May 27, 2012: "Let's Straighten It Out."

Coming down off the headiness of the 30th birthday madness has been somewhat of a process this last week, with the minutes, hours and days ticking by more slowly than usual…a friend of mine jokingly said, “well shit Dylan, that’s what it’s like after you turn 30.” I personally blame it less on my passage into a new set of digits and more on the fact that it’s just been a gloomy, moody, draggin’-ass week…ain’t like I never had one of those before I was 30. But, here I am at the end of it, feeling damn good and ready to finish out the school year strongly, then taking on a summer full of music, travel, and generally positive vibrations. As usual, I have some fantastic, rare records to help usher in this coming season…the diggin’s been good lately, what can I say. And so it goes…

The Soul Searchers: "Salt Of The Earth"

Gotta start it all off with a tribute to the late, great Chuck Brown, the oft-proclaimed “father of go-go” but so much more.  I found a copy of this record a couple years back, kinda steep in price, but I was willing to pay ‘cause I’d been looking for it for a while at that time.  Come to find out, that copy had a nasty warp…not bad enough to skip the vinyl, but enough to affect the play quality significantly.  So, fast-forward to this past Wednesday, while out digging with a friend in SE Portland, I find another copy for dirt cheap, and in way better shape.  Took it home and remembered once again what an incredible album it truly was…DJ’s love these early Soul Searchers sides for the breaks, but beyond that there is a wonderful, unified artistic statement to “Salt Of The Earth” that puts it in a category of its own.  The foundations of go-go are here, in more of a raw funk format…see “Ashley’s Roachclip,” “Funk For The Folks” and “If It Ain’t Funky” for numerous breaks and samples, complete with the Afro-percussion tinge that so expertly defined go-go as a specific sound.  However, let’s go past the breaks for a moment.  Opener “I Rolled It You Hold It” (they made this record for the heads, that’s for damn sure) is pure jazz-funk-fusion, right up there with Kool & The Gang and/or the Blackbyrds for sheer jazz-funkiness, with the band flashing their dominant chops.  “Blow Your Whistle” is hardcore funk that will make even the most jaded beat-seeker’s ears perk up, it simply stomps a path right through to the one while still keeping the party going.  “Ain’t It Heavy” is East Coast harmony soul mixed up with psych-rock mixed up with early synth meditation, exploring a bold and fearless new territory in its genre mashing.  The result of all this is the creation of a record so staggeringly different and potent as to forever eliminate the labeling of Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers as a tag-line footnote in music history, rather elevating them to penultimate revolutionaries of a certain sound and time.  Like Chuck says, “one, two, sock it to your biscuit.”

Hysear Don Walker: "Complete Expressions"

A 30^th birthday present from my mom.  Strictly for the rhodes heads.  Hysear Don Walker is a somewhat mysterious figure…he worked as a sideman with Young-Holt Unlimited for a time, and the Chicago/post-Ramsey Lewis style of grooved-out, live-in-the-studio sounding keyboard jams is in full effect throughout this LP.  This record is painfully short, but manages to be effective in its evocation of ethereal rhodes tone and mood.  It has a subdued, very personal quality to it, with only “Fat Flower, Skinny Stilk” and “Hydel” really upping the tempo.  The other tracks, particularly “Inner Face,” “Jade Silhouettes” and the Beatles cover “Dear Prudence” exude a sort of pensive energy that rewards more upon repeated listens.  This is the kind of album for a glistening early morning, coffee in hand and thoughts in flux, the day coming subtly to life just as the songs from this LP gently persuade and awaken.  Singular.

