Trim as a jockey, nonstop busy wouldn't have it any other way a grandfather five times over though looking a decade younger than his real age, he rushes absolutely everywhere, recently coming off an eight years vacation relaxing myself. With the financing and expertise, he and longtime associate, friend, arranger and jazz drummer Sticks Evans, decided to try something new, which the latter had originally suggested as far back as 1967. After a lifetime in the music business, even though he does it all by ear and can neither play an instrument nor read a note, Johnny Worlds is ready for a different challenge: his first CD, Thrill of a Lifetime, is just out, arranged largely by himself with ex-Talking Head keyboardist Jonathan Best, and two additional releases are scheduled shortly, one of them done with Howard McGee.

Johnny came up in 1964 from Baltimore, where he had formed singing groups with his younger brother. But it was in New York that he saw music as a lifes work and commitment, after hometown friend Sonny Til introduced him to Clyde McPhatter. From that very beginning, with Abie Baker at Forest Green Records in the Broadway CBS Building, Worldss participation was in the promotion and marketing end of things.

Working sometimes with Sticks or with Johnny Harper, at Manhattan Center he financed and put together shows for King Curtis, usually featuring a guest costar or two, and along the way, with various labels and distributors, he marketed records for legends like Jackie Wilson, Gladys Knight, Sammy Davis, Jr., Jimmy Handyman Jones, Ramsey Lewis, Johnny Mathis, the Flamingos, Wicked Wilson Pickett, Grover Washington, Jr., and others.

Branching into production, Worlds worked with many of the above, plus Johnny and Joe, the US Five, Baby Washington, Frankie Paris, J.J. Jackson and Lester Chambers. Altogether, in one or another capacity, he has been involved with thirty-eight Top Ten recordings. His public relations résumé includes clients that range from Smokey Robinson to Rev. Jesse Jackson. As well, Worlds has served in consulting or official capacities for independent record or distribution companies, written for radio and television and contributed to a syndicated entertainment column. We do different things with different people, the we a reference to MIC, Masterpiece Innovation Company, which was formed by Worlds and others and now has connections throughout the globe.

Not a trained musician, far from it, and despite the three recent CDs, Johnny Worldss concentration has remained in the business sector of the industry. And he has been scrupulous and insistent at it, perhaps as a result of having seen the financial and emotional ruin of Alan Freed, whom he, and many others, accompanied on that last Channel Five show before the payola scandal broke and new laws were passed.

Four decades in the industry, Johnny proudly remarks, and nobody owes me five cents. None of my acts ever got screwed, either. Everyone has a dream, a plan, but its how one executes that makes all the difference. Many people never reaped their financial rewards or, to this day, the simple recognition they deservedhe drops three or four outstanding examplesbut if youre in charge of your own life, if you take care of your business, your business will take care of you.