Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (21 page)

But Moynihan wasn’t finished in his efforts to rewrite the country’s racial history. In his role as an adviser on urban and social policy to the recently elected Republican Richard Nixon, Moynihan wrote a memo to the president that would become as infamous as “The Negro Family.” “The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect,’” the memorandum stated. “The subject has been too much talked about. The forum has been too much taken over by hysterics, paranoids and boodlers on all sides. We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades. The Administration can help bring this about by paying close attention to such progress—as we are doing—while seeking to avoid situations in which extremists of either race are given opportunities for martyrdom, heroics, histrionics, or whatever.”
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Granted, Moynihan was probably desperately scrambling to prevent the Nixon regime from going headlong down a path of extreme racial polarization. But, as Peter Carroll wrote, “The manipulation of language, the message implied, would diminish black expectations, allow the inertia of American institutions to absorb and soften the demands for change.”
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When it was printed in
The New York Times,
the memo, once again, was greeted by howls of protest from black leaders and liberals from Moynihan’s own party. “The most significant reaction to the Moynihan letter, however, was scarcely noted,” Carroll wrote. “As a historical symptom, silence is an elusive document, impossible to verify or quote. But while black leaders and liberals denounced the cynicism of administration attitudes, the mass of blacks hardly blinked at all. For them, presidential machinations simply reinforced a sense of separation, a feeling that government was a white man’s game in which a handful of exceptional black leaders were permitted to participate, sometimes as equals. Few blacks, the silence indicated, were genuinely surprised by the unexpected glimpse behind the scenes.”
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The resignation and despair, instead, were channeled into the paranoid soul of the early ’70s, particularly the “smiling faces trope” that was instigated by Norman Whitfield when he wrote “Smiling Faces Sometimes” in late 1970 with his regular songwriting partner, Barrett Strong. “Smiling Faces Sometimes” first appeared on wax as a twelve-minute miniepic on the Temptations’
Sky’s the Limit
album, which was released in April 1971. However, it was first recorded by a vocal trio that Whitfield formed almost as a sketchbook for his studio experimentation. When the (much better) version was finally released as a single in June 1971, the Undisputed Truth (Joe Harris, Billy Rae Calvin, and Brenda Joyce Evans) had its first and only United States Top 10 hit with its first record. Despite the uncompromising lyrics, the record’s success was no surprise: With massed chorales, percussion that imitates both a ticking clock and a rattlesnake, swooping strings, the “Can you dig it?” that Isaac Hayes would borrow for “Theme From Shaft,” and palpably gargantuan brass and woodwind sections, “Smiling Faces Sometimes” was the most fully realized orchestral soul production up to that point.

However, this was no Hugo & Luigi, easy-listening, crossover appeal for Sam Cooke or the Stylistics. The first four seconds let you know all you needed to to figure out what was to come. “Smiling Faces Sometimes” begins with a horn fanfare from some hyperspace where Vegas, Bob & Earl, and Charlton Heston biblical epics conjoin, only to be compounded by a heroic wah-wah echo that bounces around the sound field like a Rabelaisian Ricochet Rabbit. In the third second, the scything strings that would become blaxploitation’s other signature slice the production in half, leaving a dangling guitar lick and doomy, insistent maracas. Lush arrangements straight off of Isaac Hayes’s
Hot Buttered Soul
follow, but the instrumental richness is denser, thicker, more claustrophobic—the sweetening becoming ever more cloying and fulsome, like false praise. When lead singer Joe Harris comes in, he sings like a mourning Levi Stubbs: You can hear his power held in reserve as if he is subduing his hectoring tone because he has resigned himself to the fatalism the song describes.

