The 4th Pip: “Midnight Train to Georgia” - Part I

An evening at the Apollo Theater with the self-proclaimed “4th Pip,” the man who inspired the Midnight Train to Georgia.

NYC. Summer. 1985.

It was a Learning Annex adult-education event, held at a packed Apollo Theater on 125th Street. It was entitled “Stories from the Midnight Train (Dreams Don’t Always Come True... Nah-ah... No-oh)”

The instructor was a short Black man in his early 40s, prematurely greying, amply goateed, with horn-rimmed Cornell West glasses, a mustard colored suit, bellbottom pants, and a ruffled tuxedo shirt. The gentleman introduced himself as Wilfred Frank and set the agenda for the evening.

There would be a question and answer session followed by never-seen-before Pip Moves, music from his three-piece band, The Chainsmokers, and audience interaction throughout.

Everyone was there for the same reason. In the Learning Annex guide, Frank claimed to be the “4th Pip,” the “Superstar that Didn’t Get Far,” “the man that inspired the song Midnight Train to Georgia by Gladys Knight & the Pips.”

It is fair to say that not a single person in the auditorium believed him. So, from a bang-for-your-buck perspective, nothing that evening could possibly go wrong. For this same reason, the event spread like wildfire and was relocated to the Apollo Theater from a Holiday Inn conference room in Midtown.

A drooping vinyl backdrop on the Apollo stage featured a black and white picture of Frank performing in a row alongside three other Pips. Gladys Knight, The Empress of Soul, was nowhere in frame.

You also could not verify that the other Pips in the backdrop were actual Pips because they were mid-phased twirl #7 while he was in left-facing locomotion pose,¹ which positioned their backs to the camera while Frank, knee hoisted like a marionette, remained facing forward.

Even a novice Learning Annex student could spot the disastrous synchronicity glitch.

“Only the Questions on the Cards, Please”

The evening started off with the question and answer session.

Frank’s interviewer was an audience volunteer, a plump, argumentative woman with a stub nose like a Himalayan cat. When Frank had asked for “a beautiful woman who could sing,” her arm rose like a tank cannon, and before he could even select her, she made tracks to the stage.

It wasn’t going well. Frank had given her a deck of index cards with his pre-written questions, but she couldn’t make out his handwriting, grew frustrated very quickly, and he had to get up multiple times from his interview seat to decipher his handwriting for her.

The two of them began to squabble like siblings. Frank repeatedly put his hand over the wrong microphone so that we wouldn’t hear.

“I can’t read this chicken scratch. You said I’d be singing.”

“Take your foot off the pedal! I also asked for someone beautiful!”

Something tragically inaudible was drowned in laughter. The audience did catch “No, I did not dive onto the stage,” an outraged rebuttal that did not require a sound system.

The first waves of a great hurricane of entertainment lapped up on the shore. The $25 orchestra seats already looked like a steal.

Frank’s answers to the pre-loaded questions were coordinated with backing music from the Chainsmokers, and little by little, Frank began to — curiously — pepper his answers with actual singing. He delivered his responses — more curiously — with long pauses and the “wait-for-it” intervals of a professional backup singer. This was followed by whistling and stronger hurricane waves of laughter.

The plump, argumentative woman with the pug nose either stared at him stone-faced during the singing pauses or shook her head in disbelief at the index cards to come. She began to ask her questions in a monotone at increasing speed, as if she was getting paid by the index card.

Q: "Did LA prove too much for the man?"

A: "(singing) No... no, no"

Q: "Was the midnight train really at midnight exactly?"

A: "(speaking) 11:05... (singing) it was the 11:05…"

There was an long pause as The Chainsmokers worked their way around again.

Q: “Are you finished?” she asked stone-faced.

A: “(waiting, then waiting, staring her down, then singing) it was the 11:05.”

Q: "Do you have any regrets?"

A: "(singing) That I sold my car... sold my car."

Q: "Why don’t you have pictures of you with the other Pips besides that?" She pointed to the sagging backdrop.

A: "(speaking) I had to pawn everything I owned. (singing) If you knew the song, then you’d know because it was in the song. And please… (pause) stick to the questions on the cards."

Q: “(she sings) The questions on the cards, questions on the cards (then, spoken, angry) You said I was singing.” And ever-so-slightly she stamped her foot, like someone who’d left something, dammit, back at the house.

Eruption. A solid CAT-3 now.

11:05

Over the din of this firefight, we learned Frank had been the original 4th Pip, that he had been the most talented among them, but jealousy over his four-part choreography and his growing “proximity to the lead singer” led to him being “dispatched.”

“For this proximity, I was dispatched,” he clarified his fate like he’d identified the exact prosecutorial term. He allowed the word to sink into the CAT-3 waves.

He did not name The Empress of Soul directly, but the blasphemous insinuation he tortured out of the word proximity made the Apollo audience uncomfortable — which is saying something — and every time he used the word he accented a different syllable.

“Prox-IM-it-ty.”

“The PROX-im-it-y was the jealousy. The jealousy was the prox-im-it-TY.”

Imagine Cornell West as a Pip.

Nobody was sure what that meant.

Again, Cornell West.

