It looked as if a tornado had passed through the house, picked up the remnants of Arrow Brown’s strange, sordid life, and dumped them in the alley. September 1990: a warm breeze moves through Chicago’s South Side. Brown has been dead only a few weeks, but out behind his two-story greystone at 4114 S. King Drive, his dream is already decomposing. The legacy of this would-be music mogul lies in ruins: his papers torn and scattered, his 45s in a thousand jagged pieces, and all around, spools of master tape reduced to tangles of black ribbon melting in the late summer sun. This was the fate of Brown and his empire: a tiny, illusory kingdom built on a tragic combination of ego, deceit, and control.
For more than a decade, beginning in the late 1960s, Arrow Brown was the head of Bandit Records. Although he never sang or played a note, he was the undisputed star of the label, tapping the talent, writing and producing the songs, and putting his imprimatur on everything from his groups’ names—the Arrows, the Majestic Arrows—to their stage moves. Between 1969 and 1981, Bandit released more than a dozen singles and one full-length LP. Though he never scored a major hit, Brown didn’t need airplay or sales receipts to keep going. He financed his label with the welfare money he collected from the harem of women he lived with and lorded over in a bizarre ghetto commune.
Brown juggled as many as a dozen ladies at a time, among them his wife, several longtime mistresses, and a bevy of young girls he referred to as his “daughters” – many of whom were signed over, or in some cases, sold to Brown as guardian. He controlled them all completely: mind, body and soul. To some he was a predator, to others a protector. For many, he was both.
A migrant of the small-town South, Arrow Brown had come to Chicago as a child during the roaring 1920s. In the avatars of the big city, he saw all the things he was not—sharp, tough, powerful, glamorous—but wanted to become. Through cunning and persistence, he would shape his destiny on the backs of others, their lives spent satisfying his decadent appetites. Brown’s outsize existence was matched by an oversize persona. A wannabe hustler, gangster, and Godfather, he was rarely seen without his signature cigar, black homburg, and pearl handled revolver—it was a rogue image that even served as the Bandit label’s logo for a time.
From a distance, it’s hard to understand how Brown pulled it off for so long. He was not extraordinarily talented or handsome. Instead, his power lay in his instincts. He understood the cruel verities at the core of show business: looks fade, voices deteriorate, the weak are exploited, and carefully tended dreams are stillborn.
Savvier than many small-time operators, Brown surrounded himself with multiple generations that would serve as the rungs on his ladder to wealth and fame. Bandit Records’ roster was an odd collection, filled with Brown’s children and concubines, and the strangers who came to him desperate for stardom. Though he preached love and loyalty, he stole from all of them: taking song credits, money, and innocence.
Brown felt justified in his actions, for he believed his family was destined for greatness. And so he sold them a dreamland, one built on a foundation of lies, on the corruption of souls. As one of his children recalls, “He dared to dream—only he let that dream become a nightmare for everyone else.”
In the end, the nightmare would become Arrow Brown’s as well. His heart failing, his conscience overwhelmed by his sins, he died abandoned and unfulfilled. Bandit Records was left to waste away in the streets—but its music and its story, despite being left in an alley like forgotten contraband, would survive.
The mystery of Arrow Brown is such that even the most basic facts of his life remain in dispute. His funeral program lists his date of birth unequivocally as September 10, 1923, while government documents suggest March 1922. His birthplace is equally uncertain: in that same program, Merigold, Mississippi, is indicated, but the name “Sunflower” is scribbled above it.
Merigold and Sunflower, both of them small, predominantly black communities, are separated by 30 miles of Mississippi’s Yazoo Basin, the myth-laden swath of the American South that gave birth to the blues. Beyond those two pins in the map, the early life of Arrow Brown remains shrouded in conjecture, a patchwork of history and rumor stitched together to resemble plausible fact.
The son of a sharecropper and the youngest of 22 children, Arrow Brown spent his earliest years weathering the cruelties of the Jim Crow South. His family’s fortunes were determined by a series of nation-shaping events: the Great Mississippi Flood, the Great Migration, and the Great Depression.
In 1927, the Mississippi River flooded its banks, its waters inundating 27,000 square miles, causing more than $400 million in damages and killing 246 people across seven states. Swelling to 70 miles across and a depth of 30 feet, it was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history. This cataclysmic event would factor heavily in the coming of the Great Migration, which sent two million blacks northward out of the Mississippi Delta in search of better lives. Following the death of his father in 1929 from a heart attack, Arrow Brown and his mother were swept inevitably into this great human tide.
The trip from Mississippi to Chicago was an easy one for the Browns—a straight shot north along the Illinois Central Railroad. They settled into the city’s south side that fall, on the eve of the Great Stock Market Crash. As an impressionable seven-year old, Arrow feasted his eyes on a particularly lawless and corrupt period in the city’s history. Chicago’s seedy underbelly—a headline-grabbing demimonde of bootleggers, bank robbers, and flashy gangsters—was about to pass into legend.
Arrow’s childhood played like a montage of crime wave imagery: Al Capone brazenly strutting the streets he essentially owned, John Dillinger making daring escapes from the authorities. The lives of these mythic figures—and the colorful bravado of their empire-building enterprises—would have a profound effect on Brown.
In the mid-1930s, Arrow’s mother remarried and, with her baby boy in tow, took up residence with Asabee Whitehead in a two-story greystone on the 4100 block of S. Park Drive. The house would eventually come into the Browns’ possession after Whitehead’s death, resulting from a grisly attempt at removing his own appendix in front of a mirror. On the topic of this deadly DIY surgery, Arrow’s daughter Tridia could offer only that Whitehead “was either a doctor or he wanted to be one.”
In 1937, Arrow enrolled at Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, where he purportedly showed a gift for music. “He had an abundance of talent,” said his son Kevin. “He sang just like [jazz and R&B vocalist] Arthur Prysock. He could play just about any instrument: guitar, especially the double organ and keyboards.” However, studio pros that later worked with Brown describe him as either marginally musical or completely tone-deaf.
Following the repeal of Prohibition, Chicago’s nightlife underwent a renaissance that further intensified with the end of the Depression in 1939. “The south side and west side, the black neighborhoods, just erupted with bars and taverns,” according to Chicago cultural historian Robert Pruter. “It was a thriving and exciting nightclub scene. There were live bands, mostly jazz combos, at all these places. That was the golden age of the black tavern, and a lot of people just soaked it up.” The teenaged Arrow Brown was one of them. He soon dropped out of Wendell Phillips and continued his education on the streets. “He got hold to the city, and then the city got hold to him, so he just took off with it,” surmised Kevin. But it was a wild, often violent, environment where carousing could lead to bloodshed. “It was a rough time...I remember him saying that,” Kevin said. “It was razor-totin’ time.”
Brown learned to brawl, and to womanize. He did the latter with a skill that belied his somewhat unremarkable looks. With a short, squat build, Arrow Brown may not have been classically handsome, but he possessed a languid smile and an unerring instinct for the slightest hint of invitation or weakness. He was a chameleon as well: capable of acting like a refined gentleman, a streetwise tough, or anything else the situation, or the lady, called for.
Brown’s great motivation in life was the avoidance of hard labor. His facility with women—both for getting into their pants and their pocketbooks— helped in that regard. “He definitely had his way with the ladies. So whatever money they got hold of, he would get,” remembered Kevin. “In all the years, I never saw him drive a rag. He always had a brand-new car.
In December 1941, dive-bombing Japanese planes put an end to Arrow’s high times. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was drafted into the Army—Uncle Sam cut his hair, handed him a rifle, and sent him to war. Attempts at uncovering Brown’s service records have proved typically frustrating. A 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis destroyed some 16 million files on those who’d served during World War II, including Brown’s. But family lore and photographic evidence suggest he spent several years in the Pacific Theatre—fighting the Japanese and making advances of his own upon the natives. Three grainy snapshots, each picturing Arrow and a different island woman, are the only mementos of Brown’s military service.
In late 1945, the 22-year-old Brown was discharged and returned to Chicago. Rudderless, he found himself back in the old neighborhood, hanging with a group of kids at his alma mater, Wendell Phillips High School. The first sign of Brown’s predilection for young girls came when met Mary Louise Tate, a 15-year-old conga-playing sophomore, whom he married the following year. Their union bore three children in rapid succession: Arrow Jr., Kevin, and Tridia, each arriving 14 months apart. To support his growing family, Arrow reluctantly took a job labeling soup cans at the Campbell’s factory at 35th and Rockwell.
For a time, Brown settled down and seemed to accept his domesticated fate. But the prospect of punching a clock at Campbell’s and sleeping with the same woman for the rest of his life grew more unappealing with each passing year. Inevitably, the lure of barroom neon, young flesh, and the desire for a sybaritic lifestyle proved too great. In 1953, he left his wife and family, with his youngest child Tridia still teetering through her first steps.
Arrow remained a peripheral presence for a few years, visiting during birthdays and holidays. When Brown and Tate legally divorced a decade later, he’d settled just a few blocks away but had disappeared from their lives completely.
By then, Arrow Brown was patriarch to a different kind of family.
