I’m counting down my 100 favourite songs of all time. To keep this from becoming a Bob Dylan / Tom Waits love-in, only one track per
artist is allowed.
Go to 75: No Diggity by Blackstreet
Go to 77: Valerie by Mark Ronson feat. Amy Winehouse
You know those novels that are so epic in scope they have a list of characters at the beginning? This is one of those stories.
There will be digressions.
When asked what he thought of soul singer Jackie Wilson being described as “the black Elvis Presley”, the King of Roll and Roll replied, “well that must make me the white Jackie Wilson”.
Elvis loved Jackie Wilson. During a brief Las Vegas residency in 1956, he saw Wilson perform as part of The Dominoes. The set included a cover of Don’t Be Cruel, which Wilson sang in the style of the King. But his performance was more than mere mimicry.
“He tried so hard until he got much better, boy, much better than that record of mine,” Elvis told Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis during the legendary Million Dollar Quartet recording at Sun Studios. “I went back four nights straight and heard that guy do that. He sung the hell out of that song.”
The quartet recorded a new version of Don’t Be Cruel with Presley adopting Wilson’s style and mannerisms. The impression of an impression didn’t stop there as Elvis also took on the wild dance moves and stage antics that had earned Wilson the nickname Mr. Entertainer.
As influential as Wilson was, his predecessor in The Dominoes, Clyde McPhatter, was known as the “first soul star” and is considered one of the originators of the classic R&B sound.
Born in North Carolina, McPhatter sang in gospel choirs during his youth and, after moving to New York, brought a southern spirituality to secular songs. Recruited for The Dominoes by musician and manager Billy Ward, McPhatter’s boundary-shattering style helped them become one of the biggest R&B groups of the 1950s.
Ward was not an easy guy to work for. Always happy to encourage the idea that he was the main singer on The Dominoes’ hit records, Ward even tried to pass McPhatter off as his brother. Long before James Brown, he was routinely fining his band members for being late or making mistakes.
The Dominoes weren’t paid that much to begin with: $100 a week minus tax, expenses and those inevitable fines. Eventually McPhatter had enough and quit. When Ahmut Ertegun saw The Dominoes live and noticed McPhatter was missing, he immediately left the show, found the singer and signed him to Atlantic Records.
Together, Ertegun and McPhatter created one of the all-time great soul bands, The Drifters. The original line-up included writer James Baldwin’s brother, David, but members came and went quickly, including McPhatter who left to go solo after just two years. Though many soul purists view McPhatter’s Drifters as the best, the band’s biggest hits came without him.
Much like how McPhatter’s successor in The Dominoes would go on to outshine him, so the new lead singer of The Drifters, Ben E. King would become a household name. By the early 1970s, McPhatter – having sold his share of The Drifters to the band’s manager – was broke and an alcoholic. Reduced to third billing at tiny clubs in the north of England, the original soul star bitterly declared “I have no fans”.
Jackie Wilson always remained a fan. When McPhatter quit The Dominoes, Ward made him agree to stay on and coach his replacement. Wilson says that he learned everything about singing and performing from these sessions and that “Clyde was my man”. Yet, he arrived at his initial audition bragging that he was a much better singer than McPhatter.
This behaviour was typical of the brash young singer, who had survived a tough upbringing in Detroit. His songwriter father was an unemployed absentee alcoholic who left for good when Wilson was nine. In his teens, Wilson joined a local gang and served two spells in juvenile detention. At 17, he was pressured into marrying Freya Hood, after getting her pregnant. It’s said that this was far from the first child Wilson had fathered during those wild teenage years.
After getting married, Wilson started performing in clubs, having learned to sing at a Baptist church during trips to visit his mother’s family in Mississippi. At first a solo performer, Jackie soon joined The Falcons, which was how he came to the attention of Johnny Otis.
