2

PURE ESSENCE

All throughout high school, I’d played in and out of bands, and after graduation, my plan was to make a living doing the same. It didn’t take long, though, to learn that playing music in the real world is an entirely different experience.

During high school, playing in bands had begun for me almost by accident. I used to set up my drum kit in the basement and practice by myself at my mother’s house in Madisonville. There was a window that you could see through into the backyard, and one day when I was practicing, I glanced up to see someone looking at me. I went outside to see who he was.

“I’m Russell,” he said. “You’re pretty good. Kind of funky. You hit the drums hard. Nobody around here is doing it like that. I’m a bass player.”

He mentioned his band, and I actually knew their name. I was impressed to meet someone who was a notch up from me, playing in a real band, digging what I was doing. We chatted a bit, and I played some more for him. He told me about a cousin of his who also played bass and had a guitar player, but no drummer. He offered to introduce me. I had never been in a band. I’d never played with other musicians from outside school before. I’d only played by myself. This would be the very first time.

I joined the band with Russell’s cousin Richard and another guy. We played funk music and called the band Smoked Herbs because we liked to smoke pot, though we never performed in public, only at home in the garage. We did Bobby Womack’s “Woman’s Got To Have It” in the first session. We learned songs by Chicago, but since we didn’t have any horns, we’d play only the Chicago rhythm section stuff—or at least try to.

Russell and I became buddies. We would hang out at his house or my place and listen to music. He turned me on to Tower of Power, one mean band from the Bay Area with the cool song “What Is Hip?” and the badass drummer David Garibaldi. One day Russell came by and asked if I wanted to go to the music shop. We jumped in his car and went to the instrument store, somewhere near where we lived, a store I’d never been to.

As we got out of the car and headed into the store, he handed me a guitar case. “Just carry this in,” he said.

Once we got into the store Russell took the guitar case from me, and while I checked out the keyboards and drums, he went to the guitars and basses. We were in there for about twenty minutes when he came over to me, ready to leave, and handed me the guitar case as we walked out. It seemed heavier.

By the time we got in the car and drove off, I realized there was a guitar in the case, a guitar he’d stolen. He had made me an accessory to the theft, and I was not cut out for that. I never thought of stealing anything, let alone a guitar.

“What are you going to do with it?” I asked.

“I’m going to sell it,” he said.

“Okay, but you’re going to give me some of the money, right?” I said.

He looked at me but didn’t say anything. His body language clearly said no. My attitude about Russell changed on the spot. Suddenly I didn’t think so highly of him. I stopped hanging out with him after that. I would see him in passing, but I was no thief and I didn’t want to be around one.

I found out only later that robbing music stores was his thing. He would visit the stores during the day and leave a window unlocked, then come back at night. Eventually he got caught. The irony is not lost on me—the guy who really gave me my first push into the music business turned out to be a thief.

As a band, Smoked Herbs never amounted to anything, and throughout high school, making a living from music seemed like a dream. I dove into music at school because it drew me. I didn’t think about a career in music. I was just a kid smitten with rhythm. I continued to play drums by myself at home, but after all that jamming with the Smoked Herbs, I wanted to play in a real band.

When I was about fifteen, and still going to Hughes High and studying in Mr. Brown’s class, Russell did hook me up with an even better band, the Generation Gap, which turned out to be my first real professional group. I went over to audition for the band in Kennedy Heights, which was considerably more upscale than Madisonville. These were rich kids. They drove their parents’ cars. They had great equipment. They had expensive amps. They played Telecaster guitars and had Fender Precision basses. I’d never seen money like this before, and I noticed the class distinction. Coming from the lower middle class, we owned our house and were by no means poor, but these guys were clearly more affluent. We didn’t even go to school together—they went to Woodward High, which was in a better neighborhood back then.

Despite all that, I joined the Generation Gap—it was my first real band and these guys could play. Steve Hunter was the bass player; he also sang. Delbert Williams was the guitar player, and another guy named Greg was amazing on the organ. We had a couple of horn players. It was serious—I was with real musicians now. We played local clubs and parties, played the funk songbook from Funkadelic to Tower of Power. The band played high school proms, a few talent shows, and once did a fashion show. We had a regular gig at the Clock Bar on Burnett Avenue in Avondale, where all the pimps and hookers hung out. It was street. The guys wore loud colors and big hats and drove Cadillacs with chrome grills and TV antennas attached. One pimp named Lavender had the finest girls and kept a big knot of cash in his nylon socks, which he would take out to pay for drinks.

