Better & Better
A soulful mezcal sipper named for sweet 1970s R&B singers
By Geoff Hachis
CEDAR KEY, Fla • 2004 — Javier Jabnish was working the late-night bar shift at the Cedar Key Jai Alai and Card Club when Robert Better, the casino’s musical act for the past week, sat down.
“What can I get for you, Mr. Better?” Jabnish asked.
“I’ll have one of those mezcal drinks, Javier,” Better said. “The one with rum you made me the other night.”
Strictly speaking, Better was just one half of his act. The other was his current wife, Madrigalia Better, who was not a drinker. Or much of a singer, really.
“How was the show tonight, Mr. Better?” Jabnish asked as he placed the cocktail on the bar.
“Not terrible,” Better said. “I’m guessing more than half full.” The Vroom Room at the Cedar Key Jai Alai and Card Club seated 45.
Better & Better
1½ ounces mezcal
½ ounce Smith & Cross rum
¼ ounce falernum
Stir all ingredients with ice • Pour into a rocks glass filled with ice • Garnish with a lemon peel
Over the last week Jabnish had learned a lot about Robert Better’s career, and it hadn’t always been this grim. In fact, Jabnish was too young to remember, but there had been a period in the 1960s and 1970s when Better & Better had regularly topped the R&B charts with their brand of sweet, love-driven soul.
Tracks like “Oh, Loving The Love” and “Can’t Love You More Than I Love Me” charmed soul radio DJs. Better & Better was a married couple—Robert and his wife—and their wholesome image on album covers and during television appearances was a welcome contrast to the violence and chaos Americans saw on the TV news in the late 60s.
Robert met his first wife, Lorraine, in 1964 when they were both 20 and choir members at Sunnyside Baptist Church in Houston. They married the following year, and through a connection with Sunnyside’s choir director, they met record producer Kelvin Flatch, who quickly signed them to Fonky Records. Better & Better’s debut album, “Never Leave You, Love,” was well-received by critics. Heart-and-soul radio stations put two of the tracks, “My Heart Is Yours Forever, Babe” and “I Can’t Be In a Room By Myself When You’re In a Different Room,” in heavy rotation.
While the album sold well for Fonky, Better & Better only performed live in support of “Never Leave You, Love” twice before Lorraine took off with the keyboard player and filed for divorce. Believing all the work that went into the record was at risk, Robert panicked and immediately proposed to a stewardess, Wendi Smaleg, on a flight to Atlanta, hoping she could sing and the tour could continue. At the Atlanta show that evening, Wendi proved she could not sing. The next morning, Robert withdrew his proposal and Wendi reported for work at Atlanta Airport for a flight to Cincinnati.
Fonky Records canceled the Better & Better tour, and Robert decided to quit the music business and explore a career he’d toyed with since high school: hazmat removal. He was only 21. His whole life lay ahead. Why not help his community by identifying and removing asbestos, lead, and radioactive waste from the environment? He returned to Texas and, for the next decade, worked his way up the ladder at Houston Kleencinerate & Sons, neutralizing and clearing flammable, corrosive, and toxic materials around the city.
In 1974 Robert—now a director at HKS—met Belinda Horvtash, a chemist contracted by the company to evaluate radium and tritium contamination at an old manufacturing site for Houston blues club signage (including the signs for famed spots Shady’s Playhouse, Ms. Mabel’s Lounge & Club, and The Scarlet Dauphin). Over long coffee breaks, they discussed site property surveys and the relative merits of cesium-137 versus strontium-90. Also: Belinda had pipes.
Over dinner one night in 1975, Robert proposed, asking Belinda to marry him and write an album with him as half of the third version of Better & Better. Belinda agreed as long as their contract included a provision that she receive half the band’s future royalties - in perpetuity. Robert enthusiastically agreed.
A few months later, Robert sent his old friend and record producer Kelvin Flatch, now an executive at Hot Hot Cakes Records, a demo of Better & Better’s new songs. Flatch signed the duo and got them into a studio. The resulting record, “Love Is All Around And In It,” dropped in the summer of 1976 and would go on to win three Grammy awards, including Album of the Year, beating out Stevie Wonder’s “Songs In The Key of Life.” During Better & Better’s acceptance speech, Belinda told presenter Richard Pryor to “step back behind me, Rich, and look cute while I talk to these people.”
Three singles from “All Around”— “Love Is In My Pocket; Fish It Out,” “Oh, Man I Love That Thing,” and “Love Is Up That Hill, Then Take a Right Toward the Old Bucket”— charted on the Billboard Hot 100 that summer, with “Up That Hill” eventually selling 750,000 copies and earning a gold record. Other songs from the album—“Tyrannosaurus Love” and “Calf Deep In Love Pudding”—also sold well.
