Plush Chicago

Chicago was an epicenter for soul music in the '60s and '70s. Many Chicago productions tended toward lavishness, especially in the later '60s. It was stately soul, it was soul which gravitated towards strings, sophisticated vocal arrangements and bracingly funky drums.

1. Little Sherman & The Mod Swingers, The Price of Love (Sagport)
Sublime group soul with the sort of plush, 747-Class production that took ten thousand gallons of jet fuel to get off the ground. Who bankrolled grand projects like this in 1969? Mayor Daley?

The infectious, sweeping sound of "The Price of Love" is characteristically Chicagoan.

2. The Chymes, My Baby's Gone Away (Down to Earth)
The Chymes are supported here by the Soul Crusaders, the versatile and ubiquitous Chicago house band. It’s the Soul Crusaders' bells which signal the incoming “dream sequence," and which herald this 24K gold nugget of Chicago group soul.

“My Baby’s Gone Away” is a spiritual half-brother to “The Price of Love,” and it succeeds, too, as a sort of urban drama. Note also the passing reference to Vietnam, which, without drawing attention to itself, reflected the everyday reality of the war and conscription for the young black male.

3. The Gaslight, Here's Missing You (Grand Junction)
This was a fairly popular record back around 1970. But, along with the question of exactly why his baby left him, everything about the Gaslight is a mystery. The information on the label connects the Gaslight to the Chicago psychedelic funk artists Fugi and Black Merda, though the Gaslight were recording here in a relatively straightforward harmony-soul style.

Either way, “Here’s Missing You” breaks down, day by tear-jerking day, the entire trajectory of a week-long relationship, finally condensing it into three minutes of perversely blissful harmonies.

Sleeping pills

It all depends on the week.

Sometimes you’re chugging along and it seems that every time you turn your perfectly-shaped head there’s another library being named for you, another director who wants you for their picture, or just another good-looking friend who wants to raise a toast to you. You're at the top of your game and, dammit, it shows.

And sometimes, like this week, it’s just you in your boxer shorts, a handful of pills, and the test patterns on TV.

1. Parker McDougal, Foxxy Minor (M and M)
The sound of your next downward spiral. This dark bop obscurity helps me hit rock bottom every time. McDougal was a Chicago tenor saxophonist who recorded for the hipster label M&M. (See the fantastic Red Saunders Research for the full story on M&M and other indie Chicago R&B/jazz labels.)

“Foxxy Minor” was recorded in 1960.

Yeah, see you in rehab, buddy.

2. Henry Glover & His Quartet, Sassy's Dream (King)
Henry Glover distinguished himself behind-the-scenes at the legendary King records as a talented producer, songwriter, and A&R (Artists & Repertoire) guy. And, on this lovely 50’s downer, he steps briefly from the shadows to play piano.

There's serendipity here in the combination of title ("Sassy's Dream") and atmosphere (yes, dreamy). Dreamy... verging on chemical torpor. While it’s unlikely that Glover recorded this as a drug song, it's still fun reading all sorts of illicit messages into it. It just makes "Sassy's Dream" seem that much more darkly evocative, somehow.

3. Bob Bain’s All Stars, Black Beauty (Montclare)
“Black Beauty” is an old street name for amphetamine and, for once, I’m sure that the song title was a coincidence. The song is, in fact, the opposite of amphetamine. And, while “Black Beauty” is slightly less bleak by this week’s standards, it still slows to a crawl, and threatens to dissolve entirely.

This is ether music of the finest order. Bob Bain, a jazzy guitarist and longtime LA studio musician, is here heard along with Plas Johnson, another prolific LA studio heavy, famous for his saxophone work on “The Pink Panther” theme. Plas’s horn line, which manages to keep its head above the lull of the organ, verily whispers, “Go ahead, friend. Treat yourself. You deserve the opportunity to drink yourself into a stupor at 3:45 am. It’s time to live.”

“Black Beauty” was recorded in Los Angeles in the early- to mid-60’s.

The Generation Gap

Disavowing the square world has, of course, always been something at which angst-laden youngsters excel. If the subject matter of these three selections is any indication, then 1967 and 1968 was a happy time indeed to be putting down the plastic people.

1. The Things, Jazz-Rock With Soul (Ray Pro)
We’re gonna play that new sound,
The sound of Jazz-Rock With Soul.
This is our music.
And it’s for generations now,
And the ones that follow.

Ah, young men. Young men, with their solemn proclamations and their maracas.

The Things succeed with a primeval form of garage-rock - if not with the more problematic concept of “Jazz-Rock With Soul.” Though their version of jazz basically translates into screaming organ solos and drum breakdowns, the Things still beat Miles Davis to the concept of Jazz Rock by several years. You’d think they’d at least get some credit for that.

