by Len Lear

When I read in the Inquirer on April 25 that singer Billy Paul had died the previous day in Blackwood, NJ, at the age of 81, my mind was immediately catapulted back to the day in 1972 when he was a worldwide sensation and I met him by accident.

At the time he had the number one-selling record in the U.S., “Me and Mrs. Jones (We Got a Thing Going on),” about a couple having an affair when they were both married to other people. According to the song, “We know that it’s wrong, but it’s much too strong to let it go now.” You could not turn on the radio without hearing the song, which was not only a huge hit in the U.S. but in some other countries as well.

At the time I was working for the Philadelphia Tribune, the nation’s oldest black-owned newspaper, in a building on South 16th Street, between Lombard and South Streets. Every day I would walk across the street to a small corner grocery store and buy a 16-ounce bottle of soda, a small bag of chips and a small package of Tastykakes to have with a sandwich I would bring from home. (I did not realize at the time how unhealthy all of these foods were. It is a miracle that I have survived until 2016.)

One day when I was in the store buying these toxic chemicals, I happened to walk past another customer who looked very familiar. I said to him, “Excuse me, but you look just like Billy Paul.”

He said, “That is probably because I am Billy Paul.”

I said, “That’s impossible. Billy Paul is a huge recording star with the number one song in the world. What would you be doing in this corner grocery store?”

“Well,” he replied. “For one thing, I have to eat, just like everyone else. For another thing, I happen to live in an apartment right above this store. So naturally I come down to get some food once in a while. It’s convenient.”

“But why aren’t you eating in the top restaurants in New York and L.A. right now and living in some penthouse on Fifth Avenue or Rodeo Drive?”

“Obviously you do not know how the record business works,” he said. “I did not write and produce ‘Me and Mrs. Jones.’ Gamble and Huff did. That’s where the real money is. Most singers make very little from hit records. You are so happy just to get a record deal that you’ll agree to anything to get your career going. If you can eventually go on tour and sell a lot of tickets, then you can make some serious money, but there are a lot of singers who made hit records who are now broke or working as a janitor or driving a cab.”

I later interviewed Billy for articles, and he was a nice guy. I found out that he grew up in North Philly and attended the West Philadelphia Music School and the Granoff School of Music in center city, founded by Ukrainian immigrant Isadore Granoff, who died in 2000 at the age of 99.

Billy told me that when he went into the U.S. Army in 1957, he was stationed with Elvis Presley and Gary Crosby, Bing Crosby's son. “We were in Germany,” he said, “and we decided to start a band so that we might be able to avoid doing any really hard work.

“We tried to get Elvis to join, but he said he wanted to get away from music for a while. Instead, he was given a job driving a jeep. So Gary Crosby and I started a band, which we called the Jazz Blues Symphony Band. The Army bigwigs loved it, and they sent us on a tour all around Germany to build good will between Germany and America. After all, we had fought a pretty big war with Germany just 30 years before that.”

Billy told me that he also did some boxing in the Army. He said a lot of the kids he grew up with in North Philly were into boxing because you had to be tough to live there. “In fact, I later became friendly with Miles Davis, and he would say: 'Come to the gym! I'm gonna beat your ass!' Then one time I got hit really hard, and I said that from then on I would be a singer, not a boxer!” (I could relate to Billy’s story because I tried boxing as a teenager at the Police Athletic League, 35th District in West Oak Lane, but that “career” ended abruptly when I was knocked out and could hardly remember my name afterwards.)

"Me and Mrs. Jones (We Got a Thing Going on)" was a No. 1 hit for the last three weeks of 1972, selling two million copies (platinum single status), and went on to win Paul a Grammy Award. In a later conversation (I ran into Paul several times in or just outside of the grocery store), Paul told me the Grammy victory blew his mind.

"I could not believe it,” he said. “I was competing against Ray Charles, Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes. And Ringo Starr got up and called my name as the winner! Are you kidding me? I thought I was dreaming, and I did not want to wake up.”

Paul (his birth name was Paul Williams, by the way) continued to have a decent career with many more albums, but he never came close to duplicating the success of “Me and Mrs. Jones.” His follow-up single was “Am I Black Enough for You,” a song with a very strong political message which turned off most mainstream radio stations, which would shoot themselves in the foot rather than take a chance on offending even one listener. Even Marvin Gaye could not get away with his political message songs, which shot down his formerly meteoric career.

Like so many other singers, Paul claimed he was cheated out of a great deal of money by his former record company for unpaid royalties. He alleged that he had not received an accounting statement from Philadelphia International Records for 27 years, so he sued Assorted Music, its owners Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, and Sony Music Entertainment for nearly $500,000. (Gamble and Huff were quoted in a Philadelphia Inquirer article a few days after Paul’s death praising him lavishly.)

At the 2003 trial in a federal district court in Los Angeles, Joseph E. Porter, the attorney for Assorted Music, argued that Paul was only owed about $27,000, explaining that while the company had mistakenly failed to collect proper foreign royalties on the record, Paul actually owed the company about $314,000 for the costs of recording and producing the 10 albums he made for Philadelphia International from 1971 to 1980.

In the end, the jury deliberated for less than an hour and found that Paul did not owe the company anything. Instead, they awarded him half a million dollars in unpaid royalties for his recording of "Me and Mrs. Jones."

Paul's lawyer, Steven Ames Brown, said after the verdict, "It was a stunning victory for Billy. The jury even awarded him $12,000 more than we requested. The years of deception and excuses, are over, and Billy Paul will from now on enjoy the fruits of his talents … And Billy Paul was Kenny Gamble's best friend. Can you imagine what might have happened to the others?"