without the efforts of these three men. PIR was it throughout the ’70s, and there was a wealth of talent in and around the Philadelphia area during this time that called the label home. “All of our artists were different,” Gamble explains. “And we styled them different. None of their music sounds the same. The O’Jays didn’t sound like Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Archie Bell didn’t sound like the Intruders, and Lou [Rawls] didn’t sound like Teddy [Pendergrass]. Patti [LaBelle] didn’t sound like Phyllis Hyman. We had a great stable and collection of artists.” And PIR made it all work in a rapidly changing musical climate—a fertile time for Black music independence, when Gamble and Huff were among the most independent of them all. On a humid morning last June, I sat down with the pair at the PIR building on the corner of Broad and Cypress along Philadelphia’s Avenue of the Arts. We started out talking about the music of their youth—Frankie Lymon, Little Anthony and the Imperials, the Flamingos, Harvey Fuqua and the Moonglows, and Marvin Junior, Chuck Barksdale, and the Dells. “WDAS here in Philadelphia used to play all of the new music,” Gamble recalls. “I was pretty much engrossed in music as a young guy.” “I was basically the same,” says Huff. “WDAS beamed into where I grew up in Camden [New Jersey], and not a day went by when WDAS wasn’t in the house.” WDAS disc jockeys Georgie Woods, Douglas “Jocko” Henderson, and, in particular, Jimmy Bishop would become instrumental in helping the young entrepreneurs learn the business and garner airplay for their artists. Prior to starting their own labels in Excel, Gamble, and Neptune, the two had met while working in Philadelphia’s Schubert Building—Huff as a songwriter for Johnny Madara and Dave White, and Gamble under record producer Jerry Ross and his partner Murray Wecht.
Sitting in on the interaction between Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff is much like witnessing the give-and-take of an old married couple—or better yet, having a conversation with two uncles. On one hand, you have Uncle Leon, reserved but articulate, reminiscing on memories of yesteryear with the ease and casual elegance of a tenured Ivy League professor. And then you have Uncle Kenny with his golden tongue and man-about-town cool, evidence—in the good sense—that you can take the boy out of the streets, but you can’t take the streets out of the boy. In the companion booklet to the Love Train: The Sound of Philadelphia box set, longtime collaborator Thom Bell said of the three, “One can talk, one doesn’t talk, one shouldn’t talk! [ laughs ] Kenny can talk, and he should, because he has a brilliant mind.” What Gamble and Huff accomplished independent of one another and as a team, both before and after their formation of Philadelphia International Records (PIR), was not just the result of brilliance, but surrounding themselves with the right individuals and learning to take advantage of any and every opportunity. Each possessed a grand vision, made even more powerful by their union, but to hear many of their peers tell it, not all was harmonious under the PIR roof. Stories of dissent, questionable business practices, and unfair distribution of royalties are plentiful among those who worked for and with the duo, told in great detail in John A. Jackson’s A House on Fire: The Rise and Fall of Philadelphia Soul . Jackson explains how much has been made over the treatment of Black artists at the hands of White record company owners, but it’s not so much an issue of race as it is of power, as he cites Berry Gordy and Motown as an example that Gamble, Huff, and Bell may have inexplicably followed. But what is just as important to remember is that many PIR artists and associates may have never reached great heights
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