I saw the Rolling Stones the first time when we were on The T.A.M.I. Show together. It was a TV film with a whole lot of acts that were popular then: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Lesley Gore, Jan and Dean, Gerry and the Pacemakers. We taped it at the Santa Monica Auditorium in November 1964, and I think it came out early the next year. It was directed by Steve Binder, the cat who directed Elvis’s television special in 1968.
My group and I got to the auditorium to rehearse about eight in the morning. I think we did our segment three times all the way through in rehearsal. The production crew was taping all the rehearsals and blocking the show out, and then later in the day we were going to do the actual performance in front of an audience made up of mostly white teenagers. Motown had gotten very hot by then, and there were a lot of young white kids hanging all over the Motown stars. When Byrd and some of the other fellas saw what was happening, they started worrying. “Man,” they said, “it doesn’t look like we’re going to get such a good reception.” I said, “Don’t even worry about it. Once we get through, we aren’t going to be able to get out of this place.” I think the other acts knew it, too, even if the audience didn’t. They made it plainly understood they didn’t want to come anywhere after us. They knew what we could do. So the Stones, who were really big already, were scheduled to follow us.
They came in around one in the afternoon, with a bunch of guards, went straight to their dressing room, and didn’t let anybody get near ’em. Meantime, we were out there doing another rehearsal. When we did, a lot of people came out of their dressing rooms to watch, Mick included. I think he’d heard about us already, but when he saw what we did, he couldn’t believe it. After he saw me, he didn’t even want to rehearse. Some discussion started then about them going on sooner. I heard that Mick smoked a whole pack of cigarettes, he was so nervous. We thought that was a good sign, but we knew we still had to deal with the audience of young, young kids.
A funny thing happened when the actual show went on. Lesley Gore went out and did two songs. When she came off, a bunch of people crowded around asking for her autograph. Then this older lady—I don’t know if it was her mother, her keeper, or whoever—said, “Oh, no, don’t bother her, don’t bother her. She’s tired now. Wait until she rests.” We had already been out there and nearly killed ourselves twice already, and she hadn’t even done any rehearsals. When the lady said that, we all looked at each other and said, “There must be something we don’t know.”
We went on, a little nervous because we didn’t think this audience really knew us, but when we went into “Out of Sight,” they went straight up out of their seats. We did a bunch of songs, nonstop, like always. For our finale we did “Night Train.” I don’t think I ever danced so hard in my life, and I don’t think they’d ever seen a man move that fast. When I was through, the audience kept calling me back for encores. It was one of those performances when you don’t even know how you’re doing it. At one point during the encores I sat down underneath a monitor and just kind of hung my head, then looked up and smiled. For a second I didn’t really know where I was.
The Stones had come out in the wings by then, standing between all those guards. Every time they got ready to start out on the stage, the audience called us back. They couldn’t get on—it was too hot out there. By that time I don’t think Mick wanted to go on the stage at all. Mick had been watching me do that thing where I shimmy on one leg and when the Stones finally got out there, he tried it a couple of times. He danced a lot that day. Until then I think he used to stand still when he sang, but after that he really started moving around. Anyway, after they were finally able to get on the stage, they got over real good. At the end, all of the people on the show came out and danced for the finale. Later on, Mick used to come up to the Apollo and watch my shows. I used to make him come on the stage, and he became a good friend of mine. I like Mick, Keith Richards, and all the guys. I don’t think of them as competition; I think of them as brothers.
I’m not sure when I first met The Jacksons, but I think it was around this time, too, late 1964 or early 1965, in their hometown of Gary, Indiana. They were called the Jackson Family then—Jackie, Tito, Jermain, Marlon, and Michael, who couldn’t have been but about six years old. I think they were playing talent shows and amateur things around Gary. Their father, Joe, came to see me about getting them on the revue. Joe had played guitar with the Falcons, the group that Wilson Pickett, Eddie Floyd, and a lot of other people came out of, and he knew about the business. Joe wanted me to carry them around for a while, get them some exposure and some seasoning, but I did not want to take them out of school. I thought that if they didn’t make it as entertainers, they’d regret not getting their formal education. I was hesitant also because of the record label fight I was in. If I wasn’t going to be able to get any new vocal releases out, I was afraid it mighty eventually affect the popularity of the revue, so it didn’t seem to be a good time to expand the payroll. I did put them on one of the shows in Gary, and they were fantastic. They could really dance, especially Michael. Their choreography was smooth, and they sang real nice. You could see Joe had really trained them to be professional.
