Tag Archives: Soul

Swamp Dogg: Rat On!

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SwampDogg_RatOnSecond helping of outspoken, deep Southern soul

Swamp Dogg’s newly penned liner notes tell the story of this album’s original sessions (under the title of “Right On”) at Florida’s TK Studios, with a backing band that included Betty Wright, Lonnie Mack, Al Kooper and a label worker (and future disco star) named Harry Wayne “KC” Casey. Apparently the results sounded awesome to the alcohol- and herb-fueled participants, but were not so easy on the ears of anyone else. The resulting tapes were shelved (though a single of the original “Straight From My Heart” was released with a B-side cover of Joe South’s “Don’t Throw Your Love to the Wind”), and a second run at the album was made at Quinvy Studios in Muscle Shoals. The latter sessions were released on Elektra in 1971 as Rat On! The Quinvy crew featured several legendary musicians, including bassist Robert Lee “Pops” Popwell and guitarist Jesse Willard “Pete” Carr, and Swamp Dogg’s soul sound, much like that on his debut, gave the players solid grooves to explore. His songs continued to mix outspoken views on race, sex, religion, war, relationships and social issues, couched in melodies whose sweetness sometimes obscures the deep twists and turns of his lyrics. Listened to in passing, Rat On! offers top-flight ‘70s southern soul, with deep bass and punchy horns. But listened to more carefully, the album reveals a daring songwriter who wasn’t afraid to tell it as he saw it, challenging society’s icons of freedom with “God Bless America For What?” and landing himself on Nixon’s enemies list. The album features soulful reworkings of the Bee Gees’ “Got to Get a Message to You” and Mickey Newbury’s “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye,” and though the original tunes aren’t nearly as absurd those on Total Destruction to Your Mind, their messages are just as powerful, and their grooves are just as deep. [©2013 Hyperbolium]

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Swamp Dogg: Total Destruction to Your Mind

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SwampDogg_TotalDestructionToYourMindLost soul classic lost no more

Industry veteran Jerry Williams, Jr. unleashed his alter ego on this 1970 masterpiece, spelling out his unconventional views in groove-heavy soul music. He makes good on the title’s brag with catchy, original songs that touch on environmental decay, social isolation, dystopian visions, racism and questions of paternity. Williams’ lyrics are often Zappa-like in their surface absurdity, but there’s a gripping observation or lament at each song’s heart. His voice has the pinched, keening sound of the Showmen’s General Norman Johnson, but with a rounded richness that suggests Jackie Wilson. Recorded at Capricorn Studios in Macon, GA, his band is soaked in the horns, low bass and guitar riffs of Southern soul, and touched by the propulsion of West Coast funk. It’s hard to imagine how this record (as well as the follow-up, Rat On!, an album better known for its cover than its content) has remained so obscure and hard to find. A two-fer on Swamp Dogg’s S.D.E.G label has been available off-and-on since 2000, but Alive’s digipack remaster should give this five-star gem the broader circulation it deserves. It’s a shame new liner notes weren’t included to provide the album’s history and context; the booklet does reproduce the song list, personnel credits, a few “relevant quotes,” and a short, typically absurd, autobiography. Analog fans will be happy to find both this and Rat On! are also being reissued on vinyl [1 2]. [©2013 Hyperbolium]

Swamp Dogg’s Home Page
A 1997 Interview with Swamp Dogg

Bobby Rush: Down in Louisiana

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BobbyRush_DownInLouisianaSwamp-tinged, soul-grooved electric blues

Singer/guitarist Bobby Rush has traveled an interesting road as a musician. Born in Louisiana, his family relocated to Chicago in the early ‘50s, where Rush was schooled by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and other giants of the Windy City’s iconic blues scene. He developed his own sound in the ‘60s, equally fueled by blues, funk and soul, and then in 1971 he moved back to the South and made it his home base for extensive roadwork. He’s traveled the remnants of the chitlin’ circuit, played nightclubs, auditoriums and Las Vegas showrooms, and at the age of 77 remains terrifically vital as a singer, songwriter, guitarist and harmonica player. His latest album blends electric blues with the soul of his native Louisiana, rendered by a stripped-down quintet of guitar, keyboards, harmonica, bass and drums. The results range from twelve bar blues to swamp-funk to the ‘70s styled groove “Rock This House.” Rush and co-producer/keyboardist Paul Brown add a few contemporary touches to the vocals, but the music never strays far from the sounds that are deeply rooted in Rush’s musical soul. [©2013 Hyperbolium]

