A Funky Farewell to Thom Bell

He gave us "The Rubberband Man" and oh so much more...

It’s a Saturday afternoon in late September 1976 — early enough into the Michigan autumn that you can still run around outside without a jacket on.

After spending most of the Bicentennial summer with my grandparents in Tuscaloosa and my mom in L.A., I’m pretty stoked to be back with my friends in Ann Arbor again. We’ve just started the fifth grade at Burns Park Elementary, and we’re all feeling just a little bit like hot shit, given that most of us have now reached double-digits. Fifth grade? Hell, we’ll practically be learning how to drive soon!

Today, my friend Marc joins the rest of us here on the cusp of pre-adolescence by turning 10, and we’re all celebrating with him at Putt-Putt Golf. Marc actually shares a last name with a prominent PGA golfer, but that’s not why we’re here; in our little elementary school world, Putt-Putt is the place to celebrate your birthday, at least if you were lucky enough to be born during the warmer months.

(If you weren’t, your parents take you and your friends out to see a movie, which is how I got to see The Bad News Bears for the first time back in April. Or you party in your family’s basement rec room with pizza, a cake, some KISS albums and a case or two of Towne Club Pop. I don’t make the rules, folks; this is just simply how it is. )

As miniature golf courses go, Putt-Putt is pretty no-frills; even the tougher holes are pretty basic looking. It’s nothing like The Castle out in Sherman Oaks, CA, where my mom has taken my sister and I a few times in the past. That course is a veritable paradise of whimsical traps and water features; this one is really just a bunch of drab wooden frames wedged together and carpeted with Astroturf. But it’s still challenging enough to be fun, especially if you’re playing with your best buddies and you’re all tanked up on free pop…

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Back in the summer of ‘75, I’d had something akin to an ecstatic out-of-body experience when Mike Post’s “Theme from The Rockford Files” suddenly came over The Castle’s PA system while I was putting, and something similar happens to me on this particular Putt-Putt afternoon when “The Rubberband Man,” the latest hit from The Spinners, bursts out of the tinny speakers that dot the course. I’ve heard the song before, but today its soulful groove, infectious chorus and congenial air of good-natured silliness just carries me away, and I start spinning and strutting around the course, sassily brandishing my putter as my “walking cane”.

“Epstein, get over here,” one of my friends calls out in annoyance. “It’s your turn.” “Just play through,” I tell him, using a phrase I’d picked up while caddying my grandfather’s golf rounds. “I’ve got to BOOGIE!!!”

To this day, “Hand me down my down my walking cane/Hand me down my hat” remains one of my favorite song opening lines ever, right up there with Eddie Money’s “Well, they took me to the hospital…” (“No Control”) and Brian Wilson’s “Sometimes I’ve got a weird way of showin’ my love” (from The Beach Boys’ “She Knows Me Too Well”). It instantly sets a mood and a scenario, and pulls you right in for the ride.

Likewise, “The Rubberband Man” has remained one of my favorite songs from 1976. One of my more vivid memories from my first weeks of college in 1985 is of slapping the 45 on my roomate’s turntable and miming to the entire song in front of a roomful of really stoned fellow freshmen; I know I totally weirded out a few people that night, but what the hell — when The Rubberband Man calls, you accept the charges.

It wasn’t until much later, however, that I learned that the song was the work of Philly producer/arranger/songwriter extraordinaire, who had penned it with his longtime songwriting partner Linda Creed. Nor did I know until the early 90s — after I was already out of college, and beginning to seriously study 70s soul music — that Bell was behind so many of the great soul sides of my childhood.

The list of Bell credits is truly prodigious: “A Brand New Me” by Jerry Butler (recorded shortly thereafter by Dusty Springfield). “La-La (Means I Love You),” “Hey Love” and “Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time)” by The Delfonics. “You Are Everything,” “Betcha By Golly Wow” and “Break Up To Make Up” by The Stylistics. “I’m Doing Fine Now” by New York City. “One of a Kind (Love Affair),” “Mighty Love” and “They Just Can’t Stop It (Games People Play)” by The Spinners. And then of course there were his jaw-dropping arrangements for The O’Jays…

And that’s really just a smattering of his credits, the tip of the Bell iceberg. Jerry Butler was just the first established artist from outside Philly to restart his career in the City of Brotherly Love with help from Bell — Dionne Warwick (who, paired with The Spinners, enjoyed the massive Bell-produced 1974 hit “Then Came You”), Elton John and even Johnny Mathis sought him out when a change of fortune or musical direction was needed.

