REUNITE THE SOUL CLAN IN THE ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME

This is an act of pure advocacy.

Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, Joe Tex – what do these four all have in common? Well, they were all charter members of the near-mythic (no, I mean really mythic, as in “some mythic creature”) Soul Clan, who recorded just one side of one picture-sleeve 45 – without Otis, who had died, without Pickett, who had had an emotional flare-up – but were conceived by Solomon, in typical Solomonic fashion, as a force that might have changed the world. Well, they did – with their music. And three of them are enshrined in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Only Joe Tex, who is on the ballot this year for what well may be the last time, remains excluded.

The first time I saw Joe Tex he was on the same bill with Solomon and Otis (Solomon was the headliner) in a 1964 Soul Summer Shower of Stars, and he more than held his own. As an entertainer, who took great delight in his ability to give pleasure to his audience and in their evident delight with him.  As a songwriter and exemplar of mother wit, dispensing healthy dollops of good humor mixed in with sharp shards of his own earthy philosophy. (Check out songs like “Anything You Wanna Know” or “Grandma Mary” on his brilliant, entirely self-penned album, Buying a Book.) As an effortless performer, endlessly enchanting his audience with his easy onstage manner, lithe dancing, and microphone manipulations. Not for nothing was he known as the Dapper Rapper.

But in the end, what made Joe Tex an intrinsic member of the Soul Clan, dues paid up in full and in perpetuity, was his dedication to Deep Soul (think James Brown’s “Lost Someone,” Solomon’s “The Price,” Otis’s “These Arms of Mine”). Just listen to his breakthrough hit, “Hold What You’ve Got” or, for that matter, “The Love You Save,” self-written like nearly every one of his hits and much of his album material, and see if you can resist the pathos and deep-seated feeling at the heart of his music.

So I’m asking for your vote, the last vote left to us in this Year of Jeremiah (I wonder what Solomon would have to say about that): VOTE JOE TEX FOR THE ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME.

And now I’ll turn over the lectern to Brother Joe.

Mr. C Speaks:

I second that emotion.

And just to reinforce the point: there’s a three-part, black-and-white YouTube clip of the full Joe Tex Show, live in Sweden 1969 and complete with explosive sound, that provides a rare visual glimpse of the stage mastery of Joe Tex. Part 3 opens with an original take on Henson Cargill’s #1 country hit, “Skip A Rope,” and ends with a burning version of Joe’s signature “Skinny Legs and All,” a highly eccentric Top 10 pop hit in 1968. Joe and his band, led by ferocious drummer Clyde Williams, turn “Skip a Rope,” a socially aware composition with a nursery rhyme structure, into a Sam Cooke kind of rave-up, complete with horn voicings lifted from any number of late Cooke uptempos. It’s that same odd mix of sass and soul that made Joe Tex so different from any other soul singer, while at the same time declaring his commonality, that same utterly unique talent which was on display night after night, whether in Sweden or on the endless string of clubs and stages that Joe Tex inhabited.  “Original,” like “genius,” is a much-abused appellation, but Joe Tex fully deserves both titles. VOTE JOE TEX

Guest Blogger: Mr C on Don Covay

It’s In The Wind

by Joe McEwen (aka Mr. C)

Don Covay wrote “It’s in the Wind” after the plane crash that killed his friend Otis Redding.  Today this wistful, melancholy ode sadly serves as Don Covay’s own epitaph.

Born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Don migrated to Washington D.C. and 

joined some doo-woper friends in The Rainbows.  Somehow he latched on to Little Richard, who briefly took Don under his wing, nicknaming him Pretty Boy and producing his first solo record, “Bip Bop Bip,” backed by the Upsetters.  After several years as a Richard wannabee and a bunch of boogity shop singles, Covay found his footing in the emergence of ‘60s soul.  After advice from his singing and songwriting idol, Sam Cooke, he developed a keen, narrative songwriting style that found early success with Gladys Knight (“Letter Full of Tears”) and particularly Solomon Burke (“Tonight’s the Night,” “I’m Hanging Up My Heart for You” and “You’re Good for Me”), who became a buddy and partner in mischief.

His own records, first on Rosemary/Atlantic as Don Covay and the Goodtimers, were extraordinary,  idiosyncratic gems. They were passionately sung tales framed with trademark choppy, guitar-led syncopation and highlighted by the oft-covered smash “Mercy, Mercy.”  Covay seemed to thrive in Jerry Wexler’s Atlantic universe, despite only achieving two subsequent hits of his own: “See Saw” (recorded with Booker T and the MG’s at Stax) and “Sookie Sookie.”