It was about a year before I saw them again, in Chicago, when I was playing the Regal. By that time I wasn’t playing the theaters anymore except for the Regal and the Apollo. I think Al Green was on the show, and Jackie Wilson, too. Jackie had gotten wild and crazy after being shot—he was drinking a lot and using drugs pretty heavy. They had to lock him in the dressing room and make him stay there until he got straight, then he came out and did a great show. But it was terrible to see Jackie in such bad shape.
The Jackson Family wasn’t booked on the show, but they were backstage. Joe came to see me about letting them go on. The show was very tight, but I said they could go on at intermission. I knew the Regal would be a good shot for them—a lot better than those hometown gigs. They did another fine job. A few months later, when I went back into Chicago to McCormick Place, which was much bigger than the Regal, they were booked on the show. I think they had a record on a little local label by then, and they were even better than before.
About a year after the McCormick Place gig, some of my people helped them get booked into the Apollo, around July 1968. Joe sent some money ahead for their hotel rooms and to see they were well looked after, since they were still just kids. Baby James, the cat who worked for me as a bodyguard, was supposed to take care of it, but something came over him and he spent the money instead. Now the kids get into New York for the first time; they’re supposed to debut at the Apollo the next morning, and they don’t have any place to stay, and no money to eat on. Baby James was afraid to tell me what he had done; instead he took them over to Byrd’s apartment on Lenox Avenue. By this time Byrd had married Vicki Anderson, who’d joined the revue as a singer in the spring of 1965. Bobby and Vicki took in the Jacksons and fed them. After dinner they all sat around the piano and played and sang. The next morning when the kids got dressed and ready to go, they told Bobby and Vicki they wanted to sing them a song. They gathered around the piano and sang a song that had “thank you” in it. It started out ‘Thank you for this, thank you for that,’ and it ended with them all harmonizing on ‘and we all thank you.’ Byrd told me he didn’t know if it was a song they knew or if they had put it together right that morning, but it was the prettiest song he had ever heard in his life.
That’s the kind of kids the Jacksons were. Here they’d had all their money spent up and they were just grateful for what they did get. They were always well mannered—it was always “yessir” this and “no, ma’am” that. You could tell they’d had a good upbringing and had a lot of discipline instilled in them. They’re like that right today.
On top of meeting great acts like the Stones and the Jacksons around this time, I met another great one in Vicki Anderson. She lived in Houston and had already cut a record. Her manager played her tape for me when I was in Houston. I bought the tape from him with the idea of recording her myself. When Anna King left the show a few months later, I asked Vicki to come to Miami where I could record her, and then she joined the revue. She walked into the studio while the band was putting down the tracks for a song called “Baby, I Love You.” Byrd was in the corner writing the words for it. She recorded it right then.
I’ve known a lot of singers, a lot of different kinds of singers, but I will say this flatly: I’ve never met a person in the world who sang better than Vicki. I used to call her Songbird. She could outsing anybody I know. Any day. Standing flat-footed. She can beat Aretha Franklin, and I love Aretha to death. Aretha is Soul Sister Number One, but she cannot beat Vicki singing. Vicki can sing “People” better than Streisand. She was not just the best singer I ever had with the revue, she was the best singer, period.
I also met another special person during this time—the lady who would later become my second wife. Her name was Deirdre, but I called her Deedee. She was from Baltimore, and I think we first met when I was playing one of the Maryland beaches, but I’m not sure. It wasn’t one of those love-at-first-sight things. We met several times, and things just grew from there. We became very close, and she eventually joined me in New York. We couldn’t get married because Velma and I had never gotten around to getting a divorce. Deedee and I weren’t ready to be married anyway; we split up a few years later and didn’t get back together for a good while after that. But we started out good.
Around the same time I added more key people to the band: Jimmy Nolen on guitar, Melvin Parker on drums, and Maceo Parker on alto sax. Jimmy Nolen came from Johnny Otis’s band, and Melvin and Maceo were brothers I had heard one night in the El Morocco Club in Greenville, North Carolina. I really wanted Melvin but I figured I had to hire Maceo, too, if I wanted to get his brother. Of course, Maceo turned out to be fantastic—an aggressive, dynamic player and a real worker. Over the years he has quit and been fired more times than either one of us can count, but he’s still with me right today.
