Eli Paperboy Reed Trio - Gijon, Spain 7th March 2015

The Eli Paperboy Reed Trio hit Gijon last night for some deep down 'n' dirty blues, gospel, soul and Saturday night rock'n'roll.

Or I should say Sunday morning as the band didn't actually plug in and go until one in the morning. It was a long night for Eli as he also did a DJ set after the band finished.

I must say that, much as I like Eli's 60s Soul inspired albums, live is really the way to see him, and this back to basics Walkin and Talkin 10th anniversary tour really packs some primo blues'n'soul punches.

Eli has a phenomenal gospel inspired voice that is quite often reminiscent of Sam Cooke, Joe Tex or a more tender Wilson Pickett. The trio really gives his voice room to maneuver and also, I imagine,  allows for some gospel style vocal improvisation to take place.

An example of which may be seen on this clip when Eli's microphone broke in the middle of I'm Gonna Leave You Alone. He just carries on anyway and the result is some sublime soul. A really stunning performance.

And one that invited audience participation. The spirit was there and we were truly moved.
Watch.

And I swear the spirit of Sam Cooke was conjured up in the first 60 seconds of Take My Love With You.

Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Club in 1963?
Nope. Eli Paperboy Reed live in Gijon last night.
What a voice.

And this a cracking version of James Brown's Think.

The whole show was a brilliant example of gospel and soul flavored swamp blues with just the right amount of rock'n'roll chaos.

Just what you want in the midnight hour on a Saturday night.

Indeed, the very spirit of Saturday night itself.

Go see 'em.




More stranger than known

"Elvis is on the guest list" - Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Gijon, Spain 22/05/2014 

Gregory Porter - The Gijon Jazz Festival 

James Brown's Deep Funk - No synthetic effects. No Safety Nets... 

Key To The Highway - The Rolling Stones at Chess Studios 1964 and 1965 

Peter Green - "A Mind To Give Up Living" - The Blues of despair and salvation
 

Brenda Holloway / The Night Beats at the Euroyeye Festival, Gijon, Spain 31/7/2014

The 20th Euro Ye-yé festival is taking place in the city of Gijon in the north of Spain this weekend. It's a 4 day festival of 1960s style and music - especially all things Mod, Beat, Garage, Psych and Soul. There are bands, films, all-nighters and even a march of the mods scooter parade through town. It's a week-end long celebration 60s cool.

60s Motown star and Northern Soul favourite Brenda Holloway kicked things off last night with a free concert in the Town Hall Square in the center of Gijon. It was a very short (35 minutes) set that included her old hits "Every Little Bit Hurts", "When I'm Gone", and "You've Made Me So Very Happy". To be honest, the Town Hall Square is not the best place to see any band as the sound is truly awful. The square is surrounded by buildings of concrete and brick on all four sides and the sound just bounces around all over the place and is invariably echoey, shrill and distorted. And every year the local council puts gigs on there. Work that one out. Anyway, despite all that she managed to put in a surprisingly energetic and enthusiastic performance with a local pick-up band as support and her voice, even at the age of 68, is still in fine form with a more overtly gospel influence in evidence nowadays.

A short set but one that left everyone wanting more.

The Night Beats are a Seattle psych garage rock band with two albums already under their belts. Playing at the Sala Acapulco venue - a nice smallish sized gig with usually pretty good sound - the band tore through a powerful 60 minute set that finished around 2 in the morning. Primitive, raunchy and shambolic (in a good way). I thoroughly enjoyed them.

more stranger than known

Horizonte Eléctrico - 10 Great contemporary Spanish bands...

Hugh Hefner's "Playboy After Dark"   

Los Brincos - Glorious 60s Garage Beat Psych Pop...

New Year's Eve 1968 "Surprise Partie" with The Who, Small Faces, Booker T, Pink Floyd, Joe Cocker, Fleetwood Mac... Dawn of the Rock Revolution

Yé-yé! Spanish Nuggets - Ten 1960s Grarage, Beat and Psych classics from Spain. 

Pure Funk - The complete James Brown show in Bologna, April 1971

Over the last few years some pretty amazing black and white footage has appeared on Youtube of the James Brown performance at the Palasport in Bologna, Italy, in April 1971.

