Cherry Hill, New Jersey, is in the southern part of the state, a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, across the Delaware River. In the movie Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, the White Castle hamburger restaurant Harold and Kumar eventually descend upon is located in Cherry Hill. In reality, Cherry Hill has no White Castle, but for years it was home to a swank Las Vegas-style nightclub called the Latin Casino.
Opened in 1960 on Route 70 after a dozen years in downtown Philly, the Latin Casino wasn’t particularly Latin, and it didn’t feature gambling, but it did offer top performers and big stars, from Liberace to Frank Sinatra, the Four Seasons to James Brown. The place could accommodate upward of two thousand people for dinner and a show at long banquet tables in its curved, “plush cavern” showroom. Between New York and Miami Beach, there was nothing like the Latin Casino. South Jersey’s “Showplace of the Stars” was one of the classiest joints on the East Coast, and only the Copacabana in New York City could boast more zing.
On Monday, September 29, 1975, rock ’n’ roll rolled into the Latin Casino for a weeklong engagement. Dick Clark’s Good Ol’ Rock and Roll Revue was a package of oldies acts, including Jackie Wilson, Cornell Gunter’s Coasters, and Dion DiMucci, formerly of Dion and the Belmonts, accompanied by old film footage from the glory days of Clark’s American Bandstand.
This was a homecoming of sorts for Dick Clark. His career as a rock ’n’ roll star-maker and world’s oldest teenager took off in Philadelphia, when, in 1956, the ambitious radio deejay took over as host of Bandstand, the local afternoon rock ’n’ roll dance show, on WFIL-TV, and remained with the show when it went national on ABC a year later as American Bandstand.
Clark had cooked up the multimedia oldies show in 1973 for a run in Las Vegas, after that summer’s release of the movies Let the Good Times Roll and American Graffiti launched an oldies boom. As his gang of yesterstars arrived at the Latin Casino, 1950s nostalgia was already showing its age. Fewer than 250 people turned out for the first of two shows that opening night.
Dick Clark was emcee and presented his clips. Cornell Gunter, who’d replaced lead tenor Leon Hughes in the Coasters in 1957, got everyone going with comic flamboyance in the Little Richard vein, leading one of several competing yakety-yakking Coasters lineups working the decade. Dion sang his hits “Runaround Sue,” “Ruby Baby,” and his post-doo-wop stab at social relevance, “Abraham, Martin and John.”
And then the headliner burst onto the stage. Jackie Wilson was the showstopper, a soulful R&B singer with a four-octave operatic range and dramatic stage moves that rivaled James Brown’s and inspired Michael Jackson’s. The critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that his performance in that evening’s early show was fast-paced and physical as it built to the finale: his 1958 hit “Lonely Teardrops”:
My heart is crying, crying
Lonely teardrops.
My pillow’s never dry of lonely teardrops!
They called Jackie Wilson the Black Elvis and they called him Mr. Excitement, and even at forty-one, eight years after his last Top Ten single, he worked what there was of a crowd into something approaching a frenzy with his amazing footwork and dips—sliding, gliding, dropping into splits, and rearing back to plead, “Just say you will! Say you wi-hill!”
The crowd was on its feet, and Jackie was at the point where his voice would ring a cappella through the big old showroom. “My heart is crying, crying!” This time, he repeated the words:
My heart . . . my heart . . .
Jackie Wilson balled up both fists and drew them to his chest. Then he extended his arms out to the sides and fell backwards, landing flat on his back, his head smacking the hard stage floor. Promoter Walt Cohen was in the audience and he heard the crack of the skull. Reporter Chuck Darrow also heard “a sickening thump” but told South Jersey Magazine, “I’ll never know whether it was the microphone or Wilson’s skull hitting the floor.” Regardless, Darrow admitted almost forty years after the fact that the sound “haunts me to this day.”
The band played on. They, like most everyone in the audience, figured this was part of the act. Dick Clark was backstage, and he had seen Wilson perform enough times to know that it wasn’t.
“I’d never seen him do that before,” Clark recalled in Tony Douglas’s biography Jackie Wilson: Lonely Teardrops. “It looked like it was part of the act but he never got up. The irony of it is that just before Jackie was singing, ‘My heart is crying, crying,’ and doing the splits.”
