For those not already aware of the sad news, Terry Johnson, the last surviving member of the Flamingos, died yesterday in Las Vegas at the age of 86 - "performing to the end", Marv Goldberg says. He can be seen above (with guitar) on the cover of Flamingos Serenade, the 1959 album of standards which includes his arrangement of I Only Have Eyes For You, the Al Dubin-Harry Warren film song which finally gave the group the crossover success they'd been seeking.
Terry Johnson was not an original member of the Flamingos but had a vision, when he first saw them perform in October 1956: "I saw a glow of light around them and I saw myself with them." He auditioned the day after this mystical experience and was invited to join on Christmas Eve.
It wasn't until they left Chess and signed with a major, Decca, the following year, however, that he really came into his own. When high tenor Johnny Carter, who also did the arranging, was drafted it fell to Johnson, as the only musician, to take over the task - and this, in effect, was the beginning of what could be termed a Mark II, more pop-oriented, Flamingos.
While recording for Chance and Parrot Records in 1953-54 they had been more inclined to R&B, despite incorporating pop numbers into their repertoire; Robert Pruter uses the phrase "deep R&B doo wop" to describe some of those early sides. There had also been a looser, jazz feel in the backing, something which began to change during their time at Chess, as Pruter and Robert L. Campbell explain:
In 1955, when doowop groups emerged as rock'n'roll entities, the record labels - notably Chess and Vee-Jay in Chicago - consciously worked with their session men, most of whom had jazz backgrounds, to change their accompaniment style from jazz to rock 'n' roll.
Success on a grand scale continued to elude them at Decca, however, partly because of difficulties arising from their lead, Nate Nelson, still being signed to Chess as a solo artist. And it seems as though Decca didn't really know the worth of what they had. Despite Johnson's involvement with the group's arrangements he didn't have the final say in the studio, as he told Richard Buskin when remembering, with some regret, what he considered the most promising Decca side:
The Ladder Of Love was such a beautiful song. I changed the chords a little and made it build, because when Nate first gave it to me it was bland. As the only musician in the group, it fell to me to do the arranging, and this was my first time really arranging the harmonies. Again, what I gave them was different, but Decca took my harmonies and buried them in the track, and then they had three white girls doing another kind of harmony structure that their own arranger came up with. It sounded more like something Pat Boone would do, and we were a little upset about that. I think we recorded 10 songs, and The Ladder Of Love was my baby because I thought it was the only one that really had potential, but the company wanted us to sound too white.
The Decca recordings, while interesting for students of the group, don't make for satisfying listening generally, in large part because of those bolted-on elements, and it's a particular sadness to me that Kiss-A-Me, with a very strong lead by Nate Nelson, is similarly overburdened; I'd really love to hear a sparer version.
But things changed for the better when the Flamingos left Decca and were picked up by George Goldner's End Records. They had a hit with the dreamy Lovers Never Say Goodbye, penned by Johnson and sung by him and Paul Foster:
His arrangement for the song gave George Goldner an idea, as Terry Johnson told Richard Buskin:
"He and Richard Barrett had a meeting,” Johnson recalls, "and they asked Jake [Carey] and me to come in so they could tell us, 'You guys have just crossed over into the pop market. The white people love your music, and that's very different.' After all, most black music was R&B at that time. So he brought me 33 songs — he and Richard went out and picked all of these old standards and asked me if I could change them around and do some different things with the vocals.”A neat turnaround from the time the Flamingos, in their earliest days, were actually turned down by a record company for sounding "too white" ... Johnson particularly took to the task because he had been brought up with classical music and white pop - R&B had been discouraged in his home, though he later discovered it by himself. Back to Buskin:
Johnson and his colleagues ran through all 33 songs, a dozen of which ended up on their first LP, Flamingo Serenade, and included covers of compositions by George Gershwin, Lorenz Hart and Cole Porter. However, the number that gave the co‑producer the hardest time was I Only Have Eyes For You.
At this point, let me refer you to a short clip from Episode 3 of the Radio 2 documentary series Street Corner Soul, in which Terry Johnson describes for himself the way in which the arrangement for I Only Have Eyes For You eventually came to him; unfortunately I can't seem to embed it here but here is the link.
And here is the original mono record:
You can read the rest of Richard Buskin's excellent article about the recording of I Only Have Eyes For You on the Sound on Sound website here, and my review of Todd Baptista's book about the Flamingos can be found here. For more about the Johnny Carter-era Flamingos, a guide to my posts about the group's Chance and Parrot recordings can be found here.
This really is the end of an era. Marv Goldberg's R&B Notebooks page on the Flamingos, here, which I have also drawn upon for the above, succinctly explains the significance of the Flamingos, and of Terry Johnson's role in their history:
The Flamingos are one of those groups (and there are very, very few of them) that had a deep, lasting influence on R&B music. Most of the groups of the 50s listened to the Flamingos. They had a superb R&B lead singer in Sollie McElroy and a superb lead singer, period, in Nate Nelson. Throw in Johnny Carter's high tenor and arranging, and then Terry Johnson's arranging, matched with George Goldner's know-how, and the Flamingos were a mighty force.