We decided to join forces with a singing trio and renamed our band Mama’s Pride; this was the band I was in when I finished with high school. We did everything from the Spinners, the Temptations, and the Four Tops to the Doobie Brothers. We started drawing nice crowds. Our three vocalists didn’t dance much, but they could sing. They brought harmonies and sophisticated ballads to the bandstand—“You Make Me Feel Brand New” by the Stylistics, “Superwoman” by Stevie Wonder. Mama’s Pride was more than simply another funk outfit, although the band didn’t stay together long.

After high school was over, Mr. Brown came by one of the Mama’s Pride rehearsals in the basement of my girlfriend’s house. He had quit teaching during our senior year to concentrate on his own singing group. He told us that day about a new thing that was going to change music—video. He said people were going to make little films of people playing songs and that would be the next new wrinkle. The music scene was rapidly changing in exciting ways, and we wanted to be part of that future.

From the crowds at our shows, and our regular gigs, it seemed like we were going somewhere. The Mama’s Pride lead vocalist was Dwight Tribble, who remains one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. He had this amazing voice, a range that never seemed to stop. There was never a note he couldn’t hit with his natural voice. He could sing like Stevie Wonder or Donny Hathaway. Or he could sing jazz. He was also a handsome lady-killer. I liked to kid Trib about it—we called him Trib. After a show one night at the Club Diplomat in Cincinnati, I made a little joke. “You’re not the only one the girls noticed tonight,” I said. “Some of the girls noticed the drummer.”

“Well, you can have all of them,” he said. “This is our last show.”

I had no idea what was going on, but that was it: the band broke up that night. The Mama’s Pride singers never really got along with the guys from the Generation Gap, and there was some kind of tension in the band that went over my head. I wasn’t the leader of the band. I was only the drummer.

It was disappointing—that band had seemed destined for success—but I’d gotten enough of a taste that I decided to make my life in music. I had been swept up by the experience of playing drums with my first professional group, a band I thought could be successful, and once the idea of making a living in music had taken root, I didn’t look back. I had no strategy in mind and didn’t know what I was doing, but I wanted to try.

Some of the Generation Gap guys called me to try out for a different band. They liked me and we ended up bringing in musicians I knew from school. First, I brought in my friend Kayo to play bass. More guys came and went, and before long, all the Generation Gap people were gone and all the Mama’s Pride singers had left, and I found myself with Kayo, some other players I knew from high school, and a couple of other guys. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I refused to give up the game.

We formed Pure Essence, which was more of a funk band that did only originals and covers of Sly and the Family Stone. We started out in my girlfriend’s mom’s basement every night at seven, but before long, we were rehearsing at whoever’s house every night until midnight. After practice, we would hang out and talk until the middle of the night and sleep until noon.

The guys in the group came from all over. The lead vocalist, named Jerome Richmond but known as Mouse, was leader of the band, the motivator, the loud talker, the guy in the locker room getting everybody fired up before a game. He patterned himself after Sly Stone, so he was not exactly an original. Kayo was my best friend and the bass player. Steve Tucker Walters—we called him Tuck—was one of two guitar players, a little older than the rest of us and our spiritual adviser. Tuck was a heavy thinker. He studied transcendental meditation. He taught us the difference between mediocre and great, between KC and the Sunshine Band and Funkadelic. He showed us how to write songs that had multiple meanings and layers. He wanted the band to have depth.

