It was only for a few minutes, but oh, man…”

One time I did sneak in and stood off to the side until they came and threw me out. confessed to author Ben Edmonds, “so they’d never let me in, I watched through the window. Little wonder that singing wasn’t a priority for Walker: growing up, he listened to the jazz and rhythm & blues of Louis Jordan, Illinois Jacquet, Earl Bostic, Lee Allen, King Curtis and Sam “The Man” Taylor and Lester Young, among other reedmen. He got to see the last-named of these giants in a Chicago club. “But I was too young and too small,” Jr. would be the right choice.” In between the song’s key changes, Lamont and partners Eddie and Brian Holland had him sing in part of the key, “because he didn’t play in a lot of keys…and play his horn in the other key. It just fit perfectly.”Īs for ‘Shotgun,’ Walker said he wrote the tune after “watching a couple of kids doing this different kind of dance in a club.” Later, he confided to Irish writer Gavin Martin that it was also the first time he’d sung. “It never occurred to me to do it before, but I picked it up real easy.” “I didn’t have any idea who it could be for,” said Lamont Dozier about ‘(I’m A) Road Runner,’ “but somehow or other we got our heads together and decided that Jr. Nothing displays that better than his group’s first couple of big-selling crossover sides: ‘Shotgun,’ which arrested Top Five positions on America’s R&B and pop charts in 1965, and ‘(I’m A) Road Runner’, which claimed Top 20 slots on both sides of the Atlantic the following year. Of course, raising the roof was Walker’s raison d’etre. and his sax blowin’ midway through ‘Urgent,’ a Top Five US hit for Foreigner. I’ll be there tomorrow, can you set it up for tomorrow?’ We were good friends, I liked him, so it was OK.”Walker and his band were the funkiest hitmakers on the Motown roster. It was no accident that they were assigned to the company’s Soul label when it was unveiled in 1965. Nor was it a surprise when in 1981, Mick Jones, frontman of Anglo/American rock combo Foreigner – seeking some grit for a new song which he and producer Robert “Mutt” Lange were cooking up – knew exactly who to call. So that’s Jr. The late Johnny Bristol, who played a central role in Walker’s career, recalled that he would have Motown studio time booked and ready for Jr., “and he would call me from Indiana and say, ‘Look, this guy called me at the last minute and I have to go make this money. figured being in the studio was a gamble,” said writer/producer Lamont Dozier, who helped to forge the saxman’s celebrated ‘(I’m A) Road Runner’ smash in 1966, “and he needed to be out there on the road, picking up the money. That was a sure thing, right? He could see it in his hand, not like waiting six months for a royalty cheque.”

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