However the JB part of the show has now just turned up in complete form and it really is great stuff. It's JB in his prime. It's a stellar band. It's pure funk.

Thanks very much to hughenmatt for uploading the complete show.



Check it out below.
There is also a solo performance from Bobby Byrd.and the band features an 18 year-old Bootsy Collins on bass.

1. Soul Power
2. Brother Rapp
3. Aint It Funky Now?
4. Sunny
5. Bobby Byrd - I Need Help (I can't Do It Alone)
6. There Was A Time
7. Sex Machine
8. Papa's Got A Brand New Bag >
9. I Got The Feeling
10. Give It Up Or Turn It Loose
11. It's A Man's Man's World
12. Please Please Please
13. Super Bad
14. Get Up, Get Into It, Get Involved

James Brown: vocals, organ
Bobby Byrd: MC, vocals, organ
Darryl "Hasaan" Jamison: trumpet
Clayton "Chicken" Gunnells: trumpet
Fred Wesley: trombone
St. Clair Pinckney: tenor saxophone
Phelps "Catfish" Collins: lead guitar
Hearlon "Cheese" Martin: rhythm guitar
William "Bootsy" Collins: bass guitar
John "Jabo" Starks: drums
Don Juan "Tiger" Martin: drums

stranger than known

James Brown's Deep Funk - No synthetic effects. No safety nets. Cold Sweat

Optimism, Positivity and SOUL POWER!

The Ike and Tina Turner Revue in Europe - February 1971

The Soul of Stax

Optimism, Positivity and SOUL POWER!

The other night I was guesting on Campo Aperto, a radio show on Spanish Radio Kras. The theme of the program was late 60s and early 70s funk and soul. Mainly funk. We were playing James Brown, The Meters, Sly Stone, King Curtis... that kind of thing. If you want to listen to the program, the link to the podcast is here http://radiokras.net63.net /index.php?id=1535 (however it is in Spanish)

Anyway, while doing the show I was struck by how positive and optimistic Soul was. Fueled by a righteousness born of gospel and the belief that future really was going to be better than the present, Soul music marched on Washington and, against truly overwhelming odds, really did change the world.

Real change is always slow but if some 45 years later there is a black man in the White House, this is the music that put him there.

There is a lesson here for our times. We too have a need for optimism. We need to believe that the future will be a better place. And we need a music, art, philosophy that inspires that belief.

So, meanwhile, here is some Soul Power to get you through your day.




The Temptations' Ball of Confusion shows that in 45 years the world's problems have not changed much.

Marvin Gaye - What's Going On?

Involvement
Get into it. James Brown - Get Up! Get Involved!

Sly Stone - Stand!

Belief
Lee Dorsey - Yes We Can!

The Impressions - We're a Winner!

Curtis Mayfield - Move On Up!

The real soul power?
OV Wright - You Must Believe In Yourself!

More
James Brown's Deep Funk

The Soul of Stax

Pretty much the only music I listened to in the 1980s was Soul. After the death of Punk in the late 70s there didn't seem to be anything around that had the same kind of passion and honesty. So I went retro. Only 60s Soul did it for me.

I remember hearing Otis Redding's Otis Blue and Wilson Pickett's In The Midnight Hour for the first time on Alexis Korner's BBC Radio 1 Sunday night Soul and R'n'B show somewhere around late 1979. Both albums were recorded at the Stax recording studios in Memphis (though not all the Pickett album was recorded there but the best tracks, like In the Midnight Hour and Don't Fight It, were). The music was powerful. The arrangements were lean. There was absolutely nothing there that didn't need to be there. The rhythm section was tight and funky. The horns punched out lines that responded gospel style to the singer's agony or ecstasy. Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett, and all the other Stax singers I was later to discover, like Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, Mavis Staples, Johnny Taylor... they had voices with enormous power and range that seemed to live the songs, not just sing the words. I was hooked.

