 Interview recorded in London in person, March 10, 2012
London-born John Abbey's contribution to the world of soul music has never been fully documented: as the creator of Britain's "Blues & Soul" magazine, he was responsible for introducing thousands of readers to the artists who were at the very foundation of soul music. Through his company, Contempo, John brought classic artists like Al Green and Barry White to the UK as well as creating an in-office record store, a record label and producing recordings on deep soul singers like Oscar Toney Jr. and Doris Duke.
After moving to Atlanta in the late '70s, John worked with legends like Curtis Mayfield, Clarence Carter and William Bell through his Ichiban Records. He continues to work in the world of soul music as the manager of The Three Degrees and in this in-depth interview with David Nathan - whose own career owes much to his work with John from the early days of Blues & Soul - John traces his fascinating journey...
David: I am sitting in London in a hotel just not far from the middle of central London, Oxford Circus, which for those who have never been to London, you wouldn’t know where I’m talking about. For those who do, that’s kind of the heart of the shopping area of London and I’m sitting opposite a gentleman who truly I can say, without any hesitation, and with some bias, is one of the absolute pioneers that really helped create the Soul Music or R&B movement in Britain.
There’s only a few people that can really claim that, so there’s no question that this gentleman did that through various different means, particularly of course through the publication which I shall name shortly. It’s also true to say, on a personal level for me, that - and this is quite amazing, given - if it hadn’t been for that publication, if it hadn’t been for this gentleman saying to me, “okay, if you go to New York, you are going to go to New York obviously, you’re going to go, but you have to write as much as you can to justify being there for three months,” I don’t know what would have happened. Well, we don’t know, but that is what happened.
I’m referring to John Abbey, the creator and founder of Blues and Soul Magazine, which many people still refer to as, or referred to I should say, as the ‘soul music bible,’ as the publication they could count on to find out exactly what was happening in the world of soul music, and now as John and I have reflected, we look back now and we think about the impact it’s had, and it’s just amazing.
I thought that given we have a new series at SoulMusic.com, called Giving R-E-S-P-E-C-T, it was extremely appropriate to have an interview with John, so, it sounds funny to say this, but John, welcome to Soulmusic.com.
John: Thanks, David. It’s a joy to be here.
David: Alright, so what we’re going to do is really trace a little bit of your history. I guess to do that, we need to find out where you were born, but obviously how you first got exposed to what was then called R&B or Rhythm and Blues.
John: Well, I was born in London and my uncle - and I haven’t even though about this in God knows how many years so it’s quite funny - but he was very much into jazz music. Everybody else in my family, my older brother, my mum and dad, they would be playing the pop songs of the day, just the usual garbage everybody else was playing. Well, [my uncle] had a news agency, and I used to deliver papers for him and while I was waiting to pick up my round he would be playing his jazz music in the background. I guess I must have been 8 or 9 years old, so don’t tell the government I was making [money] - I’d probably get in trouble for it! - but he played Fats Domino way back, at the very beginning of Fats Domino’s career and he thought he was not jazz enough. I remember standing there while he was writing the numbers on the papers for me to deliverand I said, I remember saying to him, “who’s that?” and he told me, so anyway, to cut a long story short, about two years later, my uncle bought a record store and I used to go work there on the weekends, I was probably 11 or 12. Well, he wasn’t making any money, so he used to pay me in records. And in those days, they were 78s, and I remember getting Fats Domino, the very first Little Richard, a group called the Del Vikings, Coasters, all those early mid-‘ 50s, late-‘50s type things, and… it just grew from there as an interest.
David: Okay, so that’s really the beginning of your interest in R&B and obviously you acquired the records, but like many other people of course, you loved the music. Didn’t necessarily mean you were going to do anything further about it.
John: It wasn’t a passion yet. I was more interested in watching Arsenal [football club], playing football, doing all the same things that young teenagers do. And school, grammar school, early mid-teens, we had kids who wanted to start what we thought was like a doo wop group. So we practiced on a whole bunch of things, like I remember The Dubs, “Could This Be Magic?” Do you remember? A bunch of songs from that era, anyway. At that point, I started to show an interest. And I’m guessing that because of my uncle’s passion for what he was doing, maybe it’s a family trait that if we do something we tend to do it. Well, it got later than that and I started being interested in going to shows and so forth and got a job, and I guess I’ll mention names, there was a magazine called Shout. Tony Cummings, and he probably doesn’t even remember this, if he ever hears this, but I sent him a couple of reviews of shows and he, they didn’t get printed.
