![]() Having served 31 years of a 37-year sentence, Whiteside was finally released after a successful appeal on September 1, 2016, which was boosted by an online petition by friends, family, and musicians, who claimed his imprisonment was a miscarriage of justice. Police acknowledged that Whiteside was never present at the scene of Carter’s death, yet still claimed he oversaw the purchase of the murder weapon – a charge he has always vehemently denied. ![]() Her life was later immortalised in Christopher Cross’s mournful hit “Think of Laura”. Carter, a talented lacrosse player, was being driven by her father downtown to dinner following a victory in a game earlier in the day when she was hit by a stray bullet, which fatally pierced through her left lung, from a nearby gang fight. On April 3, 1985, Whiteside was sent to prison for forgery and conspiracy to commit aggravated murder for the drive-by shooting of 18-year-old Laura Carter, a Denison University student unintentionally caught in the crossfire of a gang dispute in 1982. Frustrated and poor, its creator turned to robberies and hustling, and he stopped making music altogether by the early 1980s. You Can Fly On My Aeroplane gathered dust, with copies becoming scarce due to its lack of national distribution. And on “Put It In Real Good”, Whiteside sings about sex as a cerebral act, crooning: “Just let me take my brain and put it into you.”Īlthough this music caught fire locally, the record, released in the winter of 1977, was deemed too leftfield by major labels, including Mercury, Atlantic, Motown, and Stax, who each believed Whiteside was unable to make a hit and rejected him at auditions. On “Alone Reprise”, Whiteside makes his synths sound like they’re crying. On the chilled title track, Whiteside fantasises about an aeroplane scooping him out of the ghetto and up into the infinite blue skies above, where he believes he is “destined to roam”. You Can Fly On My Aeroplane is the kind of record that sounds instantly familiar, its nine songs inducing a state of dreamy euphoria. Under Whiteside’s skilled direction, Wee were able to craft their sole studio LP, You Can Fly On My Aeroplane, which was released on the indie label OWL in 1977, with its creator confident it would shift the course of black music. “I know people have heard of the first three, but why have they never heard about Norm?” To soul music aficionados, this remains one of the great unanswered questions – and to answer it, you need to go back to the summer of 1976, where a then-22-year-old Whiteside was a determined young artist leading a collective of musicians, known simply as Wee, into a studio in Columbus, Ohio. “There were only four black artists given the budget or creative freedom to make conceptual soul music in the 1970s: Stevie Wonder, Isaac Hayes, Sly Stone, and Norman Whiteside,” says Sevier. Whiteside, a soul singer from the 1970s who effortlessly combined the feelgood melodies of Stevie Wonder with the dangerous funk of Sly Stone, released just one masterpiece, You Can Fly On My Aeroplane, before his career was derailed by a three-decade stretch in prison – but after being sampled prominently by everyone from Kanye West to Frank Ocean, his legend has unexpectedly continued to grow. “Norman Whiteside,” declares Rob Sevier, co-founder of Chicago-based record label Numero Group, “was the Frank Ocean of the 1970s.” For the past 15 years, Sevier and Numero Group have dedicated themselves to reissuing black music that failed to find a mass audience in its day – yet discovering the songs of hustler-turned-singer Whiteside ranks among their greatest achievements.
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