NY Post says he's living in a van in Los Angeles;
Funk legend Sly Stone now homeless and living out of a van in LA
By WILLEM ALKEMA and REED TUCKER
Last Updated: 5:33 AM, September 25, 2011
Posted: 2:05 AM, September 25, 2011
In his heyday, he lived at 783 Bel Air Road, a four-bedroom, 5,432-square-foot Beverly Hills mansion that once belonged to John Phillips of The Mamas & the Papas.
The Tudor-style house was tricked out in his signature funky black, white and red color scheme. Shag carpet. Tiffany lamps in every room. A round water bed in the master bedroom. There were parties where Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Miles Davis would drop by, where Etta James would break into “At Last” by the bar.
Just four years ago, he resided in a Napa Valley house so large it could only be described as a “compound,” with a vineyard out back and multiple cars in the driveway.
But those days are gone.
Today, Sly Stone -- one of the greatest figures in soul-music history -- is homeless, his fortune stolen by a lethal combination of excess, substance abuse and financial mismanagement. He lays his head inside a white camper van ironically stamped with the words “Pleasure Way” on the side. The van is parked on a residential street in Crenshaw, the rough Los Angeles neighborhood where “Boyz n the Hood” was set. A retired couple makes sure he eats once a day, and Stone showers at their house. The couple’s son serves as his assistant and driver.
Inside the van, the former mastermind of Sly & the Family Stone, now 68, continues to record music with the help of a laptop computer.
“I like my small camper,” he says, his voice raspy with age and years of hard living. “I just do not want to return to a fixed home. I cannot stand being in one place. I must keep moving.”
Stone has been difficult to pin down for years. In the last two decades, he’s become one of music’s most enigmatic figures, bordering on reclusive. You’d be forgiven for assuming he’s dead. He rarely appears in public, and just getting him in a room requires hours or years of detective work, middlemen and, of course, making peace with the likelihood that he just won’t show up.
There was a time when Sly was difficult to escape. Stone, whose real name is Sylvester Stewart, was one of the most visible, flamboyant figures of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
The multiracial, multi-gender band that Stone assembled fused funk, soul and psychedelic rock and became one of the most influential acts ever. The San Fran-based group released a string of hits beginning with the 1968 album “Dance to the Music,” followed by “Everyday People,” “Family Affair,” “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and “Stand!”
The group’s costumes and showmanship were just as memorable. The members favored giant afros, flashy capes, Beatle boots, neon vests and leopard-print jumpsuits.
Read the full post HERE.
Showing posts with label soul. Show all posts
Showing posts with label soul. Show all posts
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Earth, Wind & Fire in the late 1970s
Bought this photo back in the day, I am assuming it was in San Diego in the late 1970s. Verdine White (L) is the reason i eventually became a bassist, and I cannot count the hours of joy Maurice White's (C) music has given me. Guitarist Al McKay (R) played some mean rock and rhythm, but he was replaced in the early 80s. If I had to guess I would say this was 1978 or so. Can't say enough about the powerhouse that this band was.
Monday, February 07, 2011
Marvin Gaye's 1983 national anthem performance
Tonight Christina Aguilera messed up a line of the national anthem at the Super Bowl. In seeing a few posts about it I was reminded of this performance for the 1983 NBA All Star Game. No other artist singing the national anthem will floor an audience with soul and surprise like Marvin Gaye did back in 1983.
and some of the back story to this performance here on NPR.
and some of the back story to this performance here on NPR.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
The Story of the O'Jays' "For the Love of Money"
Nice little story from 1999 in the archive of Mix magazine.
Classic Tracks: The O'-Jay's "For the Love of Money"
Apr 1, 1999 12:00 PM, Blair Jackson
The meatiest part:
"For the Love of Money" was another socially conscious Gamble and Huff tune tailor-made for the O'Jays' powerfully gritty vocal style. It was recorded in the fall of 1973 at Sigma. Typically, Gamble and Huff's productions were done in three or four separate sessions, days or weeks apart. At the first session, Tarsia would record the basics on what was often a ten- or 11-piece group: "It was a mass of people to do rhythm," Tarsia says. "On a typical Gamble and Huff record, if you count doubling, we would have 54 to 60 people-that's almost a symphony orchestra.
"We might cut four tracks in a day; or we might cut just one and then recut it the next day if we didn't like it," he continues. "So rhythm was one day. Kenny and Huff would take the finished roughs of the tracks and listen to them over and over again and then work out the backgrounds and vocal parts. Then the next thing to be recorded was voices, when enough songs were assembled. With the O'Jays, they'd usually be around only for that; they'd do their parts and leave. If there was any kind of sweetening-like putting on another guitar part or a solo part-that would be done next. Strings and horns were a day, and then the mix was a day."
By 1973, Tarsia had put in a 32-input Electrodyne console, and he was recording to 16-track Scully (the studio went 24-track the following year). "It was a primitive board," he says. "It had one echo send and a three-setting equalizer. But we used to use outboard EQ-we had some API equalizers in the rack and a couple of Orban parametrics." The studio had a 40x6x12 live chamber, as well as EMT reverbs.
Effects were usually kept to a minimum, but "For the Love of Money" is notable in part because it did have some interesting audio trickery on it. The relentlessly funky bass line by jazzer Anthony Jackson (who even received a co-writer's credit for his contribution) is curiously altered, and then there's the distinctive background vocal wash-the famous, ghostly refrain of "Money, money, money" blowing through the song like an ill wind. The song proffers the notion that money is the root of all evil, and sonically the effects on the track do sound sinister.
Tarsia credits another Philadelphian, Todd Rundgren, for getting him into experimenting more with effects. "Back when Todd was doing The Nazz, he came in here with an engineer from the West Coast and they had all sorts of interesting ideas. I was basically a one-man studio so I spent a lot of time on this. They proceeded to do things like take a guitar amp, plug it into a Leslie cabinet from a Hammond organ and turn the input up with nothing plugged in, so it made noise. They double-miked the rotating horn in the tone cabinet to produce a stereo swishing sound. Then they were flanging part of another song. They were creating all these psychedelic effects and it was totally fascinating to me.
"And I absorb like a sponge, so lo and behold a jazz player [Anthony Jackson] comes to Philly and he's working with Gamble and Huff and he has a wah-wah pedal on his bass. Now the way Kenny used to work is he'd hand out chord charts to the musicians and Huff would sit at the piano and they would literally run down the song 20 or 30 times, and the musicians would start to gel together. Norman Harris would play a little guitar line, or Vince Montana would do something on the vibes, and they would weed and cultivate the arrangement. And after a couple of hours, they'd be ready to cut a track. On 'For the Love of Money,' I remember Kenny was sitting down on a stool in the middle of the studio, Huff was at the piano, and they were running down the song. I had just gotten an Eventide automatic phaser, and I heard that bass line and I plugged the phaser into [that and] the drum tracks and I thought, 'I better play this safe because Kenny might not like it.' I recorded them twice-once as I normally would and once phased. And when Kenny came into the control room he loved it. The other new toys I had just gotten were Kepex noise gates. We used that on the vibes-Kenny didn't like the vibes on the record and wanted to dump them. I decided to try to get something out of the the vibes by employing a Kepex gate, which was triggered by the snare drum and gated the vibes, adding tone to the snare."
As for the effect on the voices, after the O'Jays had left the background vocal session, "I took the tape, put it on the machine backwards and recorded echo on different tracks in reverse so the echo precedes the vocal. It's reverse echo," Tarsia says. "I was printing effects, but to the extent that I was covering my ass and had it with and without effects. The vocals were already down, so the backward echo was on another track and I would add that at will. And in the case of the drums, I doubled up. The other effects-the Kepex stuff, the echo on the bass-happened in the mixing. When we mixed it we went for broke. [On the opening of the track] Kenny reached up, grabbed the echo pot and turned it on the bass and then turned it off. At the time I hated it, but today I love it."
Read the entire post HERE.
Classic Tracks: The O'-Jay's "For the Love of Money"
Apr 1, 1999 12:00 PM, Blair Jackson
The meatiest part:
"For the Love of Money" was another socially conscious Gamble and Huff tune tailor-made for the O'Jays' powerfully gritty vocal style. It was recorded in the fall of 1973 at Sigma. Typically, Gamble and Huff's productions were done in three or four separate sessions, days or weeks apart. At the first session, Tarsia would record the basics on what was often a ten- or 11-piece group: "It was a mass of people to do rhythm," Tarsia says. "On a typical Gamble and Huff record, if you count doubling, we would have 54 to 60 people-that's almost a symphony orchestra.
"We might cut four tracks in a day; or we might cut just one and then recut it the next day if we didn't like it," he continues. "So rhythm was one day. Kenny and Huff would take the finished roughs of the tracks and listen to them over and over again and then work out the backgrounds and vocal parts. Then the next thing to be recorded was voices, when enough songs were assembled. With the O'Jays, they'd usually be around only for that; they'd do their parts and leave. If there was any kind of sweetening-like putting on another guitar part or a solo part-that would be done next. Strings and horns were a day, and then the mix was a day."
By 1973, Tarsia had put in a 32-input Electrodyne console, and he was recording to 16-track Scully (the studio went 24-track the following year). "It was a primitive board," he says. "It had one echo send and a three-setting equalizer. But we used to use outboard EQ-we had some API equalizers in the rack and a couple of Orban parametrics." The studio had a 40x6x12 live chamber, as well as EMT reverbs.
Effects were usually kept to a minimum, but "For the Love of Money" is notable in part because it did have some interesting audio trickery on it. The relentlessly funky bass line by jazzer Anthony Jackson (who even received a co-writer's credit for his contribution) is curiously altered, and then there's the distinctive background vocal wash-the famous, ghostly refrain of "Money, money, money" blowing through the song like an ill wind. The song proffers the notion that money is the root of all evil, and sonically the effects on the track do sound sinister.
Tarsia credits another Philadelphian, Todd Rundgren, for getting him into experimenting more with effects. "Back when Todd was doing The Nazz, he came in here with an engineer from the West Coast and they had all sorts of interesting ideas. I was basically a one-man studio so I spent a lot of time on this. They proceeded to do things like take a guitar amp, plug it into a Leslie cabinet from a Hammond organ and turn the input up with nothing plugged in, so it made noise. They double-miked the rotating horn in the tone cabinet to produce a stereo swishing sound. Then they were flanging part of another song. They were creating all these psychedelic effects and it was totally fascinating to me.
"And I absorb like a sponge, so lo and behold a jazz player [Anthony Jackson] comes to Philly and he's working with Gamble and Huff and he has a wah-wah pedal on his bass. Now the way Kenny used to work is he'd hand out chord charts to the musicians and Huff would sit at the piano and they would literally run down the song 20 or 30 times, and the musicians would start to gel together. Norman Harris would play a little guitar line, or Vince Montana would do something on the vibes, and they would weed and cultivate the arrangement. And after a couple of hours, they'd be ready to cut a track. On 'For the Love of Money,' I remember Kenny was sitting down on a stool in the middle of the studio, Huff was at the piano, and they were running down the song. I had just gotten an Eventide automatic phaser, and I heard that bass line and I plugged the phaser into [that and] the drum tracks and I thought, 'I better play this safe because Kenny might not like it.' I recorded them twice-once as I normally would and once phased. And when Kenny came into the control room he loved it. The other new toys I had just gotten were Kepex noise gates. We used that on the vibes-Kenny didn't like the vibes on the record and wanted to dump them. I decided to try to get something out of the the vibes by employing a Kepex gate, which was triggered by the snare drum and gated the vibes, adding tone to the snare."
As for the effect on the voices, after the O'Jays had left the background vocal session, "I took the tape, put it on the machine backwards and recorded echo on different tracks in reverse so the echo precedes the vocal. It's reverse echo," Tarsia says. "I was printing effects, but to the extent that I was covering my ass and had it with and without effects. The vocals were already down, so the backward echo was on another track and I would add that at will. And in the case of the drums, I doubled up. The other effects-the Kepex stuff, the echo on the bass-happened in the mixing. When we mixed it we went for broke. [On the opening of the track] Kenny reached up, grabbed the echo pot and turned it on the bass and then turned it off. At the time I hated it, but today I love it."
Read the entire post HERE.
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Still Bill: New Bill Withers Documentary
Sasha Frere-Jones has a write up in The New Yorker
In 1972, a year after the release of his first album, “Just As I Am,” Bill Withers performed a song on British television. “Harlem,” the record’s first single, had done little on the charts, but radio d.j.s had picked up on its B-side. Wearing a ribbed orange turtleneck and sweating visibly, the thirty-three-year-old rookie introduced the first song he had ever written:
“Men have problems admitting to losing things,” he said. “I think women are much better at that. . . . So, once in my life, I wanted to forgo my own male ego and admit to losing something, so I came up with—” Withers began to play his acoustic guitar and sing. “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone / It’s not warm when she’s away / Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone / And she’s always gone too long, any time she goes away.”
