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.

2. Inell Young, The Next Ball Game (Big-9)
No one seems to recall much detail of Inell Young, a New Orleans vocalist whose legacy rests on a handful of late ‘60s 45s and the undying obsession of soul collectors. Even the irrepressible Edwin Bocage (aka Eddie Bo), the New Orleans institution who arranged and composed two of Young’s three records, seems to have been somewhat nonplussed by Young, remembering her in Wax Poetics (2004, issue no. eight) as a troubled creature, and suggesting she succumbed to a drug overdose.

The chaos of Inell Young’s lifestyle was belied, though, by the exceptionally finessed vocal on 1969’s “The Next Ball Game,” the one and only release on the Big-9 record label. Like all of this week’s selections, there’s also a bit of Motown-style emotional pathos around the edges of Young’s voice, even when you can’t quite understand her. Was this Eddie Bo’s bid for a pop record? The sensibility is there, sure, but whatever Bo’s aspirations, there’s no getting around where this record was made: the sun rises in the east, the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico, and so, too, for every New Orleans record will there be syncopated horns and colossal rhythm.

These particular colossal rhythms were in fact the handiwork of James Black, a versatile drummer who played on many of Eddie Bo’s house releases. “Next Ball Game” exemplifies the way Black could dominate a song; he took the blank spaces normally found between other drummer’s beats and filled them with skittering wallop and his own boundless enthusiasm.

No surfeit of praise is too much for Eddie Bo, either, the composer and creative soul behind “The Next Ball Game” and countless New Orleans gems. Eddie Bo is a true hero of the city’s recorded music, his groundbreaking recordings, production and arranging credits, and compositions (not to mention his talents on the keyboard) read like a condensed version of several decades (1950s-‘70s) of post-War New Orleans R&B, soul and funk.

3. Eula Cooper, Heavenly Father (Atlantic)
This was one of only a handful of 45 releases from Georgia’s Eula Cooper, a soul singer whose scant body of work lies in inverse proportion to its exceptional quality. 1969’s “Heavenly Father” was originally released on the Atlanta-based Tragar, and picked up for wider distribution by soul heavyweight Atlantic Records. This would be Cooper’s only release to see proper distribution.

“Heavenly Father” is an odd one. Musically speaking, Cooper’s hypnotic vocals and her backing group - which may or may not be the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm and horn section - seem to be going in slightly different directions at times. Still, though, they seem to wind up in the same place. Lyrically speaking, “Heavenly Father” is an appeal to a higher power, leading me to wonder: why waste such an appeal on your reprobate boyfriend? I save my appeals for more important things, like getting out of speeding tickets.

“Tragar Production,” seen here on the label, refers again to Tragar Records. As a label, it was one of Georgia’s finest R&B and soul indies, its roster of long-forgotten names today reading like a who’s who of disillusionment and musical dreams abandoned.

Credit for the information on Eula Cooper must go entirely to Brian Poust, creator of the Georgia Soul Blog and the Georgia Soul website, one of the internet’s best regional soul surveys. Here you can listen to another Cooper 45, the sublime “Try.”

A black & white affair

It’s not the psychedelized, socially conscious soul of Sly & the Family Stone or Cloud Nine-era Temptations I’m talking about. Nor is it the tripped-out voodoo of the first Funkadelic record (Funkadelic) either, though that’s getting a bit closer to it. Jimi Hendrix was too much his own inimitable entity, and the Equals (of “Baby Come Back” fame) were British (via the West Indies) and just not very psychedelic.

If we’re discussing successful early prototypes of black psychedelic rock this week, it must be the Chambers Brothers’ 1967 “Time” (hear an excerpt here). A major pop hit, “Time” (along with its full eleven-minute album version) was an excellent example of early psychedelia, its demented weirdness matched, against all odds, by its commercial achievement. “Time,” like all of this week’s selections, was music realized in that brief window when, if they weren’t desperately casting about for new formulas in psychedelia’s puzzling tumult, major record labels were actually taking chances on new artists and configurations of artists. Marketed to mostly white audiences, this was a rare and fleeting form of psychedelia before soul evolved into the socially-, culturally- and politically-engaged funk, transforming everything irrevocably.