David: They didn’t?
John: No. And I took it personally.
David: I’m not surprised. You were a teenager!
John: Well, you know the way you do. Most things, I probably wouldn’t have done, but I did anyway. So, I thought ‘well, hell, I can do this.’ And so a friend of mine that I was working with who was also interested in the music as well, we started a magazine called Home of the Blues which was a predecessor to Blues and Soul, and we took the name from, this is bizarre, it was never intended to be a soul music magazine because soul music had not quite emerged at that point.
David: No, I think it was still called R&B.
John: It was still R&B, but it was just morphing if that’s the right word, but I took it from a Johnny Cash song. Right? Because as - one of the few people who knows - I still love country music. I always see country music and R&B as being like cousins. So, we did that and then we put the magazine out. I remember we used to run it off. I worked at a travel agency and the people there, I would work weekends for them issuing tickets and stuff. In return for that, twice a week they would let me use their Gestetner machine. You would put them on a skin, you’d type them in. And one of my friend’s girlfriends typed it up while I was learning to type, but that’s how it started.
David: Wow. And what year was that?
John: I want to say ’66. I think ’66 was, we started in ’65, and the first one came out in the early part of ’66.
David: Now, because I don’t remember seeing the very first one, do you remember what was in the first one?
John: The only thing I remember - because it’s funny - I’ve still got a copy of it, the front cover was Don Covay, and I took the picture and it was atrocious. It was so dark that you couldn’t see the definition of his face, poor guy, but he was in it, Erma Thomas was in it. Wait, first or second one Charlie Rich, we did, we covered blues, we covered the emerging soul music, and we covered like country or the more rock and roll-y country, like Jerry Lee Lewis would qualify, Charlie Rich because they were actually into this sort of line between black music and country music, really didn’t exist at that point. There were no black music stations in America and it’s funny because, you well know this, Millie Jackson’s almost a neighbor of mine, she grew up, she knows more country songs than almost anybody I know and even to this day, if I need to know something about an old country song, I’ll say ‘I don’t know who that was,’ I’ll call Millie, she’ll tell me.
David: I love it! I love it!
John: It was funny, of all people, Millie.
David: Well, now [with] the magazine, at that point, Home of the Blues, was the content that you just described, were they interviews, or were they reviews? Or a mixture of reviews and show?
John: It was a mixture. Don Covay was an interview. Again, the first {issue] I said when Dee Dee Warwick was in - what happened was back in those days, it was the very beginning of tours. You got the left overs of the Bo Diddley’s and the Chuck Berry’s which have kind of gone on since the mid ‘50s through to the ‘60s, but like I said, the soul thing was just starting to happen. People like Don Covay…would come over and they’d do like eight shows on eight days, they’d be dragged around in these God-forsaken little vans, they would stay in hotels….it was better than not being there. They were happy to be there and when they would get here, like Don Covay [who said] I’ve never been interviewed before.” Never. I mean, he was just all, “why do you want to talk to me?” And also, being Caucasian, for lack of another word, it was like… well, it must have been very strange for him, coming from the south, where certain situations were still prevalent….and from that point, [the magazine] grew, but obviously we had no money. I remember in fact, most of what we did was on subscription. There were maybe four record stores in London, Dobell’s being one of them, and you would leave the first one, they probably had six [copies]. The guy called me the next day at work and said, “I sold them all. Do you have any more?” And it was like, “oh yeah sure”, then we’d be busy that night going upstairs to the Gestetner machine in the agency running copies off and that was it! We’d print fifty or one hundred or whatever it was and if he needed twenty more, that’s what you did and the cover was just like a two-sided and we got a couple of hundred printed to start with and it was funny the way it grew because…with the subscriptions, my mother sent all the subscriptions out because I was at a day job, do you know what I mean?
David: Right. …I remember that time because Soul City started in September of 1966 so from based on, by then, by the time Soul City started (Soul City being a record shop, for those who are listening and would not necessarily know this, Soul City was a record shop I started with Dave Godin, who had been the founder of the Tamla Motown Appreciation Society and one of his friends, Robert Blackmore, the three of us started Soul City in September of 1966)…Home of the Blues had already been out for obviously several months.
