A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
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So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
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Saturday, January 5, 2019
Thom Bell (b. January 26, 1943): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, songwriter, arranger, orchestrator, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher
In tandem with the visionary production team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, arranger and producer Thom Bell
was among the principal architects of the lush and seductive Philly
soul sound, one of the most popular and influential musical developments
of the 1970s. Born in Philadelphia in 1941, Bell studied classical piano as a youth; he joined Gamble's harmony group the Romeos in 1959, and by the age of 19 was working as a conductor and arranger for hometown hero Chubby Checker. Within months he began writing original material for Checker as well, eventually joining the singer's production company. When Checker's organization folded, Bell signed on as a session pianist with Cameo Records, where he first worked with the local soul group the Delfonics. When their manager Stan Watson formed the Philly Groove label in 1968, Bell came aboard as a producer, helming Delfonics classics like 1968's "La La Means I Love You" and 1970's "Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time."
Bell's work with the Delfonics became immediately recognizable for its shimmering beauty and exquisite sweetness, and when he reunited with Gamble and new partner Leon Huff
at their newly formed Philadelphia International Records, the classic
Philly Soul sound quickly began to take shape. Over the course of
seminal releases like Jerry Butler's 1969 smash "Only the Strong Survive," Billy Paul's 1972 smash "Me and Mrs. Jones," and the Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes classic "If You Don't Know Me by Now," the Gamble-Huff
production aesthetic -- an intoxicating combination of sweeping
strings, smoky horns, and insistent rhythms -- emerged as the definitive
soul sound of the early '70s, its success due in large part to Bell's impeccable arrangements. The team arguably reached their pinnacle working with the O'Jays,
scoring a series of classic hits like "Back Stabbers," "Love Train,"
and "For the Love of Money" and drafting the blueprint for the rise of
disco during the latter half of the decade.
By the mid-'70s Bell began moving away from the Philadelphia International sphere, branching out to produce records for the likes of Johnny Mathis (1973's I'm Coming Home) and the Spinners; the latter with whom he enjoyed a long and fruitful collaboration that included albums like 1974's Mighty Love and the following year's Pick of the Litter. In 1977, Bell also teamed with Elton John, although the sessions were soon aborted, with only three tracks released two years later. After producing two LPs for singer Deniece Williams during the early '80s, Bell
assumed a low profile throughout the remainder of the decade,
resurfacing only occasionally to appear on efforts by artists ranging
from Phyllis Hyman to Chuck Mangione. He remained similarly quiet through the 1990s, his sporadic work schedule including sessions with the likes of James Ingram, Angela Winbush, and Earth, Wind & Fire.
Bell created the Sound of Philadelphia with "Mighty Three" partners Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, the most important and dominant sound of the early and mid 70s.
Much of Soul music history over the last half century has revolved around great producer/artist combinations. But no combination was more pleasing than the work of various artists and producer Thom Bell beginning in the late 60's through the 1970s and beyond. With "Mighty Three" partners Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, Bell created the Sound of Philadelphia, the most important and dominant sound of the early and mid-70s, and the heir to the Motown sound of the 60s. And as a songwriter, musician, producer, and arranger, Bell established himself as one of the most important R&B/Soul music figures of all time.
Born in 1943, Bell studied classical music as a child. As a teen, he met up with and joined Gamble in The Romeos. He learned to play multiple instruments and planned to become a classical conductor. But instead, at age 22 he became a staff writer and touring conductor for "The Twist" singer Chubby Checker. He then earned his first production gig for a local group called the Delfonics in 1968. The combination yielded two big hits, writing in 1969, "La La Means I Love You" and "Didn't I Blow Your Mind," and enhanced Bell's reputation beyond Philadelphia.
Bell's early work set the stage for his style of production and arrangements. He was known as being extremely organized and precise, but more importantly was quite adventurous. He generally came to the studio with a specific sound in mind. His exacting work was groundbreaking, as he created unique arrangements using seemingly odd instruments, such as sitars and bassoons, to create first-of-a-kind Soul sounds that others would try to ape for years afterward. His productions tended to be lush and orchestral (influenced by his classical background), but with hot, pulsating beats and excellent vocal arrangements. While his work may have owed a debt to the Motown sound of the 60s, he clearly took Soul music to a new and different level, and his work became the template for dozens of acts throughout the 70s.
1972 was a major year for Bell. He produced the debut album by the Stylistics, considered by many to be one of the greatest sweet Soul albums of all time, and, with his songwriting partner, lyricist Linda Creed, contributed such classics as "Betcha By Golly Wow" and "You Are Everything" to that seminal album. He also provided production and arrangement work on the O'Jays' Backstabbers album and completed one of his greatest works, the Spinners' self-titled Atlantic Records debut (which included "I'll Be Around," "Could It Be I'm Falling In Love" and "Ghetto Child," among others), in the view of many, the decade's greatest album. It was also a remiss to fail to mention Bell's magnificent work on The Spinners' second album "Mighty Love" (including the transcendent title track). Bell won the Grammy award in 1975 in the category of "Best Producer of the Year."
Over the course of the decade, he became one of R&B music's most prolific hitmakers, working with numerous acts including Dionne Warwick, Teddy Pendergrass, New York City, Ronnie Dyson, Lou Rawls, Little Anthony and The Imperials, Dusty Springfield, and Johnny Mathis. He was also approached by Elton John for an album collaboration that resulted in a delayed EP and the hit "Mama Can't Buy You Love" at the time and over twenty years later the re-release of the collaboration "Are You Ready For Love?" as a dance remix by Fatboy Slim which soared to the top of the charts in Europe.
Bell later moved to Washington State and slowed down his pace, working less frequently but helping acts such as Deniece Williams, the Temptations and Phyllis Hyman. He also briefly reunited with the Stylistics on their Closer Than Close album. Perhaps his best work of the decade was on Hyman's Living All Alone album (he co-wrote and produced the chilling ballad, "Old Friend").
In the 90s and beyond, Bell worked with artists as diverse as James Ingram ("I Don't Have the Heart"), Angela Winbush, David Byrne and Joss Stone, while continuing to see his hit songs sampled and covered by countless artists.
How Thom Bell Rang Up The Hits For Philly International
6/16/2006
BILLBOARD
For fans of soul from the '70s, the hits were unforgettable: "Betcha by Golly Wow," "Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart)," "La La Means I Love You," "You Make Me Feel Brand New."
As the co-writer (many with the late Linda Creed), arranger and producer of these and other romantic, densely orchestrated soul classics, Thom Bell was an integral part of what became known worldwide as the sound of Philadelphia.
Though not a business partner in Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff's Philadelphia International Records label, Bell was a partner with them in their Mighty Three Music publishing company and served as one of the label's secret weapons, developing the funky horn lines, sweeping strings and insistent multirhythms that were the hallmarks of the label's sophisticated output.
Among his sterling credits, Bell also guided the sound of the Delfonics for the Philly Groove label, the Stylistics for Avco and a run of hits for the Spinners on Atlantic, among others.
As PIR this year marks its 35th anniversary, Bell's contributions are well-remembered. The Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York included Bell among this year's class of inductees. On June 29, the Rhythm and Blues Foundation in Philadelphia will honor Bell at its revamped Pioneer Awards.
Raised in a musical family, Bell was a teen studying to be a classical pianist when he met Gamble, who went to school with his sister. When Gamble heard Bell's piano skills, the future label founder immediately drafted him into his group Kenny & the Romeos.
Inspired by a record by Don & Juan called "What's Your Name," the two also joined forces as Kenny & Tommy and with help from Gamble's mentor, Jerry Ross, cut a 1959 record for the Heritage label called "Someday."
"We weren't really singers, but we thought we'd give it a try anyway," Bell says. "It didn't do anything, but it gave us a chance to be in the studio and see what real instruments sounded like and be with this band until I got married, left the band and got a job."
The job was writing lead sheets for a local Philadelphia recording studio. The experience proved invaluable for Bell, and ultimately for Gamble & Huff, who by the early '60s had branched out into their own songwriting/production team.
When the noted local Cameo-Parkway label decided to follow Motown's lead and develop its own in-house rhythm section, the label consulted Bell, who immediately called in members of the Romeos and began writing and producing as well.
"The very first stuff was done by those Romeos," Bell says. "They would hold auditions on Saturday, have different acts come in and try to find talent, and we would play behind them. That's how that whole sound of Philadelphia musically came together, with that band." Meanwhile, Bell worked on sessions with Jerry Butler, Laura Nyro, Dusty Springfield and Wilson Pickett.
With a growing list of song credits on different labels among them, Gamble, Huff and Bell decided to pool their writing output to gain recognition and earnings. Mighty Three Music was born in the late '60s with a logo featuring three elephants and the motto: "You'll never forget our songs."
The publishing company was born of necessity, Bell says. "I was producing for one side of Philadelphia, and [Gamble] was producing for another side of Philadelphia. And we found that we had a better chance, did much better if we joined forces. He had his sound, I had my sound, but put it together, the sound worked perfectly."
Again inspired by Motown's Jobete catalog, Mighty Three was a way for the hitmakers to stake their claim within a white-dominated publishing world that would not work their songs to other artists.
"In those days you didn't have your own publishing company. You had to go with the big white companies, and they owned all the stuff," Bell says. "If you wrote something they would take the publishing and we didn't like that so hot, so they said, 'If you don't do it our way we won't record your stuff.' So we said, 'We'll try it our way.'"
A consummate musician, Bell liked the independence of being able to work for a wide range of artists, using his elegant approach and easy demeanor to bring the best out of the sessions.
"I was not involved [as a business partner] in Philadelphia International, and since that was the case, I was an independent producer," he explains. "I didn't even produce most of the PIR artists. Towards the end I think I produced the O'Jays and [Teddy] Pendergrass and MFSB, but my job was independent, I did the outside stuff. [Gamble & Huff] were building PIR, I was building Bell Boy Productions. It all funneled into Mighty Three Music, the songwriter mechanicals and royalties."
By the late '70s Bell was turning his attention away from the Gamble & Huff operation to work with such artists as Nancy Wilson, Elton John, Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams. He had also moved his base of operations to Seattle and traveled between the two cities for many years.
Now, almost 40 years later, the recordings Bell created remain so vibrant because of the brilliant orchestrations and pristine production. A self-described romantic, Bell used vibes, oboe, sitar, flute, harpsichord and bassoon along with strings, brass and percussion. Some musicologists credit him with creating the earliest disco records.
"When you study classics you hear all the instruments that you don't hear usually in other forms of music," Bell says. "You don't hear a pedal steel guitar in jazz, you don't hear a harp in blues. It's not impossible, just not common. I come from a classical world, and I hear classical ways of doing things."
Though the Seattle-based musician has spent the last decade in relative retirement, Bell's prodigious skills are still in demand. He says he is collaborating with singers Peabo Bryson, Jeffrey Osborne and James Ingram on a long-planned "three tenors"-styled pop album and may work on other projects.
Adulation for his work, such as the Songwriters Hall of Fame honor, still seems to surprise Bell, who says he was not conscious of laying the foundation for a uniquely contemporary R&B sound. "I would love to say, 'Oh, yes, I planned it that way!' That it was something I looked in the mirror and saw no one else was doing and I decided I was going to do it," he says with a laugh. "That's horse manure. It just sounded good to me.”
Posted
September 17, 2007 by Mike Mineo in
Features
Soul Music’s Genius Sculptor: Thom Bell
Usually above this text, there is a picture of an artist or band
posing ceremoniously for a photographer with the intent of public
distribution. You will be hard-pressed to find any photos like this of Thom Bell.
