Free Traveling Soul by Todd Mayfield Page A

Impressions would go through when the record hit. The paranoia subsided. “We were very happy and very grateful,” Jerry said. “Mostly, though, we were very surprised that a group like the Spaniels, with all their success, would be that decent and down to Earth.”
    Muszynski and Abner drew up a contract signing the Impressions to Bandera for one year, with an option to renew within five days of its expiration. Vee-Jay would distribute the records. The Impressions got two points, which in the music industry’s arcane lingo meant they’d earn 2 percent in royalties out of every 90 percent of records sold. Bandera didn’t have a standard contract form, so they borrowed one from Vee-Jay, crossing out the Vee-Jay masthead and typing Bandera’s below it. Everyone signed, and since my father, Richard, and Jerry were minors, their mothers also had to sign the contract.
    Saturday morning, the Impressions had their first professional recording date. They arrived early and stood outside Universal Studios on Walton Street, trying to stop their nerves from jangling. Finally, Arthur broke the macho facade, saying, “I ain’t gonna lie, I’m scared as hell.” Everyone burst out laughing and calmed down.
    They entered Studio A, “a huge room with the control room way up in the air, like an airport,” according to the recording engineer that day. The Impressions began with one of my father’s earliest compositions, “Sweet Was the Wine,” a song straddling the line between doo-wop and rock ’n’ roll, a genre just beginning to take the white world by storm in the form of a swivel-hipped dynamo named Elvis Presley. It took a few passes to warm up, but as Jerry remembered it, “Four or five takes later, we got into a good groove. My voice cracked on one note. [Carter] played ‘Sweet Was the Wine’ back a couple of times to convince himself it wasn’t too bad. Then he asked us to do ‘Precious Love.’”
    From the days rehearsing in Seward Park, the Impressions were used to singing a song again and again until they had it just right. But after half a dozen takes of “Precious Love,” it still sounded wrong. Due to union rules, my father couldn’t play guitar on the record, so two other players named Lefty and Guitar Red filled in. They might have been great session men, but with their standard tuning, they weren’t getting the
sound
. Carter, to his credit, recognized the problem.
    He told Curtis to grab his guitar. Taking Lefty and Guitar Red aside, he asked them to sit out without telling the union—such a breach could get Vee-Jay into an expensive legal battle. Carter returned to the recording console and told the Impressions to hit the song again. Two takes later, it was perfect. Carter wanted to send it to the pressing plant right away. In fact, he liked it so much he had several acetates, or test pressings, cut that day so he could take one home.
    Carter gave one of the acetates to his sister Vivian (as cofounder of the label, she was the “Vee” in “Vee-Jay”), who hosted a radio show in Gary, Indiana. She told the Impressions she’d play it that night. When the time came, the group huddled around a radio in the Brooks house aching with anticipation. Finally, Vivian introduced the song and Curtis’s opening guitar notes seeped from the radio’s speakers. Jerry recalled, “When we heard that song coming across that little box that was sitting there over in the corner, we started out jumping up and down on the bed, grabbing, hugging each other, and then we started to cry because it was overwhelming. And we didn’t really know how good it soundeduntil we heard it on the radio. Then people started calling, ‘Play it again.’ She must have played it five or six times.”
    The young Impressions had little time to bask in the glow of their radio debut. The next day, they