Wee’s Wild Aeroplane Ride
Norman Whiteside seemed an incarcerated artist doomed to the footnotes of history, until a novel reissue and a handful of samples gave his music – and, ultimately, Norman himself – a whole new lease on life.
It’s been more than three decades since original hip-hip band Stetsasonic dropped this potent slice of sampling wisdom:
“Tell the truth, James Brown was old
‘Til Eric and Ra came out with “I Got Soul”
Rap brings back old R&B
And if we would not, people could’ve forgot…”
It’s a bold claim – perhaps too bold, given just how ubiquitous Brown is – but there’s no denying that the Godfather benefitted from the advent of sampling. In 1984, Brown linked up with Afrika Bambaataa for minor hit “Unity”; in 1986, he released In The Jungle Groove, a breakbeat-oriented collection pulled from his funkiest era; and in the ‘90s, the Godfather solidified himself as the most sampled artist of all time; and in the wake of his 2003 death, Brown has continued to impact the work of just about every other purveyor of samples.
Not all spotlights are created equal, and it’s this harsh reality with which crate diggers must contend: if hip-hop can really “bring back new R&B,” it too can carelessly appropriate at the expense of the artists themselves. Gregory C. Coleman, the man behind the most influential and widely-disseminated break of all time, died destitute in the mid-2000s, penniless in spite of his foundational role in a swathe of subgenres.
Most sampled artists seem to occupy the middle ground: flipped infrequently, paid intermittently and utilised in obscurity. It’s a flattering if not profitable space to exist, but even the mild spotlight of production prominence came as a surprise to Norman Whiteside, a mid-’70s R&B trailblazer who seemed lost to the passage of time.
Whiteside was born in Columbus, Ohio, where he spent a tough childhood enduring bullying at the hands of his majority-white classmates at Siebert Elementary School. The experience strengthened his resolve, and by the time Whiteside was in high school, he was resilient and independent. He was ultimately expelled from the Columbus public school system for refusing to take off a Hendrix-inspired headband.
Norman poured himself into music, teaching himself the piano and honing his vocals, moulding his sense of melody and harmony into an undeniable skill for songwriting. Soon enough, the teen was camping outside the headquarters of Capsoul Records, set on impressing founder and local DJ Bill Moss. That he did: hired on the spot, an 18-year-old Whiteside became the youngest member of the Capsoul team.
If it wasn’t a dream, it sure was an education: Whiteside remembers seeing Moss threaten an Indianapolis DJ to get a record airtime, filling in for a since-departed Vigil Johnson on tour with Capsoul staples Johnson, Hawkins, Tatum & Durr, and cutting tobacco in Tennessee to raise gas money after an ill-fated label trip. If the early-’70s were the halcyon days of Motown, they proved dog days for the many regional labels that emerged in its wake.
Whiteside broke with Capsoul on their dissolution in ‘74, falling in with soul band Wee and Owl Recording Studios owner Tom Murphy. Norman’s impressive artistry again came to the fore: he soon took creative control of Wee, and through an enamoured Murphy, gained free rein over Owl, a studio replete with new-age electronics. The only caveat was that Murphy produce his records, itself an endorsement of his talents. “He had the whole package,” Tom remembered for Columbus Monthly in 2014.
All the while, Whiteside was working as an operator for Ohio Bell and moonlighting as a club DJ. In his telling, Norman met Jacquie – a well-known prostitute – at the club, and after her insistent campaign that involved both kidnapping and bribery, the pair eventually became romantically intertwined. Jacquie introduced Norman to a regular john, and that man became his benefactor, paying for $50,000 of studio equipment. He even funded a thousand-strong pressing of You Can Fly On My Aeroplane, Whiteside’s long-gestating Wee record, in ‘77.
“It turned out some of her resources were responsible for buying music equipment for me, and I said, ‘Hey, this isn’t half bad… I’d always been fascinated with those movies like ‘Super Fly’ and ‘The Mack’ ... but until you saw it from the inside, you didn’t know that was all hype. You didn’t know that’s not how it really was.”
– Norman Whiteside for Columbus Alive, 2016
A promising collection though Aeroplane proved, the major deals that came Norman’s way were marred by conditions – achieve more local success, drop the band – that he couldn’t accept. The promotional period passed, and with it, Norm’s hopes of breaking in. Tom Murphy and Sterling Smith, leaders at Owl, moved to Los Angeles, and Norman, despondent, couldn’t bring himself to cut another LP. The boundless optimism and sage guidance of Murphy was gone, and Whiteside struggled to fill that void.