John: Five or six months. I don’t think we changed to Blues and Soul at that point. I don’t think so because that was ’67.
David: Exactly. But I do actually remember us selling copies of Home of the Blues in the shop [Soul City] in Deptford. I absolutely remember it.
John: I used to work over there on the weekends. I remember bicycling over after I played football.
David: So, let me ask you before we move on to the Blues and Soul era, is there a song associated with this particular part of your life, or should we wait until we get to the next part?
John: No. You know, it’s interesting you say that. There’s still a song that I still play often from that era. It’s by Howlin’ Wolf called “Going Down Slow”.
David: Absolutely.
John: A great, very underrated artist. I remember the first interview I did with him. It was in a God-forsaken hotel on Sussex Gardens [in London]… to do the interview and - you will laugh at this, but it’s the truth - his room was so small, I had to sit outside the room to do the interview! Now, obviously we didn’t have tape recorders so it was written down... but I remember sitting in like this hallway, it was a horrible place. To him it was fine. He sat on the end of the bed and I just made my notes. You talk about memories!
David: Well, great. We will now play Howlin’ Wolf, “Going Down Slow”. My reference of this song, well, two things that I want to say about it, number one Howlin’ Wolf - I just referenced the late Dave Godin and Howlin’ Wolf was unquestionably his favorite blues artist of all time. He absolutely loved Howlin’ Wolf. Absolutely, and he tried to convert me to Howlin’ Wolf and I didn’t go, it was a little to earthy for me, I was a little too uptown, you might say…but anyway the other thing is that my reference to this song actually doesn’t come from Howlin’ Wolf, but from Aretha Franklin and that was a B-side - I don’t want to get too technical, but it was a B-side of her single “Baby I Love You” and it’s absolutely a brilliant recording with King Curtis…but we’re going to do is play the Howlin’ Wolf one.
John: Let me just say this, Howlin’ Wolf’s wasn’t even the original. St. Louis Jimmy Oden was the guy that wrote it and recorded it. And that weird guitar sound on the Wolf version came from St. Louis Jimmy.
David: There ya go. Alright then, let’s play it. Here’s Howlin’ Wolf with “Going Down Slow”.
[HOWLIN’ WOLF: GOIN’ DOWN SLOW]
David: Okay, that was Howlin’ Wolf with “Going Down Slow”. That was John Abbey’s first choice in five songs that he’s going to be choosing that help to illustrate the story of his career and life in the world of soul music. So, now we’re at 1967, Home of the Blues has been out for I guess most of 1966 and how does it morph into Blues and Soul?
John: We did probably six or seven Home of the Blues, and again I’ve got copies. Things were growing; timing’s always important… and the whole soul thing started to emerge. Also, we backed away from the country [music] - I hate to put this in terms of colors - but we shied away from, if you will, the non-black things. Not for political reasons, but for musical reasons. So, I wanted to keep the ‘Blues ‘part [of the name] but soul was becoming the word that was being used. So, strange enough, Dave Godin was the one - I remember running it by him - and he said, ‘yes, you’ve picked the right time to do this’ … But it wasn’t only that, we also had a gentleman who - and it’s again a funny story - he invested fine hundred pounds in the whole concept of what we were doing. And that allowed us to actually print the magazine instead of what before had been [with the] Gestetner-type writing and stuff like that; it allowed us to actually look like a magazine. In those days it was just two- color, that’s all that we could afford. It also coincided with a club opening in London called Tiles on Oxford Street and the gentleman that was the manager there… I probably got to know him through the magazine, but he basically gave us carte blanche - ‘anything you want to do, every artist that comes in here, you can have the exclusive interview,’ they sold the magazine there, that kind of lifted us up one peg up the ladder, bearing in mind there were no publications that were dealing with anything even close to this. At that point Shout [magazine] I think still existed, but I think Tony had always seen it as a labor of love, not as a commercial entity.
I don’t want to make it sound like I saw it as a great big business opportunity. It wasn’t. It was just growing, and I couldn’t run 2,000 off of a Gestetner [machine], I would’ve been there for the rest of the week, you know what I mean? So, we also got a distributor, Surridge Dawson,…at the same time, I had made a relationship and a friendship that existed to this day with a gent called Jeff Kruger. And we started a record label called Specialty and he had contracts with several companies like LuPine [Records] for example in Detroit.. and he basically came and he gave us a whole catalogue to just plow through.
