Frank Guida

Frankie’s Got It:
Frank Guida and the Birth of
the Norfolk Sound
by Don Harrison

“When Elvis Presley went into the Army, I thought rock ‘n’ roll was finished.”

Frank Guida is inside his fenced-off office building, not far from where Frankie’s Birdland and Frankie’s Got It sold R&B and jazz to a mostly African-American clientele in Norfolk for generations.

“Presley used to sell a lot of records, even to blacks, but then it just came to a real halt. It was over,” says the former powerhouse behind the Norfolk Sound — a complicated, driven man who freely describes himself as obsessive. “Even though there were all these kids (Frankie Avalon, Fabian), if they couldn’t get a great song they wouldn’t sell doodley squat.”

Current mythology holds that rock ‘n’ roll music lay dormant in the early ’60s, parched and perched for the Beatles to disembark from the docks of Liverpool to change the world. “The way it was appearing, whites were taking everything from black culture,” he says, thinking about those days.

Seeing an angle, Frank Guida, record dealer, became one of the early independent producers, marketing music based on its distinctive, signature sound years before that became fashionable. He’s promoted Tidewater to the world for close to 50 years, discovering area talent, writing and producing national hits. Before slowing down, he had founded more than 20 labels, including Legrand, S.P.Q.R., Romulus and (yes) Peanut Country, exploring different musical styles through the prism of Tidewater’s talent pool.

“There was no creativity coming out of the white rock groups. They were just imitating,” he says.

A Bronx-born Renaissance man, a prodigious force in popular music, an inspiring, obsessive, infamous, trailblazing presence for over 50 years … and you’ve probably never heard of Frank Guida.

The sleepy-eyed older man leans forward, makes eye contact. “I said, hey, why don’t the blacks start doing pop?”

When the tireless canvassing and quirky style of a self-described “fanatic individual” was midwifed to a double bass beat on the black-belt asphalt of Church Street in the late ’50s, it was another seaport, Norfolk, Va., that kept rock’s independent spirit alive. Spawned were two early slabs of wildness — “New Orleans” and “Quarter to Three” — landmarks injecting exotic cadence and what-the-hell exuberance into American pop at a particularly stagnant juncture in its history. A key component was calypso music.

“The calypso influence is most evident in many of Guida’s productions,” says U.K. writer Brian Walsh, current working on a book on “The Norfolk Sound.” “It is possible to trace the origins of the melodies to numerous songs from Trinidad … ‘If You Wanna Be Happy’ is an amalgam of two songs, the most famous being ‘Ugly Woman.’”

“Frankie” enlisted a band of local R&B players in 1959, later called the Church Street Five, which included drummer “Nabs” Shields, bassist-tuba player Junior Fairley, pianist Willie Burnell, trombonist Leonard Barks and saxophonists Earl Swanson and Gene Barge. Guida says he imposed on these bluesy charges the jaunty melodies he’d sung as the Calypso Kid while stationed in the West Indies during World War II.

“I have such a strong objection to my concept being classified as R&B,” he stresses. “Let it be called ‘Norfolk’s contribution,’ or whatever, but the chord progressions [of the early hits] are in no way R&B.”

Purchasing a studio, he helped construct unusual party records around good-looking local singers Gary Anderson and James McCleese — launching both “Quarter to Three” and “If You Want To Be Happy” from a town not previously recognized for its indigenous recording activity. Both hit #1 on the national charts.

“Listen to the chord changes,” Guida says many times, humming out an all-too familiar melody line to show its West Indian flavor. “Ta da da … .” After the seventh such performance in two interviews and twice as many phone conversations, even he has to laugh. “Now you know how some of my musicians felt. I had to drum it into their heads. I want to make sure you get it.”

The Italian-American transplant who never lost his accent explains how he ended up in the honkytonk Navy town he would help popularize in song. It’s simple, he says. He visited his sister (Matilda, as in “Twistin’ Matilda”) who lived in Newport News. He liked the area. Their mother back home liked the two of them close. He started a business.

