Six months later I was back at Rivoli Records and told Turk I did what he asked. This time he said that hiring me was up to Little George because he was in charge of the 45s. I got along pretty well with Freddie and Little George when I would visit, but this was business. Did I have what it took to work with them? My moment of truth came in a way I least suspected. In front of Big George and Freddie, Little George said to me "who Laura Lee?" Now Laura Lee was no cross-over artist. She was on the Chess label with all their funky guitars, sour horns, organs and gospel singers. She did songs like "You a Dirty Man" with lyrics like "get outta my house and don't never come back. You and that other woman are two of a kind". Now unless I listened to Black stations regularly, I would never have heard of her. But I knew who she was. So I burst out singing "Wanted lover, no experience necessary, I will train him (gospel singers) sho' will train him, boo-opp". Little George looked at me, looked at Big George, never looked back at me but pointed at me with his thumb. "He hired". Here is the full song that I sang.
Catching the Wicked Pickett at the Apollo
For the next six months I was in heaven. I worked full time and was thriven' in the Broadway scene. From the prostitutes on 7th Avenue, to the drunks hanging out in front of the store, to the musicians who stopped by, to Lloyd Price's nightclub a couple of blocks down. One time soon after I started working there, Little George told me Wilson Pickett had stopped by and dropped off a couple of tickets to see him at the Apollo. He said he couldn't go, but asked me if I wanted to go. I sensed this was some kind of test. Little George wanted to see if I had the nerve to go to 125th Street and see the show even if I would be one of five white folks in the whole audience. But just as I had done at the Brooklyn Fox years ago, I mustered up my courage and went. Sure enough, on Monday night Little George says "well, did you go"? I never blinked and sang to him: "Ninety-nine and a half just won't' git it!" I showed him my receipt. He slipped me some skin.
Over the next six months I noticed that when things were slow Little George would practice his James Brown dancing moves. You know, where he glides across the floor but it looks like he's standing still. I watched Little George and with some encouragement, I started to do it. But there were two problems. One problem was I didn't have any dancing shoes on, so practiced in my socks. Secondly, the floor of the store was not uniformly smooth so I couldn't practice these moves anywhere in the store. So, over the weekend, I went up to Florsheim Shoes up on the Bronx Grand Concourse. I always loved the Temptations' white boots, and I really wanted a pair. I got carried away and bought some for one-hundred bucks (which would be about $600 today). When I went into work Monday night, I showed Little George my shoes. He smiled and shook his head. But that wasn't the end of it. I brought a bag of corn meal to work with me. Corn meal makes the floor more slippery. So before Little George left, I cued up the Temptations song, "Ain't Too Proud to Beg". I showed him my moves, and the corn meal on the floor really worked. What I didn't tell Little George is that I had been practicing on the weekend so I was ready for him Monday night. Big George and even Freddie were smiling as I made my moves. He watched me, looked away and looked at Big George as if to signal what to do. Big George yelled out "YEAHHHHHHH", and Little George smiled, never looked at me, and went home.
The best documentary that captures the Broadway scene in the late sixties is great piece of work on the life of the great musical producer Bert Berns. He is pictured with Solomon Burke in the image at the front of the article. Click Here
Conclusion: Music and Magick
When I look at social organization in Yankeedom, I see a crisis in legitimacy. Fewer and fewer people are joining churches or attending them. The approval rating of Congress has been less than 10% for some time now. In any given election for the past fifty years, 40% to 50% of the people don't bother to vote at all. Neither political nor religious authorities have any heroic qualities to offer us. So where do we go? To the field of entertainment: sports, movies and music.
Suppose Colin Kaepernick ran for President and Marshawn Lynch ran for Vice President, as members of the Green Party. I guarantee you that if the party played their cards right, the poor and working class would be mobilized. As for the movies, we have already had two actors who won governorship in California and they were terrible actors. It is no different with musicians. Suppose Ray Charles, James Brown or Smokey Robinson ran in a third party. These candidates would unite blacks across classes and across generations. What these celebrates have is what Weber called charisma. They appear to have the spirit (inspired) and when we listen to the ones we love, that spirit possesses us. But it is more than that.
In previous articles, I've defined "magick" (as distinct from stage magicians), close to the way Aleister Crowley did. "Magick is the art and science of changing consciousness at will". What I would add is that it is also changed through:
- The saturation of the six senses (including kinetics-dancing)
- The use of imagination (getting lost in the story of the song)
- Done in a collective context (groups in a concert)
- A ritual structure (in which space, time and timing are orchestrated)
I promise you that any couple who is having a rough time in a relationship will have an altered state of consciousness and not be the same after they attended a Johnny Mathis concert. You sit at a table in a nightclub, and you listen to "Fly Me to the Moon", "Chances Are", "The Twelfth of Never", "Wonderful, Wonderful", "A Certain Smile", "Misty", and "Maria". Ninety minutes later, you're in an altered state. No therapy, no drugs. The rhythm and blues artists I mentioned had a similar hypnotic effect on me. Fifty-two years later, my music has been transformed from 45s and 33 1/3, to tapes and now CDs. But all my gods and goddesses are with me, and they still cast their spell on me just as Screamin Jay Hawkins once sang. They never get old and they never die. As Frankie Crocker once said "sock it to me mama".
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