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.

Blues Mixology

This is a real artifact.

Now ordinarily I don’t believe in artifacts. But I made this mix tape (I don’t know that that’s what we called it then) over twenty-five years ago – Jake says I made it when he got his license, I thought it was when he went off to college (which I like better). I say, Print the legend. But I’m sure Jake’s right.

I don’t want to ascribe any cosmic significance to it. I mean, it’s just a mix tape – and now a very slightly modified Spotify list – compiled on the fly, sort of. But it sums up so many of the things that I was passionate about then – and that I remain passionate about now, mixing in fun and profundity, the well-known and the obscure (at least then), without any more rhyme or reason than to bring together some really great music in the same way that Gregg Geller has always approached the reissue albums that he’s done for Columbia, RCA, and Warner Bros., with all the excitement intact.

I’m sure no one will be surprised by the omnivorous presence of Howlin’ Wolf. (Every time I hear “I’ll Be Around,” I’m reminded of the elderly babysitter, long before the creation of this tape, who peered around nearslghtedly looking for the source of the unearthly sound that was coming from another room and then said a little worriedly  to Alexandra: “I didn’t know your husband sang.”)

Anyway. You’ll note lots of Muddy Waters influence, too. And Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Mister Downchild” was the title source (and the inspiration) for both my second collection of short stories and my fifth novel – unpublished, like the first four, and probably deservedly so. (Sometime in the next few months I’m going to post a blog memoir about “Writing Fiction,” which will serve both to describe the past and, hopefully, to herald the future.)

I guess the thing that surprises me most here is the prevailing influence of Tommy Johnson (“Smokestack Lightnin’,” “I Asked For Water,” “Maggie Campbell,” “Dark Road”), not to mention Robert Johnson, both of whom I was obviously well aware of at the time (I mean, look at the order) but whose ongoing presence, it occurs to me now, gives the lie to the kind of revisionist history which would suggest they were important mainly because they were important to blues collectors. Floyd Jones, Muddy Waters, Johnny Shines, Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Nighthawk, Elmore James – these were not collectors. They were disciples, who are here paying passionate tribute to some of the music that captivated them most when they were growing up and continued to fuel their musical imagination and inspiration all their lives.

Another seminal source – and I’ve got to admit, this kind of embarrasses me – was the original Sonny Boy Williamson (John Lee), of whom I was also very much aware but whom I had probably consigned, according to the prevailing wisdom of the day (and with the kind of snobbery to which none of us is fully immune), to the ranks of commercial mediocrity. Kind of silly in that, as it turns out Sonny Boy was the inspiration not only for the second Sonny Boy but the direct source for Junior Wells’ seminal “Hoodoo Man,” much of the other harmonica playing on this collection, and Baby Face Leroy’s great “Blues Is Killing Me,” which I’m sure I heard completely differently at the time simply because it came from the same singer who can be heard wailing with Muddy Waters and Little Walter on the very African-sounding “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” (man, that is still amazing).

Oh well, I guess it just goes to show how parochial (and proprietary) genre enthusiasts of every stripe can be. So all right, maybe the revisionists have something. And further all right, I’m going state right here: John Lee Williamson was something else (get the great album, Blue Bird Blues, that Colin Escott put out on his “Secret History of Rock ‘n’ Roll” series for RCA).   

Anyway, I don’t think you need to know a thing to enjoy this “crazy music” (Buddy Guy title). I get such a kick still out of “Eisenhower Blues,” or the chaotic ride that Hop Wilson’s “My Woman Has a Black Cat Bone” takes you on, or the doomy mood of Buddy Guy’s “Ten Years Ago,” or the hair-sticking-up-on-your head nightmare phantasmagoria of “First Time I Met the Blues.”

Make up your own blues mix – don’t forget Little Walter next time, or T-Bone Walker, or B.B. King, or any of the hundreds of other blues men and women (right down to Billy Joe Shaver and Aretha Franklin) that you might want to put in your mix.

P.S. Soul tape from the same era coming soon!

R&B The Transition Years

From the Sweet Soul Music Discography: R&B-Transition Years

This is a playlist I originally put together in 1986 as a kind of introduction to the Discography section of Sweet Soul Music. But I only imagined it – I never actually listened to it straight through. Here it is slightly revised and available through Spotify (and I’m sure you can recreate this on MOG, RDIO, or ITunes).  I can’t guarantee that every recording is the original – but it sounds pretty good to me. And in a funny way I find myself appreciating it so much more now than I once might have – even though these were always songs that I admired without reserve.

