Archive - January, 2008
Thursday, January 31st, 2008
LOS ANGELES, CA - Stax Records (now a division of Concord Music Group) will release Stax Does The Beatles and Stax Sings The Songs of Motown® Records on February 26. Stax, of course, was best known for creating its own
songs – classics like “(Sittin’ On The) Dock of the Bay,” “Knock On Wood” and “Respect Yourself.” But in the hands of a Stax artist, a Beatles or Motown song found a new Southern groove, often redefining what would seem improbable to improve upon.
“I was moved by the Beatles,” explained Booker T. Jones of Booker T & the MGs, quoted in Rob Bowman’s Soulsville USA. “I thought they were doing really great things. Their records didn’t sound alike ever.” And thus Booker T & the MGs recorded the Beatles covers album titled McLemore Avenue, containing such songs as “Eleanor Rigby,” “Michelle” and “Lady Madonna,” all included on Stax Does The Beatles. MGs guitarist Steve Cropper called The Beatles “a cool group of superhumans. Hats off to the Beatles and thanks for the music.”
But Booker T & the MGs were by no means the only artists to turn to the Beatles as a song source. Isaac Hayes turned in a 12-minute version of “Something,” included here, on his 1970 album The Isaac Hayes Movement. Carla Thomas chose Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” as part of her Live at the Bohemian Caverns sessions in Washington, DC. She had met McCartney in 1967 at London’s Speakeasy Club. Otis Redding’s version of “Day Tripper” became an immediate classic – the Fab Four’s riff lending itself famously to Stax’s horn section. Other prime Stax Beatles covers, contained here, emanated from David Porter, the Mar-Keys, Reggie Milner and John Gary Williams.
Album annotator Richie Unterberger writes, “While Stax was destined to be primarily remembered for the wealth of original soul classics it generated, Stax Does The Beatles reminds us that its artists were also able interpreters of music first performed outside the Southern soul genre.”
Liverpool wasn’t the only outside source of Stax hits. The Memphis label found equal reserves within the repertoire of its Detroit rival label, Motown, proven by the 15 tracks of Stax Sings Songs of Motown® Records. Joel Selvin, pop music critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, who wrote the notes for the Motown covers album, noted: “In Detroit, Motown followed an automated approach to making records, influenced no doubt by founder Berry Gordy’s early work at the Ford plant, while in Memphis, the Stax musicians took a more organic tack.”
Yet when the shimmering teen pop of Detroit made it down to Stax’s Memphis studios, songs found a whole new life. Take, for instance, Margie Joseph’s soulful reading of the Supremes’ “Stop in the Name of Love.” The Staple Singers’ version of the Temptations’ minor hit, “You’ve Got To Earn It,” penned by Smokey Robinson, narrowly missed the R&B Top 10 in 1971. And blind soul singer Calvin Scott gave a gospel-tinged Southern workout to “Can I Get a Witness” for his album I’m Not Blind, I Just Can’t See.
As he did with the Beatles, Isaac Hayes re-imagined Motown with his deconstructed cover of the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye.” The song was a highlight of Hayes’ classic Black Moses album from 1971. Hayes also contributed production finesse to his frequent songwriting partner David Porter’s cover of the Stevie Wonder song “I Don’t Know Why I Love You,” featured on Porter’s 1970 Enterprise solo debut album.
Other Stax artists to cover Motown included Mavis Staples, Barbara Lewis, Billy Eckstine, the Mar-Keys, Fredrick Knight, O.B. McClinton, the Bar-Kays and the Soul Children.
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Saturday, January 26th, 2008
In addition to their solo success, both William Bell and Carla Thomas proved to be valuable Stax contributors in the duet format, Bell with Judy Clay (”Private Number”) and Thomas with Otis Redding (”Tramp”) and also with poppa Rufus. With “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” Bell and Thomas take on one famous musical duo - Phil & Don, the Everly Brothers - in the form of another, the romantic soul ballad tag-teams popularized by Marvin Gaye with Tammi Terrell and other female vocal partners.
“Dream” was originally released on 1968’s Duets, which compiles Bell’s duets with Mavis Staples, Clay and Thomas, then released as a single in March ‘70 (it failed to chart). Around this same time - the spring of ‘70 - Booker T. & the MGs were working through their tribute to another pop-rock band, the Beatles, with their McLemore Avenue take on Abbey Road.
