Trust In Love – James Gallagher

Chapter 20

Chapter 20
Philly is my home.
‘…they pull me back in again!’
“Somebody Loves Me” / “When I Give My Love (This Time)”

At first when I returned to Philly, I was not at all sure of what I would do next. I knew I was near my parents and my sisters and most importantly my son. I knew I was probably finished with the music business as I had spent the fifteen or so years of my life making records and I was ready to either do something new or find a way to make more money at it. I went through a real difficult period of soul searching. Staying sometimes briefly at my parent’s home in Bethlehem (where I seriously investigated studying forensics) and staying sometimes at my younger sister’s apartment in Philly, sleeping in a sleeping bag on her floor, and sometimes even having Rustin there with me. I had no place of my own, no job, no love interest in my life and, worst of all no idea what I wanted to do next with my life. These were some very dark days for me. Looking back, they were some of the worst. However, I soon knew that I was only going to go up from there and started to plan my next move. It just so happened that at one point while on night shift at Sigma, before I left for Los Angeles, I went back to Temple and took a class or two during the day. Those classes kept all my credits alive for ten years. They were about to die when I decided to go back to Temple and study Filmmaking again. I got really lucky when the department head at that time met with me to discuss my plans and upon hearing about my background, offered me a class to teach despite the fact that I hadn’t yet finished my Bachelor of Arts and was planning to return to the same department to study. He did not care about the academic repercussions of any decisions he was making because he knew he had AIDS and was not going to be there long enough for them to do anything about it. I want to thank him for what turned out to be the second time I got to teach audio production at a college level without a degree.

I began my studies in May of 1987 taking a two-part class in archeology, one in each summer session. The first was accompanied with an independent study that entailed me shooting the dig in South Jersey the first six-week semester and the follow-up lab work in class on campus the second summer semester while taking another lecture class in anthropology that semester. I shot what was to be a much too long documentary of the dig by the class and the people who participated in it. The comments I got from my professor (who by the way had the nerve to sign out a good camera and the rest of the gear I needed for six weeks without even knowing me) were, “Be sure to take the editing class next”.

That Fall I did. In fact, I took it and five other classes. Quite an overload and I taught my audio production class for the first time in Studio “G” at Temple main campus. Some days I would be sitting in Filmmaking classes with the very students who on other days were sitting in my class learning from me, not with me. In that class I met two people who would later be a big part of my life. As I mentioned in Chapter 16, Joe Kraus and my wife Pam Mammarella were in that first class. Looking back, I realize that I may never have taught an audio class better. There are a few reasons for that. One, I had no teaching assistant (yet), so I taught all 8 contact hours. Two, an academic change later at Temple reduced the class to four contact hours a week instead of eight which is how it is today. Three, I was teaching at Temple for the first time, and I needed to bring my “A” game as I had to do with all my endeavors there as both a new faculty member and a returning (now older) student. I kicked it up to full throttle. I may never have worked quite so hard in my life. I would get up and start my day at 6:30 AM and work until midnight six days a week. On the seventh day, I would get up at 6:30 AM and work until 6:00 PM. Then I would take the evening to relax (maybe see a movie or do my laundry or see my son as I had every other weekend since the divorce except while in Los Angeles and New York City). I only took off time from that schedule for holidays and an infrequent break to spend a little time with Rustin. I did this from May until Graduation in May the next year. I had dropped out of the music business and no one from the Philly music scene even knew I was in town. I graduated with honors. I was Cum Laude, missing Magna Cum Laude by one one-hundredth of a point. I only realized that at graduation. If I had known how close that I was I would have found a way to pull up one of those few B+ or A- grades I got that would have made the difference. It is amazing how far I had pulled up my average considering how bad it was before that year, remember I had dropped out of Temple for the music business and previous to that damn near flunked out of Wilkes from lack of focus and total distraction from the late sixties and the war and my family’s alcohol problems, not to mention my own depression, etc.

