In this season of long, cold nights, various versions of "I'll Keep My Light in My Window" have been spending a lot of time on my turntable.
"I'll Keep My Light in My Window" was co-written and first performed by Leonard Caston, who had been a member of the 60s-era Chicago soul group the Radiants before joining Motown. There, he had his greatest success working with Eddie Kendricks; Caston co-produced Kendricks's biggest hit, "Keep On Truckin'" and co-wrote and co-produced the untoppable "Girl You Need a Change of Mind", among other things. Caston and his wife, Carolyn Majors, cut one LP, a self-titled flop that included their recording of "I'll Keep My Light in My Window".
The song was co-written by Terri McFaddin, who had collaborated with Caston on some songs for Kendricks and later went on to co-write Patrice Rushen's "Forget Me Nots".
I don't know how the song became a staple; as far as I can tell, no version of the song ever charted. Nonetheless, it's been recorded many, many times, both by gospel artists (e.g., the Mighty Clouds of Joy, Shirley Caesar, etc.) and secular ones (Diana Ross, Eruption, etc.). Here are five of my favorite versions.
This was the first version I heard, thanks to Chi Ali. I love the guitar part. This version was arranged by Tony Silvester from the Main Ingredient and the ubiquitous Bert "Super Charts" DeCoteaux.
The New York Community Choir was a group that included Phyllis Joubert and Benny Diggs; both made a bunch of great music that bridges the gap between the church and the disco. There are three versions of this recording: a truncated album version, a punched-up disco 12" version and this one, which is my favorite.
This was from of those eras where the Temptations were lacking not just in fashion sense but also in star power-- they had no Eddie Kendricks, no David Ruffin, no Dennis Edwards, not even a Damon Harris. Even so, their vocal and the arrangement are great.
Natural Elements is one of my favorite rap groups simply on the strength of a half-dozen mid- to late-90s 12"s and an EP. I was geeked to walk into the record store yesterday and see that after 15 years, they finally have a full-length album out:
1999 isn't their shelved Tommy Boy album, although it features many of the better tracks from it. It also features both sides of their Dolo single, their song from the Nervous comp, a great posse cut from a Mr. Voodoo 12" and a bunch of unreleased tracks. The credits say that everything was recorded in 1999, but a few of the tracks were released before then and a few sound like they might be more recent.
I hope it sells well enough that they release more material. There's a ton of great tracks Natural Elements did that still have never seen a legitimate CD or digital release, like the 2Face 12", Mr. Voodoo's 12"s, L-Swift's 12", the Fortress EP or this, which I would love to have a decent-sounding version of:
Here are a couple of rap covers that also would have made nice additions to 1999. I think the first was done as a promo for Stretch & Bobbito; although it has appeared on bootleg vinyl, every version I've heard sounds like a radio rip. The latter actually made it to a legit promo 12".
I'm really late in doing this but I've been meaning to offer big thanks to all who made my recent trip to NYC such a blast, including those who hosted me (Chairman Mao, mOma, Stimulus, Jared Boxx, Old Chris, Pablo & the rest of the Lost & Found crew, Radio Rios, Oskar Mann & the Never Not Working crew), those who passed through gigs (Amir, Jessica from Spectre, David Griffiths, Dave Tompkins, Mr. Finewine, Jonny Paychecks, Brian Coleman and everyone else) and, last and first, DJ Eleven, who is the most generous host and friend anyone could ask for.
I meant to key this post to Thanksgiving but got caught up actually celebrating Thanksgiving and then got sidetracked trying to find a copy of a record I was pretty sure I had stashed somewhere but evidently don't, Big Boe Melvin's version of "Thank You (Falletin' Me Be Mice Elf Agin)".
Anyhow, here's another version that's not really well-known. Aside from Sly's own remake, which on some days is my favorite song ever, this is about as close to good as covers of "Thank You" get:
When I was in NYC I picked this 12" up at Big City Records because the b-side is hilarious, but this is kind of a grower. The beat and Kangol-inspired flow are kind of whatever but it got me thinking about rarely rap songs offer any kind of realistic perspective on romance and wondering if the genre is somehow just fundamentally not engineered to do that.
I spent most of the day ripping vinyl and looking at news and quasi-news, including some video of teabagger protests and Harry Allen's exposé of post-VMA twitter lunacy. I was feeling really dismayed at how shrill, irrational and intolerant a lot of the public discourse is when I got to recording this:
The 21st Century Ltd. had a pretty limited discography; after this single got picked up by Atco they appeared on the Blacula soundtrack and I think dropped the "Ltd." and recorded an album for RCA. This track's melody and vocal sound a lot like Sly Stone's "Somebody's Watching You". Speaking of which, I'd forgotten how good this cover is, especially the intro:
Davis was a DC-area pianist and singer with a great voice-- he sounds uncannily like Ray Charles on some of his slower numbers. He later cut an LP on Black Fire.
