DONNA SUMMER

A four act show always runs the risk of dragging, even when the organisation is as meticulous as it was last Saturday at New York’s Radio City Music Hall when Archie Bell & the Drells, Donna Summer, Bobby Womack and the Temptations all appeared in one of a series of concerts promoted by black WBLS disc jockey Frankie Crocker.

But the use of two stages, one at the rear and one at the front which rose as the curtains closed on the rear, kept the show moving with the kind of precision that every road crew must dream about. Apart from a ten-minute break before the Temptations, there was no delay at all, Summer following Bell and Womack following Summer so quickly that their respective songs almost segued into one another.

My most particular interest lay in Womack and Ms Summer, as did that of Mick Jagger who, I was reliably informed, was closeted up in the balcony of this massive ancient theatre chatting before he went on with Womack who wrote ‘It’s All Over Now’, one of the Stones’ biggest early hits.

Donna Summer has had a massive disco hit in the US with ‘Love To Love You Baby’, and her album of the same title, the first side of which contains a 16 minute and 30 second version of the same song, is also a hot seller. Her act is based entirely around this song, although she sang two other numbers besides, one of which was a dead ringer for ‘I’m A Man’, the Steve Winwood classic recorded by the Spencer Davis Group. 

Entering the stage rather as Cleopatra entered Rome, carried by a couple of hunky guys and wearing a gold hairpiece, Donna opened with a brief version of ‘Love To Love You’ accompanied by a couple of dancers and a biggish back-up unit called Smoke. There followed the two other songs and a five-minute spell of instrumental funk noodling before she reappeared for a final, lengthy reprise of ‘Love To Love You’, on which she was joined by six dancers, three amorous couples, and plenty of dry ice.

While Ms Summer warbled the lyrics and cooed in the orgasmic fashion of the record, the dancing couples, all dressed in skin tight, flesh-coloured garments that gave the impression of nakedness from where I was sat, simulated various sexual positions. It all seemed a bit Benny Hill meets Carry On Up The Khyber to me and the audience, bored rather than shocked at this massage parlour display, responded limply. 

        It took Bobby Womack and his excellent band to stop the giggling and bring back the music. Most of Womack’s material was new, up-tempo funk. He pushed it along with hoarse vocals, and was perpetually prodding at the band to get the most out of them, especially the three-piece brass section. Looking rather like a Cuban revolutionary in his beret and khaki clothes, he strapped on a Les Paul during his final two numbers and sounded remarkably like Hendrix.

He was good but rather anonymous. He didn’t play ‘It’s All Over Now’ – I was rather hoping Mick would join him for this as an encore – but he didn’t get one, even though I thought he deserved one. Both Bell and his Drells and, most especially in the light of their hit-strewn back catalogue, the Temptations delivered traditional black soul, complete with fancy steps, nice vocal harmonies and, in the case of the Drells, some Kung-Fu action. 

SLY STONE (1943-2025)

Oh Sly, you great big mixed up ball of confusion! I loved your records and only The Who could have followed your set at Woodstock, the defining moment of your chequered career. But what a mess you made of things along the way. 

        I have written about meeting Sly before but the death yesterday of this musical-genius-cum-provocateur-extraordinaire prompted me to re-read the three editions of Melody Maker in which I wrote about him and reproduce the second – an interview – pretty much verbatim for the first time. 

        The first time I saw Sly was in November 1973, a show at the Hollywood Palladium. “Will he? Won’t he?” I wrote in my review for MM’s Caught In The Act page. “Sly Stone’s reputation is too firmly etched for those questions not to be asked when he’s advertised to appear anywhere in the USA these days. His tantrums and failures to show for concerts are legendary to the extent that his contracts now contain a clause with a heavy penalty for non-appearance. Well, Sly did show at the Palladium but only just. The Palladium was sold out for the funky guy with the panama hat – but Sly made only a token appearance, leaving the stage after just over half an hour, apparently satisfied that the customers had had their seven dollars’ worth on entertainment. It was as big a rip off as I’ve witnessed since I started reporting on rock’n’roll three years ago.”

        I went on to report that while his band was stage for about an hour Sly was present for only half that time, offering his audience endless choruses of his two best-known songs, ’Dance To The Music’ and ‘I Want To Take You Higher’. “When the house lights went up everyone went home surprisingly peaceably. For what there as of it the music was tight and entertaining but other aspects of this show left me with a bitter taste in my mouth,” I concluded.

        Although I didn’t realise it at the time I caught Sly Stone on a relatively good day when I interviewed him in a basement apartment on New York’s West Side in June of 1974. It was his HQ in New York that week because, I was told by his publicist, he didn’t like hotels but after less than an hour in his company I figured it was more a case of hotels not liking him. Either way, bad days outnumbered good ones at this stage of his career, and would go on to do so for much of his troubled life.

As I recall in my Just Backdated memoir, Sly dressed for his Melody Maker interrogation as he would for the stage: a gleaming all-white leather outfit with tassels and rhinestones topped off with a huge afro, his eyes hidden behind outsized sunglasses. Sat next to him on a couch in this cramped, untidy apartment was his fiancée Kathy Silva whom he would soon marry on the stage at Madison Square Garden. She was decked out in a matching outfit save for the petite mini-skirt that exposed a generous amount of thigh, so much so that shortly after the interview began Sly enticed her into the adjoining bedroom for an intimate tête-à-tête, quite noisily too. In the meantime, the mortified publicist and I made small talk and twiddled our thumbs.

