Precious Wilson – Hold On I’m Coming

Her first solo single had her old band’s name printed on the label

The Hansa label on the single reads Precious Wilson ex Eruption. That is what her first record without the band said on it — the band, right there under her name, because nobody at the label believed she could be sold without it. Hansa released it in August 1979. Frank Farian produced it. A few weeks later she walked onto a German television stage to sing it alone.

Keep watching: Eruption – I Can’t Stand the Rain

This is that performance: Auf los geht’s los, September 2, 1979, with a single barely a month old and everything in front of her still unsettled. She had spent five years as the voice of a band that had gone top five in Britain and top twenty in America, and she had walked away from it that same year. The song she chose to walk away with was thirteen years old and belonged to two men in Memphis.

Memphis, 1966, through a bathroom door

Stax Records operated out of a converted movie theater at 926 East McLemore Avenue, and the men’s restroom in it was not just a restroom. Tiled floor, tiled walls, a speaker piping studio sound in and a microphone sending it back — the room was the label’s echo chamber, and the reverb on half the Stax catalog was made in there.

Isaac Hayes and David Porter were the house writing team, and one afternoon they were getting nowhere on a Sam & Dave follow-up. Porter went to the restroom. Hayes, impatient at the piano, shouted at him to come back and work. Porter shouted back through the door, and what he shouted was the title. He came straight out and told Hayes he had it. They both heard the second meaning immediately, and by Porter’s account the song was finished within the hour.

Jim Stewart produced it and Stax put it out in March 1966. It went to number one on the Billboard R&B chart and stalled at twenty-one on the Hot 100, because a lot of radio stations decided the title was suggestive and would not play it. The label on most copies was reprinted as Hold On! I’m A Comin’, on the theory that the extra word made it sound less like what everybody had already heard in it.

What Farian did with it

Sam & Dave’s record runs 2:35, two men trading lines over a horn section with nowhere to hide. Wilson’s runs 4:10. Farian, with Stefan Klinkhammer arranging, rebuilt it as a late-seventies disco and funk production — longer, smoother, engineered for a floor rather than a chapel, with the urgency moved from the horns into the rhythm section. Sam and Dave were shouting at each other. Wilson does it on her own.

There is one more thing about that recording, and it is the detail that says the most about her position in 1979. The same track turned up on Boney M’s Oceans of Fantasy, released that year, credited there as a performance by Precious Wilson. Farian had spent two years using Eruption as Boney M’s backing band and support act. Now he had her solo debut doing double duty as a track on his other group’s album.

She had joined Eruption in 1974 to sing backing vocals. When the frontman Lindel Leslie left, the band spent months looking for a replacement before anyone thought to turn around. She fronted them through I Can’t Stand the Rain and One Way Ticket, and then left while the second one was still on the chart. Of that original lineup she is the only person still performing, more than fifty years after she joined it. The record had to borrow the band’s name to get out of the door. It turned out to be the only part of that arrangement she ever really needed.