Lee Fields's new album comes out Tuesday. I'm not crazy about retro soul as a genre but Truth & Soul really nail the production and also choose excellent songs. My favorite track is a remake of this:
I don't know anything about Top Shelf, but I believe the "P. Adams" in the credits is Patrick Adams, whose work with Black Ivory is for me the pinnacle of sweet soul. This ranks with the best of that stuff.
Mickey Murray released two pretty solid LPs, 1967's Shout Bamalama and 1970's People Are Together, which this is drawn from. The former has been reissued twice; the latter has not but oughtta be.
"Ace of Spades" is one of hundreds of songs credited to but not written by Deadric Malone a/k/a Don Robey, who was sort of the J. Prince of his day. Through Duke, Peacock, Backbeat and other labels Robey released mountains of great black music by the likes of Bobby Bland, Junior Parker, O.V. Wright, the Dixie Humminbirds and so on.
I've been obsessed with this song since first hearing it on the Trojan Rocksteady Box a few years ago.
Partly it's because it's a great, great song but also I couldn't quite put my finger on where he'd cribbed it from-- I recognized bits of Billy Stewart's "I Do Love You" (or is it "Sitting in the Park"? they're too similar) but it took me about two years to figure out that the intro was from the Alan Brandt/Bob Haymes tune "That's All", which is one of the prettiest standards I know.
Since receiving a nice plug over on O-Dub's soul-sides blog the other day I've noticed my downloads have tripled, so I presume there are a lot of folks who wandered over here from there.
Welcome.
Come on in, take off your coats. Set a spell.
Looking around, you may have noticed it's a little shabby. The design is blogger.com off-the-rack and there are no homey touches like nifty album art montages or clever photoshopped jpegs that fit a theme.
The content is seamier, too. There's a lot more rap music, much of it new, some of it unapologetically wrong, plus the occasional bad word. I'm aging less gracefully and more fitfully than Oliver.
Finally, there generally isn't much context, biographical, personal or otherwise. I post songs or mixes because I like them, trusting that if you like them you'll follow through by supporting artists, looking for more information on them, etc. I'll point your way but I won't hold your hand.
Now I'm not generally one to pander but I'm enjoying the attention and figure, hey, why not throw new readers a bone?
As a casual soul-sides reader, I'm attuned to O-Dub's three obsessions: cover versions, boogaloo & songstresses. I've been casting about for a song that would hit a trifecta, but couldn't think of anything beyond La Lupe's "Fever", which is great but a little too commercially available (regular AND remixed for those who need everything to be 130 bpm!).
So instead, let me salve the obsessions individually:
Los Johnny Jets were from Mexico. There are exactly two versions of "Tighten Up" with funnier ad-libs, Homer Simpson's and the sound-alike version by the Classmates, both of which repeat the "Hi everybody we're Archie Bell & the Drells" part verbatim.
Vivian Reed was a Broadway singer and her first LP is mostly showtunes, but this track has a soul pedigree. It was co-written by Barbara Acklin & the Chi-Lites' Eugene Record; Philly sweet soul kings Thom Bell & Bobby Martin arranged it.
As I was pulling the Jerry Washington LP to rip yesterday, I also grabbed a couple nearby Grover Washington, Jr. records that I hadn't listened to in a while.
When I started off buying jazz and funk I turned up my nose at Grover Washington records. I associated him with "Just the Two of Us", a song I can kind of ride for now but which I detested as a kid. It took some schooling from Beni B to make me bother to listen to funk stuff like "Mr. Magic", "Knucklehead", etc., but I was glad I did.
Still, some of Washington's music takes mellow over a precipice, followed by a queasy-making drop into smooth jazz territory. This is about as close to the edge as I care to follow him:
The seagull noises sound an alarm right away-- "THIS SHIT IS SMOOTH JAZZ!" If you're tempted to run for cover, wait it out to about the 45 second mark when the the drums and clavinet drop-- it's like an "all clear" as they balance out the new age-y ambience of the rest of the track. (BTW, the song was used well on Siah & Yeshua's "Visualz", a record that was vinyl-only and for a long time hard to track down; it's now in print on CD and mp3.)
