March/April 2008

Frankie’s Got It

“Norfolk Sound” producer Frank Guida spearheaded a sonic revolution on Church Street in the 1960s that continues to influence popular music.

By Don Harrison

“Anything that I say, nobody will challenge,” Frank Guida told me when we met eight years ago. “The truth is always the truth. It burns hard in one’s soul, if you are a liar, especially.”

The sleepy-eyed older man was well known in the music industry for making all kinds of claims about “The Norfolk Sound”—500 popular music recordings he produced from 1955 to 1988. “I think we saved rock ’n’ roll music,” he had once told a reporter.

Mr. Guida passed away this past May, just a week shy of his 85th birthday, leaving behind a tangled web of undeniable achievement and incessant self promotion. The taped conversations I had with “Frankie” in his fenced-off Norfolk office in 2000 would turn out to be the final in-depth interview he would give. As I learned early on, this flamboyant and demonstrative man was not afraid to toot his own horn:

“ ... If you know anything about music, you know the kinds of chord changes that were being used in the ’50s, up until we came along ... like ‘New Orleans’—nobody had ever done it before.”

“ ... Listen to what came before us, and what came after. Listen to ‘New Orleans’ and ‘Quarter to Three’ and then listen to [Motown’s] ‘Heatwave,’ ‘Fingertips’ ... I could go on.

“ ... Are you aware that ‘Stand By Me’ was given to Ben E. King by yours truly?”

“ ... You know, I started nutty names in rock ’n’ roll.”

This much is true: As producer, arranger, publisher and label owner, the man behind Frankie’s Birdland record shop in Norfolk discovered area talent—most successfully two kids he personally renamed Gary U.S. Bonds and Jimmy Soul—and scored #1 hits from a ramshackle studio on the bad side of what was once considered one of America’s wickedest cities. These out-of-the-way sounds would influence countless musicians around the world and through the years—most famously John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and every bar band that ever needed one final jam at the end of a long gig.

“It wasn’t just that what we were doing was rock ’n’ roll,” Guida told me. “It was different. And we did it here, in Norfolk, Virginia.”‘

For the rest of this feature, see the March/April issue of Hampton Roads Magazine, currently available on newsstands.