Tag: Soul

Categories
Cover Feature Music Music Features News

So Long, Sam

Stax salutes a fallen hero. (Photo: Courtesy Stax Museum of American Soul)

Back during the initial flowering of Stax Records, as the label went from success to success in its first half-dozen years, and all its rooms buzzed with an ever-expanding staff trying to keep up with popular demand, one star in particular had a tendency to saunter away from the studio, where the action was, and take a detour down Stax’s back hallways from time to time. Deanie Parker, one of the label’s first office employees who soon became their lead publicist, remembers it well — that’s where she worked. 

“Every now and then, he just walked in the door,” she recalls a little wistfully, “with little gifts for the girls in the office, little packages. That’s the kind of person he was.”

Now, scores of mourners will be sending flowers to that same soul singer, Sam Moore, the high tenor partner of Dave Prater in Stax super duo Sam & Dave, who died at the age of 89 on January 10th in Coral Gables, Florida, from post-surgery complications. This week, we pay tribute to the great Sam Moore by revisiting the pivotal role he played in the history of Stax and all soul music, as remembered by two who were right there with him: Deanie Parker and David Porter.

(Photo: Bill Carrier Jr. | Courtesy of The Concord API Stax Collection)

Sam Moore: The Stax Years

The quieting of one of soul music’s most expressive voices sent powerful shock waves throughout the music world — certainly among his late-career collaborators like Bruce Springsteen, but not least in Memphis, where Moore and Prater, singing the songs of Porter and Isaac Hayes, helped bring the Stax sound to its fullest fruition in the mid-’60s, becoming overnight sensations with hits like “Hold On, I’m Comin,’” “You Don’t Know Like I Know,” “I Thank You,” and “Soul Man.” 

Even then, “Sam Moore got along especially well with the administrative staff,” says Parker, recalling those spontaneous gifts. “He was the most gregarious of the duo. He was a great conversationalist and very personable. Dave was rather laid-back, kind of quiet.

“Keep in mind, now, that I was not in the studio with him all the time because I was in administration,” Parker goes on. “But because of our proximity to each other, it gave me an opportunity to get up and, when the record light was not on in Studio A, go in and observe and listen — not only to their rehearsals, but to the final takes and the playback.” 

Surely anyone at Stax was rushing down the hall to hear the hot new duo’s latest, once the hits were hitting, for they were taking the Stax recipe to a whole new level of artistry. Yet while those songs are now part of the Stax canon, the definitive statements of the Memphis Sound, the success of two newcomers named Sam & Dave was not a foregone conclusion when they arrived.

Deanie Parker heading up the publicity desk at Stax (Photo: Courtesy Bill Carrier Jr. | The Concord API Stax Collection)

Newcomers

“There was no one interested in Sam & Dave,” songwriter David Porter told Rob Bowman in the liner notes for The Complete Stax/Volt Singles: 1959-1968. “It was like a throwaway kind of situation [to] see if anything could happen with them.” Indeed, it seemed no one at Atlantic Records, who had a distribution deal with Stax, knew what to do with this singing duo from Florida, who’d had little luck with their scattered singles on the Marlin, Alston, and Roulette labels. Despite this, said Porter, “I was very much interested in Sam & Dave.”

But were Sam & Dave interested in Memphis? Atlantic had “loaned” the duo to the smaller label that was showing so much promise, but in 1965 Stax was hardly a household name. Moore’s reaction, according to Parker, was, “Who wants to go to Memphis?” Moore had his sights set on crossover pop stardom in the Big Apple, not moving to what seemed like a backwater. “He really did not have a positive impression about Memphis,” Parker says. “And apparently he was not all that familiar with Stax, which stands to reason, because when Sam & Dave got here, we only had a couple of stars. We just had Rufus and Carla, Booker T. and the M.G.’s, the Mar-Keys, and Otis [Redding]. I don’t know that we had more than those in the category of the top stars.”

Moore himself described the situation hilariously in his acceptance speech for Sam & Dave’s induction into the Memphis Music Hall of Fame in October 2015. “When Dave and I first came to Memphis,” Moore recalled, “the first person I saw was David Porter. He had on a small hat, a big sweater, and his pants looked like pedal pushers. Water came into my eyes.” Moore paused for laughter with impeccable comic timing. “Then it got worse: I saw Isaac. Isaac had on a green shirt with a low-cut neck, like that, a white belt, chartreuse pants, pink socks, and white shoes. I started crying harder. I wanted to go home.”

