Does anyone else actually know or remember this group? Sometimes it seems they were only a thing in my dream: an unattainable vision (and sound) of doo wop perfection, never seen by waking eyes or heard with unclogged ears (I'll explain later).
And yet there they are on youtube; CDs can be bought; they're mentioned in Jay Warner's Billboard book of vocal groups and there's still an official website online - even though to all intents and purposes they called it a day in 2003.
14 Karat Soul were undoubtedly an accomplished act, slaying live audiences time after time, as I can testify, yet they never made it big in America or the UK, only attaining the scale of recognition they deserved in Japan. And that's why I want to do my bit to commemorate a group who deserve to be revered all round the world.
I first came across them in 1981 at the Edinburgh Festival, an annual celebration of the arts in Scotland's capital. Anyone can perform at the so-called Festival Fringe, which over time has become much bigger than the festival itself.
Studying Greek tragedy at university in nearby Glasgow at the time, I was intrigued by the notion of a production of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus with Gospel music. I can't remember if the word "doo wop" was mentioned in the Fringe brochure (each act is given two or three lines to sell itself to potential audiences) but what I got for my gamble in the staid setting of the Assembly Rooms that evening in Edinburgh was what seemed to me doo wop heaven.
As well as The Gospel at Colonus, as the Sophocles adaptation was called, the group performed a piece called Sister Suzie Cinema which was all about atmosphere rather than plot (five young men enter a cinema, are beguiled by visions of fifties starlets, then leave). The university student in me ought to have dismissed this as the slighter piece; the burgeoning doo wop fan was only aware of the most gorgeous, soaring harmonies, unimpeded by any instrumentation, and a growing sense of entering a kind of trancelike state. Doubtless this was partly the production's intended effect - the characters were in a place which peddled dreams - but the feeling was enhanced in my case because although I had been collecting doo wop albums for the last ten years I had never imagined that the essence of those fifties recordings which I listened to in my bedroom could be brought so vividly to life. And although I had been going to concerts for around the same length of time there weren't many doo wop groups, vintage or revivalist, who stopped off in Glasgow. (Please don't bring Showaddywaddy into it.)
Through a cruel twist of fate, at the precise moment of this wonderful discovery I was having ear trouble which meant that I had to pull down sharply on one lobe in order to hear anything which didn't sound as though multiple layers of cotton wool had been interposed between me and the sound source. So there I was, doing my best to soar high in doo wop heaven and drink in all this acapella perfection, taken to heights of aural ecstacy such as I had never known before ... all the while with a constant reminder of the baseness and imperfection of my human form, my head to one side, forever tugging on that lobe.
I'll spare you the details of the subsequent treatment, except to add that as wonderful bright, clear three-dimensional sounds finally rushed into my head once again, I could only mutter to the nurse: "Too late."
Living in the UK with no internet in those days, I had no easy means of finding out afterwards about the group's career in America, though I do remember thinking: "Hey, don't they realise they could use that singing ability to perform actual doo wop oldies? Now that I would pay to go and see." It never occured to me that Lee Breuer, creator of the two pieces, had chosen 14 Karat Soul precisely because, young as they were, they already had a reputation as ace doo wop revivalists, championed by the late Stan Krause and others. (Krause was a New Jersey record shop owner who founded Catamount Records.)
My chronology is now a little vague, but around a year later I was delighted to find that the group, who had toured The Gospel at Colonus and Sister Suzie Cinema around Europe, were having a week long residency in the unlikely location of the Mitchell Theatre in Glasgow.
I say unlikely because although Glasgow audiences are known for their warmth - Green's Playhouse, later the Apollo, was a renowned UK venue for rock acts - the more modestly proportioned Mitchell Theatre was part of a recent extension to Glasgow's main reference library, so it had no history or particular atmosphere to speak of. 
Possibly it had been cheap to hire and/or seemed was a handy place to try things out away from the glare of too much publicity. Maybe it had state of the art sound, as that was certainly very good. Or it could be that the decision was the a result of their earlier appearance at Mayfest, Glasgow's modest attempt to start a festival of its own to rival Edinburgh's.
Anyway, I booked to go to the Mitchell Theatre, normally home to local amateur theatre groups, just about every night of their stay. I saw them quite a few times afterwards but that week at the Mitchell Theatre is how I remember them. Aspects of the act changed from night to night, suggesting that it may have been a tryout base, although these were fairly minor. Essentially, they were good to go from the first night - and the first number - onwards.
Quite a few of the songs they sang that week are available on CD, although those antiseptic studio recordings are a long from hearing (and seeing) five figures with nowhere to hide blasting out at you.
I think this is what draws me to acapella doo wop, and acapella in general: the knowledge that you're watching a balancing act, and if there is one weak link in the troupe they will all topple. You're seeing something vulnerable and human.
At around the same time, a lecturer at Glasgow University was trying to explain the twentieth century to us - a good trick in precisely fifty five minutes. His main point was that in previous centuries people were in touch with the objects which surrounded them - eg a door handle would have been carved out of wood, and you could visualise how it was made: by a man, as you were a man. You could have made it. (Unless you were a woman, of course, but that was a whole 'nother lecture.)
Come the twentieth century, however, the advent of mass production and the development of new, artificial materials meant people were surrounded by objects which they didn't really understand and so they lost a secure sense of their place in the world which led to social alienation and lots of depressing - I mean, challenging - literature.
