Traveling Soul (11 page)

As Jocko performed his rap at the Apollo, a picture of a rocket ship was projected onto the theater's huge movie screen. When he finished, the screen lifted to reveal him on stage in his space suit and helmet. Then, the Kodaks did their set, followed by the Story Sisters, Lee Andrews and the Hearts, Huey Smith and the Clowns, and Robert and Johnny. Finally, it was time for the Impressions. Curtis and the guys rubbed the Apollo's famous tree of hope for good luck as they strode onto the stage. What they saw almost stopped them dead.

Faces—a sea of them—faces stacked on faces, stacked on faces, towering as high as the eye could see, which wasn't too high because the stage lights mercifully expunged the upper rows, which were themselves full of faces, upon faces, upon faces. A crowd that size has a way of making its presence felt, though, and the young Impressions heard it stirring with a thousand little noises, breaths, grunts, and groans. My father, guitar in hand, led the group into some crowd-friendly fare. They opened with a cover of “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” a rollicking song Elvis had just taken to the top of the R&B chart. As Jerry explains, “Since we were going to New York, we knew we had to be super sophisticated, and what was more sophisticated than to do an Elvis Presley tune?”

The only problem with crowd-friendly fare was, this was no friendly crowd. The Apollo crowd has never suffered fools, and if a performer didn't know that going in, he learned quickly. My father's first lesson came after the Impressions finished their Elvis cover. As the final notes died out, someone shouted, “Y'all take that white shit someplace else and sing what I came here to hear!” The restive audience burst into pockets of laughter and applause.

It was a shaky start, but it contained an important message. The Negro performer existed between two worlds. The white world had money but rarely accepted Negro artists. The Negro world offered a support base that could last an entire career but couldn't bring the same riches. This left Negro performers like my father on a tightrope. Sure, it was possible to cross over to the white market and massive fame and fortune—Ray Charles and Sam Cooke had done it a few years before. But it was just as possible to stray too far from your core audience trying to appease the white market and end up unceremoniously dropped by both.

The person who shouted at the Apollo subconsciously warned the Impressions they were wobbling on that tightrope, in danger of falling. My father would never forget this lesson—he couldn't. It restated the unspoken rule he learned listening to Dunbar's two-voiced poetry, and it was a part of the music business that would plague him for decades. Like everything else about American life, whites and Negroes remained separate in the music business, too.

As the laughter settled down at the Apollo, Dad hit the opening notes of “For Your Precious Love.” The effect was devastating, like lighting a fuse that made the theater burst. When the song finished, the crowd demanded three encores. After their set, the Impressions floated backstage, jubilant, sweaty, bubbling with excitement. Bobby Schiffman, manager of the Apollo, greeted them. “I'll tell you what to do,” he said. “I want you all to sing ‘For Your Precious Love,' and if you get an encore, I want you to sing it again, and if they call you back a third time, I want you to sing it again.” For the rest of their engagement, they did just that.

At the end of the night, the Impressions returned to their rooms at the Grampion hotel in Harlem. The Grampion wasn't so different from the White Eagle, the seedy hotel where Curtis grew up. “Plenty of junkies and rats,” Jerry recalled. To make matters worse, Carter had warned that junkies would creep up the fire escape at night to steal anything that wasn't nailed down. He suggested the Impressions leave their money on
the dresser—that way the junkies wouldn't have to wake them up with a pistol to take it.

They couldn't help but feel nervous, although they didn't own much for a junkie to steal. The group pulled in $1,250 for their week's work at the Apollo, which seemed an astronomical sum on paper, but after paying commissions and expenses, it didn't amount to much once split between five band members.

During their stay at the hotel, they lived in adjoining rooms. Sam, Richard, and Curtis shared the front room; Arthur and Jerry took the back room near the window and fire escape. As they settled down that first night, shining their shoes and preparing for the upcoming shows, they told jokes and ghost stories until Jerry dozed off. With Carter's warning and the unease they all felt, Dad couldn't miss an opportunity for a great practical joke.

As Jerry slept, a loud crash near the window jolted him awake. He opened his eyes, saw a hand in front of his face, and screamed in terror. This sent Curtis, Arthur, Sam, and Richard into paroxysms of laughter. The crash came from a shoe Curtis threw against the wall, and the hand was Jerry's own dangled before his eyes. That was life on the road with my dad. He was the type of guy who would throw a bucket of cold water on you in the shower and lose himself in laughter.