There must have been more than a little truth to that, for, as Moore went on to explain, “I had in mind to sing like Jackie Wilson, James Brown, Wilson Pickett … but then they introduced us to these two guys and we went inside and they introduced us to the songs. And they didn’t sound nothing like Jackie Wilson and all these people! And then I turned to Dave … and he was trying to get a phone number to get to the airport.  

“Being the new kids on the block, we had nothing to say. So we had to go on in there.”

In fact, they were walking into the Stax brain trust, which had always dared to be different. When Sam & Dave’s pre-Stax singles tried to emulate the more polished soul of Wilson or Sam Cooke, albeit without their orchestral flourishes, the results came off as rather corny. Now it was 1965, and pop music was getting edgier, from Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” to the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Even James Brown, whose biggest hits had been ballads like “Try Me,” was cooking up material like “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” 

Porter and Hayes mapping out the next Sam & Dave hit (Photo: Courtesy Bill Carrier Jr. | The Concord API Stax Collection)

Dream Team

David Porter, who saw their potential early on, inched them toward a rawer take on soul music when he penned the shuffling, feel-good “A Place Nobody Can Find” for them, though the B-side, written by Porter and Steve Cropper, was a more tender ballad, with sassy horns thrown in for good measure. Unlike their later hits, Prater was given the lead vocal, though Moore’s upper register parts hinted at the harmonies that were to come. It wasn’t until their next single that Porter and Hayes teamed up to produce the duo, and their nascent songwriting partnership blossomed. And they gelled not only in the substance of the songs, with Porter crafting lyrics for Hayes’ music, but in the strategy they mapped out for the two new kids on the block.

Reflecting on that strategy today, Porter says that Sam & Dave “didn’t have a concept as far as the artistic direction that they needed to go. That’s why Jerry Wexler, the president of Atlantic Records, brought them to Memphis, in hopes of finding whatever that was — he didn’t know what it was. But we had our concept of what we wanted to do, and that was to bring it out of the church, the spirituality out of the church, and have the music emphasize what we called the low end of it, the bass, drums, and guitar, and the underlying chord progressions in the low end, paired with the gospel persona of it, the spirituality of the church.”

And yet, as with Ray Charles and so much of the finest soul music, the gospel underpinnings supported very secular, worldly sentiments. Lyrically, Porter paired the world of the bluesman with the spirit of church. And that came as a shock to the singers, who had both grown up singing in church choirs. 

“David Porter and Sam could clash,” Parker recalls, “but it wasn’t hostile, and it didn’t last but a few minutes. It was like they were sparring, you know? Of course, Isaac’s thing was the keyboard, he was the melody man, and Porter was the lyricist. And sometimes Porter had to stop and help both of the guys understand what he meant when he wrote, ‘Coming to you on a dusty road.’ You know what I’m saying? Because this was not Sam & Dave’s environment. This was David Porter’s environment from the area around Millington, Tennessee.” 

And so a great foursome was born, beginning with the single “I Take What I Want,” which, as Bowman notes, “was to provide the model for the majority of Sam & Dave’s Stax 45s.” By the time “Hold On, I’m Comin’” dropped in March of 1966, topping the R&B charts and reaching number 21 on the pop charts, that model was locked in. After crafting a song and a sound, Porter and Hayes would only need to give the duo a brief rundown before they got it. Porter can still picture it today: “I’m standing there with them, and I’m looking at them as I give them the lyric sheet. We go through the melody at the piano, and then by the time they get on the microphone, they go into another world. They made it their own, and that’s when you know you’ve got something special.”

And so, even if “Sam was the dominant one,” as Parker recalls, and more prone to pushback, both Sam and Dave were consummate professionals. “We had to go on in there,” as Moore recalled, and they did. 

Porter says, “There never was a comment like, ‘Well, I don’t want to do that song. I don’t like that song.’ Because we produced the albums, even when we were doing a song by some other writer, and on occasion we would do that, they still didn’t object. They would bring their own spirit and commitment to wanting to make it as good as it could possibly be. And they did that.”

