 David Nathan: I am elated to welcome to the very first edition of a brand-new series we have at SoulMusic.com which is called Giving R-E-S-P-E-C-T, as in respect, and this series is dedicated to the women and men who really created and were at the forefront in building a foundation for what we call modern-day soul music on both sides of the Atlantic.
It seems appropriate to welcome as our very first guest on this series a lady who I’ve been privileged to know since I moved to Los Angeles way back in the Eighties and lived there for many, many years. She is an incredible human being, apart from being an amazing resource with regard to music, and she’s the lady who also was the pioneer in starting a publication that I used to read whenever I could find it in London back in the early Seventies… late Sixties, actually—let me get it right: late Sixties, early Seventies. Whenever I could find a copy of SOUL newspaper I would be thrilled, because it wasn’t that easy to find in London, but it was, unquestionably, the publication that was almost like the musical bible for many, many people in learning about what was going on in the world of soul music, R&B… in fact, you could say in terms of black entertainment. And in that respect it was absolutely a pioneering publication. So having said all that, it’s now time to welcome to Giving RESPECT my friend Regina Jones. So welcome, Regina.
Regina Jones: Thank you, David. It’s great to talk to you and it’s great to be a part of a new adventure that you’re stepping out on.
DN: Yes, absolutely, and I could think of no one more appropriate. So let’s just dive right in and tell us and put us in perspective how SOUL came about and what were you doing before its creation.
RJ: Before its creation, okay. SOUL started in 1966; if I remember correct, it was an April issue. Prior to that I was a young, uninformed housewife with five children. I went to work at a job, and I’ve always loved music. My job was with the Los Angeles Police Department as a radio dispatcher, meaning I broadcast police calls from the police department to the different patrol cars. On that job, a riot broke out in Watts, California in, I believe, 1965… might have been ’64. It was ’65—it was definitely ’65. I happened to get the first call, ‘officer needs help’ and I quickly did what I was supposed to do with knots in my stomach and everything, but as soon as I could get a break from my position I raced out to the public phone in the hall to call my husband, who was home with the five children, and tell him that a riot had broken out. What he was doing for a living; he was a radio reporter on radio stations KGFJ and KRLA, I believe it was, in Los Angeles. And I wanted him to get the scoop on it and get out where the riot was, because the riot broke out not nine or ten blocks from my home and [from] where he was. So how in the world a riot evolved into SOUL Newspaper is a weird story, but as Ken was doing his job and we were at the broadcast studios for KRLA in a tower, a building at Sunset and Vine, he looked out of those magnificent windows south and he could see Watts burning.
He could see the fires in the distance, and Ken had an idea that we needed something positive for the black community: he thought of this idea of doing a music publication for the black youth to read about our artists. We all knew about what we heard on the radio, we grew up with the radio, but we didn’t read stories; nowhere could you pick up a publication and really read other than maybe a local newspaper and it wasn’t in-depth on, say, a James Brown. I’m even remembering as a kid growing up, there were no publications about black entertainers. There were other magazines, but you just didn’t read stories about black entertainment. So that’s how the concept of SOUL started: watching Watts burn in 1965. And he had the idea and moved it through, and our first issue came out in April of 1966.
DN: And you were opted in, I assume?
RJ: Well, the joke was no, I continued to work my job, but I had some experience and I was always good with numbers, so I had bookkeeping. My job at the very beginning was to be the bookkeeper and take care of the financial end.
The first issue of SOUL that came out in April, there were five thousand copies printed, it was just in Los Angeles and it was affiliated—he came up with the idea—with the radio station KGFJ, so it was called KGFJ SOUL. And that way, we didn’t just throw a newspaper out on the newsstands but we had radio promotion on-air promoting it. That was the novelty. So you heard on KGFJ, along with all the hit records, you heard a ‘Don’t miss, go out and pick up a copy of KGFJ SOUL, on sale at newsstands now.’ So that was the concept, and that’s how the first issue came out. It was a weekly, like I said before it was eight pages, and James Brown was on the first cover.
DN: Well, that seems like a perfect cue, because part of what we’re going to do in this series and in this program in particular is we’re going to ask you to choose some music that is appropriate to the conversation, and since you mentioned James Brown as the first cover, what would be an appropriate James Brown track for us to play right now?
RJ: The first one I would like it to be is my childhood memory of “Please, Please, Please”, that came way before there was a SOUL or a riot. And then later on maybe we can go to where SOUL came from, which would be James Brown “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud”.
DN: All right, well, let’s start out with James Brown and the classic “Please, Please, Please”.
{SONG #1, “Please, Please, Please”}
DN: That was James Brown with the classic “Please, Please, Please”. So here we have SOUL hit the streets, as one might say, with James Brown on the cover. And what would have been the next milestone as you progressed with the publication?
RJ: Oh, milestones—every milestone was every issue that came out every week. Just putting together the newspaper, finding the stories… you gotta remember, David, in those times, like I said, there weren’t stories, hardly, on black entertainers.
There were no bios, so if you liked a record and you picked up a copy and you played it or you listened to it on the radio, you couldn’t just run out to your local newsstand like you can now and find something on that artist. Or my God, let me talk about people today: you just go on the Internet and search them.