If Norfolk was known more for rowdy bars than its music, Guida picked the right place to open shop. Frankie’s Birdland was blocks from a chapel owned by Daddy Grace, a legendary preacher who, before his death in 1960, had amassed a nationwide 350-temple franchise. His Norfolk church’s rhythmic stomp was a neighborhood heartbeat — “Quarter to Three” was based on a tribute called “A Night With Daddy G.” — and the raw feel would remain in the music.

“There’s no question that “the Norfolk musicians’ treatment of [Guida's] hybrid R&B-calypso rockers made an impact on the upcoming generation of musicians,” Walsh says from a discographer’s perspective. Guida is more direct about industry copycats, a perpetual thorn. “Listen to what came before us, and what came after. Listen to ‘New Orleans’ and ‘Quarter to Three’ and then listen to [Motown's] ‘Heatwave,’ ‘Fingertips’ … I could go on. A friend of mine told me, ‘Frank, they had your records in the Motown studio.’ It was a joke!”

Guida still thinks his influence was deeper than the Time/Life History of Rock, or music scholarship, suggests. “I mean, Phil Spector was doing ‘Dear Lady Twist’ in his studio and calling it ‘Da Doo Ron Ron.’” He cites other popular tunes that followed the “New Orleans”/”Quarter to Three” progressions: “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” “Palisades Park,” Aretha Franklin’s “Don’t Play That Song.” “The other night, on a commercial, I heard it again (‘Ta-da-da …’). But they were playing it on the drums.”

Was …

“I mean, it’s a joke!” he says, exasperated, sarcastic.

Choosing it as the 142nd Greatest Single of All Time, music critic Dave Marsh cited “Quarter to Three” as having “the most peculiar unity. I’ve played it on stereo systems ranging in price from $49.95 to $10,000, and the equipment makes no difference.”

Concerning the ambiance of the Legrand hits, Gary U.S. Bonds makes a point to both credit and blame Joe Royster, Legrand’s sales clerk-turned-acoustic tech. “Frank wanted Joe to be the engineer so he became the engineer,” Bonds says with a chuckle. But was he good? “He was a shoe salesman,” Bonds laughs.

Guida says a young whippersnapper named George Martin peppered him about how he captured the “Norfolk Sound.” It was during a visit to London’s then state-of-the-art EMI Studios before Martin produced the Beatles. Since the Norfolk groove’s origins lay in two humble studios, the first at the corner of Church and Princess Anne Road, the other on Sowells Point Road, one can only imagine their conversation. The equipment back home was ingeniously rigged, not high-tech. Vocal tracks were cut in the bathroom. To add weight to tracks, kids were brought in to add claps and murmurs.

The gist of it, Columbia professor Terry Pender has written, “was a strange outdoor sound, featuring double-tracked vocals squeezed to the hilt with compression. [The] records were recorded in mono for AM [radio] and cut as loudly as possible, often with meters pinned in the red. Guida would instruct his engineers to not only move the record and playback heads of a tape machine apart, but move them within 360 degrees so that the azimuth [texture] of the sound changed and affected the pulse on the vocal to give a more exciting effect.”

“The songs were electronically created” is all Guida will say about Prof. Pender’s analysis. Certainly different, the aurally-dense ’60s productions prodded industry ears immediately — “Runaround Sue,” anyone? — and they galvanized musicians on both sides of the shore. “Practically every beat group, amateur or professional, featured ‘New Orleans’ in their stage repertoire,” writer Brian Walsh recalls of the U.K. groups comprising the British Invasion. Johnny Hallyday’s remake even taught the French how to rock (sort of).

One of the last great Legrand discoveries, soul singer/songwriter Lenis Guess, runs a New York recording studio.

Frankie’s still got it. Unlike many era’s independents, Guida still owns all original masters, and he and “right arm” Rosetta Burns administer the royalties. Films like My Best Friend’s Wedding and Mask have featured — and everyone from Herbie Mann to Neil Diamond to Bruce Springsteen has covered — “the Sound.”

