Born in 1950, Adams grew up in Harlem, New York. His story as a young artist revolves around 125th Street, where he remembers seeing Malcolm X and running into people like Muhammad Ali. He would hang out by the Apollo Theater as a teenager, trying to meet the artists who performed there. Acts like the Miracles sometimes played basketball with neighborhood kids near the back of the theater, and Adams took advantage of the opportunity to talk music. “They would come out and play basketball with everybody. It was real cool. That was a different time,” says Adams. “But I wasn’t going there to play; I was going there to learn music. I was going to ask people like Marv Tarplin, the guitar player for the Miracles, ‘How do you do that?’” On one occasion, Adams asked Smokey Robinson for some advice. “I knew he had started when he was fifteen,” Adams says. “So I asked him, ‘What advice would you give a young person who wants to be a producer?’ Smokey looked me straight in the face and said, ‘Forget it.’ I look back at that, and I cherish it, because it was the right thing to say.” Adams spent so much time hanging around the Apollo that Pete Long, the stage manager, and Rueben Phillips, who conducted the orchestra, gave him a job. “I guess they saw that I was not just trying to hang out to hang out, that I really had an interest in music,” says Adams. “They actually let me sit in the middle of the orchestra, like, in the middle of the saxophones. I’d sit there, or I’d hand out music. I guess you could call it, like, being the band boy. “That got my ears accustomed to great arrangements, because you figure this week, it’s the Stax Revue—Sam & Dave and that whole crew—and next week, it’s the Supremes, and the week after that, it’s the guys from Chicago. So every week I’m sitting there absorbing the best music of the day.” Adams had first been exposed to music in Catholic school, where he appreciated the “richness” of hymns. He never took a lesson, but his father, a merchant seaman, saw potential in his middle son and bought him a trumpet at age ten. “I don’t know what I did to let him know I liked music so much,” Adams says. “I guess I was always humming in the house or something. I guess he felt that because I was a Pisces, maybe I might be like Quincy Jones.” After seeing the Beatles for the first time on The Ed Sullivan Show , Adams realized the trumpet wasn’t for him and asked his father for an electric guitar. “He bought me a cheap acoustic guitar,” he recalls, “and said, ‘I’m going away for three months, and when I come back, if you can show me that you learned how to play that guitar, I’ll buy you an electric.’” He taught himself enough chords to convince his father, and, in three months, he had his first electric guitar. By the time he was fifteen, Adams had written hundreds of songs. “I used to write every day,” he says. “Every time I learned a new chord, I tried to find a way to incorporate it into a song.”
One day, a group of teenagers from the neighborhood came looking for a guitar player to audition with them for a part in a movie. “They came to me,” says Adams, “and I didn’t know any of the guys. And it was like, ‘How would you like to be in a band? And we’re going to audition for a movie tomorrow.’ ‘Sure.’” They learned two songs in one day and got the part as the high school band in the Warner Brothers production Up the Down Staircase . The band members named themselves the Sparks. Around that time, there was an in-house production being put together at the Apollo called “Listen, My Brother,” for which the Sparks became the backup band. The show had a cast of local teenagers that included a young Luther Vandross. It was performed four times over the summer of 1967, and the cast was featured on Sesame Street , where they performed one of Adams’s songs, “You’ve Got to Learn Something.” “Here I am seventeen,” he remembers, “and I’ve got a song on an international show; it’s a great start.” Signed to MGM, the Sparks had no hits but toured through the late ’60s, opening for some big acts. “It was like a dream come true. Here we are one week with the Commodores, one week with the Young Rascals, the Temptations. We were on the bottom rung of the show, but we were there, and it was everything you could imagine it would be when you’re seventeen, eighteen years old,” says Adams. He remembers being mesmerized, peeking in on George Kerr producing an O’Jays session when the Sparks went to record at Broadway Studios. Adams had always been fascinated by recording techniques. “When I was five years old, my father had a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and my older brother Gus had a singing group,” he recalls. “They would come over to the house, and they’d record themselves singing. When I was fourteen, I got my father to buy me a reel-to-reel tape recorder with sound-on-sound [overdubbing], and my younger brother Terry and I, he would play bass and drums, and I would play guitar, and we would do sound-on-sound recordings. That gave me a chance to experiment with all these things.” Adams’s initial studio experience came at sixteen, when he began working at Avant Productions, run by Al Avant on 125th Street. Avant had let Adams teach himself piano in the rehearsal studio and, in turn, asked Adams to rehearse artists. There, he learned to engineer sessions and got his first chance to write and arrange with a group called the Carlettes. They recorded one of Adams’s songs called “Lost Without Your Love,” which was later put out by Bobby Robinson and is now a goodie for rare-soul collectors. In 1968, Adams was told by a friend to check out a talented young singer from the neighborhood named Leroy Burgess. “I knew he was a star when I saw him,” says Adams of the then sixteen-year-old Burgess. Feeling like there were no good New York falsetto groups, he put together the group Black Ivory
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