In 1964, the Magnificent Men, the only white act to ever headline New York 's legendary Apollo Theatre and the other major stops on the rhythm and blues "chitlin circuit," was formed from the improbable combination of two integrated bands. York, Pennsylvania's Del-Chords, a seven-member group that featured singers Dave Bupp and Adrian "Buddy" King, often played Battle of the Band contests against Harrisburg's nine-member Endells, led by drummer Bob Angelucci. Neither band could get regular club bookings owing to an unwritten proscription against mixed bands, an obstacle that spurred Bupp, King, Angelucci and some of the Endells' rhythm section (Tom Pane, Terry Crousore, Tom Hoover, and Jim Seville) to team up and begin playing as the all-white Magnificent Seven.

That year, a Harrisburg entrepreneur, Dick Phelan, began booking top rhythm and blues acts to play at his newly built Raven Teen Club and hired the Magnificent Seven as the house band. Soon the Magnificent Seven had played with and for such acts as Curtis Mayfield's Impressions, Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Gladys Knight and the Pips.


Buoyed by their success at the Raven, the group auditioned in New York City at the Peppermint Lounge and caught the attention of an agent, Ron Gittman, who signed them for a series of club dates in Manhattan . Noting that many groups were calling themselves the Magnificent Seven, Gittman, after passing by a theater marquee advertising the film, "Those Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines," redubbed his new find the Magnificent Men and wrangled an audition for them at Capitol Records. After just a few bars, Capitol executives were impressed enough to halt the audition. "Book studio time and get started," they told the band.

Capitol arranged a thirty-piece orchestra for the self-titled first album. "We put the headphones on," says Bupp, "and when those strings came in, we looked at each other in that sound booth, and I remember thinking, 'Holy shit, this is gonna be cool.'" The first side of the LP revealed everything that would mark the group's best work: Bupp and King trading leads on a version of "Misty" that they copped from the Vibrations, ending with King's falsetto spiraling into the ether; tight horns and rhythm on two Bupp-King compositions; the lush melody of a Bupp-King composition, "Peace of Mind," and their smoldering cover of Koehler and Arlen's classic, "Stormy Weather," which would later chart as a single. "Keep On Climbing" brought the side to a close with a promise: "Until I reach that mountaintop/ I'm never gonna stop."

When "Peace of Mind" climbed to the top of black radio station play lists in Philadelphia , disk jockey Georgie Woods of WDAS, booked the group to play on one of his shows at the Uptown Theater. It marked the first appearance by the Magnificent Men at a chitlin circuit venue but not the last. For the next four years, the group appeared at the Uptown, the Apollo, and Washington , D.C. 's Howard Theater , sharing the bill (and sometimes topping it) with every big name in rhythm and blues.

Convinced that the chitlin circuit provided "one type of audience you can't fool," the Magnificent Men entered the world of bright suits, ruffled shirts, and fancy footwork with a determination to sing from the heart and steer clear of "screaming," putting on "a big act," or "outlandish physical gyrations," all shortcomings they noted in other blue-eyed soul acts.

The biggest test of heart came for the Magnificent Men, as it did for all performers, at the Apollo Theater in Harlem . Although the 1960s was the Apollo's most celebrated and successful decade, following a July 1964 riot the area had become increasingly off limits for whites. As the theater's choreographer, Honi Coles, observed in 1967: "Whites don't come up here anymore because they are afraid to. All of this racial stuff and the riots has them scared."

Bupp admits that, in terms of the music, going into the Apollo was a "scary thing" to do. Sammy Davis, Jr. once cracked: "It was like playing the Copa. You didn't go into the Copa lightweight: they'd break your legs. But at the Apollo they'd break your heart." The first time on the Apollo stage, Bupp says, "stuff came flying at us before we even opened our mouths. Once we started singing, the stuff stopped coming at us, and from the first song on we got standing ovations." Even in 1966, with just one album out, the crowds that the group was drawing to the 1,700-seat theater required special police.

