Photo via Little Artie & The Pharaohs/Facebook
Little Artie & The Pharaohs
Little Artie & The Pharaohs
When the most famous jazz singer who ever emerged from Milwaukee speaks well of your work ethic, that’s some high praise. Artie Herrera received just that.
“Al Jarreau, who sat in with us at Gallagher’s, called Art ‘Artie the Workhorse,’ due to his physical performances and stage presence,” recalls Phil Zinos of Herrera, whose involvement in Milwaukee music goes far back as the early 1960s when his soul band, Little Artie & The Pharaohs, recorded three singles for Sauk City’s Cuca Records.
Zinos, a friend of Herrera’s since South Division High School’s 1958 freshman class, as well as one of his former Pharaohs, recalls that Artie and brother Al Herrera, raised in Waco, TX, “introduced soul music to a whole new generation of teens in the Milwaukee area.” Artie Herrera died on Oct. 28, 2021, from what was diagnosed as organ failure.
The Pharaohs (no relation to Sam The Sham’s contemporaneous Texas outfit of the same name) also played at The Attic and The Scene. It was at The Scene where Chicago music promoter Joe Defrancesco saw the band, thus luring the Herreras to work with Windy City R&B band The Chicagoans. The siblings also recoded three singles as Kane & Abel in a style closely akin to The Righteous Brothers. According to Mike Baker’s “Forgotten 45s” website, the Righteous Brothers told the Herreras that they mistook a Kane & Abel song they had heard on a Chicago radio station for one they forgot they recorded with producer Phil Spector.
The Herrera brothers would then join forces with The Chicagoans to form The Mob, replete with gangster-looking matching outfits. Under that guise, the group would start off in a soul direction befitting the dancefloors of England’s Northern soul subculture several years later. The act would eventually veer into a more pop rock sound similar to The Grass Roots. By the time they recorded albums for national labels Colossus and Private Stock (one for each and both, curiously, self-titled), they flirted with blues, funk and an early hybrid of rock and disco.
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Sometime along that career arc, The Mob became associated with South Dakota to the extent that the group was inducted into the state's Rock & Roll Music Association Hall of Fame in 2011. And though none of Hererera’s musical involvements had breaks big enough to put them in the oldies radio pantheon, “The Mob came close. They were a very popular Las Vegas lounge act," according to Zinos. In the years when he wasn’t making his living with music, Herrera “worked as a draftsman and warehouse worker.”
In his Pharaohs days, Heerrera broke ground as a Hispanic performer playing clubs catering to Milwaukee’s black clientele. Though Baker reports that Herrera’s ethnicity apparently proved problematic for his advancement as a soul star, Zinos emphasizes that his friend and bandmates received “no flack” for playing music associated with African Americans in his hometown. And though The Mob’s catalog may encompass too many licensing hurdles to make a thorough retrospective easily feasible, a collection compiling The Pharaohs’ and Kane & Abel’s output, on the order of last year’s digital album collecting the work of Herrera’s fellow Milwaukeean and Cuca label mates Harvery Scales and his Seven Sounds band, could be in the offing. But, Zinos says, “It would need to be okayed by his three daughters.”
Until whenever that would occur, here are a couple of sides by Artie's Pharaohs...
youtube.com/watch?v=YZeZzcKjLfM
youtube.com/watch?v=wsl8lIbpF-Y
two more from Kane & Abel...
youtube.com/watch?v=KVREdzEzJ1o
youtube.com/watch?v=BLoCfcchvAs
...and, lastly, a pair of songs encompassing The Mob's reign...
