The Story Behind: Archie Bell and the Drells, “Tighten Up”
Each month in “The Story Behind,” I’ll look at the history of a well-known Top 40 hit based on interviews I’ve conducted with individuals who performed some of the most familiar pop and soul hits of the 1960s and ’70s. This month, I’ll look at Archie Bell and the Drells’ 1968 #1 hit, “Tighten Up.”
Native Texan Archie Bell first formed his group with some friends in 1966. “We started out as just the Drells,” he told me. “L.C. Watts, who left the group before we became famous, loved the Dells and added the “r” to come up with ‘Drells.’ We always said that a Drell is an excellent entertainer and a perfect gentleman. It was only later when I came to be seen as the frontman that we went to Archie Bell and the Drells, and my name just happened to rhyme.”
The group recorded some sides for the Ovide label, including “Tighten Up,” with its lead off that proudly proclaimed they were “Archie Bell and the Drells from Houston, Texas.” “I said that about being from Texas, because after the Kennedy assassination, I heard a DJ say nothing good had ever come out of Texas,” Bell told me. “I knew that wasn’t true, and that was my way of making a statement.”
Initially, there wasn’t much of a chance anyone would hear the comment anyway, because “Tighten Up” was the B-side of the record. The group’s manager, disc jockey Skipper Lee Frazier, was pushing the flipside, “Dog Eat Dog,” as the A-side, but when disc jockeys started playing “Tighten Up” instead, the record took off.
In fact, it moved several hundred thousand copies regionally before coming to the attention of Atlantic Records, which released it nationally and watched it sell a million units, climb all the way to #1, and earn a gold record in 1968. Everyone was shocked, and no one more than Bell.
“We never thought ‘Tighten Up’ would be as big as it was,” he said. “It was a real surprise to everybody.” Perhaps even more so because other than Bell’s lead, there was almost no participation by the rest of the group on the record. The backbone of the song is the instrumental work of a Texas group, the TSU Tornadoes, and save some hand clapping and whistling, the Drells don’t contribute much else.
But unfortunately, by the time the song became #1, Bell was in no position to go on tour, put out a follow up record, or anything else. He’d been drafted when “Tighten Up” was still a regional release, and so his music career was on hold — if not over. But stranger still, Bell told me he had to both hear about and enjoy the record’s success from a hospital bed in Germany.
“After I was drafted, I served in the 53rd Transportation Unit stationed in Germany. I’d been in a wreck and was in the hospital when my manager called me and told me that ‘Tighten Up’ has just gone gold. Earlier, I’d been telling the guys I served with, ‘Hey, that music you hear on the radio, that’s me.’ One of them said, ‘You guys from Texas sure can tell some big lies! I guess that’s because everything’s big in Texas!’ They didn’t believe me.
“But when Skipper called me, I rolled my wheelchair down the hall and told my buddies my record had gone gold, and they realized what I’d been telling them was really true — it really was me! Suddenly, I had an entourage! We’d be on bivouac, and there’d be 12 men trying to get in a four-man tent!
“Everywhere I went, people knew me. There was a paper called the Overseas Weekly, and about two weeks later, they had an article there about me that said I was ‘the richest GI in the army since Elvis!’ It was really all a dream.”
But it could have been a nightmare. The group needed to follow up their big hit, but that was pretty hard to do while their frontman was stationed in Germany. Fortunately, the army was pretty liberal with Bell after “Tighten Up” became a hit and frequently allowed him to go home for a few days to perform.
One of those trips resulted in a meeting that was to pay big dividends. “After ‘Tighten Up’ came out, we were in Longside, New Jersey, in a bar called Loretta’s High Hat. The manager had connections with the Philadelphia music scene, and after the show, Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff came into the dressing room, though I didn’t know who they were. They said they liked ‘Tighten Up’ and told me, ‘We’ve got a song for you.’”
Atlantic was excited that Gamble and Huff wanted to work with the group, and their first collaboration was 1968’s “I Can’t Stop Dancing.” It was a strong follow-up for “Tighten Up,” going to #9 on the pop charts, perhaps because it closely followed the same formula as their previous hit. “If you listen to ‘Tighten Up’ and ‘I Can’t Stop,’ they have almost the same riffs, tempo, and everything, except ‘Tighten Up’ was a jam,” Bell told me. “It turned out to be a big, big number for us.”
Those two hits in 1968 would be the biggest the group would ever have, although they’d have about a dozen songs on the Top 100 overall. The group finally decided to call it quits in 1979, and Bell went solo for a while but solo success was elusive. Today Bell still tours, cranking out those great tunes for fans across the nation — but he’s never had another song quite as magical as “Tighten Up.”