The tutor probably put it better (it was over twenty five years ago) but when I see an acapella group onstage, vulnerable in way that no rock band can be, I feel in touch with something fundamental. There's the sense of intimacy involved: the directness of the human voice, as opposed to an instrument, to provide the music; the self-exposure and risk in the sharing of that voice, in offering it to others for judgement. Then the magical-seeming way in which a group of individual personalities subdue their egos to create a single entity. To go back to the image of the balancing act, when nobody falls - when, in fact, they all seem to soar - then that is a joyous moment which affirms your faith in humanity. And as the listener, you feel like an intimate part of that group. During a discussion of In the Still of the Night on a long-vanished doo wop forum someone pointed out that there were actually only four members of the group, but it seemed to me that those who listened to and cherished that record - were the fifth Satin.
As part of my job I've had to do some research into folk music in Britain. I'd always known about the fifties folk revival in America and Britain but didn't realise that all through the twentieth century and earlier collectors had been trying to preserve what they could of ballads handed down through the generations. I don't know enough to discuss it in detail, though I believe part of the impulse in Britain would have been as a response to the growing dominance of imported American culture. Interestingly, however, on a visit to Cecil Sharp House (the UK's Folk Music Central), when I mentioned my interest in doo wop to the assistant librarian Peta Webb, she likened it to folk music. Which I suppose all comes back to a phrase which struck me all many years ago in the entry about doo wop in the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock'n'Roll: "music you or your lover could have made."
The group kicked off their Mitchell Theatre set every night with Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy, and both ears now fully operational and tuned in. The bass singer, Reginald "Briz" Brisbon, had been a drummer, and was miming a double bass; but the moment I really knew this was something special was at a particular blending of voices around about the line "And now the company jumps when he plays reveille ..."
I can't describe precisely what was being done; I can only say it sounded grainy but right, rough but undoubtedly polished, not accidental. And a million miles away from the smooth stylings of barbershop. Or, come to that, any white doo wop group I'd heard. The nearest match I've heard on record is towards the end of the Spaniels' Get Away Child (You Don't Move Me). Below is the group's Catamount recording of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy. The sound is more basic, less processed, than their later studio albums but it still doesn't convey what I heard on those successive nights at the Mitchell Theatre. The sheer attack of that opening number (cannily chosen from outside the genre), and the promise of an evening of like joys to come, is something I'll never forget.
But one of the highlights for me was Farewell, My Love, which I'd never heard before. I subsequently found out it's an old Temptations number which was as much doo wop as soul; on the original recording the bass voice echoes (or is echoed by) an actual bass all the way through, so really one or the other is redundant, and the song was eminently suited to an acapella rendering. I'm presuming it was a favourite of Stan Krause's, as the Royal Counts also recorded it.
But the biggest thrill, perhaps, was seeing Gloria acted out rather than merely sung. Rather than repeat myself, I'll quote the relevant part of a Doo Wop Shop discussion:
The full meaning ... came to me: the bass, Briz, loomed as the lead sang, one last time, of his yearnings, intoning over him those doomy notes that spelled out just one thing: You're alone, Bub; get used to it. The bass was reality, just as he often takes over on "baser" group sides (Pookie for the dreams; Gerald for the down'n'dirty), and his notes here were a death knell for the lead's tattered vision of togetherness ("Maybe she'll want me... "), a bell to toll him back to his sole self, alone in the less than tender night. Briz was singing right into his face, with a sort of evil glee: maybe this message from the Reality Zone had to be given, but he was certainly enjoying the task, and the "teenage" lead was not much liking it, protesting his love and need to the end.
You can read the above in its original context here.
Whether it was before or after that residency, I was with some friends at the Mayfest festival and 14 Karat Soul were queueing in the communal cafe (no Edinburgh elitism in good old leftwing Glasgow). I wanted to go over and say It's great what you're doing - I love the Dells, etc - but I didn't. I dearly wish I had.
Fast forward a few years and I'm living in London, going to see 14 Karat Soul at the Fridge in Brixton. I'm near the front of the stage, immersed in the performance, when I find I'm one of the people called up to add a few extra dum dums to Come Go With Me.
This is a task into which I throw myself with relish - only at some point one of the singers, grinning, makes a gesture. He slashes his throat with his index finger, which I know now almost certainly means "Shut the *&%! up as you cannot carry a tune in a bucket," but I thought then, and even now would like to present it as a remote possibility, that it meant he envied my vocal command, joshingly indicating that he wished my prowess could be curtailed so as not to expose his own limitations quite so cruelly when he next stepped up to the mike. But I admit it's a bit of a long shot.
I'm still haunted by that singer's gesture. But maybe it's best - in order to pull some tattered shreds of self esteem around me - to look up from the gesture and fix instead on his grin, which seemed conspiratorial. So it could have meant - oh, I don't know what it could have meant, but whatever was going on, I was part of it, I loved what was going on, and the odds are I didn't actively ruin it.
Someone even complimented me at the bus stop afterwards: "That was great, man. Do it again!" But maybe he was tone deaf too.
This is a revised version of a piece originally posted ten years ago today. Other posts about 14 Karat Soul:
14 Karat Soul in 1980 here.
14 Karat Soul live on Channel 4 in 1983 here.
As They Should Be Heard here. (From a 1983 BBC Radio 1 session.)
Try Them One More Time here. (The one-off reunion gig in 2011)
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