The Key to the Speedboat

The foursome’s recipe for success not only gave Sam & Dave’s career a boost; it solidified Stax’s standing as a label. As Robert Gordon writes in Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion, “their album Hold On, I’m Comin’ proved to be the breakthrough for Stax’s album sales. In all the company’s years through 1965, they’d released only eight albums. … In 1966 alone they released eleven albums and Sam & Dave’s Hold On went to number one on the R&B album sales chart. Albums were good business.” 

Parker likens it to the fledgling label acquiring a sleek new machine. “They reminded me of a speedboat,” she says. “A boat that nobody was 100 percent familiar with because they were not on the water in the speedboat every day. They had to figure out a lot of things mechanically, and they had to become acquainted with each other. And I’m talking about Sam and Dave and David and Isaac. Once Sam and Dave found their groove with David and Isaac, it was like they had found the key to speedboat. They then began to realize that they had more going for them with their new producers than they’d ever imagined.”

If the speedboat was designed by the producers, Porter makes it clear that Sam & Dave supplied the spark of ignition. “You, as a creator, can create something that you know is strong and good, but when you have an artist that’s able to create their own individuality through the spirit of what you’ve done, then you’ve got something special. That’s the thing that made Sam Moore such a special talent, as well as Dave: They would go into the ownership of the message. I would tell them where the vibe was, and they would have to live the spirit of the message. That’s where true artistry comes in. And the more songs we wrote for them, the more comfortable they would get into doing it.”

Or, as Porter wrote on social media after Moore’s death, Sam & Dave “were always filled with passion, purity, individuality, and believability, grounded in soul.” 

The road grew dustier and rockier as the years rolled on, with Atlantic claiming ownership of all Stax masters prior to 1968, and taking Sam & Dave away from Memphis. The duo never reached the heights of their Stax records again, and split apart as Moore struggled with addiction through the ’70s. Yet, with the help of his wife Joyce MacRae, whom he wed in 1982 and who now survives him, he kicked drugs (coming to support several GOP candidates along the way) and revived his career without Prater (who died in a car crash in 1988). 

By the time he spoke to the Memphis Music Hall of Fame 10 years ago, Sam Moore had fully embraced his Stax past. “Coming from a humble beginning, with no formal training in singing or anything, we were just two guys who got out there and took the church with us, like Al Green did. … I’m going to say this to you: Thank you Memphis people, the band, the friends that Dave and I met all those years. …They believed in us. They stuck with us. Every record company that we had been with just didn’t know what to do with us. Sixty years later, I’ve been doing this. I’m blessed.”

Sam Moore knew he’d helped build something for the ages. As David Porter reflects now, “The music that was done by the four of us together will live on forever. There’s no doubt in my mind.” 

Categories
Music Music Blog

Ponderosa Stomp Recap: 24 Hours in NOLA

CREDIT: Alex Greene

Alex Greene

Andria Lisle, Vaneese Thomas, and Carla Thomas

Although Ponderosa Stomp, the New Orleans-based love letter to lesser-known soul, blues, rockabilly, and garage artists, was cut short by the fizzled Hurricane Nate, the festival was hopping last Friday. Many of the performers and audience alike stayed at the Ace Hotel, where the daytime hours were filled with panel discussions and interviews as part of the event’s Music History Conference. While vinyl junkies perused the record bins in a side room, and that evening’s bands rehearsed in a closed space near the lobby, hundreds more filed through the hotel’s main event hall to hear some history.

For those eager to hear personal tales of the music world, it was an embarrassment of riches. An early highlight was the panel dedicated to the late Billy Miller, visionary co-founder of Norton records. The label has released many Memphis treasures, from archival re-issues of rockabilly and Big Star to more recent works by the Reigning Sound. Miller passed away last year at the young age of 62, making this memorial panel an emotional one. His wife and partner, Miriam Linna, said that she was especially proud of his last labor of love, a collection of lost Dion tracks from 1965. The panel was moderated by the unflappable Michael Hurtt, of Royal Pendletons fame, also a musicologist in his own right.

