When asked what kind of music I like, rather than resort to the vague (and not quite accurate) answer “all kinds,” I generally lead with soul music and country music. I like lots of other stuff too, of course, but a good percentage of my favorites fall loosely into those categories, or betray the influence of one or other, or both. Naturally, therefore, I’m especially interested in music that showcases the close relationship the two genres share–their shared roots and the sometimes blurry boundary between them.
The flow from one genre to the other tends to run more heavily in the direction of soul and R&B artists covering country songs. Singers like Solomon Burke, Ivory Joe Hunter and Arthur Alexander performed country songs in an R&B setting, and even wrote a few. And certain country standards like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and “Funny How Time Slips Away” are so frequently covered by soul artists that they have become almost standards of that genre as well. One sees less explicit influence moving back in the other direction, probably owing to a certain racial conservatism that tends to adhere to traditional country music. Gram Parsons made a point of doing countrified versions of various soul tunes to demonstrate the essential similarity of the two musical streams, although he was not in his day widely accepted as a member of the country music establishment.
Then there were many artists who managed to straddle the line, while not really belonging to either camp. In particular, a lot of white southern artists of the late 60s and early 70s–Jim Ford, Tony Joe White, Dan Penn, Bobbie Gentry, Bobby Whitlock and others–worked in a hybrid style perhaps best lumped together under Ford’s self-applied term “Country Funky.” And then there’s Charlie Rich, who experienced the greatest success as a mainstream country performer in the early 70s, but who really embodied the mingled influences of all kinds of American Music over his long and various career better than perhaps any other individual I could name.
The muddling of the genres spilled over into more mainstream rock ‘n roll as well. Both The Beatles and The Stones betrayed clear influences from both kinds of music. The Band’s earliest and best albums are great examples too. And even Elvis, the most archetypal rock ‘n roller of all, had that essential mixture of black and white influences running throughout all of his music, but really made the country-soul connection explicit on his last great album From Elvis in Memphis, and in several lesser iterations of the theme thereafter.
This album, obviously, is a major landmark of the country-soul continuum. It isn’t wholly responsible for the idea that country and soul could comfortably coexist so much as it was of a piece with a developing trend. Solomon Burke’s country-soul classic “Just Out of Reach (of My Two Loving Arms),” for example, came out the year prior to this album, and Little Willie John’s lesser known but spectacularly dramatic take on “She Thinks I Still Care” came out at about the same time. But certainly this was the album that made the connection explicit in the broader public consciousness, and in the process, helped move both country and soul music closer to the center of popular music. So while Ray Charles can’t be given sole credit for the coming together of these musical streams, it’s fair to say that this album exerted greater influence over that development than any other one album or song.
And yet for all that, it’s always been an album I’ve had trouble warming up to. The song selection is good, and Charles’s vocal interpretations of them are beyond reproach. But it is the move to the center, specifically in the spectacularly garish arrangements, that I find hard to overcome. In recent discussions on the music of Etta James and Sam Cooke from a similar period of time, I’ve had to grapple with this same problem–the mania for string section and choral accompaniment that nearly drowns these artists out in an effort to appeal to the more mainstream, white, adult audience of the day. And yet in those cases, I found myself largely able to get past the distracting arrangements–to understand the commercial (and broader socio-political) function that they served, and to focus on the more important contributions of the artist at the center.
I have had a harder time doing that with this record, as I have with many of the records Charles made after leaving Atlantic Records for the more lucrative pastures of ABC. Certainly he made many fine recordings at ABC, among them great straight ahead soul tracks like “Hit the Road Jack” and “Unchain My Heart” that rival some of his Atlantic sides. And yet I tend to associate this period of his work primarily with these heavily orchestrated, stylistically diverse kind of albums whose intent I can appreciate, but which I am rarely moved to listen to. In the case of Sam Cooke and Etta James, it is unavoidable that some of their best work was thus marred, and thus must be endured. But in the case of Ray Charles, his Atlantic recordings are so much more viscerally satisfying that it is difficult to imagine opting to listen to records of this sort instead.
Certainly there are exceptions, both on this record and elsewhere. Few would argue, for example, that his reading of “Georgia on My Mind” is not a masterpiece, even with its somewhat sodden arrangement. On this album, the obvious standout is “You Don’t Know Me,” on which Charles’s performance is sufficiently powerful to have all but erased all memory of Eddy Arnold’s original. I’m sure there are many contemporary lovers of this song who are not even aware that it began its life as a country song, and who have no idea who Eddy Arnold was. It is simply a Ray Charles song now.