Sly, Funkadelic, “Say It Loud”-era James Brown: theirs was music that, like “white” psychedelia, had a conscience. Theirs was music that was countercultural, colorful, rhythmic, and long enough to permit extended flights of instrumental fancy. But theirs originated in African-American communities - rather than from external agencies like major label record companies. Even if it did enjoy crossover success, funk captured an ethos in a way that immediately obviated the sort of industry efforts that, no matter how good the intention, went into coupling R&B and soul singers with psychedelic instrumentation - like, for instance, this week’s ephemeral curios.

Of course, it’s just such ephemeral curios that I’m most interested in. So let’s take a look.

1. Larry Williams & Johnny Watson with The Kaleidoscope, Nobody (Okeh)
Maybe the most unlikely of an unlikely bunch this week, “Nobody” unites shimmering ethno-psychedelic rock with the world of rhythm & blues.

Larry Williams’s career began in the early ‘50s as a session pianist at Cosimo Matassa’s New Orleans recording studios. He briefly joined Lloyd Price’s band, and thereafter earned a name for himself as an R&B shouter with late ‘50s hits like “Short Fat Fannie,” “Bony Moronie,” “Bad Boy” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” on the great Specialty label. In the early ‘60s, Williams relocated to the West Coast, there working as a producer and A&R man for Okeh (Columbia Records’ R&B subsidiary) and a handful of other California labels. Never quite able to revive his early successes as a recording artist, Williams lived out the sort of disreputable life that you expect of the echt R&B musician, succumbing to a gunshot wound in 1980 that, depending on who you ask, was not necessarily self-inflicted.

When Williams’ friend, the multi-instrumentalist Johnny Watson, arrived in early ‘50s Los Angeles, he’d already gigged with Houston bluesmen like Johnny Copeland and Albert Collins. Still in his teens, Watson toiled in Los Angeles as a session guitarist and, a year or two later, he’d begin making - now as Johnny “Guitar” Watson - a string of gutsy R&B singles. These included, amongst many others, the stratospheric 1954 instrumental “Space Guitar,” his autobiographical “Gangster of Love” (re-recorded in 1963 and again in 1978), and his biggest ‘50s hit, the swamp pop-flavored “Those Lonely, Lonely Nights.” Watson would continue recording and performing in the ‘60s in a more uptown, sophisticated soul style. It wouldn’t be until the ‘70s that Watson would finally find his enduring fame, however, with his funky Southern blues persona: the “Gangster of Love.”

In the mid-‘60s Williams and Watson joined briefly together for a few fine duet releases on the Okeh label. There were obvious similarities in their career trajectories up to this point. Both were hardened, Gulf Coast-born R&B musicians. Both maintained ties to the criminal underworld: as a musician, Watson earned money on the side as a pimp (or vice-versa, according to Peter Guralnick), and Williams had a criminal record for dealing drugs and extensive involvement, it was rumored, in prostitution.

From 1967, their exceptional “Nobody” features the instrumentation of the Kaleidoscope, a preternaturally eclectic California group who, with varying degrees of success, were fusing elements of Middle Eastern music, folk, and psychedelia in the late ‘60s. Was it Kaleidoscope’s bohemian influence, or was it just the beatific vibes afoot in the Summer of Love? Either way, both Larry Williams and Johnny “Guitar” Watson were able to momentarily suspend their darker natures for this improbable Aquarian artifact.

Check out Richie Unterberger’s great interview with the Kaleidoscope’s multi-instrumentalist and founder Chris Darrow, who recounts the “Nobody” session in great detail.

2. Junior Parker, Tomorrow Never Knows (Capitol)
Born Herman Parker in the blues mecca of Clarksdale, Mississippi, Junior Parker cut some raucous R&B sides early in his career as “Little Junior Parker” for Memphis’s Sun Records (in the label's pre-Elvis, pre-rockabilly years). It was a prolific stretch at Houston’s Duke Records in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, though, that showcased the smooth, warm vocals and brassy R&B for which Parker is still best known.

In the mid-‘60s, Parker was recording in a more soul-inflected style for the Mercury label. In 1970, when this selection was recorded, it was an era of aging bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf making some pretty dire psychedelic rock albums. Parker’s version of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” appeared on what was marketed by Capitol Records as Parker’s “heavy” record, Outside Man. Outside Man was actually more a sort of funky electric blues album, however - and not a bad one at that. Still, “Tomorrow Never Knows” was easily its highpoint.