Needless to say, I was on the upswing again. I was focused. I was feeling better about myself all the time. I was accomplishing a year and a half of credits in one calendar year. I was an honored graduate. In the last semester, I had been so noticed that I had been asked by a department head and my editing teacher to produce, direct and edit a short documentary about the founding father of the communications school, John Roberts. He was to be honored by the Broadcast Pioneers of America’s Philly chapter as Person of the Year and a five to ten-minute-long video was needed to praise him and reflect his accomplishments. Professor Frank Heying who had asked me to do it told me he wouldn’t allow his name to be added to the credits unless it met with his approval. He was the toughest teacher I had at Temple. I got a perfect 10 on his first and most difficult assignment (a scene from Gunsmoke, the old TV show) but only an A- as a final grade. I was honored to have been asked and nailed it. I got to interview all sorts of Philly TV celebs and big deals at Temple: Deans, the President, and all the important board members, etc. I finished it off by getting Dick Clark to shoot a 20 second thank you and tribute and have him mail it to me. He was the last person in the show, and it was very well received. And Frank let me put his name in the credits. Maybe the best payoff of it all.

After graduation, I was broke. I had been the proverbial “starving student”. I had stopped working altogether except for teaching that one class in the fall and then again in the spring semester. That meant I was earning about enough money to pay my rent of the apartment I had moved into in West Philly. It did not cover my books, or my film class expenses (film, developing, video tape etc.) gas, insurance, all that stuff and of course food. I ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I literally would notice, while on break from class, that someone might not eat something from their lunch and I would not be too proud to ask, “Are you going to eat that apple?” This meant that after I finished, I could get back to work. However, I had finished Film School to move on and maybe someday, edit, direct or produce films of my own. But with the summer break ahead at Temple, there were no rent checks even coming in now. I had already run my credit cards up sky high during the school year. So, now I needed some work. I had been interviewed for a job editing the news at WFIL-TV, but I did not get it (only because someone else with previous experience got it). I was even called up and told that I was almost hired anyway. That’s how good an editor they thought I was but was not yet as quick (as you really need to be) for TV news. I took that well but still needed to pay my rent, so I went downtown to 309 South Broad Street and knocked on the door.

Kenny Gamble was delighted to see me. In fact, he said sit down and let’s talk. I was hoping to just pick up a session or two to pay the rent as I continued to search for work in the film-TV world. But Kenny had another idea. Come with me he said, and we stepped out of his office and took two steps down the hall and walked into the door of what had been Sigma Studio 4, which way back in the day was Cameo Parkway’s “B” room where Joe Tarsia had recorded records for Chubby Checker and the like from that label. I was surprised to see that it was not an empty shell of a studio as last I had seen. Just before I had moved to Los Angeles Joe had closed Studio 4 and pulled out all the gear. After all it was Sigma’s gear built into Kenny’s space. While I had been in school Kenny had hired Joe to refurbish the 309 studio with another console, a 24-track machine, some outboard gear, some ¼ inch master machines a pair of new DATs and some sweet monitors. Essentially, Gamble now owned his own 24-track studio where he could record all he wanted without paying Joe. Now I’m sure he and Joe knew that if projects were to be upgraded to 48-track or recorded digitally, Gamble would be right back across town to Sigma. However, Gamble now needed someone to manage and engineer for him at 309. Joe had just finished, and I happened to walk in the door looking to pay my rent. Like in the Godfather III, no matter how I tried, “They just keep pulling me back in!” I was suddenly the new Studio Manager and Chief Engineer of Gamble and Huff’s 309 Studios.

I worked there for the next few years recording a number of great records while at the same time with an agreement with Kenny to allow me to pursue other endeavors. In the next few years, I produced and directed three short documentaries, continued to teach at Temple, returned to teaching at the University of the Arts and was hired at the Art Institute of Philadelphia to teach part-time as in the other schools but also to be an advisor to the development of their new program, Music-Video-Business. The new MVB program was very fun to teach in and I could have gone full time there earlier than I did but I was still working for Kenny at PIR.

Some of the projects that came through there during those years were fantastic. I got to record the entire Universe album with Dexter Wansel producing and Bruce Hawes doing a lot of the programming. Bruce of course was accusing me of following him everywhere he went now! At that time, I was contributing some production concepts to that album and I think Dexter and Gamble gave me an “honorary” associate producer credit. Honorary in that I was never contracted as or paid as a producer. I loved that record. After recording it I mixed what ended up being the first two songs on the album and then he stopped, explaining that he had obligations to work with others in town, i.e., mix some of it at Sigma. There were reasons to do so. Sigma had two really great rooms and both if memory serves had automation (computer-controlled consoles with recall and programming capabilities) by then. Upstairs in the big room did for sure. So, Dexter went off and mixed the whole album with other engineers in other rooms. I was not very happy about that but as they say, “That’s Show Biz!” As the album was about to come out Dexter came to me and told me that two songs that I had mixed in 309 without an automated console were better than the other two times he mixed both songs elsewhere and that those two mixes of mine were going to be used in the album. I was very happy. As I teach, I remind myself and my students that sometimes “feel beats perfection.”

