Traveling Soul (29 page)

Finally, show time. Curtis, Fred, and Sam, tired from the press party at Basin Street the night before, took the stage at the Fillmore West alongside Santana and Ike and Tina Turner. They still didn't feel comfortable performing—losing their road band in the accident meant making do with new guys who only knew the hits, and they were fed up with their current drummer. Regardless, they were seasoned performers and did their best to get over to the crowd. Sweating through their hip getups under the spotlights, they ground out old classics like “Gypsy Woman” and “Keep On Pushing” along with “Choice of Colors” and other new hits. Unfortunately, the largely white rock crowd that packed the Fillmore gave the Impressions a tepid welcome. Despite years of toil, they hadn't crossed over to the pop market in a meaningful way.

After the set, a black man with an Afro accosted my father backstage. The lyrics to “Choice of Colors” had him upset.

If you had a choice of colors

Which one would you choose, my brothers?

“We
don't
have a choice of colors,” the man said. “We don't. We don't have a choice at all.” My father listened patiently and tried to explain his side. “You aren't listening to the words,” he said. He repeated them, a tinge of annoyance creeping into his soft, measured voice. “You listen to that song again,” he said. “If you still don't understand it, we can talk about it again tomorrow night.” Few celebrities would have invited a fan to engage in such a deep discussion about lyrics, and though Dad never saw the kid again, it showed how much he wanted people to understand him.

While “Choice of Colors” hit the top of the R&B chart—the Impressions' fifth number one—the young man put a fine point on a feeling Dad had sensed for a while. His audience had changed. Lyrics like “How long have you hated your white teacher?” made sense in his head, but perhaps they didn't make sense to his listeners. Even the term “white teacher” had paternalistic undertones that didn't fly with the young, militant, urban blacks that had taken over the movement. For these young kids, the white man was the problem. My father often complained about “Whitey” and “crackers,” but he still believed the biggest problem was “ourselves.” “‘Choice of Colors' isn't for Whitey, it's for us,” he said. “We have to get together. If we united behind our leaders we'd be much stronger. Martin Luther King had the biggest following and it was too small. There's twenty million of us and that's not enough.” Of course, my father understood the young man's position. “That doesn't mean you just lay down all the time,” he said. “You should be pushing, even scaring, sometimes.” Still, he didn't see Black Power as any more viable in the long run than White Power.

The young man walked away from the conversation unsatisfied. Dad did, too. He always wrote songs based on what he heard from his community, and now he heard anger like never before. At the same time, his main concern was selling albums, and while conciliatory songs like “Choice of Colors” didn't sit right with some militant young blacks, songs with harder edges like “This Is My Country” alienated many white listeners. Sam recalled when they played white college dates in the South, they had to stop performing the latter song. “People didn't like it too
much,” he said, “especially down South when you're talking about ‘whips on your back.'” It put my father in an impossible situation. He couldn't please every listener, and he had too much integrity to sell out his ideals in trying.

At eleven o'clock the following morning, Curtis, still in a robe, opened the door of his sixteenth-floor room. He'd come a long way from the days of being chased out of a white hotel because Sam tried to get some ice. In making his living as a traveling performer, he'd seen the worst segregation had to offer. He knew about staying in seedy motels because no hotel would take him, eating in grimy back alleys because no restaurant would seat him. Now in his fancy San Francisco hotel room, he finished a room-service breakfast—steak and fruit cocktail—slipped out of his plush robe, and got dressed.

That day, the Impressions planned to find some hip West Coast clothes before another late night at the Fillmore. As my father dressed, Marv entered the room. “Are you doing any writing?” he asked. “I haven't had any time,” my father said. “All this moving around, trying to get the band into shape. There's no time to write.” That represented another major change from years past—years when Dad could knock out chart-busting songs in between sets on tour, or in the car speeding from gig to gig. It frustrated him. Writing was like breathing, and the road felt increasingly suffocating.

Touring wasn't all a grind, though. As the Impressions drove to the fashionable stores on Polk Street, they talked about the Playboy Club, where they had dined after the Basin Street press party two nights before. They still couldn't quite believe it. Bunnies brought them gourmet food, and the manager personally welcomed them. It seemed like everyone in the place tried to make them feel pampered, including a bevy of beautiful women. Just think of it, that whole production for three guys from the South Side of Chicago.

At the store, they browsed the racks with my father complaining, “I can't get into anything. It's my ass, sticks out and throws everything
out of whack.” He still didn't feel comfortable with his body. He picked out a few things, stuck a Napoleon hat on Marv for giggles, paid with a hundred dollar bill, and the band headed back to the Hilton to prepare for the second show and the week ahead.

