Warren Walkabout 2014 by Pete Bilderback on Mixcloud

This was my latest DJ set. I stuck mostly to R&B and Soul rather than my usual mix and match approach.

Setlist:
Five Du-Tones - "Shake A Tail Feather" 
Ronnie Mitchell - "Having A Party"
The Swingin' Medallions - "Double Shot (Of My Baby's Love)"
Big Maybelle - "96 Tears"
Raphael Saadiq - "Heart Attack" (for Guy Benoit)
The Mar-Keys - "Banana Juice"
Bunny Sigler - "Lovey Dovey & (You're So Fine)"
Rex Garvin & The Mighty Cravers - "Emulsified"
Shorty Long - "Devil With The Blue Dress On"
The Velvelettes - "He Was Really Saying Something"
The Bandwagon - "Breakin' Down The Walls Of Heartache"
Booker T. & The MG's - "Time Is Tight"
The Mad Lads - "No Strings Attached"
Chuck Wood - "Seven Days Too Long"
Marvin Gaye - "That's The Way Love Is"
Ray Bryant Combo - "Madison Time"
Aretha Franklin - "Spanish Harlem"
Billy Preston - "My Sweet Lord"
Curtis Mayfield - "(Don't Worry) If There's A Hell Below We're All Going To Go"
The Mystic Moods - "Cosmic Sea"
Nina Simone - "To Love Somebody"
Al Green - "L-O-V-E (Love)"

Milky Edwards & the Chamberlings - Soul Love

I want to believe. Really, I do. But these soul covers of tracks from David Bowie's The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars, by a previously unknown outfit called Milky Edwards & the Chamberlings are just too perfect.

These three videos were uploaded to youtube about a year ago, and have gone more or less unnoticed until now (David Bowie's official facebook page posted an item about this today):







So I don't believe this is authentic, but that doesn't mean I don't love it. Anybody want to venture a guess as to who is behind this? I'm looking in the general direction of Gabriel Roth and the Daptone Records crew, as they are about the only folks I can think of capable of pulling off such authentic sounding and looking 70s soul music.

Whoever did it, I hope they get around to recording the rest of the album and actually release it.

R.I.P. - Michael Jackson

We headed up to New Hampshire for a short vacation starting last Wednesday and on the way up I pulled up the Jam's Sound Affects on my iPod.

Perhaps because I once read a quote from Paul Weller in which he claimed Sound Affects was intended to sound like a cross between The Beatles' Revolver and Michael Jackson's Off The Wall, I started thinking about Jackson. I said to my wife something to the effect of "someday we're going to find out all the weird stuff that has been going on with Jackson the over past 10+ years, and it won't be pretty." I didn't realize it at the time, but I was talking about what would happen when Jackson died, which coincidentally happened the next day.

Because we were staying in a motel, I had access to cable news (no cable at home), and its weird world of wall-to-wall coverage of major and not-so-major events. It was strange hearing the different takes on Jackson. Depending on who you believe, Michael Jackson was either the closest thing the world has ever seen to a perfect human being (a child-like, innocent and kind humanitarian who only thought of others) or history's greatest monster (a master manipulator, with bizarre, twisted and seemingly insatiable appetites). Of all the people I heard voicing their opinion on Jackson on CNN, MSNBC and Fox, no one outside of Deepak Chopra offered anything close to a nuanced opinion on the man and his personal life. (Chopra clearly had great affection for Jackson as a person, but also seemed intensely aware of his flaws.)

Personally, I do not have any special insight into Michael Jackson, other than to fall back on cliches like "the truth probably lies somewhere in between," which, given the wide chasm between the two camps of opinion, hardly seems adequate either. In any case, the world doesn't need my opinion on who Michael Jackson really was, and not only because I honestly have no idea.

Perhaps the most prescient take on Michael Jackson was offered in episode one of the third season of The Simpsons, in which Jackson lent his voice to Leon Kompowsky, a bricklayer from Patterson, NJ and mental patient laboring under the illusion that he is Michael Jackson. Though Bart is initially let down when Homer brings home a "big white guy who thinks he's the little black guy" instead of the real Michael Jackson, Kompowsky still manages to save the day by helping Bart write a song for Lisa's birthday.

