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Disclosure: My father, a drummer named Jimmy Curtis, fell in love with Opal Jewel in the summer of 1970. For the duration of their affair he was married to my mother, who in ’71 got pregnant with me. Before my birth, before the world had a chance to know much about my father beyond these facts, he was beaten to death by a racist gang during the riot at Rivington Showcase.
***this book is entirely fictional
This is a personal history that, throughout my life, I have taken significant pains to conceal. In my twenty-five years as a journalist, I’ve never needed to lean on it. I got here under my own steam—toured the world’s most dazzling arenas with U2; won awards for following funny money raised by benefit concerts; even interviewed artists who, oblivious of my connections, cited Opal Jewel and Nev Charles, together and solo, as their heroes: Santigold, the White Stripes, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, to name just a few.
You could say that every decision I’ve made to divorce myself from the violent birth of Opal & Nev has been like this: intentional, and a touch paranoid.
But I wouldn’t want to bullshit you. This book exists because in March 2015, when I was named Aural’s editor in chief—the first African American and first woman to win the gig since the magazine launched in 1965—I gave myself permission to write it.
I worked hard, kept my head down, and made a meticulous, watertight case, supported by data-stuffed PowerPoints, for every idea I ever pitched. And still I worried that the reasons for my success would be questioned by even my most progressive white colleagues. I imagined that at cocktail parties, the bane of my socially anxious existence, they would gossip about me after I left their huddles—roll their eyes and snark to each other, between bites of crab cake, “Isn’t diversity wonderful?”
As if on cue, like the supernatural force I’d always imagined her to be, Opal Jewel appeared in my life not long after that reverie. At the April 2015 taping of a Netflix music special honoring studio wizards, the first high-profile event I’d attended since taking Aural’s reins, I ran into her—literally ran into her, as in both of our clutches fell to the floor, her bullet of lipstick and my cell phone clattering across the marble.
She hadn’t made the scene in decades, and that night her attire was subdued—she wore a simple black shirtdress, with a yellow paisley turban hugging her scalp instead of one of the old, wild wigs. Still, I knew instantly who she was. I know her the same ways that you do, as Nev Charles’s onetime partner-in-strange: the ebony-skinned provocateur, the fashion rebel, the singer/screecher/Afro-Punk ancestor, the unapologetically Black feminist resurrected via GIFs and Instagram quotes for these intense political times. Of course, through my lens, so many other identities were superimposed: Here
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Opal was the one who gave my mother the money for my education, straight through to my master’s in journalism from Medill. During my visit she was blunt and funny, edge-snatching as always, and when Virgil returned she sent me away but told me I could see her in Los Angeles, if I were so inclined.
A note on the door pointed me to the back of the house, where Opal, bald as you please, was smoking a joint in a rocking chair and directing an assistant gardener in the care of her tomato, okra, and basil plants. In the daylight her dark skin glowed, still unlined despite her sixty-six years, and the high angle of her cheekbones, sitting above the deep-V chin, gave her an ethereal, almost alien aspect. We talked for another two hours as the dusk came down and the air grew thick with gnats.
We touched on her childhood years, the development of her brash political philosophies and style, and how, forty-five years ago now, she, an outcast Black girl from Detroit, and Nev, a goofy white English boy, had decided to take a chance on each other. No, these stories weren’t totally new. But even skimming them at surface level, I could see a potential for something deeper. An opportunity to hear anecdotes and revelations I had never read in any of the old interviews with Opal, or even in the relative mountain of press and biography that exists today on Nev.
Yet instantly I knew that this timing was smart. A tour had the potential to excite not only the Mercurials, as Opal & Nev’s old cult of fans call themselves, but a new generation—crowds ready to scream along, with these crazy progenitors of dissidence and dissonance, that Black lives matter, that love is love, that the future is female. Ready to embrace Opal Jewel not as ahead of her time, but as now now now.