Arrow Brown settled back into the familiar old greystone on S. Park Drive, which became Martin Luther King Drive in 1969. The house would ultimately become the foundation of his illicit kingdom, serving as a family commune and base of operations for Bandit Records, as well as a popular neighborhood party pad.
Freed from the shackles of his first wife, it didn’t take Brown long to find a new female companion in Lilliane “Pepper” Powell. While it’s unknown how the pair met, Powell would become Brown’s only legal wife after his divorce from Mary Louise Tate was finalized in 1962. A postal worker with a steady paycheck, Powell was a dutiful and obedient spouse. Soon after marrying her, Brown finally left his hated job at the Campbell’s factory, living off Pepper’s earnings. “She convinced him to quit the job so he wouldn’t have to pay child support for us,” recalled Tridia.
Family members also suspect that Powell was unable to bear children, and thus gave Arrow permission to pursue outside relationships. It was a freedom he clearly relished. Within a few years, Brown assembled a worshipful collection of young girls—concubines he euphemistically referred to as his “daughters.”
The first seeds of Arrow’s music business dreams were sown in 1963, when he met a teenage Johnny Davis and his ten-year- old sister Mary Ann. The Davis kids were doo-wop lovers who’d grown up singing harmony on neighborhood street corners. While Mary Ann was a capable vocalist, Johnny was the true talent, blessed with a wounded tenor that climbed stunning falsetto heights—its tender conveyance would make for some of Bandit’s most emotionally vulnerable songs. An absentee and alcoholic mother was the only opening Arrow would need, with Mary Ann taking up residency on S. Park Drive shortly after. It would prove a peculiar sort of guardianship. At the age of 13, Mary Ann gave birth to Altyrone Deno Brown, the first of three sons she would bear Arrow, followed by K. K. and Delbert.
It wouldn’t be the last time a young girl entrusted to the care of Arrow Brown found herself serving as his lover. Many of these girls came from broken homes, the wayward children of desperate, dysfunctional families. Others were relinquished by parents dazzled by Arrow’s promises of a better life and musical stardom. And though he never pimped his “daughters”—Brown was far too jealous and possessive to share them with anyone—he did collect and control the money his growing coterie of girls received in government welfare checks. By the mid-’60s—even as conservative politicians like Barry Goldwater were attacking the fraud and flaws that plagued federal programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children—Brown was gaming the system, using such funds to support his cushy lifestyle and musical ambitions.
Brown worked a remarkable balancing act, serving variously as father, lover, husband, and Svengali to his coterie. “He was able to juggle [all those] women ’cause they all needed something, too,” said Kevin. “They needed shelter, they needed someplace to go, somebody to guide them. Plus he got them all right out of the cradle. So he nurtured them and took them to the point where he made them afraid to go out on their own. He made them dependent on him.”
For all his perversions, manipulations, and petty cruelties, Arrow did provide a sense of community and hope for those who had none. He preached a fiery brand of collectivism to his women—though it was one rooted in fear. Individually, they were just a bunch of poor welfare mothers, stains on the margins of society. Together, though, they were strong; they were a family. Each night, Arrow would bring his brood together around the big Baldwin organ in the living room. As he sat at the organ, his hands fluttering across the keys, he filled his family with a defiant pride in their talents, a belief in their inevitable fate. “He made you think all of the success he promised was really going to happen,” said Tridia. “He had us all convinced.”
By the late 1960s, Arrow’s house was teeming with half a dozen women. His unconventional family was growing as well. In addition to three children with Mary Ann, Arrow fathered another two with a woman named Eileen Hughes, and one more with Loretha Hughes, Eileen’s daughter from a previous relationship. Eventually, Mary Ann’s younger sister Edna would join her in Brown’s home, as part of his expanding retinue. The Brown family tree was as knotty as the giant, twisted oak that decorated the greystone’s front yard.
As his domestic situation became increasingly bizarre, Brown began to embrace his role as a kind of ghetto Godfather. He abandoned his proletarian factory worker look, grew an elaborate ear-to-ear mustache, and began sporting sharp pinstripe vests and brushed suede hats. He was rarely ever seen without his ice pick, and would frequently punctuate his directives by hurling the weapon into the nearest wall or door. Tucked into a holster beneath his arm was a .38 Colt revolver, the same gun Al Capone had favored in his heyday.
Odd as his domestic scene may have been, Brown’s house was a happening, exciting place to live, and a party destination for a whole subset of Chicago’s music community. Nearly every weekend, Arrow hosted raucous throwdowns, providing ample booze and atmosphere. The main source of entertainment was a form of proto-karaoke that involved people singing over records played at a low volume. “He loved to party. Not meaning getting high, but he loved music,” said Mary Ann Davis. “That’s how we was well-known, especially in the neighborhood, ’cause people came to the house.” Among the throngs of attendees were Chicago musical heavyweights like the Chi-Lites, Walter Jackson, the Brighter Side of Darkness, and the Pieces of Peace. Through his contacts with these talents, Arrow began to conceive a path to fame and fortune for his family, through the wilder corners of the independent record business.
Johnny and Mary Ann Davis would form the core of what became the first group to record for Brown’s newly minted Bandit label. In a moment of divine self-inspiration, Brown named the group the Arrows.
Johnny’s wife Linda Brown (no relation) joined, as did Allen “Po’ Boy” Stevenson, a singer who was a regular at Arrow’s parties. With the group’s lineup in place, Arrow would write and produce the songs, pulling the strings as manager and mogul—the wizard behind the curtain. From the start, Arrow was exceedingly ambitious. He talked of building Bandit into an entertainment empire, expanding to stage, screen, and television. But for all his confidence and bluster, Brown had little understanding of the music business. When it came to running the label, he was prone to comic errors in judgment and jargon—among his common malaprops was referring to acetates as “agitates.”
In later years, Brown would claim to have worked two jobs to raise the money to fund his label. This is pure fiction, of course. His toil at the Campbell’s soup factory, which ended in 1965, was the only clock he ever punched. Bandit’s start-up money came almost exclusively from the public assistance checks his growing stable of women and children brought him. In a sense, Bandit might well be considered the first and only government-funded soul label.
Prior to Bandit’s launch, Arrow Brown sought advice from the established artists and label owners who frequented his weekend parties. Chi-Lites leader Marshall Thompson remembered Brown as “very nice” but aggressive. “He pushed, pushed, pushed,” Thompson says. “But he was very smart because he always wanted to be around the ones that had success.” Through his persistence, Arrow convinced Thompson to play drums and help him produce the first Bandit single, the Arrows’ 1969 recording of “We Have Love” b/w “Bring Back The One I Love.”
Though lushly arranged psychedelic soul was beginning to light up the charts, “We Have Love” harkens back to an earlier, grittier era of hard shouters. A striking achievement for a first shot, the song is a haunting, pained evocation of poverty and want relieved only by the pleasures of love. Deep, soulful cries, with voices wracked and cracking, tumble over lean drumming, echoing guitar runs, and blasts of brass. Bandit sides were rarely ever this raw or emotionally direct again, as Arrow Brown’s sonic vision grew more grandiose with each successive single. “We Have Love” represents Po’ Boy Stevenson’s only recording with the Arrows; their other known 45s just feature Johnny Davis on lead. But Po’ Boy gives “We Have Love” much of its raw power. On later cuts, Davis would tend to prefer a lighter, more polished touch when it came to vocal performances, eschewing the gospel-flavored drive that gives “We Have Love” such deep feeling.
Bandit’s output also benefited from Brown’s association with Paul Serrano’s P.S. Studios. Serrano was a hard bop trumpeter with Count Basie before he opened P.S. on East 23rd Street in 1966 and emerged as a world-class engineer. P.S. Studios was a crucial factor in Chicago recording during the ’60s and ’70s, cutting everyone from Donny Hathaway to Dan Boadi, and nearly all of Arrow Brown’s Bandit productions.
While the extent of his own musical gifts is subject to debate, Arrow Brown had an undeniable eye for recognizing talent. His persistence and aggressive brand of charm was well spent on those who could fulfill his musical vision and help turn his rudimentary song ideas into fully-fleshed arrangements. Over the years, many top young players would become part of Brown’s circle. In addition to members of the Chi-Lites and Pieces of Peace, he also worked with Derf Reklaw of the Pharaohs, the Scott Brothers Orchestra, and arrangers David Baldwin and Benjamin Wright. However, Brown’s careful maneuvers around musicians’ union rules left many other talents totally uncredited.
Few among Brown’s music industry associates knew about his unusual domestic arrangements or how the label was funded. “I had been over to the house a couple times, but I didn’t know what Mr. Brown was doing and who all was involved and the whole bit,” said Benjamin Wright. “But things did appear to be very close-knit over there.”
Brown’s son Kevin says part of his father’s talent was his ability to manufacture and sustain a gleaming facade. “He made his ghetto family look like we were from Beverly Hills,” he says. “He could make us look like we was the greatest in the world, even though we was just raggedy little people.”
