Samuel George Jr., lead singer of the Capitols, who had a 1966 US #7 hit with "Cool Jerk", died in Detroit after being stabbed with a knife during a family argument. He was 39 years old...
Samuel George was the lead vocalist and drummer of “The Caps,” a 1962 R&B group out of the Ann Arbor/Detroit area.
The Caps were “discovered” by former Ann Arbor DJ Ollie McLaughlin when the group performed at a local dance headlined by Ann Arbor’s Barbara Lewis.
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| Barbara Lewis (born February 9, 1943) is an American singer and songwriter whose smooth style influenced rhythm and blues. Lewis was born in Salem, near Ann Arbor |
They signed onto McLaughlin’s Karen label and, in 1963, recorded their single “Dog and Cat/The Kick”—the record was a failure and the group split up
In the mid-1960s, a particularly sexual version a dance called “The Jerk” had become popular in Detroit clubs
—The Detroit version of the dance was called the "Pimp Jerk" and Ralph Julius Jones; who happened to be married to a girl named Alice, who just happened to be the cousin of Motown Records founder and producer Berry Gordy, and who happened to have had Ralph help raise her son who was named Berry after his famous uncle; well, Ralph had written a tune called “Cool Jerk.”
Ralph also just happened to have been one of the “Caps” so the group got back together to do that tune…
The song was recorded at Golden World Studios in Detroit on March 14, 1966 with the legendary Motown house band The Funk Brothers.
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| 3246 West Davison Formerly The Golden World Studios |
Though the song was meant to include a horn
accompaniment, the contracted musicians failed to show up for the recording session and their parts were omitted from the track. "Cool Jerk" was released on July 2, 1966 and was a smash hit, reaching as high as #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #2 on the Billboard R&B charts
The group released eight additional singles after "Cool Jerk", only two of which made the Billboard charts, getting no higher than #65, relegating the group to a One-Hit Wonder. In late 1969, the group broke up for the final time.
Don Storball (vox & guitar) went on to a career in the Higland Park, MI Police Department, and still lives in Detroit. Ralph Julius Jones (vox & writer) died January 21, 2007 of lung cancer. Richard McDougall (vox & keys) died on February 19, 1984 of unknown causes.
Samuel George died March 17, 1982 after he was fatally stabbed in a domestic dispute.
R.I.P. Capitols, You did OK…
NOTE: Gary Rasmussen, Ann Arbor/Detroit Bassman extraordinaire,
played at least one gig with these cats WAY back (like way before The (Dangerous) UP band)…Check out what he has to say about it:
…We were the Citations, and we all had matching outfits…matching vests and stuff, and there was a guy on Detroit radio named Dave Schaeffer, he was actually the program director for CKLW. He would do sock hops on the weekends, so we were like “his band” – he’d drag us along to all these sock hops. It was in a lot of teen kind of clubs and roller skating rinks and those kinda things. People would be skating to the music! A lot of ‘em would be in Canada, like Windsor, Kingsville, kind of close, but within an hour or so of Detroit…Port Huron, Michigan. So we’d play live and he’d spin records and talk, and they’d always have one famous, something-that-was-on-the-radio kind of band, maybe Question Mark and the Mysterians, or one time it was the Capitols. What they would do is, they would come and just lip-synch to their record. So we were playing in Windsor with the Capitols, and they were coming to do their one song, and the record player wasn’t working right, so they asked if we could do that song. I was probably 13 or 14 or something…young! So we played that one song, and they sang it!” –Gary Rasmussen
(From an interview with “The Stash Dauber” http://stashdauber.blogspot.com/)
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