Terry Johnson

Doo wop fans will be sad to learn that Terry Johnson, who steered the group to their massive crossover hit I Only Have Eyes For You, died yesterday at the age of 86. In addition to Todd Baptista's highly recommended biography of the group, written with Johnson's assistance, there is a detailed online piece by Richard Buskin which goes into detail about the making of that recording and helps to explain just what the addition of Terry Johnson brought to the group. 

When they began, with Johnny Carter making many of the musical decisions, the Flamingos were more inclined to R&B, despite incorporating pop numbers into their repertoire: Robert Pruter used the phrase "deep R&B doo wop" to describe their early sound, backed by jazz musicians who were occasionally given their head and allowed to play solos. This is partly because there wasn't initially a set way of playing rock'n'roll - this only began to change around the time the group joined Chess. Success on a grand scale continued to elude them, however, and when they switched to Decca, although Johnson was involved with the arrangements he didn't have the final say, as he told Richard Buskin:

The Ladder Of Love was such a beautiful song. I changed the chords a little and made it build, because when Nate [Nelson] 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 don't make for happy listening generally, and it's a particular sadness to me that Kiss-A-Me, with a strong lead by Nate Nelson, is overburdened with instruments and backing vocals. But things changed when the Flamingos 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. He was also responsible for the arrangement, which gave George Goldner an idea, as Richard Buskin recounts: 

"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 early days, were 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 was discouraged, 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, allow me to refer you to a short clip from  Episode 3 the excellent Radio 2 documentary series Street Corner Soul, in which Terry Johnson describes for himself the way the arrangement for I Only Have Eyes For You eventually came to him. Unfortunately I can't embed it here but here is the link. 

 You can read the rest of Richard Buskin's article on the Sound on Sound website, here, and my review of Todd Baptista's book about the Flamingos here. A guide to my posts about the Flamingos' Chance and Parrot recordings (in the Johnny Carter era) can be found here. 

This really is the end of an era.