Booker T. and beyond

Booker T. and the MG’s contributed so much to the popularity of Memphis’s Stax Records in the ‘60s, and were so fundamental to the label’s sound - sharp, soulful, and classy, never flashy - it’s impossible to separate the histories of the two.

The group coalesced from young session players at the Stax Records studios - Booker T. Jones (organ, piano), Steve Cropper (guitar), Lewie Steinberg (bass, replaced by Donald “Duck” Dunn in ‘64), and Al Jackson Jr. (drums) - really only becoming an official unit after the success of their iconic instrumental “Green Onions.” In turn, the group helped make Stax a ‘60s powerhouse soul label - just behind Motown - and stars of many the label’s roster - Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, Johnny Taylor, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas.

Booker T. and the MG's, mid-'60s publicity photo. Donald "Duck" Dunn, Booker T. Jones, Steve Cropper, Al Jackson Jr.

It wasn’t just that Booker T. and the MG’s were racially integrated at an inauspicious moment in Southern history. It wasn’t just that they were sensitive accompanists, either, or that their sound or their guitar-bass-drums-organ line-up was unprecedented. Simply, it was that they consistently hipper and funkier than anyone that had come before them, playing with an impeccable economy that skirted minimalism. Even on their records like “Time Is Tight,” “Hip Hug-Her,” or, of course “Green Onions” - terrific sides as successful as the Stax headline artists they backed - they were brilliant strategists, never playing two notes where one would do.

Just as every hit inspires a dozen hopeful homegrown soundalikes and variations, all of this did not go noticed by American musicians, this week’s included. America itself seemed to prefer its Memphis instrumentals straight from the source, however (Willie Mitchell perhaps being the notable exception), and Booker T. and the MG’s would continue to oblige, producing hits from one end of the ‘60s (“Green Onions,” 1962) to the other (“Melting Pot,” 1971). Our guys didn’t have the same luck, but they had nothing to worry about in retrospect. There’d always be more room for their kind around here on Office Naps.

1. Del-Rays, Night Prowl (R and H)
The Del-Rays were one of several white R&B-based groups who percolated out of northwestern Alabama in the late ‘50s.

It was a surreal scene. They came from surrounding Alabama towns, young white kids nursed on country music and crazy for R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. Crazy, period. Early on, in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the Del-Rays were working an improbable circuit of Southern fraternity parties alongside like-minded groups like Dan Penn & the Pallbearers, the Mystics and Hollis Dixon. When they weren’t confounding the brothers from Phi Kappa Theta with manic versions of “Baby, What You Want Me to Do” or “Kansas City,” these musicians gravitated to the FAME recording facilities.

Started in the late ‘50s, FAME (short for Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) was the quixotic vision of local Florence character Tom Stafford and young musicians Billy Sherrill and Rick Hall. Commandeered by the ambitious Hall in the early ‘60s, and moved to nearby Muscle Shoals, the FAME studios would become the region’s galvanizing force of soul music. Arthur Alexander recorded “You Better Move On” there in 1961, and Jimmy Hughes “Steal Away” in 1963. By the mid-‘60s, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin had recorded there. By 1971, so had the Osmonds: FAME had come a long way.

As part of the studio’s house band, the Del-Rays - or at least several members - would play a significant role in FAME’s success along the way. In 1964, however, when “Night Prowl” was recorded, the Del-Rays were another working-touring group, hanging around the FAME Studios but still a few months away from becoming full-time session musicians there.

The influence of Stax Records - a mere hundred miles to the west, but sort of in a different league at this point - is clear on this selection. Lean and mean, like “Green Onions,” perhaps even more so, a title like “Night Prowl” promises much, and the song delivers - the greatest thing to hit street brawling since Thunderbird Wine. “Night Prowl” would be the second of four 45s by the group, who at this point included guitarist Jimmy Johnson, saxophonist Billy Cofield, organist Billy Scott and drummer Roger Hawkins. (The Del-Rays’ debut was 1959’s “Hot Toddy”; the two later 45s - one on R and H, and one on Atco Records - were more rock ‘n’ roll-oriented, with vocals by Jimmy Ray Hunter.)

Not long after “Night Prowl,” Johnson, Cofield and Hawkins would join FAME as the studio’s second, and most storied, house band. Along with organist Spooner Oldham, bassist Albert “Junior” Lowe, guitarist Marlin Greene, trumpeter Jack Peck and saxophonist Don "Rim" Pollard, this band would back Pickett, for instance, on “Mustang Sally” and Aretha Franklin on the original version of “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You).”

In 1969, Johnson and Hawkins - along with fellow Muscle Shoals musicians David Hood and Barry Beckett - left FAME. They formed the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, and would became partners in the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, an immensely successful recording studio in ensuing years.

2. The Pac-Keys, Dig In (Hollywood)
Like “Night Prowl,” this selection encapsulates a certain aspect of Southern R&B history. The Pac-Keys in this case were the vehicle of Charles “Packy” Axton, a saxophonist known as both a founding member of the Mar-Keys, and the son of Estelle Axton, the early co-owner of Stax Records, a label which her brother Jim Stewart - Packy’s uncle - founded.

The early chapters of Stax Records are inextricable from Packy Axton. The label, founded as Satellite Records in 1957 (the name changed to Stax in 1961) had some early success with 1960 records by legendary R&B father-daughter team Rufus and Carla Thomas. It would be one of Axton’s early records with the Mar-Keys, however, that brought his family’s record business to national attention. 1961’s “Last Night” (hear excerpt here) was just as significant for its popularity - charting at number three - as it was for its lean, soulful motif, which set an early precedent for the Stax sound, and the sound of Memphis soul in general.

Other members of the Mar-Keys (Steve Cropper and Donald “Duck” Dunn) would disembark for even greater fortune as Booker T. and the MG’s. Axton’s own would not follow down the same path, however. A wild man, his tendency towards dissolution increasingly marginalized him from the shifting rosters of the Mar-Keys (who, either way, were largely overshadowed by Booker T. and co. by the mid-‘60s) as well as the Stax staff in general, despite his mother’s fierce loyalty.

It wouldn’t be the last of Axton, though, who relocated to Los Angeles in 1965. There he recorded the moddish instrumental “Hole in the Wall” with, oddly enough, members of Booker T. and the MG’s, who were then touring the West Coast as part of the Stax Revue. Released on infamous Los Angeles DJ and promoter Magnificent Montague’s Pure Soul label, and credited as the Packers, “Hole in the Wall” would be a surprise number five R&B and a top fifty pop hit in the fall of 1965.

More records hastily followed for the Packers, whose shifting members revolved around the erratic stewardship of Axton and percussion player Bongo Johnny Keyes, one of Montague’s old friends. There was a flurry of releases on various indie labels - HBR, Imperial, Tangerine, Soul Baby and Pure Soul - as the Packers; there were also several releases under different names - the Martinis, L.H. and the Memphis Sounds, and, finally, the Pac-Keys.

These records are hip, if a bit unmemorable, R&B instrumentals. The thumpingly great “Dig In” was recorded back in Memphis at Hi Records with James Alexander (bass), Jimmie King (guitar) and Carl Cunningham (drums) - all members of the Bar-Kays, another famed Stax instrumental group. “Dig In” is by far the most impressive of these records, clocking in at a scant 1:51, which only meant you could hear it again that much sooner.

Released on Hollywood Records - a former Los Angeles R&B label then operating as a scaled-back subsidiary of the country Starday label - neither “Stone Fox,” nor its follow-up “Greasy Pumpkin,” nor any of the various Packers releases, recaptured the success of “Hole in the Wall.”

Axton would drift further into obscurity, and deeper into his cups, alas, as the ‘60s wore on. He died of a heart attack in 1974 at age thirty-two.

3. Lorenzo the Hat and the Mad Hatters, Fun-Key (Space)
This week’s mystery selection, Lorenzo the Hat was either one Lorenzo Mandley, according to the label credits, or one Lorenzo Monley, according to BMI. Either way, this may be Lorenzo Manley, a Los Angeles singer who released a good soul 45 in early 1967, “(I’m Gonna) Swoop Down on You” on Original Sound Records. Again, just speculation.