Another Memphis panel featured Reggie Young, guitarist extraordinaire with Hi Records and American Studios. Young was not in the best health, but certainly of sound mind and body as he exchanged comments with moderator Red Kelly on the landmark singles and albums of his career, beginning with his first encounter with Jack Clement and Bill Black at the Memphis “Home for Incurables” in the 1950s. The success of the Bill Black Combo (who were known to wear “BBC” suit coats) led to tours with the Beatles, Kinks, and Yardbirds. When Kelly cued up James Carr’s “The Dark End of the Street,” featuring Young’s guitar work, the crowd gave the record a standing ovation. Similarly, upon hearing just the guitar break in Joe Tex’s “Skinny Legs and All,” the crowd once again rose to applaud. Young also recalled taking a lunch break while recording with King Curtis. At the local diner, Curtis picked up a menu and began riffing on menu items in musical terms, including some “boiling Memphis guitar.” The group loved it so much, they skipped lunch and returned to the studio to cut “Memphis Soul Stew.”

Another fine panel tied to Memphis was Andria Lisle’s discussion with Carla and Vaneese Thomas. They recounted their early love of the Teen Town Singers, and the pride they felt when Dave Clark, being dubbed “The World’s Oldest Teenager” at an award ceremony, turned to kneel before Rufus Thomas as he looked on, saying that honor could only go to him. Carla also recalled writing songs just for fun as a teen, as her father recorded on a home reel-to-reel tape deck. One of these was a little tune called “Gee Whiz (Look at his Eyes),” the recording of which Rufus took down to Stax on a whim, launching her career.

When dusk settled on the Crescent City, festival goers migrated over to the Orpheum to see that evening’s full roster of bands. It all kicked off with Billy Boy Arnold, who delivered a soft-spoken “I Wish You Would,” along with other blues. A swamp pop revue followed, featuring T.K. Hulin and G.G. Shinn, and the latter’s “Harlem Shuffle” was galvanizing. Some fine, funky soul followed with Warren Storm and Willie West, but it was Winfield Parker who really brought the house down with his voice, an under-appreciated treasure of the soul genre.

It should be noted that a perplexing audio mix plagued much of the night, but every performer rose above it with aplomb. Barbara Lynn, a Stomp regular by now, was in fine voice and demonstrated some sublime guitar work. Archie Bell whipped the house into a frenzy, both with his “Tighten Up” and the lesser-known “Strategy,” which had him screaming “I’m soaking wet! I’m soaking wet” at the song’s climactic chorus, perhaps in sympathy with the Gulf Coast being on the receiving end of Hurricane Nate.

Roy Head carried on over the full horn section rave up during “Treat Her Right,” another Stomp favorite. And then came the abrupt shift to cajun stomping music with Doug Kershaw, who was a little out of it, but sang with gusto every word of his hit that he could recall. “He’s got Muskrat hides hanging by the dozens/ Even got a lady Mink, a Muskrat’s cousin/ Got ‘em out drying in the hot, hot sun/ Tomorrow papa’s gonna turn ‘em into money.” It had the floor shaking with knee-slapping joy, and Kershaw’s freestyle fiddling over the chord changes made the band sound almost psychedelic.

But the psychedelia was just beginning. Roky Erickson, who’s reprise of 13th Floor Elevators cuts has been known to be spotty at other festivals, was completely on point this night, and the band supported him mightily. The chemistry in this band led “Dr. Ike,” festival organizer Ira Padnos, to exclaim that it was the closest thing he could imagine to seeing the Elevators themselves.

Finally, show closers the Gories hit the stage fast and furious, building a glorious wall of noise with minimalist, primitivist swagger. Again, the ferocious music rose above the sound mix and the house was gyrating to Mick Collins’ blasts of noise guitar, soaring over the wiry groove of guitarist Dan Kroha and drummer Peggy O’Neill. For those Memphians who have long adulated this stunning band, it was a fine, gritty apotheosis to the night and the perfect melding of R&B, blues, punk, and unclassifiable parts and grease off the garage floor.

Alas, though Nate was a fizzle in the Big Easy the next day, a city curfew forced the cancellation of the second night’s show. Although there was an impromptu concert in the Ace Hotel on Saturday afternoon, this did not include performances by Don Bryant or the Thomas sisters. Indeed, the Bo-Keys, crack soul band of the current era in Memphis music, didn’t even make it to New Orleans due to bad weather or the threat of it.