You Can Fly on My Aeroplane reissue art, featuring Numero’s Asterix imprint label in the top left.
Disheartened, Whiteside fell into drug abuse. A planned tour with Wild Cherry fell apart, allegedly because of issues at City National Bank, so Whiteside turned to forging cheques and crafting fraudulent IDs to make ends meet. At the end of 1978, just one year after the release of You Can Fly On My Aeroplane, Norman was arrested for forgery and receiving stolen property charges. He spent 11 months in prison.
Those 11 months saw Murphy and Smith strike up rapports with The Beach Boys, Fleetwood Mac and Bob Dylan, and whilst those connections bode well for Whiteside’s musical talents, his days of soul singing were all but done. Released on parole, he returned to criminal enterprise, and soon enough, Norman Whiteside was the most notorious forger in Columbus.
It was a notoriety in which he relished. Whiteside, ever-charismatic, would call up Detective Tom Bennett of the Columbus Check Squad every few weeks. The pair walked distinct sides of the thin blue line, but they saw a mutual mission in law enforcement – Bennett could bring in offenders, and Whiteside could offer up those underlings who dared go against his word. The calls were conversational, and the foes came to know each other in a unique way. “In kind of a weird sense, me and Norman were friends,” Bennett told Columbus Monthly in 2014.
On a 1982 phone call, Norman made reference to “the little thing out east,” an aside Bennett connected to the shooting death of Laura Carter, an 18-year-old college student struck and killed by a stray bullet whilst riding in a car with her parents and three friends. The case attracted immediate attention, and her best friend’s boyfriend – one Christopher Cross – took her memory to the airwaves with “Think of Laura.” The nation called for answers, but the police were coming up empty handed.
Whiteside agreed to help. Police quickly arrested two suspects, but Whiteside dismissed them, and when tests showed that they didn’t fire the lethal shot, Norm said he could deliver the murder weapon. On May 27, 1982, he handed over a .38 caliber revolver. Norman had given the fuzz their first big break – it was just the beginning.
May 28: Norman Whiteside sat for a two-and-a-half hour interview with detectives. In it, he traced the arc of the stray bullet, going back years as he spun an incredible story about rival gangs, criminal extortion, territorial feuds and profit margins. He implicated himself in not only hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of forgery, but also an ‘underground airline’ he ran for felons, before naming three associates in Carter’s death. Dave Ghose of Columbus Monthly paints him as having “implicated his associates because his conscience bothered him, and he empathized with Carter’s family,” but a police report on that meeting claims that Whiteside also “bragged about his intelligence and criminal exploits… claimed it was his idea to do the ambush… and told police he masterminded the purchase of the murder weapon.” A key question arose: was Whiteside’s invaluable cooperation bundled with immunity?
In 1982, U.S. District Judge Joseph Kinneary maintained that detectives had promised not to prosecute, but in 1985, owing to ocassions of perjury, he was charged with “conspiracy to commit aggravated murder” whilst already serving a fresh 12-year sentence for forgery-related crimes. It was a decision that split law enforcement: some, such as one Detective McMenemy, had written glowingly of Whiteside and his cooperation, but others such as Asst. Prosecutor Patrick Sheeran, considered him “one of the most dangerous criminals in Central Ohio.” That characterisation stuck, and Whiteside received 50 years, a sentence reduced to 37 on appeal.
Norman performing at Warren Correctional Centre in 2012. Photo: Joshua A. Bickel
Condemned by the system though he was, there were those who remembered Norman Whiteside as a prodigious musical talent. You Can Fly On My Aeroplane quickly became a collectors item and pressings fetched up to $800 after “Try Me,” issued as a slightly-altered “45 single, gained a foothold in the UK-based Northern Soul culture.
His legend lingered throughout the ‘90s, and when archival label Numero Group was founded by Rob Sevier and Ken Shipley in 2003, it inaugurated itself with Eccentric Soul: The Capsoul Label. Whiteside’s fingerprints, if not his name, was all over their catalogue, and in 2008, the archival record reissued You Can Fly On My Aeroplane. It garnered press and gathered acclaim, quickly becoming a fan-favourite with archival adherents, a group that counts soul searchers, regional devotees and crate diggers amongst their ranks. Kanye West, a longtime Numero fan, is at least two of those.
Though Jay Electronica was amongst the first to sample Norman’s work, it was Kanye who suddenly pushed him to the forefront of popular culture. “(West) could have used any one of a billion pieces of music,” said Whiteside from prison, speaking on the dominant interpolation of “Aeroplane (Reprise)” that runs throughout his hit 2013 single, “Bound 2.” “I recognized [my chord progression] from the jump,” he later told Columbus Alive, recalling hearing the track for the first time when West debuted the music video on Ellen. Norman took the use of his work in stride, and though he earned chart-topping radio play and two Grammy nominations, he was still far removed from those former dreams.