“Ain’t No Sunshine” gave Withers his first gold record, earned him a Grammy, and, with later hits such as “Lean on Me” and “Use Me,” forms the cornerstone of a small but indispensable section of the American songbook. A new documentary about Withers, “Still Bill,” is an unshowy, confident attempt to render the personality of a man who wrote so well and then walked away, in 1985, adding only a handful of songs to his legacy since then.
Read the full review HERE.
Here is a local W. Virginia TV story on Whithers' induction into the West Virginia music Hall of Fame, with lots of interview time with him:
Withers' website is HERE.
In 1972, a year after the release of his first album, “Just As I Am,” Bill Withers performed a song on British television. “Harlem,” the record’s first single, had done little on the charts, but radio d.j.s had picked up on its B-side. Wearing a ribbed orange turtleneck and sweating visibly, the thirty-three-year-old rookie introduced the first song he had ever written:
“Men have problems admitting to losing things,” he said. “I think women are much better at that. . . . So, once in my life, I wanted to forgo my own male ego and admit to losing something, so I came up with—” Withers began to play his acoustic guitar and sing. “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone / It’s not warm when she’s away / Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone / And she’s always gone too long, any time she goes away.”
“Ain’t No Sunshine” gave Withers his first gold record, earned him a Grammy, and, with later hits such as “Lean on Me” and “Use Me,” forms the cornerstone of a small but indispensable section of the American songbook. A new documentary about Withers, “Still Bill,” is an unshowy, confident attempt to render the personality of a man who wrote so well and then walked away, in 1985, adding only a handful of songs to his legacy since then.
Read the full review HERE.
Here is a local W. Virginia TV story on Whithers' induction into the West Virginia music Hall of Fame, with lots of interview time with him:
Withers' website is HERE.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
In Praise of Sly Stone
I'm going through a bit of Sly & the Family Stone revival, mostly due to a surprise interview done on KCRW over Memorial Day weekend. Sly's daughter has been getting him back into things gently, and KCRW's Chris Douridas had the enviable job of speaking with Sly Stone for nearly an hour. You can hear the interview HERE AT KCRW. You can podcast it too.
Sly & the Family Stone TV medley back in the day (check out the priceless reaction shot to Sly's vocal intro at :27-28 [I feel ya, girl!]):
Some interview Sly, guessing mid-80s:
Stand:
1970s rehearsal footage:
I wanna take you higher (on Dick Cavett):
If You Want Me To Stay (solo piano on Mike Douglass show) (sorry about the overdubbed talk)
Sly & the Family Stone TV medley back in the day (check out the priceless reaction shot to Sly's vocal intro at :27-28 [I feel ya, girl!]):
Some interview Sly, guessing mid-80s:
Stand:
1970s rehearsal footage:
I wanna take you higher (on Dick Cavett):
If You Want Me To Stay (solo piano on Mike Douglass show) (sorry about the overdubbed talk)
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Stevie Wonder's "Superstition"
NoiseAddicts has a great post with a bunch of clips of Stevie Wonder performing "Superstition" back in the day, but also a clip of someone with the original studio tracks layering them via his computer to show the components of the song. It's fascinating, but also not cool as it appears someone dumped the tracks onto Bit Torrent rather than Stevie releasing them. See the post here at NoiseAddicts.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Obamas honor Stevie Wonder at White House
That's my President:
MSNBC/AP
Obamas honor Stevie Wonder at White House
Singer-songwriter is praised for creating ‘a style that’s uniquely American’
The Associated Press
updated 7:39 a.m. PT, Thurs., Feb. 26, 2009
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama on Wednesday thanked musician Stevie Wonder for creating “a style that’s uniquely American” as he presented the singer-songwriter the nation’s highest award for pop music.
Obama, who called Wonder the soundtrack of his youth, gave the star the Library of Congress’ Gershwin Prize for Popular Song during an East Room tribute that featured Tony Bennett, Martina McBride and Wonder himself. The president joked that the group was “the most accomplished Stevie Wonder cover band in history.”
Wonder was emotional at times, thanking Obama for the award and reflecting on what his election as the first black president means to the United States.
“What is truly exciting for me today is that we truly have lived to see a time and a space where America has a chance to again live up to the greatness that it deserves to be seen and known as, through the love and caring and the commitment of a president — as in our president, Barack Obama,” he said.
Wonder cited Martin Luther King Jr., his faith and his mother during an acceptance speech that flowed into a set of Obama’s favorite songs. The Grammy-winning musician — he has 25 of the awards — joked that he looked forward to writing more love songs — perhaps a soundtrack for “you know, maybe I’ll be a part of creating some more of those babies.”
Obama praised Wonder’s decades-long career and a style that has blended pop and funk, R&B and gospel.
“Stevie has always drawn on the incredible range of traditions in his music and, from that, he’s created a style that’s at once uniquely American, uniquely his own, and yet somehow universal,” Obama said. “Indeed, this could be called the American tradition — artists demonstrating the courage, the talent to find new harmonies in the rich and dissonant sounds of the American experience.”
First lady Michelle Obama spoke in more personal terms, calling Wonder “one of the world’s greatest artists.” She recalled how she and her grandfather would listen to Wonder’s albums together.
“He’d blast music throughout the house and that’s where he and I would sit and listen to Stevie’s music together — songs about life, love, romance, heartache, despair. He would let me listen to these songs over and over and over and over again,” she said.
The first album she bought was Wonder’s “Talking Book,” and she and Barack Obama used “You and I” as their wedding song.
President Obama said he was lucky to have already loved Wonder’s music when he first met his mate.
“I think it’s fair to say that had I not been a Stevie Wonder fan, Michelle might not have dated me, we might not have married,” Obama said, with his wife sitting in the front row. “The fact that we agreed on Stevie was part of the essence of our courtship.”
Although the president is a well-known fan — Wonder performed at his nominating convention in Denver last summer and at a Lincoln Memorial concert before his January inauguration — the Library of Congress had decided to honor Wonder before Obama won the election.
The Gershwin Prize honors George and Ira Gershwin and is given for lifetime achievement in popular music. Paul Simon claimed the nation’s first prize in 2007.
Wonder’s performance will be broadcast Thursday on PBS stations as part of a White House series on the arts.
MSNBC/AP
Obamas honor Stevie Wonder at White House
Singer-songwriter is praised for creating ‘a style that’s uniquely American’
The Associated Press
updated 7:39 a.m. PT, Thurs., Feb. 26, 2009
WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama on Wednesday thanked musician Stevie Wonder for creating “a style that’s uniquely American” as he presented the singer-songwriter the nation’s highest award for pop music.
Obama, who called Wonder the soundtrack of his youth, gave the star the Library of Congress’ Gershwin Prize for Popular Song during an East Room tribute that featured Tony Bennett, Martina McBride and Wonder himself. The president joked that the group was “the most accomplished Stevie Wonder cover band in history.”
Wonder was emotional at times, thanking Obama for the award and reflecting on what his election as the first black president means to the United States.
“What is truly exciting for me today is that we truly have lived to see a time and a space where America has a chance to again live up to the greatness that it deserves to be seen and known as, through the love and caring and the commitment of a president — as in our president, Barack Obama,” he said.
Wonder cited Martin Luther King Jr., his faith and his mother during an acceptance speech that flowed into a set of Obama’s favorite songs. The Grammy-winning musician — he has 25 of the awards — joked that he looked forward to writing more love songs — perhaps a soundtrack for “you know, maybe I’ll be a part of creating some more of those babies.”
Obama praised Wonder’s decades-long career and a style that has blended pop and funk, R&B and gospel.
“Stevie has always drawn on the incredible range of traditions in his music and, from that, he’s created a style that’s at once uniquely American, uniquely his own, and yet somehow universal,” Obama said. “Indeed, this could be called the American tradition — artists demonstrating the courage, the talent to find new harmonies in the rich and dissonant sounds of the American experience.”
First lady Michelle Obama spoke in more personal terms, calling Wonder “one of the world’s greatest artists.” She recalled how she and her grandfather would listen to Wonder’s albums together.
“He’d blast music throughout the house and that’s where he and I would sit and listen to Stevie’s music together — songs about life, love, romance, heartache, despair. He would let me listen to these songs over and over and over and over again,” she said.
The first album she bought was Wonder’s “Talking Book,” and she and Barack Obama used “You and I” as their wedding song.
President Obama said he was lucky to have already loved Wonder’s music when he first met his mate.
“I think it’s fair to say that had I not been a Stevie Wonder fan, Michelle might not have dated me, we might not have married,” Obama said, with his wife sitting in the front row. “The fact that we agreed on Stevie was part of the essence of our courtship.”
Although the president is a well-known fan — Wonder performed at his nominating convention in Denver last summer and at a Lincoln Memorial concert before his January inauguration — the Library of Congress had decided to honor Wonder before Obama won the election.
The Gershwin Prize honors George and Ira Gershwin and is given for lifetime achievement in popular music. Paul Simon claimed the nation’s first prize in 2007.
Wonder’s performance will be broadcast Thursday on PBS stations as part of a White House series on the arts.
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Motown/Soul composer/producer Norman Whitfield (1941-2008)
LA Times
Norman Whitfield dies at 67; Motown producer and songwriter won two Grammy Awards
The producer for the Temptations and the writer of such hits as 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' had long struggled with diabetes and other ailments.
By Randy Lewis
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 18, 2008
Norman Whitfield, the Grammy-winning songwriter and forward-thinking producer who helped shape the direction of R&B and soul music at Motown Records in the 1960s and '70s, died Tuesday. He was 67.
Whitfield, the co-writer of dozens of Motown hits, including Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and producer of most of the Temptations' recordings, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, reportedly of complications from his long struggle with diabetes. He also had a history of heart and kidney ailments.
"Norman Whitfield was one of the most prolific songwriters and record producers of our time," fellow Motown veteran Smokey Robinson said in a statement Wednesday. "He will live forever through his great music."
Whitfield wrote, usually with Barrett Strong, and produced such era-defining hits as "Grapevine," “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)" and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” The latter earned Whitfield one of his two Grammy Awards as a songwriter and composer.
His ambitious production work helped move Motown from the catchy love songs that typified the label's output in the early and mid-'60s into social commentary reflecting volatile issues that were at the heart of the civil rights movement.
"Of all the brilliant writer-producers that Motown has given to the world, I believe none was more brilliant than Norman Whitfield," the Temptations' longtime manager, Shelly Berger, said in a statement Wednesday.
"Most producers stick to basically one type of music," Berger added. "When you listen to Norman's body of work, from 'Beauty Is Only Skin Deep,' 'Ain't Too Proud to Beg,' 'Ball of Confusion,' 'Cloud Nine,' 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone,' two [hit] productions of 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine,' then top it off with 'Just My Imagination' . . . Norman [is] in a class of his own."
Whitfield had a reputation as a tenacious songwriter and producer who extended the life of his songs by recording them with different artists and varying arrangements.
"I Heard It Through the Grapevine" had been recorded with little success at Motown by the Isley Brothers and the Miracles -- and Gaye -- before Whitfield tried it with Gladys Knight & the Pips.
He recorded it with her in part out of frustration over Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr.'s refusal to release Gaye's version as a single. Knight's record went to No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 2 on the pop chart, persuading Gordy to change his mind and put out Gaye's version, for which Whitfield had pushed him to the upper limit of his vocal range.
"While working on the songs for the 'M.P.G.' album, Norman set the songs in keys that were too high for Marvin so he could get Marvin to strain and hit the top of his tenor range without going into falsetto," said David Ritz, author of "Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye." "That drove Marvin crazy and they almost came to blows."
Gaye once told an interviewer that while recording "Grapevine": "I was reaching for notes that made my veins bulge. . . . Had I written the song myself, I would not have sung it at all like that, but there are many benefits in just singing other people's material and taking directions."
That 1968 recording spent seven weeks at No. 1 and pushed Gaye's career to a new peak. "When people heard 'Grapevine,' they said, 'This is a phenomenal artist -- he can do anything," Strong said in 2003.
That success also gave Motown renewed cachet at a time when the hits were slowing down from the label's earlier powerhouses such as the Supremes, Four Tops and the Miracles, before the Temptations got their second wind thanks to Whitfield's guiding hand in the studio.