DN: Absolutely, of course.
RJ: Remember, nothing was available. And often some of the black music that came out, they didn’t even use their pictures on the 45 sleeve, because they weren’t pushing blackness at the time; they were just selling the music, the sound, the feeling. There were no photos. We ran as an eight-page Los Angeles paper for about six months, but before that time we opened up a second affiliate with KDAY Radio up in the Bay Area—I believe it was out of Oakland, San Francisco. And then we hooked up around the country and added about twenty-seven more stations, from Los Angeles to New Orleans to New York to D.C., down in Houston, Texas… all over the place. And that’s how SOUL grew from day one to the first year of publication.
DN: Well, obviously there was a hunger and a thirst for the information that was contained in the pages. And since you reference the fact that there were really no bios, there probably weren’t many photographs; how, as a young publication, did you manage to convince or persuade record companies or artists to participate?
RJ: The artists were ready and willing: they wanted the coverage, they wanted to see their pictures in print, they wanted to see stories about them, they wanted to be interviewed… they wanted all these things. In those days artists were much more accessible. It wasn’t a mob scene or anything like that, but you could go to a local club and see them perform. I’m just thinking back of the years that I spent at The Apartment, which was a club on Crenshaw, and Dick Griffey was part of that. It was Dick and then it was also the… oh boy, I just slipped that one, but Lonnie Simmons out further south.
DN: Total Experience?
RJ: The Total Experience, okay. I’m thinking… I have so many years of this entertainment in my head, it goes back to the It Club: the It Club was before; it was on Washington, I remember Lou Rawls playing there. But that was before there was even a SOUL or anything like that. We’d go to these small venues; it was nothing to go to The Total Experience to see The Four Tops perform or The Temptations perform. Or at The Apartment, I remember Aretha came out for a SOUL night one night, and she performed. I remember she was doing it as a favour for SOUL and she hadn’t shown up yet, and I was assigned to go to the hotel where she was staying and make sure she got there. And so I remember going to the hotel and beating on her door, and she was asleep, and getting her up and helping her get dressed and standing there over an ironing board, pressing her pants. The willingness to do anything to get her there!
DN: I love it, I love it.
RJ: So I don’t mean to ramble like this and not be in an order, but there was so much going on. Yeah, and then everything had to come to fruition in being a story in print. And we went to every two weeks, and we went from being eight pages to sixteen pages… and there are just so many stories, I don’t know what to tell you. After “Please, Please, Please”, there are just memories for me. “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud” was part of the whole precedent of what SOUL was about, and so we embraced that just so thoroughly. And James Brown wrote a column for SOUL Newspaper for about three years.
DN: Really?
RJ: So every issue of SOUL had a column written by James Brown. Now, you know James did not sit down with a pencil and a paper and scribble out a column, don’t you?
DN: I imagine he didn’t do that.
RJ: Or sitting at a computer!
DN: No, that was pre-computer!
RJ: Okay. But what we did whenever James was around or close by, we would go and hang out with him for a number of hours. And he would just talk about all the things he wanted in his column. So he basically would talk through these columns and we would—our writers and editors and whoever was assigned at the time—would make incredible notes—later on we became sophisticated enough to tape it—and then write these stories, and then make sure he was okay with them, and then they ran in SOUL. And it was all what he was saying to the public about how to be proud of yourself and how to stay in school.
DN: That’s incredible.
RJ: He really preached in a really positive way—he was preachin’ and teachin’ along with what he was doing on the music circuit.
DN: Well, before I play the record that’s most associated with what you just said, I just have one other question related to that: how did you make the initial contact with James Brown and create that relationship? Because obviously at that point he was already established as, one could say, one of the very first black superstars—absolutely no question about it. So how did that come about, do you remember?
RJ: Now remember I said my husband, Ken Jones, whose idea was SOUL—we ended up being co-publishers, but I always give Ken credit; he was an idea man, a visionary—he saw the need for a SOUL. I’m in the kitchen—like I said, I was assigned to take care of the books.
I’m the one that if you had a dream—he had a dream and he had an idea—I’m an implementer: I would make it real. Ideas and dreams float around in the universe.
DN: True, true.
RJ: If you have it and you give me the tools to it, I’m going to nail it down and work out how it’s going to work. So we turned out to be a very good team; I ended up having to take a leave of absence and then quit my job. As far as James Brown, Ken was working at radio station KGFJ, so as a reporter there—and James came to KGFJ every time he was in Los Angeles—that’s how the two hooked up and we started this relationship with James. And James was always very, very accessible. Sometimes his people would get overly protective and try to protect him from us, but bottom line… I was laughing as I was thinking about this interview earlier this morning: [I remember] running backstage at… I want to say the sports arena; I don’t know if my times are right or not. But knowing every back door behind-stage and how to get in and out… remember I was young then, it’s hard for me to remember that; how to get wherever you had to be, how to go around security or how to con, beg, or whatever you had to do to get where you had to go. And once a concert would start, everything would lock down like jail cells. And eventually it became more sophisticated, where you had badges or wristbands or different I.D.’s, but at the beginning none of that existed, because there was no need for it—we all knew each other.