A photo of him accepting a prestigious award is more than symbolic of
his career. Much like the career of this masterful producer, arranger,
and songwriter, the preference for substance over style resounds in his
own unforgettable musical legacy. Though he was never found on stage
crooning fervent soul classics like Marvin Gaye or Otis Redding, Bell’s
work behind the scenes made him arguably the most important figure of
soul music throughout the 1970s. Born in Jamaica but raised in
Philadelphia, Bell found his love for music very early in life while
studying classical piano at the age of 5. Working diligently throughout
his childhood, Bell’s recognition rose fast and he was conducting and
arranging songs for local groups by his late teens. When Bell caught his
first break and a major label (Cameo Records) came calling in 1967, he
was only 24 years old. While Marvin Gaye, James Brown, and Sam Cooke
among many others had popularized their own form of soul music before
Bell’s national inception, Bell introduced a style to the world that
would later be dubbed “Philly Soul”. Seeking solace in sweeping strings,
endearing horns, and other grandiose orchestral arrangements, this
smooth stylistic innovation brought enormous success to Bell’s name
throughout the 3 major groups he worked with: The Delfonics, The
Stylistics, and The Spinners. When Cameo Records approached Bell with the intentions to produce the then-aspiring The Delfonics,
he was a mere session pianist for the label. However, upon seeing his
impeccable grasp regarding production and arranging, the label knew that
Bell was the right man for the job. Almost immediately, Bell and The
Delfonics’ manager, Stan Watson, formed the Philly Groove label in
association with Bell Records (no relation to Thom Bell). Under the
label, Bell produced The Delfonics’ classic debut album, La La Means I Love You,
in 1968 and introduced his form of Philly Soul to a wide range of
audiences. Under Bell, The Delfonics later went on to become one of the
most memorable soul acts of the decade. Though they never quite echoed
the sales of The Stylistics, The Spinners, or The O’Jays, their cult
following continues to grow and brilliant gems like “I’m Sorry” and
“Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” are absolutely irresistible, the
latter receiving a bit of revived exposure in 1997 when Quentin
Tarantino used it as a focal song in his entertaining film, Jackie
Brown. Bell produced and wrote three albums for The Delfonics from 1968
to 1970, all of them being fantastic. I recommend all three
wholeheartedly, or at least their greatest hits. Like all three of the
soul acts Bell primarily worked with during his career, they declined
after Bell left. Despite The Delfonics’ brief time in the spotlight,
their success gave Bell the vehicle to expose his irresistible style of
suave soul to the world. This led to bigger and brighter things,
establishing Bell in the early ’70s as one of the most sought-after
songwriters and producers in the music industry.
After the The Delfonics’ finesse started to faded, Bell moved onto
another freshly aspiring soul group. Like The Delfonics, Bell discovered
The Stylistics out of local hype and after being
personally impressed with lead vocalist Russell Thompkins, Jr.’s
spine-tingling falsetto and the backing band’s melodic capabilities.
When Bell and fellow songwriter Linda Creed produced and released The
Stylistics’ self-titled debut in 1971, it garnered immediate attention.
When the debuting single, “You’re a Big Girl Now”, dabbled in the charts
at #73, it proved as only a tease. The prom floor classic, “You Are
Everything”, was one of the many great moments on the debut. From
Thompkins Jr.’s rich falsetto to the brilliant electric sitar over
Creed’s simplistically powerful lyrics, it is a flawless soul classic.
Though you have likely heard it before (either at a prom, in a movie, or
as a cover), this is the type of song that simply never gets old.
Though it reached #9 and went gold, The Stylistics’ most popular song
still had yet to come. Naturally, the exceptional “You Make Me Feel
Brand New” was also written by Bell. Reaching #2 both in the US and UK,
it was one of the best songs of 1974 with its sheer beauty and delicate
arrangements. It also proved as a farewell for Bell, as he left The
Stylistics that same year. Similar but even more dramatically impacting
than his work with The Delfonics, Bell had made The Stylistics into
stars with their first three albums. Though they had marginal success
after Bell’s departure with commendable songs like “Na Na Is the Saddest
Word”, their success and originality was undoubtedly never the same.
When Bell left The Stylistics, he appeared to be looking for a challenge when he decided to produce The Spinners
for Atlantic Records. Unlike Bell’s first two projects, The Spinners
were hardly a rookie band. They had been around since 1957 while Bell
was still a teenager, going by virtually unnoticed for 15 years before
Bell decided to lend a hand. The Spinners always had the proper tools in
place, they just never knew how to execute their style properly. Bell
provided his magic touch and, predictably enough, The Spinners became
one of the most successful soul bands of the ’70s. In fact, many
respected critics consider The Spinners to be the greatest soul group of
the early ’70s; the exact period in which Bell took the wheel.
Considering the abundance of blossoming soul artists during that time
period, it is a remarkable lasting impression to leave behind. The
Spinners would eventually chart dozens of Top 100 singles, with five
coming off of Bell’s first production with the band in 1972’s The Spinners.
The Spinners’ finest album, it featured era-defining classics like
“I’ll Be Around” and “Ghetto Child”. When Bell left The Spinners in the
late ’70s, he was responsible for molding three wildly influential bands
in a timespan of just over 10 years. Though Bell also produced artists
like The BeeGees, Johnny Mathis, and even Elton John for a short while,
he will always be remembered for his unforgettable impact on the genre
of soul music.
In tandem with the visionary production team of Kenny Gamble and
Leon Huff, arranger and producer Thom Bell was among the principal
architects of the lush and seductive Philly soul sound, one of the most
popular and influential musical developments of the 1970s. Born in
Philadelphia in 1941, Bell studied classical piano as a youth; he joined
Gamble’s harmony group the Romeos in 1959, and by the age of 19 was
working as a conductor and arranger for hometown hero Chubby Checker.
Within months he began writing original material for Checker as well,
eventually joining the singer’s production company. When Checker’s
organization folded, Bell signed on as a session pianist with Cameo
Records, where he first worked with the local soul group the Delfonics.
When their manager Stan Watson formed the Philly Groove label in 1968,
Bell came aboard as a producer, helming Delfonics classics like 1968’s
“La La Means I Love You” and 1970’s “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time.”
Producer, composer and arranger Thom Bell was one of the prime
originators of the Sound of Philadelphia, creating hits with the
Delfonics such as "La La La Means I Love You" and "Didn't I Blow Your
Mind." Bell was born in Jamaica and moved to Philadelphia at age 5. Bell
planned to become a classical conductor, but in his early 20s, he was
signed by Cameo Records to create a Philadelphia version of Motown.
Aside from his work from the Delfonics, Bell produced the Stylistics'
debut album, worked with the O'Jays and the Spinners, and later went on
to collaborate with solo artists including Johnny Mathis, Bob Marley and
Elton John. This year, Hall was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of
Fame.
In an exclusive interview with PopMatters,
Grammy-winning producer Thom Bell recalls bringing Dionne Warwick to
number one and crafting her critically acclaimed "Track of the Cat".
Dionne Warwick is fluent in the parlance of soul,
sophistication, and effortless cool. From the very beginning of her
career, she mastered some of the most complex melodies ever composed.
Musical innovators like Burt Bacharach, Thom Bell, Stevie Wonder, Barry
Gibb, and Quincy Jones have all derived inspiration from Warwick's
voice. "You'll know Dionne's voice out of a thousand voices,"
Bell exclaims. "That's how I can tell when you really have something
superb -- I can close my eyes and know your voice anywhere. I love those
kind of voices, man!"
However, Bell occupies a place all his own
among the esteemed producers who've recorded the legendary vocalist over
the years. During an interview at the Apollo Theater in October 2016,
Warwick recalled the impact of "Then Came You" (1974), a song that Bell
commissioned specifically for her and the Spinners. "Thom gave us a
wonderful gift that also happened to be my very first number one
recording -- ever," she declared.
Beyond crafting Warwick's first chart-topping hit, Bell produced an entire album for the vocalist, Track of the Cat (1975). Rolling Stone
proclaimed it "her best album in years", considerable praise, given
that Warwick had already released nearly two dozen albums between 1963
and 1975. Of course, the singer still had decades of albums and hit
singles ahead of her, but Track of the Cat held a luster that's only become more radiant with the passage of time. In this exclusive interview with PopMatters, Bell retraces Warwick's "track" to the top and remembers his vision for a vocalist without peer.
New
York's pop music scene of the late '50s and early '60s was virtually
defined by the constellation of songwriters, producers, and musicians
that orbited the Brill Building. Warwick emerged from a cadre of session
vocalists who sang background for hit producers like Jerry Leiber and
Mike Stoller and cut demo records for songwriting teams who hustled
their tunes to labels and publishing companies. Though based in
Philadelphia, Bell was often called to New York for studio dates with
Burt Bacharach, Luther Dixon, and King Curtis. "There were so many
background singers," he says. "Most of those background singers couldn't
sight-read. I said, 'Put me up front, Jack! If you can write it, I can
sing it!' Dionne can also sing and read. She can do both."
Produced by Bacharach and Hal David, Presenting Dionne Warwick
(1963) marked the singer's full-length debut for Scepter Records and
established Warwick as a vocalist whose facility with pop, soul, and
gospel sensibilities defied categorization. If anything, the music she
recorded with Bacharach and David became a genre unto itself, often
confounding musicians who backed Warwick on one-nighters across the
country. "I worked with Dionne at the Uptown Theater in Philadelphia,"
says Bell. "The unit that played for her also played for the Coasters,
the Isley Brothers, Little Anthony & the Imperials, Jerry Butler … I
worked with all of them.
"I was the house pianist. You cannot
hear a piano with an 18-piece band. Ain't gonna happen! I would be back
there playing, banging my fingernails until they split, trying to get
heard, but you couldn't hear me. When I finally got tired, I said, 'I'm
done with this crap. I'm going to sit up there and write some songs
while these guys are singing' because I knew they couldn't hear me!" [laughs]
At
the time, Warwick's debut single "Don't Make Me Over" was climbing the
charts. Her declaration at the song's climax -- "Accept me for what I
am" -- sparked a lightning bolt across AM radio. Warwick conveyed a
refreshingly bold sentiment for young women in a climate when Little
Peggy March vowed "I Will Follow Him" and the Chiffons gushed "He's So
Fine". In fact, exactly 12 months after "Don't Make Me Over" debuted on
the Hot 100 in December 1962, Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me" charged
the airwaves with another statement of female empowerment.
With astounding consistency, Warwick, Bacharach, and David created
three-minute masterpieces that expanded the vernacular of pop music,
drawing from styles that spanned classical and bossa nova. Make Way for Dionne Warwick
(1964) furnished some of the trio's finest moments, including the
Grammy-nominated "Walk On By", "A House Is Not a Home", "Reach Out for
Me", and "You'll Never Get to Heaven (If You Break My Heart)". Bell
relished the musicality of Warwick's songs. "Dionne had great
records," he says. "'Promises, Promises' (1968) was a very well
put-together, very well-written piece of music. You couldn't go on that
recording session just leaving 'Piano 101'. If any one person made a
mistake on that, then the whole band would have to stop.
"I gotta tell you, Bacharach and David are two of the greatest writers. They did classical
things, and that's what I always wanted to do. People told me, 'Black
people don't dig that kind of music.' I'd say, 'What do you mean? I'm black and I
dig it. There's got to be more of me out there than just me.' When it
comes to music, the hue of skin has nothing to do with likes or
dislikes. Music is not something you wear. Music is something you feel."
Bell
channeled that sensibility into his own productions for the Delfonics.
In 1968, he scored his first Top Five pop hit as a producer with the
group's "La-La Means I Love You". Interestingly, Warwick achieved a
career benchmark of her own with a song she released that same year. Not
only did her recording of "Do You Know the Way to San José" (1968) win
the Grammy for "Best Contemporary Pop Vocal Performance, Female" in
March 1969, she became the first artist to receive the Recording
Academy's newly minted award for the pop field, conquering fellow
nominees like Aretha Franklin and Barbra Streisand.
Two years
later, Warwick won her second Grammy Award with "I'll Never Fall In Love
Again" (1970) while Bell began producing another Philadelphia-based
vocal group, the Stylistics. Bell and his writing partner Linda Creed
fashioned silky and sumptuous tunes on The Stylistics (1971), the
group's Avco debut that featured "Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart)",
"People Make the World Go Round", and the gold-selling singles "You Are
Everything" and "Betcha By Golly Wow".
Bell's winning streak continued with the Spinners. The group's career
had all but stalled at Motown and their initial sides at Atlantic
Records with producer Jimmy Roach lacked chemistry. In 1972, Bell
brought the group to Philadelphia's Sigma Sound Studios and outfitted
them with material penned by his stable of writers. His touch spawned
three consecutive number one R&B singles for the Spinners: "I'll Be
Around" (co-written by Bell with Phil Hurtt), "Could It Be I'm Falling
In Love", and "One of a Kind (Love Affair)". Spinners (1973)
crowned the top of the R&B chart for three weeks in May 1973 and was
named "Soul Album of the Year" by Village Voice critic Robert
Christgau. It would be the first of several full-length efforts Bell
produced for the group throughout their tenure at Atlantic.
Around the same time the Spinners signed with Atlantic, Warwick found a new label home at Warner Bros. Dionne
(1972), the singer's first album for the company, was primed to begin a
successful new chapter for the singer, but the reality told a different
story. Warner granted minimal promotional support, further compounded
by the fact that Bacharach & David, Warwick's collaborators of ten
years, dissolved their partnership after the album was released.
Produced by former Motown songwriting trio Brian Holland, Lamont Dozier, and Eddie Holland, Just Being Myself
(1973) met the same fate as the singer's Warner debut, despite a wealth
of solid material. Warwick continued working with an array of
producers, including Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, who'd also just
signed with Warner Bros., but the recordings were ultimately shelved.
In
the midst of his success with the Spinners and the Stylistics, plus his
projects with Ronnie Dyson, vocal group New York City ("I'm Doin' Fine
Now"), and his first production for Johnny Mathis, I'm Coming Home
(1973), Bell received an invitation to see Warwick at Caesar's Palace.