The Pure Essence band logo (designed by Designology), Indianapolis, Indiana, 1979

The other songwriter was the second guitarist, Larry Middleton, a sexy, good-looking guy with a growling baritone in the mold of Marvin Gaye. He’d dropped out of Hughes High when I was still there, but I could remember him coming to Mr. Brown’s class with his acoustic guitar and killing Marvin’s “Distant Lover.” Larry was already a regional star. He belonged to Combined Forces, whose “Colors Are Real” was a local hit, so when Larry joined our little group, we knew it was getting serious. Larry was also the guy who gave me my nickname. It was at a rehearsal during the 1975 World Series with the Cincinnati Reds. I was wearing a Los Angeles Dodgers jersey as a kind of protest. Larry looked across the room at me. “OK, LA,” he said, “you count it off.” It stuck.

To this day, these are all my friends.

Pure Essence was my first group that played only original music (with the exception of the Sly covers), and because of that, the group represented a coming of age for me, a time when I began to notice life on a deeper level, a new era of consciousness for me. Musicianship began to fascinate me. Whether playing original music with my band or listening to records, I wanted true musicality, intellectual depth, songs with meaning. Chord progressions needed to be complex. While our band wasn’t the most musically sophisticated, we listened only to music we felt could enlighten us. From the start, we were all determined to make a musical mark with Pure Essence.

I had discovered rock music in junior high school. I’d known about soul music, but when I started listening to rock, it opened my ears to a wider world of exciting music. I still remember the first time I heard Led Zeppelin. Drummer John Bonham was a hero to me. My high school was right across the street from the campus of the University of Cincinnati. The street was filled with head shops with black light posters and weed pipes. Hippies would sit around the sidewalk playing folk music on their guitars. I went to rock concerts at the college to see bands like Grand Funk Railroad and Edgar Winter with his brother, Johnny Winter.

When we started Pure Essence, the ’70s rock scene was at its full glory. As we wrote our own music more, rock music became so compelling to us that we drifted completely away from the black music scene. We studied FM radio that played music by the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and all the other rock heroes. We would read every issue of Rolling Stone magazine cover to cover religiously. To us, dancing was a no-no and corny lyrics were out of the question. We smoked a lot of weed and went from dressing slick to wearing blue jeans. We played long sets and every musician did lengthy solos. My entertaining, extended drum solos were earning me the reputation as the top drummer in town. We were a bunch of black hippies at the dawn of the disco age.

With the exception of Stevie Wonder, I pretty much stopped listening to much black music. I got into all kinds of rock music—the hard rock of Black Sabbath, the progressive rock of Yes. I was into Carlos Santana. I dug the horn bands—Chicago; Blood, Sweat, and Tears; Tower of Power. I even liked the supercommercial pop thing like Three Dog Night. But as I branched out, it wasn’t just about rock; I also got into jazz fusion with Weather Report, Return to Forever, and Herbie Hancock. And I loved and paid special attention to drummers Billy Cobham, Steven Ferrone, Lenny White, and Steve Gadd. I liked a piano player named Deodato. There was an artist from Canada, Gino Vanelli, who was like a jazz singer. The Stones got my attention with their disco hit, “Miss You.”

As we experimented with our sound and influences, we realized that in order for our band to be taken seriously, we needed to make a record. Our vocalist, Mouse, knew the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball star Dave Parker, who had grown up in Cincinnati, and he talked Dave into paying for some studio time. I had been in the recording studio only once, me and Kayo with Mr. Brown, who had hired us to play on a jingle for Keebler cookies, “Keebler’s Makes Uncommonly Good Cookies.” For the Pure Essence session, Mouse booked studio time for the group in a cut-rate studio in Chillicothe, outside Columbus, Ohio.

In 1976, we went in and cut two sides, “Wake Up” and “Third Rock,” both in about two takes, which was important since studio time was valuable. Although we did not have any real studio experience, we were able to create a sound that was funky yet progressive. We pressed up the first single, “Wake Up,” and took it to local black radio station, WCIN. It was an okay song, but we got no airplay.

About the same time, Kayo and I played a session with another local act called Larry and Vicky. Vicky was a high school friend from class with Mr. Brown, and she had real star quality along with a very sweet voice. We cut two sides with them produced by another guy. “How I Wish” by Larry and Vicky came out and went straight on WCIN and turned into a local hit. That was bittersweet after our Pure Essence record bombed.

