Unheard demos from legendary Indianapolis band found after 50 years

WFYI music journalist Kyle Long tried to temper his expectations when he pulled a reel-to-reel tape from a menagerie of its brethren of cassettes, CDs, floppy discs, ZIP drives and more, where it had lived for decades.

“Vanguards. 1 – Ghetto. 2 – Never/Never,” read the looping, oblong letters that Long spotted as he dug through the historic Indianapolis collection about two years ago.

The songs weren’t among the cataloged recordings by the Vanguards, the Circle City-based ensemble that rose to fame in the late 1960s. But once Long heard the tracks, he had no doubt the unreleased demos were indeed recovered treasures from the band often likened to the Temptations.

Lamp Records founder Herb Miller releasing lost tracks by The Vanguards

Lamp Records Founder Herb Miller on producing a limited edition record of lost tracks by The Vanguards on July 11, 2024 in Indianapolis.

Earlier this year, Long sat with Herb Miller Sr. as the founder of the Vanguards’ record label donned headphones to keep the music from sounding muddy in his hearing aid. And for the first time in half a century, Miller listened to the two songs.

“It just blew me away,” said Miller, now 85. “It was like having a shot of adrenaline.”

The songs’ rediscovery is fueling a revival that’s been underway of the Vanguards’ music and the other groups represented by Miller’s LAMP Records, which grew from a production company that started in 1969 and operated into the early 1970s. In 2019, Now-Again Records reissued an anthology of the label’s songs. In April, Luna Music began selling a limited edition seven-inch lathe cut of “Ghetto” and “Never Never.” Last week, the Cultural Trail began playing the LAMP catalog on the new Indiana Avenue extension outside the Madam Walker Legacy Center. And next month, Miller plans to release a 45 of the newfound demos through Luna Music.

Miller, Long and other collaborators behind these efforts want to spread the story of LAMP — often referred to as Naptown’s Motown. The label’s songs continue to be seeds for samples, remixes and covers by artists in the US and abroad. LAMP musicians have performed with the likes of Stevie Wonder and the Spinners and influential global stars like Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds.

And while the music reverberates around the world, the Vanguards’ legacy and once-lost demos are best understood through the lens of the musicians, modest recording studios and intimate venues that fueled the Indianapolis scene during the height of soul.

‘There was an energy’: the Vanguards’ rise to fame

The Vanguards unbottled pure emotion on stages in Indianapolis and across the country, and audiences responded accordingly. Packed in mere feet from the band, people cried through melodies of love, heartbreak and regret. Women threw their underwear. Crowd members ripped the ruffles from lead singer James Davis’ shirt, as the singer related in an interview with Long, the producer-host of WFYI’s “Cultural Manifesto.”

The band shared concert bills with the likes of Isaac Hayes and The Jackson 5. In 1969, “Somebody Please” climbed into the top half of the Billboard R&B Top 100 chart, and “It’s Too Late for Love” peaked even higher in 1970. The latter was the first-ever published song by a then-20-something Tony Black, who would go on to write more tunes for LAMP artists and preserve the Vanguards’ lost demos in his collection before he died in 2020.

Davis had a voice that traveled effortlessly from a shimmering lullaby to a wail brimming with palpable pain. Vonzell Wheeler’s contrasting bass could envelope listeners in velvet or assume the weathered tone of a narrator relating a story about hard times.

Lester Johnson on the Ebony Rhythm Band and The Vanguards

Meet Lester Johnson from the Ebony Rhythm Band

The classic lineup included Wilbur Winston, Dickey Pierson, Bill Morgan, Elaine Livingston and guitarist “Cadillac” Paul Irvin, Long said. And the Vanguards’ collective strength rested in the fact that any member could have sung lead, said Lester L. Johnson, a bass guitarist for the Ebony Rhythm Band, which started as LAMP’s house band.

“It wasn’t (just) a bunch of guys standing there singing. These guys would be sweating,” Johnson said. “There was an energy that came because of the emotional content of what we did. So when James starting singing, ‘Somebody Please,’ we felt it.”

Behind the Vanguards’ success was Miller, an unflappable entrepreneur who had identified the need for someone to coordinate recording, performing and distributing platforms that would bring talented Indianapolis musicians regional and national acclaim.

How LAMP built an Indianapolis label from the ground up

Miller grew up in the Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood and went to Arsenal Tech High School before attending Purdue University for a few months. He spent much of his career with the Indianapolis Fire Department and later founded his own forensic and fire investigations business.

How Host of WFYI’s Kyle Long fell in love with Lamp Records

Producer-host of WFYI’s Cultural Manifesto, Cultural Manifesto’s Kyle Long on what you need to know about Lamp Records on Monday, June 10, 2024, at WFYI.

In addition to his day job, Miller booked major musicians, including James Brown, to perform at local social club dances and other fundraising events. That led him to believe that the Circle City’s funk and soul bands deserved bigger stages, so he leveraged his national music industry connections to find opportunities for up-and-coming Indianapolis musicians who wanted to practice their craft full time.