Recorded around 1967, “Fun-Key” is a funky jam that rotates around the guitar fill from Booker T.’s “Hip-Hug Her” (hear excerpt here). Many great ‘60s instrumentals - think “Wipe Out,” or for that matter, “Green Onions” - followed this pattern: barely rehearsed sketches that started out interesting melody and wound up chart-topping hit. “Fun-Key” sounds awesome with its electric piano and wicked drumming, but it is not, in retrospect, a case of should-have-been-a-hit. “Fun-Key” is so loose it is clearly stoned, not the sort of thing to capture the public’s imagination. To be fair, its flipside “The Hat’s Back,” another stylish instrumental, has much more in the way of convention - a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end, for one.

Space Records was a subsidiary of Kris, an independent Los Angeles record label founded by singer-turned-DJ-turned-entrepreneur Mel Alexander. Kris issued a lot of excellent Los Angeles R&B and soul throughout the 1960s on its subsidiaries (Space as well as Car-A-Mel and New Breed), though Space’s would be the coolest label design.

Chicago soul, part two

(Ed. note: more of my favorite late ‘60s Chicago soul this week and a continuation of a very early Office Naps post - back when I wouldn’t let minutiae like research or facts stand in the way of posting.)

Like its Great Lakes counterpart Detroit, Chicago in the 1960s was a vast industrial landscape, a city with a substantial and concentrated African-American population, much of whom had migrated in earlier decades from the Mississippi Delta and other parts of the American South.

Though it had its Brunswick Records in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Chicago, unlike Detroit, never truly had its own Motown Records, that national tastemaker, that entity which so thoroughly dominated the local record industry. Chicago had its own homegrown economy of labels, though, a network that serviced and sustained itself through the African-American community. Successful independent record labels - United, Mercury, Vee-Jay and, perhaps most critically, Chess Records - registered both the vibrancy of Chicago’s post-War African-American demographic and north-by-south pedigree of its music scene. Its appeal would extend well beyond Lake Michigan, too, with millions of Chicago blues, R&B, gospel and jazz records sold nationally in the post-War decades. And the ensuing infrastructure of A&R men, distributors, studios, record stores, clubs, promoters, session musicians and entrepreneurs - the bedrock of a strong record industry - carried Chicago soul music well into the ‘70s, its record industry more formidable, diverse and ultimately more resilient than Detroit’s.

Chicago's well-developed concentration of R&B-oriented labels would be the foundation from which the soul-oriented labels could emerge after a gospel-infused number like Jerry Butler and the Impressions’ “For Your Precious Love” proved an early hit in 1958. Artists like Jerry Butler, the Impressions, Curtis Mayfield, Gene Chandler, the Sheppards and the Dells paved the way for soul’s organic evolution from R&B; established labels like Chess, Okeh and Vee-Jay - as well as new indies like Constellation and One-Derful - would be there to capture it. Soul music was ascendant, the hits rolled in, and many of Chicago’s own would be national stars by the mid-‘60s: Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions, Betty Everett, the Dells, Gene Chandler, the Artistics, the Vibrations, Fontella Bass, McKinley Mitchell.

Most soul groups and soloists truly were vocalists only, however, and their backing, as had long been tradition, was still primarily assembled from session musicians, their productions in turn orchestrated by studio arrangers and engineers. If the Chicago soul idiom had begun to coalesce in the mid-'60s, then behind-the-scenes names like Burgess Gardner, Calvin Carter, Carl Davis, Billy Davis, Johnny Pate, Bill Sheppard, Johnny Cameron, Willie Henderson would define that style every bit as much as the performers themselves. (Some, like Curtis Mayfield, Syl Johnson and Monk Higgins were immersed in both worlds.)

This week’s selections, all made in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, reflect a pattern common amongst all commercial recordings, the tendency, that is, to appropriate the sound and spirit of their popular contemporaries. Specifically, these selections reflect the sound of industry veteran Carl Davis’s Brunswick Records (and its sister label Dakar), a Chicago label then rising with hits like Jackie Wilson’s “Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher and Higher” (1967), the Artistics’ “I’m Gonna Miss You” (1967), Barbara Acklin’s “Love Makes A Woman” (1968), Tyrone Davis’s “Turn Back the Hands of Time” (1970) and Gene Chandler’s “The Girl Don’t Care” (1967). Carl Davis was an A&R man, vice-president and, importantly, a producer at Brunswick Records. His aesthetic was dramatic - strings, vibraphones and an abundance of the soaring, sophisticated, gospel-infused harmonies that have been so identified with Chicago soul since the early soul hits of the Dells and the Impressions. Davis’s productions also managed a rhythmic wallop, too – loud bottom end and clear drums – that resonated with the dancefloor.

Brunswick Records embodied both the sound and hit-making success of late ‘60s and early ’70s Chicago soul – according to that logic, these selections should’ve been hits. But then you wouldn’t be reading about them on Office Naps, of course.

1. The Roe-O-Tation, Old Love (Gerim)
Precious little is known of the Roe-O-Tation themselves, but the credits of their sole 45 reveal much: this record was the handiwork of Gerald Sims, a name ubiquitous in ‘60s Chicago soul.

Gerald Sims, born in 1940 and a participant on the city’s music scene since his arrival from Kalamazoo, Michigan at age nineteen, was absorbed early on into the Daylighters, a vocal group then recently transplanted from Alabama. His considerable musical gifts – singing, writing, guitar playing – found Sims assuming lead vocal and songwriting duties for the Daylighters, and he would oversee the group’s transition from R&B to soul with solid regional hits like 1962’s “Cool Breeze” and “I Can’t Stop Crying.” Sims himself would release two obscure soul singles under his own name on Okeh Records. His performing career, however, would be exchanged for expanded behind-the-scenes duties as a session guitarist, songwriter and producer with Okeh, Constellation and Chess Records, easily three of the city’s most vital soul labels in the mid-‘60s. Later that decade, Sims procured work as a songwriter and orchestra leader at Brunswick Records, but - before finally landing a producer role at Jerry Butler’s Fountain Productions in the early ‘70s - Sims worked in some time to release one record, this selection, on his own independent label, Gerim. Likely produced in 1969 or ’70, “Old Love” (and its flipside, “Special Category”) would be a one-off trial run for Sims’ label aspirations.

The sublime “Old Love” is a production in every sense of the word, a stunning bit of theater with wild tempo changes and an almost psychedelic vibes-and-guitar breakdown – great for making the whole dancefloor list to one side. “Old Love” makes you wonder what was happening in 1970. These soul guys were always running into old girlfriends on the street.

Gerim Records operations would be revived in the early ‘80s - the Chicago scene a pale shadow of the powerhouse it had been a decade earlier - for a brief flurry of contemporary soul releases from local groups like MC², Encore and 7 Miles High.

2. The Esquires, Reach Out (Capitol)
The Esquires, a group best known for 1967’s harmony-soul hit “Get On Up,” were originally formed at Milwaukee’s North Division High School in the late ‘50s by siblings Gilbert, Alvis and Betty Moorer and a series of neighborhood acquaintances.

Though popular in their native city, the Esquires did not record until relocating to Chicago in 1966, where the young group caught the attention of Bill “Bunky” Sheppard. Former A&R man at the recently bankrupt Vee-Jay Records, independent promoter and manager, owner and vice-president of Constellation Records: Sheppard was an entrepreneur completely immersed in the city’s music industry.

Following the collapse of Constellation Records, Sheppard was shopping for talent for his new label, Bunky Records, and the Esquires impressed Sheppard enough to record a Gilbert Moorer original, “Get On Up.” Released in the summer of 1967, “Get On Up,” characteristic of their sleek, falsetto-led sound, was a huge pop and R&B hit, and it unequivocally put both Bunky Records and the Esquires on the map. It would be their biggest hit, too, though the Esquires, suddenly thrust into the national spotlight, would continue to work closely with Sheppard, charting with late ‘60s singles like “And Get Away,” “You’ve Got the Power” and “Girls in the City.”