Whitfield and Strong's "Psychedelic Shack" brought the sound of experimental rock into the halls of Motown in 1970 and became a Top 10 hit for the Temptations. They scored an even bigger hit with the follow-up, "Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is Today)," a sonic whirlwind that piled on topical lyrics and rhymes á la Bob Dylan or John Lennon.
"To me, he gave Motown another 10 years of life by coming up with this new attitude," said Ritz, who also collaborated on Robinson's autobiography.
"Smokey said the great thing about Norman -- and they were extremely competitive with each other -- was that he brought out the best in everybody," Ritz said. "It was almost like by being confrontational with the vocalist, he got them to not only sing their [best], he also got them to dig into their souls a little bit deeper."
Whitfield was born in 1941, according to voter registration records, in New York City and was a teenager when his family moved to Detroit, where Gordy had recently launched Motown Records.
As a teen, Whitfield produced recordings for local R&B acts at Thelma Records. He often hung around Motown, and in 1962 was hired as a songwriter, joining Gordy's growing stable of writers that included Harvey Fuqua and the team of Brian Holland-Lamont Dozier-Eddie Holland.
Gordy teamed Whitfield up with Strong, whose 1960 recording of his own song, "Money," gave Motown one of its first hits. After some early successes with their songs, Gordy recognized Whitfield's talent at production and put him in charge of the Temptations, who first reached No. 1 on the pop chart with "My Girl," written and produced by Robinson.
But starting with "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" in 1966, Whitfield wrote and produced more than two dozen hits for the group over the next eight years.
"We grew up together," original Temptations singer Otis Williams said Wednesday. "He was my lifelong friend [and] one of the best producers Motown ever had."
Whitfield also oversaw recordings by Edwin Starr, who hit No. 1 with Whitfield's thunderously produced single “War,” and the Undisputed Truth.
In the mid-1970s, Whitfield left Motown and started his own Whitfield Records, and went to No. 1 again with Rose Royce's disco-era hit “Car Wash.” The musical score for that 1976 film snagged Whitfield his second Grammy.
Said author Ritz: "I was working with Berry Gordy once and he told me 'Man, if the Motown Museum should have a whole wing dedicated to one person, it would be Norman Whitfield.' "
In 2005, Whitfield pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was fined $25,000 for failing to report more than $4 million in income. He was sentenced to home detention rather than prison because of his failing health.
Information on Whitfield's survivors or funeral services was not immediately available.
Norman Whitfield dies at 67; Motown producer and songwriter won two Grammy Awards
The producer for the Temptations and the writer of such hits as 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine' had long struggled with diabetes and other ailments.
By Randy Lewis
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 18, 2008
Norman Whitfield, the Grammy-winning songwriter and forward-thinking producer who helped shape the direction of R&B and soul music at Motown Records in the 1960s and '70s, died Tuesday. He was 67.
Whitfield, the co-writer of dozens of Motown hits, including Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and producer of most of the Temptations' recordings, died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, reportedly of complications from his long struggle with diabetes. He also had a history of heart and kidney ailments.
"Norman Whitfield was one of the most prolific songwriters and record producers of our time," fellow Motown veteran Smokey Robinson said in a statement Wednesday. "He will live forever through his great music."
Whitfield wrote, usually with Barrett Strong, and produced such era-defining hits as "Grapevine," “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)" and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.” The latter earned Whitfield one of his two Grammy Awards as a songwriter and composer.
His ambitious production work helped move Motown from the catchy love songs that typified the label's output in the early and mid-'60s into social commentary reflecting volatile issues that were at the heart of the civil rights movement.
"Of all the brilliant writer-producers that Motown has given to the world, I believe none was more brilliant than Norman Whitfield," the Temptations' longtime manager, Shelly Berger, said in a statement Wednesday.
"Most producers stick to basically one type of music," Berger added. "When you listen to Norman's body of work, from 'Beauty Is Only Skin Deep,' 'Ain't Too Proud to Beg,' 'Ball of Confusion,' 'Cloud Nine,' 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone,' two [hit] productions of 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine,' then top it off with 'Just My Imagination' . . . Norman [is] in a class of his own."
Whitfield had a reputation as a tenacious songwriter and producer who extended the life of his songs by recording them with different artists and varying arrangements.
"I Heard It Through the Grapevine" had been recorded with little success at Motown by the Isley Brothers and the Miracles -- and Gaye -- before Whitfield tried it with Gladys Knight & the Pips.
He recorded it with her in part out of frustration over Motown founder Berry Gordy Jr.'s refusal to release Gaye's version as a single. Knight's record went to No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 2 on the pop chart, persuading Gordy to change his mind and put out Gaye's version, for which Whitfield had pushed him to the upper limit of his vocal range.
"While working on the songs for the 'M.P.G.' album, Norman set the songs in keys that were too high for Marvin so he could get Marvin to strain and hit the top of his tenor range without going into falsetto," said David Ritz, author of "Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye." "That drove Marvin crazy and they almost came to blows."
Gaye once told an interviewer that while recording "Grapevine": "I was reaching for notes that made my veins bulge. . . . Had I written the song myself, I would not have sung it at all like that, but there are many benefits in just singing other people's material and taking directions."
That 1968 recording spent seven weeks at No. 1 and pushed Gaye's career to a new peak. "When people heard 'Grapevine,' they said, 'This is a phenomenal artist -- he can do anything," Strong said in 2003.
That success also gave Motown renewed cachet at a time when the hits were slowing down from the label's earlier powerhouses such as the Supremes, Four Tops and the Miracles, before the Temptations got their second wind thanks to Whitfield's guiding hand in the studio.
Whitfield and Strong's "Psychedelic Shack" brought the sound of experimental rock into the halls of Motown in 1970 and became a Top 10 hit for the Temptations. They scored an even bigger hit with the follow-up, "Ball of Confusion (That's What the World Is Today)," a sonic whirlwind that piled on topical lyrics and rhymes á la Bob Dylan or John Lennon.
"To me, he gave Motown another 10 years of life by coming up with this new attitude," said Ritz, who also collaborated on Robinson's autobiography.
"Smokey said the great thing about Norman -- and they were extremely competitive with each other -- was that he brought out the best in everybody," Ritz said. "It was almost like by being confrontational with the vocalist, he got them to not only sing their [best], he also got them to dig into their souls a little bit deeper."
Whitfield was born in 1941, according to voter registration records, in New York City and was a teenager when his family moved to Detroit, where Gordy had recently launched Motown Records.
As a teen, Whitfield produced recordings for local R&B acts at Thelma Records. He often hung around Motown, and in 1962 was hired as a songwriter, joining Gordy's growing stable of writers that included Harvey Fuqua and the team of Brian Holland-Lamont Dozier-Eddie Holland.
Gordy teamed Whitfield up with Strong, whose 1960 recording of his own song, "Money," gave Motown one of its first hits. After some early successes with their songs, Gordy recognized Whitfield's talent at production and put him in charge of the Temptations, who first reached No. 1 on the pop chart with "My Girl," written and produced by Robinson.
But starting with "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" in 1966, Whitfield wrote and produced more than two dozen hits for the group over the next eight years.
"We grew up together," original Temptations singer Otis Williams said Wednesday. "He was my lifelong friend [and] one of the best producers Motown ever had."
Whitfield also oversaw recordings by Edwin Starr, who hit No. 1 with Whitfield's thunderously produced single “War,” and the Undisputed Truth.
In the mid-1970s, Whitfield left Motown and started his own Whitfield Records, and went to No. 1 again with Rose Royce's disco-era hit “Car Wash.” The musical score for that 1976 film snagged Whitfield his second Grammy.
Said author Ritz: "I was working with Berry Gordy once and he told me 'Man, if the Motown Museum should have a whole wing dedicated to one person, it would be Norman Whitfield.' "
In 2005, Whitfield pleaded guilty to tax evasion and was fined $25,000 for failing to report more than $4 million in income. He was sentenced to home detention rather than prison because of his failing health.
Information on Whitfield's survivors or funeral services was not immediately available.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Gnarls Barkley Album and "Run" video
"Run" video by Gnarls Barkley (hi-res hosted by NYT). I love the early eighties retro homage intro.
And the New York Times article on the album "The Odd Couple"
April 6, 2008
Music
First Came Crazy, Now Comes Odd
By JEFF CHANG
LOS ANGELES
ON a late February afternoon Gnarls Barkley, the duo known for its funny costumes and psychedelic post-hip-hop sound, was unmasked and at rest at a quiet hotel in Beverly Hills. Cee-Lo Green, the short, heavily tattooed singing and lyric-writing half, had just finished a snack of sushi. Danger Mouse, the tall, scruffy producing half, was wiping sleep from his eyes after a head-down nap on a marble table.
They were pondering how their second album, “The Odd Couple,” then unreleased, might be received, given the buzz that it was a good deal weirder and darker than their million-selling debut, “St. Elsewhere” from 2006.
“It’s going to be a surprise for me,” said Danger Mouse, 30, whose real name is Brian Burton, in a baritone you might hear on late-night soul radio. “It may be really big or really modest, I don’t know.”
Clues came much more quickly than the two probably expected. In early March the album leaked onto the Internet. On March 18 the band’s label, Atlantic Records, rushed it to digital and retail stores, weeks ahead of its planned April 8 release. Fans were notified by an eccentric press release issued just hours before the album became available: “With the shifting seasons, furtive romantic entanglements and fierce college basketball rivalries, the latter half of March can be confusing. People need to be soothed and inspired now.”
The day after its release “The Odd Couple” was atop the iTunes albums chart. But its first-week sales were only 31,000 copies, landing it at No. 18 on the Billboard chart. Jeff Antebi, the band’s manager, said many brick-and-mortar stores did not get shipments until the end of the week.
“No one was looking at extraordinary Week 1 numbers,” he said. Given that the first single, “Run,” received a lukewarm response from radio and that most early reviews bemoaned the lack of a song as infectious as “Crazy,” the band’s smash single from 2006, it appeared the album was not on track to match the success of “St. Elsewhere.”
But Craig Kallman, the chairman and chief executive of Atlantic, remains optimistic. “It’s a fantastic album, and it’s one that’s going to continue to get discovered,” he said.
Mr. Burton, who had been inspired by 1960s psych-rock and his recent collaboration with the Good, the Bad and the Queen, said he wanted to create a more cohesive set of moods with the album’s songs. “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul?” implies the blues through hushed textures and subtle rhythmic disjunctures. In “Open Book” the beat skitters like arrhythmia as Cee-Lo does some not-so-soothing Lennon-inspired wailing reminiscent of “Mother.”
Cee-Lo, 32, whose real name is Thomas Callaway, often flips familiar rap themes like jealousy and rage into close studies of loneliness and connection, darkness and sunshine. “Hurt people hurt people,” he sings on “Would Be Killer.” The album’s pivotal moment may be the slightly ominous ditty “Surprise,” which evokes the duo stumbling down Sunset Boulevard arm-in-arm with Arthur Lee, the leader of the ’60s rock band Love, who died in 2006. In it Cee-Lo sings, or perhaps warns, “If that big old smile ends up being just a disguise, don’t be surprised!”
Cee-Lo, who started his rap career as a member of the groundbreaking Atlanta rap group Goodie Mob, said that Gnarls Barkley “has been my safe haven and my sanctuary to expose or share and bring closure to my own issues.”
He was referring to the deaths of his parents, both ordained ministers. His father died when he was 2. His mother was paralyzed in a car crash and died two years later when he was 18, just as he was beginning to find success. Cee-Lo addresses their passings on “She Knows” and “A Little Better,” from the new album, and speaks of his mother’s presence as that of a lingering friendly ghost. “I want to thank you mom and dad for hurting me so bad,” he sings on “A Little Better,” “but you’re the best I’ve ever had.”
“The first show we did in Atlanta, the day our record came out, his mother died,” said Cameron Gipp, known as Big Gipp, an original member of Goodie Mob and one of Cee-Lo’s closest friends. “We found out as soon as we came off the stage.”
Mr. Gipp said that, devastated, Cee-Lo poured his emotions into the Goodie Mob song “Free,” which implied that he had suicidal thoughts. “His emotions, he really had to learn how to control them,” he said.
When Danger Mouse was a teenager, his parents moved his family from Rockland County in New York to Atlanta. He later worked at the same Athens, Ga., record store where members of R.E.M. and Olivia Tremor Control had worked. Danger Mouse asked Cee-Lo to contribute to a remix for the rapper Jemini in 2003, their first collaboration. At the time Cee-Lo had left Goodie Mob over artistic differences and made a well-received but commercially unsuccessful solo record; Danger Mouse had yet to make his name with “The Grey Album,” the unauthorized mash-up of the White Album by the Beatles and “The Black Album” by Jay-Z, which became a cultural phenomenon in 2004.