I always tuned in rock music radio and was driving in my car listening to WEBN one day when I heard the disc jockey announce that the station was looking for recordings by local talent for a compilation album. I had a cassette in the car of the other song from the Pure Essence session, “Third Rock” (a little nod to Jimi Hendrix), and, without telling anyone else in the band, I stopped and dropped it off at the station. The program director phoned a few days later to say he wanted to include the track on the album.

I called the guys and told them the good news. Most of them were happy, but not Mouse, the bandleader. He felt I had gone around him and had been insubordinate, but the other guys quickly squashed that with their enthusiasm. WEBN started playing the song, and the station phone started ringing. We had a local hit on the radio, alongside Boz Scaggs, Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, and all the other rock radio favorites of the day.

Suddenly, one record we were on was getting played on rock radio, and Kayo and I were on the black station with Larry and Vicky, not to mention the national commercial we played for Keebler cookies. We were starting to feel some momentum and see exciting possibilities, but we were also figuring this out as we went along. With the record on the rock station, Pure Essence started to attract more of a white college crowd, which led to us playing many fraternity parties. Bit by bit, it was happening for us.

We were working gigs around Cincinnati, frequently at the Club Diplomat, the hot spot for local talent. We would rent out the club, buy commercials on local radio, and pack the place. We were having a great little run. Our plan was working. We were making a little money playing music, even though we all still lived with our parents. Also, we were getting better and better live, everything was going great, drawing crowds, playing our asses off—but it all came crashing to a halt one Sunday morning only a few short weeks later.

Preforming with Kayo and Mouse at Club Diplomat, Cincinnati, Ohio, 1977 (Steven Tucker)

I got a call that the club we used for rehearsals had burned to the ground with all of our instruments and equipment inside. We lost everything. We had no insurance and no money, and, now, no instruments and no equipment with which to make money. We were able to borrow some gear to do a couple of gigs, but that didn’t last more than a couple of weeks. Without income, the pressure started to get to us.

I was determined to find my way in music, but I needed to make money. I’d never made my own living in my life and didn’t even know where to begin. My mother was getting frustrated with me staying home all day and going out at night, but not working, not gigging, just wasting time. She told me she had a gentleman for me to meet who would help me get a job. I told her I wasn’t cut out for labor work. I flatly refused to even meet the guy, just to prove my point that my life belonged in music. She said, “Fine, but you better hope music can find you a place to live,” because she was done supporting me.

I was twenty-one years old, still living with my mother, and I no longer owned a car. (I was such a horribly oblivious driver, Mom wasn’t keen on me using hers.) I had no real prospects in the music business, but that didn’t occur to me. I knew that if I wanted to get back on the bandstand, I needed to take every little step. I went out and looked for work.

I found a job at a factory that made paper bags. There was a strike at the Duro Bag Manufacturing Company over the river in neighboring Covington, Kentucky, and the company didn’t mind hiring a bunch of kids from Cincinnati foolish enough to cross the picket lines. My job was working on the dock, loading trucks with huge bundles of paper bags. It was a dirty job, but I did it until I met Winston Twe, a slightly older African gentleman studying for his PhD at the University of Cincinnati who didn’t ever seem to be working hard.

For the most part, he kept to himself, but I met him in the cafeteria and we discovered that he lived on the same street where I had taken an apartment with my girlfriend, Pamela. He spoke proper Queen’s English, not American ghetto slang, and his job at the plant was to patch the bundles of paper bags if they broke, which they rarely did. So mostly he stood around all day. He took a liking to me, spoke to someone, and soon I was working/not working alongside him, patching bundles.

Winston started teaching me things. He gave me books to read. He introduced me to Bob Marley’s music at parties at his home. We would hold long discussions, and he would ask me crazy questions, such as, Why are stoplights red?

“Psychologists made the stoplight red,” he told me, “because red is a jarring color and it makes you stop. In Chinese theater, the performers always wear red because you can see them from any point in the theater.”

I’d always felt guilty that I didn’t have a formal education, so I devoured the books Winston gave me. I loved listening to him speak in his velvet tones and elegant language. With his help, I started to see, for the first time, that I was smart.