1969’s “Reach Out” was released on Capitol Records, based in Los Angeles, but don’t let that fool you. This embodies Windy City soul in all of its brassy, thumping glory; one doesn’t mistake Chicago soul like one doesn’t mistake an oncoming freight train. Produced and written by Bill Sheppard and Tom “Tom Tom” Washington (a Chicago-based arranger closely aligned with Sheppared), “Reach Out” was recorded by an incarnation of the group comprised of Gilbert and Alvis Moorer, Millard Evans and Sam Pace (part of the group from their Milwaukee days). It is silly-energetic, a 45 single flinging itself at the pop charts through exuberance alone, and a lesson in why that rarely works. Too bad. The Esquires’ star had begun to plateau a bit, but it wasn’t reflected on this gem.

Their last chart hit was their 1976 disco remake “Get On Up ’76.” As of ten years ago at least, the Esquires were still singing together in some capacity.

3. Judson Moore, Everybody Push and Pull (Capri)
“Everybody Push and Pull”: obscure soul dance, you-got-your-thing-I-got-mine party anthem. Push. Pull. Or not. Just be yourself, baby.

Research returns nothing on Judson Moore, and little more about either Capri Records – a label with a few other obscure 1970-era releases by Fred Johnson (“I Need Love”) the Scott Brothers (“Gotta Get Away From You”) and Reggie Soul and the Soul Swingers (“My World of Ecstasy”) - or this selection’s principal producer Al Altog, who had a hand in releasing a few singles by the Soul Majestics on his own Al-Tog label in the early ‘70s.

This was speculatively recorded in 1970, the year that Rufus Thomas recorded his “(Do The) Push and Pull” on Stax Records.

Message from the ghetto

What ties this week’s selections together is not merely their spoken word component (though it’s significant, certainly). Nor is it just their cause of change and greater societal welfare. Awareness-raising ballads, agitprop invective, activist commentary, summons-to-action and subversive parody are everywhere in recorded music - African-American or otherwise.

Their defining aspect, rather, is their specificity. “Invitation to Black Power,” “It’s Free” and “I Care About Detroit” aren’t broad laments of urban blight or gospel-liberated anthems. Theirs are messages associated with specific causes, specific religious organizations, specific cities, specific venereal diseases, even, and they’re calibrated to their communities accordingly.

The late ‘60s and early ‘70s would be the apogee of this sort of thing, specialized message records reflecting the general tumult of the era - the counterculture, the assassinations, the radical strategizing and the sexual and cultural politics. Music suffused the era’s upheavals, and the years’ idealism and anger inspired more than a few to disseminate the word in turn on the very model of audio expediency, the 45 rpm record. It’s music meets message meets shiny black wax this week on Office Naps.

1. Shahid Quintet, Invitation to Black Power, part I (S and M)
Despite its reference to the "long, hot summer” - Detroit’s deadly spell of rioting and discord in 1967 - I believe that “Invitation to Black Power” was actually produced in Chicago. The selection was likely recorded in 1968 or 1969 - after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 1968 assassination, certainly. But no substantive light can be shed on the Shahid Quintet or Richard or Earl Shabazz, who, either way, were probably not related. (Shabazz is a frequent surname assumed by Nation of Islam adherents.)

Its mysteries aside, “Invitation to Black Power” is a fascinating, a one-of-a-kind snapshot of a particular dimension of the black inner-city experience of the late ‘60s. It’s a bit amateur, sure, and its format is more a throwback to earlier beat-poetry-with-cool-jazz collaborations than the screeching saxophones and intellectual aspirations of contemporaries like Archie Shepp or Amiri Baraka. But it succeeds in one account: running down, humorously and unpretentiously, the Nation of Islam promise of rebirth, equality and separation of the races.

2. Shahid Quintet, Invitation to Black Power, part I (S and M)
Which is not to say that “Invitation to Black Power” was ever a proselytizing tool espoused, officially or otherwise, by the Nation of Islam in the local communities. It has more the flavor of a vanity project, the handiwork of a ragged jazz combo and two men with poetic and theatrical proclivities and the zealous energies of the converted.

Earl Shabazz and Richard Shabazz might have envisioned their record finding its way to their local Black Nationalist bookstore, they might have seen it being sold at local poetry readings. Some forty-odd years later, though, they likely wouldn’t have foreseen that their recording had landed mostly in hands of white record collectors, the inevitable home to such cultural ephemera.

3. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, I Care About Detroit (Motown and Stein & Van Stock, Inc.)
A name that looms large in America’s pop music annals, William “Smokey” Robinson was born in 1940 in Detroit and grew up singing and writing songs for the local vocal group the Five Chimes. The Five Chimes became the Matadors who, in turn, metamorphosed into the Miracles, the group with whom Robinson, the very icon of the romantic, urbane tenor, would go on to become one of the definitive voices of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Besides his considerable vocal gifts, there was Robinson’s acumen behind-the-scenes at Motown Records and his longstanding partnership with the man at the head of the Hitsville U.S.A. empire, Berry Gordy, Jr. It was Berry Gordy, then an aspiring producer, who recorded the Miracles for their first single “Got a Job,” a minor hit for the New York City-based End Records in 1958. It was Gordy who signed the Miracles as one the first groups to his fledgling Tamla Records (later absorbed under the Motown Record Corporation aegis) and it was Gordy, too, who made Smokey Robinson the company’s vice-president in 1961.

If early Miracles records failed to catch fire, 1960’s million-seller “Shop Around” changed all that. It would be the first in a decade-long series of hits like “Tracks of My Tears,” “I Second That Emotion” and “The Tears of a Clown.” Robinson’s successes as in-house songwriter and, later, producer mirrored both the ascendancy of the Miracles as one of the decade’s great soul groups and the broader fortunes of Motown.

The little-known “I Care About Detroit” was Motown in full 1968 flower, the synthesis of social consciousness and soulful groove, the embodiment of young, interracial, turned-on America. Penned by Michigan labor attorney Jack Combs and Detroit R&B vocalist Jimmy “Soul” Clark, this was the second of two Motown 45s produced for “Detroit Is Happening,” a summer-long education and recreation program implemented after the Detroit riots of 1967.

The record industry was not quite the cynical monolith in 1968 that it is today. Still, Motown Records was a mainstream tastemaker and hardly one to hurl itself at a cause without a certain reflexive measure of caution. If Motown is to be commended for their gesture to public service, then Detroit’s disillusionment was that much more acute when Motown Records abandoned the imperiled city for its sleek new Los Angeles headquarters in 1972. Coming together for unity and progress seemed like a good idea until everybody had tried out their new, leather-upholstered swivel chairs.

Officially parting with the Miracles in 1972 to pursue a solo career, Robinson’s success as an adult-contemporary R&B singer - and unwitting pioneer of the dreaded quiet storm format - tapered off sometime after his biggest solo hit, 1981’s “Being With You.” A vice-president at Motown until the company’s sale to MCA in 1988, Robinson has remained semi-retired since, with a few albums of smooth ballads and gospel in the last decade-and-a-half.

4. Bishops of the Holy Rollers Fallout Shelter with Curtis Colbert, It’s Free (CAVDA)
This spoken-word gem was written and performed in part by Gylan Kain, a poet and a founding member of the Last Poets, easily the best-known spoken-word group in the pre-rap era. To the relentless beat of conga drums, the Last Poets spieled unsparingly about revolution, racist society, poverty and the plight of African-Americans. Kain, though he never actually recorded with the Last Poets, took their aesthetic one step further on his sole LP, 1971’s Blue Guerrilla, a potent stew of psychedelic, funky jazz and Kain’s incendiary poetry and surreal incantations.

Produced by Gylan and Denise Kain (his wife, presumably) for the Chicago-based Citizens Alliance for VD Awareness, “It’s Free” has moments that bear resemblance to Blue Guerilla’s colorful, stream-of-consciousness imagery. If the references to “johnsons” and pre-AIDS unprotected sex seem a bit quaint in 21st Century America, then the level-headed humanism and candor of “It’s Free” seem positively radical in cultural terrain presently mediated by sinister, regressive forces like the Christian Coalition. Still, “It’s Free”’s quandary is not unlike that of any organization attempting to connect with a younger demographic. It’s hip, it’s direct, “It’s Free” rises to the challenge of outreach with aplomb and intelligence. The problem was neither its message nor how it was conveyed, though. The problem, rather, was the stomach-turning imagery of "It's Free." No one ever, ever played this record, which explains why this 45 is always in perfect condition when you find it.