“They want a book?” She nodded, squinting. She seemed to be searching my face for something. “If I’m gonna go back to that music, to me and to Nev and your daddy, to doing interviews again and whatnot, it seems like a decent place to start.” And so on that pleasant night in Opal Jewel’s garden, I charted in my head the book I would write—the definitive unpacking of the whos, hows, and whys surrounding the riot that killed my father and shot his weird friends and bandmates into our consciousness. I would report it as the latest volume in our Aural History series, chronicling the origins of rock
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You might find it at times untamed and unwieldy, and find that it contains no easy answers. But as I write these words now, embracing the funny, humbling way hindsight works, I promise my fellow Mercurials this: Though in moments it might break your heart, as it surely did mine, this story is the closest I could get to true. —S. Sunny Curtis February 20, 2017
And while she watched, she let me flip through the magazines she kept laid out on her coffee table. Ebony, of course, and Look, and some trash ones too, the throwaway movie magazines—you remember those.
Kubrick started on at 16 at 'Look' magazine around this time. Day of the Fight was his big feature spread. He shot a motion picture version soon after.
After this life I’ve led, I know it’s hard to imagine my ass in a church. [Laughs] But listen, church back then could be a different thing—a political thing, a place of organization and action, real philosophy. You had men in Birmingham like the Reverend Shuttlesworth, who gave shelter to the Freedom Riders over at Bethel Baptist, and, yeah, men like my Uncle Bill. Sometimes he would write his sermon on whatever was happening in the news and in the Movement, and those were the services I liked best. It wasn’t just about folks falling out on the floor and writhing, or pastors screaming out
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Baaaaaby, let me tell you, I was a revolutionary at twelve years old! I wanted to join SNCC, CORE, SCLC, all of it! I even started reading Uncle Bill’s copy of Stride Toward Freedom [the first book by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.], until Auntie Rose took it away and told me I needed to just enjoy being a girl.
“A tranquil heart gives life to the flesh, but envy makes the bones rot.” That’s Proverbs 14:30, the Good Book. My faith still gives me joy, gives me life, and I take comfort in that, amen! I was blessed to have found my voice, literally, in that church—and it was a voice so strong I surprised myself.
I looked up toward the pulpit and there she was, Pearl Robinson, singing the lead on “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” Mmmm! She had her eyes squeezed shut and stood still as a rock, just rooted to the music, with a voice that blew the roof entirely off and sent a chill down my neck in that sweltering room. I went back the next Sunday, and the one after that. All the Sundays till she and Opal went back to Detroit for the school year.
I’m not gonna lie—Pearl shocked the hell outta me. We used to sing together to the pop songs on the radio, just for fun, and the harmonizing sounded decent—nothing too special. But honey, once Pearl got in that choir? Once she learned how to press on her diaphragm and work that alto? The girl opened her mouth and the angels flew out.
The voice was there, but Pearl didn’t have any presence. She’d just be standing there, closed up like a fist. Even with that stacked body of hers. It was weird. You heard the rapture but you couldn’t see it.
Pearl, 69, and her husband entertained us over bear claws and apple cider in the living room of their large colonial in Pontiac, Michigan. During the course of the interview, even while discussing her often strained relationship with Opal, Pearl proudly showed off old childhood photos of her sister, as well as promotional materials she’s collected over the years related to Opal’s career.
Opal Jewel has a form of alopecia areata, an autoimmune skin condition in which sufferers lose hair from the scalp and sometimes other parts of the body. Though there are some treatments that may promote hair regrowth, there is no cure.
The wrinkles around Nev’s eyes made him look smart and distinguished. Better than on television. The kind of older man referred to as a fox. Did he look a bit like an older, redder Benedict Cumberbatch? He did, I thought; he did. In the seat next to him was a tote that had fallen onto its side to reveal what he was consuming these days: The New Jim Crow; a recent issue of The Atlantic; a slim book of poetry that, by some miracle, had just cracked the New York Times’ best sellers list.
