Archie Bell

Archie Bell, Still Tightening Up
By Sean Hillegass, 10.22.04

Thirty-six years after “Tighten Up” topped the charts, Archie Bell was asked what he thought about his biggest hit song. “When I look back on it, it’s like a dream, or a fairytale,” he said. “It still amazes me, even now.”

Bell’s song is one of few songs that mention the name of the group in the song’s opening line. It begins, “Hi everybody, I’m Archie Bell of the Drells from Houston, Texas, and we not only sing, but we dance as good as we walk.”

Bell started off this way because a disc jockey had said, “Nothing good ever came from Texas,” referring to President Kennedy’s death. “I just wanted people to know that we were from Texas and we were pretty good.”

Bell began singing at the age of four in his grandfather’s church. By ten, he sang professionally. When he was 12, Archie saw R&B singing legends Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson perform.

“I knew then I wanted to be on stage and sing,” Bell said.

Bell formed the Drells while attending Junior High School, in Houston, Texas. He named his group the Drells, because it rhymes with his last name.

1967 – A year of change
Archie Bell and the Drells were ”one of the most popular groups” in Houston in 1967. In February 1967, Bell received his draft notice. Shortly afterwards, Bell came up with the lyrics for “Tighten Up.”

“I was over at my friend Billy Butler’s house one day when he started doing a dance I wasn’t familiar with,” Bell said. “When I asked him what it was, he said it was called the ‘Tighten up.’ Right then I started thinking up the lyrics for “Tighten up.”

In Sept. 1967, Archie reported to boot camp in Fort Polk, La. While on furlough in Houston, Archie recorded “Tighten Up.” It soon became the top selling single in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. When “Tighten Up” was released nationally, Archie had no idea his song was a big hit.

“The first time I heard that ‘Tighten Up’ was a hit was when I received a phone call from Skipper Lee Frazier,” Bell said. “I was in a West German hospital recovering from an automobile accident, and Skipper called to tell me that ‘Tighten Up’ had sold a million copies and would be the number one song in the country by next week.”

“It seemed that right after I received that call from Skipper, I started to hear ‘Tighten Up’ on the Armed Forces Radio Network,” he said.

He told people that, he was the Archie Bell they were hearing on the radio. But, nobody believed him. He even had one guy say that “People from Texas tell big lies and that I should stop telling big lies.”

Weeks later an article in a West German newspaper stated that Bell was the richest G. I. since Elvis Presley.

“As a private first class I was making $136 a month, but missing out on as much as $50,000 a night,” he said.

Bell now found that his problem with the people around him was opposite. “After that article everybody wanted to hang out with me,” he said. “There seemed to be a crowd of people everywhere I went.”

Where’s Archie Now?
Bell continued to have chart success into the 1980s.

While he was in Germany, Bell couldn’t tour, so counterfeit groups became a problem.

“There were as many as nine groups passing themselves off as Archie Bell and the Drells. There was even a group of white boys from Nashville passing themselves off as us,” he said. I pleaded with the army to give me time to tour but the best I could manage were three day passes, which gave me enough time to go to New York City and record follow up singles, and not much else.”

These days Archie still performs around 100 days a year.
“Performing is in my blood. I’ll always perform” Bell said. Besides performing Bell has found time to write a book, several newspaper articles and earn a black belt in Kung Fu.

When asked if the music business aged him any, he said, “Not really, it’s been more of a vacation.”