Traveling Soul (17 page)

“Sad, Sad Girl and Boy” represented an important step leading the Impressions forward as a trio. It also marked five consecutive failed singles. Even worse, despite all his success for other artists, Curtis still had not written a real blockbuster. He knew to reach that level, he needed to come up with something truly inspired.

Back on the chitlin' circuit at the Top Hat in Nashville, Tennessee, the Impressions hired Bob Fisher and the Bonnevilles (sometimes referred to as the Barnevilles) to open for them. The Bonnevilles featured a young guitarist named Jimmy Hendrix, who had kicked around the circuit playing for the likes of the Isley Brothers, Little Richard, and even Jerry Butler. Hendrix looked like he could use a good meal, but he could play the hell
out of his guitar, and he revered my father, copying his lyrical style of playing. Four years later, Jimmy would become Jimi and change the course of music history. For the time being, he was just a kid playing alongside one of his idols (according to one story of that tour, Hendrix borrowed Dad's amplifier without asking and turned it up so loud, it broke).

During that stop, my father wrote two of the most important songs of his life. One was a catchy tune called “The Monkey Time,” written to go along with a new dance craze called the monkey. The Impressions didn't do dance numbers, so Dad put it in the bag to await another artist, as he always did when he wrote a song Fred and Sam didn't want.

The other song came to him after the first set at the Top Hat. Sitting in the green wagon with Fred and Sam waiting for the next show to begin, Dad “got to talking and running off at the mouth and just dreaming about ideas and things that might happen to us in the future,” Sam recalled. “Fred kept answering back … ‘Well, all right, well, that's all right,' you know. Before I knew it, it rang in my head. We had a real hook line, ‘It's All Right,' so I said, ‘Say it's all right.' Before we knew it, we had actually written two-thirds of that tune right there in the car! We could have gone on stage for the next show and sung it.”

They often worked that way, constantly rehearsing and tightening their sound anywhere and everywhere. Between sets, while other artists might take a break or chase girls, the Impressions worked on their harmonies. Even jostling from town to town in the cramped wagon, my father always had his guitar slung across his body. “I drove most of the time,” Fred said, “and Curtis would be in the back, playing the guitar, Sam sitting on the passenger's side. And he'd be writing and playing songs for us to kind of bounce them off of us.”

When they returned to Chicago, Major Lance had nothing to work on, and Davis couldn't wait to get him back in the studio for several reasons. Chief among them, Major was hard to deal with when not busy. Davis said, “He knew that I liked coffee, so he'd run out and get me cups of coffee. Every five minutes, he would run out and get me another cup. It got to the point where either I had to keep him busy in the studio, or have a stroke from a caffeine overdose.”

To find Major a song, Davis paid a visit to Curtis's house in Markham. He couldn't believe the number of songs my father had in the works. After playing the potential songs, my father said, “Which one do you like?” Davis replied, “I like all of 'em! What ones are you not going to do on the group?”

“Well, I know we're not gonna do ‘The Monkey Time,'” Curtis said, “because that's a dance tune, and Fred and Sam don't want to do dance tunes.” Of course, that was the song Davis wanted in the first place. “You had to learn to work around Curtis,” Davis said wryly. He took the song to Johnny Pate, who wrote the arrangement, and Major cut it.

The song charted at number eight pop and number two R&B, making Major a bona fide star. It also propelled the fad dance to the height of pop culture, along with Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' “Mickey's Monkey.” After the song's success, Major even bought a monkey, causing my father to have a little fun at his expense.

One day, Major made one of his regular visits to Grandma Sadie's house—as Uncle Kenny says, “A lot of [Curtis's] entertainment friends would hang out at Grandma's house, because Grandma loved to cook rolls, and when Grandma cooked rolls, the whole neighborhood lined up.” When Major arrived with the monkey on a leash, Uncle Kenny recalls, “We were peeking in the car and [Curtis] was saying, ‘Which one is Major?'”

“The Monkey Time” also featured Fred and Sam on backing vocals, making it the first session where all three Impressions worked with Johnny Pate. “That was my first introduction to arranging,” Dad said. “Everything prior to that, we'd just try to nail the rhythm and get it through. But Johnny gave me my first encounter with real arranging…. He was the love of my life as far as real arrangers go.” After the session with Major, my father approached Johnny and said, “My group's the Impressions, and we're with ABC/Paramount. We got a session coming up, and we'd like to have you do the arrangement on it.” Johnny agreed.

Working with Johnny changed their lives. Sam said, “He started putting brass, and he put funky rhythm in our track, and he would enhance the vocal. Man, it just made you sing.” For his part, Johnny approached the gig philosophically, saying, “I never tried to cover what Curtis was doing, because Curtis was the artist. He was the star, and the Impressions were the star. I was merely background.”