 His singles were singular in style, rich in storytelling drama, and delivered with absolute conviction: “Take This Hurt Off Me,” “Temptation Was Too Strong,” Watching the Late, Late Show,“ House on the Corner” I Stole Some Love" and The Soul Clan (Solomon Burke, Arthur Conley, Ben E. King, Joe Tex and Don) opus “That’s How It Feels.”  He delivered perfectly calibrated, classic songs for Wilson Pickett (“Three Time Loser,” “I’m Gonna Cry”), Little Richard (the epic wrenching, recitation “I Don’t Know What You Got (But it’s Got Me),” Otis Redding (another beautifully crafted, “begging” classic,“Think About It,” which was only released posthumously), and Aretha Franklin (“Chain of Fools).  Later, in 1973, at Mercury, Covay clicked with the half-whispered, half-sung infidelity tale "I Was Checkin’ Out (While She Was Checkin’ In).”

Before his debilitating 1992 Stroke, Don Covay was an irrepressible force, never lacking for a song, an idea, a plan, a scheme (the Soul Clan was one of his best) or a bright new day.  On a personal note, our paths happily crossed often in 1974 and '75, and I hosted him on my WBCN radio show where he proudly premiered the glorious, Dixie Hummingbirds style rave-up, “It’s Better to Have and Don’t Need (Than Need and Don’t Have).”   Today, Don Covay is in the wind.

Mr. C Remembers Little Jimmy Scott

Jimmy Scott. The singer.
by Joe McEwen

This was original published on http://www.caughtbytheriver.net

Jimmy Scott was a singer. Though his musical support was mostly jazz-powered, he was not your typical jazz singer but instead sang ballads and sang them as if the delivery of each syllable was an extraction of precious metal. Scott sang sad songs from the the songbooks favored by Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra, two artists who shared his deep, mature and naked emotional investment. On stage, Jimmy Scott bled for his audience and, more likely, himself. Motherless at 13 and afflicted with Kallmann Syndrome (a condition that prevented him from reaching puberty), Scott inhabited an often harrowing, unwelcoming universe. Jimmy Scott always stood on the outside looking in.

My own connection with Jimmy Scott began in college with an album on Atlantic Records called The Source (1969). The Source was produced by Philadelphia jazz DJ turned record man Joel Dorn. It was jazz but it wasn’t quite, featuring stalwarts Jr. Mance, Ron Carter and David Newman as support. The music was otherworldly to a college freshman; a raw, bittersweet emotion that was soul music of the deepest kind but buttressed by a fragrant unit of NYC jazz players. And the voice pouring into each song was hypnotic, the fragile cry of a lonely spirit calling out hauntingly in “On Broadway” and “Our Day Will Come,” among others. It was not quite male, but then not female (although close your eyes and he sounds a little like Nancy Wilson, to me anyway).

Our paths crossed remarkably enough at Sire Records in 1991. Over a period of five years Scott recorded a trilogy of albums for us, All The Way (Tommy LiPuma), Dream (Mitchell Froom) and Heaven (Craig Street), that remain very personal to me. But this not my story. These three projects would certainly not have happened without Seymour Stein and Bill Bentley, and probably not without the death of Jimmy’s friend and champion Doc Pomus, whose funeral service occasioned Scott’s solo delivery of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” a riveting moment that stunned the assembled, including Seymour and myself. The Sire albums, each its own uniquely conceived masterpiece, enabled Jimmy Scott to perform regularly for the rest of his life.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to listen to a Jimmy Scott album all the way through, much as it was seeing him live. One song is often so draining, requiring an undivided emotional investment. I think Jimmy Scott was a genius, a very mortal man who gave everything for the cause. He was born on July 17, 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio and died on June 12, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Jimmy Scott was indeed a singer.

Guest Blogger: Mr. C on Al Green

I met Joe McEwen (a/k/a Mr. C) in 1970 when Jake and Alexandra and I were selling tickets to a Lightnin’ Hopkins concert at the door. Jake was 2, and Joe was 18 or 19. “Did you mean what you said in that Solomon Burke article you wrote in Rolling Stone?” Joe said, without bothering to introduce himself. “Yes,” I said. We’ve been friends ever since.