Though the original version seems to float…uh, dreamily, cloudlike and wistful, the version Bell and Thomas delivered is decidedly more earthbound and pained, more “Stax-ified.” The tempo seems slowed down just enough to make the downbeats sound and feel more pronounced, like good funky soul music should. Bell and Thomas, especially in the bridge and last verse - when Bell sings, “I need you so, enough to die,” you sure believe it - weave soulful magic together.
“All I Have To Do Is Dream” remains available on The Compete Stax-Volt Soul Singles Volume 2.
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Saturday, January 26th, 2008
Almost forgotten with the constant change in technology is the reality that before the early ‘80s, many of the great recordings of the ’60s and ‘70s were gone, out of print, hard to find and only rarely rediscovered if you happened upon a worn out LP in a used record store! The invention and advent of the compact disc brought back literally thousands and thousands of tracks that might have been permanently lost to posterity. The CD ‘revolution’ of the ‘80s and ‘90s and beyond gave avid record collectors and music enthusiasts the opportunity to revive memories associated with specific tracks as well as introducing us to albums and singles we just might have missed the first time around.
Take William Bell’s Stax catalog: I still recall loving his first album for the label, “Soul Of A Bell” because of tracks like “Everybody Loves A Winner” and a particular favorite, “You Don’t Miss Your Water.’ Loved his duets with the late Judy Clay – the classic “Private Number” and follow up “My Baby Specializes,” wishing they had done an entire LP together. Thought his 1968 hit, “I Forgot To Be Your Lover” was magnificent. But, honestly, I never really followed some of his subsequent Stax albums, only being reminded of this soul man’s skills when he signed with Mercury Records in 1976 when “Tryin’ To Love Two” brought him back to the R&B and pop charts.
Seeing William in action last summer in Memphis when he performed as part of the Stax 50th anniversary celebration (and having seen him at a small Cleveland nightclub a year or so prior at a pre-Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame tribute to Sam Cooke), I was struck by his ability to remain true to his musical roots: he was, after all, the very first male solo vocalist signed to Stax back in ’62, thus an important figure in the company’s growth and expansion. Live, he’s a solid soul man, expressing himself with real emotion and truth-tellin’ honesty.
Digging into the still-available set of two-on-one CDs first issued by Fantasy and remaining in the Stax/Concord catalog I find “Wow” and “Bound To Happen,” a twenty-one track collection that comprises two albums first issued in 1971 and 1969 respectively. The ten cuts that make up “Wow” are particularly interesting, mostly produced by Stax president Al Bell and all but three tracks cut in Muscle Shoals, Alabama rather than in Memphis. The horns and strings were overdubbed at Ardent Studios (in Memphis) while the particularly soulful background vocals – courtesy Kim Weston, then-husband producer Mickey Stevenson, Patrice Holloway (sister of Motown star Brenda) and Jessie Smith (of the vocal group Hodges, James & Smith) – on seven tracks were done at MGM studios in Los Angeles. The result? A decidedly different-sounding album for Mr. Bell! Maybe a little more polished than some of his early Memphis-cut material, the standout tracks including “Till My Back Ain’t Got No Bone” (an Eddie Floyd-Al Bell song, later recorded by Esther Phillips), artist/songwriter (Prince) Phillip Mitchell’s “Somebody’s Gonna Get Hurt” and Stax songwriter Bettye Crutcher’s “A Penny For Your Thoughts.” Hoping to generate extra sales, Stax added Bell’s 1968 hit “I Forgot To Be Your Lover” to “Wow” but it didn’t make much difference: at the time of its release in 1971, Gulf & Western (which had assumed financial control of Stax) were only interested in ‘numbers’ and William Bell’s LP, bereft of a new hit single, just didn’t get any major push.
Of greater interest to more traditional soul fans is 1969’s “Bound To Happen,” produced by Booker T. Jones and featuring the MGs (Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn and Al Jackson Jr.) augmented by Stax musicians Marvell Thomas (son of Rufus, brother of Carla), Michael Toles and James Alexander with The Memphis Horns. Aside from the exquisite “I Forgot To Be Your Lover,” the original twelve tracks included originals such as the upbeat “Happy,” (a Bell-Jones original), the memorable “My Whole World Is Falling Down,” (co-written by Bettye Crutcher and Booker T.) and the Caribbean-flavored “Bring The Curtain Down.” Of the covers, most notable: “Johnny, I Love You,” another Jones’ tune originally recorded by Booker for the “Uptight” soundtrack; a great version of “I Got A Sure Thing,” first cut by Stax labelmates Ollie & The Nightingales; and an interesting reading of “Born Under A Bad Sign,” the song William had written with Booker T. Jones a few years earlier for blues guitarist Albert King. As a classic late ‘60s Stax album, “Bound To Happen” is certainly worthy of attention and while William Bell may never have reached the mainstream heights of, say, Isaac Hayes or Sam & Dave, his music is a bona fide representation of Stax at its soulful best.