Even those who didn’t believe all the women in the house were Brown’s “daughters” didn’t bother asking questions. “No one said anything,” says Deno Brown. “But I’m sure they did wonder what was going on. They probably wanted to know how one man [had] so many women. I wondered that myself.”
The Arrows would follow up their harrowing debut with a selection of more upbeat material. The songs featured Davis, now the sole lead vocalist, singing in a tender, Impressions-influenced style. “Boogedy Boogedy” made a small splash on local dance-floors and marked the first of Bandit’s releases to feature expanded orchestration—little trills of violin over the verses, more complex and sustained horn parts in the choruses—and a galloping intro that’s noticeably different from the song it precedes. Such extended, often incongruous, intros would become a staple of Bandit releases, growing more and more ornate over time. Both “Boogedy Boogedy” and the string-soaked soul ballad “The Love I See Now” were credited to Johnny Davis & the Arrows; the singer was the closest thing to a “star” the label had. Although the singles did not sell in large numbers, the bits of money and interest they attracted locally did give Bandit some much-needed legitimacy and momentum.
When it came to his acts, Arrow was a stern taskmaster. He controlled his artists with the same single-minded focus he used to steer his women, micromanaging every aspect of their performance and threatening dire consequences for those who disappointed or disobeyed him. Over the years, Brown pulled his sidearm on more than one musician under his direction. Band rehearsals were rigorous, demanding, and frequent. Conducted in the basement or in the living room, the daily drills found Arrow directing every note and harmony, every inflection and breath. Brown typically presented his new tunes a cappella, evidence of which survives on a handful of rehearsal tapes, underscoring Brown’s musical shortcomings. His attempts at singing were often painful—his voice woefully out of tune and cracking. Recording sessions were equally tense and drawn out. “It wouldn’t be no quick session,” recalled Mary Ann of the Arrows’ studio forays. “It would always be a long session. We’d go in and do some parts and have to go the next day, be up till two and three o’clock in the morning doing stuff.”
In 1972, Brown decided to dissolve the Arrows, in order to focus on Johnny Davis as a solo act. Brown doubled down on the heart-pounding “You’ve Got To Crawl To Me.” With a driving organ, flashes of wah-wah guitar, and hauntingly urgent backing vocals, it was the most commercially relevant single the label had released. More insult than love song, the lyrics detail a heartbreak that morphs into wounded pride and ultimately twists into a desire for emotional revenge and physical control.
Johnny Davis
Unfortunately, Johnny Davis’ first solo side would also be his last. Early in 1973, Davis’ broken body was discovered in a dumpster where he’d landed after falling headfirst from the roof of a twelve-story warehouse. Chicago Police Department files show that an investigation into the death was conducted, but the results were inconclusive: Davis may have fallen, jumped, or perhaps even have been pushed. But without eyewitnesses or evidence, a formal homicide case was never opened, and no suspect was ever charged. His sister Mary Ann still believes it was murder, but even she can offer only scant details. “Somebody dropped him on his head....Hit him in the head with an iron pipe and threw him down,” she said. “And that’s all we know.”
Perhaps because of Davis’ demise, “You’ve Got To Crawl To Me” never got the promotional push that might have found it an audience and taken Bandit to the next level. Davis had been Arrow Brown’s star, the vessel of all his ambitions. And, suddenly, he was gone. In order to continue his enterprise, Brown would need to find new talent.
Even before Johnny Davis’ untimely death, Arrow Brown had been looking to expand Bandit. He realized he needed to move beyond his immediate circle in order to establish a real roster of performers. Brown put word out on the street that he had songs and a recording budget. That call circulated among a network of Windy City players and reached the attention of musician George Barrett, whose sister-in-law Sandy Cleveland was eager for an opportunity to sing.
Shelbyville, Tennessee, born and bred, Sandy Cleveland was the seventh of 14 children. She had so impressed her junior high music teacher that he invited her to join his club act, The Imperial Seven, with whom she cut her first recording at the age of 15. A full scholarship at Tennessee State was put on pause after two years when Cleveland discovered she was pregnant. To escape the scorn of her devout Baptist family, she fled to Chicago to live with an older sister. Following a brief phone interview, Brown invited her to audition for Bandit Records.
Cleveland’s first visit to the Brown home made it clear she wasn’t working with a seasoned professional. Arrow played her his most recent creation, “Boogedy Boogedy,” and though not terribly impressed with the track, Cleveland was still eager to give her all to her two Brown-penned assignments: “My Heart Would Never Lie To Me” and “We Love Together.” She returned to the house a dozen times over the next few months, receiving notes from Brown on the specifics of her delivery and performance. Brown said he wanted her prepared to deliver the best possible version in a single take. Sessions commenced at Ed Cody’s Stereo Sonic at 328 South Wabash in August of 1971. As planned, Cleveland made a single live pass at each track, supported by the Soul Providers trio, with Herman Frazier on drums, Michael Morrison on bass, and Patrick Williams on guitar.
Sandy Cleveland
During the months spent waiting for the release of her first single, Sandy Cleveland gave up on her dreams of being a Bandit recording artist. Brown continued to string her along, lamenting about distribution problems. A promotional pressing was done, of which Cleveland received one copy. Another copy fell in the lap of Teako label owner Ed O’Kelley, who tacked his name on as producer, scrapped the B-side in lieu of an unnecessary instrumental, and flipped the master up to USA Records. That label’s red, white, and blue–sleeved release of early 1972 vintage was unknown to Cleveland. Thereon, her recording career stalled out, and she found herself parked at the end of the decade in smoky lounges as a member of the Expressions.
Sandy Cleveland’s ill-fated tenure with Bandit overlapped with that of another young upstart, Linda Balentine. Born in Detroit and raised in California and Chicago, Balentine’s father’s eyes were fixated on the same stars as Arrow Brown’s. A music-lover but not a musician, he fed his young daughter a steady stream of his favorite R&B and gospel songs and encouraged her to perform them for the family. “He would always play records and have me sing along,” remembered Balentine. Alongside childhood friend and future Emotion Sheila Hutchinson, Linda formed the vocal harmony trio the Shirlettes. Their 1968 silver-winning performance at a Regal Theatre talent show might’ve netted them gold, were it not for five Jackson siblings from nearby Gary, Indiana, then on their first steps toward mega-stardom.
Balentine’s connection with Arrow Brown began after she crossed paths with the members of the Soul Providers. Patrick Williams, the Providers’ hotshot guitar player, fell hard for 15-year-old beauty queen Balentine, leading to an invitation to front the Providers. Their gigs were a family affair, with Balentine’s proud father taking care of the band, transporting instruments, and escorting his underage daughter to major nightclubs like the Green Bunny, the Bonanza, the Beale Street Blues Cafe, and the High Chaparral. Occasionally, the group practiced at the tomb of Stephen Douglas—a very tall monument to the very short man who had debated Lincoln— where Patrick Williams’ father worked as caretaker. Linda recalled the experience as “kind of weird.”
Arrow Brown had been working with Williams for a couple years, using his arrangements on a number of Bandit tracks. “He was instrumental in putting together Brown’s songs,” Balentine said. Williams told Balentine that if she really wanted to make a record, he could introduce her to Brown. But he warned her that the man’s domestic situation was, in a word, unusual. “He told me all about [Arrow’s] lifestyle, his women,” said Balentine. Despite the warning, the reality of the life inside the greystone still managed to shock Linda. Arrow lived communally with multiple women while hordes of children ran underfoot. “This little ugly man and he’s got these girls....I found out they were young,” said Balentine. “They were close to my age.”
In the time that she spent at the Brown home, Linda became friendly with Mary Ann Davis. Given her own father’s strong presence in her life and music career, Balentine realized that proper family support was what Mary Ann and the other women in the house lacked. Without a father figure to guide them through life, they had turned to Arrow Brown. “But he was looking for something else,” she said. “Nowadays it would be called child molestation, and he would be in jail for what he did.”
Disgusted, Linda made plans to cut the songs and leave as quickly as possible—before Arrow tried to add her to his collection of “daughters.” In private, whispered conversations, she urged Mary Ann to escape with her, to get out while she still could. Increasingly paranoid about maintaining a hold over his women, Brown had installed a secret listening system so that he could monitor conversations throughout the house. Brown overheard Balentine conspiring with the women. He considered her the worst of all possible things—a threat to his stable. “He didn’t like me at all after that,” Balentine said. Still, Brown recognized her potential. “Glad About That” was rehearsed only a few times before cutting the track, while rehearsals for “You’re A Habit Hard to Break” dragged on for weeks. Brown felt the latter tune was the surefire hit he’d been chasing, and wanted it to be perfect.
“Glad About That” has a simple slinky groove, an easy stride propelled by chiming, springy guitar that climaxes in multiple ecstatic breakdowns. Balentine’s husky vocals are surprisingly mature for her age and, perhaps because she wasn’t micromanaged on the song, she sings with a looseness and ease that’s hard to fake. Aesthetically, “You’re A Habit Hard to Break” is more typical of Bandit’s output, with a 20-second psychedelic intro and multiple changes, including pre- and post-choruses, and a battery of horns.
