The Final Revival of Opal & Nev

by Dawnie Walton

Anything I could see, I tried to know at least a little something about it. They call that a dilettante, and that’s supposed to be a bad thing—but in my mind, I was versatile! Multitalented! Twice as good at everything, as we aspirational Negroes had to be back then. So, you know, I watched Miss Julia Child come on TV, and after that I was going to the white folks’ markets to find things like fresh parsley and thyme, and on Sundays, when Pearl was back from whatever marathon church session she was wailing at that day, I’d serve up the prettiest roast chicken you ever saw.

So maybe I was going to be a chef; maybe I was gonna open my own restaurant. Or sometimes I would study the sewing patterns in women’s magazines—I’d spend my check at the fabric store and make pretty skirts in all kinds of prints. Yeah, I could have been a fashion designer too. But you already know that.

On September 15, 1963, white supremacists set dynamite outside the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. That Sunday morning it detonated, murdering four Black girls—three of them the same age as Opal that year.

SANDRA COKIE, NEV’S UNIVERSITY GIRLFRIEND: We took a class together called Introduction to British Media. We never spoke then but I did take notice of him because of his red hair, very shaggy, and the way he’d arrive late and then fall asleep three-quarters through the lecture. Everything about him intrigued me. I wondered who he was, especially after he stopped coming to class at all. A popular pub near campus—that’s where we first had a chat.

I stayed in Birmingham awhile, to help my father regroup. I took some shifts at the Charlie’s in Hagley Road, and reminisced about the times I’d spent there as a boy. I think I even wrote a couple more installments about my old friend Thomas, just to see what it felt like. Then one day Dad and I were in the kitchen—he was flouring up the cod, and I was lining the baskets—and he said it was time for me to get back to London, to stop worrying about him and get on with my life. I told him on the spot that I didn’t plan to go back to school, that it only felt right to do what Mum would have wanted. I asked him for his support, and he wiped his gunky hands down the front of his apron and pulled me in for a hug. “You have it, lad,” he said.

Late in the summer of 1968, Morris Charles sold his interest in the Charlie’s outposts in Coventry, and gave a portion of the profits to his son. With enough money to cover living expenses for a year, Nev Charles left England bound for New York City.

I liked the idea of them, the image of the wandering observer, the songwriter as respected and important. Plus none of them was the most brilliant vocalist or instrumentalist, and that let me know there might be room for my talents.

I didn’t know anything when I first came, so I took a flat on the Upper West Side, a tiny one-bedroom with a tub in the kitchen. Ninety-Sixth and Amsterdam. Today that area is Equinox and bloody Starbucks, but back then it was thieves and rent boys and worse, and at night it was an apocalypse, dodgy being an understatement. When I wasn’t watching my pocket, all my time was spent on the subway getting downtown. The Village, that’s the New York I had pictured from England. At night I hit as many open mics down there as I could; during the day, I played in coffeehouses, if they’d have me, or around the benches in Washington Square. My mum had always stressed to me, “You have to perform as much as you can—grab any opportunity, no matter how small. You never know who’s got eyes on you, Nev.”

There were three of us girls on First Avenue between Eighth and Ninth. One of my roommates met Nev at this café on MacDougal where she was waitressing at the time. So she brings him home along with a couple bottles of wine she’d made off with, and she says to him, “Hey, you gotta play that funny song for my friends!” He picks up his guitar and does an early version of “Chemist Kismet,” right there in our living room. He camped out on our couch for a month and a half. We were very modern girls, so I’m sure Nev got upgraded from that couch a few of those nights. But maybe I’m only speaking for myself.

I popped over to the chemist nearest my hall of residence, and in the back running the shop was one of the saddest-looking men I’d ever seen. Mid-sixties and jowly and completely overwhelmed by his customers come to pick up their prescriptions. But he soothed each one of them, answering their questions and wishing them to feel better. I went back to my room, downed my medicine, and wrote about him from what I imagined to be his perspective. I gave it a jangly sound, very up-tempo, for irony but also to please a crowd. In the verses I go through his customers and their ailments—[singing] “Mr. Trout / Has the gout / Vitamin C will knock it out”—and in the chorus it’s about how he can’t mend his own broken heart. I never say it expressly in the song, but I had imagined the chemist to be a widower. Later it made me think of Dad, obviously, but it was written before. Anyway, I always played that one for American women, because it’s probably the most stereotypically English thing in my repertoire, and they loved it.