After a minute or so, it was evident Jackie Wilson wasn’t getting up again. One of the band members called out. Clark ran onto the stage, stopped the music, and called for the maroon curtain to drop. A few seconds later, he walked out in front of the curtain in tears and said, “Is there a doctor in the house?”
The show was over. The other stars of the revue moved in to Wilson’s side. “I ran out on stage, and he was biting down on his tongue,” Dion told Atlantic City Weekly. “His body froze up.” Cornell Gunter was the first to point out that Jackie Wilson wasn’t breathing. He attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but it didn’t seem to help.
“None of us knew CPR,” Clark said. “This is probably some of my guilt coming forward.” A nurse stepped up from the audience, and paramedics ultimately showed up. Dick Clark asked the audience to pray for Jackie Wilson.
“The audience was asked to exit the premises,” said Darrow, who’d been scheduled to interview Clark for the Temple University News after the show. “I definitely remember one guy in the audience screaming he wanted his money back.”
The evening’s second show was canceled, but someone told a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer that the revue would resume the following evening, possibly with local hero Chubby Checker taking Jackie Wilson’s headlining spot. Ultimately, R&B singer Chuck Jackson filled in.
Jackie Wilson was rushed to Cherry Hill Hospital, where doctors said he’d suffered a “severe heart attack.” They managed to stabilize his vital functions, but the lack of oxygen to his brain, possibly exacerbated by a stroke resulting from that hit to the head, caused him to slip into a coma.
For a time, friends and fans had hope that Jackie Wilson would recover. In early 1976, he emerged briefly from the coma. He wasn’t able to speak, but he was aware of his surroundings and even managed to take a few unsteady steps before falling back into the purgatory of a semi-coma and total dependency.
Later that year, the rhythm and blues vocal group the Spinners and their manager organized a benefit concert for Jackie Wilson on the same stage at the Latin Casino where Wilson had fallen. One of the Spinners’ lead vocalists, Philippé Wynne, was, like Wilson, born in Detroit and was greatly influenced by Wilson’s singing and performing style. The group and its management put up $10,000 to cover travel, hotel, and other expenses and vowed that every penny of the proceeds, minus 5 percent for the taxman, would go to Wilson’s family. (Money for the taxman was something Jackie Wilson did not set aside. At the time of his collapse, he owed the IRS hundreds of thousands of dollars.)
Twelve ringside tables, each seating ten, were set aside for $1,000 each. The rest of the tickets were twenty dollars. No dinner would be served. The all-star line-up would also include Al Green, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, Sister Sledge, Stephanie Mills, B. T. Express, and comedian Irwin C. Watson. Soul Train’s Don Cornelius and Dick Clark would serve as emcees.
The Latin Casino was sold out for the benefit on October 3, 1976. Record industry execs scooped up the ringside tickets. Al Green at first declined to sing, but then performed an a cappella version of “Let’s Stay Together” and donated $10,000 to the Jackie Wilson Fund. Dick Clark once again hauled out a film clip from his collection, this one of Jackie Wilson singing “Lonely Teardrops” on American Bandstand. The Spinners, including Philippé Wynne, put on an exciting show that included a medley of their hits. Later, the Spinners management announced that $60,000 had been raised for Jackie Wilson’s medical expenses.
Legalized gambling and big Vegas entertainment an hour away in Atlantic City took business and headliners from the Latin Casino and led its owners to close the nitery in 1978. Totie Fields headlined the last show on June 28. Like the Latin Casino, the comedienne had suffered serious health problems in the past couple of years—in her case, breast cancer, two heart attacks, complications from eye surgery, and the amputation of her left leg.
She entered the stage on a wheelchair. “Jesus Christ, they had to cut off my goddamn leg to get me to lose weight!” she crowed. “If they could just whack my other leg and both of my arms I think I could reach my goal weight!” Totie Fields died thirty-five days later, the morning she was to have opened a two-week gig at the Sahara in Las Vegas. She was forty-eight.
Meanwhile, several million dollars were poured into converting the Latin Casino into Emerald City, which Billboard called “one of the nation’s most spectacular discotheques.” Within three years, the owners filed for bankruptcy. After the building burned to the ground a few years later, it was gutted. The corporate headquarters of Subaru of America rose on its spot.