When Parker intones, "Listen to the color of your dreams,” it sounds like some stark moonlight incantation. If “Tomorrow Never Knows” was the Beatles at their most blindingly experimental, then Parker (with the help of veteran jazz and pop arranger Horace Ott) manages to do the impossible by retaining the original’s spookily psychedelic flavor and transforming it into something entirely his own.

3. Pepper & the Shakers, Semi-Psychedelic (It Is) (Coral)
This group, at least according to my sources, is thought to be the same Pepper & the Shakers who cut a rare Doo-wop record for Kentucky’s Chetwyd Records in ’59.

I’m not entirely sure it’s the same group. I’m not entirely sure this was an African-American - or integrated, at least - group, for that matter. It puts me in the somewhat problematic position of assaying the race of a singer from the sound of his voice, but for the sake of a complete post and a satisfyingly obscure theme, I’m including “Semi-Psychedelic (It Is).”

Actually, the whole concept of "semi-psychedelic" seemed a bit problematic for me at the outset. A few paroxysms of fuzztone and Echoplex delay later, though, and I had a much better sense of it.

This relic was recorded in 1967.

Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue

Dusty Springfield, with her big voice, bigger bouffant, and genre-defying hits like “Wishin’ and Hopin’,” “The Look of Love,” and “Son of a Preacher Man,” may have been the queen of ‘60s blue-eyed soul (a term that always amuses me - rock critics just got tired of referring to them as “white guys and/or girls who sing black,” I guess). She wasn’t the only ‘60s white soul girl, though.

To a certain extent, much of commercial pop music is black music retooled for white audiences. Such interests may have played into the record contracts and promotional support accorded to this week’s singers, but there’s far more to Evie, Chris, and Sharon than just financial bottom lines and marketability. These are three supremely talented individuals. They each developed their own idiosyncratic ways of rendering heartbreak, certainly - as you’ll hear. But, beyond their soulfulness, they all shared at least one other talent: emotional gravitas. When these women’s love came tumbling down, it tumbled down and came crashing through the ceiling.

1. Evie Sands, I Can’t Let Go (Blue Cat)
Even during the 45 rpm record’s halcyon years as the preferred medium for commercial pop success, you needed more than the blessing of camera-ready dark looks, innate ability, and a stunning, husky voice. You needed more than top-notch production and the brilliant pop songwriting talents of Al Gorgoni and (future Austin resident) Chip Taylor. The music-obsessed, Brooklyn-raised Evie Sands, perched several times throughout her career on the brink of bigger success, was blessed with all of these qualities except, it seems, for that most slippery ingredient of broader pop fortune: luck.

Sands’ first single, “Take Me for a Little While” - also on songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller’s fascinating Blue Cat label - was characteristic of her mournful, soulful style; while terrific, it was beaten to the charts by a competing version from Chicago singer Jackie Ross. If “Take Me for a Little While” was worthy, then “I Can’t Let Go” - which followed a few months later - was thumping 1965 girl-soul perfected, with one of the most staggeringly catchy choruses in ‘60s pop. Sands was expert at casting a vulnerable hitch into her voice - it verily coursed with the hormone surges of the young, lovelorn America. Yet “I Can’t Let Go,” too, only grazed the charts. In 1969 Sands would enjoy her greatest success with “Any Way That You Want Me” and an excellent full-length album on A&M; it would mostly be her songwriting talents that carried Evie Sands financially through the ‘70s, however. Sands retreated from the music business not long thereafter, her career perpetually remaining one of continued undervaluation - a fact which, if nothing else, guaranteed Sands an existence in the purgatory of diehard soul fans’ adoration.

Sands would eventually reunite with songwriter Chip Taylor in 1999 for her album Women in Prison.

Incidentally, England’s Hollies would revive this song in 1966 with, true to form, better luck than Evie. The Hollies’ version is well worth seeking out, too.

2. Chris Clark, Love’s Gone Bad (V.I.P.)
Like this week’s other artists, Chris Clark’s releases ultimately worked their way to a niche of soul fanatics, but broader musical fame eluded her. Which isn’t to say that Clark didn’t manage success - she did. That success came in the same place where she’d started, however: behind the scenes at Motown Records. Clark started work at Motown as a receptionist in 1963, eventually working her way up to a position as Vice-President of the label’s Television and Movies division in the ‘70s. The irony, of course, is that Clark, who’d always wanted to be a singer, truly belonged out there in front of the scene - way in front the scene - that whole time, as the sight of a six-foot blonde soul chanteuse commanding the stage on national TV would have been a riveting experience, if not the very first step to world peace. Perhaps the American mind could wrap itself around the prospect of only one statuesque blonde with a skyward bouffant, though, and they already had that in Dusty Springfield.