Trying though it must’ve been, the anti-authority sentiment that defined his teenage years never died out, and his prisoner conduct was marred by his alleged role as a legal counsel for inmates, his litigious tendencies and his sharp criticism of the parole board itself. “I haven’t quite learned how to admit to something I didn’t do,” he told Dave Ghose in 2009, and that staunch incredulity didn’t do him any favours in hearings. As those behind the gun atoned, Whiteside became the sole holdout of a bygone crime.
Ricky Newill, charged with “involuntary manslaughter, conspiracy to commit aggravated murder and felonious assault,” lived as a fugitive until 1992. He served just 14 years, receiving parole in ‘06, despite the fact he was at the scene when Laura Carter was killed. His brother Gordon Newill, who pulled the trigger, was paroled in 2012 having served 25 years. All the while, Norman – a forthcoming informant who wasn’t present at the scene – remained behind bars, insisting his characterisation as a conniving mob boss was untrue.
Whiteside post-release. Photo: Andrew Spear
In a way, sampling helped save Norman Whiteside.
“Things are coming together, and it’s because of this music,” he said of the successful Numero reissue. “Now you got people who before would say, ‘Leave him in there, kill him, crucify him.’ Now, they’re saying, ‘Man, let’s get this guy out of the joint.’” Numero Group campaigned tirelessly, recruiting their new contingent of fans, a base that only grew larger after “Bound 2” commandeered the airwaves. It worked. In 2016, after 31 years and five attempts, Norman Whiteside was finally granted release by the parole board, stepping out into the first days of a Cincinnati fall as a free man.
Whiteside returned to Columbus without music on his mind, “especially after 31 years on ice,” but the enthusiasm of his newfound fans came as a surprise. A mere two-and-a-half months after his release, Whiteside found himself headlining a fresh-faced show, the musicians on stage as youthful as the crowd. “It’s almost like I robbed a nursery school and taught them all to play,” he joked in the days prior, though that tutelage – “I yell, I scream, I’m in their faces,” he told Columbus Monthly, “but they don’t take it personally, because they know this is all love” – pulled strongly from the old-school approach of Capsoul’s Bill Moss.
He reconnected with old friends, their lives divergent but bonds renewed. He reacquainted himself with the stages of Columbus through his shows, a welcome surprise for a man who’d planned to “take a job for a trucking company owned by a relative.” His music continued to impact hip-hop in different ways, and whilst Kanye’s initiative had already made fans of Logic, Statik Selektah and Ski, an acknowledgement from Frank Ocean – just a week-and-a-half before his release – was another high-water mark. The growing appreciation didn’t stop with Whiteside’s freedom, and just last year, the mid-’60s songwriter found himself on yet another year-defining release.
It was Madlib who took a more direct sample of his work, with the lush album highlight “Teach Me How” featuring prominently on Bandana cut “Cataracts.” Madlib has long used sampling to shine a light on his inspirations, taking many a prompt from the work of Melvin Van Peebles, Sun Ra and Russ Meyers. There’s a reverence in that recontextualisation, and when it comes to Wee, it’s a slight salute and a whole lot of sound.
“That You Can Fly On My Aeroplane album Norman put out with Wee is one of my favourite albums of all time,” said Madlib to Thomas Hobbs in the wake of Bandana. “I would bump it while I cleaned my house.” Nostalgic though it may be, the domestic soul of yesteryear makes for a compelling instrumental in its own right. “I naturally gravitate towards that slick 70s sound as that was when music was at its best, as it could be gentle and hard at the same time.” It’s a sound that suits Gibbs’ luxe cocaine raps, and he once again took to a Wee sample – “Alone (Reprise)” – on Alchemist-produced ALFREDO cut, “Scottie Beam.”
“Make sure you tell Norman that I’m down to do something,” Madlib added, a little surprised – “that’s crazy!” – that Whiteside was “over the moon” about the sample. It seems the kind of opportunity that Norman Whiteside would relish: one that pushes him into a future that was never assured, one replete with freedoms we’d likely take for granted.
“In terms of making up for lost time, it’s gone,” Whiteside said in the lead up to his comeback show. “That can’t be done. So here’s what we do: We take today and go forward.” It was the distant past that gave Norman Whiteside his unlikely future, his music an archival gift that made for a brighter present.