I’d been warned in advance that interviewing Sly Stone might be problematic but I’d come away unscathed from an awkward encounter with Lou Reed earlier that year and fancied my chances. Things got off to a bad start, however. It was scheduled for 3.30pm but when I arrived I was asked to return at 5pm because Sly was having a blood test, a legal requirement for his forthcoming marriage. I did as I was bid but there was no sign of him at 5pm, so I waited for a further hour during which his soon-to-be-released LP Small Talk was played for me. “It was only a rough mix but, again, it’s a departure from previous Sly material,” I reported. “All but the two opening songs on the first side feature a prominent violin and many of them are slow, almost waltz-time, pieces. Despite this, there’s still the pounding bass that has distinguished Sly’s recordings from the early days.” 

The new LP offered me a topic of conversation when Sly finally arrived but before we began I gave him a recent copy of MM that contained a feature on him in our Rock Giants series. This was a mistake as he promptly left the room to read it, evidently on the toilet as his return was accompanied by the sound of plumbing. I tried to sound friendly, smiling openly as I asked my first question, about the use of violins on his new album. 

        “It’s different. It’s unusual. That’s probably why I did it. The strings were around so I used them.”

Have you been wanting to do this for a long time?

“Probably. I don’t need to think about it at all to get it together.”

You seem to be forever changing.

“Time changes me, man.”

Will you be introducing strings on stage?

“I got a violin player in the group now. His name’s Sidney. He’s from Sausalito and I’ve known him just long enough for him to get into the group.”

Did you arrange the strings yourself?

“Part of them.”

There’s a lot of slower material on the album. Are you cutting down on the frantic Sly Stone material?

“There’s a lot of songs so I introduced slow songs also. There’s 11 songs. I don’t count which are slow.”

How big is your group at present?

“Nine people.”

It was at this point that Sly and Kathy retired to the bedroom. They were gone for about 15 minutes and returned together, Sly looking rather pleased with himself. I resumed my questioning as if nothing had happened. 

Tell me something about the bass player.

“That’s me. I play bass on all my records. I play most everything on all my records. I just overdub everything.”

[Later in the year I would interview Larry Graham, the bass player in the Family Stone, who refuted this.]

Wouldn’t the group like to be on the records with you?

“Sometimes they’re on the records also, but they feel good about it [not being on the records]. They like it this way and they’re pretty honest about what they like. I‘ve recorded like this ever since the Stand album, ever since ‘Dance To The Music’ I guess.”

Bass is such an important part of your sound. Have you ever felt like playing bass on stage yourself? 

“Sometimes I do.”

“It’s in his heart,” chipped in Kathy who by now had returned from the bedroom and re-joined Sly on the couch. He plays it so good that he’d like to play everything on stage if he could. He’s only one man but he has a million thoughts.” 

Do you get bored with always playing the very familiar material like ‘Dance’ and ‘Higher’?

“No, they like it and they keep on liking it and you gotta keep telling people you like it too. I love every period of my career.”

Where you do you write?

“My songs come from environments. I just go about my day an as things come to me, I write them down. I write on the toilet ‘cos no one bothers me there.”

Are you trying to change your image by getting married and releasing slower material? Is the image mellowing these days? 

“I’m not trying to. Vibes just leave me. I’m still as crazy as I always was, if crazy is the right word.”

Will you actually turn up for shows?

“I won’t ever be predictable.”

But there have been reports of you not turning up.

“It’s bad promoters, man.”

Your performance in the Woodstock movie helped you enormously in England.

“Sure. I enjoyed playing there. All my gigs are good.”

Are there other highlights of your career that you remember?

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t know about them.”

Because I was the wrong country?

“It’s not the country you’re, it’s the skin you’re in. And it’s not the colour at that. I enjoy myself best on the toilet and I wouldn’t invite you there.”

“This last remark brought the interview to an inevitable conclusion,” I wrote. “Sly’s PR showed me to the door while the man himself curled up on the soda with his fiancée. ‘You know something,’ said his PR girl. ‘He really opened up this afternoon. Usually he just grunts at writers. He’s done a few interviews this week and he’s said more this afternoon than he’s said all week’.”

A triumph, then.

A week later I reported on Sly’s nuptials at the Garden in my New York news column. “The ever-unpredictable Sly Stone married the mother of his nine-month-old son in front of 20,000 fans at Madison Square Garden on Wednesday evening,” I wrote. “Following a set by Eddie Kendricks, Sly’s mother came on to the stage to call for quiet. Then she introduced Sly’s 12-year-old niece who sang a gospel hymn like someone twice her age before the stage filled with friends and relations all dressed in gold costumes.

Sly & Kathy on the MSG stage as they were marred. 

        “A dozen girls holding palm leaves high in the air formed a backdrop as Sly himself loped out last, dressed all in gold with a gold cape. The preacher – brought in specially from San Francisco – called for hush and the service began. Appeals for the audience to keep silent because of the solemnity of the occasion were largely ignored, but the words of the marriage service were clearly audible through the PA system. When the words ‘Do you, Sly Sylvester Stewart, take this woman’ were uttered, a huge cheer went up. The service closed with the traditional ‘Let no man put asunder’ line which prompted the crowd to go crazy.

        “Then everyone trooped off. The whole affair was over in less than 15 minutes. There was another delay before the band came back on, followed by Sly who ripped into a long set, at least by his standards. 

        “The new Family Stone included a violinist and there were several new songs in his repertoire as well as old favourites,” I informed MM’s readers. “‘Dance To The Music’ opened and closed the set. Musically, Sly was as good as ever, alternating between organ, guitar and harp. He seemed to rise to the occasion and actually addressed the audience between numbers instead of merely jumping from one number to the next to hurry the proceedings over as quickly as possible.”

Two years later Sky and Kathy separated. “He beat me, held me captive and wanted me to be in ménages à trois,” Kathy later told People magazine. 

JAMES JAMERSON OR CAROL KAYE: WHO PLAYED WHAT?