The crowds and the ovations would have been enough, but the Apollo provided more, first when they became the first white act to headline there, and then when they floored the Godfather of Soul. In March of 1967, the group was backstage during the Apollo's Saturday midnight show--the high point of each week. When headliner Tommy Hunt failed to show, management asked James Brown, who had dropped by, to do a few numbers. Though exhorted to perform, he was without his legendary band--no small thing inasmuch as he had, in the early 60's, gained unprecedented permission from the Apollo to use his own musicians rather than the house band. Brown asked Angelucci if the Magnificent Men knew his songs. Assured that they did, he agreed to sing and began his set, as he often did, with "I'll Go Crazy." As he finished his first verse, something unexpected happened. Pane recalls: "I can remember Buddy was running between Dave and I, giving us our notes for a background part coming up." Brown was happy to have the horns and rhythm behind him and never gave a thought to the possibility of backing vocals. "When we came in, we were right," Pane says, singing the chorus softly as he relives the memory: "'You've got to live for yourself/yourself and nobody else.' I remember he turned around when he heard the background vocals come in." Brown shot first the band, and then the crowd, a look of eye-rolling disbelief. The audience rose in glee.

The set rolled on, the Magnificent Men stepping flawlessly into parts usually reserved for Brown's Flames: draping the star with his cape, reviving him from his feigned collapses. "I am blown away by these ofay boys," Brown told the crowd. The boys were blown away by Brown, who stopped in their dressing room--five flights up--after the show. Angelucci still gets chills from the remembrance. "He was really overwhelmed," he says, "because we had every break and every cut down to a 'tee.' Everything that could be there was there: vocals, horns, rhythm. You take seven young guys from central Pennsylvania that had a hard time getting out of the teen clubs and then all of a sudden you're playing behind one of the biggest R. & B. entertainers--it was absolutely incredible. I'll never forget that as long as I live--because he really enjoyed it."

Many R. & B. groups had been together more than a decade without the payoffs that had come the Magnificent Men's way by the end of 1967. They'd appeared nationally on "The Merv Griffin Show," "The Mike Douglas Show," the Jerry Lewis telethon for muscular dystrophy (as they came off stage, Lewis told them, "You guys are pretty good. You ought to form a band") and had played on a non-televised show that Johnny Carson did at Ohio State . In 1968 they performed with the Motortown Revue in Cleveland as the only outside group to ever appear in that show's lineup. Nonetheless, they failed to crack Billboard's Top 40, and by 1969 the end was in sight.

Though as many as one hundred radio stations in 1967 had been playing primarily black music, the market was vanishing. The chitlin circuit dried up. As blacks began exploring their African roots, the Southern experience that had given R. & B. its soul and the chitlin circuit its family feel lost out. The Apollo began hosting acts that accented African heritage: Miriam Makeba, the African Ballet, among others, and the other black venues suffered in the flux of the times. In simple terms, Bupp says that "it was just no longer cool to like soul music."

With the integrationist phase of the civil rights movement wavering, time was ticking on a white band that sounded black. Having failed to produce a Top 40 record with Capitol, the group signed with Mercury and issued a final album in 1970, "Better Than a Ten Cent Movie." Its songs are a record of new tensions. "We always wanted to be a little bit ahead," says King. "And all of a sudden, we saw ourselves falling behind to Chicago , Blood, Sweat and Tears, Sly and the Family Stone."

On the new album, keyboardist Billy Richter, who had replaced Tom Hoover in 1965, admits, "We were trying to play with things we probably shouldn't have." The results were disappointing. Beginning with a cover of Dylan's "Lay, Lady, Lay" (King: "I detested our approach to that."), the album covered Mayfield's "Gone Away" and offered its own psychedelic arrangement of "Cloud Nine." Most of the cuts sounded more like the hybrid rock that Chicago was playing. Only one Bupp-King tune, "Whatever It Takes," was included. Angelucci didn't think the effort was bad, but he wasn't sure what the next step would be and he could, he says, "see it coming unglued."

Playing on a college bill with Chicago , the group blew all its amps during their opening number. Shortly thereafter, Bupp quit the group. Angelucci was felled, first by mononucleosis, then all the childhood diseases: mumps, measles, chicken pox. He never went back to the group and his departure erased any possibility that they would return to R. & B.

The transmuted band began playing a mix of Genesis, Argent, Gentle Giant, and other progressive rock. It was here--in this new music and its whiteness--that common sense and racial lore suggest they should have found their peace of mind. The group had forsaken their trademark tuxedos in favor of billowing cravats, bell bottoms, and long hair, but manager Gittman continued to book the new act as the Magnificent Men, disenchanting fans and club owners, who were expecting an R. & B. show. In 1973 the group disbanded for good, the low point having come after a six-day gig in the Florida panhandle. The promoter locked up and left town before paying them; after wiring for money, they returned for good to the hills of central Pennsylvania .

