Not long ago, Little Anthony Gourdine took a trip to Cleveland, down to the chilly banks of Lake Erie and into a giant glass pyramid whose every wall and corner honors the founders, pioneers and innovators of rock 'n' roll.
"I was walking around like I was on a high, just to see all these people, what they said about this one, and that one — all the great ones," says Gourdine.
This weekend, after a long, long time waiting, Gourdine will be there, too.
Little Anthony and the Imperials, who gave us some of pop music's most beautifully melodramatic songs — Hurt So Bad, Going Out of My Head and Tears on My Pillow, which Rolling Stone once called "as excruciatingly painful a plea of unrequited teen passion as has even been waxed" — will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Saturday.
"I'm their peer now," he says, as if he can't believe it. "I'm on their level. What that means to me, about what I do? It just really knocks me down."
Last year, Gourdine and the Imperials — Clarence Collins, Ernest Wright Jr. and Harold Jenkins — celebrated their 50th anniversary with a new album called You'll Never Know, an appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman and a renewed dedication to proving that they're more than a moldy oldies act.
The group's most classic members — Gourdine, Collins, Wright, Tracy Lord, Glouster "Nat" Rogers and Sammy Strain — are being inducted. (Jenkins, the group's longtime choreographer, joined in 1972, and it's worth noting that unlike many classic groups still touring, the Imperials' current lineup bears a majority of original members.)
Artists are eligible for induction 25 years after the release of their first single, which means The Imperials have technically been waiting since 1983, three years before the Hall's first ceremony. But Gourdine's not the least bit bitter about it.
"Man, that blew me off the planet!" he says of finding out that the Imperials had finally made the list. "I was just a kid from Brooklyn, a little black kid off the street. It's not like we never got an award — I got a lot. But this is where your peers tell you that you're the best at what you do."
Smokey Robinson, whose Miracles were one of Little Anthony and the Imperials' descendants in the pantheon of flawless vocal harmonies, will induct the group, but Gourdine says that he's so excited, "The local butcher could come out and (induct) us and I'd be OK with that."
As enthused as the singer, born Jerome Anthony Gourdine in Brooklyn in 1941, is about his induction, he's concerned that many, maybe even those inducting him, don't get something vital about the group.
"I like to start out by setting something straight," he explains. "We've been doing this for a long time. That's the reason we've survived for 50 years. We've never allowed anyone to define us."
The definition he's talking about, the one that's stuck with them ever since the young singer joined a group called The Chesters in 1957, which changed its name to the Imperials a year later, is the word "doo-wop."
It's a limiting label, one that forever ranks the group in a quaint time capsule rather than as a still-talented, still-vital musical entity, he says.
Label 'disconcerting'
"We came out of a certain era, as young kids, and our body of work is definitely from a period of time that is defined as doo-wop, but that's one of the most disconcerting things in my life," Gourdine says. "We are an R&B contemporary group — we always have been, we always will be. I'm putting that down."
But he doesn't blame his contemporaries who wear the doo-wop mantle — "They just wanna eat. They wanna make sure they make a living, so they accept that moniker. But (that limits) the ability to progress and to do what we need to do. (Labels) hold us back from that. If you get stale, you get bitter."
There is, of course, the matter of the presence of Little Anthony and the Imperials on several doo-wop tours — in fact, their most recent South Florida appearance was in March for Richard Nader's Doo-Wop Reunion Show. So ... what's that about not being a doo-wop group?
"Some at the doo-wop show may say 'Then how come they're here?'" Gourdine admits. "They're paying us a lot of money, for goodness sake! But we're moving in another direction. We can't go on those shows anymore, even though they pay us a lot of money."
Back in the beginning, Gourdine says, the group saw themselves "as rock 'n' rollers," who signed with End Records in 1958 and quickly scored a hit with Tears on My Pillow. Fans immediately took note of Gourdine's sobbing tenor, which the singer says was the result of a tonsillectomy that lowered the former boy soprano's voice to a smooth falsetto.
"I couldn't (hit soprano notes) as easily as I did before. I didn't understand the technical things. ... Finally someone said 'You're a tenor now.' I said 'Does that mean I got a high voice?' I had to learn to accept it," he says.
Delivery to match words
That tenor became, of course, more than a burden to accept — it became the trademark of the singer that was eventually dubbed "Little Anthony" by DJ and rock promoter Alan Freed. After following Tears up with the hits Two Kinds of People and Shimmy Shimmy Ko Ko Bop, Gourdine left to pursue a solo career, but returned in 1963, for an astonishing run of hits.
Most of those were written by Teddy Rendazzo, a former member of the group the Three Chuckles, whom the Imperials had known in the scene. Rendazzo had "a heck of a voice, an Italian Vic Damone sort of voice," but thought Gourdine's anguished delivery was a better vehicle for the kind of tortured melodramatic feelings he wanted to commit to music — specifically his own.
"I became Teddy's voice," Gourdine says. "Look at the pattern — I'm on the Outside (Looking In), Going Out of My Head, Hurt So Bad, Take Me Back. Each one was about one woman, who he was having, obviously, a rocky love affair with. He used (the music) to state his pain. I was able to interpret it in my voice, and get exactly what he was trying to say — which was torment."
Gourdine may not have written the words to Hurt So Bad, but every night he sings it, the emotions become his own.
"Nancy Wilson did it, and it was the same thing. It affected her that way. Linda Ronstadt heard it that way, too. We understand it," he says. "Sometimes, I'll be singing it — and I've done that song many, many times — and I never know what emotions are gonna come out on any given night. It never gets old. That feeling is as old as man, as old as people — 'It hurts me. I hurt. I'm hurt. Somebody hurt me, see, and it's so bad.' "
Gourdine's way of musically, and elegantly, channeling that hurt was apparent in that episode of The Late Show last summer. When musical director Paul Shaffer approached the group, they were reluctant to do an old hit, preferring something from the new album and not be presented as a nostalgia act. But Shaffer had a counter offer.
"He said, 'I sold this to David Letterman, that I wanted to do something better, with 47 musicians, big, the way you recorded it,' " he remembers. "And that was one of the greatest things that happened to us."
Instead of cementing the group as a one-note act from yesteryear, Gourdine says it "made his job easier" by showing them as masters of their craft, still in their performance prime. They weren't hamming their way through this — the Imperials were serious.
"It's a lot of work and a lot of dedication," Gourdine says. "We are artists. That's why we've survived for 50 years. And we will give the best show anyone's possibly seen."
THE REST
OF THE BEST
Other inductees this year:
Run-D.M.C.: Groundbreaking rap group that crossed cultural barriers with mainstream hits and a collaboration with Aerosmith on Walk This Way.
Jeff Beck: The guitarists' guitarist, known for his inventive work with both the Yardbirds and the Jeff Beck Group.
Bobby Womack: Soulful singer, songwriter, guitarist. Best known for hits like Across 110th Street and It's All Over Now.
Metallica: The band that signfied heavy metal in the '80s — and beyond.
EARLY INFLUENCES:
Country singer Wanda Jackson, left
SIDEMEN:
Elvis Presley's bassist Bill Black and drummer D.J. Fontana
Muscle Shoals session man and songwriter extraordinaire Spooner Oldham, left (The Dark End of the Street, Cry Like a Baby)
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