Traveling Soul (15 page)

Then, Fred got hit with a scare courtesy of the US Army. Since the mid-'50s, the army had been quietly amassing troops in Vietnam to stanch the tide of communism flowing through the Far East. As President Kennedy escalated troop deployment, a few attentive citizens guessed how serious the affair had become. Fred, like many others, did not. In 1961, he received papers to report for an army physical, but he couldn't have predicted the bloody war brewing or how it would brutalize his generation within a few short years. For the time being, he only worried what the call to duty would mean for his career. “I was scared to death,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I'm going to miss out on [the Impressions] again.'” Luckily, the recruiters only chose every other man for active duty, and Fred wound up the odd one out.

With that scare over, the Impressions watched from Chicago as “Gypsy Woman” sold half a million copies. ABC president Sam Clark offered Eddie a job as a national promotional manager. Now, in addition to the Impressions, Eddie promoted everything from Ray Charles's
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music
, to the Tams' “What Kind of Fool (Do You Think I Am),” to releases by B. B. King, Tommy Roe, and others. ABC also offered the Impressions a five-year contract, which they gladly signed. After years of hustling, grinding out one-nighters, and swallowing their pride, they had a solid footing in the music business for the first time.

Curtis had little time to spend at home with Helen before leaving on another hectic sprawl across the country. The tour for “Gypsy Woman” played out like any other: more one-nighters, more miles piled in the green wagon, more girls after each show making it easy to forget the wife back home. “Girls were there by the fortress,” Eddie said. “I mean, dozens, and dozens, and dozens, specifically on Curtis.” My father found it impossible to say no, as he would for most of his life.

On tour they hit the usual places—the Apollo in New York, the Regal in Chicago, the Uptown in Philly, the Howard in DC, the Royal
in Baltimore—and Dick Clark featured them twice on
American Bandstand
. At the Apollo, they performed alongside B. B. King as he made his debut at the hallowed venue. King was so nervous before going on stage, he turned to Fred and said, “Man, you think the people are gonna like me?” Fred replied, “B.B., people are gonna love you here.” The Impressions had seen enough to know the real thing. They were old pros.

Touring took a lot out of my father. “The country was our neighborhood,” he said. “We were putting on 150,000 miles a year. It was a grind.” Making matters worse, traveling through the South was still dangerous for Negroes, even famous ones. After a show in Jackson, Mississippi, the Impressions steered the green wagon toward a Negro boarding house. Though the speed limit on the road was thirty-five miles per hour, they went a bit slower just to be safe. Soon, lights flashed in their rearview mirror, and a cop pulled them over. “You're driving too slow. Where are you going, where are you from, and what are doing here?” he demanded. He gave the Impressions a ticket, and the next day, as Eddie recalled, “We went downtown to pay the ticket. Guess how much the ticket was? A dollar! I can't forget that. All these little petty things they'd do, just things to interrupt you.”

The Impressions did everything possible to avoid trouble. They registered the green wagon under the company name to forestall white cops from wondering how a bunch of Negroes got such a nice ride. They also learned to fill up on gas early in the day to avoid stopping in dangerous towns after sundown. Nighttime was long in the South. The Klan burned crosses at night; King's house was firebombed at night; Emmett Till was murdered at night. It seemed racists found violent courage when the moon was the only witness.

Even with those precautions, the Impressions crawled cautiously as sheep in a wolf's den through places like Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. “Oh Lord, it was rough,” Fred said. “We were just scared to death a lot of times.”

If they managed to avoid trouble with cops, they often ran into it at gigs. “A lot of auditoriums that we played, the people that were running the sound would just be so nasty,” Fred said. “They'd say you got to be
out by a certain time. You couldn't go a minute over that time, because they'd turn the mics off, they'd turn the lights off. I don't care if you're in the middle of your song or what.”

They couldn't stay in white hotels, so Negro rooming houses became their only oases. Negro artists worked out an impressive network for finding these houses. Backstage on the chitlin' circuit became gossip central, and groups hung around exhausted from the work but exhilarated from the cheering crowds, talking about money, and girls, and life on the road. When the Impressions heard from their peers of a rooming house with good Southern cooking—greens, black-eyed peas, smothered steak, and all the fixings—they'd check it out and pass the word to the next group they met. In such a way, an entire economy grew in the Negro community based upon housing traveling musicians.

The rooming houses were often nothing more than spacious private homes. “You had your room, but everybody shared a bathroom,” Fred said. “And it was like your mom cooking in the kitchen, everybody go in there and eat, sit down at the table.” Dinnertime at those houses was quite a scene. Since most artists toured together in package shows and crossed paths with others doing the same thing, it is possible to imagine the Impressions huddled around a table breaking bread and dishing gossip with the Four Tops, Jackie Wilson, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Patti LaBelle, Martha Reeves, James Brown, and others.

In these boarding houses, Curtis usually stayed to himself in his room—a habit he inherited from his mother and grandmother. “When the fellows would go out to have fun and maybe there'd be parties after the set, they would leave all their wallets with me,” he said, “and I'd sit in my room and live through my own fantasies and write.” He liked to write late at night, sitting on the edge of his bed. Sometimes he'd come up with something special, pad down to Fred or Sam's room, knock gently on the door and say, “Hey, come listen to this.” Fred would soon hear one of the most important songs the Impressions ever recorded that way.

