3/12/2023 0 Comments Philly sound studioThe City of Brotherly Love joined Detroit, the home of Motown, and Memphis, the home of Stax Records, as sanctuaries of soul. They’d created the Sound of Philadelphia. Back Stabbers sold more than 700,000 copies that first year. Just as important, they were Columbia’s foray into the market for albums by black artists. Jones,” the Spinners’ “I’ll Be Around” and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ “If You Don’t Know Me By Now.” Clive Davis, then chief operating officer of Columbia, wrote in his memoir that Gamble and Huff sold ten million singles. By January 1973, the song was number one on the Pop and R&B charts and on the way to selling a million singles, just the kind of crossover hit Columbia envisioned when it invested in Gamble and Huff.Ī little more than a year after forming PIR, they also had produced hits with Billy Paul’s “Me and Mrs. “Love Train” was the third single released from their album Back Stabbers, issued in August 1972. “I knew once we put our leads on Back Stabbers it had the potential to be something special, but I didn’t know to what magnitude,” Williams says. So for the first singles on PIR, they wrote songs featuring the two trading vocals. While Eddie Levert had been singing lead for the trio, they liked the interplay between Levert and Walter Williams they saw onstage. Gamble and Huff had spotted them three years earlier opening a show at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. Within 15 minutes, he recalls, they had a song for the O’Jays, a group from Canton, Ohio, that had considered calling it quits after a couple of minor chart successes. Gamble, the words guy, began singing, “People all over the world, join hands, form a love train.” ![]() One of the titles on a legal pad had promise: “Love Train.” Huff fingered the piano. “So we were talking about how you need something to bring people together.” All this confusion going on in the world,” Gamble says. “We were talking about the world and why people really can’t work together. With the money, Gamble and Huff opened their own label, Philadelphia International Records (PIR).Īs they sat down to compose following the deal, the Vietnam War raged on, conflicts over desegregation spread across the country and civil war ravaged Pakistan. The opportunity came 40 years ago in 1971 when Columbia Records, hoping to finally break into the black music market, gave them a $75,000 advance to record singles and another $25,000 for a small number of albums. “It was an easy, easy fit,” Gamble recalls.ĭuring the 60s, they had moderate success with hits like “Expressway to Your Heart” by the Soul Survivors, “Cowboys to Girls” by the Intruders and “Only the Strong Survive” by Jerry Butler.īut they wanted to be more than writers and producers of regional hits who occasionally made a national mark. ![]() Soon after, they met at Huff’s Camden, New Jersey home on a Saturday and wrote six or seven songs the first day. The two first ran into each other in an elevator in Philadelphia’s Schubert Building, where they were working as songwriters on separate floors. ![]() “The best ones came in ten, fifteen minutes.” “Sometimes would take 15 minutes to write and sometimes they’d take all day,” Gamble recalls. ![]() He would start playing and Gamble would riff lyrics. Huff would sit at the upright piano in his office with a tape recorder rolling. When Leon Huff and Kenneth Gamble would huddle to write songs, they’d each bring a long, yellow legal pad of potential titles, sometimes 200 or 300 each.
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