There was another song that I mixed that way at 309 without a computer while competing with everyone else who had one. It was on a song that I love maybe the most from that time period at 309. Kenny and Roland Chambers wrote and produced a song called “When I Give My Love (This Time)” for Phylliss Hyman. He was the guitarist in Kenny Gamble’s first band The Romeos and went back even farther with Kenny than that. “Zob” (Quinton Joseph) played the track with real drums when many of the other tracks on her album were being programmed. It was a real session with “Zob”, Roland on guitar, Steve Green on bass and Eugene “Lambchop” Curry on piano and synths. We even upgraded it to 48-track and Roland wrote a string and horn arrangement for it which I recorded over at Sigma. However, one day I get a call from Kenny just as we would be about to mix the 48-track version over at Sigma, and he asked, “Is everything but the new strings and horns on the first original 24-track tape?” I said, “That’s right.” He said, “Can you come in on Saturday and have Sigma get that tape back before then?” I did, and we came in to 309 for a very rare Saturday morning session and mixed the song real time, just the two of us. I had no assistant which usually gave you another pair of hands on the “real time” mix, so I had to use almost every trick in my book to stay on top of that mix and get it right. It is one of my most fond memories of working with Kenny. I am very proud of the fact that that mix is one of the last “real time” mixes that came out of Philly and that it hangs right in there on that album with all the other automated mixes. A rare shot of Kenny Gamble and me at a Temple function honoring him.

It turns out that without my knowing it we were working with Roland for the last time. During that entire project, he played on songs, did that arrangement, and had co-written that song as well, all while suffering with stomach cancer. Within a year he was gone.

I was having many late-night, post-session talks with Phylliss during the two albums plus that she did at PIR. We would talk about everything from aspects of the business we both hated to personal problems. We both suffered from depression. She was perhaps the only client I ever opened up to about it. That was because after those sessions we were just relating as two people after a while, not as an artist and an engineer. It was around that time I had begun recording my first album of songs I was writing and co-writing and producing. I wrote a song to one of Angela Falco’s gorgeous melodies that I called “Falling in Love”. I had always wanted to produce a track “old school” live with everyone in the room live. I wanted to try it on that song. I also had imagined that this production would be recorded with vocalists in isolation booths and a soprano sax also isolated but live with all the rest of the music. I would then be able to replace the voices and the sax later. The background voices with pros and the lead vocal with Phylliss and the sax with Grover Washington Jr. I was now well established at the Art Institute of Philadelphia and the studio there that I had helped with some of the small design issues was capable of just such a session. I pulled in a million favors and got a lot of great people to play on it. As I was producing a “live” date I was not going to try to record it too, so I asked Joe Kraus to do it. It was amazing to have Ted Greenburg on drums Angela Falco on electric piano, a synth bass played live through an amp, a few (not really enough) real strings with cello and upright bass, a harp played by my dear friend Mary Ann Coppa McCann, percussion by Edgardo Cintron, my sister-in-law Sue Mammarella and two other women singing background in one booth, another woman singing lead in another booth and Chris Farr on soprano in yet another booth. All live with a string and harp arrangement by Dan Levinson conducting. What a night! We only had a limited number of hours but pulled it off. I later redid the vocals having Carla Benson, one of the three women who sang background on all the Sound of Philly hits, sing the lead and some background. She nailed it in less than an hour by the way. She was magnificent!

After I finished mixing that song, I took it to two artists I had been working with a lot lately in Philly: Patty LaBelle and Phylliss Hyman. As is often the case in the business, you never hear anything back and they have passed on your song. That’s the way it is. One day, my phone rang, and it was Glenda, Phyliss’ manager. She said, “Jim, we love your song, but we have plenty of ballads for this album already, but we promise she will put it on her next one. Do you have any up-tempo tunes?” As you can imagine I was beside myself with joy. This could mean I would be making money in the music business that would be serious money not to mention that it could open an entire new road for me as a writer and/or producer if they used my track. Only a few months later my wife, Pam and I were on vacation and staying in a hotel in Baltimore and we heard on the radio the tragic news that Phylliss Hyman had committed suicide. I was crushed. The world had lost a tremendous talent. I had lost a friend. And I had lost what might have been an opportunity of a lifetime.