Just as an interesting aside to that, I was still into country music, as I still am to this day, and if you will quote unquote, we discovered Glen Campbell and we worked out a deal with EMI where they weren’t interested in Glen Campbell - he was a nobody to them at the time - they gave us two years of his product if we got behind it, and within two months, “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” …so Jeff Kruger obviously cleaned up on that. Good luck to him, but in the meantime, he was still letting me plow through these catalogues. He flew me to Detroit, which is how I first met Eddie Floyd, Wilson Pickett, Joe Stubbs, all of the Falcons of course because [that was] the main group that he had, so that opened the door, I had never been to America at that point, it opened doors, I got to see things first hand. It was exciting, I won’t lie.
I remember going back, working at Soul City that Saturday, and I was like a little kid I know it. I remember, I think Dave [Godin] had been to America once, but… he kind of went there as a fan and I remember him saying how envious he was that I’d been there to go to the companies and it was the next step up. Everything that we were doing was a step up on an imaginary ladder that didn’t exist because nobody had been down those roads before.
David: Just again, and of course as part of the story, in the first issue of Blues and Soul, which had a, if I’m correct, a pinkish kind of color? It might not have been the first one. In one of the early issues of Blues and Soul, I wrote a piece on Aretha Franklin and because - I don’t remember the reason why - Dave asked that I didn’t use my name on there, so it actually came under a completely made up name, ‘Simon Frazier,’ and that was actually not the first thing I ever had published, it was the first thing I had published that was associated with Blues and Soul. So, that has some resonance for me too because I remember the magazine. Actually, I still do have a copy of that one. But, anyway, so Blues and Soul now is beginning and do remember what month in 1967?
John: No, it must have been fairly early because the second issue was when the Stax tour came over, and I remember we got our first bump of advertising form Polydor {Records] for Stax [with] Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, I remember cashing the first check and it was like ninety pounds [when] they took a double spread out. Not only that …Frank Fenter (who is unfortunately not with us anymore)… he was in charge of Atlantic [in the] UK and he gave us a whole day when they were rehearsing to literally sit down with Samand Dave and all of them in detail...[I] had a conversation with a whole bunch of folks and again it was the amazement that they had. ‘Why does this guy even want to talk to us?’ And when they saw the magazine - because the magazine came out right at the end of the tour - and I remember Sam and Dave - the bar was blue but the picture was brown, giving them the magazines and it was like….they’d just won a million pounds or dollars! And they were saying ‘look look look everybody’ and the musicians would come over…we were pioneering something. I don’t think we realized what we were even getting ourselves into at this time.
David: I went, I remember, actually I can tell you date wise when that was…March 1967 because I went to the show. I think the one I went to was actually in Croydon.
John: The first one came out in…it was supposed to come out in January, but it ended up February.
David: And that actually, probably would make sense when I mentioned about Aretha Franklin because her record, her first Atlantic record, “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You”, came out in February of 1967….
John: Again, think of the timing. That whole sort of black music thing was exploding. We were sitting on the threshold of it. It’s got to be luck, but I don’t know, the point is we were there at the same time. We were never playing catch up. That’s I think the thing. There were other people that came behind and tried to do different things, but they were always playing catch up.
David: So what point did - talking about the year 1967 - did Blues and Soul become what I remember it as, in the next generation of it, which was a full color cover, multi-color cover, different size magazine?
John: Again… none of it happened overnight, but as it grew, and again the timing being so important, it grew from being like a couple hundred Home of the Blues, the first Blues and Soul I’m guessing we did maybe 3,000, all I remember about it is Surridge Dawson called like two days afterwards, “We need another 3,000.” So, it suddenly went from 2-3,000 up to about 10,000 fairly quickly and 10,000 may not sound like a lot, but –
David: …it was back then.
John: When you’re running on a shoestring…for example it wasn’t until I think ’69, or late ’68 that we had an office. We were still running everything from home and I remember biting the bullet and saying, ‘okay, we’ll move into an office,’ and then we had [art director] Jeff Tarry who had… a huge impact on the magazine because up until then, it was just want you read. The pictures didn’t have to be that good, most of the time the record companies didn’t even have pictures back in the early days, but I would say, the end of ’68 and ’69 was when it jumped up to that next level.