In 2005 the duo made a demo for the song “Crazy,” which earned them a deal with the boutique label Downtown Records; the song became a blogosphere favorite and a sensation in Great Britain.
Mr. Kallman was so intrigued by the song that he pursued a joint venture deal with Downtown. He said that when he first played “Crazy” for Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic, Mr. Ertegun congratulated him after the first chorus.
“Crazy” lingered around the top of the charts in 15 countries for much of 2006 and won a Grammy Award, leaving even its creators a bit thunderstruck. They began work on “The Odd Couple” while on tour for “St. Elsewhere,” which also won a Grammy. Afterward Danger Mouse went home to Los Angeles, and Cee-Lo returned to Atlanta. They communicated primarily through the music they sent back and forth via e-mail and Federal Express.
Cee-Lo said they didn’t try to write another “Crazy.” “If there was a formula to it, I would cut this interview short and go to the studio,” he said with a beatific grin in his raspy, reedy Southern drawl.
When the duo performed “Crazy” at the MTV Movie Awards in 2006, Cee-Lo dressed as Darth Vader and Danger Mouse as Obi-Wan Kenobi. During the interview, Cee-Lo wore a white T-shirt and black Polo sweat pants, a diamond-encrusted necklace and a sparkling Rolex beneath a tattoo of a laughing clown. Danger Mouse wore a thick camouflage jacket and an ironic rock T-shirt.
He told a reporter that the duo picked a self-explanatory album title so “we wouldn’t have to talk about it.” But then he wondered aloud to Cee-Lo if they should put a question mark at the end to make it more provocative.
“It would change the meaning,” he said. “Like, are we? Are we really that odd, with ourselves or compared to anybody else?”
Few recent groups have so consistently feinted right while going left. In its riotous videos and stylized performances Gnarls has played with what Nate Chinen called a “miserable exuberance” in a review of “The Odd Couple” in The New York Times.
The song “Run” may be about a soldier in Iraq or a heroin dealer (not unlike the way “Crazy” might have been about a spurned lover or a serial killer). But the video is nothing but a party. It is a tribute to Michael Holman’s “Graffiti Rock,” a rap television show from 1984, with a bewigged Justin Timberlake starring as the host and dancers recapping a history of hip-hop dance crazes. For its promotional photos for “The Odd Couple” the duo chose to dress as a bride and groom.
All of this might suggest that the two spend a lot of time devising stratagems. Not so, Cee-Lo said. “As far as songs or albums or concepts are concerned, there’s not ever really a formal conversation about it.”
Neither member had initially figured Gnarls Barkley for a career-making project. Until “The Odd Couple” Danger Mouse had never done a second album for any of his many eclectic projects, including Gorillaz, MF Doom and Beck. His latest credit is “Attack and Release,” the new album by the Black Keys, a hard-rocking duo from Ohio.
“He doesn’t overpower you,” said Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, referring to Danger Mouse’s production style. “He’s just a completely unpretentious guy for somebody who has such a stranglehold on the Top 10 all around the world.”
For his part Cee-Lo has been working on a reunion album with Goodie Mob, buying masters of unreleased Jimi Hendrix recordings, producing an album by a group called the Good Time Guys and gearing up to start his own label, Radiculture.
But both Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo said that the Gnarls Barkley project best captures who they are as artists and as people, at least right now. This project is “pure me,” Danger Mouse, the more private of the two, insisted. “It’s the most me.”
Earlier, while Danger Mouse napped, Cee-Lo made the same point. He said that he grew up listening to funk and hip-hop, and “everybody from ABC to R.E.M., Billy Joel to Billy Idol.” When Danger Mouse first played him sample tracks in 2003, including the strange groove that would become “Run,” he could not believe his ears.
“As soon as I heard the music, it immediately struck me as mine,” he recalled. “I said, I can’t see anyone doing anything to these tracks but me. And I mean the real me, the inner me, the me deep down that nobody knew I was made up of. All of me.”
So finally the duo gave up trying to explain the new album. Instead Cee-Lo puzzled over how these two unlikely musical partners, who seem to be able to communicate a great deal without ever really talking, had even found each other. He first turned to a reporter. “I think I asked him this once, but he never answered it.” Then he looked across the table to Danger Mouse. “Like, did you seek me out?”
Somewhat startled, Danger Mouse answered, “Well, no other singer or rapper ever heard the Gnarls stuff.”
“And how did you know I could do that?” Cee-Lo wondered. “Because I hadn’t really done stuff like that before.”
Now Mr. Burton sat straight up: “I don’t know! I mean, I had his solo record, and it was a great solo record. I knew he could do a lot of things.” He trailed off.
Then he looked straight at Cee-Lo. “But I had been around a lot of rappers with that music and never thought to play them any of it.”
Mr. Callaway nodded slowly and didn’t have to smile. “I got it,” he said.
And the New York Times article on the album "The Odd Couple"
April 6, 2008
Music
First Came Crazy, Now Comes Odd
By JEFF CHANG
LOS ANGELES
ON a late February afternoon Gnarls Barkley, the duo known for its funny costumes and psychedelic post-hip-hop sound, was unmasked and at rest at a quiet hotel in Beverly Hills. Cee-Lo Green, the short, heavily tattooed singing and lyric-writing half, had just finished a snack of sushi. Danger Mouse, the tall, scruffy producing half, was wiping sleep from his eyes after a head-down nap on a marble table.
They were pondering how their second album, “The Odd Couple,” then unreleased, might be received, given the buzz that it was a good deal weirder and darker than their million-selling debut, “St. Elsewhere” from 2006.
“It’s going to be a surprise for me,” said Danger Mouse, 30, whose real name is Brian Burton, in a baritone you might hear on late-night soul radio. “It may be really big or really modest, I don’t know.”
Clues came much more quickly than the two probably expected. In early March the album leaked onto the Internet. On March 18 the band’s label, Atlantic Records, rushed it to digital and retail stores, weeks ahead of its planned April 8 release. Fans were notified by an eccentric press release issued just hours before the album became available: “With the shifting seasons, furtive romantic entanglements and fierce college basketball rivalries, the latter half of March can be confusing. People need to be soothed and inspired now.”
The day after its release “The Odd Couple” was atop the iTunes albums chart. But its first-week sales were only 31,000 copies, landing it at No. 18 on the Billboard chart. Jeff Antebi, the band’s manager, said many brick-and-mortar stores did not get shipments until the end of the week.
“No one was looking at extraordinary Week 1 numbers,” he said. Given that the first single, “Run,” received a lukewarm response from radio and that most early reviews bemoaned the lack of a song as infectious as “Crazy,” the band’s smash single from 2006, it appeared the album was not on track to match the success of “St. Elsewhere.”
But Craig Kallman, the chairman and chief executive of Atlantic, remains optimistic. “It’s a fantastic album, and it’s one that’s going to continue to get discovered,” he said.
Mr. Burton, who had been inspired by 1960s psych-rock and his recent collaboration with the Good, the Bad and the Queen, said he wanted to create a more cohesive set of moods with the album’s songs. “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul?” implies the blues through hushed textures and subtle rhythmic disjunctures. In “Open Book” the beat skitters like arrhythmia as Cee-Lo does some not-so-soothing Lennon-inspired wailing reminiscent of “Mother.”
Cee-Lo, 32, whose real name is Thomas Callaway, often flips familiar rap themes like jealousy and rage into close studies of loneliness and connection, darkness and sunshine. “Hurt people hurt people,” he sings on “Would Be Killer.” The album’s pivotal moment may be the slightly ominous ditty “Surprise,” which evokes the duo stumbling down Sunset Boulevard arm-in-arm with Arthur Lee, the leader of the ’60s rock band Love, who died in 2006. In it Cee-Lo sings, or perhaps warns, “If that big old smile ends up being just a disguise, don’t be surprised!”
Cee-Lo, who started his rap career as a member of the groundbreaking Atlanta rap group Goodie Mob, said that Gnarls Barkley “has been my safe haven and my sanctuary to expose or share and bring closure to my own issues.”
He was referring to the deaths of his parents, both ordained ministers. His father died when he was 2. His mother was paralyzed in a car crash and died two years later when he was 18, just as he was beginning to find success. Cee-Lo addresses their passings on “She Knows” and “A Little Better,” from the new album, and speaks of his mother’s presence as that of a lingering friendly ghost. “I want to thank you mom and dad for hurting me so bad,” he sings on “A Little Better,” “but you’re the best I’ve ever had.”
“The first show we did in Atlanta, the day our record came out, his mother died,” said Cameron Gipp, known as Big Gipp, an original member of Goodie Mob and one of Cee-Lo’s closest friends. “We found out as soon as we came off the stage.”
Mr. Gipp said that, devastated, Cee-Lo poured his emotions into the Goodie Mob song “Free,” which implied that he had suicidal thoughts. “His emotions, he really had to learn how to control them,” he said.
When Danger Mouse was a teenager, his parents moved his family from Rockland County in New York to Atlanta. He later worked at the same Athens, Ga., record store where members of R.E.M. and Olivia Tremor Control had worked. Danger Mouse asked Cee-Lo to contribute to a remix for the rapper Jemini in 2003, their first collaboration. At the time Cee-Lo had left Goodie Mob over artistic differences and made a well-received but commercially unsuccessful solo record; Danger Mouse had yet to make his name with “The Grey Album,” the unauthorized mash-up of the White Album by the Beatles and “The Black Album” by Jay-Z, which became a cultural phenomenon in 2004.
In 2005 the duo made a demo for the song “Crazy,” which earned them a deal with the boutique label Downtown Records; the song became a blogosphere favorite and a sensation in Great Britain.
Mr. Kallman was so intrigued by the song that he pursued a joint venture deal with Downtown. He said that when he first played “Crazy” for Ahmet Ertegun, the founder of Atlantic, Mr. Ertegun congratulated him after the first chorus.
“Crazy” lingered around the top of the charts in 15 countries for much of 2006 and won a Grammy Award, leaving even its creators a bit thunderstruck. They began work on “The Odd Couple” while on tour for “St. Elsewhere,” which also won a Grammy. Afterward Danger Mouse went home to Los Angeles, and Cee-Lo returned to Atlanta. They communicated primarily through the music they sent back and forth via e-mail and Federal Express.
Cee-Lo said they didn’t try to write another “Crazy.” “If there was a formula to it, I would cut this interview short and go to the studio,” he said with a beatific grin in his raspy, reedy Southern drawl.
When the duo performed “Crazy” at the MTV Movie Awards in 2006, Cee-Lo dressed as Darth Vader and Danger Mouse as Obi-Wan Kenobi. During the interview, Cee-Lo wore a white T-shirt and black Polo sweat pants, a diamond-encrusted necklace and a sparkling Rolex beneath a tattoo of a laughing clown. Danger Mouse wore a thick camouflage jacket and an ironic rock T-shirt.
He told a reporter that the duo picked a self-explanatory album title so “we wouldn’t have to talk about it.” But then he wondered aloud to Cee-Lo if they should put a question mark at the end to make it more provocative.
“It would change the meaning,” he said. “Like, are we? Are we really that odd, with ourselves or compared to anybody else?”
Few recent groups have so consistently feinted right while going left. In its riotous videos and stylized performances Gnarls has played with what Nate Chinen called a “miserable exuberance” in a review of “The Odd Couple” in The New York Times.
The song “Run” may be about a soldier in Iraq or a heroin dealer (not unlike the way “Crazy” might have been about a spurned lover or a serial killer). But the video is nothing but a party. It is a tribute to Michael Holman’s “Graffiti Rock,” a rap television show from 1984, with a bewigged Justin Timberlake starring as the host and dancers recapping a history of hip-hop dance crazes. For its promotional photos for “The Odd Couple” the duo chose to dress as a bride and groom.
All of this might suggest that the two spend a lot of time devising stratagems. Not so, Cee-Lo said. “As far as songs or albums or concepts are concerned, there’s not ever really a formal conversation about it.”
Neither member had initially figured Gnarls Barkley for a career-making project. Until “The Odd Couple” Danger Mouse had never done a second album for any of his many eclectic projects, including Gorillaz, MF Doom and Beck. His latest credit is “Attack and Release,” the new album by the Black Keys, a hard-rocking duo from Ohio.
“He doesn’t overpower you,” said Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, referring to Danger Mouse’s production style. “He’s just a completely unpretentious guy for somebody who has such a stranglehold on the Top 10 all around the world.”