I have twice contributed to bassplayer magazine, on both occasions eulogising the unique skills of John Entwistle, and this irregular involvement entitles me to free copies, courtesy of its editor Joel McIver, from whom I commissioned many books for Omnibus Press. His best-selling book was a biography of Metallica that was translated into several languages but the first, in 2000, was a handbook for fans of Extreme Metal. You can find a picture of Joel in every issue of bassplayer, top left on page 4, above a brief resume of what that month’s issue contains. He’s bearded and brandishing a sturdy looking 4-string bass guitar with a religious cross and stag’s head etched on its body, which could imply that he’s still au fait with the rituals of the bands he wrote about in that book, though in reality they're the logo of Jagermeister, a herbal liqueur favoured by heavy metal fans. 

        Not having played bass since I was a teenager, I only occasionally find anything to interest me in the magazine, usually features on bassists I’ve known over the years, among them Roger Glover of Deep Purple, which enabled me to reconnect with him and become involved in a project that might see the light of day in a year or two. 

        This month, however, bassplayer includes something quite different that interests me, a fascinating article on two of the greatest bass players of all time, James Jamerson and Carol Kaye, specifically a sort of “who played what” investigation. There’s a controversy here too. 

        Jamerson, of course, was the Motown Funk Brothers bassist who played on countless records that spun out of Hitsville USA at 2648 W. Grand Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan, and died in 1983 aged 47, an indirect result of his alcoholism. Many regard him as the man who made the sixties swing and America dance. 

James Jamerson

        Kaye, now 86, worked out of Los Angeles and played on thousands of recordings during a 50+ year career, including some Motown sessions which have been disregarded by scholars inclined to favour Jamerson. She now alleges, probably correctly, that some of her work has been wrongly attributed to Jamerson. 

Carol Kaye

        All this might be pretty small time compared to the problems – sorry challenges – the world faces these days, but without knowing it I was a huge fan of Jamerson in my days as a DJ in Andertons Bar in Skipton back in 1968, and probably before. In the discos they played their Motown loud, and the bass lines stood out. Motown, however, never credited the musicians who played behind The Supremes, Vandellas, Four Tops, Temptations, Miracles, Stevie W, Marvin and all the rest, so how was I to know I was tapping my feet to James Jamerson? 

        I didn’t really realise this until 1985, when, on behalf of Omnibus Press, I bought the rights to Where Did Our Love Go? – The Rise And Fall Of The Motown Sound by Nelson George, an unauthorised but extraordinarily revealing book on the label that for the first time told the behind-the-scenes story and gave due credit to the musicians who were as responsible for the Motown Sound as the stars themselves. Jamerson figured prominently, and the book led me to Standing In The Shadows Of Motown (1989), a book about Jamerson that included two cassettes of his bass lines isolated from the rest of the tracks. A bit nerdy I know, but those bass lines were so lyrical, so full of invention, or so goddam funky, that it was worth the effort to listen. Man, could he play. 

        “The Motown producers rarely wrote detailed arrangements for Jamerson,” wrote George. “Instead they’d hand him a chord sheet or have him listen as the melody and lyrics were run down on piano by Brian Holland or Norman Whitfield, and he would build the bass line around what he heard.” Bassist Louis Johnson, who played on Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall and Thriller, told George: “Jamerson brought the triplet feel on bass to pop. Before him it was unusual for the bass to deviate from that single note, dum-dum-dum style Jamerson broke the mould and made the bass more creative.”

        Carol Kaye, equally well regarded, doubtless outplayed Jamerson in terms of total work accomplished, and in her book Studio Musician (2016) and on her own website, has attempted to correct any misconceptions about who played what. Her first session, in 1954, was with Sam Cooke, so her CV is as illustrious any in the game. 

        And while it’s not unreasonable to assume that, since Jamerson spent most of his working life in Detroit and Kaye in Los Angles, Kaye took over when Motown moved its headquarters to California in 1972, it’s not that simple. Which is why bassplayer has interviewed Brian F. Wright, Assistant professor of Popular Music at the University of North Texas in Dallas, who has dug deeply into the who played what controversy. I won’t divulge the contents of the interview, or the link to the website where Wright’s dissertation, Reconstructing The History of Motown Sessions Musicians: The Carol Kaye/James Jamerson Controversy, all 11,292 words of it, complete with annotated lists of sessions and those who worked on them, can be found, but it makes great reading for anyone interested in a story that didn’t quite keep me on the edge of my seat but was well worth an afternoon’s reading. 

        Thanks Joel.

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK! ON WOOD: A LIFE IN SOUL by Eddie Floyd with Tony Fletcher.

Eddie Floyd isn’t a household name like Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding, his private life was never as lively as Marvin Gaye or James Brown, and it’s probably due to his genial, unflappable and rather cautious nature that he’s still with us, having turned 83 in June. All of which might suggest that this autobiography – inevitably titled after his best-known song – could be a dreary affair but his extraordinary memory for songs, names and dates makes Knock! Knock! Knock! On Wood: A Life In Soul a valuable historical record of his life and times, especially the period when he was associated with Memphis-based Stax Records in the mid to late sixties.                                                                                                     Although the book is advertised as Eddie Floyd’s autobiography, it has been ghost written by my friend Tony Fletcher whose interest in sixties soul, dormant during the period he wrote books about white bands, seems to have been reignited by his 2017 biography of Wilson Pickett. Tony has now written ten books, including one novel, but this is his first shot at ghost-writing, a discipline that requires a writer not just to step into the shoes of their subject but to interpret their voice as well. 