Thus began a lifelong Soul obsession. And in the early 80s those original 60s LPs were getting pretty hard to find. There were no cheap CD reissues, box sets or compilations around in those days and you pretty much had to slog it around the second hand record shops to pick up old copies of American imports of Stax, Atlantic, Motown, Hi records... (American pressings were more highly prized because they were mastered from the original tapes and had noticeably better sound quality. I remember some of the UK pressings of Atlantic albums, which in the 60s were distributed by Polydor, sounded really godawful.) So I spent most of the decade pretty much going from one second hand shop to another on the look-out for pristine pressings of Aretha Franklin, King Curtis, Sam and Dave, The Meters, James Brown....  Even around Europe. Amsterdam, Paris, Copenhagen, Madrid... never mind the museums and restaurants what were the second hand shops like?

Listened to now, 60s and 70s soul sounds more marvelous than ever. Like the blues there's no arsing about or studio trickery. It's clean. It's real. Recorded more or less live. What you hear is what went down. Great singers. Great songwriters. Great musicians. Soul also had optimism. Fueled on the righteousness of good old gospel and the 60s Civil Rights movement, it had a belief in itself and the future. These were marching songs for changing times. People get ready. A change was gonna come...

The Soul of Stax
The home of Soul music in Memphis, Tennessee was Stax Records. It was founded in 1962 by Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton and it went bust in January 1976. Those 13 or 14 years are the classic years of southern Soul music.

The Soul of Stax, a 1994 BBC / French co-production directed by Philip Priestley, tells the the story of those classic years - the first hit with Rufus and Carla Thomas; the rise and international success of Otis Redding, Sam and Dave, the Staple Singers; the decline and fall of soul after the loss of optimism in the civil rights movement and rise in anger and militancy after the assassination of Martin Luther King; and finally, Stax's eventual bankruptcy.

It features Stax founders Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton, Isaac Hayes, Al Bell, Rufus Thomas, house band Booker T (Jones) and the MGs (Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn) and clips of Sam and Dave, Otis Redding and the Wattstax movie.

The Ike and Tina Turner Revue in Europe - February 1971

1971 was a good year for Ike and Tina Turner. In the previous 12 months they'd had their first top 40 hit in the USA in nearly ten years with a cover of Sly & The Family Stone's I Want to Take You Higher (their most famous hit River Deep - Mountain High was a flop when originally issued in the US). A cover of The Beatles' Come Together also charted and began a switch away from R'n'B towards rock flavoured material. In early 1971, they covered Creedence Clearwater Revival's Proud Mary which became their biggest hit, reaching number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and selling over a million copies. A live album What You Hear Is What You Get was recorded at Carnegie Hall and became their first gold-selling album. Such was the success of their 1971 recordings that Ike was able to build Bolic Sound Studios near their home in Inglewood, California.

Watching the clips below from German Beat Club and Dutch TV one can see that Tina Turner was always a star. The voice. The energy. The command of the stage. The sexual allure...  However, how much was she held back by Ike and what could she have achieved without him?

There is no doubt that Tina owes her career to Ike but imagine if she'd left him sooner. Ike and Tina Turner scored some memorable hits but they were covers. What if someone had been writing material especially for her? Can you imagine the results if Tina had recorded at Muscle Shoals for Atlantic in the mid to late 60s? Or, given that Tina always said she preferred singing rock to soul, fronting a rock band and outrocking Janis Joplin?

Anyway, we can only guess and watch some of these excellent clips from the 1971 European tour when Tina still had a lot of rock'n'roll edge before she got softened up in the 80s. The Ikettes are also impressive here as back up singers. Perhaps the choreography doesn't stand up too well now but they have a personality and character that contemporary backing vocalists never have. There is warmth, playfulness, energy and some real raw soul here.



On Beat Club
River Deep - Mountain High
Beat Club was a German music program that ran from September 1965 to December 1972. It was broadcast from Bremen, Germany. The version of River Deep - Mountain High here is stunning - one of the best live versions I've heard. Raw and primitive but matching the tumultuous intensity of the Spector version.

Proud Mary
Starts nice and easy...

Take Another Piece of My Heart.
The Ikettes get their turn and do a solid version of Take Another Piece of My Heart. According to rabbitno2's comment on YouTube under this clip the Ikettes here are, left to right, Esther Jones, Jean Burks and Vera Hamilton

Come Together / Respect
Respect is ironic considering Tina's personal life at the time with Ike. "I'd like to talk about respect but instead..."