Even without a record on the charts, she remained one of the biggest
attractions in Las Vegas. "They invited me out to sit with Dionne and
listen to her," he recalls. "They wanted me to do an album with her. I
didn't have the time -- there's only 24 hours in a day -- and I didn't
want to give her any sloppy junk. If I can't give you the best, I won't
bother you. I said, 'Let me go back and see what I can come up with.'
"I
came up with a duet. I thought, That should satisfy what Dionne needs
and what the Spinners need. In those days, I had writers working
specifically for certain artists. I got with two of my writers, Sherman
Marshall and Phillip Pugh. I said, 'I want you to write for Dionne and
the Spinners. That's your job, period. Don't bring me nothing else.'
They came to me with 'Then Came You'. It was a good song, but I just
added a little icing on the cake. I don't think I've ever produced a
song that I didn't re-write in some way."
The Spinners toured with
Warwick for seven weeks throughout the summer of 1973, culminating with
another of the singer's successful stands in Vegas. "At the last show,
Thom came to see us," Warwick recalled during her interview at the
Apollo. "He came upstairs to the dressing room after the show was over.
He said, 'I have a wonderful surprise for you.' We all said, 'Great!
What is it?' He said, 'It's the end of the tour and you had a wonderful
time together. I got a song that I think you guys should record. It
would be the perfect way to say bye-bye to each other.' It was a little
song called 'Then Came You'." By year's end, news of the star pairing
reached industry trades, with Billboard announcing the duet in its 15 December 1973 issue.
The
interplay between Warwick and the Spinners on "Then Came You" generated
a contagious kind of excitement. From harmonizing with Bobby Smith in
the verses to trading ad libs with Philippé Wynne in the closing vamp,
Warwick delivered a customarily strong performance. "It was amazing,"
she said. "We had the best time in the studio. Philippé was such an
intricate part of that recording."
Wynne's soulful voice offered
an appealing contrast to his duet partner. "Philippé could sing in any
key, any time, day or night," says Bell. "He could make things up so
fast, it'd make your head spin. If he did it ten times, he'd give it to
you ten different ways. I said, 'Philippé, what I want you to do as
you're singing is just think of Dionne as a feather. Think of her as
your daughter. She's an angel. Don't sing to bore out of the sky. Keep
it moderate, man. I want you to sing so she floats around you and you
float around her.' I had them do a Marvin Gaye / Tammi Terrell thing. I
had them looking at each other and singing to each other in the same
booth."
"Then Came You" bowed on the Hot 100 the week ending 27
July 1974 and was subsequently featured on the Spinners' third Atlantic
album New and Improved (1974). Three months later, it supplanted
Billy Preston's "Nothing from Nothing" from the top and became both
Warwick and the Spinners' first number one pop hit. Both artists were
also rewarded with a gold single and would receive a Grammy nomination
for "Best Pop Vocal by a Duo or Group" the following March. Bell himself
made Grammy history when he won the Recording Academy's inaugural award
for "Producer of the Year" in 1975.
Bell's production of "Just
As Long As We Have Love" showcased Warwick and the Spinners in a more
tranquil setting. Issued as the B-side to "Then Came You", the song
featured a rare lead vocal by group member Henry Fambrough, whose
sensitive phrasing complemented the more delicate textures of Warwick's
voice. "Henry can really sing," says Bell. "He's got a gorgeous
voice. One problem with Henry is he's got stage fright. Dionne could
coax him along, so I put those two together. She was singing just as
nice as he was singing." Written by Vinnie Barrett and Bruce Hawes,
"Just As Long As We Have Love" would later appear on the Spinners' Pick of the Litter (1975).
Eager to capitalize on Warwick's latest smash, Warner titled the singer's third album Then Came You
(1975). However, aside from the hit title track, producer Jerry Ragovoy
oversaw the album's production. Fans and industry insiders had all
expected a full set of duets between Warwick and the Spinners, but the
project never materialized. Instead, Warwick's work with Ragovoy
featured stylish, soul-inflected pop that landed the singer a guest
appearance on Soul Train in May 1975. While "Take It From Me"
made the R&B Top 30, and "Move Me No Mountain" contained a verve and
vivacity that seemed destined for the charts, the album stirred only a
modest ripple in the marketplace.
Take one soul ballad. Add a falsetto vocal, swooping strings, timpani
and an oboe or two. That's symphonic soul. Paul Lester talks to the
heroes of R&B's most remarkable outpost
The early 70s were arguably even more of a golden age for soul than
the mid-60s. This was when Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and Stevie
Wonder gave the music a socio-political dimension, James Brown, George
Clinton and Sly Stone changed funk forever, Al Green became a new kind
of sensitive lothario and Isaac Hayes and Barry White took orchestrated
R&B to orgasmic heights.
Around the same time, in Philadelphia, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff,
the Neptunes of their day, were writing and producing uptempo dance
songs, dripping with strings, tinged with sadness, for the likes of the
O'Jays and Harold Melvin & the Bluenotes. It was this "Philly soul"
that provided the bridge between Motown and what would soon be known as
disco.
But there was a spin-off of Philly soul that was perhaps more
remarkable than any other music then being made by black artists; as
remarkable, in fact, as any music ever made in the name of R&B: the
lavishly scored ballads of Philly vocal groups the Delfonics, the
Stylistics and Blue Magic, and their contemporaries such as the
Chi-Lites, the Moments, the Manhattans and the Dramatics. They called it
symphonic soul, and no wonder. It featured complex melodies and
grandiose arrangements based on an experimental use of oboes, bassoons,
flugelhorns and timpani.
The
man responsible for the behind-the-scenes work on many of the symphonic
soul classics was a classically trained musician called Thom Bell,
often referred to as the black Burt Bacharach. Bell's was the kind of
richly textured fare Brian Wilson crafted on Pet Sounds, a baroque
approach to arrangement.
Factor in the near-androgynous ethereal tenors or falsettos of the
singers, who subverted the myth of the black male as sexual supremacist
with a breathtaking vulnerability, and you've got music that was
revolutionary in intent and radical in its sheer loveliness.
"They came to me in a dream," says William Hart, lead singer with the
Delfonics and co-writer, with Bell, of the group's best-known songs -
La-La Means I Love You, Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time), I'm Sorry,
Ready Or Not Here I Come (Can't Hide from Love), Break Your Promise and
countless others. "I have no idea where the melodies or lyrics came
from. God, maybe. Or the universe. They just popped into my head and I
started writing."
Hart believes the extraordinary pleading and wailing in
symphonic soul is down to simple male inferiority. "Men are the weaker
sex," he contends. "We are generally the losers in love. And I guess
women like to hear a man say they're sorry."
Many of these songs have proved popular with sample-hungry rappers
eager to offset their homicidal fury with some overblown romance:
Ghostface Killah and Jay-Z have underscored their gritty monologues with
some symphonic soul.
The Delfonics' exquisite mini-symphonies, arranged over five albums
between 1969 and 1972, made the Bell-Hart partnership the Lennon and
McCartney of tragic-soul angst. But how did Hart, then only in his early
20s, manage to summon up such deep wells of sorrow?
"I
could imagine at a very early age what a broken heart was all about,"
he says. "Being a young man, I had to put myself in that position. And I
found I could just write about it. It's like imagining what it's like
to jump off a cliff - you can write about it, but you don't have to
actually jump off that cliff."
Hart recalls conjuring Didn't I out of thin air while Bell was
tinkling away on a piano at their label manager Stan Watson's office.
"It was amazing," he says. "It came all at once, and we completed it in
two hours. I got the idea of the complicated melody from the great Mr
Burt Bacharach. I thought he was an example to follow."
Bell was the schooled muso able to translate the more implausible
ideas spinning around Hart's brain. "My hobby was going to biblical
movies, like when Charlton Heston played Moses," Hart explains. "The
music in those films had all these French horns and bugles, clarinets
and big timpani drums. I would go to Thom and say, 'Give me that French
horn sound and that big drum sound that goes bom bom bom!' And he'd do
it, because he understood me." Were they the John and Paul of symphonic
soul? "Exactly. I couldn't have put it better myself."
Ted Mills was the lead singer and writer with Blue Magic, the last of
the great symphonic soul groups, emerging from Philadelphia in 1973
with hits including Sideshow, Stop to Start and Spell. He has just
recorded an album with the other giants of symphonic soul, William Hart
and Russell Thompkins Jr of the Stylistics, called All the Way from
Philadelphia: The Three Tenors of Soul.
He would also like it to be known that the name that sometimes appears
in articles and on posters - Ted Wizard Mills - is his actual name.
"It's not a stage name," he says. "My birth name is Ted Wizard
Mills." Although the records he created in conjunction with
producer/arranger Norman Harris, Blue Magic's own Thom Bell, reached new
levels of quasi-symphonic ecstasy, Mills is modest about his
achievements.
"I'm what you call a one-trick pony," he says. "I just wanted to be
the best in my field - love music and ballads. I heard William [Hart]
and the heart- touching love songs he did, and then another great tenor
surfaced, Russell Thompkins, and what I did was combine those two great
influences.
"I went to a few music schools, and learned to read and write music
from Thom Bell. And I learned from Norman how to create a space between
the flutes, oboes and harps for the brass in an arrangement. The results
sound as though I was classically trained. I wasn't; I learned on the
job. But I wasn't bad for an R&B guy."
Trying to explain the unusually acquiescent sentiments expressed in
Blue Magic's songs, Mills says: "Real men have finesse and charm.
They're suave, not brutal or rough. There is a saying: you get more bees
with honey."
Nevertheless,
Mills' experiences soon toughened him up. When I ask if he now lives in
a palatial mansion with guard dogs, he says: "You have to realise that
we came out in an era when many millions of records were sold, but the
artists never made money. You get young rappers today making millions on
the backs of the classic R&B stars who fought for changes in the
record business so that future artists would be paid properly; so that
they can get the writing and publishing royalties that our generation
were denied."
He offers two glimpses behind symphonic soul's perfect façade. One of
a party he once attended with "beautiful girls and all kinds of
craziness" on a yacht moored near waste ground. It was raided and Mills
had to scram. Later, the bodies of 20 prostitutes buried under that land
were found by police. That was the kind of company you kept in the
music business during Blue Magic's heyday. Another time, three hoods
jumped him in a car park and held a gun to his head, "Squeezed it right
up tight against my eyeball." Suddenly, one of the thugs recognised him
as the leader of the great Blue Magic. "He shouted, 'Hey, it's the
Wizard!'" laughs Mills. "So they put the gun down, shook my hand, went
off and robbed someone else."
If Hart is the underrated one and Mills is the unassuming one,
Russell Thompkins is the driving force behind the superstars of
symphonic soul: The Best of the Stylistics was one of the biggest-
selling albums of the 70s, and the group's collaborations with Thom Bell
- Betcha By Golly Wow, I'm Stone in Love With You, You Make Me Feel
Brand New and the No 1 Can't Give You Anything (But My Love) -
represented symphonic soul's commercial high watermark.
Unfortunately, Thompkins didn't enjoy a single minute of it. This was
because he regarded his bandmates as vocally weak, which, he says, "ate
away at me for years and years". Oh, and because they all hated each
other's guts.
"I was always going to be the lead singer because I sang better than
all of them," he says. "None of the other guys really sang on those
first three Stylistics albums. Hugo & Luigi [the group's producers
after Bell left to work with the Spinners] despised them, and Thom just
didn't like the way they sounded. But still, I told them that, no matter
what, I was a part of the group and I'd share everything with the
Stylistics name on. That turned out to be a mistake. They will get money
for the rest of their lives for songs they never sang on because that's
what I agreed all those years ago."
Thompkins stuck it out for 25 years, even though he was miserable
during most of it. "People would say, 'Why don't you smile?' Look at
every shot of me on TV, every show we ever did: why wasn't I smiling?
There were a lot of reasons."
Apart from his lack of regard for his bandmates' abilities, he had,
he says, "marital problems, internal revenue bills, problems with my
parents and sister. It got so bad that I thought I would never sing
again. I lost my voice and my head was totally messed up. I had to get
away from there otherwise I would have had a nervous breakdown."
Eventually, after constant in-fighting and angry silences based on
mutual distrust and loathing, Thompkins quit. It was particularly hard
because he'd known his fellow Stylistics since they were boys. But they
haven't spoken a word to each other since a gig in 2000, when two
members openly mocked Thompson onstage.
"I'll never say another word to them as long as I live," he says.
"Listen, I've been inducted into the Vocal Group Hall of Fame, and I've
had conversations with people from the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame, but
they have a rule that they only induct groups with all the original
members. And I wouldn't care if they were going to give me the Nobel
Peace Prize or the Congressional Medal of Honour. They would have to
start selling air-conditioners in hell before I had anything to do with
those guys again.