Recently Joe came across this amazing Al Green clip and dropped by to tell us about it.

– PG 

Mr C:

Al Green didn’t share peanut butter sandwiches with his grade school classmates.  “I’ve always been a loner,” he tells interviewer Ellis Haizlip. 

“I was always the fellow that was alone, by myself.”  

 This little bit of revelation is spoken without irony or pretense. In this remarkable performance/interview on the Soul! TV show aired on January 3, 1973, Al Green seems unburdened by the crush of success that has suddenly thrust this once lonely schoolboy into the guy that now everybody wants to know. He talks, but mostly sings, with full band and by himself, guitar in hand. Despite his owndisclaimer, Al is in great voice and fully engaged, seeming to enjoy Soul!’s inviting setting. For an hour, we’re absorbed by the full flowering of the mercurial Al Green.

Soul! was a PBS black culture hour, the brain child of Manhattan sophisticate Haizlip. It aired from September of 1968 to March of 1973, a Thursday night show that originally featured King Curtis as house bandleader. Guests ranged from Apollo stars like Joe Tex, Jerry Butler, and the Manhattans, to an array of such political and literary lights of the era as James Baldwin, Leroi Jones, Shirley Chisholm, and Julius Lester among others.  It was ambitious and understated, a television show that succeeded without the flash of the moment.  A small audience sat, café-style, at small tables, while Ellis Haizlip directed our attention. Looking at Soul! 40 years later, it’s wondrous that something as special and well-crafted as this managed to exist.

 Like a future album title, Al Green Explores Your Mind, on this January evening it was more a case of Al Green Exploring His Own Mind.  And we get to ride along.

http://www.thirteen.org/soul/jan-3-1973/#.UsqKtvbLf4R

Guest Blog- A Word from Mr. C: Soul is Alive... The Blues of Sonny Green

A report from the West Coast by Joe McEwen

Singer Sonny Green is the show tonight. He’s the focus and driving wheel behind the buoyant energy flowing through La Louisianne, a Los Angeles restaurant/lounge in the Crenshaw District.  Sonny Green is at ease being the man.

Sonny’s singing style comes from the vocabulary of Bobby Bland and inhabits the gravel end of Bland’s voice.  He sings slow, easy soul songs that tell a story, he is an interpreter of the hits of his contemporaries: Johnnie Taylor, Bobby Womack, his late friend ZZ Hill and, of course, the just-deceased master Bobby Bland.  The sixty or so people around the bandstand know the words and happily sing chorus after chorus, led by the ever-engaging ringmaster. “That’s the Way I feel About ‘Cha,” “Running Out of Lies,” “Stop Doggin’ Me Around” (“That’s d-o-g-g-i-n”) roll off the tongues of the assembled, as Green strolls the floor, dancing, jiving and collecting tips. 

Familiar faces are introduced; Dancing Ann, Huey the guitar legend, and all the women “in the house tonight” born under the sign of Cancer. Also brought forth are Hank Carbo and the sharply dressed man, Ed Wheeler, who owns the place and gets  his own time in the spotlight singing an impassioned, heartfelt “The Things That I Used To Do."  Everybody seems familiar.  The place is alive., and the songs suddenly breathe a life much different from the  records.  They become a vehicle for a particular and comforting emotional grounding.  The audience and performer, transplanted from the Deep South (posed as a question by Sonny with a predetermined answer) to Los Angeles have become one.

Many years ago, the great soul DJ, the Magnificent Montague, responded during a taped repartee with Sam Cooke: ” I see tonight you’re trying to gather some material for your soul, through mine.“ Those of us in the audience on a recent Monday night at La Louisianne did just that through Sonny Green.  And at show’s close, we  wandered off into the night, so much the better for it.

A Word from Mr C: Lost Soul

Mr. C:

Lost Soul was originally a series of albums I put together at CBS Records in the “80s that cobbled together truly inspired CBS label singles that sadly missed their commercial mark.  The Lost Soul concept seemed to fit the final piece of the SWEET SOUL MUSIC discography. 

Looking at this list almost thirty years later, the song selection still seems on the money.  And if CD reissues and YouTube have made them readily available, the navigation compass remains true to the spirit of intent.  Lost Soul stands as a sturdy and lovingly assembled tribute to great voices from the shadows.

For this edition– a special bonus cut!

