For Herb, his day job’s the real peach

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/06/2009 (6332 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WASHINGTON — Friday unfolded just like all the other days for Herb Feemster, the suave Reunited and Shake Your Groove Thing singer from Southeast Washington who rose to international fame in the 1960s and ’70s with Peaches and Herb.

The 67-year-old soul man with the sweet falsetto scraped himself out of bed and pushed off from his suburban Maryland home in the still of the night. He pulled into a city parking lot somewhere between 4:30 and 5. He put on his patent leather shoes, gray slacks, white shirt, red tie and blue blazer. And by 6, he was on the clock at the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, where he works as a deputized court security officer for the U.S. Marshals Service.

Never mind that the first new Peaches and Herb album in more than a quarter-century was released Friday. Feemster, who uses the stage name Herb Fame, didn’t plan some wild celebration, despite having finally reunited with his recording career. (And yes, it feels so good, ’cause he understood. Of course.)

The idea of a pop star slumming in the working class isn’t a regular part of the celebrity-culture diet. Stars really aren’t supposed to be like us. They’re supposed to lead glamorous lives, always and forever — unless they’re in rehab or on a reality show, or both. But they’re not supposed to be in the middle, with the rest of us workies.

Feemster, though, isn’t concerned with pop star convention.

“I’m going to show up to work,” he said before his album’s release. “It’s not like a holiday for me.”

You will not, then, find Feemster humming any new (or old) Peaches and Herb songs in the halls of justice.

“I come here to work,” he says during an interview in an empty courtroom. “I really enjoy coming to the court every day. I enjoy the people here; I smile and laugh with them every day. And I enjoy standing in the court and listening to these trials.”

Some entertainers hire bodyguards; Feemster is more or less working as one, as his duties include judicial personnel protection. He carries a Glock and two extra magazines on his belt, and if you want to make a No. 1-with-a-bullet joke, well, by all means.

Thirty years ago this month, Peaches and Herb were perched atop the Billboard singles chart with the No. 1 song in the country: Reunited, an impossibly romantic and sentimental ballad that became a wedding-dance staple and the soundtrack to so much seduction. “I always hear people saying that their child was made off of that song,” Feemster says proudly. Reunited was preceded by the propulsive Peaches and Herb smash Shake Your Groove Thing, one of the more irresistible and enduring songs of the disco era.

But when the million-selling hits stopped coming for the so-called Sweethearts of Soul, Feemster went back to work. Again.

“ö “ö “ö

In the early 1970s, after a series of chart successes — and subsequent dissatisfaction with the music industry — he’d taken a break from the business of being Herb Fame to work as a District of Columbia police officer. When he revived the Peaches and Herb brand later that decade, he traded his silver police badge for a couple of platinum records.

Feemster eventually got out of the recording business again and landed the court security job in 1986, though he continued to perform a handful of concerts each year with a series of Peaches replacements. “See, I never wanted to be a starving artist, so I had to get a job,” he says.

The employment concerns almost don’t compute, given that Feemster was a force on the pop and R&B charts, all over Soul Train and American Bandstand and on radio and in black-culture magazines, which kept asking if he was romantically involved with Peaches because of their onstage chemistry. (Very happily married to my high school sweetheart, Yvonne, the answer always went.) There were private jets and enormous hotel suites with step-down Jacuzzis and touch football games with all the R&B stars of the era, and even a trip to China to perform with Bob Hope.

Comparatively, punching in at daybreak seems so mundane. So surprisingly … normal.

Even the new Peaches, a curvy Spaniard by the name of Meritxell Negre, was shocked to learn, upon meeting Feemster, that the old-school singer has a day job.

“I thought he’d be, like, chillin’ and just touring,” she says one night during a break from a rehearsal. “When I found out he was going to work every day, I thought: ‘Wow, that’s different.’ “

Feemster says he doesn’t need the paycheque anymore; he insists he has enough money banked that he doesn’t need to work at the court, especially after winning a series of lawsuits over unpaid royalties. It’s just that he likes to work. Imagine.

“I want to work till I die,” he says, his voice a high, airy rasp.

Why, exactly, Feemster left music in the first (and second) place seems to depend, as his answer periodically changes. He was either worried about not being there for his four children or weary of constantly trying to please everybody or worn out from all the work or flat-out disillusioned with the business end of the music business. Probably a little bit of all of that.

But his feelings about the music and craft never wavered, he says. “My love of all, the woman that’s never disappointed me, is music. It gets inside of me and turns me upside down. It relaxes me and does all the things you would do normally if you had a woman. That’s my woman. Besides my wife.”

— The Washington Post

Concert Preview

Peaches & Herb

Maxine Nightingale

Club Regent Casino

Thursday at 8 p.m.

Tickets: $30