The VeeJay Story

Calvin Cater: Jerry Butler came in with a group with Curtis Mayfield called the Impressions. They came to us on a Saturday. Jerry had been all up and down Michigan Boulevard trying to record. So they finally came to us. These five guys walked in the door, sang about five or six numbers and sounded pretty good. So I said, “Do me a favor, sing me a song that you wrote, one that you’re almost ashamed to sing in public.” So Jerry says, “Let’s sing that church type song!” And Curtis says, “No, not that one.” I said, “Well let’s hear it.” The song was “For Your Precious Love.” I signed them on the spot and recorded them on the Wednesday after I signed them. Now, I took the dub over to my sister Vivian and she put it on the air and we got immediate reaction. At that time, there was a very big singer named Roy Hamilton… everybody thought it was a new Roy Hamilton record. They asked, “Who is it?” and I said “The Impressions.” but they said, “No who’s the singer?” But I didn’t even know their names then, so I called them into rehearsal and…got down their names.

I had made a mistake previously with the Spaniels; if I had given Pookie credit on the records, I could have had two acts when they broke up. I told myself that I would never do that again, that I’d give the lead singer credit on the record. So I put the record out as Jerry Butler & the Impressions. The promoters picked it up, and they brought the group to the Apollo for their first gig. On the marquee was, in very big, bold letters, “Jerry Butler,” and down in the corner-“& the Impressions.” And they screamed. It almost broke the group up. They came running to me with…”What is this?…all for one and one foe all.” So I said, “Okay, on the next pressings I’ll change it.” But I never got around to changing it. As a result, I got two acts out of that one act.

The early 1960’s were tremendously successful for Vee-Jay. The decade was only a month old when Jimmy Reed released “Baby What You Want Me To Do,” which became a standard for seemingly every rock ‘n’ roll band in the country. Rosco Gordon also made a brief appearance on the label, but a memorable one.

Calvin Carter: “Just A Little Bit” was a really big record. Rosco was not from Chicago, he just came through and recorded and I never did get much information on him or get to know him.

Jerry Butler, who had gone solo shortly after “For Your Precious Love,” had not been able to come back with a really big hit until he teamed up with Curtis Mayfield and Calvin Carter in 1960 on “He Will Break Your Heart.”

Calvin Carter: I had given the Impressions their release, because I was never really in love with Curtis’s voice. I did a couple of things with them, and Sam (Gooden), who was the bass, kind of sounded like Jerry, but it was pseudo. I told Jerry that the best thing for him to do was to take Curtis as a guitar player. I never met a guitar player who played the way Curtis did. Everything was on open strings, and it sounded very unusual. You’d always hear people say, “Play me some Curtis Mayfield-type guitar,” and they’d know what you were talking about. Curtis was also a prolific writer.

Calvin Carter’s name appears on quite a few Vee-Jay records from that period. What part did he play in writing them?

It was also about that time that Vee-Jay welcomed newcomer Wade Flemons who hit with “Here I Stand.”

Calvin Carter: Wade Flemons was in a group called the Newcomers from Wichita, Kansas. We decided to use Wade as a solo singer and forget the group.

Dee Clark, who has been recording under his own name for some time, finally caught fire in 1958 with “Nobody But You.”

Calvin Carter: When Little Richard quit singing and went into gospel, there was a guy called Sullivan in California who had booked thirty dates on Little Richard. When Richard quit, it left him with all these dates hanging. Previously, I had put out a record by Dee Clark, where he was sounding like everybody; he could sound like Sam Cooke, Little Richard, whoever, so Sullivan called me and he said he wanted Dee to come out and sing with Richard’s band, the Upsetters, to fill the dates.

Sid McCoy, a long time friend of the Vee-Jay people, finally joined the label formally in 1958 as A&R head of the newly-formed jazz department.

Sid McCoy: It was quite a while after the label had started that I joined. In the meantime I continued in radio. The first date was a Bennie Green thing, and on it was Gene Ammons, Nat Adderley and Tommy Flanagan. We started off recording the jazz things in stereo; it became apparent early on that the stuff should be done in stereo because it was the state of the art.

At this time, Vee-Jay was also involved with The Sutherland Lounge, a large room in Chicago’s Sutherland Hotel, which featured jazz acts regularly. One of the acts to play the Sutherland was Miles Davis, and Vee-Jay ended up with contracts on many of Davis’s sidemen, such as Paul Chambers and Wynton Kelly, Wayne Shorter and Lee Morgan.

Calvin Carter: I usually did the lyric. Like on “He Will Break Your Heart,” they came in with the hook “don’t break my heart” and I turned it all the way around, told them, “No, put the triangle in there, he will break your heart.” Now we have a hook, and I’m trying to figure out the first verse, because I basically know we have a song. I would always try to find a true story but couldn’t come up with anything, so I started thinking about literature. When you think about literature, you think about England, and what’s a famous line from English literature? And it just popped into my mind, “Fare thee well.” The next line, “I know you’re leaving for the new love that you’ve found,” we took because we noticed on the road, we came into a town as strangers and got all the local chicks. The guys they came with would be left outside the dressing room waiting for them to come out from getting autographs, and whatever else they do in dressing rooms.

Now Sid McCoy was going with a girl that I wanted, and as we were writing, it popped into my head, “he uses all the great quotations, he says all the things I wish I could say.” From there, it was simple to finish it up, because we were in the theater: “When the final act is over and your left standing alone, when he takes his bow and makes his exit, I’ll be there to take you home.”

And that was the song. All of this was done within maybe a twenty-minute span.

Things were picking up for Vee-Jay; a dozen hits in 1960. In the space of five years, they had gone from a converted garage on 47th Street to an office building on Michigan Ave., and then to their own building at 1449 Michigan Ave. The label itself was looking more prosperous with a new look. It now had a rainbow-colored band around a black and silver label with a new red and white oval logo.

These artists were the nucleus of Vee-Jay’s jazz department.

In addition to jazz, Vee-Jay in 1959 began a gospel series of albums with releases by the Staple Singers, Swan Silvertones, Five Blind Boys and Highway QC’s. This focus was nothing new, merely expanding efforts the label had been making since 1953.