DN: Amazing… amazing, amazing. Well, let’s play the song that we referenced there when you were talking about James Brown and the column, and that is of course another classic. I’m not going to use the word classic anymore, because every recording I’m going to play today is, in its own way, classic; so I’m just going to say, here’s James Brown with “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud”.
{SONG #2, “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud”}
DN: That was James Brown with “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud”. So here we have SOUL now being distributed throughout the country through different radio stations, now having a James Brown column in it; it’s reaching, obviously, a much wider audience… Now let me ask you before I ask the question I was going to ask: obviously you also made a reference a little earlier to a club where you would see groups like The Temptations and The Four Tops—I think you said it was The It Club, or was it Total Experience? One of those.
RJ: The It Club.
DN: The point being that Motown, alongside people like James Brown and then from 1967 on, Aretha, Motown was already in its ascendancy as a part of, actually, popular culture, not only on your side of the water but on ours, too. So tell me, before we move on to talking about the evolution of SOUL, what role Motown might have had in the success and the reach that you had through the artists on the label?
RJ: Early on Motown was there, and they didn’t that have much of a publicity outlet but they had a man working for the company named Junius Griffin. And Ken and Junius met, and Junius understood the need to have the Motown acts in SOUL and made sure we met Berry Gordy. And right around this time I think they had started their offices here, were moving here, but I remember Junius inviting me to Detroit to come to Motown and see their facility—and maybe it might be the first time I met Berry—to go back there and go in the studio and just see what they were doing, and I just remember that trip. It’s kind of vague, because that was early on and I was not a seasoned traveller—remember, I was a teenage mother, and by then I was in my early twenties with five children, so my experience was Los Angeles. So I was in Detroit meeting people, seeing people in the studio and the whole bit, and we followed it up, I’m pretty sure, by being at The Total Experience for The Four Tops. And I think… I want to say “I Need Your Loving”, because I remember being married, being young but having a tremendous crush on Obie.
DN: Obie Benson?
RJ: I thought he was the cutest thing I had ever seen in my life, and I couldn’t let anybody at that time know I had that crush, and I couldn’t do anything but sit there and love that music and think he was singing to me.
DN: All right, well, you know what? That’s such a perfect lead-in and cue to playing another great song from The Four Tops, “Baby, I Need Your Loving”.
{SONG #3, “Baby, I Need Your Loving”}
DN: The Four Tops with “Baby, I Need Your Loving”. And really, thank you for sharing that story. I’m just envisioning you, you’re going to Detroit—which probably took quite a few hours back then, I imagine?
RJ: Yes, it did.
DN: And then meeting Berry Gordy and being in the studio, and then coming back of course to Los Angeles and really being a champion for Motown. Of course not only Motown, but given the prevalence of their hits at the time—actually through the Sixties and early Seventies—obviously SOUL played a key role. So let’s continue with the story. So now SOUL is, as we said, reaching many of these radio stations, therefore reaching many of the members of the public. So what would you consider to have been the next milestone along a series of milestones?
RJ: David, every day we awakened and I’d go into that office it was a milestone. Every time we paid the printer to get an issue out and sold enough ads to pay for that, it was a milestone. But we were driven by the music, what we believed in and by the letters that we received from all over the country and all over the world of the people, just like yourself, that got their hands on a copy of SOUL and they would write. And again, you’re making me realize I really need to make some notes on this, because early on we were getting letters from Vietnam with three dollars—I think the subscription was three dollars—and there would be three one-dollar bills, and there would be dirt and a couple of times, blood, on the money or in the envelopes. And they were these APO and FPO boxes, these were military postal boxes, getting their subscriptions to SOUL. At some point we started selling SOUL Brother and SOUL Sister sweatshirts, and one of the FBI—it wasn’t FBI, but it was one of the big investigative units of the government—coming into our office wanting to see who this SOUL was that had these men in Vietnam, these black men, wearing these SOUL Brother sweatshirts. And I remember how that horrified the whole office staff.
The memories are unbelievable… there are so many stories. And I know we have a timeframe here, but you’re making me think, you’re making me walk back down memory lane. I don’t sit and think about this—I’m almost getting tears as I speak to you now. Because we didn’t know what we were doing; we were just trying to do the best we could of getting information out there, and we had nerve enough to want to speak completely truth. We thought we were journalists and we wanted nothing but the truth, so we’d break these stories that we weren’t supposed to have. And I remember Motown getting angry at us and telling us that we weren’t supposed to tell that story, and we told it anyway. I remember David Ruffin being the unlucky one—or the lucky one, depending on how you look at it: being late at night at the office and the whole staff has gone, and I’m there alone and the phone rings and it’s David Ruffin calling SOUL to say he’d been fired. And me trying to make notes because I was not the writer—I was the machine, I was the business person.
And I’m making these notes ninety miles an hour, and I know I have a breaking story because I’m talking to David, and going over to the, at the time, other staff and trying to put this story together to get it on the presses the next day. And we break this story with no information from Motown, and they were so furious with us.
DN: I imagine they were.
RJ: They even stopped the advertising for a minute there.
DN: Wow. Well, obviously not for long.
RJ: Unbelievable. These kind of things would happen because it was small enough, and a heartbroken artist like David, who did he want to express this to and get out what was happening to him? He called SOUL.