For his part Cee-Lo has been working on a reunion album with Goodie Mob, buying masters of unreleased Jimi Hendrix recordings, producing an album by a group called the Good Time Guys and gearing up to start his own label, Radiculture.
But both Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo said that the Gnarls Barkley project best captures who they are as artists and as people, at least right now. This project is “pure me,” Danger Mouse, the more private of the two, insisted. “It’s the most me.”
Earlier, while Danger Mouse napped, Cee-Lo made the same point. He said that he grew up listening to funk and hip-hop, and “everybody from ABC to R.E.M., Billy Joel to Billy Idol.” When Danger Mouse first played him sample tracks in 2003, including the strange groove that would become “Run,” he could not believe his ears.
“As soon as I heard the music, it immediately struck me as mine,” he recalled. “I said, I can’t see anyone doing anything to these tracks but me. And I mean the real me, the inner me, the me deep down that nobody knew I was made up of. All of me.”
So finally the duo gave up trying to explain the new album. Instead Cee-Lo puzzled over how these two unlikely musical partners, who seem to be able to communicate a great deal without ever really talking, had even found each other. He first turned to a reporter. “I think I asked him this once, but he never answered it.” Then he looked across the table to Danger Mouse. “Like, did you seek me out?”
Somewhat startled, Danger Mouse answered, “Well, no other singer or rapper ever heard the Gnarls stuff.”
“And how did you know I could do that?” Cee-Lo wondered. “Because I hadn’t really done stuff like that before.”
Now Mr. Burton sat straight up: “I don’t know! I mean, I had his solo record, and it was a great solo record. I knew he could do a lot of things.” He trailed off.
Then he looked straight at Cee-Lo. “But I had been around a lot of rappers with that music and never thought to play them any of it.”
Mr. Callaway nodded slowly and didn’t have to smile. “I got it,” he said.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Bobby Byrd of James Brown Fame Dies
From the Los Angeles Times
Bobby Byrd, 73; singer collaborated with James Brown
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
September 15, 2007
Bobby Byrd, a longtime collaborator with the late "godfather of soul" James Brown, has died. He was 73.
A singer, songwriter, keyboard player and arranger, Byrd died Wednesday at his home in Loganville, Ga., said a spokesman for Willie A. Watkins Funeral Home in Atlanta. News accounts attributed Byrd's death to cancer.
One of the chief architects of Brown's trademark sound, Byrd made contributions that can be heard on early James Brown soul tracks and on hits that laid the foundations of funk, like "Get Up [I Feel Like Being a] Sex Machine." The punctuating phrase "Get on up," which repeats throughout that song, was sung by Byrd.
"You listen to those records and those voices together, it was incredible," Keith Jenkins, a member of Brown's Soul Generals, told the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle. "Whether they were singing in harmony on something like 'Licking Stick' or doing call and response on 'Sex Machine,' it was always something special."
Byrd was born in 1934 in Toccoa, Ga. He sang in church choirs growing up and met Brown when they were teenagers playing on opposing baseball teams.
Brown was serving a sentence in a north Georgia reform school for breaking into cars and pitched for the juvenile detention facility's team. Byrd, a law-abiding youth, played shortstop for his local youth team.
Byrd and Brown became friends, and in 1952 Byrd's family arranged to take Brown into their home.
Byrd also took Brown into his gospel group. Soon they changed their name to the Famous Flames and their style to hard R&B.
Byrd stayed with the Famous Flames, and the JBs after that, until 1973. Later, he would have a string of modest R&B hits.
Starting in the 1980s, Byrd enjoyed a resurgence in popularity when hip-hop artists began sampling his music for their recordings, most notably Eric B. and Rakim's use of Byrd's 1971 song "I Know You Got Soul" in 1987.
In 2003, Byrd sued Brown and his record label for unpaid royalties on songs he said he wrote, including the breakout 1956 single "Please, Please, Please." The lawsuit was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired.
Despite the legal wrangling, the two men remained on good terms. Byrd performed at Brown's memorial service in December.
"Uncle Bobby and Daddy, they were like brothers," Brown's daughter Deanna Brown told the Augusta Chronicle this week.
Byrd's survivors include his wife, Vicki Anderson, who also sang and performed in Brown's touring band.
Bobby Byrd, 73; singer collaborated with James Brown
From Times Staff and Wire Reports
September 15, 2007
Bobby Byrd, a longtime collaborator with the late "godfather of soul" James Brown, has died. He was 73.
A singer, songwriter, keyboard player and arranger, Byrd died Wednesday at his home in Loganville, Ga., said a spokesman for Willie A. Watkins Funeral Home in Atlanta. News accounts attributed Byrd's death to cancer.
One of the chief architects of Brown's trademark sound, Byrd made contributions that can be heard on early James Brown soul tracks and on hits that laid the foundations of funk, like "Get Up [I Feel Like Being a] Sex Machine." The punctuating phrase "Get on up," which repeats throughout that song, was sung by Byrd.
"You listen to those records and those voices together, it was incredible," Keith Jenkins, a member of Brown's Soul Generals, told the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle. "Whether they were singing in harmony on something like 'Licking Stick' or doing call and response on 'Sex Machine,' it was always something special."
Byrd was born in 1934 in Toccoa, Ga. He sang in church choirs growing up and met Brown when they were teenagers playing on opposing baseball teams.
Brown was serving a sentence in a north Georgia reform school for breaking into cars and pitched for the juvenile detention facility's team. Byrd, a law-abiding youth, played shortstop for his local youth team.
Byrd and Brown became friends, and in 1952 Byrd's family arranged to take Brown into their home.
Byrd also took Brown into his gospel group. Soon they changed their name to the Famous Flames and their style to hard R&B.
Byrd stayed with the Famous Flames, and the JBs after that, until 1973. Later, he would have a string of modest R&B hits.
Starting in the 1980s, Byrd enjoyed a resurgence in popularity when hip-hop artists began sampling his music for their recordings, most notably Eric B. and Rakim's use of Byrd's 1971 song "I Know You Got Soul" in 1987.
In 2003, Byrd sued Brown and his record label for unpaid royalties on songs he said he wrote, including the breakout 1956 single "Please, Please, Please." The lawsuit was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired.
Despite the legal wrangling, the two men remained on good terms. Byrd performed at Brown's memorial service in December.
"Uncle Bobby and Daddy, they were like brothers," Brown's daughter Deanna Brown told the Augusta Chronicle this week.
Byrd's survivors include his wife, Vicki Anderson, who also sang and performed in Brown's touring band.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Prince as 21st-Century Pop Star/Multiplatform Corporation
July 22, 2007
Music
The Once and Future Prince
By JON PARELES
I’VE got lots of money!” Prince exults in “The One U Wanna C,” a come-on from his new album, “Planet Earth” (Columbia). There’s no reason to disbelieve him. With a sponsorship deal here and an exclusive show there, worldwide television appearances and music given away, Prince has remade himself as a 21st-century pop star. As recording companies bemoan a crumbling market, Prince is demonstrating that charisma and the willingness to go out and perform are still bankable. He doesn’t have to go multiplatinum — he’s multiplatform.
Although Prince declined to be interviewed about “Planet Earth,” he has been highly visible lately. His career is heading into its third decade, and he could have long since become a nostalgia act. Instead he figured out early how to do what he wants in a 21st-century music business, and clearly what he wants is to make more music. Despite his flamboyant wardrobe and his fixation on the color purple, his career choices have been savvy ones, especially for someone so compulsively prolific.
Like most pop stars, he goes on major tours to coincide with album releases, which for Prince are frequent. But he also gets out and performs whenever he chooses. Last year he took over a club in Las Vegas and renamed it 3121, after his 2006 album “3121,” which briefly hit No. 1 and spawned multiple conflicting theories about the significance of the number. He started playing there twice a week for 900 people at $125 a ticket. In February he had an audience in the millions as the halftime entertainment for the Super Bowl. He has gone on to play well-publicized shows at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood for a few hundred people paying $3,121 per couple, and another elite show last weekend in East Hampton for about $3,000 per person.
Meanwhile Verizon put Prince in commercials that use “Guitar,” another song from “Planet Earth,” as bait for its V Cast Song ID service, making the song a free download to certain cellphones. On July 7 Prince introduced a perfume, 3121, by performing at Macy’s in Minneapolis.
In Britain he infuriated retailers by agreeing to have a newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, include the complete “Planet Earth” CD in copies on July 15. (The album is due for American release this Tuesday.) Presumably The Mail paid him something in the range of what he could have earned, much more slowly, through album sales. British fans have remunerated him in other ways. On Aug. 1 he starts a string of no fewer than 21 sold-out arena concerts, 20,000 seats each, at the O2 (formerly the Millennium Dome) in London at the relatively low ticket price of £31.21, about $64. The O2 ticket price also includes a copy of the album; Prince did the same thing with his tour for “Musicology” in 2004. Those “Musicology” albums were counted toward the pop charts, which then changed their rules; the “Planet Earth” albums will not be. But fans will have the record.
Prince’s priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it’s purchased or not. “Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those that want to hear it,” his spokesman said when announcing that The Mail would include the CD. (After the newspaper giveaway was announced, Columbia Records’ corporate parent, Sony Music, chose not to release “Planet Earth” for retail sale in Britain.) Other musicians may think that their best chance at a livelihood is locking away their music — impossible as that is in the digital era — and demanding that fans buy everything they want to hear. But Prince is confident that his listeners will support him, if not through CD sales then at shows or through other deals.
This is how most pop stars operate now: as brand-name corporations taking in revenue streams from publishing, touring, merchandising, advertising, ringtones, fashion, satellite radio gigs or whatever else their advisers can come up with. Rare indeed are holdouts like Bruce Springsteen who simply perform and record. The usual rationale is that hearing a U2 song in an iPod commercial or seeing Shakira’s face on a cellphone billboard will get listeners interested in the albums that these artists release every few years after much painstaking effort.
But Prince is different. His way of working has nothing to do with scarcity. In the studio — he has his own recording complex, Paisley Park near Minneapolis — he is a torrent of new songs, while older, unreleased ones fill the archive he calls the Vault. Prince apparently has to hold himself back to release only one album a year. He’s equally indefatigable in concert. On the road he regularly follows full-tilt shows — singing, playing, dancing, sweating — with jam sessions that stretch into the night. It doesn’t hurt that at 49 he can still act like a sex symbol and that his stage shows are unpredictable.
Through it all he still aims for hit singles. Although he has delved into all sorts of music, his favorite form is clearly the four-minute pop tune full of hooks. But his career choices don’t revolve around squeezing the maximum return out of a few precious songs. They’re about letting the music flow.
Prince gravitated early to the Internet. Even in the days of dial-up he sought to make his music available online, first as a way of ordering albums and then through digital distribution. (He was also ahead of his time with another form of communication: text messaging abbreviations, having long ago traded “you” for “U.”) Where the Internet truism is that information wants to be free, Prince’s corollary is that music wants to be heard.
How much he makes from his various efforts is a closely guarded secret. But he’s not dependent on royalties trickling in from retail album sales after being filtered through major-label accounting procedures. Instead someone — a sponsor, a newspaper, a promoter — pays him upfront, making disc sales less important. Which is not to say that he’s doing badly on that front: “3121” sold about 520,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and “Musicology,” with its concert giveaways, was certified multiplatinum.
Prince ended a two-decade contract with Warner Brothers Records in 1996 after a very public falling out with the label. During the mid-1990s he appeared with the word “Slave” painted on his face and said the label was holding back material he wanted to release. For a while he dropped the name Prince — which was under contract to Warner Brothers and Warner/Chappell Music — for an unpronounceable glyph; when the contracts ran out, he was Prince again. And since leaving Warner Brothers he has been independent. He owns his recordings himself, beginning with a three-CD set called “Emancipation” from 1996. He has released albums on his own NPG label and Web site or has licensed them, one by one, for distribution by major labels, presumably letting them compete for each title. Over the past decade he has had albums released through EMI, Arista, Universal and Sony.
The idea behind long-term recording contracts is that a label will invest in building a career. But Prince (in part because of Warner Brothers’ promotion) has been a full-fledged star since the ’80s. So now a label’s main job for him is to get the CDs into stores.
Prince also experimented with having fans subscribe directly to receive his music online, which turned out to be a better idea in theory than in execution. After five years he quietly shut down his NPG Music Club in 2006. Still, his Web site (which is now 3121.com) usually has a rare recording or two for streaming or downloading. Why not? There’s plenty more.
“Planet Earth” is a good but not great Prince album. Unlike “3121,” which built many of its tracks around zinging, programmed electronic sounds, “Planet Earth” sounds largely handmade, even retro. “In this digital age you could just page me,” Prince sings in “Somewhere Here on Earth,” a slow-motion falsetto ballad. “I know it’s the rage but it just don’t engage me like a face-to-face.”