This is another one I almost feel uncomfortable about liking-- soprano saxophone is probably the ultimate signifier of smooth jazz:
Not that there's anything so wrong with "smooth" per se. Peep game:
The "Smooth" radio format is some revolutionary (if throwed-back) shit, though. Outside of mixtapes, in how many other contexts do you hear music that's programmed not by its genre and not by the demographics of its listenership but by its abstract aesthetic?
My dad is deep in the Smooth lifestyle (dude was country when country wasn't cool, so to speak: He's been down with the Smoove unit since the mid-eighties when his avuncular cocoa co-worker Greg--he of the late-model zinfandel-colored something with the "LOAFIN" vanity plate--turned him out with some Najee), so whenever we go to visit him, it's wall-to-wall "Wave FM" or whatever--in the crib, in the convertible, while ordering assorted chicken-based wraps named after towns in Arizona, etc.--and I can honestly say that said station will seemingly play anything, by any artist, in any genre, from any time period, as long as it feels smooth. In one weekend, on one station, I heard Bobby Caldwell, late-period Miracles, Beck, Al Green, MacNeal and Niles, Paul Hardcastle, Etta James, The Deele, Dave Brubeck, Steely Dan, Maroon 5, Lee Morgan, Johnny Hammond, Jefferson Starship, Jobim, Talking Heads, and on and on and on.
Regardless of how one feels about the individual artists, where the fuck else do you hear that kind of sensibility in wide public broadcast? Those of you that can't get past the specifics of the playlist ("Fuck a Kenny G, thun!"), think of it this way: Imagine if there was some station that would play anything, by any artist, in any genre, from any time period, as long as it felt hard (settle down, Beavis): MC5, Public Enemy, Metallica, Prince Far I, Funkadelic, Alber Ayler, M.O.P., and on and on and on. Well, that's what's going on with a lot of these "Smooth" stations. You ain't gotta like it, but please recognize this for the soft bomb that it is.
The preceding was posted a few years ago on Soulstrut by james a/k/a James Cavicchia, a guy who ought to be writing for a living. While in general my feeling is that what happens on message boards should stay on message boards, that's one of the best pieces of music writing I've ever read. (For more on James as well as his meditation on summer songs, visit O-Dub's seasonal blog.)
James's reference to M.O.P. reminded me of the following possibly apocryphal exchange between them and a U.K. interviewer (I think this may have been in a Hip-Hop Connection interview, but I've never seen the piece firsthand) that highlights their love for smooth:
BILLY DANZE: Kenny G? He's dope! LIL' FAME: Kenny G is just like "God damn!" John Coltrane's alright but... I would buy a Kenny G CD. Coltrane's not like my era. But Kenny G, he makes music for black people and that shit is so beautiful. It's like the classical soul and the R&B soul when people sing, Kenny G plays that shit and makes it sound like it's singing, nigga! BILLY DANZE: And Phil Collins, that's our homey, though! You don't like Phil Collins? You crazy! Phil Collins is dope, come on! LIL' FAME: I bet if I do a song with Kenny G that shit would be huge. I'll do some brand new shit with Kenny G, and that would fuck everybody up. I would do it and then you'll label it a crossover. For real, I wanna do a song with Kenny G...
But, uh... back to the lecture at hand; here are two really obscure version of Grover Washington's "Mr. Magic":
The way the drums are recorded is crazy-- kind of remind me of Weather Report's "Non-Stop Home". This is from an LP on a mysterious label that I think occupied the same shady tax-dodge territory as Guinness and Tiger Lily.
Johnny Heartsman was a major figure on the Oakland blues & R&B scene from the 50s to mid-60s but then largely disappeared, leading his own trio in the Central Valley and then a band for singer Joe Simon. Around 1990 the blues scene rediscovered him and he cut a couple records; he passed away in 1996.
The arrangement on the Eddy Jacobs version is weird and awesome-- there's the wild intro with the guitar part and then the drum part that seem to be drawn from two totally different songs and then there's the monologue. The guy who's responsible, Harry Whitaker, was the arranger for Roberta Flack and Roy Ayers and recorded this awesome thing.
I was watching a documentary from last year, Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, and there was a shot of a flier for a gig where Strummer's pre-Clash pub-rock band, the 101ers, opened for these guys:
Gonzalez was an English soul band who had a minor disco hit with "I Haven't Stopped Dancing Yet". A few of their records got released in the U.S., but not their debut, which this was taken from. I first heard this in the early 90s and it took me years to find a copy, although that probably says less about this record's rarity than about how much the record game has been changed by the internet.
In the last minute-and-a-half it goes into a "Hot Pants Road" rip-off and then borrows from "Giving Up Food for Funk". The first 7 minutes are a cover of this:
Last night I was jonesing to hear this record, specifically the part right after the break where they come in with the guitar part and the wailing vocal.
