Doug Shorts finds a new home at boogie-inspired Cherries Records. Storied Chicago funk and soul singer SE COND ACT
“I feel like Doug’s story is the story of a whole lot of people,” says producer Andrew Brearley by phone from his Queens home. Brearley and his wife, Sheila Hernando, run Cherries Records. The “story” he speaks of is the life of their flagship artist, Frederick Douglass Shorts. “Creating new music with him showed us the potential and possibility of our dream becoming a reality,”Hernando says.It’s a new partnership for an old dog.Visiting the house Shorts shares with his mother on Chicago’s South Side reveals a timber-wolf-gray ’39 Buick with a ’67 Bonneville engine sitting in the middle of the backyard. Next to the car is a jagged, twelve-foot stump, all that’s left of a hundred-year-old tree that recently toppled and nearly crushed everything in its shadow—including the Buick. Inside of Shorts’s five-by-nine-foot brick and wood-paneled basement studio, Funkland, are various pieces of recording gear that are functional, if past their prime— Korg X3, Roland 880 Workstation, Axiom 25 MIDI controller, Boss Dr. Groove. The walls are lined with pictures of “the originators,” which is how he refers to Bird, Dizzy, Billie, and Count Basie. Interspersed among those pics are promo shots of Shorts solo or with his most well-known band, Master Plan Inc. The “Inc.” was added in the mid-’70s when an astrologist read the charts of the Zodiac signs for Shorts and some of his bandmates and said they were in a “business phase” and should capitalize while the stars were aligned.There may have been marijuana involved.They ended up at a free business-management school, earning degrees in less than a year. Doug is “just a cool-ass dude,” Brearley says. “Not everybody is as cool as him, and that’s a huge part of it…just him being good energy, having an open mind about working with younger folks, and doing things.” Bearley is right on all accounts. Shorts, sixty-three, is indeed a cool dude, with a story not that unlike many other performers of his generation. He was born into a musical family near Cabrini–Green, raised in the shadows of his swiftly changing neighborhood and the stars performing at Chicago’s original Regal Theater. He attended singer Jerry Butler’s songwriters’ workshop, joined groups with names like the Visitors and the Mannequins, but his biggest success came with Master Plan Inc., a funk collective with all the talent to make it big. But as these stories go, they didn’t make it at all. Shorts once had to pass
by Ronnie Reese photography by Freddy Anzures
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