For the next couple of years, Better & Better toured the country to enormous crowds. Belinda and Robert became known for their massive afros and fabulous psychedelic outfits, making them catnip for television producers and magazine editors. Soul Hits Magazine alone featured the couple—always posed just before kissing—on its cover eight times in 24 issues. The “Soul Sweeties,” as DJs began referring to them, went back into the studio in 1978 after writing a new batch of songs on the road.
But neither critics nor fans got behind Better & Better’s next album, “Why Can’t We Just Breathe Love Instead Of Air?” DJs mostly ignored the singles “Arrows of Love Through My Neck Area” and “I Met Love at Burlington Coat Factory.” A strategic single written and released to garner new audiences in Europe, “What If Love Was More Like A Krankenhoser?,” fell flat, and audiences for the tour supporting “Breathe” were anemic.
Frustrated, Belinda decided chemistry was her true love. She quit music and Robert in 1979. Robert quickly married a woman, Shirley Shir, he heard singing in a south Houston Food Land, and together they put out Better & Better’s only hybrid disco/metal album, “Entombed (And In Love) Darkly On The Dance Floor,” (Skeeter Records) which sold just 134 copies. The marriage soon fizzled.
Robert returned to hazmat removal and, in 1981, secured a job as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Site Remediation Enforcement (OSRE), overseeing the country’s new Superfund program. He personally directed Superfund clean-up efforts at Kentucky’s Valley of the Drums site, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, and the ongoing, general toxicity of New Jersey.
But over the two decades Robert spent cleansing the country of hazardous materials, his thoughts frequently drifted back to Better & Better’s most successful years with Belinda as his partner. During that time, nostalgia was catching up with Better & Better’s music. In 2002, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Gilmore Girls,” and “Monk” all featured Better & Better songs in episodes. The soundtracks of both “Blade II” and “About Schmidt” included “Love Is Up That Hill, Then Take a Right Toward the Old Bucket.” The producers of “The Bourne Identity” ran the entirety of “What If Love Was More Like A Krankenhoser?” over the film’s closing credits.
Robert, nearly 60, saw the chance for a comeback and proposed to his neighbor, Heather von Egret, who he’d once heard singing in the shower. He called Kevin Flatch, now the head of Vivendi/Universal Music Group, and began writing songs. Flatch put out Better & Better’s new album, “Reassembled Just Like Lovers Should,” (which pictured Robert and Heather tastefully naked on the cover) in 2003 on A&M Records and booked them as the opener on Sting’s “Sacred Love” tour that summer.
It worked until it didn’t. Better & Better’s comeback single, “Your Love Is the Ankle Tattoo Of My Soul,” received heavy airplay on R&B radio. Sting often brought the couple onstage during his set to sing his favorite Better & Better song, a deep track from the mid-70s called “Sweat Out Your Love After A Nice Lunch.”
But the adulation didn’t last. Robert found the 21st-century music business frenetic and inattentive. The shiny new thing was top of mind for a distracted public, and soon producers and promoters stopped calling. Even so, being on stage in front of thousands of Sting fans had sealed Robert’s future. He’d never go back to hazmat removal. He’d live the rest of his days singing for Better & Better’s fans. Heather left him, but no matter. There would always be another Better to be his better half.
“I’ll have another of these mezcal drinks, Javier,” Robert said, looking around the jai alai club as if for the first time. Talking to Javier about his career had lifted his mood. “Why don’t we name it something great?”
“Oh, I already named it for your wives, Mr. Better,” Jabnish said. “It’s called the Better & Better & Better & Better & Better & Better & Better & Better & Better & Better.”
Robert laughed. “I like that, Javier! They’re each worthy of their own drink, though — let’s just stick to two Betters,” he said. “Or, what about Love Pudding?”
Editor’s Note: Fact-based cocktail historians claim the Better & Better was created at Dutch Kills in New York City by Jan Warren in 2012
SOURCES:
Joanie R. Marbalszhc, “Sweet Soul: Robert Better’s Influence on Ashford & Simpson, Peaches & Herb, and Womack & Womack,” Rhythm & Blues Review and Journal (Issue 45, 2010)
Belinda Horvtash, You Say Cesium-137, I Say Strontium-90: My Better Years (New York: Rabbletab, 1991)
Gordon Matthew Sumner, Pity Partying: Backstage Drinking and Drugging With My Opening Acts (London: Financial Times Publishing, 2018), pp. 66
Contributors Notes:
Geoff Hachis is an editor and fisherman. His “Poetry for the Shower in English” (translated by Crane W. Holler and Mike Toops) is forthcoming. Hachis is the founder and managing director of the Slippery Sweaty Bicycle Seat Foundation in central Latvia. The Foundation's purpose is to study the entire written historical record of bicycle seats with the goal of making them less sweaty and slippery.