As is the case with most support staffers, Salducci, now 70, was privy to the most top-secret shenanigans of her higher-ups. With her red-framed glasses, big barrel-rolled hair, and strong New York accent, she was the breakout star of Emergency on Line 1, a 2007 Sundance documentary about showbiz assistants, in which she described herself as a “tough bitch with a long memory.” When we met at her rent-controlled apartment in Astoria, Queens, and I congratulated her on the success of that film, she promised that she had “tons of other color” up her sleeve. To my delight, and occasionally my horror, she did not disappoint.

Early Rivington deals varied in the amount paid to artists upon signing, but all of them—including Nev’s and, later, his contract with Opal—had one thing in common: The label would manage and thus reap a percentage of everything the artist did, from albums to concert tours and other lucrative appearances. Today, such agreements, called 360 deals, are frowned upon by artists as overreaching and exploitative.

I went to talk to Columbia about producing opportunities, but somehow I walked out with a job in A&R. I suppose technically I was qualified, as a musician myself, and my bosses seemed to believe that my being English gave me a different ear and a talent for coaxing someone special out of the masses. But I’m sorry to say I didn’t like the scouting much. It required that I drag myself out nearly every night to see live music, most of which was rather hackneyed, and I loathed the club scene. I was thirty, which of course sounds very young now, but back then seemed ancient to just be starting out. I only wanted to go home and rub my wife’s swollen ankles. Instead, more often than not, I’d fall into bed at two in the morning, reeking of ganja and drained after having killed someone’s dreams by telling them, “I’m sorry, you just aren’t ready yet.”

This is not what I pictured for myself. I much preferred to dig in with an artist who was already squared away, to know them inside out and accentuate the best qualities of who they were. That kind of magic happens in the studio, but I hadn’t been inside one for quite some time. I knew I needed to get back, and figured that Rivington, which had become a laughingstock among my colleagues at Columbia after they lost the How Now, might be desperate enough to take me on for cheap.

I was always good at dealing with big egos and difficult personalities; I was born to it, as my own father was a vicious drunk. The key is that you never take the piss out of them. You approach them with overwhelming respect, and then you do what you need to get done, and then you must be humble enough to say it was their brilliant idea all along. Understand: This has been half my talent working with rock stars. [Laughs]

I could never do this. Maybe give folks a moment or two to get over themselves but if they carry on....imortalize those folks in words they will not like.

Any fool will tell you that from an economic standpoint, this deal was 100 percent risk on my end. It meant that for a full year, my family would subsist on crumbs, and then afterward there was a chance I’d be out of a job full stop. It also meant there was a lot of pressure on me to deliver popular albums, which are rare in the grand scheme. When I confessed to my poor wife what I wanted to do, she put on a brave face and said she’d support me no matter what. But one night early in that first year, when she thought I was asleep, I heard her crying on the line with her sister: “Oh, what has he done? What has he done?”

Before I shook Howie’s hand and signed the papers, I got a copy of the Nev Charles LP. It was amateur. But immediately I could sense the bones of something. And I desperately wanted to be the one to shape it, to chisel the masterpiece from the slab of quality marble. Those first few days I played Nev Charles over and over again, really let it burrow into my brain.

Hizey called me up to come round to the studio with my guitar, and I arrived about two hours late with a black cloud over my head. Since everything went wonky with the Boys from Birmingham, I was used to working on my own and pleasing no one else but myself, and I hated the idea of an artistic overlord, especially one who looked the part of an epic square. But from the start Hizey was so kind in the face of my hideousness…. He quoted back to me his favorite bits from the first record, which no one had bothered to listen to, and he confessed that I was, to his mind, the most promising artist at Rivington. Sha! This was me he was talking about! He also reassured me straightaway that he would take promotions and press and bookings off my list of worries so that I could focus on the music. Having a shield from all the tedium appealed to me.