"Believe in Me Baby Pt.1 +2” (Jesse James/20th Century Fox)  Reworked Little Milton cover to an appreciative audience with an emotional sermon on “the fast life and things like that.”  A 6 minute charging soul drama that ends at peak crescendo. Showtime.

Mr. G:

Joe’s right. It was so great working on Sweet Soul Music and getting these mix tapes in the mail – one after another, close to 40 in all. It was the basis not just for a book but for a lifelong dialogue, one that pre-dated Sweet Soul Music and has never really stopped.

Listening to this mix today – which was never actually a tape, more like an ideal –  reminds me once again of the richness and diversity of the music.

Now don’t forget: you can still see Otis Clay, a 2013 Blues Hall of Fame inductee, who, like Mavis Staples, continues to perform with undiminished fervor, each of them as emotionally compelling (wait’ll you hear Mavis’ new Jeff Tweedy-produced album) as they ever were. And if you like Jackie Moore’s beautifully controlled version of Paul Kelly’s “Personally” (co-produced by William Bell), check out Kelly’s own “folk soul” album on Bullseye, Gonna Stick and Stay, from 1993, or his great Warner Archives collection, The Best of Paul Kelly, with all but one song on both albums written by Kelly himself.

There’s a Sam Cooke component here that I was not fully aware of at the time. I knew that Arthur Conley’s “Let’s Go Steady,” which stands as an explicit tribute to Sam, was written by J.W. Alexander, Sam’s business partner, mentor, and friend. But I’m sure I didn’t know that Bobby Womack’s striking “What Is This?” was produced by Fred Smith, a Kags songwriter and SAR employee (Sam and J.W.’s publishing company and record label respectively), who had great success on his own as songwriter and producer (the Olympics’ “Western Movies” was just one of his many hits, and he worked with Bill Cosby’ for years), and was the owner of Keymen the label on which Bobby’s single appeared.

Maybe what stands out most of all for me, though, is Little Richard’s epic “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got (But It’s Got Me).” As Joe wrote on the final page of the book, it is “arguably the greatest soul ballad of all time. The Mt Rushmore of soul.” And it is. I can remember seeing Richard with Jimi Hendrix on guitar at the Donnelly Theater in Boston in May of 1965 around the time he recorded the song. (I ushered the show!) He didn’t sing “I Don’t Know What You’ve Got” that night. His showstopper was “Shake a Hand,” on which he left the mike and came to the edge of the stage, projecting his voice effortlessly without amplification and imploring the audience to join him. Which, without hesitating for a second, they very soulfully did.

I remember, too, buying that great Don Covay composition in its various Vee Jay versions (it came in two parts, and different lengths, for some reason, on different pressings). I bought it at Skippy White’s Mass Records: Home of the Blues, where I bought just about every soul record that I own, including Jesse James’ gently insistent “Believe in Me Baby” and Aretha’s first Atlantic album, I Never Loved Man the Way I Love You, the night it came out. That’s where Joe got much of his collection, too – but Joe went me one better. I just brought my Paperback Booksmith paycheck to Skippy. Joe went to work for him after graduating from college – and I’m sure it was the best postgraduate course there ever was.

A Word from Mr. C: A REFLECTION ON CURTIS MAYFIELD, THE IMPRESSIONS AND WE’RE A WINNER

By Joe McEwen

Keep on pushing, move on up, we’re a winner: these exhortations were at the forefront of the content and spirit of the music Curtis Mayfield recorded with his group, The Impressions, in the mid and late 1960s. If his record, “People Get Ready,” captured a more steady, righteous, nose-to-the-moral-grindstone tone, “We’re a Winner,” released in l967, lifted higher and aimed for a more liberating result.

 The music matched the message and performance.  Arranged and produced by Mayfield’s long-time, hugely undervalued creative partner, Johnny Pate, “We’re a Winner” explodes from the opening brass flourish.  A live studio audience, recorded  at Chicago’s Universal Studio, adds a kinetic energy throughout– right from the “Come on sock it to me!” shout-out that follows the two-note horn blast intro.  This record demanded attention.

Still it’s the words that carry the day:

         "I don’t mind leaving here, 

          To show the world we have no fear

          ‘cause we’re a winner

           and everybody knows it’s true

           we’ll just keep on pushing..“

"We’re a Winner,” rose to Number One on the black radio charts that year.  The mood and emotional force it thrusts out, born of the Civil Rights Movement a few years before, was also directly carried forward in the increasingly aggressive speeches of Martin Luther King. 1967 was a tipping point in so much of American society – race riots, Vietnam the war, and the accompanying protests – the basic challenge of ‘what it was and what it is,’ to ‘what could be and what should be.’  The ceiling-breaking liberation that imbued “the message” got so ratcheted up that it had nowhere to go except burst. And it did, quickly.  Still, these many years later the words bang around in my head. How that poetry must have been such an inspiration to the man that authored them.