Finished with her recording sessions, Balentine was given a single white label copy of the resulting 45—one of only three copies known to exist today. “I heard that [Brown] was going to try to promote it and everything. But I didn’t stick around to find out,” she says. There’s no evidence that Bandit ever released the record commercially.
When Balentine last heard, Patrick Williams had traded in his guitar for a lawnmower and a pair of shears, succeeding his father as the caretaker of Stephen Douglas’s tomb. Balentine, too, would eventually leave her musical ambitions behind. After her Bandit single, she toured the U.S. and Canada with a series of groups, including Future Shock, Rapscallion, and Magic City, but never released another record. Far from the bright lights of the biz, she found a job with an insurance company, a position she’s held for more than 30 years. She would never hear from Arrow Brown or Bandit Records again.
Today, Altyrone Deno Brown—the eldest of Mary Ann’s three sons with Arrow—keeps his childhood memories in a thick leather portfolio embossed with the initials “ADB” in gold leaf. His was a childhood lost, spent not on playgrounds but in recording studios, dressing rooms, and nightclubs, chasing the promise of stardom. In his portfolio are newspaper stories, magazine pieces, theater programs, personal photographs, and dozens of headshots and publicity photos. Tattered press clippings tell the story, proclaiming Deno the “Michael Jackson of Chicago”; one headline even put Bob Dylan on notice: “Watch Out Dylan, Here Comes Deno!”
Though Deno spent his formative years trying to entertain the masses, he was really striving to please just one man. With all that talent streaming in and out of his childhood home, Deno sat wide- eyed, absorbing the music, the moves, the scene, like a sponge. “I was about four when I started singing,” he said. “That was the beginning stages of my father trying to train me how to carry my voice and things like that. He saw the talent in me, so he wanted to invest a little bit and see where it was gonna go.”
While other kids were outside playing, Deno was in the house, practicing the songs for his debut 45 over and over again. As his press clippings and publicity glossies attest, Arrow’s investment paid off quickly. He went from a sideshow for family and friends at his father’s weekend parties to a full-fledged artist on Bandit Records in no time flat. Handwriting on the label of his first Bandit single announces the young performer’s age: just seven years old.
That 1972 record is impressive, even considering the “7 Year Old Wonder Boy of Chi-Town” who fronted it. On one side, “If You Love Me” is a rollicking, wah-drenched soul stomper of the kind Arrow had attempted with Sandy Cleveland and Linda Balentine; “Sweet Pea,” on the flip, is a downbeat ballad with low-key drumming and guitar arpeggios, nearly unique in the Bandit catalogue. While “If You Love Me” finds Deno aping the grownup entertainers who partied at his father’s house, he’s far more on-point with “Sweet Pea” —the confusion and sadness of the song is a better fit for the naïve fragility that Deno’s young voice naturally conveyed. “Ben” worked similarly for an adolescent Michael Jackson, who provided a crucial model for Arrow Brown when it came to managing his son’s career. “He was watching Berry Gordy and Michael Jackson,” said Tridia. “And he wanted to be the Chicago Berry Gordy.”
While it didn’t make him a star, Deno’s first record generated enough interest to make the boy a fixture on the Chicago club scene. Crowds were eager to see the chubby-cheeked wunderkind on stage, singing and dancing like a professional, performing the elaborate routines his father had choreographed. Arrow Brown had bigger goals in mind for his son than conquering the local circuit—he wanted the boy on radio, on television, on screen and stage. Deno spent his days auditioning for commercials and acting roles and his nights serenading patrons at southside clubs, which left little time for normal childhood pursuits.
Publicity photos from the period show Deno with friends laughing and playing; he now admits the shots were all staged, that he’d never met any of the other kids.
“As I look back now, there’s a lot of childhood missing,” says Deno. “I don’t regret it, but I would like to know what it would’ve felt like to do some children things, to grow up as a child. I had to grow up fast.”
Deno wasn’t the only child of Arrow’s who missed out on a proper childhood. “His children were at home,” said Tridia. “They never really actually ventured out unless their mothers took them out. He didn’t let them go out and play like regular kids. They’d play in the front of the house, where he could see them.” Arrow also attempted to turn his and Mary Ann’s youngest son, Delbert, into a bright- burning child star. One photo, intended as promotion, shows the boy sitting in deep concentration as he jammed on an organ. Handwritten on the back of the photo is a note requesting 100 copies with his “Name in Bold Letters DELBERT MILLER BROWN.”
Arrow also produced a résumé for the boy: “At the age of 4 months, this spunky lad, born under the sign of ‘Leo’ spoke his first word, ‘Daddy.’ At the age of 8 months, he began walking....At age 4, he is writing and learning words on his own.” The résumé goes on to tout Delbert’s talent for spelling multisyllabic words like “paraplegic,” “schizophrenia,” “congratulations,” “condominium,” and “antidisestablishmentarianism.” It also brags about his skills on the organ, claiming he had composed two songs, “Delbert’s Nursery Boogie” and “I Love My Mama and Daddy.” Curiously, no Bandit release of these songs has ever surfaced, and Del’s career never caught fire the way his brother’s did. Deno remained the success story, and Brown heavily favored him over his other sons, especially perennially overlooked middle brother K. K.
That’s because Deno’s career took off in a hurry: he landed plum spots in commercials for Jewel supermarkets, Tide laundry detergent, Sprite, and Sears. In 1975, he was cast as Travis Younger in a touring production of Raisin , Broadway’s soulful musical adaptation of A Raisin In The Sun starring Tony-winning actress Virginia Capers. He left grade school and spent two years accompanied by a tutor as he toured the country. “I was at the doorstep of stardom,” says Deno. “By me getting the exposure of the play alone, that was a Broadway show, that was my ticket.”
Next, Deno beat out several hundred children for the part of Bugger in 1976’s The Monkey Hustle , a Chicago-filmed blaxploitation flick starring Yaphet Kotto as Big Daddy Foxx and Dolemite’s Rudy Ray Moore as Goldie. “I felt like a well-known kid,” said Deno. “I didn’t know the word ‘celebrity’ at that time. I was well-known and well- loved, put it that way.”
Arrow’s determined control of his son’s career cut both ways— helping and hindering. Brown made sure Deno always dressed well and looked sharp, just like his dad—perhaps a bit too much like his dad. Casting directors of one film turned Deno down for a part, believing he looked and acted too much like an adult; they were particularly unsettled by headshots of the boy wearing a fedora, posing with a cigar, and looking sinister.
Flush with Deno’s acting income, Arrow began to spend freely, buying a custom-painted van in which to carry his acts around. He also opened an office downtown, on West Washington Avenue, and decorated it in the day’s hottest styles: shag carpet, wind chimes, beaded curtains, and a bust of a black Jesus. Brown Productions supplanted Bandit as the primary company, something of a farce considering that Arrow never formally established any of his businesses, or ever paid any taxes.
He installed his older son Kevin as vice president of Brown Productions, but the job only lasted a few short months. Kevin had been performing music on his own, leading Ultimate Power, a 15-piece funk band that was beginning to draw notice. “I worked for Dad...until he tried to do something slick with my band,” said Kevin. “He wanted me to sign them to his label, and I didn’t trust him.”
During the latter half of the ’70s, Arrow Brown would try and parlay Deno’s success into an expanding enterprise, dabbling in artist management and film production. These attempts would bring Brown into contact with an exceedingly odd collection of characters. Brown was sure he was just a step away from realizing his ambitions for an entertainment empire. The dream was so close now. After so many years, it was practically in his hands.
To his first family, the one he left behind in the 1950s, Arrow Brown was a phantom. His three older children—Arrow Jr., Kevin, and Tridia— had grown up having little contact with Brown for nearly two decades. Just an infant when he disappeared from her life, Tridia recalled her father as a hazy recollection of a large man playing the piano for her. “I grew up thinking he was Fats Domino,” she said.
Music was in the Brown family blood. Tridia had learned to play percussion from her mother, and gotten her first taste of showbiz performing with her older brother Kevin as the LaSonics. While attending Kenwood High School, she formed the Au Naturals, a Motown-inspired girl group which lasted through graduation but never managed to record. Her mother reluctantly told Tridia that if she really wanted to get into the music business, her long lost father could probably help. He was producing records, booking shows, and running his own label just a few blocks away.
Anxious about seeing her estranged father, Tridia brought her boyfriend with her to meet Brown. When they arrived, Tridia saw Arrow standing on his porch smoking a cigar, surrounded by his women and children. Nervous, Tridia initially refused to get out of the car. “So my boyfriend walked up to him and asked if he had an older daughter named Tridia,” she said. “He got really excited and said, ‘Where is she?’ I got out of the car and introduced myself. He hugged me...and that was the beginning.”
Despite the years apart, Tridia quickly became a regular at her father’s house. She worked to build their relationship, even though Arrow, terminally wary of other men, told Tridia’s boyfriend he was no longer welcome. Tridia soon moved into an apartment across the street, and eventually into the greystone itself. She says she was initially oblivious to what was happening in the house. “I’d mostly led a sheltered life, so it was a couple months before I figured out what was going on,” she said. “I didn’t tell my mom, ’cause she probably would’ve told me to stay away from him.”