As with Opal Jewel, I wanted to start our formal interview at the beginning. I felt that I needed to start there, although initially, with a megastar like Nev, I wasn’t sure why. Certainly there’s been enough ink spilled on the facts of his childhood, enough to comprise two paragraphs of his impressively long Wikipedia page. At first he unspooled it for me with great wit and verve, the way any crowd-pleaser spins through the old repertoire: He burst into snippets of melody when remembering the evolution of a riff or chorus, and his warm English accent modulated high or low with the mood of
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This journey begins circa 1962—the year Nev turned fourteen, and his musical life began in another Birmingham.
So I was alone much of the time, and did the things lonely boys do, I suppose. Yes, that’s right, wanking every possible moment. [Laughs] No, well, I mean imaginary friends and all that. And then when I was older, that transitioned to making up stories about people I wanted to know, boys I wanted to be. I always had a composition notebook filled with pieces of stories, and companion drawings too.
And every one of his adventures would end with him coming out of his fit and back to the present, and reflecting on everything he’s learned while eating a tin of his favorite hazelnut biscuits. That’s from an absolutely deranged mind, I tell you!
Because I thought my stories would be good for telly, you know, and you need a good theme song for telly! But I knew nothing about music, and so I was just testing lyrics to classic melodies, figuring out the notes and pecking them out on her upright piano—“Baa Baa Black Sheep,” “Frère Jacques,” “London Bridge Is Falling Down,” stuff like that. [Singing to the tune of “London Bridge”] “Thomas Chapman writhes and shakes / Pulls up stakes, goodness sakes! / Thomas Chapman, trips he takes / Come home, Thomas.” Not exactly “When I’m Sixty-Four,” is it? [Laughs]
I thought George was brilliant—coolest person I’d ever met. During the day he taught pathetic sods like me, but by his sideburns and the scuff on his loafers you could tell he had a whole different story going at night. At first he’d wear a cheap-looking black blazer and his hair slicked back very neat, trying to make an impression—but then Mum increased his visits to twice a week, and he relaxed enough to let his curls loose and put on the corduroy. Dad raised an eyebrow but he didn’t say much, as long as Mum was happy.
Oh, you know, I was playing in a band like everybody else at the time. We were a quintet: lead and rhythm guitars, bass, drums, and me banging away on piano. We called ourselves the Boys from Birmingham. We worshiped the trinity: Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis. In another universe maybe we were the Beatles. Maybe even slightly tighter, though, because we had formal training—although to our parents’ horror we had no interest at all in playing classically.
Most of the kids I taught were brats, very entitled—I didn’t care as long as their parents were paying me to babysit. But there was something about Nev that just broke my heart, this kid so eager to please but simply not connecting in a traditional way to the music. I felt I was robbing his lovely mother. One afternoon I was considering quitting after watching Nev wrestle for the hundredth time with something simple—“Yankee Doodle” or something like that—and Mrs. Charles invited me to stay for lunch. When you’re young and poor, you don’t turn down free food. So I sat at the table with her and
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Newly passionate about the possibilities of music, Nev continued studying under George Risehart and wrote the lyrics for a handful of Boys from Birmingham tunes—including 1963’s “Rosy,” the first Nev Charles song captured on record. Although the band was never signed, they found enthusiastic patrons in Nev’s parents, who paid for studio time and allowed their son to join in their raucous nightclub concerts.
Nev was a sponge. He’d come to our practices with his notebook and watch Jerry working through a new melody, all of us straining to string together something that we wouldn’t be embarrassed to sing in a room full of people. And one day he felt bold enough to chime in with his suggestions.
When he switched from the piano to the guitar, that was the last straw; we’d all got fed up. Especially Jerry, who felt very threatened because Nev was catching on fast. The Charleses were floating us by then—everything we’d done that was worth anything was subsidized by them—and because of that we felt obligated to keep Nev in the mix. But he was clearly eager to break out. At the shows the crowd would clamor for him, and he’d make his way to the front, standing next to Jerry like it was his rightful place. He made us look like the backing band, the accompaniment. At which point, as kindly as
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They kicked me out. Actually, no, they didn’t, because they never truly decided I was in. [Laughs] Ah, can’t blame them, really. It all worked out, you could say.