And what a brutal vision the song relates: “Smiling faces sometimes pretend to be your friend / Smiling faces show no traces of the evil that lurks within / Smiling faces, smiling faces sometimes they don’t tell the truth / Smiling faces tell lies and I’ve got proof … / Beware of the handshake that hides a snake / Beware of the pat on the back / It just might hold you back.” On the surface it seems a pretty clear indictment of the white establishment that failed to deliver civil rights while promising the world and of Richard Nixon and his “Southern strategy.” In an effort to reverse the century-old aversion of white Southerners to the Republican party that had freed the slaves and destroyed their way of life, Nixon appeased the Dixiecrats by shifting the focus of the racial debate from the peculiar institutions of Southern racism to the more thorny, more subtle issues of racial inequality throughout the country. While seeming to attack de facto as well as de jure segregation by bringing the race issue north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Nixon was actually aiming to destabilize the Democratic power base in the Northern unions with initiatives like the Philadelphia Plan.
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“For Nixon, outward appearances seemed more important than substantive racial policy,” Carroll said. “The President might utter rhetorical platitudes, offer sums for urban renewal and unemployment, but in secret the administration operated on different assumptions: in planning racial policy, the White House assumed that the ultimate weapon for achieving racial peace was military force.”
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In a song written by Al Bell, the Staple Singers harped on this duplicity and saw things pretty much the same way as the Undisputed Truth. 1972’s “I’ll Take You There” contained the refrain, “I know a place / Ain’t nobody crying / Ain’t nobody worried / Ain’t no smiling faces / Lying to the races.” Rarely had a popular African-American record (“I’ll Take You There” was #1 on the R&B chart for the entire month of May as well as being a pop #1) been so direct about its protest. However, “I’ll Take You There”—along with War’s “Get Down” from 1971’s
All Day Music
(“Police and their justice laughing while they bust us”)—was the least ambiguous of all the records that invoked the “smiling faces” trope, perhaps because Al Bell was a minister who had become the president of Stax Records and there was no room for equivocation in his vision of paradise. But that line about the handshake in “Smiling Faces Sometimes”—which has resonances with the Black Power movement and its numerous soul handshakes and hand signs—seems to indicate that it’s not only Whitey who’ll cheerfully rob you blind. It wasn’t alone.

*   *   *

On the amazing “Don’t Call Me Brother” from the O’Jays’ 1973 album
Ship Ahoy,
lead singer Eddie Levert breaks into a sermon: “Just the other day, when I was hanging out down on the main drag / I went in to get me a small, teeny weeny toddy for the evening / And when I come out, I got a bad case of the blues when I saw my tires gone / I open up the door and there was my glove compartment all torn out from the dashboard / And here you come, here you come, skinnin’ and grinnin’, skinnin’ and grinnin’ / Here you come—I know you did it—with the power sign / Talkin’ about, ‘My man, solid on that, my brother’ / I said I don’t like it, how can you really, really mean it? / I know about ya, I know what you’re really good for…”

Following the even more incredible “Back Stabbers” (more on which later), “Don’t Call Me Brother” was produced by Philadelphia International’s Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, who were the main instigators of a whole series of records from that city that seemed to interrogate traditional roles of black masculinity (see also former associate Thom Bell’s productions of the helium harmonies of the Delfonics and the Stylistics, who took falsetto into the realm of the castrati). Before Levert’s sermon, the O’Jays took that enduring symbol of black male camaraderie, the street corner doo-wop group, and turned it into a savage indictment of black masculinity. Over some of the ripest music of Gamble and Huff’s opulent career (but just as in “Smiling Faces Sometimes,” the unctuous vibes and zinging strings reinforced the song’s message), the O’Jays ask some ne’er-do-well, “How can you call me brother when you don’t respect my woman? How can you call me brother when I can’t even trust you behind my back?” But it’s that sermon and its “skinnin’ and grinnin’” line, “power sign” detail, and even that bit about “a small, teeny weeny toddy” that give the song its force. Given that Kenny Gamble was a Black Muslim, it seems strange that the character we’re meant to identify with is drinking and criticizing at least the trappings, if not the substance, of the movement. Was this Gamble questioning his faith? Or was the sermon improvised by Levert, who was taking a camouflaged potshot at his boss? Or were the details simply coincidence?