By this time, eight women and half a dozen children shared the house with Brown. Tridia saw firsthand how her father maintained order though a series of physical and psychological controls. “He had intercoms set up in all the rooms,” recalled Tridia. “You’d have to really be careful what you said because he might be listening.” Brown also kept nude pictures of his ladies—”glamour shots,” he called them—pinned up around the house. His self-idealized station insisted that everyone, women and children, kiss him hello and goodbye whenever they came and went.
“I didn’t like the situation, didn’t like the way my dad was living,” she said. “But I didn’t say anything, I guess I was in love with the idea that I [was] finally with my father—’cause I had missed that part of my life. And I really wanted to get into the music business. Plus, you know, Dad was a charmer. He could charm the pants off of anybody.”
By 1973, Arrow was working to put together a new vocal group, centered on Larry Johnson, a big man with a powerful tenor and a surprisingly light and airy falsetto. Johnson, who worked as a nurse at Provident Hospital, had honed his chops singing with doo-wop outfits the Moroccos and the Persuaders. He’d become a regular guest at the house and was recruited to lead a group Brown dubbed the Majestic Arrows—apparently, the original Arrows hadn’t quite captured the full majesty of his ambitions.
During one weekend party performance, Tridia’s rendition of a Gladys Knight song grabbed Arrow’s attention. “My father was actually shocked, ’cause he really didn’t...believe I could sing,” she recalled. Several members had already come and gone from the Majestic Arrows, and Brown was too shrewd to miss the opportunity. “They were looking for someone else to join,” said Tridia, “so he asked me if I was interested.”
Though a list of singers cycled through membership in the group— including two Tridia remembers only as “Red” and “Derick”—the most durable Majestic Arrows lineup included Palario Collins and a newly arrived Gloria “Poolie” Brown—no relation of Arrow’s. Gloria was just 17 when she met Arrow through a family friend and auditioned for the group. Underage, she was unable to travel and perform in shows. In a move now well practiced by Brown, he convinced Gloria’s mother to sign over guardianship to him. But unlike so many others before her, Gloria never moved into the house or became sexually involved with Arrow. “I never spent one night there,” said Gloria. “My mother wouldn’t let me.”
Gloria did get a glimpse at the power of Arrow’s personality and the way he financed his organization. “He was cunning,” Gloria remembered. “The majority of money came from his ladies. They even gave him their food stamps.” For all his macho bravado, Gloria came to see Arrow as a deeply insecure and fearful man. She continued: “Really, he was just scared somebody would take his ladies away. He was very protective of them. And they were very attractive ladies, a few of them anyway. [He] would get mad if they flirted with men. He was always trying to be a tough guy.
Despite his expansive personality and reputation as a gregarious party host, Brown was not one to be trifled with. “He’d keep his gun handy during the parties, in case somebody wanted to get drunk and act the fool,” recalled Gloria. “He wouldn’t be very loud or anything, but he would let them know what time it was.”
After the partying was done, the sins of Saturday night gave way to the serenity of the Sabbath. Arrow would take his whole flock each Sunday to seek absolution at Zion Travelers Missionary Baptist Church, where his older brother W. C. Brown served as pastor. “We’d be in church and Dad would lean over to pray, and I’d see he’d have a gun under his coat in a holster. How you gonna go to church and carry a gun?” Tridia wondered. Arrow Brown wasn’t taking any chances, even with the Almighty.
Brown’s blasphemy went unpunished, however, as Bandit Records had a particularly blessed run between 1973 and 1974. The Majestic Arrows were gaining a strong following around Chicago, lighting up stages at the Arie Crown Theater, the Bonanza Club, the High Chaparral, the Family Club, the Skyway Lounge, and the Green Bunny. At the height of their popularity, the group was invited to perform on the first episode of Soul Train Chicago . For a moment, it seemed as though Arrow Brown might actually make good on all the showbiz promises he’d been peddling for years.
To capitalize on the Majestic Arrow’s local clout, Bandit issued a string of singles, including one that brought Brown as close as he ever got to a legitimate hit. The quartet had been performing“The Magic Of Your Love” in concert to good response, and the recorded version did not disappoint. The track finds Arrow’s aesthetic in full bloom. Almost ridiculously lush, the song rides on soaring, yearning vocals. The track boasts another of Brown’s epic openings, this one featuring a string quartet, an electric piano, and a French horn. Brown had clearly moved on from gritty, guitar-driven, Stax- influenced numbers, and now preferred the kind of aching scope and breadth that would define the Philadelphia International label. During the summer and fall of ’73, “The Magic Of Your Love” was getting regular airplay on a number of local radio stations, and the single sold nearly 5,000 copies.
The Majestic Arrows’ success didn’t stop Arrow from cheating his daughter. He kept Tridia’s share of the money from shows, telling her that no one in the group was getting paid. “Then I found out later on, they all got paid and I didn’t,” she said. Arrow also took credit for the Majestic Arrows song “I’ll Never Cry For Another Boy,” which Tridia had written herself, years before. On one occasion, Tridia even faced the business end of Arrow’s gun. Brown’s listening system had picked up a private conversation between her and later Majestic Arrows member Claudia “Candy” Phillips. Tridia was trying to convince Phillips that everyone, no matter how good, told a white lie now and again. Tridia made the mistake of using her father as an example, unaware that he was listening to everything.
“I said, ‘Even Dad lies. Everybody lies.’ Right away, I heard his feet coming down the stairs....He put his hands on his sides...and said, ‘Are you calling me a liar?’” When Tridia moved to apologize, Arrow’s rage boiled over. He pulled his gun on his daughter and told her to get out of his house. But Tridia was back the very next day. “I didn’t pay Dad any attention....I wanted to be around him, period. And the music,” she said. “I just couldn’t accept the fact that maybe Dad really didn’t love me.”
The Majestic Arrows continued their streak, following up “The Magic Of Your Love,” with “Doing It For Us” which also enjoyed some local airplay. Arrow spent the better part of 1974 working on the Majestic Arrows’ album, the only full-length LP Bandit would ever issue. After much tinkering, The Magic Of The Majestic Arrows was finally released the following year. Its oddly perfect cover, hand- drawn by Arrow’s friend and sometime producer Eugene Phillips, depicts the group caught up in the eye of a flaming tornado issuing from a magic lamp that dominates a diamond-and-crown studded landscape at dusk. Stranger still, an image of the Chosen Few appears on the back cover, though the group is not credited with performing a single note on the album. Whether Brown was priming the market for the Few’s one-and-done Bandit 45 or merely trying to shoehorn in a shot of Brown Productions’ office front is unclear.
A Brown-penned bio for the Majestic Arrows’ LP tells the full story of the group—as well as a report of the zodiac signs of each member:
“Mr. Arrow Brown who has years of experience and knowledge in music has searched for years for unique and natural talent capable of producing a Chicago Sound....He searched and searched until he found Larry Johnson who is a Sagittarius, born in Chicago. Producers by-passed Larry because they didn’t understand his unique style....Next, Mr. Brown found Palario Collins. Palario, a native of Chicago, is Aquarius and he sings Baritone or Tenor... [and] is now the Group’s Choreographer. Gloria Brown, born in Chicago...is the sign of Cancer. Her hobby is singing....She can sing Alto or Soprano and is also an accomplished dancer.”
The bio ends on an ominous note of self-praise that foreshadowed the eventual demise of the Majestic Arrows: “Their strength comes from the guidance and experience of Mr. Brown. Everyone in the Group respects Mr. Brown because of his forthright effort and his demand to follow the guidelines.”
The album raised enough interest to put an international tour in the works. “Somebody from Australia contacted Dad,” said Tridia. “He wanted to take the Majestic Arrows, and we were going to go overseas.” Instead, the end of the group arrived in a fiery whirlwind.
Arrow’s desperate need for control had birthed the group; now it would doom them. Two events precipitated the end—one involved sex, the other money. An inter-band romance was taking place behind Arrow’s back, purportedly resulting in the pregnancy of Candy Phillips. “Secretly, I think Dad liked her himself,” said Tridia. “That kind of made him jealous.” Brown’s jealousy was a red-hot thing that boiled. “Everybody fell out with Dad. I mean, he was the top dog, and you don’t go against what he said.”
Once Arrow found out its members had been “fraternizing,” as he called it, he seemed hell-bent on breaking up the Majestic Arrows. A couple weeks later, an argument erupted between Brown and lead singer Larry Johnson over proceeds from a gig. Brown pulled out his pistol and shot over Johnson’s head. “And that,” said Tridia, “was the end of the group.”
Arrow attempted to reform the Majestic Arrows with a different group of singers, including an all-male lineup—at least there would no concerns about fraternizing. This version of the Majestic Arrows only issued one single, “Ladies and Wonderful Girls” b/w “Time Machine,” the latter cut recycled from the LP. The new incarnation dissolved soon after that. “The guys [always] wanted to fight with each other,” said Mary Ann.