In other words, maybe who Michael Jackson really was matters less than who people (his fans and detractors alike) think he was. Michael Jackson's music has brought joy to millions, and no doubt will continue to do so for many, many years. But he is also there for those of us who need monsters to demonize as well.

Stevie Wonder on Sesame Street

Thanks to Guy for pointing this YouTube video out to me. It's Stevie Wonder doing an epic take on "Superstition" live on Sesame Street. Guy remembers being completely freaked out by this as a four or five year old. I can understand why, I am not sure children that age should be exposed to music this funky. I have to say, this version completely crushes the studio version of the song from Talking Book.

Unfortunately, I don't remember seeing this. I would have been three years old on April 28, 1973, so I would have been the right age. Perhaps it's buried somewhere deep in my subconscious.

It's always been a bit disappointing to me that neither of my kids has ever shown much interesting in Sesame Street (although as I type this Will is wearing an Elmo t-shirt that Amelia picked out for him to wear today). Will also completely wore out a Cookie Monster shirt (Cookie Monster is pure id, so of course children love him). But just a couple weeks ago, I could not talk Will into letting me buy him a Bert t-shirt. "Come on," I said, "you'll be the only kid in school cool enough to have a Bert shirt." He told me if I could find him another Cookie Monster shirt, he'd wear it, but Bert wasn't happening (Bert is all superego, so I guess he's a tougher sell).

Anyway, from the little bits of Sesame Street I've seen over the past several years, I can tell you without a doubt it is nowhere near as cool, or dangerous, as this. Check out the kid with the long hair in a full-on funk freak-out on the fire escape. Awesome!

And here's Stevie teaching Grover a little bit about soul.



Finally we have a Wonder's vocoder drenched classic written specially for his Sesame Street appearance.

Fugi - Mary Don't Take Me On No Bad Trip

Fugi's 1969 single "Mary Don't Take Me On No Bad Trip" is what you might call a funky nugget. Funky, heavy, druggy and slightly paranoid, the song would have sounded right at home on Funkadelic's lysergic apex, Free Your Mind... And Your Ass Will Follow. Truth be told, it would have been a stand-out track on that album. But virtually nothing was heard from Fugi (aka Ellington Jordan) for years following the release of that one spectacular single on Chess subsidiary Cadet in 1969.

Information about Fugi and Jordan is scarce. Executives at Cadet purportedly passed on releasing a full length Fugi LP because they considered the music too "druggy." A full album worth of material recorded for Cadet around the same time as the single was finally issued by the Funky Delicacies label in 2005, but appears to have gone out-of-print on CD. At least some of the material on the album was recorded with fellow Detroit psychedelic funkateers Black Merda.

A couple more Fugi singles appeared in the early 70s, including "I'd Rather Be a Blind Man," a song co-written by Jordan that was recorded as "I'd Rather Go Blind" by Etta James, Clarence Carter, Fleetwood Mac, Rod Stewart, Paul Weller, and literally dozens of others. Not much more was heard from Jordan until Shaak, a CD credited to Fugi, was released on the Bogalusa label in 2003. Almost Home, credited to Ellington Jordan, appeared in 2005. I can't tell you any more than that, but I'm guessing there's much, much more to the story (Jordan discusses some drug issues in the reissue liners). Talent like this doesn't just disappear for such an extended period without there being a story there.

This version of "Mary" is what appeared on the a-side of the original single, and was also included on the spectacular Rhino Compilation, In Yo' Face!: The Roots of Funk, Vol. 1/2. The single was originally issued as one of those "pt.1/pt.2" deals (so this is "pt. 1"). To my ears this edited version sounds harder and funkier than the extended version that appears on the Funky Delicacies album. I suspect it's a result of a punchier, more compressed mix. It's killer.

Sly & the Family Stone - Fresh (Version B)

Back in 1991 somebody at Sony made a boo-boo and pulled the wrong tapes from the archives for the first CD issue of Sly & the Family Stone's Fresh. As a result, the entire CD (except the first track) consisted of alternate takes. Sony quickly realized its mistake, recalled the CD, and reissued it with the correct takes. An acquaintance that worked at Tower Records in Annapolis told me what had happened, and I picked up a copy before the store returned its recalled stock.