DN: That’s amazing.
RJ: And you know we weren’t prepared.
DN: Well, it says a lot. It really speaks to the pioneering role that SOUL was playing for black music artists and for the audience, the fact that that was his first call. My recollection—as I said, I used to occasionally get copies, I don’t think I had a subscription… I may have had; I don’t think I did, though—but whenever I could get a copy, I would devour it. And I remember specific stories… one that still stands out—and you probably wouldn’t thank me for remembering this—but there was a story you ran of how Aretha, who was of course one of my heroines at the time, was having a hard time in Las Vegas and essentially was asked to leave because she wasn’t performing correctly. I’m trying to be nice about it, but I remember the story very vividly and the only place I read it—I certainly didn’t read it in Billboard—the only place I read it was in SOUL. So the point you were making about telling the truth and being champions of honesty and just telling it like it is; you definitely were that, absolutely.
RJ: David, you mentioned Aretha and I have to smile, but we ran a story on Aretha at one point… I remember being in New York on business, and accidentally somehow or other with the group of people I was hanging out with—and it’s weird to think back, because it was Richard Wesley, who wrote movie scripts, and I don’t even remember his hit movies in the day, Lonnie Elder, who wrote Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, and Carolyn Franklin. And we were all together in somebody’s apartment, talking, and Carolyn gave me a lot of information she wasn’t supposed to about the family.
So we wrote a story and it was an honest, true story, but Aretha was so angry she would not talk to us. I don’t remember the Vegas show, but it could have been around that time. But I remember having to track down and call her father, the Reverend Franklin, and talk to him about what was going on and he said, “Oh, no, no, no—you’re the black press, she’s got to talk to you. I’ll take care of it, not to worry.” And something I remember that Carolyn talked about, before Aretha was a superstar but she thought she was because she had this big deal with Columbia, she still had to come home and do her share of the chores, and that meant scrubbing the floor on their hands and knees.
And she laughed about Aretha on the floor with this wonderful add-on ponytail she was wearing, and crying and scrubbing and that ponytail flying from side to side. Now you’re going to make me have to dig out and see what did I actually say about that story; what of that was told. But Aretha was so upset with us she would not talk to us for a while until Reverend Franklin intervened on our behalf and said, “Come on, ’Retha—talk to them.” Oh, she was angry, and I can remember her telling me how upset she was with me on the telephone.
DN: Well, good to say that many, many years later—and of course we’re fast-forwarding decades and decades—I remember when you and I went up to see her at the… I want to say Universal Amphitheatre.
RJ: That’s very possible.
DN: Which I think is no longer called that; it’s called something else now. And afterwards we went to a function at her hotel in Beverley Hills, and I remember reintroducing—well, I say reintroducing—saying, “I know you remember this lady,” and her actually, of course, saying, “Regina?” So obviously however that relationship got healed, it got healed definitively.
RJ: Oh, yes. After that, she was careful—I’m going to tell you the truth, she was always careful after that, but she gave us carte blanche and when something was going on… I can remember being in her home, being invited to… I want to say it was her son’s wedding; it could have been her wedding. I don’t know at the moment, I’d have to look through SOUL. So she became a good friend; she was just an angry friend, and she felt at that time we felt free enough to be angry and not hide behind a publicist.
DN: Sure. Well, we’re talking about superstars: you already mentioned James Brown, of course; now we’re talking about Aretha and we talked about Motown. And of course at the time period that we’re talking about—we’re talking about late Sixties, beginning of the Seventies—at that point soul music was really part of the tapestry of music in general, and there were certain artists that were emerging worldwide, really as flag bearers for what we’re calling soul music but really was a tradition that had been born out of R&B and gospel and jazz and so on. So since we’re referencing superstars, one of the people who emerged of course from a departure from a very famous group was Diana Ross. And I’m wondering, did you have much of a relationship with, since we are mentioning Motown, Diana Ross?
RJ: Lots and lots of relationship with The Supremes and Diana Ross and then with Diana Ross as Diana Ross, as a soloist. One fond memory that comes up… is you mentioned the Amphitheatre… it was Universal Studios Amphitheatre, must have been the early Seventies. I was a guest in the audience for a Diana Ross concert, and Miss Ross got out and walked around the audience with her microphone and she was singing “Reach Out and Touch”, and she walked up to me. And I almost fainted as I saw her do the eye contact thing with me, and I knew she was headed to me with this mic, and she’d stick the mic in front of your face and you were to sing [sings] “Reach out and touch…” Well, I never sing around anybody because I knew they’d boo me out of the entertainment industry—the singers—totally, because I can’t keep a pitch, right? And she stuck this mic in front of my mouth, and only God knows what happened, but I sang the verse in beautiful pitch. I could not duplicate it again. I was frightened into singing properly. And she looked shocked and I looked shocked and all I could think of was I was so grateful when she moved on. And “Reach Out and Touch”, I’ll never forget that moment as long as I live.
DN: Well, let’s play the song. Let’s play it.
{SONG #4, “Reach Out and Touch”}
DN: That was Diana Ross with “Reach Out and Touch”, and what a wonderful memory—what a wonderful memory to have. So tell us, at this point how is SOUL progressing, what’s happening with it? We’re talking now about the early Seventies. So at what point did it go from obviously being distributed, as you mentioned, through different radio stations to being even more widely available?
