TSOP

     I’ve heard this one before. As Thom Bell puts it near the end of John A. Jackson’s A House on Fire: the Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul (2004): “Just like the Motown sound, the Memphis sound, just like anybody’s sound, anywhere, it starts from nothing, it becomes something, it gets big, it lasts for a while, it fades, and it goes away.” Or, from another, no less stereotypical angle: there’s the struggle to get a foothold in the industry, the breakthrough, the commercial and artistic peak, the internal discord (always about who is and isn’t getting paid or receiving recognition or given space to develop), the defections, the commercial and artistic decline, and the lawyers.

Jackson provides context because he must, writing about black boys, Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Bell, who grew up to be the architects of Philly Soul, after establishing themselves in a racist system during one of the most turbulent periods of US history. Only it’s rather potted. What’s more, as the writer explains in the introduction, Gamble and Huff didn’t participate (and felt the need to give him a hard time merely for asking them to). Still, plenty of session musicians, singers, songwriters, engineers, and producers do speak to him but he doesn’t fully flesh them out. Nor are there many noteworthy scenes or anecdotes. …Nor is it loaded with insightful critical assessments. …Nor is it animated by the sublime music he describes. The primary value of the book is information. While it fails to distinguish itself on several levels within a familiar arc, by the end, the reader should at least have a rough outline of what happened and the times in which it happened, background on essential contributors unknown to the majority of listeners, some fun and not-so-fun facts, and a map to obscure albums and artists.

Gamble visits a girl’s house and notices her brother, a fellow high school student, playing the piano, and turns his attention to him. This is the first meeting between Gamble, who sang but never learned to play an instrument, and Bell, who would learn to play an additional eighteen instruments. Later, the gregarious Gamble would pair up with the taciturn Leon Huff, who played a real nice piano too, though he wasn’t formally trained. They gained wider exposure in the late 60s with a few hits: “Expressway to Your Heart” (inspired by the recent construction of an expressway in Center City), “Cowboys to Girls,” a Jerry Butler song that isn’t among my favorites (try “Never Gonna Give You Up” instead). But, separately, Thom Bell was the mastermind behind the Delfonics, from forming the group to co-writing songs to playing nearly every instrument on the debut hit, “La-La Means I Love You,” to writing every musical note (no improv allowed) on top of producing. Then, after three albums, feeling as though he didn’t have any more ground to cover with them, and tiptoeing away from the drama and upheaval within the group, he became the mastermind of the Stylistics, from advising lead singer Russell Thompkins, Jr. on how to use his voice to starting them off, alongside his new writing partner, Linda Creed, with their own sterling hits such as “Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart)” and “You Are Everything.” As I began to wonder how Gamble and Huff would compete with that, the O’Jays blow up with “Back Stabbers” and “Love Train.” Then Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes do too, with such songs as “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” and “The Love I Lost.” And back-and-forth through the 70s.

A side note: Up to now I’ve kept my distance from Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes because I was always confused by them. Fans at the time were too, greeting Teddy Pendergrass, the group’s lead singer, as “Harold.” (A shortlived solution once it began to irritate him: Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes featuring Teddy Pendergrass. As this episode hints, soon it would just be: Teddy Pendergrass.) I owe this book for re-introducing me to them.  “The Love I Lost,” one of the first disco singles, as melancholy as it is joyous, perfected the genre earlier than I thought, almost on arrival. For an indelible image of radiant youth and vitality, check out Teddy Pendergrass and the Blue Notes on Soul Train singing (that is, lip-syncing to) this very song before a rapturous crowd.

In the early 60s, Gamble and Bell were barred from entering the building where the Cameo-Parkway label was headquartered. With the hits stacking up, they, along with Huff, had the dough to form a real estate business and bought the building. A sweet measure of success. However, delving further into the politics of the music makers, particularly Gamble’s, mostly doesn’t enhance the listening experience. He and Huff co-wrote a pro-Vietnam War song. Once, he found room on a Billy Paul record to insert an anti-abortion message. (Women artists were hardly ever prominent in the label’s heyday.)  At around the time of the book’s publication, he’s publicly questioning the value of integration. Elsewhere, Jackson offers this shoddy defense against the black critics of Gamble’s appearance at the RNC in 2000: “But what these critics fail to recognize is that, first and foremost, Kenny Gamble is a capitalist. ‘I support people, not [political] parties,’ said Gamble, a registered Independent, in 2003. ‘It’s all business to me.’” This is where the writer ends his argument: ignoring or missing the contradiction, totally credulous and assuming everyone should rest assured now. As though a capitalist doesn’t have politics (admitted or not). And this, after reporting on the number of people who left Philadelphia International Records feeling exploited for their work. Racial barriers to entry aside, Gamble and Huff largely recreated the unsavory conditions under which they apprenticed. Luckily the book rewards the reader with a scene that hilariously encapsulates the harmless figure, who operates above (or beneath) the fray, better than I can:

At one of CBS’s annual conventions, Harry Coombs handed Alexenburg a preview cassette of the O’Jay’s “For the Love of Money.” The Epic Records president stood up in front of the entire CBS Sales and Promotion department and introduced the song as the next release from Philadelphia International. Alexenburg then reminded the crowd that Gamble and Huff’s company ‘has made you people nothing but’—at which point he sang the lyric, ‘money, money, money.’ The audience of over a thousand CBS people stood and cheered.

Once more what would be too heavyhanded for satire turns out to be reality.

So, like many other cases, the Philly Sound, when examined more closely, isn’t a pure sound. Without fair dealing, flexibility, and talent cultivation, the label eventually hemorrhaged key personnel. Some even sued. Not only was it a stain on the label’s legacy, as the 70s turned into the 80s, it ultimately harmed future productions.

Although there was always filler. Sometimes this resulted in tracks such as the Stylistics’s “Country Living,” which I can see as montage music in an abysmal farm comedy. But sometimes it resulted in music to start the day to, such as Lou Rawls’s lightly funky version of “Pure Imagination.” A Soul Willy Wonka. A Philly Wonka.