Gladys Knight & The Pips - Essential 1961-1965
GLADYS KNIGHT & THE PIPS LONG NOTES
It was quite a rare development when a new act exploded on the charts with two simultaneously released versions of the same song. But that’s precisely what happened when Gladys Knight and the Pips watched their two competing renditions of “Every Beat Of My Heart” chase one another up the R&B and pop hit parades during the spring of 1961.
The extremely unusual situation wasn’t their fault. The first version, which turned out to be an R&B chart-topper, was released without their consent—for all intents, a bootleg. The other, which sold very well too, is one of the many highlights of this expansive overview of the legendary Atlanta group’s early years, when Gladys and the Pips traversed the U.S. on all-star package tours and made a name for themselves as a high-energy act displaying dynamic vocal harmonies with a lovely teenaged lead singer who glowed with soul-steeped goodness.
There’s a possibility that none of it would have happened if a young neighbor of the Knights hadn’t insisted on taking his record player home at Gladys’ brother Bubba’s tenth birthday party because no one else wanted to hear his choice of platters. That lack of recorded sounds forced Gladys, Bubba, and their relatives to make their own music—and confirmed the quintet had real vocal talent, enough to convince their folks to invest in their performing future.
Of course, Gladys’ singing ability was already fairly well-known across the nation. At the tender age of four, Little Miss Gladys, born May 28, 1944, had been a featured vocalist at Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Atlanta. In 1952, she traveled to New York City several times by train to compete on the nationally televised Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour—and against all odds, won it all by charming the country’s TV viewers as she closed in weekly on the big prize (the award practically stood as tall as Gladys). The finals were televised live from Madison Square Garden.
“I didn’t realize the importance of it until much later in my life. I was seven years old, and I was just kind of being obedient to my parents, you know? I enjoyed singing, but I couldn’t understand what the hoopla was all about,” said Gladys. “I did ‘Brahms’ Lullaby’ on one show. I did ‘Because Of You’ on one show. But the winning song that everybody started to request was ‘Too Young’ by Nat Cole. That’s the one I sang at the Garden.”
It was later that same year when Gladys surprised her older brother Merald, Jr. (born September 4, 1942), better known as Bubba, with that backyard shindig for his tenth birthday. “It was a surprise party,” says Gladys. “We got like 20 cents worth of bologna and two loaves of bread and a jar of mayonnaise and some Kool-Aid and some potato chips. And the girls all got together and made the sandwiches, and we cut ‘em real little and put ‘em on some plates.
“When they came in from the playground, we said, ‘Hey, why don’t you guys come in for a minute?’ And so Bubbs came in with his friends, and when they came in, we said, ‘Surprise!’ And so we had a little party. We went out in the backyard and we had borrowed another friend’s little record player. We had 78 records at the time.
“We went out in the backyard, hooked up the record player through the bedroom window, and started dancing and having fun. And then the guy that we borrowed his record player, he said, ‘I don’t wanna play that song!’ We said, ‘Well, we want to hear that song!’ ‘Well, I’ll take my record player home!’ So we said, ‘Okay!’ So we said, ‘Okay, let’s have a talent show!’ So everybody got off in their little corners and started figuring out what they were gonna do.
“We decided, because my cousin Eleanor, my sister Brenda, my brother Bubba, and my cousin William, we all went to the same church. So we said, ‘Well, let’s sing something!’ So we got together and we sang something. And we went inside for that part, because it was getting dark. And our parents were there and heard us singing, and that’s kind of how we got it going. They came and said, ‘Hey, you guys sounded great! Is that something you’d like to continue doing?’ And we said, ‘Yeah!’”
“We all sung together prior to that at church,” said Bubba. “We would meet each other at church on Sunday. So we actually sung long before that. We just say that that was the beginning, because that was the first time we had performed in front of an audience, other than in church.”
“The original group then, there was three girls and two boys,” noted their late cousin William Guest, who was born June 2, 1941. “There was Gladys and Bubba’s other sister Brenda, and my sister Eleanor Guest. There was three girls and two boys at that time.”