The Box Tops: Playlist – The Very Best Of

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BoxTops_PlaylistTheVeryBestOfStirring set of Memphis pop-soul singles in glorious mono

Fans of the Box Tops’ Memphis-tinged radio pop, whether period AM listeners or working their way backwards from Big Star or Alex Chilton’s solo work, will find something interesting here. The band’s ten charting singles (from 1967’s chart-topping debut, “The Letter,” through the non-LP “Turn on a Dream” and “You Keep Tightening Up on Me”) are supplemented by four B-sides, all in their original gut-punching mono. The B’s include the first Alex Chilton track released on a single, “I See Only Sunshine,” as well as “Together,” his B-side to “Turn on a Dream.” Though the group’s original albums provide a deeper experience, stringing together the hit singles and a few B-sides closely replicates how the band was heard by record buyers at the time. It’s a compelling introduction to Alex Chilton’s soul-soaked vocals and the terrific production of Dan Penn, Chips Moman and Tommy Cogbill. It’d be great if someone released a complete singles collection, adding the missing B-sides and the group’s later sides for Bell, Hi and Stax, but at fourteen tracks the set provides some lesser-heard B-sides without losing the focus on the group’s hits. Best of all, the mono mixes deliver an original sound that really distinguish this set from the longer Best of the Box Tops. [©2013 Hyperbolium]

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Chris Stamey: Lovesick Blues

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ChrisStamey_LovesickBluesA pensive set from a legendary singer-songwriter

It’s been nine years since Chris Stamey’s last solo album, Travels in the South. In the interim he’s worked with Yo La Tengo on A Question of Temperature., re-teamed with fellow dB Peter Holsapple for Here and Now, regrouped with the dB’s for Falling Off the Sky, and continued a busy career as a recording engineer and record producer. The long years between solo outings are certainly understandable, if not necessarily a happy state of affairs for fans; but those same fans should feel rewarded by this collection of eleven magnificent new productions. Stamey’s melancholy tunefulness has never sounded more graceful, rendered in contemplative tones and finely crafted instrumental textures that shift seamlessly between rock, soul, jazz and classical.

Stamey’s formal education in music theory and composition has never been a secret, but his recent work on the Big Star Third concerts seems to have deepened his thinking about how orchestral instruments could fit into and augment his music. He interleaves strings, woodwinds and brass with guitars, bass and drums, dotting his musical landscape with cello, bassoon, flute and trombone. The results are both ethereal and dynamic, offering everything from neo-psych dreaminess to symphonic vigor, sometimes within the same song, as on the sky-gazing “Astronomy.” This coalescing of musical influences is seemingly foreshadowed by the merging of souls in the opener, “Skin.”

At 59, Stamey’s long since expanded upon the punchy guitar rock with which the dB’s introduced themselves, though “You n Me n XTC” has a chorus hook that will make listeners think back. The album plays as late-night ruminations on metaphysical wanderings, philosophical wonderings and haggard day-end inventories. Stamey sings with a thoughtful absorption that suggests Paul Simon’s folk songs, and the self-referential “I Wrote This Song for You” has the charm of an Alex Chilton love song. Stamey’s lyrics remain poetic, but his vocabulary and singing have softened from their earlier percussiveness – a change that fits these pensive songs. [©2013 Hyperbolium]

Chris Stamey’s Home Page

Gabriel Kelley: It Don’t Come Easy

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GabrielKelley_ItDontComeEasyCountry, rock and soul

Kelley is a singer-songwriter brought full-circle to his rural roots after stops in Sweden, Nashville and Guatemala. Born in Virginia, his taste was seeded by his parents’ music: Leon Russell, Neil Young, John Prine and others. His songwriting sprouted during two years of vagabonding that eventually led to a staff writing position in Nashville. But Music City’s stock liturgy turned out to be too confining: “Nashville was kinda like cowboy hats and belt buckles, and I was more the long-haired granola kid.” He left publishing, spent more time abroad and returned to a vagabonding life that freed him to pour his experience into songs rather than songwriting appointments. What emerged, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, is a fervent, soulful singer-songwriter.

