Doug Shorts has been trying to get his foot in the door of the music industry since the late 60s, when he was a student at Wells High School near Ashland and Augusta. But it wasn’t until about five years ago, when he working as a doorman on Lake Shore Drive, that he met the man who’d finally release some of his songs on a proper label. Shorts, 62, lives in Chatham, but he grew up on the near north side, where he started singing in soul bands at age 16. For decades his career in music was a collection of almosts. In the early 70s he almost joined Chess Records vocal-soul group Shades of Brown while touring as their support act; a few years later he almost released four songs he’d cut with future Prince producer David Z.; in the late 70s he almost finished a recording session for Brunswick Records; in the mid-80s he almost signed a songwriting contract with Motown.
Only Abrahamian and other diehard collectors might ever have heard Shorts sing, because he’d all but given up on music in the early aughts—it was a chance encounter with Galapagos4 rapper Brian “Robust” Kuptzin about five years ago that turned him around. At the time Shorts was the night doorman at the condo on Lake Shore Drive and Irving Park where Kuptzin’s girlfriend lived. Kuptzin introduced Shorts to Brearley, who’d been a producer for Galapagos4 under the name Meaty Ogre since 2000. Brearley is also a record buyer and Chicago soul fan, and in 2012 he and his wife, Sheila Hernando (aka DJ Shred One), would launch Cherries.
In the early 70s, Shorts started the Master Plan with Stevenson, drummer Dean Knox (from Shorts’s earlier band the James Clark Revue), and bassist Eddie Manning (from the Mannequins’ closest rivals, the Fugitives). The Master Plan changed lineups, broke up, and re-formed several times before calling it quits in 1980, but the group’s core turned out to be Shorts, Knox, and the Fugitives’ Archie Brooks on vocals and guitar.
Things went sour after Brunswick house producers started horning in on the Master Plan’s sessions. Shorts says he confronted label head Raymond Haley and was told that nobody makes money from their first release—that is, the band shouldn’t expect to see any of the potential profit from their recordings. The Master Plan backed out on Brunswick, then left without their masters (though Shorts had a copy of the unfinished songs on quarter-inch tape). Shorts says Haley was none too pleased to pay for the band’s studio time without any records to sell, and the two of them almost came to blows.
Shorts and his mother are close, and she’s the reason he moved back to Chicago in 2003. “I said, ‘I should be there with her, have coffee with her in the morning and stuff instead of being selfish and being by myself,’” he says. “I did a lot of soul searching, ’cause I know I didn’t want to come back to Chicago, but the fact is she’s getting old. I wanted to spend the twilight years with her.” Shorts moved into the attic at his mother’s house in Chatham, where she’s been living since 1974, and set up a modest studio in the basement, which he calls Funkland. He got a security job at the Ginger Ridge Apartments in Calumet City, then moved on to the doorman post at the Lake Shore Drive condo where he met Kuptzin.
Brearley referred Shorts to Abrahamian, who interviewed him on Sitting in the Park in May 2011 and played some of those old recordings, including a muddy version of a breezily brassy unreleased tune called “Try It You’ll Like It.” A friend of Brearley’s passed Shorts’s music along to the folks at Daptone Records, who took about a year to decline to release it—they liked what they heard, but the recording quality was too poor.