The dissolution of the group barely slowed Arrow, but it was a great blow to the members of the Majestic Arrows—a shattering of dreams that affected them for a lifetime. “The last time I saw Larry [Johnson],” said Tridia, “he was at 51st and King Drive. He was waiting on a bus from Provident Hospital, and he told me that he had cancer. I said, ‘Cancer?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I got cancer of the breast, would you believe that?’”
For the first half of Bandit’s existence, Arrow Brown had relied on a core of young up-and-coming arrangers and bands to shore up his musical shortcomings. Men like Benjamin Wright and the Soul Providers helped take his rough ideas and transformed them into real songs, translating his crudely articulated studio suggestions into enthralling, artful production. By 1974, most of his early collaborators had moved on. Wright was very much in-demand, and would soon leave Chicago for Los Angeles, taking a job as musical director with the Temptations; meanwhile, the Soul Providers took a backseat to Patrick Williams’ career tending a tomb. Brown needed replacements, people with enough hunger and desperation to put up with his eccentric ways. Elvin Spencer’s the Chosen Few, Eugene Phillips, and Steve Byrd’s Michigan Avenue Sound Orchestra fit the bill perfectly—at least temporarily.
A native of Memphis, Elvin Spencer had relocated to Chicago after mustering out of the military at the end of the 1960s. An audition for the High Chaparral led to a Friday support slot, and ultimately front and center for arranger David Baldwin. Liking what he heard, Baldwin recommended Spencer to Bill Meeks, who promptly signed him to his pop-soul Al-Teen label in 1969. “Lift This Hurt” b/w “Don’t Make This Dream Come True” followed on the label’s Winner subsidiary, which would, ironically, fail after three losing releases. “Lift This Hurt” received little airplay, but it did catch the attention of local soul sensation Syl Johnson, who convinced Twinight Records to buy Spencer’s contract from Al-Teen.
Not quite ready to let go of his signature song, Spencer recut “Lift This Hurt” at Paragon with Johnson behind the board in December of 1970. The Pieces of Peace can be heard in the backing, with Bryon Bowie taking an arranging credit on the 1971 re-release. Plans for a second single were in the works following strong spins on WVON, but were dashed when Syl split for Memphis’s Hi Records at year’s end, causing Twinight to fold in early 1972. When Spencer’s live band Dynamic Soul fell apart around the same time, he knew it was time to make a clean break. Just not with “Lift This Hurt.”
Via mutual friends, Elvin Spencer connected with percussionist Lamar Bell, then in the early stages of forming the generically named Chosen Few with bassist Dexter Gordon. The group was rounded out by guitarists Rico Collins, “James,” an unnamable drummer, and Spencer. Approaching the Chosen Few was well outside Arrow Brown’s character. To date, all of his productions had carried his imprimatur in one form or another. But with the Chosen Few, Brown only added the Bandit label’s crudely drawn logo. Bandit’s 1974 issue of “Lift This Hurt” and “You Been Unfair” was pulled straight from Twinight’s master reels, a move gleaned from Brown’s dealings with Ed O’Kelley and USA Records on “My Heart Would Never Lie To Me.”
Brown’s promo budget was never very large. Still, a considerable amount of money was spent on elaborate Chosen Few photographs, one of which was destined to appear on the back cover of the Majestic Arrows’ LP. And a promo copy of the Chosen Few record had made its way to Charlie Check, a Toledo deejay, who turned “Lift This Hurt” into a regional hit. Spencer asked Bandit for copies to sell to record stores in Ohio, but Brown refused to spring for shipping costs, citing unrecouped expenses from the photo shoot. Incensed over Bandit’s backward priorities, the Chosen Few severed ties with Brown and founded their own Chosen Few Records out of spite, issuing “Lift This Hurt” yet again. Brown was unfazed.
In 1975, the band issued a single on Chuck Sibit’s Mod-Art label, followed by a bluesy Rico Collins & the Chosen Few 45 on their vanity imprint. Despite their lack of success as recording artists, the band was still popular as a club act, regularly appearing on the south and west sides of Chicago throughout the ’70s. Chi-Sound’s Carl Davis recruited the act to record and tour behind his hitmakers the Chi-Lites and Walter Jackson, where they stayed until Jackson’s death in 1983. Out of gas, the Chosen Few chose to proceed as just one. Solo for the first time in a decade, Elvin Spencer did what came naturally, trotting “Lift This Hurt” out for one final run on his own E.S. Cozy label.
Eugene Phillips grew up in rural Robbins, Illinois, a suburb south of Chicago. He describes himself as a “quiet and introverted” boy with a gift for music. In 1964, Phillips left Robbins behind and moved north to the big city, seeking his share of fame and fortune—but a draft notice in the mailbox demanded his assistance in the escalating conflict in Vietnam. Phillips joined the Air Force but had a fateful meeting just days before he shipped out, making the acquaintance of one Herb Cope, then singing with the Swinging Hearts. When Phillips finished his tour and returned home, Cope was waiting.
Phillips settled at 80th and Union on the south side of Chicago, driving a taxicab to make ends meet. Amidst the grease and fumes of the company garage, he made singing a regular habit, first to himself and then for his coworkers, a few of whom eventually joined Phillips and Cope to form the Moments of Truth. The group featured Phillips’ future brother-in-law, Earl Westbrooks, as well as McKinley “Mac” Hood, Eric Perkins, Hosea Olawumi, and Virgil Dyson. They independently cut “Come Love” b/w “I’ll Step Aside,” recording the vocals at Paul Serrano’s spot. The Moments of Truth single eventually saw release on Toi Records, one of Bob Lee’s many imprints. “Come Love” found regular rotation on WVON, but the Moments’ manager’s schemes to move the group to a bigger label resulted in a contract dispute that so angered Lee, he not only stopped promoting their record but also left the group unable to legally record or write for anyone else.
With the Moments of Truth stuck in legal purgatory, Phillips and Cope started their own label, Scorpion Records, hoping to farm out productions to bigger labels with funding for proper promotions. Because of their continuing legal dispute with Toi, the duo operated under the pseudonyms Herb Copeland and Phillip Little. They successfully placed the Answers’ “The Chance That I Take” b/w “Thinking of You” with Giant, leading to a follow-up single on MGM’s Lion imprint, and repeated their winning ways with Newsound’s “Bet You Never Even Thought About It” b/w “Just One More Time” at Mod- Art. And while both were successful 45s in their own right, Scorpion’s founders had to admit that their financial situation wasn’t improving.
By the mid-1970s, Phillips and Cope were still kicking around the lower rungs of the business, working with the fledgling N&H Productions, the brainchild of Ken Neal and Bill Higgins, who were moonlighting as music moguls between shifts as Chicago cops. It was through N&H that Phillips first crossed paths with Bandit Records. Neal had a variety of dealings with Arrow Brown, and several musicians involved with N&H were also doing session work for Bandit. One of those was a conga player known only as Hassan.
In addition to providing percussion for the Majestic Arrows album, Hassan had his hands all over the soundtrack to 1976’s Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy . This massively successful adult film starred Playboy cover girl Kristine DeBell as Alice, and featured original songs such as “What’s A Girl Like You Doing On A Knight Like This?” Chicago film critic Roger Ebert described the movie as “having a certain charm” but made no mention of the soundtrack.
Hassan, however, had bigger aspirations than providing backup to a dirty Cheshire Cat. He fancied himself a singer and wanted to cut his own single. The fact that he couldn’t carry a tune failed to dampen this ambition. What Hassan could do is in full display on the Phillips and Cope–produced “Ghetto King.” The song featured a funky Shaft -style backing, a wash of urban street sounds, and Hassan rapping the tale of the titular pimp and pusher: “This is the story of a bad mean dude, talking about shrewd, baby...this brother can pitch pennies and make ’em turn into nickels, dimes and quarters—that’s super cold!” Issued on the Ken-Will imprint in 1974, the record stalled out, purportedly due to the efforts of Chicago activist and Operation PUSH founder the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who decried “Ghetto King” for its glorification of drugs and dealers.
Arrow Brown began managing Hassan, envisioning the tall, charismatic musician as a potential movie star. There’s some evidence that Hassan and Brown conceived a blaxsploitation film based on “Ghetto King.” Test photos featuring Hassan in “Ghetto King” wardrobe—wearing a fur coat and hat and leaning on a Cadillac decorated by a young beauty—were shot, but the movie project doesn’t appear to have gotten much further than that.
Hassan drifted out of the scene after “Ghetto King” failed to find its way to screens. A few years later, Eugene Phillips encountered him on 75th Street, with Hassan seemingly in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Deeply paranoid and looking in poor health, Hassan made claims that the CIA and the FBI were tracking him. He hasn’t yet been heard from again.
After their collaboration on “Ghetto King,” Eugene Phillips found himself working closely with Arrow Brown. He was wary of the Bandit owner and operator at first. Strange rumors swirled around Brown. It was more than just the tales of his harem and his threatening reputation. There were stories that Brown performed voodoo incantations, that he was a seer, that he was connected to the Masons and to the mob and had made payoffs to Ken Neal and his cop buddies. Despite Brown’s dubious aura, Phillips was, like so many others who came into contact with Arrow, moved to serve the man. “The minute you met him,” Phillips recalled, “He started to assess your good and bad qualities... to figure out whether you were really worthy to spend time around him...[you] had to have something that Mr. Brown could use.”
