In 1964, The Magnificent Men, the only white act to ever headline New York 's legendary Apollo
Theatre and the other major stops on the rhythm and blues "chitlin circuit," was formed from
the improbable combination of two integrated bands. York, Pennsylvania's Del-Chords, a
seven-member group that featured singers Dave Bupp and Adrian "Buddy" King, often played
Battle of the Band contests against Harrisburg's nine-member Endells, led by drummer Bob Angelucci. By the end of the year, Bupp, King, Angelucci, and some of the Endells began playing
as the all-white Magnificent Seven, a change spurred by the unwillingness of some in both
bands to become fulltime musicians, a quest for a new collective sound, and the reluctance of
some club owners to book mixed bands.

That year, a Harrisburg entrepreneur, Dick Phelan, began booking top rhythm and blues acts
to play at his newly built Raven Teen Club and hired the Magnificent Seven as the house band.

Buoyed by their success at the Raven, the group auditioned in New York City at the Peppermint
Lounge and caught the attention of an agent, Ron Gittman, who signed them for a series of club
dates in Manhattan . Noting that many groups were calling themselves the Magnificent Seven,
Gittman, after passing by a theater marquee advertising the film, "Those Magnificent Men and
Their Flying Machines," redubbed his new find the Magnificent Men and wrangled an audition
for them at Capitol Records. After just a few bars, Capitol executives were impressed enough
to halt the audition. "Book studio time and get started," they told the band.
 
Capitol arranged a thirty-piece orchestra for the self-titled first album. "We put the headphones on, "says Bupp, "and when those strings came in, we looked at each other in that sound booth, and I remember thinking, 'Holy shit, this is gonna be cool.'" The first side of the LP revealed everything that would mark the group's best work: Bupp and King trading leads on a version of "Misty" that  they copped from the Vibrations, ending with King's falsetto spiraling into the ether;

tight horns and rhythm on two Bupp-King compositions; the lush melody of a Bupp-King
composition, "Peace of Mind," and their smoldering cover of Koehler and Arlen's classic,
"Stormy Weather," which would later chart as a single. "Keep On Climbing" brought the side to
a close with a promise: "Until I Reach that mountaintop, I'm never gonna stop."

When "Peace of Mind" climbed to the top of black radio station play lists in Philadelphia , disk
jockey Georgie Woods of WDAS, booked the group to play on one of his shows at the Uptown
Theater. It marked the first appearance by The Magnificent Men at a chitlin circuit venue but not
the last. For the next four years, the group appeared at the Uptown, the Apollo, and Washington,
D.C. 's Howard Theater , sharing the bill (and sometimes topping it) with every big name in
rhythm and blues.
 
Convinced that the chitlin circuit provided "one type of audience you can't fool," the Magnificent
Men entered the world of bright suits, ruffled shirts, and fancy footwork with a determination to
sing from the heart and steer clear of "screaming," putting on "a big act," or "outlandish physical
gyrations," all shortcomings they noted in other blue-eyed soul acts.

The biggest test of heart came for The Magnificent Men, as it did for all performers, at the Apollo
Theater in Harlem . Although the 1960s was the Apollo's most celebrated and successful
decade, following a July 1964 riot the area had become increasingly off limits for whites. As the
theater's choreographer, Honi Coles, observed in 1967: "Whites don't come up here anymore
because they are afraid to. All of this racial stuff and the riots has them scared."

Bupp admits that, in terms of the music, going into the Apollo was a "scary thing" to do. Sammy
Davis, Jr. once cracked: "It was like playing the Copa. You didn't go into the Copa lightweight:
they'd break your legs. But at the Apollo they'd break your heart." The first time on the Apollo
stage, Bupp says, "stuff came flying at us before we even opened our mouths. Once we started
singing, the stuff stopped coming at us, and from the first song on we got standing ovations.
" Even in 1966, with just one album out, the crowds that the group was drawing to the 1,700-
seat theater required special police.

The crowds and the ovations would have been enough, but the Apollo provided more, first when
they became the first white act to headline there, and then when they floored the Godfather of
Soul. In March of 1967, the group was backstage during the Apollo's Saturday midnight show--
the high point of each week. When headliner Tommy Hunt failed to show, management asked
James Brown, who had dropped by, to do a few numbers. Though exhorted to perform, he was
without his legendary band--no small thing inasmuch as he had, in the early 60's, gained
unprecedented permission from the Apollo to use his own musicians rather than the house
band. Brown asked Angelucci if The Magnificent Men knew his songs. Assured that they did, he
agreed to sing and began his set, as he often did, with "I'll Go Crazy." As he finished his first
verse, something unexpected happened. Pane recalls: "I can remember Buddy was running
between Dave and I, giving us our notes for a background part coming up." Brown was happy to
have the horns and rhythm behind him and never gave a thought to the possibility of backing
vocals. "When we came in, we were right," Pane says, singing the chorus softly as he relives the
memory: "'You've got to live for yourself/yourself and nobody else.' I remember he turned around
when he heard the background vocals come in." Brown shot first the band, and then the crowd,
a look of eye-rolling disbelief. The audience rose in glee.