        The task of the ghost writer is helped enormously if there’s a shared heritage, a similar cultural background, but that’s certainly not the case here. Eddie Floyd was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1937, and Tony was born in Beverley, in East Yorkshire, in 1964. Beyond the fact that English is their shared first language, their circumstances couldn’t be much more diverse, a factor that adds considerably to what Tony has achieved as he gets inside Eddie’s head to translate his life in the correct vernacular and thereby convey his ‘Steady Eddie’ character to the reader. 

        Tony first met Floyd in 2015 while he was researching his Pickett book. Without hesitation he agreed to be interviewed and they met at Montgomery’s smartest hotel. “Eddie, his silver hair the only sign of old age on a honed body that men half his age would covet, was dressed to the nines, sporting a stylish two-tone suit as if ready to step on stage at a moment’s notice,” writes Tony. “I came away under no illusions that I had just spent several hours with the living embodiment of the Soul Man.” Indeed, the encounter so impressed Tony that after the Pickett book was published he contacted Floyd again to suggest he write his own book with Tony’s help. This is the result. 

        That Eddie Floyd is a gracious and amiable old soul is easily detectable from its pages and while you can’t help but admire this likeable aristocrat of the soul trade, in some respects the book resembles one of those old fashioned showbusiness memoirs wherein everybody is great and any unpleasantness brushed beneath the carpet. Although he raises an eyebrow or two at the behaviour of his rival Pickett, Eddie is too nice a guy to bear any grudges. Grit is kept to a minimum. 

        Eddie is certainly dismayed by the financial woes that befell Stax after it became clear that its owners had inadvertently squandered valuable assets but he doesn’t point the finger in an angry manner, even though his own fortunes were certainly buffeted by the label’s misadventures. Most everyone he meets in his career is wonderful, talented and kind-hearted, and only rarely is a song or record criticised. And while the many musicians with whom he works are exhaustively listed and given due credit for their work, there is a distinct lack of information about his personal life, which involves more than one wife and plenty of children. We are told that Eddie remains on good terms with his female partners, but of his domestic arrangements we remain ignorant, fleeting references to his family serving to whet an appetite fulfilled only by reference late in the book to a son, Anthony, also a musician, with whom he collaborates.

        Similarly, Eddie avoids much mention of racial discrimination or politics. I came away from the book with the impression that he simply doesn’t want to rock the boat on such matters, that whatever he thinks is better left unsaid and, in any case, no good can come of it by venting his spleen about what he probably believes he is powerless to change. He’s a musician not a senator, full stop. 

        On the plus side, the detail is extraordinary. Lovers of Stax music – Motown’s little but cooler brother in my book – will revel in the inside information about what went on in the converted movie theatre at 926 E McLemore Avenue in Memphis. The process of song writing is lucidly explained, with copious examples, the point well made that although Eddie is perhaps best known as a soul singer it’s his song writing skills of which he is most proud. 

        Key episodes in Eddie’s life receive the coverage you would expect. I defy anyone not to be charmed by Eddie’s warm recollections of his first visit, in 1967, to the UK and elsewhere in Europe where the reception rivalled a royal tour. “As far as that Stax/Volt tour of Europe went, it was perfect. Just perfect,” he writes. The death not long afterwards of Otis Redding is sadly recalled, not least because it indirectly gave rise to another of Eddie’s songs, ‘Big Bird’. 

        Many collaborators and admirers were interviewed for the book, among them Bruce Springsteen, Steve Cropper, William Bell, Alan Walden, Paul Young and Bill Wyman. As you would expect, Springsteen’s recollections of inviting Eddie on stage with E Street Band in 1976 are particularly erudite and heartfelt. Eddie was obviously overjoyed at the inclusion of ‘Raise Your Hand’ on his Live 1975-85 LP set in 1985.

        Eddie Floyd was never workshy. From his days with The Falcons, his fondly-remembered first singing group, to the awards shows he invariably shows up for today, he feels a duty always to do his best, for his audience and for his own gratification. If things sometimes don’t go according to plan he simply gets back up and starts over, cheerfully too. He’s level-headed and, when necessary, as tough as some of the boxers he so admires. Most folk he meets know he doesn’t go looking for a fight but it’s wise to avoid starting one with him. It’s left largely unsaid that the publishing revenues from ‘Knock On Wood’, and to a lesser extent ‘634 5789’ and ‘Raise Your Hand’, all songs of his that have been covered by a host of singers, have kept his bank account in credit all his life. 

        And he knows he’s been fortunate. “I have no regrets,” he writes in a feelgood closing chapter that summarises a life many would envy. Touch wood, or knock on it as Americans say, it’ll continue that way and he’ll live on for plenty more years. 

BLACK LIVES MATTER

As protests in America erupt following yet another violent death of an unarmed man of colour at the hands of a gung-ho American cop, I spent a while thinking this morning about how to react and how to support the Black Lives Matter cause. The best way would be to use my Just Backdated blog, which gets between three and four hundreds hits a day, sometimes more when I can somehow link it to a fan site.

            Scanning the blog, however, I find that posts about black acts are pretty rare, the last being my tribute to Little Richard earlier this month, but in truth 25 out of a total of 806 posts, about 3%, is way too small really. Those posts constitute a category down the right hand side of page that I called ‘Soul/R&B/Mobo’ but the reality, of course, is that well over half my posts are probably either about Music Of Black Origin or, more precisely, about acts that perform Music Of Black Origin, most of them white.

            In an attempt to remedy this I decided to look at the iTunes folder on my laptop and check how many black acts were there. Turns out there’s well over 300, a decent amount and if I was sympathetic to rap music and what passes for R&B these days, which I’m not, there’d be a lot more. I suspect there’s way more black acts than white acts but in terms of actual songs the white acts dominate. Of the black acts, only a handful – Hendrix, Prince, Al Green, Sam Cooke, Bob Marley, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Otis Redding, Miles Davis, maybe one or two more – seem to have lots of songs but none really compare to the amounts of songs I have by the likes of The Who, Presley, Bowie, Beatles, R.E.M. etc. (The total number of songs is now 20,575.)