Elsie Mae “T.V. Mama” was another regular on the revue around this time. She was funny and talented, and very, very large. She sang “Take All of Me” and took off her skirt; she had tights on underneath. She was very big but very shapely. She was a comedy act, but she also sang well, like Big Mama Thornton or somebody.
The show was tight, and I tried to keep it that way. We still had the system of fines, but now it covered fluffed notes and mistakes on the dance routines. See, a lot of the routines were worked out while we were on the road. We worked them out in rehearsal, went to eat, came back, rehearsed a little bit more, and then hit the stage. I wanted it all absolutely right. When I was dancing on the stage, I could see everything going on. If I caught a bad mistake, I’d mash potatoes over to where the person who’d messed up could see me and I’d flash my open hand once for each $5 fine—five times for a $25 fine, and so on. I did it right on the beat of the music so it looked like part of the act, but the person being fined knew what was happening. Some of the fellas might have thought it was a little rough, but it worked. I think we had the tightest band and the tightest show out there.
I was keeping busy on the road, recording a lot of the acts, doing instrumentals, and doing some television like The Lloyd Thaxton Show and Where the Action Is. The Flames and I did a cameo in a Frankie Avalon movie, Ski Party, dressed up in ski outfits. I was a little suprised at how much work it is to make a movie, but Frankie was a very easy person to work with. I never had any burning desire to be a movie star the way a lot of singers have—Elvis, Sinatra, or Frankie Avalon, for that matter. It wasn’t something that was open to people of my origin at that time anyway. Louis made a lot of movies, but he always played himself and was never really the star of them.
Meantime, it was a standoff between King Records and Mercury. I started to think there was something funny about it; Mercury seemed more interested in putting Mr. Nathan out of business than in recording me on vocals. The doors at King were all but closed; they had beat him, he had nothing to fight with. I felt bad about it, so I went to Arthur Smith’s studio in Charlotte, North Carolina, cut “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” and sent the tape to Mr. Nathan. It was done underground—I had to sneak the tape to him.
The song started out as a vamp we did during the stage show. There was a little instrumental riff and I hollered: “Papa’s got a bag of his own!” I decided to expand it into a song and cut it pretty quick to help Mr. Nathan, so when we went into the studio I was holding a lyric sheet in my hand while I recorded it. We were still going for that live-in-the-studio sound, so we cranked up and did the first take.
It’s hard to describe what it was I was going for; the song has gospel feel, but it’s put together out of jazz licks. And it has a different sound—a snappy, fast-hitting thing from the bass and the guitars. You can hear Jimmy Nolen, my guitar player at the time, starting to play scratch guitar, where you squeeze the strings tight and quick against the frets so the sound is hard and fast without any sustain. He was what we called a chanker; instead of playing the whole chord and using all the strings, he hit his chords on just three strings. And Maceo played a fantastic sax solo on the break. We had been doing the vamp on the show for a while, so most of it was fine, but the lyrics were so new I think I might have gotten some of them mixed up on the take. We stopped to listen to the playback to see what we needed to do on the next take. While we were listening, I looked around the studio. Everybody—the band, the studio people, me—was dancing. Nobody was standing still.
Pop said, “If I’m paying for this, I don’t want to cut any more. This is it.”
And that was it. That’s the way it went out. I had an acetate made and took it to Frankie Crocker, a deejay in New York. He thought it was terrible, but he put it on the air and the phones lit up. Then he admitted I was right about it.
“Papa’s Bag” was years ahead of its time. In 1965 soul was just really getting popular. Aretha and Otis and Wilson Pickett were out there and getting big. I was still called a soul singer—I still call myself that—but musically I had already gone off in a different direction. I had discovered that my strength was not in the horns, it was in the rhythm. I was hearing everything, even the guitars, like they were drums. I had found out how to make it happen. On playbacks, when I saw the speakers jumping, vibrating a certain way, I knew that was it: deliverance. I could tell from looking at the speakers that the rhythm was right. What I’d started on “Out of Sight” I took all the way on “Papa’s Bag.” Later on they said it was the beginning of funk. I just thought of it as where my music was going. The title told it all: I had a new bag.