Sam Cooke’s transcendent “A Change is Gonna Come” was born of the same era, and the same racial striving, as the Impressions records.  Barack Obama has used both  "A Change is Gonna Come" and “Keep On Pushing”, to powerful effect in major speeches.  Currently, a Samsung commercial featuring basketball star LeBron James, in winningly relaxed engagement with family and friends, has “Keep On Pushing” as its music bed. The message of warmth, hope and resolve remains vital and stirring. “We’re a winner, and everybody knows it’s true” is more than a self-help mantra, it’s a primal declaration of basic civil and human rights. Keep on pushing indeed.

Bonus Extra Credit in the College of Musical Knowledge:

Mr. C’s Johnny Pate primer

A Word from Mr C: Dan Penn-The Fame Recordings

Guest Blogger: Joe McEwen (Mr. C)

Me and Mr. C:

I met Joe in 1970 when Jake and Alexandra and I were selling tickets to a Lightnin’ Hopkins concert at the door. Jake was 2, and Joe was 18 or 19. “Did you mean what you said in that Solomon Burke article you wrote in Rolling Stone?” Joe said, without bothering to introduce himself. “Yes,” I said. We’ve been friends ever since.

–PG

DAN PENN– THE FAME RECORDINGS (ACE)

For years there was quite a mythology surrounding the name Dan Penn.  A Southern soul songwriter whose name appeared

on some off the most heartfelt, literate ‘60s soul music stories (sung by voices like Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Percy Sledge, James Carr and Arthur Conley), Dan Penn was also something of a singer, whose impossible-to-find random singles and never-heard demos were rumored to be at least the  equal of the Murderers Row that made them famous.  Much of the Dan Penn myth-making was fueled by the enthusiasm of Atlantic Records entrepreneur and A+R guy Jerry Wexler. In fact it was Wexler’s Atlantic label that released more than a few of Penn’s best compositions.

There’s no doubt Dan Penn was a mysterious presence, more heard about than heard.  A white man who succeeded in a black man’s world.  Not unlike LSU basketball genius Pete Maravich (whose college career timeline paralleled Penn’s years here), Dan Penn was a larger-than-life ghost, with little national exposure.

A few years back, CBS Sports aired a documentary about Maravich.  Watching it was really something.  Pete Maravich was certainly more than advertised, a basketball-playing magician and soloist whose talent stood outside time and place. To my mind, it’s not a stretch comparing the Maravich footage to the 23 publishing demos (there’s one actual Fame single) on Dan Penn: The Fame Recordings.

In the early part of the 1960s, Dan Penn led a band, Dan Penn and the Pallbearers, that played the college fraternity circuit throughout Mississippi and Alabama. Despite local success, Penn found his calling in songwriting. The liner notes to this project are mostly a conversation with Dan, a self-revelatory monologue about the craft of writing songs. 

Dan Penn took this work with studied seriousness.  His writing influences ran a gamut of radio hit styles: Phil Spector, Motown (Marvin Gaye), Sam Cooke and Joe Tex.

As a singer, Penn’s vocals are styled and impassioned, equal parts Elvis Presley, Charlie Rich and Bobby Bland.  He was a mimic when he needed to be, anything to sell the song.  His more-than-occasional mid-song soliloquies  (particularly “Uptight Good Woman” and “It Tears Me Up”) are spot-on Tex. 

Dan Penn was an original, an eloquent songwriter with a voice to match.  He helped popularize a style that has become known as country-soul and Penn landed right in the middle of those two worlds. Backed by producer and label owner Rick Hall’s home-grown house band (an ensemble embarking on their own spectacular career), Penn created a kind of soul music that was high-level pop art.Wallace Daniel Pennington aka Dan Penn, to use a Maravich-inspired basketball metaphor, could throw a blind behind-the-back bounce pass on the run. The thrill is in these songs and performances.  Once in a while the myth really does become the man. Such is the case with Dan Penn.

– Joe McEwen

Dan Penn: The Fame Recordings available at fine records shop everywhere or from Amazon.com