I think maybe I just wasn’t as open to wistfulness and melancholy in those days – in some ways I’ll put it down to the education that Elvis and Sam Cooke have provided me with. But, you know, when you really get down to it, it’s probably just life. Nat King Cole’s “Gee Baby, Ain’t I Good to You” – at one time I might have dismissed it as just a little proper, just a little sentimental. But now I hear Oscar Moore’s guitar solo, Nat’s piano, that voice, and there’s no hold-back in my engagement. I’m with Sam Cooke, I’ll take Nat King Cole as my tutorial model any day. Same with Charles Brown’s “Drifting Blues,” with Oscar Moore’s brother Johnny giving his name to the group and playing the beautiful guitar lead. Or the subtlety and heartache of the Prisonaires “Just Walking in the Rain.” It’s not that I didn’t appreciate them way back then. But I appreciate them so much more now.

Is mellowness all? Certainly not. Dig Guitar Slim’s “The Things That I Used to Do,” one of the rawest, most tore-down commercial blues of all time, which also marks the debut of arranger and pianist Ray Charles’ hard r&b sound. Or songs like Roy Brown’s “Good Rockin’ Tonight” – everyone knows what that led to. Or Louis Jordan’s seminal “Let the Good Times Roll,” which left its mark (like so much of Jordan’s groundbreaking work) on James Brown, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, and Sam Cooke, just for starters. And, of course, where would we be without the Dionysian spirit of Howlin’ Wolf, James Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis, or Bob Dylan and Billy Joe Shaver in their untrammeled poetic years? (None included here – just a few points of reference.)

And then there’s the gospel infusion: the majestic Faye Adams version of “Shake a Hand” (I wish you could have heard Little Richard mashing down on this for six or seven minutes at the Donnelly Theater in his 1965 secular comeback – with Jimi Hendrix on guitar!). Or Roy Hamilton’s operatic version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic,  “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which established a trend for spiritual uplift until Ray Charles blew the model wide open with his literal translation of the Southern Tones’ “It Must Be Jesus” into “I Got a Woman.” Or listen to the inspirational message of “Please Send Me Someone to Love” from Percy Mayfield, the “poet laureate of the blues” – nothing to do with gospel, really, just a universal (and universally influential) message of social uplift and racial justice cloaked in a graceful metaphor.

Every song here tells a story – each one has its own story. There’s no trend, there’s no stamp – or if there is a trend (and lots of people, obviously were catching on) each song, each artist stands on his or her own with a heartfelt message of exuberance, sorrow, plaintiveness or pain – doesn’t matter, there’s something to suit every mood.

You know, listening to this I started thinking about Solomon Burke (again), who considered himself a kind of cross between Gene Autry, gospel giant Brother Joe May (“The Thunderbolt of the Middle West”), and Ivory Joe Hunter (just dig Ivory Joe’s very soulful, and hugely influential, “I Almost Lost My Mind”).

You can hear everything that Solomon was listening to here – well almost. But I’ll tell you a funny story about “Don’t Deceive Me,” presented here in its original form by Atlanta blues singer Chuck Willis. When Solomon was making Soul of the Blues for Black Top Records, I suggested that he cut “Don’t Deceive Me” – I thought it would be a perfect match for Solomon’s improvisational skills, with its simple, gut-wrenching lyrics and melody and its wide-open space for a sermon. (I was thinking of the remarkable way that Howlin’ Wolf transformed the song in live performance.)

Well, Solomon did record it – and he called me up right afterwards. “You’re going to be really proud of me, Pete,” he said. “I did it just like you always want me to. I sang the song. And every time I started to get off of it, Selassie told me [this was his son, Haile Selassie], ‘Stick to the song, Dad. Remember what Peter said.’” And when I heard his version, it was indeed true. Solomon had stuck to the song, as I had not infrequently urged him to do – particularly when he stubbornly resisted learning many of the new songs that he was recording in favor of what he liked to call “spontaneity.” “Don’t Deceive Me,” for me, was an altogether different case. Or at least it should have been. But this was where Solomon chose to apply the lesson. Which is why you won’t hear any sermon on Solomon Burke’s beautifully rendered, emotionally controlled version of “Don’t Deceive Me.” I guess I’ll just have to take the blame.