Various Artists The Philly Sound: Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff & the Story of Brotherly Love (1966-1976) (Epic/Legacy)
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Gamble and Huff rose from freelance songwriters to record-industry heavies in the early 70s. As a teenager in Philadelphia in the mid-50s, Gamble would visit the home of jazz arranger Bobby Martin because he was fascinated by his ability to design tricky countermelodies; ten years later, he and pianist Huff were trying to do the same. By the late 60s, they’d penned campy hits for such groups as Soul Survivors (“Expressway to Your Heart”) and Archie Bell & the Drells (“I Can’t Stop Dancing”), and had broken their first group, the Intruders, on the independent Gamble label.
Columbia agreed to launch their Philadelphia International Records with a $75,000 advance for 15 singles and $25,000 apiece for fewer albums. The label recouped almost immediately through Billy Paul’s 1972 gold record “Me and Mrs. Jones.” Bobby Martin, whom PIR hired as an arranger, won’t discuss that song today because he’s a Jehovah’s Witness and condemns adultery, but it’s an exception to what became the norm at the label. The label’s leading vocal groups, the Intruders and the O’Jays, and even Paul sang about family, romantic maturity, and community, while the 42-piece house orchestra, MFSB (Mother, Father, Sister, Brother), reinvented the lush strings and mercurial beats of Motown and Mayfield. The resulting songs were embraced in gay and African-American dance clubs long before right-wingers exploited similar ideas.
Perhaps the most interesting legacy of the Philly sound can be traced through the records of Public Enemy, and not just in Chuck D’s lyrics. The group’s sound can be seen as a digitalized version of the Philly approach, its dense, groundbreaking sampled instrumentation an update of the orchestral innovations of PIR. In the box set liner notes, Chuck D calls Gamble and Huff the “forefathers of hip-hop,” and considering what hip-hop has wrought, that’s no insignificant epitaph.