Born to Greek immigrants in a mostly black neighborhood, the young Johnny Otis decided that “if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black”. Father of Strawberry Letter 23’s Shuggie Otis, Johnny was a renowned unearther of musical talent, with Wilson sitting alongside Etta James and Johnny Ace in his catalogue of discoveries.
(Johnny Ace would come to a tragic early end on Christmas Day of 1954, while touring with a group of musicians including Big Mama Thornton, who first sang Hound Dog, which Otis co-wrote. Ace – a gun nut – was casually waving a pistol around backstage after a show. When Thornton warned him to be more careful, Ace bragged that he knew exactly which chamber the bullet was in. To prove his point, he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.)
Johnny Otis found Wilson a manager, Al Green (not that one), who landed him the Dominoes audition. Wilson eventually left The Dominoes in 1957 and started performing with his cousin Levi Stubbs. Stubbs had been in The Falcons with Wilson and would go on to be the lead singer of The Four Tops and the voice of Audrey, the man-eating plant in the film version of Little Shop of Horrors.
Wilson had two other musical cousins, both in a band called The Contours. After being turned down by Motown’s Berry Gordy, Hubert Johnson called his cousin and asked him to help. Wilson got the band another meeting with Gordy and though they sang the same songs, the same way, this time they got a seven-year deal, which would yield the huge hit and Dirty Dancing favourite, Do You Love Me?
Wilson’s intervention with Gordy worked because the singer was essentially responsible for the making of Motown. During the mid-50s, Gwen Gordy was a well-known figure in Detroit’s music scene because she worked at the famous Flame Show Bar. Always using her status to promote her brother Berry’s wannabe songwriting career, she introduced Berry to the Flame Show Bar’s owner Al Green (that one, but not that one).
Green had just secured Jackie Wilson a deal with Brunswick Records and was looking for new material. Boy, did Berry have some. Writing with his sister and her boyfriend at the time, Billy Davis, Berry gave Wilson one hell of debut solo single.
Though Reet Petite is now considered a modern classic, it wasn’t a major hit for Wilson, only reaching no. 62 in the US charts though it did make the UK top 10. Its current status may have a lot to do with a brilliant claymation video shown on the BBC in the 1980s that saw the song become the UK no. 1 for four weeks.
The trio of the Gordy siblings and Davis continued to deliver the goods for Wilson, including Lonely Teardrops, which reached no. 1 in the US R&B charts and no. 7 in the Billboard 100. But splitting royalties three ways wasn’t a great way to earn a living so Berry tried to get some of their other songs on Wilson’s B-sides. When Wilson’s new manager Nat Tarnopol (Al Green had died suddenly) refused, Berry decided to take his songs elsewhere.
Ultimately the money he earned from those early Jackie Wilson hits allowed Berry to set himself up as a producer and head of his own record label, which would become Motown, one of the most famous imprints in music history. Meanwhile, Billy Davis would go on co-write and produce the famous Coca-Cola song, I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.
Nat Tarnopol was not only Jackie Wilson’s manager, he soon became boss of his label, Brunswick. As the incident with Berry Gordy suggests, Tarnopol was not a fan of sharing money with the talent, not even with his cash cow Wilson. Founder member of The Dells, Chuck Barksdale, claims that he saw Tarnopol’s goons hang Wilson out of an upstairs window by his feet when the singer enquired about a pay rise.
After the split from the Gordy songwriting trio, Tarnopol pushed Wilson into singing ballads and Sinatra-style easy listening songs, which produced hits like Baby Workout and Alone At Last. After a commercial lull, which Wilson filled by recording with Count Basie, Tarnopol sent him to Chicago to record the sessions that would produce some of his biggest hits.
Yet Wilson would see few of the financial benefits of all this success. In the mid-70s a federal case made it clear that Tarnopol routinely ripped off the singer over his royalty payments and owed him more than one million dollars. He also failed to pay Wilson’s taxes, leading the Internal Revenue Service to seize the singer’s house in early 60s.