David Nathan
Aka the British Ambassador Of Soul
Owner, www.soulmusic.com, www.soulmusicstore.com, www.soulmusicglobal.com
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Friday, January 25th, 2008
Author Rob Bowman, widely acknowledged as the definitive source for all matters Stax (not only as the writer of the tome “Soulsville USA: The Story Of Stax Records”) but as the penman behind dozens of liner notes for Stax reissues calls “Genesis” and “Friction” by The Soul Children “among the finest soul recordings in the 1970s.” He describes the vocal workouts between original members Norman West, J. Blackfoot, Shelbra Bennett and Anita Louis as “incendiary”
and Bowman knows of what he speaks. Listening back to the two-on-one CD still thankfully available on Stax, I can only agree with Rob’ assessment: while I have a personal preference for “Friction,” the soap opera-styled concept LP on the subject of infidelity created by producers Homer Banks (himself a Minit recording artist in the late ‘60s) and songwriting partner Carl Hampton, the seventeen tracks on this one record are simply stunning. For many reasons – including the likelihood that the quartet was simply too soulful for radio airplay – The Soul Children never received the mass appeal that their music deserved. They did, most assuredly, resonate with black music buyers in the South but never gained the foothold among a more mainstream crowd that could have ensured greater recognition.
It’s obvious from their eight-minute reworking of vocalist Lorraine (“Stay With Me”) Ellison’s 1967 cut “I Want To Be Loved” (not, as Mr. Bowman suggests in his liner notes originally recorded by Willie Hightower but rather by Ellison) that is the opening cut on “Genesis,” The Soul Children didn’t play when it came to laying down gospel-fused passionate vocals. It didn’t hurt that Stax co-founder Jim Stewart masterminded the sessions for 1971’s “Genesis,” co-produced by MGs’ drummer Al Jackson Jr. According to Rob Bowman’s notes, “the sessions…marked a return at Stax to both the communal way of working and the gospel aesthetic that permeated most of the company’s work in the 1960s.” Indeed, when producer/writers Isaac Hayes and David Porter had first created the concept for The Soul Children in 1968, it was as natural musical successors – with the expansion to a quartet – to Sam & Dave, who had been constant hitmakers for Stax in the ‘60s.
Aside from the hit single, “Hearsay,” other key cuts that are remarkable for their sheer soulfulness include the standout “All That Shines Ain’t Gold” (co-written by KoKo artist Tommy Tate), the amazing “I’m Loving You More Everyday,” the Eddie Floyd-penned “Never Get Enough Of Your Love” (the rhythm track for which was cut in Jamaica) and the Southern soul-flavored “All Day Preachin’” (co-written by Stax stalwart Bettye Crutcher).
“Friction” may be best remembered for the classic opus “I’ll Be Other Woman”: as writer Bowman explains, producers Banks and Hampton decided to make full use of the vocal capabilities of all four singers quoting the late Homer Banks as saying, ‘This group is full of lead singers, what if we explored other territories,’ a reference to the fact that most of the quartet’s recordings had featured J. Blackfoot as the lead singer. Following a story of the ups-and-downs of a relationship, “What’s Happening Baby” with its real-life rap from Blackfoot is just pure brilliance as is “Can’t Let You Go.” A few cuts on “Friction” including “I’ll Be The Other Woman” showcase female vocalist Shelbra Bennett who Banks had known from the years when she sang at a local Memphis club including the wonderful “It’s Out Of My Hands” and the album’s closer “Love Makes It Right,” (the group’s last charted single for Stax) which also includes a truth-tellin’ rap about the everyday challenge that folks deal with when faced with falling in love with someone else’s mate! Ask me how I know: “Friction” was actually the soundtrack for a real relationship I was experiencing at the time of its release which is probably why the LP will always have a special place in my memories. That said, Rob Bowman calls it “one of the greatest soul albums of the decade” and I concur. If you can handle soul music of the deep variety, check out this brilliant two-on-one CD!
David Nathan
Aka the British Ambassador Of Soul
Owner, www.soulmusic.com, www.soulmusicstore.com, www.soulmusicglobal.com
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