As garish as the strings and chorus on that and other tracks are, my deepest antipathies are actually reserved for some of the upbeat numbers such as “Bye Bye Love” and their shrill, piercing horn section accompaniment. At this faster clip, Charles’s ability to overcome the arrangement with a nuanced performance is curtailed, and the horn parts sound to me not so much soul or even jazz-based as they just sound like showbiz. Much of the first side passed for me in this state of vague annoyance, almost wishing someone would (or could) release a stripped down copy of this music–just Charles and a basic band, without all that exhausting sonic schmaltz around it.
Realistically, the first side is probably about as far as I have gotten in most of my previous attempts to listen to this record, because by the time I got to side two, I found myself relaxing into the music a bit more. It seemed to me that the objectionable arrangements gradually became less aggressively interwoven with the actual music, the obnoxious horn string or choral parts relegating themselves more and more to the beginnings and endings of songs, leaving the meat of the song relatively unspoiled. There’s a string of slower songs making up the bulk of the side that all sounded pretty good to me, and helped improve my overall perception of the album.
The schmalz factor came back in a big way near the end with the album’s other biggest song, “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Here too, Charles’s rendition has almost come to feel like the canonical version. In recent years, I’ve mostly frequently heard the song as performed by Kitty Wells, and yet even so, it is Charles’s more complex phrasing that I hear when I think of the song in the abstract. Like “You Don’t Know Me,” it’s a colossally great achievement of interpretation on Charles’s part, and probably the most heart wrenching version of a very widely performed song. And yet the choral part is so unremittingly hysterical, so staggeringly out of place, that it really makes Charles’s great performance difficult to appreciate as much as it deserves to be.
It’s really a shame about this record. It is of central importance to the history of American music, bringing together two of its main streams and illustrating their shared roots. It’s also a consistently great record in terms of Ray Charles’s performances. While perhaps not as deep as his earlier work, it certainly showcases his transition to being one of the great interpreters of American song who ever lived. And yet those Montovani-style strings, The Euclid Flom Chorale background vocal parts, and above all those shrill, piercing horns just make this record way more of a bummer than it ought to be. This wasn’t the first time I listened to it, and it won’t be the last. But for what a great record it is at its core, it is way too much of a challenge to get through, and that’s too bad.
Source: LP
I didn’t really grow up listening to The Rolling Stones, and even if I had, I suspect this album is not one that would have been a part of my life. Its fairly high ranking on the list suggests that it meant a lot in its own time, and yet I can’t say that it has aged particularly well as an album. There’s nothing truly bad about it, but it really doesn’t give off the quality of a thoughtfully assembled, cohesive piece of work. This is all the more true when you consider how wildly divergent the American release (which is the one on the list) is from the original British version. They are almost completely different albums. But where such meddling in the case of American Beatles albums has been retroactively understood to have been a terrible aesthetic crime, it really doesn’t seem to matter much in this case. Neither version looks to be a truly great album in the modern sense of the word.
Though the track listing between the two diverges wildly, the underlying thematic constitution of the two are basically the same: a little more than half is R&B covers, and the rest original material of varying degrees of quality. I have acquired a certain amount of sympathy for the band’s early blues and R&B-centric period. I know that for a lot of people at the time, The Stones provided the valuable service of essentially introducing America to its own music. I’d imagine that lots of kids first heard the music of Slim Harpo, Solomon Burke and others by way of The Stones. Their versions also hold up as serviceable, well-intentioned efforts, with Keith Richards’ thick guitar textures in place of a horn section providing the bulk of the enduring appeal–particularly in light of the ways in which it influenced his style more generally. And yet for myself, having grown up in a different era, I don’t feel an overwhelming interest in actually listening to this phase of their career. I was raised (by my Stones-educated father) to know the originals before I knew these versions, and it’s difficult not to acknowledge their superiority in almost all cases. (Even Mick Jagger quite explicitly said so.) They really didn’t become a band I have an abundance of interest in listening to until they had left behind the covers and started focusing on their own material. This album represents a transitional point in that process, and so is only partially of interest to me.