An older cousin emerged to act as the newly minted group’s manager. Perhaps more importantly, he lent then his nickname for their stage moniker. “His name was James Woods, but everybody knew him as Pip,” said Gladys. “He did so much for us. We just said, ‘We can’t pay you.’ And in the beginning, he wouldn’t accept money anyway. He just loved helping us out.”
“After we decided we was gonna sing together, he took up a lot of time. He would take us around to different places that let us rehearse so people could hear us,” said Guest. “He took us to different things, like we found that a lot of church organizations would have teas on Sundays. And we would go over there and we would sing. And he would take us from there to other places for people to hear us.
“So after we started rehearsing, one time we said, ‘Well, we’re gonna find us a name.= So everybody went home and brought back a list of names. Had all kinds of birds and flowers and stuff like that. So we couldn’t decide on the names that everybody brought in, so we decided that we’d name it after him. His nickname was Pip. And so he said, ‘Oh, no, you don=t want to name yourself that!’ We said, ‘Yeah! We’re gonna name ourselves the Pips, and we’ll never change!’”
Their early repertoire was varied. “Spiritual songs, gospel songs, popular songs,” said Bubba. “‘Canadian Sunset,’ ‘How High The Moon,’ songs of that nature. We did ‘Bless This House’ and ‘The Glory Of Love.’ All types of songs.” Added William, We didn’t focus in on just R&B. We just was doing songs that we liked to do. And they was all type of songs.”
Mrs. Knight had impressive connections up in the Motor City. She hired veteran bandleader Maurice King, later a Motown mainstay, to polish the youngsters’ act. King was the musical director at the Flame Show Bar (Berry Gordy’s older sisters Anna and Gwen operated its photo concession), and he’d cut a 1951 session for OKeh with then-unknown vocalist LaVern Baker. During World War II, King had managed the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, a pioneering integrated all-female orchestra.
“He was a friend of my mom’s,” Gladys said. “My mom would put us with who she thought could really teach us, and take us to whatever levels we could go. She wasn’t pushing us to be anything, but she always wanted us to be the best that we could be. And she would give us whatever help we’d need.”
“We used to go to Detroit every summer when we would get out of school,” said Bubba. “Our parents would take us up—Mama, and Big Brother (William) and Eleanor=s parents, and my mom, Elizabeth Knight, would take us up. And Mr. King would train us vocally during the summer. He liked us so well, and he saw the potential in us being a successful group, that he went out and got us a record deal with Brunswick Records. And he brought to us the songs ‘Whistle My Love’ and ‘Ching Chong.’ And that was our first experience in recording. We recorded it in Detroit on Brunswick. They released the record. Came out, didn’t make a whole lot of noise, but it did introduce us to the recording industry.”
King wrote the swinging “Whistle My Love” himself and teamed with the Pips and Richard Hunter to brainstorm the novelty “Ching Chong.” Issued on Coral’s Brunswick imprint in January of 1958 as by the Pips, “Whistle My Love” was a minor hit in the group’s hometown, which didn’t hurt their gigging opportunities one bit. “We just did a lot of work in Atlanta, because I think that was the only place they really played the record,” said Guest.
“And we were already the number one group in Atlanta,” added Bubba. “That was just like a little bit of icing on the cake, because people could say, ‘Yeah, they’re recording artists! They’re not just a local group. They record also!’ Though we didn’t have any national recognition recording-wise at that point.” But the road beckoned as well.
“There was a guy that managed us later on by the name of Henry Wynn,” said Bubba. “He had an organization in Atlanta called Supersonic Attractions. And that’s how we got a chance to start being on tours with people like Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, and all the popular artists during that time. Because they worked for Henry Wynn on tours in the south. Henry Wynn would put us on the same tours with those people.”
“By that time, we had started really working the theater circuit and the one-nighter circuit,” said Guest. “They used to have us to start to show off and stuff. Then later on, people started calling us show-spoilers, because we would start to show off, and the people didn’t want to come on behind us. So they started calling us the show-spoiling kids.”