The Jackie Wilson whom rock ’n’ roll and R&B fans knew and loved died that Monday evening in 1975, never to sing, dance, or split again. The mortal Jackie Wilson lived on, in various stages of a coma and in need of constant attention. In 1977, he was moved to the Medford Leas Retirement Center in Medford, New Jersey, about twenty-five minutes east of the old Latin Casino, while a court battle raged over his finances.
On April 14, 1978, a Camden County Court judge awarded guardianship to Wilson’s estranged wife, Harlean Wilson (they’d married in 1967). The judge ruled against Tony Wilson, a son by a previous marriage, and Joyce McRae, who was described as a fan who moved to New Jersey to be near her “friend.”
On January 8, 1984, Wilson was admitted to Memorial Hospital of Burlington County in nearby Mount Holly. That’s where he died thirteen days later, on Saturday, January 21, 1984, from complications of pneumonia. He was forty-nine.
Philippé Wynne left the Spinners and in 1977 went solo with his new manager, Alan Thicke. In 1979, he joined up with George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic crew and was a featured vocalist on the funk classic “(Not Just) Knee Deep,” which went to number 1 on Billboard’s Black Singles and R&B charts.
In 1984, Wynne was on the road to promote his new self-titled LP, released on the Sugar Hill label. On July 13, nearly six months after the death of Jackie Wilson, he was in Oakland, California, playing Ivey’s nightclub, a popular showplace in Jack London Square, the waterfront entertainment district. It may have been Friday the Thirteenth, but it was a lucky night for the two hundred patrons of Ivey’s, for if ever the spirit of Jackie Wilson was alive, it was onstage that night. Philippé Wynne put on a show that was high on energy and full of hits; it had everyone on their feet. The crowd brought him back for two encores. Wynne left the stage that third time to another standing ovation.
Now, it was forty-five minutes before midnight and he was back for a third encore. What more could he give? The band kicked into the Spinners’ 1974 hit “Love Don’t Love Nobody.” Like “Lonely Teardrops,” the song summed up the pain of a man who loved and lost. It was a song that could have been sung in church, and it was a perfect final encore. It would wring every last drop of sweat from Philippé Wynne and the audience alike.
The band eased out the song in a slow burn and built from there. Gradually, Philippé Wynne’s soulful voice rose from regret to the shouts of the gospel singer he once was. Women in the crowd raised their palms toward the ceiling. Men cheered him on.
Wynne removed the microphone from the stand and stepped off the stage and began to walk through the audience, like a preacher, roaring, testifying, that love . . . don’t love . . . nobody!
Sign of pain is on my face, well . . .
My heartbeat stops—
Yes, he did. Just as his hero Jackie Wilson had sung, “My heart is crying, crying—my heart, my heart—” before falling backwards to the floor, Philippé Wynne sang, “Sign of pain is on my face! Well, my heartbeat stops!” Then, standing amid the crowd, he suddenly dropped the microphone, and he himself dropped to the floor. The music stopped. The women who were screaming in ecstasy were now screaming in alarm. Two police officers and a nurse who happened to be in the club made their way through the audience to administer aid. As the singer was taken from the club to Providence Hospital, many women cried.
Philippé Wynne’s heartbeat had indeed stopped. Like his hero, Jackie Wilson, he’d suffered a severe heart attack. Unlike Jackie Wilson, he did not hang on. Wynne was pronounced dead a little over an hour after he fell, at 12:27 AM on Saturday morning, July 14. He was forty-three.
Jackie Wilson was buried in an unmarked grave at Westlawn Cemetery near Detroit. In 1987, a fundraiser by a Detroit radio station collected enough money to re-inter him next to his mother in a mausoleum. The fact that Jackie Wilson did not die onstage but hung on for many years before finding a need for a grave may seem unique in recent pop music history. Yet he wasn’t the only one.
Curtis Mayfield was another R&B and soul music legend. With the Impressions in the 1960s, he brought social consciousness and activism to the charts with songs like “People Get Ready,” “Keep On Pushing,” and “It’s All Right.” As a solo artist in the 1970s, he was a funk music pioneer who turned a soundtrack for a blaxploitation flick called Superfly into a commentary on violence, crime, and drug abuse in America’s urban ghettos—and a very soulful and funky commentary, at that.