            This is obviously because I have downloaded loads of Various Artists CDs in the blues, reggae and soul genres and the result is that I have a far wider selection of black acts than white ones, which I found interesting. I also noted that these downloaded CDs, especially the reggae ones, have been played as much as, if not more than, most other CDs. For the record, here’s all the black acts I could find in my iTunes folder. I may have missed some. An asterisk indicates a mixed band. And this list is the best way I can think of to say that Black Lives Matter.

            Aaron Neville, The Abyssinians, Admiral Bailey, Al Green, Albert King, Alicia Keys, All Saints, The Alley Cats, Althea and Donna, Ann Peebles, Anoushka Shankar, Apache Indian, Archie Bell & The Drells, Aretha Franklin, Art Blakey, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Arthur Alexander, Arthur Conley, Aswad, Average White Band*

            BB King, Barbara Lewis, The Bay-Kays, The Beat*, Beenie Man, Ben E. King, Benny Spellman, Betty Everett, Betty Wright, Big Bill Broonzy, Big Joe Turner, Big Joe Williams, Billie Holiday, Billy Preston, Billy Stewart, Black Uhuru, Blind John Davis, Blind John Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Blue Mink*, Bo Diddley, Bob B. Soxx & The Blue Jeans, Bob Marley & The Wailers, Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland, Bobby Taylor & The Vancouvers, Booker T & The MGs, Booker T, Brook Benton, Buddy Guy, Buena Vista Social Club, Buju Banton, Bukka White, Burning Spear

            Cab Calloway, Cannonball Adderley, The Capitols, The Capris, Carla Thomas, Cassandra Wilson, Chaka Demus & Pliers, Champion Jack Dupree, Charlie Parker, The Chantels, Charly Black, Chic, The Checkmates, Chubby Checker , Chuck Berry, Chuck Willis, Clarence Carter, The Cleftones, The Clovers, Clyde McPhatter, The Coasters, Cole Stevens, The Contours, The Cookies, The Crests*, The Crystals, Curtis Lee, Curtis Mayfield

            Damien Marley, Dandy Livingstone, Darlene Love, Dave & Ansel Collins, Dawn Penn, The Del Vikings*, The Dells, Dennis Brown, Deon Jackson, Desmond Decker, Desperados Steel Band, Detroit Emeralds, Diana Ross, Dinah Washington, The Dixie Cups, Dobie Grey, Don Covay, Donald Byrd, Donny Hathaway, Doris Troy, Dorothy Moore, The Drifters, Duke Ellington

            Earth, Wind & Fire, Eartha Kitt, Eddie Floyd, Eddie Holland, Eddie Taylor, Eek-A-Mouse, Ella Fitzgerald, Elmore James, Emile Ford & The Checkmates, The Equals*, Eric Donaldson, The Esquires, Esther Phillips, Etta James

            Fats Domino, Fats Waller, Fine Young Cannibals*, The Fi-Tones, 5 Royales, The Five Satins, The Flamingoes, Fontella Bass, The Foundations*, The Four Tops, Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers, Fun Boy Three, Funkaldelic

            Garnet Mimms, Gene Allison, Gene Chandler, Geno Washington, George McCrae

Gladys Knight & The Pips, Glamma Kid, Grandmaster Flash, Gregory Isaacs

            Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes, The Harptones, Harry Belafonte, Harry J Allstars, The Heptones, Herbie Hancock, Horace Parlan, Howlin’ Wolf

            I Roy, Ike & Tin Turner, The Impressions, The Ink Spots, Inner Circle, Irma Thomas, Isaac Hayes

            JB Lenior, Jackie Wilson, Jackson 5, James Brown, James Eastwood, Janet Kay, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Cliff, Jimmy Reed, Jimmy Ruffin, Joe Tex, John Coltrane, John Lee Hooker, John Legend, Johnny Nash, Josh White, Junior Walker, Junior Byles, Junior Kelly, Junior Murvin

            Kamasi Washington, Ken Boothe, Kevin Lyttle, Kim Weston, Koko Taylor, Larry Williams, Lavern Baker, Leadbelly, Lee Scratch Perry, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Li’L Millet, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Little Junior Parker, Little Milton, Little Richard, Little Walter, Lloyd Price, Luis Armstrong, Louis Jordan, Lowell Fulsom

            M People*, Mabel John, Marc Seales, The Mar-Kays, Martha Reeves & The Vandellas, The Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, Mavis Staples, Max Romeo, Maxine Brown, The Melodians, Memphis Minnie, Memphis Slim, Michael Jackson, Mighty Diamond, Mikey Dread, Miles Davis, Minnie Riperton, The Miracles, Miriam Makeba, Mississippi John Hurt, The Moonglows, Muddy Waters

            Nat King Cole, Neville Brothers, Nikhil Bannerjee, Nicky Thomas, Nina Simone, Norah Jones, Notch (Norman Howell),

            The O’Jays, The Orioles, Oscar Peterson, Otis Redding, Otis Rush, Otis Spann

            PP Arnold, The Paragons, The Penguins, Percy Sledge, Peter Tosh, Prince, Prince Far I

            Ramsey Lewis, Ravi Shankar, Ray Charles, Rita Marley, Robert Johnson, The Ronettes, Ruth Brown

