![]() “Lord Gas pulled me aside and said, ‘Stop singing to the pretty girls and start singing to the fat girls cos they will bring all their pretty girl friends with them’. It felt unbelievable, it’s finally happening…and you realise what groupies were really about! And I thought, ‘Where were you when I was younger? I needed you then!’.”Įddie laughs loudly. “You spend years chasing a hit and when you finally get that hit, it’s like dreams are finally coming true. Bobby Massey didn’t want to do it, I kept calling until I persuaded him.”īack Stabbers was the game changer. “I knew that we’d get airplay with Gamble & Huff. Nobody made me want to sing like they did.”Įddie convinced the group to sign to their Philadelphia International label. But when a subsequent deal with Chess Records reached stalemate, they were on the verge of quitting for good. The O’Jays first worked with Gamble & Huff on Neptune Records, releasing minor hit One Night Affair, regarded as one of the earliest disco records, in 1969. “So, we gigged with the Dave Clark Five, the Beach Boys, Sony & Cher…we did shows with DJs, we’d do four or five gigs a night.” “In the Sixties, we were considered a pop act, not R&B,” says Eddie. ![]() ![]() Their biggest success before that was Lipstick Traces (On A Cigarette) which went Top 50 in 1965. I was married, I had two kids, rent to pay…we did all kinds of clubs, Detroit, Buffalo, travelling around in a station wagon, sometimes with a five-piece band, which was pretty cramped.” And the more you get into it, it’s less about the girls and more about the business and trying to be a true star and make a living. “We were in Colorado, in the middle of nowhere, and on the radio, they started playing Back Stabbers, except we didn’t realise because all we’d heard when we recorded it was the rhythm section and they’d added strings. We didn’t recognise it was us until the singing started! That was the moment we realised we were in the business. “We’d just left for the West Coast doing dates, midnight specials, Hullaballoo on NBC and all that,” Eddie recalls. Real success came when they signed to ace Philadelphia producers Kenneth Gamble & Leon Huff in 1972 and the silk smooth soul of Back Stabbers propelled them to Number 3 in the US charts and Top 15 here. “We didn’t have knowledge about publishing. “I was so naïve about the music business, I thought as soon as you made a record you were rich, you’d made it and you could buy your mum a house… “We played our first gig on a major stage in front of 3,400 people and we were thinking, this is what we were going to do for the rest of our lives! The bug had bit. Carlysia recalls, however, when she was a little girl, her father would always tell her, “Don’t turn gay.” It was apparent that Gerald saw and sensed something in his daughter before she saw it in herself.After going out as The Mascots and The Triumph, they became The O’Jays in 1963 when Cleveland DJ Eddie O’Jay championed them, notching up a minor US hit with Lonely Drifter. As far as what her late father, Gerald Levert, would think about his daughter’s sexuality, if he were alive – he died in 2006 when Carlysia was about 14 – she believes he would not have liked it in the beginning, but because of his unconditional love for her, would have gotten over it and continued to love her. Today, Grandpa Eddie and Carlysia’s mother, Carlene, now see that “love is love” and support Carlysia in her decisions about who she wants to be with. Gerald Levert’s son, LeMicah, intervened in the matter, hoping to be a buffer that would convince his grandfather that Carlysia was still a good-hearted person and nothing should change because of her sexuality. Instead, Eddie expressed his feelings, privately, to Carlysia’s mother. The word was that Grandpa Eddie wasn’t happy about his granddaughter’s sexual preference, but never told her so directly, according to Carlysia. “Then my grandpops Eddie found out and it unraveled from there.” “My mom took it really hard in the beginning,” Carlysia said in an article at. Carlysia was attending Spelman College in Atlanta. Yet, Carlysia knew in her heart-of-hearts that she loved women.Īctually, Carlene got a heads up about her daughter after Carlene’s sister saw social media photos of Carlysia and her then-girlfriend. ![]() The teen, not wanting to hurt her mother, told her the truth – sort of – by implying that “maybe it’s just a phase that she was going through. ![]()
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