Prince, as usual, is a one-man studio band — drums, keyboards, guitars, vocals — joined here and there by a horn section or a cooing female voice. This time he leans toward rock rather than funk. Serious songs begin and end the album. It starts with “Planet Earth,” an earnest environmental piano anthem with an orchestral buildup, and winds up with the devout “Lion of Judah” and with “Resolution,” an antiwar song. In between, Prince flirts a lot, playing hard-to-get as he rocks through “Guitar” (“I love you baby, but not like I love my guitar”) and promising sensual delights in the upbeat “One U Wanna C” and the slow-grinding “Mr. Goodnight.” There’s also a catchy, nutty song about a model, “Chelsea Rodgers,” who’s both hard-partying and erudite; Prince sings that she knows about how “Rome was chillin’ in Carthage in 33 B.C.E.”
Although Columbia probably thinks otherwise, how the album fares commercially is almost incidental. With or without the CD business, Prince gets to keep making music: in arenas, in clubs, in the studio. Fans buy concert tickets, companies rent his panache, pleasure is shared. It’s a party that can go on a long time.
Music
The Once and Future Prince
By JON PARELES
I’VE got lots of money!” Prince exults in “The One U Wanna C,” a come-on from his new album, “Planet Earth” (Columbia). There’s no reason to disbelieve him. With a sponsorship deal here and an exclusive show there, worldwide television appearances and music given away, Prince has remade himself as a 21st-century pop star. As recording companies bemoan a crumbling market, Prince is demonstrating that charisma and the willingness to go out and perform are still bankable. He doesn’t have to go multiplatinum — he’s multiplatform.
Although Prince declined to be interviewed about “Planet Earth,” he has been highly visible lately. His career is heading into its third decade, and he could have long since become a nostalgia act. Instead he figured out early how to do what he wants in a 21st-century music business, and clearly what he wants is to make more music. Despite his flamboyant wardrobe and his fixation on the color purple, his career choices have been savvy ones, especially for someone so compulsively prolific.
Like most pop stars, he goes on major tours to coincide with album releases, which for Prince are frequent. But he also gets out and performs whenever he chooses. Last year he took over a club in Las Vegas and renamed it 3121, after his 2006 album “3121,” which briefly hit No. 1 and spawned multiple conflicting theories about the significance of the number. He started playing there twice a week for 900 people at $125 a ticket. In February he had an audience in the millions as the halftime entertainment for the Super Bowl. He has gone on to play well-publicized shows at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood for a few hundred people paying $3,121 per couple, and another elite show last weekend in East Hampton for about $3,000 per person.
Meanwhile Verizon put Prince in commercials that use “Guitar,” another song from “Planet Earth,” as bait for its V Cast Song ID service, making the song a free download to certain cellphones. On July 7 Prince introduced a perfume, 3121, by performing at Macy’s in Minneapolis.
In Britain he infuriated retailers by agreeing to have a newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, include the complete “Planet Earth” CD in copies on July 15. (The album is due for American release this Tuesday.) Presumably The Mail paid him something in the range of what he could have earned, much more slowly, through album sales. British fans have remunerated him in other ways. On Aug. 1 he starts a string of no fewer than 21 sold-out arena concerts, 20,000 seats each, at the O2 (formerly the Millennium Dome) in London at the relatively low ticket price of £31.21, about $64. The O2 ticket price also includes a copy of the album; Prince did the same thing with his tour for “Musicology” in 2004. Those “Musicology” albums were counted toward the pop charts, which then changed their rules; the “Planet Earth” albums will not be. But fans will have the record.
Prince’s priorities are obvious. The main one is getting his music to an audience, whether it’s purchased or not. “Prince’s only aim is to get music direct to those that want to hear it,” his spokesman said when announcing that The Mail would include the CD. (After the newspaper giveaway was announced, Columbia Records’ corporate parent, Sony Music, chose not to release “Planet Earth” for retail sale in Britain.) Other musicians may think that their best chance at a livelihood is locking away their music — impossible as that is in the digital era — and demanding that fans buy everything they want to hear. But Prince is confident that his listeners will support him, if not through CD sales then at shows or through other deals.
This is how most pop stars operate now: as brand-name corporations taking in revenue streams from publishing, touring, merchandising, advertising, ringtones, fashion, satellite radio gigs or whatever else their advisers can come up with. Rare indeed are holdouts like Bruce Springsteen who simply perform and record. The usual rationale is that hearing a U2 song in an iPod commercial or seeing Shakira’s face on a cellphone billboard will get listeners interested in the albums that these artists release every few years after much painstaking effort.
But Prince is different. His way of working has nothing to do with scarcity. In the studio — he has his own recording complex, Paisley Park near Minneapolis — he is a torrent of new songs, while older, unreleased ones fill the archive he calls the Vault. Prince apparently has to hold himself back to release only one album a year. He’s equally indefatigable in concert. On the road he regularly follows full-tilt shows — singing, playing, dancing, sweating — with jam sessions that stretch into the night. It doesn’t hurt that at 49 he can still act like a sex symbol and that his stage shows are unpredictable.
Through it all he still aims for hit singles. Although he has delved into all sorts of music, his favorite form is clearly the four-minute pop tune full of hooks. But his career choices don’t revolve around squeezing the maximum return out of a few precious songs. They’re about letting the music flow.
Prince gravitated early to the Internet. Even in the days of dial-up he sought to make his music available online, first as a way of ordering albums and then through digital distribution. (He was also ahead of his time with another form of communication: text messaging abbreviations, having long ago traded “you” for “U.”) Where the Internet truism is that information wants to be free, Prince’s corollary is that music wants to be heard.
How much he makes from his various efforts is a closely guarded secret. But he’s not dependent on royalties trickling in from retail album sales after being filtered through major-label accounting procedures. Instead someone — a sponsor, a newspaper, a promoter — pays him upfront, making disc sales less important. Which is not to say that he’s doing badly on that front: “3121” sold about 520,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and “Musicology,” with its concert giveaways, was certified multiplatinum.
Prince ended a two-decade contract with Warner Brothers Records in 1996 after a very public falling out with the label. During the mid-1990s he appeared with the word “Slave” painted on his face and said the label was holding back material he wanted to release. For a while he dropped the name Prince — which was under contract to Warner Brothers and Warner/Chappell Music — for an unpronounceable glyph; when the contracts ran out, he was Prince again. And since leaving Warner Brothers he has been independent. He owns his recordings himself, beginning with a three-CD set called “Emancipation” from 1996. He has released albums on his own NPG label and Web site or has licensed them, one by one, for distribution by major labels, presumably letting them compete for each title. Over the past decade he has had albums released through EMI, Arista, Universal and Sony.
The idea behind long-term recording contracts is that a label will invest in building a career. But Prince (in part because of Warner Brothers’ promotion) has been a full-fledged star since the ’80s. So now a label’s main job for him is to get the CDs into stores.
Prince also experimented with having fans subscribe directly to receive his music online, which turned out to be a better idea in theory than in execution. After five years he quietly shut down his NPG Music Club in 2006. Still, his Web site (which is now 3121.com) usually has a rare recording or two for streaming or downloading. Why not? There’s plenty more.
“Planet Earth” is a good but not great Prince album. Unlike “3121,” which built many of its tracks around zinging, programmed electronic sounds, “Planet Earth” sounds largely handmade, even retro. “In this digital age you could just page me,” Prince sings in “Somewhere Here on Earth,” a slow-motion falsetto ballad. “I know it’s the rage but it just don’t engage me like a face-to-face.”
Prince, as usual, is a one-man studio band — drums, keyboards, guitars, vocals — joined here and there by a horn section or a cooing female voice. This time he leans toward rock rather than funk. Serious songs begin and end the album. It starts with “Planet Earth,” an earnest environmental piano anthem with an orchestral buildup, and winds up with the devout “Lion of Judah” and with “Resolution,” an antiwar song. In between, Prince flirts a lot, playing hard-to-get as he rocks through “Guitar” (“I love you baby, but not like I love my guitar”) and promising sensual delights in the upbeat “One U Wanna C” and the slow-grinding “Mr. Goodnight.” There’s also a catchy, nutty song about a model, “Chelsea Rodgers,” who’s both hard-partying and erudite; Prince sings that she knows about how “Rome was chillin’ in Carthage in 33 B.C.E.”
Although Columbia probably thinks otherwise, how the album fares commercially is almost incidental. With or without the CD business, Prince gets to keep making music: in arenas, in clubs, in the studio. Fans buy concert tickets, companies rent his panache, pleasure is shared. It’s a party that can go on a long time.
Friday, July 20, 2007
A Stax Records Celebration in Los Angeles
From the Los Angeles Times
POP MUSIC REVIEW
Nostalgia reigns, future beckons at Stax celebration
A 50th anniversary show for the revived record label just touches on the glory of its beginnings while hinting at what might be ahead.
By Ann Powers
Times Staff Writer
July 20, 2007
Isaac Hayes must have felt a wave of déjà vu as he sat behind his Korg keyboard Wednesday at the Hollywood Bowl. The soul music sovereign was headlining a celebration of Stax Records — something he'd also done 35 years before. Wednesday's event was a landmark, celebrating the Memphis label's 50th anniversary. But the earlier show actually made history: It was Wattstax, the Black Woodstock.
That August day in 1972, the Rev. Jesse Jackson led the mostly black crowd in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in a chant of "I am somebody"; gospel and blues music fed the feeling of community pride. Six years after the Watts riots, Wattstax was a statement of renewed pride and hope, and Hayes stood proudly at its center, Black Moses at the mountaintop.
Much has happened since those heady days of liberation. Hayes himself pioneered a synthesis that set the stage for disco and hip-hop — which soon relegated classic soul to the oldies bins. Baby boomers became the main champions of the earthy sound Stax embodied, while the children of the Wattstax audience invented "urban" music. Today, white hipsters such as Amy Winehouse adopt the Stax vernacular while its originators hit the casino circuit and PBS telethons. The man who wrote the theme from "Shaft" almost became better known as the voice of a cartoon chef.
Onstage Wednesday, though, Hayes looked to the future. He's recently signed to the Stax imprint, which was reinstated this year. "I have a new record coming out," he murmured. "It's going to be the joint. You know this next song, though." And he offered another familiar groove to the Bowl's mostly baby boomer picnickers.
The very fact of Hayes' performance was reason to cheer: Last year, he suffered a stroke, and he is clearly still recovering. Leading a brawny band that featured two drummers, three additional keyboardists and itchy-fingered guitarist Charles "Skip" Pitts, Hayes labored to focus as his trademark lush arrangements unfolded. His baritone croon cracked on the high notes, and he needed a notebook for lyrics; yet even when stumbling, he maintained his cool.
Hayes' set was a poignant conclusion to an evening that offered a somewhat skewed view of the label's legacy, while tentatively asserting its future. With major Stax artists such as Otis Redding and Rufus Thomas deceased, and others, such as Sam Moore, apparently unavailable, the roster beyond Hayes mostly consisted of lesser-known label stalwarts.
Eddie Floyd zealously shouted out his career-topper "Knock on Wood"; William Bell, a key Stax songwriter, affably vamped through "I Forgot to Be Your Lover." Dr. Mable John — the doctorate is in divinity — drew on her ministerial experience to wring drama from "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)." Keyboardist and bandleader Booker T. Jones, a crucial player in the Stax story, led a revamped lineup of the MGs through a couple of tight, bright instrumentals.
These veterans, feted by enthusiastic host Randy Jackson, did their best to argue for the enduring importance of Stax. The absence of the label's biggest legends inevitably weakened the case. Tribute concerts are overdone these days, but a few upstart stars trying to fill those giant shoes might have offered support to the elder voices.
The younger artists who did appear are neo-soul veterans whose careers Stax may reboot. Angie Stone and Lalah Hathaway could be perfect for the label's revival. Each has a trend-resistant style that makes sense within its lineage.
Hathaway's steamy version of Luther Ingram's "(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right" showed serious intelligence, while Stone, making her way through Shirley Brown's "Woman to Woman," exhibited the grace and good humor that already should have made her a bigger star.
If Hathaway and Stone succeed, Stax could be the label that finally reinstates black voices within the "retro soul" trend exemplified by Winehouse. Their upcoming releases will tell; for now, rich history must suffice.
