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When a musical group celebrates its 50th anniversary, the typical expectation is that by then it is living on memories and will now fade quietly into history.
Many groups that began in the 1950s have taken that path, while a few others are barely hanging on, doing gigs one step above weddings. Nothing could be farther from that scenario than contemporary reality for Little Anthony and the Imperials, for whom April 2009 may be the best month ever.
The legendary group will be on stage at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Friday, April 17, no doubt still on a high from last week, when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The show in Westhampton Beach begins at 8 p.m., and “it will be one of our first appearances as Hall of Fame members,” Jerome Anthony Gourdine said proudly. Other inductees at the ceremony last Saturday, which was broadcast live on the Fuse cable network, were Bobby Womack, Run DMC, Jeff Beck and Metallica.
Jerome Anthony Gourdine is, of course, Little Anthony, a sobriquet given to him by Alan Freed, who is often credited as being the first disc jockey to champion rock and roll. Mr. Gourdine insisted that he has no interest in resting on his laurels as leader of one of the best groups to come out of the popular rhythm and blues explosion of the Eisenhower decade.
“I swear, I am having more fun at 68 than I did at 28,” he said in an interview last week. “Now I know how George Burns felt in his 80s when he said he was having the time of his life. I remember Moms Mabley saying to me, ‘Honey, these sure are the good old days.’”
A band called the Chesters that formed in 1957 consisted of Mr. Gourdine, Clarence Collins, Tracy Lord, Nathaniel Rodgers, and Ronald Ross. “We were just 17-year-old kids from the neighborhood happy to sing together under the streetlights in Brooklyn,” recalled Mr. Gourdine, who emerged as the lead singer. “We didn’t really have ambitions or know much about the world. I mean, we thought New Jersey was the West Coast. We were a bunch of snotty-nosed kids. But we wanted to have fun and we loved music and we couldn’t stop singing.”
They did a few recordings for Apollo Records that did not attract much notice. But everything changed the following year when Ernest Wright replaced Ross and the five friends changed their name to the Imperials. The group was signed by End Records which issued their first single, a tune of teenage sorrow titled “Tears On My Pillow.” The 1958 release was an immediate hit and is considered an early rock classic.
It was fortunate enough that Little Anthony and the Imperials had a big hit so soon, but even better was the fact that success didn’t ruin a rookie group. “Yes, we were very, very fortunate in that we all had moms and dads, that none of us had single parents who had so many of their own struggles and challenges that they couldn’t help us with ours,” Mr. Gourdine recalled.
“Our parents were big influences on us and we respected them. We did make mistakes, but we had great people to fall back on. We had people in our lives who taught us about class and style and helped us stay grounded, and we could concentrate on creating and performing music we loved.”
During the next three years, more hits followed, including “Two Kinds of People” and “Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko Ko Bop.” But even though the members of the Imperials felt fairly grounded and proud of the music they were putting out, they experienced what many creative groups do over time: the coming and going of artists wanting to try something new.
The first to do it was Mr. Gourdine, who left in 1961. Lord and Rodgers left and were replaced by Sammy Strain and George Kerr, and when the latter left he was replaced by Kenny Seymour. After two years of attempting to make Little Anthony a successful solo act, Mr. Gourdine was back, replacing Seymour.
There would be other changes, but beginning in 1963 the Imperials embarked on a long period of popular and critical success. Their hits included “I’m On the Outside (Looking In),” “Goin’ Out of My Head,” “Hurt So Bad,” and “I Miss You So.” They even did the title song of the James Bond movie “You Only Live Twice.”
They appeared on dozens of television programs ranging from the variety shows hosted by Ed Sullivan, Perry Como, and Merv Griffin to “Hullabaloo” and, of course, Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand.” Very early in his career, Bruce Springsteen was an opening act when the Imperials played in the New York-New Jersey area.
While the Imperials don’t have the album sales today that they enjoyed in the 1960s and ’70s, the group never fell out of fashion. They kept working, performing as an individual act or as part of tours of R&B and doo-wop groups. Beginning this year, though, the group is steering clear of the doo-wop tag and focusing exclusively on its rhythm and blues repertoire.
“That is who we really are,” Mr. Gourdine said. “We came out of the era of the black singing groups. Somehow, we got that doo-wop label and we were never comfortable with it, though we respect and enjoy doo-wop music. We don’t see ourselves as hardcore blues artists but as R&B contemporaries. For as long as we can, that is what we want to focus on. We’re sort of going back to our roots and reclaiming our original identity.”
A distinction that Little Anthony and the Imperials have which is of some importance to concert-goers is that in Mr. Gourdine and Collins and Wright the group has a majority of its original members on board, which can also be said by a few other groups that formed in the ’50s, such as the Dells and the Spinners, who performed last year at WHBPAC. It is not a distinction shared by such peers as the Drifters, Platters, and Coasters.
That made the Hall of Fame induction especially sweet for Mr. Gourdine and his two longtime friends. And it sure doesn’t hurt to be introduced as a Hall of Fame member, which is pretty select company.
“You can look at it as a crowning achievement, and we do in the sense that we are now bona fide, USA-approved legends,” Mr. Gourdine said with a laugh. “We have been accepted into a very exclusive club that includes greats like Elvis Presley and Smokey Robinson and B.B. King. Our body of work has been recognized and we feel joyful about that because it hasn’t been an easy task to keep at it for over 50 years.”
A possible downside to phrases like “crowning achievement” is the implication that maybe it is time to get off the road and sit back and listen to music instead of performing it. The same goes for awards, and Little Anthony and the Imperials have collected quite a few in recent years, including the Rhythm and Blues Foundation’s Pioneer Award and inductions in the Vocal Group Hall of Fame and Long Island Music Hall of Fame.
“It’s funny how some performers as they get older tend to count themselves out before the audiences do,” lamented Mr. Gourdine. “I never have felt that way. Our philosophy is never quit, let’s take it to the end.”
But Mr. Gourdine said that a big reason for the group to still keep doing what they’re doing is the response and even age of the audience. “After every show we like to meet the people and sign records, and it’s been amazing to us how many of them are in their 20s and 30s and they know our music,” Mr. Gourdine said. “They say, ‘Now we understand what mom and pop have been talking about all these years.’”
He pointed out that the phone keeps ringing. A CD released last summer, “You’ll Never Know,” has sold well. Last Friday, they played the famous Agora Ballroom in Cleveland, and the night after the Hall of Fame induction they sang the national anthem at the Cleveland Cavaliers game, which was broadcast nationally on ESPN. After Little Anthony and the Imperials performed on the David Letterman show last August, there were more than a million hits on the group’s You Tube site.
Mr. Gourdine characterized the renewed interest in his group this way: “Being rediscovered,” he said, “is a wonderful thing.”
Little Anthony and the Imperials will perform at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center on Friday, April 17, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $65, $80 or $95; call 288-1500 or visit www.whbpac.org.
on Apr 7, 2009