The day after the second show, the Impressions had a spot on KDIA, a local R&B station, where the interviewer leveled a serious accusation: “You try to present yourselves as ordinary people, but you're not ordinary,” he said. My father replied, “Well, we're just simple people. Just down to earth.” The interviewer pressed to find the big ego somewhere. He asked the Impressions about making themselves spokesmen for their people. “I like to call these songs of inspiration, songs of faith,” Dad answered, deflecting the question. “We don't try to be spokesmen, although we speak our minds. We're entertainers. We're complimented that they look on us as spokesmen, but we just think we're singing what all the brothers feel.” Sam added, “The black performer isn't a shuffler anymore.” Fred picked up on the theme and said, “James Brown wouldn't sing about pride three years ago.” What Fred tactfully left in the subtext of that statement was that the Impressions had played a major role in creating a world where Brown could sing about pride.

They had precious little time to pause and reflect on these things. The week after the last show at the Fillmore, the Impressions appeared on a local television show and played four nights at Basin Street. The next week, they traveled to Los Angeles, where Marv had booked a radio spot, five television guest appearances including
American Bandstand
and
The Joey Bishop Show
, three nights at the Troubadour, and a Saturday night concert at the Hollywood Palladium. Dad always found the road exhausting, but with the extra weight of Curtom on his back, he couldn't bear it much longer.

Despite the increased demands on his time, the Impressions were freer than ever. They could dress how they wanted, sing what they wanted, and express unabashed pride in their blackness. Most of that freedom came from my father's songs and his decision to start Curtom,
which allowed the Impressions to call their own shots in ways that were impossible at ABC. Marv also added to their freedom, booking slots on TV shows they'd never played before and giving them a stronger connection than ever to the white pop market. The freedom also hurt the group, though. It moved Dad further into his own world—a world where he saw himself standing on his own, free from the monotonous slog of touring.

During the Impressions' run at the Fillmore, the Four Tops had an engagement just down the street in the Crown Room at the Fairmont Hotel. The Tops played to a white supper-club audience and made a killing. One night after their show, they dropped by the Impressions' dressing room. Even though it was two in the morning, even though they were all exhausted, even though the road had ground them down physically, mentally, spiritually, the room exploded with, “How you
doin'
brother?” and hands shaking, hands slapping, everyone laughing, exchanging their newest road stories, talking about whose band was hot, who had the tightest rhythm section.

Dad got the scoop from the Tops on playing the white supper-club scene and how much money he could make there. Then, Levi Stubbs of the Tops asked about the audience at the Fillmore, and the Impressions—who just moments before onstage had been three men with one voice—all began talking at the same time. “You wouldn't be
-lieve
that smoke when you walk out there it's like to knock you
over
. There's cops standing right there next to it and I think
they's
high too.”

Fred and Sam shied away from drugs, but my father had begun experimenting with marijuana. “I wasn't dropping acid, but I guess it's safe for me to say that I too smoked herb,” he said later. “It was no big deal. I didn't do nothing until I was twenty-seven years old, and smoking herb didn't seem like a heavy cost to pay to cure my curiosity.” Still, he never performed high, and even he felt surprised at the level of drug use in the audience. By 1969, it seemed few remained immune to the siren song of mind expansion.

The next night at Basin Street, a young drummer named André Fischer—who would go on to play in the band Rufus with Chaka Khan—caught the Impressions' set. André had met my father a few times before, so he stepped backstage after the show and said hello. “What are you doing here?” my father asked, a little surprised. Every time the two had met, it had been in a different city. André explained he was drumming for
Big Time Buck White
, a Black Power play down the street. Then, he started talking with organ player Melvin Jones. “Man, we can't stand this drummer,” Jones said. “We're looking for another one.”

The next day, André stopped by the Impressions' sound check at Basin Street. The Impressions didn't invite their current drummer in order to give André a shot. Turned out the kid had big ears. He knew their records and had seen the show the night before, so he could play all the parts. No one wanted him to leave. He didn't.

Upon learning the band made $250 a week with no per diem, he asked for $300 and a per diem. He got it. It pissed off the band, so André made them see it as an opportunity to increase their own pay. My father grudgingly agreed to the raise. If he had trouble sharing stakes in Curtom with Fred and Sam, he certainly didn't want to give away money to his backing band, even though he needed them, too.

Hiring André proved fateful, leading my father to a musician who would influence his direction in coming years. When the Impressions sought a second guitarist, André called his friend Craig McMullen, who was fluent in jazz, psychedelia, soul, and R&B. At the time, Dad was searching for new textures to add to his sound. Craig, with his guitar effects pedals and jazzy chord changes, helped point the way forward.