Traveling Soul (16 page)

He went further in depth about his guitar style, saying:

My voicings are different compared to the standard. And even my favorite keys are unorthodox. For instance, F# or A, or B instead of B flat. When I first started, I played flat, like a steel guitar. And I was fretting with my thumb. You can play a lot of grooves that
way. Eventually, I turned the guitar upright. Still, I thought, “My left thumb is closer to the bass string, why not use it?” So I carry the bass line with my thumb, where the average guitarist doesn't. That's not in the book. In the beginning, I used a clamp [capo]; that's how I changed keys. But after a while, I outgrew that. I've never taught myself to use a pick. That's why there are many things I can't do. When you can't do something, you find a way not to need it anyway. I pluck the strings very gentle. Almost the way I sing. I don't do nothin' hard. Rather than do a single-note lead part, I use chord movement … If it wasn't guitar, it would be piano. If it wasn't piano, it would be harp. It would have to be something that would give me a full chord movement. To sing a melody, I need a chord to ride upon.

If Curtis's guitar provides the backbone of the Chicago Sound, Johnny Pate's arrangements form the musculature. Davis said, “I chose to use Johnny in particular with the OKeh records because I wanted to develop what I thought was indicative of the Chicago kind of things. I always felt we were a bit of the South and a bit of the North combined. So I liked the syncopated rhythm and I liked the fact that he did the things with horns.” Johnny's string and horn lines are particularly interesting when considering Chicago's history of big band and swing. In a way, he provided a link between Nat King Cole and soul.

My father became a true producer through his experience at OKeh. He wrote the music, melodies, and lyrics, coached the artists on how to deliver them, and often presided over the sessions as they cut his songs—dozens of them, including Walter Jackson's “That's What Mama Say” and “It's All Over,” and Major Lance's “You'll Want Me Back” and “Think Nothing About It.” He'd always wanted control over all things in his life. Now, he had more of it than ever. He still felt insecure about his looks, his teeth, his stature, but with each new success, the sting of “Smut” momentarily faded.

He had no shortage of songs to keep success coming, either. Gerald Sims, one of Davis's partners at OKeh, said, “I used to go out to Curtis' house a lot of times, and Curtis would have a shopping bag full of tapes, and a lot of them were songs that he would only have six or eight bars to. Because when Curtis used to get an idea he would go to a tape recorder and put the idea down. Then he would go off into something else, and he would come back to it later on. A lot of times you'd pick up a tape and play it, and you'd get off into it, and then it would stop! You'd have to go back and ask him to finish this tune or finish that tune. So he would do it; he was very obliging about it and would go write you a complete tune.”

Near the end of 1962, Major went through Dad's bag of songs again and cut one called “Delilah” for OKeh. It didn't chart, but it made enough noise for people to start paying attention. At the same time, Gene Chandler recorded a slow burner of my father's called “Rainbow.” The song came out as the B-side to “You Threw a Lucky Punch,” which Davis wrote as a response to Mary Wells's Motown smash “You Beat Me to the Punch.” “Rainbow” ended up a surprise hit that rose fourteen places higher on the R&B chart than the A-side.

In rapid succession, Chandler hit again with another sultry Curtis tune called “Man's Temptation,” which features revealing lyrics such as “This woman won't leave me alone / She's going to ruin my happy home with a man's temptation.” The song reads as a deeply personal one, considering what my father was going through with Helen. The lyrics show a man in the painful position of having to choose between two women, and while Dad often wrote songs like this from his imagination, he had indeed begun courting another woman.

Earlier that year, a beautiful young girl named Diane had taken three of her girlfriends to see the Impressions at the Apollo. Even though she preferred the Miracles—after all, the Impressions just
stood
there on stage—Diane loved “Gypsy Woman.” In fact, she knew most of the Impressions' music, though she didn't know Curtis by name. He wasn't quite famous enough yet, and although he sang lead, he didn't seem an obvious choice for the group's leader. He didn't have Sam's handsome
facial features, and standing a squat five-foot-seven, he seemed diminutive next to Fred's heft and height. Anyone close to the group knew he held the power, though. Diane would soon find that out for herself.

Leaving the Apollo, the Impressions slipped into a limo and their road manager Eddie Suitor gunned the engine toward the hotel. At the same time, Diane and her friends crossed the street to get to the subway. As the limo bore down on them, Suitor slammed on the brakes, just missing the girls. Fred and Sam got out, apologized, and offered them tickets to the show the next night in Brooklyn. Curtis, ever the loner, sulked in his plush seat without saying a word.

After the show in Brooklyn, Diane and her friends went backstage where a gaggle of hangers-on milled about, everyone dressed to the nines. The Impressions still wore suits or tuxedos, while many other men sported the Mod look—bright, colorful suits with frills and cravats, wide ties, trouser straps, leather boots, and collarless jackets popularized by the Beatles. Diana Ross led the way for Negro women, with classic wigs, knee-length flared dresses, and fake eyelashes. For the adventurous, the miniskirt had just been invented; for those wanting to project chic airs, Jackie Kennedy's pillbox hat became iconic.

Curtis, Fred, and Sam mingled with the stylishly garbed crowd, but they were men set apart. Youth culture was exploding, and they stood at its vanguard. Beautiful women cast flirting looks at them. Men gave them soul-brother handshakes. The whole place crackled with postperformance energy and the manic hum of a bunch of young guys trying to get laid. My father wasn't the only one cheating—Fred and Sam already had New York girlfriends.