In recent years, Gylan Kain has collaborated with the Dutch jazz and turntablist group Electric Barbarian.

Ed Bland

Ed Bland is an American composer, musical arranger and producer with a considerable catalog of contemporary classical compositions - “Art Music,” as Bland would note - to his name. Bland is, at least among a coterie of vintage soul fans, also identified with his recordings of the ‘60s and ‘70s, singular R&B and jazz arrangements so distinct that they unwittingly dominate the music at times. You’ll know what I’m talking about by the end of this post.

Ed Bland was born in 1926 and grew up in Chicago’s South Side, studying as a young saxophonist and clarinetist at the University of Chicago and the American Conservatory of Music after World War Two. Composition studies behind him, infatuated by philosophy and West African drumming, he immersed himself in avant-garde musical theory as well as the intellectual life of post-War Chicago trying, all the while, to get his songs and compositions published. In 1959, he co-produced the experimental film Cry of Jazz, an exposition of race and jazz (with rare early footage of Sun Ra), before moving with his family to New York City in the early ‘60s.

In New York City, Bland found work as a freelance producer, composer and arranger on the strength of his jazz and conservatory pedigree. Ed Bland’s musical objective was to “create a raw, colorful, funky, soulful sound combined with complex linear patterns,” according to his own abstract musical philosophy. Therewith he would spend much of the next two decades in the record industry, eventually becoming a producer and A&R head at Vanguard Records from 1974 to 1978.

Settling in Los Angeles in 1984, where he continues to live and work, Bland wrote music for motion pictures, TV and occasional record productions, composing the scores for A Raisin In the Sun and The House of Dies Drear and orchestrating A Soldier’s Story. Bland still actively composes, his recent score for 34th St. NYC and albums of compositions like Urban Classical: The Music of Ed Bland (Cambria) and Dancing Through the Walls (Delos), though with no obvious connection to his days as an R&B innovator, evincing an idiosyncratic vision at work.

Looking over his discography, one gets the feeling that Ed Bland is one of these gifted American musical minds who successfully navigated the straits of the record industry but who was rarely granted the latitude to fulfill their vision - especially on the industry’s commercial terms. There’s something of a maverick quality to Bland, a musical individualist if not eccentric, which perhaps explains why his handiwork never found a more consistent niche in an industry that rarely rewards such qualities. Helloooo, Office Naps.

1. The Pazant Brothers, Skunk Juice (RCA Victor)
Brothers Eddie (saxophone) and Alvin Pazant (trumpet) were raised in a musical family in Beaufort, South Carolina, though it was in New York City with Lionel Hampton where Eddie’s professional career first took root in the late ‘50s and also where, a few years later, both Eddie and Alvin met Ed Bland, then a freelance arranger with Hampton. Forming their own group in 1964, their sporadic records as the Pazant Brothers would alternate throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s with supporting gigs in Hampton’s band and Pucho & the Latin Soul Brothers (among other notables).

Theirs, mostly, is a long discography of jazz, R&B, soul and rock session work, but with the Pazant Brothers’ handful of late ‘60s 45s - as well as their 1975 LP Loose and Juicy - something different is clearly happening. One senses that in the Pazant Brothers Bland had found his ideal protégés, musicians who were both sympathetic to his unorthodox vision and had the chops to realize it. Tellingly, the ‘70s recordings the Pazant Brothers issued without Bland’s involvement - and there are a handful of such 45s - suffer as merely decent instrumental funk.

There are identifiable solos, riffs and verses in Bland’s charts, it’s just they’re never conventional. By his standards, 1969’s “Skunk Juice,” with its wildly kinetic expressions of melody, is still quite exceptional, though. Whole honking flocks of geese, whole brass bands, are swallowed and spat back out, all in march tempo. Hope is renewed for tuba players everywhere.

The Pazant Brothers play today as leaders of the Cotton Club All-Stars.

2. James Moody, If You Grin (You’re In) (Sceptor)
An important and accomplished post-War bop composer, saxophonist and flautist, James Moody was born in 1925 in Georgia, grew up in New Jersey, and, like many other second-generation beboppers, found himself in army bands overseas during World War Two. His return to the states included - again, like many of his generation - a formative apprenticeship in the pioneering bop orchestra of trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Though much of his post-War time was spent abroad in Europe’s more jazz-sympathetic cities, Moody established a higher profile with some leader dates in the late ‘40s, recording “Moody’s Mood for Love,” (based on Jimmy McHugh’s “I’m In the Mood for Love”) in Sweden, a significant hit in 1949 and an even bigger hit in 1952 with singer King Pleasure’s vocalese reading.

Moody also spent an increasing part of his days in his cups, a struggle later recounted on 1958’s Last Train From Overbrook. The five decades since have seen Moody leading small groups of his own, and, with the exception of a few funkier sessions and some years spent as a backing musician in Las Vegas in the ‘70s, he’s rarely veered from sterling, straightahead bop. Though well regarded amongst other musicians and devotees, Moody’s consistent, prolific output has perhaps been overlooked by casual jazz fans only interested the latest Blue Note reissues.

“If You Grin (You’re In)” was taken from Moody’s 1964 LP Running the Gamut and was recorded with a group including Patti Bown (piano), Albert Heath (drums), Reggie Workman (bass) and Thad Jones (trumpet). Though it is an early recorded date for him, the arrangements and wild horn play are unmistakably Ed Bland. There’s no logic anywhere that says a single, unwavering organ chord should sound so funky, but it does, and gloriously so, and I suppose that is why, finally, Ed Bland was the arranger here and not you or I.

Ed Bland also produced Moody’s ’76 album Timeless Aura. James Moody himself is still very much active.

3. Lionel Hampton and his Inner Circle of Jazz, Greasy Greens (Glad-Hamp)
Jazz’s best-known vibraphonist. Born in Kentucky in 1909 and attracted to music - drums, originally - from an early age, Hampton played a few early ‘30s Chicago vibraphone dates, some of jazz’s earliest, before being discovered in Los Angeles by clarinetist Benny Goodman. Famous swing dates with both Goodman and with his own all-star groups ensued, and though he played piano and drums capably, it was Hampton’s spellbinding, consummately swinging work on vibraphone which made him a star during the swing era. After World War Two, Hampton continued leading his own big bands and absorbing popular tastes. Sometimes his groups reflected bebop, just as often they sounded like R&B, but Hampton remained popular with audiences as one of jazz’s elder statesmen until his death in 2002.

Hampton’s own Glad-Hamp Records was a label that was home to many of his ‘60s albums. It was label that, in between endless iterations of warhorses like “Flying Home,” one can find some interesting selections. Take this, for instance, a number commissioned for Ed Bland by Hampton in 1967. “Greasy Greens,” thumpingly funky, sounds unlike anything Hampton, or anybody else, had ever done - not counting other Ed Bland productions, of course. Hampton would later make other funk-tinged records in the early ‘70s for Brunswick Records, but nothing so bracing.

Credit Hampton for making this record, and for making “Greasy Greens” something of a concert staple. The musicians on this first version include Wallace Davenport (trumpet), Ed Pazant (alto sax), Dave Young (tenor sax), John Spruill (piano), Billy Mackel (guitar), Skinny Burgan (bass), Ronnie Kole (drums) and Hampton on vibraphone.

4. Phil Upchurch, Muscle Soul (Milestone)
Chicago’s Phil Upchurch has long enjoyed a fairly high profile, which has as much to do with his infectious, funky R&B instrumental hit, 1961’s “You Can’t Sit Down,” as it does with his professional musical career.

