by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the Doctor Blake
episode KPBS showed one of their interminable pledge-break music specials, a T.
J. Lubinsky “MyMusic” presentation (that horrible spelling, two words mashed
together with the second one capitalized in the middle of the whole thing,
started with the naming of computer programs and has since regrettably spread
to other forms of commerce) called Rhythm and Blues at 40: A Soul
Spectacular. Directed by Barry Glazer, this
show was filmed in 2001 and therefore contains quite a few people, including
James Brown, Fontella Bass, and Percy Sledge, who have since gone beyond to
that great Black church choir in the sky. The reference isn’t accidental:
virtually all the great soul singers started out as kids, singing in Black
churches, and their voices were professionally trained by the church choir
directors. I seem to harp on this every time I write about Black soul music, especially about revival concerts
like this one, but it’s the reason why people like Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner
and Patti LaBelle were able to have long, prosperous and productive careers
while the whites who tried to imitate them usually crashed and burned vocally
in a few years. White singers heard the great Black soul records and figured
all you needed to do to sing that way was stand in front of a band and scream.
Not so: soul requires as disciplined a vocal technique as opera, and the great
Black singers got it, along with the emotional power and fervor of their
singing, from their churches.
Though all the performers on A Soul
Spectacular were Black, and therefore we
didn’t have the clashes we got on some of Lubinsky’s other “MyMusic” specials
between Black voices in excellent shape and white ones of similar vintage
cracking all over the place and missing the high notes they nailed with ease 30
or 40 years before, singer after singer on this program testified (a good
church word!) to the excellence of the vocal training they got way back when.
The program opened with a rump version of The Temptations — for a while Motown,
which owned the name, toured with a five-piece vocal group that sounded
reasonably like the original Temptations and contained the last surviving
original member, Otis Williams, but with the group’s two original lead singers,
David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks, having long since “passed” it hardly was the
same. The rump-Tempts did “Get Ready” and the inevitable “My Girl” (one of the
great soul ballads of all time, written for them by Smokey Robinson — on the
combination greatest-hits and interviews LP box The Motown Story one of the Tempts recalled wrestling this song away
from Robinson, who naturally had wanted to save it for his own group, the
Miracles), and the usual interminable promos (which in this case were actually
built right into the show during its closing number) mentioned that if we gave
tons of money to our local PBS station we could get an extended version of the
program that would also include the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.” Then
Sam Moore came out for a rendition of “Soul Man,” one of the mega-hits he
turned out with his former partner as half of Sam and Dave; two years later he
would appear in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Only the Strong
Survive (which I got to see at a
promotional screening for a release that never took place; what happened to
that film remains a mystery to me) and his would be one of the most poignant
stories in the film.
Sam Moore dropped out of the music business and fell so
low he ended up as a drug dealer on the streets, sometimes embarrassing himself
by trying to sell to people who remembered him from his glory days, until he
ended up married to a white woman who essentially became his keeper, steering
him away from the dope scene and back to a comeback. There’s an especially
moving scene in which Mr. and Mrs. Moore visit the modern high-tech
headquarters of Atlantic Records and joke that they’re there “to visit my
money.” Not surprisingly, no hint of that compelling backstory marred the
celebratory atmosphere of A Soul Spectacular! Next up was Eddie Floyd, doing his big hit “Knock on
Wood” and, if anything, doing it even more soulfully than he had in 1967; his
voice was in excellent shape and easily made the notes of his song (though at
the risk of sounding sacrilegious I must say the white singer Melanie’s cover
of “Knock on Wood” for her 1977 Phonogenic album seems to me even stronger than Floyd’s original — Melanie got
locked into that horrible hippie-dippie image by songs like “Beautiful People,”
“Candles in the Rain” and “Brand New Key,” but she was — and still is — an
incredible singer with a wide range of styles, and she blazed the trail
followed by more recent talents like Cyndi Lauper, Sheryl Crow, Jewel and
Lorde). Then the show featured a singer and a group whose name was so garbled
in the announcements (by Jerry Butler and Dionne Warwick) it wasn’t until
he/they actually performed that I realized who it was: Little Anthony and the Imperials
doing “Hurts So Bad.” I’m not sure how many of last night’s participants were
original Imperials, but Little Anthony’s peculiarly whiny voice was as amazing
as ever. After a pledge break Warwick came on for her own vocal feature, the
Burt Bacharach-Hal David “Walk On By” — I always thought of Warwick as
easy-listening rather than soul, but her voice was magnificent and in 2001 it
was still as good as it had been in the 1960’s (when she was virtually the only
good singer doing Bacharach-David
material — I once had a CD of early recordings of Bacharach-David songs and the
performances, except for Warwick’s, were so generally terrible they were an
ironic testament to the quality of the songs that they survived despite the
lousy people introducing them — it wasn’t until Bacharach and David started
getting their songs to great
singers like Warwick and Dusty Springfield that they became star songwriters) —
and then Jerry Butler introduced the Impressions.