I love Nev like he is my own blood. But sometimes I think it’s difficult for him to truly see outside of himself. He likes to think that he is not influenced by others, that he is his own unique and strange creation. And yet we all pick up tics, don’t we? I discovered that the ones Nev had picked up while living in New York, hanging about in this singer/songwriter scene, had drained him of anything exciting and different. His lyrics were offbeat and imaginative, often wry; by contrast, the image he was mimicking felt trite and predictable, and that weighed down the entire package. He needed to be pushed, needed to be surrounded by fresh sorts of influences that would take him unfamiliar places.

At the time, “Gimme Shelter” was the biggest hit out there, and it featured Merry Clayton just wailing away about God knows what. What was that chorus… About murder, about rape? Who ever heard of such a thing in a song? But she was raw, and she had grit, and she was a real soul sister with lots of attitude—you know what I’m saying. Her whole vibe just married with that guitar, and she’s going back and forth with Mick in a way that knocked everybody out. And as a business guy, if I see something working very well, of course I want to imitate it! Why wouldn’t I? It sounds good, it makes money, win-win. So I got this British singer, he makes weird rock-and-roll songs, and I’m told he needs a shot of energy, some wake-the-fuck-up. What am I gonna look for?

A Black chick with a giant voice, that’s what.

And after those soul-crushing hours, we’d drive across to the Black parts of town—there always was a Black part of town, you understand, the segregation in the States is so endemic. You’ve read about the redlining, yeah? Shameful, shameful… Anyway, we’d visit these establishments and we’d be the only white people in the room. Can you imagine? Silly, awkward me traipsing behind Howie, who was like a ball of offensiveness barreling through every single venue. The saving grace was that the patrons liked to drink with us, and for obvious reasons they found us amusing.

Atlanta, Memphis, Chicago… Most of them could sing big and loud, and a few of them were very sexy, you know, and could do the cooing thing like Diana Ross. There was one in Chicago who looked like Diahann Carroll, whom I personally always liked. Sweet as pie too—I bought her a drink after her set and she sat with us for a while. At the end of every night I’d ask Nev, “You like her?” and every night he’d shake his head no.

And then we got to Detroit.

The Gemini had an open-mic hour with a live backing band and that’s how we got on. Pearl would refuse to sing anything fun—for some reason she hated the word baby, she thought it was too worldly or some nonsense—so that knocked out a lot of the Motown hits right there. And honey, this was 1969, 1970 Detroit! I was trying to meet Mr. Berry Gordy! It was very reasonable that one day he would walk into the Gemini looking for his next starlets, and we’re up there singing Christmas carols? But I always meant for it to be Pearl, I really did. She had the voice; I was just the backup.

And I did our outfits. Mine was always the shorter, tighter, lower-cut version of hers. Even though, to tell you the truth, Pearl had a lot more to work with, if you know what I’m saying.

Christ, that one had a rack. You didn’t know whether you were hypnotized by the voice or the tits.

💀

Opal never did have any friends, and she looked more mature than she was. Without me to look out for her, she might have been susceptible to a certain kind of wicked attention. That sinning lifestyle can be seductive. So I tried to keep up with her as much as she’d let me. And if that meant wearing those outfits she made for Saturday nights, well, I’d humor it, long as I was covered enough.

That night Pearl and I were wearing crushed velvet. Gold crushed velvet. Or maybe velour… Honey, I don’t know, whichever one of those is the cheaper fabric. I’d made Pearl a jumpsuit out of it with a top that I tried to keep fitted, so the people could see she had something. And out of the same material I’d cut myself a halter and shorts, and I took a brass chain from an old pocket watch I found at the Goodwill and I shined it up nice and wrapped it around my skinny little waist like a belt, trying to create some kind of effect.

For years Pearl had adored “To Sir with Love”—I mean, everybody was crazy about the movie because Sidney Poitier was so damn fine, and the sentiment of it was very sweet and chaste. But don’t let the sweetness fool you—that’s a belter’s song, a big chance to show out, and Pearl used to beat it dead.

I remember watching her, absolutely gobsmacked, and thinking how mysterious and scrappy she was, this girl in the gold shorts and the bad wig making up her own part. This girl with the voice that flew over and through and around her sister’s so strangely.