Upchurch never quite recaptured the spotlight of “You Can’t Sit Down.” Nor did he have to: beginning with late ‘50s blues and R&B sessions for Vee-Jay Records and, later, soul and jazz for Chess Records in the ‘60s, Upchurch has been a wildly successful studio guitarist (and bassist), his name showing up everywhere over the decades - on Donny Hathaway albums, on Staple Singers albums, on Cat Stevens albums, on Chaka Khan albums for that matter. Upchurch also has his own extensive recorded history as a leader, and while his late ‘60s soul jazz releases like The Way I Feel have some psychedelic rock moments, mostly his solo releases mirrored the straight ahead pop, blues, soul, jazz and R&B of his studio work.

“Muscle Soul” is more straightforward than this week’s other arrangements. If, that is, straightforward can be said to consist of five things going on where in Bland’s case there’d normally be ten: it’s still a jolt of crashing freneticism. This selection originally appeared on what is Upchurch’s first and probably strongest jazz-oriented LP, 1967’s Feeling Blue, with Ed Bland providing arrangements. The album also includes Al Williams (piano), Chuck Rainey (bass), Bernard Purdie (drums), Warren Smith (congas), Wallace Davenport (trumpet) and John Gilmore, Pat Patrick and Eddie Pazant (saxophones).

Now based in Los Angeles, Phil Upchurch is as active as ever.

Get rhythm

The drum machine was one of a wave of early mass-produced electronic instruments and studio devices in the ‘60s that expanded by quantum leaps the technological and creative bounds of music and recording.

Historically speaking, however, early drum machines like Ace Tone Rhythm Ace and the Maestro’s Rhythm King, with their somewhat awkward analog drum sounds and preset rhythms, would long remain marginal to keyboard synthesizer counterparts like the Moog. A Moog could wow early '70s audiences with bleeps, gurgles and swooping sequences of tonal pulses. Early Japanese-made drum machines, intended from the start as an organ accompaniment or rehearsal aid, mostly just sat there, dutifully pattering away in metronomic samba time and eventually finding their niche as a built-in component in Lowrey and Hammond church organs.

The Maestro Rhythm King (Picture credit, Backbeat Books, from their book Strange Sounds: Offbeat Instruments and Sonic Experiments in Pop.)

It wouldn’t really be until after Roland’s introduction of its crunching TR-808 drum machines in the early ‘80s that the drum machine would finally find its true calling - electronic dance music - and become less of a bastard stepchild.

Nonetheless, from Bee Gee Robin Gibb (1970's Robin's Reign) and

Sly Stone protégés Little Sister (1970’s “Stanga”) to Dick Hyman and soul-pop guitar innovator Shuggie Otis (1974’s “XL-30”), the drum machine did catch the attention of the occasional pop musician or two. For some, its gadgetry was enough to add a futuristic sheen. For others, like Sly Stone, who used it on the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, the drum machine was a probably a nice option after you’d fired another drummer in a coke-fuelled meltdown. Most of these musicians seemed to recognize that the drum machine was too incidental to ever supplant an actual drummer, but, luckily for us, there were still a few eccentrics left over that heard the ring of the cash register somewhere in those mechanized rhythms.

1. Timmy Thomas, Funky Me (Glades)
Best known for his 1972 hit “Why Can’t We Live Together,” singer and keyboardist Timmy Thomas grew up in Indiana playing piano in his minister father’s Methodist Church. Graduating from Tennessee’s Lane College with a BA in music, Thomas did some session keyboard work for the Memphis soul independent Goldwax Records, and, a few obscure soul numbers under his name for Goldwax later, he settled in Florida in the late ‘60s. There he worked as a college administrator and opened his own Miami Beach club, “Timmy’s Lounge." There Thomas recorded his impassioned peace-and-harmony anthem “Why Can’t We Live Together” for the tiny local Konduko label in 1972.

Leased for distribution by Florida music impresario Henry Stone for his Glades label, the spare organ-and-rhythm arrangements of “Why Can’t We Live Together” (hear excerpt here) made for a somewhat unlikely million-seller in 1972. Just as unlikely, however, was its chugging instrumental flipside “Funky Me.” Unerring in its tempo, its juicy organ vamps and mechanical funkiness would have made a good b-side on some early ‘80s New York art-disco 12”. This was the danger of an early drum machine like the Maestro Rhythm King. Simultaneously hit the “rhumba” and “go go” presets and suddenly you were ten years into the future.

In 1973 Timmy Thomas released the full-length album Why Can’t We Live Together, which sustained the spare aesthetic of “Funky Me” and “Why Can’t We Live Together.” Thomas currently works as a music teacher and director of One Art, an independent music and arts educational initiative in Florida, and has recorded sporadically in the decades since.

2. Simtec Simmons, Tea Pot (Maurci)
1967’s “Tea Pot,” for all its whimsical qualities, was not some after-hours lark of a studio engineer at loose ends. This selection was the handiwork of Simtec Simmons, the singer, guitarist and leader of aspiring Chicago R&B group the Tea Boxes. “Tea Pot,” according to legend, was recorded at the behest of Herb “Kool Gent” Kent, a Chicago radio disc jockey who was taken with the sound of the rhythm machine and who in turn encouraged Simmons and his combo to record using it.

“Tea Pot” features Simtec Simmons on guitar and two members of the Tea Boxes - his brother Ronald Simmons on bass and Bobby Pointer on the drum machine. Released on Maurice Jackson’s tiny Chicago soul label Maurci in 1967, “Tea Pot” was, improbably enough, a good-sized regional hit, its anomalous and quirky appeal sending robots all over the upper Midwest to their local record shops for something they could finally dance to.

Around the time of “Tea Pot”’s release, Simtec and the Tea Boxes were performing as part of a nightclub act with another local Chicago R&B group, Wylie Dixon and the Wheels. The two bandleaders would join together as the hard-edged funky soul duo Simtec and Wylie in 1969, going on in the early ‘70s to score some sizeable hits like “Do It Like Mama” and “Gotta Get Over the Hump”. After a few more years of recording and performing in Chicago, Simmons quit the music business in the late ‘70s.

3.

The Computer and the Little Fooler, Computing (Maurci)
Let me paint a picture for you. In 1967, a song like “A Day in the Life” (hear excerpt here) was transcendent, an orchestral capstone to the Beatles’ Summer of Love tour de force. In 1967, Jimi Hendrix was pushing psychedelia’s outer limits with space guitar epics like “Third Stone From the Sun” (excerpt here). That same year the Velvet Underground’s noisy, experimental aesthetic would culminate in a selection like “I Heard Her Call My Name” (excerpt here), and, on the R&B charts, James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” (excerpt here) steered popular African-American rhythms into dark new directions.

And, somewhere on the south side of Chicago in 1967, our friends from the previous selection - Simtec Simmons and Maurci Records head honcho Maurice Jackson - rushed this selection out to a market awaiting a follow-up to “Tea Box.”

4. The Computer and the Little Fooler, Sw-w-wis-s-sh (Maurci)
I’m not sure who or what the Little Fooler was, but I’d wager that he was roughly the size and shape of a pocket calculator.

The weirdest post-War American music has always shown up first on the 45 rpm record, one of the most expedient of commercial music media. But, that said, the strange-witted minimalism of “Computing” and its backwards flipside “Sw-w-wis-s-sh” beggars all belief. “Computing” was neither funny nor weird enough to be a novelty record, nor did it offer anything that anyone could point to as a being conventionally instrumental. There’s simply little sense to be made of it. Sometimes I think this is the greatest record ever made.

Cinema funky

Just as its antecedents in the mid-‘60s had their sitar interludes and fuzztone atmospherics, the hipper cinema of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s oozed with wah-wah guitars, jazz basslines and funky backbeats. And why not? Whatever Tinseltown's machinations, film had long been a dramatic and stylish medium, and its soundtrack composers were some of the coolest talents around. Movie and television scores afforded lucrative opportunities for a Lalo Schifrin or Henry Mancini to satisfy some serious interests in jazz and composition, if not to experiment with riffs from psychedelic rock or dark rhythms from funk.