Not long after their debut release, Brenda and Eleanor left to attend college. They were replaced by Woods’ cousin-by-marriage Edward Patten (born August 27, 1939 and formerly of a rival group, the Overalls) and Langston George, born March 7, 1940. “He was one of my cousins that I didn’t get along with too good, so I wasn’t happy about that decision in the beginning,” said Gladys of Edward. “He turned out to be the best cousin. My staunchest supporter.”
While attending Archer High School in Atlanta, Gladys secured a musical mentor of her own in school band director Lloyd Terry. “He also had a jazz band that played around town, a very popular jazz band. And he knew of my singing, and so we were just talking one day. He said, ‘How’d you like to sing with the band?’” said Gladys, who acquired herself a strong jazz education by checking out Terry’s huge album collection. “Before he let me sing a note, he made me study them,” she said. “Now I’m so grateful to him for that move, because it opened up a whole new musical world for me. I mean, I had heard jazz before, but sometimes knowing a thing and studying it gives you a different perspective of it.
“He would quiz me. He’d say, ‘What’d you listen to? What’d you think? What’d you hear?= He was just awesome. And that’s where my love for this music grew. And my experience with the band was so much more, I think, because of that, than what it would have been. I did the band throughout my high school years.”
The Pips made some interesting contacts on the road. “We was on a tour with Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, the people that made >The Twist.’ So at night on the bus, there was a guy in the group, his name was Sonny Woods. And he said, ‘I’ve got a song, kids, I’d like to teach you that we recorded.’ They recorded ‘Every Beat Of My Heart,’” said Guest. “And he taught it to us. Little did we know that later on, we would have an opportunity to record it.”
And had the Pips known that they were recording the song that would make them stars, they might have been a bit more nervous about the occasion when it did arrive. But nightclub owner Clifford “Fats” Hunter didn’t inform them that he had anything more in mind than laying down a quick demo when he asked the group to let him tape some of their repertoire.
“We were performing at this club called the Builders Club,” says Gladys. “They got some equipment in one weekend. And so the owner of the club, to show you how stupid we were then, said, ‘Would you guys mind doing me a favor? We got some equipment. We don’t know what this stuff will do. We got some equipment in today, so could you guys stay over after the show a little bit tonight and put down some things that you’re doing, so we can test out this equipment?’”
“They asked us what we was gonna sing, so we decided we would sing the song that Sonny Woods taught us,” said Bubba. “We rehearsed it with the band, Cleveland Lyons’ trio. And we sang that song.”
“After the show was over and everybody left the club, we went and they set up the mic onstage,” continued Gladys. “So we started singing, and so we put down some things. And then he said, ‘Do you guys have anything original or anything like that that you do?’ And we said, ‘Well, yeah!’ We were always preparing. My mom told us to always be ready for an opportunity. So I said, ‘Yeah, we were preparing in case we got a record deal one day, to have some stuff to record.’ He said, ‘Well, why don’t you throw some of that on while you’re at it?’ Okay. So we did it, and ‘Every Beat Of My Heart’ was the song.”
“Every Beat Of My Heart” wasn’t an original. Woods was a member of the Royals when his group cut the ballad for Syd Nathan’s Cincinnati-based Federal Records in March of 1952. Its composer, Johnny Otis, was one of the architects of postwar Los Angeles rhythm and blues as a bandleader, multi-instrumentalist, talent scout, nightclub owner, deejay, label head, and producer. He’d scored no less than 10 R&B chart entries in 1950 (including three chart-toppers) and three more hits in 1951, all for Herman Lubinsky’s Savoy label and its Regent subsidiary. The breathtaking ballad “Every Bit Of My Heart” wasn’t a hit for the Royals, but once the Hank Ballard-fronted outfit changed their name to the Midnighters in 1954 and paced the R&B hit parade with “Work With Me Annie,” their fortunes improved considerably.
Hunter and Atlanta jump blues shouter Tommy Brown (he tearfully fronted the Griffin Brothers Orchestra on their 1952 R&B chart-topper “Weepin’ & Cryin’” for Dot Records), launched their HunTom label with the Pips’ “Every Beat Of My Heart” in February of ‘61. The rough-and-ready rocker “Room In Your Heart,” authorship unlisted on the label, sat on the flip.