Boobie Knight & The Soulciety: "Soul Ain't No New Thing"

Super-rare and super-dank.  Yet another album that in some way involves soul mastermind Harvey Fuqua III, who I’ve talked about extensively in previous posts.  His full contribution to this LP is a bit muddled…he’s listed in the songwriting credits, and in the liner notes is described as having had the idea to form the Soulciety as a band, but it is unclear as to whether or not he served in the capacity of svengali-auteur for the Soulciety in the same way he did for his other brainchildren the New Birth, the Nite-Liters, etc.  Name headliner and band drummer Boobie Knight certainly appears to be adding his own manic zaniness to the music, which has some commonality with other Fuqua artists but in the end is stranger, heavier and more psychedelic.  The all-time cut here is the B-Boy breaking classic “Ego Tripping,” an insanely fast funk workout that showcases the band in all its glory.  Other notable tracks are the title song—a rumination on the concept of “soul” being nothing new to those who invented it—as well as “Lettin’ Happiness In,” “The Changing Game” and “Power To The People,” all of which continue in the same mode as “Ego Tripping,” blending furiously churning funk with political, acid-chant proto-rap and a severe, distorted grunginess.  Doesn’t seem like these guys ever really had a hit, which makes sense…this is straight-up underground, it is to James Brown what Busdriver is to Jay-Z in modern hip-hop.

Ike White: "Changin' Times"

So, I post a lot of rare records here, but this is some private press, beyond-rare funkiness.  Any fan of the Bay Area funk sound of acts like Sly Stone, Tower Of Power, early Pointer Sisters, Graham Central Station, the Headhunters, Betty Davis, etc. will want to investigate this.  This was recorded while Ike was an inmate at Tehachapi State Prison, believe it or not, and how anyone managed to get such a clean, full sound in that setting is beyond me.  I mean, was there a fully stocked, pro-grade recording studio in this prison or what?  Production was done by War’s Jerry Goldstein and former Sly & The Family Stone drummer Greg Errico, and that’s about all the liner notes give the listener, other than a quoted endorsement of Ike White by Stevie Wonder (…?).  There are no musician credits, which leads me to wonder what Ike was playing, ‘cause these songs are amazing…I know he’s on vocals, and I’m guessing he might be on guitar as well.  Some of the songs have such a unified coherence that they almost suggest Ike may have been a self-contained writer/performer-of-all-instruments in the mode of Shuggie Otis or Junie, but alas, such theories are mere conjecture, and aside from trying to track down Ike himself, I don’t exactly know how one might find answers to these questions.  This is all a sidebar, however, to the exceptional grooves found here, from the spaced-out synth/guitar jams “Antoinette” and “I Remember George” to the breakbeat favorite “Love And Affection,” which features Ike rappin’ about his sexual frustration stemming from his prison stay, with plenty of criminal-justice-system puns for good measure.  I’ve never heard anything like this record…it has its influences, sure, but it is truly in its own head-space…behind bars but freer than the clear blue sky itself.

May 17, 2012.

I’m approaching my 30th birthday this week, with some trepidation perhaps, but a certain verve and enthusiasm as well…I mean, why not? Each day, hour, minute, second is what you make it, regardless of what point on the chronological spectrum it occurs. I am lucky enough to be surrounded by an unbelievably supportive, affirming, positive network of family and friends, and then of course there is my anchor in this often-confusing and tangled sea, my wife Dolly. Having this kind of love and beauty in my life is my own personal definition of success, as the mind-numbing bureaucracy of the so-called “professional” world has an unfortunate tendency to obscure the truly important things. I love and am loved…30th birthday or otherwise, there is no substitute for that. In keeping with this personal theme, I feel as though I have no choice but to name this particular entry “The Soul Iconoclast Series,” as each of the artists and LP’s I’m discussing this time out have their own unique and idiosyncratic way of approaching the “soul” genre, a label with a scope so wide and vague as to signify nothing at all except, perhaps, a general sort of sensibility. It becomes clear in the work of artists like those mentioned below that labels and tags have little to no importance in the feeling one gets from the music, and the musicians mentioned in this go-round have feel for DAYS…as well as three individualized aesthetics that manage to connect the dots from one soul-sound landmark to the next. So, that being said, “swing down sweet chariot stop and let me ride…”

Swamp Dogg: "Total Destruction To Your Mind"