Even at home, my father spent a good deal of time alone with his music, either in his den playing guitar or holed up in the studio trying to
score another hit. “During those times of my life I was sleeping with my guitar and writing every feeling,” he said.

Anger, love, everything in my life would come out on paper…. It was even an escape if I was hurt too bad or if something wasn't going right. I could always retire to writing my sentiments and my personal feelings. A lot of times those songs were mostly for me. I was the one trying to learn the first lesson because I didn't have the answers. My fights and arguments, even with God, went down on paper. Why, when, what—well, this is how I feel about it.

As a child, he used to ask those questions of his mother. Now, he asked his guitar.

Unfortunately, the next songs Curtis wrote for the Impressions failed to even sniff success. The first attempt, a doo-wop-flavored number called “Grow Closer Together,” had a similar rhythmic feel to “Gypsy Woman.” While it featured some choice guitar licks and a warm blanket of backing vocals, it wasn't perceived to have the brilliance of its predecessor melodically or rhythmically.

The next effort, 1962's “Little Young Lover,” failed to impress the pop charts, despite opening with a swinging, driving beat and ending with one of my father's most breathtaking guitar licks. It peaked at number ninety-nine. Curtis did write two songs that achieved minor success—“Find Another Girl” and “I'm A Telling You”—but he wrote them for Jerry, not the Impressions.

During this dry streak, the Brooks brothers grew antsy. “Our style was so different than what was really going on,” my father said. “My music and my own personal creations were so dominant. They being from the South, Chattanooga, the people they loved were the Five Royales, the Midnighters, James Brown. [The Impressions] just wasn't their music.” For the Brooks brothers, the Impressions seemed stuck in the doo-wop age while Brown inched toward funk with songs like “Night
Train.” At the same time, Motown blazed a new path of rhythmic pop, releasing smashes like Marvin Gaye's “Hitch Hike,” the Miracles' “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” the Marvelettes' “Beechwood 4-5789,” and dozens of other songs by artists like Little Stevie Wonder, the Supremes, and Eddie Holland (the same Eddie Holland who performed Jackie Wilson's routine with the Impressions three years before). To Arthur and Richard, it seemed Curtis didn't have his finger on the pulse of hit music.

As 1962 wore down, the Impressions cut “I'm the One Who Loves You,” an up-tempo, doo-wop-tinged song. When it disappeared without notice, the Brooks brothers snapped. “They were wanting to do stuff like Little Richard was doing,” Fred said, “whereas we kept telling them that we needed to have our own identity and that we couldn't just be doing what everyone else was doing. So they got really mad, took the record, threw it in the garbage, and said ‘We're quitting! We're gonna sign to End Records instead!'—because at the time Little Anthony & The Imperials were really hot on End Records.” The Brooks brothers left the group in Chicago and went to New York to create their own short-lived version of the Impressions.

My father, Fred, and Sam had felt the split coming for a while. They'd even begun rehearsing as a threesome whenever Richard and Arthur went out to eat between shows. “Sam, Curtis, and I had become really tight,” Fred said. “When the time came and they threw the record in the garbage can, we didn't make no big fuss about it. We just kept on going and rehearsing. It was a lot of work perfecting that sound that we had with just the three of us.”

Before they could perfect their sound, my father was called away on other business. Just after the Brooks brothers left, Carl Davis hired him as a staff writer for OKeh Records—a great break for him but tough for Fred and Sam, since they now took a backseat to his new job. He had to take the offer, though. Davis was one of the hottest record producers on the planet, having scored an enormous hit with Gene Chandler's “Duke
of Earl,” released on Vee-Jay in January 1962. “Duke of Earl” hit number one on both the R&B and pop charts and held the number-one slot on the
Billboard
Hot 100 for three weeks. Chandler became a household name, and Davis soon joined Columbia Records as producer and head A&R man for the subsidiary OKeh label.

Davis, another son of Louisiana migrants who settled in Chicago, felt a strong connection to my father. “I wanted Curtis more for his guitar playing than his singing,” he said. “He was a true innovator like T-Bone Walker and B. B. King. He was a songwriting genius, and his guitar style has done more for rhythm and blues than anyone's.”

For nine months, Fred and Sam were relegated to singing backup on other people's records while Curtis helped create what became known as the Chicago Sound. Three basic elements form the Chicago Sound—my father's guitar, Davis's production, and the arrangements of jazz-bassist-turned-arranger Johnny Pate.

Unlike the bass-heavy gutbucket soul coming out of Stax and Muscle Shoals, the backbone of the Chicago Sound is Curtis's guitar. “Because I play with my fingers and play a chord along with the melody, my style suggests two guitars,” Dad said of his playing. “I [felt like I should try standard tuning] when I was around fifteen or sixteen, but by then, I was writing hit records and it was working. I felt proud because I had finally developed something that was totally mine.”

Of course, he couldn't help but invent something unique. Tuning a guitar the way he did changes the tension of the strings, which changes the way they relate to the body of the guitar. In essence, it changes the dialect of the guitar. Curtis could play the same notes as another player and have them sound completely different because his guitar had an accent,
his
accent.