(Organist/bandleader Cleveland Lyons, described as a mortician by day and musician by night, committed suicide in August of 1962 right after shooting ex-Phillies baseball catcher Valmy Thomas in a dispute. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke at the 43-year-old Lyons’ services at the Reverend’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Lyons had cut a 1957 single for RCA Victor’s Vik logo, “Fantastic Mood”).
When the Pips learned they had a new record on the shelves that they knew nothing about, they were flummoxed. “Our school friends were saying, ‘Oh, we love your record!’ Said, ‘What record?’” said Gladys. “Before we could crack down on ‘em and my mom got a hold of it, they sold the master to Vee-Jay.”
“He had put the record out all in Florida and South Carolina and North Carolina, which we wasn’t aware of,” said Guest. “And then the record got to Atlanta. I never will forget, I went to get my clothes from the cleaners. And I heard this song, ‘Every Beat Of My Heart,’ and I passed by the record store, and they had it on the outside speakers. And I just started singing right along with the song. But then I said, ‘Hey!! That’s us!!’ And I ran off and called Bubba. I said, ‘Bubba! Guess what I heard! I heard our song!’ And Bubba said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been hearing it on the radio all day.’ And that’s how we found out we had a record out.”
With regional demand for “Every Beat Of My Heart” building, Hunter sold the single to Chicago’s Vee-Jay Records, home to Jimmy Reed, John Lee Hooker, Dee Clark, and the Impressions. “Then after that, simultaneously, there was a talent scout in Atlanta from Fury Records, Marshall Sehorn,” said Gladys. “He had come by to visit my mom and talk to her about us signing with Fury. And after they had a long conversation, she finally decided that we could do that. So they flew us to New York, and we went and signed with them. And in the meantime, they said, ‘What we want to do is re-record “Every Beat Of My Heart,” and we’re gonna put it out on Fury, even though the Vee-Jay one is already out. And we’re gonna call this one Gladys Knight and the Pips, if that’s alright with you. ‘Cause that’s a way for us to distinguish between their record and ours.’”
So on April 19, 1961, Gladys and the Pips visited Beltone Studios at 4 West 31st Street in Manhattan to recut “Every Beat Of My Heart” for Bobby Robinson’s Fury Records, this time with Dave “Baby” Cortez on organ (he’d topped the pop hit parade in 1959 with his perky instrumental “The Happy Organ” on the Clock label). Recreating the original platter was so crucial to Robinson’s strategy that they even re-recorded its flip, “Room In Your Heart,” with a tighter arrangement for the B-side. “What we was trying to do was duplicate the sound,” said Guest. “Baby Cortez, he was already a Fire/Fury artist. So Bobby just got him and some more guys, and we duplicated the sound.”
The race was on for chart supremacy.
“A telegram came in that night saying that HunTom Records out of Atlanta had sold his master tape to Vee-Jay Records in Chicago,” said Guest. “Therefore, our record was out on three labels at the same time, and they was trying to outdo each other. As a result of that, it exposed our name to the world. People started knowing who the Pips were at the time.”
The Vee-Jay and Fury singles both entered Billboard’s R&B charts on May 29, no doubt confounding radio stations and record buyers alike (the Vee-Jay 45 finally revealed that “Room In Your Heart” was penned by Langston George). When the smoke cleared, the Vee-Jay rendition of “Every Beat Of My Heart” had skyrocketed all the way to #1 R&B and #6 pop. The Fury remake stalled behind it at #15 R&B and #45 pop. But Robinson would have the last laugh: Gladys and the Pips were now officially Fury artists, available to cut more hits.
In addition to operating the hottest record shop on Harlem’s 125th Street (just down the block from the Apollo Theatre), the Union, South Carolina-born Robinson had owned a series of R&B indie labels in New York dating back to 1951, when he launched the Robin label with his brother Danny. That soon morphed into Red Robin, a label dominated by vocal groups (the Velvets, Scarlets, Vocaleers, and Rainbows) and rough-edged blues and R&B (Champion Jack Dupree, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Tiny Grimes, and sax honker Red Prysock).