RJ: Well, David, with SOUL we had become a celebrity, and that has never been a comfortable situation for me. I’m a great behind-the-scenes person. And if we wanted to go to a concert or go anywhere, we just had to ask… most of the time we were invited. It brings me back to Diana Ross and The Supremes. I just adored Mary Wilson, and I still do. I haven’t seen her in years, but last time I saw her we were just like old friends giggling again. But I remember going through her marriage with her and the first child, being in her home. I remember the home Diana Ross had up in the hills and it had… kind of like caves in it. And her pregnancy with her first child—I believe that was Rhonda? And teasing her that she had an outie—talking about her navel, it was an outie. It was all very intimate; it was nothing like it is now. You were just part of their family, they were glad to have you. I remember being at Hazel and Jermaine’s wedding, but let’s go back before that. I remember getting the invitation in the mail inviting us to The Daisy Club to meet this new group that Diana Ross was reportedly at the time introducing called the Jackson 5. And then I remember Ken coming up with the idea—because he liked them so much and we were really impressed with them—of doing a series of stories on each of the Jacksons.
So then, again, we had carte blanche: we were at the home, we were at the park, we were at different places; my kids were playing basketball with them. and we ran a series of I think six—the five Jackson boys and then the family overview story in SOUL, and the fan mail at that time from all over the country, because they were just starting on their tour… the mailman didn’t come with his little bag of mail for us, he came with two and three big bags of mail.
DN: Incredible, incredible.
RJ: And we let Motown know—they knew, but we reaffirmed it—what a hit they were going to be. We were right there at the frontlines with it, and we were getting reports from fans in their letters to the editor when they hit each city. So we’re running all these letters to the editor, and just running the office and doing all that, SOUL was growing, SOUL was doing great. We had reached this place where publicists now were being hired by record companies, and now they were setting it up where they suddenly had bios—and they had publicity photos. And I would say in the early Seventies what we had experienced was starting the change that has taken place now, to the fact that most of what you see on television or read anywhere is publicized information. It’s not honest, firsthand information, okay?
So that was the beginning of the tides changing, but we fought for quite a while to keep on the right track that we felt with the integrity in interviewing, but now other publications—there’s Rolling Stone, there’s…. Look [magazine]. I remember Look being in our offices going through our files to research a story on James Brown. Other publications, they had other vehicles to go to besides just SOUL.
So things got harder and harder through the Seventies, but more like things are today. See, we had been pioneers so we didn’t know restrictions, we didn’t know limits, we didn’t understand that and we fought it tooth and nail. We had these cowboy photographers like Howard Bingham at the beginning, Eric Whittaker; I remember my girl Judy Spiegelman, who was the editor for many years. We went for purity… we really believed in what we were doing, and we wouldn’t take no for an answer and we didn’t take hostages.
DN: Wow. And that, I’m sure, is what contributed to SOUL being such a pioneering publication, that you presented it without restriction and without constraint.
RJ: It’s true, it’s true.
DN: We’re now in the Seventies with SOUL, and you mentioned, of course, about the emergence of publicists and so on. And then I guess around ’72 one of the important developments in soul music was the creation of Philadelphia International Records with Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and Thom Bell working alongside them. Actually, I’m going to backtrack for a moment. When you began the story, I’m forgetting that of course there was Stax Records—there was Stax Records as well as Motown being two of the towering influences along with Atlantic, and maybe even Chess Records back then in the Sixties. And then as we move on to different labels become important, and that’s my segue way into mentioning Philadelphia International and if, in fact, it had any impact, or you had any impact with it and its development.
RJ: Philly I don’t remember being at a publicity thing, I remember dealing with Kenny Gamble pretty much straight-on. You make me remember Thom Bell and the first interview with Thom; going into the Philadelphia offices—it’s just all very vague. But again, another funny memory would be I think around that time Billy Paul had a record out called “Me and Mrs. Jones”.
Everybody made fun about that with me—my staff, oh, they teased me to no end: “Me and Mrs. Jones”, right? Well, what made it even worse was that Billy… and I don’t know who he was meeting in the office—I swear to God it wasn’t me—Billy would come by the SOUL office and be sitting out in the front in the lobby, waiting for somebody—one of our editors, one of our writers—I don’t know. And sometimes, even, he’d been performing and he’d be dozing off in the front office, and oh, this added to the teasing and the harassment I got from staff.
So “Me and Mrs. Jones”; not only did I love the record, but the teasing makes it stand out more than any other. There are other songs that came out of Philly that had other merits and things like that, but this one was personal. And it’s interesting to me how we remember what’s personal to us.
And I just remember being embarrassed and flushed and red because they just loved it, any time they could play that song. And maybe, I don’t know…
DN: Well, let’s play it.
RJ: Yeah, let’s listen to that. I’d love to have some memories come back.
DN: Okay. Well, here’s Billy Paul with “Me and Mrs. Jones”, but not Regina.
RJ: Thank you!
