King Kenny

And so the man who had devoted himself to sweet tones, to harmony and resolution, had within himself a discord.

During one of his regular passes through his old neighborhood, Gamble found himself at the old corner where he had once sung with his friends, back in the ’50s, long before anyone knew who he was.

The place looked “devastated,” he says: empty husks of buildings, run-down and boarded up; hustlers selling drugs and flesh in an open market; fearful women peering from behind soiled curtains.

Gamble saw an elderly figure step from the doorway of his childhood house, and recognized the shape of his family’s old landlord, Sam Sobel.

“Sam!” Gamble called.

The man peered at him. “Who is that?”

“Sam, it’s me, Kenny … Ruby’s son.”

“Oh, yeah. … ”

Gamble asked if he could come inside and see his old home. “Well, you can go in there if you want,” Sobel said. “But I’m getting ready to sell this place.”

“Sell it? For how much?”

“’Bout a thousand dollars.”

Gamble couldn’t believe the figure. Could his old neighborhood really be that depressed? “A light went on in my head,” he said.

Because what he saw — and what he knew he had to do — ­connected to the lessons Gamble had learned here, growing up. The lessons that he would take to heart and that made him so successful.

Back in the ’50s, Gamble and his friends had a leader in their neighborhood: old Carlton Lewis, who owned the Ideal Barber Shop on South 15th Street.

“Mr. Lewis raised us,” says Barney Richardson, a childhood friend of Gamble’s. Neither boy had a father at home, and so they gravitated to the barbershop, where Mr. Lewis handed out nickels and advice: Good credit is more important than cash. Learn Bible verses. Be independent. And always — always — buy land when it’s cheap, because it’s never worth zero, and it’ll eventually go up.

Gamble followed that advice, starting with independence. As a young singer, despite the prevailing tastes of the record companies, he formed his own singing group, called the Romeos. When he started making music with Leon Huff, they sat for hours at the piano at Huff’s house, and kept to a simple formula — Gamble sang, while Huff played — through everything that would come.

The resulting songs didn’t just come from Philadelphia. They were Philadelphia. One of the duo’s first big nationwide hits was in the mid-’60s, a single called “Expressway to Your Heart,” with words that can still bring tears to the eyes of any Philadelphia motorist today:

I was thinking about a shortcut that
       I could take
But I found I made a mistake. …

At five o’clock it’s much too crowded
Much too crowded
Much too crowded …

As Gamble and Huff’s songs gained more attention, the two men realized they couldn’t ship their records as quickly as they could write them. They needed a distributor.  The  common solution would have been to sign on as in-house producers with one of the big record companies. But Gamble and Huff wanted their own label.

Be independent, old Mr. Lewis had said.

They wanted to work for themselves, and distribute through Columbia Records. And Columbia — incredibly — conceded. So with a deal in hand, Gamble and Huff set up Philadelphia International Records.

It was a savvy move. Throughout his career, Gamble became known for keeping one eye on his company’s bottom line, and another cast toward social responsibility. You can see it in the Gamble-Huff catalog of work: a chart-topping love song, then a social message song. Like “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me,” and then “Let’s Clean Up the Ghetto.” Or Teddy Pendergrass crooning, “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” and then barking out, “Wake Up Everybody.”

At their very best, Gamble and Huff wrote songs that were both commercial successes and social commentaries. Take the seemingly innocuous “Love Train,” which rose to number one on the pop chart just before the Yom Kippur War in 1973:

People all over the world, join hands,
Start a love train, love train. …

All of you brothers over in Africa,
Tell all the folks in Egypt, and Israel, too;
Please don’t miss this train at the station
‘Cause if you miss it, I feel sorry, sorry
       for you. …

The sweet-and-savory formula worked. Together, Gamble and Huff co-wrote more than 1,000 songs, at least twice as many as the Beatles. They won two Grammys and earned 175 gold and platinum records, with artists from Patti LaBelle to Pendergrass to Michael Jackson to Elton John.

And their songs — the list of familiar tunes goes on almost to the brink of ­boredom — shifted the landscape of music in America. They put Philly at the center.

And so now we’re back to Kenny Gamble, in the late ’70s, when he stumbled upon his old landlord, Sam Sobel, ready to sell him his old house for a thousand dollars.

Always buy land when it’s cheap, Mr. Lewis had said at his barbershop. It’s never worth zero, and it’ll eventually go up.

“I told my wife, let’s look at the ones next door,” Gamble said. “By the time we got finished. it was 130 vacant lots and empty houses.” Independent, practical, with an eye toward the bottom line, Gamble rebuilt or rehabilitated them all, and when he finished, he liked what he saw: a little patch of something positive — a song of hope — in his old neighborhood.

Meanwhile, his studio at Broad and Spruce didn’t turn out pop hits like it once did, but Kenny Gamble the music producer began a new role: Kenny Gamble the social engineer.

In the coming years, he poured money and time into his old neighborhood — ­funding community initiatives, anti-drug programs, and politicians he felt could help — but he was continually frustrated as he left his home in Gladwyne and drove through South Philly: still devastated. Still rife with dealers and prostitutes. The old neighborhood still shook its collective tin can at passers-by, hoping for handouts.

By the late 1980s, Gamble was grumbling to his wife, Faatimah, at their suburban enclave. Philadelphia could be so much more than it is, he told her. Not blight. Not decay.

“Somebody ought to do something,” Gamble told his wife.

She eyed him. “Well,” she said. “You’re somebody.”

 

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