Curt was anxious to try new ideas and explore different sounds. And so we parted again, this time more amicably.”

My father explained it like this: “Everybody who was part of the Impressions could see that it was God's calling.” He wasn't a religious man, but he'd endured enough of Annie Bell's droning sermons to recognize the sound of that heavenly phone ringing.

All he had to do now was answer.

“Maybe someday I'll reach that higher goal,
I know I can make it with just a little bit of soul.”

—“K
EEP
O
N
P
USHING
”

N
ew York City, late 1960
—The sidewalk outside the Brill Building bustled with hungry young songwriters seeking a break. Inside, the major music publishers in New York sat ready to prey on these desperate youngsters. The publishers had everything set up in the boxy building on Broadway—songwriters toiling in tiny offices, arrangers who could write a quick lead sheet for a sawbuck, an in-house demo studio, and radio promoters who pushed songs into nationwide rotation. “Brill was a building where songwriters would go up to the eleventh floor and would come down on the elevator and stop at each floor, trying to sell their songs at every office,” said Mike Stoller, who cowrote many of Elvis's hits.

Only the best writers earned offices in the building—Carole King, Phil Spector, Burt Bacharach, Paul Simon, and other soon-to-be famous names. Roving musicians and lesser writers lingered in phone booths at the Turf, a restaurant on street level, hoping for a crack at the big time. “If a songwriter was doing a demo session and someone hadn't shown up, they'd run into the restaurant and shout, ‘I need a bass player,' and he'd get one,” Stoller said.

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.