{SONG #5, “Me and Mrs. Jones”}
DN: That was “Me and Mrs. Jones” and that was Billy Paul. So continuing on with the evolution of the magazine; that’s around 1972-73. So what was happening with SOUL at that point?
RJ: Well, again, you mention things that bring memories to me. I remember when I went and saw Motown in Detroit, I also was in Chicago—I was invited to Chess Records in Chicago, Illinois. And the only thing I can really remember about that was I remember that they had these locked doors to get through—everything was just so locked up. And I thought that was kind of peculiar—I’m really naïve, now please understand this.
And it was just strange. But I do remember with great fun getting to go to WVON Radio, because we were affiliated, WVON SOUL, and visiting the facility and meeting some of the disc jockeys and meeting Sid McCoy—he was the big “voice” of WVON-type thing… just a lot of memories like that. And then you bring up Stax: going to Memphis, Tennessee and Deanie Parker was their publicity person, and through Deanie, meeting and getting to know Al Bell, who became, I consider, one of my dear, dear friends over the years—he still is a friend and we’re both godparents to a young man. Loving the Stax sound… I didn’t even talk about that, but that whole sound, the issues on Otis Redding, being down there with The Bar-Kays, I want to say Steve Cropper… there’s so many names. You said Atlantic Records: sitting in the office in New York City—oh, boy—across the desk from Jerry Wexler, and Jerry wanting me to meet this new kid they were so excited about, Donny Hathaway.
So these were experiences for SOUL that… I’m sorry that people don’t have them now. I’m sorry that you don’t get to sit in a concert that’s small and intimate where you can see everything; instead you’ve got to have binoculars and you’re happy if you’ve got a good seat—you’re a mile away. It was just an intimate relationship. Al Bell—and [another] dear, dear friend unfortunately passed on LeBaron Taylor—LeBaron and I fought about something that was horrible that we’d done, as far as he was concerned. He was a very proper gentleman, and on the phone he was just so upset with us, and me arguing back with him… and he became one of my best friends, he and his wife Yvonne, and one of the strongest SOUL supporters, because I broke down what we were doing and why we were doing it, and it was back to James’s “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud”. Because that’s who I was; that’s who we were. Jimmy Tyrell at CBS Records at the same time… Jimmy and his family and Cheryl Tyrell—dear friends for life, and just friendships you never forget. This is one thing I miss and I gotta say it: being taken to fabulous restaurants for lunch when different people were in town. That doesn’t happen anymore.
DN: No, it doesn’t. You’re right—you’re absolutely right.
RJ: And invited to Las Vegas to see Diana Ross’s final performance with The Supremes, or meeting… who was it? Linda…?
DN: Jean Terrell?
RJ: Jean Terrell, Jean Terrell when she was introduced onstage at Las Vegas. Hanging out in Vegas with Sammy Davis, who was a great supporter of SOUL. Anything we needed or wanted, Sammy wanted to try to deliver it for us; he just knew the need for SOUL and kept on. Another one from my own community where I grew up in Watts, California: Barry White—Barry was a big, strong supporter of SOUL—and hanging out with he and Glodean and being invited to their home. [I remember] a party they had one time… they had camels at the house and it was set up like something out of Arabia.
DN: I love it, I love it, I love it, I love it.
RJ: The extravaganza! Everything was incredible. What is the family that everybody talks about now and everything’s so opulent?
DN: The Kardashians?
RJ: Barry White was doing that stuff; Berry Gordy and Motown was doing that stuff way before there was what’s going on now.
DN: Well, let’s play a Barry White track. Because my own fond memory of Barry White—one of mine—is also going to his home, and I don’t know if it was the same home you went to, it might have been a different one at that point, because I’m talking about when I went there was in the Eighties when I lived in Los Angeles. And I remember specifically being completely enthralled by the fact that he had a real waterfall in his garden.
RJ: That’s the same home. “You Are My First”—am I remembering?—“You Are My First, My Last, My Everything”. Oh, my God, David, that man could sing.
DN: Well, let’s play that, because that’s a great memory of Barry White. So here it is.
{SONG #6, “You Are My First, My Last, My Everything”}
DN: That was the late and great Barry White, “You Are My First, My Last, My Everything”. And that was really an amazing time to be involved with soul music and to be involved with the emergence of people like Barry White and Isaac Hayes. In many ways, I think people think of the Seventies as the golden era of soul music. Whereas the Sixties might have been the golden era of R&B, the Seventies is considered to be when soul music came into its own when, as you correctly referenced, record companies started their own black music departments. There were executives around the country—there were people like Larkin Arnold at Capitol and many of the people you just mentioned—who were really at the forefront of promoting the music, and of course it was probably great for them having a partner in SOUL and yourself and Ken and the staff that you had in making SOUL such an important part in the breaking of those artists.
RJ: And I’m realizing, as you’re talking, the whole Warner Bros. Records group and everything that they were doing at that time. Another dear friend: Tom Draper. Okay, and I don’t know where it just popped up: Simo Doe out of Atlantic.
DN: Barbara Harris and Simo Doe…
RJ: Barbara Harris, oh, my God… there’s too many to even cover, David. You and I will just have to sit and really talk and dish the stuff that we can’t tell on the radio.
