Traveling Soul (13 page)

For a few months, they scraped by with small gigs in what my father called “the lowlands, like down in Mississippi, just in little night spots,” often billing themselves as Jerry Butler and the Impressions and letting Sam sing “For Your Precious Love,” since no one knew the difference anyway.

As 1959 ended, Vee-Jay dropped the group. Chief among their reasons was that my father couldn't come up with another hit. Also, Carter
never felt excited about Curtis's falsetto voice, and he felt less excited about butting heads with a teenager over royalties and song ownership. Even at such a young age, Dad understood the importance of owning himself. Once he took over the group, he often argued with Abner and Carter about his rights. “There were so many fights,” he remembered. “They couldn't understand it. ‘He wants his publishing!' they would say to each other. Like it wasn't mine to have.” He might not have finished high school, but he was no fool. Nobody could dupe or bully him into giving away a single cent. Unfortunately, that attitude left him out of a job.

After the Vee-Jay deal fell through, Eddie couldn't get the Impressions another contract. Defeated and deflated, they took whatever menial jobs they could find. Around this time, my father began a working relationship with a guy he knew from high school, Major Lance. Major had become a featured dancer on Jim Lounsbury's show,
Time for Teens
, and wheedled his way into a one-off single on Mercury Records. He couldn't write songs, so he turned to the one man he knew who could. “He was always coming round and looking through my bag for songs that I'd written but didn't want to do with the Impressions,” Dad said. “He was pretty good at picking them, too.” Unfortunately, the first one he picked—a middling doo-wop number called “I've Got a Girl”—got no traction.

My father now dealt with the possibility that his life as a musician, which had been his main passion, might suffer an early death. After all, the music business was littered with the carcasses of has-beens and one-hit wonders. Curtis had no guarantee of getting even one shot to hit it big, and he'd just seen that shot come and go in a flash. Sure, he was only seventeen years old, but he already had the baggage of failure hanging around his neck.

He spent the beginning of 1960 living in Cabrini-Green, working a dead-end job selling cigars with Alfred Dunhill Co. In later years, he'd often boast it was the only job he ever had outside of music. He spent his days going to fancy office buildings in the Loop, Chicago's central business district, trying to sell cigars to white businessmen. Often, they'd
either harass him or throw him out. A Negro—even one selling cigars—had no place in the white business world. As for the Impressions, they lessened the blow by calling their breakup a hiatus. Of course, the word hiatus implies things will resume, and none of them knew when or if that would happen.

Real progress, however, was being made in race relations, which gave Dad something to focus on. In 1960, John F. Kennedy became the youngest president in American history. He seemed sympathetic toward Negro rights, giving those in the movement reason for hope. Less than a month after his inauguration, the movement received another positive jolt when four young Negro men sat down at the counter of a Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave when denied service. Within a week, similar protests occurred across the state and into South Carolina. The era of sit-ins had begun, and the movement entered its most successful phase—one in which my father would play a major role. Then, as if the roller coaster of 1960 hadn't given him enough to think about, he proposed to Helen.

Curtis married Helen in a double ceremony alongside Fred and his first wife, Judy. After the marriage Curtis and Helen moved into an apartment outside of Cabrini, where Uncle Kenny visited them often. “We were still living in Cabrini-Green,” Kenny says, “and I went over to his house one time, and it was the first time I ever had a shower in my life. I think I was about fourteen years old then. That kind of stays in my mind. A lot of things I could say that I done in life was because of my brother.”

In fact, even though he had married and lived apart from his family, Curtis still played the role of the protective brother. Aunt Carolyn recalls him coming to her rescue after she got into a fight with a schoolmate. “I beat her up, and the next thing I heard was that her brother was looking for me,” she says. “I remember Mama talking about it, and Curtis was in the house doing whatever he did—he always acted like he wasn't paying
attention, but he was. And he said, ‘Who is that?' They told him who it was. He said, ‘Oh, OK.' The next thing I know, he left, and I didn't have no more problems with the brother. Whatever he said, that took care of it. He used to say, ‘If anybody asks you for something, tell them to ask me.'” Now seventeen years old, my father still embraced his role as man of the house, the part he'd played for more than half his life. It made him older than his years. Perhaps that's why he decided to get married at such a young age.

Unfortunately, he wasn't ready. His relationship with Helen faced trouble from the start. “I don't think that relationship ever came together properly,” Eddie says. “Curtis was a very unusual person because he was a genius, and geniuses have idiosyncrasies going and coming. Sometimes a woman can't deal with them, or the man can't deal with it. Basically, they couldn't get it to fit. That's just the way it went.”