Another great lady I got to work with during this period was Miss Patti LaBelle. I was so happy to be working with her again. Back in 1981, I had recorded her on one track on her PIR album The Spirits in It. I worked on the project a little but not enough I fear to have gotten a credit however enough that she knew who I was. One night she came in and said,” Jim, this may be a real short night for you. I am recording my signature song that I do in every concert. I will only sing it a very few times. We won’t be doing any punching in. Are you ready?” I said I was ready and out on the mike she went and sang “Over the Rainbow” the fantastic song from the Wizard of Oz from beginning to end. No stopping. No punching in. Just like a live show, and she killed it. Bud Ellison, I believe was the producer on that track, said to mute that track and let her do it again. I think she only sang it three times at the most. They listened to them all and picked one. That was the take they used in the mix. As promised, we all went home early that night. I think it was one of the only three times I ever got out of a session early. Especially at night, when there was no session after you until 10 AM the next morning!

But in 1991 as Gamble’s engineer and studio manager at 309 I was suddenly in the studio with the wonderful and remarkably powerful vocalist again. I worked with her with a number of producers on a number of tracks. I often used that album as an example of how and why we master projects, citing how some tracks were recorded in Philly with a number of different producers, some in NYC with other producers, one or two in Los Angeles with yet another producer and at least one track in Paisley Park Studios with Prince. Putting all those finished products together for the mastered final CD required a lot of attention and professional care to make it sound like one constant project. That is what Mastering engineers do. I got to work on more than half of the album and recorded Big Daddy Kane on the record, worked with people from New Yok and Los Angeles who came to 309 to work with Patti, including Michael Stokes whom I knew from Los Angeles. But in particular the big hit single which was produced by Bunny Sigler and written by Bunny and Lambchop: “Somebody Loves You” has a number of interesting memories. The first is another tale I sometimes relate to my students about difficult recording situations. During that project Patti was out on the microphone singing at the beginning of these sessions and she sang a take and then we listened to the playback. Everyone was commenting on the performance, but I stopped them and said that something did not sound right. I was concerned and double and triple checked everything that was in use to record her, the limiter, the patch cord, the second limiter, that’s right she was so powerfully loud that every engineer that recorded her, at Sigma at least, had to limit her twice! Vince Warsavage had an affectionate pet nickname for her: “The Razor Blade” because her voice was always perfectly spot on pitch, but it could also be so powerful and often ear-piercing depending on what notes she was singing. I checked the next cord… everything. Yet it still sounded somehow different to me. Bud or Bunny or whoever was producing that session at a point said that no one else heard anything wrong and that we should move on. Time is money after all, especially in a professional recording studio. I said, “Of course” and we went back to recording her. As she sang a subsequent take, I had turned the speakers down a bit, and I noticed what I had been hearing. I said to everyone in the control room, “Listen to this” and I turned the speakers all the way down. Everyone including my assistant engineer dropped their jaws. We could hear her through the walls. The difference I had been hearing on playback was the absence of her super loud voice coming through the professionally build multi-layered walls and angled tripled paned windows with air spaces in between! Sure, if you were blasting the speakers at abusively loud levels the sound from the control room might bleed through to a vocal mic on the other side if it was close to the wall and window, but to have a voice, her single voice come through the wall and be heard in the room over moderately loud bookshelf alternate speakers was a definite first!

Vince related a similar story from the WMMR concerts which bears being added here. He wrote this to me: I do remember that I worked almost every one of the Series 2 Saturday Night WMMR Radio Concerts as an assistant engineer when we only went to tape first… and then the tape was played the following Saturday Night on WMMR … except for working a few concerts near the end of those “Series 2” concerts when John Cougar yet to be called John Cougar Melloncamp … and eventually just John Melloncamp performed at Sigma.

