Archie Bell Made It Mellow with ‘Tighten Up’
- edgarstreetbooks
- Mar 11
- 3 min read
‘200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs’ Book Excerpt
Frank Mastropolo
In the early 1960s, Archie Bell & the Drells were a struggling Houston vocal group performing their brand of Texas funk at local talent shows. In 1964, the group recorded a demo of a song called “Tighten Up.” Although they often performed the song live, the demo was soon forgotten.
Bell was drafted into the Army in 1967 during the Vietnam War. The group planned to record a few tracks before Bell left, including a single, “Dog Eat Dog.” For the B-side, the group decided to update its old demo of “Tighten Up.” Bell told Soul-Patrol what inspired the infectious dance tune.
“I was rooming with this guy named Billy Butler. Huey P. Butler was his true name but he called himself Billy Butler. He came in and did a little dance. I said, ‘What you doin’?’ and he said, ‘I’m doing the Tighten Up.’
“We used Tighten Up just like we would Word Up or Right On, you know, it was a slang word: ‘I’ll see you later brother, tighten up.’ So when he did the little dance, I said, ‘Tighten Up . . . That’s really unique’ and I got my pen and started writing.”
Bell and Butler (credited as Buttier on the record) came up with the lyrics to the dance tune before they perfected the dance itself. Bell says Butler’s moves were just the beginning.
“He was doing a little something but as we started writing the song we got to know what Tighten Up looked like. We got together when we were rehearsing and danced together.”
Backed by a local group, Archie Bell & the Drells recorded “Dog Eat Dog” and “Tighten Up” at Houston’s Jones Town Studio in October 1967. “Dog Eat Dog” was picked up by Atlantic Records for national distribution but it flopped. Atlantic had to be convinced by the group that the B-side, “Tighten Up,” was the hit.
In All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music, Bell explained what made the song unique.
“This was the first song where every player got a solo. We wanted to get that whole house party feel. That’s what we’d do down in the Fifth Ward, have these big parties at somebody’s house and just jam all night.
“Everybody would form a circle and two people would have a dance-off in the middle. All the dancers would kick in a buck and whoever was the best dancer would win the pot.”
With “Tighten Up” the new A-side, Archie Bell & the Drells had a №1 hit in the spring of 1968. But Bell couldn’t enjoy its success; he was in a West German hospital recovering from a leg wound suffered in Vietnam.
With the relatively anonymous Bell out of the country, phony Archie Bell & the Drells groups popped up around the country. To combat this, the group took to the road with James Wise of the Drells pretending to be Archie until Bell’s return after his discharge in late 1969.
Philadelphia producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff teamed with the Drells after the success of “Tighten Up” but only produced one more hit, “I Can’t Stop Dancing.” The group broke up in 1979 and Bell pursued a solo career, recording blues and country albums.
Perhaps the most memorable part of “Tighten Up” is its spoken word introduction. Most lyric sheets cite Bell saying, “We don’t only sing but we dance just as good as we walk.” That’s wrong, said Bell.
“It’s ‘We dance just as good as we want,’” Bell insisted. “Hell, we dance a lot better than we walk.”
Frank Mastropolo is the author of 200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs, part of the Greatest Performances series. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.
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