King Kenny

The bubbles float upward to meet a cryptic symbol hanging in the sky. “It’s a symbol I designed,” said Gamble, who seemed less royal than boyish, now. “Can you see what’s there?”

“The crescent of Islam … the Star of David … ?”

“Yes!” he said. “And there’s the Christian cross, too. It’s all there. This is the Universal symbol. All in one.”

Above the symbol, the souls of Philadelphia emerge into paradise, untrapped from their bubbles, no longer anguished.

“Look at them now,” Gamble said, standing back. “See how they’re helping each other up? They’re at peace now. Universal.”

Some residents in South Philadelphia fear that Gamble’s real-life aims aren’t as inclusive; they fear that Gamble, a convert to Islam, is inclined toward racial and religious segregation, which is creating tension in what has long been an integrated neighborhood. And Gamble himself, with his sweeping and sometimes outlandish views, doesn’t always help matters.

For the moment, he regarded his painting — his enormous, garish painting — and said, “It’s beautiful.”

It is a beautiful ideal, at least; grand and strange. But ­Gamble’s introduction to his Universal ideal — the grandness, the ­strangeness — was only the beginning.

GAMBLE HAS A VISION FOR HIS CHILDHOOD neighborhood that’s just as big and illustrious as his own persona: He sees South Philadelphia as a rhythm-and-blues destination, like Nashville is for country music, or Memphis for the blues. In the meantime, his company is rebuilding entire blocks of South Philly. Gamble sees himself as the architect who will bring it all — the music, the land, the people — together.

It’s easy, in trying to explain where he started and where he’s going, to divide Gamble’s career in two: Part one is the wildly successful musician with a message; in the new one, he’s become an urban pioneer. But really, it’s all of a piece. Let’s start when Gamble seemed at the end of one career, and hadn’t yet grown into the next phase.

It was after he’d gotten rich, after he and Leon Huff had scorched pop music with hit after hit for two decades in the ’60s and ’70s. Gamble did what he thought rich Philadelphians from poor neighborhoods do: He moved to a mansion in Gladwyne in 1980.

But he always drove through his old South Philly neighborhood on his way to his company, Philadelphia International Records, on Broad Street. And he visited similar neighborhoods in Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities.

“I saw that there was a threat,” he says. “It wasn’t just Philadelphia.”

In fact, in 1977, Gamble had done what he always did; he wrote a song, called “Let’s Clean Up the Ghetto,” featuring Lou Rawls. It starts as a fairly generic, nationwide call to community action:

Let’s paint a sign everybody can read,
Let’s get rid of everything we don’t need:
The pushers, the dealers,
The pocketbook-snatchers and thieves. …

Then there’s a more remarkable, personal line, a nasty snarl in which Gamble seems to predict his own dilemma:

All of you brothers that live on the Main Line,
You lived in the ghetto once upon a time.

---