Tarnopol really seemed to have it in for Jackie. He ensured that the singer didn’t keep leaving his Chicago recording sessions for parties in New York by telling Freya Hood whenever he appeared in the city. The couple had divorced by this point and Wilson was behind on his child support so Hood would call the police to arrest him for non-payment if she heard he was in town.
By the late 60s Wilson and Tarnopol’s relationship had deteriorated so much that the singer suspected his manager of having an affair with his new wife Harlean Harris. She was an ex-girlfriend of Sam Cooke and was the woman Wilson brought home to his Manhattan apartment in 1961 only to find another girlfriend, Juanita Jones waiting for him. The enraged Jones shot Wilson twice, leaving the singer alive but minus a kidney and with a bullet permanently lodged near his spine.
On a more positive note, Tarnopol was the man who introduced Wilson to Carl Davis, the producer who insisted Wilson ditch Brunswick’s in-house musicians in New York and come record with him in Chicago. With Detroit just a short hop away, Davis convinced Motown rhythm section The Funk Brothers to join the sessions. Though the group thought Wilson was old hat, they liked Davis and the double rates they were earning.
Another musician to join the Chicago sessions was Billy Davis (not the one who co-wrote Reet Petite), a guitarist who had been in The Midnighters alongside members of Wilson’s old band The Falcons. Davis was an outrageous on-stage performer, doing backflips and playing guitar with his teeth. If these antics sound familiar then it’ll be no surprise to learn that Davis introduced a teenage Jimi Hendrix to the electric guitar and taught him all his tricks.
If that wasn’t enough people named Davis, let’s bring back the other Billy Davis (the one who co-wrote Reet Petite). Now at Chess Records, Davis had been involved in creating a song for The Dells with a couple of other writers. While The Dells version remained unreleased, Davis allowed another songwriter called Gary Jackson to play around with it. The next thing he knew Jackie Wilson had released Jackson’s version of (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher. It took a complicated series of inter-label deal-making to ensure all parties (except The Dells) got their share of what would become a huge hit.
(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher opens with a gloriously clean and funky bass line, quickly followed by percussion that sets an unrelentingly upbeat tempo. Next comes Billy Davis’ jangly guitar line, like a reggae rhythm played at double-time, and the rolling snares. Finally we hear Jackie…“Your love…”.
When he first attempted the song, Wilson used the familiar soul croon that had been so successful on songs like Lonely Teardrops. Producer Carl Davis immediately stepped in, demanding a fierier approach to fit with the backing track. When Wilson expressed doubt, Davis was so convinced that his way would sell millions of records, he threated to record the vocals himself.
Wilson relented and adopted a style that refers back to the playfulness of Reet Petite, while retaining his renowned smoothness and sweetness. When he rasps “keep it up” in the middle of the first verse, you know that something special is happening here. This feeling is confirmed by his magnificent falsetto “keep on” on the chorus. Always renowned as a versatile vocalist, Wilson shows off the full extent of his range on Higher and Higher.
Davis drafted in more Motown session artists for the chorus, which features vocals from backing singers, The Andantes. The strings that appear at this point are probably unnecessary but hardly a misstep. Anyway, the best part of the whole song is just about to happen.
The horns that enter on verse two are Higher and Higher’s real hook. At first playing a call-and-response to Wilson’s vocals, they take centre-stage on the middle-eight with a short but ridiculously addictive riff that is the essential source of the song’s immense joy.
Though there’s no let-up to the exuberant rhythm, the phrasing of the final verse’s opening line – “I’m so glad I finally found you” – presages a wonderfully satisfying sense of conclusion. When Wilson stands up to face the world, he brings this glorious journey to an end, though the track itself fades out as that rhythm simply refuses to stop.
(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher reached no. 6 on the Billboard 100 and topped the R&B charts. Wilson followed it up with the lovely I Get the Sweetest Feeling, another song from the Chicago sessions. The song only got to no. 34 and signalled the singer’s slow slide into professional obscurity and personal misery.