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Music Video Monday: Marco A.

Good morning, Monday. Time for a music video to brighten your day. 

In this clip for Marco A.’s “Follow Your Heart”, the R&B singer endures a text-based relationship crisis in the middle of a recording session. Directed by Robb Smith of Memphis-based production team Rockwell Visual and shot in the New School Media studios, the dance-heavy video matches the smooth 80s tone of the catchy song. 

Music Video Monday: Marco A.

If you’re a band, artist, director, or other interested party, and you would like to see your music video featured on Music Video Monday, email cmccoy@memphisflyer.com. 

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Amy

There’s a strange contradiction in the hearts of performers. On the one hand, being the center of attention of a large group of people (“public speaking”) regularly tops surveys of people’s biggest fears. On the other hand, being the center of attention of a large group of people is the ultimate goal of any performer. If you want to get rich — or even make a living — as a musician, you’re going to have to be able to thrive in conditions that the vast majority of people would call hell.

That’s the big takeaway from Amy, the new documentary on the rise and fall of Amy Winehouse directed by Asif Kapadia. This is the director’s second documentary after 2010’s excellent Senna. But while the story of Formula One racing legend Ayrton Senna was mostly triumph, Winehouse’s story is a slow-motion tragedy that makes for a much more complex and challenging film.

As in Senna, Kapadia uses all archival footage stitched together with a keen editing eye. There are no talking heads — the few contemporary interviews are all presented as voice-only under relevant footage. We first meet Winehouse in 1998 at age 14 singing “Happy Birthday” with her friends Lauren Gilbert and Juliette Ashby. Her prodigious talent is already evident, even though she’s just a fresh-faced “North London Jewish girl,” as Island Records president Nick Gatfield calls her. Even then, she was a woman out of time. As Britpop and hip-hop dominated the London airwaves and the beginnings of dubstep seeped through the underground, Winehouse was idolizing Ella Fitzgerald and Tony Bennett. Her first producer Salaam Remi puts it, “She had the styling of a 70-year-old jazz singer.”

There’s no shortage of images of Winehouse as a dead-eyed junkie, but Kapadia is able to show her humanity, because he won the trust of her first manager Nick Shymansky, who happened to obsessively chronicle her early tours with a handheld digital camera. Of all the people in her orbit, Shymansky comes off the best. He apparently had a bit of an unrequited crush on Winehouse, but even after she fired him in a fit of pique, he still had her best interests at heart. That is not true about literally anyone else she surrounded herself with after her 2003 album Frank became an unlikely hit in England. She started hanging out at London’s trendy Trash nightclub, where she met her husband Blake Fielder-Civil. If you’ve ever known a pair of mutually reinforcing junkies, you already know what their relationship was like. Booze, pot, coke, crack, meth, heroin — you name it, they took it. Fielder-Civil was also a musician, but when Winehouse became the biggest star in the world in the mid-2000s, he became a professional enabler.

Not that Winehouse needed much enabling. The film depicts her as never recovering from her parents’ divorce at the age of 9. She was severely depressed as a teenager and a bulimic from age 15 until she died at 27. She wrote the songs that propelled her to stardom as a way to deal with her many issues, but it was one song in particular that seemed to have doomed her. “Rehab” was written about a failed intervention Shymansky, Gilbert, and Ashby staged for her, which was squelched by her increasingly careerist father. It was kind of an afterthought on the carefully crafted Back To Black album, but when it became her biggest hit, it took on the air of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Amy functions a companion piece to Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck. The two self-destructive musical prodigies had similar trajectories, but they were treated differently by the press and public. Cobain’s junk-induced suicide was an unexpected tragedy, while the world was practically taking bets on how long it would take Winehouse’s body to give out under the onslaught of a $16,000-a-week polysubstance habit. Amy does not hesitate to point the finger at the gawkers and paparazzi who fed them, even as Kapadia depends on their copious footage to fill out the overly long end of his film. Amy succeeds at humanizing Winehouse but leaves you feeling queasy at your own eagerness to watch the trainwreck.