Clark would release a few other fine soul 45s for V.I.P. (a subsidiary label of Motown Records) and album or two for Motown itself, but the self-penned “Love’s Gone Bad,” from 1966, would remain her biggest hit and one of the highpoints of her brief, interceding years as a recording artist. The further irony is that “Love’s Gone Bad” is, simply put, rough Detroit R&B; it may have confused the record-buying public - whether or not they were even aware that Clark was white - who looked to Motown for its perfected formula of polished pop-soul.

There’s an excellent anthology of Clark’s work available here (and Clark is looking fabulous, I should add, in her huge, round sunglasses). It’s worth every music fan’s while.

3. Sharon Tandy, Stay With Me (Atlantic)
A fascinating vocalist whose life story warrants some sort of Lifetime channel biopic, Sharon Tandy grew up singing in Johannesburg, South Africa. At the behest of the young music impresario and manager Frank Fenter, Tandy made her way to the England of the mid-‘60s - there, in the swirling, pop art milieu of London, she was a sensation.

Though her time in the spotlight would be lamentably brief-lived, Tandy managed not only to cut some amazing pop, soul, and psychedelic records, but found herself featured as an opening act of the 1967 Stax-Volt European tour as well - an improbable slot which probably had something to do with the persevering promotion of Fenter - by then both Tandy’s husband and a rising star in the executive ranks of Atlantic Records. Throughout, though, there was Tandy’s spectacular voice. Her 1968 version of Lorraine Ellison’s “Stay With Me” is one of several releases she made with her backing band, the Fleur de Lys (English contemporaries of the Who), and, characteristically, it smoulders with sexuality and her formidable presence. This record must have sparked mod riots every time it was spun - there seems no other good explanation for why this 45 is so hard to find nowadays.

Tandy, grown increasingly disillusioned with the music business, eventually separated from Fenter, and returned to South Africa in 1970 to continue recording. Fenter would go on to co-found Atlantic’s subsidiary refuge of ‘70s southern rock, Capricorn Records; Tandy, though, would never find the international success that she deserved.

The flipside of “Stay With Me” is, incidentally, “Hold On,” a thundering slab of mod psychedelia that I hope to showcase on Office Naps at some future point. You can hear it on the meantime - along with all of Tandy’s recorded output (including unissued recordings made in Memphis for Stax records) on Ace Records’ justifiably acclaimed You Gotta Believe It’s… Sharon Tandy anthology.

Walls of Sound

I can’t figure out when the phrase “Wall of Sound” was coined - it just seems to be one of those hyperbolic descriptors that’s been tossed around for years in discussions of pop music. Unlike, say, “New Weird America” or John Coltrane’s “Sheets of Sound,” it’s a phrase that seems genuinely serviceable, though. “Wall of Sound” refers to the ‘60s pop production style of erratic Los Angeles studio wizard Phil Spector, and the phrase conveys something crucial about any classic Phil Spector production: its physicality.

Even if you’re not familiar with his name or story, you’ve likely heard Spector’s handiwork. The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me” (a personal favorite), the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” - they all have that peculiar sense of physical, cavernous space. I can almost feel the earth rushing up to meet me when I hear Spector’s “River Deep, Mountain High.”

Orchestrated and heavily engineered studio productions were nothing new to pop or rock ‘n’ roll or R&B in the early ‘60s. The history of commercial recording seems to be the history of producers wresting artistic control from the artists themselves; the Wall of Sound aesthetic, however, set a new precedent for rock ‘n’ roll. Everything was essentially subordinated to the producer’s art.

This week’s selections - while not Phil Spector productions themselves - were inspired by that ethos of grandeur. Singers were stripped their backing bands, their voices becoming indistinct in a densely orchestrated mix. Guitar riffs were overwhelmed by echo. Bells rang out from distant rooms. For the Wall of Sound, the musician’s individuality and role in the creative process was deemphasized in a fundamental way. This, in the case of Phil Spector, is not condemnation, though. He and his ‘60s protégés could be heavyhanded, overbearing megalomaniacs - and they were, without a doubt. But the Wall of Sound was conceived when use of technology like multi-tracking and studio echo was still innovative and full of experimental possibility. It was unashamed of its studio conception. It had no reason to be, either - it was a bold new form of pop.