From the first session, something special happened when Johnny and the Impressions came together. Usually the group ripped through three or four songs in one day—a pace Dad kept up most of his career. But when they recorded “It's All Right” in August 1963, the song stopped them dead. “We didn't record anything else that day,” Fred recalled. “We just kept on playing that song over and over again, and we were just wondering if this was a hit. Then Gene Chandler said, ‘Let me tell you something—if y'all don't want that song, give it to me. This is a hit.'”

My father left that day with the only acetate, but Fred and Sam were so intoxicated by the song, they drove all the way out to Markham from Chicago just to hear it. They knew Chandler was right. “When we recorded that song, I discovered what it meant to make the magic,” my father said.

“It's All Right” was Curtis's first great party song. Shedding the mystical, lovelorn overtones that colored much of his previous work, his lyrics simply invite the listener to have a good time. A finger-snapping shuffle drives the song, punctuated by Johnny's horn blasts. It cruises on that groove as Curtis trades the call-and-response chorus with Fred and Sam. It is deceptively simple, though. A close listen shows how tight and intricate the Impressions' vocal arrangements had become, trading between lead and background, harmony and unison with expertly timed precision.

“It's All Right” shot to the top spot on the R&B chart. My father finally had a single digit beside one of his songs. In fact, the Impressions would never record a more successful song. As Fred recalled, “That song bought Sam's home, Curtis' home, and my home; we all bought homes
off that song. By twenty-one, twenty-two years old, we all had our own homes and Cadillacs in the doggone garage.”

It came just in time. While Motown continued pushing R&B music onto the pop charts with Marvin Gaye's “Pride and Joy” and the gospel-drenched “Can I Get a Witness,” as well as Little Stevie Wonder's “Fingertips (Part 1),” and Martha and the Vandellas' “(Love Is Like a) Heat Wave,” Stax began flowering with Booker T. and the M.G.'s, Rufus Thomas, and Otis Redding. On top of that, in February, Vee-Jay released “Please Please Me” by the Beatles, a group of guys about my father's age from Liverpool, England. Even though the song wouldn't hit in America for a year or so, it was a portent of things to come.

Still, party music was not my father's forte, and somewhere deep down he knew it. Serious changes were afoot in America, treacherous ones. The movement had entered a new phase the year before when James Meredith desegregated the University of Mississippi in Oxford. It took five hundred armed guards to allow Meredith to register, and even then, sneering students assailed the marshals with stones, bottles, bricks, clubs, iron bars, gasoline bombs, and guns.

Then, in early May 1963, the movement had its most public, iconic, and brutal moment yet when the Birmingham police turned skin-searing fire hoses and snarling dogs on a group of peaceful demonstrators. Water cannons ripped the clothes off the demonstrators' backs, and images of the travesty rocketed around the world.

My father paid rapt attention to the news. More than that, he watched the country seethe in turmoil as he traveled the South. The Impressions performed in Birmingham around this time and Eddie remembers, “The hatred was strong, strong in Birmingham. We did our show and we left. We didn't stay around.” The indignities my father suffered traveling through the South, and those he watched others endure, stirred the soul deep within him.

In August, Martin Luther King Jr. and his allies pulled off the biggest public demonstration the movement would ever stage—the March on Washington. They hoped to pressure the government into passing the Civil Rights Act, which Kennedy had quietly introduced months before.
On a sunny Wednesday morning, more than two hundred thousand people marched to the Lincoln Memorial, and the movement elbowed its way to center stage in American life. “The Negro is shedding himself of his fear,” King said, “and my real worry is how we will keep this fearlessness from rising to violent proportions.”

Fortunately, the march remained nonviolent, and when King rose to give his speech, the spirit of the crowd overtook him. “I started out reading the speech,” he said, “and all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used many times before, that thing about ‘I had a dream,' and I just felt that I wanted to use it here. I don't know why, I hadn't thought about it before the speech.”

King's “I Have a Dream” speech might have been off-the-cuff, but it was recognized immediately as one of the great pieces of oration in American history. A poet himself, my father recognized the speech's beauty and latched onto its spirit, even as another faction of the movement mocked King's hope. This other faction, less patient and peaceful, was summed up by Malcolm X's reaction to the speech: “You know, this dream of King's is going to be a nightmare before it's over.” Two weeks later, dynamite blasted apart Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and killed four young Negro girls attending Sunday school.

A few months later, a bullet ended President Kennedy's life in Dallas, Texas, throwing the country and movement into panic. Kennedy was the most sympathetic president to Negro rights since a bullet ended Abraham Lincoln's life a hundred years before. An eerie similarity between the two assassinations existed—in 1963, as in 1865, a southerner named Johnson ascended to the presidency. Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, ended the Reconstruction and plunged Negroes back into quasi-slavery for the next hundred years. No one knew how Kennedy's successor, a tough, drawling Texan named Lyndon Johnson, would react to the fight against Jim Crow.