Categories
Music Music Features

Teenie Hodges: 1946-2014

CREDIT: Robert Allen Parker

Mabon “Teenie” Hodges wrote a song that one could mistake for a 19th century gospel standard. “Take Me to the River,” which he penned with Al Green in 1973, has a startling simplicity to it. But then so did Teenie Hodges’ guitar playing. He was a master refiner of ideas and phrases, whittling them down to a profound and economical beauty.

Hodges passed away Sunday night in Dallas from complications of emphysema. He had gone to Austin in March to promote the film Take Me to the River, which is based in part on the world that Hodges lived in with his brothers Leroy Jr., a bassist, and Charles, a keyboardist. In Austin, they celebrated a lifetime of soul music and success. Teenie never made it back to Memphis, but his soul and his spirit leave an indelible mark on our city. The Mitchells and the Hodges are founding fathers of Memphis’ musical identity.

“My dad and mom had seven kids in four years,” Teenie’s brother Charles Hodges said last March before heading to Austin. “So there were three sets of twins in a row. Leroy (bass) is my oldest brother. Teenie is between Leroy and me. Teenie’s twin is a girl, and I have a boy twin. They had eleven kids in all.”

It was a musical home: Their father, Leroy Sr., had been a musician and kept a decidedly musical house. One might think that a home with so many brothers might collapse into a competitive mess. But that was not the case.

“We didn’t compete. We worked together,” Hodges said. “We didn’t go to school for it. It was a gift from God. My dad just helped us develop our talent.”

Robert Allen Parker

The Germantown Blue Dots, Teenie far right.

Named “Teenie” due to his diminutive stature, Hodges began playing in his father’s band at age 12 and was soon noticed by bandleader Willie Mitchell, who played a profound role in Teenie’s life. But Teenie made major contributions to the Mitchell empire too. “Howard Grimes,” Charles said. “Willie had another drummer after Al Jackson went with Booker T. and the MGs. Jeff Greer. … Willie wanted to change the drummer. So Teenie told him about Howard Grimes. We heard Howard, and he just blended in.”

The records that came from this period are classics and key elements to our musical culture as a city and as a country. Al Green, Ann Peebles, O.V. Wright, and the Hi-Rhythm albums don’t need further explanation. If you don’t know them intimately, you have a problem. The music Teenie made with Mitchell also became the gold standard for young players, and his openness as a person and a mentor provided a supreme example to younger players.

“Memphis lost a cornerstone of its musical identity,” Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars wrote of Hodges’ death. “Similar to Al Jackson, without Teenie, Memphis soul will never be the same. Teenie was so cool. He elevated the whole city singlehandedly. He was one of the real Memphis guitar heroes, like Scotty Moore, Roland Janes, Steve Cropper, and Reggie Young, playing melodies and rhythms on records that millions of people love worldwide. His guitar style is ingrained in the human collective consciousness.”

Joe Restivo, through his work with engineer Scott Bomar and his band the Bo-Keys, was occasionally called upon to fill in for the ailing guitarist.

“I didn’t quite understand his genius until I got to play within the context of Hi-Rhythm. There’s a way that whole thing fits together. That’s when the light bulb goes on. … His parts fit perfectly in relationship to Howard Grimes, to Charles, Leroy, [and] Hubie [keyboardist Archie Turner]. If you’re playing that role — and I had the opportunity to do that a couple of times — you find yourself doing Teenie. You can’t do anything else. It’s his style, his concept, where he laid it in the pocket.”

Charles addressed the same approach to music when we talked last March. “The bass player knew what I was going to do. I knew what the guitar player was going to do. The drummer knew what we all were going to do. We didn’t get in anyone’s way. We came together spiritually. Teenie, Leroy, and I are biological brothers. But Howard and Hubie are just like our biological brothers. We’re spiritually connected. We just feel each other.”

Categories
Sing All Kinds We Recommend

Wild Bill’s Is Going Strong

Wild Bill’s reopened in December under new owners after having been closed since June of 2013. They now serve food and are open every day for lunch. On Fridays and Saturdays, they are open until 3 a.m., with live blues and soul from 10 p.m. Every out-of-town needs to see Wild Bill’s. That rhythm section is tough to beat. Here are the Memphis Bluesmasers with Ms. Nikki and a woman screaming in the background. Bless her heart. 