"But they don't threaten me," he adds, rather shattering the
illusion, offered by symphonic soul, of a brotherhood of men singing
mystically pretty hymns to idealised females. "They don't whip me. There
won't be no physical threats or nothin' like that. They won't come
anywhere near me. Because there'll be trouble if they do."
· All the Way from Philadelphia: the Three Tenors of
Soul is available on Shanache. The Best of the Stylistics is out now on
Universal
For
writer Jayson Greene, seemingly disparate styles of music—from
classical to soul to hip-hop and beyond—are linked in mysterious and
powerful ways. It's all about finding the right connectors—like Philly
Soul architect Thom Bell.
Overtones is a column that examines how certain sounds linger in our minds and lives.
"You picked a heck of a subject because most people, they don’t know. They don’t understand. It’s very rare for someone to even think like that." This is what Philly Soul composer Thom Bell
tells me when I reached him on his home phone in 2011 to talk about his
string arrangements for soul songs. I had spent some time tracking him
down, circling through old managers who didn't represent him anymore and
old friends who had stopped passing his number along. He hadn't worked
in any meaningful capacity in years; he was comfortably a legend,
carrying around a suitcase full of sterling, immortal credits—co-writing
and producing "La-La (Means I Love You)" by the Delfonics and the Stylistics' "You Make Me Feel Brand New" to name just two—that would be powerful currency until the day he died. Nonetheless, he answered his phone on the third ring and chatted with
me for two hours. My need was not necessarily journalistic. I was
calling because I had a problem—an aesthetic one, but it felt
pressingly real to me: I needed to connect all the music I'd ever loved
back to itself. I thought Thom Bell might be able to help me out.
This is a lifelong, helpless weakness of mine. I've always yearned to
be told that everything I love is related, even if I haven't figured
out quite how yet. My personal musical interests, meanwhile, insist on
the opposite. We are just the lint you've accrued in life, they say. Classical? Childhood violin lessons. Rap? Growing up in a mid-90s suburb. Punk and indie rock? See previous answer. But I've never been able to leave it there. If all of this stuff is going to occupy my mind, it has to join up somehow.
So why Bell? He intrigued me because he was essentially castoff, a
refugee, from American classical music. He was the head of a loose
coterie of hippies, hipsters, and misfits operating at the fringes of
1970s soul; people like Larry Gold,
a cello prodigy who dropped out of the Curtis Institute to play in The
Sound of Philadelphia orchestra when he was a teenager. Or Bunny Sigler,
a spectacularly eccentric R&B tenor and sometime opera singer who
referred to himself as the Great Siglieri. Bell, meanwhile, was a
discouraged former pianist who gave up the classical repertoire when he
learned inserting your own harmonies into the masterworks was frowned
upon.
These people shared a love of classical music that they didn't quite
know what to do with, a feeling I will always relate to. They had
stumbled into this peculiar world—charged with private ecstasies and
riddled with forbidding behavioral codes—and then stumbled out,
bewildered, grand sounds glowing in their heads and a pressing need to
find somewhere to put them. They proceeded to feed Wagnerian brass and
Samuel Barber strings (or their own crude approximations of them)
directly into the pop-cultural mega-processor. Their sound is leaked
into the groundwater now.
"I didn’t want to re-voice chords in my head—adding sevenths, ninths,
elevenths—but the music made me do it," Bell tells me. "And once I
started hearing those things, I told my mother, 'I’m awfully sorry, but I
can’t just can’t do any more of this [classical] music.' That stuff
started getting on my nerves—the chord progressions, the whole tonality
was always the same. When you play Prelude In C-Sharp minor, it’s
Prelude in C-Sharp minor. If you vary one note, then people say, 'Oh, he
wasn’t so hot.' People don’t expect you to be contemplating changing
things."
So Bell brought this classical training, as rudimentary as it was,
into pop music. He had nowhere else to put it. "We were all muddling
through," he says, of the sessions that bore out majestic songs like
'La-La (Means I Love You)'. "We were all nothing together. I just
happened to be the leader of the nothings. I used four violins, one
viola, and one cello for years. That’s all I could afford."
His pitiful budget, combined with his partial, on-the-fly
understanding of the art of orchestration, which he absorbed via library
books and constant quizzing of his musicians, produced an inimitable
sound. All great art has at least one grievous accident beneath it, the
grit that produces the pearl, and Bell's arrangements were nothing if
not a series of them.
"The very first time I wrote music out for my strings, I wrote a
figure and put above it: 'pluck,'" Bell remembers. "And the musicians
said to me, 'Hey Bell; what’s this ‘pluck’ business? What are you
talking about, man?' I was like, 'You know, [mimes plucking strings with fingers].' They just looked at me and said, 'You mean pizzicato!'
They still send me Christmas cards teasing me about that. Oh, and in
the beginning of 'La-La (Means I Love You),' when they have the tremolo
parts—I wrote that as ‘shake.’ All of a sudden these four guys just
started shaking in their chairs. I said, 'What are you guys doing!?'
'You said ‘shake!'"
Partly because of these knowledge gaps, Bell's harmonic language
remains like nobody else's. I sat down with a composer friend at a
keyboard to try and suss out the chord changes in the song "You Make Me
Feel Brand New", and as he plowed through it, he kept sitting back,
chuckling. The parts could never have been written by a "proper" student
of orchestration, but the song feels literally transformative as a
result, never quite in one key or another. It is in a permanent state of
arrival—every harmonic turn feels like the epiphany that the song has
been building towards. It is clear that Bell regards it as his
masterpiece.
"That’s the only song in the world that kicked my backside," he
admits. "I kept trying to force this melody to do something and it just
would not do it. And I walked around with it in my brain, and I wrote it
and rewrote it—and it was nothing but one note! It was one chord. One
lousy chord. I rewrote that fucker in my mind for about a week."
Bell confesses to some savant-like tendencies. "I’m like three or
four different people working on the same song," he says. "Sometimes
these people sit down and talk to each other beforehand, sometimes they
don’t pay any attention to each other. After I've written out the
arrangements, I would sit down at the podium to conduct it and just
think, 'Who wrote this?'"
He continues, "Every melody I ever wrote, I worked hard on.
And once I deliver it, that’s it. There’s nothing else I can do. I had
one rule: You cannot change that melody. You don’t know why it’s right,
but you know it is. You take a pencil and you put it in the pencil
sharpener and you sharpen it and sharpen it and sharpen it—once it
reaches its point, it’s done. Once it gets to where it’s supposed to be,
that’s where it’s supposed to be. After that, it breaks."
When I ask Bell why he struggled with "You Make Me Feel Brand New" in
particular, he waxes lyrical. "When you make a person feel brand
new—and you’re talking about the inner fiber of a person’s
being—that is a very sacred, dark, private spot that not many people
touch and that no one sees. When you are in love with somebody, when
you’re making love with somebody, you’re riding the ether with them.
That’s the closest of love you’re ever going to feel. So the music
itself has to indicate that same feeling. You look at the lyrics 'you
make me feel brand new,' and whatever goes with that has to be strong,
boy. It cannot be weak anywhere. It has to be like the girder going up a
100-story building. And when you take that away and listen to the
melody, it has to be just as strong. That’s what I was trying to do."
Soaking in these stories, I felt something settle in, with a click.
Most days, my love for classical music feels like a phantom limb pain,
an impulse with no receptors. Hearing Bell talk, I felt an
almost-physical sense of relief. Classical to soul to rap: It remains a
series of imposingly wide leaps. But listening to Bell talk about, say,
working out the voicing possibilities of the French horn from a library
book for "Ready or Not Here I Come (Can't Hide From Love)"—a song sampled for Missy Elliott's "Sock It 2 Me!" and Three 6 Mafia's "Who Run It!"andquoted by the Fugees—I
felt the gaps narrow. Classical music fans and rap fans may regard each
other with mutual mistrust and blank incomprehension, but the music,
slippery and promiscuous, knows better.
Recorded in Philadelphia in 1972, the Spinners’ hit song became the inspiration for many disco hits in the 1970s
by Marc Myers
The start of the Philadelphia dance sound of the 1970s can be
traced back 45 years to the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around.” The song’s
rollicking conga-infused backbeat would become the inspiration for many
Philly disco hits that followed.
When “I’ll Be Around” was released in August ‘72, it appeared on the B-side of a Spinners’ single. After radio DJs discovered the song, it climbed to #3 on the Billboard pop chart that fall and to #1 on the R&B chart.
Recently, the song’s co-writer and producer Thom Bell (who received a Grammy Trustees Award this year), the song’s lyricist Phil Hurtt and drummer Earl Young talked about the influential hit’s evolution. Edited from interviews.
Thom Bell: One Friday afternoon in early ‘72, I was at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studios producing a Stylistics record. When we finished, Vince Montana, a superb percussionist and a friend, started teasing me.
“Man, Thommy, I bet you can’t write a simple song with three chords, like the old doo-wop stuff.” I laughed and said, “Doo-wop was nice, Vince, but we’ve evolved.” He said, “Yeah, but I still bet you can’t do it. You need three legs to dance to some of this stuff.”
Back at my office that evening, I couldn’t shake Vince’s challenge. I turned to my piano and played a series of three-chord combinations. Eventually I landed on E major 7, G sharp minor and F sharp major 6 (Mr. Bell illustrates on the piano).
I realized I had the start of a song for Bobby Smith, the Spinners’ lead singer. The Spinners had just signed with Atlantic, and I was producing two songs for them—“How Could I Let You Get Away” and “Just You and Me Baby.” I wanted a third, for insurance.
What I loved about Bobby’s voice is that he had an unusual vibrato and rarely sang on the beat. The melody and rhythm that I came up with was perfect for his voice. When I was done, I needed a lyric. But there was a problem.
My writing partner, lyricist Linda Creed, was leaving on her honeymoon and I couldn’t wait until she returned. The Spinners were coming into the studio that Tuesday to try out all three songs.
So the next morning, on Saturday, I went into my office and found lyricist Phil Hurtt, Bunny Sigler’s writing partner, in another office.
I played Phil the song on the piano. Then I gave him a cassette tape of me playing piano and humming the melody.
I told Phil the title I had in mind—“I’ll Be Around”—which was based on my melody. I didn’t tell him what kind of storyline I wanted. I left that to him.
Phil Hurtt: That evening, I was watching the 76ers basketball game with the sound down and listening to Thommy’s tape. I started writing the lyric based on his title.
As soon as I came up with the first line, “This is our fork in the road,” the rest came fast. (Mr. Hurtt sings a verse): “You made your choice, now it’s up to me / To bow out gracefully /Though you hold the key, but baby / Whenever you call me, I’ll be there.”
My lyric was about a guy who loves his girl but he understands that she’s confused and wants to date someone else. Instead of getting angry, he lets her go. He’s hurt, but he’s betting she’ll come back.
He’s giving her space and offers a safety net. He knows there isn’t much he can do if she wants to leave. His play is to be there if things don’t work out for her. It was an unusual theme then from a guy’s perspective.
Thom Bell, the song’s co-writer and producer, was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in June 2006. PHOTO:STEPHEN LOVEKIN/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES
Mr. Bell: As soon as I heard Phil’s opening lines—“This, is our fork in the road / Love’s last episode / There’s nowhere to go, oh no”—I loved it.
The romantic storyline was perfect for the Spinners. Now that I had the song’s words, I wanted to be sure the song worked for the guys. The Spinners had a distinct, vulnerable sound.
When Bobby and the Spinners came in that Tuesday, I played piano and sang Phil’s words. Then Bobby and I went over the lead vocal part.
Once he was set, I worked with the rest of the Spinners. I sang each of the background notes I wanted them to sing, and they tried them out. Before they left, I recorded each Spinner singing his part and gave them each a tape.
They had just come off the road and were heading home to Detroit for two weeks to rest. By practicing their parts at home, we’d save time and money when they came back to record.
When the Spinners left, I began writing and arranging the basic rhythm-track arrangement. After I finished, I brought the musicians in to record.
On the intro, I had Norman Harris open with three notes using octaves on his guitar resolving in an E major 7 chord. Then I answered his line with three chords on the Clavinet, which sounds like an electrified harpsichord.
I wanted the Spinners to record more uptempo dance stuff, so I had the drummer, Earl Young, emphasize the second and fourth beats. The flavor he came up with was fantastic. It became the start of the Philly dance beat that was adapted for many disco hits that came later.
Earl Young: As a session drummer, I had to have a thousand different beats in my head. I didn’t do solos or stick-spinning stuff. I played grooves. My job was to come up with a beat that made the lead vocalist want to sing, so you could hear that energy and excitement in his voice.