Before funk became an obligatory element of every post-Shaft blaxploitation picture, though, before it became a cliché on primetime television fare like CHiPs, there were this week’s selections. Some of these were written for movies. Some of them weren’t written for the screen but wound up there. Some of these were versions of soundtrack themes that exceeded the original. At one end of town, circa 1970, there were serious young men with serious pedigrees from music conservatories sitting in studios with handfuls of annotated charts. At the other end of town, the poorer part of town, churning funk music spun out in endless iterations. And, in that planetary stretch in between, these selections happened.

1. Roy Budd, Carter (DJM)
Roy Budd was a British musical prodigy who began his professional career as a jazz pianist at the tender age of sixteen. It would be his later soundtrack work for movies like Kidnapped (1971) and The Wild Geese (1978), however, for which Budd would find his lasting fame.

Budd imparted a chilly minimalism to “Carter,” his theme for 1971’s Get Carter, a British thriller starring Michael Caine. One can run down the possibilities all day and still never account for how Budd managed, with only a motley ensemble of bass, Indian tablas, and electric harpsichord and piano, to create a tableau so perfectly redolent of both the stark landscape of northern England and of the gangsters who went shooting about there with characteristic disregard.

Budd passed on in 1993. He was forty-six.

2. Julio Gutierrez, Last Tango in Paris (Vico)
The great Julio Gutierrez emigrated from his native Cuba in the late ‘50s, pursuing his calling in both Miami and New York City with freelance stints as a composer, session pianist and musical director. Despite two very hip ‘60s Latin jazz LPs, Progressive Latin and Havana B.C., Gutierrez would never regain the stature he’d enjoyed in Cuba, where, in addition to leading the legendary Cuban Jam Sessions series, he’d been among his country’s best known modern bandleaders and composers.

1972 would perhaps represent the crowning year for the pornographic movie in its brief-lived moment of mainstream chic, and few soundtrack themes would better encapsulate its adults-only art-house cachet than Argentinean saxophonist Gato Barbieri’s “Last Tango in Paris.” 1972 would also mark one of the final years of Gutierrez’s recording career, but if his would hereafter be one of diminishing visibility, it wasn’t for lack of audacity. Other Latin bandleaders like Mongo Santamaria, Willie Rosario and Tito Puente would tackle Barbieri’s continental boudoir anthem, but no one else would inject it with the same groovily psychedelic flair.

Gutierrez died in New York City in 1990.

3. The Johnny Harris Orchestra, Footprints On the Moon (Warner Brothers)
British-born Johnny Harris first made a name for himself in the mid-‘60s writing arrangements for pop singers like Petula Clark and Jackie Trent. Later in the decade, Harris would produce and arrange sessions for Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdink, Shirley Bassey and other pop acts including the Flirtations. His career arc would also include turns in the late ‘60s touring with Tom Jones and serving as musical director for British singer Lulu’s brief-lived variety show Happening For Lulu.

We are not discussing a serious jazzbo or renegade experimentalist here. Harris’s, rather, was a professional kind of hip, a kind that distinguished itself as a turtleneck-and-beads-wearing young talent in the somewhat staid end of the British pop studio system.

While an ear attuned to the latest in the pop charts meant getting served with unenviable tasks like resuscitating Paul Anka’s career, it also afforded its share of fringe benefits. Like John Schroeder, Harris would release a handful of LPs and 45s under his own name. Albums like 1970’s Movements were uneven affairs, certainly, with polite, state-of-the-art covers of “Light My Fire” and “Give Peace a Chance” along with some more adventurous moments like the funky “Fragments of Fear,” “Stepping Stones” and this selection.

Inspired by the Apollo moon landings and subsequently used for the British ITV Network coverage of NASA’s lunar missions, “Footprints on the Moon” follows in the great tradition of Les Baxter’s Space Escapade or Dick Hyman and Mary Mayo’s Moon Gas, albums where the moon’s surface was imagined more as luminescent lovers’ playground than science's new frontier. Each reverberating piano note of “Footprints on the Moon” seems to bring the listener one gravity-defying step closer to their astrological love destiny. Careful, Libra, your love investments will soon pay off, but watch for a calculating Capricorn to step across your earth shadow.

Since 1972 Johnny Harris has lived in Los Angeles, working mostly in television composition, most famously for Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Wonder Woman.

(Thanks go to this site for much of the information on Johnny Harris.)

Detroit City

Any attempt to encapsulate the history of 1960s Detroit soul in a few meager paragraphs is destined to failure. A few items are worth noting, though. First of all, Detroit was one of the powerhouse cities, if not the powerhouse city, of ‘60s soul. Secondly, it’s impossible to talk about Detroit soul without talking about one label - the label - Motown Records.

It’s easy to forget, but Motown, for all its international scope and finishing-school philosophy, was still fundamentally a Detroit label. Its offices and studios were located in a residential neighborhood in west Detroit. Its staff and stable of singers, groups and session musicians were predominately assembled from post-War Detroit’s burgeoning African-American population - middle class, poor or otherwise.

No other Detroit soul label would ultimately succeed in recreating Motown’s success, of course. Few had a Berry Gordy at the helm, and few could afford either Motown’s business model or its top-to-bottom vision of production. Of the profusion of small, soul-oriented record labels that sprouted during the city’s ‘60s soul boom, few could afford not to be aware of the staggering popularity of Hitsville’s soulful groove, though.

It’s one of the great recurring patterns in America’s independent recording industry: Detroit begat Motown whose unparalleled success in turn begat many more Motown wannabes. First, there were the city’s dozens of recording studios, some housed in small commercial buildings, just as many in the converted residential backrooms and garages of Detroit’s west side neighborhoods. There was the network of innumerable personalities, too - the A&R men, the producers, the DJs, the promoters, the engineers, the entrepreneurs as well as the singers and musicians, professional and amateur alike - who facilitated everything with varying amounts of scrupulousness.

Finally, there were the labels. Hundreds of them. D-Town, Impact, Inferno, Wheelsville, Soulhawk, Revilot, Marquee, Palmer, LaSalle, Wingate, La Beat, Karen, Thelma: the list goes on and on and on. With one eye cocked to the charts, however, all were ready to capitalize upon a pool of aspiring Detroit singers and groups not otherwise being serviced at Motown. Some labels, like Ric-Tic (with Edwin Starr’s “Agent Double-O-Soul”) or Golden World (with the Reflections’ “(Just Like) Romeo and Juliet”) would enjoy bona fide national hits. Some, like Groovesville, might find a bankable singer in Steve Mancha who would consistently skirt R&B success without ever scoring that breakout hit. Many, many other labels, the Temples and Enterprises, would barely endure past a single 45 release or two.

Thousands of ‘60s soul productions would come in time to constitute Detroit’s recorded legacy. Wheels turned, smoke billowed, soul records of the highest possible caliber rolled off the line. Careers were made and mishandled, dreams were summoned and smashed to bits. While it may be impossible to encapsulate the history of 1960s Detroit soul, its soul music, if nothing else, was an industry.

Thanks to the invaluable Soulful Detroit for much of this week’s historical information.

1. The Precisions, Such Misery (Drew)
The Precisions were a vocal group formed by Arthur Ashford, Michael Morgan and Dennis Gilmore on the Motor City’s west side, a neighborhood mecca for much of the city’s R&B talent as well as the site of its densest aggregation of recording studios.

With a few obscure mid-‘60s singles on the prolific Detroit soul and R&B label D-Town already to their name, the Precisions would go on to add young college student Billy Prince as a lead vocalist in 1967. This selection, the debut release of the reconfigured group, would be the first of five Precisions records on Drew Records, a label whose discography, as it turns out, only included other Precisions records.

“Such Misery” follows faithfully in that time-honored soul music tradition of rallying cries for the broken-hearted. Nothing new there. “Such Misery” is quite striking, however, for its drastic changes in feeling and tempo, its thudding drums and bass the colossal Yang to the celestial Yin of its vibraphone and graceful harmonies.

Two Precisions follow-ups, “Why Girl” and “If This Is Love (I’d Rather Be Lonely),” would enjoy moderate success on the R&B charts. A move in 1969 to the nationally distributed Atco Records (part of the Atlantic Records empire) proved fruitless, though. The Precisions would fold shortly thereafter, theirs a not-atypical story of line-up changes, mismanagement and general vulnerability to an industry where singing talent was seen as the most dispensable part of the equation.

