![]() ![]() There you could hire a funk, jazz or steel pan band, alongside ordering soul food and go-go dancers for your party. Later that day, on the way to our gig, we heard the news of his murder on the radio.”ĭetermined to run his own operation, in the late 1960s Curtis set up House of Fatback, a booking agency and record label he ran from Queens until 1992. “I saw Martin Luther King speaking from his balcony and I waved at him and he waved back. While touring with Clyde McPhatter, he once stayed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was very humble, really talented.” And he worked dates with many rising stars, drumming for Aretha Franklin’s first New York appearance, in Greenwich Village. That woke us up.”Īfter completing his military service, Curtis settled in New York where he worked in the Apollo theatre’s house band: “We backed Marvin Gaye on his Apollo debut. “One of the band went into a gas station’s restroom in the south, oblivious to the fact that it was for whites only,” he recalls, “and the owner pulled a shotgun on him. ![]() Thomas grew up in the Bronx, “surrounded by all kinds of people”, and he didn’t experience racial discrimination until he went on the road as a musician. “OK, once we got to high school, things were segregated – but that didn’t stop me doing what I wanted to do.” “There was segregation but I had white neighbours,” he says, “and white friends. Although he grew up under Jim Crow-era apartheid, Curtis doesn’t recall those years as particularly onerous. Hard work has been a constant in Curtis’s life, ever since he started out as a professional musician in his mid-teens playing with local blues outfits in Fayetteville, North Carolina. (Do the) Spanish Hustle spent seven weeks in the UK charts, peaking at No 10 in 1976. Curtis raises an eyebrow and notes that he now plays percussion on stage as “drumming for Fatback is hard work”, but adds: “I’m from that school where you work till you drop.” “Bill’s unstoppable,” says Thomas with an admiring chuckle. Today they share a brotherly camaraderie: Thomas, 75, is full of energy and enthusiasm while Curtis, a remarkably well preserved 91, is droll and nonchalant. “This was before the DJ era, so we played the hits that people liked to dance to.”īack then, Thomas was a rookie trumpeter while Curtis was an R&B veteran, having worked the chitlin’ circuit – venues for black Americans during mid-century racial segregation – as drummer for dozens of acts, including Jimmy Reed and Sam Cooke. They first met in 1967 while in a band playing “weddings, bar mitzvahs, parties” in Queens, says Thomas. Instead, when I meet him and fellow Fatback founding member, keyboardist Gerry Thomas, at a Travelodge in Hounslow, west London – the band have been playing a residency at London’s Jazz Cafe – I find both men full of good cheer. ![]() Not that Curtis expresses any bitterness. ![]()
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