No one seems to know exactly what the deal is with these alternate takes. Did they constitute an alternate version of the album approved by Sly, but rejected by Epic? Were they demo takes? Were they different takes altogether, or merely alternate mixes? How did the mistake happen in the first place? What happened has been the subject of much speculation and debate, little of it informed by any actual facts. Those who know aren't saying (and probably couldn't remember anyway).

One thing is for certain; the takes issued on the 1991 CD are radically different from the versions that were originally issued on LP. The "official" version of Fresh has a much more compressed "AM radio" sound than the alternate takes, while "Version B" (as it came to be known) has wider stereo separation and a spacier feeling closer in sound to There's A Riot Goin' On. One could probably write a book on the differences between the two versions, but suffice to say, they're quite different.

Many people prefer "Version B" to the official album, and I would count myself among them, although both versions have their charms. When Sony/BMG reissued Fresh this year, five of the alternate takes from "Version B" were included as bonus tracks, marking the first time these takes were issued legitimately.

Sly Stone Interviews on Youtube

Yesterday's post on Sly Stone led me to a couple interviews on Youtube. The first is an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show from July 1970 (around the time I was celebrating my first birthday). Stone is flying high in the friendly skies, and Cavett does his best to keep the plane from crashing. Note at one point that Cavett mentions that Stone had apparently missed previous bookings on the show. Given how messed up Sly is here, it makes you wonder what kind of condition he must have been in for the shows he missed.



The second interview is much later, filmed as Sly was working on his 1979 comeback album Back On The Right Track. Growing up I remember seeing this kind of "whatever happened to Sly Stone" feature every few years.

Sly Stone - High On You

Sony/BMG's Legacy division issues remastered versions of Sly and the Family Stone's first seven albums today. Unfortunately, corporate behemoth Sony/BMG is over a year too late to capitalize on the surge of interest created by Sly's brief, bizarre reappearance at the 2006 Grammy Awards. Nevertheless, the time is always right for Sly's music to be rediscovered.

Sadly, Sly Stone's first solo record, 1975's High On You, remains out-of-print. Hopefully, that oversight will be corrected soon because it is an under-rated album that deserves a second look.

While the first five Family Stone LPs (up through 1971's There's A Riot Goin' On) are universally acknowledged as classics, Sly's later albums are more controversial. By 1971 Sly's drug use had gotten out of control, and his erratic behavior, including a slew of missed gigs, began to take a toll on his career. Nevertheless, the later albums have much to recommend them. Fresh is one of my all-time favorite Sly albums, and is generally recognized as a good record, even if it is held in lower critical regard than Riot.

Small Talk, High On You and Heard Ya Missed Me on the other hand, are typically written off as the work of a spent artistic force. While they are certainly uneven efforts, much of the music on Small Talk and High On You still sounds fresh and vital to me. Not every track on these albums is great, but Sly digs into some deep funky grooves that rival anything George Clinton and company were doing under the P-Funk umbrella at the time. Anyone who is a fan of The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique (and who isn't?) should own a copy of Small Talk, if for no other reason than to hear where the boys ripped-off one of the funkiest grooves of all-time.

The title track of High On You went to #3 on the R&B charts, but peaked at #52 on the pop charts. Frankly, I don't know what pop radio programmers were thinking, because "High On You" is crazy great, nearly as good as Sly's best songs from the 60s. But what I really don't get is why the album's third single "Crossword Puzzle" failed to chart altogether. It could be because Epic made the mistake of issuing the inferior "Le Lo Li" as the album's second single. With its lame "different freaks for different weeks" lyric, "Le Lo Li" does indeed sound like a pale echo of past glories. "Crossword Puzzle" on the other hand, is the funkiest defense of single-motherhood you will ever hear. Despite the song's lyrical content ("How could you wish her pain, Cuz' she has her maiden name"), I bet the killer groove could get even Focus On The Family's James Dobson's hips moving. Bonus funk points to anyone who can tell me where the killer horn hook from this song was famously sampled.

(BTW, I think I could make those pants work for me.)