These are brave souls. And, while I have no evidence for where they hailed from, I’d have to guess California.

2. The Jelly Bean Bandits, Generation (Mainstream)
A New York group with an excellent full-length LP and - unlike their beguilingly sincere West Coast counterparts - a cultivated sense of irony. Which, I suppose, allowed them to freely mix UFO paranoia in with oblique commentary on the generation divide. Fine by me. It’s a loud 45, too, and what the Jelly Bean Bandits couldn’t articulate with free associations and wordplay, they put across with volume, feedback, and crashing reverb.

Note those weird pulses of organ vibrato, too. Wild! It’s from 1967.

3. Savage Resurrection, Thing in "E" (Mercury)
The Savage Resurrection took the hippie ethos of cultural secession and, with a throbbing beat and some whispers of “It’s better,” imbued it with a jaunty biker vibe all their own.

The fuzz guitars and the generally pleasant reek of drugs and juvenile reprobation remind me of some of the heavier Texas psychedelia of the late 1960’s. The Savage Resurrection was actually a Bay Area group, though - and they, too, had an entire full-length LP to their name.

Roscoe Weathers, pt. 1

Part of it is the mystery. As far as I can tell, West Coast jazz musician Roscoe Weathers’s entire output consisted of ten 45 rpm records. Several online references place Weathers in the post-War nightclubs of the Pacific Northwest where, as a saxophonist and bandleader, he’d play with Bobby Bradford, Floyd Standifer, Warren Bracken and other young Portland and Seattle beboppers. At some point in the late 1950s, however, Weathers relocated to California. There he’d contribute to the 1958 album Stringin’ Along, an obscure West Coast jazz session led by Bob Keene. More significantly, Weathers would release a series of 45s on tiny Los Angeles labels, becoming something of a regular in the bohemian clubs and coffeehouse of the Venice Beach scene of the ‘60s.

Then there's the music. Hip and atmospheric, the records feature Weathers's talents on flute along with his crack jazz combo. They’re great examples of the Latin jazz that flourished on the West Coast among jazzbos like Cal Tjader, Eddie Cano and Bobby Montez, a form that favored hip exoticism over the hotter, brassier style of New York musicians like Machito, Dizzy Gillespie or Tito Puente.

It’s both the obscurity and the quality of these 45s, three of them featured this week, which have spawned something akin to fascination on my part. It all leads, finally, to the question: just who exactly was Roscoe Weathers?

1. Roscoe Weathers, Penny Whistle Montuna (Cornuto)
We start with the wonderful “Penny Whistle Montuna.”

Thunderous conga drums, flute, mad penny-whistle birdcalls. This is the template for Weathers’ s exotic brand of Latin jazz. This is what the product of four dark, sleepless nights with one’s Roland Kirk and Tito Puente records sounds like. This is a ball of nocturnal tension e’er there was one.

Jimmy Welton, noted in the writer credits, was a producer who owned and ran the Cornuto, Protone, and (I believe) Vended Record labels, all tiny Hollywood operations. Protone was, until at least very recently, active as classical music label and was run in part by Jane Courtland (see “Penny Whistle Montuna”’s credits again), a producer herself and the widow of the late Jimmy Welton.

If the publishing date is correct (and they’re sometimes not), “Penny Whistle Montuna” was recorded in 1964.

2. Roscoe Weathers Quintet, Echoes (Vended)
On “Echoes,” there’s again that sense of subcontinental latitude. Weathers’s jungle flute, along with the vibraphone (that archetypal Pacific accoutrement) and electrifying percussion showcase make it impossible to locate which latitude, of course, but that’s not the point. It was somewhere intriguing and mysterious, and that’s all you need to know.

I’d guess that “Echoes,” as with all of this week’s selections, was recorded around 1964 or ’65.

3. Roscoe Weathers Quintet, I'll Remember Clover (Aspect)
Somewhere in some West Hollywood backroom are the tapes of “I’ll Remember Clover” in its entirety, moldering alongside the Maltese Falcon and the missing JFK footage. As you hear, this selection is faded out hastily after the piano solo, just as the group seems to reach some sort of thematic refrain. This practice was fairly widespread back in the day, actually, and says far more about the independent record industry than it does about the musicians involved.

“I Remember Clover” isn’t without precedent in the California of the 1950s and ‘60s. If anything, the coast’s music reflected its own stereotypes. Jazz icons like Chet Baker, Art Pepper and Chico Hamilton are California cool personified while the Latin jazz of Cal Tjader or Eddie Cano pulsed with a peculiarly Pacific atmosphere. I won’t belabor the point: Roscoe Weathers was West Coast jazz at its darkest, hippest and most piquant, and “I’ll Remember Clover” is its perfect illustration.