When his son Jackie Jr. was murdered at the age of 16 in 1970, Wilson became more dependent on the drugs and alcohol that had often fuelled his life. Two of his other children would also die tragically young: Sandra in 1977 at just 24, while Jacqueline was killed in a drug-related incident in 1988. However, their father was not around for either experience.
Wilson once told Elvis that he took salt tablets and drank gallons of water before going onstage because it made him sweat a lot and “the chicks love it”. It’s unknown whether he was on this high blood pressure-producing combination before his last live appearance at Dick Clark’s Good Ol’ Rock and Roll Revue in New Jersey on Sep 29th, 1975, where he had a massive heart attack while singing Lonely Teardrops.
While many in the audience thought the collapse was all part of Mr. Excitement’s act, Cornell Gunter of The Coasters ran onstage and attempted to resuscitate him. Being a Coaster seemed to make you a magnet for tragedy. Gunter was shot dead in his car in Las Vegas in 1990 and the killer was never found, saxophonist King Curtis was stabbed by junkies outside his block in 1971, while most horrifically, Nathan ‘Buster’ Wilson was murdered and dismembered with some of his body parts turning up near the Hoover Dam and his severed head found in California.
While Gunter was briefly successful in reviving Wilson, the singer soon went into a coma. After a brief recovery a year later where he even walked a few steps, Wilson returned to a semi-comatose state. He spent his remaining years in a care home, unable to speak but aware of his surroundings. Elvis reportedly covered many of the costs.
By the time he died of pneumonia on January 21st 1984, Wilson was broke and buried in an unmarked grave. But this state of ignominy did not last long. A Detroit radio station ran a fundraiser to pay for a headstone. The inscription read: Jackie The Complete Entertainer.
The month following his death, Michael Jackson paid tribute to Wilson while picking up his Grammy Award for Thriller, saying “Some people are followers. Some people make the path and are pioneers.” Once again, Wilson’s onstage energy, craft and movement and the power, beauty and range of his voice had inspired a King.
Follow me on Twitter
If you like this, try:
This even more uptempo live version
I Get the Sweetest Feeling
Reet Petite
Lonely Teardrops
Go to 75: No Diggity by Blackstreet
Go to 77: Valerie by Mark Ronson feat. Amy Winehouse
Go to 75: No Diggity by Blackstreet
Go to 77: Valerie by Mark Ronson feat. Amy Winehouse
You know those novels that are so epic in scope they have a list of characters at the beginning? This is one of those stories.
There will be digressions.
When asked what he thought of soul singer Jackie Wilson being described as “the black Elvis Presley”, the King of Roll and Roll replied, “well that must make me the white Jackie Wilson”.
Elvis loved Jackie Wilson. During a brief Las Vegas residency in 1956, he saw Wilson perform as part of The Dominoes. The set included a cover of Don’t Be Cruel, which Wilson sang in the style of the King. But his performance was more than mere mimicry.
“He tried so hard until he got much better, boy, much better than that record of mine,” Elvis told Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis during the legendary Million Dollar Quartet recording at Sun Studios. “I went back four nights straight and heard that guy do that. He sung the hell out of that song.”
The quartet recorded a new version of Don’t Be Cruel with Presley adopting Wilson’s style and mannerisms. The impression of an impression didn’t stop there as Elvis also took on the wild dance moves and stage antics that had earned Wilson the nickname Mr. Entertainer.
As influential as Wilson was, his predecessor in The Dominoes, Clyde McPhatter, was known as the “first soul star” and is considered one of the originators of the classic R&B sound.
Born in North Carolina, McPhatter sang in gospel choirs during his youth and, after moving to New York, brought a southern spirituality to secular songs. Recruited for The Dominoes by musician and manager Billy Ward, McPhatter’s boundary-shattering style helped them become one of the biggest R&B groups of the 1950s.