David: …At what point did you personally stop doing your other job and start doing Blues and Soul, at that point did you create Contempo as a company?
John: It came right behind it. What happened was the gentleman who had invested the money, once he and I both saw that ‘ maybe we can run this as a business,’ we formed a company which we called Contempo International and then the label that was spawned from that was Contempo… came under that one umbrella. So, Blues and Soul the magazine - we had other magazines, remember the Skyline thing - they were all under that umbrella and then we did the label, then we did the record shop, you know what David, I can’t remember the order…
David: I have some idea of the order. I can help you with that one. But what I am interested in, is at what point did you saw, ‘okay, I’m ready. I’m not going to do my other job anymore. This is it full time. ‘
John: ’68.
David: Did you have any fear about doing that? Just stepping out and saying, ‘I’m just going to do this now?’
John: When you’re young like that…I mean I didn’t really have any overheads, I’d been able to save a little bit of money by that time. No, I wouldn’t say fear, but I think that I’d probably be more scared of it today because, you know what the downfall can be. When you’re young and stupid, you don’t think about those things. You just jump in, it’s just like jumping in a swimming pool, you don’t even look to see if there’s any water in there. If you’re lucky enough that you bounce and get back up… I think [it was] timing… I think we had good people, most of the time people who are devoted to what we were doing. People like yourself, people like Dave Godin. Even though he never worked for the company, his contribution in those early days was incredible because Dave, as you well know, Dave had a credibility that I don’t think anybody else had at that time. He was the godfather.
David: He really was, of British R&B. Absolutely.
John: And I think that he will always [be], with people that care about the music, that know anything about those days, will always think of him as that. People that came after, and maybe even achieved greater heights, he was the first; he was completely unique in everything he did.
David: Oh yeah. That’s true. Absolutely.
John: Probably the only criticism, and this is something that he and I talked about, he didn’t have a business sense.
David: Well, as his partner in Soul City, I can absolutely validate that comment and tell you, since that wasn’t my forte either… it didn’t bode well, given that he didn’t have it and I didn’t have it, so hey….
John: There were times at Soul City that I would sit, cause we would often go and eat after the shop closed, sometimes without you and Rob, and I’d say ‘Dave, why don’t you do this? …Because you’re always struggling to pay the rent’ and for me it was a labor of love too, but for him, that was all it was. He was devoted to some of the most bizarre people, some of the most bizarre records, people that subsequently I’ve gotten to know, and in some cases done deals with and stuff like that. …I always think of like [singer] Bessie Banks. I will always think, Bessie Banks, Dave Godin. They were joined [at the hip], even though they weren’t!
David: Absolutely.… Are we at a point yet where there’s another record that is associated with this period, or would that be following on a little further down the line?
John: You know, if you were asking me to pick twenty songs, records, there would be, but there’s nothing that sticks in my mind from that era that I think would be more important…
David: Okay. So, let’s continue talking. So, the next part in my recollection of chronology and, I’m sure you will verify, is that the magazine’s going, it’s starting to prosper, as you said you got an office… I remember, my recollection of where your office was, was somewhere near Savile Row. I can’t remember what street it was on, it might have been... New Burlington [Street]. It just came back to me and my association with you in a formal sense - because I know I’d written for Blues and Soul in those interim years - but our kind of formal working together came in 1970 and it came on the heels again of Aretha Franklin, who was visiting Britain and wasn’t doing any interviews and because of my own association with her which went back a little further, I had gone to see her at Top of the Pops [TV show]. I didn’t have a job at the time because there was no longer Soul City and I called you up on the phone and said ‘do you have an interview with Aretha,’ and you said, ‘no, she’s not doing any.’ And I said. ‘I did have this conversation with her at Top of the Pops’ and you said, ‘can you turn it into a story?’ and that actually became my first Blues and Soul cover story. In August of 1970.
John: Yeah, you’d done Nina Simone things before.
David: I had, yeah. But …that was my first cover story and in the wake of that is when you and I talked about me working on the mail order part, it was not what it became, but at the time the mail order that we were talking about had to do with a very large collection of Sun [Records] 45s that you had which I had no interest in whatsoever, but I needed a job. So, it was really a job at that point and what I remember, as a vivid memory, is that was when the office moved from New Burlington Street to Hanway Street.
John: We were thrown out of New Burlington Street.