Capability Brown: "Beautiful Scarlet" (The Famous Charisma Label, 1972)
It's 50% cheese and 200% awesome. When it got to the quiet part, I remembered that it was a cover of this:
I don't know much about the Round Trip Ticket 45 other than that it's from Detroit and there's a much better-sounding version of the song with vocals. Until I heard that version, I had no idea this was a Neil Young cover.
He wrote a ton of great soul music, from the Marvelettes' "Too Many Fish in the Sea" to Rose Royce's "I Wanna Get Next to You" and was a phenomenal producer. Taking over from Smokey Robinson in the late 1960s, he reshaped the sound of the Temptations and pioneered a crazily lush, psychedelic brand of soul.
A jazz vibraphone player gets sent to the studio to make an album of pop covers saddled with sitar and strings and draws a Beatles cover. Beatles covers are inherently really hard to pull off because (duh) the band were so fucking great. This works, though.
Being an instrumental, McCoy is freed from having to sing Lennon at his most self-indulgent and precious ("sitting on a cornflake"? "elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna"?) and can focus on the deliciously off-kilter melody.
Or at least I assume it's based on Hayes's version. This one lacks not only strings but also horns that are in tune, yet that snaky, fuzzed-out guitar has got to originate with one of the two.
Garrett's LP credits her recording date as October 1969; Hot Buttered Soul came out sometime that same year but 5 minutes of doing a google and a glance at Rob Bowman's Soulsville, U.S.A. didn't tell me when. (BTW, great book, although it gets a little ponderous at the end and the type could not possibly be smaller.) For anyone recoiling at the mere suggestion that Garrett could have been first with the arrangement, let me just say that producer Andre Williams came up with a lot of stuff he's never received proper credit for.
Gospel week, day 2: stealin' in the name of the lord
Secular soul music often borrows pretty liberally from traditional gospel songs (e.g., "Little Walter" from "Wade in the Water", "My Babe" from "This Train", "This Little Girl of Mine" from "This Little Light of Mine", etc. etc.), but I always kind of bug when borrowing goes the other way. I mean, the 8th Commandment applies to gospel dudes, too, right?
Anyhow, these guys understood that the world needed a gospel rip-off of "Long Train Running":
The other day I had an intense Peter Sellers jones and watched The Pink Panther for the first time in 20+ years. I had forgotten all about the dance scene, so I flipped when it came to this part:
Within the context of the film, the scene makes no sense—Claudia Cardinale’s ambiguously ethnic (but really kinda Indian) princess character spontaneously rocks a ski chalet with a latin-esque dance number (in Italian, no less) and then the action resumes with no comment—but Mancini’s “Meglio Stasera” is a great song.
This version is pretty good, too:
Les McCann: “It Had Better Be Tonight (Meglio Stasera)” (Pacific Jazz, 1964)
The J.B.'s: "Damn Right I'm Somebody (Love and Happiness) A Tribute to Disc Jockeys & Radio Stations" (Polydor, 1974)
This is a promo-only track in which James Brown, Lyn Collins, Danny Ray, Maceo Parker, Fred Wesley and the JB's name every radio DJ they can think of over an instrumental version of Al Green's "Love & Happiness". Now if only Chuck and Flav had recorded themselves reading the Rapp Control DJ list....
Big shouts to Kool Moe Dee, Richard Pryor, Ron Isley, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Willie Nelson and Joe Lewis. Spiro Agnew, Leona Helmsley and Dennis Kozlowski get the bozack.
The Presidents were a 60s-era band from Indiana who recorded a handful of singles for Deluxe, one-offs for Plum and Hollywood and then, bizarrely, a few singles cut in Spain for the Penelope label.
There's a partial discography here and a bunch of label scans here, but not much biographical information about them to be had. I recall reading that at one point they were being groomed by King Records (Deluxe's parent) to be a sort-of stand-by JB's, much like Bootsy's Complete Strangers, but damn if I can find the source for that.
They've been sampled a little ("Stinky" for BDP's "The Style You Haven't Done Yet", "Peter Rabbit" for Kool G. Rap & Polo's "Ill Street Blues"), had two tracks legitimately reissued ("Gold Walk" on BGP's less-than-half-assed King Funk and "I Want My Baby Back" on Kent's awesome Impressed! comp), and, in the past few years, bootlegged a lot (once by Egon, twotimes by Vampisoul).
Here are clips of their 78-second demolition of Marva Whitney's "It's My Thing":