On “I’ll Be Around,” I created a medium-tempo dance beat. I hit the snare and floor tom-tom at the same time on the second and fourth beats to give them a fatter sound.
Meanwhile, I played what I call my “Indian beat” on the bass drum—two hits on the first beat and a one hit on the second, repeating the pattern on the third and fourth beats. This gave the song its groove.
Mr. Bell: When the Spinners came in to record, they put on headphones and added their vocals to the rhythm track. Once the vocal track was combined with the rhythm track, it was time to overdub the horns.
After I recorded their parts, Don Renaldo and his strings overdubbed my “sweetening” arrangement. Then I overdubbed myself playing tambourine on the second and fourth beats to add a little shimmer.
I also added female background vocals. The Spinners were great, but they had low voices. The song needed a greater vocal range. I auditioned about 20 singers and hired Barbara Ingram, Evette Benton and Carla Benson. They were students at Glassboro State College in New Jersey. I found them through my first wife, who was best friends with Barbara’s big sister.
This was the first time I used female background singers with the Spinners. After “I’ll Be Around,” I used them on everything I produced. They became known as the “Sweethearts of Sigma.”
By the end of the year, with “I’ll Be Around” a hit, Atlantic had me produce the rest of the tracks for “Spinners,” the group’s first album for the label, released in April 1973.
Mr. Hurtt: The first time I heard “I’ll Be Around” on the radio, I loved it. The only change I noticed in my lyric was the addition of the word “once”: “And love can burn once again, but I know you know.”
I didn’t write that word in my original lyric. Bobby Smith must have added it so the line would be easier to sing at that tempo. Hey, it worked.
My kids called the song tuition. In the 1980s, they were in college, and whenever they heard it, they’d call and say “Hey, dad, chich-ching!”
Mr. Bell: In November ‘72, I saw Vince Montana at one of my recording sessions. I said, “Hey, remember that three-chord song you said I couldn’t write? ‘I’ll Be Around’ is #1 on the R&B chart and #3 on the pop side.”
Vince looked down, shook his head and just laughed. Hey, if Vince hadn’t challenged me that day, I probably never would have written that song.
When “I’ll Be Around” was released in August ‘72, it appeared on the B-side of a Spinners’ single. After radio DJs discovered the song, it climbed to #3 on the Billboard pop chart that fall and to #1 on the R&B chart.
Recently, the song’s co-writer and producer Thom Bell (who received a Grammy Trustees Award this year), the song’s lyricist Phil Hurtt and drummer Earl Young talked about the influential hit’s evolution. Edited from interviews.
Thom Bell: One Friday afternoon in early ‘72, I was at Philadelphia’s Sigma Sound Studios producing a Stylistics record. When we finished, Vince Montana, a superb percussionist and a friend, started teasing me.
“Man, Thommy, I bet you can’t write a simple song with three chords, like the old doo-wop stuff.” I laughed and said, “Doo-wop was nice, Vince, but we’ve evolved.” He said, “Yeah, but I still bet you can’t do it. You need three legs to dance to some of this stuff.”
Thom
Bell is the beloved record producer behind much of the “Philadelphia
soul” subgenre of music in the 1970s. While working for Atlantic
Records, he produced artists such as Dionne Warwick, James Ingram,
Johnny Mathis, Billy Paul and Elton John, and even teamed up, briefly,
with the Stylistics.
Dan Kimpel conducted this interview in March 1992 for the Los Angeles Songwriters Showcase Musepaper.
Growing up in the Midwest in the late 60s the AM radio was my
connection with a world beyond the cornfields and oil refineries. Soul
music and R&B provided a soundtrack to my teen years-in the winter
of 1969 as I was driving my dad’s Buick Special across the tracks the
car radio played a song so dramatic that I had to pull over to the side
of the road to listen. The song was “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time”
by a group from Philadelphia, the Delfonics; written and produced by
Thom Bell. The lush, arch romanticism of Bell’s work was everywhere in
the next couple of years, and when I was old enough to go to bars my
friends and I would drive to the big city of Toledo to dance the night
away to the Spinners and the Stylistics hits pumping out of a jukebox.
Thom Bell’s subsequent work with Dionne Warwick, Johnny Mathis, James
Ingram, and Elton John was always a breath of fresh air in oft-stagnant
musical times.
When Songwriters Musepaper editor John Braheny was unable to
interview Thom Bell, I leaped at the chance to meet a longtime hero. On a
beautiful winter day I drove to a Studio City motel. Thom Bell was
waiting for me at the desk, and he carried my briefcase up to his room.
He lit the first of many Benson & Hedges 100s (“my only bad habit”,
he explained), and we began.
DK: I didn’t know you were from Jamaica.
TB: Yeah, I’m from Kingston. I was born there, but I was
brought to the United States when I was five when my parents moved to
Philadelphia. But I have tons and tons of relatives still living in
Jamaica. I don’t get down there too often. It’s too hot.
DK: Have you recorded down there at Compass Point?
TB: I worked with I-Threes at Compass Point. I also worked with
Marley. Marley and I were good friends. That was before he got sick in
1979 and 1980. In fact, I was represented by the same cat. Him being a
Rastafari, he didn’t believe in white people, in banks. He hid all his
money and stuff in the mountains, and they’re looking for his money to
this day. No banks, no checks. In the eyes of Rastafari, you don’t fix
up with any money, accept checks of any kind, no drafts, all cash. But
then the poor boy died. I kept telling him to go to the hospital, man,
but he thought that roots and herbs and things would cure him.
DK: Did you watch the Grammys last night?
TB: No, I didn’t watch for a reason. Back in 1968, when I won
my first Grammy for a song called “La La Means I Love You,” they didn’t
allow any black acts on stage. Most people don’t know that. What they
would do is advertise the Grammys, but they would have the “chocolate
version” somewhere in a corner and have the white version on television.
They never told you that until you got there and you’re looking to be
in the audience. They would tell you later on, “I’m awfully sorry, but
your version will not be on TV, but thank you for coming anyway.” They
didn’t want to give me tickets for the show. And I said, “But I thought I
was nominated for a Grammy.” I finally did get one ticket, because at
that time–I don’t know if the companies still do it–but the companies
sponsored the tables and things. I wormed my way in. They made one
special seat by the door in the back. When they announced the Grammy for
Song of the Year, which was “La La Means I Love You,” somebody else
went up and got it. It was the president of the company who went and got
it.
He had nothing in the world to do with it. I decided never to go to
another Grammy show as long as I lived. And I haven’t. Here’s another
bit of history for you: Until 1973 or 75, they didn’t even have a
producer’s award. It wasn’t until I had gotten so many hit records. I
was the first one they created the award for.
DK: And so you received a Grammy?
TB: I received the first Grammy for Producer of the Year and
then I later received Producer of the Year two years in a row. I was the
only one that beat Stevie Wonder. Stevie never forgot that, either!
DK: So what are you doing right now with James Ingram?
TB: We’re working on a new album, new tunes. We’re going to
keep him in the same direction, but take him to another level now. The
songs that we’ve been getting have been clones of the hits he’s had
before. So we’re taking our time, and we’re coming up with different
kinds of songs. Still good songs, because he’s got that kind of
voice…it’s amazing to have a voice like that and not to have operatic
training. He has a vast range and he breathes extremely well, and he
works hard on his voice.
DK: “I Don’t Have The Heart” which you produced, was an
incredible hit for him, the writers, Alan Rich and Judd Friedman, are
members of our organization.
TB: Those guys worked real hard on that tune. That song took
eight or nine months from the break, if it had not been for a guy named
Steve Rosen at Peer. He believed in the song, and they believed in the
song, and we believed in the song, and they got independent people on
it.
DK: Did you pick that song for James?
TB: What happened was that Karen Jones–who worked for Benny
Medina–picked that song and sent it to James. James and I were sitting
down listening to songs and I said, “There’s the song.” And he believed
in the song himself. It wasn’t just me.
DK: When did you live in New York?
TB: I was studying to be a conductor and a concert pianist. I
went to New York to study further, but they weren’t taking any chocolate
conductors on Broadway at the time. We’re talking about the ’60s‹about
1961–and they said “Well, here’s what you do. There’s a fantastic place
up in Harlem. It’s called the Apollo. They really could use you up
there. What you do is…” And I said, “Wait a minute, you didn’t give me a
chance.” But again, nothing stopped me.
DK: When did you go back to Philly?
TB: I moved back in about 1963, 64. I became a conductor for
Chubby Checker. I did that for two years. I got tired of conducting the
twist all over the world, so I left and went to a record company called
Cameo/Parkway Records. At that time Motown was doing real well, so Cameo
thought that since Motown has a bunch of black artists there, all they
had to do is get a bunch of black musicians and they could do the exact
same thing. That didn’t work out very well. I became the head of the
studio musicians because I was the one who could read the best. During
that time, a guy came to me with a group who said, “Man, you produce
records?” I said yes even though I didn’t know the first thing about
producing records. He said he had a group he wanted me to listen to.
They weren’t so hot. He wanted to know when we could get a hit record
with this group. I said, “Well, I don’t know if I hear anything here.
Let me hear the drummer sing.” He couldn’t sing. The bass player
couldn’t sing. The guitar player sang. I said, “From now on, you don’t
play guitar no more, because you’re now the lead singer.” I took the
group. I couldn’t use the rest of the cats because they were like a
drain. I chopped them down from eight in the group to three. They were
called The Five Guys then. When I chopped them down to three, we made
the The Delfonics.
The first record I did with them in 1965 was with Cameo Records.
Cameo didn’t know anything about black music at the time, and neither
did I. But the record did well in the Philadelphia, Baltimore,
Washington, Virginia area. The second record did well in the same area,
and then the company folded. When the company folded, the guy went out
and got a loan and put some money up and said “Man, you’ve got to give
me a hit record on this group.” So I called around different publishers
and told them my name. “Who?” “Thom Bell.” “No, I’m afraid the only Bell
we know is Bell Telephone and the Liberty Bell with the crack in it.”
And I said, “I’m looking for songs.” “Well, no.” And if they did send
you songs, they’d send you the junky songs. I said, “This can’t be. I’m
going to write my own doggone songs.” And that’s what I did. Same as I started writing arrangements. I know
enough music and all I have to do is go down to the library, get some
more music, get some books on orchestration, theory and composition. It
cannot be too much different from what I studied on piano. I got myself
some books, and nobody has ever written another arrangement for me. I
write my own everything.
DK: How big were the string sections you were working with at that time?
TB: Usually there were 20 strings–12 violins, six violas and
two cellos. But when I started in 1968, I didn’t have any money, and we
had four violins, one viola, one cello. But as things got bigger, the
sounds got bigger and people starting copying it. Then, of course, your
instrumentation has to get bigger. No one really knew what an oboe sound
was until they heard the introduction to “Betcha By Golly Wow.” They
weren’t even into a bassoon until they heard things like “Make Up To
Break Up,” where I used a bassoon. Because guys were starting to catch
up to my sound, I said, “that’s okay, that’s all right.” I started
digging deeper into my own background and deeper into the symphonic
orchestra.
DK: You used french horns with the Delfonics. Celeste–was that what was doing the bell sounds?
TB: Yeah, that was celeste. I don’t even know if they make a
celeste anymore. On those first sessions, 80 percent of the instruments I
was playing myself because I didn’t have the money. Like timpanies and
things of that nature. I didn’t have the money, so I got myself some
books, read about timpanies. I would get the timpani and practice
timpani. I started as a drum major, actually. So when it came to
different types of rolls–I started out that way. By the time I was six, I played drums and piano. By the time I was
11, I got into fluglehorn, but it hurt my mouth. Then I got into
trumpet; that hurt my mouth. Then I got into the big drums in the drum
and bugle corps and them things used to kill my back walking down the
street. I said, “no, no, no, I can’t have no instrument that hurts me.”
By the time I was eight or nine, I was playing harp. My brother was in
Germany and he sent me the big chromatic harps, which you call a
harmonica. I made my own little guitars out of cigar boxes and a piece
of wood and some rubber bands. Music was essential in our family because
my mother is a concert pianist, my father plays pedal steel guitar,
piano and also accordion. By the time I was nine or ten, I was playing
accordion. Most people don’t know that on a lot of records, I was
playing accordion.
DK: As a songwriter you’ve collaborated with people like Linda Creed.
TB: Linda Creed was my collaborator for a time. William Hart
and I wrote “La La” and “Didn’t I Blow Your Mind,” and then Creed and I
wrote until she died. My next collaborator after that was Deniece
Williams, who is a very good lyricist by the way. And after that came my
nephew, Leroy Bell. Then after that was with James. I did one with Phil
Hurt which was “I’ll Be Around.” I really haven’t collaborated with
that many writers. Only five or six. Until you find the right one that
fits your thoughts; it’s like making love, man. You could have a bunch
of ladies in your sheets, one every hour until the right one comes along
that fits you.
