Traveling Soul (8 page)

Like millions around the country, my father felt great hope as King grew in stature. He supported the bus boycott and then rooted for King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Finally, something stirred him as deeply as music.

As the '50s progressed, a new breed of singers elbowed onto street corners beside Chicago's electric bluesmen and hip beboppers. These young kids with processed hair and smooth-as-silk voices wove intricate harmonies into a new style. They sang anywhere and everywhere—on the corners, in stairwells, or in years to come, at one of Herb Kent's sock hops.

Paralleling the competitions between gospel groups, which Dad had experienced, and anticipating hip-hop freestyling competitions two decades later, doo-wop groups battled each other for street-corner control. Reggie Smith, a member of the Five Chances, remembered my father hanging around the Five Chances' turf at Forty-Fourth and Prairie, saying, “We'd tell him to get away from us with all that noise, 'cause we're trying to sing, [but] he went on to beat us to death.”

Doo-wop was bigger than Chicago, though. Every city seemed to have its own collection of aspiring teenagers honing their harmonies, and in 1953, five young friends in Chattanooga, Tennessee, formed such a group. Sam Gooden, Fred Cash, Emanuel Thomas, and the brothers Richard and Arthur Brooks called themselves the Roosters. After Thomas quit the group, his sister Catherine joined, and they became Four Roosters and a Chick.

Catherine soon married and left, but the Roosters continued even though Fred's religious parents never approved of the group. He was
barely a teenager, and they didn't want him out all night singing that secular music. Like most teenagers, Fred found a way around their disapproval. “Once they'd gone to bed, I'd slip out of the window and join the other guys on the corner, and then we'd go do to this little club on East 9th Street called Memos, where we'd sing,” he said. “And then, once we'd finished, I'd come home, slip back in through the window, go back to bed. And neither my mom nor my dad would ever know I'd been out.”

Chattanooga had no record labels to speak of, and after the Roosters tried to cut a record in Nashville to no avail, they faced a dilemma. Any serious singer knew that to make it in the music business, you had to go to Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, or New York. Those places were far away and full of unknown dangers, though. With no other options, they took a chance. The Brooks brothers had a sister in Chicago, so the band loaded up on bologna sandwiches, packed into a car, and drove six hundred miles north to the Windy City.

Fred's parents wouldn't let him go, which meant Sam, Arthur, and Richard had to find a replacement in Chicago. After a little searching, they met Jerry, who was working a dead-end job as a short-order cook. With his strong voice, he got the gig. As Jerry remembered the group on first meeting them:

Arthur was stockily built with a light complexion. Sam, who was about my height and complexion but thinner, had narrow facial features that enhanced a big, broad smile. Richard, Arthur's brother, was about my age. Much skinnier than Arthur, Richard had distinctive sandy, curly hair that he combed constantly.

Arthur and Richard were dead serious, but I always got the feeling that Sam really didn't give a damn. I remember him saying once that if he didn't make it singing, he could always play baseball. After watching him play one day, I could see why. He could really play.

Soon, they worked out a practice schedule—Jerry went straight to meet the guys after work around midnight. He'd sing all night, work all day, and do it again the next night. It didn't take long for them to get
tight. Even though they had grown up in different cities, they shared a common link in the church. Sam's father was a minister and his mother an organist. His parents forced him to sing solos in church, which he hated doing. Jerry had grown up in Annie Bell's church with Curtis, listening to and singing the same gospel tunes. Unlike Sam, he loved the spotlight.

They all knew the basic rules of singing gospel and shared a love of doo-wop, but Jerry knew the group lacked a key element—a musician who could tie it all together. He thought first of my father and asked him to join the group. Always bent on control, Dad saw no reason to leave his own group, where he was the leader, for one where he'd be just another member. Jerry pleaded with him, “If you join us, man, with the way you play the guitar and the way they sing, we'll come up with a different sound.” Dad didn't bite. Jerry cooked up a scheme. “Dig, Curt,” he said. “Let's do it like this—you rehearse three nights a week with us and three with your group. Whoever improves first, or seems to have the most potential, will be the group you go with.” Even at such a young age, my father knew a good business deal when he heard one.

Jerry's persistence paid off—Curtis soon dropped the Alphatones and joined the Roosters. Wasting no time, they began working on original material, dreaming of writing the next big hit. “We woodshedded for a good year,” Dad said, “and finally we came along with a few songs.” One of the songs, an emotional, spoken-word ballad called “For Your Precious Love,” would become the group's calling card. It owed a good deal to Ray Charles's genre-bending style—it wasn't quite gospel, R&B, or pop, but contained all those elements. It also shared quite a bit in common with the Gospel Clefs' “Open Our Eyes,” which Herb Kent used to close his radio show. Structured around Curtis's plucked guitar chords and set in a slow 6/8 meter, “For Your Precious Love” played almost like a hymn. My father's high falsetto rode atop the heavenly backing vocals, providing a lush bed for Butler's chocolaterich voice.

As they perfected the song, they also looked for a break. The Roosters entered a talent show at Washburne High School in 1957 and challenged
some of the best groups in Cabrini, including the Medallionaires, who held the distinction of releasing a single called “Magic Moonlight” on Mercury Records. The Medallionaires were so professional they even had a manager, Eddie Thomas, who drove a canary-yellow Cadillac with glinting white trim. As Eddie recalls, “The Medallionaires thought they were hot stuff. Girls were screaming and hollering, going crazy, and they had a song they had just written and recorded on Mercury Records. I have a feeling they bought all the copies that were sold themselves. It didn't do that well.”

