We were working down in Tampa when Clint called to tell us that King wanted us in Cincinnati to record right away. We hadn’t heard from anyone there since Ralph Bass signed us the morning after he’d seen us at Sawyer’s Lake. Since then we’d been working clubs around Tampa and Jacksonville, and we were beginning to wonder if he’d really liked us.
The club work in Florida was all right, but the club owners had a meal ticket system that could wear you out. At the beginning of, say, a week-long engagement, they gave us a meal ticket to their place. With what we were making, that meal ticket could be our margin of profit on the gig, but there was a catch: If they served breakfast at six o’clock in the morning, you better be there at six o’clock in the morning if you want to eat, even if your show the night before had lasted until 2 a.m. I missed a lot of meals that way.
We drove the four hundred miles from Tampa to Macon, stopped and picked up some money there, and continued for another six hundred miles to Cincinnati in a station wagon that had The Upsetters painted on the side. Clint had let Little Richard use the car before, and now we were jammed into it with all our clothes and instruments. We rode all night, stopping only for gas. It was the first time out of the South for any of us, and when we got to the outskirts of Cincinnati somebody came out from King and led us to the hotel, a place called the Manse. It was a fleabag, but it was better than anything we’d stayed in before.
Instead of sleeping we went straight over to King Records, situated in an old icehouse at the end of a dead-end street. They did everything there, recording, mastering, pressing, shipping, even printing the album covers. At one end of the building, facing the street, there was a big opening where the ice used to come down; now the rollers that shot out the ice were shooting out the records, big boxes of albums and 78s rolling down the chute. An entrance on the other side led into the studio, consisting of some microphones and a plate-glass window separating this area from the control booth, and a little mixing room behind that.
We had never seen an operation like this before and walked around the place in a daze. From the studio you could go into the stockroom, where they pressed the records. We watched them lay small balls of soft vinyl on a sort of platter, and then the press would come down and mash them into records. They were just about to move entirely from the big, old 78s to 45s.
While we were being shown around, we were introduced to Earl Bostic. He was fixing to cut that day, and he invited us to watch. Back in the control room we met Syd Nathan, who had started the company back in 1945. Syd was Little Caesar—short, fat, and smoked a big cigar. He yelled all the time in a big, hoarse voice, and everybody was afraid of him. Even though Syd didn’t know one note from another, King had been successful in all kinds of music. In the country field they had Moon Mullican, Cowboy Copas, Grandpa Jones, Hawkshaw Hawkins, and a lot more. In R & B instrumentals they had, besides Earl Bostic, Lucky Millinder, Tiny Bradshaw, Bill Doggett, and Big Jay McNeely. They had singers like Bullmoose Jackson, Wynonie Harris, Cleanhead Vinson, and Little Willie John, and groups like the Midnighters, the Five Royales, and Otis Williams and the Charms. Mr. Nathan also had several companies that published most of the songs King recorded.
We were supposed to record the next day, but when we showed up we found out Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had come in unexpectedly. Everybody at the studio was tied up in a big meeting with them, so our session was postponed until the following day. When we showed up, Little Willie John had come in to record, and our session was put off again. Little Willie John was just a shade over five feet tall, and he looked really sharp. Later on he came to mean a lot to me, but when I met him that day, I was thinking more about whether my own session would ever come to pass.
When it finally did, on February 4, 1956, I almost wished it hadn’t. We were set up in the studio, with Mr. Nathan and Gene Redd, the musical director, sitting in the control booth. Through the glass we could see Ralph Bass and the engineer, too. I didn’t like the idea of a muscial director because I felt I knew my music better than anyone else. Besides, our stuff wasn’t put together in the conventional way. We used a lot of seventh chords. Fats played keyboards and voiced chords with the sevenths instead of the triad. And we used sevenths for passing chords, too. Playing in the key of G, for example, we might want to go from a G chord to a C chord, and to make the change we might play a G7 as the harmonic transition.
They rolled the tape, and we ripped into “Please” in our style. When we were halfway through, Mr. Nathan suddenly jumped up from the board.
“What’s that? What in hell are they doing? Stop the tape,” he yelled. “That doesn’t sound right to my ears.” He was in a rage. “What’s going on here?” He turned on Gene Redd, who just shrugged because he didn’t understand it, either. Then he turned to Ralph Bass. “I sent you out to bring back some talent, and this is what I hear. The demo was awful, and this is worse. I don’t know why I have you working here. Nobody wants to hear that noise.”
“It’s a good song, Syd,” Ralph said. “Give them a chance.”
“A good song?” He looked at Ralph like Ralph was crazy. “It’s a stupid song. It’s got only one word in it. I’ve heard enough.” He stormed out of the room and up the stairs to his office.
We were frozen in the studio. We had made it through only half a track of our first professional recording session, and the owner of the company had walked out in the middle saying we were so bad he couldn’t use us. We were thinking, “Oh, Lord, we’re fixing to get sent away, and we just got here.” Gene came from behind the glass to talk to us.
“Can’t you do it some other way?” he asked.
“That’s the way we’ve always done it,” I said.
“But Mr. Nathan doesn’t like it,” he said.
“Mr. Nathan doesn’t understand it,” I said. He looked disturbed at that. “Everybody’s music can’t be alike, Mr. Redd. If everybody comes up here and goes to cutting alike, then nobody’s going to do anything.”
I showed him the chord changes on the piano and explained to him what we were doing. Once he understood, and it made sense to to him, he said he would go and tell Mr. Nathan that they should try it, even if it sounded funny. He was gone a long time. While we were waiting, hanging out in the hall, we could hear them yelling upstairs behind closed doors. When Gene came back, all he said was, “Okay, we’re going to cut it.” When Mr. Nathan never showed up again, we couldn’t help feeling that the session wasn’t legit, but we went ahead with it anyway. We cut “Please,” “Why Do You Do Me Like You Do,” “I Feel That Old Feeling Coming On,” and “I Don’t Know”—in spite of all the turmoil that day.
Usually, King pressed and shipped a record within days after it was recorded. Before we left Cincinnati we saw a handful of 78 RPM pressings of “Please,” but as soon as we got back to Macon we got worried. We heard that Ralph Bass had been fired and King wasn’t going to release the record. Mr. Nathan hated the master as much as he had hated the demo. Mr. Brantly was on the phone to him every day for nearly a month. At the end of February, Mr. Nathan told him that against his better judgment he was going to put the record out on his Federal label. So on March 3, 1956, “Please Please Please” was released. Eventually, it sold a million copies.