There, the world beyond music had changed as well. On July 21, 1969 , while the band was on the road, Lillie Belle Allen, a young black girl from South Carolina , accidentally steered her car into a hostile white neighborhood in York following the shooting death of a white police officer. Her murder by unknown gunmen capped ten days of violence. Two were dead and sixty were wounded. When the National Guard tanks finally left York , they rolled through blocks of charred homes and businesses. In the wake of the disturbance, the band's old stomping grounds, White Oak Park, was put out of business. Chris Huber, who had run the Battle of the Bands contests there says, "When we first started, white people tolerated whites dancing with blacks; when the riots started, they didn't."

For all that, Bupp avows, "There are no unhappy endings here." Though the seven don't see each other regularly, they have lately come to a reckoning with the group's place in pop history. In central Pennsylvania former fans get to reconnect twice a year when Angelucci unites his current band (which includes bassist Seville ), with, among others, the old Del-Chords in an assemblage he calls The Class of Sixty Something. Mixing covers of old Top 40 songs with arrangements of R. & B. that few have ever heard, it is more than an oldies act--it is one of the only places you can still hear what rhythm and blues sounded like in its heyday. It is a stirring show, and the promoter scarcely needs to mention a date before the thousand seats are gone.

Perhaps what is most moving is to see Bupp and King singing next to their former friends from the Del-Chords, Buck Generette and Spike Sexton, a reminder of the troubles that had forced the friends to split four decades earlier.

It is remembrance of those furious long-ago days of love and rage that Bupp remembers in distilling the essence of the Magnificent Men: "The truth is in the fact that we went into the Apollo Theater, blew 'em away, and came back as a co-headliner--no white group on the face of the earth was ever a headliner at the Apollo Theater."

Formed:
1966 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Disbanded:
1969




Views: 560

Comment

You need to be a member of E.FM Radio to add comments!

Join E.FM Radio

Comment by Shelley "SoleMann" King on September 22, 2008 at 6:13pm
I love that peace of mind...I have it in my music on my page...Those White Soul Brothers were smooooth
Comment by Shelley "SoleMann" King on January 7, 2008 at 3:16pm
Well i like the layout, but i just want it for a header and not all over the page.
Comment by Edie Antoinette on January 7, 2008 at 3:14pm
It's some pictures--and this layout is ON...EXCELLENT!!!

It's actually stunning...
Comment by Shelley "SoleMann" King on January 7, 2008 at 2:38pm
Pooooooooooooooor Dena....LMBO. I wish i knew her too...SMILE

Can't wait to her Mama's Classics....BIG SMILE
Comment by Edie Antoinette on January 7, 2008 at 2:36pm
I got some classics from Momma's to post--stay tuned.
Comment by Edie Antoinette on January 7, 2008 at 2:34pm
I never will forget one time Dena had did 'somethin' and Momma went and got the strap. Dena tried to get away by jumping across the bed but her long legs were her undoing--she leaped and Momma reached out and grabbed her leg--that was it!!! It looked like the Alien when he leapt onto Ripley's fleeing craft and all you could see was the spindley leg stretchin...BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Dena is going to kill me for tellin..LOLOLOL!!!!
Comment by Edie Antoinette on January 7, 2008 at 2:31pm
"a high flying 7 jumper"...? Bwaaaaaaaaaaaa
haaaaaaaaaaa..that's what you think. Where you think you got the speed from youngsta?..LOL
Comment by Shelley "SoleMann" King on January 7, 2008 at 2:27pm
Lawd his last name is King and he somebodys Buddy...LOL. I ain't seen that Candy Ring pic in a couple of years and you can't catch a high flying 7 jumper....LOL. Yes i remember MellO
Comment by Edie Antoinette on January 7, 2008 at 2:23pm
That's a great video too!!! Excellent! Say, guess who's here?? Mell0..remember him? Go welcome him please.

