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editHave removed the following as it is only indirectly related and it makes for too much text with copyright:
I remember the beginning well. It was winter and I needed a guitar player and tried to get a guy whose phone number I had – Cornell Dupree. I called him and asked him if he could make the date – it was at the Masonic Temple on Gates Avenue in Brooklyn. He lived in Harlem and there was a snowstorm. He asked how much the job paid and I told him $25. He said he couldn’t make it for less than $30. I hung up the phone – but soon called him back and agreed to the $30. I remember seeing him come up the street from the subway, carrying an amplifier and a guitar. That was the really the start of Stuff because Cornell and I had a groove going that night. He said he was going back to Texas the next day, but that he would let me know when he was back in town. About 4 or 5 months later he came back and he started working with me on a regular basis. I remember the band got so good that we called it the Encyclopedia of Soul – we used no piano player because at that time there were no electric pianos and when you go to these halls the pianos were so bad – some of the keys would be missing, so we were better off without keyboards. Believe it or not Dupree played both the chords and the melody at the same time. We had a horn player and we were working every weekend, Friday, Saturday and Sunday – probably making more money than we were making later on in life – we always had money in our pockets. By now, as well as playing live on the weekends,