After the set Pearl and I went backstage to this tiny greenroom they had at the Gemini—literally, a green room; it had dingy green carpet and olive-green walls, and the air was funky green with a bad old-man smell. I had just taken off my high heels and about seventy-five pounds of makeup when the manager of the place came in, and right behind him was this troll in a suit. Howie Kelly. He was so damn short he was eye level with Pearl’s chest, and don’t you know he kept his eyes locked there for those first couple minutes he started running his mouth?

Five words that changed my whole life: “Do you have representation, sweetheart?” Obviously, all these years later Howie Kelly is not among my favorite people on this earth. But that night, when he asked me that question? And then fished out that official business card that said RIVINGTON RECORDS, NEW YORK CITY? Darling, in my mind I was losing it. On the inside I was screaming, I was doing cartwheels down the center of the street, I was grabbing Howie by that beady cue-ball head and pressing it into my own pitiful chest.

I think he said hello. I said hello back. My first impression? Hell, I don’t remember. Nev looked like Nev. Pale, skinny. That hair, those eyes. We talked a little. What I remember liking about him most was that he was British. Because I could at least respect the British rock and rollers—they were clear on their influences, clear that what they were doing was just a riff on Black folks singing the blues, and better than that, at that moment in time they appreciated what freshness we could bring to the sound. Billy Preston was practically another one of the Beatles by then, you know, that organ on “Get Back” and “Don’t Let Me Down” holding everybody together at the end. And of course Merry had that moment to shine—outshine Mick, matter of fact, and that was A-OK by Mick. So if I was going to get into any creative partnership with a white person, I just automatically trusted a Brit to be better.

Howie was a different story.

“What kind of music do you make? How do you earn a living off this? What kind of establishments do you play? Why have I never heard of you?” Opal didn’t say a word, just glanced back at her sister and the questions stopped.

Mama was in the kitchen making Sunday dinner—she had invited Howie to stay, in her gruff way—and every time I said something she didn’t like she made a whole big clatter with the pots. [Laughs] See, my mother had told me that I would be a fool not to take this white man up on his offer, leave home and make something of myself. But I understood my worth, even when everybody else thought I came cheap. I have never been one of those okey-doke, “just happy to be here” Negroes, you see what I’m saying? So I’m looking down at that contract and reading words like perpetuity and likeness, words and clauses that I’m too familiar with now but back then had me thinking, How can I sign this if I don’t understand what it is? My heart was falling through the floor, but I told him that I would need to have my lawyer look at it. Now, did I have a lawyer? Nah! [Laughs] But I had my gut and my hustle.

Howie came back to the motor inn in a state. I asked him, “Well, come on, then, what’s happened?” and he muttered a series of profanities—some terrible racial language as well, I’m afraid—and he said that hell would freeze before he’d see Opal in his lineup. He ordered me to pack my things and said that we were leaving the next morning, that we were going back to Chicago to sign this other girl who he liked and that was that. As you can imagine, I panicked.

When pressed I couldn’t say why, exactly, although I’m sure she will offer you many theories, perhaps some of them Freudian. [Laughs; long pause] I suppose that, first, I thought Opal was interesting, in her music and in herself, and then to my surprise she was quite strong-willed, and those two things together signaled to me that she could back me up in making odd and creative things and then be willing to fight for them.

Anyway, I asked Nev did he want something cool to drink, and he said that a beer would be nice. I told him we didn’t keep any liquor in Sister Pearl Robinson’s sanctified home but I could hook him up with some strawberry Quik. [Laughs] I meant that as a joke but he said yeah, he wanted some, so I mixed us two big glasses full and we sat at the kitchen table sucking it down through straws, like little kids, and it tasted sweet and good. Because the record player was broke, I told him he could go ahead and sing me something right then. He said he couldn’t because he didn’t have his guitar. I said forget the guitar. I said that if you sing like you talk, all high and reedy like that, you mostly need some bottom, and I can give you that, no problem. So he started singing, and I slapped my thighs to make the beat.

Opal was hurrying me off. On my way out the door I asked her what she thought of the song, what she thought of coming to New York now, and she said, “I liked it fine, but I was wearing shorts. Not a dress.” I laughed and told her I was taking poetic license. And do you know what she said to me then, the clever girl? She said, “You tell your boss to take some poetic license with that contract, and maybe I’ll think about it.”