I remember the April Wine Concert that I worked when Arthur didn’t put enough bass into the “live stereo mix” because that band was so loud that we felt the bass parts right thru the double-glass window and wall in the old Studio 1’s Control Room. Fortunately for the band, before they started playing, they demanded to go directly to the 24-track simultaneously with the 2-track. Therefore, after hearing the 2-track mix sounding so bass-less I believe the band asked to hear the 24-track and Arthur played it back and did a rough mix with the bass at the level that it at which it should have been. April Wine seemed pleased that they could hear the bass at the level at which it should have been mixed. They took the 24-track with them and I assume that they mixed the 24-track themselves before giving a 2-track copy to WMMR. I was usually working most of these Saturday night concerts so I never got to hear these WMMR concerts broadcasted over the air. But somewhere in my house I should have a quarter inch copy of April Wine doing their version of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man” from that show. And although I wasn’t that familiar with their material yet, I thought that was the best song they played that night! Although I’m a big fan of early King Crimson and Greg Lake had such a unique sounding voice April Wine’s version sounded pretty spectacular!

“Somebody Loves You” went on to sell a lot of copies, go Gold, be nominated for a Grammy and won. Oddly enough it won the Best Female R&B vocal performance in a very rare tie. I forget who also won one for that category that year, but certainly Patti definitely deserved it. She had come back with Bunny a number of times, redoing a little part here and then another little part there until some of us felt she was spending too much time on it. I guess we were wrong, it paid off big time. Speaking of putting in a lot of time on this song, I had recorded it from the basic track and had done a lot of overdubbing sessions with Bunny and “Lambchop” adding and then often redoing keyboard parts. Overdubbing stacks and stacks of background harmony parts sung by Bunny and again with Bunny and others I think and on and on spending a lot of time on that song. We then started mixing it and in the middle of that stage of the process Patti came back and did a touch up on her vocals again. I think I spent three different nights just mixing it. It just wasn’t quite coming together. Sometimes you “get too close” of just starting to burn out on a song you put a ton of time into. This was the case with this one. It ended up being remixed by Mike Tarsia, Joe’s son whom I had helped train and had watched come along into his own. He claims it was a mess when it got to him. I always thought that it was almost “there” but just needed another “go” at it with fresh ears and I would have nailed it. All’s well that ends well and this one ended very well.

My time with Gamble and Huff at 309 was filled with lots of great recordings that never saw the light of day. Philly soul groups and artists were coming to Gamble and wanting to do more recording and put some spark back into their careers the way he had done with Lou Rawls and Jerry Butler and others previously. This was now years later and the situation was very different. The way Kenny and Leon dealt with it was usually giving them time in the studio with me with the understanding that if a deal was then ascertained from CBS/Sony or some other label, then the project would continue with that label reimbursing PIR and paying for the rest of the production costs. Gamble was essentially giving what was called “spec time” in the studio to make a record that would get the label to pick it up. I recorded new albums of songs for the Delphonics (one song I remember as very good was “Checkmate”), Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Billy Paul. Billy did get a deal eventually with some of the songs we did but as far as I know the other projects never saw the light of day.

During the songs by Billy Paul, I pitched one of my own songs, “Lift Up Your Hearts”, to Billy. He liked it and I got Gamble to let me produce a track. I had Bruce Hawes play piano and organ (which I wanted Huff to eventually replace) Tyrone Brown to play bass, and the drummer was a young man I had met named Ray Williams who had helped me with the song (by changing one chord from an A minor to a C which on a guitar is one note, changed the key and suggested a modulation in the song, in fact two) and was listed as the co-writer when I had it copy-written. The track was a song I wrote the night of Ronnie Baker’s funeral. Ronnie was the original bass player in MFSB of Baker, Harris and Young. I loved him and loved working with him. When he died, I went to the services and all the traditional gospel songs that were played that morning swam around in my head all day. I had been asked at the last moment to be a pall bearer and was greatly honored but had to decline as I had to get back to 309 that day for a session. Everyone in his family understood and I am sure Ronnie would have too. But that night I came home from my session and went to bed but could not sleep. Soon I found myself up in the spare bedroom in our little place in South Philly where I had my simple home recording gear and my guitars. I began writing this song. As the night wore on, I realized it was really becoming something worthwhile, so I pulled out a portable cassette recorder, played it on my guitar and sang the words I had just written down so smoothly and effortlessly. I stopped and thought… Where did this come from? I rewound the cassette and played it back. Now when I used to work with Ronnie in the studio and he needed to get a musical idea out to someone (like when he produced an album for Eddie Holman) he would sing the part in a falsetto. Always in a falsetto. I hit play on my cassette and heard myself, I was singing in a falsetto which I never use. I was freaked out. I literally got the chills and shook. I was so freaked that it had seemed like the song came through me and not from me that I put the tape away and did not listen to it until about a year later. Then I listened again suspecting that it was a decent song and sure enough it was a pretty good gospel song. Me! Jimmy white boy from the Pennsylvania upstate mountains, who never heard gospel music until I was a grown man and recorded it at Sigma, had written a gospel song!