In about six months, I had saved enough money to buy a new drum kit and quit the paper bag factory. The other guys did the same and we put the band back together. We started practicing and writing songs while looking for work. Sadly, our bandleader, Mouse, had turned to heavy drugs and was strung out on heroin. He was never the same after that, although he stayed in the band.

I wanted desperately to get back to playing music, but even though I had a new drum kit and the band was back together, it was a dark time for me. To pay the rent, I had to take a job working the graveyard shift at a convenience store called King Kwik. The relationship with Pamela had been straining both of us and I’d already been feeling trapped when we learned that Pamela was pregnant. Her mother showed up one day and started in on me after checking out the décor of our little apartment.

“Why do you have the pictures up so high?” she asked—apparently I knew nothing about interior design. “And how are you going to take care of my daughter? And I heard that you was running around with this other girl, and if I hear about you running . . .”

That was way too much for me. I cracked. I called my friend Toby and told him to come get me, but I couldn’t even wait. By the time he picked me up, I had already walked three or four blocks up the street. I got in his car and drove away. I knew she was pregnant, but I was in no way ready to start a family. I was a reckless, irresponsible twenty-two-year-old who wasn’t ready to face a future of King Kwik and give up my dream. I was a piece of shit. I always did what I could to help, but it would be years before I could bring my son into my life completely.

Just as I was trying to get my music career back on its feet, my uncle Albert, who had inspired my love of drums, and my grandmother died in a freak accident, suffocating from carbon monoxide while they were holding a conversation in his car parked on the street. He never married and didn’t have any children, but he had felt especially close to me, so he had left me his drum set and the car they died in. I was too poor not to take the car, a 1972 Ford Galaxy—my first car.

After their funeral, I went to band practice and I played harder that day than I had ever played before. I kept dropping sticks, I was so nervous, but I felt like the only way I could represent my uncle was to play harder, commit more time, practice more. He took me seriously and encouraged me to always improve myself, not just on my instrument, but to study and read and continue my education. He’d inspired me to drum in the first place and ushered me into that fraternity of musicians; now that he was gone, I was determined to put his drum kit to work in a way that would have made him proud.

Relaunching the band, we faced problems. It was 1977, and in semicosmopolitan Cincinnati, disco had taken hold and local bands were being replaced by disc jockeys. We could find work only on the weekends. In Indianapolis, a hundred and fifteen miles away, the clubs generally booked bands five nights a week, Tuesday through Saturday, but there were also several clubs that had live bands all seven nights.

One day in 1978, I took a drive to Indianapolis with a friend to check out the scene. The first stop was a club on Thirty-Eighth Street called the Zodiac Lounge. I walked in and asked for the club owner. The gentleman I asked turned out to be the owner. I explained that I had a band and was looking for work. He asked a few questions and told me he would hire us for $800 a week to play covers, if we were good. “You guys can start next week,” he said, “but if you aren’t as good as you say, I’m sending you back to Cincinnati.”

I went to the next spot, called Ricky’s Lounge. Ricky was much nicer than the tough, gangsterish guy who owned the Zodiac. Ricky also told us he would give us a shot at playing covers. Now I had two weeks of work booked for nearly $2,000, and back in Cincy, I held a band meeting to discuss the plans, but Mouse announced he would quit the band rather than go to Indianapolis and sing covers. Instead, we found another member of our high school music class who was a singer. Tony Coates wasn’t a good-looking guy, but he could sing his ass off. He was more R&B than funky, but we needed somebody right away and gave Tony the gig.

It didn’t take long for us to see that Indianapolis was a very different kind of town—slower, more laid-back, less cosmopolitan, but the music scene was serious. It was a real music town. The musicians were far more developed and committed than those in Cincinnati, playing music full-time for a living. The bands played like pros because if you play six nights a week, you get good. Many of them had recording deals and local hits. We had a lot of catching up to do.

We streamlined the band’s name to simply “Essence” and hit the circuit. Our first few weeks were rough, as we were used to playing only original songs in Pure Essence. We had to learn the current chart-topping hits quickly, and though we played them well enough, we were not nearly as good as the bands in Indy. We drew a decent crowd most nights, but nothing to write home about. Just up the road was the more posh nightspot called the Mark 4, where we caught bands like Manchild, Midnight Star, and several other lesser-known bands, all really impressive. We especially liked Midnight Star, who were also from Cincinnati.