The Bowl concert wasn't the only way to get a fix of that history. A 50th anniversary boxed set was issued last March. On Aug. 1, PBS will air "Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story," part of its "American Masters" series. And this weekend, American Cinematheque's Mods & Rockers Festival brings five Stax-related films — including Mel Stuart's mesmerizing documentary about Wattstax — to the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. Anyone who's sung along wistfully to a Stax song should see these films, and witness the music as it was when nostalgia didn't apply.
POP MUSIC REVIEW
Nostalgia reigns, future beckons at Stax celebration
A 50th anniversary show for the revived record label just touches on the glory of its beginnings while hinting at what might be ahead.
By Ann Powers
Times Staff Writer
July 20, 2007
Isaac Hayes must have felt a wave of déjà vu as he sat behind his Korg keyboard Wednesday at the Hollywood Bowl. The soul music sovereign was headlining a celebration of Stax Records — something he'd also done 35 years before. Wednesday's event was a landmark, celebrating the Memphis label's 50th anniversary. But the earlier show actually made history: It was Wattstax, the Black Woodstock.
That August day in 1972, the Rev. Jesse Jackson led the mostly black crowd in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in a chant of "I am somebody"; gospel and blues music fed the feeling of community pride. Six years after the Watts riots, Wattstax was a statement of renewed pride and hope, and Hayes stood proudly at its center, Black Moses at the mountaintop.
Much has happened since those heady days of liberation. Hayes himself pioneered a synthesis that set the stage for disco and hip-hop — which soon relegated classic soul to the oldies bins. Baby boomers became the main champions of the earthy sound Stax embodied, while the children of the Wattstax audience invented "urban" music. Today, white hipsters such as Amy Winehouse adopt the Stax vernacular while its originators hit the casino circuit and PBS telethons. The man who wrote the theme from "Shaft" almost became better known as the voice of a cartoon chef.
Onstage Wednesday, though, Hayes looked to the future. He's recently signed to the Stax imprint, which was reinstated this year. "I have a new record coming out," he murmured. "It's going to be the joint. You know this next song, though." And he offered another familiar groove to the Bowl's mostly baby boomer picnickers.
The very fact of Hayes' performance was reason to cheer: Last year, he suffered a stroke, and he is clearly still recovering. Leading a brawny band that featured two drummers, three additional keyboardists and itchy-fingered guitarist Charles "Skip" Pitts, Hayes labored to focus as his trademark lush arrangements unfolded. His baritone croon cracked on the high notes, and he needed a notebook for lyrics; yet even when stumbling, he maintained his cool.
Hayes' set was a poignant conclusion to an evening that offered a somewhat skewed view of the label's legacy, while tentatively asserting its future. With major Stax artists such as Otis Redding and Rufus Thomas deceased, and others, such as Sam Moore, apparently unavailable, the roster beyond Hayes mostly consisted of lesser-known label stalwarts.
Eddie Floyd zealously shouted out his career-topper "Knock on Wood"; William Bell, a key Stax songwriter, affably vamped through "I Forgot to Be Your Lover." Dr. Mable John — the doctorate is in divinity — drew on her ministerial experience to wring drama from "Your Good Thing (Is About to End)." Keyboardist and bandleader Booker T. Jones, a crucial player in the Stax story, led a revamped lineup of the MGs through a couple of tight, bright instrumentals.
These veterans, feted by enthusiastic host Randy Jackson, did their best to argue for the enduring importance of Stax. The absence of the label's biggest legends inevitably weakened the case. Tribute concerts are overdone these days, but a few upstart stars trying to fill those giant shoes might have offered support to the elder voices.
The younger artists who did appear are neo-soul veterans whose careers Stax may reboot. Angie Stone and Lalah Hathaway could be perfect for the label's revival. Each has a trend-resistant style that makes sense within its lineage.
Hathaway's steamy version of Luther Ingram's "(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don't Want to Be Right" showed serious intelligence, while Stone, making her way through Shirley Brown's "Woman to Woman," exhibited the grace and good humor that already should have made her a bigger star.
If Hathaway and Stone succeed, Stax could be the label that finally reinstates black voices within the "retro soul" trend exemplified by Winehouse. Their upcoming releases will tell; for now, rich history must suffice.
The Bowl concert wasn't the only way to get a fix of that history. A 50th anniversary boxed set was issued last March. On Aug. 1, PBS will air "Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story," part of its "American Masters" series. And this weekend, American Cinematheque's Mods & Rockers Festival brings five Stax-related films — including Mel Stuart's mesmerizing documentary about Wattstax — to the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. Anyone who's sung along wistfully to a Stax song should see these films, and witness the music as it was when nostalgia didn't apply.
Friday, December 29, 2006
A Loud, Proud Send-Off for an Icon of Soul
New York Times
December 29, 2006
A Loud, Proud Send-Off for an Icon of Soul
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
James Brown gave one last show in Harlem yesterday, three days after his death, in a golden coffin lined with white velvet, on the flower-bedecked stage of the famed Apollo Theater, before a crowd of thousands who had lined up for blocks to see him.
Mr. Brown’s body arrived beneath the Apollo’s red-neon sign just before 1 p.m. in a white-painted carriage pulled by two white horses with feathery plumes atop their heads. The carriage was small, with tall windows and white curtains with silver fringe. Two solemn men sat atop it, guiding the horses, and Mr. Brown’s friends and associates and Harlem dignitaries walked alongside and behind it.
Hundreds who lined 125th Street outside the theater on a chilly, overcast afternoon cheered and applauded. Helicopters hovered. Photographers aimed their cameras from the surrounding rooftops. A guy hawked commemorative T-shirts for $10. Mr. Brown’s cries and exultations filled the street, blaring from one of his concert videos playing on a beat-up television mounted above a sign for Uptown Tattoos. A chant rose up: “James Brown! James Brown! James Brown!”
When the theater’s doors finally opened, people began streaming in for a public viewing. They walked up a few stairs and stepped onto the red-carpeted stage, where Mr. Brown’s body lay in an open coffin, washed in white and gold stage lights. The coffin was made of 16-gauge steel with a gold paint finish. Mr. Brown was wearing a cobalt, sequined satin suit with white gloves and pointed silvery shoes. Loudspeakers played his breakthrough album, “Live at the Apollo,” recorded Oct. 24, 1962.
Women wearing veils approached. A man in a suit dropped to his knees and crossed his heart. One couple broke into a brief dance. “Right now,” Mr. Brown said on the loudspeakers, in a snippet of between-song banter, “I’m going to get up and do my thing.”
Mr. Brown did his thing yesterday: he put on a show. Throughout the day, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, formed two lines on 125th Street outside the Apollo, one to its east and one to its west, each one filling up 125th Street, reaching the corner and then stretching for blocks up Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, forming a giant U. Some had been waiting since midnight Wednesday.
“We’re sending him out in the style he lived,” said Nellie Williams, 58, of Greer, S.C., who stood near the front of one line. “He was a man that had to be seen and heard.” She brought her daughter, and a copy of an oil painting her brother did of Mr. Brown, his pompadour perfectly teased, his shirt open, his smile wide. “I want to show my last respects for his last show in New York,” Ms. Williams added.
Mr. Brown, 73, died of congestive heart failure early Monday in Atlanta. He was remembered, during a private ceremony for family and friends at the Apollo, and amid the lines of fans standing outside for the public viewing, as a singer, dancer, bandleader, funk pioneer, entrepreneur, black-pride icon and entertainer who many said transformed American pop music and African-American culture.
A private ceremony will be held today near Augusta, Ga., Mr. Brown’s adopted hometown, and a public service is set for tomorrow at the James Brown Arena in Augusta.
Yesterday, the somber pageantry that accompanies the death of a dignitary could be found on the streets of Harlem, retuned for the death of a showman in the nation’s black cultural capital. The spectacle — the horse-drawn hearse gliding down 125th Street, the Apollo temporarily transformed into a funeral parlor, the crowds of admirers waiting in line for up to five hours to say a prayer near the coffin — made clear this was a different kind of funeral for a different kind of man. This was a man who personified, as the headwaiter at a soul-food restaurant put it, “the outrageous expression of life.”
Mr. Brown’s journey to Harlem began in Augusta the day before. A white hearse carrying his body left the city about 9:30 p.m., accompanied by the Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime friend who considered Mr. Brown a father figure. Fourteen hours later, about 11:30 a.m., the hearse pulled up to Mr. Sharpton’s National Action Network headquarters on West 145th Street in Harlem.
Outside the headquarters, it was impossible to tell people were waiting for a hearse. One man played a bongo drum, and someone else played the upbeat funk of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” on a portable stereo. The carriage waited, and so did the horses, Commander and Whitey, and the man who would hold the reins, Vet Harris, 66. “It’s an honor,” Mr. Harris said. “It’s beautiful.”
When the golden coffin was removed from the hearse and placed in the carriage, there was applause. Some onlookers cried. A group of friends and dignitaries assembled behind the carriage for the march down Lenox Avenue to the Apollo, among them Mr. Sharpton; Frank Copsidas, Mr. Brown’s agent; Ali Woodson, former lead singer of the Temptations; and the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, pastor of the House of the Lord Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn.
Outside the Apollo, throughout the morning and into the evening, hordes of people assembled on both sides of 125th Street behind metal police barricades. They were a largely black crowd, young women and retired men, elderly couples and families with children. Mr. Brown’s tunes played from storefronts, and women danced to the beat and sang along to his 1968 song “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.” His image was everywhere: On T-shirts, posters, paintings people brought from home. The computerized Apollo marquee read, “Rest in Peace Apollo Legend, The Godfather of Soul, James Brown, 1933-2006.”
Burnis Hall, 65, stood near Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard with his wife. They were on vacation from Lathrup Village, Mich. “I first saw him in 1959, in Amarillo, Tex., when I was young airman in the Air Force,” Mr. Hall said of Mr. Brown. They stood with others in the chilly wind, struggling for the words to capture the legacy of a man who worked hard to defy convention. “Here’s an old guy that’s been there since the mid-’50s, still active in 2006,” Mr. Hall said. “How can you ignore this person?”
Nearly everyone had a James Brown story. They wanted to talk about the time they jumped on stage and danced with him, or met him at a party, or, like Samuel A. Herbert of Buffalo, once shined his black boots behind the Apollo. “He gave me $5 and he touched me on my shoulder and said, ‘God bless and be in courage,’ ” said Mr. Herbert, 57, retired from his work as a cancer research technician.
Inside during the viewing, Mr. Sharpton stood near the coffin, which was flanked by sprays of white lilies, white carnations and red and white roses. One flower arrangement spelled out “J B”; another, “Godfather.” A velvet rope kept people in the fast-moving line several feet from the coffin. Mr. Brown’s friends and family members sat in the first several rows of seats.
Tomi Rae Brown was there, dressed in black, chewing gum and passing out pink roses to Mr. Brown’s relatives. Ms. Brown has described herself as Mr. Brown’s wife, but his lawyer has depicted her as the singer’s partner, and she was barred from his South Carolina home a day after his death. “He’s my husband and the father of my child,” she said. “I’m mourning.”
About 6 p.m., the public viewing was interrupted for a service for Mr. Brown’s family, friends and the news media. “One era had a Bach, another had a Beethoven, but we had Brown,” Mr. Sharpton told the few hundred who sat in the Apollo. He said that those close to Mr. Brown decided Wednesday evening that he deserved a special procession and a special coffin. “We had some 30 people offering their planes, but because of the weight of the casket, we couldn’t get an ordinary flight,” Mr. Sharpton said. “I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, we’ll drive.’ ”
Mr. Sharpton said the public viewing was being extended by an hour, to 9 p.m., to accommodate the hundreds outside who still wanted to pay their respects. At 9:20, the police announced that no one else would be allowed inside, and the few hundred people remaining moved across the street.
During the service, Mr. Sharpton called six of Mr. Brown’s children to the stage, where they held hands. Then he introduced Charles Bobbit, Mr. Brown’s personal manager, and Ms. Brown, who spoke through tears. “My name is Tomi Rae Brown,” she said. “I love that man, and I have loved that man since the day I met him.”
Mr. Bobbit was with Mr. Brown when he died in Atlanta. “Before he passed, he said, ‘I think I’m going to leave you tonight,’ ” Mr. Bobbit recalled. “I said, ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ ”
Cassi Feldman and Eric Konigsberg contributed reporting.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Monday, December 25, 2006
James Brown, 73, Dies; ‘Godfather of Soul, Hardest Working Man in Show Business, Soul Brother Number 1, Mr. Dynamite’
Filed at 3:13 a.m. ET
ATLANTA (AP) -- James Brown, the dynamic, pompadoured ''Godfather of Soul,'' whose rasping vocals and revolutionary rhythms made him a founder of rap, funk and disco as well, died early Monday, his agent said. He was 73.
