Being denied that recognition may
have fueled Robinson’s drive in the
decades that followed, through boom
times to bankruptcy and back again.
But her success with Sugar Hill did
not satisfy a hunger for credit that
ultimately metastasized into greed
and tarnished her reputation.
N
EARLY EVERYONE KNOWS
the song, beloved by
filmmakers who wished to
evoke the spirit of the late
’50s in movies like Dirty
Dancing and Casino. “Love Is Strange”
hit No. 1 on the Billboard R&B charts in
- It made Sylvia Robinson’s career.
Before then, she had been “Lit-
tle Sylvia” Vanderpool, a teen artist
releasing a string of minor R&B
singles on the Savoy and Jubilee labels
between 1951 and 1953. The Harlem-
born-and-bred daughter of immigrants
from St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, Sylvia
had nearly given up on her showbiz
dreams, taking a typist position at
Metropolitan Life while considering a
career in nursing.
Two partnerships helped change
that. The first was with MacHouston
“Mickey” Baker, her guitar teacher.
Eleven years older than Sylvia, Baker
was inspired by the success of Les
Paul & Mary Ford, and wanted to try a
similar male-female duo. The second
was with Joe Robinson, a young Navy
vet who made a small fortune in the
Harlem numbers racket and invested
it in real estate and nightclubs. Joe met
Sylvia on a day cruise up the Hudson
River, courted her and wed her. But
Joe played a supporting and support-
ive role in their marriage: He encour-
aged her work with Baker and set up a
publishing company with her.
The sudden success of “Love Is
Strange” took Mickey & Sylvia to
stages across the country. On NBC’s
Steve Allen Show, their act simmered
with sexual innuendo — Sylvia
wrapped in a sequined dress, cooing
and throwing her hips at the besuited
Baker. She was the architect of their
prosperity, interpolating a Bo Diddley
vamp, rewriting the lyrics and adding
the song’s flirty repartee: “Oh, lover
boy...” Still, it was initially credited to
Diddley’s alias, Ethel Smith (his wife’s
name), likely in order for Diddley to
dodge contractual commitments —
one woman denied credit, another
used as a vessel for her husband.
“Love Is Strange” gave Mickey &
Sylvia a forever hit that proved impos-
sible to follow. Sylvia had the talent
and the ability for a plan B — song-
writing and production — but there
was little precedent for a woman in
that role. So she and Joe settled into
nascent black suburbia in Englewood,
N.J., and had three sons: Joe Jr. (aka
Joey), Leland and Rhondo.
T
HE ROBINSONS CO-FOUNDED
All Platinum Records in
1968 — the “All” inserted
in the name because they
knew distributors that paid
their vendors in alphabetical order.
She built the roster, signing groups like
The Moments, while Joe handled the
operations and scavenged for projects
to promote, like a record by The What-
nauts that was bubbling at black radio.
“Message From a Black Man,”
produced by George Kerr, was an op-
portunistic cover of a song from a 1969
Temptations album. Kerr, a former
Motown artist, knew Gordy was never
going to release a deep cut as a single,
and his quickly assembled What-
nauts imitation was a play to shave
off customers who didn’t want to buy
a full Temptations album just to own
the song. As such, Kerr was a hustler
after Joe’s heart. Kerr was promoting
the record at a radio station in Virginia
when Joe found him.
“I was coming out with the program
director to take him to lunch, and
here are these two white Italian guys
coming up the sidewalk,” remembers
Kerr. “I knew they were gangsters.
They said, ‘Which one of you is George
Kerr?,’ and I pointed to the other guy!”
The gentlemen clarified that they
merely wanted to introduce Kerr to
someone who could help with his
record. Walking back into the station,
they put Kerr on the phone with Joe
(“We got him, Joe!”), who convinced
a reluctant Kerr to fly to Newark, N.J.,
for a meeting. When Kerr arrived, he
found Sylvia and Joe waiting for him
beside a black limousine, both be-
decked in white mink coats and hats.
Sylvia hugged Kerr like an old
friend. “How did you have the guts
to go up against Motown?” she asked
with a laugh. By the time they bustled
Kerr back to Englewood, they had
convinced him that All Platinum
could take his record farther than he
could selling it out of the trunk of his
Cadillac — especially considering their
connections.
Kerr already knew that those rela-
tionships ran along the fringes of orga-
nized crime, as was often the case for
independent labels. Connected guys
with money to launder could provide
funding for a company, influence to get
DJs to play its records and coercion
to get distributors to pay for those
records. Joe, with his years in the
numbers game and New York nightlife,
had amassed a lifetime of relation-
ships with Harlem kingpins like Nicky
Barnes and industry operators like
Morris Levy and Nate McCalla, who
were both tied to the Genovese family.
“Joe was a good earner,” says Kerr.
Soon, Kerr began spending time
with Sylvia in the studio the Robin-
sons had built at 96 West St. in Engle-
wood. “She had one of the best ears
for music I’ve ever known,” recalls
Kerr. “She was genius. When she was
producing The Moments, she would
be in the studio with headphones
dancing in front of Harry Ray or Billy
Brown and open up the buttons on
her blouse to draw the best perfor-
mance out of them. She was good.”
That combination of intellect and
intuition garnered Sylvia a string of
classic ’70s soul hits for All Platinum,
including “Shame, Shame, Shame” for
Shirley & Company. Yet the artist who
ended up with the label’s biggest hit
would be Sylvia herself.
Sylvia’s sonics often paralleled the
Philadelphia sound 100 miles to the
south, awash with sweet strings and
soft vocals, but Al Green’s Memphis
machine was the mood she evoked
in “Pillow Talk,” a tune she wrote
with Michael Burton expressly for
Green and shopped to his producer,
Hi Records’ Willie Mitchell. When
Mitchell balked at making it a single
and insisted on taking the publishing,
Sylvia shelved the tape.
Kerr was in the studio with Sylvia
when that same reel fell onto her foot
from behind a tape machine where it
had been wedged. They cued it up —
Sylvia moaning out an aural orgasm,
“Uno momento poquito! Nice, Daddy!”
— whereupon she made what Kerr
had come to know as her signature
pronouncement: “That’s a mother-
fucking smash!”
“Pillow Talk,” cut right from the
“She knew how to take key
elements, magnify them and turn
things into a recording ... Sylvia knew
how to work with musicians.”
—DOUG WIMBISH
&
POWER PLAYERS 2019
76 BILLBOARD • OCTOBER 19, 2019
Sylvia with Baker, her partner
in the million-selling 1957
classic “Love Is Strange,” in
New York, circa 1958.