Red Robin folded in early ‘56. Bobby immediately went into business with Jerry Blaine to launch Whirlin’ Disc Records. Despite introducing the Channels to doo-wop fans, the partnership lasted less than a year. Robinson wasted no time in forming Fury in ‘57, kicking off his new enterprise with a single by Lewis Lymon and the Teenchords. Once again, vocal groups were a priority at Fury, Bobby doing well with the Kodoks, Channels, and Starlites. But he did a lot better with single artists—especially Wilbert Harrison, whose tough-as-nails 1959 revival of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s “Kansas City” was an across-the-board chart-topper.
Thanks to Buster Brown (“Fannie Mae”), Elmore James (“The Sky Is Crying”), Bobby Marchan (“There Is Something On Your Mind”), Lee Dorsey (“Ya Ya”), and Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford (“I Need Your Loving”), Fury and its Fire subsidiary would make Robinson one of the most successful R&B indie label bosses of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Gladys and the Pips did their part to enrich Bobby’s coffers, recording exclusively in New York for the label.
For their initial Fury encore that summer, the quintet (Gladys was now permanently front-billed) latched on to Jesse Belvin’s tender ballad “Guess Who,” a sizable hit for the R&B crooner in the spring of ‘59 on RCA Victor. Despite a bravura reading by Gladys, the remake, produced by Sehorn and Robinson, avoided the charts entirely. With “Every Beat Of My Heart” still a national sensation, it may have simply been too soon for a followup. Bubba and William were responsible for the eminently Twistable flip side “Stop Running Around,” spotlighting Gladys’ volcanic pipes over a churning up-tempo groove.
By the time Fury tried again late that autumn, the public was ready for a new single from Gladys and her Pips. Don Covay, a Washington, D.C. vocalist and songwriter whose “Pony Time” was a major hit for Chubby Checker earlier in the year, penned the dramatic “Letter Full Of Tears,” and the group had its second winner for Fury. The emotionally charged ballad maxed out at #3 R&B and #19 pop during the early weeks of 1962.
“Don Covay wrote it specifically for us, and then Bobby Robinson had Horace Ott to do the arrangement. And that was the first time we had ever used a string section. Horace Ott was well-known for his string arrangements,” said Bubba. “Bobby didn’t really want to record strings, and Marshall Sehorn begged him to put strings on this song for us. Because during that time, when you used strings, it kind of made yourself a little bit more sophisticated than the regular R&B thing. Oh man, that was outstanding! We thought we was on our way then!” “You Broke Your Promise,” another violin-drenched ballad, was its B-side, its authorship credited to Izore Williams, Bobby Dunn, and Robinson.
Bob Elgin and Edward Snyder (as K. Rogers), two-thirds of the trio that wrote Gene McDaniels’ 1961 smash “A Hundred Pounds Of Clay,” scribed Gladys and the Pips’ next Fury offering, “Operator” with Ray Jones. Under Sehorn and Robinson’s supervision, Ott sketched out a bright and brisk uptown soul arrangement decorated with dancing strings, but the single barely squeaked into the lowest rungs of the pop hit parade during the spring of ‘62 and missed the R&B charts altogether.
“We was trying to get something close to ‘Letter Full Of Tears,’ because it had been such a good record for us,” said William.
“That was Horace Ott, ‘cause he made that string arrangement real close to ‘Letter Full Of Tears,’” said Bubba. “‘Operator’ worked out real good as one of the numbers in the show, because of the kind of the tempo that it had.” Covay conferred with Dunn, Williams, and Robinson to create the elegant ballad gracing the opposite side, “I’ll Trust In You.”
Then Gladys decided to take a break. “Gladys went home to start a family,” said Bubba. “She got married, and she started a family. She had her first child, little Jimmy Newman, Jr. She wanted to raise her child. She didn’t want to drag a child up and down the road, and she wanted to start a family. So she decided that she was gonna come off the road for a while.