Kelley sings in his own voice, rather than one designed to capture a market segment. He writes invitations to an emotionally closed mate and anchors himself to faith as he sends out lifelines. Ironically, it’s Kelley himself who could often use the lifelines as he wavers between loneliness and forgiveness, rarely finding resolution in either. He wallows deeply in the details of his misery on the closing “Holding Me Down,” and the album’s one moment of contentment “See Ya Comin'” is more memory and expectation than here-and-now. The latter features passionate, gospel-infused backing vocals from Bekka Bramlett, Marueen Murphy and Gabe Dixon.

Neal Cappelino’s productions of guitar, drums, keyboards, pedal steel and harmonica are often quite grand, but they’re tethered by Kelley’s earthiness. The rolling guitar figures and strong walking beat of “Only Thing to Do” are supplemented by Wurlitzer piano, a string quartet and sitar-like twangs that come from either Jon Graboff’s pedal steel or Reggie Young’s guitar. The latter provides inspiring musical figures throughout, highlighting Kelley’s songs with dollops of soul, just as he did for the Box Tops and numerous others over the years. This is a sophisticated debut from a songwriter with confidence in his lyrical and singing voices, and a backing band that offers up stirring mixes of country, rock and soul. [©2013 Hyperbolium]

Gabriel Kelley’s Home Page

Creedence Clearwater Revival: Ultimate – Greatest Hits and All-Time Classics

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3-CD overview ofAmerica’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band

As a band whose albums, singles and live performances were equally exciting, it can be argued that Creedence Clearwater Revival remains the greatest group in American rock ‘n’ roll history. Whether stretching out a psychedelic jam of “Suzie Q” or “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” or packing everything they had into the 2:21 of “Bad Moon Rising,” their synthesis of rock, country, blues, and southern soul was riveting. Their hit singles still leave listeners reaching to turn up the volume, and their albums harbor dozens of lesser-known, but no less terrific covers and Fogerty originals. In a six-album stretch from 1968’s eponymous Creedence Clearwater Revival through 1970’s Pendulum, the quartet never faltered – dropping dozens of hit singles and revitalizing well-selected covers with iconic guitar riffs and vocal turns that hook your ear as readily today as they did forty years ago.

The CCR catalog has seen its fair share of reissues, with a box set in 2001, individual album remasters in 2008, and in 2009 a mono singles collection, vintage live concert and a covers collection. And then there are numerous tributes and an endless array of karaoke discs. Fantasy’s latest reiteration of the core catalog is a three-disc set that goes beyond the hit singles, but not as far as the box set. It’s a better introduction than a single disc, and with the inclusion of album and live tracks, a broader look than the two volume Chronicle set. The set is delivered in a tri-fold cardboard sleeve with extensive liner notes by Bay Area music historian, Alec Palao. Among his insights is the astonishing fact that CCR never scored a chart-topping U.S. single; Green River and Cosmo’s Factory each topped the album chart, but their peak singles, “Proud Mary,” “Green River” and “Lookin’ Out My Back Door” topped out at #2.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the longevity of the group’s legacy is broader than hit singles. The set’s first two discs sample from the group’s seven original studio albums, including four Fogerty-piloted tracks from the swansong, Mardi Gras. Disc three collects live performances from 1970-71, recorded in the Bay Area and across Europe; all were previously issued on either The Concert or as bonus tracks to the 2008 album reissues. The live mixes are necessarily rawer than the studio recordings, but they’re full and punchy, show off the band’s tight ensemble playing and demonstrate how well CCR’s material translated to the stage. This is a great set for listeners who haven’t upgraded their Chronicle LPs to CDs, those not ready for the box or album reissues, or younger listeners that need to have the waxy buildup of contemporary pop removed from their ears. [©2012 Hyperbolium]