Eddie came to the talent show to watch his group perform, but he'd also heard of the Roosters and made sure he caught their set. That night, the Roosters harmonized on Sam Cooke's “You Send Me,” and despite struggling with a single microphone that kept cutting out, they took the house by storm. “Their harmony was mind blowing,” Eddie says. “The lead singer had a great smooth, sexy baritone voice. They had a young guitar player who had a very unusual style of playing his guitar. When they learned that I was working with this group called the Medallionaires, they asked me could I work with them too.”

Eddie, a born hustler, agreed—on one condition. He demanded the group axe the name Roosters. “Too country,” he said. My father heartily agreed. “We couldn't get through a song after we told the audience the name,” he said. “They'd be crowing and making all kinds of barnyard sounds.” There was only one problem: no one had a better name. For a while everyone threw around suggestions, but they couldn't make anything stick. It didn't help that Arthur, Richard, and Sam didn't want to change the name. “We're gonna lose a lot of sales in Chattanooga,” they protested. “The Roosters are very popular there.” Eddie explained he had his eye on a much bigger picture. “I can't see it on a marquee,” he told them. “I can't see it at the Regal Theatre.” Besides, a publicist could alert fans of the name change once the group had something to promote.

“What's the new name then?” they demanded.

They kicked around a few clunkers, but still nothing seemed to stick. After several failures, they wrote down ideas and threw them in a hat. Sam reached in and pulled out a scrap. He nervously unfolded it.
Scrawled on it was one of Eddie's ideas, conceived after recalling how impressed he had been the first time he saw the Roosters perform.

“How about the Impressions?” Sam said, reading the paper.

It stuck.

“Taking all that he can take,
Gambling with the odds of fate,
Trying to get over.”

—“S
UPERFLY
”

A
pril 5, 1958
—The Hawk screeched through Chicago overnight, blanketing Hudson Street in sparkling snow. Dad woke to find drifts piled five feet high, glinting in the cold sunlight. Of all the times for a freak snowstorm, this one threatened to ruin the Impressions' audition with Vee-Jay Records. Early that morning, they humped their gear through the not-quite-winter wonderland to Record Row, breath jetting out in steamy spurts, looking for a record deal or bust.

They had endured this before, minus the snow. In previous months, the guys had taken “For Your Precious Love” to Savoy Records, where owner Herman Lubinsky suggested Jerry sing the lyrics rather than speak them. Jerry took his advice, but Lubinsky passed on the group. They had also solicited King Records, where Ralph Bass, head of Artists & Repertoire, passed as well. Bass had enough work breaking a young singer named James Brown. After that, Eddie set up an audition with an A&R man at Mercury Records who took the Impressions into a small studio, listened to their material, and said he dug the sound but couldn't sign the group because his roster was already too heavy.

He offered the Impressions an opportunity to do some background singing with a singer named Eddie Howard, which they happily took. “I had never heard of [Eddie Howard] myself,” Jerry said, “but for $25 an hour per side, I was willing to do some serious chirping.” Still, the gig didn't represent the success they sought.

Options dwindling, Eddie Thomas went to a tiny label called Bandera, where he met founder Vi Muszynski—a large woman in her forties with platinum blonde hair. “She talked very fast, squirmed in her seat, and smacked her lips when she talked,” Jerry recalled. “She always seemed too heavily made up to me. She was such a nice woman, though, that you tended to overlook everything else.” Around town, everyone knew Muszynski as “the record lady.” She wanted to the sign the Impressions, but Bandera lacked the funds to publish a record. The label's pittance of publishing went through a much more successful label, Vee-Jay, and Muszynski couldn't cut a deal without Vee-Jay's approval.

At that time Vee-Jay reigned over Negro music in Chicago. Its office was a sort of headquarters where everyone in the business went after hours, no matter where they worked during the day. As renowned Chicago producer Carl Davis recalled:

Vee-Jay had an employee lounge that turned into a nightspot after working hours. Industry personalities would be up there trading stories and shooting the breeze, while others would be playing cards. The people who didn't want to gamble would sit around the makeshift bar, which was really a lunchroom counter, and have a few drinks … Vee-Jay had the luxury of having everybody promoting Vee-Jay. Vee-Jay set the standard. Vee-Jay kept you in the know. We all took some pride in the fact that it was
the
black record company, and to even be indirectly affiliated with them gave us all welcomed credibility.

Muszynski scheduled an audition for the Impressions with Vee-Jay's A&R man, Calvin Carter, on April 5. With better intentions than taste, she selected several songs that were “an inch away from being country,”
according to Jerry, and had the Impressions learn them. “We thought they were ridiculous, but we went along because we didn't want to hurt her feelings,” Jerry said. “We … tried to make them as soulful as possible.”

In one version of the audition story, when the Impressions arrived that snowy day, they knocked on the door at Chess Records first. They made eye contact with a security guard sitting inside but he didn't let them in, so they crossed the street and went to Vee-Jay. While romantic, this version doesn't square with the other facts known about that day. First, Eddie recalled unsuccessfully offering “For Your Precious Love” to Chess Records before meeting Muszynski, which makes a return to Chess unlikely. Second, Muszynski scheduled an audition at Vee-Jay, which makes a spur-of-the-moment drop-in at Chess equally unlikely.

Regardless, when the Impressions reached Vee-Jay's offices on Forty-Seventh Street and South Parkway they met label president Ewart Abner, a thin, dapper Negro with kind eyes and an immaculately trimmed moustache. He sat with his ever-present Great Dane slobbering by his side. Abner was a slick man, a charmer, and one of the most powerful men in the business. Trembling, the Impressions climbed the stairs to the rehearsal room and played a few of Muszynski's numbers for Carter, who sat unimpressed. “Do you have any original material?” he asked. They played a few originals, which Carter liked better, but still not enough to sign the Impressions.