And with good reason: Bell’s arrangements and productions — typically waxed at Philly’s Sigma Sound Studios, with a dynamite selection of session musicians — were lush, elegant and majestic, yet also warmly, deeply soulful. They were designed to shine on the most deluxe stereos (when I significantly upgraded my system last year, The Best of The Spinners was one of the LPs I used to make sure my new vintage 70s components were properly dialed in), but also came across beautifully over AM car radios and, well, Putt-Putt Golf PA speakers. And with the exception of “The Rubberband Man” and the gimmicky “Rockin’ Roll Baby” (the only Stylistics hit that makes me lunge for the “skip” button), the songs Bell helped create were lyrically aimed at grown-ass men and women, yet hooky and melodic enough to appeal to the small-fry. It’s music that gave me a sense of what adulthood might actually be like, and then soothed my soul decades later during times when adult life and love turned out to be even more challenging than I could have ever imagined.

Every time I hear a classic Delfonics or Stylistics slow jam, it triggers a sense-memory that I can’t fully place, yet is still somehow extremely vivid to me. I’m with my dad and sister on a cold winter night back in the mid-70s, and we’re walking into a moodily-lit restaurant in Ann Arbor whose cocktail lounge is done-up for the Christmas holidays. The football helmets that adorn the walls are covered in shiny tinsel, cut-out paper snowflakes are taped to the mirror behind the bar, and everybody’s drink is some warm shade of brown or another. As we pass through the lounge on our way to our table, the jukebox is pouring out some warm, brown sounds of its own. Maybe it’s “You Are Everything”. Maybe it’s “Hey Love”. But it’s definitely got that Thom Bell vibe, and it’s alluring as hell. It makes me want to stay in the lounge and soak it all up, even though it’s no place for kids.

Here’s another Bell-ringer of a memory: It’s March 1977, and I’m staying up every night well past my bedtime, mono earpiece plugged into my transistor radio, so I can listen to Ernie Harwell and Paul Carey call the Detroit Tigers’ spring training games on WJR. And when the Tigers aren’t playing, I still find myself listening to the station’s late-night call-in show hosted by Warren Pierce. (Some four decades later, Pierce will interview me on WJR about my book Stars and Strikes, and will be audibly less than thrilled when I gush that I used to listen to him all the time when I was 10.)

WJR is a news and talk station, not a music station, so I typically only hear a couple of songs on there a night, usually used as “bumpers” between the show segments. But there’s one song they’re regularly spinning that completely transfixes me. It’s upbeat in a mellow way, and makes me feel profoundly content every time I hear it. But they never announce what the song is or who it’s by, and after a while it disappears from the rotation. The chorus sticks with me — “Living in a world of laughter/Love and sugar bear smiles/On the lazy morning after/Daydreams run for a mile” — but I never hear it again on any other radio station, or anywhere else. As the years ago by, I will occasionally make an attempt to find the song and find out who recorded it, but after a while I'll become ever-more convinced that I simply hallucinated the whole thing.

Then, one night this past spring, during a bout of anxiety-induced insomnia, I make another stab at finding it, and this time I strike gold. It’s “World of Laughter” by Johnny Mathis, a track from his 1977 album Mathis Is…, which was of course produced by none other than Thom Bell, who co-wrote the song with Casey James. (James later teamed with Bell’s nephew LeRoy Bell for the disco smash “Livin’ It Up [Friday Night]”.) Hearing the song again after all these years, I feel like someone has put me on an IV drip of honey and morphine; everything suddenly seems like it’s going to be all right.

Thom Bell died yesterday at the age of 79. There are already many excellent pieces floating around out there that talk about his hits, his awards, and how he, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff (a.k.a. “The Mighty Three") essentially created the Philly Soul sound as we know it. (This excellent one from the Philadelphia Inquirer, for instance.) But for me, the full measure of the man’s accomplishments can be found in just how many memories his music has soundtracked for how many people, how many lives it touched, and how many lives it actually improved — and I don’t believe there’s a super-calculator super enough to accurately tally that number. I just hope he knew how much his music meant to so many of us, and how good it made us feel.

It’s impossible for me to pick a favorite Thom Bell-related track, but if I had to choose one that summed up his brilliance as an arranger, it would be this instrumental piece from The Delfonics’ self-titled 1970 album. “Delfonics Theme” would be re-recorded with vocals for the group’s luscious 1972 album Tell Me This Is a Dream, but I love being able to just hear the instruments do their thing, the electric sitar artfully threading its way around the French horns, etc. As a piece of sonic architecture, it’s absolutely stunning; but it’s also welcoming and even healing music, and listening to it as I write this makes me feel incredibly grateful to have lived at the same time that a giant like Thom Bell walked the Earth. Rest In Peace and Power, good sir. And thank you for everything.