DK: Linda Creed was obviously right on the money. Was she the lyricist?
TB: Yeah.
DK: Do you write lyrics too?
TB: Yeah, but I always classified her as being the lyricist.
Lyric, to me, is a very serious art. I’m talking about when you’re
really writing lyrics, like “The Greatest Love of All.” Those are
lyrics. That’s not some poof puff nonsense that anybody can write. I can
sit down and write, yes, but–
DK: Did she bring you completed lyrics or how was it?
TB: She couldn’t stand sitting around waiting for me to come up
with melodies and things. So she’d go home and I’d call when it was
ready. I would call her the next day and make a tape of it, give it to
her and whatever I wrote–if I wrote the first verse, or sometimes I
didn’t write anything but the hook of the song, like “Betcha By Golly
Wow” or “People Make The World Go ‘Round” or something like that. Then
I’d give it to her and the next day, she’d have it.
DK: You would put the hooks in the titles when you were involved in those?
TB: Yes.
DK: A lot of your hooks in the titles came from real, everyday situations.
TB: I was never one for writing fantasy. I always wrote about
very material things. I don’t live in the past. I live today and
tomorrow. Being an Aquarian, I always live in the future.
DK: What do you think when you turn on the radio and hear your licks being copped? Do you like it?
TB: I think it’s funny. When you put your things out there, if
someone likes them–I feel that they borrow them. They borrow the licks.
Like the guys from Toto said, ” ‘Africa’, that was you and the Spinners,
man.” To me, that’s nothing like the Spinners, but to them, it was the
Spinners. If I put it out there, I put it out there for people to enjoy.
If you can make something from it, God bless you.
DK: Now there’s an electric sitar thing that you were using.
TB: That was, in actuality, the real sitar. Because my folks
are from the West Indies, I was into the sitar a long time before the
Beatles were. That and the African hairless drum and the African finger
piano and things of that nature. I was into all those instruments years
ago.
My mother used to work at the University of Pennsylvania as the
coordinator of exchange students. My grandfather was a teacher of botany
and a horticulture at UP. So we would get exchange students all the
time, from all over the world. And they would bring instruments. These
learned scholars would come to my house and play music. And when you’re a
little kid, you’d be right there, listening. I was playing a gourd at
seven years of age; the kind that wraps around your arm and comes all
the way up like this. They were about four feet high. I was into all
those instruments so that when it came time to hear that kind of music,
it came natural to me. I never had to sit down and wonder what can make
that sound.
Of course, there were times I would ask “how can I get that sound I
want to hear?” And there were instruments that I was not familiar with. I
had The Harvard Book of Musical Instruments to find out the
characteristics of the instrument and the sound that I wanted. I was
lucky because my mother and my grandfather were involved with the
University of Pennsylvania, with these exchange students, to hear all
these different kinds of instruments. So when you hear all these sort of
odd instruments, that’s something like breathing out and breathing in
for me. Just part of the way I grew up.
DK: Are you using samplers now to do those things?
TB: No. I have four keyboards. I use them for certain sounds
just for myself. Like on “I Don’t Have the Heart,” that was not a real
bass. That was me playing the upright bass on the D50. I don’t rely on
them totally. I’m rather lucky that I came up in an era where I was able
to get knowledge from real instrumentation, the real ambience of the
instruments, and also lucky enough to make the transition to the
keyboards and sequencers and different things that can give you a
reasonable facsimile.
I find that going into the studio with a lot of electronics, you
waste more time. I’ve gone into the studio with cats who said, “Play so
and so. That’s enough.” “But I didn’t play nothing.” “Well, we can
sample the rest.” “Look man, turn the machine off. By the time you get
finished sampling this thing, I could have played the thing 50 times
already.” I come from another school where you put the music down and
you play it. You either play it right or you get out. That’s the reason I
practiced for years and years, to learn my craft. That’s nerve-wracking
to me.
DK: I hear you’re producing Jordan Knight from New Kids on the Block
TB: They wanted to come back to the sound they love, like
“Didn’t I Blow Your Mind.” I’ve had cats ask me, “What do you think
about that white cat taking your sound?” I stop right there. Why can’t
he love something that I do as well as a Chinese or German person likes
what I do? It’s reverse discrimination–the same crock I went through.
Now you want to put somebody else through it. Music is music. Look at
the music I’ve done. It had to come from somewhere, from some of the
masters of the 17th century and the 1940s and 1950s. I was with Ferlin
Huskey and cats like that long before most black cats knew anything
about it.
DK: Ferlin Huskey?
TB: And Roy Clark. Yeah, I love those cats to death! Garth
Brooks–my main man! Travis? Love him. I love all kinds of music. And one
day, I’m going to do a country tune.
DK: Who would you like to work with?
TB: One would be Rod Stewart. He did one of my tunes too called
“You Are Everything, Everything Is You” which is on his new album. I’d
also love to work with Steve Perry. Fantastic voice. He sings exactly
like Sam Cooke. Charles Aznavour, I love that cat’s voice, man. Another
cat I love is a composer and conductor, Ennio Moriconne. Did you ever
see the picture, “JFK?” That’s some of his newer music. Remember “The
Good, Bad And The Ugly”? He scored all that. “Once Upon A Time In
America,” “The Untouchables.” Ennio Moriconne again. One of the world’s
greatest. I’d love to work with Henry Mancini, the Bergmans. I’d love to
work with Julio Iglesias. A lot of great singers out there, man. I’d
love to work with Tony Bennett…maybe Sinatra one day.
DK: That’s a great list of people. Be careful, a lot of people read this magazine.
TB: Van Halen’s another one. I got a tune for them too, that
the world isn’t ready for. Have you ever heard a tune called “Rock And
Roll Baby?” I’ve got a rock version of it I wrote ten years ago, man. I
can’t wait to find a rock band to do it.
DK: (sings) “Tootsie roll soul in little white shoes.”
TB: I did that tune for Van Halen or David Lee Roth. Another
cat I think is fantastic is Sting. Paul Simon. There’s a lot of great
cats out there. And girls. I did well with Deniece Williams. I wouldn’t
take her until–it’s not nice to say, but it’s a fact–until she stopped
making hit records. Because there would be no need for her to come to
me. Don’t bring ’em to me unless they’ve got bombs. That’s my job, to
keep you from getting bombs.
DK: Did you put the Spinners together with Dionne Warwick? Was that your idea?
TB: Yeah. Dionne wasn’t doing anything at the time and asked if
I would record her. I told her I didn’t have the time. I don’t think
she’d ever done a duet, and I’d never done a duet with nobody before. So
I wrote this tune. I guessed at their key, neither one heard the song,
came out to L.A. and took them to the old Beach Boys studio. That turned
out to be a total experience. Yucca and Argyle. I recorded them both
for the first time, got one record. That’s it. Number one record, man. I
had fun. I had a great time.
DK: You have eight kids. How old is the youngest?
TB: Nine months old. The oldest one is 25. And I’ve got two grandchildren. My one grandchild is older than my youngest baby.
DK: Where do you live now?
TB: I live on Snag Island. There are about 30 families up there
and it’s all surrounded by water and you can see deer walking around
and you find some elk and every now and then you might find moose.
DK: How did you get to live up there?
TB: I wanted to get away. I never liked the city. I always
wanted to be away, because I don’t like the nonsense most people talk.
They always have a game, always some nonsense.
New
urban jazz keyboardist Bob Baldwin disdains the "smooth jazz" moniker,
but that doesn't necessarily mean he isn't familiar with the conventions
of the genre. He's got ideas that don't have a thing to do with
cranking out infinite versions of the same old sound with a few new
riffs. Baldwin is a bit more ambitious than that and with Betcha By Golly Wow: The Songs of Thom Bell he honors one of the most successful songwriters of 1970s soul music.
Though not intended as the successor to Baldwin's last tribute recording, Never Can Say Goodbye: A Tribute to Michael Jackson (Trippin n' Rhythm, 2010), the new album is tighter and more focused than last year's Re-Vibe
(Trippin n' Rhythm, 2011) which meandered at over 70 minutes in length.
Here Baldwin is working with superior material from Bell (and his
collaborator, the late Linda Creed) and the results are reproductions
that pay respectful homage to the originals even if they don't quite
match them.
Most of Bell's biggest hits are included. "Didn't I
(Blow Your Mind This Time)," "Betcha By Golly Wow" and "People Make the
World Go Round" became staples of soul music when The Delfonics and The
Stylistics performed them and Baldwin's interpretation augments his
keyboards with contributions from guitarists Russ Freeman and saxophonists Gerald Albright, Marion Meadows and Paul Taylor, among other guest musicians and vocalists.
There
are some curious choices in material as Baldwin bypasses Spinners
smashes "I'll Be Around" and "Could It Be I'm Falling In Love?" in favor
of the corny "The Rubberband Man," which is salvaged by Ragan Whiteside's flute and Paul Brown on guitar. Bell himself penned a new song, "Gonna Be Sweeter."
"Break Up To Make Up" is the album's centerpiece with Will Downing's
vocals gliding over the scorching beauty of Albright's alto sax and
augmented by six background singers as Baldwin and the rock-solid rhythm
section of drummer Buddy Williams and bassist Anthony Jackson
keep everything in the pocket. Downing has lost a bit as he falters
toward the end, but he's still one of premier crooners working today. Vivian Green interpretation of "La La Means I Love You" is pretty impressive and she's a vocalist deserving of wider recognition.
If
the album has a problem, it is that there is a certain coldness due the
reliance upon electronic "bass and drums" instead of live musicians. It
may be more efficient to employ synthesizers, but for anyone familiar
with Thom Bell's lush arrangements in his heyday, the change in
instrumentation is noticeable and jarring.
Baldwin may have
seized upon a blueprint to build his future recordings around. He can
alternate between his original works, and tributes to other unsung
songwriters whose success in crafting hits for others denied them some
of the recognition they deserved. Potential possibilities could include
the music of Gamble and Huff, Holland-Dozier-Holland, Maurice White,
Prince or Stevie Wonder.
If he follows that career path and make albums as pleasingly solid as Betcha By Golly Wow: The Songs Of Thom Bell , Baldwin will be a very busy man for the next decade or so.
Tracks:
Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time); The Rubberband Man; La La Means I
Love You); Gonna Be Sweeter; Break Up To Make Up; You're As Right As
Rain; I'll Be Around; Bell & Creed; Betcha By Golly Wow; People Make
the World Go Round.
Personnel: Bob Baldwin: piano, bass, drums,
percussion; keyboards, vocals, background vocals, horn arrangement; Russ
Freeman: guitars (1); Ragan Whiteside: flute, vocals (1, 2, 6); Preston
Glass: keyboards, loops, horns, clavinet, drums, vocals, additional
keyboards (1-4, 6, 7); Dennis Johnson: drums (2), drum loop (4); Paul
Brown: guitars (2); Vivian Green: lead vocals (3); Gemma Burns:
background vocals (3); Will Downing: lead vocals (5); Gerald Albright:
alto saxophone (5); Buddy Williams: drums (5); Anthony Jackson: bass
(5); B.J. Nelson, Paulette McWilliams, Audrey Wheeler, Craig Derry,
Curtis King, Vanesse Thomas: background vocals (5); Paul Taylor: soprano
saxophone (6); Marion Meadows: soprano saxophone (7, 10); Tony Lewis:
drums (8); Toni Redd: vocals (9); Bob Francheschini: saxophone (9);
Onaje Allen Gumbs: arrangement (9); Chembo Cornell: percussion (10).
Track Listing: Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time); The Rubberband
Man; La La Means I Love You); Gonna Be Sweeter; Break Up To Make Up;
You're As Right As Rain; I'll Be Around; Bell & Creed; Betcha By
Golly Wow; People Make the World Go Round Personnel: Bob Baldwin: piano, bass, drums, percussion; keyboards,
vocals, background vocals, horn arrangement; Russ Freeman: guitars (1);
Ragan Whiteside: flute, vocals (1, 2, 6); Preston Glass: keyboards,
loops, horns, clavinet, drums, vocals, additional keyboards (1-4, 6, 7);
Dennis Johnson: drums (2), drum loop (4); Paul Brown: guitars (2);
Vivian Green: lead vocals (3); Gemma Burns: background vocals (3); Will
Downing: lead vocals (5); Gerald Albright: alto saxophone (5); Buddy
Williams: drums (5); Anthony Jackson: bass (5); B.J. Nelson, Paulette
McWilliams, Audrey Wheeler, Craig Derry, Curtis King, Vanesse Thomas:
background vocals (5); Paul Taylor: soprano saxophone (6); Marion
Meadows: soprano saxophone (7, 10); Tony Lewis: drums (8); Toni Redd:
vocals (9); Bob Francheschini: saxophone (9); Onaje Allen Gumbs:
arrangement (9); Chembo Cornell: percussion (10)
The
first two names listed on the sign above the doorway at the
Philadelphia International Records offices at 309 S. Broad St. are those
most closely associated with the sophisticated soul music that became
universally known as "The Sound of Philadelphia" in the late 1960s and
early 1970s.