Eventually, Brown found the value he was looking for, commissioning Phillips to pen the cover for The Magic Of The Majestic Arrows. Eugene considered it far from his best work: “It was absolutely awful, I thought.” But no one at Bandit shared his opinion—the band loved it. And they weren’t alone. “Most of the record stores liked the cover more than they did the album as a whole,” Phillips said.
Steve Byrd, known to his friends as “The Birdman,” was a songwriter and arranger, given to stomping around in cowboy boots and feathered ten-gallon hats, flouting his university degree in music composition. After impressing Arrow Brown with his credentials, Byrd became a regular fixture at the greystone. “[Steve] was beyond weird,” said Phillips. “He was brilliant. As a matter of fact, I think he was brilliant to the point where he verged on insanity.” That insanity found expression in Byrd’s Michigan Avenue Sound Orchestra, arguably the most over-the-top act ever handled by Bandit.
Almost nothing is known about the group or its single, so it’s likely to have been a Steve Byrd studio creation rather than an actively gigging band. A 1977 release, “Poon Tang Thump,” the Orchestra’s only output, burned through two sides of a 45, offering an epic, multipart instrumental funk suite that took its cues from Isaac Hayes, Superfly , and the soundtrack soul of the blaxploitation era. Like “Ghetto King,” it certainly never hit the big screen, nor too many turntables; in classic Bandit fashion, only a handful of copies of “Thump” are known to exist today.
Steve Byrd’s connection to Bandit ran deeper than that lone 45, however. Among the papers found in Arrow Brown’s abandoned home was a handwritten receipt from 1981, which transferred guardianship of Byrd’s 13-year-old daughter to Brown in exchange for $100. Why either party would want a record of a transaction that comes so perilously close to human trafficking defies explanation.
As “The Me Decade” wore on, life inside the Brownstone began to become more and more unusual. “The house was like The Munsters , that’s as close as I can put it,” Phillips says. “Black candles in the washroom...everybody thought the house was haunted....Mr. Brown [might’ve] played it up.” Tridia is less equivocal. “The house was haunted,” she says. “Some strange things happened in that house.... You could just feel a presence. It was just so strong.”
Aside from these supernatural stirrings, the late-‘70s marked a quiet period for Bandit Records. Brown was mostly focused on managing Deno’s career. For a time he even decamped to Los Angeles, where Deno was starring in a stage production of The Wiz , trying to drum up more film work. Arrow’s heavy-handed managerial approach ultimately short-circuited his son’s promising career. “If it wasn’t for his selfishness, Deno would’ve made it,” says Kevin Brown. “If he had left Deno alone and given him to another manager and just took a piece of it, Deno would’ve been big. There’s no telling how big.”
Busy with Deno, Brown effectively put Bandit on ice for the remainder of the ’70s. Eugene Phillips also hibernated during Bandit’s long pause. He was burned out and bruised by the crushing failures that had befallen all of his projects. After finally falling out with Ken Neal, Phillips ostensibly retired from the music business for good and returned to the after-hour anonymity of a simple cab driver. Or so he thought, until a fateful late-night fare hailed his car at the dawn of a new decade.
It was past midnight, in the early months of 1980, when Debra Burkes flagged down Eugene Phillips’ taxi. Even though his for-hire light was switched off, Phillips took pity on the young woman and gave her a ride. They began to talk, and Burkes told him she was a singer fronting the fledgling funk outfit the Bad Boys. When Burkes found out that her cabbie had written and produced numerous records and had a connection to the business, she took it as a clear sign from above: he’d been delivered by God to help her. “We got back to her house and she just would not get out,” Phillips recalled. Burkes begged him to come and check out her group, maybe even get involved. Phillips finally relented and promised to see the band, if only to get Debra out of his cab.
Phillips went to see the Bad Boys the following evening, ready to dismiss the group out of hand. Instead, he liked what he heard so much that he became the band’s mentor and musical director, rechristening them Wind. True to its name, Wind modeled itself on the stage band blueprint established by Earth, Wind & Fire. Singing songs with a conscious message, the lineup featured Phillips, Burkes, John Savage, Thomas Slaughter, Carolyn Nelson, and Tyree Bell on vocals, with Danny Miller on rhythm guitar, Williams Parks on keys, Percy Fry on lead guitar, and the sibling duo of Stanley and David Hull on drums and bass, respectively. Phillips describes Wind as “a powerhouse...the strongest group I’ve been with.” 
Wind began gigging around town, gathering followers and honing the songs they had been practicing with Phillips and his old producing partner Herb Cope. Phillips and Cope took the band into the studio, self-financing sessions and emerging with an entire album’s worth of material. When news of Wind blew in Arrow’s direction, an offer was tendered to sign the band to the dormant Bandit imprint. Phillips thought he could score a far better deal with a bigger company, and spurned Brown’s advances.
Phillips used his contacts to get Wind heard by a couple A&R men at Columbia Records. The label expressed serious interest in signing the band. But before a deal could be consummated, Eugene Phillips “kidnapped” newsman Dan Rather—the star of CBS’s 60 Minutes and Walter Cronkite’s soon-to-be successor as anchor of The Evening News .
The incident made national news in the fall of 1980. Reported by the Associated Press, United Press International, and newspapers from coast to coast, headlines touted the bizarre tale of a celebrity’s cab ride gone wrong. Phillips hadn’t recognized Rather when the newsman hopped into his cab at an O’Hare International Airport terminal on November 10. Rather had come to town to interview Studs Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, radio journalist, and oral historian.
Unfortunately, Rather didn’t know quite how to get to Terkel’s house, and Phillips wasn’t having much luck either. After several wrong turns, an increasingly frustrated Rather accused Phillips of trying to run up the meter. Scheduled to meet Wind for a studio session in the suburbs, Phillips was getting pretty fed up himself.
With Terkel’s address finally on the horizon, Rather went to get his wallet, but still angry, asked to see Phillips’ hack license. The driver explained that it was being held for bond until he paid a ticket, though he was still legally able to drive in the meantime. Refusing to pay the $12.55 fare unless Phillips produced his license, Rather began to get out of the cab. “He reached for the door, and I hit the gas,” recalled Phillips. “You could be the King of England, your ass is going to pay this fare, and I got the meter running again. You’re going to pay whatever the hell it said when we stop finally.”
Phillips later told the Chicago Sun-Times that he was looking for a police officer who could deal with Rather. “If Dan Rather said I kidnapped him, he’s a fat-faced liar,” Phillips said. “You see, that’s the only thing a driver can legally do when somebody said they aren’t going to pay. If I try to stop him physically, then he’s got me for assault. If I keep his luggage, then they’ve got me for theft of his property. If I follow him into the house, they’ve got me for trespassing.”
As Phillips sped along Lake Shore Drive, Rather rolled down his window, stuck his head out, and shouted, “I’m being kidnapped!” at passing motorists. An off-duty corrections officer recognized the TV personality and gave chase. Phillips only discovered the identity of his famous passenger after he was finally stopped by the cops. A crowd quickly gathered, and the cabbie figured the police would force Rather to pay the fare. Instead, they arrested Phillips for disorderly conduct and for refusing to let a passenger out.
An incensed Rather called Phillips a “madman” and asked the city to revoke his chauffeur’s license. The following evening, Rather went on the air and described the incident as “life in the raw in the streets of America. It can get tough. And it did.” Rather, also the victim of 1986’s bizarre “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” attack in New York City, declined to comment when contacted in preparation for this booklet.
Although all the charges against Phillips were eventually dropped, he says the incident soured Wind’s pending major label deal with Columbia—then owned by Rather’s employer, CBS. Phillips filed a four-million-dollar lawsuit against Rather and CBS in 1982, for defamation and loss of income. Phillips represented himself in court, but the case was thrown out.
It was this unlikely turn of events that led Phillips back to Arrow Brown. Phillips figured that Wind could put out a stopgap single with Brown, while he tried to reignite major label interest in the band’s completed full-length. Released in early 1981 on the Brown Productions subsidiary Eclipse, Wind’s “Don’t Let Them Tell You,” featuring Debra Burkes on lead vocals, rides a hillbilly riff over a strangely tribal drum rhythm and features plenty of harp swirls, a signature of Phillips/Cope productions. “People,” the B-side, was culled from the LP sessions and has the typical Wind sound: a strong bassline, scratchy funk guitar, deep synthesizer tones, and a minor- key, harmony-laden message to the “people of the world.”
Meanwhile, Deno Brown’s acting career was reaching a dead end. Though he appeared in 1980’s The Blues Brothers and 1981’s On the Right Track , starring Gary Coleman, Deno’s movie roles were getting smaller and smaller. The jobs and auditions would soon dry up completely. Watching his cash cow starve, Arrow made efforts to restart his teenage son’s long-dormant music career. Soon, Wind was serving as Deno’s backing band on club dates. Phillips said the effect was electric. “[Deno] was fantastic on stage, and the band loved playing behind him....We just had a field day. If we could have kept it together we would have been big as bubble gum, we really would have been huge.”