The Precisions reunited in the United Kingdom for 2006’s Prestatyn Weekender, performing, among other selections, “Such Misery,” “Why Girl” and “If This Is Love (I’d Rather Be Lonely).”

2. The Fabulous Peps, With These Eyes (Wee 3)
The Fabulous Peps, legendary in the ‘60s for their barnstorming showmanship and choreographed dances, were comprised of a trio of veteran Detroit tenor vocalists, Ronnie Abner, "Little Joe" Harris and Tommy “Storm” Hester.

Initially named the Peps, the group parlayed their live renown and reputation as popular exponents of the Impressions’ falsetto harmony sound into a few well-received releases on local labels like Thelma and Ge Ge in the mid-‘60s. Rechristened the Fabulous Peps, it would be at D-Town Records (with assistance from industry character and former Precisions producer Mike Hanks) that they'd enjoy their most fruitful run of releases.

By the time - 1967, I believe - the Fabulous Peps recorded their original “With These Eyes,” the mood of Detroit’s independent record industry was one of rapidly escalating excitement. Accordingly, details can get a bit hazy. The Fabulous Peps themselves were all over the place, recording more material in Memphis (with either the Hi rhythm section or the Stax rhythm section, depending on who you ask). Their three Memphis records would be released on another brief-lived Detroit soul label, Premium Stuff.

“With These Eyes,” from the same year, would be one of just three soul records on the brief-lived Wee 3 Records and, confusingly, the selection also appeared on yet another Detroit independent soul label, Wheelsville. It’s unclear how “With These Eyes” wound up on two Detroit labels simultaneously. These things just happened.

But for all the details that will likely forever remain obscure, it’s still easy to listen to “With These Eyes” and envision the excitement of the Fabulous Peps’ club show, the gravity-defying spins, flips and splits, the screaming call-and-response vocals, the impossible energy levels. It’s easy to envision that honest-to-goodness live weeping went along “With These Eyes,” for that matter. This was a group unafraid of pushing things to the brink.

Beset by mounting internal personal pressures, the Fabulous Peps would dissolve that same year, 1967, though several reunions would soon follow. Joe Harris would go on to greater fame in the early ‘70s as part of the Motown’s Undisputed Truth.

3. The Superlatives, I Don’t Know How (To Say I Love You) (Dynamics)
1969’s “I Don’t Know How (To Say I Love You)” is one of the highpoints of the Superlatives’ career, a discography which includes several other releases on Detroit’s tiny Dynamics label and, later, a lone 45 on Wal-ly Records.

This is a widely beloved track. Its classic soul harmonies, ringing vibraphone and rock-solid bottom end elicit approval throughout the wide, weird spectrum of soul fanaticism. (See recent appreciations at both Soul Sides and Funky16Corners.) Everything is groovy here - except that there is precious little information to be found on the Superlatives themselves.

The writer of “I Don’t Know How (To Say I Love You)” was not a member of the Superlatives, for instance. This was the vocalist Rhonda Washington, rather, who would later sing with the brief-lived female group Hot Sauce in the early ‘70s. Other Superlatives writing credits variously include J. Edwards, A. Lanot, G. Jones, J. Hendricks, T. Russell, and F. Robinson. Darius Moore, the arranger of “I Don’t Know How (To Say I Love You),” may have been a member of the group as well, but that’s nothing but naked speculation. Who were they? Hired songwriters? Group members? Both? Dead ends all.

This selection would prove popular enough that it was later picked up for distribution as one of the earliest releases of Armen Boladian’s nascent Westbound label.

1968: The R&B instrumental

It could be a jazz organist angling for a catchy original number to climb the R&B charts. It could be a young six-piece combo who played together in their high school band and who were now letting loose with a funky James Brown-style instrumental workout. It could be a handful of session musicians stretching a recycled blues riff over the two sides of a 45 rpm record.

The sixties were the R&B instrumental’s halcyon days. As well as encompassing every possible regional variation of the form, the decade’s R&B instrumentals absorbed every new development in popular music from one end (e.g., Dave “Baby” Cortez and 1959’s “Happy Organ”) to the other (e.g., Eddie Bo with 1969’s “Hook and Sling”).

Stylistic developments and differences aside, the R&B instrumental’s niche in the continuum of post-War music owes most everything to its live and spontaneously funky quality. This was much of its broader crossover appeal. The form did not set out to make history or invoke spiritual revelation. The typical R&B instrumental sounded best performed in a club in the wee smoky hours, or rattling through the boozy din from a corner jukebox. Nor did it put on airs. A few beers, copies of “Green Onions” or “The Horse,” your turntable: an R&B instrumental also sounded pretty fabulous in your friend’s living room.

If the R&B instrumental was its own self-sustained phenomenon, then its rapid evolution closely followed soul music’s rise from rhythm & blues in the sixties. As soul grew ever funkier and ever more colorful, absorbing Latin and psychedelic influences with each passing year, its instrumental counterparts would do the same.

This week’s trio of selections falls somewhere in that overlap between the mod-styled thump of shingaling soul and the polyrhythmic surge of James Brown-style funk. Its instruments? Horns, of course, and the organ, which from the powerhouse churn of the Hammond B-3 to reedier Farfisa organ, was vibrating nightclub walls with peals of piercing electricity. Its look? Dark mohair suits, turtles, leather boots, the whole works. The net result? Pure discotheque dynamite.

1. Booker T. Averheart, Heart ‘n Soul (Soultex)
Memphis-style Horn stabs, dramatic changes, minor key vamping: with a few added lyrics “Heart ‘n Soul” could have been any number of ‘60s dance crazes. Were it not, of course, for its deadly, stony-faced sense of self-possession.

The Dallas/Fort Worth area, though never the hub of Texas R&B that Houston was, still had its own vibrant club and studio scene. The independent Soultex Records, operated by local entrepreneur and guitarist Roger Boykin, was one of several musician-owned labels that served the area’s jazz and R&B musicians.

In addition to being a airplane pilot, motel owner, local music promoter, Booker T. Averheart was a Dallas-based bassist, keyboardist and bandleader. A string of four late ‘60s 45s, all excellent, exemplified Texas’s gritty, funky strain of soul and R&B. 1969’s “Heart ‘n Soul,” the follow-up to his “I Wanta Be the President,” would be the last 45 released the Soultex label.

Averheart passed on in 2004.

2. The Touch, Pick & Shovel (Lecasver)
The Touch, likely inspired by the success of funky late 60’s instrumentals like the Meters’ “Cissy Strut,” labored here under the assumption that America would also be mentally ready for the “Pick & Shovel” and its pure Cubist strains of organ. And clearly, America wasn’t, as the dizzying “Pick & Shovel” sank without a whisper. Led by the obscure session keyboardist John Frangipane, these were probably New York City studio musicians, but little is otherwise known about the Touch or how many Newports they smoked before knocking out this gem.

“Pick & Shovel” was released on New Jersey’s Lecasver label, circa 1969.

3. The Bobby Cook Quartette, Ridin High, Part 1 (Compose)
There is some evidence to suggest that the future free jazz guitar pioneer James Ulmer played on this selection, but there's precious little information about either Bobby Cook, a Detroit jazz musician, or his quartet.

The several minutes that you take to listen to both sides of 1968’s “Ridin High” will likely be several minutes that you will later have a difficult time remembering. This is the hypnotic power of “Ridin High.” Both the Hammond player (presumably Cook himself) and saxophonist take solos here but you’d barely notice them - or anything, for that matter - for all of “Ridin High”’s surging forward momentum.

4. The Bobby Cook Quartette, Ridin High, Part 2 (Compose)
This is the first of two 45s that Bobby Cook released on the Compose label. (The second, “On the Way” and its flipside “Sister Lu,” is credited to Bobby Cook and the Explosions.) Compose was a tiny label run from Ecorse, Michigan, a town outside Detroit and home to another lost nugget of gurgling Hammond gold, the Organics’ “Foot Stumping.”