“(H)ave a job and use the music right now as an extra job and build yourself to the point where you’re known … and if you’re going to be a national talent, you’re going to be recognized national talent,” Miller, who now lives in Carmel, would tell them.

Just as with Motown, local writers and performers comprised the backbone of the Indianapolis-based LAMP — an acronym that incorporated the name of Miller’s initial promoter partner. The connections came together quickly; many artists had first pursued music together at Shortridge and Crispus Attucks High Schools. LAMP grew to include the Ebony Rhythm Band, the Pearls, Words of Wisdom and Revolution Compared to What, among others.

And as the nation became acquainted with LAMP, Indianapolis’ musicians felt its impact.

“It started the ball rolling for me,” said Pam Tanner , a vocalist with the Pearls and the Ebony Rhythm Band, which later became the Ebony Rhythm Funk Campaign. “It lets me know that this is exactly what I want to do with my life.”

Five decades later this legacy is one of the things that makes Miller most proud.

“I think my success was getting some of the people that I got together — to put them on a journey,” Miller said.

And while the journey played out in live shows at venues like Indiana Avenue’s Blue Eagle, it also extended to the recording studio, where the Vanguards’ magnetism pulled in listeners.

‘Sing your little tail off’: The studio that recorded the newfound demos

“Ghetto” and Never Never” came to life around 1971 inside a home basement studio so orderly that musicians stood on floors buffed to a shine, plugged into amplifiers bracketed into place and took their cigarette breaks in a specified area outside. The space, at 10th Street and Arlington Avenue, belonged to recording engineer Les Ohmit, who was known for his meticulous methods, Johnson said.

With technology that at the time allowed only a few tracks to capture takes, musicians had to deliver polished performances out of the gate.

“They couldn’t take three tracks and just leave them for you, just for your vocal,” said Tanner, who now lives in Los Angeles. “You had to go in there, sing your little tail off and come on out of there, and that’s what we did.”

On “Never Never,” Livingston’s voice tenderly soars atop the Vanguards’ harmonization with lyrics that commit to a love forever. On “Ghetto,” the ensemble alternates between recitation and heart-piercing melody to tell the story of a man walking along the railroad track, away from his former one-room home in a rat-filled slum absent of heat.

“It’s very much of the Civil Rights era,” said Long, who’s researched LAMP for more than a decade and co-wrote the 2019 anthology notes. “Songwriters like Curtis Mayfield at that time were writing these anthems directed towards the Black community who were living in housing projects and in inner cities and striving to improve the quality of their lives. This song is cut from that same mold.”

The songs’ authors aren’t definitively known, but Long speculations that lead singer Davis could be the author of both demos or that he collaborated with The Finished Product songwriting group — which included Davis, Charles “Moose” Amos and Ed Fisher — to compose “Never Never.”

Miller planned to record the demos, which are accompanied only by a guitar line, as singles. But the Vanguards disbanded before that came to fruition, he said. Several other LAMP groups fizzled as musicians moved on to other projects and young people’s music tastes shifted, Long said.

“I had too many other things going to want to continue to fight this,” Miller said. “I lost my place in the music world in the mid-70s.”

For the next 50 years, “Ghetto” and “Never Never” would live only on brown tape wound between two clear plastic discs. At some point, the reel-to-reel moved across town from Ohmit’s studio to songwriter Black’s Butler-Tarkington home.

The Vanguards remain popular around the world

Black built a repository of Indianapolis music history over the decades, with all manner of recordings — including one he made of a teenaged Babyface — stored around his home according to a method his son described as “organized chaos.”

“My dad was an unintentional historical hoarder,” said Evan Black, laughing. “It’s a blessing that he had that mindset — like, ‘This could be something in the future.'”

Tony, who worked for Eli Lilly and Co., was reticent to talk about his music during his life, and after his death, his family invited Long to catalog his collection. Like his LAMP-affiliated counterparts, Tony’s work has influenced current generations of musicians, said Evan, who now works as DJ Stylistic and performs at Pacers games, among other events.

The Vanguards’ “Good Times, Bad Times” has found another life in the underground Northern Soul subgenre club scene in England. Multiple interpretations of “Somebody Please” have been circulating as well, with R&B duo K-Ci & JoJo, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, Chicano musicians in East Los Angeles, hip-hop artist Lil Blacky and others recording remixes, samples and covers.

“You couldn’t even buy the song for 50 years. It was out of print, and it was bootlegged many times,” Long said. “The song somehow found its way in the world without any record label or agent or publicist pushing it.”

As the Vanguards’ unheard demos finally become public, Long is continuing to dig through the hundreds of recordings in Black’s collection — a task that’s tedious but rewarding, especially given the possibility that he’ll find another treasure or two.

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Contact IndyStar reporter Domenica Bongiovanni at 317-444-7339 or [email protected]. Follow her on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter: @domenicareports.