Ward was not an easy guy to work for. Always happy to encourage the idea that he was the main singer on The Dominoes’ hit records, Ward even tried to pass McPhatter off as his brother. Long before James Brown, he was routinely fining his band members for being late or making mistakes.
The Dominoes weren’t paid that much to begin with: $100 a week minus tax, expenses and those inevitable fines. Eventually McPhatter had enough and quit. When Ahmut Ertegun saw The Dominoes live and noticed McPhatter was missing, he immediately left the show, found the singer and signed him to Atlantic Records.
Together, Ertegun and McPhatter created one of the all-time great soul bands, The Drifters. The original line-up included writer James Baldwin’s brother, David, but members came and went quickly, including McPhatter who left to go solo after just two years. Though many soul purists view McPhatter’s Drifters as the best, the band’s biggest hits came without him.
Much like how McPhatter’s successor in The Dominoes would go on to outshine him, so the new lead singer of The Drifters, Ben E. King would become a household name. By the early 1970s, McPhatter – having sold his share of The Drifters to the band’s manager – was broke and an alcoholic. Reduced to third billing at tiny clubs in the north of England, the original soul star bitterly declared “I have no fans”.
Jackie Wilson always remained a fan. When McPhatter quit The Dominoes, Ward made him agree to stay on and coach his replacement. Wilson says that he learned everything about singing and performing from these sessions and that “Clyde was my man”. Yet, he arrived at his initial audition bragging that he was a much better singer than McPhatter.
This behaviour was typical of the brash young singer, who had survived a tough upbringing in Detroit. His songwriter father was an unemployed absentee alcoholic who left for good when Wilson was nine. In his teens, Wilson joined a local gang and served two spells in juvenile detention. At 17, he was pressured into marrying Freya Hood, after getting her pregnant. It’s said that this was far from the first child Wilson had fathered during those wild teenage years.
After getting married, Wilson started performing in clubs, having learned to sing at a Baptist church during trips to visit his mother’s family in Mississippi. At first a solo performer, Jackie soon joined The Falcons, which was how he came to the attention of Johnny Otis.
Born to Greek immigrants in a mostly black neighborhood, the young Johnny Otis decided that “if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black”. Father of Strawberry Letter 23’s Shuggie Otis, Johnny was a renowned unearther of musical talent, with Wilson sitting alongside Etta James and Johnny Ace in his catalogue of discoveries.
(Johnny Ace would come to a tragic early end on Christmas Day of 1954, while touring with a group of musicians including Big Mama Thornton, who first sang Hound Dog, which Otis co-wrote. Ace – a gun nut – was casually waving a pistol around backstage after a show. When Thornton warned him to be more careful, Ace bragged that he knew exactly which chamber the bullet was in. To prove his point, he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.)
Johnny Otis found Wilson a manager, Al Green (not that one), who landed him the Dominoes audition. Wilson eventually left The Dominoes in 1957 and started performing with his cousin Levi Stubbs. Stubbs had been in The Falcons with Wilson and would go on to be the lead singer of The Four Tops and the voice of Audrey, the man-eating plant in the film version of Little Shop of Horrors.
Wilson had two other musical cousins, both in a band called The Contours. After being turned down by Motown’s Berry Gordy, Hubert Johnson called his cousin and asked him to help. Wilson got the band another meeting with Gordy and though they sang the same songs, the same way, this time they got a seven-year deal, which would yield the huge hit and Dirty Dancing favourite, Do You Love Me?
Wilson’s intervention with Gordy worked because the singer was essentially responsible for the making of Motown. During the mid-50s, Gwen Gordy was a well-known figure in Detroit’s music scene because she worked at the famous Flame Show Bar. Always using her status to promote her brother Berry’s wannabe songwriting career, she introduced Berry to the Flame Show Bar’s owner Al Green (that one, but not that one).
Green had just secured Jackie Wilson a deal with Brunswick Records and was looking for new material. Boy, did Berry have some. Writing with his sister and her boyfriend at the time, Billy Davis, Berry gave Wilson one hell of debut solo single.