“So William, Edward and myself decided to keep the name of the Pips going, ‘cause we felt like we still had enough talent to keep rolling. Langston went solo. We called Bobby Robinson and told him we wanted to record some music. And he said, ‘What kind are you gonna record? Y’all background singers!= So anyway, he gave us a shot. We recorded ‘Linda’ and ‘Darling,’ and it came out good. So we kept alive that way ‘til Gladys, her and her husband (saxist Jimmy Newman) decided to come back on the road, come back into the business.”
“Bobby Robinson didn’t have no idea we could sing by ourselves,” added Guest. “So when we sang that in front of him in person, his eyes lit up like a light. He saw another group inside the group.”
Robinson dug the dazzlingly harmonized “Darling” and “Linda,” both generated within the group, releasing them on Fury under the Pips moniker in the summer of 1962. “We worked off of that, because he put ‘Darling’ and ‘Linda’ out around the New York area, the Philadelphia area, Washington D.C., key cities,” said Bubba. “And we worked all of these places, just as the Pips.”
“Matter of fact, we was getting real, real popular at that time,” said Guest.
“We was bad!” replied Bubba.
“We was drawing crowds,” said William.
“Gladys used to come see us at the Uptown Theater,” remembered Bubba. “She’d be in the audience, watching us sing, and then we’d introduce her, and the people were happy. They’d call her up on the stage, they’d applaud: ‘Yay! Yay! Yay!’”
“People thought we were back together,” said Guest.
“She’d come up on the stage, and we’d let her sing in our act. And then we’d say, ‘Okay, get off!’” laughed Bubba.
Gladys made her own short-lived attempt at solo stardom, Fury issuing her yearning ballad “Come See About Me,” a Robinson/Sehorn production, at the start of 1963 without any mention of the Pips on the label. Covay wrote it with Charlie Partee, Ott’s multi-layered arrangement blending strings, a vocal group well back in the mix, keening harmonica, and kettle drums (Don waxed his own version for his 1964 debut album on Atlantic). Ott piled the violins on the melodramatic flip “I Want That Kind Of Love,” another arresting Elgin/Rogers creation.
Somehow or other, the stately Robinson-produced ballad “Queen Of Tears,” written by New York stalwarts LaCharles Harper and Ronnie Miller, was leased to Vee-Jay—the very logo that beat Bobby out on “Every Beat Of My Heart”—in the summer of ‘63. The 45 listed Gladys as a solo and a “Vocal Background by The Pips” line inserted in smaller typeface underneath. The same credits were used on the opposite side, “A Love Like Mine,” its authorship credited to Bobby and drummer/momentary Fury artist Delmar Donnell.
“William, Edward and myself were living in New York at the time,” said Bubba. “And Gladys and her husband came back to New York. She recorded a song called ‘Queen Of Tears,’ which didn’t do very well for her. And at that particular time, we were living with Marghuerite Mays. We had apartments in her home, Willie Mays’ ex-wife. And we had apartments in her home that we were paying rent on. I was working, and Baby Brother and Edward were working. We had other jobs, other than singing. We survived that period together by working and trying to rehearse whenever we could.
“Gladys came to New York, and Marghuerite Mays had an apartment available. Gladys and her husband needed a place to stay. So we told her about the apartment, and her and her husband moved out and they started paying rent out there. And Marghuerite Mays came down one day and said, ‘Why don’t you guys just go back together and be a group once again, because you were so talented as a unit?’ So we decided, ‘Okay, we’ll do that.’ To make a long story short, we all quit our jobs and started rehearsing again. And Marghuerite let us live in her house until we started back working again.”
“She wouldn’t allow us to go hang around with the people that we were hanging around with before that time,” said William. “She said she wanted us to stay there and woodshed and practice. That’s when we located Cholly Atkins, and we located Larry Maxwell during that time. Larry Maxwell started his own label at that time by the name of Maxx Records. It was like a subsidiary of Amy/Mala/Bell Records. So she wanted us to just get prepared, so once we’d come out again, we would be ready. We went and found Cholly Atkins during that time.”