DN: This is true, this is true. But anyway, as we’re pointing out, of course, this is the golden era of soul music, and of course it’s filled with many, many people and many memories. Of course as you correctly pointed out, we could spend hours talking about the many things that happened, but just give us a snapshot of what was going on around the mid-Seventies with you, with SOUL. How were things going?
RJ: Again, LeBaron Taylor inviting me to—I believe it was Vancouver? Which one’s on the east coast? Toronto, Canada, inviting me to a CBS convention in Toronto and flying there, not a clue where I’m going, what I’m doing. And it just so happens on the plane from Los Angeles sitting behind me is Minnie Riperton and Dick Rudolph. And Minnie had on one of her little characteristic hats and I knew who she was, but she didn’t know who I was. And they introduced themselves, I guess, to this woman flying solo in front of them—they were very polite and we talked, and we exchanged who we were. But by the time we got to Toronto they wouldn’t hear of me taking a cab to the hotel. They personally adopted me and looked after me during the whole stay there.
Dinner, the whole bit. So we became good friends. And I never buddied with the celebrities to try to make them my best friend like people often do; I never was a groupie because again, what we printed in SOUL had to be the truth, and I couldn’t cross the line of being your best friend and hanging out with you and gossiping and then printing things.
And so I kept the line professional and warm and friendly and made it feel good for both ends. But Minnie—I can tell this tale now—many people that know Minnie know that she died from breast cancer. She was about thirty-one years old, and she was this brilliant, beautiful woman whose heart was all over the place. She was just light—she was light. But I remember one time being in a fine restaurant in Brentwood and Minnie pumped me over the table and said, “Let’s go to the bathroom,” and we went to the bathroom, and that’s when she shared with me what was going on with her. And I just remember how it broke my heart. And then she was gone—it was so quick it was un-frigging-believable.
But just an angel. Literally, Minnie Riperton was an angel. Stevie Wonder: just being in the studio with Stevie and Minnie… Stevie was another one. I have to tell this story about Stevie. He invited us to visit him if we were in the area—I think we were on the plane with him, I was headed with Judy Spiegelman to New Orleans for something-or-other; I suspect it might have been a Warner Bros. Bootsy Collins concert or whatever. But Stevie said, “If you get a chance, pop in and see me; I’m at the studio at Studio In The Country.” We said okay, and he said, “Yeah, I’ll make sure everybody knows and talk to [his assistant] Ira Tucker,” and blah-blah-blah.
And so we do our business in New Orleans and Judy and I decide to rent a car and drive to Studio In The Country in Bogalusa, Louisiana. Little did we know it was a twenty-four mile ridge with water splashing up, and it was the dead of night, and we ended up in Mississippi because our directions were something wrong. I’m horrified. I tell Judy, who’s Jewish, “Let me sit in the front seat and you get in the back seat, because if we’re stopped, I’m your driver, okay?” I’m horrified of the thought of being in Mississippi at the time, you know? Well, we finally find our way to Studio In The Country, and of course Stevie is a night person, I learned, not a day person. He’s up—he’s not recording, it’s a break—but he’s playing air hockey, so he challenges me to a game of air hockey on the table that’s there in the studio. He beat the heck out of me—he cheated at air hockey.
DN: Oh, no.
RJ: Yes, he did. He would put his arm down on the table and say that it was a fair advantage for him because he had no sight. Now they were recording an historic album that maybe didn’t hit pay dirt as far as money, but it was a brilliant masterpiece, THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS. And that’s what he was recording.
DN: Well, let’s do this: you mentioned Minnie Riperton, so before we play Stevie… let’s play them in a row, in fact. Let’s play Minnie Riperton’s “Loving You”, which actually was written, if I’m correct, was written or produced by Stevie Wonder—one of the two. I should know that.
RJ: It may have been produced; that may be why I was in the studio with the two of them.
DN: That’s exactly what happened, but there was a contractual reason why he couldn’t put his name on it so he had to produce it under an alias when it actually came out, I believe. But anyway, so let’s play that, and then let’s play the one song that actually did resonate from that amazing piece of work that you mentioned, SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS, which was “Send One Your Love”, which features, of course, Stevie’s then-divorced wife but former wife at the time, Syreeta Wright. So let’s hear Minnie and then Stevie.
{SONG #7, “Loving You”}
{SONG #8, “Send One Your Love”}
DN: Well, that was in succession Minnie Riperton with “Loving You” and Stevie Wonder with “Send One Your Love”. Well, only because of time, not because I couldn’t continue speaking to you for many, many hours, give us an idea of what was happening and how, at some point, SOUL ceased publication and you went on to do other things.
RJ: It became harder and harder to compete and get the type of interviews we wanted. It became more and more, as far as I’m concerned, plastic: they wanted to send you a press release and you run it as is, and I just couldn’t do that, it just didn’t sit well with me. We were going through an economic slowdown in the United States, so money was harder and harder to get, and my twenty years of marriage was falling apart and my mother was dying of cancer. So I basically quit.
DN: Yes, I gotcha.
RJ: I totally quit—I took a break. I was blessed that the break was good for me, and I turned SOUL over and J. Randy Taraborrelli tried to keep it going for a few months. And he did an admirable job, but economically, he couldn’t do everything he did… and the money was just not coming; the advertising was just not coming. We had to completely suspend publication. He was running it on my behalf, and I was not doing the sales… he was trying to do everything and it just didn’t happen, and we finally had to just shut it down.