Various Artists: Adios Amigo: A Tribute to Arthur Alexander

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All-star tribute to legendary country soul singer-songwriter

When country soul singer-songwriter Arthur Alexander passed away in 1993 at the age of 53, he was in the middle of a comeback that finally saw him recognized and rewarded for his songwriting genius and the heartbreaking quality of his performances. His last album, Lonely Just Like Me, his first in over two decades, rang as true as anything he’d recorded previously, and was followed the next year by this multi-artist tribute. Alexander’s songs had long been a favorite of top-flight artists, with formative covers by the Beatles and Rolling Stones giving Alexander early crossover exposure. But the artists gathered for this seventeen-track set weren’t just looking for good material to foster their own burgeoning careers, they were acknowledging their debt to Alexander as a songwriter and artist.

As one should expect from an assembled tribute, the interpretations vary in quality, but if you focus on the set’s high points, they’re very high indeed. Elvis Costello gets the program rolling with a scorching vocal and low, electric blues guitar on “Sally Sue Brown” and legendary vocalist Chuck Jackson provides the grit needed to rough up Mark Knopfler’s polished backing on “You Better Move On.” Nick Lowe, who’s later songwriting owes much to Alexander, nails the quiet pathos of “In the Middle of it All,” and fellow Brit Graham Parker captures the soul of Alexander’s heartbroken “Ever Day I Have to Cry.” John Prine, Gary U.S. Bonds and others give additional heartfelt performances. None of these substitute for Alexander’s originals, but they provide a nice capstone to a career that didn’t always garner the fame it so richly deserved. [©2012 Hyperbolium]

Taj Mahal: The Hidden Treasures of Taj Mahal 1969-1973

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Extraordinary set of early rarities and a superb 1970 concert

This 2-CD set of previously unreleased material provides a superb complement to the previously issued Essential anthology. Where Essential set surveyed thirty-three years of Mahal’s immense catalog, this latest collection focuses on five years from early in his career. Those formative years found Mahal exploring numerous threads of the blues, including pre-war styles, as well as soul and funk. The first disc includes a dozen finished studio tracks that clock in at a generous 77 minutes. The recordings were made in Woodstock, Miami, the San Francisco Bay Area andNew Orleans, the latter produced by Allen Toussaint in rustic, drumless arrangements. The bands include 3- and 4-piece combos, as well as larger aggregations that feature the Dixie Flyers and a brass band. Jesse Edwin Davis’ guitar provides a strong, guiding presence on many tracks, and Mahal’s harmonica adds an expressive voice on a superb cover of Dylan’s “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” and a soulful instrumental version of “People Get Ready” titled “Butter.”

Disc two features a 1970 concert atLondon’s Royal Albert Hall. The live set features both original material and covers, including Sleepy John Estes’ “Diving Duck Blues,” Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Checkin’ Up on My Baby,” and a lengthy take on Robby Robertson and Garth Hudson’s pre-Band era “Bacon Fat.” Mahal starts his set – an opening slot for Johnny Winter and Santana – with a gutsy, a cappella version of the traditional “Runnin’ by the Riverside.” His stage manner is warm and welcoming, offering detailed introductions to his songs and drawing on the folk tradition of audience participation. His performances are backed by a superb four-piece that includes Jesse Davis (guitar), John Simon (Piano), Bill Rich (Bass) and James Karsten (Drums), as well as Mahal’s National Steel and harmonica.

Perhaps most amazing is that this entire set – both the studio and live tracks – is previously unreleased. Few artists ever record material this good, let alone in such quantity that they can leave some of it in the vault. Mahal is equally compelling in the studio as he is on stage, something few artists achieve; his studio recordings breathe freely and his stage work is lively but tight. Miles Mellough’s liner notes are detailed and informative, though a bit over-the-top in their devotion. Sound quality is good throughout, with the concert tapes sounding full and punchy – perhaps having Santana and Johnny Winter on the bill brought out the A-list live truck. This is a terrific find for Mahal’s fans, providing insight into both his studio process and the musical alchemy he brought to the stage. [©2012 Hyperbolium]

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