1. The Date With Soul, Yes Sir That's My Baby (York)
Jack Nitzsche was a quintessential West Coast studio man. He began his career in the Los Angeles of the late 1950s as an arranger and session musician, working his way into studio production and scoring a 1963 hit with the instrumental “The Lonely Surfer.” Having provided the arrangements for many of Phil Spector’s ‘60s sessions, Nitzsche also absorbed, at least initially, some of those grandiose Spectorian production sensibilities.

This group - the Date With Soul - was a studio project for Nitzsche, and it found him laboring in full Wall of Sound mode. His version of the enduring “Yes Sir That’s My Baby” is pure distillate of the Los Angeles studio world; the notable voices buried in the chorus include, apparently, Brian Wilson, Jackie DeShannon, and Sonny and Cher, amongst others. Soul vocalist Edna Wright sang lead, but this wasn’t soul, really - not even the polished Motown variety of soul. Slowness was used to great, dramatic effect here. Strings - another Nitzsche hallmark - descended in prismatic tones. So what was this, exactly? No one else quite seemed to know either, but sensing that this was some freakish new species of pop, “Yes Sir That’s My Baby” was passed along from record label to record label and released three different times between 1964 and 1967.

This version on the York label was to be its last appearance.

2. Ruby and the Romantics, Your Baby Doesn’t Love You Anymore (Kapp)
Love. Gone right, it’s sunshine. You know the feeling? It’s chocolate and strawberries and endorphins, all gently floating on the breeze. It’s Paris in Springtime. Then it goes wrong. Very wrong. Apocalypse Now wrong. Darkness descends. Food goes bad in the refrigerator. Sleep? Don’t even think about it. Hearts are ripped out, dragged to the desert and shot unceremoniously.

Distinguished by Ruby Nash’s gorgeous lead vocals and - behind her - the sophisticated harmonies of the Romantics, Ohio’s Ruby and the Romantics were masters of smooth, romantic soul. 1963 hits like “Our Day Will Come” and “Hey There Lonely Boy” exemplified their sophisticated style. Their lyrical fare was urbane, their productions jazzy and lush. Ruby and the Romantics knew what they were doing.

“Your Baby Doesn’t Love You Anymore” isn’t the sort of sentiment you’d naturally ever care to hear, but, if it came down to that, it was better to hear it from seasoned professionals. There’s something about Ruby and the Romantics that says “dignified pathos” instead of “three unshowered weeks spent watching Turner Classic Movies.” Your friends mean well and everything, of course. But believe me - you’re better off letting Ruby and the Romantics handle this sort of heartbreak. They were the professionals.

This 1965 jewel was produced and arranged by New York-based studio veterans Tom Catalano and Alan Lorber. Lorber was shortly to engineer one of rock’s most infamous cash-in campaigns, the “Bosstown Sound.”

3. The Flirtations, Nothing But a Heartache (Deram)
Eager for chart success and a more receptive audience, the Flirtations, an American female R&B vocal group, managed to find both in England in 1967 with the assistance of aspiring producer Wayne Bickerton. Bombastic in the best possible way, with crescendo after breathtaking crescendo of deep girl group harmony sound, their “Nothing But a Heartache” was a major UK hit and an instant sensation among the Motown-worshipping mods of 1960’s Britain.

Decades later, it was just as instantly spoiled for these same souls after it was used in a television commercial for a popular fried chicken vendor.

Dawn of the Soul Diva

This week: Late '60s R&B records, that fertile medium where the cross-over popularity of soul music and the voices of female empowerment and social consciousness were all beginning to intersect in a profound, primordial way. They mingled, they fermented, and not long thereafter something new was spotted emerging from the pop music ooze. She was resplendent in her sequined gowns and diamonds, she looked you directly in the eye, and she shook the rafters in a righteous rain of Spinto soprano notes.

It was the dawn of the Soul Diva.

1. Jean & The Darlings, How Can You Mistreat the One You Love (Volt)
Jean & The Darlings were a group of Arkansas-based, gospel-raised singers which included sisters Jean (also spelled Jeanne) and Dee Dolphus, Jeanne’s daughter Paula, and family friend Phefe Harris. In addition to their service as background studio singers at the seminal Memphis soul label Stax, they released six 45s of their own on Stax’s sister label Volt in the late 1960s.

