It’s a Thursday evening in early November, and Chicago soul great Syl Johnson and five other veteran musicians are at Soundmine Studios in Stony Island Park to rehearse. Drummer Morris Jennings, bassist Bernard Reed, keyboardist Anthony Space, guitarist Larry Blasingaine, and baritone saxophonist Willie Henderson—sans horn and here to help with the arrangements—all have stands full of sheet music for a dozen tunes that Johnson recorded four decades ago. This band’s never played any of them, and Johnson himself might as well be learning them for the first time.
When the original 1970 recording of “That’s Why,” a funky number with lush arrangements by Donny Hathaway, bursts from the speakers, Johnson loses himself for a moment. He jumps up from his stool, wiggles his hips seductively, and tugs at the fabric around the crotch of his pants. I think I might be the only person who notices—the others are engrossed in their charts.
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The next day I visit Johnson at his two-story Bronzeville home, identifiable by the green guitar in bas-relief at the top of its red stucco facade. Over the course of a rambling two-and-a-half-hour interview, I learn firsthand what the folks at Numero Group have already told me—that the focus Johnson displays where music is concerned pretty much ends there.
A conversation with Johnson can be a challenge, but his friends and colleagues take it in stride. Guitarist Pete Nathan, who produced two of Johnson’s late-career albums, puts it best: “He gets exhilarated and gets too far over his skis sometimes.”
Johnson has made a lot of money from hip-hop artists sampling his old records—his 1967 funk hit “Different Strokes,” which opens with a series of well-placed grunts, the delirious giggling of a 19-year-old Minnie Riperton, and a huge Morris Jennings breakbeat, has been sampled more than 50 times. He’s made enough to build his house and buy the land it stands on, including an adjacent plot where he maintains an impressive garden—far more than he’s seen in royalties from his entire discography. But much of that windfall came his way only as a result of litigation, and he hasn’t forgotten that.
“Man, they also found some good shit,” he continues, and sings the opening line from “I’m Looking for My Baby,” a 1962 single he cut for Federal Records in Cincinnati. “I forgot I had made that record. Ken and them are some great researchers. I was totally flabbergasted about how many songs I had made that I couldn’t remember. You got a band, you’re moving around, shit, you didn’t get no deal, you make a little would-be record on that label or whatever label, nothing happened, you forgot about the label, you forgot about the tape, but it was good. I couldn’t remember that stuff.”
Twilight didn’t incorporate until several singles later, changing its name to Twinight to avoid conflict with a label in California. At that point another record promoter, Peter Wright—then managing the New Colony Six and generally more in tune than Bedno with what the kids were buying—came aboard as a partner.
