Memory Lane

BREAD AND BUTTER: Charlie Gracie had Cameo/Parkway's first big hit "Butterfly" in 1957. He's booked through 2007.

Setting the record straight on Charlie Gracie, Cameo/ Parkway and the original Sound of Philadelphia.

by A.D. Amorosi

When Charlie Gracie met Bernie Lowe in December 1956, neither knew they were on the verge of a revolution. Gracie was an aspiring guitarist-singer from South Philly who had recorded for the town's tiniest labels.

Lowe? He was a pianist and TV talent-show bandleader who had written "Teddy Bear" for Elvis with his buddy Kal Mann. He was trying to bite off his own piece of the pie.

"Bernie had $2,000 to get a label off the ground with a tall, skinny good-looking Elvis type," recalls Gracie. "Instead Bernie wound up with me." Now 67, Gracie laughs about recording his hiccuping rockabilly song "Butterfly" with Dave Appell and The Applejacks behind him for $600. That track went on to bankroll everything else that followed on Lowe's independent label Cameo Records, and its sister, Parkway.

"A million seller like that — first time out of the box — doesn't come along every time," says Gracie, puffing on a Camel. "Lowe was a genius record-cutter."

About a decade in — after defining the danceable sound of Philly, black and white, with hits by the Dovells, Bobby Rydell, Chubby Checker and Patti LaBelle — Cameo/Parkway got sold, in part, to Allen Klein, one-time manager to the Rolling Stones, Apple Records and a majority of the Beatles. It is his fight with Kal Mann, another label co-owner who held onto the label's master tapes, that was reputed to have kept the catalog off CD shelves all these years. Any copy of "The Twist" you've heard on CD has been a re-recording. Go figure. But Klein's son, Jody, and the family's ABKCO label have cleared away the litigation brush to present the missing emerald in the jeweled crown of Philadelphia music — a catalog as valuable a pop-soul machine as Motown and Atlantic — starting with the four-CD box, Cameo Parkway 1957-1967.

Lowe wasn't trying to be an innovator, wasn't trying to unite races, or put Philly on the map, though he did all that. He was just hoping to make as much money as he could. "Bernie didn't think he was going to make anyone famous other than himself," says Cameo's musical architect and A&R guy, Dave Appell. "We just got lucky with our sound. There wasn't too much research in rock 'n' roll back then. Things just happened."

Based on Lowe's time spent as a songwriter for artists like Elvis Presley, the signature sound Lowe, Mann and Appell developed was one thick with reeds (not brass), jazzy rhythms (lots of high-hat) and big voices in the background.

"A lot of Cameo acts, like Mike Pedicin, were on Sound 'n' Teen, a little label Bernie had a little piece of with Bob Horn and Nat Siegel before Cameo," says Jerry Blavat — historian, Geator and Cameo recording artist. "But Bernie wanted more." Siegel was Blavat's manager and in Blavat's words, Siegel and Dick Clark became silent partners in Lowe's new enterprise with Mann, when Horn, host of American Bandstand between 1952 and 1957, had to sell off his labels and get out of Philly in a storm of shady legal and personal circumstances.

"Bernie was my vocal coach long before he was my boss — and in between he was the musical director of this Philly TV talent show, The Paul Whiteman [TV] Teen Club, playing piano," says smash-making singer Bobby Rydell, 63. "Bernie was all over the joint."

Rydell points toward hearty gospel singers like Dee Dee Sharp whose "whoa whoas" punctuated every song as definitive Lowe/Appell arrangements. "When the needle dropped down on a 45, and you heard that sound, you knew that was Cameo."

Appell not only discovered Chubby Checker (plucking chickens) and Bobby Rydell (at a record hop), he wrote their songs. He penned Rydell's "Wild One" while driving from Philly to the Paramount Theater in New York City. "Literally seat-of-your-pants stuff," laughs Appell, 82, who throughout Cameo's tenure produced artists at the Broad and Locust studio — "The men's room had a perfect sound as long as nobody flushed" — as well as Rec-O-Art's 13th and Market mono studios. Usually, his band, the Applejacks, backed them. His previous life playing jazzy lounge tunes and early rock tracks for Ernie Kovacs' Philly-filmed television show gave Appell a wide sonic berth.

