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Gamble & Huff, Thom Bell and the Philly Groove

So what’s the secret? After all, Sigma Sound has no special assets.  The sleeve notes to the Neptune LP O’Jays In Philadelphia describe it as ‘unhiplooking’ and the horn and strings are invariably local union dads.  No, it's the rhythm section — the erstwhile Romeos, plus Ronnia Baker on bass, Leon Huff himself of piano, additional guitarist Bobby Eli and Norman Harris, and sometimes Len Pakula on organ, that have the magic musically.  Earl Young, for instance, will often lay off everything but hi-hat pedal and bass-drum till the first ‘hook’ chorus, say a third of the way through a track, giving it a characteristic lift when he finally bursts in.  Huff has an interesting percussive style with a tasty line in boogie left hand (check out the O’Jays’ ‘Looky Looky’).  Roland Chambers, if indeed it is him, leans on light, octave-based, Wes Montgomery-esque lines to convey an impression of effortless swing.  Meanwhile back in the control room, Kenny G.  and engineer Joe Tarsia put their individual touch on what’s coming through the monitors: punchy horns against smooth strings, imaginative percussion — claves, woodblocks, etc.  — to beef things up, and that great drum sound, copiously spiced with echo.  (And hell, a good gimmick always comes in useful — like the traffic noises that herald the Soul Survivors’ ‘Expressway To Your Heart’, or the race track effects at the start of the new Intruders, ‘She’s A Winner’).  What comes out of all this is an airy, bouncy kind of a sound; tight, but not in the sense of clean and compact, as one might apply the word to Southern funk from Memphis or Muscle Shoals.  And, like Motown again, custom-made for car radios.

Way down the bill that night in ’67 at the Uptown was a local trio, lisping slightly and resplendent in rose pink, the high-voiced lead singer mildly camping it up, to the audience’s delight.  By a year after that show, the Delfonics were Philly’s hottest act.  This was largely thanks to one man — composer, arranger, and producer for the group Thom (Tommy) Bell, the third of the mighty triumvirate that now rules Philadelphia.  While still working often for G&H and associates as arranger (he did those absurd ‘Back Stabbers’ charts), Bell created his own label, Philly Groove, distributed (confusingly) through Bell Records, exclusively for the Delfonics, notching up a run of hits that only stopped a few months ago when the group split with him, lamely carrying on under his partner, manager Stan Watson.  Thom’s songs are intricate and satisfying.  He often will plant rich, moody intros only to change to a different key and tempo when the song comes in; or lay out the verse in an unrelated key to the chorus.  ‘I’m Sorry’, ‘Break Your Promise’, ‘Ready Or Not, Here I Come’, ‘You Get Yours And I’ll Get Mine’, and for my money the best record of its type ever to emerge from Philly — the cataclysmic ‘Didn’t I Blow Your Mind This Time’.  Every one was a short but grandiose epic, hugely commercial but at the same time ambitious and unarguably solid in musical conception.  William Hart, lead singer with the group, would come up with the lyrics.  Slight and unimportant in themselves, it was the soulful whine he delivered them in that mattered.  But Thom Bell took care of biz on everything else: panoramic arrangements leaning heavily on instruments traditionally not used in R&B, like shimmering celli and Wagnerian French horns.  A lost LP track — ‘How Could You’ on the Didn’t I album, is surely one of T.B.’s great moments.  Beautiful, spine-tingling self-indulgence as a series of changes is repeated hypnotically, with increasing intensity, for five minutes, electric sitar in the lead over a hefty backbeat, with the voices coming in, softly, on the fourth minute.

In 1971, on the Delfonics departure, Thom Bell didn’t blink an eyelid.  Guided by Hugo and Luigi’s Avco Records to a local Philly group, the Stylistics, just off a minor hit on a small label with ‘You’re A Big Girl Now’, he moved to even greater heights both artistically and in terms of success proportionate to product, for the Stylistics’ album yielded no less than four single gold records.  It was the Delfonics revisited, and more.  Russell Thompkins Jnr., lead singer, has perhaps an even finer falsetto than Hart (this time out one Linda Creed does the words): he explained to me on a recent U.K.  visit that Thom Bell goes through each song round a piano with the group, sketching out harmonics and topline, cuts a basic track with rhythm section, brings the group into the studio briefly for a few hours to add the vocal, then gets to work himself on the ‘sweetening’.  Next thing the Stylistics themselves know, the record is out! One could well criticize such a process, on grounds of ‘conveyor-belt soul’.  But Lord, I’m not about to complain when the end result is so exquisite.

Bell’s work on his own songs has the edge for me over the Gamble-Huff stuff.  He goes for a different sound.  Though using the same musicians, studio, and engineer, he somehow contrives to make the final mix more integrated, with less sense of overdubbing and a greater corporate identity.  He’s as capable at the board as with the baton, churning out ingenious, even moving arrangements that are creamy but never sickly.

Totally committed until recently to the fly-by-night 3-minute single, designed for saturation AM airplay and swift obscurity, men like Gamble, Huff and Bell have turned handicap to advantage by making almost every master a complete, concise statement in itself.  But up to the last few months G&H and cohorts remained to the rock consumer remote, unfashionable figures.  Happily, though, all three men are riding their current crest of a wave on singles without compromise.  Bell’s output with the Stylistics (he’s also started to work with the Spinners) has got to be his best ever, track for track, whilst the O’Jays and H.  Melvin smashes are among the most soulful sides put together by Gamble and Huff.  No way are any of them flagging.  (An attempt by G&H in 1970 to broaden their market via a 5th-Dimension type ‘class’ group, the New Direction, was a dismal flop.  Similarly, for example, Stax’s pop product is notoriously unsuccessful.  Moral: do what you do do good!).

You won’t find any blues, not much country either, in Philadelphia; but it’s the acknowledged center for Northern black gospel and birthplace with N.Y., of 'corner-boy' vocal groups.  So it annoys me when rock experts seeking ‘roots’ should dismiss the things coming out of Sigma Sound as being too ephemeral and superficial, when the Philly men’s respect for an inspiration from these origins is undoubted.  Why the Intruders had a hit in ’69 with a faithful revival of the Dreamlovers’ ‘We’re Gonna Get Married’! Outsiders, unfamiliar with the idiom, can bypass it as not "hard" enough, or laugh at the piercing falsetto, originated by the old ‘bird’ groups like the Flamingos and used by artists like Hart and Thompkins.

But it is part of a living tradition, adopted without self-consciousness and as absorbing as anything in blues or country music.  The records stand up by any contemporary standard in pop as a whole.  To my mind at least, today’s lush backdrops and technologically perfect productions extend, rather than smother, that tradition.  I know, in these enlightened times, the black original still remains unnoticed until and unless copied in the white market — how else are the Osmonds as big as the Jackson Five? But the dwindling mass of punters who still wear blinkers making them blind to uptown soul, are missing the point, and a lot of wonderful music.

© Pete Wingfield, 1973

 

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