Jerry Butler - The Ice Man Cometh - A Past Article
Something I wrote a few years ago hoping to get in Record Collector magazine. Apparently they only run features on artists who might have a new collection or whatever. And it’s a bit long
Jerry Butler - The Iceman Cometh
As 1966 made way for 1967, Jerry Butler’s career was at something of a crossroads. The 27-year-old had moved to the security of the well-heeled Mercury label following the financial meltdown of his previous label, Vee Jay, but so far there had been little to trouble the high reaches of the US charts, certainly nothing to match the success of his first-ever release in May 1958, For Your Precious Love (No 3 R&B, No 11 pop) on which he sang lead as Curtis Mayfield and the other Impressions backed him up.
But in 1967 Butler was to begin recording the tracks that would give him back his artistic credibility, and which would in due course make up The Ice Man Cometh, a masterpiece of a work that can lay claim to being soul’s first concept album. It’s a suite of love songs inhabited by lyrics of rare introspection for the times in black music, beautifully sung, and immaculately played and arranged. It’s to soul music what Pet Sounds had been to the rock and pop field in 1966.
The Ice Man Cometh was also up-and-coming songwriting and production team Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff’s first collaboration with a blue-chip artist. A massively-successful career running their own record company, Philadelphia International, lay ahead of them in the 1970s. On the album, Gamble, Huff and Butler’s compositional skills were combined in a partnership that seemed to have been forged in musical heaven, but was to last for only two albums.
However, they represent the crowning glory of Jerry Butler’s career, one that has seen him record for the label that “lost” The Beatles, collaborate with Curtis Mayfield, write a rock and soul classic with Otis Redding, co-write and record a Northern Soul favourite (not bad for someone who was primarily a balladeer), form a writers’ workshop that encouraged the likes of Terry Callier, become a partner in a beer distributorship, and become a politician in his adopted home city of Chicago.
And all this while never having a chart record of his own in the UK , accounting for the fact that many of his releases in this country, on labels like Top Rank, Stateside, Sue, Columbia and Fontana, are extremely collectable.
Jerry Butler was born in Sunflower, in the Mississippi Delta, on 8 December, 1939. At the age of three his family followed what had now become a familiar trip for blacks, heading up to a Northern industrial city, in the Butlers’ case, Chicago. As he grew up he sang in church choirs, and joined The Northern Jubilee Gospel Singers, part of The Travelling Soul Spiritualistic Church, where he met Curtis Mayfield.
They went on to join different singing group, in Butler’s case, The Quails. He had to leave when he was forced to drop out of school following his father’s death, but in 1957 joined the Roosters, fresh into the city from Chattanooga, Tennessee. Butler, along with brothers Richard and Arthur Brooks and Sam Gooden, the new boys in the city, decided they needed someone who could play an instrument and get their harmonies together.
As a result, Butler persuaded Mayfield, then still only 16, to leave his group The Alphatones and join him in The Roosters. They began to make a name for themselves on the Chicago club scene, and teamed up with Eddie Thomas, who became their manager and is usually credited with changing their name to The Impressions. Vee Jay, a growing label in the city, passed on a number of demos sent them before an audition with A&R chief Calvin Carter paid off.
He liked a song Butler and the Brooks brothers had written, For Your Precious Love, with a melody and feel rooted firmly in gospel music but with lyrics from the secular world telling us how lovestruck Butler is with a certain young lady. The 18-year-old Butler’s baritone was already well-formed, and he led the other Impressions’ moaning and harmonising on a song released in May, 1958, which somewhat surprisingly climbed the national charts considering they were a first-time-out group and the record was very black-sounding. It got a release in the UK too (on London), and if you can find a mint 45 it will set you back a tidy sum.
Apparently ructions were caused within the group when the label billed them as ‘Jerry Butler and The Impressions’, and after only two more releases with them, Butler cut out on his own. His replacement was Fred Cash, and after the Brooks brothers left the scene, it was left to Mayfield, Gooden and Cash to forge a highly-successful career as a three-strong Impressions, which Gooden and Cash still tour as today.
Butler’s solo career had a promising-enough start (Lost, No 17 R&B, March 1959), but there was a string of less-successful singles before A Lonely Soldier (No 25 R&B, May 1960). This was also his first UK solo release, backed with I Found A Love (Top Rank JAR 389, June 1960). The problem was, Vee Jay didn’t really know what to do with Butler, or thought they did but were going down completely the wrong path.
They thought his warm baritone, with the occasional rough edge (which he’d employ to stunning effect later in his career) lent itself to the sort of MOR material that could make him a crossover star. Chicago soul music expert Robert Pruter wrote in The Blackwell Guide To Soul Recordings: “The songs were somewhat in the pop mode and had the same kind of fluffy arrangements as Atlantic were putting out on its R&B artists at the time. A flute, tinkling piano, chirpy girl chorus, syrupy strings and bouncy rhythm did not work that well with Butler’s forceful vocal approach. The songs were good, but producer Calvin Carter was saddling them with ill-advised production.”