Whatever problems Curtis and Helen had going into the marriage were heightened by an unexpected turn of events that sent him back on the road. In mid-1960, the IRS came after him for $400 in taxes. Even though royalty checks still trickled in, he didn't have that kind of money. He did own a Webcor tape recorder, on which he recorded snatches of potential songs that came to him while he noodled around on his guitar between shifts at the cigar store. The IRS wanted him to sell the tape recorder to pay off his debt, but he needed it too much. His creativity came in torrents, and the tape recorder was the only way to hold onto the hundreds of chord progressions, melodies, lyrics, and song structures he discovered before they disappeared back into the ethereal cloud where ideas are born. Curtis needed an escape. Just then, fate stepped in.

Jerry spent most of 1960 touring the chitlin' circuit trying to break as a solo artist. One day in New York, his guitar player—Phil Upchurch, who would soon play on much of my father's work—announced he was leaving the band. Stuck in a bind, Jerry called and asked my father to meet him in New York. “Man, I don't know anybody's songs but yours,” Curtis said into the phone. “Well, just play those—that's all I'm singing,” Jerry replied. “Well, I don't have no amplifier,” Curtis said. “Get here,” Jerry said. “I'll have your amplifier when you get here.” So, my father
jumped right back into life on the road. “When Jerry called, I had nothing to do,” he said later. “I got away from [the IRS] by playing for Jerry. I did nothing but play for Jerry and sleep with my guitar and write songs.”

Curtis didn't just sleep with his guitar, though; he also shared a bed with Eddie to save money. When Jerry had started his solo tour, he had hired Eddie as a valet, a position Eddie saw as demeaning but necessary. “I was his chauffer—or flunky, that's what I called it, carry his shoes, go to the bathroom with him, wipe his behind, whatever it takes,” Eddie says. “Swallow your pride, that's what you call it.”

When Dad joined, he and Eddie became closer than ever. “We were living together like man and wife almost,” Eddie says. “You don't get any closer than that. We were always planning and scheming, maneuvering, what we were going to do. He was always writing something, asking what did I think of it.”

Eddie also learned that despite the humiliations he suffered as Jerry's valet, the job came with hidden benefits. As he explains that period:

I was making history with radio stations and disc jockeys. I had their names, their home phone numbers, their kids' numbers. I had a book of DJs. You name a place, I'll tell you something about it. I would live with the jocks. I had a strong bond. I was like a powerhouse. I could come to town with no money, other guys come to town with a couple thousand dollars in their pocket to go on the radio station, but the [DJs] always gave me a pass because they knew I was broke and poor, and I could take them to get a cup of coffee and a hamburger or something, but they accepted me because they felt me from the heart. I was at radio stations promoting Jerry but at the same time promoting Eddie Thomas.

As winter approached, Curtis had been on the road for almost two years, making it easy to forget Helen back home. Despite the fact Jerry occasionally traveled with his wife and that Curtis slept with Eddie most nights, they were three young men who had women falling at their feet. Curtis had already experienced a taste of what fame could bring in terms
of female attention, and he liked it. Being on the road with Jerry, he got another heaping plateful.

In regard to their marriages, Jerry says,

I can assure you that we did it very poorly. It was not an easy thing to do. But why wasn't it easy? Because we had nothing to compare it to. We were treading in new territory. You know, you're young. Never had enough of anything. And all of a sudden, everything is coming at you in great abundance. How do you deal with it? There was no [Uncle] Charles around to say, “Don't do that.” And you always felt that everybody around you was trying to hustle you. Nobody was around you because they really liked you. They were there because they liked what you represented. Or they liked what you had. And they became vicariously stars in their own way. And pretty soon, you got to the point where you couldn't trust anyone.

Call it the famous man's curse—thousands of acquaintances but few real friends. It plagued my father and Jerry throughout their careers, and as Jerry said, they had no mentor to help them deal with it. While Curtis was away, both Uncle Charles and Wal Mayfield left Annie Bell's house on the same day, never to return.

One night, watching the miles flash by between Philadelphia and Atlantic City, Jerry started humming a melody. My father sat splayed in the back seat with his guitar, as he usually did on tour, and he began putting chords behind Jerry's voice. “He always had an instrument close to him if he could,” Jerry says. “I mean sometimes we might not have space, but that was rare. Because usually he'd be in the backseat with my wife and the guitar, and Eddie and I would be in the front seat driving to wherever we had to go.” As they worked on Jerry's melody, they went through the normal conversation of whether it should be fast or slow, what the lyrics should say, and so on. Soon, they had polished off an up-tempo number called “He Will Break Your Heart.” It would become Jerry's first
number-one R&B hit as a solo artist and a national top twenty record, featuring my father on guitar and backing vocals. It shared a similar rhythmic backbone with “Lonely Teardrops,” a song made famous by Jackie Wilson two years earlier, cowritten by Berry Gordy.