Eventually, Curtis found Diane. He didn't say much that night, but as the evening wore on, people disappeared until it was just the two of them. At that point, he warmed up a bit. They exchanged numbers and arranged middlemen and middle-women, since Diane was married and had a young son named Tracy, and the two parted company.

Diane found Curtis to be attractive in his sincerity; he seemed to deeply believe whatever he said. She also didn't mind that he had a little bit of money, since she came from the same low-income background he
did. The Impressions pulled in about $100,000 a year, and my father's work with OKeh also poured in royalties—quite a sum for 1962.

No matter how much money he made, Dad always lived a modest life. He appreciated fancy things, like a sleek new Jaguar bought with the proceeds from “Gypsy Woman,” but that's not why he wanted money. He wanted it because it gave him the power and control no one in his family had growing up, except Annie Bell. Money made him
the man
, which meant he could buy his family new furniture and food. It meant he could afford a nice home. It also meant he could attract women.

In the furtive early days of their relationship, he'd call Diane and say, “What did you do today?” to which she might answer, “Well I was just window shopping,” and he'd reply, “Was there something you saw? Because I'll send you the money for it.” In such a way, the relationship deepened. It reinforced the message Curtis had learned from Annie Bell—music made him special. It brought him everything he wanted, including beautiful women who might not have looked at him twice if not for his money and fame. He and Diane rarely saw each other—he was either on tour or in Chicago, and she lived in New York—but she'd make a point to see him whenever the Impressions swung through her region. The rest of the time, they'd write letters or talk on the phone.

As 1963 dawned, Davis offered my father a job as associate producer, and the two presided over OKeh's renaissance as a soul label. My father faced incredible pressure, like a juggler with too many balls in the air, but somehow he managed it all without losing his cool aloofness. He continued adding to his fame, fortune, reputation, and, most important, control.

He'd spend all week producing and recording in the studio. On weekends, he'd shoot around the country on tours with the Impressions, only to come back for more writing, rehearsing, and recording. Somehow he also kept up relationships with Helen, who was now pregnant, and Diane, who left her husband (and would become pregnant with me two years later).

Curtis received the news he'd be a father at roughly the same age as his father, and his first son would be born into a house just as fraught with marital tensions. If nothing else, his son wouldn't face the same financial hardship. Dad knew the more he wrote, the more he'd earn, and after he penned a minor hit called “We Girls” for Jan Bradley, Chess Records wanted to hire him as a writer. He would have taken the job, but Chess wanted a piece of the publishing, and he wouldn't give it up. That was his business sense—owning himself meant more than anything, more even than working for one of the nation's biggest labels.

He didn't need the gig anyway. While Fred and Sam grumbled about doing background work, ABC grew restless watching them score hits for OKeh. After almost a year of silence, the Impressions cut a slow ballad called “Sad, Sad Girl and Boy.” It didn't fare well on the charts, but it did hint at the Impressions' new direction.

During their hiatus, my father, Fred, and Sam pushed themselves to create a new sound as a trio. Fred and Sam lived next to each other in Chicago, and Curtis would drive out to them from his house in Markham, a small suburb south of the city. They'd sit in Fred or Sam's basement, working all night. Curtis would pick out their vocal notes on guitar, and they'd sing them over and over until they figured out how to make three voices do the same work five used to do. Their bond became unbreakable in that basement—just three kids camped around a guitar with everything to prove and one goal in mind.

Other than Eddie, Dad would never have closer friends than Fred and Sam. For a decade, they spent more time with each other than they did with their families. Dad grew to trust and love them. He looked at them as brothers. But brothers or not, they'd eventually learn my father could easily separate friendship from business. It was one of many areas where his dual nature as a Gemini came into play. He could cherish a filial bond; he could be kindhearted and generous—but, as Miles Davis often said, geniuses are selfish. My father was a genius, and when it came to money, power, and control, he wanted all of it. If he had to harm or end a close relationship in the process, he would.

That wouldn't happen to Fred and Sam for a few years, though. Practicing in the basement, they became three parts of the same voice. The
trio left no room for ego—Dad had to learn to fall into backing harmony as he traded leads with Fred and Sam. Sam also had to adjust, as the new arrangements forced him to sing uncomfortable notes. “They were taking me out of my range,” he said. “When the whole group was together, I was doing a lot of bass singing. After the Brooks brothers left, they started raising me up.”

Sam stretched himself to hit those notes because he understood the power of singing in a range where few other male singers could compete: “We were trying to establish something that nobody else had, so we said we'll sing higher than anybody else.”

With their new format, the Impressions found something unique in R&B music, although that sort of interplay among voices—trading parts of the lead back and forth, singing in unison and then breaking off into harmony—was nothing new. As Curtis said, “In gospel, you knew how to sing lead and also how to incorporate yourself into the group, how to blend in. Sometimes everyone would come out and sing harmony with a portion of the lead. It made us [as] a three-man group stronger than we were as a five-man group. It locks everybody in; you really know where the voices are. When you have four or five men, if one moves up, the other doesn't know where to go.” Many artists had drawn from gospel's deep, holy well to make great secular music, but none had done it in the harmonic way of the Impressions.