“The great thing about Guida is that he started producing records in Norfolk back in 1955 and was still producing local talent in the late 1980s,” Walsh says. “It should be remembered that whereas a lot of local talent had to leave Virginia to achieve international fame, [he] created his recordings in Norfolk, using local musicians and singers, in local studios.”

Walsh was a wide-eared kid living 3,000 miles away in a community called Droitwich, listening to “Quarter to Three” on a fading signal from Radio Luxembourg. He became one of many young aficionados gathered together by Bonds’ U.K. fan club secretary Bob Richardson. Many of these kids would grow up to become ardent Virginia music archaeologists, uncovering lost whistles from a far away, and exotic, wilderness.

Walsh and fellow fan James Cullinan started the Norfolk Echo. The scholarly British fanzine, documenting the Virginia-bred “Sound,” reached diehard fans as far away as Germany and Australia … and Pennsylvania. Eventual contributor John Elmendorf grew up in a map blip near Philadelphia called Sharon Hill. After hearing a spin of the Church Street Five, the future school administrator’s world opened up. Today his collection of Norfolk-related music is renowned among collectors worldwide.

New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen was another impressionable listener slavering over the stuff during the ’60s. He later enlisted a Virginia saxophone player schooled in the sax work of Barge & Swanson — Clarence Clemons — to be his E-Street Band’s “Daddy G.”

“What people need to understand is that Frank Guida came [to Norfolk] with nothing,” Elmendorf, a genial man with a Pennsylvania license tag that reads QTR 23 says, with passion. “And he did all of this.”

It’s all about passion. Mr. Guida passionately implores the reporter to tell the story of the music in a surprising way — to shock the reader. “That’s what I did,” the man who once successfully pitched almost 30 different versions of “High School USA” says. “That’s my trademark, my whole existence. I shocked people. You have to do that with your article… you need to make them say, ‘hey, wait a minute …’

“… and you must tell them that we did it here in Norfolk, Va.”

The inventor of “the Norfolk Sound” is moving to Virginia Beach. Frank Guida is in a jogging suit, looking invigorated. When Rockmasters’ security system won’t let a visitor into the building, he comes out and wedges open the gate. The former basketball player keeps fit; one reason he says he liked Don Kirshner was that the music director/TV host could run ball.

He’s rested today, but still in the middle of a tiring move to be closer to his beloved wife, Millie, who is convalescing at the Beach after suffering a stroke. Contrary to the sentiments of one of his biggest songwriting successes, “If You Wanna Be Happy,” he is quick to say that he didn’t follow the formula the song set forth — he’s been very happily married to a pretty woman for 45 years.

What we see today isn’t a fast-talking sonic scientist but a successful, conservative businessman, sitting in a brightly decorated office, with distinguished citations on the wall and community newsletters on the work desk. He admits to a passion for classical and semi-classical music, painting as a hobby, writing children’s books. “I’m an administrative animal now,” he says, wistfully.

Current mythology holds that early record producers exploited their talent behind expensive cigars inside penthouse offices. There are even those who maintain that one of the earliest of the “auteur” producers had little to do with the stompin’ calypso-ized oldies created in the studio he created, for the labels he pressed himself. Some critics have challenged his songwriting credits, and a WHRO Church Street documentary leaves him out entirely; even his landmark ’50s jazz show, on Portsmouth’s WTVZ-TV, is forgotten today, even though it helped build up a following for jazz in Tidewater that exists to this day. “Nobody had ever done it before,” he says, once again.

Poke around and you’ll find so many circulating ‘Guida stories’ — anecdotal, affectionate, eye-rolling evidence of calypso head-drumming, meticulous mic placement, outrageous arranging and nutty novelties — that the self-hype carries weight; importantly, the music holds up (see sidebar, p. –). Raymond Haskiss, a member of the Sheiks and a backup vocalist on many of the hits, says, flatly: “We never recorded without Frank.”

