Revisiting “Supership” – George “Bad” Benson (1975)

In April 1975, Record World‘s Vince Aletti reported in his weekly Disco File column that CTI Records sent out a number of unlabeled 45s to disco-oriented DJs in the New York area. Each record bore only a small white sticker stamped with the neologism “SUPERSHIP.” No artist was credited. The single was accompanied only by a letter asking for the DJs’ reaction.

“The response, according to CTI,” wrote Aletti, “has been sufficiently overwhelming – if only in the volume of calls – that the company now feels encouraged to go beyond the immediate release of the single (scheduled in the next two weeks) to a more serious involvement in the disco field.

“‘Supership,’ which takes the ‘Love Train’ metaphor to sea with a pleasant, churning upbeat, turns out to be by George Benson, whose pop departure from his usual jazz work CTI wanted to test in the disco market.”

Aletti’s informal survey of the DJ circuit elicited a considerably more nuanced, if not more tempered response: “The reactions I’ve heard range from shrug-offs to raves like ‘to die over,’ with a large middle ground of solid enthusiasm. Watch for this one.”¹

II.

The “Supership” single was officially released in the U.S. in May 1975 as CTI OJ-25 F (backed by an edited version of “My Latin Brother,” from Benson’s 1974 CTI release, Bad Benson) at about the same time as Hubert Laws’s CTI disco ditty “The Chicago Theme” – making the two tracks among CTI’s very first forays in to the then-burgeoning disco market.

The credit to George “Bad” Benson, nomenclature which riffs off the earlier LP, may well have had two oppositional meanings – one positive, the other, not so much (note the two double-entendre CTI compilations The Baddest Hubbard and The Baddest Turrentine as well) – the song finally allowed Benson his greatest wish, which was the exact opposite of Frank Zappa’s later three-disc series Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar. Here, Benson put down his guitar and opened his mouth to sing.

Benson had sung, sporadically, on previous CTI releases (Tell It Like It Is, The Other Side of Abbey Road), but never as much as he wanted. Taylor had blocked that as much as possible. Somehow, Taylor relented for “Supership.”

The song was composed by veteran percussionist and frequent CTI session player Ralph MacDonald (writer of Grover Washington Jr.’s “Mister Magic,” a big hit at the time for CTI) and frequent collaborators William Eaton, William Salter (co-writer, with MacDonald, of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s Grammy-winning “Where is the Love”²) and Arthur Jenkins (the former Latin Jazz Quintet pianist and one-time Johnny Nash partner).

The 120-b.p.m. rhythm section, the waka waka guitar and the well-arranged horns do all the work, while steam boat sounds add a gimmicky and oddly-anachronistic sense of weird verisimilitude straight out of Taylor’s late-fifties “Creed Taylor Orchestra” records with Kenyon Hopkins.

Truth be told, “Supership” sounds like nothing else in the CTI catalog, not even such pop-oriented fare as Grover Washington, Jr.’s “Mister Magic,” Hubert Laws’s “The Chicago Theme,” Ron Carter’s “Anything Goes” (a surprising dancefloor hit) or even Esther Phillips’s “What a Diff’rence a Day Made” – all of which happen to feature Ralph MacDonald on percussion.

Here, Benson’s signature guitar is altogether absent, replaced by his perfectly soulful and commanding baritone vocal, a sound most unfamiliar to listeners in 1975. (Benson’s breakout hit, “This Masquerade,” would be issued nearly a year later.)

None of the other musicians are known, or are as readily identifiable as so many CTI records tend to be. The churning arrangement was done by “Supership” co-writer Arthur Jenkins, who, while serving as session percussionist on several previous CTI discs (including Carter’s Anything Goes), had never arranged anything else the label ever released.

The music press that took notice was mostly positive: “An excellent vocal performance by the man known mainly for his dexterity at the guitar could be the start of a new phase in his career,”³ raved Cash Box while Record World enthused that the “[j]azz guitarist makes the vocal/disco/pop transition in one heaven-bound thrust forward. Blast-off time for this year’s answer to “Rock the Boat” is here!⁴

It’s interesting to note that even though “Supership” was all but ignored in the U.S., the Cash Box take was totally spot on.

The market response was tepid, at best. Hailed as CTI’s “first non-album single” (it wasn’t) hardly distinguished it in any meaningful way.⁵ “Supership” only reached number 98 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July of that year. The ship had sunk in American waters.

III.

At about the same time, though, “Supership” was issued as a single in the UK as CTI CT SP 002, backed, here, with Bad Benson‘s “My Latin Brother.”

The song fit perfectly into that country’s then-emerging “Northern Soul” category and, later in the year, “Supership” – which was being hailed as “all the rage in the nation’s discos at this very moment”⁶ – reached an astronomical number 30 on the British charts (it reached number 8 on the British Soul charts and number 12 on the U.K.’s disco chart). “Supership” became an immediate European hit.

Suddenly, the jazz guitarist became a dance-floor hero, mere months before becoming a hit-making crooner. Oddly, Benson’s disco cred would lay dormant for a full five years – as the genre was dying out (at least in the United States) – when his first number-one hit, the Quincy Jones-produced “Give Me the Night” confirmed Benson’s superstar status.

“Though I’ve been working in the jazz form for the past decade,” Benson said in 1975, “ever since joining the Jack McDuff group as guitarist, I’ve always incorporated R&B rhythms and harmonies into everything I do. That’s helped me to keep a young audience, which doesn’t find the mixing of jazz and soul so strange.”

Apparently, though, “Supership” came about by accident. “Creed Taylor laid down the backing tracks and intended Esther Phillips to overdub the vocals, Benson said. “But she couldn’t make the session, so I asked if I could do it instead and he agreed.”