The boundlessly energetic “How Can You Mistreat the One You Love,” from 1967, was the first of Jean & the Darlings’ Volt releases and it must have given the Stax producers some pause, too, after it only barely grazed the charts. Was it the hand clapping? Too many dBus on the signal levels? They probably puzzled over the possibilities for weeks before finally shrugging their shoulders, chalking another one up to the vagaries of the pop charts.

2. Erma Franklin, Change My Thoughts from You (Brunswick)
Being a relation of the famous comes with its own weird sort of curse. As the son of a popular president, the daughter of a Nobel Prize winner, or, for example, the sister of the Queen of Soul, your accomplishments and aspirations are invariably judged against the fame which preceded you. We’ll likely never know whether Erma’s relative obscurity was due to the comparisons to her ebullient sister, or simply to the whims and injustices of the music business, but it can be fairly said that having Aretha Franklin as a sister probably didn’t make one’s own ambitions as an R&B singer much easier to realize.
Erma Franklin grew up singing with her younger sisters Aretha and Carolyn (also an overlooked singer); like Aretha, she recorded a few tentative major label albums in a poppier vein, none of which aroused much notice upon their release in the early ‘60s. Erma began hitting her stride around 1967, though, with strongly soul-oriented fare for the Shout record label and, a year or two later, for the Chicago-based Brunswick.

From its elemental piano and drum introduction, “Change My Thoughts From You” is one of Franklin’s highlights on the Brunswick label. Her voice sexy and unequivocally in control, it works flawlessly with the production of veteran studio whiz Carl Davis; it’s a quintessentially Chicagoan swirl of Motown-style melancholic hooks, sweet harmonies, and snappy drums. Erma Franklin recorded “Change My Thoughts From You” in 1969, unfortunately the penultimate year of her recording career.

3. Ruby Andrews, You Made a Believer (Out of Me) (Zodiac)
The Detroit songwriting team of Fred Bridges, Richard Knight, and Robert Eaton appropriated the metaphor of religious rebirth for this selection, swapping the language of the devout for the language of the infatuated. Nothing really new there, of course: that’s part of secular soul music’s evolution from gospel. It does take the right singer, though, to prevent lyrics to a song like 1969’s “You Made a Believer (Out of Me)” from sounding merely overwrought. And that’s exactly what Ruby Andrews does - her voice soars, cutting through the song’s low center of gravity and its funky, off-kilter rhythms.

Born in Mississippi, Ruby Andrews’ recording career took shape in Chicago in the late 1960s with a series of 45s and two full-length albums for the Zodiac label, hitting her commercial zenith early on with 1967’s “Casanova (Your Playing Days Are Over).” Since a brief return in the late ‘70s with more disco-oriented fare, Andrews has only recorded infrequently, alas, her voice in fine form but generally heard in bluesier settings.

Bay City Rollin'

(Ed. note: A terrific guest post this week courtesy of O-Dub, well-known to many of you as the proprietor of the one best and longest-running music blogs out there, Soul Sides.)

I don't remotely profess to have a very deep collection of Bay Area soul/funk 45s. I leave that to my friends like Justin Torres or Matthew Africa. That said, as the place where I spent 16 years living and more importantly, became a DJ, writer and record collector, I do feel an affinity with the soul tradition that came out there, especially given how so much of it flew under the proverbial radar for many years. I pulled out three selections: two recent acquisitions, the other an all-time favorite.

1. Sugar Pie DeSanto: The Whoopee (Brunswick)
No doubt, someone will astutely note: but uh, Brunswick wasn't a Bay Area label. This is true but DeSanto was most definitely an artist who became associated with the Bay (even if she was born in the BK). Normally, I would have been tempted to post "Git Sum," a fantastic track she put together for Oakland's Jasman Records. However, I had never heard "The Whoopee" until recently and it's another great soul cooker from her. Personally, I really want to see how this dance is done but as she says, we won't really know how to do it until the Sugar Pie do (with mini-skirt no less). Yowzers.