But there were more than two major players writing the Philadelphia chapter in the great American soul-music history books.
Along
with Philadelphia International Records owners Kenny Gamble and Leon
Huff, there was also Thom Bell, the producer, arranger, and songwriter
known for the delectably sweet music he made with the Delfonics and the
Stylistics.
Of
the Mighty Three - the name of their joint publishing company - Bell's
name is not quite so synonymous with the Philly sound as Gamble's and
Huff's. That's in part because, rather than come in as a partner when
the duo formed PIR in 1971, he carried on as an independent producer for
the Spinners, Dionne Warwick, and Elton John.
And
it's partly because the Kingston, Jamaica, native has lived on the West
Coast since the 1970s. He currently resides in Bellingham, Wash.,
where, he says, he's more likely to see a mountain lion or peregrine
falcon than a cheesesteak. He doesn't fly and rarely travels home to the
city where he was raised.
But,
"Betcha by Golly, Wow," there on a recent afternoon at the PIR offices
was the elusive Thom Bell. Not only in a publicity shot on the wall from
1962 - when he was a member, along with Gamble, of Kenny & the
Romeos - but also in the flesh, seated at a conference table, talking
about past triumphs and future projects.
"He
came to my house on Parrish Street in West Philadelphia so my sister
could help him with his homework," says Bell, 70, remembering how he
first met Gamble. (Gamble and Huff were later to bump into each other in
an elevator in the Shubert Theatre, now the Merriam.) "I was there
practicing at my piano. He said, 'You play piano? I write songs.' I
said, 'Really? Maybe one day we'll get together.' "
When they did, they found they were naturally simpatico.
"That's
the way it was with these two, too," says Bell. "And that's the way it
happened with Linda Creed and I," he adds about his late partner, with
whom he wrote "You Make Me Feel Brand New" for the Stylistics and
"Rubberband Man" for the Spinners.
"It's
like you and your wife, your mate. You know when it fits. There are not
too many people you can ride the ethers of life and love together with.
You're lucky if you can do it by yourself, twice as lucky if you can do
it with a partner." He looks across the table. "When the three of us
got together, it was like hand in glove."
"Like magic," says Gamble.
Three
years ago, the PIR building, which housed the offices of Cameo-Parkway
records before Gamble, Huff, and Bell bought it in 1970, was damaged in a
fire, though the studio - where G & H's first songwriting
collaboration, Candy & the Kisses' "The 81," was recorded in 1964 -
was unharmed. This trip back east via train was Bell's first look at the
damaged building ("It's bad," he said) and for the partners, who are
now signed with the William Morris Agency with an eye to preserving
their legacy, to discuss future projects. "We're doing a book together,"
says Gamble. "And there's talk of a [Sound of Philadelphia] stage play.
... "
"Like Jersey Boys," says Huff.
"There's a lot of interest," adds Gamble. "Plus, we're trying to wrap up some business with the fire."
The
Mighty Three meet-up was also a chance to consider why the smooth,
sleek Philly sound has proved so durable, from Harold Melvin & the
Blue Notes' "If You Don't Know Me by Now" to the Three Degrees' "When
Will I See You Again" to the O'Jays' "Love Train," still played
incessantly in Coors Light ads on TV.
"We
all came from humble beginnings," says Gamble, 69. "The music was our
passport to travel the world in our minds. We all had a desire to
accomplish something in the music industry. And then we realized we
could work together, rather than work apart."
When
the trio were hustling in the early '60s, they were frustrated by their
inability to get work at Cameo-Parkway, the white-owned dominant label
in town.
"There
weren't too many chocolate folks working in this building," says Bell.
Adds Huff, 71: "There were African American artists. The Orlons, the
Tymes, Chubby. ... "
"But
there were no African American producers or administrators or
musicians," recalls Gamble. "That was the difference. When we came in,
we opened the doors to everybody. We had no fear of people."
Indeed,
their "Message in the Music" heyday was marked by racial cooperation in
a time of social upheaval. Black songwriters worked with black and
white musicians, string players from the Philadelphia Orchestra crossed
Broad Street to record with African American arrangers like Bell and
Bobby Martin.
"It
was like a school," says Gamble. "A lot of people got their start here.
We were dealing with the human race. We weren't dealing with that
madness that comes from separation. You get more out of everything when
you blend stuff together."
For
all that the Mighty Three have in common, there are clear distinctions.
Bell's music is lighter than cotton candy (though rarely too sticky
sweet); Gamble and Huff's tunes are more rugged, earthier.
"The
stuff I do goes to the heart," says Bell, who is of the opinion that
"the only two things you can write about are love or escape."
What
Gamble and Huff "write goes to the soul. The Stylistics go to the
heart." He sings a few bars of "La La (Means I Love You)," then lowers
his voice: Teddy "Pendergrass goes to the soul."
The key to the music's longevity, says Gamble, is the collaborative spirit with which it was made.
"The
reason it still sounds good is we worked as a team. I'm very thankful,"
he says. "But the reality of it is, we always used to say, 'Let's make
classics.' That's what we were shooting for. I'm just glad we hit that
mark."
Grammy Awards salute 'Philly Sound' legend Thom Bell
Entertainment Reporter
Kimberly C. Roberts Entertainment Reporter
Kimberly C. Roberts Producer and
songwriter Thom Bell, a pioneer of the world-renowned “Philly Sound,” is
among a stellar group of musical icons being honored when “Great
Performances,” in collaboration with the Recording Academy, presents
“Grammy Salute to Music Legends 2017, the second annual all-star concert
offering a primetime spotlight for the academy’s 2017 Special Awards
recipients. Premiering at 9 p.m. Friday on WHYY, the celebration and
tribute concert features rare performances by honorees and renditions by
those they’ve inspired. The two-hour special, led my Grammy-winning
industry icon Paul Shaffer as musical director, was recorded in July at
New York’s Beacon Theatre. Historically held during Grammy Week, this is
the second time the Recording Academy has celebrated the Special Merit
Awards with a stand-alone event and musical tribute. This year’s
Lifetime Achievement Award honorees are Shirley Caesar, Ahmad Jamal,
Charley Pride, Jimmie Rodgers, Nina Simone, Sly Stone and the Velvet
Underground. Additional Special Merit Awards honorees include the
Trustees Awards recipients — record executive Mo Ostin; recording
executive, A&R man and music publisher Ralph S. Peer; audio inventor
Alan Dower Blumlein, who is the Technical Grammy Award recipient; and
Bell. Bell, who moved to Philadelphia from Jamaica as a child, was
initially preparing for a career as a concert pianist before becoming
captivated by rhythm and blues. A trailblazer of the symphonic soul
genre, Bell, once a partner in the prolific Mighty Three Publishing with
Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, is best known for his work with the
Philadelphia-based vocal groups the Delfonics (“La La Means I Love You,”
“Didn’t I Blow Your Mind this Time?”) and the Stylistics (“Betcha By
Golly Wow,” “Stop, Look, Listen”) as well as solo artists Johnny Mathis
and Deniece Williams. In 1974, his exquisite work on the Spinners’
unforgettable “Mighty Love” album, featuring the wistful ballad “Love
Don’t Love Nobody,” earned Bell the Grammy Award for Producer of the
Year. Along with never-before-seen video packages celebrating each
honoree’s contributions to the music industry and our cultural heritage,
there will be performances by Caesar, Pride, jazz pianist Stanley
Cowell, Valerie Simpson, Andra Day, Kirk Franklin and Charlie Wilson.
Paying special tribute to Bell will be Russell Thompkins Jr., original
lead singer of the Stylistics, who delivers the classic “You Make Me
Feel Brand New,” as well as Dionne Warwick, who will sing “Then Came
You,” which she recorded with the Spinners. There is also a special
appearance by Grammy winner Whoopi Goldberg, who accepts for the late
Nina Simone. Producer and songwriter Thom Bell, a pioneer of the
world-renowned “Philly Sound,” is among a stellar group of musical icons
being honored when “Great Performances,” in collaboration with the
Recording Academy, presents “Grammy Salute to Music Legends 2017, the
second annual all-star concert offering a primetime spotlight for the
academy’s 2017 Special Awards recipients.
Premiering at 9 p.m.
Friday on WHYY, the celebration and tribute concert features rare
performances by honorees and renditions by those they’ve inspired. The
two-hour special, led my Grammy-winning industry icon Paul Shaffer as
musical director, was recorded in July at New York’s Beacon Theatre.
Historically held during Grammy Week, this is the second time the
Recording Academy has celebrated the Special Merit Awards with a
stand-alone event and musical tribute. This year’s Lifetime
Achievement Award honorees are Shirley Caesar, Ahmad Jamal, Charley
Pride, Jimmie Rodgers, Nina Simone, Sly Stone and the Velvet
Underground. Additional Special Merit Awards honorees include the
Trustees Awards recipients — record executive Mo Ostin; recording
executive, A&R man and music publisher Ralph S. Peer; audio inventor
Alan Dower Blumlein, who is the Technical Grammy Award recipient; and
Bell. Bell, who moved to Philadelphia from Jamaica as a child, was
initially preparing for a career as a concert pianist before becoming
captivated by rhythm and blues. A trailblazer of the symphonic
soul genre, Bell, once a partner in the prolific Mighty Three Publishing
with Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff, is best known for his work with the
Philadelphia-based vocal groups the Delfonics (“La La Means I Love You,”
“Didn’t I Blow Your Mind this Time?”) and the Stylistics (“Betcha By
Golly Wow,” “Stop, Look, Listen”) as well as solo artists Johnny Mathis
and Deniece Williams.
In
1974, his exquisite work on the Spinners’ unforgettable “Mighty Love”
album, featuring the wistful ballad “Love Don’t Love Nobody,” earned
Bell the Grammy Award for Producer of the Year. Along with
never-before-seen video packages celebrating each honoree’s
contributions to the music industry and our cultural heritage, there
will be performances by Caesar, Pride, jazz pianist Stanley Cowell,
Valerie Simpson, Andra Day, Kirk Franklin and Charlie Wilson. Paying
special tribute to Bell will be Russell Thompkins Jr., original lead
singer of the Stylistics, who delivers the classic “You Make Me Feel
Brand New,” as well as Dionne Warwick, who will sing “Then Came You,”
which she recorded with the Spinners. There is also a special appearance
by Grammy winner Whoopi Goldberg, who accepts for the late Nina Simone.
A Hall of Fame hitmaker finds happiness and harmony in Bellingham
Thom Bell, a Hall of Fame songwriter and music producer with more
than 30 gold records, lives in Bellingham, in the hills above Chuckanut
Drive. Here, with Bellingham Bay in the background, Bell shows how he
used to start playing piano as a young boy in Philadelphia. (Steve
Ringman/The Seattle Times)
The creative force behind some of Philly Soul’s greatest hits, and stars, has put all that behind him for a quiet life.
AN ENTHUSIASTIC CHEF, Thom Bell has collected some 1,500
cookbooks. Their numbers grow like a soufflé in the Mediterranean-style
home he and his wife, Vanessa, built in Bellingham in 2000. They rarely
eat out, preferring his mainly Asiatic cuisine.
What you won’t find around their well-appointed home is any trace of
his former life. You won’t see walls covered with the 30+ gold records
or 10 platinum records he received for the soul-music hits he wrote or
produced in Philadelphia from the 1960s to the ’80s. You won’t see
photos of him with the groups he made into stars — the Delfonics, the
Stylistics, the Spinners. Or the artists he worked with — Johnny Mathis,
Dionne Warwick, Elton John and James Ingram, among many others.
He
gave all that memorabilia to his kids and grandkids. “That’s another
life,” the 75-year-old Bell says. “Good memories, but I’m finished with
it now.”
Bell was playing piano in Chubby Checker’s band in the 1960s when he
stopped in Bellingham on his way to Vancouver, B.C., for a show. He was
impressed with the beauty of the scenery, the chill of the air and the
warmth of the people. “I couldn’t believe how nice the people were,” he
says. He kept Bellingham in the back of his mind.
While still working in Philadelphia, Bell moved with his former wife,
Sylvia, to Tacoma in 1976 because she had health problems they believed
were exacerbated by the tension of living in a big city. They divorced
in 1984, and he remarried a year later. He and Vanessa, who was born in
Hawaii, lived in the Seattle area and Maui before moving to Bellingham
in 1998.
