As Stax rose, so did the business prospects of Pervis Staples, who had helped bring the Emotions to the label and established Perv’s Music as a management and artist development company partially funded by Al Bell. Pervis had left the Staples in 1969 to work with the Chicago-based Emotions but had never reached a formal, legally binding agreement with the group. A few years later, he and the group parted ways, and as Stax sunk, so did Pervis’s fledgling career as a music industry talent scout.
But Pervis was impossible to keep down for long. He reset his sights on opening a nightclub and enlisted Pops to help put together and finance the $500,000 property deal with A. R. Leak Enterprises—the same Leak family as Mavis’s ex-husband. Perv’s Place opened on Halloween night 1974 in a refurbished banquet room at 79th Street near the Chicago lakefront.
With three bars on two levels, the venue suggested an outdoor club with a garden playground, wicker tub chairs, green turf-like carpeting, and an indoor waterfall—it was the ’70s, after all. The opening night celebrities included state senator Charles Chew and singer Oscar Brown Jr. Pops couldn’t make it because he was attending the funeral of his sixty-four-year-old brother, Reverend Chester A. Staples, whose Holy Trinity parish had hosted the first public singing performance by the Staples family in the 1940s. Oceola was there, however, to sing her son’s praises for the benefit of the Chicago media: “Pervis, oh, he’s really something. Why, do you know he’s always had a real head for business? We once, Pop and I, bought him a snow-cone machine to play with. Well, he’d take that machine out to a parade that was going on and come back with his pockets full of money, drop it all out on the table, and tell me to go out and get lots of food for everybody to feast on. He’s something else.”
Pervis, dressed in green leather, addressed the full house and thanked his family “for a whole lot of money that I’m going to pay back.” For a few years before disco changed everything, Perv’s Place was a late-night South Side magnet for African-American entertainers, ballplayers, politicians, and business executives. Pervis’ connections in the music business enabled him to book a string of top-flight R&B acts, including Teddy Pendergrass, Bobby Womack, Gladys Knight and, not least of all, the Staple Singers.
Like Pervis, the group’s career was taking a turn. On April 15, 1975, Al Bell formally let the Staple Singers become free agents, and the group signed with Warner Bros. Records after a dinner with Bob Krasnow, the label’s vice president of talent acquisition. For Krasnow, the dinner paid an unexpected two-for-one bonus: Pops brought along a friend and admirer, guitarist George Benson, and persuaded the record company executive to sign him as well. Benson went on to become one of Warner’s biggest success stories; his 1976 label debut, Breezin’, sold more than three million copies.
Krasnow aimed to pair the Staple Singers with their old Chicago crony Curtis Mayfield, who was writing and recording solo albums, overseeing movie sound tracks, and producing other artists on his Curtom label, a Warner subsidiary. Mayfield was one of the pillars of Chicago soul in the ’60s, crafting a series of civil rights anthems for his group the Impressions, including “Keep on Pushing,” “People Get Ready,” and “We’re a Winner.” In the ’70s, Mayfield shifted into a solo career and began delivering urban operas steeped in funk and gritty realism such as the sound track for the blaxploitation movie Super Fly. He also collaborated with distinctive vocalists including Gladys Knight and Aretha Franklin on movie sound tracks, and he relished the idea of partnering with Mavis Staples and her family on a 1975 project he had in the works, the sound track to the Sidney Poitier–Bill Cosby movie Let’s Do It Again.
Though the film was a comedy, Mayfield said he was inspired to write the title song when smitten by the opening scenes featuring actress Jayne Kennedy. Its lyrics were fairly explicit, especially by the standards of mid-’70s commercial radio: “I’m not a girl that could linger / But I feel like a butter finger / Let’s do it again.”
Only a few years earlier, in defending the Staple Singers’ message-oriented songs against claims of sacrilege and sellout by the gospel police, Pops protested that all the songs in the group’s Stax repertoire wouldn’t sound out of place if performed in church. Not so with “Let’s Do It Again.” Dressed up in Mayfield’s Curtom recording studio on Chicago’s Northwest Side with sensual strings, purring guitar, and keyboard lines atop a smoky groove, “Let’s Do It Again” sounded like postcoital bliss—even without the lyrics.
“The only secular song that we have ever sung was ‘Let’s Do It Again,’ and Pops didn’t want to sing that,” Mavis recalls. “It took a lot of convincing by Curtis. Curtis wanted Pops to sing those lines, ‘I like you lady, so fine with your pretty hair,’ and Pops says, ‘I’m a church man, I’m not singing that!’ ”
Mayfield just smiled, his voice remaining low-key and calm as he assured the man he had once looked to for advice in the ’50s. “Oh, Pops, the Lord won’t mind. It’s just a love song.”
Pops knew Mayfield respected the Staple Singers’ legacy. “They started out with the church music, gospel music, and they’d already built a great following and name for themselves,” Mayfield told author Craig Wenner. “So they of course made their crossover. But they always wanted their music to be inspirational. So their style didn’t really change too much. They simply found music that spread them out, allowed them to make a better living.”
Mavis, Cleotha, and Yvonne were slightly less philosophical about it. They simply loved the idea of their music showing up in a movie starring Cosby and Poitier. Mavis laughs as she recalls the conversation. “My sisters and I were hoping Curtis could convince him. We just wanted to hear our voices on the big screen—we were even begging Pops to sing it. He finally came around. And then, when we’d do the song in concert, when Pops would come in with his part, the ladies would lose their minds. Scared him so bad he forgot the next line. Then he’d start grinning.”
The song anchored an otherwise flimsy collection of Mayfield originals, including three instrumentals, and four more Staples vocal performances in a similarly soft-core vein. It didn’t matter. “Let’s Do It Again” began selling at a pace of forty thousand a day after it was released in October 1975, ended up selling more than two million copies, and became the group’s sole number 1 hit. Next to Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ ” and Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” it ranked with the top-selling hits in the label’s history.
“The ‘it’s just a little love song’ argument worked especially when Curtis told Pops how much money he might make if he said, ‘Oh, okay,’ ” says Bill Carpenter. “The money changed it. Pops would perform that song right up till the last time I saw him in the ’90s. Here in Washington, D.C., at an outdoor festival, he and Mavis sang that song and the audience went crazy. Pops always struck me as a trailblazer in the sense that he had deep thoughts and developed convictions about certain things, but he wasn’t doctrinaire, a blind follower of the church. If he came to a logical conclusion that flew in the face of the church, that didn’t bother him, he would do what he was going to do because he had a good reason for doing it. It wasn’t that big of an issue. In the case of ‘Let’s Do it Again,’ he wanted to get things off to a strong start with their new record label, and when people he trusted like Curtis and Mavis made him realize it’s not that big of a deal, times are changing, people will accept this, he went for it.”
The Staple Singers celebrated by headlining four consecutive nights, October 23–26, 1975, at Perv’s Place to packed houses. Each night, the group sang “Let’s Do It Again.” And each night, the women would scream when Pops delivered his mellow mash note, “Now I like you lady, so fine with your pretty hair . . .”