Love - Reel To Real Again

I don't usually post on the same album twice, but I wanted to follow up briefly on my previous post about Love's 1974 album, Reel To Real. In that post I focused mostly on my own initial negative reaction to the album and how differently I reacted to it upon hearing it again. Some of the questions that this album raises for me are central to what I think I am trying to accomplish with this blog in general: Why do we like certain kinds of music and not others, and why do our preferences change over time? Why do certain albums achieve "classic" status and remain in print for years, while others are discarded and forgotten almost immediately? Is there anything worth recovering in the things we have discarded? How does music affect our memory of the past, and how does our memory of the past affect the way we listen to music? Of course none of these questions have definitive answers, I see them as merely jumping off points for discussion.

In writing my original post I had to consider the possibility that my judgment might be clouded by the fact that I paid a lot of money to obtain the album. I think on the whole I assessed it as honestly as I could, and I stand by that assessment completely. I have been listening to the album regularly for the past couple of weeks. I've enjoyed it, and so have my wife and son. While I do not believe that Reel To Real is a consistently great album like Forever Changes, I do think it is pretty good with some excellent tracks. It is also far, far better than its critical reputation suggests. It sounds like what could have been an exciting, and potentially commercially successful, direction for Arthur Lee. Unfortunately that was not to be; the album tanked commercially and within two years of its release he was earning his living painting houses with his father-in-law. It would be six years before he released another album, and he would never again record for a major label.

So just how bad is Reel To Real's critical reputation? In short, to the extent that it is not forgotten completely, very bad. Colin Larkin, editor of The Encyclopedia of Popular Music lists Reel To Real as one of the 80 or so worst albums of all time, in the company of The Country Side of Pat Boone, Merry Christmas With The Smurfs, Telly Savalas' Telly, a Milli Vanilli remix album, and LaToya Jackson's From Nashville To You. Of course Colin Larkin has as much a right to his opinion as I do to mine, but I would strongly argue that the album does not belong in company like that, and that the negative critical reactions to the album are colored by preconceptions about what a Love album is supposed to sound like and not by the music itself.

Love - Reel To Real: Lost Classic or Bummer In The Summer?

Reel To Real might be easier to understand if thought of as Arthur Lee's third solo album (after Vindicator and the never-released Black Beauty) rather than as a Love album. Certainly it has little in common with Love's best-known work, Forever Changes, or their final Elektra album, Four Sail. It does share some common ground with the Hendrix-like hard-rock of Vindicator, but rather than psychedelia or hard-rock, Reel To Real is predominantly soul music, harkening back to Arthur Lee's earliest work with The American Four and LAG.

Reel to Real is easily the rarest album released under the Love moniker, selling few copies upon its initial release on RSO in 1974, and never having been released on CD. I first heard this album back when I was in high school and my friend Peter picked it up in the "bargain bin" at the Annapolis Record Exchange. It seemed like a major score . . . until we actually heard it. This wasn't Love! This was more like disco! I think we both concluded that by 1974 Arthur Lee was a sad drug casualty who had completely lost his way musically.

Peter later sold his copy, but after reading about Guy's initial bum reaction to Forever Changes, I found myself getting curious about Reel To Real again. Was it really as bad as I remembered all those years ago, or had I simply approached the album with the wrong set of preconceptions? So when a still-sealed copy popped up on eBay, I bid on it. Then I was outbid, so I bid again. And again. And again.

So the 46 dollar and 33 cent (including shipping) question is: was it worth it? Well, I paid more for it than I should have, but listening to Reel To Real with fresh ears in 2007, I think it is mostly terrific. The easiest way to describe the album is as a cross between the Hendrix-inspired hard-rock Lee aspired to post-Forever Changes and the greasy soul music of Lee's Memphis birthplace.

No matter what you think of the music, it's undeniable that Lee assembled a crack band--in terms of technique, perhaps the best of his career--the band is tight. "Time Is Like A River," "Good Old Fashion Dream," and "Who Are You?" are genuinely funky with soulful vocals by Lee. "Which Witch Is Which" and a cover of William DeVaughn's "Be Thankful For What You Got" sound a bit like Cadet-era Terry Callier, and "Busted Feet" is a compelling amalgam of Hendrix and Memphis Soul.