“Marguerite introduced us to Cholly,” said Bubba. “She knew him through Sammy Davis, Jr., and Coles & Atkins.”
“We found him, and she asked him, ‘Would you start working with us on choreography?=” said Guest. “And he was more than happy to, ‘cause he had heard about us. Because we were doing a lot of high steppin’ and our own unique type dancing even before we met him. That’s what made us so popular, because we took the dances that we knew in Atlanta, along with the creative minds in the group, and created our own style. The people loved us because of our performances. So Cholly Atkins came along and enhanced that a thousand percent.
“Larry Maxwell, he was about to start his own label called Maxx Records. So he asked Marghuerite, could he record us? So he did, and people still thought we was broken up. The first record we recorded was ‘Giving Up.’ When we recorded that, Marghuerite Mays was very instrumental in people beginning to know us again.”
For the song that would reintroduce Gladys and the Pips to the record-buying public, Maxwell turned to Van McCoy, a Washington, D.C. native who spent time during the late ‘50s with an R&B vocal group, the Starlighters, that recorded for George Goldner’s End label. McCoy went solo in 1961 with a handful of 45s on the Rock’n logo, but songwriting was his specialty. McCoy’s elegant ballad “Giving Up” was just the vehicle to relaunch the quartet on Maxx in March of 1964. Either Gladys or her hubby was responsible for the slinky flip “Maybe Maybe Baby”—it was credited to Newman on the label—and she was largely relegated to a responsorial chorus role, weaving through the mix while the male Pips grabbed the spotlight.
Mays was heavily involved in promoting the single. “She took us to the radio station,” said Guest. “By that time, there was a guy in New York by the name of the Magnificent Montague. He was the popular jock in New York. So we took it in and we broke that record that night in the studio with him. So then later on, she went to the Apollo Theater and spoke to Honi Coles, which was the manager of the Apollo Theater, and he was Cholly Atkins’ ex-partner. They was known as Coles & Atkins. They was a tap dancing team. So he booked us in the Apollo. So when we came back to the Apollo, when we jumped back on the scene again, we was hot. We had a new record, a hot record, and a new show, new clothes, new everything. She was very instrumental in this group too.”
“Giving Up” broke into the pop Top 40 that spring, and Gladys Knight and the Pips were on their way once more. “That was the first record that made a debut for the label, for Larry Maxwell,” said Guest. “And that was the first time Cholly Atkins had started working with us. So it was brand-new. And we had good routines and everything. Everything was fresh. New song, new writer, new choreographer, new clothes, new everything. And from then on, it seemed like our career just really started really booming.”
Meanwhile, Robinson dug into his deep stash of masters by the group that summer and pulled out “What Shall I Do,” an irresistible Horace Ott-penned ballad given the full uptown soul treatment, and the group-penned “Love Call,” rendered in sensuous harmony. The single emerged on Enjoy, yet another of Bobby’s labels (sax blaster King Curtis had inaugurated it in style in 1962 with his R&B chart-topping instrumental “Soul Twist”).
Both songs had first surfaced on the group’s ‘62 Fury album Letter Full of Tears, primarily a compendium of singles (“Love Call” was then known as “I Really Didn’t Mean It”). There were two exceptions: the driving “Morning, Noon And Night” (the work of Richard Gottehrer, who usually wrote with Bob Feldman and Jerry Goldstein inside New York’s fabled Brill Building but went solo here) and “I Can’t Stand By,” an intimate ballad constructed by Elgin, Rogers, and Ott.
Wasting no time, the group was back on Maxx that summer with another ultra-classy McCoy-penned ballad, “Lovers Always Forgive.” It lingered for five weeks in the lower rungs of the pop charts before fading, but deserved a much higher profile. “Van McCoy was a writer, boy,” said Bubba. “Oh, he had some good songs. I loved doing Van McCoy’s songs.” Its utterly relentless flip side “Another Love” emanated from inside the immediate Knight family, the Pips displaying spine-chilling harmonies behind Gladys’ commanding lead.