He added that “I’ve included a measure of vocal cuts in most of my recent albums and the success of ‘Supershlp’ will enable me to do so to an even greater degree. In fact, I reckon we should cut a 100-per cent soul album now.”⁷

IV.

That “100-per cent soul album” was still another few years off. Some might argue the first was In Flight (1977), but I would lean toward either Living Inside Your Love (1979) or Give Me the Night (1980) as the fulfillment of Benson’s hopeful reckoning there.

That comment, however, comes at an interesting time in Benson’s transition away from CTI Records to pop superstardom at Warner Bros. At this point, Benson was four months past several contentious sessions with Creed Taylor for the CTI album Good King Bad and two months prior to the California sessions that would mark his debut recording for the Warner Bros. label, Breezin’.

In August 1975, George Benson was enticed away from CTI – at that time, the world’s best-known and most popular jazz label – to Warner Bros. Records, the mighty major label that specialized in nearly every sort of popular music except jazz. It’s not known whether Creed Taylor knew anything about this at the time. But, of course, there are always two sides to every story, even if the plot points are a little murky on both sides.

From CTI’s perspective, Benson “left” the label nearly two years in to a four-year exclusive contract, with only two LPs (and one, possibly two, in progress) of a six-album deal getting made. Benson alleged that jazz labels such as CTI “had drastically cut the number of their releases, gone on hiatus, or pulled the plug altogether. This left musicians with fewer and fewer venues in which to record, and it started to seem that in terms of advances, it was all or nothing. [emphasis mine]

“I was done with CTI, so I was a guy in search of a label.”⁸

Both sides had a point. And it’s highly likely, as the above emphasis hints at, that Benson was not getting paid for Taylor’s overriding control of his career. Benson credits Tommy LiPuma, his producer at Warner Bros., for being “the first producer who wanted to focus on my vocals.” Regardless, Creed Taylor initiated a string of lawsuits that would not get resolved (in his favor) until 1989, well after Benson’s popular appeal had long since waned.

Nevertheless, Taylor, dissatisfied with Benson’s July sessions, called the guitarist back to Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in December 1975, where they recorded the bulk of what ended up appearing on the magnificent Good King Bad record. The following month, Benson was in L.A., recording Breezin’, a landmark album in many ways but one that – for better or worse – smoothed out jazz irrevocably.

Breezin’ was released in March 1976 and Benson’s sumptuous take on Leon Russell’s “This Masquerade” – and its parent album – were already huge hits when Good King Bad was issued to all-too-little notice in June of that year (additional tracks from these sessions ended up on such CTI albums as 1978’sSpace [the disco-vocal cover of “Hold On, I’m Comin'”] and 1983’s Pacific Fire⁹).

After an initial agreement between CTI and Warner Bros., Benson would return to complete only one more album for the label, the wonderful and all-instrumental David Matthews-arranged Benson & Farrell, an album Benson co-led with reed player and fellow CTI All Star Joe Farrell (1937-86). The title and cover art – oddly – mimic the British cigarette maker Benson & Hedges for no apparent reason (cigarette advertising was banned on TV and radio at least five years earlier).

It was the last album both leaders would record for the CTI label (Farrell, too, briefly moved to Warner Bros.) and would land at a healthy number three on the Jazz charts, at the exact same time that Breezin’ was, of course, number one.

V.

“Supership” finally docked on an LP in February 1976, when CTI issued the pop-oriented “hits” compilation Fire Into Music. The compilation, which was named for a campaign launched by Metronome Records the month before to promote CTI product in Germany, was also issued in Canada as A Taste of CTI/Kudu: The World’s Leading Jazz Label.

The George Benson track was also included in German and Japanese LP compilations titled Fire Into Music, both with different track line-ups and covers than the American version of the Fire Into Music LP.

“Supership” was also included on the 1975 Dutch CTI compilation Feelin’ Allright (a.k.a. The Chicago Theme), the 1977 disco-oriented British compilation The Sound of Things to Come, and – in its only known CD iteration – the 2017 compilation Cool Heat: The Best of CTI Records.

Endnotes:

1. Aletti, Vince, The Disco Files 1973-78: New York’s Underground Week by Week (New York: D.A.P., 2009), p. 96. The original article was published on p. 34 in the April, 26, 1975, issue of Record World. ↩︎
2. Grover Washington, Jr. covered “Where is the Love” on his 1972 CTI/Kudu disc All the King’s Horses. The song was not issued as a single, but co-writer Ralph MacDonald himself would have a minor R&B hit with the song in 1977. ↩︎
3. Cash Box, May 10, 1975, p. 18. ↩︎
4. Record World, May 10, 1975, p. 16. ↩︎
5. Like early CTI singles by such forgotten non-jazz artists as Hack Bartholomew, John Martine and Sampson & Delilah (1969-70) and later singles on the CTI subsidiary Three Brothers by Cassandra Morgan and The Clams (1973-74), “Supership” was issued as a teaser to test the waters of demand for a full album. This was a common ploy at many labels during the fifties through to the eighties – and a tactic Taylor himself often explored at both ABC-Paramount and Verve. ↩︎
6. Record Mirror & Disc, November 8, 1975, p. 20. ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. Benson, George with Alan Goldsher, Benson: The Autobiography (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2014), p. 160. Not surprisingly, Benson’s memoir says nothing about “Supership.” ↩︎
9. Pacific Fire featured a Benson vocal on “Moody’s Mood for Love.” According to Benson’s autobiography, Creed Taylor was against recording it and even the band despised Benson’s performance of the song. In 1980, Benson would take another, seemingly more successful stab at “Moody’s Mood” with producer Quincy Jones for the Give Me the Night album. “In 1983,” Benson wrote, “Creed released the inferior CTI version on a collection of unissued tracks. He never got my approval.” ↩︎