He saw me as I was, and still he seemed to be choosing me. It’s a basic thing, but I had never in my life been chosen before. You understand what that means? I’m saying here was this stranger, clearly as crazy as I was, this person who dropped into my life out of nowhere, and he was reaching out his hand.

Opal Robinson’s first Rivington contract was good for just one year, but stipulated she would be paid in weekly installments of $85 (which, even after taxes, would total a few dollars more than the lump cash sum Kelly traditionally gifted his artists). Awaiting her arrival, Nev spent a lonely couple months holed up in the Ninety-Sixth Street flat, stuffing cotton balls in his ears to dull the racket of sirens and revelry outside his window. During this period he filled a notebook with new compositions, many of which would make up their first album together, Polychrome. Nearly insolvent and reluctant to ask his father to wire more money, he recalls, he subsisted primarily on lunch meat and saltine crackers sprinkled with grated Parmesan cheese.

Two people needed more than what my meager acoustic guitar could offer, especially when one of those people was Opal. I didn’t see any girls; I stopped hanging round the Village. I took an occasional call from Hizey, who was doing his own preparations, and I would ring Opal in Detroit, partly to feel assured that she was indeed coming and partly to remember the cadence of her voice. Sometimes she would speak to me and sometimes she wouldn’t.

These here are from the night before she left. We had a nice dinner out, just the three of us, at this Chinese restaurant we used to love because it had those lazy Susans and red leather booths and the zodiac printed on the place mats, but we could still afford it. Pastor, don’t Mama look good? So pretty in that turquoise. Oh, she was so proud of Opal—bragging to the waiters and asking them to take pictures. PASTOR LAWRENCE WELMONT: Y’all were celebrating, huh? Even got a bottle on the table. PEARL WELMONT: Mama loved her white zinfandel.

Inside, this cool little room felt as hushed and reverent as the religious-studies section of a university library, but at the same time, its thrilling options for every proclivity put me in mind of a sex shop’s DVD back room. Among Bob’s collection you could find Beethoven’s sonatas or big-booty bass, Nas or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. It took me a minute to crack the code of exactly how it had all been arranged, by an ethnomusicology PhD student at NYU who’d once interned at Rivington, but eventually I got a rough idea of the organizing principles—historical period, genre, subgenre, artist.

I’m an old chick now and I like my quiet, but when I first came to New York I was twenty-one years old. I could feel the energy of that place jolt through my body as soon as I stepped off the bus. At first you just notice the nastiness: You know, everything was so extra—extra hot, extra funky, extra loud. But sitting in the back of that yellow cab, I was like an astronaut in a shell traveling through space, pressed up against the window and taking in the stars. There were businessmen in brown and blue suits looking clean and sharp, Teflon dons on those dirty-ass streets. I saw swarms of moving people, people who knew rules I didn’t yet know, and in the swarm you could pick out gray-haired society ladies and Hispanic workmen and Hasids in their outfits, the curls and hats and coats, even in that summer heat. And then we drove alongside Central Park, and I saw a fully grown sister on roller skates. In a plaid sundress and cornrows, hollering at folks to get out the way and rumbling down the sidewalk like it was the most natural thing in the world. And I thought, Oh my God—my people! [Laughs]

I had lived among Black people my whole life, and I didn’t know a lot about New York except the things I saw secondhand. Harlem seemed to be a place where Negroes congregated but sometimes of their own volition, and it was a place that inspired so much creativity. So that’s where I wanted to stay—somewhere I could start my own personal renaissance.

OPAL JEWEL: Virgil told you I hid? Really? Okay. I don’t remember that, but I guess it might be true. Scared? Aw, wasn’t nobody scared. I just wasn’t ready. I hadn’t fully worked out what I was doing yet.

or that Pocahontas mess, it didn’t go. None of them was right. And I remembered Nev already knew about my condition, so who the hell cared anymore? I was sick of hiding it anyway. I was so frustrated I could have ripped out what hair was left, straight from the root. I asked Virgil, “You know where we can get some big earrings? I’m about to need them.”