The Ike and Tina Turner Review live
An hour of the Ike and Tina Turner Review recorded in February 1971 for Dutch TV.
Not as impressive as the Beat Club performances but Tina is in fine voice, looks great and is very much the star of the show. The Ikettes lend splendid support. What backing singers are this athletic nowadays? Ike stays pretty much in the background, which is probably just as well, as he seems to be sporting a 1964 Beatle wig and looks like he just beamed down from the Starship Enterprise. No wonder the audience seem so bemused in the early part of the show.

Mostly a rock oriented repertoire however the bluesy I Smell Trouble is outstanding - deep soul with Ike giving it some fine and dirty blues guitar.

1. Them Changes
2. Sweet Inspiration
3. I Want To Take You Higher
4. Ooh Poo Pah Doo
5. A Love Like Yours, Don't Come Knockin' Every Day
6. River Deep, Mountain High
7. Come Together
8. Honky Tonk Women
9. Proud Mary
10. I Smell Trouble
11. There Was A Time
12. Shake A Tail Feather
13. I Want To Take You Higher

 

James Brown's Deep Funk - No synthetic effects. No safety nets... Cold Sweat.

In 1967, the year of Sgt Pepper, when popular music seemed to be trying to become ever more complex and sophisticated, James Brown decided to buck the trend and strip everything right down to the basics. The Funk. The one. He put out a record called Cold Sweat.

Cold Sweat was basically just a groove that just kept on building. From 1967 on this was pretty much JB's template on all his single releases. Forget the words or the tune, those are for "listening" to, this is for dancing.

Arguably more influential than the rest of the Sgt Pepper styled psychedelic complexity of 1967, James Brown hit on one of the most important and influential ideas of the late 60s. The funk revolution emphasized rhythm, made everything else subservient to it, including the vocals, and relegated melody and lyrics to a mere supporting role. Guitars became percussion instruments and individual parts became syncopated within the whole musical arrangement. And in so doing, he pretty much invented modern dance music and had a massive influence on rap. James Brown is the most sampled artist in the world.

However, the important thing for me is that, unlike a lot of modern dance records, on most of the old JB hits the band played live. And it feels alive. It breathes. You can hear the drummer sweat. Dance music always seems to me to be far more intense, hypnotic and dangerous when it's being played live with no mechanical input, no drum machines, no synthetic effects and no safety nets. A machine will suck out the funk. It'll be precise. It'll play on the beat. Not behind or in front. So there's no tension. There's no sense that anything could go wrong, speed up, slow down or do something weird.

I know there was a lot of discipline in JB's bands which the musicians sometimes found difficult to deal with (see the 1968 Apollo Can't Stand It clip below as a glorious example of how much that discipline paid off) but there's also a sense of unpredictability and danger. There is tension. And here is release. And when the tension builds, the release can sometimes be truly sublime. On the (superior) version of Cold Sweat on the 1967 Live at The Apollo album the band go into a solid groove during Maceo Parker's sax solo (starting around the 2:00 mark on the clip below) while the drummer, the great Clyde Stubblefield, compliments and pushes Maceo onward to the climax of the solo (around the 3:30 mark). For a very brief moment drummer and saxophonist are soloing together. Without the drummer performing the usual anchoring function the band appears to leave the ground and levitate.

Cold Sweat live at the Apollo 1967

It is evident towards the end of that remarkable performance (one of my favourite ever pieces of JB music) that this music, though apparently simple, is not easy to play. It's intense and demanding and easy to foul up. What is not played is just as important as what is played. That's the funk part. However it's the human element, the amazing proficiency and timing of everyone in that band, plus the sweat and the danger and the funk, that make it so damned hypnotic. And danceable.
And that is where the art is.



Bonus
Mother Popcorn on TV in 1969
An astonishing band performance. On Maceo Parker's solo (around the 3 minute mark) the band let the brakes off to hit overdrive while JB duets with Maceo by way of yelps, screeches and screams.