Curtis Mayfield may have been the embodiment of soul. He’d reached his commercial height with the Superfly soundtrack in 1972 but remained a vital artist into the next decade. In 1990, he and his band toured Europe and returned that summer to the States, where, on July 7, they headlined the SummerStage in New York City’s Central Park.
On August 13, Mayfield was back in New York City, in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, for a free outdoor concert at Wingate Field. The show was sponsored by State Senator Marty Markowitz, a glad-hander who was known as “Senator Impresario” because most of his constituents knew him for the free concert series he promoted. He was referred to by the New York Times as “the only politician in the city who deliberately seeks to entertain” and by the Daily News as a moonlighting “non-profit concert promoter” who brought headlining acts from Manhattan to the eastern side of the New York City bridges.
The stage, sound system, and lighting rigs were set up that Monday afternoon. The ten thousand people who streamed into the park brought along their own chairs and blankets. As they settled in, there was some concern about the weather. Official policy called for an outdoor event to be canceled in case of heavy thunder, lightning, or high winds—anything more than a “light rain.” People who were there will tell you that winds were whipping around the park that day, but in these cases, most everyone seems to err on the side of the show going on.
Shortly after the sun went down, at 7:30, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, who’d opened for the Spinners, with Philippé Wynne, at the Latin Casino Jackie Wilson tribute in 1976 (and whose former lead singer, Teddy Pendergrass, had been paralyzed from the chest down in a car accident in 1982), began their opening set. An hour later, Curtis Mayfield was introduced. He was carrying his guitar as he walked up the steps to the stage and surveyed the thousands of cheering fans before him when, Marty Markowitz told United Press International, “an overwhelming wind hit us and blew the speakers off the stage and the lighting trusses down.”
The lighting towers, weighing several hundred pounds, crashed to the stage. At least seven people were injured, including three crew members and a twelve-year-old girl. No one was hurt as badly as Curtis Mayfield.
The scaffolding and the tower of lights smashed on top of him, onto his head and back from behind. One moment he was holding his guitar. The next, he was flat on his face with a broken neck. He was admitted to Kings County Hospital in critical condition and placed in intensive care.
The next morning, Markowitz told local reporters the accident was “a terrible tragedy” caused by “a freakish gust of wind like a mini-tornado” that no one could have foreseen. The next show at Wingate Field took place on schedule the following week, and everyone in the crowd was asked to sign a giant get-well card.
Eight days after the accident, the New York Times published a letter to the editor from the vice president of Local 4 of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, criticizing Markowitz for using prison inmates rather than skilled union professionals to set up the stage. “Rigging and setting up an outdoor show with electric lights and sound on tall steel towers requires skill and experience,” the union veep wrote.
Eleven days after the accident, Curtis Mayfield was transferred from Brooklyn to Shepherd Spinal Center in Atlanta, near his home. He was paralyzed from the neck down, but there was hope his spinal injuries would heal.
He made his first public appearance six months after the accident. On February 12, 1991, he arrived in Miami to donate a $100,000 check to set up the Curtis Mayfield Research Fund at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis.
The hope soon faded. Curtis Mayfield would remain paralyzed for the rest of his life. He’d never be able to play guitar or walk again, but he wasn’t wheeled into a convalescent home. He continued to compose and sing.
In 1996, he directed the recording of one last album. He recorded his vocals, one line at a time, while lying on his back. It was the only way he could draw enough air into his lungs to get the words out. The lines were edited together to assemble each of the thirteen tracks on the album. New World Order didn’t crack the Top 100, but it received three Grammy nominations. Reviewer Leo Stanley of the AllMusic website called the album “a touching, moving comeback.” He wrote, “The songs are hit-and-miss, but the main strength of the record is that it illustrates that Mayfield can make music that is still vital.”
Curtis Mayfield died of complications of type 2 diabetes, related to the accident, on December 26, 1999. He was forty-eight when he was paralyzed, fifty-seven when he took his last breath.
It took Jackie Wilson more than eight years to die; Curtis Mayfield held on for more than nine.