Many of the originals represented here are also somewhat lackluster–juvenilia in the context of the better work to come. “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man” almost comes off like a Monkees song, albeit one with some bite to it. “The Spider and The Fly” is a decent little blues number, but it fails to distinguish itself as being by a band bound for greatness. The three songs that really stand out on the album are “The Last Time,” “Satisfaction” and “Play With Fire”–all of which, interestingly, were absent from the British release. It’s amazing how much these songs pop out as being wildly superior to everything else on the record–and not merely, I would argue, for reasons of familiarity. Each represents the band really coming in to their own, developing their sound in a way that presages their more mature efforts to come, but which also stand on their own as indelible classics. My favorite of the three is “Play with Fire” for its aura of taut, controlled menace, but “Satisfaction” is obviously the biggest song on the album. While I implied above that The Beatles were better album-oriented artists than The Stones, at least at this phase of their respective careers, it’s only fair to note that The Beatles probably never had as purely exhilarating a single as “Satisfaction,” a song that is almost uniquely emblematic of the rock ‘n roll single as massive cultural phenomenon.
I would have to imagine that it was those three songs, and “Satisfaction” in particular, that made this album so successful as to still be regarded as important these many decades later. The thing is, that feels like a bit of a cheat. They are each of them singles at heart (although “Play With Fire” works convincingly in an album context), and are most in their element not on this album, but on a compilation such as Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass), released the following year, and which situated these songs among other similarly great, essential early Stones tracks. Here they kind of stick out like a sore thumb. It’s a case where I would argue that a compilation actually makes more sense as a “great album” than this somewhat sloppily cobbled together, not quite artistically unified “real” album.
Source: High Resolution Audio – 24 bit, 88 kHz. I’ve been calling these “HD Tracks,” which is the name of the website I buy them from, but it looks like “High Resolution Audio” is becoming the industry standard name as a push is on to make better sound more appealing to the masses.
I take my two year old daughter to a weekly gym class at kind of a soulless corporate children’s edutainment facility in our neighborhood. It’s not a bad way to spend a morning, for her–running around, burning off steam, and almost interacting with her peers. For me, it can be a bit stressful. All of one’s own psychosocial ambivalence comes right back to the surface in watching your own child learn to navigate the universe of others, and seeing my sweet deferential daughter get knocked around by under-supervised, overconfident little bastards does little to assuage my basic underlying suspicion that life is bullshit. But she likes it, and that makes me happy.
The other good thing about it is that one of the teachers, aside from being great with the kids, has awesome taste in soul music. As the kids are running around bouncing and climbing and whatnot, the music playing through his shattered iPhone is likely to be Otis Redding or The Jackson 5, or some other perfect music that a lesser person would never think to play for young kids, but which they seem to love. Once a kid (not mine!) was having an all out melt down, and he put on Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me.”
A few classes ago, I had one of those great moments when a song comes on and you know you know it, but can’t quite place it till the singing begins, and in that interim, you get to enjoy the positive right on-ness of the sound without your preconceptions about the artist getting in the way. As soon as the vocals came in, I recognized it as The Impressions’ “It’s Alright,” and was pleased to find myself enjoying it so much, because I am in general haunted by my failure to adequately appreciate the artistry of Curtis Mayfield. There are some albums on this list where my tack is to explain why I think the music on it is crap, and is undeserving of a place on this list. This is emphatically not one such case. I fully support the thesis that Curtis Mayfield was a great, large-souled musical genius, and I blame some deficiency in myself for not usually being as swept up by his music as was in that moment.
In listening to the first of the two discs in this collection, I felt about it as I have in my other attempts at listening to The Impressions–which is to say kind of puzzled by how little I enjoyed it. Individual songs, like “It’s Alright,” pique my interest, but the general tenor and timbre of the music leaves me feeling vaguely..annoyed. There’s a few possible reasons for this. One is that I generally prefer the dryer sounds of southern soul over the more lushly produced soul of the north. A lot of The Impressions’ stuff is not only too orchestrated for my tastes, but a little too…uplifting sounding. Another is a certain ongoing squeamishness I have for listening to sociopolitical message music as entertainment in my capacity as a reasonably well-off white male.
These are all factors, but I’m pretty sure that the real reason is probably the very thing that many people love about this music–which is that I can’t warm up to Curtis Mayfield’s voice. I appreciate its gentleness and sensitivity, and the personal largesse it portends, but there’s something in his constant falsetto that I find draining to listen to. It feels forever right on the verge of getting pitchy, particularly against the backdrop of the other Impressions’ harmony singing. I don’t think he ever literally ever goes out of key, but my sense that’s he right on the edge of it makes for a fatiguing listening experience.