Therein hangs a tale: in 1958
The Impressions, an aspiring R&B/doo-wop group with two principal talents,
lead singer Jerry Butler and songwriter Curtis Mayfield, got signed by Vee-Jay
Records and had a hit with their first single, “For Your Precious Love” — only
someone at Vee-Jay, without consulting the group, got the bright idea to bill
them as Jerry Butler and the Impressions. Needless to say, Mayfield had a
jealous hissy-fit about that, and
though they carried on for two years after that, they finally broke up in 1960,
with Butler going on to a solo career (including making the first record,
outside Audrey Hepburn’s croaking of it in the film Breakfast at
Tiffany’s, of the Henry Mancini-Johnny
Mercer classic “Moon River”) and the Impressions carrying on before they made a
comeback in the mid-1960’s on ABC Records with soulful Black-pride anthems like
“We’re a Winner (Moving On Up).” (Ironically, though the 1960’s were the peak
time both for soul music and African-American civil-rights activism, Curtis
Mayfield was virtually the only
Black R&B star writing socially conscious material until Norman Whitfield,
Marvin Gaye and James Brown took it up in the early 1970’s.) Butler
acknowledged Mayfield’s passing before introducing a latter-day Impressions
doing a song called “It’s All Right,” following which he joined them for “For
Your Precious Love” — the song Mayfield had written for him and which had
sparked the break between them way back when. Then Fontella Bass, introduced as
being from St. Louis even though I’d always associated her with Chicago (mainly
because well after her big R&B hit “Rescue Me” she married Lester Bowie,
trumpeter for the avant-garde jazz group Art Ensemble of Chicago, and she
turned up on quite a few of their records in a very different context from what
people were used to from her), did her big hit, “Rescue Me,” and did it just as well as she had on the
original record. After that came Percy Sledge, whose version of his big hit (a lot of the performers on this show were essentially one-hit wonders, but
what great songs those one hits were!) “When a Man Loves a Woman,” was if
anything even more impassioned than the original — particularly since he personalized the song in a way he hadn’t in 1966, making it clear
(as the original record hadn’t) that he was the man in love with a woman to whom the song referred.