"PROX-im-it-ty. She sur-REN-dered.” “Surrender” being an injudicious legal term to banter about.

An “Amen” regarding his prox-im-IT-ty to The Empress of Soul would have gotten any audience member — at minimum — escorted back onto 125th Street.

At minimum.

Merald “Bubba” Knight

To sum up the first hour:

Frank was sabotaged by the Pips, his moves were stolen, they changed the dance steps to make him look foolish, shifted entry points for the backup vocals, and swapped out their sock colors so that Frank looked foolish on the "vacuum the carpet" raised-arm slide-backs.

Reliving it was painful for him. He began to wince while explaining.

“You can see it all in the picture,” he offered as righteous proof — he’d grabbed a rolled-up Learning Annex pamphlet from his bass player’s amp and was stabbing at his ankles on the vinyl backdrop. He was also beginning to range wider and wider around the stage, never a good thing for a Pip.

But “the lead singer promised to come meet him” to go back to Georgia together, but she was given a 12:19 departure time by Pip Merald “Bubba” Knight, instead of the actual 11:05 departure time.

“Drove me out. They drove me out,” Frank repeated, shaking his head at the confusion of the memory, and catching sight of the Himalayan nose lady, glared at her like it was her fault.

There was a smart-alec chorus of “Yes-they-did, brother. They drove you out.”

“A-ay-ay-ay-men,” the Himalayan cat lady sang out suddenly from her interviewer chair. It was melismatic — a long, virtuosic, vocal run.

“Amen,” someone in the audience repeated. She ignored it. She was fully focused on Frank.

“You said I’d be singing.” She clutched both armrests in a vise grip so tight she could rotate a turret.

Red

There was a break as one of The Chainsmokers brought out five standing microphones. Four rowed evenly in back and one in front.

During this set change for a potential reenactment of some sort, the audience met for jury deliberations in any available conversational direction. As a result, Red was caught out talking to his two friends. He was not on his toes when Frank called on him.

“White Boy with the bright red hair, why don’t you come on up here and help me out?"

The 22-year-old Red looked around. From the heads shaking affirmatively in the seats around me, it was clear that looking around was unnecessary.

“You, Red. You. Get on up, son. You battin’ leadoff,” chuckled a man behind him who slid back into his chair, getting comfortable.

“You got this, White Boy,” somebody yelled out from the balcony with the clear implication that he did not have this.

Red’s two friends both gave him encouraging, but concerned nods.

The Sandman

On his way up to the stage, Red looked into the wings for the Apollo Theater’s legendary Sandman — The Executioner, they called him. Howard “Sandman” Sims was a fixture of Amateur Night, which this Learning Annex evening seemed well-qualified for.

For decades with his broom and ragged patchwork clothing, Sims “swept” Apollo Amateur Night performers off of the unforgiving stage — in his way, protecting them before they were met with career-destroying insults.

“The Sandman had more influence over a young performer’s career than The New York Times,” wrote The New York Times, but only after the Sandman passed. “You did not want to see the Sandman in diapers coming after you with his nativity-sized shepherd’s crook,” they wrote.

Red was right to keep an eye out for him.

As it turned out, the Sandman was not there for the first part of the evening, but ushers were already racing over to his apartment.

Pull the “Whoo-Hoo” Train Horn

"Stay with me, Red,” Frank said, “I’m going to teach you the simplest Pips’ move. It’s so simple it’s not even a move."

“A White Boy move,” yelled the balcony.

“All you need to do is stand there and pull the Midnight Train “whoo-hoo” train horn when I point at you. Just like the Pips did. Right over your left ear. Tug, tug, whoo, hoo. Can you do that for me, Red?”

Frank was talking to Red like a magician at a children’s birthday party, but Red ignored the tone. He maintained the calm of a nomadic Kung Fu master being manipulated into the unavoidable bar fight.

“I can certainly do that,” he spoke into his mic, a tad too formally for the Apollo. The phrasing launched a fusillade of “White Boys” spreading from the balcony cheap seats into the orchestra. Easily half of the evening’s $25 value was returned in that one sentence.

“Very well,” Red thought — but wisely did not say this aloud.

While interest gathered in his Apollo Theater fate, audience members scrambled to get into the aisles for full-body, unobstructed hilarity.

Red took little note of it. He adjusted his mic for his 5'4" height, and then, without warning, did a mic kick-down #8, toe bounce leverage pop, mic snap back, snap mic pass left, snap mic pass right, eyes stage right #2b, dead head down, and Elvis freeze.

Years of practice. James Brown from Atlanta, 1975. The Beacon.

“Good God," Red grunted explosively.

“Good God, White Boy,” said Red’s heckler from the balcony, but this time he punctuated White Boy with something between a question and an exclamation mark.

White Boy!?

Audience members heading into the aisles froze mid-step over their neighbors. “You’re blocking me. I can’t see!” someone scolded. “I can’t see.”

Looking back on it later, it should have been clear to Wilfred Frank: the red-headed Kung Fu Master had given him a “it’s not too late to turn this around” courtesy warning.

And he should have taken advantage of it.

Next Chapter >>

1. Volume 1 of My Diary of Pips Moves