            Sade, Sam & Dave, Sam Cooke, Sammy Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Scott Joplin, Scotty, The Selector, Shabba Ranks, Shaggy, The Shirelles, Sister Nancy, Sister Sledge, Skip Marley, Sleepy John Estes, The Slickers, Slim Harpo, Sly & The Family Stone, Sly & Robbie, Smokey Robinson, Solitaires, Solomon Burke, Sonny Boy Williamson, Sophia George, The Soul Stirrers, The Specials, The Spinners, The Staples Singers, Stephen Marley, Stevie Wonder, Sugar Minott, Super Cat, The Supremes

            Tanto Metro & Devonte, Tarrus Riley, The Temptations, Thelonious Monk, Third World, Tina Turner, Tony Tribe, Toots & The Maytells,

            UB40*, Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan

            The Valentinos, Village People *, The Vocaleers, Wes Montgomery, Wilbert Harrison, Wilson Picket, William Bell, Womack Brothers

            Yabby You, Yellowman, Ziggy Marley

The only way to follow this list would be to list those acts who wouldn't be where they are if it wasn't for Music Of Black Origin having given them the impetus to become musicians in the first place. But that's for another day. Remember: Black Lives - And Black Music - Matter. 

LITTLE RICHARD – OOH MY SOUL!

So where do we start?

         Elvis worshipped him. Bob Dylan’s boyhood ambition was to join his band. On 27 December 1960, at Litherland Town Hall, the first step on their yellow brick road, The Beatles opened up with ‘Long Tall Sally’. Mick says when the Stones were on tour with him he’d watch his moves to learn how to entertain. Jimi was fired from one of his bands for trying to upstage him. My biggest influence, says Elton. Then there was Nod. 

         The first sighting I had was of his shoes, black with silver toecaps, and baggy pants. Then the camera panned upwards to this black guy in a brown silk suit with a pencil moustache and high quiff, swaying to and fro as he bashed the keys on a baby grand piano with its lid up. ‘Ready set, go man go, I got a gal that I love so.’ And there he was, hollering away, backed by four horns, guitar, bass and drums, rocking up a storm, an image that remained unchanged for six decades.

         That was The Girl Can’t Help It. I was ten. I missed Don’t Knock The Rock but saw his second movie in our local Odeon. It was an otherwise forgettable romantic comedy, produced as a starring vehicle for platinum-blonde sex goddess Jayne Mansfield, but its influence far outweighed its limited ambition. When I first saw David Byrne in his baggy suit I wondered whether he got the idea from seeing Little Richard in The Girl Can’t Help It.

         The records all arrived around the same time. ‘Tutti Frutti’, ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’, ‘Lucille’, ‘Jenny Jenny’ and more. Richard’s recording of ‘Tutti Frutti’ was my first exposure to rock’n’roll before I heard Elvis, albeit only just. It was a 12” 78rpm disc on the London-American label, brown and silver, played in a classroom at school in Cross Hills and to this day I can recall with absolute clarity not just the actual room where I heard it but where the wind-up gramophone was located and even where I was standing in relation to it. And also, of course, the bomb-drop shock of that opening line.

         All of Little Richards great rock’n’roll songs were recorded between September 1955 and October 1957, and a year later, to my profound distress, he gave it all up for God. I remember reading about that in NME and cadged the money to buy Here’s Little Richard, the first non-Elvis LP I ever had.

         Elvis had his sneer, Chuck his duckwalk, Bo his square guitar, Buddy his Strat, Don & Phil their harmonies and Jerry Lee his 13-year-old bride, but Little Richard outshone them all when it came to showmanship. He was, I think, the purest of all the rock’n’roll pioneers. There was something elemental in his frantic, unrestrained delivery, that voice screaming from the rooftops, a blood-curdling shriek, and the gibberish of the lyrics: nothing exploded the eardrums like “Awopbopaloobop alopbamboom”. If you didn’t know what it meant you weren’t alive, man.

         ‘He’d scream and scream and scream,’ wrote Nik Cohn in Rock From The Beginning, his seminal treatise on rock’n’roll, subsequently retitled Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom. ‘He had a freak voice, tireless, hysterical, completely indestructible, and he never in his life sang at anything lower than an enraged bull-like roar. On every phrase, he’d embroider with squeals, rasps, siren whoops. His stamina, his drive, were limitless. And his songs were mostly total non-songs, nothing but bedrock twelve-bars with playroom lyrics but still he’d put them across as if every last syllable was liquid gold.’

         That’s the best description of Little Richard’s enormous voice that I’ve read anywhere. It gets to the nitty gritty better than all the quotes from the rock stars whose opinions were solicited by those who wrote stories about Richard’s demise in the papers and on line today.

         Interestingly, they didn’t include Noddy Holder, whose singing voice most clearly resembled that of Little Richard to my ears, unless you count Paul McCartney who when he wanted to could imitate Richard about as well as anyone. Slade’s first hit, of course, was ‘Get Down And Get With It’, a cover of a Bobby Marchan 1964 B-side, but Slade’s version was more along the lines of Little Richard’s cover of the same song from 1967. The very best rock’n’roll track The Beatles ever recorded – or Paul sang – was their 1964 cover of ‘Long Tall Sally’ on an EP I still treasure.

         Noddy has recalled seeing The Girl Can’t Help It in a Wolverhampton cinema – sorry picture house – in 1957, an experience from which he never recovered. “When I saw Little Richard dressed in a silk suit with that big bouffant greased hair, pounding the piano, screaming his head off, shaking his arse, the band behind him just swinging, I just flipped,” he told Neil McCormick of the Daily Telegraph in 2005. “The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. This is what rock and roll is: shock, performance, primal beat.”

         In 2003 at Omnibus Press I published a revised edition of Charles White’s book The Life and Times of Little Richard: the Authorised Biography, and was dumbstruck to learn that his biggest UK fan was a dentist from Scarborough. It’s a great book, full of tall tales and downright filth, all about the man whom Charles dubbed the Quasar of Rock. There’s also the best account anywhere of the dubious origins of ‘Tutti Frutti’.

