If you were going to change an arrangement, it needed to sound better than the original.
We won the citywide talent show when I was eight with our version of the Temptations' song "My Girl." The contest was held just a few blocks away at Roosevelt High. From Jermaine's opening bass notes and Tito's first guitar licks to
all of us singing the chorus, we had people on their feet for the whole song. Jermaine and I traded verses while
Marlon and Jackie spun like tops. It was a wonderful feeling for all of us to pass that trophy, our biggest yet, back
and forth between us. Eventually it was propped on the front seat like a baby and we drove home with Dad telling us,
"When you do it like you did tonight they can't not give it to you."
We were now Gary city champions and Chicago was our next target because it was the area that offered the steadiest
work and the best word of mouth for miles and miles. We began to plan our strategy in earnest. My father's group
played the Chicago sound of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, but he was open-minded enough to see that the more
upbeat, slicker sounds that appealed to us kids had a lot to offer. We were lucky because some people his age weren't
that hip. In fact, we knew musicians who thought the sixties sound was beneath people their age, but not Dad. He
recognized great singing when he heard it, even telling us that he saw the great doo-wop group from Gary, the
Spaniels, when they were stars not that much older than we. When Smokey Robinson of the Miracles sang a song
like "Tracks of My Tears" or "Ooo, Baby Baby," he'd be listening as hard as we were. The sixties didn't leave Chicago behind musically, Great singers like the Impressions with Curtis Mayfield, Jerry Butler, Major Lance, and
Tyrone Davis were playing all over the city at the same places we were. At this point my father was managing us
full-time, with only a part-time shift at the mill. Mom had some doubts about the soundness of this decision, not
because she didn't think we were good but because she didn't know anyone else who was spending the majority of
his time trying to break his children into the music business. She was even less thrilled when Dad told her he had
booked us as a regular act at Mr. Lucky's, a Gary nightspot. We were being forced to spend our weekends in Chicago
and other places trying to win an ever-increasing number of amateur shows, and these trips were expensive, so the
job at Mr. Lucky's was a way to make it all possible. Mom was surprised at the response we were getting and she
was very pleased with the awards and the attention, but she worried about us a lot. She worried about me because of
my age. "This is quite a life for a nine-year-old," she would say, staring intently at my father.
I don't know what my brothers and I expected, but the nightclub crowds weren't the same as the Roosevelt High
crowds. We were playing between bad comedians, cocktail organists, and strippers. With my Witness upbringing,
Mom was concerned that I was hanging out with the wrong people and getting introduced to things I'd be better off
learning much later in life. She didn't have to worry; just one look at some of those strippers wasn't going to get me
that interested in trouble - certainly not at nine years old! That was an awful way to live, though, and it made us all
the more determined to move on up the circuit and as far away from that life as we could go.
Being at Mr. Lucky's meant that for the first time in our lives we had a whole show to do - five sets a night, six nights
a week - and if Dad could get us something out of town for the seventh night, he was going to do it. We were
working hard, but the bar crowds weren't bad to us. They liked James Brown and Sam and Dave just as much as we
did and, besides, we were something extra that came free with the drinking and the carrying on, so they were
surprised and cheerful. We even had some fun with them on one number, the Joe Tex song "Skinny Legs and All."
We'd start the song and somewhere in the middle I'd go out into the audience, crawl under the tables, and pull up the
ladies' skirts to look under. People would throw money as I scurried by, and when I began to dance, I'd scoop up all
the dollars and coins that had hit the floor earlier and push them into the pockets of my jacket.
I wasn't really nervous when we began playing in because of all the experience I'd had with talent show audiences. I
was always ready to go out and perform, you know, just do it - sing and dance and have some fun.
We worked in more than one club that had strippers in those days. I used to stand in the wings of this one place in
Chicago and watch a lady whose name was Mary Rose. I must have been nine or ten. This girl would take off her
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clothes and her panties and throw them to the audience. The men would pick them up and sniff them and yell. My
brothers and I would be watching all this, taking it in, and my father wouldn't mind. We were exposed to a lot doing
that kind of circuit. In one place they had cut a little hole in the musician's dressing room wall that also happened to
act as a wall in the ladies' bathroom. You could peek through this hole, and I saw stuff I've never forgotten. Guys on
that circuit were so wild, they did stuff like drilling little holes into the walls of the ladies' loo all the time. Of course, I'm sure that my brothers and I were fighting over who got to look through the hole. "Get outta the way, it's my turn!"
Pushing each other away to make room for ourselves.
Later, when we did the Apollo Theater in New York, I saw something that really blew me away because I didn't
know things like that existed. I had seen quite a few strippers, but that night this one girl with gorgeous eyelashes and
long hair came out and did her routine. She put on a great performance. All of a sudden, at the end, she took off her
wig, pulled a pair of big oranges out of her bra, and revealed that she was a hard-faced guy under all that makeup.
That blew me away. I was only a child and couldn't even conceive of anything like that. But I looked out at the
theater audience and they were going for it. applauding wildly and cheering. I'm just a little kid, standing in the
wings, watching this crazy stuff.
I was blown away.
As I said, I received quite an education as a child. More than most. Perhaps this freed me to concentrate on other
aspects of my life as an adult.
One day, not long after we'd been doing successfully in Chicago clubs, Dad brought home a tape of some songs we'd
never heard before. We were accustomed to doing popular stuff off the radio, so we were curious why he began
playing these songs over and over again, just one guy singing none too well with some guitar chords in the background. Dad told us that the man on the tape wasn't really a performer but a songwriter who owned a recording
studio in Gary. His name was Mr. Keith and he had given us a week to practice his songs to see if we could make a
record out of them. Naturally, we were excited. We wanted to make a record, any record.
We worked strictly on the sound, ignoring the dancing routines we'd normally work up for a new song. It wasn't as
much fun to do a song that none of us knew, but we were already professional enough to hide our disappointment
and give it all we could. When we were ready and felt we had done our best with the material, Dad got us on tape
after a few false starts and more than a few pep talks, of course. After a day or two of trying to figure out whether
Mr. Keith liked the tape we had made for him, Dad suddenly appeared with more of his songs for us to learn for our
first recording session.
Mr. Keith, like Dad, was a mill worker who loved music, only he was more into the recording and business end. His
studio and label were called Steeltown. Looking back on all this, I realize Mr. Keith was just as excited as we were.