A rare occasion—me singing—at the Zodiac Lounge (Courtesy of Cheryl Brooks)

We moved to Indianapolis and stayed for three years working in those clubs. We didn’t make a lot of money, but we made enough money to pay the rent and eat. We were playing music for a living. We were learning our craft. Playing the same cover material grew old quickly, but we definitely improved as musicians, since we had to compete with the other Indianapolis bands, who could play anything, from jazz fusion to pop. Indianapolis wasn’t really a funk town, so we played black music, whatever was hot at the time. We did some disco songs. Rick James had a funky style of disco music and we could play that. Mostly, however, whatever the Top Forty songs were, we would learn twenty and play those.

Living conditions were grim in Indy. The entire band lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Thirty-Eighth Street. Eight guys, one bathroom with a broken door. We played four forty-five-minute sets every night with very few days off. We would practice during the day, learning new material, and gig at night.

Times were tough and we established a house rule with the band: no free fucking. None of us were allowed to spend the night sleeping with a girl somewhere else if we didn’t bring something back—cash, clothes, food, cigarettes, something. Sometimes somebody would bring breakfast back. We quickly got trained to get money out of girls. Our conquest wasn’t the girl. Our conquest was to get them to pay the rent or buy some food. Which one could we borrow a car from? We worked it like that.

One time I got into a fight with this girlfriend I had. I would never hit a woman, but I guess I raised my hand while she was ironing. I scared her and she took the iron and hit me on the temple with it. I had a show that night. She put makeup on the mark on my temple to cover it up. We were playing the show when the keyboard player saw the blood and started laughing. The music started sounding funny because the whole band was picking up on it and laughing. We used a word among ourselves—“does”—to stand for “domestic problems.” “LA is having does,” he said. “He has blood.”

I was playing at Ricky’s Lounge in Indianapolis when my cousin Rhonda, Kayo’s girlfriend who lived in Cincinnati, called to tell me my son had been born. That weekend, after the shows were over, I went back to Cincinnati to visit Pamela in the hospital. I walked into the hospital room and she was holding him.

“This is your son,” she said. “I named him Antonio.” Looking in his eyes, I saw my life stretch out before me. It was hard for me to comprehend—this was my son. I was happy, but I still was in no way ready, so I went back to Indianapolis.

The band landed a monthlong booking in faraway New Orleans through a hustler cousin of our keyboard player. We rented a U-Haul truck, packed up our gear, and strapped it down to prevent movement during transit. We piled in some mattresses for the band to sleep on during the freezing-cold fourteen-hour trip to New Orleans in mid-February. Fumes from the exhaust mixed with the air we breathed. We had no real cash, very little food, and only a little weed to take the edge off. We ate packets of ketchup we lifted from a fast-food restaurant. Talk about struggling—a bunch of black men rolling through the South in the back of a truck.

When we arrived in New Orleans and got out of the back of the truck, we were swollen, starving, and smelly. The promoter rented us a house for the month. The first gig was at Pratt’s Alhambra, a local bar near the French Quarter. No one showed up. That city is the most unusual city in America. It was hard to figure out; we felt it as soon as we were there. We played to a nearly empty room. We weren’t that bad, but the club was dead. After one night, we were fired.

A week later, the promoter found us another gig and things started to look up. We played a few shows, but we didn’t seem to connect with the New Orleans crowd, who preferred a different kind of music than we played. After our last gig, we went to the house to pack up to leave and found our clothes on the porch, the doors locked. We had been kicked out. No money, no food. The promoter had disappeared with whatever money there was. The only thing we had was the U-Haul truck that we hadn’t paid for, so technically all we had was a stolen vehicle.

I had met a girl who worked at a nearby grocery store and went to her for help. We had had a moment while I was in town. I asked her to loan us some gas money to get back to Indy. She kindly gave whatever she could. Since she was married (although separated), I never got her phone number or address. I never gave her anything back, and I regret that I didn’t know how to reach her. She saved our lives.