And oh, love you..*pinch pinch bite bite swiping your candy ring and running* LOL
Comment by Edie Antoinette on January 7, 2008 at 2:22pm
Awwww his name is Buddy King..let's leave the monster mash alone, po fella..LOL

Introspection

Entr'acte

  1. play Norman Brown — Night Drive
  2. play Norman Brown — Feeling
  3. play Norman Brown — Still
  4. play Miles Davis — miles 1
  5. play miles 2
  6. play miles 3
  7. play miles 4
  8. play miles 5
  9. play Marvin Gaye — I Met A Little Girl
  10. play Santana — 01 Singing Winds, Crying Beasts
  11. play Santana — 02 Black Magic Woman-Gypsy Queen
  12. play Mongo — 02. Afro Blue



The history of the Butlers/Raw Soul is dense, but for all of us music nerds, that's normal. It is not totally clear what year the Butlers actually formed but they released their first single in 1963 on Liberty Records. That single was "She Tried To Kiss Me" and another single followed on Guyden entitled "Lovable Girl." After the Guyden single the Butlers took a break not recording another record until the single "Laugh, Laugh, Laugh" was released on the Phila label in 1966. The group also backed Charles Earland and Jean Wells on one Phila single ("I Know She Loves Me"). 


As you might be noticing, the Butlers were doing a fair amount of recording but not achieving much success. The group's recordings sold regionally but never had the promotion to make an impact on the national scene. After the single with Phila, the Butlers moved to the Fairmount label (part of the Cameo-Parkway family) and released a handful of singles, some being reissued singles of the past. The Butlers were with Fairmount for 1966-67 and then moved to Sassy Records. Sassy released the group's greatest single (in my opinion) "Love (Your Pain Goes Deep)" b/w "If That's What You Wanted." A copy of that 45 sold for just under $500 last summer on eBay. Even though that isn't that much in the world of record collecting--it's still a hefty sum. The Butlers released another single on Sassy ("She's Gone" b/w "Love Is Good") that appears to be even 
harder to come by then the "Love (Your Pain Goes Deep)" single.

 

The true history become a bit blurred here as the AMG biography states that the Butlers last record was released on C.R.S. in 1974 (". However, between 1971 and that single, Frankie Beverly formed a group called Raw Soul and released a number of singles. Some of the songs recorded by Beverly during this period are "While I'm Alone," "Open Up Your Heart," (both on the Gregor label) and "Color Blind." "Color Blind" was released by the Eldorado label and rerecorded by Maze. Beverly's big break came when Marvin Gaye asked Raw Soul to back him on a tour. Gaye helped Beverly/Raw Soul get a contract at Capitol. Beverly decided to take the group in a different direction, a name change occurred, and Maze was created. 

The above isn't the most complete history of Beverly but hopefully someone will know a way to get in touch with the man or his management because a comprehensive pre-Maze history needs to be done on Frankie Beverly (his real name is Howard, by the way). Below you'll find every Frankie Beverly (pre-Maze) song available to me right now ("Color Blind" will be up soon). 

If you have a song that is not included below, shoot it over to funkinsoulman (at) yahoo.com and it will go up in the next Frankie Beverly post (later this week--highlighting Maze). Also, if you have any more information please share your knowledge. The Butlers material has been comp-ed sporadically (usually imports) but the entire Maze catalog has been reissued and is available. 

Enjoy.  "She Kissed Me" (Fairmount, 1966 or 1967) 
 
 "I Want To Feel I'm Wanted" (not sure which label or year) "Laugh, Laugh, Laugh" (Phila, 1966) "Because Of My Heart" (Fairmount, 1966 or 1967)
   
 "Love (Your Pain Goes Deep)" (Sassy, 1967)
   
 "If That's What You Wanted" (Sassy, 1967)
 



Frankie Beverly is one of those cats that has lasting power. He started in the music business doing a tour with doo wop group the Silhouettes and then formed his own group called the Blenders. The Blenders never recorded a single, Beverly wouldn't appear on wax until forming the Butlers a few years later. Along with Beverly, the Butlers included Jack "Sonny" Nicholson, Joe Collins, John Fitch, and Talmadge Conway.

Beverly would later enjoy great success fronting Maze and Conway would become a
well-known penning Double Exposure's
"Ten Percent" and the Intruders' "Memories Are Here To Stay." 
 While Maze is a phenomenal group, Beverly's work before that group will always stand out as his best (imo).

The Butlers produced tunes that most Northern Soul fans would kill for and Raw Soul gave the funksters something to pursue. If, by chance, you know of a way to get in touch with Frankie Beverly or his management, please drop me an e-mail. It would be absolutely great to do an interview with him about his pre-Maze work. He's still playing out, most recently doing a New Year's Eve show in Atlanta.
:: Funkinsoulman ::

Power...Through Simplicity ♪♫♪

Members

About

© 2024   Created by Edie Antoinette.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service