Given the swirling paranoia of “Back Stabbers,” it’s hard to imagine that they were merely coincidence. Beginning with what must surely be the greatest intro of any pop song save maybe “Johnny B. Goode,” “Back Stabbers” is the tale of a man whose friends want to steal his woman. The first song written by the duo of Gene McFadden and John Whitehead (with input from Leon Huff) who would later find fame with “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now,” “Back Stabbers” probably is just that: the story of a guy whose relationship is going south trying to fend off the opportunists and scavengers putting the final nail in the coffin. But those roiling piano chords that introduce the record create a drama too big to be contained by the merely personal. The heavenly strings that gradually fade in the mix, trying desperately to get the upper hand on the relentless, insistent beat only to be undone by the punchiest horns in the Philly lexicon, turn “Back Stabbers” into a huge, Shakespearean saga. “What they doin’? They smilin’ in your face / All the time they want to take your place / The back stabbers.” While the music speaks volumes, to really hear “Back Stabbers” as the crucial part of the smiling faces conversation, you need to listen to it as part of the album with the same title.
Back Stabbers
begins with an almost mocking James Brown horn riff before modulating into a hard funk groove called “When the World’s at Peace” that borrows heavily from Sly Stone in both musical and lyrical tone. The first verse goes, “I can see the day when it’s safe to walk the streets / When we’ll learn to care for those lost in poverty / There’ll be no need for our sons and daughters to march up and down the streets singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’” and its civil rights reference places “Back Stabbers” in context. The next line is “When the world’s at peace will it still be in one piece?” and the song soon slows down to a disoriented crawl.

“Back Stabbers” emerges from this percussion fog. It reached #1 on the American R&B chart on September, 9, 1972, six days before the “Plumbers” were indicted for their role in the Watergate break-in. Released at a time when the full scale of Nixon’s treachery was just beginning to be revealed, at a time when the O’Jays and Gamble and Huff still believed that people needed to sing “We Shall Overcome,” at a time when Moynihan was blaming the cycle of poverty on African-American men, the refrain of “Smilin’ faces sometimes back stabbers” resonated with a significance that went far beyond the tale of a man whose friends were going after his lady. Coupled with the eerie piano, screeching strings, and off-kilter percussion, the air of spooks, dirty tricks, and double-crossing is unmistakable.

One year later, as John Shaft was doing his thing in Africa, former Motown lackeys the Four Tops were wailing, “There’s not a street that you can walk / You gotta watch just who you’re talking to / They’re out to get ya / Can’t turn your back on a smiling face / Next thing you know, there ain’t no trace of you … / Gotta keep your eye on the passersby, better watch your step / ’Cause you never know where the knife will go and they ain’t missed yet.” Produced by Chicago soul stalwart Johnny Pate for the
Shaft in Africa
soundtrack, “Are You Man Enough” was largely pro forma blaxploitation: surging Hollywood strings, gratuitous wah-wah, hand claps, and a wonderfully cinematic intro.

For the most part, the lyrics are pretty pro forma as well. Except for two remarkable passages that add layers of meaning to the conversation, where the above lines merely reiterate the terms of the debate. If “Back Stabbers” was all suggestive metaphors and uncanny timing, “Are You Man Enough” was unquestionable intention: “There’s no pretending it goes away, with every step that you take you’re paying your dues / And I ain’t lying / You got to struggle to see the light ’cause someone’s looking to steal your right to choose / And they don’t stop trying.”

If Nixon was the perfect symbol of the changing same of Afro-America, then “Someone needs a friend just around the bend / Don’t you think you should be there? / Are you man enough when the going’s rough / Is it in your heart to care?” is a plea for new paradigms, echoing the critique implied by the O’Jays and forcefully stated by the Temptations and Norman Whitfield on “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.”

*   *   *

Long before Harvey Ball ever dreamed up his little yellow man, America was full of even more pernicious smiling caricatures. The pickaninny was a depiction of a black child with nappy hair, bulging eyes, enormous lips, a wide mouth usually being stuffed with watermelon and, almost inevitably, a huge, stupid grin. Most scholars date the origin of the pickaninny to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Topsy character from
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
but Topsy was a solemn girl meant to symbolize the brutality of slavery. The caricatures, both literary and figurative, that followed, however, universally depicted the “good-for-nothing gator bait” pickaninny as mirthful and more than happy with his or her lot. The pickaninny was a fixture in American popular culture until very recently, with such notable examples as Little Black Sambo, Buckwheat from the
Our Gang
films, and numerous minstrelsy characters. In 1932, Cab Calloway recorded a version of the old minstrelsy number, “There’s a Cabin in the Cotton”: “I got a feeling so sentimental / And I see a smile so gentle / When I think of old Virginny / And my pickaninny days.”