Latin funk

Funk and salsa, as musical forms, were both ascendant in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. They were forms, too, that were nourished within culturally aware, politically mobilized communities. And so, according to the tradition that America will always co-opt its most disenfranchised, it follows that for a few years in the ‘70s you couldn’t throw a brick at our popular music without hitting a syncopated bassline or a conga drum. Things got ever weirder as the decade went on and R&B and salsa’s musical components were further unhinged from their message. Easy-listening maestros Percy Faith and Ferrante & Teicher made funk records. Nashville’s timbaleros were booked for six months solid, I’ve heard.

It was inevitable that Latin music and funk would have converged, and without that much commercial debasement, at some point. And so they did. Latin funk was a diffuse phenomenon, though, less an extension of an earlier counterpart boogaloo (with its composite of vamping Afro-Latin rhythms and R&B attitude) than a part of the overall psychedelic cultural swirl that made crossover experiments so much fun in 1970. Ray Barretto and Joe Bataan - artists identified with the boogaloo - made popular Latin funk records. Tejano artists like Augustine Ramirez and Tortilla Factory made them, as did Los Angeles' El Chicano and Oakland's Azteca. So, too, did black artists like Jimmy Castor and War.

‘70s Latin funk can be a real mixed bag, however. Tracks like Ray Barretto’s “Together” and Ocho’s “Hot Pants Road” hold up extremely well today, pulsing with wild, psychedelized energy while similar experiments by Harlem River Drive and Malo seem dated and overly self-conscious. All, including this week’s geographically disparate artifacts, partook of the same spirit, though, diving headlong into that cauldron where Hammond organs, vibraphones and conga drums swirled in equal measure.

1. Johnny Zamot, Spaced Out (Gema)
Among New York City’s post-War Latin musicians you’ll find the occasional Tito Puente or Eddie Palmieri, that bandleader whose visibility extended beyond just the Nuyorican community. No less vital - and certainly a more representative remainder of their cohort - are names like Hector Rivera, Bobby Valentin and Louie Ramirez, talented musicians, bandleaders, arrangers and producers with long legacies largely circumscribed by the Five Boroughs.

Born in Puerto Rico, Johnny “Ray” Zamot is a versatile percussionist and bandleader and one of the more daring of the younger generation that forged their musical skills in the orquestas and combos of New York City’s fertile ‘60s Latin scene. Unlike their mentors (who generally disavowed the style), Zamot’s was a generation that was comfortably committed to the youthful, brash style of the boogaloo, though.

Zamot is today still an active part of New York City salsa, but it’s his run of hard-to-find releases of the late ‘60s through the mid-‘70s for which he’s more widely remembered. 1968’s The Latin Soul of Johnny Zamot or 1970’s Boogaloo Frog represent a typical, if not exemplary, late ‘60s blend of boogaloo, Latin jazz, mambo, cha-cha and guaguanco - son-based Latin styles that would soon all be formalized under the salsa rubric.

Even by Zamot’s fairly adventurous standards, though, “Spaced Out” is a strange one. If its snappy horn lines and pop sensibilities seem to place it somewhere in the previous decade, then that inverted bassline and echo-drenched waaah-chuck-chuck-chuck chorus seem to point to some indeterminate, loopy year in the future.

"Spaced Out" would also appear that same year on Zamot's self-titled album on the veteran New York City Latin label Gema.

2. Lou Garno Trio, Muy Sabroso (Very Tasty) (Giovanni)
“Muy Sabroso (Very Tasty),” as the story goes, was released as a promotional tie-in with Giovanni’s Italian restaurant/lounge in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s an unusual, though mutually remunerative, way to make a record, and the arrangement probably made Giovanni Furcini feel pretty good about himself in 1972. Not as good as the record collectors who keep coming across unopened boxes of this 45 some thirty-plus years later, of course - but still, pretty good.

Lou Garno, along with the trio’s organist (Larry Crinklaw) and drummer (Jim Golini), are all still active in Arizona jazz circles. It’s not entirely clear what role Garno played in this groovy bit of Latin-fired jazz, though, as he was and is a saxophonist and flautist. “Muy Sabroso (Very Tasty)” is not live, either, of course, despite the better efforts of our wonderfully canned emcee and audience. Nor is this actually a trio. Check your coats, slide into those garnet-colored leather banquette tables and order your drinks. It's just best to let Furcini deal with such trivialities.

A plumbing tool specialist now sits at the former site of Giovanni’s.

3. Tempo 70, El Galleton (Mericana)
Tempo 70 were a brief-lived group led by Argentinean-born Bebu Silvetti, a pianist and arranger whose career peregrinations took him to Spain, Mexico and Miami as a sort of international contractor in the world of Latin music. The early ‘70s found Silvetti in Puerto Rico, where he convened Tempo 70 for a few albums of polished salsa and Latin pop.

1972’s “El Galleton,” Tempo 70’s highpoint, somehow successfully steers between cuatro- and percussion-driven Afro-Latin rhythms, Hammond-fueled funk and jazzy piano runs - each with a section to itself: “El Galleton”’s charts could have been a disaster in less skillful hands. It must have been a technical bonanza for the band, of course, but hell for anyone on the dancefloor, as every premonitory surge of organ seemed to bring “El Galleton” into a drastic new decade.

This selection was taken from Tempo 70’s debut album (entitled El Primer LP), which also happened to the first full-length release of Mericana Records, the New York City Latin label operated (along with Caytronics Records, a Mexican pop clearinghouse) by the Cayre Brothers before they went on to found disco giant Salsoul Records.

Their hearts filled with love

No lofty cultural themes or sub-sub-sub-genre exhumations this week on Office Naps, just a survey of 1969, that transitional year when funky drums collided with a vestigial girl-group aesthetic. Heartache, sequined jumpsuits to ensue.

1. Betty Everett, 1900 Yesterday (Uni)
“Shoop Shoop Song (It’s In His Kiss)” remains both Betty Everett’s greatest-selling record and the greatest disservice to the memory of her talents. Blessed as she was with a wistful, tart voice, Betty Everett was far more capable than what the bright girl-group pop of “Shoop Shoop” might have suggested.

Betty Everett, born in 1939, grew up singing gospel in Mississippi. Barely out of her teens, she relocated to Chicago, there working her way from one small independent blues label (Cobra) to the next (CJ) without much chart success. A move from gritty R&B material into more sophisticated territory accorded Everett some attention, and the regional chart success of the slow-burning soulful blues “Your Love Is Important to Me” brought her to Vee-Jay Records, one of Chicago’s best-known indie labels. Everett would again dent the charts with a fine version of Dee Dee Warwick’s “You’re No Good,” but it was 1964’s “Shoop Shoop Song” (which Everett recorded with great reluctance) that incontrovertibly landed her in the spotlight and, later, oldies radio rotation hell.

Other hits followed for Everett at Vee-Jay (including duets with Chicago soul legend Jerry Butler), but nothing, alas, on the scale of “Shoop Shoop.” Following Vee-Jay’s collapse in 1966, Everett recorded for other Chicago record labels with mixed success. An on-and-off relationship with Leo Austell - Chicago businessman, producer, and Everett’s long-time manager - lead Everett finally to the Los Angeles-based Uni Records in the late '60s.

Which brings us to this selection. On Uni Records, Everett enjoyed probably the most successful of her comeback hits, “There'll Come A Time,” the title track from an excellent album of big, sophisticated soul. “1900 Yesterday,” written by Chicago producer and songwriter Johnny Cameron, would be the third single released from that album in 1969.

For every Diana Ross or Aretha Franklin there will always be a hundred Betty Everetts, genuine talents who, like so many soul and R&B singers in the history of the vocation, struggled to sustain - if not simply attain - their transitory moment of fame. The pop spirit was there on “1900 Yesterday.” So too were the strings, the sweeping production, the melodic grandeur and the emotional pathos. Everett had the presence, talent, and depth to transition smoothly into soul/pop diva territory at the dawn of the ‘70s, but for better or for worse it just never came to pass. Everett notched a few more minor R&B hits in the early ‘70s, but her Uni recordings would be her swan song.

Hawaiian lounge-pop group Liz Damon’s Orient Express would release a very popular version of “1900 Yesterday” in 1971.