On a Friday last September, patrons of the Circle Bar in New Orleans dazedly stumbled out as the sun began to rise. With random strands of hair plastered to their faces, sweat-soaked T-shirts clinging to their bodies, and gator-sized grins, it was as if someone had slipped them a hit of Ecstasy and deluged them with saltwater. They weren’t drunk — they had just witnessed something that critic Cleothus Hardcastle described as “A miracle akin to a resurrection … soul music’s very own Lazarus [risen] from the dead.”
A long-lost soul man, Howard Tate, had come out of hiding.
The club had been jam-packed with sweaty record-store clerks, slurring bohemians, and weird old people in Shriners’ hats who were part of a secret music sect known as the Mystic Knights of the Mau Mau, whose mission statement reads, “Mystic Knights continue their quest of bringing lost blues, rock ‘n’ roll, country, and soul to the forefront with the same aplomb with which King Arthur’s men of long ago searched so zealously for the Holy Grail.” This covert club was responsible for booking Tate, along with a pickup band of session pros including the East Bay’s own Freddie Roulette, with his lap-steel styles.
When Tate hit the stage that night, a wave in the crowed shifted suddenly to the right and then to the left as the short black man with a bright red suit and gold-framed glasses smiled and sauntered up to the band. The horn section began to play the opening bars of an upbeat soul-stroll, and Tate rose his finger in the air like an electrified ecclesiastic, belting out the beginnings of a concert that made the walls sweat like a three hundred-pound man eating spicy jambalaya on a hot summer’s day.
Most of the people in the crowd never thought they’d be dancing to an intimate live performance of a lost soul legend whom most of them presumed dead.
But it was a dead man’s party in New Orleans, and the host was not only alive, he was on fire.
If you’ve never been to Village Music in Mill Valley, don’t go inside looking for the new Hives, Vines, Strokes, or any other flavor-of-the-month CD. Take that shit to Sam Goody. Village Music sells vinyl. The musty musk of old records is the first thing you smell upon entering, and a quick panoramic glance reveals endless layers of records that quite possibly could be the only structural foundations holding up the building. Then there’s the gray-bearded proprietor behind the counter. John Goddard owns Village Music, and he has the power to raise the dead.
“Here was a guy who sang better than most … a true soul legend,” says Goddard about Howard Tate, whom he has recently invited to play the Bay Area. “He cut an amazing LP, toured for a while, recorded some more, and then just fell off the face of the earth.”
Adored mostly by vinyl fetishists, musicians in the know, and even the most jaded of bespectacled music critics, Howard Tate could have been bigger than Sam Cooke and maybe even Otis Redding if the Verve record label hadn’t dropped the ball on his 1966 debut album Get It While You Can. “Everyone thought Howard Tate was dead for years, until somebody recognized him in a New Jersey grocery store just over a year ago,” says Goddard. The person who recognized Tate in the produce aisle of a Shop-Rite was none other than Ron Kennedy of Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. Kennedy put Tate in touch with Phil Casden, a disc jockey in New Jersey who often played songs from Tate’s first album on his radio show. Casden then put the word out on an Internet newsgroup. Soon after, a British journalist contacted Jerry Ragovoy, Tate’s mentor, producer, and friend who was the mastermind behind Tate’s remarkable recordings. “I’ve spent years trying to find him,” a stunned Ragovoy told him.
“Well, I just talked to him yesterday,” the journalist replied.
Howard Tate landed three minor hits on the R&B Top 20 chart from his debut LP Get It While You Can, including the strolling “Ain’t Nobody Home” (later recorded by B.B. King) as well as the bluesy, soul-pop sing-along “Look at Granny Run Run” (later covered by Ry Cooder) and the gospel-funk epic “Stop” (later covered by Buddy Miles with Jimi Hendrix’ Band of Gypsys and then by the James Gang). And although Tate never had a hit with it, Janis Joplin made the album’s title track famous on her 1971 album Pearl. On his recordings, Tate’s singing swings from a stalwart tenor to high up on his trademark falsetto — a range that defied as much gravity as his towering pompadour. His vocal flourishes dip in and out of country-inspired styles deeply steeped in rich gospel and gritty blues. His voice can put shivers up your spine and comforting warmth in your belly like you were crawling out of the swimming pool into the hot tub.
Tate — who, despite his many years under the radar, still seems infused with an endearing conceit — was never surprised that so many people covered his work. “Well you know what that proves?” he asks, his upbeat voice bouncing out of the speakerphone. “It’s that all the heavies listened to our music. I knew back then that we were great. I knew that nobody was better.” His speaking manner is that of a seasoned reverend, with an animated accentuation that carries with it more character than even his singing inflections. Although his words come off as bragging and boastful, his conversational tone sounds like nothing more than the words of a man confident in himself and his producer. When he stirs the fire in the timbre of his speech, you can visualize his finger being raised and shaken in the air like a true preacher man.
“I knew that our bad breaks came because Verve didn’t know how to market my type of music,” he says. “We should have sold twenty million copies of the Get It While You Can album, and it’s Verve’s fault for that! But all the greats — Jimi Hendrix and all them — they were listening!” The man’s music speaks for itself, but the fact that his recordings never made him a household name seems to have left Tate with a slightly salient undertone of bitterness. Perhaps he blames the hardships of his life that were to come after Verve never pushed his debut on the audience that made artists such as Solomon Burke, Aretha Franklin, and Clarence Carter set for life. Verve could’ve worked each song as an individual hit, had it known what it possessed at the time. Instead the album was damned to the kind of obscurity experienced by artists such as Eddie Hinton or Big Star.