Memphis Bluesmasters feat. Ms. Nickki-I’m Gettin It-Live at Wild Bill’s from Memphidelity on Vimeo.

Wild Bill’s Is Going Strong

Categories
Calling the Bluff Music

Worth Checking Out: The Itis By S.O.U.L.

SOUL_The_Itis_Ep-front-large.jpg

I recently became aware of S.O.U.L., an indie hip-hop group that puts you in the mind of early Outkast blended with a little Big K.R.I.T., and a couple other dope lyricists.

S.O.U.L. recently dropped their debut EP, The Itis. For it to be their first official release, the project is pretty impressive. The Memphis-bred rhymers fuse honest, insightful, and, at times, entertaining rhymes with organic beats on The Itis.

The EP’s title derives from an episode of The Boondocks, an animated television series, also titled “The Itis.” The episode, which the group uses an excerpt of on the EP’s intro, focuses on the fatigue a person experiences from eating unhealthy food.

The Itis is definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan of hip-hop. Stream and download the EP below. Some tracks I’m feeling off the project are “The Real,” “Throwed Off,” “Ghetto Girl,” and “Light Up.”


Download Mixtape | Free Mixtapes Powered by DatPiff.com

Follow me on Twitter: @Lou4President
Friend me on Facebook: Louis Goggans
Check out my website: ahumblesoul.com

Categories
Music Music Features

Hard-Earned Homecoming

CREDIT: Lance Murphey

Even for those with proven greatness, the pursuit of stardom can be a cruel fate. For John Gary Williams — the singer for the Mad Lads, whose success on Stax’s Volt subsidiary was derailed when he was drafted in 1966 — the possibility of redemption is at hand. Thanks to the hard work of Williams, Emmy-winning producer John Hubbell, and Stax eminence Deanie Parker, Williams has another shot.

When Williams returned to the U.S., he was reinstated into the Mad Lads (against the wishes of his band mates) at the insistence of Stax founder Jim Stewart. A mix-up in 1968 involving the civil-rights-era agitators the Invaders landed him in prison. Upon his release, Williams recorded a long-missing 1973 self-titled solo album. Williams’ album was not released: a casualty of label mismanagement on a scale comparable to the period’s musical grandiosity. This is late-period Stax: Strings and a funky rhythm section combine for epic soul music.

This Saturday, he will perform in concert with Opus One and soul revivalists the Bo-Keys at the Levitt Shell. It’s the first performance of music from Williams’ album. Hubbell and Parker have worked for nearly a decade to locate the masters and negotiate their release, an effort still in the works. Hubbell and photographer Lance Murphey are also producing a documentary to tell Williams’ story. To watch the trailer, go to iseehopememphis.com and get on board with this Memphis homecoming.

John Gary Williams with Opus One and the Bo-Keys, Levitt Shell, Saturday, September 28th, 7:30 p.m. The concert is free.

Categories
Music Music Features

Master Blaster

Despite being blind since infancy and surviving the duel depredations of a hardscrabble east Detroit upbringing and child stardom to become one of the most celebrated pop musicians in recorded history, Steveland Judkins “Stevie Wonder” Morris doesn’t have a biography that can match the torment or weirdness of Ray Charles, James Brown, Al Green, Prince, or Michael Jackson. And, right, he missed out on the mythologizing that early death provided to Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, and Marvin Gaye.

Like his onetime Motown elder Smokey Robinson, he’s a relative normal (no, I haven’t forgotten about Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants) and a lifer whose music suggests those rather unexciting qualities. And also, right, a genius.

These days, Wonder is too often thought of — when thought of at all — as the Grammy-certified embodiment of middlebrow respectability: neither a hip-hop/neo-soul touchstone (like Gaye) nor a totem of crossover hip (like Brown).

But who else in soul/R&B has produced a deeper, more wide-ranging catalog? And how many can match his longevity? No other R&B artist who was making notable pop music when Wonder debuted, at age 12, with 1963’s “Fingertips (Part 2)” was still much of a factor well into the ’80s, much less 2005. That was when Wonder released the unexpectedly solid A Time To Love, his first proper studio album in a decade and an album that, aside from its few nods to hip-hop, could have been released in 1977 without sounding terribly out of place.