          Ooh, my soul!

THE LEGENDARY SAM COOKE

Prompted by a discussion on a Rock’s Back Pages podcast, for the past week or two I have immersed myself in the music of Sam Cooke, and not for the first time.
         I recall first hearing Sam on the juke box in a coffee bar in Skipton, my home town, when I was about 12 and big on Elvis, Buddy and the Everlys. I liked Little Richard and Chuck Berry too, but Cooke was the first black singer that really got to me as a singer and not just as a rock’n’roller, which he wasn’t anyway. He was a gospel singer who moved into pop and in so doing became an innovator of soul music. ‘Only Sixteen’, ‘Wonderful World’ and ‘Cupid’ were pop songs, beautifully sung, as sweet as anything I’d ever heard, and I bought them as 7” singles on HMV and RCA. All the rest of the singles I bought, or was given, in those days were chosen because I liked the song or the performer but with Sam Cooke it was simply because I loved the sound of his voice, the way he seemed to float through the words and incorporate a sort of spontaneous yodel at the end of a line, a ‘whoa-ho-ho-wo’ signature phrase that I’ve never heard anywhere else.  

         A year or two later I bought ‘Twistin’ The Night Away’ too, and then The Beatles arrived and Sam got killed so I forgot all about him until one evening in 1974 when I was in my apartment in New York watching TV. Up popped an ad for The Legendary Sam Cooke, a triple-LP vinyl set, so I sent off for it, enclosing a cheque for something like $3.99. It was the first Sam Cooke album I’d ever bought, one of a handful of records I actually did buy in those days since my job as MM’s US editor brought an avalanche of free records on an almost daily basis.

         As soon as The Legendary Sam Cooke arrived I put disc one on my turntable and was drawn back to Sam and my old coffee bar, and I played the hell out of all three discs for the next year or two, often quietly in the background as I was writing or reading. In December 1975 I interviewed Bobby Womack who was once a protégé of Cooke, playing in his band and – scandalously – marrying his widow within three months of Cooke’s death. The interview was mainly about Womack’s brief association with The Faces, led by Cooke aficionado Rod Stewart of course, and I felt reluctant to mention Cooke to Womack, as if I was digging up something he might not want to talk about. In the event he talked a bit about Sam without me having to prompt him.

         The RBP Podcast led me to buy Peter Guralnick’s book Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, a masterly biography of the singer that I finished reading last weekend, and as read it I listened again to Cooke’s music, this time on the three-CD set The Essential Sam Cooke, which I’d had for years, and two CDs I bought while reading, one by The Soul Stirrers, the gospel sextet for whom Cooke sang before he turned to secular music, and Live At The Harlem Square Club where his band featured the great King Curtis on sax. In truth no two Sam Cooke records could be so different, from the sacred to the profane in one giant leap. In some ways Sam’s voice had toughened up by 1963, when the live album was recorded, but then again it seems to me that as he matured Sam employed a different, raspier, voice on stage than he did in the studio. This, the live voice, is the one that so influenced Rod. “Who knows, if there weren’t a Sam, there might not have been a Rod,” he writes on the reverse of the CD’s most recent package.

         Dream Boogie reveals that although Sam was the son of a pastor he was no saint. He fathered several children before he married (twice). He liked his whiskey and his women but he wasn’t into drugs. He was careless with his money, too generous to friends, but was an uncompromising perfectionist in the studio, taking immense care over his recordings, take after take, which are analysed in great depth by Guralnick. He wrote most of his own hits, usually on an acoustic guitar, and soon realised the benefits of controlling his own music publishing. He had interesting encounters with Cassius Clay (soon to become Muhammed Ali), Malcolm X, Jackie Wilson and others singers of the era. Elvis was a fan and once talked to LC, Sam’s brother, about Sam, “for 20 minutes. He knew his gospel music”.

         The book also reveals that my old editor at Melody Maker, Ray Coleman, in New York in June 1964 to cover Sam’s opening at the Copacabana, encountered a slightly tipsy Sam in the bar at the Warwick Hotel. “The Beatles are clever. They sell emotion,” he told Ray. Sam was among the first to predict – and welcome – the British Invasion. When I interviewed Bobby Womack I asked him about the Stones’ recording of ‘It’s All Over Now’ which Womack wrote for his group The Valentinos. “Y'know... I didn't dig it at all when I knew the Stones were doing that song,” he told me, confirming what Guralnik has written. “That was my first record and it was a hit and I didn’t want to know about no cover version. It was Sam Cooke that told me and he was happy because he had the publishing, but I didn't care about the Rolling Stones... no... I said, ‘Let them get their own songs together man’ but they did it and I didn’t understand why Sam was happy until I got the first cheque.”

         I never knew Ray had met Sam and if I had I’d have asked him about it.

         I did know that in the last year of his life Sam’s business affairs became managed by Allen Klein who was brought on board to straighten out Sam’s tangled finances. Klein managed to extract money that was owed to Sam and seems to have loved him like a son, and Guralnick steers well clear of any conspiracy theories that suggest his tragic death at the age of 33 was anything other than the outcome of a chain of unwise but disastrous circumstances. Sam changed labels, from Specialty to Keen to RCA, breaking contracts in the process, and was involved in lawsuits with disgruntled label owners. He could be abrupt, occasionally short-tempered, and he no doubt upset a few people by insisting on following his own path, managing his career the way he wanted to, but he didn’t make enemies to the extent that they might have wanted him dead. He was too nice a man for that. 