Brown decided it was time for Bandit to put out a new Deno single. It had been eight years since “Sweet Pea,” and the material now seemed hopelessly out of date for a growing young man and a changing era. Arrow took him into the studio to record two new songs— “The Eclipse of Love” and “I Will Find You” —and invited Phillips along for good measure. Phillips did not like what he heard—the old Bandit had lost his touch. “The first one stunk,” he said. “It sounded like a damn Roy Rogers cowboy movie.”
Brown sent out promo copies to local DJs and received a similarly negative response. Arrow’s pride was wounded, but he turned to Phillips for help in remaking the tracks. However, Brown refused to let him re-record Deno’s vocals, insisting he’d gotten them right. In order to save the songs, Phillips was forced to match the original beats and overdub new instrumental tracks on top. The process was laborious, with Phillips layering harp and synths under the original vocals, until he finally had something more contemporary sounding.
Also gracing the record were Deno’s backup singers, the Touch of Love. The group featured Tridia, her cousin Regina, and fellow Majestic Arrows survivors Gloria “Poolie” Brown and Gwen Hughes—the sister of Loretha and daughter of Eileen Hughes. After her star turn with the Majestic Arrows, Tridia was less than pleased with the arrangement. “I didn’t want to sing with a group,” she said. “When I came to him I wanted to sing solo....But Dad had his own ideas and whatever Dad wants, Dad gets.”
Phillips believes that with his and Cope’s help, Tridia and the Touch of Love might have succeeded where the Majestic Arrows had failed. “We could have written for them, and they could have become an independent group on their own,” Phillips said. “Tridia could sing. That girl knows she can sing. I mean she could break glass she can go so high.” But that’s not the way Arrow Brown saw it: to him, Deno was the star, and everyone else worked in his service.
This new alignment of talent should have been the second coming of Bandit Records, a fresh start for the label at the dawn of 1980s. Deno was readying a single, Wind had a whole album ready, and the Touch of Love were primed for their own act. With Phillips, Cope, and Tridia around to write for them all, Bandit might finally have emulated the factory system that had made Berry Gordy’s Motown so inspiring to the young Arrow Brown. But that would have meant Arrow ceding portions of his precious control—and that wasn’t going to happen. “Unfortunately, his ego was his downfall,” said Phillips. “He could have had four or five multimillion sellers. Deno was just unbelievable. Mr. Brown’s ego stopped his music career.”
Wind was no more insulated from Arrow’s Brown manipulations than the Touch of Love. With the Wind single getting good response from DJs, Arrow tried wresting the band away from its leader. Phillips had invested much of his own money in the Wind recordings, but when he found out the group had begun covert rehearsals under Brown’s direction, he walked away in anger. “I spent thousands and thousands of dollars,” said Philips. “That album cost...an arm and a leg—and my arms and legs, is what it cost....Everyone assumed I was going to come back, even Mr. Brown.”
Musically, Wind was lost without Phillips, but it was Arrow Brown’s indulgences that placed the final crack in the band’s split with Bandit. “Any time a woman came to his house, Mr. Brown felt like she was his,” said Phillips. “That was his thing, all the females in his house, that includes yours.” Wind singer John Savage made the mistake of bringing his second wife to the house on King Drive. When Arrow made a pass at her, things got ugly. “Mr. Brown pulled a rifle on him, and he just took it. John just reached over, snatched it, pointed it at him and said, ‘You ever pull a rifle on me, I’ll kill you.’ That ended his affiliation with Mr. Brown.”
More distressing than the loss of Wind was the failure of Deno’s new single. Released in late 1981, “The Eclipse of Love” was an unmitigated disaster. Planned as Deno’s breakthrough hit, the record was instead denied airplay and shunned by local retailers; the rejection hit Arrow Brown hard. “The Eclipse of Love” marked the final release from Bandit. “Mr. Brown was so dejected,” Phillips recalled. “He told me ‘I’m getting out of the business. I quit.’”
“The next time I saw Mr. Brown,” said Phillips, “he was really on his deathbed."
With his showbiz career stalled out, Deno decided to return to school in 1982. It had been years since he’d experienced anything resembling a regular life, but high school finally made him feel like a normal kid. “I was back, part of the world again,” he said.
Today, no one is sure how much money Deno made during his career—or where it all went. “Deno was a millionaire,” claimed Tridia. “But I also know that Dad did stuff with that money. What exactly he did, I don’t know.” After years of hard work, Deno hit adolescence—the end of many a child star’s showbiz path—only to find that no trust fund or savings account awaited him. A decade’s worth of earnings had simply vanished.
In the end, there would be no great comeback for Deno, or for Arrow Brown. “I think I was his last big chance,” said Deno. “But when I turned 17...I had my first child. So I had to come into my manhood and get a job like a regular person.” When the Brown house was robbed and stripped of all its musical gear, Arrow took it as a sign. He finally had to admit that none of it—the records, the label, Deno—were going to break big after all.
Having reached his 60th year, Arrow Brown felt his spirit and energies were waning along with his great enterprise. After decades of furious activity and constant hustling, his final years were quiet, tinged with bitterness and regret over what could have been. Disempowered by the loss of his music producer mystique and the big dreams and high hopes he spun around the family in glittering strands, Arrow Brown became just another emperor without a stitch to wear.
As the years wore on, Tridia discreetly encouraged the ladies in Arrow’s house to take their children and leave. “I loved my father with all my heart, but I didn’t approve of the way he lived,” she said. The birth of her own daughter made Tridia more determined to put an end to her father’s predatory ways. “There wasn’t no age limit with him. Ten years old was the start. That’s what turned me off. Ten years old? I mean, c’mon, Dad.”
By the mid-1980s, the golden era of independent R&B labels had receded into distant memory. The companies of yore had either vanished or been consumed by corporate monoliths. Stax collapsed amid a barrage of bad decisions and bankruptcy in 1975; a decade later, with Motown hemorrhaging money, Berry Gordy sold out to MCA. The times had simply passed Bandit by.
His spirit broken, Arrow Brown saw his health begin to fail. He suffered a massive heart attack in 1989. “I remember looking at him as he was laying in the bed because he was real sick,” said Tridia, “and he looked at me and did a half-smile and went like, ‘I’m not dead yet.’ Shortly after that, I believe he had a stroke.”
Faced with his own mortality, Arrow made an attempt to repent for his years of venery and selfishness. He took down the glamour shots, disconnected his listening system, and told the few remaining women in the house to go. In place of weekend parties, there were worship services.
After years of frosty silence, he called his old friend Eugene Phillips and tried to make amends. “Mr. Brown had a great fear of dying unprepared,” said Phillips. “I presume he had attempted to make his peace with God because he was definitely a believer.” Even old charges like Gloria “Poolie” Brown reluctantly came to see the dying man one last time. “I really didn’t want to, but I did it anyway, out of respect,” she said. “He was all by himself then.”
In the summer of 1990, Brown’s health took another serious turn. Doctors had diagnosed him with internal bleeding from a leaky heart valve, but there was nothing that could be done. Years of high, hard living had left Arrow unable to survive the necessary operation. “He was just too weak,” said Tridia. On August 30, 1990, Arrow Brown died at home, alone. He was presumably 66 years old.
A memorial service was held at Gatling’s Funeral Home on 111th Street. The event mirrored the man: it was a spectacle of song and dance for a capacity crowd wrought with conflicting emotions. Deno and Kevin both performed, as did cousin Regina from the Touch of Love; Paul Serrano spoke; and a minister from Zion Travelers Missionary Baptist Church delivered the eulogy. “I was too broken up to do anything but cry,” remembered Tridia. “It was a packed funeral, though. He was quite popular...and unpopular at the same time.”
Brown’s remains were cremated, and the family scattered his ashes in the front yard of the house. In death, as in life, Brown would remain a powerful presence. Family members living at the house then would claim to have encounters with Arrow’s ghost for weeks after his passing. One day while driving his cab past the house, Eugene Phillips swears he saw Brown’s apparition, a solitary figure standing on the front porch.
A month after the funeral, Tridia visited the greystone and found the outside littered with her father’s possessions. K. K. Brown—Mary Ann’s middle child, perpetually neglected by his father in favor of the talented Deno and the precocious Delbert—had flown into a rage and gathered the entire Bandit legacy of records, papers, and even master tapes and thrown it all out like common garbage. Younger kids tossed 45s like Frisbees, smashing them against brick walls and asphalt. “Everything was sprawled down the alley,” said Tridia. “People picked some of the [45s] up....The rest just blew away.”
Today, the old Bandit house at 4114 S. Martin Luther King Drive is empty and unclaimed. Its ceiling is crumbling, the insides a mass of broken brick and rotting wood. Thieves long ago gutted the place of wiring, pipes, anything of value. But in the front room, where so many used to gather in celebration, sits a single relic. The Baldwin organ, paid off in humble monthly installments, stands alone now amid the ruins of one man’s dream, an empire bathed in dust and silence.
— Bob Mehr and Ryan Boyle, September 2012