“We were with a jazz company who just didn’t know how to market me,” says Tate. In 1966, Verve’s artist roster was all jazz-based except for Tate, who was the label’s guinea pig in a failed experiment to work a soul artist into its audience. He claims that, by the time the label had figured out where to work him, a crucial window of time had closed. In the label’s defense, it eventually managed to work Get It While You Can to number one on the Motor City charts and then booked Tate at the Twenty Grand opening for Marvin Gaye. They even put him on a busy touring schedule, but by this time the record had been out too long for any workable buzz to pick up momentum again.
Tate didn’t release another record until 1972, when he recorded a self-titled second album for Atlantic (again with Ragovoy’s production). The pressure to deliver something radio-ready to a bigger label may have caused Ragovoy to gamble with a different formula. For example, by 1972 everyone from the Byrds to Sam Cooke had landed a hit by covering a Bob Dylan song, and Tate’s sophomore effort included a country-tinged soul version of “Girl from the North Country.” The result was counter in style and sound to the driving power-soul of Get It While You Can.
“Jerry said that’s the worst mistake he made,” said Tate recently in an interview with the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever. “He changed my style a little bit when I went to do the Atlantic album.”
Almost a decade later, in 1981, Tate recorded Reaction on Lloyd Price’s Turntable Records, with Price and Johnny Nash producing this time. While the performances on this album were solid, none of the song arrangements had Ragovoy’s magic precision. That, along with the fact that Tate had once again signed with a record label that didn’t have a strong foothold in the soul and R&B market, made for a failed reception to Reaction. Following his third try, Tate disappeared without a trace.
“I dropped out of the music scene,” he says, looking back. “You know, I really just got tired.” But it was more than that. He also had a falling out with Ragovoy, the one man who knew how to drive his voice.
Shortly after Tate’s disappearance, Ragovoy began to receive phone calls from various interested parties looking for the singer. But nobody knew how to get hold of him, nor did anyone know anything pertaining to his whereabouts.
“It was sort of shocking … since the mid-’80s straight through till the end of the ”90s, I was getting up to a dozen calls a year from various club owners wanting to book Howard,” recalls a soft-spoken Ragovoy. “They were trying to find him, and I thought that maybe Howard could use some money, so I’ll just call him up and let him know what’s going on. And of course every number I called was either disconnected or no longer in service … nobody knew where he was. So after about eight or ten years I thought that maybe the poor guy had passed away, you know? It seemed like a normal assumption to make.”
“It kinda shocked me to learn that many people came to presume that I was dead,” replies Tate. “But then I thought about it and realized that I left the music world altogether, and I guess they would assume that I was dead because why would anyone with a God-given talent like I have — and I never took a music lesson in my life — why would he leave the music world unless he’s dead or in jail?”
As it turns out, Tate had indeed suffered an unfortunate run of bad luck. In the mid-’70s, his thirteen-year-old daughter died in a house fire. During the early ’80s, he went through a painful divorce from his wife of twenty years, and then lived homeless in the streets. But in 1994 he had a spiritual awakening. “I had a revelation from God who told me that he wanted me to do something,” he says. God asked him to build a church and rehabilitation center for the downtrodden.
“I said, ‘Well, I better do it, because I don’t want to ignore the call of God, who takes care of us all whether we realize it or not.’ Now I manage to deal with housing the homeless and dealing with rehab and drug addicts and alcoholics and people in trouble.” Howard Tate became a minister.
And the Lord does indeed work in mysterious ways. Tate has reunited with Ragovoy, and they are working on a brand-new album. “We’re doing soul as we done in the ’60s and ’70s,” says Tate. “Just an updated, modern version of it.” After over three decades of trials and tribulations, Tate has come back swinging for a second chance, still talking himself up with the impassioned fever of a young Muhammad Ali.
“It was like dustin’ off some cobwebs in a way, because thirty years is a long time,” he says. “But once we got back together and the chemistry got crazy again because Jerry can write for me like nobody else can write for me. And when you hear this CD, the world will know that the Verve album was not a fluke. It was the real McCoy. … I truly think that Jerry and I gave them something thirty years ago, and we’re givin’ them something today that’s gonna shock ’em right outta their seats thirty years later!”
Tate’s live shows have indeed been getting rave reviews, from The New York Times to the Boston Herald, which wrote, “Most remarkable … wasn’t merely the return of an artist many had presumed dead. It was that Tate’s voice, arguably one of the greatest in the annals of soul music, sounded as good as did three decades ago.”
In his usual modest way, Tate hopes that he will generate five million dollars to accomplish God’s divine request. Some might say that’s nuts, and that he is setting himself up for a fourth failure. But if anything is going to drive Tate to his holy goal, it’s the very faith that he believes first brought God’s voice to him. “I consider myself blessed that Jerry is in good health and that we haven’t lost a beat,” he says. “And it looks like I’m gonna get that five million dollars that I asked the Lord for to build a rehabilitation center and a sanctuary, and do the work that he called me to do.”
Amen.
