DOOWOP AND LOS ANGELES

DOOWOP AND LOS ANGELES

I was in a doowop band in high school called The Enchanters, running parallel to the school band. One of my friends who just died, he was the lead singer in the band. We sung everywhere — sororities, on campus.

There was a girl who really loved the group and her mother was an agent and she wanted her mother to hear us. Her mother really liked us, so we used to go up to Oakland Hills every Saturday and practice. She was going to polish up our choreography and everything.

But us, we would come close to something good and lose it. So the band wouldn’t rehearse and she dropped us. It broke our hearts.

Other than that, we formed another group. There was Otis who just died. And Harvey who had his own business as a carpenter. There were four of us and we came to LA.

So we went down there, and in a short time we had an offer of a contract from a producer. The guy was on Sunset and Vine. The guy had a small operation, really only had one artist. And we sung for him. He really liked us and he offered us a contract.

We didn’t know—we were just ignorant. So me and this other guy, Buford, looked down the street and saw Capitol Records. So we decided to walk down there with our contract. We wanted to compare—it was the silliest thing.

And the woman at the reception when you walked in, I think her name was Johnny, we told her our problem. And she said there were 2 rhythm and blues producers, Adam Ross and Jack Levy. She said, “It’s lunchtime right now, you come back after lunch and you can probably meet him.”

Just before we were about to go out, Adam Ross came walking down the stairs. She said, “Oh, there’s Adam Ross”. So we went and introduced ourselves to him and told him what we were looking at and he wanted to hear us. He told us to come back after lunch. They were on the 7th floor and Jack Levy was there too. So we sang—we always sung A Cappella—we sang one of our favorite songs to him. They liked it, but they said, “Before we offer you a contract, we got to hear you on recording. Some people can sing but they don’t come through on recording.”

When he told us that, we said, “Well, forget about it. We got a contract already”. So they said. “Wait a minute”, and they gave us a contract.

Talk about kids that didn’t know anything. We were down here 3 months and we had a lot of fun. But the boys started to fade out and wanted to go home. I stayed a little while after they left and then I came home to Oakland too.