I had been rehearsing with Link (Bob Davis) and the Mod Squad, a rhythm and blues band in 1972 and one of the folks rehearsing was Ernest “Pepper” Reed. Ernest was seventeen, an earlier graduate of Columbus Mohawk High School and a guitar phenomonen, playing with Rusty Bryant’s Band at aged fifteen.
Pepper was rehearsing with a couple of bands and he suggested that I make a rehearsal with a South Columbus Band, The Soul Superbs. The band’s personnel was Chris Powell, sax, Anthony Ludaway, drums, Frankie Justice, vocals, Larry Ferris, bass, Bobby Payton and Pepper on guitar.
I rehearsed with them a couple of times early in June and the next weekend they were going out of town to do a week in Rock Island, Illinois at Woody’s Magic Room. They asked me to join them and I did. I fronted the money for a trailer rental and we were off in two vehicles.
It was quite a long drive to Rock Island, one of the Quad Cities and home of the legendary Rock Island Line (Get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island Line). We made it with no problem and played six days at Woody’s Place. Woody was the Black entreprenuer of Rock Island; he owned the night club, the rib joint and the liquor store. We played six nights, ate well and were paid decently.
We had a booking agent in Beloit, Wisconsin and from Rock Island, we went to Grand Rapids, Michigan to work at The Golden Glow. The club owner, who name escapes me, had a nice club and a house that he rented to the band for the week’s stay for one hundred twenty-five dollars. We played and went to a nice home, where everyone had their own bedroom. I can remember good Mexican food and a waitress whom I was fond of, Lori Smith.
From Grand Rapids, we went to a club in Battle Creek, Michigan, The El Dorado, where we played one night. I remember a party after the club, because the girI who was chasing invited me into the bathroom and it was the first and only time that I shot up heroin. I was the first one to get the needle, she put it in my arm, then drew it back out, then shot me back up. I wasn’t effected.
That incident reminds me of the first time that I was introduced to cocaine, on a music trip to Galesburg, Illinois, by a lesbian woman, or as Black folks say “a Bulldagger.” We were in the front seat of our new Dodge van between sets and the “nose candy” came out, I snorted, snorted again and returned it to the sister. I couldn’t feel anything. I only indulged one other time and wrote cocaine off as a bad luck drug that did do anything for me.
I got along well with everyone in the Soul Superbs except the bassist, Larry Ferris, who was a jerk and liked to mess with people. Anthony Ludaway and Chris Powell were co-leaders of the band and we had one recording session during my year with the band. We recorded Just Ask Me and Cannibals and I have been told that the disc is a collectors item on Ebay.com.
Eventually we became managed by Kenny Keels, of Columbus, and he booked The Soul Superbs in Bluefield, West Virginia at a club. We tried to get there in one day from Beloit and if it wasn’t for fog on the West Virginia Turnpike, we would have made it. We played in White Sulphur, West Virginia at Haynesworth’s Hotel and the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, where singer Billie Holiday had been incarcerated years earlier.
In January, 1974, I played my last weekend at Haynesworth’s and bid farewell to the Soul Superbs. We had made money the first few times that we went out together, but subsequent trips were unproductive, breaking even or losing on the trips.
The Soul Superbs packed up for California just after I left, changed their name to Nitro, secured an agent named Dick Griffey, got signed to a contract by Motown Records and produced two albums. Ernest “Pepper” Reed went into the studio with a group, Shalamar, and produce a guitar line on A Night to Remember that is legendary.
I saw Ernest a few times later. He was a shadow of the lively guy I had known in the early 1970s. He succumbed to kidney problems in the 1990s.