We packed the truck and made it back to our place in Indy only to find the same thing. Doors locked. Keys changed. No money, no food, and now no place to live. One of the guys had a girlfriend who let us crash at her apartment until I could find our landlord and beg him to let us back. He did, but only after he gave us two weeks to pay the two months’ back rent.

Indianapolis was still buried under two feet of winter snow. I set out on foot to find work for the band. I went to all the spots where we had worked before with no luck. I went back to Ricky’s and managed to get another two-week run with a cash advance of $200. We were again back on our feet for another round of local gigs. We played Ricky’s and another popular spot called the Night Flight. This club was a discotheque, but it had a lounge downstairs where the club owner let us play for the door. That lasted a few weeks, but we never made enough money to pay the rent.

Finally, I went back to the Night Flight to speak to the owner. I asked him to advance us a few dollars against our next gig; what I got was a life-changing conversation that I will remember forever. Walt told me, first of all, that he wouldn’t give us an advance, because we were fired. “The band sucks,” he said, “and didn’t draw a crowd.” He called us dated and uninteresting. “This band will never make it,” he said. He eventually coughed up a hundred-dollar bill and told me to remember this and to do the same for someone when I got the chance. His exact words were “Pay it forward.”

That club owner taught me a lesson I never forgot. The years in Indianapolis had been excellent musical training, but we had failed, no matter how well we were now playing. Clearly something had gone wrong, and the man from the Night Flight helped show me what.

That would have been the bitter finish to Essence except for one last desperate try. We made a deal to buy this sweet customized van from a nighttime deejay on WTLC in Indianapolis, Vicki Buchanan. We hooked up a U-Haul trailer and went off to the South to play a string of dates in itty-bitty towns such as Ashburn, Georgia; Tifton, Georgia; Sylvester, Georgia; and Eufaula, Alabama.

First we stayed in a house in Ashburn, Georgia, and then moved into a trailer the promoter gave us in Albany, Georgia. One of the guys in the band picked the lock on a trunk in the trailer and found a collection of sex toys, so it turned out to be a place where guys brought women to have sex. That was a complete turnoff—we lived in the whores’ chamber. My mom had no idea. I would call her and tell her how great everything was going. I didn’t share any of the struggles with her. To me, that was just part of the deal. Losing the instruments had been depressing. Not being there for my son hurt. But the rest of it was the dream, and my optimism was as high as the heavens. I never had a doubt for one second.

We finished the tour and came back to the trailer. The next morning I went to the promoter’s house to collect the money and he was sitting there with this long face and no money. He offered me gas money for the drive back to Indianapolis. I understood. We played to empty houses. He took a gamble, we took a gamble, and everybody lost. When we got back, we still hadn’t paid for the van, but Vicki told me everything was cool and to come by anyway. As soon as she saw me, she snatched the keys out of my hand and took the van back.

That was the end of Essence, but oddly enough, I didn’t feel defeated. I was beginning to think I could do this. Even though I’d invested a lot of time into the band, I didn’t see what had happened as a failure, because it was an experience I could learn from. When I’d arrived in Indianapolis, I had been exposed to a higher level of musicianship—those club bands could play Mahavishnu, Miles, all that badass jazz, along with Earth, Wind, and Fire, Rick James, the funk. But while their musical talent may have been superior, these Indianapolis groups seemed to lack direction, focus, and concept. And the longer we’d been in Indianapolis, the more we’d become just like those bands. We had lost our way in that city, playing those clubs, trying to get the rent paid. We had no vision, no concept, no idea. We had concentrated on playing. The fact that I could now recognize the difference between talent and vision gave me confidence—it energized me. It was the first time I realized that success in this business had as much to do with learning from what hadn’t worked as it had to do with making hit records.

Drive was just part of the equation, though. If I hadn’t figured out exactly where we had failed, maybe I would have lost heart, but thinking over how things had gone for Essence, I put my finger square in the socket: our band wasn’t entertaining. We were serious about being musicians. We knew how to play. We knew how to sing. We even knew how to write, but we didn’t understand entertainment. I knew what we needed to do—that one conversation with the owner of the Night Flight had made that painfully clear—but I just wasn’t sure how to do it. Although I didn’t know what my next step would be, I was not lost. I was found.