It took them two years to build their home on a heavily wooded 3-acre
parcel overlooking Bellingham Bay. “You need a strong house here,” he
says. “The wind can be 70, 80 mph. The first year we were here, a tree
fell — it was about 40 or 50 feet tall. It missed my house by six feet
and crushed my Jeep Cherokee.”
He says this with the chuckle of a man fortunate enough to have had a
talent that made listeners’ spirits soar — and allowed him to build a
home with a spectacular view.
AS A TEENAGER in 1958, Bell was
making fish cakes in his father’s West Philadelphia fish market when he
listened, transfixed, to “Tears on My Pillow,” the first hit by Little
Anthony and the Imperials. “I fell in love with the whole production,’’
he says. “I listened to the background, the bass, a lot more than just
the lyrics.”
Kenny Gamble, left, and Thom Bell were
interviewed at Philadelphia International Records more than 30 years
ago. As teenagers, they formed a singing duo, Kenny and Tommy. That
venture didn’t go well, but each became a successful music producer and
songwriter. (Myrna Ludwig / The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1986). 1 of 11
In the late 1960s and ’70s, it would be Bell’s music that delighted a
generation of Baby Boomers. They sang along with the sweet melodies and
tight harmonies he created as a writer, arranger and producer during the
heyday of Philadelphia soul music, including the Delfonics’ “La-La
(Means I Love You)” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) and the
Stylistics’ “Stop, Look, Listen (to Your Heart),” “You Are Everything,”
“Betcha by Golly, Wow” and “People Make the World Go Round.”
In 1972, Bell took over a group that had been sorely neglected at Berry
Gordy’s Motown Records (the singers had to work as chauffeurs for the
Temptations and other groups). Under Bell’s direction, the Spinners
became Top 40 regulars with such songs as “I’ll Be Around,’’ “Could It
Be I’m Falling in Love,’’ “One of a Kind (Love Affair),’’ “They Just
Can’t Stop It (The Games People Play)” and “The Rubberband Man.”
Bell helped rekindle Warwick’s flagging career in 1974 by teaming her
with the Spinners on “Then Came You.’’ Joe Tarsia, the studio engineer
on many of the hits Bell produced, told me he was “the black Burt
Bacharach.’’ From the time Bell received a small drum kit for Christmas when he
was 5, he knew he wanted a career in music. At his mother’s insistence,
he started piano lessons around the same time. As he got older, he
played the classics but also was composing tunes in his head. His
father, an accountant and businessman, played Hawaiian guitar and
accordion. His mother was a pianist and organist who instilled in Bell
and his nine siblings a love of music. He performed in recitals and
sometime accompanied his sister Barbara’s ballet performances. But he
says he got bored playing other people’s music, even Chopin’s.
During
the 1970s, Bell produced hits for the Stylistics, the Spinners and
Dionne Warwick, plus others. (Courtesy, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 1977)
“I’m a poor imitator,” he says. “I wanted to create my own music.” Bell and his teenage buddy, Kenny Gamble, tried unsuccessfully
to make it as the singing duo “Kenny and Tommy.” But Bell knew his
future was at the keyboard. He dropped out of Dobbins High School in
North Philly to do club gigs with various bands. It was Checker’s road manager who urged him to change his name from
Tom to Thom to make it more distinctive. Bell played in the house band
at the Apollo in Harlem and at Philadelphia’s Uptown Theater, backing up
Sam Cooke and others. Producer Luther Dixon heard him at the Uptown and
invited him to New York, where he played on Chuck Jackson’s hit “Any
Day Now,’’ and with the Shirelles. SYLVIA,
HIS WIFE at the time, wasn’t happy with the unpredictable life of a
studio musician. At 22, Bell promised her he’d find another profession
if he didn’t make it by the age of 25. He landed a tedious job
transcribing songs at Cameo-Parkway Records before getting his big break
with the Delfonics. Time was running out on his deal with Sylvia when
he co-wrote (with the group’s lead singer, William Hart) and produced
the No. 1 record “La-La (Means I Love You).” In time, he became a major creative force in the burgeoning music
empire that Gamble headed with Leon Huff. Bell never partnered with them
at their record company, Philadelphia International, preferring to pick
his spots with singers, musicians and other record companies. Unlike Gamble and Huff,
who wrote and produced dozens of soul hits, Bell could read music.
While Gamble and Huff brought songs and chord progressions into studio
sessions and worked things out with musicians on the fly, Bell wrote
every note to every part. He insisted they be performed exactly as
written. In some sessions, he played piano or one of the other 17
instruments he had mastered.
Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell, from
left, pose in front of a wall of gold records at Gamble and Huff Music
in Philadelphia, during a rare trip back home for Bell. The three are
partners in a music publishing company. Gamble and Huff were inducted
into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. (Stephanie Aaronson / The
Philadelphia Inquirer, 2013)
Although success came, he and fame eluded each other. While Gamble
and Huff were celebrities in Philly, “I was like a ghost,’’ Bell says.
“I didn’t want to be recognized. I’m strictly a music person, 24 hours a
day.” He composed soaring ballads, often with lush arrangements backed by
musicians he enlisted from the Philadelphia Orchestra. “Most black
people were not supposed to do things like that,” he says. “They’re
supposed to write toe-tapping music.’’ In the 1960s, Motown’s chief songwriting tandem of Lamont
Dozier and brothers Brian and Eddie Holland were widely known. When
success came to the so-called Philly Sound, much of the credit went,
rightfully, to Gamble and Huff, who were also Bell’s partners in the
Mighty Three music publishing company. The two kingpins of Philadelphia
International were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in
2008. Bell, in the words of Little Anthony, remains “on the outside
looking in.’’ He hasn’t been ignored, though. He was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2006 and received a Grammy Trustees Award last year in New York. Bell latched on to the Stylistics because he loved Russell Thompkins
Jr.’s clear falsetto. He didn’t care for the backup singers, and on most
of the recordings, their voices were replaced by studio vocalists,
sometimes including Bell himself. As he did for all the singers he
worked with, he would record every part on tape and give each singer the
part to practice.
“To put it in a nutshell, he’s responsible for everything that’s
happened to me in my career,” says Thompkins, who still tours, with a
group called The New Stylistics. “He helped me in knowing my vocal
range, finding the best way to sing a song. Everyone was his instrument.
It didn’t matter if you were a singer, a trombonist or a studio
engineer. You were part of his construction.”
Although he ruled recording sessions with a firm hand, Bell says he
never saw himself as the star. “I’m just a conduit, part of a chain that
makes other people the stars,” he says.
He wasn’t the first soul-record producer to use orchestral
arrangements, but he was a pioneer in using unorthodox instruments. He
employed a sitar on the Delfonics’ “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This
Time),’’ an oboe on the Stylistics’ “Betcha by Golly, Wow.’’ Even wind
chimes — he has several around his Bellingham home. They lend mystery to
the opening bars of the Stylistics’ “People Make the World Go Round.”
The Spinners were considered underachievers in Detroit and were about
to be released from their record contract. Bell had seen them perform
at the Uptown in Philadelphia and wanted to work with them.
“They had gone through so much crap with Motown,’’ Bell says. “They treated them like dogs.’’
To lure them, he promised if he didn’t produce a No. 1 record for
them, he’d pay each of them $10,000. If he did, they’d have to buy him a
custom Cadillac. Sure enough, “I’ll Be Around’’ was a million-seller.
But he let the Spinners off the hook. It was just as well, because Bell
didn’t learn how to drive until he was 45.
He made a more realistic side bet with Warwick. She had so little
faith in the original track of “Then Came You,” which she recorded with
the Spinners and Bell produced, that he made her a wager. He ripped a
dollar bill in half. If the song hit No. 1, she’d have to send her half
back to him and write “I’m sorry” on it. If it didn’t, he’d have to do
the reverse. He still has both halves, one inscribed with her apology.
FOR MUCH OF Bell’s career, his main songwriting partner was Linda
Creed, who fell in love with black music when she saw Smokey Robinson
and the Miracles on TV. She wanted to be a singer and landed an audition
with Bell. Her rendition of “Heat Wave’’ by Martha and the Vandellas
was “terrible,’’ Bell says.
“You probably are a great singer,’’ he told her. “You’re probably
fantastic to somebody, but I don’t think I’m the right person for you.’’
She told him she also wrote lyrics. He offered to give her a melody to
see what she came up with, telling her she had to stick exactly to the
melody, with no extraneous syllables. The next day she came back with
the words, and he was stunned. The song turned out to be “I Wanna Be a
Free Girl’’ and was recorded by Dusty Springfield. “Stop, Look, Listen
(To Your Heart)’’ was the first of many hit love ballads the Bell/Creed
team wrote for the Stylistics.
“In those days, people didn’t particularly appreciate a black and
white team,” Bell says. It took some people a long time to realize they
were partners, not lovers. At the studio, her race was irrelevant to the
mostly black artists. Nobody called her Linda; she was simply “Creed.’’
Unlike his other songwriting partners, she grew bored sitting
with him at the piano. When he finished the melody, she would work on
the lyrics, then sing them to him. The process worked well. Fighting
writers block one day, they took a walk down Broad Street in
Philadelphia. They saw a well-dressed black man in his late 20s,
standing in the middle of a busy street and looking back at a woman
headed in the opposite direction. “Cars started to honk,’’ Bell says. “I
don’t know how he survived, but he did. He kept looking at this girl.
He’s thinking she’s somebody he knows. But it’s not who he thinks it
is.”
It was one of the few times Bell came up with the opening lyric:
“Today I saw somebody/Who looked just like you/She walked like you do,/I
thought it was you …” The million-seller “You Are Everything’’ was
born.
“All songs are either about love or escape,’’ he tells me, a
contention I think is highly debatable. He and Creed didn’t always
agree, either. When he came up with the jarringly unpoetic opening words
to “People Make the World Go Round,’’ Creed hated them: “Trash men
didn’t get my trash today/Oh why, because they want more pay.” She
couldn’t believe he thought that was a good idea. Said Bell, “It sounds
right to me.’’ He stuck to his guns, and that was a hit, too.
They avoided religion and politics because they felt those subjects
were too personal to appeal to wide audiences. That is, until Creed sang
her words for “You Make Me Feel Brand New” and came to “God bless you
…’’ Bell objected, leaving Creed in tears. Her mother later told him
that Creed had written the lyrics as a tribute to him. He relented. “I
felt like about two cents,’’ he says. They worked for six weeks on an album for Mathis, “I’m Coming Home,’’
sometimes writing two songs a day. Unlike other songwriters, who
embraced Mathis’ ability to hit the high notes, Bell preferred “the
conversational sound of my voice in the lower register,” Mathis says.
“It was enlightening and very pleasing. I love to listen to that
stuff.’’ Mathis calls it “one of the best albums I’ve ever done.’’
Mathis says his first meeting with Bell and Creed surprised him. They
asked him questions that had nothing to do with music. “What colors do
you like? What clothes do you like? What makes you sad — or happy?”
Later, he realized they had incorporated his own phrases into the songs.
“Linda used a lot of words that only I could understand. That’s the way
I talk. It was the most enjoyable experience I ever had with
songwriters.’’
A recording session with Elton John produced six songs,
including the catchy “Are You Ready for Love” with the Spinners; it was a
hit, but only in England. Bell produced songs for a former Stevie
Wonder backup singer named Deniece Williams, and “It’s Gonna Take a
Miracle’’ became her first No. 1 hit.
Bell and Creed worked together for nine years. One of her last hits
was “The Greatest Love of All,’’ recorded by George Benson and later
covered by Whitney Houston. Creed left Philadelphia in 1978, unhappy
that Gamble and Huff wouldn’t make her a full partner in their
organization. She and her husband, record promoter Stephen Epstein,
moved to California. After fighting breast cancer for 11 years, she died
in 1986 at the age of 37. Bell was among those at her side.
“We were like brother and sister,’’ he says.
WHEN
ONE OF his old hits plays on the radio while he’s driving in Bellingham,
Bell generally switches the station. He’s already heard it hundreds of
times, he says. “I knew every nuance. If you were writing a piece for a
magazine, would you want to keep reading the same thing over and over?”
His daughter Tia, a clinical psychologist in Alameda, Calif., has a far different reaction.
“When I hear his music, I hear safety,” she says. “It’s calm; it’s my
childhood. If I’m having a day where I really miss him, I’ll put his
music on, and I’ll hear his voice. There’s something about him that’s
magnetic.
“He is a genius.”
Tom FitzGerald is a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle.
THE MUSIC OF THOM BELL: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH THOM BELL:
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
Thom Bell, a Hall of Fame songwriter and music producer with more
than 30 gold records, lives in Bellingham, in the hills above Chuckanut
Drive. Here, with Bellingham Bay in the background, Bell shows how he
used to start playing piano as a young boy in Philadelphia. (Steve
Ringman/The Seattle Times) 