** I just learned recently that Sugar Pie suffered a devastating loss: her house caught fire and her husband died trying to put it out. Not only has she lost her house but also her life partner. People are in the process of trying to set up a way for donations to get to her. More info available here. **

2. Eugene Blacknell: The Trip (Pts. 1 & 2) (Boola Boola)
The 7" everyone used to want by Blacknell was "Gettin' Down" and sure, it's a good funk 45..."massive breaks," that sort of thing. But in terms of the go-to 7" I'd want to use in the middle of a DJ set, I'd grab "The Trip" first, every time. The elements here are superb: gutbucket guitar, a chomping bass, tireless drumming and that bank of horns that pushes the groove on, relentlessly. Did I also mention the "massive breaks" in the middle? The 45 has parts 1 and 2 split in half on the 7" but I stitched them together to create a more seamless song.

3. Pi-R-Square: Fantasy (Pts 1 & 2) (Wee)
Hands down, not only my favorite Bay Area 7" but possibly my favorite 45, period. For a long time, it was a Holy Grail single amongst collectors though in recent years, it's become far less obscure but that hasn't diminished its singular excellence one bit. I've tried to describe it before but it's difficult to articulate just how sublimely awesome this whole single is. The way it builds, transforms, takes you on this nine minute trip that you never want to get off of.

--O-Dub (Soul Sides)

Funk and the blues

While I cringe when I hear talk of authenticity or purity in music, I’ll readily admit to some prejudices if pressed. Latin and jazz, Liberace and chinchilla capes, psychedelics and any kind of music: they're concepts which generally improve each other’s company. Rock and opera, jazz and exercise, on the other hand: no. Presently, it seems “funky” blues (or, worse, blues-rock) is what passes for all blues. It's come to sound clichéd and a bit pandering, like what you'd hear blaring from sports bars and lite beer commercials, which it does.

Blues progressions and funk rhythms are one of those fusions which worked well for a time, though. Like, say, the 1960s - a time of blues-inflected top 40 hits from cities like New Orleans and Memphis - a time of R&B and soul records with earthy flavor and hard, spare drumming. (Lowell Fulson’s “Tramp” - as O-Dub notes - and Alvin Robinson’s “Down Home Girl” spring to mind here.)

This week's selections adhere to that earlier aesthetic.

(Ed. note: Thanks to JD for her help with this week’s post.)

1. Buddy Conner, Half-Way Loving (Early Bird)
The organ, the Memphis-style horn section, the shuckin’, the jivin’: “Half-Way Loving” is as resolutely Southern as a bag of hog maws. Never mind, then, that Buddy Conner and company were actually from the Bay Area - it didn’t seem to bother them at all. A burst of organ and a few walloping drum beats later, they wasted no time getting into the proper down home spirit on this off-kilter bit of late-60’s funky soul.

2. Shelley Fisher, I’ll Leave You (Girl) (Kapp)
Fisher can toss out every cliché from the book of blues one-liners I wouldn’t care. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve heard lines like “I don’t need that kind of treatment, girl / Your love is the choking kind.” Sometimes a selection can succeed on the sheer gutbucket strength of its drums alone.

The Mississippi-born Shelley Fisher recorded “I’ll Leave You (Girl) (For Somebody New)" shortly after his arrival in Los Angeles in 1970, and near the beginning of his long career as a singer, songwriter, and performer. He is still active today.

3. Lee Harris, I’m Gonna Get Your Thing (Get You) (Forte)
Singer & guitarist Lee Harris’s raucous “I’m Gonna Get Your Thing (Get You)” was committed to vinyl around 1970 and released on one of Kansas City’s fine independent soul labels, Forte. (See this page for an excellent overview & discography of Forte.)

There’s warping tape near the song’s beginning (an audible “whooshing” sound), there’s the stylistic shift of the song’s last loopy minute, and, in between, there’s a roomful of musicians, manic background vocalists, and two strategically placed microphones. It’s exciting to hear things captured in such visceral fidelity, and I get excited too at the prospect of sorting out exactly whose thing is whose. Maybe it’s your thing, I don’t know.

Girl trips

This week, three female harmony-soul records from the early '70s. Their production styles are wildly different, but they’re all suffused with the lightly trippy aesthetic of the era.

1. The Three Degrees, Collage (Roulette)
An enduring Philadelphia female vocal trio, the Three Degrees found national fame in the mid-1970s on Gamble and Huff’s massively influential early disco label, Philadelphia International Records.

