A group of soulful singers and producers came together in the 1960s to create a sound unique to Philadelphia.
The musical genre, appropriately dubbed the Philly sound, produced hits like "Love Train," "The Rubberband Man" and "Disco Inferno." Characterized by string- and horn-heavy arrangements, it had its heyday in the 1970s before tragedies befell some of its key architects.
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The story of this music and its makers is chronicled in the documentary "The Philly Sound... Heard 'Round the World." Executive produced by John Legend and Al Roker, the film makes a case for the music's historical importance and enduring influence today.
The movie features interviews with some of the genre's best-known artists, including performers like Patti LaBelle and the O'Jays. The legendary songwriting duo Gamble and Huff, aka Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, also lend insight to the film, along with the equally influential songwriter-producer Thom Bell.
According to the documentary's director Bill Nicoletti, the project has been over a decade in the making. He was initially drawn to the movie through Joseph Tarsia, the founder of Sigma Sound Studios. This recording studio was the incubator for countless Philly sound recordings and attracted superstars hoping to experiment with the genre — like David Bowie, who recorded "Young Americans" there in 1974.
Nicoletti befriended Tarsia when he was renting space in the building, located at 212 N. 12th St., in the early 1990s.
"I would sit in on sessions late at night and it wasn't uncommon for Joe and I to to wind up at a diner somewhere with him telling me stories," Nicoletti recalled. "And after hearing so many different stories, I said, Joe, we gotta tell this someday. This is phenomenal."
Sigma Sound became the story's spine, connecting the various musicians who walked through its doors. But "The Philly Sound....Heard 'Round the World" also touches on the local music scene that made it possible, explaining the impact of "American Bandstand" and Cameo-Parkway Records, the Philadelphia label that specialized in novelty tracks like Chubby Checker's "The Twist." (Tarsia worked as an audio engineer there before striking out on his own.) Uptown Theater on Broad Street also gets a spotlight as a crucial stop on the Chitlin' Circuit, a patchwork of venues that provided stages for Black entertainers in segregated America.
The documentary moves chronologically, charting the Philly sound's rise locally in the late '60s and its resonance as far away as the United Kingdom. Its creators prided themselves on making excellent music that got people dancing, but some balked when their singles got tagged as disco, another major movement of the era.
"They were offended by it," Nicoletti said. "Disco was a fad and they were so pure to their craft that they felt disco kind of was an insult. ... And there was such a disdain for disco as well, which didn't exist with classic R&B. There were haters with disco, so all of a sudden, there was a line that never existed before with what they were doing. And they didn't like it."
The genre kept churning out hits through the '70s, but it started to stumble in the following decade. The film suggests that two events stymied the musical genre. One was the 1982 car crash that left Teddy Pendergrass, one of the scene's brightest stars, paralyzed. The other was the untimely death of Linda Creed, a frequent Bell collaborator who wrote such classics as "The Greatest Love of All." She died from breast cancer in 1986.
Some of the documentary's subjects have also died over the course of the lengthy production. Bell and Tarsia both died in 2022. Jerry Blavat, the longtime DJ and "American Bandstand" dancer, also gave an interview before his 2023 death.
According to Nicoletti, financial and licensing woes hampered the movie's completion. He and his crew ran out of money more than once, resuming work once Roker and Legend came aboard. Nicoletti had also hoped to feature music from Philadelphia International Records, which Huff and Gamble founded in 1971, but the label's parent company refused to license the tunes. Nicoletti retooled the film following their decision.
The music licensing issue killed a Peacock streaming deal Roker had helped finagle, but Nicoletti is shopping his documentary to other distributors following its run at the Philadelphia Film Festival. He is hopeful the festival can serve as a "springboard" for a new release, one that gets the movie in front of a general audience unaware of the Philly sound's cultural significance.
"I think there is a misunderstanding as to what took place in Philly and how important Philadelphia was, and what came out of Philly," Nicoletti said. "I think there's definitely a miseducation about that without question. And I think people are blown away when they realize how big Philadelphia really was and what they put out."
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