Maxx got one more single out on the group before year’s end. McCoy supplied the sophisticated “Either Way I Lose,” while Billy Myles, the New York songsmith who had his own 1957 hit on the Ember logo with “The Joker (That’s What They Call Me),” was responsible for the simmering B-side “Go Away, Stay Away.” Gladys and her guys kicked off 1965 with McCoy’s pulsating “Stop And Get A Hold of Myself;” Knight and Guest teamed to pen the B-side, the delightfully intense “Who Knows.” Myles was back with the lilting plug side of the quartet’s next Maxx offering in the summer of 1965, “If I Should Ever Fall In Love,” while Knight and Newman were credited with bringing in the dramatic flip “Tell Her You’re Mine.”
Inexplicably, Gladys and the Pips’ last three Maxx singles avoided the charts altogether. Maxwell folded his label and took a gig as a Motown promo man, offering to bring Gladys and the Pips along to Hitsville. That prompted some spirited debate within the group. “When the vote came up to go to Motown, we had three for and one against,” said Bubba. “Gladys didn’t want to go to Motown. For a good reason: she didn’t want to be put in that line of Motown artists that she felt that we would have to come behind.”
“I said, ‘I don’t want to go over there. We’ve been fine up to now, creating our own avenues, our own following--the whole thing. You know if we go over there, we’re gonna come behind all those artists they consider their best. We won’t get the attention that I feel we deserve at this stage,’” explained Gladys. “The guys were so adamant, said, ‘We know how to take care of ourselves. But what we need is a nationwide hit--worldwide, if we’re so blessed to get one. And we think Motown can do it!’ I said, ‘Yeah, if they will. But I don’t think they will.’”
“We decided that we didn’t have that much to lose,” said Bubba. “Because if we hit it big at Motown, that meant we would hit it big! But if we didn’t at least we could get over there and get the experience, work with the best writers and producers, and all of that. We could learn ourselves how to become better writers and better producers. So here was a win-win situation for us, by going over there, even if we did not get a hit record.”
But they did, reuniting with Maurice King and Cholly Atkins after their arrival. Teaming initially with producer Norman Whitfield, the group scored huge 1967 hits with “Everybody Needs Love” and the volcanic “I Heard It Through The Grapevine.” After that, the smashes came non-stop: the funky “The Nitty Gritty” and “Friendship Train” in 1969 preceded two more #1 R&B blockbusters, “If I Were Your Woman” in 1970 and “Neither One Of Us (Wants To Be The First To Say Goodbye)” in early ’73, just before they exited Motown to sign with Buddah. That’s where Gladys Knight & the Pips achieved full-fledged superstardom.
“A lot of people think the real marriage was with Motown,” said Bubba. “But the real marriage was with Buddah Records.”
“Midnight Train To Georgia” became the quartet’s first across-the-board chart-topper in the autumn of ’73. Their immediate Buddah encores “I’ve Got To Use My Imagination” and “Best Thing That Ever Happened To Me” also paced the R&B hit parade. Gladys Knight and the Pips continued to ride high until 1989, when the soul-soaked chanteuse went solo (she continues to perform today). The Pips went into retirement; Edward died February 5, 2005, while William passed on Christmas Eve of 2015.
The amazing story of Gladys Knight and the Pips begins in spectacular fashion with the music on this comprehensive collection.
--Bill Dahl
SOURCES
Between Each Life of Pain and Glory–My Life Story, by Gladys Knight (New York: Hyperion, 1997)
Discogs website: www.discogs.com
45cat website: www.45cat.com
Jet, September 5, 1962: “Atlanta Mourns Tragic Death of Musician Lyons”
Joel Whitburn’s Top Pop Singles 1955-1990, by Joel Whitburn (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc., 1991)
Joel Whitburn’s Top R&B Singles 1942-1988, by Joel Whitburn (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc., 1988)
Van McCoy, Inc. official website: HYPERLINK "http://vanmccoymusic.com/van/bio.htm" http://vanmccoymusic.com/van/bio.htm
Wikipedia website: HYPERLINK "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Knight_%26_the_Pips" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Knight_%26_the_Pips