“Boy, you really had to know how to record back then,” Norfolk Sound singer Lenis Guess says about the early days of bouncing tape. “You had to know where to put the mikes. If you made a mistake, everybody had to stop.”

Guess originally got involved with Guida as a songwriter; later he became a house arranger and co-producer with Guida. He now owns Lenis Guess Recording Studio in New York, having learned sound engineering by working alongside the producer. “Guida trusted me. He gave me the keys to the studio and said ‘you have the knack for engineering, go to it.’ That’s where I learned the business.” Interestingly, the Norfolk native’s journey to New York 20 years ago (“to start a business”) mirrors his mentor’s — businessman Guess now hosts a bi-weekly gospel TV show, has a thriving clientele of R&B and gospel, and would like to mention that he has a new gospel CD out, on his own label.

As Guida says, “If you don’t toot your own horn, no one else will.”

When asked about the man who discovered him when he and his teen group were streetcorner singing, Gary U.S. Bonds answers, “I didn’t know what a producer was.” Reclining at Norfolk’s Backstage Cafe, one hour after being inducted into in a new Hampton Roads Walk of Fame, the performer says, “I thought [Frank] was capable. Since then I’ve had the chance to see other guys work. Frank had a different approach … I guess [he was] sit-back more than anything else.”

Really? Frank Guida … sit-back?

Bonds had just caught an Arizona red-eye where he participated in a golf tournament; he’s tired, but funny and ruminative. “I’ve known Frank quite a few years. It was a very good [relationship]. We just have things we disagree [about], certain things that happened.” He pauses, more serious, measuring his words. “They can’t be resolved now. I guess they could, but it’s not going to happen now. It’s differences of opinion more than anything else.”

Rockmasters’ Burns maintains that songwriters get all their royalties, but (and this is a big but for some) many musicians signed work-for-hire contracts against rights to recorded performances. Guida has never been sued successfully for chicanery; on the contrary, he dogs suspected plagiarists and bootleggers to the point where he’s considered a maverick in that area of the business. His assistant of two decades confirms that “he saves everything. Every form, every contract.”

His relations with some have grown decidedly chilly — Guida did not attend Bonds’ Walk of Fame ceremony — but when Norfolk State University hosted a “Norfolk Sound Day” a decade ago that saw a reuniting of all the major players, the producer showed for that one.

The former Gary Anderson now lives in Jersey but “comes home seven or eight times a year”; Tommy Facenda still lives in Tidewater; the sold-off Birdland Records is established in Virginia Beach; Joe Royster went west in the ’70s and disappeared; “Daddy G” Barge has emerged as a character actor (Under Siege) after a career that saw him place his honking stamp on everything from Atlantic R&B to the Rolling Stones to “the Sound”; essential personnel like Nab Shields, guitarist Wayne Beckner and Jimmy Soul have passed away, but Willie Burnell is a Baptist minister in Portsmouth and Leonard Barks still plays clubs in town, as does drummer Melvin Glove.

Looking back, Guida is glad he moved to Norfolk, Va. He would’ve had no chance to make music “his way” in New York, he says. “All those guys hanging out in Tin Pan Alley … sharks.”

Often preoccupied with old grudges, he’s sometimes more reflective. “It’s not easy to wear all of these hats at one time,” he says softly one afternoon. “I’ll probably get back into producing.” He mentions a musical he’s written.

“But that’s another day, “Frank Guida says, realizing the time. It’s almost quarter to three.

Recommended on CD:
The Very Best of Gary U.S. Bonds (Varese Sarabande)
Gary U.S. Bonds – Take Me Down to New Orleans (Ace U.K.)
Church Street Five – Daddy G Rides Again (Finnbarr U.K. )
Jimmy Soul — If You Wanna Be Happy: The Very Best … (Ace U.K.)
The Norfolk Va. Rock ‘n’ Roll Sound (Ace U.K.)
If You Wanna Be Happy (Varese Sarabande)
Aliens, Psychos & Wild Things (Arcania International)

— Originally published in 64 Magazine, Jan.-Feb. 2001.