And of course, I wasn’t telling everybody what was going on with me, so I’m sure they couldn’t understand how I’d jumped ship and was just not that available to them. I know they were hurt and felt betrayed, but when life gets bad sometimes, you do what you do to save yourself. I’m proud to say, though, that I made enough friends that at some point shortly after—I don’t know, a year or so—Dick Griffey, SOLAR Records, came after me. And of course Dick had been part of The Apartment and Dick Burnett’s Guys and Dolls, and hired me to come to SOLAR, Dick Griffey Productions, as his head of publicity. And I told him I didn’t know how to do publicity, and he says, “Well, I’m willing to pay you for six months to prove that you do.” So there thus began my career as a publicist.
DN: Wow. And what year was that?
RJ: I think I started working for Dick in 1983 and I think SOUL’s last issue was in ’82, because I know my mother died right around then. It’s kind of all vague still. I was just blessed to be there for… I don’t know, two years, and then start up my own publicity firm and handle the NAACP Image Awards, all their publicity. During their growth spurt I handled thirteen of their shows, which came a huge show on NBC, eventually, and enjoyed years with that. And then I for some reason thought I needed to do something else and went into non-profit child development, to give back. And believe it or not, we started getting celebrities coming to our fundraising dinners and stuff, which is amazing. And for the last five years, which I can’t believe it’s been that long, I’ve been working on a book with Jan Gaye, and it’s her story about her life. That was the second wife, the seventeen-year-old he married, of Marvin Gaye. And we got a publishing deal and she’s supposed to be in New York as we speak right now, delivering that manuscript to the agent, and we’ll have a book called… oh, God, I don’t even… we have a working title.
But anyway, it’s Jan Gaye on Marvin Gaye and it will be coming out in 2012 towards the end of the year. And now talking to you, you’re making me think I really need to get into my brain and put this down before I’m dead and gone.
DN: Well, that would be good—that would be good! Well, I just want to say you just, of course, within the space of an hour—which is not really enough time—you really gave us a great overview and snapshot of SOUL and its importance and how it became, over a seventeen-year period, the most—I would say unquestionably—the most important vehicle for promoting black music, soul music, in the United States. Just as you were sharing the story I could see the development, how it became central and key in the exposure that really was responsible for breaking many of the artists—and really, giving people a whole other aspect of who they were outside of the music, which wasn’t really available, as even I remember, living in America in the Seventies. There really wasn’t anything—there were very few publications. There were a few that started to emerge at that time; I remember of course at some point Black Beat and Right On! and so on, but those all followed from SOUL as, really, the pioneer in really ensuring that people knew about the artists and the people who were behind the scenes.
RJ: David, may I add one thing? I’ve contributed the archives, the complete set of SOUL—there were three hundred and seventy-four issues of SOUL, and I don’t remember how many issues of SOUL Illustrated, which was the magazine—but I’ve donated a complete set to UCLA library, the Charles Young Library, which they are in the process of digitizing now...
DN: Fantastic, fantastic.
RJ: —and they already have on their finder {UNCLEAR}. Indiana U: Portia Maultsby back there has been after us for years, so they have quite a nice collection of SOUL Newspaper. And I know the Berklee School of Music has, on their own, been collecting back issues of SOUL.
DN: So in other words, this material is going to be made available as a result of digitization so all the people who are listening to this broadcast at some point are going to be able to read what you’ve been talking about.
RJ: Yes, history will be preserved. The stories will be there as they were, forever. I went with UCLA and not Indiana U as our main giving source because I’m an Angelino: UCLA is here in California and they have a mandate to collect Los Angeles history.
DN: Well, definitely SOUL and you are a part of that. And it’s really been great speaking to you today and getting, really, a sense of what you accomplished and the important role that you and Ken and all the people who worked for SOUL played in its creation and development. And it still remains, of course, as you said so correctly, a part of the history of the music, of African-American culture and of the city of Los Angeles. Not bad, huh?
RJ: David, thank you so much. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention more modern-day photographers, Bruce Talamon and Bobby Holland, who have done a lot in documenting photographs for SOUL and for a whole lot of other people that are out there to be found if anybody’s ever looking for them.
DN: Good to know. All right, Regina—my friend Regina—thank you for spending time with us today on our very first edition of Giving R-E-S-P-E-C-T, respect, and that’s absolutely what you deserve for all the work that you’ve done in preserving an important aspect of modern-day soul music. Thank you.
RJ: Thank you, David. Thank you again.
About the Writer
David Nathan is the founder and CEO of SoulMusic.com and began his writing career in 1965; beginning in 1967, he was a regular contributor to Blues & Soul magazine in London before relocating to the U.S. in 1975 where he served as U.S. editor for the publication for several decades and began being known as 'The British Ambassador Of Soul.' From 1988 to 2004, he wrote prolifically for Billboard, has penned bios, produced and written liner notes for box sets and reissue CDs for over a thousand projects. He returned to London in 2009 where he has helped create SoulMusic.com Records as a leading reissue label.
|
|
|