The set rolled on, the Magnificent Men stepping flawlessly into parts usually reserved for
Brown's Flames: draping the star with his cape, reviving him from his feigned collapses. "I am
blown away by these ofay boys," Brown told the crowd. The boys were blown away by Brown,
who stopped in their dressing room--five flights up--after the show. Angelucci still gets chills
from the remembrance. "He was really overwhelmed," he says, "because we had every break
and every cut down to a 'tee.' Everything that could be there was there: vocals, horns, rhythm.
You take seven young guys from central Pennsylvania that had a hard time getting out of the
teen clubs and then all of a sudden you're playing behind one of the biggest R. & B. entertainers
it was absolutely incredible. I'll never forget that as long as I live--because he really enjoyed it."

Many R. & B. groups had been together more than a decade without the payoffs that had come
the Magnificent Men's way by the end of 1967. They'd appeared nationally on "The Merv Griffin
Show," "The Mike Douglas Show," the Jerry Lewis telethon for muscular dystrophy (as they
came off stage, Lewis told them, "You guys are pretty good. You ought to form a band") and had
played on a non-televised show that Johnny Carson did at Ohio State . In 1968 they performed
with the Motortown Revue in Cleveland as the only outside group to ever appear in that show's
lineup. Nonetheless, they failed to crack Billboard's Top 40, and by 1969 the end was in sight.

Though as many as one hundred radio stations in 1967 had been playing primarily black music,
the market was vanishing. The chitlin circuit dried up. As blacks began exploring their African
roots, the Southern experience that had given R. & B. its soul and the chitlin circuit its family feel
lost out. The Apollo began hosting acts that accented African heritage: Miriam Makeba, the
African Ballet, among others, and the other black venues suffered in the flux of the times. In
simple terms, Bupp says that "it was just no longer cool to like soul music."

With the integrationist phase of the civil rights movement wavering, time was ticking on a white
band that sounded black. Having failed to produce a Top 40 record with Capitol, the group
signed with Mercury and issued a final album in 1970, "Better Than a Ten Cent Movie." Its
songs are a record of new tensions. "We always wanted to be a little bit ahead," says King.
"And all of a sudden, we saw ourselves falling behind to Chicago , Blood, Sweat and Tears,
Sly and the Family Stone."

On the new album, keyboardist Billy Richter, who had replaced Tom Hoover in 1965, admits,
"We were trying to play with things we probably shouldn't have." The results were disappointing.
Beginning with a cover of Dylan's "Lay, Lady, Lay" (King: "I detested our approach to that."), the
album covered Mayfield's "Gone Away" and offered its own psychedelic arrangement of "Cloud
Nine." Most of the cuts sounded more like the hybrid rock that Chicago was playing. Only one
Bupp-King tune, "Whatever It Takes," was included. Angelucci didn't think the effort was bad,
but he wasn't sure what the next step would be and he could, he says, "see it coming unglued."

Playing on a college bill with Chicago , the group blew all its amps during their opening number.
Shortly thereafter, Bupp quit the group. Angelucci was felled, first by mononucleosis, then all the
childhood diseases: mumps, measles, chicken pox. He never went back to the group and his
departure erased any possibility that they would return to R.& B.

The transmuted band began playing a mix of Genesis, Argent, Gentle Giant, and other
progressive rock. It was here--in this new music and its whiteness--that common sense and
racial lore suggest they should have found their peace of mind. The group had forsaken their
trademark tuxedos in favor of billowing cravats, bell bottoms, and long hair, but manager
Gittman continued to book the new act as the Magnificent Men, disenchanting fans and club
owners, who were expecting an R. & B. show. In 1973 the group disbanded for good, the low
point having come after a six-day gig in the Florida panhandle. The promoter locked up and left
town before paying them; after wiring for money, they returned for good to the hills of central PA .

There, the world beyond music had changed as well. On July 21, 1969 , while the band was on
the road, Lillie Belle Allen, a young black girl from South Carolina , accidentally steered her car
into a hostile white neighborhood in York following the shooting death of a white police officer.
Her murder by unknown gunmen capped ten days of violence. Two were dead and sixty were
wounded. When the National Guard tanks finally left York , they rolled through blocks of charred
homes and businesses. In the wake of the disturbance, the band's old stomping grounds,
White Oak Park, was put out of business. Chris Huber, who had run the Battle of the Bands
contests there says, "When we first started, white people tolerated whites dancing with blacks;
when the riots started, they didn't."

For all that, Bupp avows, "There are no unhappy endings here." Though the seven don't see
each other regularly, they have lately come to a reckoning with the group's place in pop history.
In central Pennsylvania former fans get to reconnect twice a year when Angelucci unites his
current band (which includes bassist Seville ), with, among others, the old Del-Chords in an
assemblage he calls The Class of Sixty Something. Mixing covers of old Top 40 songs with
arrangements of R. & B. that few have ever heard, it is more than an oldies act--it is one of the
only places you can still hear what rhythm and blues sounded like in its heyday. It is a stirring
show, and the promoter scarcely needs to mention a date before the thousand seats are gone.

Perhaps what is most moving is to see Bupp and King singing next to their former friends from
the Del-Chords, Buck Generette and Spike Sexton, a reminder of the troubles that had forced
the friends to split four decades earlier.

It is remembrance of those furious long-ago days of love and rage that Bupp remembers in
distilling the essence of the Magnificent Men: "The truth is in the fact that we went into the Apollo
Theater, blew 'em away, and came back as a co-headliner--no white group on the face of the
earth was ever a headliner at the Apollo Theater."