Can’t stop listening to this…Swamp Dogg and his entire vibe, especially on this debut LP, are a sort of underground musical addiction that any deep soul head worth their salt can appreciate.  Swamp Dogg (Jerry Williams, Jr.) has made appearances in this blog before, in the Doris Duke and Freddie North posts, both of which he produced.  “Total Destruction…,” however, is Dogg’s own artistic vision as intended for himself, and what a wonderful, twisted, truly bizarre vision indeed.  The music—recorded with a staggering lineup of Muscle Shoals’ famed Swampers session crew—is like a less-mass-appeal-oriented version of the great Stax and Atlantic soul sides of the time, complete with subtle horn arrangements, early ‘70’s electric piano, and an “it-feels-like-you’re-in-the-studio-with-these-dudes” production aesthetic.  The curveball, though, is Williams’ demented lyric-writing, which strays completely from its contemporary mainstream, instead offering a fascinating, and even sometimes disturbing, look into the psyche of the Swamp Dogg character, with Dogg’s voice sounding like Otis Redding gone totally off the rails, a lilt and a howl in the same breath.  While “Synthetic World” may muse about the present and all its ills, “The World Beyond” is a reflection from a post-nuclear survivor.  This sort of contradiction is on display throughout the album, as tender Southern love ballads nestle up to grimy, surreal funk and soul workouts with strikingly odd concerns and problems at their center.  Getting into this record isn’t so much “total destruction to your mind,” as the title warns, but rather is like discovering a little slice of essential listening that you’ve been missing your whole life.  Swamp Dogg is definitely a hit among those in the know, but deserves wider exposure for his very strange, very wonderful contributions to soul, funk, rock, etc.  Down-home and out-there all at once.

Lamont Dozier: "Love And Beauty (The New Lamont Dozier Album)"

There are many varying reports as to the sources of this material, as some of it is clearly and audibly Lamont Dozier, while other songs sound like full-on Holland-Dozier-Holland collaborations, with zero defined Dozier solo presence at all.  The tracks are a bit of a mishmash, ranging from hugely-arranged Invictus soul productions to relatively sparse, funky instrumental numbers.  While this doesn’t do a lot for the continuity of the album as a whole, it can almost be seen as a snapshot of a very exact point in Detroit’s early ‘70’s soul scene.  That aspect, combined with the fact that practically anything H-D-H touched at this time was golden, makes for a rewarding, historically curious listening experience.  My picks for key tracks are the record’s only hit, “Why Can’t We Be Lovers”—a classic, lush ‘70’s soul ballad if ever there was one—and the closing set of instrumentals, “Enough Of Your Love” and “Slipping Away,” which sound like Funkadelic breaking bread with the MG’s & The Funk Brothers at Smokey Robinson’s house.  Despite featuring such a scattershot song selection, this album represents a necessary and significant entry in the soul diaspora.

Allen Toussaint: "Toussaint (From A Whisper To A Scream)"

This rounds out my classic Toussaint trilogy, and is definitely the rarest of his early ‘70’s solo LP’s (the others being “Life, Love & Faith” and “Southern Nights”).  As always, Toussaint displays a dizzying array of styles and sounds, while still being firmly rooted in the New Orleans R&B traditions at the essential core of his musicality.  This is a bit of a rawer, less-slickly-produced effort than everything that came afterwards, which is wonderful in that it retains the same kind of down-home feel as the Toussaint-produced early Meters sides, although on this project he employs a different set of New Orleans session pros, among them Dr. John, Earl Turbinton and John Boudreaux.  Toussaint and the crew run the musical gamut here, from the radio-ready “Sweet Touch Of Love” to a more subdued reading of the oft-covered “Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky.”  “From A Whisper To A Scream” is the album’s best cut, a moody ballad that features a strong and affecting vocal performance by Toussaint himself.  The instrumentals on side two are some of the more interesting items in Toussaint’s rich and varied catalogue, with “Pickles” standing out as an exceedingly unique merging of blues and classical piano forms.  Toussaint is at his effortless peak here, crafting ingenious melodic hooks and lyrics over some decidedly cooking grooves from the house band.  If you’re any kind of NOLA music fan, this belongs in your collection.