Named, I'd guess, for its pastiche of gloomy and strikingly imagistic lyrics, “Collage” was, aesthetically, light years from the Soul Train dance lines and gold lamé. This was 1970, when pulling out all the stops in the studio meant a technicolor cascade of minor-key harmonies, chimes, vibraphone, and wah-wah guitar.

2. Sweet and Innocent, Express Your Love (Active)
”Express Your Love” is sweet, innocent, and - like a love letter sung into a portable tape recorder in a teenager’s bedroom - almost painfully intimate.

Cooing with a charming lack of affectation, Sweet and Innocent strive here to fill those gaping holes in their hearts and it seems that a flood of molasses-like studio echo flowed in to fill those holes. They recorded this sleeper in Memphis in the early 1970s, and, sadly, that’s about all I can report. So no word on which one was “Sweet” and which one was “Innocent.”

3. Patti Drew, Keep On Movin’ (Capitol)
Chicago-based Patti Drew has a voice that's a powerful, wondrous thing, and she really unleashes the full dramatic force of it on “Keep On Movin’.”

Listen to the gravitas with which Ms. Drew intones lyrics like, “But somewhere, somehow / I’m going to keep on trying / until in the end / I finally win.” Today, alas, this kind of grim determination would be unlikely to find its way into a pop song with Top 40 aspirations. But that wasn’t the point in 1970. This was an era generally friendlier to anthems of survival, empowerment, and "personal voyaging," an era when even flutes - an official instrument of bohemian peripateticism - could solo in complete freedom.

** Many, MANY thanks this week to Oliver, who gave Office Naps a sweet shout-out from his mighty Soul Sides site. Oliver's discipline - and his peerless writing and tastes - were a real inspiration to me (and should be for any music blogger). Back when he was reviewing LP's on a monthly basis and posting drool-y album scans, back before "blog" meant anything to you or me, HIS was one of the first homegrown music sites that I regularly checked (and it still is one of the few). Check Soul Sides everyday. **

The Shingaling

Shingaling: like the term “boogaloo,” it’s two separate (but related) mid-'60s pop phenomena.

There's the “shingaling” synonomous with Latin Soul - jazzed-up guajiras and mambos with an R&B kick, sung in English and Spanish by younger Nuyoricans. Possibly more familiar, though, is the “shingaling,” the peculiar evolution of '60s soul dance music shortly before the polyrhythmic funk of “Cold Sweat”-era James Brown changed everything around. It sustained the tradition of silly lyrics, though it was arguably more sophisticated than the dancefloor styles that preceded it. It had big, jazzy horn riffs, it looked good (it dressed in mod suits), and it had a walloping beat. And, most of all, it was just crazy danceable.

It’s from the latter definition that we present these funky bits of discotheque nougat. (Which, incidentally, are all from the Philadelphia area.)

1. Gene Waiters, Shake and Shingaling (part 1) (Fairmount)
We’ve got all the requisite ingredients: the horns, the titantic drum fill, the lyrics about keeping “it” moving. Spiced with guitar and some fab organ, and finally wrapped together like some stylish stick of dynamite, "Shake and Shingaling" is to me the very essence of shingaling soul. It bobs along with the unbounded confidence that comes from being a member of the new breed, whoever they were.

2. Carl Holmes and the Commanders, Soul Dance No. 3 (Blackjack)
Carl Holmes - guitarist, gifted screamer, and a kind of tightly wound version of Wilson Pickett - here conjures the transcendent 1966 blare of American dancefloor mojo-shake. If stomping were a path to enlightenment, then, like dancefloor Buddhas, I really do believe we’d be radiating kindness toward all beings after only a few rounds with this one.

Carl Holmes led various R&B and soul combos throughout the the 1960s and '70s, and toured the Mid-Atlantic extensively, including my old south-central Pennsylvania stomping groundS. (See the fantastic Funky 16 Corners for more info on Carl Holmes.)

I sure dig that hand-drawn label.

3. Bobby Sax, Sock It (DePlace)
Bobby Sax’s “Sock It” careens forth at a heart-pounding tempo for its 1:55 sprint to the finish line, ain't that a whole lotta whoo, indeed.

This hot potato is full of such poetry - a poetry pretty much unique to the shingaling. Even within the genre, “Sock It” is exceptional, though. It's constructed from monumental slabs of echo, horns, and drums, and, with sound bleeding from every available channel, it manages to distinguish itself as possibly the loudest record on earth.

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.