Top of the Pops featured live performances by the day’s chart-climbers, while Juke Box Jury, an adaptation of an American show, had a panel of musicians, actors, sports figures, popular DJs, and other notable types critiquing new releases and declaring each a “hit” or a “miss.” As a solo artist, Nev Charles appeared on Pops several times, and on the other BBC series once, during a 1990 reincarnation hosted by Jools Holland.
Opal Jewel and Pearl Welmont both described their relationship as closer in early childhood. As the siblings matured, their outlooks on life diverged, and each sought to form meaningful connections outside the home.
Every week Sister Pearl turned it up a notch. Driving us up the wall. Mama didn’t mess with religion—who knows what abominations she’d seen holy people do, growing up down there—and by that summer I was old enough to have my own mind and my own interests. My patience with Pearl quoting verses and looking cross-eyed at me on Sundays had worn entirely out. I would’ve understood it more if all that passion she supposedly felt for Jesus didn’t wax and wane, depending on whether she’d heard from that man. If she’d mustered some real gumption, maybe she could’ve become a preacher herself, instead of
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Now, people today have turned evangelical into a dirty word, something political, but at the root of it is a deeper love than a lot of folks will ever know. I get that my sister likes to joke about me preaching to her—at her, she likes to say—but what I’ve really been trying to do all these years is save her life. We’re sinners, each and every one of us, but we can be forgiven. And when she seeks the Lord’s forgiveness, she’ll have the peace I’ve always wanted for her. An unshakable rock.
It’s funny looking back on it now, but we weren’t working with material that made logical sense at Eastern. The students said no to Carmen Jones and Cabin in the Sky—they looked sideways at some of those roles, you know, and this was in the years before The Wiz and Dreamgirls. What we ended up with was a school full of inner-city Black kids doing South Pacific, singing ’bout “Bali Ha’i.” [Laughs]
Opal would come out for her audition, and we’d get to arguing. Technically the singing was not as excellent, but to me she was a shining star on that stage. I believed every word out of her mouth. The best time I remember, and I think this was after Pearl had graduated and Opal was a senior and it was her last shot to get cast, she told us she had prepared her own reading. The principal said that wasn’t allowed, said she had to audition using the material that was given to everybody, but for some reason I felt of a mind to speak up for her. So I said, “Go on ahead, Miss Robinson,” and she
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Although she declined to walk in her class’s commencement ceremony, Opal Robinson graduated from Eastern High in June 1967. A little more than a month later, Detroit exploded in five days of violence following a police raid on a party at an unlicensed bar. The eighty-two revelers arrested in the raid had gathered at the Twelfth Street speakeasy to celebrate two young soldiers home from Vietnam. Anger over the arrests translated into looting, arson, and worse after the National Guard arrived: Forty-three people, most of them Black men, were killed in street skirmishes.
I wasn’t throwing rocks in the Twelfth Street riot, but I could have been. Just like I could have been one of those four little girls blown up in Birmingham a few years before.
When you look back on how the ’67 riot got started, it almost seems silly—the pigs busted up another party, so what? But many of us young people, we were just filled with anger. Justifiable rage. We were over-policed and underemployed. Our young men were being shipped across oceans, the first time most of them had ever been outside of Detroit, and because they didn’t have any other viable options they were fighting on the front lines of a war nobody could explain.
I was just a month out of high school, still living at home and dreaming about the miracle that I knew was gonna come my way. Pearl was working some shifts at GM, some secretarial work she was proud of for some reason, and both she and Mama were breathing down my neck about getting a job of my own. But during those days of the riot we were all cooped up in the apartment together glued to the news, the same way we had been years earlier when the Freedom Rides were happening.
Pearl was praying constantly—“Lord Jesus” this and “Lord Jesus” that.
There was no escape to be had, anywhere, by being so damn regular.
You know, my sister has never worked a real job, with structure and hours. And I think that’s what makes her so… so… I don’t know…
Obstinate.
She can’t relate to normal things, like a marriage and a family, and the sacrifices we make every day out of love.