Brown was hospitalized with pneumonia at Emory Crawford Long Hospital on Sunday and died around 1:45 a.m. Monday, said his agent, Frank Copsidas of Intrigue Music. Longtime friend Charles Bobbit was by his side, he said.
Copsidas said Brown's family was being notified of his death and that the cause was still uncertain. ''We really don't know at this point what he died of,'' he said.
Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, Brown was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolized him, and sometimes openly copied him. His rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson among others. Songs such as David Bowie's ''Fame,'' Prince's ''Kiss,'' George Clinton's ''Atomic Dog'' and Sly and the Family Stone's ''Sing a Simple Song'' were clearly based on Brown's rhythms and vocal style.
If Brown's claim to the invention of soul can be challenged by fans of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, then his rights to the genres of rap, disco and funk are beyond question. He was to rhythm and dance music what Dylan was to lyrics: the unchallenged popular innovator.
''James presented obviously the best grooves,'' rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy once told The Associated Press. ''To this day, there has been no one near as funky. No one's coming even close.''
His hit singles include such classics as ''Out of Sight,'' ''(Get Up I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,'' ''I Got You (I Feel Good)'' and ''Say It Out Loud -- I'm Black and I'm Proud,'' a landmark 1968 statement of racial pride.
''I clearly remember we were calling ourselves colored, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black,'' Brown said in a 2003 Associated Press interview. ''The song showed even people to that day that lyrics and music and a song can change society.''
He won a Grammy award for lifetime achievement in 1992, as well as Grammys in 1965 for ''Papa's Got a Brand New Bag'' (best R&B recording) and for ''Living In America'' in 1987 (best R&B vocal performance, male.) He was one of the initial artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, along with Presley, Chuck Berry and other founding fathers.
He triumphed despite an often unhappy personal life. Brown, who lived in Beech Island near the Georgia line, spent more than two years in a South Carolina prison for aggravated assault and failing to stop for a police officer. After his release on in 1991, Brown said he wanted to ''try to straighten out'' rock music.
From the 1950s, when Brown had his first R&B hit, ''Please, Please, Please'' in 1956, through the mid-1970s, Brown went on a frenzy of cross-country tours, concerts and new songs. He earned the nickname ''The Hardest Working Man in Show Business.''
With his tight pants, shimmering feet, eye makeup and outrageous hair, Brown set the stage for younger stars such as Michael Jackson and Prince.
In 1986, he was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And rap stars of recent years overwhelmingly have borrowed his lyrics with a digital technique called sampling.
Brown's work has been replayed by the Fat Boys, Ice-T, Public Enemy and a host of other rappers. ''The music out there is only as good as my last record,'' Brown joked in a 1989 interview with Rolling Stone magazine.
''Disco is James Brown, hip-hop is James Brown, rap is James Brown; you know what I'm saying? You hear all the rappers, 90 percent of their music is me,'' he told the AP in 2003.
Born in poverty in Barnwell, S.C., in 1933, he was abandoned as a 4-year-old to the care of relatives and friends and grew up on the streets of Augusta, Ga., in an ''ill-repute area,'' as he once called it. There he learned to wheel and deal.
''I wanted to be somebody,'' Brown said.
By the eighth grade in 1949, Brown had served 3 1/2 years in Alto Reform School near Toccoa, Ga., for breaking into cars.
While there, he met Bobby Byrd, whose family took Brown into their home. Byrd also took Brown into his group, the Gospel Starlighters. Soon they changed their name to the Famous Flames and their style to hard R&B.
In January 1956, King Records of Cincinnati signed the group, and four months later ''Please, Please, Please'' was in the R&B Top Ten.
While most of Brown's life was glitz and glitter, he was plagued with charges of abusing drugs and alcohol and of hitting his third wife, Adrienne.
In September 1988, Brown, high on PCP and carrying a shotgun, entered an insurance seminar next to his Augusta office. Police said he asked seminar participants if they were using his private restroom.
Police chased Brown for a half-hour from Augusta into South Carolina and back to Georgia. The chase ended when police shot out the tires of his truck.
Brown received a six-year prison sentence. He spent 15 months in a South Carolina prison and 10 months in a work release program before being paroled in February 1991. In 2003, the South Carolina parole board granted him a pardon for his crimes in that state.
Soon after his release, Brown was on stage again with an audience that included millions of cable television viewers nationwide who watched the three-hour, pay-per-view concert at Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles.
Adrienne Brown died in 1996 in Los Angeles at age 47. She took PCP and several prescription drugs while she had a bad heart and was weak from cosmetic surgery two days earlier, the coroner said.
More recently, he married his fourth wife, Tomi Raye Hynie, one of his backup singers. The couple had a son, James Jr.
Two years later, Brown spent a week in a private Columbia hospital, recovering from what his agent said was dependency on painkillers. Brown's attorney, Albert ''Buddy'' Dallas, said singer was exhausted from six years of road shows.
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Wilson Pickett dead at 64
Soul singer 'Wicked' Wilson Pickett dead at 64
By Dean GoodmanThu Jan 19, 11:35 PM ET
Veteran soul singer Wilson Pickett, known for such hits as "Mustang Sally" and "In the Midnight Hour," died on Thursday of a heart attack in Virginia, his manager said. He was 64.
Pickett, an Alabama native famed for his trademark screams, flaming delivery and flamboyant costumes, performed on a regular basis until about a year ago, when he began suffering from health problems, said his manager, Margo Lewis.
Dubbed "Wicked" Wilson Pickett by Jerry Wexler, the co-founder of Atlantic Records, where he enjoyed his greatest success, Pickett was one of the leading exponents of the hard-edged Memphis sound, a grittier alternative to the pop singles being churned out by Motown Records in Detroit.
Often recording with the house band of Memphis-based Stax Records, Booker T and the MGs, he enjoyed a long string of hits during the 1960s, including the R&B chart-toppers "634-5789," "Land of 1,000 Dances" and "Funky Broadway."
"We've lost a giant, we've lost a legend, we've lost a man who created his own charisma and made it work around the world," soul singer Solomon Burke, a close friend of Pickett's, told Reuters. "It's just hard for me to really grasp that Wilson is already traveling toward the greater place."
"In the Midnight Hour" was his breakthrough hit, transforming the relative unknown into a soul sensation virtually overnight in 1965. Pickett co-wrote the tune with MGs guitarist Steve Cropper in about an hour, and it spent a week atop the R&B singles chart in August of that year.
"CAREER BREAKDOWN"
His luck ran out by the early 1970s, when he switched labels and suffered what he once described as a "career breakdown." An ambitious plan hatched in 1981 to tour as the "Soul Clan" with fellow R&B veterans Solomon Burke, Joe Tex, Don Covay and Ben E. King quickly fizzled.
Somewhat bitter about his diminishing fortunes, he endured various domestic disputes, and got into trouble with the law during the 1990s for cocaine possession and drunk-driving.
Burke said Pickett had turned his life around, and the two of them were planning to reunite with King, Covay and "Mustang Sally" songwriter Mack Rice to record an album this year.
Born March 18, 1941 in Prattville, Alabama, Pickett grew up in a poor household with 10 brothers and sisters, an abusive mother, and a preacher grandfather who beat him whenever he sang secular songs. He moved up to Detroit in his mid-teens to live with his father, and quickly gravitated to the sounds being purveyed by the likes of local singers Jackie Wilson and Little Willie John.
Although he considered himself a gospel singer, Pickett was invited to join an R&B group called the Falcons. He wrote and sang lead on their 1962 hit "I Found A Love." He became a prolific songwriter and enjoyed a handful of modest solo hits including "If You Need Me," a tune that was also covered by both Burke and the Rolling Stones.
CREDITS DISPUTE
Pickett signed with Atlantic in 1964, and was sent down to record in Memphis after his first few singles disappeared without a trace. "Midnight Hour," one of three recorded in one night, became the subject of an authorship dispute in later years. Pickett told music writer Gerri Hirshey in her 1984 book "Nowhere to Run" that he deserved sole credit. Cropper told Reuters a decade later that Pickett was "completely crazy" and "had nothing to do with writing that music."
Although Pickett was best known for his urgent, propulsive tunes, he also earned acclaim with non-R&B fare, most notably his 1969 cover of the Beatles' "Hey Jude," which featured Duane Allman on guitar. He also recorded bold interpretations of such tunes as Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild" and even make-believe group the Archies' "Sugar, Sugar."
Pickett was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, and experienced a career renaissance that same year with the release of the movie "The Commitments," which revolved around a Dublin band that idolized him. He released his last album, the Grammy-nominated "It's Harder Now," in 1999.
He is survived by a fiancée, two sons and two daughters. A viewing will take place in Virginia next week, and then he will be interred with his mother in Louisville, Kentucky, his manager said.
(Additional reporting by Dean Goodman)
By Dean GoodmanThu Jan 19, 11:35 PM ET
Veteran soul singer Wilson Pickett, known for such hits as "Mustang Sally" and "In the Midnight Hour," died on Thursday of a heart attack in Virginia, his manager said. He was 64.
Pickett, an Alabama native famed for his trademark screams, flaming delivery and flamboyant costumes, performed on a regular basis until about a year ago, when he began suffering from health problems, said his manager, Margo Lewis.
Dubbed "Wicked" Wilson Pickett by Jerry Wexler, the co-founder of Atlantic Records, where he enjoyed his greatest success, Pickett was one of the leading exponents of the hard-edged Memphis sound, a grittier alternative to the pop singles being churned out by Motown Records in Detroit.
Often recording with the house band of Memphis-based Stax Records, Booker T and the MGs, he enjoyed a long string of hits during the 1960s, including the R&B chart-toppers "634-5789," "Land of 1,000 Dances" and "Funky Broadway."
"We've lost a giant, we've lost a legend, we've lost a man who created his own charisma and made it work around the world," soul singer Solomon Burke, a close friend of Pickett's, told Reuters. "It's just hard for me to really grasp that Wilson is already traveling toward the greater place."
"In the Midnight Hour" was his breakthrough hit, transforming the relative unknown into a soul sensation virtually overnight in 1965. Pickett co-wrote the tune with MGs guitarist Steve Cropper in about an hour, and it spent a week atop the R&B singles chart in August of that year.
"CAREER BREAKDOWN"
His luck ran out by the early 1970s, when he switched labels and suffered what he once described as a "career breakdown." An ambitious plan hatched in 1981 to tour as the "Soul Clan" with fellow R&B veterans Solomon Burke, Joe Tex, Don Covay and Ben E. King quickly fizzled.
Somewhat bitter about his diminishing fortunes, he endured various domestic disputes, and got into trouble with the law during the 1990s for cocaine possession and drunk-driving.
Burke said Pickett had turned his life around, and the two of them were planning to reunite with King, Covay and "Mustang Sally" songwriter Mack Rice to record an album this year.
Born March 18, 1941 in Prattville, Alabama, Pickett grew up in a poor household with 10 brothers and sisters, an abusive mother, and a preacher grandfather who beat him whenever he sang secular songs. He moved up to Detroit in his mid-teens to live with his father, and quickly gravitated to the sounds being purveyed by the likes of local singers Jackie Wilson and Little Willie John.
Although he considered himself a gospel singer, Pickett was invited to join an R&B group called the Falcons. He wrote and sang lead on their 1962 hit "I Found A Love." He became a prolific songwriter and enjoyed a handful of modest solo hits including "If You Need Me," a tune that was also covered by both Burke and the Rolling Stones.
CREDITS DISPUTE
Pickett signed with Atlantic in 1964, and was sent down to record in Memphis after his first few singles disappeared without a trace. "Midnight Hour," one of three recorded in one night, became the subject of an authorship dispute in later years. Pickett told music writer Gerri Hirshey in her 1984 book "Nowhere to Run" that he deserved sole credit. Cropper told Reuters a decade later that Pickett was "completely crazy" and "had nothing to do with writing that music."
Although Pickett was best known for his urgent, propulsive tunes, he also earned acclaim with non-R&B fare, most notably his 1969 cover of the Beatles' "Hey Jude," which featured Duane Allman on guitar. He also recorded bold interpretations of such tunes as Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild" and even make-believe group the Archies' "Sugar, Sugar."
Pickett was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, and experienced a career renaissance that same year with the release of the movie "The Commitments," which revolved around a Dublin band that idolized him. He released his last album, the Grammy-nominated "It's Harder Now," in 1999.
He is survived by a fiancée, two sons and two daughters. A viewing will take place in Virginia next week, and then he will be interred with his mother in Louisville, Kentucky, his manager said.
(Additional reporting by Dean Goodman)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