And while the fact that Lee recycled three songs from previous releases may suggest creative exhaustion, "Everybody's Gotta Live" and "Busted Feet" sound better the second time around. Sure, the album is not perfect; I could have lived without the remake of "Singing Cowboy," and the "We got the power, we're gonna make it right on" sloganeering of "With A Little Energy" sounds overly facile even without considering that it comes from the man who brought the world "A House Is Not A Motel" and "Bummer In The Summer." But the band locks into a solid groove and Lee sells the positive message with a genuinely enthusiastic performance.

So my revised verdict is that Reel To Real is one of Arthur Lee's strongest post-Forever Changes releases. It is a far better album than I remembered. In 2007 Reel To Real sounds more like an artistic re-birth for Arthur Lee than the last gasp of a spent creative force. Had the album met a better fate commercially it might have provided a blueprint for bringing Lee's music to a broader audience during the 1970s. (Now if someone could just explain the cover art to me.)

If you approach this music without the baggage of this being a Love album, I think you might dig it.

Funky Denim Wonderland: In 1974 Arthur Lee had one of the best bands of his career, but the music never found an audience.

R.I.P. James Brown

I woke up Christmas Morning to discover James Brown had died. I realize this is old news, but I wanted to pay my respects. I don't have much to add to all the more timely eulogizing: James Brown was a giant, as big an influence on popular music as Elvis and the Beatles, if not more so. But what I love most about James Brown is that he was not afraid to let you know that he was willing to work his ass off to entertain you, and to earn your love. In today's media environment where multi-media celebrities seem to believe they are entitled to your love and money by mere virtue of their celebrity that alone is something to be honored. It really was no exaggeration to call him the "hardest working man in show biz."

This 1966 clip of Brown performing "Prisoner of Love" shows off the Godfather's more sensitive side.

Early Parliament

Parliament's first album, Osmium (1970), doesn't fit in neatly with the rest of their catalogue. It doesn't sound much like the slick, pop-oriented funk that would characterize later Parliament albums starting in 1974 with Up For the Downstroke. But neither does it sound exactly like the full-on freaky psychedelic/funk hybrid Clinton and company would create under the Funkadelic moniker starting the same year.

On the whole this sounds more like a Funkadelic record than a Parliament one, but with greater emphasis on the funky than the freaky. I don't think George Clinton quite had the master plan nailed down in 1970, and this sounds like an embryonic version of what would follow. But that in no way detracts from the overall quality of the record itself. The album starts with a version of "I Call My Baby Pussycat" that is funkier and superior to the one that was re-recorded by Funkadelic for America Eats It's Young, and contains other hit-worthy tracks like "My Automobile," "Funky Woman," and "Nothing Before Me But Thang." It also has the hilarious "Little Old Country Boy" which is unlike anything else in Clinton's catalogue.

The album was originally released on Invictus, a label formed by the Holland/Dozier/Holland team after they split from Motown in 1968. "Invictus" is Latin for "unconquered" and also the title of a poem by William Ernest Henley with an interesting history, and like the P-Funk phenomena itself, reflects the spreading influence of the black-power movement at the dawn of the 70s. Osmium has been reissued numerous times, under numerous titles, by numerous labels, sometimes with bonus tracks, sometimes without. As far as I can tell, the bonus tracks haven't been on an in-print edition of the album for years, which is too bad because they were taken from singles that were just as good as anything on the album proper if not better. Here is one of them--this is some funky stuff.

The Mothership Connection

I have really been enjoying the recent Honda Odyssey commercials featuring Parliament's 1976 smash "Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)." But let's face it, if you are considering buying a Honda Odyssey you are among a handful of the most un-funky creatures in the Universe. Sir Nose d'Voidoffunk drives an Odyssey. Rumpofsteelskin drives an Odyssey. The truly funky among us drive Dodge Caravans. The truly, truly, freaky-deaky funky drive Grand Caravans.*

I saw P-Funk live at Constitution Hall in Washington D.C. in 1992. While they were musically as tight as ever, and both Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell were there, I wish I had been able to see them back in the 70s when the shows were a true all-out spectacle. I also wish I had been able to see Glenn Goins perform. This clip from a 1977 show in Houston is among the best things I have seen on YouTube.

*Full disclosure: I drive a Grand Caravan and am unarguably the funkiest organism in the Universe.**
**Full, full disclosure: Only half of the above statement is true, I will leave it to you to decide which one.