For "Butterfly," the label's first hit, Gracie's rockabilly-infused pop got a different voicing from Appell. His Applejacks, rather than be dismissive of rock 'n' roll, took to the new, rugged sound with glee, giving the twitch of Gracie's righteous rhythm guitars a mellifluous sensibility.

"Whatever we put down stuck," says Appell. "We might have been jazzheads, but we could rock." His contribution to the box set, "Mexican Hat Rock," proves as much.

"It was huge," exclaims Blavat of the rhythm section's sound filled with beat-up old pianos and thick cymbal rides from jazz drummers who brought heavy hands to the sessions. Jerry got that same big sound for his own Cameo singles like the one he recorded with the Yon Teenagers, "One More Time Back to School."

"Anytime producers ask me how we got that cymbal sound, I'd say "pie plates,'" laughs Appell. His approach to reeds — often three saxophones or more, dense with tenor and baritone sax — was innovative. "In Manhattan studios, they used no more than two saxes. But my voicings were fatter," says Appell, who brought axe-men like Buddy Savitt onto sessions with rough kids like the Dovells or the Orlons whom he found singing on street corners.

"We had to wear football helmets and carry whistles just to get through those sessions," laughs Appell.

Gracie, a rhythm guitar player with the meanest right-hand strum, was still a kid.

An industry vet since 10, when his father bought him a guitar rather than a suit from a South Street pawnshop ("It was warped, but I mastered it as if it were a gift from God"), Gracie had recorded for small local labels like 20th Century, when Lowe came to him with the proposition.

"I wasn't trying to say I was the best thing to come along, it just happened to have happened with me," says Gracie. "Bernie was a heckuva great musician who knew what he wanted and knew how to get it from you."

What Gracie wanted eventually was money. Unhappy with cash he received for several million-selling songs — "Four thousand here, five grand there," says Gracie — he went to Lowe to collect.

""Let's not argue amongst ourselves,' Bernie told me," says Gracie. So they didn't. Instead, it was the beginning of the end of Gracie's recording career, with lawyers hashing it out (they settled out of court, reportedly for $40,000) and Gracie getting branded a troublemaker, floundering from Decca to Roulette and zilch after leaving Cameo in 1958.

"I cut my throat by suing Cameo," says Gracie. "I never wound up on Bandstand again. Who knew Dick Clark had a piece of the label?"

Ask Rydell about money and he laughs. "Did they calculate the exact amount of sales correctly? Who knows? They were fair to me. Very fair." Rydell stayed until the label was sold in 1967.

Gracie holds no grudge against Cameo — especially since he went on to create a career in the early '60s playing rockabilly for fans like Van Morrison and Paul McCartney. "A lot of guys get snagged in the record business," says Gracie.

"If the Rolling Stones could get screwed, who am I? I'm lucky. My right hand is still strong. Amen. "Butterfly' was a big song. I sold a million of it. Andy Williams sold a couple million of it. If it wasn't for Cameo, I'd still be working for a couple hundred a week. Instead I'm booked through 2007, God willing."

Various Artists
Cameo Parkway 1957-1967
(ABKCO)
During its tenure, Cameo/ Parkway went beyond regional chart-topping to become an integral part of American pop mythology. Multiracial and independent, C/P took on out-of-town dirty garage rockers like Bob Seger (!) and ? & The Mysterians (yes, "96 Tears" was a Cameo hit), groovy novelty tunes ("Dinner with Drac," Clint Eastwood singing "Rowdy") and moody crooners Len Barry and Bunny Sigler. But C/P's strong suit was yanking fruit from local growers, producing hip-swiveling rockabilly ("Butterfly" from Charlie Gracie), honking R&B jazz (Mike Pedicin's "Shake a Hand"), teeny-bop classics (Bobby Rydell's "Wild One"), smoldering soul ("You'll Never Walk Alone" by Patti LaBelle & the Bluebelles) and every sound in between. A jazzman's quirky sense of arrangement, production and songcraft — wound through dance-craze R&B tracks that juked and jived with snorting saxes and jittery rhythms ("The Twist," "The Bristol Stomp," "The Wah Watusi," "Mashed Potato Time") — is what gave Cameo its signature, an indelible stamp that's still bristling and alive.