David: I don’t remember that part.
John: …It was an accounting company and they rented these two little rooms to us, and one room had me and my wife in it, the other room had these box loads, there were also chests, I remember that and some very early Stax records and we made up these soul packs… and there again timing.
David: Well, what I was going to say was that I remember the move to Hanway Street, only because I have one memory. I remember Bob Killbourn who had previously been the [Stax] label manager for EMI, I remember seeing Bob Killbourn, who of course subsequently became the editor of Blues and Soul at some point, on the floor, painting the skirting board of the room that would go on to become what everyone affectionately would call Contempo being the actual record shop. So, that’s my memory and that would be 1970 because that was when I first started really working with you.
John: In a way, that was a successor to Soul City. Soul City had ceased to exist and there was no way you could buy these [records] - not so much the Aretha’s and the Sam and Dave’s - but that next level down. There was a demand for it that Dave had created with all these esoteric artists nobody knew much about, but because Dave had so much clout, if he rubberstamped on a song or a record in Blues and Soul, you suddenly had 300 people wanting it. That may not sound like a lot, but it was. When you’ve got 300 people banging on your door, ‘how can I get this record?’
David: So now, we’re, let’s kind of picture we’re now at Hanway Street, Blues and Soul is now becoming established as the primary outlet, publication for soul music, absolutely at that point. At what point did the next level of Contempo emerge? Meaning, the part of the office became the record shop, and then of course the mail order [which]was flourishing I remember - because I used to work on it with your wife at the time, Maureen - and then at some point, in there, you started…promoting shows and bringing people over. So tell us about how that evolution happened.
John: That was the next level. That was again a natural, there were two or three promoters here, Roy Tempest for example who was doing the Fabulous Drifters and …many of the rip-offs, but you had some other promoters like Henry Sellars, Danny O’Donovan, that started to bring some of these artists over and they needed Blues and Soul to advertise and expose interviews, etc. We hadn’t quite reached the point then - we’ll go into it later - when we were doing interviews by the telephone, that was probably two or three years away, so you were working off of the little bios and pictures that records companies gave you. It was so basic in those days, but it was still further than anybody had gone before. And then, about, ’71, ’72, then…I got very close at the people at Atlantic, after the Stax thing especially, we stayed in touch and they helped us a lot. They agreed to pay for phone calls with artists. They never forced anything on me, but they gave us access to people as they were starting and happening in America. Tyrone Davis… I’ll never forget this…I was living in Islington, we didn’t have a phone in the apartment, I mean as most people didn’t, and I used to have to make these phone calls, interviews, from a phone box outside the apartment building, you know what I mean? Well, the Tyrone Davis [interview] was done in the middle of winter. It was snowing a blizzard and of course the phone lines weren’t as good as they are today, but you used to have to do it on a rotary phone and charge the call to the Atlantic office in London. So, it took fifteen minutes to even get the call, in the meantime, I’m in one of these little red telephone kiosks, well, all the windows are broken, I froze to death.
David: Interviewing Tyrone Davis!
John: I’ll never forget that. I was trying to write the notes, my hands were blue and I was thinking, while I was doing the interview, I was thinking ‘the pen won’t work, I’m going to have to remember all of this stuff. ‘ Getting back upstairs and
Maureen says, ‘you’ve been gone so long, you’re blue!’ I said, ‘well not only have I been so long and I’m blue, but I couldn’t write, it was so cold! The pen wouldn’t write,’ but we still did the interview.
David: Amazing, amazing.
John: So, that was a little bit, and then once we started to do the interviews over the phone, obviously once Motown found out, [Motown’s] John Marshall, everybody did…but we were they only ones doing it. So, what would happen is, we’d be doing these interviews with people, and from those conversations, ‘well we’d love to come to England. It sounds great.’ Well, I would maybe talk to Danny, or Henry Sellars [and they’d say] ‘oh we don’t know about this, we’re not going to do it.’ Well, same thing I did with Tony Cummings, Well, ‘if you won’t do it, I will.’ And by doing that, again, timing. There was Al Green, nobody wanted to touch. Barry White, nobody wanted to touch. Bill Withers, and I saw a very interesting Bill Withers interview on TV yesterday… it got to the point where we were doing things before they really happened. Sometimes we got real lucky like with the Al Green where we literally caught somebody in their ascendance. Every now and again we’d get it wrong and the tour wouldn’t work or whatever, but very few of them didn’t work.