Wonder’s embrace of the middlebrow genteel — and its even more fervent returning affection — made him an institution during his fecund adult prime in the ’70s and well into an ’80s now best remembered for his soupy but somewhat underrated soundtrack smash “I Just Called To Say I Love You.” But that reputation overshadows how much of a politically tough-minded, musically idiosyncratic groove machine he was at his peak. And, perhaps just as much as the larger social forces coming to bear, he was the primal force that changed Motown, musically and in a business sense, in the incredibly fertile five-year period (1971-1976) after he turned 21 and seized control of his career, culminating with the overreaching but often brilliant double-record-and-then-some Songs in the Key of Life.

Some highlights of a discography ripe for rediscovery:

Love songs: Pre-emancipation Motown singles “I Was Made To Love Her” and “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” are well-oiled vehicles for Wonder’s irrepressible and — by Motown’s early standards — nearly chaotic vocal performance. But Wonder’s best love songs might be those that bookend what is, despite the elevated reputations of Innervisions and Songs in the Key of Life, his best album, 1972’s Talking Book. The opening “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” its synth-and-bongos intro the unlikely sound of a waking epiphany, might be the most wholly beautifully record he ever made. The closing “I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)” is a romantic hymn hypnotic in its repetitions.

Political songs: Aside from an early, Motown-mold-breaking Dylan cover (“Blowin’ in the Wind”), the then-19-year-old Wonder made his first foray into political pop with 1970’s “Heaven Help Us All,” singing someone else’s words over too-intrusive gospel-styled backing vocals and making them sound a lot tougher and smarter than they really were. On his own after that, Wonder proved a more astute commentator. Innervisions‘ “Living for the City” is an epic, personalized allegory for the civil rights movement that makes pained acknowledgement of its lost momentum. Wonder then devoted the second strongest synth riff of his career to the Nixon-era admonishment “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” a fed-up lament that’s lost little bite or relevance in subsequent decades.

Groove records: With the possible exception of Wonder-inheritor Prince, there may not be a modern R&B musician who so fully absorbed the variety of the black music canon. With its sassy, swinging horn fanfare, shout-outs to the greats (adding Glenn Miller to Ellington, Basie, and Armstrong), and joyful interjections from Wonder himself, “Sir Duke” captures this better than anything, though Wonder would extend his jazz tribute across 10 minutes of “Do I Do” with Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet. “Boogie On Reggae Woman” was a fruitful nod to the Jamaican contribution to the black pop diaspora, but Wonder topped it with 1980’s “Master Blaster (Jammin’),” still probably the best non-Jamaican reggae record ever. “Higher Ground” is a funk workout not even the Red Hot Chili Peppers could ruin. And on Talking Book‘s “Maybe Your Baby,” Wonder multi-tracks his own vocal into a trance-like rhythmic abstraction.

Devotional songs: Vocally, musically, and philosophically, Wonder may have been soul music’s least gospel-influenced star, at least through his own prime years. Songs in the Key of Life opens like Sunday morning, with the one-man-backing-choir of “Love’s in Need of Love Today” and the personal devotional “Have a Talk With God.” But, more often, Wonder found the spiritual in the form of others: Martin Luther King Jr. on the joyous “Happy Birthday,” a special someone who spurs contentment on the lovely “For Once in My Life,” and, most of all, a newborn daughter on “Isn’t She Lovely?”

Visionary, mystical, or otherwise beyond classification: “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” probably rivals latter Motown discovery Michael Jackson’s (and the Jackson Five’s) “I Want You Back” as the greatest kid-pop ever recorded. A 15-year-old Wonder runs roughshod over a locomotive Motown groove, yelping, “Got empty pockets, you see, I’m a poor man’s son!” at the climax of a conventional poor-boy-rich-girl love story turned into something more. “Visions” is Wonder’s ultimate testament of faith in this world, more affecting for how matter-of-fact it is, a blind man’s meditation on the certainty of leaves changing from green to brown. And “Superstition” is probably one of the greatest pop records: such a tough, gritty, and synthesized groove paired with an equally tough, questioning lyric about religion (“You believe in things you don’t understand, then you suffer”) that it would take more than a decade for another black pop musician to take up.