Though Reet Petite is now considered a modern classic, it wasn’t a major hit for Wilson, only reaching no. 62 in the US charts though it did make the UK top 10. Its current status may have a lot to do with a brilliant claymation video shown on the BBC in the 1980s that saw the song become the UK no. 1 for four weeks.
The trio of the Gordy siblings and Davis continued to deliver the goods for Wilson, including Lonely Teardrops, which reached no. 1 in the US R&B charts and no. 7 in the Billboard 100. But splitting royalties three ways wasn’t a great way to earn a living so Berry tried to get some of their other songs on Wilson’s B-sides. When Wilson’s new manager Nat Tarnopol (Al Green had died suddenly) refused, Berry decided to take his songs elsewhere.
Ultimately the money he earned from those early Jackie Wilson hits allowed Berry to set himself up as a producer and head of his own record label, which would become Motown, one of the most famous imprints in music history. Meanwhile, Billy Davis would go on co-write and produce the famous Coca-Cola song, I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.
Nat Tarnopol was not only Jackie Wilson’s manager, he soon became boss of his label, Brunswick. As the incident with Berry Gordy suggests, Tarnopol was not a fan of sharing money with the talent, not even with his cash cow Wilson. Founder member of The Dells, Chuck Barksdale, claims that he saw Tarnopol’s goons hang Wilson out of an upstairs window by his feet when the singer enquired about a pay rise.
After the split from the Gordy songwriting trio, Tarnopol pushed Wilson into singing ballads and Sinatra-style easy listening songs, which produced hits like Baby Workout and Alone At Last. After a commercial lull, which Wilson filled by recording with Count Basie, Tarnopol sent him to Chicago to record the sessions that would produce some of his biggest hits.
Yet Wilson would see few of the financial benefits of all this success. In the mid-70s a federal case made it clear that Tarnopol routinely ripped off the singer over his royalty payments and owed him more than one million dollars. He also failed to pay Wilson’s taxes, leading the Internal Revenue Service to seize the singer’s house in early 60s.
Tarnopol really seemed to have it in for Jackie. He ensured that the singer didn’t keep leaving his Chicago recording sessions for parties in New York by telling Freya Hood whenever he appeared in the city. The couple had divorced by this point and Wilson was behind on his child support so Hood would call the police to arrest him for non-payment if she heard he was in town.
By the late 60s Wilson and Tarnopol’s relationship had deteriorated so much that the singer suspected his manager of having an affair with his new wife Harlean Harris. She was an ex-girlfriend of Sam Cooke and was the woman Wilson brought home to his Manhattan apartment in 1961 only to find another girlfriend, Juanita Jones waiting for him. The enraged Jones shot Wilson twice, leaving the singer alive but minus a kidney and with a bullet permanently lodged near his spine.
On a more positive note, Tarnopol was the man who introduced Wilson to Carl Davis, the producer who insisted Wilson ditch Brunswick’s in-house musicians in New York and come record with him in Chicago. With Detroit just a short hop away, Davis convinced Motown rhythm section The Funk Brothers to join the sessions. Though the group thought Wilson was old hat, they liked Davis and the double rates they were earning.
Another musician to join the Chicago sessions was Billy Davis (not the one who co-wrote Reet Petite), a guitarist who had been in The Midnighters alongside members of Wilson’s old band The Falcons. Davis was an outrageous on-stage performer, doing backflips and playing guitar with his teeth. If these antics sound familiar then it’ll be no surprise to learn that Davis introduced a teenage Jimi Hendrix to the electric guitar and taught him all his tricks.
If that wasn’t enough people named Davis, let’s bring back the other Billy Davis (the one who co-wrote Reet Petite). Now at Chess Records, Davis had been involved in creating a song for The Dells with a couple of other writers. While The Dells version remained unreleased, Davis allowed another songwriter called Gary Jackson to play around with it. The next thing he knew Jackie Wilson had released Jackson’s version of (Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher. It took a complicated series of inter-label deal-making to ensure all parties (except The Dells) got their share of what would become a huge hit.