David: My recollection of course of Al Green particularly is because Bloodstone were the opening act and then I remember there was a Roberta Flack concert.
John: Yeah, I’d forgotten that.
David: Absolutely, and the ones you mention, and the one that always, probably because of the visual of it, is Barry White, only because I’d never seen a full orchestra.
John: The funny thing about Barry White was I, again I haven’t thought about this in God knows how long, I knew Barry White from - you remember Randy Wood, who had Mirwood Records, Bob and Earl?
David: Yeah, Jackie Lee and all that.
John: Well, Jackie Lee was, well Bob [of Bob & Earl]. I went to California, by this time I’d been back and forth. I went there and I went to a Bob and Earl show. Their chauffeur was this great big hefty guy, Barry White, and I remember him sitting down with me, telling me about this great concept he’s got and all of the people there are saying ‘oh no, he’s cornered him with this stupid stuff about this orchestral thing.’ And I remember sitting with him and a gentleman called George Greiff who was Bob and Earl’s manager and I said to George and his partner, I said, ‘you may laugh at this, but this actually is the next step for Motown’ and Barry White said, ‘see see, this guy from England, he knows what he’s talking about. You need to listen to him.’ Bob and Earl was a circus anyway. Barry White came - let me get the order right - you were just starting to see sophistication coming to music and Barry White, they got Barry White a deal through 20th Century through gentleman called Russ Regan, who was a friend of George and [his partner] Sid [Garris]… They had no idea what was going on. I said, ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do, we’ll bring him on our dime, we’ll bring him to England. Don’t know how we’re going to do this,’ I said, ‘but this is going to be a hit record.’
Well, we settled on the dates like six months in advance, without knowing where it was going. I remember getting back and thinking, ‘how are we going to do this?’ And by that time, we’d created things like the [studio band] Ultra Funk… To cut a long story short, the first time Love Unlimited Orchestra ever appeared was in London. They’d never done it because they weren’t ready. And I remember Gerry Shury, who was a great arranger, he put the orchestra together, which became the Armada Orchestra right afterwards… I remember the look on Barry White’s face. [Barry’s co-manager] Sid Garris was the music director because he was very qualified to do that. He did all the arrangements. I remember seeing Barry White sitting there and the smile on his face, and I remember him coming over he said, ‘remember? You were the one that we talked to about this, it’s because of you that this is all happening.’ I said, ‘no actually it’s not. Look at all those people out there. It’s because of you that we’re doing to this, and we’re doing this together.’ It was a great night.
David: It was. And I remember sitting in the audience of Hammersmith Odeon and I just remember it so vividly because, like I said like most soul music fans, I’d never seen an orchestra. I’d seen one on television, but never been in a live event with an orchestra and I remember him walking out with his jerry curl - big guy as you’ve correctly pointed out - and with the baton and doing “Love Theme” and then the next part of the show was Love Unlimited and then the final part was Barry White with the whole thing.
John: He had it all worked out. By the time he got here - again timing - by the time he got here, the first record was already way up on the charts so we hit it perfectly. But the funniest part about it all, and I don’t know if you even remember this, but Pye Records had their offices around in Cumberland Place - because they basically financed it but 20th Century [Records] paid for it - they put him into, I think the hotel was called the Londonderry in those days, it was right next to the Hilton. Well, on the ground floor of the hotel was a Rolls Royce dealership. Barry White had gone downstairs, bought a Rolls Royce, and charged it to his room.
And I remember a gentleman called Walter Voyda who was the managing director of Pye, called me and said, ‘what have you got me into? We just had the hotel call, telling them that Mr. White has charged a Rolls Royce to his room.’ I said, ‘well, I don’t even know anything about it, but tell me this, his record’s number one on the pop and the R&B charts in America,’ I said, ‘call Russ Regan and ask him if he’s okay with it. Because his royalties - I’ve heard all these stories about record companies paying [artists] in cars - I said, ‘I guess Barry just took it to the next level.’ He chose his car and he got his car. It was that simple. It was classic, because again he came over to me and he said, ‘you know what, I’ve got the car, my dream came true,’ and he never forgot it. Every time he came to England in those days - obviously later on I wasn’t there to see it - but that was a magical story.
Part 2 of David's interview with John to follow...
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.
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