         Running parallel to Sam’s story in Dream Boogie is the best account of life on the chitlin’ circuit – the clubs where black musicians earned their living, usually in cash – that I’ve read anywhere, and also the gospel circuit where women were especially welcoming to the many competing vocal groups that praised the Lord in song. The book is also littered with instances of racism directed at Sam and other black performers during an era when segregation and brutality were rife, especially in the southern states. It was this ugly aspect of life in America for people of colour that gave birth to what is nowadays regarded as Sam’s masterpiece, the sublime ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, inspired by Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have Dream’ speech at Washington DC in August 1963, which became an anthem of the Civil Right Movement, covered by many.

         But over and above these subplots in the all too short life of Sam Cooke, what all this listening and research has done is to impress on me yet again that he really was the greatest soul singer who ever lived. I didn’t know that when I was 12, only that I loved his voice, a voice that still charms me over 60 years later.

MEMORIES OF PETER TOSH

Each week I get a notification from Rock’s Back Pages that draws my attention to about 60 new articles or reviews that have just been added to its vast library, and about once a month an old piece of mine, either an interview or a show or LP review, crops up amongst them. RBP is an online library of pop writing curated by Mark Pringle and Barney Hoskyns, and to date it contains 304 articles of mine, the vast majority from Melody Maker, and the number keeps rising.

         In some ways Rock’s Back Pages acts as an aide-memoire for me as, of course, do old copies of MM. On RBP last week, for example, there was my review of Jefferson Starship at New York’s Academy of Music from MM dated 13 April, 1974, so this confirms that I was in New York during the week before. I have completely lost count of the number of shows I reviewed in those years, especially when I was in America.

         Because they are more substantial I can usually remember doing the interviews that crop up on RBP but sometimes I read one of these old show reviews and can’t for the life of me remember writing it, let alone the show. Did I really see Jefferson Starship at the Academy? I can’t recall the show at all but must have done I guess, as here’s what I wrote: “Jefferson Starship went into orbit last week, circling the Village area and making several landings into the Academy of Music to entertain sell-out audiences. Putting aside some preconceived ideas about what the evening's spectacle would produce, I took in the opening show at the Academy and came away pleasantly surprised.”

         This week on RBP, however, there’s an interview of mine from November 1976 with Peter Tosh, one of the original Wailers, and I definitely remember spending an hour or so with him and his entourage in a hotel room in midtown Manhattan, largely because Tosh was deeply intimidating and all bar me were stoned out of their heads. Also, he talked in rhymes, mumbling in Jamaican patois that I found very difficult to understand, and when I came to transcribe the tape later I had to play it back time and time again to faithfully report what he had to say.

         Tosh was tall and thin, with a mass of dreadlocks, and he wore jet black sunglasses with leather sides so I couldn’t see his eyes. “He eased forward in an armchair, took a massive pull on a newly rolled joint and allowed the smoke to drift upwards across his features until he was almost totally obscured by clouds,” I wrote.

         Alongside him in the room were five or six other Rastas, one of them a white guy with dreads who kept nodding off. They were passing round these massive joints rolled from crinkly paper. There was a big bag of herb on a coffee table and not once during my interview was there a moment when at least two spliffs weren’t on the go. All of Peter’s friends mumbled in agreement at what he was telling me, things like “You gotta go through some humiliation to reach to tribulation” or “communication is justification” or “exploitation is the manifestation of subordination” – there were lots of -ations – and the more he warmed to his subjects, the more it seemed to me as if I was participating in some sort of Jamaican religious ritual, with Peter as the preacher, his friends as the congregation and me taking communion for the first time. I couldn’t help but wonder whether or not I was being taken for a ride.

         Peter had strong feelings about legalising marijuana. “Yes mon. Dat is de message mon. I see no reason why man should be incriminated for a thing dat man cannot make. Dis was created de same de trees was created, de same way de birds and de bees was created. Dis,” he continued, waving his gigantic joint in the air, “is a part of the creation. Man is trying to show man dat dis thing is a part of dangerous drugs and poison. What am I? If I use dangerous drugs and poison 24 hours a day, what am I?”

         “A dangerous person?” I suggested. Then I wrote: “Tosh let out a huge laugh, coughing dangerous and poisonous fumes into the air that smelled infinitely preferable to the exhaust from the cars that droned by on 57th Street below.”

         I asked Peter why he had left Marley and The Wailers, and he responded by telling me my question was back to front. Marley left him, he said. "You wanna aska why Marley leave me... well, dere was some spiritual vibration between de group. Bob is a leader, he is a singer and writer. All de years it is Bob dat de people has been hearing about and in all dat time we have been writing and making de music and haven't had the opportunity of putting it out to de people. De inspiration and ideas dat I got faded and it is a sin to get talent and hide it, just totally a sin. We can't go on living in sin all de days of our life, mon, and it was de same father who inspired Bob go sing who inspired I and Bunny, so we have to go out and put de message dere. And dere were other causes that come between us but we couldn't go through dat bullshit because I had de message and de message is to play music. Bunny and I had messages and dey were getting wasted, mon. We are strong together because unity is strength but the unity between de three minds have to be coordinated together. If two minds are together and one mind is somewhere else it fails to function, mon."

         Looking at my interview on RBP this week I’m amazed that I managed to stretch it to 1,500 words, most of my quotes in Peter’s Jamaican patois like the ones above.

         In 2013 I published a book about Peter Tosh called Steppin’ Razor, and its author, John Masouri, told me that Peter loved intimidating timid young white writers like myself. John knew Peter well and told me it was a big joke to him. Behind those inscrutable shades, he said, Peter would have been laughing to himself. I half suspected this, and certainly came away from my encounter with Peter with a feeling that he was one of the good guys. So my grief was genuine when I learned he had died of gunshot wounds sustained during a robbery at his house in 1987.