When he first attempted the song, Wilson used the familiar soul croon that had been so successful on songs like Lonely Teardrops. Producer Carl Davis immediately stepped in, demanding a fierier approach to fit with the backing track. When Wilson expressed doubt, Davis was so convinced that his way would sell millions of records, he threated to record the vocals himself.
Wilson relented and adopted a style that refers back to the playfulness of Reet Petite, while retaining his renowned smoothness and sweetness. When he rasps “keep it up” in the middle of the first verse, you know that something special is happening here. This feeling is confirmed by his magnificent falsetto “keep on” on the chorus. Always renowned as a versatile vocalist, Wilson shows off the full extent of his range on Higher and Higher.
Davis drafted in more Motown session artists for the chorus, which features vocals from backing singers, The Andantes. The strings that appear at this point are probably unnecessary but hardly a misstep. Anyway, the best part of the whole song is just about to happen.
The horns that enter on verse two are Higher and Higher’s real hook. At first playing a call-and-response to Wilson’s vocals, they take centre-stage on the middle-eight with a short but ridiculously addictive riff that is the essential source of the song’s immense joy.
Though there’s no let-up to the exuberant rhythm, the phrasing of the final verse’s opening line – “I’m so glad I finally found you” – presages a wonderfully satisfying sense of conclusion. When Wilson stands up to face the world, he brings this glorious journey to an end, though the track itself fades out as that rhythm simply refuses to stop.
(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher and Higher reached no. 6 on the Billboard 100 and topped the R&B charts. Wilson followed it up with the lovely I Get the Sweetest Feeling, another song from the Chicago sessions. The song only got to no. 34 and signalled the singer’s slow slide into professional obscurity and personal misery.
When his son Jackie Jr. was murdered at the age of 16 in 1970, Wilson became more dependent on the drugs and alcohol that had often fuelled his life. Two of his other children would also die tragically young: Sandra in 1977 at just 24, while Jacqueline was killed in a drug-related incident in 1988. However, their father was not around for either experience.
Wilson once told Elvis that he took salt tablets and drank gallons of water before going onstage because it made him sweat a lot and “the chicks love it”. It’s unknown whether he was on this high blood pressure-producing combination before his last live appearance at Dick Clark’s Good Ol’ Rock and Roll Revue in New Jersey on Sep 29th, 1975, where he had a massive heart attack while singing Lonely Teardrops.
While many in the audience thought the collapse was all part of Mr. Excitement’s act, Cornell Gunter of The Coasters ran onstage and attempted to resuscitate him. Being a Coaster seemed to make you a magnet for tragedy. Gunter was shot dead in his car in Las Vegas in 1990 and the killer was never found, saxophonist King Curtis was stabbed by junkies outside his block in 1971, while most horrifically, Nathan ‘Buster’ Wilson was murdered and dismembered with some of his body parts turning up near the Hoover Dam and his severed head found in California.
By the time he died of pneumonia on January 21st 1984, Wilson was broke and buried in an unmarked grave. But this state of ignominy did not last long. A Detroit radio station ran a fundraiser to pay for a headstone. The inscription read: Jackie The Complete Entertainer.
The month following his death, Michael Jackson paid tribute to Wilson while picking up his Grammy Award for Thriller, saying “Some people are followers. Some people make the path and are pioneers.” Once again, Wilson’s onstage energy, craft and movement and the power, beauty and range of his voice had inspired a King.
Follow me on Twitter
If you like this, try:
This even more uptempo live version
I Get the Sweetest Feeling
Reet Petite
Lonely Teardrops
Go to 75: No Diggity by Blackstreet
Go to 77: Valerie by Mark Ronson feat. Amy Winehouse
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