The onset of the holidays complicated my getting through this entire collection in a timely fashion, and so I took the unusual step of listening to disc two in my car while driving up to my Mom’s house for Christmas. It’s a bit of a trade-off, since the stereo isn’t as good, and yet the effect of driving changes–usually for the better–ones relationship to the music. Whether for that reason or otherwise, I did find that I enjoyed at least parts of the second disc more than the first. The later Impressions material sounded better to me than the earlier stuff–a little more gritty and less florid. And while the “message” angle became a little more overt than I would ordinarily care for, I found songs like “This is My Country” and “Choice of Colors” among the most stirring and satisfying in the set. I felt similarly about “Move on Up,” the first solo Curtis Mayfield song on the collection.
Much of the other solo stuff I was less fond of. Superfly is coming up much higher on the list, so I’ll refrain from saying much about it now. But in general, I found a lot of the solo material a little too gritty in a way that felt somehow out of step with the gentleness of Mayfield’s voice and persona–like a slightly too deliberate quest for relevance. It also didn’t help that many of the songs were eight or twelve minutes long, as was the style at the time, when their point could have been made just as well in three or four. But then right near the end, there was a song (either “So in Love” or “Only You Babe”-I forget) that just floored me. It had a warm, mature soulful sound, almost in the style of Marvin Gaye, and, though it was presumably a later and more minor effort, I thought it sounded a lot better than much of what had come before it.
Again, though, my ultimate feeling is that Curtis Mayfield was a superbly talented artist (I love, for example, the songs he wrote for Major Lance), and I can only chalk up my own relative disinterest in a lot of his music to some peculiarity of my taste. The music on this collection rightly belongs here, and I’m glad to own it. It’s just that, a handful of tracks excepted, there won’t be too many occasions that I’ll find myself listening to it again.
Source: CD
#180 – The Rolling Stones – The Rolling Stones, Now! (1965)
January 2, 2014
The Rolling Stones were not my first love, and while my appreciation for them has increased considerably over the years, I’ve never felt moved to indulge my completist tendencies in their direction. Their catalog is too vast and irregular to fathom trying to take in as a whole. And while there are periods even less interesting to me (such as anything after Tattoo You), I have traditionally had very little enthusiasm for exploring their earliest work, back when they were primarily an American Rhythm & Blues cover band.
This album represents something of the end of that era, although it’s an American release drawing on several years worth of recordings that had been released earlier in Britain. Still, most of the cuts find them beginning to hone their own sound, still largely on cover material, but with the occasional original thrown in. The songs draw on a pretty good spread of great artists, from the blues of Willie Dixon to the early rock ‘n roll of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley to the soul of Solomon Burke and Otis Redding. At no point do they come anywhere close to equaling any of the originals. Mick Jagger himself famously wondered why anyone would bother listening to The Stones doing “King Bee” when they could listen to Slim Harpo’s original. That song isn’t on here, but the sentiment applies more broadly.
Still, I wound up liking it better than I thought. It’s best understood as juvenilia–the necessary machinations by which the Stones became the Stones. One hears Mick Jagger gaining confidence in his weirdly British soulman bravado through the vehicle of black American music. He almost embarrasses himself in places, as on Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” and yet he also knows when to hold back. The version of “Pain in My Heart” on here is not even in the same universe of greatness as Otis Redding’s original (or for that matter Irma Thomas’s “Ruler of My Heart,” from which it was drawn). But to his credit, Jagger just sings it kind of plain, knowing he can’t compete with what, for my money is one of the greatest vocal performances of the twentieth century.
Perhaps more importantly, you can hear the band working out their sound, adapting the tropes of the music they were imitating to their own instrumental palette and musical personalities. Much is made of the blues roots of The Stones, and there is plenty of evidence of it on this record, but perhaps what is more striking is that way the soul numbers come out sounding the most like The Rolling Stones to come, with Keith Richard’s fat, chunky guitar parts mimicking the horn sections.
There are also a handful of originals mixed in, and what’s nice to hear is how much more enthused they sound as a band doing their own stuff. Songs like “Off the Hook” can’t compare to the classics that surround them, but are elevated by the energy the band puts into them. “Heart of Stone,” possibly their first truly great original, is one here, and is the best thing on the album.
From the vantage point of history, most of the stuff on this record makes for inessential listening, both compared to the music it’s drawing on and to the more mature efforts of The Stones. But I was somewhat gratified to be able to hear glimmers of what might have made this record an exciting one it its day. It’s some kick ass, no nonsense sock hop music, and if you were young and wanting to dance, especially if you didn’t have access to the artists who originally wrote and performed the music on here, this would be a great record. And I guess it still is, in its way.
Source: HD Tracks (88 kHz/24 bit)
Hunkered Down in Brooklyn 