But re-enter Curtis Mayfield. He replaced Phil Upchurch as Butler’s on-the-road guitarist, and with The Impressions’ reappearance some time away, settled down with his new employer to write his next three singles, much more musically satisfying than the Carter-produced tunes, and returning Butler to the national pop chart – He Will Break Your Heart (No 7, November 1960), Find Yourself Another Girl (No 27, March 1961) and I’m A Tell-in You (No 25, July 1961). They were not only Butler-Mayfield co-compositions, but virtually duets too, with Mayfield adding his floating tenor (and distinctive guitar work) to Butler’s lead. The first two of these also got UK releases on Top Rank.
Butler was truly up and running now, and moving into a period that would solidify his reputation as a singer’s singer, a real class act in the rapidly burgeoning soul music field. He had the looks, too, a handsome man who always dressed smart for the camera and for the stage. His ‘coolness’ was seized on by Philadelphia radio DJ Georgie Woods, who dubbed him ‘The Ice Man’ – a nickname that has stayed with him ever since.
However there was a brief step back into the pop field with Moon River (No 11, October 1961; UK Columbia) before a true classic – the first recording of the Bacharach-David song Make It Easy On Yourself, which marked a milestone in Burt Bacharach’s career, as he recalled in a 2002 interview. “I’ve always been grateful to Calvin Carter because he let me go in and make my first record where I could actually be in the studio and write the arrangement. That gave me the confidence and enough of a story so that other people would let me do the same.” Jerry Butler’s version climbed to No 20 in July 1962 (the first in a run of six releases on Stateside in Britain), and it remained for the Walker Brothers to have the big British hit with the song with an identical arrangement in 1965, with Scott Walker’s voice ideally suited to copy Butler’s lead.
There were some mightily satisfying and reasonably successful singles to follow in 1962, 1963 and 1964, including another reunion with Curtis Mayfield for Need To Belong (No 31, November 1963) and the spine-tingling I Stand Accused, co-written by Butler with younger brother Billy (the man whose The Right Track was to become a Northern Soul classic), with Randy Newman’s I Don’t Want To Hear It Any More on the flip. I Stand Accused got a UK cover courtesy of The Merseybeats, and was later given the Isaac Hayes treatment on his The Isaac Hayes Movement album. The delectable Van McCoy-penned I Can’t Stand To See You Cry had Jerry in the uptown beat-ballad style fashionable in 1965, and earned a British release on Fontana TF 588 as the UK licensing of Vee Jay product continued to be all over the place (as Butler closed out his days with Vee Jay, there were also two releases on Guy Stevens’s Sue imprint in 1966).
During this period there was a meet-up on tour that was to produce one of the most enduring compositions for its writers, Butler and Otis Redding. On the road together, they adjourned to a hotel room in Buffalo and came up with the melancholy I’ve Been Loving You Too Long. Redding’s version came out on Stax in 1965, and remains one of his signature performances.
Then there was the teaming with Vee Jay stablemate Betty Everett for the Delicious Together LP – remarkably Butler’s first chart album – which produced his biggest single hit to date, a revival of the standard Let It Be Me (No 5, September 1964). However these dizzy heights were soon to become a thing of the past as Vee Jay steadily went down the pan and eventually went bankrupt early in 1966.
Vee Jay, of course, are famous as being the label that had the Beatles… and lost ‘em. Legal battles with the giant Capitol Records and music-licensing firm Trans-Global over the Fabs did not help in their battle to keep afloat as the in-house creative staff began to desert the sinking ship, probably because they weren’t getting paid. Butler’s final release for the company was a remake of his first success there, For Your Precious Love.
The move to the more secure surroundings of Mercury was to prove to be a mighty good one for Butler. However, it got off to a false start when personality problems with his assigned producer Luchi De Jesus led to his first album project, Soul Artistry, being shelved. Things improved when another staff producer, Jerry Ross, entered the picture. He had Bobby Hebb’s Sunny on his CV and was soon to find success with Spanky and Our Gang, Keith, and Jay and The Techniques.
The result of the Butler-Ross link-up was two delicious singles, I Dig You Baby and Mr Dream Merchant in 1967, but most importantly Ross provided the connection to Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. Ross and Gamble were both Philadelphia-based, and together had written Butler’s single You Don’t Know What You Got Until You Lose It the previous year. Gamble and Huff had played together in groups around The City of Brotherly Love, and after struggling to find success with their productions in anything but the R&B market, suddenly found themselves hot in 1967, with the Soul Survivors’ Expressway To Your Heart and the Intruders’ Cowboys To Girls reaching No 4 and No 6 respectively on the national chart. Curtis Mayfield said: “Gamble and Huff made a new Jerry Butler. That’s when he came back alive.”