The second day of their engagement, Sunday, a line stretched from the Apollo box office halfway down Seventh Avenue while they rehearsed inside. During one rehearsal, the Apollo house musicians couldn't figure out how my father was getting
that sound
out of his guitar. They couldn't follow his chord fingerings either. That's how he found out he tuned his guitar to open F sharp, from a bunch of grizzled old pros that had never seen or heard anything like it. In no time, all the great guitarists around—session guys mostly—came to the Apollo to watch this kid create something new and magical with his instrument.

Monday, the performers could get a little money in advance of the full payment to pay off debts they incurred from food-and-clothes
expenses, or the constant gambling backstage. After the second show, the Impressions asked for $300 to pay their food tab and have some spending change. As soon as they got their money, the underworld rose to meet them. “Every junkie and booster in Harlem had been standing around the corner waiting for the eagle to fly,” Jerry said. “When it did, they swooped down on the theater with hot suits, hot watches, televisions, radios, rings, socks, underwear, shirts—everything, in your size, shape, and color. You name it, they had it. If they didn't, they promised to have it by the last show, which was payday.” It was a cutthroat world for a bunch of kids. The next day, Tuesday, my father turned sixteen onstage at the Apollo.

Sometime during the whirring blur of that week, the Impressions also appeared on a local TV show hosted by Alan Freed. Freed was famous for coining the term “rock and roll,” and his show gave Negroes a great chance to cross over to the white market without teetering off the tightrope. In fact, although he was white, Freed had recently tripped on that same rope, in the opposite direction. In 1957, he hosted
The Big Beat
on ABC, a weekly music show that was canceled after Negro singer Frankie Lymon danced with a white girl in the studio audience after his performance. Such was the state of racial progress in America.

Still, the Impressions needed the show. “We had sold only so many records with Jocko and the other black deejays playing our song,” Jerry said. “With Freed playing it, we potentially could sell 200,000 copies in New York alone.”

The TV appearance flashed by like lightning. The Impressions rode in a limousine to the television studio, met Freed, and strode on his stage dressed in pink after-six jackets, crisp white shirts, jet-black pants, black bow ties, pocket scarves, and patent-leather shoes shined to shimmer. Curtis slung his guitar around his neck, although like most television shows at the time, the musicians didn't perform live. Canned music started from the control room, the floor man swiveled his finger at the Impressions signifying they were
on
, and they mimed along as “For Your Precious Love” played. Two minutes and forty-seven seconds later, the crowd screamed, clapped, and whistled, and the Impressions left the
stage and stepped into another limousine that sped through Central Park and deposited them back at the Apollo. It almost didn't seem real.

Freed and Georgie Woods did the trick. A few days later, Abner got a call from Red Schwartz, one of Vee-Jay's top promotion men. “Turn on
American Bandstand,”
Schwartz shouted into the phone. “Why?” said Abner. “They're gonna play ‘For Your Precious Love,' that's why,” Schwartz huffed. “Somebody go across the street and get a TV!” Abner yelled, almost dropping the phone. “Dick Clark is playing our record!”

Dick Clark was
the
channel to the white market, bar none. His acceptance plugged a Negro artist into white American youth culture, and that brought money. In essence, Clark's approval was a badge
—these Negroes are safe
. It was a stupid, racist game but it was the only one going.

Racism in the country remained strong while the movement briefly floundered. Whites across the South violently battled desegregation using the old tricks—racist judges, economic intimidation, and terrorism in the form of homemade bombs chucked through windows in the dead of night, or rocks flung at protestors' heads, or guns cocked and pointed at a line of marchers. As local governments in the South met the movement with open hostility, the federal government dragged its feet, offering the same old platitudes. King met with President Eisenhower seeking federal action, but Ike wasn't about to mar the last years of his antiseptic reign with the stain of Negro rights.

Vice President Richard Nixon seemed more willing to help, but nothing came of it. King said, “Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere … he almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity. If Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.” King wouldn't live to witness the irony of his words.

King rallied supporters with high oratory. “This is the creative moment for a full scale assault on the system of segregation,” he said. “We must practice open civil disobedience. We must be willing to go to jail
en masse
. That way we may be able to arouse the dozing conscience of the South.”

Dad listened to these words. He felt an increasing sympathy with the movement as the situation for Negroes in Chicago became more desperate. The State Street Corridor between Cermak and Fifty-First Street, where Negroes had crammed since before Annie Bell arrived, could hold no more. The only other option was the growing West Side ghetto, where conditions were even worse. Racist whites made easy targets for blame, but these conditions existed and thrived with the approval, unspoken or otherwise, of the Negro power structure, which depended on de facto segregation to retain its power. It was a thorny, impossible mess of a problem. Curtis wouldn't live in Cabrini much longer, and he could escape these problems on the road, but his mind would never stray far from them.