I played it for Bruce and Ray and others (always Pam, my wife, first) and they all agreed that it was a good song, and I should pitch it. So, I pitched it to Billy Paul, and he agreed, and we got to record it. Unfortunately, my first ever opportunity to produce something that Gamble was going to be listening to and supporting got very messed up. Ray who happened to be sightless, had hung around PIR a lot during and after the session and had gotten to know a lot of the people who worked there. Somehow, he had gotten studio time when I was off teaching by telling them that he was co-producing the song which he was not. He then went in the studio with another engineer and brought in another piano player and recorded a different piano on my master tape. Much to my dismay they did not simply mute the original piano and record a new one on empty tracks (as any producer who knows anything about making records would do), they instead erased the original piano. Somehow, I found out that this was happening (I think I walked in after a class for some reason (after all I was the Studio Manager for the tech side of things, obviously not the bookings) and found them doing it or listening to a playback. I flipped out! As you can imagine I was livid. I could barely control my temper and raised a stink with the person who had believed his lies about being a co-producer and that he was doing this with my knowledge and approval. I was crushed and heartbroken. This kid whom I had brought to a Stevie Wonder concert and introduced him to Stevie, had let him “co-write” my song, got him in the studio to play drums on the session and been a friend to him in many other ways, had stabbed me in the back and, because of the souring of the song by the blow up, had put a knife in heart of the chances of my song ever being used again.

I only had a cassette of the last time I had worked on it. It was the original track with Billy’s vocal. I had always known what I would have done if the label picked up the project. I would have added a gospel choir, I would have gotten Huff to replace the organ and I might even have had Jack Faith write strings and horns. I had to master the version I had from a cassette to include it on my next album (a very unprofessional thing to do) but I had no choice as I never got the opportunity to work on that master again. It belonged to Gamble and sits somewhere in his archives forgotten by him. I always wanted to do a new version with Bunny Sigler but who knows, maybe “Lift Up Your Hearts” just wasn’t meant to be. By the way it had an ending that needed to be conducted for the big finish. Since Ray, the drummer, was blind I as the producer had to figure a way to accomplish that. I told everyone to watch me and as the song was getting down to where I wanted it to end I walked into the studio as we recorded it and went in the drum booth where Bruce and Tyrone could see me and put my hand on Ray’s shoulder conducting him by squeezing his shoulder and conducting the others with my free hand. It worked very well.

Another aspect of my story relating to that song happened years later when a dear friend of mine played it for a minister who was producing a new album with his church. I unfortunately allowed this to take place believing that everything was set up appropriately. A new version of my song was produced and released for sale by this minister. I was completely ripped off. Remember that I had only ever worked in the studio and had had nothing to do with the business side of the record industry. Apparently, it was easy to take advantage of me. I know the minster must have made money on his album (ironically entitled “The Ten Commandments”). In my angry battle with those involved I kept saying that I thought that this minister should review the Ten Commandments, in particular the one where it says “Thou shalt not steal”! Oy vey! What a business! One thing about the existing Billy Paul version of the song, from my second CD, I want it played at any memorial service for me after I am gone.

One more “never saw the light of day” records I made at 309 in those years was a single that Leon Huff wrote and produced for Little Richard. We worked on it a lot getting this phenomenal track together that Huff simply murdered! He is one of the best rock and soul piano players ever as far as I am concerned. If you don’t believe me listen to his body of work. My God, there are masterpieces with him leading the band to blistering heights like on “992 Arguments”, “Backstabbers”, “You’ll Never Find” and “Wake Up Everybody” just to name a few. Listen to his piano playing on any of those tracks and maybe hundreds more and you will hear what I am saying…

However, despite the fantastic track that Huff and “Zob” had created, and I had recorded, Little Richard (whom I believe did come to Philly and recorded vocals) never came to an agreement with Huff and PIR and it never was released. Man, what a shame.

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