Afterwards
the Isley Brothers did “Who’s That Lady?” from their late-1970’s comeback
period and then “Shout” from their original breakthrough in 1958 (a version of
them doing “Twist and Shout,” probably more famous from the Beatles’ cover, is
apparently one of the items available on the full-length DVD if you contribute
mucho bucks to your local PBS station), and then they slowed down the mood a
bit for the Chi-Lites’ “Have You Seen Her.” This was a surprise hit in the
early 1970’s; the Chi-Lites were a project of former Temptation Eugene Record,
and at first they thought their way to the top was going to be through songs
like “For God’s Sake (You Got to Give More Power to the People),” Black-pride
anthems similar to those Norman Whitfield was writing for the Temptations at
the time — only a song they just stuck on their album as filler ended up
breaking out, getting AM radio play and being the biggest hit of their career
(and was later reworked by M.C. Hammer, though why the Hammer thought he should
turn a song that was already largely spoken into a rap song is a mystery to
me). Then they trotted out James Brown, just three years before his death, for
a rendition of “I Feel Good” — he surprisingly didn’t bring his own band (the
Isley Brothers were the only act on the program who did) and it took two
drummers to play the licks Clyde Stubblefield had managed well enough on his
own on his original record, but he still made an impact even though the
ultimate James Brown movie has to be The T.A.M.I. Show from 1965, on which he tore through four songs,
ended with his career-making 1956 hit “Please, Please, Please” and his bizarre
act in which his bandmates put one gaudy cape after another on him and he sang
much of the song from the floor. I’ve long suspected James Brown is one of
those acts for whom “you had to be there” — his records, which reduce the usual
soul mannerisms to guttural and almost incomprehensible grunts, never impressed
me that much, though as a white kid in the 1960’s what did impress me was the incredible tightness of his band:
at a time when we were used to the psychedelic rock combos who seemed to be
trying to make a virtue of sloppiness, the tight, well-rehearsed playing of
Brown’s sidemen was a palpable relief and a reminder that it’s possible for
people to make music together.
The show went on after James Brown’s electrifying segment for “Ooh, Baby, Baby”
by the then-current edition of the Miracles (by that time Smokey Robinson had
long since left the group but they were still relying on his old songs and for
some odd reason they were showing an old clip of themselves on TV when Robinson
was still part of their act, giving the odd effect that he was hovering over
them above the stage and giving his blessing to their performance) and a
surprise performance by Maxine Brown of her hit “Oh, No, Not My Baby.”
I
remember this song from the David Cassidy cover with the Partridge Family (the
Partridge Family were produced by Brill Building alumnus Wes Farrell and since
they were working for Columbia Pictures, they had access to all the Brill
Building songs Columbia’s music-publishing subsidiary owned), and my
then-girlfriend Cat was incensed when she heard Brown’s version and noticed
that in the “woman’s lyric” for this song she forgave her estranged boyfriend
for “your little fling,” while in the “man’s lyric” the woman had to swear that
she’d been totally chaste to get him to take her back. Maxine Brown was the one
singer on the program who had to sing her old song in a noticeably lower key
than she had on the original record, but she still made an impact and — as with
Carla Thomas’s performance of “Gee Whiz” in the film Only the Strong
Survive — the song was arguably more
powerful and moving in the lower key. Then the hosts garbled another name I
wasn’t familiar with, Eddie Holman, who recorded the song “Hey There, Lonely
Girl” for ABC Records in 1969 — the song was originally called “Hey There,
Lonely Boy” and was introduced by
Ruby and the Romantics in 1962, but Holman’s version was the hit and it in turn
was covered by the Delfonics. I wasn’t familiar with the name “Eddie Holman”
but I certainly remembered the record, and as with so many of the other singers
on this program his voice was in surprisingly excellent shape and he negotiated
the almost unearthly falsetto as well as he had in 1969. The final segment of
this show was the one in which they integrated the PBS commercial directly into
the program itself, using Sam Moore to sing “I Thank You” as a built-in
thank-you in advance for contributors to their local station in the PBS network
(a sort of guilt-tripping that just annoys me and makes it less, not more, likely that I’ll give), but all in all A
Soul Celebration was one of the better
items in Lubinsky’s MyMusic
series, and as I noted above it benefited from having only African-American
performers; usually when Lubinsky presents a mixed-race lineup one is
alternately annoyed at heartbroken at how much better the Black singers’ voices
have held up than the white ones, and as I noted at the start of this post it’s
all because of the professional vocal training the Black singers got as kids from
the choir directors of their churches.