Their first collaboration was the Motownesque Lost, recorded not in Philly but at Bell Sound Studios in New York in September 1967. Of the five singles to be included on The Ice Man Cometh album (it was also on Butler’s earlier Mr Dream Merchant long-player), it was the poorest performing, reaching No 62 on the pop chart. The other ten tracks for ‘Ice Man’ were recorded on Gamble and Huff’s home patch, using the musicians they had played alongside in the clubs, and who had accompanied the pair into the studios to help them develop what was to become an unmistakable sound.
Drummers Earl Young and Karl Chambers, bass player Ronnie Baker, guitarists Norman Harris, Bobby Eli and Roland Chambers, Huff himself on keyboards and Lenny Pakula on organ, percussionist Larry Washington and vibes whiz Vince Montana were the core players, wonderfully supported by a sympathetic horn section and a string section organised by Don Renaldo, most of them players from the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. This ensemble stayed with Gamble and Huff into the Seventies, developing the sophisticated yet soulful backdrop to Philadelphia International hits by the likes of The O’Jays, Billy Paul and Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes. In his book Only The Strong Survive – Memoirs Of A Soul Survivor (with Earl Smith), Butler also credits engineer Joe Tarsia with helping create the “magic” of his sessions in Philadelphia.
So, although the remaining tracks for The Ice Man Cometh were recorded between February and September 1968, there was a oneness, a certain atmosphere, that contributed to the concept feel, helped immeasurably by the arranging skills of Thom Bell and Bobby Martin. Then there were the lyrics, in the main by Butler and Gamble, with Huff providing the musical muscle. There was no moon and June here, but young men talking about real life and experiences. Gamble himself said: “We would talk about different situations that people would get themselves into in their love life and whatever, and we would write about it. We would look at it from every angle we could think of.” In his book, Butler wrote: “…we would work in the same way; sitting in Kenny and Leon’s office – Kenny, Huff and me. Huff would be on the piano, while Kenny and I would come up with the lyrics. Huff and Kenny would come up with some concept and play chords, and I started singing. That’s how we came up with Never Give You Up, which is considered a classic today.”
At the heart of everything was Butler’s voice, aching, pleading, cajoling; the epitome of soulfulness.
Never Give You Up and Hey Western Union Man (renamed Send A Telegram for Britain) both made the pop top 20, but the poignant Are You Happy stalled at No 39. But the biggest hit off the album was the song that would become Jerry Butler’s signature tune, Only The Strong Survive, which made No 4. They had, and still have, lyrics to make you reflect on relationships, and the ballads (Strange) I Still Love You, Go Away – Find Yourself and the country-flavoured I Stop By Heaven, revealed men’s emotions in a way that few songs in the soul idiom did in 1968.
The Ice Man Cometh, with sleeve notes by the DJ Georgie Woods, who inspired its title, reached No 2 in the R&B chart and No 29 in the national chart. It got a release as Mercury 20154 SMCL in this country before 1968 was out.
Butler, Gamble and Huff, their musicians and arrangers, reconvened in early 1969 to work on the follow-up album, Ice On Ice. Not quite as successful as its predecessor, it works brilliantly as a pair with it. The arrangements are possibly more inventive and unusual, but Bobby Eli’s sitar becomes wearing at times. Lead-off track Moody Woman has become a floorfiller on the Northern Soul scene and, ironically, possibly Jerry Butler’s best-known song in this country.
And then it was all over. Gamble and Huff got into contractual difficulties with Mercury, and severed their connection with Butler to set up the phenomenally-successful Philadelphia International company, reviving the career of Wilson Pickett in between times.
Butler would never reach the heights of The Ice Man Cometh and its singles again, although many of his Seventies records make for rewarding listening, particularly the duets with Brenda Lee Eager. He set up the Butler Music Workshop, with financial backing from Chappell Music, in 1970, and it gave Butler a source of songs while encouraging the careers of the likes of Terry Callier. After a spell with Motown he even reunited with Gamble and Huff on Philadelphia International in 1978 for a pair of albums which showed the great voice was still intact, and the production pair were just as sympathetic to what was needed to enhance it. However by the early Eighties the show was over for The Ice Man, as classic soul was shunted off the radio and out of the studios.
In his book, Butler admits he recognised this, and so got involved in a Chicago beer distributorship, The Iceman Beverage Company, dealing with brands including Carling Black Label and Skol. He was also becoming more politically active, and in 1985 won a seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners, and today is its longest-serving member, and what has drawn most of his attention for more than 30 years. He's left recording, and the road, behind him now, but has been visible on TV in the States presenting a series of PBS music specials, looking as suave as ever, usually suited and with his grey hair making him look even more distinguished.
Only The Strong Survive, he sang, but sheer talent goes a long way too.
Added by site
